A King's Commander by Dewey Lambdin Read Free Book Online

well-salted and daubed with his “ha’porth of tar” since he was nine. Hmm . . . good family, he’d learned, was Hyde. Talented, cheerful, able. A bit on his guard, being so new aboard, but the port admiral had recommended him highly, had lifted him out of a 3rd-Rate seventy-four for more  seasoning aboard Jester where he’d be one of two, instead of one among twenty-four middies. To do the port admiral a favor usually meant one in return; you scratch my protégé, I’ll scratch yours.
    â€œYer pahdons, Cap’um,” Andrews said at last, coming onto the quarterdeck. “But dot Aspinall say yer suppah jus’ now come from de galley, pipin’ hot, sah.”
    â€œThankee, Andrews!” Lewrie brightened, as famished as a middie on short commons by then. “Toulon slunk out of hiding yet?”
    â€œWell, sah, ah ’spect he’s ovah ’is sulk,” Andrews chuckled in a deep, soft voice, “An’ when he caught a whiff o’ po’k cracklin’s, he come on out, sah. ’Twoz all me an’ dot boy Aspinall could do, keepin’ him off de table. Do ah go forrud an’ tell ya cook ya be wantin’ cawfee later, Cap’um, fo’ dey douse de galley fires fo’ de night?”
    â€œNo, no coffee tonight,” Lewrie decided. There was a very good chance this wind would veer ahead during the Middle Watch, rousing him from bed. After all the excitement and tension, a good meal would put him under quickly, and he needed some sleep, beforehand. “You tell him to forget it this evening, and turn in, the pair of you.”
    â€œAye, sah. Thankee, Cap’um,” Andrews replied.
    â€œEnjoy the singsong, below-decks.” Lewrie grimaced.
    On the berth deck, where “pusser’s glims” still burned on mess tables, the sounds of fiddle, fife, and tuning box could be heard, well into a droning, lugubriously sentimental, dirgelike song. Hands were singing along, some already in their hammocks hung from carline posts and overhead beams; linens, bolsters, and thin mattresses already full of softly swinging seamen, in the minutes before Lights Out.
    â€œOoh, Law’, not dot’un, sah.” Andrews shook his head in scorn. “Sailors, dey know de words t’hundred o’ songs . . . but only know de one tune. Dot’un. Same’z it woz ’board ev’ry ship I been on, sah.”
    He and Andrews went back a long way, to the Shrike brig, and he had become Lewrie’s coxswain briefly, before she’d paid off after the war ended. Now he was cox’n, again, in charge of Alan’s gig and crew. Andrews had always been reticent about his past. In the West Indies, Lewrie’d been certain that Andrews in his youth had been a house slave, and a runaway. There were no lash scars on his back, he vaguely remembered, but . . . Andrews could read and write, even then, had skills enough to make ordinary seaman, and had been rated able before they’d paid off. Alan wasn’t even sure that Andrews was his real name, but that was the one he was known by at the Admiralty, never a place to be picky about a volunteer seaman’s antecedents.
    His recent history had been merchant service, a summer in the Portugee fisheries off the Grand Banks, then a spell ashore as house servant and valet to a retired Liverpool merchant captain; but that fellow had passed over recently, and he’d lost his comfortable shore position. Now he was both cox’n and great-cabin factotum.
    A “bright,” Caroline had called him, after she’d met him, one of what she termed “the yard-Cuffies”; the by-blow of a white master or overseer on a mulatto or quadroon housemaid. Part white and part black, and pent like a storm petrel over both worlds, belonging to neither. Her North Carolina, slave-owning family experience warned her, and Alan, against him, but he was an old shipmate. And a Navy man