The King's Marauder

The list grew longer in his head, when he considered how much food and water must be carried in her, how many spare muskets, flints, bayonets, and cutlasses would have to be requisitioned from Captain Middleton’s warehouses, and … sailors released from the hospital and re-assigned, with any lacks in their kits made good, or replaced entirely.

A Purser! Lewrie realised; Someone t’sell ’em tobacco, keep an eye on the rum issues, replace their broken mugs and plates?

“I fear you’re going to be paying out a lot more, Mountjoy,” Lewrie warned him. “Or your superiors will, to recompense the Admiralty, for all that’s wanting for our little expeditions.”

“Now why do I feel as if I’ve been set upon by a pack of bully bucks?” Mountjoy said, with a sigh.

“You’ll feel like you’ve been cudgelled half to death, before all we need is rounded up,” Lewrie hooted back, then began to tick off those needs. Mountjoy held up a hand and went to the desk to fetch a pen and paper, before allowing Lewrie to begin again. By the time it was complete, Mountjoy had to shake finger-cramp from his hand, and a fresh bottle of sparkling wine had to be opened.

“Is it possible we may be asking for a tad too much, I wonder?” Mountjoy said after a long, sullen silence. “What if we can’t get any sailors from the hospital? Could you spare men from your ship?”

“Well, if I had to, I could give up fifty hands and a couple of Midshipmen,” Lewrie admitted, equally gloomy. “But, there goes the men I intended t’arm and land alongside my Marines. I could send the Purser’s clerk, Irby, our ‘Jack In The Breadroom’, t’dole out sundries and such, too.”

“With about an hundred soldiers aboard, do those men need the spare weapons, then?” Mountjoy asked.

“No,” Lewrie said. “I could send a chest full of pistols aboard, and cutlasses, so they can defend themselves after they land on the beaches. They’d stand by the boats, and not go inland, waiting for the soldiers to finish their tasks, and come back to be taken off.”

“That solves one problem, then,” Mountjoy said, “and one less request, or burden, demanded of Captain Middleton. That may mollify him a bit, once he sees the whole list. Maybe he won’t scream quite so loudly. Rations, hmm.”

“At least enough for three months,” Lewrie stated.

“Really? How long did you intend to stay out? Just rampaging up and down the coast, Will-He, Nill-He?” Mountjoy asked.

“What d’ye mean?” Lewrie queried back.

“Now I’ve a way to communicate with my agents, and … sources, via Cummings and his boat,” Mountjoy pointed out, “It seems to me that we could gather information about how well-defended certain objectives might be, and lay our plans accordingly. Strike the Dons where they aren’t? You might plan one specific operation, based on the best intelligence, load the troops aboard Harmony, sail out and attack it, then return to port so we can plan the second.

“Now, if there were two or three tempting targets within a day or two of sailing,” Mountjoy went on, perking up for the first time in an hour, “you could go after them, depending on the weather and how rough you judge the landing might be, and not be away from port for more than a fortnight, so you wouldn’t have to cram too much aboard the transport at any given time, leaving more room for soldiers and your sailors.”

“You learn as much as you can about Estepona, say, rough hand-drawn maps prepared by your people can be copied for my Marine officers and the officers commanding the soldiers, and we plan how to go about it, one target at a time? Hmm,” Lewrie slowly grasped.

When he’d been a temporary Commodore in the Bahamas two years before, he knew nothing of what lay a stone’s throw behind the beaches and inlets of the coast of Spanish Florida, and he had rampaged up and down the shore like a blind pig rooting for truffles, sure only that there would be settlements round the inlets, and that there were towns marked on his copies of old Spanish charts. Mountjoy’s concept was a “horse of another feather” as his old Cox’n, Will Cony, would say. It was … bloody scientific!

“Damme, I like it, Mountjoy,” Lewrie exclaimed. “I love it!”

“I’ve been gathering information, already,” Mountjoy told him, “though I haven’t requested maps from my people, yet, but will do so, as soon as Cummings returns from his present trip.”

“Mountjoy, I swear you’re a bloody genius!” Lewrie whooped.

“Well, if you say so,” Mountjoy said, beaming.

More time in port, Lewrie happily contemplated; Then short, hard jabs at the Dons. Spread chaos and mayhem, in spades!

And when not pummelling the Spanish, there was a chance that he could dine at Pescadore’s more often, where Maddalena whoever-she-was complained that her keeper always took her, and learn more about her!

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“You’ve done a fine job of it, Mister Mountjoy,” Lewrie said after a tour of Harmony from bow to stern. “The ‘big turnip’s’ ready.”

“Oh yes,” Mountjoy drolly replied, with a roll of his eyes. “I have Captain Middleton, and every shipwright in the dockyards, angry with me, Hedgepeth grinding his teeth and growling like a cur every time I meet with him, Harmony’s cook ready to jump ship if we expect him to prepare rations for nigh two hundred men, and the ship’s mates cursing me for taking half their cabin space for the Army officers. If I’d ordered their women raped, and their children boiled alive, I don’t think I could have done better!”

“No matter, Mountjoy,” Lewrie told him, “change always bothers people, big changes irk them worse, but they’ll learn to cope. Make adjustments? And, you have your maps, and intelligence.”

Lewrie had taken Sapphire back to sea after their last meeting, and had stayed out for another month of cruising the coasts of Andalusia, doing more threatening and chasing than capturing and burning Spanish coasters and fishing boats. From Estepona to near Cartagena, there were no longer many Spanish mariners who would dare go too far out, lest el diablo negro got them.

In point of fact, Lewrie had to admit that he could not take all the credit. The brig-sloops and frigates of the Mediterranean Fleet were working close inshore of the provinces of Catalonia, Murcia, and the sliver of seacoast of Aragon, ranging further afield than the French naval bases of Marseilles and Toulon. Sapphire had run across several of them and had closed to briefly “speak” them, bantering as to who was poaching in whose territory. Most of it was good-natured.

And, he’d come across agent Cummings’s boat a couple of times, the last encounter a meeting far out at sea at Cummings’s summons of the faded red jib. He was bound for Valencia, but had garnered maps and notes on an host of possible objectives for Lewrie to rush back to Mountjoy at Gibraltar. The man’s personal reports painted a grim picture of want, poverty, and unemployment among the Spanish people as the government in Madrid slavishly enforced Emperor Bonaparte’s Continental System which closed all Europe to British trade and goods. He even went so far as to predict that if things did not improve for the Spanish people, there would be a rebellion, sooner or later. He had no trouble finding willing informants, and some who had asked for arms from the British.

To Lewrie’s lights, Thomas Mountjoy was looking a tad haggard, but that was to be expected. He had a lot on his plate lately, what with dealing with Harmony’s conversion, the yards, and the stores warehouses, looking under every rug on the Rock for spies and Dalrymple’s imagined rebellion, double-dealing smugglers, and sifting and sorting all the reports from his own agents to stitch together plausible and trustworthy assessments to send back to London, with only Deacon for help in the doing.