11 Havoc's Sword by Dewey Lambdin

Author:Dewey Lambdin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

11 Havoc's Sword

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Soft Rabbit in a fashionable gown and picture hat was laughing with glee as he danced with her at Ranelagh Gardens, under the myriad candles, white-silk heeled shoes and stockinged ankles flirting under the froth of lace at her hems, whilst Theoni Connor stood and fanned herself near the string orchestra in livery and powdered wigs playing, inexplicably, a lively jig called “Go To The Devil And Shake Your?self.” Theoni had a mug of ale in her other hand—and a Muskogee “papoosa” cross her back which bore twin boys, peering over one shoulder and beneath an armpit. Theoni was quite fetching in beaded buckskins, but a pair of gnarled, tanned, and sooty bare feet quite put him off, and . . .

“Sir! Sir!” Midshipman Grace said in a harsh whisper near his bed-cot. “Mister Adair's duty, sir, and he says to tell you that the enemy is in sight, sir!”

“Woof?” Lewrie grunted, pushing himself up from his face-down frog sprawl to an elbow. “Umm . . . where away?”

“Two points off the starboard bows, sir, and almost hull-up to us, sailing about Nor'west-by-North . . . reefed down for the night, he said to tell you, sir!” Grace tumbled out with eagerness. “It is now a quarter-glass shy of Four Bells, and Mister Adair has doused all of our lights, soon as the starboard bow lookout sang out, and ... !”

“Very well, Mister Grace,” Lewrie replied, shaking his head to clear the cob-webs; the cool air streaming into his cabins had put him into a deep, muzzy, and dizzying sleep, as he had expected the afternoon before. “Move, Toulon, there's a good cat!” he hissed as he flung off the sheet and quilt he'd drawn up sometime after he'd caulked out cold. Toulon was curled up atop the quilt, between his spread thighs, taking his sweet time to stretch at being wakened at such an ungodly hour.

Aspinall had been summoned from his hammock a deck below in the after stores room, but was taking his sweet time arriving, too. Lewrie grabbed the first clothes his hands encountered off the back of a chair near his bed-cot and hurriedly dressed.

“Mister Adair is to call all hands to Quarters, Mister Grace,” he snapped as he drew a shirt over his head. “No pipes, no fifes and drums, and tell him I'll be on deck, directly. Go! Scamper, lad!”

Shirt and breeches, shoes and coat, and no time to fool with a pair of stockings; a trundle cross the cabins to his arms rack for his hanger, and to hell with his hat. Within a frantic two minutes in the dark, he was out past the Marine sentry on the gun-deck and scampering up the starboard ladder to the quarterdeck scant moments ahead of the hands who'd come to strip his great-cabins of partitions, furniture, and fittings, to man the 12-pounders mounted right-aft.

“Captain, sir,” Lt. Adair reported, knuckling his forehead for a salute, instead of doffing his hat. “You can see her in the night-glass, sir .

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