Alan Lewrie #01 - King's Coat by Dewey Lambdin

Alan Lewrie #01 - King's Coat by Dewey Lambdin

Author:Dewey Lambdin [Lambdin, Dewey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Great Britain, Historical, Large type books, Action & Adventure, Sea Stories, Lewrie; Alan (Fictitious Character)
ISBN: 9780783804408
Publisher: G.K. Hall
Published: 1994-01-02T00:00:00+00:00


The King's Coat

Chapter 10

There were many strange and awful dreams that bothered him as he swam in the delirium of a raging fever. He and Mrs. Hill- wood romped in the maintop while Marines threw buckets of seawater on them by the numbers and Captain Osmonde called the pace with a fugleman’s cane. Tad toasted cheese on burning sails for him and asked if he wanted his shoes blacked. Keith Ashburn and Shirke bought him a half-dozen bottles of claret, but he couldn’t drink with them, for their heads were skulls with dacking jaws and the wine ran down their chests like black ink.

Lieutenant Harm and Mr. Pilchard and Margaret Haymer danced together, comparing wounds. His sister Belinda was a figurehead on a ship ofthe line, and the sailors fondled her bare breasts as they sat on the beakhead rails to relieve themselves. Chapman hopped one-legged down the Strand with a beautiful young girl in a blue gown in search of a bookseller’s, and he could not catch them no matter how hard he ran. Sir Hugo and Sir Richard Slade chased him down an endless work gangway, waving their pricks at him.

He found himself flying low across sparkling wavetops with a crowd of pelicans who knew how to do spherical trigonome- try in their heads, and he jeered with them at the seagulls, who had to use slates. Captain Bales was served at dinner by a nude Lady Cantner with an apple in her mouth. Alan was made post, but his ship was a hundred fathoms down off Nevis, and the wind kept shifting all about the compass. Kenyon and some admiral stood together in full uniform but no breeches and told him what a brute he wa<; to harm the French, who were only two inches tall and crawled allover him. He was in a cart on his way to Tyburn to be hanged, and with his jeering friends telling him to die game, there was an elfin face framed in honey gold ringlets staring up at him and telling him to keep his wig on straight, while a fiddler did a bad rendition of “Portsmouth Lass” and Claghorne and seaman Crouch shoved on the cap- stan bars, and some very ugly old woman sold poking sticks to the gentry who wished to have at him.

He dreamed he had Yellow Jack and had turned the color of a Quarantine flag, all his hair falling out in his eyes, and a beau- tiful young girl tenderly bathed his face, softly saying “you sonofabitching bastard” over and over, and he had an erection because her eyes were the color of the ocean in a shallow island harbor, and Cassius rang a tiny silver bell so everyone could come and marvel.

Then there was a dream of a cool room, dim and quiet and still, with some kind of bars slanting one wall, and that one lasted for a while. The walls looked like plaster instead of the lathed partitions of a



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