The Gun Ketch by Dewey Lambdin

Author:Dewey Lambdin [Lambdin, Dewey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9781590131299
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1993-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part V

"Expulsis piratis—Restituta Commercia."

"He expelled the pirates and restored commerce."

—Former National Motto

Of The Bahamas

Chapter 1

Alan Lewrie was jealous.

It was a novel experience for him, this gnawing apprehension, instead of the cut-and-thrust, quickly done sort of rivalrous jealousy of his bachelorhood where the prize was discarded once gained, and the only thing that mattered was outwitting one's rivals. But now, with the prize becoming ever dearer to him, and with the evidence clear after his long enforced separation from Caroline, he was fearful that jealousy, and its attendant alarums, would be a permanent way of life, one never even hinted at in those tales of "happily-ever-after" one read of in fiction.

For the characters of the smugly moral Richardson's novels, or even the risque rogues of a Fielding book, there was always a happy ending where two souls, after much bother of course, share a life of indolent bliss together, with nary a cross word, nary a threat once the principal villain has been dispatched. Spooning and bussing from morning 'til night in blessed mutual agreement, and in such sweetly disposed and addlepated disconnection with the rest of the scurvy world that it could go hang, as long as the Happy Couple got their tea water the right temperature, and nothing more distressful than burned toast ever seemed to plague them from that moment on.

Then, of course, Alan Lewrie grumped moodily, there's the real world, and you're bloody welcome to it! All those writers; Fielding, Richardson, even bloody Smollett, were a tribe of debol-locked, clueless, hopeful... bachelors!

It had begun soon after his return to Nassau Harbour to a hero's welcome as dizzying as a conquering Roman general might have received; the eight-day wonder, with manacled pirates as his captives to parade under the yoke as a spectacle in his triumph.The Spanish ladies he had freed were greeted and swooned over in the better salons in Nassau society as the epitomes of romantic tales in which the virtuous young maiden is rescued by an English knight from the dragon's very mouth, and Alan had been feted as their champion, much like a modern-day St. George.

Until, of course, the town had learned that those poor, piteous senoritas had not done all a plucky English girl would have under the circumstances, that they had not gamely spurned their captors' Base Designs, as heroines in fiction seemed to do when taken by Turks and slung into the sultan's harem. Their social stock fell considerably, and with a great sigh of relief, and many muttered imprecations such as "... what may one expect; they're only dagos," and "blood will tell," they were hustled off for Cuba to complete their voyage quicker than one could say "knife," so rude fact could not contradict high-flown popular sentiment.

As that fame faded for Alan, the trial which followed restored him to center stage, which trial resulted in a "hanging fair" as gay and cock-a-whoop as any he'd ever seen at Tyburn. And the trial had kept Alacrity in harbor for weeks

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