Dewey Lambdin - THE GUN KETCH

• Название: THE GUN KETCH
• Автор: Dewey Lambdin
• Жанр: Морские приключения

It's 1786 and Alan Lewrie has his own ship at last, the Alacrity. Small but deadly, the Alacrity prowls the waters of the Caribbean, protecting British merchants from pirates. But Lewrie is still the same old rakehell he always was. Scandal sets tongues wagging in the Bahamas as the young captain thumbs his nose at propriety and makes a few well-planned conquests on land before sailing off to take on Calico Jack Finney, the boldest pirate in the Caribbean.

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The blade descended to lift one breast on its razor-sharp edge. "Still, I got me five more t'offer ye, so this 'un won't be missed."

"Bring that prisoner up, Mister Odrado," Lewrie called over his shoulder. "So help me, Doyle, you harm the girl in the slightest, and you hang before the sun is down. You show one sign you mean any harm to any of them, and I will open fire, devil take the hindmost, and God protect the innocent!"Squire's son don't crave ye, girl," Doyle frowned, and spoke in her ear, making her wail with redoubled panic. But in Spanish!

Now I have you, you bastard, Lewrie thought, wolfish with glee!

"That Spanish I heard, Doyle?" Lewrie forced himself to laugh, "Christ, all this hanging back for fear of harm to Spanish bitches?"

"Now, lookee here, squire's son…" Doyle began to splutter.

"This scum a friend of yours?" Lewrie asked as Odrado forced a prisoner to kneel in front of him. "Would you be upset if I shot him right here and now? What if I started in shooting all your men I hold, like the curs they are?"

"She dies, damn ye!" Doyle threatened, bringing the sword-tip up below the girl's jaw, and leveling his arm at full-bent extent for a thrust. "Just t'prove I'm not bluffin'!"

"And then you're one hostage less, Doyle. One dago bitch less! No one I'd sport charity for. I dislike dagos more than cold, boiled mutton, don't ya know! Fought too many of 'em in the war, hey?" Alan guffawed, putting an icy edge to his sarcastic laughter. He drew out the dragoon pistol and pulled the dog's-jaw back to full cock, then laid it against the kneeling scoundrel's ear.

"I ain't foolin', squire's son!" the pirate leader snarled at him, pressing the sword's point deeper, drawing a trickle of blood, and a muffled, wheedling scream from the tormented girl.

"Neither am I," Lewrie told him. And pulled the trigger on the pistol and shot the kneeling pirate's head apart like a melon!

"Nombre de Dio!" Odrado croaked, crossing himself.

"Fetch up another prisoner, Mister Odrado," Lewrie instructed, trying to keep his bile down as he turned to blow the remaining powder embers from the priming pan. "And reload that for me."

"Jesus and Mary, ye…!" Doyle blanched, then recovered his bluster. "I swear t'Christ, this bitch is dead!" He began to stab her through the throat. She fainted dead away.

"Trade lives with me, will you?" Lewrie scoffed. "I kill one, you kill one, and then you run out of dago bitches a lot faster than I run out of pirates, who don't deserve better, anyway, Doyle. Now would you call that a handsome bargain, you son of a bitch?"

"Christ, yer lunatick!" Doyle goggled, trying to hold the girl up, then letting her sag unconscious to the ground. "Ah, d' ye think I care 'bout them yonder? Keep 'em, then! Do wot ye please!"

"I'll keep shooting them down until I run across one of your cut-throats you do give a damn about, Doyle. You do what you please with your captives. They don't signify to me!" Lewrie taunted. "You get no boats, you don't go free, and if you don't give up the women, throw down your arms and come out of there, you're dead! Now, damn your eyes!"

The two buccaneers holding their squealing, struggling captives were just as appalled as anyone else on the beach, and peered around their prisoners to gawk at one of their comrades shot to flinders.

God save me, Lewrie prayed! "Now, Cony!"

Two shots rapped out as Lewrie ducked to the side and drew one of his pistols; one light crack from the.54 caliber fusil musket, an accurate weapon for a muzzleloader, and the deeper report of a breech-loading Ferguson which, in an age where Brown Bess couldn't hit a man in the chest at sixty yards, could reach out flat and true to 200!

One pirate gave out a high scream as he was hit in the temple, the other grunted as he was plumbed right between the eyes!

"Abajo, senoras! " Lewrie screamed. "Down, ladies, get down!"

The women had the sense to drop to their knees, but began to scramble and claw away from the terror, away from the cave mouth on their knees and bound wrists, scraping over the rocks despite Lewrie's pleas. "Shit! Fire, Mister Parham! Fire!"

The boat-gun chuffed, and there was a howl over his head as the canister spread with enough wind to take off his hat. The roof of the cave sparkled and smoked just inside the entrance shelf profligate as a royal fireworks show, then the cave sang with winnings and keenings as the musket balls caromed and ricocheted inside to a satanic chorus of screams.

Lewrie rose from his protective squat as the pirate Doyle did, took aim at the amazed man, and fired. Doyle grunted with the impact and went over backwards, lifted off his feet by the heavy ball, and dropped out of sight, but for his heels drumming on the shale.

"Come on, lads, up and at 'em!" Lewrie called, drawing his sword. He stepped up the short slope of rock to peer inside as his men came thundering up to join him.

There was no fight left in them, those pirates who had lived through that lead sleeting. Lewrie knelt by Doyle, who was gut-shot and going fast.

"Jesus an' Mary, wot kind o' King's officer they givin' commissions t'now, damn ye?" Doyle panted, wincing with agony. "Yer not supposed t'…"Do you surrender to me now, you bastard?" Lewrie grinned. "Devil take ye!" he groaned and sank back. "No, the Devil take you, Billy Bones," Lewrie spat. "I just wish I'd had the complete pleasure of watching you swing!"

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 so testimony could be taken, which had coincided with the height of the hurricane season, so Alacrity ended up swinging at her anchors even longer. Which enforced idleness was simply "the nuts" to Alan, for he could spend nights ashore with Caroline in their snug little home, and enjoy the fruits of his variant labors, and a hero's proper welcome. Deliriously happy as he felt, it was then that he began to see portents which disturbed him.

It rankled him when officers from the garrison or Fort Montagu down the eastern road halted their rides together to tip their hats to her and converse a tad too gallantly for his liking. When he and Caroline went to town to shop or accept an invitation, gentlemen came up to them to exchange pleasantries and gossip from past social gatherings. Would they go to tea, to ecarti, a drum, rout or ball, or a cool evening salon, there would be fashionable young sprogs sidling up to her to discuss people and topics of which he was ignorant. At dances, he would end up grinding his teeth by the punch bowl as Caroline was surrounded by hopeful blades who begged just the one dance, or come nigh on snapping his neck to keep an eye on her as he performed his social obligations to dance with the stout, clumsy, or frippish matrons and their pimply, runny-nosed daughters.

In his absence, Caroline had developed social relations with many Loyalist families, and a fair number of old-time Bahamians as well. She had also struck up a close friendship with Betty Mustin, Commander Benjamin Rodgers' "kept mutton," who was no shrinking violet when it came to accepting invitations.

She and Caroline went coaching together, riding horseback as an almost inseparable pair, shopped and visited back and forth as dear as cater-cousins, and made the social rounds together, in company with the much older Peyton and Heloise Boudreau, their landlords, along as chaperones. Innocent as it sounded, Lewrie thought Betty Mustin just a bit "fly," and a disturbing influence.

Perhaps it was all innocent socializing, he thought, but then he could remember being cock-of-the-company and buck-of-the-first-head in such circumstances, too, in his bachelor days, when he had preyed upon the loneliness of abandoned young matrons with an itch to scratch, and shammed being a "Robin Goodfellow" until they'd come around to his way of thinking. It gave him pause, it did.

Giving him pause, too, was his reticence to believe that such deceit had entered his married life, or to bring up the ugly subject. What could he say that would not make him look like a foolish cully? Where could he draw a line without shaming her? How was a fellow to order some simpering young toad to sheer off and leave his wife alone in future? He was even fretful to mention it to her in private, if her tempestuous reactions to their first disagreement were anything to go by.

That had occurred about a week after his return, after the dew was off the rose, so to speak.

"Uhm, Caroline," he had asked, having regarded their paintings and sketches on the restfully pale tan walls of their house and found one missing. "Where's that oil o' mine, the large one with the women taking their baths?"

"That nude harem scene?" she'd frowned, though fondly. "Alan, really, whatever could you have been thinking of to purchase it? It was taking up space, and I could not hang it anywhere decent people might see it. I sold it."

"Sold it!" he'd goggled. "But I rather fancied…"

"Traded it, really," she'd laughed quite matter-of-factly. "I obtained yon Sunset Over Nassau Harbour there. A local artist did it, Augustus Hedley. It has such lovely ships in it, and the colors are quite spectacular, do you not think? As near to any as ever I did see on our voyage here. Whenever I gaze upon it, it reminds me of our honeymoon aboard Alacrity, and makes me blissful."

"You can look out the door and see sunset over Nassau Harbour, and all the ships you wish anytime you bloody well please," Alan had groused. "Why not a painting of a gash-bucket, then, ifyou want to be reminded of the voyage? Or the Townsleys at table? Pretty much the same, really. Horrid feeders, they were. And spewers."

"We won't always live in Nassau, Alan," she had responded with a hug and sweet reason. "And then we will wish a memento of our time here. I quite like it. Don't you?"

"Damned ships aren't even rigged proper, damme if they ain't. Who's this Hedley, then?"

"The funny little fellow in the yellow ditto suits. We met him at the dance last week. He's very talented. He does everyone who is anyone's portraits. People say he's good as any in the Royal Academy."

"Well, I hope he does noses better than he does masts, or he's overcharging," Alan had laughed.

"Then must art depict reality so closely one could use it as an illustration in your Falconer's Marine Dictionary?" she'd asked him rather sharply. Ominously, there was a tiny vertical line of threat between her lovely brows, a line he could not recall seeing before. He'd sensed an argument, and had submitted, humphing into silence.

The real explosion had come later after supper, as they sat on their breezeway savoring sundown and a post-prandial brandy. Alan had speculated, to his cost, which particular shade of green the house was now painted.

"And the Boudreau house up the drive," he'd allowed easily, his feet extended, slumped down in an unpadded wooden chair Caroline had had a local carpenter construct. "Pink as cooked salmon. A bit off-putting, I must say. Whatever happened to white, cream, or gray like a London row house? All these pinks and blues and all…"

"And pale mint green?" she had inquired. Very coolly. "Looks as if they could get nothing but castoff paints sent here," he'd blathered on, attempting to be amusing, "that pink must be a mix of ship's bottom-paint. White stuff and red stuff stirred up and slathered on, same as Alacrity'd get afore recoppering. I would have thought, long as you were painting, and they were, you'd have put your head together with Heloise and come up with a match."

"I chose this mint green to make our house appear different, Alan," she had replied archly. "Not an extension, the gatehouse or coach-house to theirs any longer, as long as we live in it." "Well, it was, though, wasn't it, dear? And will be again." "So that no one would come riding by, see it, and wonder if it is still occupied by the head groom or their slave overseer! Really, Alan, you don't like it?"