Dewey Lambdin - Sea of Grey

"I sent in a prize with my Third Officer and best midshipman in charge of her, sir. I lost two midshipmen at Mole Saint Nicholas, and I need my people back."

"Can't," Nicely brusquely said. "Sent her on to Jamaica, with all those French privateersmen. I'd no place to secure them. She's in the hands of the Prize Court, though, so there'll be some reward coming… should that be a comfort."

"Oh well, then," Lewrie said with a sad shrug. "Short-handed a tad longer. Promote a couple of quartermasters or mates as acting midshipmen? Uhm… when the Army buckled and broke, sir… do you know anything about the Fifteenth West Indies regiment? An old friend of mine commands it."

"You don't mean that fop Colonel Beauman, do you?" Nicely asked, a look of distaste on his face.

"Oh no, sir!" Lewrie all but gasped. "I know Colonel Beauman, from long ago, but… I refer to Colonel Cashman!"

"Oh, him!" Nicely laughed, throwing back his head. "One devil of a fellow. That's alright, then. Pity, though, about him and his regiment. There's a bit of a stink, after the battle up at Croix des Bouquets. Not in good odour with Maitland since. Your friend lives, though, have no fears on that score. They're somewhere along the lines, fairly close to town, I believe."

"Well, that's good," Lewrie said, letting out a breath of pent worry. "Whilst we're loading, do you not have anything for me to do, sir, I'd very much like to look Cashman up."

"Shouldn't be a problem," Nicely decided. "God keep you, then,

Captain Lewrie. We'll surely speak again, as long as this poor siege lasts. Adieu, sir." Nicely and Lewrie doffed hats, then Nicely strode out into the torrid sunshine, reaching into his left sleeve for a handkerchief, and sneezing as the full brunt of the sun struck him, before stomping briskly towards the quays.

The staff officers at the commandeered headquarters were loath to loan him a horse, but Lewrie cajoled them after a long palaver and rode up the streets out of town. The paving stones gave way to silty dirt and sand, the last tumbledown shanties and hovels of Free Blacks and petits blancs were left behind, and the undergrowth grew thicker and closer to the track, reaching overhead to interlace and block off the sun, making multiple swaying dapples of soft green light along the eerie tunnel through the woods.

Maybe this isn't such a good idea, Lewrie thought, drawing his thin-shanked, weary mare to a halt. He took off his hat to fan himself and swabbed his cheeks and chin of dripping sweat on his right sleeve. Though he was in deep shade, there was no relief from the heat and, perplexingly, it felt even warmer than under the crushing sizzle of the sun; airless, too, the heat muggy and close, and so humid that he could feel his breath flow in and out like running water.

Eeriest of all, it was ominously quiet-but for the throb of those damned drums, and the hum and buzz of mosquitoes, tiny bees, and large flies that swarmed his sweaty horse and sweaty self.

When first he'd entered the woods, there had been a faint hum of town doings astern, and the ring of axes thwocking into timber somewhere ahead. Exotic birds had screeched and hooted, crickets and grasshoppers had sawed and fiddled and cheeped, frogs had croaked and whatever-the-hell-they-weres had rustled and whined. Now, all was silent; but for the deep waggon ruts in the dirt track and the imprint of army boots along the verges where soldiers had slogged to avoid the puddles, he could conjure that he was the only human in the trackless forest, the only person to have come this way in days!

Maybe I don't like Cashman that much! he told himself considering turning around and going back aboard ship, with grim remembrances of

the underlying terror of wild wastelands he'd felt as a young midshipman in the woods of the Yorktown peninsula in the Virginia Colony before the siege began. His future brothers-in-law, Governour and Burgress Chiswick, had taunted him about skulking Red Indians, Rebel snipers, and irregulars just waiting to lift his hair, cut his throat, and carve off his privates, whilst screeching with glee and dancing above his half-dead body!

Lewrie could not see half a decent pistol-shot in the forests on either hand, the dirt track a demi-lune forming the bottom of the view down a telescope's tube, and…

He heard a jingling-plashing-thumping approach up ahead and round the slight bend in the road! He groped for the double-barreled pistol in his waistband, thumbing the right hammer back to half-cock, his legs tightening about his mount, and ready to saw the reins to run back into town, heels pressed to the mare's belly, about to thump her to her fastest gait.

"Oy, thank God!" a soldier, a Corporal, cried as he came round the bend on a horse. He was a wizened little fellow, not as big as a minute, clad in a tunic that had faded from red to pink, and stained white breeches, his walnut-tan face grizzled with several days' worth of whiskers. A short musketoon was slung across his back, and across the saddle in front of him lay several lengths of chain.

"Ah!" Lewrie snapped, very much relieved, de-cocking his pistol.

"Thort I wuz t'onliest man alive fer a bit there, sir," the old veteran merrily cackled, pacing his horse up next to him. "Spooky of place, 'ese woods, sir."

"Indeed," Lewrie "windily" agreed. "I'm looking for the whereabouts of the Fifteenth West Indies."

" 'Bout a mile an' a bit straight on, sir, then veer right along the lines, first track ya come to. Woods open up so's ya can see your way, not a quarter-mile yonder, where a big plantation wuz, an' you're fair-safe, then… among soldiers, beyond 'em fields an' all, sir."

"Thankee, Corporal."

"Be glad t'get outta th' woods, meself," the corporal said, taking a swig from a wood canteen. "Get 'ese trace-chains fixed, so's me major's waggon'll draw again. Why, do I not find a handy smith, h'it'd take me

all this day an' night, sir! Major'd not expect me t'risk 'is road after dark, sir… no, 'e wouldn't!"

The "water" in the man's canteen smelled hellish alcoholic to Lewrie's nose. An experienced old hand, the corporal obviously wanted any excuse to toddle off and dawdle over his errand, getting a shot at a decent meal, a thorough drunk, and a woman before having to go back to the Army's misery.

"You goin' up to h'arrest some o' them officers from 'at regiment, sir, 'em Fifteenth? Good Lord knows somebody should, th' cowards. 'Tis said, sir… some of 'em rode off an' left 'eir men t'die or get took by 'em dark devils. Won't see 'at in an English regiment, nossir, but… wot can ya h'expect from such an idle lot, sir?"

"Visiting a friend," Lewrie answered.

"I'll ride on then, sir, an' keep safe," the soldier bade him, saluting for the first time, with a leery expression for anyone with a friend from among that regiment's officers.

"Same to you, Corporal," Lewrie rejoined, doffing his hat, and clucking his mount into motion once more.

H e found the Fifteenth at long last, after casting rightwards past the fork in the road, slowly walking his mount along the rear of several other units' encampments and entrenchments.

Lewrie had seen defeat and despair often enough in his eighteen years of service, and this army was showing all the signs of it. Care wasn't being taken of equipment, but for personal arms. Uniforms were still mud and grass-stained, and the clotheslines were not the usually crowded rows oн bunting. The soldiers looked hang-dog and lethargic.

When he got to the lines of the Fifteenth West Indies, it was even worse. There were very few tents, replaced with brush arbors or mere awnings stretched beneath the trees, where exhausted, sick, and hollow-eyed men lolled nigh-insensible to everything around them, not even raising their heads at the rare sight of a naval officer on horseback. What tents remained contained the wounded… and the still-neat line oн larger pavillions for officers. One, the largest of all, he took for Ledyard Beau-man's; that was where some fashionably dressed and rather clean officers had gathered, raising a merry din as if they were enjoying themselves, where fine horses stood cock-footed and shivered their skins and lashed their tails and manes against the flies, blowing and nickering now and again in exasperation or boredom.

Lewrie dismounted and led his horse down the lines until coming to a sizable pavillion with a large fly, and two sides halfway rolled up. He recognised the coat hanging on a nail driven into the tentpole in front. From within there came the sounds of snores.

"Hallo, the house," he called, rapping on the pole.

"Ummph!" came a querulous, half-awake plaint.

"Wakey wakey, lash up and stow, you idle bugger," Lewrie japed.

"Alan?" Cashman croaked, coughing and clearing his throat before sitting up on his sagging cot. "What the bloody hell're you doing way out here?" he asked, swinging his booted legs to the ground.

"Came in search of good cheer," Lewrie said, kneeling down and tying his reins through a rusty iron ring set in a tethering-stone.

"Came to the wrong bloody place if you did… more fool you," Cashman grunted, scrubbing his face with dry hands and yawning broadly, reaching for a towel to soak up his sweat. "No joy here, believe me."

"Ran into a soldier on my way here…"

"Not hard t'do, that," Cashman snorted, taking the lid off his tin water pail and dipping out a ladleful to swish around his mouth and spit out. "We're lousy with 'em. Least, we were."

"Said you'd had a spot of bother, recently. Asked if I was up to arrest anyone," Lewrie said, ducking under the tent fly to sit on a folding camp stool and fan himself with his hat. How Cashman slept under canvas was a wonder to him; the temperature felt as if it had increased by a full twenty degrees inside the tent.

"Wish someone would!" Christopher spat, dipping up more water, this time to guzzle down. "My luck, though, they'd come for me."

"What happened?" Lewrie asked, waving off Cashman's offer of a crooked, local-rolled cigarillo.

"Feel like a stroll?" Cashman asked, fumbling with his tinder-box and striking flint on steel several times before getting the lint burning, with which to light his cigarillo.

"Not really, it's hotter than the hinges of Hell."

It was no matter to Cashman, who, now puffing away, stood and pulled on his waistcoat, coat, hat, and sword-belt and led the way out to the bare and sandy tramped ground of the encampment.

"We'll go up and take a look at the lines," Cashman announced, setting off for the woods to the east. Lewrie could but shrug before following him; at least, from Cashman's initial pace, it would be the slow, ambling sort of stroll he had in mind.

"That purblind, Goddamned fool back there!" his old friend said at last, once out of earshot of the officers' lines. "He got us halfway massacred… and now swears it wasn't any fault of his! I've lost a third of the regiment, dead or wounded, and the rest're so terrified, I doubt they'll be worth a tuppenny shit the next time they face those devils of L'Ouverture's."

"How?" Lewrie asked.

"Why, by being himself, Alan," Cashman said, the scorn dripping. "By bein' his merry little, useless, witless self! General Maitland put us out on his left flank, braced by a veteran regiment of regulars on the extreme left. Heard about the battle we had t'other day, at Croix des Bouquets? The 'Port-Au-Prince Derby '?"

"Only that there was one," Lewrie told him.

"Had us some trenchworks, not much, 'bout waist-deep, with the bushes and such cut and cleared a couple of hundred yards out beyond," Cashman explained as they threaded through a worn path into the woods towards their new front. "Caltrops in the grass and all, two guns on the line for help. 'Bout a half-hour before sunup, here the darkies came, the sun in our eyes. Advance party, a 'forlorn hope,' that had most-like spent all night creepin' through the grass to us? Sprang up at the first volley, and got into the trenches with their cane-knives and short spears. Some o' them just fire-hardened canes or branches, if you can feature it. I'd kept two companies back for just such an emergency, and brought 'em up myself. First time in real action, our lads, so a fair number broke, no matter what the sergeants did t'keep 'em steady… you know how that is.