THE GUN KETCH - Dewey Lambdin

"Hullo, little man," Alan crooned, putting out a hand to touch the child on the cheek, to stroke the incredibly soft flesh with one tentative finger. By God, this was reality, and a damned awesome one! He stroked the back of one tiny hand, and felt wee fingers grasp his. "Well, I'm damned!" Alan breathed out with awe as little Sewallis gave him a grave going over with his tiny eyes. He chucked him under the chubby chin.

"Sewallis, I'm your father. What think you of that?"

Sewallis Alan Lewrie screwed up bis face and began to wail.

Damned right, Lewrie thought: I would, too!

"Early days," Lewrie shrugged helplessly.

"Let's go home, this instant," Caroline invited.

"Dearest, I can't. We're off after Finney."

"Oh, God!" she gasped. "Alan, must you? I thought…!"

"I care to be no other place but with you, love, but we've been ordered to hunt him down, if we can. I have to sail at once. But, I will be back, I swear. Soon, darling."

"I'll take him, Caroline," Heloise offered, holding out her arms to receive the child. Arm in arm, Caroline strolled with him down to the quay, where his gig rocked on the tide.

"Peyton showed me the broadside, dear," Alan tried to cajole her. "You're the bravest, stoutest girl I know! That took courage, and I'm that proud of you for fending off his vile advances."

"You'll have to fight him," she shuddered, head buried against his shoulder. "There'll be a battle, I know there will. God, Alan, I have this fear, of a sudden! You're barely back at all, and gone!"

"I'll be back, Caroline," he insisted. "I love you! Now we've a real family, now I've a son to raise, I'll not do anything stupid, I swear. Once I'm back, we'll have all the time in the world together."

"Promise me you'll do nothing too rash, Alan? Please?"

"I'll do my duty, Caroline," he vowed. "And nothing rash. And, he's a good head start on us. We may not catch him up at all."

"You will, though," she sighed on the verge of tears. "I know you will." She looked up at him intently, as if trying to memorizehis face for a final time to last her through the rest of a long life without him. "I love you, Alan. I will always love you."

"And I love you, Caroline," he replied, getting a fey feeling. He bent down and kissed her. "I'm sorry, but I have to go. Be brave for me, dearest girl. I'll fetch Finney back in chains, and we may add attempted rape to his crimes. Though we've enough to hang him a dozen times over already. Goodbye, love. Just for a week or two, a month on the outside, I promise."

"I'll be waiting," she told him, attempting to smile, holding back her tears as he stepped away from her. He walked to the dock and stepped into the stern-sheets of the gig. The bowman shoved off, and Cony snapped out his orders to back-water away from the pier.

Caroline watched as Alan was rowed out to his ship, stayed rigid on the dock as he mounted to the entry port to take his salute, stayed to wave to him as he doffed his hat to her. And stayed unmovirig as Alacrity's crew began to draw her up to short-stays to up-anchor, drumming round the capstan, though the gun ketch swam in her watery vision.

She could hear the canvas rustle, the sheaves shriek as Alacrity made sail even before the anchor was catted, as fiddles and fifes played a hauling chantey, gay but insistent.

She stayed on the dock until Alacrity cleared the harbour, and receded to hull-down over the horizon. Only then did she go back to the carriage, to stand inside to keep the ship in sight for a little longer.

"We should get home, Caroline," Heloise Boudreau offered at last. "Little Sewallis needs his sup soon. She's almost out of sight."

"I know, ma'am," Caroline nodded, wiping her eyes.

"He'll be back, you know. He will!"

"I pray so."

"We will all pray for his quick return, then."

"Let me have him," Caroline requested, and Heloise handed her her baby, who at last was napping, shaded from the tropic sun by the parasol Heloise held. "Once we're home, I have to talk to Wyonnie," Caroline added after she'd settled Sewallis in her arms. "There is something she must do for me."

"Home, driver," Heloise ordered the coachee. "And what is that, my dear?"

"I wish to see the obeah-man," Caroline replied.

"Oh, Caroline!" Heloise gasped. "Those are but fancy stories! I know his herbs helped Sewallis's colic, but…"

"We're both from the Carolinas, ma'am," Caroline intoned. "And we know what our 'mammies' told us growing up, about hexes. I wish to lay a hex," she said, looking straight ahead at the road, determined and grave. "Two. One of protection for Alan. And one a curse."

Chapter 11

Nor-nor'west for the Berrys, then north of west through the shallows of the Great Bahama Bank to Great Isaac, Alacrity bowled along off the wind. Stuns'ls rode at either end of the tops'l yards, doubling her sail area aloft, and a stays'1 flew in the space between her masts on a jury-rigged jumper stay. Eight-and-a-quarter knots she made, eight and a half toward evening, racing for the Gulf Stream and its relentless northward currents. By five a.m. of the next morning, they had found the darker waters of the Gulf Stream, and bent north, riding the mighty river that added another four-and-a-half knots made good to their forward progress.

"No sign of him," Rodgers gloomed as he ate Lewrie's food and took liberal sips of Lewrie's dwindling wine supply, and had slept in Lewrie's double hanging-cot in Lewrie's stead.

"He stayed in the middle of the Providence Channel," Alan said. "We may even be slightly ahead of him to the Gulf Stream, if he sailed more north'rd of us, closer to the west end of Grand Bahama. Perhaps tomorrow's dawn will tell, sir."

"We're drivin' hard, I'll give us that," Rodgers shrugged. "Do you think she rides a mite bows-low? That'll make her crank for close maneuverin', light as she is aft."

"We're shifting supplies aft into the stern, sir," Alan replied.

"And it might not hurt to shift the Number One cannon from each battery aft as well, sirs," Ballard suggested. "Alacrity used to mount sixteen side guns as a bomb ketch, in addition to her deck mortars."Aye, there's ring bolts, side-tackle bolts, and gun ports being wasted," Lewrie agreed. "Two guns all the way aft, into the great-cabin here. Just forrud of the quarter-galleries. That's over eighteen hundredweight each, or more. Just enough to lift her bows… six inches?"

While Lewrie was a dab-hand navigator, physics was beyond him.

"About that, sir," Ballard said solemnly, furrowing his brows as he calculated the proposition in his head. "Perhaps an inch less."

"Run out the starboard battery, too, and draw the larboard close to her centerline," Lewrie plotted on. "Chock the trucks with old shot-garland rope to keep them steady. Alacrity's flat-run on her bottom, and hard-chined aft. The more upright she sails, the faster she'll be."

"I'll attend to it, sir, soon as the forrud-most guns may be shifted," Ballard replied, jotting notes to himself about the order in which chores had best be performed.

"Four hours' lead, though, sirs," Rodgers sighed sadly. "Even if Finney took a longer northern route… more like five, if ya count the time it took us to up-anchor an' clear harbour. He could be over on Andros, laid up 'til any pursuit'd passed him by. Damn him, but he's a clever 'un."

"Next dawn may tell, sir," Ballard offered hopefully.

"Dawn will tell, dammit all," Lewrie insisted, slapping at the table top. "Dawn will tell!"

The sun rose next morning, blood-red and threatening, above a horizon of gun-metal gray. The Gulf Stream waters rolled and heaved to either beam, heaping high enough to smother Alacrity in the troughs between each long-set rolling wavecrest, and set her canvas luffing before she could rise up to clear air, and crack sails full of wind.

One hundred and sixty miles she'd made on her night passage up the American coast. Lewrie had not slept a single sea-mile of it, but had lain tossing in a chart-space berth, honing his anger.

Finney had violated his home, frightened his wife and son, and however he'd gotten word to flee-if he hadn't fled, Lewrie thought miserably, he'd have taken some revenge on Caroline for spurning him; he knew enough about the brute to not doubt that she might have been dead by then because of the broadside sheet, her and Peyton both!

He had taken the deck at eight bells of the mid-watch, at four of the clock in a chilly, dark morning, as the hands surged up to stow their hammocks in the nettings, wash down the decks, and stand to Dawn Quarters before their breakfast. To fret and pace as the stars paled from the gloomy skies, to see details in the clouds in the false-dawn, and watch the last of the moon sink below the horizon.

"Aloft, there!" he shouted to the lookouts.

"Notnin', sir! Clear 'orizons!"

"Damn!" he spat

"Sir, it's…" Ballard attempted to console.

"Oh, the devil take you, Mister Ballard!" Alan snarled. He took a deep breath to calm himself, and paced off his disappointment, back to the taffrails before returning. "Very well, secure from quarters, and release the people to breakfast."

"Aye, aye, sir," Ballard replied, not in the slightest miffed by Lewrie's petulant outburst after a year and a half together.

"Sorry, Arthur," Lewrie muttered, smiling sheepishly.

"It's just your way, sir," Ballard smiled in return. "Soon as the galley's hot, I'll send Cony up with coffee for you. I assume you will keep the deck." That was not a question.

"Aye, I will, and thankee," Lewrie nodded. "More of my bloody… way!" Distressed as he was, Lewrie could not help smiling at himself.

Say Finney's lugger made seven-and-a-half knots, though, Alan calculated in moody silence; five hours' lead to start with, and 160 sea-miles to The Stream… whilst we fetched it in 150 miles. God, we might have cut three hours off his lead. And we're a knot faster, say, all last night and all day today, with the current, now he thinks he's clear of pursuit We'll make twenty-four more miles a day than he, so… if his original lead was only thirty-seven miles…Christ! What if he did put into Andros, the Berrys, inshore of the Gulf Stream down at Bimini to wait it out? Or, he could be flying everything aloft but his laundry, all this time… We'll never catch him up!

"Coffee, sir," Cony announced half an hour later.

"Hmmph?" Lewrie growled, startled from his musings.

"Yer coffee, sir," Cony offered. "An' wot'll ya 'ave fer yer breakfast, sir?"

"This'll do, Cony. This'll do for now," he grumped. "Thankee."

"Aye, aye, sir," Cony nodded sorrowfully.

Bounding, swooping, rolling at the top of a wave, Alacrity was driven on, her course due north. Foam creamed down her flanks to lay roiled astern, quarter-waves sucking low at her after hull as thesea made a perfect shallow S, horizontally from bow to stern, frothing in a millrace under her transom. Eight-and-three-quarter knots now, as enough cargo and artillery had been shifted aft to lift her bows. On steeper rollers she surfed forward, and sometimes defied the ocean a hold on her, the bow-wave breaking aft of her cutwater, and her whole hull lifting from the sea in her haste, as if she would take wings and fly in those moments when wind and sea conjoined, before falling away to snuffle deep and plow the water again with a disappointed soughing.