It didn’t happen, though. The Dutch prisoners of war were put aboard the transports and sent off with hardly any escorts, leaving HMS Reliant swinging to her anchors, a condition which turned boresome after a fortnight or so. By the end of February, Lewrie was itching to get back to sea before his crew got too bored, sullen, and out of practice. All the competitions he could stage aboard, all the rowing races and sailing races he could arrange with the ship’s boats, had lost their appeal. Personally, he had re-read all his novels, and a few new to him borrowed from the wardroom, had written so many letters to Lydia, his sons, his in-laws, his daughter, his father, old friends from the Navy, fellow lodgers at the Madeira Club in London—even Peter Rushton and Clotworthy Chute—that he had nothing more to say!

When he asked Popham’s permission to patrol round Cape Agulhas and points East into the Indian Ocean, Popham had been more than eager to allow him, telling a gathering of his officers, “But, of course you may. After all, sirs, we know by now that we must keep Captain Lewrie amused, and spared anything humdrum, what? Haw haw!”

“Thank you, sir,” Lewrie had said, though thinking, Eat shit and die!

*   *   *

He took a month away from Cape Town and its delights, working his crew back to well-drilled competence at striking and re-erecting top-masts, at tacking or wearing about on a sudden whim, at taking in sail by reefing or striking or ugly and baggy “Spanish Reefs” to spill wind from courses and tops’ls by clewing them up into bats’ wings with their centres drawn against the yards and the outer corners resembling flabby sacks. And, of course there was arms drill almost every morning, with boarding pikes, cutlasses, and musketry fired at towed kegs well astern of a barge under sail. Even if the Ordnance Board didn’t care for the expense, Reliant went to Quarters at least four days a week to practice live-firing with the great guns, from quarterdeck 9-pounders to bow chasers, carronades, and her battery of 18-pounders, expending kegs of gunpowder and hundreds of flannel cartridge bags.

In his early, confused, and miserable days as a Midshipman in old HMS Ariadne, back in 1780, the one redeeming feature of his term of servitude had been when the ship had gone to Quarters and the lashings had been cast off the guns. The crashes, the leaping recoils, the thunderous rumble of carriage trucks as they were hauled back to be loaded, then run up to the ports once more, and the thick, rotten-egg stink of spent powder that be-fogged the decks had put him in heaven! The blasts which fluttered his innards always put him in mind of shuddery raptures! And to get off three rounds per gun in two minutes and hammer a patch of sea with concentrated broadsides, well!

By the time Lewrie was satisfied with his crew’s gunnery, even Bisquit the dog had taken to running below on his own whenever the Marine drummer and fifer started the Long Roll, with no one to lead him by the collar, and Chalky learned that his wicker travelling cage was a safe and snug place to run to!

*   *   *

Off the Southern tip of Madagascar, near the mouth of the Mozambique Channel, Lewrie decided to return to Cape Town. After he had breakfasted on oatmeal and coffee, he went to the quarterdeck to give that order. Bisquit was playing fetch with some of the ship’s boys, but broke off and began to slink towards the hatchway, wary of his presence which might presage another morning of dread thunders, but Lewrie took time to whistle him up and give him some petting before mounting the ladderway.

“Good morning, sir,” Lt. Westcott, who had the watch, said.

“Good morning to you, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said back with a grin. “Put the ship about, if you please, and shape course back to Cape Town.”

“Very good, sir!” Westcott replied, perking up and baring his signature brief smile. “Bosun, pipe all hands! Stations to wear!”

Once about and steady on a course of Sou’west by West, Lewrie summoned Westcott to join him at the windward rails.

“Aye, sir?” Westcott asked.

“I’ve been ponderin’ something, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said. “The complete absence of any Dutch warships in the area.”

“Well, one would think the Dutch are too busy protecting their East Indies colonies, sir … Java and such,” Westcott said after a moment of musing. “Or, they’re preying on our India and China trades, alongside their allies, the French. What they now call Holland, the Batavian Republic, is occupied by, and subordinate to, the French. If any Dutch warships are around, one’d most-like find them at the isles of Réunion and Mauritius … under overall French command.”

“It still makes no sense to me that they just abandoned and set fire to that sixty-eight gunner anchored in False Bay,” Lewrie told him.

“The Bato, sir,” Westcott supplied.

“Aye. We were so busy landing troops, we didn’t have a rowing boat t’spare,” Lewrie continued. “They could’ve sailed her out to sea and run to Réunion and we wouldn’t have known a thing about it. And, if the Cape Colony was so important to the Dutch, and the French, why was she the only one there? We’ve seen one of our East India Company trades, a couple of Swedish ships, an American whaler or two, but not hide nor hair of the Dutch or the French. I don’t like it. I have a … fey feeling that once they get word that we’ve taken Cape Town, the French and the Dutch together could put together a decent-sized squadron t’take it all back.”

“Well, a squadron of ships, perhaps, sir, but with five thousand of our soldiers ashore and in control of the forts, they wouldn’t stand much of a chance at counter-invasion,” Westcott dismissed with a shake of his head.

“There is that, granted, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie allowed as he turned to gaze aft as if searching for a hostile sail on the horizon … any hostile sail. “We beat the stuffings out of the Dutch Navy at Camperdown, but they’d have a long time since t’rebuild it, even if Napoleon’s used their yards t’build all those thousands of invasion craft so he could land in England. They could send at least one two-decker sixty-eight to defend Cape Town, so … why not more, t’protect their East Indies colonies? Or, d’ye think I’m jumpin’ at shadows?” he asked, turning back to his First Officer to pull a face in self-deprecation.

“More … planning against the worst, sir,” Westcott replied with a hint of a grin. In his three years’ service under Lewrie, he had yet to see him take himself seriously, or become pompous. “Fore-warned is fore-armed, what? But, it may be, sir, that it’s half what you might wish, more than what the Dutch have, or might do. God, we have been so busy and active for so long that this idling in harbour, and so-far fruitless cruising, is … nettlesome. Making us sit up late at night, waiting for the shoe to drop, and listening for the odd creaking.”

“We?” Lewrie scoffed. “Me, ye mean. Frankly, it’d be better did all our ships spend more time at sea, ’stead of holdin’ victory suppers, and pattin’ ourselves on the back. Roam farther afield than Cape Agulhas and Lamberts Bay to the North o’ Cape Town. Bring every crew beyond ‘river discipline’ competence again.”

“You’re thinking more like a Commdore, again, sir, not just another subordinate Captain,” Westcott dared to comment, “serving at another man’s whims.”

“Well, I will allow that my brief time in that position was … habit-forming,” Lewrie said with a self-mocking shrug. “All that vast power and authority was intoxicatin’!”

Westcott laughed along with him.

“How to suggest such to Commodore Popham, though, sir,” Westcott said in a lower voice, “and express your suspicions of a Dutch and French combined riposte, hmm?”

“That is the rub, aye,” Lewrie replied, scowling, “without him thinkin’ me an old lady, or unwilling t’hear anything from anyone that goes against his set thinkin’. Or, takin’ any suggestion from the likes of me, at all! I think he’s a ‘down’ on me, ever since we went off on our own with the Army. Oh, well.”