*   *   *

Mister Deacon, the bodyguard, answered the door at Mountjoy’s lodgings and let Lewrie in, offering a terse “welcome back, sir” with no hint of a smile, despite the good news in Mountjoy’s note.

“Mister Deacon, well met, again,” Lewrie replied before going up the several flights of stairs. “There’ll be a couple of my men calling, my cabin-steward, and my cook. Don’t break them.”

“I stand warned, sir,” Deacon replied, with a tight grin.

At the top of the stairs, the heavy iron-bound oak door to the lodgings stood half-open, for a change. Lewrie stepped through, giving out a “hallo”, and found Mister Thomas Mountjoy at a desk in his shirtsleeves, flipping through a sheaf of papers and a thick ledger.

“Lewrie!” Mountjoy cried, leaping to his feet and rushing over to welcome him in with a wide grin on his face. “We’ve done it! Well, part of it, or at least one more stop forward.”

“‘A large turnip added to the soup’, your note said?” Lewrie asked with a brow up in query.

“An hellish-big ‘turnip’, yes,” Mountjoy boasted. “Sir, we’ve gotten ourselves a ship! Come out to the rooftop gallery and have a squint at her with my telescope!”

Lewrie tossed his hat on the cushioned settee outside, rushing to the telescope. It was already fixed upon the ship in question, and all he had to do was bend down a bit and put his eye to the ocular.

“She’s the Harmony,” Mountjoy eagerly told him. “Three-masted, as you suggested, so she can load troops into all six boats at once from her chain platforms and shrouds, though she’s not a trooper, but carries general cargo. She’s a touch under two hundred fifty tons, but she was recently re-coppered, I was assured.”

Mountjoy’s telescope was powerful enough to show Lewrie that even still fully laden, Harmony had a strip of new-penny clean copper at her waterline. Her furled and brailed-up sails were as white as if they had just come from a sailmaker’s loft, and her paint had been touched up recently.

“Two tons per man, that’d let us put at least one hundred and twenty-five officers and men aboard her, all told, right?” Mountjoy pressed.

“No more than ninety to one hundred,” Lewrie had to tell him, still studying her. “We’ll have to make room below for about fifty or more sailors to handle the boats, and the rations t’feed ’em all, too. I don’t see a single gun in sight. She sails unarmed?”

Whether a merchant ship could really mount a decent defence if attacked by pirates, an enemy privateer, or a warship, given how few crewmen that cheese-paring owners and captains hired, it was Lewrie’s experience that most of them carried some armament.

Must count on muskets, pikes, cutlasses, and a few swivel guns, Lewrie thought, looking for the forked iron stanchions along the tops of Harmony’s bulwarks in which swivel guns, usually light 2-pounders, would be set if threatened. He saw a grand total of six.

No doubt they’re stowed far below, and haven’t been brought up in ages, Lewrie told himself with a wry grimace; Most-like gone completely to rust, and I doubt if there’s a man in her crew who knows a damned thing about usin’ ’em!

“Well, perhaps she always sails in convoy, under escort, and her owners don’t feel the need for guns,” Mountjoy lamely tried to explain. “Does she really need artillery?” he asked.

“No,” Lewrie said with a shrug, standing back up and turning to face him. “Not as long as she sails with us, Sapphire can protect her. She looks like she has swivel guns, and anything heavier, 6-pounders on wheeled carriages, would just take up deck space.”

“Well, that’s all fine, then,” Mountjoy said, brightening over his new acquisition, and Lewrie’s seeming satisfaction with her. “I’ve found this marvellous sparkling white wine from Portugal, it just came in. Not exactly a champagne, but it gives a fair approximation. Let’s open a bottle and toast our addition to ‘Rock Soup’, hey? Now, where the Devil did I leave that bloody cork puller?”

The search for the requisite implement took several minutes, and it was finally found under a decorative pillow on the upholstered settee in the small salon adjacent to the outdoor gallery.

“Ah, that is spritely!” Lewrie commented after a sip, “not too sweet, either, not like a sparkling German white. Costly? I may go buy a case, if there’s any left t’be had.”

“I’ll show you where,” Mountjoy promised. “Or, as you sailors say, ‘I’ll give you a fair wind’ to it, hah! And no, not dear at all. Nothing like what the ship’s cost me. Well, Peel, and Secret Branch. Harmony is two hundred and thirty tons, but her owners insisted that if she’s to be used in an active military role, they rounded her burthen up to two hundred and fifty tons … evidently, they love round numbers … and demanded twenty-five shillings per ton.”

“Damme!” Lewrie exclaimed. “All our troopers that carried the army to Cape Town last January only cost nineteen!”

“Ah, but they never came under fire, and once empty, they were used to carry the defeated Dutch soldiers home, then went back to general work,” Mountjoy carped. “Peel wrote and told me that the owners had to hire a new master for her, after the first one objected to the risk. Half her old crew cried off, too. Not that there’s that many sailors aboard her, to begin with.”

Harmony’s owners, and the Transport Board, were equal when it came to miserliness; neither would pay for more than five sailors and ship’s boys for every hundred tons of burthen, which meant that she’d be handled by only ten hands, plus master and mates, cook, carpenter, sailmaker, bosun, and such, and Lewrie simply could not imagine how it was done! His whole life had been in warships in which no less than fourty sailors were crammed aboard, arseholes to elbows, even in the smallest cutters, and there were hundreds aboard most frigates, and Sapphire, more than enough muscle for even the hardest tasks.

How the Devil do they even get the anchors up? he wondered; Or reef, or strike top-masts in a blow?

“You’ve gone aboard her?” Lewrie asked.

“As soon as she dropped anchor,” Mountjoy assured him. “I met her master, a Mister Hedgepeth, and looked her over, though she still had a full cargo aboard, waiting for the barges and stevedores, so I couldn’t tell you much about her belowdecks. God, but Hedgepeth is a dour old twist! The only reason he took command of her was that he’s to be paid ten pounds extra a month than the owners pay him, and that comes out of my budget, and I’m to be liable for any and all repairs needed, if her paint gets scraped in the course of our activities, and he insists he’ll demand more in future, if the job looks more dangerous than he was first told.”

Mountjoy went on to relate how he had approached the Commissoner of the dockyards, Captain Middleton, before Harmony had arrived, and told him that he might have to use Admiralty labour, lumber, and stores to repair a civilian ship. Mountjoy’s reception had been more than cool; more like a winter’s night at the North Pole!

“By the by, your boats are ready,” Mountjoy said, pouring them a top-up as they sat a ’sprawl under the shade of a canvas awning on the gallery. “Six double-enders, he told me, thirty-six feet long and ten abeam, with room for small carronades in their bows.”

“He still thinks he’ll get ’em as gunboats, damn him,” Lewrie griped. “Well, once Harmony’s landed the last of her cargo, he’ll be busy convertin’ her innards … at Admiralty expense. Why?” Lewrie said with a laugh at Mountjoy’s expression. “Ships altered to carry soldiers need their holds partitioned, and beds built, to accommodate them. Scads of mess tables, her galley refitted t’feed at least one hundred and fifty … some cabins made for their officers? I suppose I’ll have t’give up a Lieutenant, or a couple of senior Mids, to take charge of the crews for the boats. That’ll ease the workload of her own small crew, too, when we’re on-passage.”