A Jester’s Fortune - Dewey Lambdin

"Captain Charlton also sent this, sir…" Birtwistle said, as he reached into his uniform coat's breast-pocket to produce another of those letters. "I'm to wait for a verbal reply, sir."

Lewrie wrenched the letter open, expecting more bad news, but was delighted to find that Captain Charlton wished the pleasure of his company, along with one of his officers or midshipmen, to accompany him ashore that evening for another of those diplomatic suppers.

"Ah," Lewrie said, eyes crinkling in delight. "Very good, sir. Pray, do you render to Captain Charlton my utmost respects and thanks for the invitation, and I will fetch along my First Officer, Lieutenant Knolles. We'll be aboard Lionheart by the start of the First Dog."

"I'll tell him, sir," Birtwistle assured him, doffing his hat and making an escape before something else set Commander Lewrie off.

Let 'em go, mine arse! Lewrie groaned.

After a day of repair work, the squadron had sailed for Venice, on a beautiful morning with a brisk little Easterly gushing down off the Balkan mountains. Twenty miles out to sea, they'd stood, outside anyone's territorial claims. It wasn't much of a voyage; seventy or so sea-miles to the west. But they'd come across several merchant-ships and had been forced to overhaul them and speak them, anyway. Two had been British, one a Maltese. But the last two had made sail and run as soon as they'd spotted them, and it had taken half a day for the swifter Jester and Myrmidon to come up to musket-shot of them and fire a warning under their bows.

Fetched-to, and all else aluff, they'd boarded them, to discover that they were both "neutrals," one a Dane, the other Dutch. But once a good search had turned up more ship's papers, they'd found that both were French-chartered. And the Dutch ship was not a refugee, but one of those still working from a Batavian Republic port, which meant that she was from a French ally.

And she was crammed with tons of compass-timber, naval stores, masts and spars! The pitch, turpentine, tar and such was crammed below by the tun and cask, the spars atop that, the masts slung to either beam of her gangways and weather deck. The compass-timber, though, in the rough, was piled any-old-how, atop sawn oak plankings and baulks.

And rare, and valuable beyond belief to the French Navy! Just about to anyone's navy!

One could steam or bend straight-cut oak to some sort of shape, though it was costly. But to find the boughs, the butts of oak that were curved by nature, which could be adzed into the thick, stout oak beams that arced upward from the keel of a warship, which made first, lowermost futtocks, upper-deck tumble-homes, reinforcing bow or stern knees, well… it took over fifty acres of oak-trees to make a ship of the line, and not one tree in a thousand yielded proper compass-timber for all the sweet curves of a well-built ship.

They'd fetched them into Venice, hoping to have them condemned, thence subject to prize-regulations, but they'd waited two days for a judgement. Two days of rocking, pitching and yawing, with anchors set four-each, as a Sutherly blew up the Adriatic-foreign warships were not allowed inside the Lagoon of Venice, especially behind the shelter of the Lido, where the Venetian ships and their many small island fortifications were located. Two days of heaving and snubbing, watching a wind-driven tide-race run in through the entrance channels, and wishing a biblical flood on all quavering, cowardly Venetians!

Well, if they were too sniveling a lot, too proud of their own neutrality to risk getting embroiled in this war, Lewrie thought… fuming again for a moment at what Charlton had mentioned in his first letter- that the two prizes had cleared from a Venetian port, after all, and should be allowed to complete their voyages, since they had found no fault in their papers…!

"Damn 'em," Lewrie muttered. "Damn 'em all. Root and branch."

Two whole days they'd lain at anchor, watching the lights, the constant coming-and-going ashore. Watching Venice light herself up in a misty swirl of faery-light each evening, and glitter like a precious, unattainable pearl… so near and yet so far, the other side of a sandbar and barrier island. It almost made him feel empathy with some of those ancient, hairy and flea-ridden barbarian Huns or Teutons who'd come down from their primeval Germanic forest hovels to the gates of a civilised old Rome; there to sit in awe and wonder (scratching away, of course) and realise what complete hogs they were in comparison!

Spires, soaring belltowers and cathedrals, great palaces and mansions, all shimmering in rosey-hued dawn or a liquid, lambent gold of sunset, shrouded in morning mists and fogs… verily, the Shining City, just out of reach, like a cup of water for Tantalus.

But, like one of those old barbarian sword-swingers, Alan ached for a shot at revenge, too; at taking Venice by storm, if they played it so aloof and grand. So he looked forward to their trip ashore with a feral, wolfish hunger. And vowed he'd not be overawed, no matter what!

"Ooh!", though.

"My word!" Lieutenant Knolles breathed.

"Umphf!" Captain Charlton was heard to sniff in appreciation.

"Ahhh…!" A moment later, from even the sardonic and mostly silent Fillebrowne, as their gondolier pointed out another magnificent scuola or palazzio even finer than the last, along the Grand Canal.

"Christ, shit on a biscuit," Lewrie muttered under his breath.

Venice was ten times grander, more impressive (dammit all, more awe-inspiring!) than London, even on a good day! Its every mansion, its every fine public building, palace or cathedral, was taller, more ornate, more colourful, or simply bigger, than anything Sir Christopher Wren had wrought, even Saint Paul's! The Duke of Marlborough's Blenheim Palace might be a match… but Lewrie thought it'd be a near thing were he to compare Blenheim against Venice's best.

And old! Ancient beyond any Italian city he'd seen, areek with the smell of ancient glory, of conquest, power and wealth. Shit-arsed English Crusaders had ridden these canals on their way to the wars in the Holy Land! Had begged or pawned their wealth for Venetian ships to take them there. He'd thought Naples a very classically Roman city, to be adored and studied, but this…! Why, some of these palaces had been old when the Crusaders had come, when the Turks had come, still inhabited by the same princely families!

It was getting on for dusk, and the Grand Canal was ambered with sundown, the walls of the houses, palaces, mansions, cathedrals, towers,… even the plebeian warehouses and such, were glowing with the fading light, as if they soaked it up during the day to radiate back like pig-iron, which stayed red-hot for a time after pouring. Lanthorns lit up the faces of the tall buildings, round the steps that ran down into the Canal, round the magnificent entryways… atop the pilings that led along the Grand Canal, and winked down every byway or turning as they passed them; the waterfront streets-the fondamenti-were as lit up as the Strand along the Thames, and every side-street ashore winding round enticing, intriguing corners was prelit with firefly glows in a grey-blue dusk.

And even at dusk, the Grand Canal teemed with a thousand boats of all sorts, though most were the artfully curved, fragile-seeming gondolas. They breezed past each other with bare inches to spare, in an unending stream, crossed each others' bows from side-canals from inshore campi, as effortlessly, as majestically, as languidly as swans on a lake or pond. All were painted not a funereal black, but a shiny, a glossily sleek ebon, each sporting a tiny lanthorn of its own, dressed with gilt, silver or polished brass tokens as big as firedogs. Many held canopied midship shelters, like open coaches, those shelters filled with men and women in the heieht of fashion…

"Ooh!" Lewrie gulped in awe once more, in spite of himself. Beyond the height of fashion, some of them, as if Fashion had risen to a high art form.

"Aah!" Fillebrowne all but groaned, as a lady in a passing gondola deigned to reward them with a regal, and imperiously lazy, nod of her head as she wafted past. Her hair was done up bigger than a watermelon on a form, powdered, dressed, crimped and curled, and sprigged with miniature portraits, bows, ribands and what Alan took for jewels! Streaked, though… a bit of powdery white, some blonde, some natural Italian coffee-brown? That'd take her hours, he thought. Her gown had been dripping with flounces, furbelows, laces, ribands, tiny seed-pearls sewn into intricate patterns. And, like a faery queen, there she'd gone, as if she'd never been, an unutterably lovely but forever unattainable paragon of feminine beauty! But wait, here comes another just as fine, attended by some simpering, ribboned fop!

These were masquers… from the six-month Carnival season, he suspected; draped in light cloaks, bibbed fronts of black, though all embroidered with pearls, sequins and gold-lace thread. The man wore a dark veil over his tricorne hat, which slumped over his shoulders and cloak, a black-and-white mask with a prominent bird's beak. So did his consort! Her veil over her high, cabbage-shaped hat and gigantic hair fell below her mask, pinned up over one ear as if she were a Moor or Turk! Even more gondolas presented idle revelers, out taking a cool boat in the refreshing night air, dressed much the same-though Alan didn't think he ever saw two masks exactly the same. And those that didn't wear masks might as well have; there was a stiff, frozen air to their features, as if bored beyond life, as they chatted in sweet whispers so wearily.

Liquid, languid and lazy was the soft Venetian Italian he heard as their boats neared others; above the almost constant sound of song or music from shore or from a larger gondola. There was a full bloody concert band, in one instance; six gondolas in-line-ahead, trailing a larger boat filled with young revelers and with violinists, flautists, harpists and oboe players sawing or huffing away like anything! And gondoliers sang… perhaps only for each other? he wondered,… with the one same tune springing from one boat to another, until the whole Grand Canal seemed to pick up at the right point and sing along in harmony!

It was magic, it was bewitching, it was beguiling, this Venice!

It…

Stank, he noted, of a sudden.

They'd come in through the Porto Lido, one of the sea-channels nearest the city, threading between its long, south-jutting breakwater barriers, in Navy boats. They'd landed at one of the lazaretti, the customs and quarantine stations, and transferred to a local sailboat, a very odd-looking craft, indeed, called a sanpierota, which mounted a single, trapezoidal gaff-sail far aft of amidships. It was beamy in the extreme, so shoal-draught Lewrie thought it incapable of sailing over a heavy dew-but the Venetian authorities at the Lazaretto insisted they take it. A heavy British rowing-boat would surely come to grief in the Grand Canal, much less the narrower Rios; there was no way to employ both sides of oars in all that heavy traffic. And, should they allow their Navy hands two hours of idleness once they were ashore, it was very possible they'd never see them again-run off to taste an indolent Lotus-Eaters' paradise!

The sanpierota proved to be a most stable and swift sailboat, though, and bore them the several miles from the lazaretto to the Canale di San Marco in moments, on a pleasant little breeze; over to the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, and its imposing cathedral; thence to the Dogana di Mare-Customs Point-roughly across from the Doge's palace, on the far side of the Bacino di San Marco. And there had yet been a pleasant sea-wind.

They'd changed to a gondola from there, and a gondolier who had some English, at least. Into the Grand Canal for a sunset tour, past the Cathedral of Santa Maria della Salute, past all those regal, faery-like palaces and such. Under the soaring Ponte dell'Accademia, following the arc of the canal…

Until they'd been… "winded," so to speak. Just about level with the Palazzio Balbi, and the Palazzio Contarini della Figure, where the canal took an abrupt starboard turn, where no breeze could reach.

'Tis no wonder they're heading out, Lewrie realised, wrinkling his nose and fanning his face with his hat, of a sudden, as the garbage-midden reek overpowered him; I'd go sailin' out where the air's clean of an evenin', too! Shut in a bit from a spectacular Adriatic sunset, the prospect to either hand suddenly didn't look quite so faery-like, so otherworldly. It was just a row of bricks and such, set along a slackwater ditch the colour of the Thames… which bore the cast-offs of London down to the sea.

Must toss everything out the windows, and hope they don't hit a passer-by, he thought sourly. Into the canals… out of sight, out of mind… if not the nostrils.

There were dead fish, he noted, bloated and belly-up, just below the murky surface. Carrot-tops, browned lettuce leaves, more fish-guts lay waving like indolent ribands, at which the surviving fish nibbled with desperate hunger. It suddenly resembled the Hooghly River, which ran past Calcutta, the most inaptly-named Pearl River, just off Jack-Ass Point at Canton, Dung Wharf along the Thames…

Some rather ripe turds went wafting by, close-aboard-while a gay song trilled from shore, taken up by their gondolier. The corpse of a tiny calico kitten… Lewrie felt an outraged sulk coming 'pon him. Why, it was all a fabulist sham! he thought. A trick of smoke or mirrors! He expected bodies in the water, too-human ones. After all, hadn't Machi-avelli grown up here in Venice? Didn't the Venetians murder people left, right and center… officially and unofficially? Then let the tides do their work, unlike the rest of the Mediterranean, which mostly had none. No, he thought, casting a chary eye upon the latest wonders round the bend in the Canal… it ain't so grand, at that!

They took a hard turn to starboard into the Rio di San Luca, just short of the Palazzio Grimani. A hard larboard swing, into the Rio Fuseri, then a landing on the Fondamenta Orseolo and a stroll to St. Mark's Square, as night came down for certain. It must have been some saint's day or Carnival event, for there was a continual popping of fireworks, bands of revelers dancing through the streets in gaudy costumes and more of those masks, the din of bands competing with each other from balconies or side streets, and their way lit by a multitude of torches or street-lanthorns. Mountebanks clad as harlequins, atop impossibly tall stilts, who leaned on upper-floor balconies to share a glass of wine with hosts in masks, or play gallant to some young lady. Jugglers, acrobats and mimes were two-a-penny, dancing dogs, begging bears…

"Ah, here's the place I was told of," Captain Charlton said, leading them into a restaurant. Lewrie noted he had a slim notebook in a side-pocket, to which he referred now and again. "This comes well recommended."

"As long as they aren't on the carte de menu, sir," Fillebrowne commented, pointing out the two dozen cats that sat, lay or gamboled just without the doorway.