Scarborough Fair - Chris Scott Wilson [20]
Paul Jones read the letter twice. Satisfied his eyes had not lied, he placed the parchment squarely on the desk and leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingertips together into a bridge. Softly, he blew through the span of fingers, long sighs to exorcise the tension imprisoned in his aching muscles throughout the winter. Franklin had done it, achieved everything he had promised. The wasted time was now as nothing. The future lay ahead. He decided to rename the ship in acknowledgement of Franklin’s efforts. Bonhomme Richard, the Good Man Richard, a pen name Franklin used for satires he wrote for the daily papers. Jones began to smile. Frustration had fled, replaced by growing elation. He demolished the bridge of his fingers, his right hand drawing into a fist.
The wheels had begun to turn.
Moylan was $4,000 adrift on his estimate of M’sieur Berard’s asking price for the new Bonhomme Richard. Either the Irishman had added his ten percent agent’s fee on top, or Berard had sniffed the King’s presence in negotiations and decided the royal purse could stand a little extra expense. Whatever, Sartine eventually paid $44,000 for the ship, then the King further authorized the royal coffers would also bear the cost of refitting and supplying armaments.
Feeling he had outstayed his welcome at Moylan’s house, no matter how the Irishman and his young wife protested to the contrary, Paul Jones moved into his captain’s cabin aboard Bonhomme Richard. His trunks and baggage arrived from Paris along with the midshipman, Richard Dale. Between them, they pored over plans spread on the chart table in the stern cabin, then personally directed the carpenters and shipwrights from dawn to dusk. At last aboard ship, Jones was reluctant to return to the land, but necessity forced him to endure coach travel on numerous occasions. Satisfied the superficial work to Richard was well in hand, he began to take advantage of the King’s carte blanche offer to pay for any armament he cared to purchase. Cannon were in short supply. With no success at foundries in Nantes and Perigeux, he managed to secure a delivery date from a firm in Angouleme along with a promise from Sezerac & Sons in Bordeaux to cast the rest.
When both contractors defaulted, Benjamin Franklin exerted heavy pressure to obtain sixteen new model sixteen-pounders from the French Navy. These were mounted on the covered gun deck along with a dozen old twelve-pounders. The six old eighteen-pounders discovered on the first day’s inspection were mounted a la Sainte Barbe in the gunroom when gun ports had been cut. Six nine-pounders on the foc’sle and quarterdeck completed Bonhomme Richard’s ordnance.
Men were harder to find than guns. Reluctantly, Paul Jones took on English deserters and Portuguese. The English were unruly, but they signed on without complaint, and American sailors recently released from English prisons were added to the complement, brawls often breaking out between the different nationalities. Captain Jones was also to find he had not escaped Therese de Chaumont’s husband. With the good news that he was at last to command a squadron came also the bad news that Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont was to be paymaster general of that squadron. Although the American received the news of his becoming a commodore with pleasure, he determined not to wallow in jubilation until the promised ships materialized.
***
It was shortly after dawn when he was woken by knocking at the cabin door. He shrugged away sleep and pulled himself up on the pillows of his narrow cot. Outside the stern lights he could see the sun barely peeping over the horizon, its first rays fanning out over the restless sea.
“Enter!”
Midshipman Dale opened the door with a broad grin. It was the widest awake the captain had seen him at that hour.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but they’re here.”
Paul Jones’s mind was still lazy with sleep. “Who? And where’s the boy with the tea?”
“The squadron,