Scarborough Fair - Chris Scott Wilson [5]
“I’m glad somebody does, even if it’s only the lower decks,” Jones mumbled. Dale frowned, but the captain brushed the remark aside. “Give me it.” He opened the canvas bag and used his thumbnail to split the wax seal imprinted with the Commissioners’ stamp. He skimmed the parchment quickly. It was there. Therese hadn’t lied after all. Her husband had been working on his behalf. And Franklin too. A ship. A ship. He refolded the sheet and pushed it back in the bag, then looked at the young officer who was watching him thoughtfully. “Midshipman Dale, you said?”
Dale stiffened. “Yes, sir.”
“What are your orders?”
Dale’s eyes sought the canvas bag. “To await any reply you may care to send, sir.”
Jones nodded. “Have you ever been to Le Havre?”
“No, sir.”
“Neither have I, and I hope it won’t be an experience we’ll regret.”
“Is there any reply for the Commissioners, sir?”
Jones smiled. “We won’t know that until we’ve been to Le Havre. We go to inspect a ship.”
***
They journeyed beyond daylight and into the night, west from Paris as fast as the horses could pull the coach. The road was tiresome, deep mud of the previous winter baked by the July sun into ruts. The driver goaded the overworked team, his whiplash drawing dark streaks into the white lather flecked across their shoulders. Inside, on hard leather seats, the two American officers endured the jolting of stiff springs. Paul Jones thought back to when he had first boarded a ship at thirteen in his native Scotland and remembered wondering if he would ever grow used to the pitching and tossing of a rough sea. Now he appreciated that the motion of a ship was heaven compared to the rigors of land travel. They maintained a sporadic conversation, not too informally as befitted the difference in ranks, but mutual discomfort built a bridge between them. Even so, the tortured creaking of the coach coupled with the rattling of the wheels and the drumming of horses’ hooves on the pockmarked road proved too formidable an obstacle.
The Deux Soldats was little more than a farmhouse, so close to the road its walls were spattered with dried mud from rushing wheels. Yellow rectangles of light cast into the night from the inn were a pleasing sight, and Jones was grateful to stretch his legs when he dismounted in the courtyard. Inside, there were few customers, the landlord quickly fetching a carafe of wine. The captain shrugged off his cloak as the innkeeper’s wife brought bread and cheese before retreating to make up two beds for her unexpected guests.
“God knows when we shall reach Le Havre,” Jones wondered aloud, excitement over the waiting ship dulled by fatigue. He noted wryly Dale’s appetite had been little blunted by travel as the young man broke bread before even sipping at his wine.
“The coachman said tomorrow afternoon, sir,” the midshipman offered before reapplying attention to his supper.
“Sooner the better. I’d trade one day’s ride in that infernal coach for ten Atlantic crossings.”
Dale grinned. “I would agree with you there, sir.”
Jones raised a smile. “Have you made many crossings? Your uniform appears to have.”
Dale glanced down at the abused cloth with distaste. “I have not had either the opportunity or the finances to replace it, sir. With all the confusion of the war I am owed many months’ wages. It is all I can do to live.”
“A common enough complaint,” the captain conceded, wondering why Dale had not been paid if he was attached to the American Commissioners in Paris. “Tell me about your war.”
“When the fighting began, sir, I was on the side of the Loyalists.” He paused, examining Paul Jones’s face, offering as an excuse, “I was born in Virginia.” He fingered his hair, drawing a new parting to show a long scar running arrow straight across his scalp. “A Yankee musket ball did that, sir, on the Rappahannock River. A marine shot at me from a cutter. When I woke up we had escaped, but were later captured by the US brig Lexington.