"There are four, actually," Lewrie further informed him. "One in the gun-room here, and one in my cabins as well. Mostly to keep his pet parrot from freezin' t' death, I imagine."

"Four, sir? Four? My word, he was profligate!" the fubsy old fellow vowed, scratching his scalp under his wig with a pencil stub. "And the coal, well! Why, there must be at least two hundredweight bagged up, to boot. What am I to do with it all, sir?"

"Leave 'em for the Standing Officers," Lewrie hopefully suggested, "t'see 'em through the winter?"

Once Thermopylae was officially de-commissioned, Mr. Pridemore the Purser; Mr. Dimmock, the Bosun; Lumsden, the Ship's Carpenter; the Master Gunner, Mr. Tunstall; and the Ship's Cook, Sauder, would watch over her in the Sheerness Ordinary, along with a small crew of other ship-keepers to manage her maintenance, paid by the dockyard at their full pay-rate for as long as their frigate sat at anchor, for as long as Admiralty deemed her valuable enough to keep in reserve. Wives and children would accompany them, of course. Unless those worthies asked for transfer to a new construction, wangled an exchange with another ship-keeper in a Navy port more desirable to them, or outright retired from service, they had full employment 'til Thermopylae rotted away or was stricken and sent to the breakers. Indeed, they'd been assigned to Thermopylae even as she had been constructed on the stocks, and were "hers" for the ship's entire life.

"Quite impossible, Captain Lewrie," the dockyard official pooh-poohed, "for, without a regular issue of coal with which to stoke them… absent the kindling and firewood issued for the galley… they're useless, and His Majesty's Dockyards are not responsible for the cost."

"Stow 'em on the orlop, then, and let the next captain sort it out," Lewrie replied, sensing that there was bad news coming.