"Well, we found the mort known as Mistress Jugg," Lewrie told him, once he'd gotten his tea and had had a liberal draught of it. "Her, and the reputed girl-child that Jugg spoke of."

"Capital, sir!" Langlie enthused.

"No, no it ain't," Lewrie gloomed.

Two months before, Lewrie's frigate had taken an easy, and rich, French prize near the enemy-held island of Guadeloupe, in the midst of confounding and capturing Lewrie's old nemesis, the fearsome Guillaume Choundas. Proteus had sailed as an "independent ship" with Admiralty Orders fetched out by Foreign Office secret agents; the Honourable Mr. Grenville Pelham, an officious, over-vaunting twit, and his much abler aide, ex-Captain of Household Cavalry Mr. James Peel. Their mission, which everyone but Pelham could charitably call a "right cock-up" of a scheme, had been to discomfit Choundas and the French, first off; find a way to regain possession of the vast wealth of the French colony of Saint Domingue on Hispaniola from the victorious slave rebellion led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, second; then drag the Americans and their spanking-new Navy hooting and hollering into a declared war with the French. Or, run the Yankees out of the Caribbean if they didn't jump through the right hoops. The prize had been icing on the cake.

Lewrie had left their prize safely at anchor in Prince Rupert Bay, in the hands of the local Admiralty Court, with six crewmembers off Proteus for her Harbour Watch. Not two weeks later, though, their prize had vanished! The dimwits of the Dominica Prize Court had flung up their shoulders and mumbled, "Well, it's a myst'ry!" but the prize, her bonded cargo, and his five sailors and one midshipman were missing with her. Lost, absconded…