"I'm t'go somewhere else, sir?" Suspicious, indeed, that.

"Far and fast, I fear," Nicely had gloomed. He wriggled as if the crutch of his breeches had suddenly pinched a testicle. "There's the matter of all those damned Samboes of yours, Lewrie. Your Cuffy sailors. More to the point, where and when you got 'em, d'ye see."

"Ah? Hmm, hey?" Lewrie flummoxed, like to cough up half of a lung suddenly. That was not the ugly shoe he'd expected to be dropped!

"I did note, and wonder, where ye'd found so many free Black volunteers, the weeks I was aboard, whilst you were away, but…" his squadron commander had said, doing some fidgetting of his own.

They're going to hang me! the irrational part of Lewrie's brain screeched at him. The rational half was too stunned to put forth any opinion. I'm caught, red-handed! Christ, shit on a …!

" 'Tis the Beauman family, d'ye see," Nicely had carped. "A dozen of their slaves ran off one night. Nothing too odd about it, at first glance. One of the risks of slave-holding, with all the tales of the Maroons who've fled into the Cockpit Country, or the Blue Mountains… where the Beaumans thought they'd run, even was that plantation right on the sea, on the South coast, and rather far from Maroon territory."

"Ah… gerk!" had been Lewrie's sagacious reply, and his heart banging away like Billy-Oh, about two inches below his tonsils, it felt like. "Bother ye for the port, if you're…?" he asked, trying damned hard not to stammer. "Then, so, sir?" he managed to state.

"Organised as the Maroons are," Nicely had gone on, "it wasn't beyond credence to think that they couldn't arrange an escape for any number of slaves determined enough to join them.