A King's Trade Page 6

  “The kutch bohjan kamraa, Ajit,” Twigg ordered. “No need to use the formal dining room… ‘mongst old companions,” he could not help adding with a faintly amused sneer. “Laanaa hamén sherry, first, Ajit.”

  “Je haan, sahib,”Twigg’s old servant replied, bowing and smiling.

  “This way, Lewrie,” Twigg commanded, stalking off on his long legs, hands tucked under the tails of his coat, and leaving Lewrie no choice but to follow.

  The well-plastered walls were tawny yellow, set off nicely with heavy crown mouldings, wainscottings, and baseboards, false-columned at intervals, with lighter mouldings to frame gilt-framed portraits, and exotic foreign scenes. Clive of India still led his small army versus native rajahs’ hordes, and grimly-smug relatives peered down with familial asperity. All the floors were teak planking, though strewn with wool or goat-hair carpets, all light, subtle Chinee or colourful Hindi, with not an Axminster or Turkey carpet in sight.

  Far East shawls, saris, or vivid princes’ surcoats did service as wall hangings, next to tapestries painted by native artists of parades, tiger hunts, leopard hunts, or court scenes, with gayly-decorated elephants bearing lords and ladies in howdahs. Some walls bore gaudy, silk mandarins’ coats, stiff-armed with a dowel through the arm-holes, next to the little pillbox hats Lewrie had seen at Canton, with the pheasant tail-feathers and coral buttons on the top that denoted rank and importance.

  It would seem that at one time Twigg had been a mighty hunter, himself, for there were boars’ heads, leopards’ heads, even a bear, its lips still curved back in his final fury. On a jungle-green wood platform there was a huge stuffed Bengali tiger—looking a little worse for wear, though, where someone’s grandchildren had used it as a hobby-horse.

  And, there were weapons galore: circles of wavy-bladed krees daggers and knives about a crossed pair of parangs; assorted Hindoo edged weapons about a brace of bejewelled tulwars; lance-heads, javelins and pike-heads, billhooks, and other pole-arm “nasties” that were favoured East of Cape Good Hope.

  Behind locked glass cabinets were racks of firearms, from clumsy match-lock muskets and hand-cannon to long, slim, and elegantly-chased and intricately-engraved Indian or Malay jezzails, some so bejewelled that they’d fetch thousands; even humble flint-lock Tower muskets, St. Etienne or Charleville French muskets given or sold to native princes’ troops had been turned into priceless works of art by Hindoo artisans. There were even wheel-lock pieces, musketoons, and pairs of pistols as long as Lewrie’s forearms that the Czar of All the Russias might covet.

  Armour? Take your pick: fanciful cuirasses, back-and-breasts and helmets, gilt or silver chain-mail suits, brass fish-scale armour over thick ox-hide; Tatar, Chinese, Mongol, Bengali, Moghul…

  “Nippon, there,” Twigg commented, pointing to a stand that held a wide-skirted, glossily-lacquered set, seemingly made of bamboo, tied together with bright orange and red wool cords; there was a horned helmet with neck pieces and side flanges so wide and deep that the wearer could shelter from a hard rain under it, with a fierce, wild-eyed, and mustachioed face-mask bound to it. “Them, too,” Twigg further stated, indicating a horizontal stand that held a long dagger, a short sword, and a very long sword, all of a piece, bright-corded, and their scabbards so ornately carved they resembled the jade or ivory “boats” with incredibly tiny figures of oarsmen and passengers, all whittled from a single tusk or block of soft stone.

  “Nippon?” Lewrie gawped. “You mean Japan?”

  “No White man has gone there, and returned to tell the tale, in three hundred years, Lewrie,” Twigg proudly said. “Though, some of the hereditary warriors, the samurai, now and then lose their feudal lord, or …blot their copy-books,” Twigg added with a taunting leer at his guest, “and become outcasts… ronin, I recall, is the term…some of whom leave their forbidden isles, entire, and take service overseas. Portuguese Macao is a port where bands of them may be hired on. Quite fierce; quite honourable if you pay ‘em regular. This fellow, here…well, let us say he proved a disappointment, and committed ritual suicide to atone. Willed me his armour and swords.”

  “Did you ever manage to land in Nippon?” Lewrie just had to ask.

  “Of course not, sir!” Twigg hooted. “I was bold in my younger days, but never that rash. Unlike some I know, hmmm?”

  Swallow it, swallow it! Lewrie chid himself.

  Another great room to pace through, this one filled with porcelain, niello brass, gilt and silver pieces, the most delicate ceramics, ginger jars, wine jars, tea sets, and eggshell-thin vases, from every ancient dynasty from Bombay to fabled Peking.

  “Didn’t know you’d always wanted t’open a museum,” Lewrie said. As they attained a smaller, plainer dining room that overlooked a back garden, barns, coops and pens, and a block of servants’ quarters. It was where the house’s owners would break their fast en famille, in casual surroundings and casual clothes, before they had to don their public duds and public faces to deal with the rest of their day.

  “As the French say, souvenirs,” Twigg scoffed, though his eyes did glow with pleasure over his vast collection, worthy of a man who’d come back from India a full nabob, with an emperor’s riches stowed on the orlop. Smugness of owning such grand things, perhaps with happy remembrance of how he’d acquired them. Or, the blood and mayhem required to do so!

  “I can see why your grandchildren were loath to leave,” Lewrie wryly commented. “My own children’d screech in bloody wonder to play amongst such a pirate’s trove.”

  “Mementos of an arduous life,” Twigg scoffed again, perhaps with long-engrained English gentlemanly modesty, “spent mostly in places so dreadful, the baubles were the only attractive things worth a toss. I assume you like goat. Do you not, it doesn’t signify, for that’s what we’re having. Keep a flock to dine on…sheep, as well.”

  “But, no pork, nor beefsteaks, either, I’d s’pose,” Lewrie said, with another wry scowl.

  “Taboo to Muslims in the first instance, taboo to Hindoos in the second, aye,” Twigg replied, his thin lips clasped together in the sort of aspersion that Lewrie had dreaded in their early days. “Old habits die hard. Well, don’t just stand there like a coat-rack, sit ye down,” Twigg snapped, pointing imperiously at a chair at the foot of the six-place table, whilst he strode with his usual impatience to the chair at the other end, and Lewrie almost grinned to see himself seated “below the salt,” no matter there were only the two of them.

  The elderly servant, Ajit Roy, bearing a brass tray on which sat two glasses of sherry, shuffled in, obviously waiting ‘til they were seated before intruding. Twigg took a tentative taste, looking puckery, as if assaying his own urine for a moment, before nodding assent and acceptance, at which point Ajit Roy came down-table to give Lewrie his small glass.

  ” Laanaa shorbaa, Ajit,” Twigg ordered, and not a tick later, an attractive Hindoo woman in English servant’s clothing, but with a long, diaphanous shawl draped over her hair and shoulders, entered with bowls of the requested soup on another tray.

  “Dhanyavaad, Lakshmi,” Twigg told her.

  “Thankee,” Lewrie echoed in English. He’d never learned Hindoo as glibly as his father, Sir Hugo, and had ever sounded pidgin barbarian when he did speak it, but it was coming back to him, in dribs and drabs. She was fetching; did she and Twigg…?

  “Ajit Roy’s second wife,” Twigg said, with a knowing leer after one look at Lewrie’s phyz. “The first’un cooks. And no, I don’t. My tastes these days, well… I also own a place in the City, quite near your father’s new gentlemen’s lodging club, in point of fact. His is at the corner of Wigmore and Duke streets, as you surely recall, while my set of rooms is nearby in Baker Street. We run into each other….”

  “Oh, how unfortunate for you,” Lewrie sourly commented.

  “We speak rather often, act’lly,” Twigg said with a mystifying smile. “Sometimes dine, drop in for a drink, or play écarté with him at his club, with no need for its lodging facilities.
”

  “And does he give you a discounted membership, sir? Or… does he make up for it by fleecing you at cards?” Lewrie cynically asked.

  “My dear Lewrie…no one has ever fleeced me at écarté… and lived,” Zachariah Twigg drawled, with a superior simper. “Your father and I rub along quite well, together, act’lly. We’re much of an age, and experienced much the same sort of adventures in exotic climes, so…absent the disputes resulting from, ah… ‘boundary’ friction in the expedition against Choundas and the La-nun Rovers …his concerns for his sepoy regiment, and taking orders from a Foreign Office civilian, we’ve discovered that we have a great deal in common. Having you and your, ah…follies in common, as well. How is your soup?”

  “Simply grand,” Lewrie sarcastically muttered, though the soup was as close to a Chinese “hot and sour” as a Hindoo cook could attain, and as tasty as any ever he’d had when moored off Canton in the ‘80s.

  “Amazing, what a small world in which we live, Lewrie,” Twigg went on, carefully spooning up his own soup, and slurping it into his thin-lipped mouth, then daintily dabbing with his napkin. “Sir Hugo is partnered with Sir Malcolm Shockley in his gentlemen’s club enterprise…. Sir Malcolm thinks the world of him, and of you, more to the point… though I’ve yet to see a valid reason why, other than gratitude for getting his wealthy arse out of Venice and the Adriatic before the French took it in ‘97. And, wonder of wonders, Sir Malcolm is wed to Lady Lucy Hungerfford, nee Lucy Beauman, of the Jamaica Beaumans who wish you hung for stealing their slaves. Well, well, well! Quite the coincidence, what?”

  “And Hugh Beauman’s already written Lucy and told her all about it?” Lewrie said with a groan, feeling an urge to slide bonelessly or lifelessly under the table, and stay there, unfindable, for, oh, say a century or so. “Christ, I’m good as dead!” he moaned, his brow popping out a sweat that was not entirely the fault of the spicy soup.

  “And…here comes the roast!” Twigg enthused as Lakshmi entered, bearing a tray of sliced kid goat, and a heaping bowl of savouried rice, mango chautney, and such. “Done to a perfect turn, I am bound!” he added, not without a purr and glare that Lewrie took for sheer maliciousness—making him feel even more inclined to slink beneath the table, un-fed!

  “I take it, an …” Lewrie managed to croak, “that Sir Malcolm’s mentioned it to Father?”

  “B’lieve so, Lewrie, yayss,” Twigg responded in a further purr of hellish delight at his predicament, all the time hoisting slices of goat onto his heaping plate of rice and mild, baked red peppers.

  Lewrie felt his face flush (not from the spicy soup!) picturing Sir Hugo’s reaction to his folly, not so much anger or disappointment, really, for they’d never really been proper father and son, leaving it quite late—in India in ‘84 or ‘85—to tentatively reconcile, thence to keep a wary distance ever since, so whatever rage Sir Hugo might display was water off a duck’s back. No, what upset Lewrie more was a firm suspicion that he’d chortled his head half-off that Alan had gone and done something so goose-brained, and been caught at it, red-handed!

  “Damme…Lucy knows, ‘tis a safe wager that all London knows, by now!” Lewrie muttered, dabbing his brow with his napery. “The hen-headed, blabbery…baggage!” he nigh-stuttered in new dread. “’Tis a wonder I’ve not been taken up, already, with…!”

  “One’d be surprised, Lewrie,” Twigg loftily told him. “Do try the kid. There’s a dahee to go with it, one of those yogurt gravies I recall you liking when in Calcutta. Tandoori-roast chicken to follow!”

  “Christ!”

  “You and Lucy Beauman were, at one time in your misspent youth, quite fond of each other, Lewrie,” Twigg breezed on, come over all amiable, as he spooned spiced dahee on his goat and rice. “She went on to wed a rich’un she met at Bath, her first Season in England… dare we speculate on what is called the ‘rebound’ following her family showing you the door for the utter cad you proved to be, hmm? Lord Hungerford, Knight and Baronet, surely was a great disappointment to her, since he proved to be just about as huge a rake-hell and rantipoling ‘splitter of beards’ as you…though, Lady Lucy seems to have been spared revelations anent your poorer qualities, for some reason. The illogic, and the blindness, that the fairer sex possess towards their un-deserving men, no matter proof incontrovertible served up on a gilt platter, hah!

  “She still has, as they say, Lewrie, a ‘soft spot’ in her heart for you, therefore, and, so far as I am able to ascertain, has yet to utter the first word to anyone, other than her husband, Sir Malcolm, of the matter.”

  “You must be joking!” Lewrie exclaimed, almost leaping from his chair in amazement at such a ridiculous statement. “Lucy is my prime suspect of writing scurrilous, anonymous letters to my wife, about my…overseas… doings …” he trailed off, blurting out more than he’d meant to.

  “Ah, those letters!” Twigg said, brightening with cruel amusement. “Why must you suspect her?”

  “You know of ‘em?” Lewrie quailed, though he had to admit that Zachariah Twigg had spent his entire life as a Foreign Office agent—he just had to know a bit about everything!

  “Your father has, since the mutiny at the Nore, he said, so…knowing my old profession, he approached me to delve into things, and discover what I could. ‘Smoak out’ the culprit. So far without joy. Why do you suspect her?”

  “When we met in Venice in ‘96, years later, Lucy, I felt, was …still after me,” Lewrie told him as he at last accepted a heap of rice, a slice or two of roast kid, and a dribble of the spiced dahee. “Even if she was married not six months, still on ‘honeymoon’ with Sir Malcolm Shockley, she was…”

  “What a burden it is,” Twigg amusedly drawled, “to be the romantic masculine paragon of one’s age…and in such demand!”

  “All but throwing herself at me, aye!” Lewrie retorted in some heat, and grovelling bedamned. “Her foot damn’ near in my lap, even with her husband at-table with us, and when I wouldn’t play, she took up with Commander William Fillebrowne, another officer from our squadron. There’s another I suspect, the smarmy bastard! Our last words, Lucy caught onto my…involvement with a lady I’d rescued from Serbian pirates, and said—”

  “Mistress Theoni Kavares Connor, the mother of your bastard,” Twigg offhandedly interjected ‘twixt a bite of food and a sip. “She of the Zante currant-trade fortune from the Ionian Islands.”

  “Er…yes,” Lewrie barely squeaked, having been rein-sawed from a full gallop to a pale-faced, hoof-sliding halt, for a moment. “Well… Lucy said something very like ‘I should write your wife and tell her what a rogue she wed’… playfully, but not without a bite to it. I told her what Sir Malcolm should know ‘bout her doin’s with Commander Fillebrowne, and that’s where we left it, but…”

  “And was she, in fact, involved with Fillebrowne?” Twigg asked.

  “Well, o’ course she was!” Lewrie snapped, hitting his stride, “I saw ‘em for myself, spoonin’ and kissin’ on the balcony of a rented set o’ rooms, just before we sailed the last time, whoever could notice ‘em bedamned… only Dago foreigners, I s’pose they thought. An old friend of mine from Harrow, Clotworthy Chute, was with me, too! Chute was doing the Grand Tour of the Continent with Lord Peter Rushton, at the time. And…she gambles. Gambles deep,” Lewrie added, recalling what that Flag-Lieutenant at Portsmouth said of Lady Emma Hamilton, as if that would be proof enough to sign, seal, and deliver the truth of his account.

  Twigg cocked an eye at him as if he thought that Lewrie had lost his mind, and was about halfway towards laughing out loud at such rank priggishness, especially coming from one so “low-minded” as Lewrie.

  “Do assay the wine, sir,” Twigg instructed after a long ponder. “A Dago wine, how further coincidental. A Tuscan chianti, in point of fact, of a very dry nature, that complements the richness of the goat quite nicely. I can understand, on the face of it, why you might susect Lady Lucy, Lewrie, but…you say you also suspect that Commander Fillebrow
ne?”

  “Well …” Lewrie elaborated, after a tentative bite of kid and rice, and a sip of the chianti, which brought back memories of Naples. “When we first met, he was anchored at Elba. Tupping a local vintner’s wife, as I recall. Thought I’d take to him, at first, but in the space of a single hour, I came away a bit disgusted. Comes from a very rich family, treats the Navy like a place to kill time ‘til his inheritance is come…all yachting, cruising, and claret, and his orlop the storehouse for art treasures he was buying up from refugee Royalist French. Boasted of it! Fillebrowne’s family’d all done their Grand Tours, the war was his, and all he cared about was … ‘collecting’!” Lewrie sneered. “He chaffered me, that very morning, with hints he’d taken up with my former mistress….”

  Lewrie paused, waiting for Twigg to say, “Phoebe Aretino, better known as ‘La Contessa,’ Corsican-born, former whore, shrewd businesswoman, and collector, trader, and treasures-dealer in her own right,” but Twigg kept his mouth shut, or busy with his victuals; and, for the sort of man whose very gaze could turn cockchafers “toes-up dead,” his expression was a very bland “do tell” and “say on.”

  “Threw it in my face, rather,” Lewrie growled, shoving rice on his plate with an angry, scraping noise of steel on priceless china. “Nose-high, top-lofty sort, the greedy, callous bastard. Well, Chute saw through him. Clotworthy’s a ‘Captain Sharp,’ makes his livin’ by gullin’ naive new-comes to London… ones who’ve just inherited some ‘tin,’ and such. When I told him that Fillebrowne thought himself an astute collector of fine art, Chute cobbled up a brace o’ bronze Roman statues o’ some sort, I never saw ‘em. Amazin’ what a week’s soaking in salt water’ll do t’make ‘em look authentic, and Fillebrowne bought ‘em, straightaway. Pantin’ for ‘em!

  “I suspect Fillebrowne figured out he’d been finessed, sooner or later, learned that Chute and I were old friends…acquaintances, really…perhaps he and…my former mistress,” he said, avoiding Phoebe’s name, as if to deprive Twigg of unnecessary information…just in case, “had an angry parting? Sharp an eye as she had, when it came t’treasures, if she tipped him that they were frauds, he’d’ve gone off like a bomb on her. On me! And, he’d have seen, or heard, just enough needful t’pen scurrilous letters to Caroline, in revenge.”