King, Ship, and Sword Page 6

  “Where the Hell did that come from?” Lewrie gravelled as their coach came even with a field that Lewrie recalled as a thinned-out wood lot, bounded by a low hand-laid stone wall. Now, the wood lot was taken over by several new buildings, a brick-works, and a wide gate open in the wall. About an eighth of a mile later, past a stretch of woods, and there was a tannery, thankfully down-stream from Anglesgreen. “My eyes, the town’s gone . . . industrious! All that’s the local squire’s land, or it was . . . Sir Romney Embleton’s. He’d not abide that. Did he pass over, and his son Harry set them up?”

  “They good people, sor, the Embletons?” Desmond asked, peering out the windows himself.

  “Sir Romney is,” Lewrie commented, not sure whether he liked the changes round Anglesgreen; it was a bucolic, boresome place, full of predictable and sometimes tiresome folk, but he’d hoped to find it as reassuring as an old shoe . . . just long enough to get tired of it before Napoleon Bonaparte, and Admiralty, snatched him back to active sea service. “Harry delights in killin’ horses at fox-huntin’, and at steeplechasin’, they’re no matter t’him. Last I was home, he was the Leftenant-Colonel of the local Yeoman Cavalry. Ye can’t miss him. . . . He’s the chin of an otter, talks louder’n an angry Bosun, and laughs like a daft donkey.”

  “Faith, sor, but one’d think ye had a down on him!” his Cox’n wryly commented.

  “Of long standing, hah!” Lewrie told him with a barking laugh. He took the risk to his hat and hair and stuck his head out the coach window once more, looking back at the brick-works and tannery, grimacing with displeasure to see the steam and stinks rising from them like a pall of spent gunpowder from a two-decker’s broadside, hazing off to a flat-topped cloud that slowly drifted eastward.

  God help us, does the wind change, he thought, just as a glob of muddy slush plopped against his cheek from the front wheel, eliciting a snarl that had more to do with the new-come industries. He swabbed the muck off with his wool scarf and sat back as he noted several new brick cottages on the left of the road that hadn’t been there before, where once there had been a common-shared pasture before the Enclosure Acts that had taken away poor cottagers’ grazing and vegetable plot rights, and turned so many from hand-to-mouth self-sufficient to common day labourers on others’ farms, or driven them to the cities, where the new manufacturies might employ them. At least the dozen or so cottages were on decent plots of land, picket-fenced, with wee truck gardens and decorative flower beds. They were substantial-looking, well-painted, with flower boxes at each window sill, and in the Spring might appear quite pleasant, he decided.

  To the right, at last, and there was mossy old St. George’s parish church, as stout and impressive as a feudal manor or Norman conqueror’s keep, with its low stone walls marking the bounds, now topped by new iron fencing. The expansive graveyard was further bound with iron fencing, too, though the oldest headstones were still lime-green with moss, and tilted any-which-way, as if braced “a-cock-bill” in eternal mourning.

  St. George’s had marked the eastern boundary of the village the last time Lewrie had been home—Christ, my last time here was back in ’97? Lewrie realised with a start—but it seemed that that had changed, too, for, hard by the church’s fenced boundary there was a lane running north, then a row of two-and three-storey brick and slate-roofed, bow-windowed shops that hadn’t been there before, either.

  “Milliner’s . . . a tailor’s . . . a tea shop?” Lewrie muttered half under his breath. “And what’s this?” There had been four row-houses just east of the Olde Ploughman public house, but someone had re-done the fronts, closing off half the entrances, and turned two of them to double doors, all to allow entry to a dry goods! “A dry goods?”

  Before, anyone wishing to do serious shopping would have had to coach, ride, or hike to Petersfield, the closest substantial town, or go all-in and stay over at Southampton, Portsmouth, or Guildford, but now. . . ! Why, in the dry goods store’s windows Lewrie could espy ready-made clothing, china sets, and—

  “This th’ public house ye told us of, sor?” Desmond asked as the coach drew level with the Olde Ploughman. It had been touched up with whitewash recently, sported a new, swaying signboard over the entrance, and new shutters.

  “Aye, Desmond,” Lewrie told him. “The side yard’s a grand place in warm weather, tables outside and . . . coachee! Draw up here, I say!” Lewrie cried, thumping his walking-stick on the coach roof. “As long as we’re here, we’ll try their ale, the coachee and waggoner, too.”

  At that welcome news, Liam Desmond sprang from the front bench seat and opened the door, jumping down to lower the folding metal steps for Lewrie, who was out not two seconds behind him, and walking round the head of the coach’s team of four to take it all in, bare-headed.

  “Ale, Pat!” Desmond cried. “The coachee and yer friend, too!”

  “Ale, arrah!” Furfy chortled.

  The Olde Ploughman fronted on the large village green that ran along the stream that bisected Anglesgreen, spanned just a bit west of the public house by a stout stone-arch bridge. Across the stream sat a second street, fairly new from the 1780s, once mostly earthen, mud and now and then gravelled. Now the street was cobbled, several row-houses had been turned into even more shops, and there were even more streets south of them, lined with even more of those handsome cottages, situated on spacious acre lots, with room enough for coach-houses and stables, chicken coops and runs, truck gardens, and walled-off lawns. Lewrie gawped in awe, slowly turning to look upstream towards the Red Swan Inn (where the squirearchy and landed gentry did their swilling, and Lewrie was most unwelcome) and found that the village had grown in that direction, too, though the smaller green of the Red Swan was yet untouched, and the groves of giant oaks still stood.

  “Neat li’l place, an’t it, Pat?” Desmond asked his mate.

  “Fair-clean’un, too, Liam,” Furfy replied, spreading his arms and expanding his chest to inhale deeply. “Nothin’ like th’ reeks o’ London. Smells . . . farm-y . . .”

  “A bit like our auld Maynooth, hey?” Desmond said with a grin.

  “Smells ale-y,” Furfy decided.

  “Ale, aye,” Lewrie announced. “Ale for all, ’fore we go on to the house.”

  Spiteful as Caroline’s most-like t’be, I might as well go home foxed, Lewrie decided; it mayn’t matter, one way’r t’other.

  The Ole Ploughman was ancient, a public house since the days of the Norman Conquest, some speculated. Its interior walls were whitewashed over rough plaster, the few windows Tudorish diamond paned, and the ceiling was low, the overhead beams black with kitchen, fireplace, candle, oil-lanthorn, or pipe smoke.

  Or so it had been. During his long absence, old Mr. Beakman and his spinster daughter had added fair approximations of Jacobean Fold wood wainscot panelling. The walls were now painted a cheery red, and the beams, and the barman’s counter, looked to be sanded down to fresh, raw wood, then linseeded and polished to a warm honey-brown. Beakman had gone with the times and had set aside a dining area round the fireplace on the right-hand half of the vast room, with new tables covered by pale tan cloths, whilst the left-hand half had been re-arranged to accommodate drinkers and smokers round the other fireplace, with double doors leading out to the trellised and pergolaed side garden, which was no longer a scraggly attempt at lawn, but brick-paved and railed in by low picket fences.

  There were brass spitoons for those who chewed their quids, and even more brass candleholders along the walls, and brass lanthorns hung from the overhead beams, making the public house much brighter, warmer, and more welcoming a place than ever it had been before.

  “My stars,” Lewrie breathed as he shrugged out of his cloak and hat, noting the framed pictures hung on the walls, too; old pastorals and race horses, prize bulls and boars, and hunting scenes featuring packs of dogs gathered round mounted riders. “Who did all this?”

  “Will ye look at ’im! Cap’m Lewrie t’th’ life!” a woman cried from behind the lo
ng bar counter, past the customers bellied up to it. “Will, come see who’s come home!”

  “Maggie Cony?” Lewrie exclaimed, recognising the round-faced local lass who’d married his old Bosun, Will Cony. She’d thickened and gone “apple dumpling cheeked” but she was still the good-hearted and hardworking woman he remembered when both she and Cony had been in his employ ’tween the wars. “You work here now?”

  “Tosh, Cap’m Lewrie, we own the place now!” Maggie said, wiping her red-raw hands on a bar towel and coming round to greet him.

  “Old Beakman sold up?” Lewrie asked, puzzled, as he made her a showy “leg” and bow. Maggie dropped him a curtsy.

  “La, ’e wuz gettin’ on in years, an’ not but ’is daughter t’inherit, an’ ’er still a spinster, so, once Will paid off from ’is last ship, with all ’is pay an’ prize-money, we made an offer an’—”

  “Cap’m Lewrie, sir! Welcome ’ome, by yer leave, sir, why I’ve not clapped glims on ya in ages an’ amen!” Will Cony said with glee as he emerged from the back kitchens. The tow-headed, thatch-haired lad he’d been had thickened considerably, too, and his forehead had grown higher, his top-hair thinned considerably, though still drawn back in a sailor’s queue.

  “Will Cony! My man! Damme, but ye look hellish-prosperous in a blue apron!” Lewrie told him, stepping forward to shake his hand. “When did ye—”

  “Last year, sir,” Cony told him, pumping away at his “paw” like a well-handle. “After I’d healed up an’ got my Discharge.” He stomped his right foot on the clean new floorboards, making a loud sound. “Th’ Dons went an’ shot me foot clean off, sir, but after a spell in Greenwich Hospital, they fitted me with a knee-boot an’ an oak foot, and I ‘peg’ round as good as ever. Ya come for th’ good old winter ale, I’d wager, Cap’m? Yer first taste o’ ’ome, not a minute back, and ya come t’th’ Olde Ploughman, an’ bless ya for it.”

  “Ale for all my party, Will, and right-welcome it’ll be, aye,” Lewrie agreed, introducing Cony to Desmond and Furfy, explaining how they’d been with him all through HMS Proteus’s commission, then Savage, and lastly Thermopylae.

  “Beakman’s daughter, ehm . . . ?” Lewrie had to ask, for before Will had wed Maggie, he’d spooned round the mort (not all that bad-looking a wench, really) and though no promises were made, no gifts exchanged to plight a throth—“I give my love a paper of pins, and in this way our love begins”—wasn’t this new arrangement prickly?

  Happily, Spinster Beakman had found herself a husband at last, a widower with two children, a fellow of middle years hired on by the squire, Sir Romney Embleton, as both a surgeon for the inevitable accidental injuries on his estate, and as a dispensing apothecary in his off-hours. Both the brick-works and the tannery used this new-come Mr. Archer’s services, sending their sick and hurt to him with coloured paper chits which required him to treat or dose them for free, though both establishments paid him an annual retainer, as did Sir Romney.

  “They’ve one o’ them new cottages, east near the brick-works,” Will Cony told them, “an’ ol’ Beakman’s set up proper by their fire in his old age, thank th’ Lord . . . though he does tramp in ’ere when th’ weather’s good, fer th’ newspapers, th’ ale, an’ th’ ploughman’s dinner.” That would have been an apple, a slab of cheese, a pint of beer, and perhaps a hunk of bread; a fixture on every rural tavern’s chalked menu board the whole nation over. “Fall off yer ’orse, Cap’m Lewrie, an’ Mister Archer’ll fix ye right up, no matter ’ow many bones that ye break!”

  After the better part of an hour spent in pleasant nattering, it was time to get on. The day was drawing to a close, the sun was lowering, the temperature was dropping, and damned if it didn’t smell like there might be more snow in the offing. The hired coach-and-four could put themselves up at the livery stables for the night (at Lewrie’s expense), but it would take longer to unload the dray waggon of all of his goods, and most-like the waggoner and his beasts would have to put up in Lewrie’s barns for the night . . . and he’d have to feed the man, to boot.

  The little convoy clattered on westwards, past the much finer Red Swan Inn, then took the turning for the Chiddingfold road. A half mile onwards, in the vale ’tween two rolling ridges, and there was the drive that led to both Chiswick and Lewrie properties; over a wooden bridge that spanned a narrow, shallow creek rippling over rocks, half covered with skims of ice and now filled with fallen limbs and twigs. Just past the bridge there was a fork; the muddy, unkempt track to the left was Uncle Phineas Chiswick’s—a man so miserly that gravel and proper up-keep was too dear. Lewrie’s drive lay to the right. There was a muddy patch at its beginning, but beyond that, as the drive ascended the low ridge, it was properly gravelled, almost two coaches in width (quite unlike Phineas Chiswick’s, which was barely wide enough for one!) and lined by trees; trees that had grown in height and thickness since Lewrie had last seen them. At present they were bare, but in Spring, they’d be delightful, and provide both shade and a sense that the drive would lead to a welcoming establishment, with nesting birds twittering and flitting about their hatch-lings.

  And there was Lewrie’s house, at last. It was of grey brick and stone, with a Palladian entrance façade, set back from a circular gravel drive and large, round formal flower bed, now bedraggled and not much to look at, unless one appreciated bare brown stalks and weeds. Lanthorns either side of the entrance and stoop and a single lanthorn by the edge of the flower bed gleamed off the shiny royal blue paint of the door and the large brass Venetian lion door-knocker that Lewrie had fetched back from the Adriatic in ’96. Despite the cold, drapes were pulled back in the first-storey windows to display candles, and Christmas wreaths of red-berried holly, ivy, and pine. All three of the fireplaces, and the kitchen chimney at the rear of the house, were fuming as chearly as convivial pipe smokers in a very friendly tavern or coffee-house. Everything said “come in, be welcome,” yet . . .

  Agamemnon thought Clytemnestra’d be glad t’see him, too, Lewrie sourly told himself as he alit on his own land for the first time in years; wonder if I should tell Cassandra t’wait in the carriage, like he did. And it came to him, a most apt snatch of classical Greek play that he’d stumbled over in his school-days, from Agamemnon, in point of fact:

  It is evil and a thing of terror when a wife

  sits in the house forlorn with no man by, and hears

  rumours that like a fever die to break again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  He thought it good policy to knock, not just barge in. It took a long two minutes, though, before anyone responded to the rapping of his doorknocker. A sour-looking older woman in a sack gown and mob cap opened the door, looked him up and down as she might inspect a drunken, reeling house-breaker, and in a pinched-nostriled and pursed-lipped impatient way, haughtily enquired, “Yes? And what is it that you want of this house, sir?”

  “I live here. . . . It’s mine,” Lewrie snarled back. “Step lively and tell Mistress Lewrie that Captain Lewrie’s home,” he said, walking past the mort, swirling off his boat-cloak, and sailing his gilt-laced cocked hat at the hall tree. “Now?” Lewrie prompted the woman who was balking in prim outrage. “Devil take it . . . hulloa, the house!” Lewrie bellowed in his best quarterdeck voice. “Anyone to home?” He barely had time to take in the black-and-white chequered marble of his foyer, the family portraits on the walls, the twin Venetian bombé chests at either side of the staircase, before chaos befell him.

  First, bugling in alarm, came a setter belonging to his elder son, Sewallis, closely escorted by a fluffy, yapping ball of fur he thought was a Pomeranian, with his younger son, Hugh, galloping down the stairs and squealing in eleven-year-old glee, whooping like a Red Indian!

  “You’re home, oh, you’re home!” Hugh cried, all but tackling his papa. “Home for Christmas, huzzah!”

  With Sewallis, ever a much more staid lad, now fourteen, came a second setter, sniffing arseholes with the first and circling about the reunion in a quan
dary whether to defend the house or go into paroxysms of delight. The fluff-ball, the Pomeranian, had no doubts about the matter; he would continue to yap, growl, and go for the boots of the intruder . . . once he’d worked up the nerve.

  “Sewallis, give us a kiss, lad,” Lewrie bade, arms outstretched to give his eldest a warm hug. “Best Christmas ever, ain’t it? All of us home, for once? Damme, but ye’ve grown! You, too, Hugh. Two fine young gentlemen, ye’ve turned out t’be.”

  “What did you bring us for Christmas, father?” Hugh asked with an impish look.

  “Me . . . peace . . . and a waggon-load o’ presents,” Lewrie assured him. “Where’s Charlotte? Where’s my little Charlotte, hey? And, can someone shut this wee hair-ball up?” he added as the Pomeranian at last worked up enough nerve to nip at his left boot, and get shoved by a swift leg thrust.

  Just in time for his daughter to appear on the landing and let out an outraged squeal of alarm to see her beloved lap-yapper be assailed. She came dashing downstairs to scoop the little dog up in her arms, quickly step back a few paces, and glare accusingly.

  “Charlotte, there ye are, darlin’,” Lewrie said. “Won’t ya come and give your papa a welcomin’ kiss?”

  “You hurt my dog!” she cried, cradling it like a baby; a madly barking, squirming, bloodthirsty little baby yearning for his throat.

  “I never, dearest, he was . . . ,” Lewrie objected, then quieted as his wife descended the stairs, seemingly in no great hurry to welcome her husband back from the wars, and the sea. “Caroline,” he said in a much soberer taking. “I’m home for Christmas.”

  “For so we see, my dear,” Caroline coolly responded, both arms folded across her chest. “Your only letter did not inform us of just when you’d appear. When your affairs in London would be done.”

  That citron-sour housekeeper came down the stairs to stand near her mistress, still scowling as fierce as a Master-At-Arms might at a defaulter due at Captain’s Mast for his fifth Drunk on Watch.