King, Ship, and Sword Page 8

  When it was Phineas Chiswick’s land, I courted Caroline there, Lewrie painfully recalled as they topped a rolling rise and the broken-toothed tower came into view; spread a blanket outside the fosse . . . chilled our wine bottles in the stream . . . kissed her the first time. Where’d all that go? Oh, right. I’m a bastard . . . in more ways than one!

  “Last one t’th’ door’s a Turk in a turban!” Sir Hugo shouted, spurring his mount, and they were off, snow, slush, and turf spraying from their horses’ hooves, and all, Charlotte included, hallooing and whooping with happiness—’til she came in last, of course, was dubbed that Turk in a turban, and got all sulky again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Respectability had altered the celebration of Christmas, even in Alan Lewrie’s times. Gangs of drunken revellers invading a house, led by the Lord of Mis-Rule and bought off with food and drink, were not much seen any longer, even in tumultuous, unruly London. The old custom of church “ales” in which every communicant in the parish, wealthy or poor, honest or otherwise, drank and supped together were things of the past in all but the most rural places, mostly reduced to a supper hosted by landowners for their own cottagers and labourers, more of a post-harvest celebration than a religious one.

  So the Lewries, the Trenchers, the Chiswicks, and several other families, direct kin or long-time neighbours, spent Christmas Eve at Uncle Phineas’s, with gay dancing right out and carols and hymns round the harpsichord replacing merriment. Mostly due to the fact that Phineas Chiswick would not pay for musicians, and held that too much gaiety anent the Birth of the Saviour was irreligious and unseemly. There was not enough wine to enliven things, anyway, or wash down their mediocre supper.

  They coached home round ten in the evening, gathered about their own harpsichord, and sang and played livelier airs on their own, with Lewrie on his penny-whistle, Charlotte scraping away on her small violin, Sewallis strumming a guitar, and Hugh making odd notes on his recorder. There was hot chocolate, with scones and jam to make up for the supper, and . . . from the kitchens the competing sounds of Liam Desmond and his uilleann lap-pipes, the thudding of Patrick Furfy on a shallow bodhran drum, and someone on the fife.

  “Sounds like they’re havin’ a good time,” Lewrie said as their last passable effort at a carol came to a merciful end. “Let’s have my lads in for tune or two, and a glass of something.”

  Mrs. Calder, who had been rocking and knitting in silent disapproval in the corner, gave a faint snort and looked to her mistress to scotch such nonsense.

  “They’re servants, my dear,” Caroline pointed out, making her “my dear” sound strained and forced, said only for the children’s sake.

  “Who’ll attend church with us tomorrow morning,” Lewrie countered, “whom we’ll gift the day after on Boxing Day, and . . . Desmond and Furfy are sailors, dearest . . . my sailors. Mistress Calder, I would admire did ye fetch a bottle of brandy and sufficient glasses, as you summon them to the parlour.”

  “Very well, sir,” Mrs. Calder replied with a stiff nod, putting away her knitting as if she’d been commanded to set out drink for the Devil himself.

  His wife and her chief housekeeper might not have approved, but Lewrie and the children enjoyed the improvement. Sewallis and Hugh learned a “pulley-hauley” chanty or two, and got instruction on how to do a hornpipe dance, then a bit of clogging Irish step-dance, at which the burly Furfy was surprisingly light-footed. The cook and her husband, the scullery girl, Charlotte and Caroline’s maids, and the maids-of-all-work (who’d been nipping at a bottle of their own on the sly) got into the spirit of things too and wanted to dance, which required Lewrie and Caroline to play some lively airs to accommodate them. It was nigh eleven before Lewrie uncorked the brandy bottle and began to pour all round.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll be prim, proper, and serious,” Lewrie told them, “and surely inspired by the vicar’s homily, but tonight . . . on the eve of our Saviour’s birth, let us count our blessings. All charged? May I and my wife wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Now . . . ‘heel-taps’ and then to our rest!” They all lifted their glasses and drank them down to the very last drops, glasses inverted at the last to show that “heel-taps” had been attained. “Good night, all, and thankee for the merriment.”

  The children were hugged, hands were shaken, Charlotte kissed and wished sweet dreams, then all were herded upstairs by the sour Mrs. Calder—sure to hiss and take all joy from the previous hours before they were all tucked in for the night.

  “Not sure I like that woman,” Lewrie grumbled as he poured himself another glass of brandy. “Stiff as that’un we had years ago . . . Missuz McGowan, wasn’t it?”

  “You disapprove of my choice of housekeeper, or governness, do you?” Caroline snapped. “It is my house, after all . . . my housewifery, year in and year out, but for the few brief spells you allow us from the Navy. I am quite satisfied with Mistress Calder’s management of both house and children . . . else the boys would be as wild as so many Red Indians . . . as wild as you, sir!”

  Merry bloody Christmas t’you, too! Lewrie thought with a groan, his nose in his glass; this ain’t workin’. Never will, most-like. I might as well lodge in London at the Madeira Club ’til Hell freezes up.

  “The boys are only home ’tween school terms, these days,” Lewrie pointed out. “And Charlotte ain’t the wild sort, Caroline. She’s more in need of tutorin’ at dancin’ and music than grim discipline.”

  The glare he got could have shattered boulders.

  “But I will defer t’your wishes, your ways,” he quickly added.

  “For as long as you stay,” Caroline grimly said. “Which is?”

  “ ’Til the French start the war again, I am home,” Lewrie told her. “It’s my home, too. And ’til the boys leave for Hilary term, I hope we can share it . . . in a sham of harmony, at any rate. After that, well . . . you’re the ‘Post-Captain’ o’ this barge, and I’ll try to accommodate my ways to yours. Stay out from under foot . . . all that,” he allowed in a soft voice that would not carry abovestairs, chin tucked in defensively. “I don’t s’pose Zachariah Twigg’s visit made any impression at all?”

  “What a horrid man!” Caroline exclaimed, her own arms folded over her chest. “Like an oily . . . spider!”

  “And a hellish-dangerous one, t’boot,” Lewrie agreed. “And God help any foe or spy that crosses his hawse. Every time he hauls me in on one of his schemes, it’s neck-or-nothing, and cut-throats and murderers on ev’ry hand. Fair gives me the ‘colly-wobbles,’ he does.”

  Zachariah Twigg, until his partial retirement from His Majesty’s Government, had served the Crown in the Secret Branch of the Foreign Office for years, and had been Lewrie’s bug-a-bear since 1784, off and on. Oh, he’d sworn he’d coach down to Anglesgreen to explain who had written the poisonously anonymous letters to Caroline—Theoni Kavares Connor—and the why, which had been spite that she could not have Lewrie for her own; and how so many of the sexual dalliances she had accused Lewrie of—in such lurid detail—had been complete fictions, . . . or so richly embellished.

  Twigg’s promised expiation could not erase all of Lewrie’s overseas doings, of course: his mistress in the Mediterranean when commanding the Jester Sloop of War, or the fact that Lewrie had indeed seeded Theoni Kavares Connor with a bastard son, but . . . the rest of it was a fantasy meant to harm.

  “Have t’talk about us . . . sooner or later,” Lewrie told her, shrugging as he took another sip of brandy. “After Epiphany or—”

  “Yes, we do, Alan,” Caroline softly agreed, looking down at the pattern of the parlour carpet. She looked up then, almost beseechingly, with the vertical furrow ’tween her brows prominent. “Do you love me, Alan? Even after all your . . . do you still love me?”

  Caroline was not the sprightly young miss he’d first met during the evacuation of Wilmington, North Carolina, back in his days as a Midshipman in the American Revolution. Nor was she the lissome bride he’d taken vows with
at St. George’s. Yet . . .

  “Aye, I do, Caroline,” he told her, and felt his chest turn hot, his eyes mist a bit with the truth of it, no matter everything else he had done. “I still do. Not for the children, not—”

  “Then we shall see, Alan,” she promised, arms still crossed in protection. “Once Yuletide is done, we shall see. Good night.”

  She paused at the double doors to the foyer and looked back for a mere trice. “Merry Christmas,” she said, then headed for the stairs, a very brief smile that might have been wistful, or rueful, turning up the corners of her mouth, wrinkling the riant folds below her eyes for the slightest moment.

  “Well I’ll be double-damned,” he breathed, muttering softly in wonder. “Might be a beginnin’ after all!” He tossed off his brandy to the last drop, set the glass aside, and went abovestairs to his own bed—down the hall in the guest chamber, still—where Toulon and Chalky at least gave him some affection after he’d rolled into a cold bed. “Merry Christmas to you, lads. Merry Christmas to us all.”

  Though they did not snuggle the way he longed for.

  BOOK II

  It was the best of times,

  it was the worst of times . . .

  CHARLES DICKENS,

  A TALE OF TWO CITIES

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Christmas Day, and the opening of presents, had passed, as had Boxing Day on the twenty-sixth; most gifts had gone over well, but for the toy muskets and swords. Sir Hugo’s real blades had made the biggest impression, and cause for chaotic tumult as Hugh and Sewallis practised their initial lessons on each other . . . swash-buckling through the entire house ’til Lewrie and his father took them in hand in the barren back garden and gave them both some sword exercises learned from hard and bloody experience. At least Charlotte was ecstatic over her new doll(s), books, and miniature fairy castle.

  After Epiphany, though, the boys coached away to begin their new school term, with “grandfather” Sir Hugo as their avuncular escort, and it was back to the routine drudgery of village and farm life in a cold midwinter, and only Lewrie, his wife, and daughter in the house.

  And, much like the descriptions he’d read of North American porcupines mating, Lewrie found the process of reconciliation, and the enforced “togetherness,” a prickly endeavour. With few occasions for visiting about, or receiving callers in return, and with Charlotte busy at her studies with her hired tutor, there were simply too many hours in a day. Not that it was boresome . . . exactly.

  Wake, rise, and dress in the guest bed-chamber promptly at six; a quick shave and scrub-up, and breakfast was taken in the smaller dining room, en famille, round seven. Farm accounts, worked on together in his office, occupied another hour or so, with Lewrie the student and she the master, striving manful to remember what little he’d known of managing a farm from years before; striving manful to stay awake and pay heed to Caroline’s “surely, you recall how . . .” or “surely, you remember what I once told you of . . .” lectures on crop rotation, animal husbandry, and sheep. A full pot of strong, hot coffee was very necessary!

  Round ten or so, Caroline was busy with Mrs. Calder, the cook, or the tutor, and Lewrie had time in which to read a book or take a stroll through the barn and stables. Half-past twelve, though, and it was time for dinner. It was only by mid-afternoon that he was free to saddle up his old gelding, Anson, and canter into Anglesgreen to the Ploughman to have a pint or two and read the daily papers coached from London.

  And, damn his hide did he linger too long or come home in his cups, either. No, once the papers were read, and a natter or two with Will and Maggie Cony and the idle regulars, life with his wife went so much better did he ride back out to his farm and skirt the bounds over the fallow fields, streams, and wood lots ’til his phyz was chilled to rosy red, and the last, lingering fumes of ale were dissipated. After that, he could return, about an hour before supper, for a stiff session in the parlour with wife and daughter, now free of household chores or lessons. A doting fuss must be made over Charlotte’s lap dog, Dolly, though the wee beast still bared her teeth and flattened her ears whenever he got too close. Toulon and Chalky would huddle with him on the settee for safety, for lap, and for affection, flattening their ears, bottling tails and hissing fit to bust whenever Dolly approached too near at her play. His cats got along much better with Sewallis’s wee pack of setters, all three of whom would never make true hunting dogs, and were goofily lumbering playmates.

  A little music, some teasing banter with Charlotte (and a stiff glass of brandy) and it was time to sup together, again. After that, it was usually back to the parlour for more music together, or teaching Charlotte the simpler card games, before Mrs. Calder herded her up the stairs, leaving Lewrie and Caroline alone together.

  “Chess,” Lewrie said, apropos of nothing, to fill a void. “Or backgammon. D’ye think Charlotte’d enjoy learning those?”

  “She hates to lose, though, Alan,” Caroline answered, looking up from her current embroidery project.

  “Can’t learn to win ’less ye lose a few first. And she ought to learn that Life don’t always let ye win. Even if she is a girl, she musn’t be so cossetted, or spoiled, she ends up a sore loser. The boys know it . . . have t’know it before they enter adult lives and careers.”

  “You say I cosset her?” Caroline asked with one brow up.

  “Not at all, Caroline!” Lewrie quickly countered, wondering how deep in trouble he was stepping. “It’s just that . . . damn.”

  Caroline gave a rare, mischievous smile. “It’s refreshing that you show concern for her improvements, dear. ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t’?”

  “Something like that,” Lewrie admitted, squirming.

  “She’s always been head-strong,” Caroline explained, returning to her embroidery of a new handkerchief. “Though usually a sweet and biddable girl, well . . . with two older brothers to vie with before we sent them away to school, and now the only child in the house, she’s developed a competitive streak . . . one which I’ve tried to scotch, as unseemly for a young lady. You may not have noticed, being at sea so long.” And for once, that did not sound like a sour accusation.

  “But you think introducin’ her to new games’d not go amiss?”

  “Even does she pout when she loses, I think she’d adore them,” Caroline told him with another grin. “She’s playing with her father, whom she hasn’t seen in years, and with both of us cautioning her to be a better sport, well . . . !”

  “Tomorrow, let’s all go for a ride together,” Lewrie suddenly suggested. “Hang the kitchen and still-room for a day, there’s your capable Mistress Calder to oversee things. That new tea shop in the village . . . tea and sticky buns or muffins . . . the dry goods store to prowl? Ride the bounds together, maybe put up a fox and have a go at ‘View, Halloo’? Away from her tutor and lessons for a bit, that’d be a treat, surely.”

  “That is a marvellous idea, Alan!” Caroline eagerly said. “We will tell her at breakfast. And I must own that some time away from household drudgery will suit me right down to my toes, as well.”

  “Good, then, we’ll do it!” Lewrie exclaimed.

  “Well,” Caroline determined, gathering up her embroidery, “it is time for me to retire. Do not sit up too late. Goodnight, dear.”

  And, wonder of wonders, she actually crossed the short space ’twixt settee and her chair to lean over and give him a brief peck on his forehead before stepping away.

  “Goodnight, Caroline,” he replied, half-stunned, unsure whether he should respond in kind; she was walking to the doors and out of his reach before he could decide.

  “You see, Alan . . . domesticity can be very pleasant,” she said as she paused in the doorway once more, with yet another of those enigmatic smiles. “After so many years of grim war and separation, your family can be a source of joy and contentment.”

  Aye, it can, Lewrie thought once she was gone; though nine parts outta ten just bovine boresome!

 
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Huzzah, we’ve letters!” Lewrie cried as he entered the house after an hour or so at the Olde Ploughman. “Letters and newspapers.”

  “Who are they from?” Caroline asked, bustling into the foyer from the kitchens, pantry, and still-room, where Spring cleaning had kept her occupied.

  “Uhm . . . one from Sophie and Anthony Langlie,” Lewrie told her, shuffling through the pack, “one from his parents, too. Burgess has written us . . . one from my father . . .”

  “Oh, give me Burgess’s!” Caroline enthused, drying her hands on her apron as they went to the many-windowed office at one end of the house, for Charlotte was practicing with her music tutor in the formal parlour. The windows were open, the drapes taken down to be beaten on lines outside and air fresh, as were the carpets. After months with the house shut against winter’s chill, the accumulated mustiness from candles, lamps, and fireplaces was being dispelled, replaced with the soft breezes of Spring that wafted in the scents of the first blossoms in the gardens, fresh-springing grass and leaves, the twitter of birds, and the soft cries from the nearest pens where sheep were lambing.

  Along with the first wasps of Spring, which Lewrie spent time to swat or shoo before opening the letter from Sophie, their former ward, and his old First Lieutenant aboard HMS Proteus and HMS Savage.

  “Yes!” Caroline shouted in triumph. “Alan, my brother is to be wed. . . . The first banns were published last Sunday! Oh, how grand!”

  “And good for him, at last,” Lewrie heartily agreed. “When do we expect the wedding, and where?”