A King's Trade Read online

  “Ask the barman for a copy of the New Atlantis,” Lewrie winked back, “that guide’s your boy to all the dissolute. Slip him sixpence. Failing that, just wander down Charing Cross, this very night.”

  He left the upright Maj. Baird to sort Sin out for himself.

  “Well, you look presentable,” Mr. Twigg said as Lewrie entered his hired coach, thank God a closed one, and not another damn’ chariot, this time. “You’re well-practiced in your responses?”

  “As well as may be,” Lewrie told him in a fretful tone as he sat across from him on the cold and damp-feeling leather bench facing Twigg. Twigg had decreed that Lewrie’s new uniform would be best, complete with his sword and both the Cape St. Vincent and Camperdown medals hung low on Lewrie’s mid-chest from their coloured ribbons.

  “Sir Malcolm Shockley and some others have put in good words for you,” Twigg informed him, sounding almost breezily unconcerned. “Your old school chum, Peter Rushton in Lords, sent a letter, as well. With his reputation for vice, God knows what use it’ll be… though I must declare it was well-written. Clerk gave it a polishing, I expect.”

  Lewrie gave that a short, jerking nod of agreement; at Harrow (in the short time in attendance before his expulsion) trying to read a sniggery, surreptitious note from Peter Rushton had been all but indecypherable, like getting a scouting report on the defences of Biblical Canaan from one of Moses’s spies, and hastily scribbled in Aramaic at that! “Meet us behind the coach-house and share a bottle of brandy” in Peter’s idea of a “copper-plate” hand could have very well meant “We’ve hid five dead mouse and they’re randy,” which of course had earned them both a caning, even if the instructor or proctor couldn’t make heads or tails of it, either.

  “We’re to speak to William Wilberforce, himself, Lewrie,” Twigg informed him. “You followed my directives? Had a last bathe, a good night’s sleep … alone…and you’re not ‘headed’ by spirits?”

  “Sober as a hangman,” Lewrie answered.

  “How apt,” Twigg said with a sniff. “Here’s the line you’re to take… ‘twas your old compatriot, Colonel Cashman, late of the King’s Service in a West Indies regiment, and local planter—”

  “And un-findable for corroboration in the United States,” Lewrie stuck in.

  ”—whose utter revulsion over the institution of slavery, even was he a participant and slave-owner for a time,” Twigg drilled onwards, “that led you to despise slavery, yourself. Very John Newton-ish, you see. It will strike a chord with Wilberforce and what possible entourage of the like-minded who might be present, for it slightly coincides with Newton’s own experience of being a slaver, then shipwrecked, and enslaved by the very people he sought to capture and sell. That poem of his, describing his enlightenment and salvation…”

  ” ‘Amazing Grace,’ aye,” Lewrie said with a grunt and a new nod.

  “You actually know of it,” Twigg nigh-gasped with surprise that Lewrie, of all people, had been exposed to it. “Well, damme. Wonders never cease! No matter…whenasked, youwill clew to this point as if your life depended on it…which it does, by the by,” Twigg said, with another sniff of faint amusement, “that it was Cashman who thought it all up.”

  “Damme, sir!” Lewrie said, recoiling. “Even if it’s half-true, he’s a good friend, and it’s not… quite honourable to shift the—”

  “He did think it up, you said so, yourself!” Twigg archly objected. “As a cruel jape on the Beaumans. In my version, however, the former Colonel Cashman, disgusted with slavery and his own part in it, manumitted all his own chattel, then, grieved by the unremitting, and inhuman, beastly cruelty with which the Beaumans kept their slaves, he schemed to free as many of them as he could…encouraging them to go into the mountains and join the free Maroons, the young men and boys to ‘steal themselves’ and join your crew as free men.”

  “But…” Lewrie tried to say, loath to put the onus on “Kit” Cashman, no matter that he was far out of reach of British justice.

  “They…stole… themselves, Lewrie!” Twigg insisted. “You did not steal them, d’ye understand the significance of that? It’s a lawyerly niggle, but, under current statutes, you only aided and abetted, but did not instigate, or commit, hah! And, you did it in a fine cause. Think of yourself as the noble hero from a free land, England!, where slavery has already been banished. Suddenly exposed in the Caribbean Sugar Isles to the utter barbarity of slavery’s realities. And it sore-grieved you. Consider also your experiences on Saint-Domingue, where you witnessed the, ah…desperate courage of self-freed Blacks trading their lives by the thousands, so their children could be free. I still have friends at Admiralty…I’ve read your reports of intercepting those sailboats full of exslave soldiers, who almost blew you out of the water with suicidal gallantry… the survivor who slit the throat of one of your sailors as his last act of defiance, and you were touched…to your very soul,” Twigg spun out, and Lewrie could see it was all a cynical sham that Twigg was creating, merely an interpretation of what really happened. Ordinary Seaman Inman’s throat had been slit out of savage hatred of any White man, not gallantry, but…it was much of a piece with what a barrister would argue at his trial, and if such an interpretation of evidence and happenstance took place at an informal hearing, not a formal trial (which would preclude a trial for a hanging offence should it succeed in gaining him sponsors, protectors), well…so be it. And he hoped Christopher Cashman would forgive him, should he ever even hear of it.

  “I’ll do most of the exposition, Lewrie,” Twigg ordered, leaning back against his facing coach bench. “You just sit there and be stoic, stern, and honourable. Refuse wine, but accept tea or coffee. The sun isn’t ‘below the yardarm’… all that. Try not to fidget or squirm on your chair. Sound resolute. Boast only when describing what fine tars your dozen Black hands are. You might allude to any religious instruction they’ve gotten since signing articles. It’d go down well, hmm?”

  Like a boxer getting last-moment cautions on his opponent, there was not time enough for Mr. Twigg to impart all of his last suggestions. Before Lewrie knew it, their coach pulled to a stop before an imposing row house’s stoop (where, exactly, a preoccupied and benumbed Lewrie in later years couldn’t say, and couldn’t find with both hands and a whole battalion of flaming link-boys) and their coachman’s son, serving as a footman, was folding down the metal steps and opening the door.

  Lewrie stepped out onto a fresh-swept sidewalk, looked up at the gloomy, coal-sooted sky, and drew what felt like his last free breath, his left hand fretting on the hilt of his hanger, and his right hanging limp by his side, loath to take a single more step forward, or climb up the steps to the row house’s door.

  For London, with all its stinks, the air he drew in was rather fresh; it wasn’t raining, for a bloody wonder, and as he looked up, as he would to read the set of the sails and the wind’s direction, Lewrie could actually make out shape and form in the clouds, even espy several patches of open, wispy blue, here and there. Then, as if the wicks of theatrical lanthorns had been turned up, the sun peeked out briefly, to stab bright shafts down on the city through those wispy cloud-gaps, and brightened the street they stood in.

  “Marvellous,” Mr. Twigg smirked as he shot his cuffs and tugged down his fashionable waist-coat. “Why, Lewrie, I do declare the sacrificial birds’ entrails are found flawless, the auguries are auspicious, and the old gods smile upon us, haw!”

  “Bugger the old gods,” was Lewrie’s muttered reply to that. “If we must, we must. Let’s get it done.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The row house fairly shouted Respectability though in a muted, subtle way; “shouting” would have been thought too “common” or enthusiastic by its owners, perhaps. The terrace of row houses was a relatively new development outside; once one was in the entry hall, however, it was obvious that materials from older, razed houses had been re-used, for the entry’s panelling looked to be authentic Jacobean Fold woodworking, the immense and i
ntricately carved marble staircases had the sheen from many hands and feet over a very long time, too well-crafted to be sent to the scrapyard. The tables and such were of a heavier, past-century style, too, and the framed paintings and mirrors were gilt-framed in a Baroque style. Bright new red, blue, and buff Axminster or Winton carpets covered the usual black-and-white chequered tile floors, and ran up the staircase to cover slick, worn spots on the treads. The house of a serious collector? Lewrie wondered, taking in the statues in the recesses, the noble Greco-Roman busts on plinths; the house of a rich merchant or banker, or someone titled?

  A balding old major-domo in sombre black livery took their hats, cloaks, and Lewrie’s sword, then ushered them abovestairs without more than a begrudging word or two. Once up, he opened a glossy wooden set of double doors and bowed them into a parlour-cum-library done in much the same You-Will-Be-Impressed decor, but for the massive walls of bookcases from floor to ceiling on two sides; more new-ish, bright Turkey carpets on glossy wood floors, a world globe on a stand in one corner about a yard across, a heavy and ornate old desk before the windows and surprisingly bright and cheery (though heavy) draperies; a desk stout enough for Cromwell and an entire squad of fully-armoured Roundheads to have fought upon, if they’d felt like it. There were several wing chairs and settees, done in brighter chintzes, on which sat some very Respectable and Seriously Earnest men and women, who stared at the newcomers like a flock of vultures waiting for “supper” to go “toes-up” and die.

  “Sir,” Mr. Twigg intoned with suitable gravity, and a head bow.

  “Ah ha,” a slim older man seated behind the desk replied, as he rose to his feet. His coat was a sombre black, too, though enlivened with satin facings and lapels, a fawn or buff-coloured waist-coat, and new-fangled ankle-length trousers instead of formal breeches, slim-cut, and light grey. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I name to you Mister Zachariah Twigg, late of the Foreign Office, and his protégé, Captain Alan Lewrie…”

  Hell if I’m his protégé! Lewrie irritatedly thought.

  “…man ofthe hour, and sponsor of human freedom,” he heard the fellow conclude.

  “Hurrah! Oh, hurrah!” a young lady cried, leaping to her feet and clapping her hands, all enthusiastic Methodist-like, which sentiment was seconded an instant later by all the others present, who stood and began to applaud him, making Lewrie gawp, redden in confusion, and almost start out of his boots. Then, to his further amazement, damned if they didn’t begin to sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” (not at all well or coordinatedly, mind), but, they sounded genuine in their approval. Lewrie decided that lowering his head and coming over all modest was called for, and considered scuffing his boot toes might not go amiss, either. What the bloody Hell? he thought, though.

  “Though there are troubling aspects, indeed, to your feat, sir,” the fellow behind the desk said as the song (mercifully) ended and he came to where Lewrie stood, “it is an exploit which I, and many others, wish to become commonplace, in future. Allow me to shake you by your hand, Captain Lewrie.” Which he did, so energetically that his long, wavy hair nigh-bobbed as he took Lewrie’s paw in his and gave it a two-handed pumping. “William Wilberforce, sir…and it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  “Erm…well, thankee, sir,” Lewrie managed to say. Wilberforce wasn’t half the glum ogre he’d imagined; and, for a Reverend, he dressed in the latest fashion, with the help of an excellent tailor, too!

  “Some of your admirers, Captain Lewrie, and the leading lights in the movement to eliminate the scurrilous institution of slavery in every British possession, not merely in the British Isles, which we’ve already accomplished, thank the Good Lord…Reverend Mister Clarkson…Mistress Hannah More…”

  The faces and names went by in a mind-muddling rush, too many at once for Lewrie, though Mistress Hannah More was another surprise to him…she might look him up and down like taking measure of a rogue, with her lips as pursed as Twigg’s, but she was, in the main, a rather handsome woman, not half the infamous and forbidding “Kill-Joy” he’d imagined, either. Though granite and ice did come to mind as he made a graceful “leg” to her, getting a coolly-imperious curtsy back.

  “…host, Mister Robert Trencher,” Wilberforce said, passing Lewrie on to a stout but handsome man in his late fourties, another of those who espoused the latest London fashions, in brighter suiting than one might expect from a run-of-the-mill “New Puritan.”

  “Your servant, sir,” Lewrie said, taking the offered hand.

  “Nay, Captain Lewrie, ‘tis I who hold that I am your servant,” Mr. Trencher heartily replied. “’Twas a risky business, but commendable, most commendable! And I shall be pleased to do everything in my power to see that you should not suffer for it. Ah… allow me to name to you, sir, my wife and daughter. Captain Lewrie, Mistress Portia Trencher. My dear, Captain Alan Lewrie.”

  Time to make another “leg” as Mrs. Trencher, a fetching older woman in shimmery grey satin, curtsied her greetings in proper fashion, and state that he was her servant, as well.

  “…Captain Alan Lewrie, my daughter, Theodora. My dear…”

  The young lady, no more than nineteen or twenty, Lewrie guessed, had no patience for staid, languid “airs.” She bobbed him a very brief curtsy, but also reached out to take both his hands in hers, fingertips gripping fingertips, and her grip trembling but strong.

  “Your servant, Miss Trencher,” Lewrie dutifully tried to say, noting that this Theodora was the very same lady who had leaped to her feet, cheered, and clapped him.

  “I echo my father, Captain Lewrie,” she nigh-breathlessly gushed, “for in gratitude for the bold step you took to free so many who cried out for rescue from abominable cruelty, it is I who are yours …your servant, I meant to say! Delighted to be!” she exclaimed, a higher blush rising to her face over her hapless innuendo, in what was obviously a rehearsed speech of welcome.

  Careful, old son! Lewrie chid himself, feeling lusty stirrings in his groin; Let go of her, now. Hands t’yourself…

  He took a half-step back and lowered his hands to break free of her fervent grip, taking note of her parents’ stern cringes over her enthusiasm; her parents taking note of his own “chaste” reticence and surprise at her departure from the normal graces, he also hoped! One more bow of his head, which let Lewrie take a better peek at her.

  God Almighty! he thought. For young Mistress Theodora Trencher was the very personification of elfin beauty! She stood not a whisker above five feet, two inches, in her soft-soled “at-home” slippers, very slim and wee. Her hair was a dark brown that was almost raven, curled with irons, and banged over a well-shaped, thoughtful-looking brow; a firm jawline and sweetly tapering chin, but with very full mouth, and lips he was sure would be eminently soft and kissable…! She did not wear the artifice of cosmetics, and had no need of them, for her complexion was the epitome of English “cream,” and her eyes, huge at that moment in enthusiasm, were the most intriguing, and rare, violet!

  “I really did very little, Mistress Trencher, though I am grateful for your good opinion,” he responded, with a dash of gruff, “sea-dog” modesty, as Twigg had rehearsed him. He managed to tear his eyes away from gawping at her impressive bosom; the newest women’s fashions evidently allowed even the Respectable to sport low necklines, and her “poonts” or “cat-heads” could not be faulted! Turning to her parents, he added, “Part of it, I must confess, was need, d’ye see. The Fever Isles are hard on European sailors, and we’d had a bad bout of Yellow Jack aboard….”

  Even with his back to him, Lewrie could feel Twigg cringe and slit his mouth, for him to blurt out that his actions were anything less than humanitarian and selfless!

  “Indeed, sir? I was informed …” Rev. Wilberfforce said with a wary sniff.

  “Had we not, though, sir,” Lewrie quickly extemporised to save himself, “there’d have been no vacancies for the escaped slaves. The Admiralty frowns on captains who recruit, or accept, volunteers above the
establishment deemed proper for a frigate of Proteus’s Rate, even to the number of cabin-servants and ship’s boys allowed, unless they are paid from a captain’s purse. They’re jealous of every pence spent on rations, kits, clothing, shoes, and what not.

  ” ‘Tis said, sir,” Lewrie concluded, striving to recall what a pious expression looked like, “that the Lord moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. The slaves’ prayers, and mine, coincided nigh miraculously.”

  “Amen!” Theodora seconded.

  “Just as Admiralty has broken captains who cheat the Exchequer by overstating the number of their crews, despite losses to desertion and death,” Mr. Twigg informed all present with a knowing and casually world-wise air (even if he was glaring daggers at Lewrie), “who pocket the lost hands’ pay, and connive with the Purser, who will sell off the un-issued rations and slop goods, Reverend, ladies and gentlemen, just as often as they would one who over-recruits.”

  “Well… shall we be seated and have tea?” Mr. Trencher suggested, waving his guests to the settees and chairs about the parlour. Twigg practically snagged Lewrie by the elbow and led him to a settee too short for more than two, looking as if he’d love to hiss cautions, but couldn’t. As they sorted themselves out, waiting for the ladies to sit first, Lewrie took happy note that he’d have a grand angle on the fetching young Miss Theodora, who dipped her head most gracefully, exposing what a fine and swan-like neck she had above her lace shawl.

  “Or, might Captain Lewrie and Mister Twigg prefer refreshments more stimulating than tea?” Mrs. Hannah More enquired with a wary cock of her head.

  Playin’ fast an’ loose with the Trenchers’ hospitality, ain’t we? Sly witch! Lewrie spitefully thought, though answering her with another of his “special modest” grins, a shrug and shake of his head.