King, Ship, and Sword Read online

  “What a splendid match!” Caroline further enthused before giving him the details. “Uhm . . . at the Trencher family’s home parish, in High Wycombe,”

  “Not so very far,” Lewrie replied, more intent on the Langlies’ letter. “Didn’t know the Trenchers were landed. Still . . . rich as he is, I’m sure her father’s found some ‘skint’ lord with a large parcel that ain’t entailed, and willing t’sell up t’settle his debts.”

  England was crawling with “new-made men” of Trade and Industry, men risen from the middling classes who aspired to emulate the titled and long-standing landowners, with country estates and acres of their own without renting. The law of entail, though, awarded the inheritance of the income that land generated, not the land itself, to eldest sons, who could not dispose of it; nor could their sons. It was only the grandsons of the heirs who could sell off land, but a new deed of settlement could stave off that shocking event to that heir’s grandson for another three generations, and it was a rare thing to see land be sold outright.

  “Uhm . . . perhaps some former commons land, taken ’tween deeds of settlement, under an Enclosure Act,” Caroline, ever practical-minded, idly commented as she squirmed excitedly in her chair. “Oh! The first Saturday after Easter! The boys can be home and attend with us! A suitable wedding present, though . . . over Christmas, Theodora told me her paraphernalia is quite extensive already, hmm . . .”

  Beds, linens, plate, and a thousand pounds per annum, to boot, Lewrie idly thought, imagining that the lovely and charming Theodora Trencher might fetch along her own coach-and-four, thoroughbred saddle horses, a likely entry in the Ascot and the Derby, and a townhouse of her own in London. Lucky bugger, that Burgess, he told himself.

  “Good God!” Lewrie exclaimed after scanning the first page of Sophie’s letter. “Sophie . . . she and Langlie have just come back from France! From Paris, and her old lands in Normandy. Them and Langlie’s parents, both!”

  “From Paris?” Caroline gawped. “And they didn’t lop off their heads? What risks they took!”

  Lewrie had rescued Sophie, her mother, and her brother from Toulon before the besieged forces of the First Coalition had evacuated; the poor girl had been, for a brief time, the Vicomtesse Sophie, pitiful “meat” for the guillotine and the murderous wrath of the Jacobin revolutionaries who were red-eyed-mad for eliminating every “aristo” family, root and branch, and anything that smacked of nobility. Such revolutionary sentiment and old grudges, Lewrie imagined, still held sway.

  “Surely not t’get her lands back,” Lewrie said, reading on. “I doubt . . . aha. Damme if she don’t say they had a grand time, a proper honeymoon month. Evidently, they took her for an English girl who—”

  “Would that not be risk enough?” Caroline quipped.

  “. . . who could speak fluent French. As Missuz Langlie, with an English husband, they hardly had a spot o’ bother. Saw all the sights in Paris . . . ate well, attended balls and levees, all sorts of things. Hmm . . . ,” Lewrie said, reading off salient points. “And it now seems there’s t’be a Langlie heir in the near future, Caroline. Sophie says to inform you she is . . . enceinte. Or grosse, d’ye prefer the colloquial French. Expectin’, ha! Here, I’ll let you read it for yourself.”

  “Later,” Caroline demurred. She and Sophie: once one of those lying letters had arrived declaring that Lewrie had been topping her, too, Caroline had turned from fond to outright spiteful towards Sophie, spurring the girl to flee to London into the dubious aegis of Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, her adored, adopted grand-père. Even now, after Sophie and Anthony Langlie had wed and those slanders had been found to be utterly false, Caroline still seemed glad to be shot of her. Lewrie doubted if she would read that letter.

  “What is the rest of the post?” his wife asked after putting the glad tidings from Burgess Chiswick aside.

  “Oh, there’s two from the boys,” Lewrie told her, still engrossed.

  “Oh, you!” she cried, only a tad vexed, springing from her seat to the desk to paw through the stack. “One would think you’d set them aside as if you were still captain of a ship! Official things first, and personal last. You’d deprive me of word from my dear lads?” she said, but it was a teasing, almost fond admonishment for his lapse.

  “Apologies, m’dear,” Lewrie told her.

  “Hmm . . . dear old Wilmington?” Caroline puzzled, looking over a travel-stained letter. “Oh, your old friend, is he not engaged in business there? The one who sent a deposition for your trial?”

  “Christopher Cashman, aye,” Lewrie agreed. “He bought into an import-export and chandlery . . . Livesey, Seabright, and Cashman. Has offices and warehouses on Water Street, he wrote me. The sawmill on Eagle’s Island cross the river . . .”

  “Why, we knew the Liveseys . . . before the Revolution. Rebels, though decent people in the main,” Caroline fondly reminisced of her girlhood home in the Cape Fear Low Country. “The only Seabright that I recall was a new-come from England . . . an officer of the Royal Artillery who’d emigrated for land. Married a Livesey, I think he did. He was a rebel, too. Helped manage the guns at Widow Moore’s Creek bridge . . . when our friends and neighbours from the Scot settlements at Cross Creek and Campbelltown were slaughtered. Ah, well. And . . . who is Desmond McGillivery, from Charleston?”

  “Say who again?” Lewrie started; he’d missed that’un when he’d hurriedly sorted through them, and, good as things seemed to be going with his wife, they could turn to sheep-shit the instant she learned that Desmond McGillivery was yet another of his bastards, a result of his brief, very unofficial “wedding” to a captured Cherokee slave of the Muskogee Indians when he’d been up the Apalachicola to entice them into war against the Yankee Doodle frontier. “Oh! I remember! He was a Midshipman in the American Navy I met back in Ninety-Eight. His uncle was captain of one of their cobbled-together warships going after the Frogs when America and France got huffy with each other. I felt sad for the lad. . . . His mother was Indian, don’t ye know. We’ve corresponded . . . on and off. Wonder what he’s up to now?”

  Caroline paid that letter no more attention, enrapt by those from Sewallis and Hugh, and thought no more about it.

  Whew! Lewrie secretly gloated; cheated death again! He would reply to Desmond’s letter . . . very much on the sly. And pay stricter attention to the senders’ names the next time he collected the mails.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Wonder of wonders, domestic relations took an even sweeter turn as Spring progressed, as Sewallis and Hugh returned from their school for the summer and filled the house with japes, pranks, and laughter. There were more family rides together, more companionable breakfasts, walking tours of the farm through sheep, cattle, and foals, nattering with day labourers and their few permanent employees, and yarns from Liam Desmond and Patrick Furfy about battles and grand adventures.

  The Lewries even went visiting, as a travelling troupe; first to High Wycombe to attend Burgess and Theodora’s nuptials, then up to London for some major shopping, and, lastly, down to the Langlies’ at Horsham, in Kent, to visit with Sophie and her husband and in-laws. Even Lewrie’s father, Sir Hugo, had coached down for that’un, for he’d always been doting-fond of Sophie, as she had been of him, her replacement grand-père.

  Lodgings, well . . . they could reach London in a day, but once there, their favourite old haunt in Willis’s Rooms, convenient to all the best shops and sights, could only accommodate so many guests, in so many beds. Charlotte and the boys could be bedded down on cots or in one nearby room. Lewrie and his wife were forced to share a bed-stead of their own . . . together.

  The same arrangements were forced upon them halfway to the wedding at High Wycombe, and in a posting house in the town, as well, and the jaunt to Horsham not only forced Alan and Caroline to sleep in the same bed on the way, but, once there, Mr. and Mrs. Langlie insisted upon putting them up at their house, assuming that Capt. and Mrs. Lewrie were just another typical married couple who
naturally shared a bed-chamber!

  Perhaps it was the joy of Burgess’s wedding, perhaps the relit notion of Romance (and a slew of wines and brandies taken aboard during the day!) but . . . Alan and Caroline found themselves in such close proximity, in such companionable darkness, and in such thin summer sleeping clothes, that Nature at last had its way. And in the mornings after such enforced intimacies, Caroline expressed such fondness and affection that Lewrie could imagine that their years’ long bitterness had been no more than a quickly forgotten little spat over her paying too much for a new bonnet!

  And even more miraculous was the fact that, once back home in Anglesgreen, there was no more of that damnable guest chamber for him. Lewrie was back in his wife’s good graces . . . though he hadn’t a clue how it had come about! Indeed, so content with things did she seem that Caroline could even abide a mid-Summer visit from Sir Hugo, down from London for a spell of country life. He’d never been one of her favourite relations, yet . . .

  “More cool tea?” Caroline asked Sir Hugo as they all sat in the shade of an oak near the back-garden of the house. “Or might you be more partial to the lemonade?”

  “The tea, m’dear, thankee kindly,” Sir Hugo replied, sprawled in a slat chair near the table, and idly fanning himself, for it was a warmish afternoon. “That rob o’ lemon drink makes me gaseous. Just a dollop o’ lemon in the tea’s sufficient.”

  A wasp now and then hummed about the sweetness of the lemonade or the napkin-covered plates of scones or sandwiches. Horses snorted, neighed, and clopped as Patrick Furfy walked them in circles in the paddock. Cattle lowed as calves butted for their milk; and it was almost so quiet as to be able to hear sheep munching grass. Except for the children, of course.

  Charlotte sat at-table primly enough, to all appearances in her style of hair and gown a miniature adult, though she did tend to prate cooing nonsense to her newest doll and that damned lap dog of hers. Sewallis and Hugh were on their knees, sailing their model frigates at each other over a close-mowed green “sea” and ordering their sailors about, just ready to open fire.

  Lewrie sat sprawled in an equal un-tidyness in a chair on the other side of the table, a wide-brimmed straw farmer’s hat set low on his eyebrows, one eye open for the shrill argument to come over “first broadsides” and what “damage” the boys’ guns had done to the other one’s hull or rigging.

  “Have you ever been to Paris, or to France, Sir Hugo?” Caroline casually enquired.

  Halloa, what’s that? Lewrie thought.

  “France?” Sir Hugo scoffed. “Can’t say that I have, d’ye not count Calais. Was in Holland, for a time, d’ye see, and . . . found it more convenient t’return t’England through Calais,” he breezed off.

  Haw! Lewrie silently sneered.

  Long ago, when a Captain in the 4th Regiment of Foot, the King’s Own, he scampered off from his “wife,” Elizabeth Lewrie, once he discovered that some of his fellow officers had bamboozled him with a “false justice,” a sham wedding, and an elopement to Holland, there to wait for the riches that should have come with his mother’s dowry and goods. Once Sir Hugo’d discovered that there would be no quick fortune, that a very pregnant girl was boresome, nagging, and a burden on his shrinking purse, and that he was, technically, as free as larks, he had fled her, taking her jewelry along, and danced his way back to London!

  “Didn’t know that,” Lewrie commented. “I thought you’d sailed direct from Amsterdam.” He tilted up the brim of his hat to peer at Sir Hugo’s answer to that, tacitly jeering.

  “Got distracted,” Sir Hugo rejoined with a toothy fuck-ye-for-asking smile. “Why d’ye ask, m’dear?”

  “Well . . . now we’re at peace with France,” Caroline tentatively said as she poured a glass of tea for herself, “and it seems that they mean for it to last . . . I was thinking on what Sophie and her husband told us of their jaunt over there. It may not be like a Grand Tour of the Continent, as wealthier folk than we undertake, yet . . . I must own to a certain . . . curiosity.”

  Very rich members of the aristocracy considered a Grand Tour of France, Holland, some of the Germanies, Spain, and Portugual, and, of course, the ruins of ancient Rome and the “artistic” cities of Italy, with a stopover in Vienna and Venice, a necessity for the “finishing” of their well-educated and polished children. And to seek bargains in paintings, sculptures, and gold and silver work to enhance the furnishings of their mansions and estates.

  “Seen Toulon, at least,” Lewrie harrumphed. “Spots ashore in the Gironde, to boot. That’s enough o’ France t’hold me for a lifetime. A squalid damned place, Toulon. Dirtier than Cheapside or Wapping. No, I don’t mean you, cat. You know t’bathe, if the Frogs don’t,” he had to tell his black-and-white tom, who, at the mention of his name, leaped into Lewrie’s lap. Not to be left out of it, Chalky came trotting to join Toulon, abandoning his butterfly hunt.

  “It would be educational for the boys,” Caroline went on in an off-handed way. “Improve their French, which every civilised man must speak.”

  “Je suis un crayon, mort de ma vie,” Lewrie quipped.

  “Oh, tosh!” Caroline objected. “So you’re a pencil, are you . . . death of your life?”

  “Papa’s a pencil?” Charlotte gawped, then burst into titters.

  In point of fact, Lewrie’s French was abysmal; execrably bad.

  “I s’pose a tour o’ France might teach ’em something, m’dear,” Sir Hugo told her. “How vile are the French . . . so they hate ’em as bad as the Devil hates Holy Water, th’ rest o’ their lives, haw haw!”

  “Perhaps as a . . . proper honeymoon,” Caroline said, lowering her eyes and going a tad enigmatic. “As Sophie and Anthony did not have when they wed, with his ship ready to put back to sea as soon as the wind shifted. As short as ours was . . . recall, Alan?”

  There had been one short night at a posting house in Petersfield and two weeks at the George Inn in Portsmouth, with him gone half the time fitting out little HMS Alacrity for her voyage to the Bahamas.

  “Hemm,” uttered both Lewrie and his father, for both knew what she was driving at, and the reason for it.

  “You’re sunk!” Hugh yelled. “I shot you clean through!”

  “Did not!” Sewallis loudly objected. “I dis-masted you, so you can’t move!”

  “Can too!” from Hugh, face-down on the grass to shove his ship.

  “Ships don’t sink!” Sewallis insisted, shuffling on his knees to move his model frigate. Hugh’s followed, at a rate of knots.

  “Do too! They burn . . . they blow up! You’re on fire!”

  “Lads!” Lewrie barked, springing from his chair and scattering cats. “Leave off!” Another instant and they’d be rolling and pummelling each other. “Here, let me show you how things go.”

  Lewrie knelt on the grass, green stains on the knees of his old and comfortable white slop-trousers bedamned. “Now, which of ye is the enemy?”

  Both pointed at the other accusingly, faces screwed up.

  “Let’s say the wind’s from there, from the stables and the paddock,” he instructed, “so you both should be sailin’ this way, on the same course. Sewallis has the wind gage, aye, but his larboard guns can’t elevate high enough to dis-mast ye, Hugh. You, on the other hand, in his lee, can shoot high enough . . .”

  And, as he explained to his sons, a couple of curious setters, and both cats, that it was very rare for a ship to be sunk in action, that extreme pains were taken to prevent fires, and that it might take an hour or better to batter a foe into submission, Caroline looked on with a fond smile on her face, the very picture of contentment as she absently jammed a fresh scone for Charlotte.

  “Ye look . . . pleased with life, m’dear,” Sir Hugo pointed out.

  “In the main I am, sir, thank you,” she told him with a grin.

  “France, though . . . Paris?” Sir Hugo queried with a scowl.

  “Perhaps a second honeymoon, . . . as I said. A proper one this time,”
she answered, Though she was smiling, the determined vertical furrow ’twixt her brows was prominent. “After all I’ve had to put up with . . . I believe we owe it to each other. A fresh beginning.”

  “That he owes you, more t’th’ point?” Sir Hugo leered.

  “Indeed,” Caroline rejoined with a slow, firm nod.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  This’ll most-like put me in debtors’ prison, ’fore we’re done! Lewrie ruefully told himself as he delved into his wash-leather coin purse to tip the porters, once their luggage had been stowed aboard the hired coach—some in the boot and the most valuable inside the box. It was prime sport for vagrants and street thugs to slit the straps and leather covers of the boot and make off with the luggage, with the travellers all unsuspecting ’til they reached their last stop.

  The porters were a surly lot, unhappy to accept British coinage and to deal with an Anglais, a “Bloody,” a Biftec in pidgin French.

  “All square?” Lewrie asked the porters. “Uh, c’est tout? Bon?”

  “Uhn,” growled one; “Grr,” the other porter sourly replied.

  “Au revoir, then,” Lewrie concluded, boarding the coach. “And may ye all catch the pox . . . if ye ain’t poxed already,” he muttered under his breath after closing the coach door. “Such a warm and welcomin’ people, the Frogs,” he told his wife, Caroline, seated by herself on the forward-facing padded bench seat. “Feelin’ a touch better, my dear?” Lewrie solicitously enquired.

  “The ginger pastilles seem to have availed, yes,” she replied.

  The crossing on the small packet from Dover to Calais had been a rough one. They’d had bright skies and brisk winds, but the narrows of the Channel when a strong tide was running could produce a prodigious chop, and the packet had staggered and swooped over steep ten-foot seas with only thirty or fourty feet between the swells. The last time that Caroline had been at sea, returning from the Bahamas aboard the little HMS Alacrity, a ketch-rigged bomb converted to a shallow-draught gunboat that would bucket about in any sort of weather past placid, she’d suffered roiled innards for days before regaining the sea legs she had found on the stormy passage out in 1786.