Hostile Shores (12 page)

“Ehm … might it be best did we issue Captain Lewrie a document of some kind, milord?” Captain Niles suggested. “An order from you allowing him to seek an audience at Admiralty might not go amiss.”

“Fine, fine, scribble him out one, Niles, and I’ll sign it, if you think that’s best,” Lord Gardner said in an irritated growl. His attention had already shifted to a fresh pile of paperwork on the side of his desk. “An excuse for truancy for the headmaster … a dispensation for past sins, hey? Carry on, then. Good day to you, Captain Lewrie. Best of luck … all that,” he muttered, poring over a fresh letter, trying to find the proper “range” at which to read it.

“Good day, my lord, and thank you,” Lewrie said in parting as he followed the pleasant Captain Niles to the outer office.

*   *   *

He had not come ashore with his boat-cloak, and regretted that lack once he left the Port Admiral’s office building with his written pass safely stowed away in a dry breast pocket of his uniform coat. A sullen and misty rain had sprung up in the meantime, bringing with it a thin haze. Lewrie strolled back towards the quayside in search of a bum-boat to row him out to
Reliant
. He dodged several timber waggons and goods carts that trundled loudly over the cobblestones of the seaside road ’til he got to the large, mossed, and rain-slick stone blocks of the quayside, and stopped to look round. There weren’t any boats to be seen, not within hailing distance.

Dozens of warships lay in the harbour, towering Third Rate 74s and a pair of more powerful Second Rates of at least 98 guns, perhaps the flagships of admirals come in from the blockade, surrounded by frigates, three-masted older sloops of war, and the newer brig-sloops. All were hazed by the rain, those lying further out indistinct. Lewrie looked to his right and left, and peered up toward the inner harbour, and Gosport. All along the hards there were scaffoldings, and ships in the middle of them being constructed. In the stone graving docks, warships were being repaired, temporarily de-commissioned. Even more, stripped to a gantline with all their top hamper above the lower mast trunks struck, and floating high with all their stores and guns landed ashore, lay anchored just off the graving docks, waiting their turns. The soft, misty rain and the wet haze acted like a blanket upon most sounds that morning, but even from this far away, Lewrie could hear the continual din of saws and hammers, and the tinny ringing of metal artificers on anvils and iron fittings. The Admiralty, and the Royal Navy and its supporting infrastructure, was the world’s largest commercial and industrial enterprise, and Lewrie felt depressingly awed to think that the bulk of its activities was centred within eye and ear shot of where he stood, that instant. It was far too busy to ever get round to dealing with him!

Pleadin’ at Admiralty may not help one tuppenny shit,
Lewrie sadly gloomed;
Should I even
try
? Oh, why not? All they can say is no.

A wryly amusing idea crossed his mind; when his father shoved him into the Navy in 1780, Sir Hugo’s old attorney, Mr. Pilchard, had scribbled out a
huge
forgery. When his son Sewallis had finagled his way aboard a warship as a Midshipman in 1803, the lad had forged his father’s signature on the introductory letter to an old shipmate that had been meant for his younger son, Hugh—in point of fact, the entire letter had been forged, inserting Sewallis’s name for Hugh’s. The art of forgery seemed to run in the family, for God’s sake! Why not just sit down in some tavern here in Portsmouth with a set of orders done by the First or Second Secretary at Admiralty and write his
own
urgent demand for
Reliant
to be docked? If he waited for the wheels to clack round like a slow-running mantel clock, he’d be twiddling his thumbs ’till next Summer!

“London it is, then, no matter,” Lewrie muttered to himself.

At least he could get some shopping done, perhaps look up some old friends for a day or two, once shooed from the infamous Waiting Room at the close of the Admiralty’s working day, and …

“Oh, shit!” he groaned.

Once in Soundings of the Channel, once the Lizard had been sighted, he had written several letters for instant despatch as soon as
Reliant
was anchored. One, the most important of his personal correspondence, went to Lydia Stangbourne at her family’s Grosvenor Street house, in hopes that the Autumn season had drawn her back from their country estates near Reading and Henley. Lydia would never miss the new rounds of plays, operas, symphonies, and art gallery showings.

He had not yet heard back from her, but, if their history together was any judge, it was good odds that she would sling a fortnight’s heap of gowns into her coach and come down to Portsmouth, instanter! How wroth might she be to get to Portsmouth to discover that he’d run off to London like the worst sort of cad?

“Meet halfway … spot her coach somewhere on the road?” Lewrie said with another groan. “Just damn my eyes!”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lewrie considered a fast horse, from which it would be easier to spot Lydia’s coach with her family crest on the doors, but in the continual misty rains, a horse just would not do. As quickly as he wished to get to London … to get to Lydia’s house before she left … the roads would simply be too sloppy and muddy, and he would end up looking like one of the urchin Thames-side “mud-lark” boys before he’d gone ten miles, and he had only two uniforms aboard, his daily undress, and his very best, and it was good odds one of them would be ruined. If only he’d kept a civilian suit and top-boots aboard, with a great-coat to protect his trousers with its long, deep skirts, but all his “mufti”, as his father called it from his days with the East India Company Army (where he’d made himself an immense pile of “tin” and had come home a full
nabob
!), was still at his father’s estate at Anglesgreen. Besides, there was Pettus to think of, and Pettus wasn’t skilled enough a horseman to keep up with the pace he planned! Lewrie would take lodgings at the Madeira Club, of course; his father was one of the founders and investors, and Lewrie could count on obtaining a room, at a discount, but he would not trust one of the house staff to “do” for him … not if he wished to make a good showing at Admiralty!

Only slightly begrudging the cost, Lewrie hired a four-horse coach for the trip up to the city. With only him and Pettus and their minimal “traps” aboard, he hoped that they would make much better time than buying passage in the diligence or “flying balloon” coaches, with Pettus relegated to a precarious seat on the roof in the foul weather, which would turn him surly for a week or more!

They set off the next morning, just a bit after “first sparrow fart”, and
damned
if the lighter coach was still too heavy to breast Portdown Hill, and they had to get down and walk. Pettus did comment that if they had booked seats on the “dilly”, they would have had to not only carry their own luggage to the top of the hill, but help with the pushing, too, which was sort of a blessing! The mud covering Lewrie’s Hessian boots like heavy plaster casts made Lewrie disagree … rather tetchily! And, once back inside and out of the drizzle, there was still the mud and mire and horse, oxen, and mule dung mixed in that was flung up in a fine shower by their coach’s spinning wheels that “got up his nose”, both figuratively and literally, that had Lewrie swiping his face and his hair in a continual grumble. Every passing equipage that looked expensive enough to be Lydia Stangbourne’s
had
to be peered at, did it not?

“It is a good thing that I thought to pack some extra towels, sir,” Pettus cheerfully said as he offered Lewrie yet another clean one, then dug into the depths of a woven basket. “Might you care for some of Mister Cooke’s pones, with Yeovill’s bacon strips, sir? Oh, we have butter, as well!”

“Grrr,” was Lewrie’s impatient comment to that offer, but he did take two of their Free Black cook’s “cat-head” flour bisquits and some bacon, and leaned back inside out of the wet to gnaw at them.

*   *   *

It was a given for travellers, no matter how impatient, that no matter how fast a coach could bowl along, no matter how rapid a pace a mount could be put to, how swiftly one of the new-fangled canal boats could be towed, or how quickly a ship with a fine breeze could sail, if one went a long distance, then it would take a long time to get there.

Making it even worse were the necessary stops every twenty-odd miles to change teams at a posting inn which
had
spare horses beyond the demands of the regularly scheduled diligence coaches. When there, no amount of grumbling and drumming of feet inside the coach would put any “urgent” into their coachman, so there was nothing for it but to clamber out, stretch their legs, head for the “jakes” to relieve themselves, slosh down some indifferently brewed tea, or sample a pint of the local beer, ale, stout, or porter. If they did not, for certain the coachman did, for which Lewrie had to pay to keep him merry and mellow. By the time they actually crossed the bridge into London, the coachman was
so
mellow that he began to bawl out songs in a raspy voice, laughing inanely between verses, and got so lost and befuddled that Lewrie had to mount the box with him to steer him to the corner of Duke Street and Wigmore Street, and the Madeira Club, just around six in the evening.

It was raining for real, by then, of course; just pouring down!

“Good ev’nin’ t’ye, fine sir, and I hope ye found th’ journey comf’table!” the coachman shouted down as Lewrie and Pettus gathered their belongings. “Ye wish me services for th’ return, just ask o’th’ publican at th’ good ol’ Three Nuns for Thom Wheeler, an’ I’ll come direck t’collec’ ye, quick’z ye kin say ‘knife’! Huzzah for th’ Navy, I say! Gawd bless ye, ye brave tars! ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rules th’ waves … Bri-tons never never never shall be’ … someone hold me horses, I gotta get down an’ piss like an ox!”

“Should we help him down, sir, before he dashes his brains out?” Pettus fretted.

“After all he’s cost me, I don’t give a toss,” Lewrie said with a laugh. The coachman’s drunken bawlings had drawn the attention of the Madeira Club’s doorman and desk clerk, who had come out onto the stoop to goggle. “Ah, Lucas!” Lewrie called to the first one he saw and remembered by name. “Captain Alan Lewrie. I will need a room for a couple of nights, and room for my cabin steward!”

“Come in, come in, Captain Lewrie, get out of the rain,” Lucas the desk clerk grandly offered, holding the doors open for them. “We do happen to have a vacancy or two, since Major Baird found a bride, and Mister Showalter is away to his home borough, on the hustings for the next by-election.”

“What?” Lewrie gawped as he shrugged off his boat-cloak inside. “He ain’t elected
yet
? I don’t know which is more surprisin’, Showalter still standin’ for Commons, or Major Baird takin’ a wife, at last.”

Major Baird had come back from India
years
before a “Chicken
Nabob
” with at least
£
50,000 in profits, or loot, and had spent that long purportedly searching for a suitable mate … when not indulging in “knee-trembler” sex with the orange-selling girls at the theatres, and getting fellated in dark corners with his breeches undone.

“One hopes his new bride is … skilled,” Lewrie sniggered.

Lucas cryptically grinned, knowing what Lewrie alluded to, but a good enough servant to appear unperturbed.

“There is brandy in the Common Room, Captain Lewrie, Spanish brandy I fear, but quite drinkable, as soon as you are settled in your rooms,” Lucas told him as he signalled for a porter to see the luggage abovestairs, “and supper will be served at seven.”

Lewrie’s rooms were second storey, in the back and away from the continual rumble and skreak of waggon and carriage traffic. There was a coal fire laid in the hearth and crackling nicely, with a brass back-plate hot and radiating both warmth and light into the dank coolness of an un-used room. Lewrie sat down on a short settee near the fireplace and tugged his muddy boots off, which Pettus took away for cleaning and re-blacking for the morrow. He handed Lewrie a pair of buckled shoes which did not quite go with snug white undress trousers, but were presentable enough for the clientele of the Madeira Club, and for a fellow who had no plans to be about the town that evening.

“All is ready for the morrow, sir,” Pettus said after brushing the ever-present cat fur from Lewrie’s best-dress gilt-laced coat and hat. The coat was hung on a dresser stand, the hat resting atop the round-topped upper spindle, the sash of the Order of The Bath draped round the spindle, and a fresh silk shirt, pressed waist-coat, and new pair of breeches and stockings arrayed on the shelves below the coat.

“Dress sword?” Lewrie asked, leaning back with his eyes half-closed. Nigh twelve hours in a swaying, jerking, and rocking coach had wrung him out like a dish-clout.

“Oh Lord,” Pettus gasped. “I believe I left it atop your desk, sir, and
meant
to include it, but … my
pardons,
sir!”

“So long as we know it’s safe,” Lewrie wearily allowed, waving a hand. “My ev’ryday hanger’ll do. So long as you’re
sure
ye left it on the desk.”

“Absolutely, sir,” Pettus assured him. “I can see it in my mind’s eye, and once we were in the coach, I
thought
I had an odd feeling that I was remiss, but … it won’t happen again, sir!”

“As far as I can recall, Pettus, this is the first time
ever
you’ve been remiss, and that’s a good record,” Lewrie excused. “Don’t take yourself t’task over it. You remembered t’pack towels, and a fine basket o’ victuals, after all.”

“Thank you, sir, and I won’t let you down again, sir. Now, I’ve your ‘house-wife’ laid out on the wash-hand stand, your razor stropped and ready for the morning. Will there be anything else before supper, sir? A pot of tea from belowstairs, or—?”

“No, I think that’ll do ’til morning, Pettus,” Lewrie said as he hauled out his pocket watch from a waist-coat pocket and peered at it. “Last time I lodged here, the kitchen staff arose round half-past five, so have them stir you, too. I think I’ll trust to the staff of the club for the rest of the ev’nin’, and you can get settled in with them and enjoy a good supper and some time off.”