The Invasion Year (13 page)

… the Value of the Stoves Captain Speaks estimates at £35 each, and intends to seek a sum of £140, plus his legal Expenses. Do please write me on this head, sir, at your earliest Convenience …

“Aw, shit!” Lewrie muttered, strongly considering his crock of aged American corn whisky for a moment.
He
didn’t know what Herbert Pridemore had done with the bloody stoves, but,
Thermopylae
had paid off in December of 1801, and they’d have been damned welcome for the Standing Officers, kiddies, and wives who would live aboard her whilst she was laid up in the Sheerness ordinary in Winter … of which the Purser, Mr. Pridemore, was a part! Perhaps he’d
meant
to ship them to the north of England, but had put it off ’til the Summer, and …

“Bugger ’em,” Lewrie growled. The cats woke from their naps on the starboard-side settee table, the large, round brass Hindoo tray that was so cool to sprawl on during a tropic afternoon. With no invitation to play forthcoming, they closed their eyes, again.

Next, a letter from his father, Sir Hugo.

His rented farm was gone. The two-storey house he and Caroline had built in 1789 for £800, the brick-and-timber barn they’d erected to replace an ancient, tumble-down wattle-and-daub one with a roof of straw—bug- and rat-infested since the War of The Roses, most-like!—the storage towers for silage and grain, and the brick stables and coach house were now the property of his favourite brother-in-law, Major Burgess Chiswick, and his bride, Theadora; as were all his former livestock, except for a few favourite saddle horses and what crops had been reaped before the transfer of ownership.

“No more pig-shit … no more sheep-shit,” Lewrie muttered with a touch of glee. “Good.”

Less the payment of your last Quit-Rents, Phineas Chiswick, that six-toothed Miser!, offered a paltry £1,000, as Recompence for all your Improvements. As your Agent in this matter, I insisted that we would take no less than £2,000, and, since I learned that Phineas had valued the property at £5,000 for the outright Sale of it to the Trenchers, who would be footing the Bill for their daughter’s Country Estate, forced him, at the last, to accept our Terms.

Since you delegated to me the negotiations whilst you were away at Sea, I subtracted a sum of £200 as my Commission, and deposited the rest, £1,800, to your account at Coutts’. Trust that my share will be spent joyfully, if not wisely, haw!

“And when did I agree t’ten percent, damn his eyes!” Lewrie fumed. Sir Hugo went on for several more pages. The Winter was a raw one, though the Thames had not frozen quite so solid as to allow the
proper
sort of Frost Fair. Zachariah Twigg had wintered at his rural estate, Spyglass Bungalow, in Hampstead, and had suffered several bouts with the ague. He was now fully retired from even his consulting work at the Foreign Office.

“Good!” Lewrie exclaimed loud enough to wake the cats, again. He’d been Twigg’s pet gun dog since 1784, getting roped into neck-or-nothing, harum-scarum deviltry overseas, time and again, and if that arrogant, top-lofty, and sneering old cut-throat had retired, Lewrie could look forward to a
somewhat
safer career, from now on.

Sir Hugo had heard from Lewrie’s sons, both now serving aboard their respective ships in the Navy. Hugh, his youngest, was a Midshipman aboard HMS
Pegasus,
under an old friend, Captain Thomas Charlton, a stolid, steady, and seasoned professional … though Charlton had a sly and puckish sense of humour, and a fond tolerance for the antics of Midshipmen. Hugh had taken to the sea like a cow to clover, and was having a grand time.

Sewallis, well … his oldest boy, and heir-apparent, had slyly amassed enough money to kit himself out, had forged a draft of one of Lewrie’s early letters to another old friend and compatriot, Captain Benjamin Rodgers, and had finagled himself a sea-berth aboard
Aeneas,
a two-decker ship of the line. His one brief letter to his “granther” told a soberer tale of his self-chosen naval career, so far, but … Sewallis had always been the serious one. He was learning all of the cautions, “all the ropes,” but said little of his fellow Midshipmen, confessing that times were hard on a “Johnny New Come” ’til he began to fit in. Sir Hugo suspected that he was coping main-well, but did not sound quite so joyful as Hugh. Had Lewrie gotten a letter from him, yet?

No, he had not, and there was not one in his latest pile. He expected that Sewallis would summon up the gumption to explain, sooner or later.
That’ll prove damned int’restin’!
Lewrie thought.

On a happier note, Lewrie’s former ward, Sophie de Maubeuge, now wed to Lewrie’s old First Officer, Commander Anthony Langlie, had been delivered of a lusty baby boy, whom she had named Charles August, to honour her late older cousin, Baron Charles Auguste de Crillart, a French Navy officer who had been Lewrie’s prisoner-on-parole in the Caribbean during the American Revolution, and Lewrie’s Royalist ally during the siege of Toulon, the both of them being blown sky-high in the old
razee
-turned-mortar battery,
Zelé,
at the siege of Toulon. Charles had gotten his shrunken family aboard the captured frigate
Radicale
to flee when the port was taken by the French Republicans, avoiding the massacre of the Royalists, but had died when three French ships had chased her down on her way to Gibraltar. He had died not knowing that his younger brother and his mother had been slain, too, leaving Sophie his last, orphaned kin, and extracting a promise from Lewrie to see them safe with his dying breath.

Anthony Langlie and his brig-sloop
Orpheus
were, so Sophie told it, raising merry Hell in the Mediterranean, and had captured several merchant prizes!

London had been grandly entertaining that Winter, with several new plays and exhibits, Sir Hugo related; Daniel Wigmore’s Peripatetic Extravaganze had put on a Winter season cross the Thames in Southwark, and had staged their comic plays and farces in a rented hall in Drury Lane; the delightful bareback rider/crack bow shot/
ingenue
actress, Eudoxia Durschenko—the delectable Cossack minx that had been hot for Lewrie, Sir Hugo teased!—was now about the town in the company of Lord Percy Stangbourne, a dashing Buck-of-The-First-Head, rich as a Walpole, intimate of the Prince of Wales, and a Lieutenant-Colonel of his family’s home-raised Yeomanry Light Dragoons. They were both as horse-mad as if they
were
Cossacks, or Mongols!

“Good for her,” Lewrie muttered, though with a tinge of loss; had it not been for Eudoxia’s murderous, eye-patched expert marksman–lion tamer father, Arslan Artimovich, and his oath that the girl would
die
a virgin if he had to kill half the males in Great Britain, Lewrie
might
have given her a go.

There was a letter from his other brother-in-law, Governour Chiswick, who, with his long-suffering but sweet wife, Millicent, was now boarding his daughter, Charlotte, at their estate in Anglesgreen. Talk about cool and stand-offish! Governour’s letter was as formal as a boarding school proctor’s end-of-term summation on a student’s progress. Governour
rated
her on her ladylike deportment, her advancing skills at singing, at playing the harpsichord and violin, her “seat” and “bottom” when riding her horse-pony, and the courage she showed on open-country rides at trot, canter, lope, and gallop. Charlotte “played well with other girls,” though she did insist on having her way if not strictly reined back. Her table manners were exquisite for a girl her age, and she kept a scrupulously neat room, without the assistance of her maid, and she kept her clothes in good order.

Charlotte dearly missed her brothers, and did not understand why her father would so
cruelly
send Sewallis off to sea, when he was the eldest, who should have still been in school, preparing for a
civilian
career! She missed her old house, though she quite enjoyed to have her “uncle Burgess” and Theadora living there.

Worst of all, she would still weep when thinking of how much she missed her dear mother, Caroline, though the sunny days now out-numbered the glum ones. Charlotte had adored her Christmas presents from Sir Hugo, when he’d come down briefly from London.

Of missing her father, there was not one ward, at all. Though Lewrie had written her several times, there was no acknowledgement of her reading them, or receiving them, and … there was no letter from her to him enclosed.

The handwriting changed on the next page to Millicent’s finer and more graceful hand, giving him a perky recital of all that Burgess and Theadora were doing with his old house, what colours they chose to repaint the rooms, which pieces of furniture they had retained, and an inventory of what they’d been given, or purchased, and how they had re-arranged. His office-cum-library with its many French doors and windows was now
such
a delightful, such a
splendid
garden room, awash in potted or hanging ferns, exotic Indian flowers and palmettos from the Carolinas in America, and one magnificent palm
tree
so reminiscent of Burgess’s service with the East India Company army, and…!

Lewrie tossed it aside in disgust and sadness. As eager as he had been to flee the place, and escape Caroline’s ghost, to be shot of all the hurtful memories, it still irked that what had been his sheet-anchor was now turned so topsy-turvy. If there had been
some
way for the children to have stayed on there, when home from school…!

“First Off’cer, SAH!” his Marine sentry bellowed.

“Enter,” Lewrie glumly called back.

“My God, sir!” Lt. Westcott barged in, his hatchet face glowing with delight, and his usual brief flash-grin replaced with one that nigh-reached to his ears. “Captain Sir Alan Lewrie! Good God above, sir! Mister Spendlove and Merriman, both, told me of it, soon as I set foot on the gangway. My heartiest
congratulations,
sir!”

“Oh, don’t
you
start!” Lewrie gravelled back. “
Blanding
earned his, I didn’t, really, and I’ve no idea
why
I was included. It’s all so damned silly.”

“But, will you say the same at the shore supper, tonight, sir?” Westcott teased.

“
What
bloody shore supper?”

“Midshipman Bailey, of
Modeste,
SAH!” the Marine bellowed.

“That’ll be the invitation, I’d think,” Westcott said, chuckling. “Care to lay a wager on it, sir?”

“Enter!” Lewrie barked more forcefully, and a Midshipman from the flagship came in, hat under his arm, and bowing as if to a duke.

Christ, they
are
bowin’ an’ scrapin’!
Lewrie sulkily thought.

“Captain Blanding’s respects, sir, and I am to extend to you an invitation … to you and all your officers an invitation, that is, to join Captain Blanding and his officers at a
f
 …
fête champêtre,
this evening at Two Bells of the Dog Watch,” the lad haltingly said, losing his rehearsed place several times. “It is to be held ashore, sir, at a …
restaurante
by name of The Rookery, and…”

“Any ladies allowed, lad?” Lt. Westcott asked, tongue-in-cheek.

“Ehm … I do not
know,
sir, no mention was made…” The Midshipman sneaked a peek at the written invitation to see whether ladies were to be included.

“The Rookery, Mister Bailey?” Lewrie asked. “I’m not familiar with it … why not ‘The Grapes’? They do naval parties just fine.”

And, The Grapes had been a dockside fixture, handily near the boat landings, since long before Lewrie’s Midshipman days;
and,
they were used to rowdy behaviour and vomit.

“I am not familiar with it myself, sir,” Midshipman Bailey confessed, looking as if he’d like to scuff his youthful shoe-toes together in embarrassment. “But the directions to it are here on the invitation, sir. Ehm … harbourside, further east along the High Street, a brick building with a courtyard, and a curtain wall before the entrances…’tis said the rear dining rooms offer a splendid harbour view.”

“God,” Lewrie breathed, knowing exactly where this Rookery was; he and Christopher Cashman, his friends, and some obliging doxies had celebrated his victory and survival after the Beauman duel, the breakfast turning into a high-spirited, drunken battle of flying food and rolls. And, long, long before, it had had another owner. In 1782, he had gone there, once, a shiny-new Lieutenant.

“Baltasar’s,” Lewrie suddenly recalled. “An
emigré
Frenchman’s fancy place … Baltasar’s. I know it.”