The King's Marauder

by Dewey Lambdin

  Five hundred pounds to Coutts’, and the rest into the Three Percents, Lewrie determined, smiling in delight as he re-folded the letter and stuck it into a coat pocket. Tomorrow, he would call on Mountjoy, visit the bank, make the transfer to the Funds, then take out enough for a shopping trip. Once warmed, he summoned a club waiter and ordered a brandy. Some enterprising smuggler along the coast must have good connexions, for the club had obtained several ankers of French brandy.

  The Three Percents, though; the thought of them brought the painful memory of his last conversation with Lydia Stangbourne’s brother, Percy, Viscount Stangbourne, at their vast house outside Reading.

  “If Lydia is determined never to marry, Percy,” he had pleaded, “me, or anyone else, then she must be provided for. Perhaps you could set aside money in the Funds, in her name … some in a solid bank, too, so she’ll have independent means, the rest of her life.”

  “Before I gamble it away, hey, Alan?” Percy had tried to tease, which effort had fallen flat. Percy’s new bride, Eudoxia Durschenko, had kerbed his penchant for gambling deep, fearing for the security of herself and her first child-to-be.

  “Her two-thousand-pound dowry is her own, too,” Lewrie had stated.

  “Christ!” he muttered, shaking his head, shaking off the memory, and brooded near the warm fire, slowly sipping his drink, putting off any thought of dressing in civilian clothes for the symphony that evening, or much of anything else.

  * * *

  Lewrie had written Lydia as soon as he had completed Reliant’s de-commissioning and had gone up to London to turn all the paperwork over to Admiralty, telling her of his possibly-crippling wound, and that he would go to Anglesgreen to heal up, if possible. Lydia had written back, promising to coach down, but he had asked her not to, in fear that seeing him in his current condition might make her think the less of him, and, once he had realised how he was received by his daughter and in-laws, allowing Lydia to face that same sort of reception was the last thing he’d wish for her.

  Finally, round Christmas, he had given in to her continued invitations and had coached up to Reading for the holidays with what few suitable presents he had been able to purchase in the new shops in the town.

  Foxbrush, the Stangbournes’ country estate, put any great house Lewrie had ever seen to shame. It was immense, a late-Palladian pile of three storeys, as long as a First Rate ship of the line and as deep, less the inset centre courtyard and carriage entry and broad steps to the front doors, as a frigate. It was spiked with over a dozen chimneys, all fuming in promise of warmth.

  Flunkeys in blue-and-white Stangbourne livery had rushed down to Lewrie’s coach to fold down the metal steps, open the door, and hand him down, then gathered his dunnage from the coach’s boot.

  The family descended the long flight of stairs more sedately, with Lydia in the lead, and Percy tending his pregnant wife, Eudoxia. Lurking astern of them was Eudoxia’s father, Arslan Artimovich Durschenko, the evil-looking one-eyed former lion tamer from Daniel Wigmore’s circus/menagerie/theatrical troupe, in which Eudoxia had once belonged as a trick shooter with muskets, pistols, and re-curved bow, and trick rider and ingenue actress. Her father wore his usual scowl of disappointment to A, clap eyes on Lewrie, and B, see that he was still alive! In his new role as Percy’s horse master and chief trainer to Viscount Stangbourne’s personally-raised cavalry regiment, the old bastard was looking particularly prosperous.

  “Oh, God, you!” Lydia had cried, clinging to Lewrie, and almost sending him tumbling. “I am so glad you are finally, actually, here!”

  “It’s been too damned long, aye!” Lewrie had breathed into her hair, leaned back to peer long and deep into her emerald-green eyes, then had given her another long and close embrace.

  It had all started so jolly, at least.

  There was his leg and his walking stick; there were those long and broad stone stairs, and once his set of rooms was ready, after a hot punch in the small salon (which was as big as his father’s grand ballroom!) there were the several flights and landings to the upper storey where he could un-pack, and rest before having to come back down for supper. That first meal, and the breakfast the next morning, had been just the intimate family circle. From there on, though, it was a constant round of holiday suppers, at Foxbrush, or at the houses of Stangbourne neighbours.

  There were dances, in which he could not participate without going arse-over-tit. There were strolls about the property, shortened for his benefit, and morning or afternoon rides with Lewrie on an unfamiliar horse that was as spirited as his own, Anson, back home. And, there were steeplechases or cub hunts, in which he did not take a part at all, seeing them off from the bottom of those detested stone stairs, then returning to the interior of the great house to drink, read, and sulk whilst everyone else trotted off in a clatter to follow the hounds to gay “ta-ta-ras”.

  Percy arranged shooting parties, even though he was a bit leery of women taking part, and it didn’t help that Eudoxia would insist on going along in her “condition”, then proving to be the most accurate of them all, with Lewrie second-best and Lydia sometimes out-shooting him.

  The best of all was the late evenings after supper, when Lewrie could retire to his rooms, and, once the house was quiet with all but the scullery maids in the kitchens retired for the night, Lydia would make her stealthy way to his bed.

  Lame Lewrie might have been, but at least his “wedding tackle” still worked!

  * * *

  “I still do not understand why you did not wish me to come down to see you,” Lydia had purred, snugly tucked into his arms with her head on his shoulder, and her hair the colour of old honey spilled on his chest. “One might imagine you would be ashamed of me, Alan.”

  “Ashamed o’ me!” Lewrie had laughed off. “You think me a cripple now, you should’ve seen how lame I was a few months ago. My old Cox’n and the lads’ve worked me daily, and I’m still not my old self.”

  “Well, in some things you are,” Lydia had purred, stretching like a cat against him. “You were afraid that if I’d seen you then, I would have thought the less of you?”

  “Yes,” he had confessed. “If the bullet had hit me an inch or so off where it did, I’d be a peg-leg, not fit for anyone, or anything else. Can you imagine how useless and idle I would’ve been, then?”

  “But, you are not, and do you continue on with your exercises, or whatever you’ve been doing, you will be completely whole by Spring,” Lydia had encouraged, then had gone sombre. “Then the Navy will have you, again, and you will be off to God knows where for several more years. I cannot bear the thought of that.”

  “I’m sorry, Lydia dear, but the Navy’s what I do, all that I know how to do by now, and … it’s the only thing I’m good at. I’d be bored to drunken tears, else,” he had gloomed. “If the war ever ends … which I can’t even imagine … well, my prospects’d put me in a permanent sulk. Half-pay, and lots o’ readin’? Hah! Not kind to women who take up with sailors, but…”

  “No, it is not,” Lydia had whispered, with a hitch of breath.

  “Besides,” Lewrie had gone on, “Anglesgreen’s a dull place, and you’d’ve been bored after a couple of days. Most of the local folks’re ‘chaw-bacon’, even the prominent ones, like Sir Romney Embleton. His son, Harry, hates me worse than the Devil hates Holy Water!”

  He had told her how Harry had plans to marry Caroline back in the long ago, before Lewrie had won her heart, describing how badly Harry had taken it, and how Caroline had lashed him with her reins and made his “bung spout claret” when the hunting hounds had treed Lewrie’s old cat, Pitt, and Harry had tried to drive the cat down to be savaged.

  “Then there’s the in-laws, and my daughter, Charlotte,” Lewrie had said with a huge sigh. “I wanted t’spare ye that,” telling Lydia how he’d been greeted, and his dread for how they would welcome her as the “new woman”, Caroline’s replacement, and the foul rumours of how it had been Lewrie’s fault that Car
oline had died.

  Lydia Stangbourne had not thought of herself as a beauty when she was a child, and still didn’t accept the fact that she’d grown to be handsome and fetching. Her first exposure during a London Season when she was eighteen had been a cruel disappointment. Even with £500 for her “dot”, other girls with less dowry had out-shone her, so much so that she’d refused her mother’s pressure to try again ’til several years later, with £2,000. She’d been mobbed by greedy young swains eager for her per annum, not her. Revolted, she’d played arch, aloof, and cynically scornful, which had made the greediest praise her for her “modernity”!

  When she finally did marry, she’d been deluded by a beast in human form, from whom she’d fled after a few months and had the family solicitor apply to their Member in the House of Commons to file a Bill of Divorcement, resulting in over two years of charges and counter charges gushingly reprinted in all the papers before Parliament had granted her her freedom. All of that had turned her into a Scandalous Woman, not fit for Genteel or Respectable Company.

  If Lydia had been cool and guarded with her emotions before, those early years did not hold a candle to how sensitive she was now to even the slightest rejection, insult, guarded snicker, or cutty-eyed glance! Lydia comported herself icily aloof in public settings, only revealing her true and easy self with family or a small circle of girlhood friends.

  Lewrie had noted that of the five close female friends Lydia had, the ones to whom he had been introduced over the holidays, all but one of them was nowhere near what one could call pretty or fetching. They were matrons, by then, chick-a-biddies with broods of children and complacent husbands of looks less than handsome. Monied they might be, high in the local landed gentry and Squirearchy, but none of them were what Lewrie could call scintillating company; they were comfortable for Lydia, safe, sure, and ever accepting.

  “It all sounds so bleak,” Lydia had said with a long sigh. “Your daughter and in-laws … your son, Sewallis, when I met him in Portsmouth…”

  “Charlotte said he’d written her, after,” Lewrie had said.

  “Then I can only imagine what he wrote of me,” Lydia had said with a toss of her head, “for he did not act in the least approving of me. Lord, what a small world to which we are reduced!”

  “Well, we’ll always have Reading,” Lewrie had quipped.

  “Your family dis-approving, most of England looking down their noses at me? What sort of life could it be, did the war end, and you were ashore for good?” Lydia had dejectedly sighed. “Even if we did decide to make our relationship more … permanent, there would be no change. With no welcome from your family, it would be even worse!”

  “We … we just tell ’em all t’sod off, go to the Devil and shake themselves, Lydia,” Lewrie had replied. Admittedly, his use of the word “we” was so fraught with dread that he did stumble over it. A fond and passionate relationship when he was back from the sea was one thing; a permanent arrangement was something altogether else! Oh, he was fond of her, missed her when he was gone … but marriage for a second time?

  “I sometimes wonder whether life would be so much easier did I stay in the country, at Foxbrush, and limit my world to Reading and Henley,” Lydia had gloomed. “I am so at ease here, and dread going to London, or anywhere else, lately.”

  “A long way from the coast, though, Portsmouth or Sheerness, or wherever I put in,” Lewrie reminded her.

  “When you rarely return,” she had said back, nigh snippily.

  “But, I’m here now,” Lewrie had teased.

  Fierce and passionate lovemaking had seemed to cheer her up.

  * * *

  From that night on, though, Lewrie had sensed a subtle change, a distancing from him, as if she thought it better for her to forsake him than to continue hoping that circumstances would change for the better in future.

  Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, then Boxing Day brought more temporary house guests. There were grand suppers, music, and carols sung, with Lewrie tootling on his humble penny-whistle to the great amusement of the others, and on Christmas Eve, gifts were exchanged. She did not come to his rooms, fearful of exposure by the many guests.

  Lewrie had brought a satin baby gown for the expectant Eudoxia, found in the drygoods shop in Anglesgreen, and for Percy a twelve-bottle case of Madeira port that Will Cony had ordered down from London. For Lydia, he’d found an iridescent dark green wool-and-silk–woven shawl, which had made Eudoxia laugh, clap her hands, and jape that the shawl might be the equivalent to the “paper of pins” from the old rhyme in sign of a plighting of troth! Lydia made the proper noises in gracious delight, but it had irked Lewrie a trifle that she was not all that enthusiastic, and he had caught her a few minutes later, seated apart and fingering the shawl, looking very pensive.

  And Lewrie had found it odd that his holiday gift was not from Lydia alone, but from her brother Percy, as well, though it was a splendid one; a double-locked and double-barrelled fowling piece with the barrels aligned over-under along the same line of sight. It was set in a glossy walnut chequered stock, and chased with silver inlay and intricate engravings.

  “A Wallace!” Percy had crowed. “I discovered it when we passed through London from the coast, and the arrangement of the barrels made such perfect sense that I got one for myself, as well, ha ha!”

  “My God, it’s magnificent, Percy!” Lewrie had exclaimed, awed and stunned by its beauty, its perfection, and how much a custom fowler must have cost. He’d felt like a miser in comparison, but a new firearm had always given him immense delight.

  “I can’t wait t’try it out,” he had declared. “Thankee, Lydia, Percy, and Eudoxia, I must also add. Such a crack shot must’ve had a say in buying it. Christ, you’ve made me stupefied!”

  The Stangbourne estates consisted of thousands of acres spread all over the county, where deer and game birds could be found. Percy swore that they would go fowling after church services on Christmas Day, and he made good on his promise, resulting in such a bag that the Christmas-night supper and the servants’ Boxing Day supper prominently featured roast pheasant and massive pigeon pies.

  It would have been wonderful to stay on a few more days, lounging about and feeding off Stangbourne largesse, but Lewrie had to get back to Anglesgreen, and his regimen. It was well that he did leave, for the last night had been the very worst.

  * * *

  Lydia had wanted to stroll in the decorative gardens behind the great house, bleak as they were in mid-Winter, and as cold and snowy as were the prospects. Wrapped up warmly, she and Lewrie went anyway, for the fresh air, and to work off a hearty dinner.

  “You must go tomorrow,” Lydia had begun, sounding glum.

  “Fear I must,” he’d told her, equally depressed.

  “And, you won’t be back ’til late in the Spring,” she’d added.

  “Have t’get fit and back to normal, after all,” he’d agreed.

  “Before you come back here, you will surely go up to London to seek employment with Admiralty, first,” Lydia had reasoned. “If you do fully restore yourself, of course?”

  “Well, it’s what I do for a living, so yes, I’d go to London, first,” Lewrie had told her, feeling the first disturbing twinges under his heart, sure that there was a shoe to be dropped on him. He’d looked towards her, but her face was set, half-hidden under the cowl of a greatcoat, with her arms crossed inside a fur muff that she held clenched to her middle. “We could meet there, spend a few weeks, perhaps…”

  “No,” Lydia had whispered, shaking her head. She had tried to glance at him, but lowered her gaze to the toes of her shoes. “I told you that I do not find London comfortable for me, any longer. Nor do I wish to sneak about from Willis’s Rooms, to a spare bed-chamber in Grosvenor Street, to a … a bagnio taken by the hour … any more than I wish to expose myself to the gawkers and snooty gossipers. I cannot, and I will not, play a part-time paramour. My heart…!”

  He had reached out to embrace her, but s
he had stepped clear, and she finally looked him in the eye, her expression as bleak as the winter-sere gardens.

  “I have loved you dearly, Alan,” she had confessed, “but there can be no ‘we’, and I cannot continue loving a man who is never here. The long separations are more than I can bear, and our few days together are so short and fleeting that they feel more like a brief waking dream, too flimsy to snatch back after rising.”

  “But, Lydia, dear…!” he’d protested, his heart sinking into his stomach in shock, “I thought we were both happy with…!”

  “You, perhaps, Alan,” she’d chillingly accused, not in anger but in sadness, “but men are so easily pleased, are they not, when things are going their way? Making love is so much easier than giving one’s heart in love completely.”

  “You think I don’t love you, Lydia?” Lewrie had objected.

  “I am sure that you do, Alan,” Lydia had said with a sad smile, “in your own fashion. That is the hardest part to bear. I hope that you will always think of me fondly, as I will of you, but … I cannot continue this way, of us being not one thing but not quite another, and…”

  “Then, marry me!” Lewrie had blurted out. “Let’s wed, today!”

  Christ! What’d I just say? he had thought.

  That had made her weep, at long last.

  “I have not had much luck with married life, Alan,” Lydia had said, lifting a mittened hand from her muff to wipe her eyes, with a rueful laugh. “I told you once, before you went off to the Bahamas, that I feared the risk to my heart too much to marry you, or anyone. And, remember what you told me, the night after we met at the palace, when you were knighted? In the Cocoa-Tree, I think it was … when I complained of being labelled a scandalous hussy, being pursued by men such as Georgey Hare, and dreading to be re-enslaved and ruled by a man?”

  “I told you to forget it all, and enjoy your life,” Lewrie had recalled, vividly, and sorrowfully. “But…”