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 torn, 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 offhanded 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 wi
th 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
T his'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.
The packet voyage had been so short that Caroline had had no time to acclimate, and she had spent most of the trip past the harbour mole by a bucket or the lee rails. Even last night, spent in a squalid Calais travellers' inn, she could tolerate nothing more strenuous than cups of herbal tea and thin chicken broth.
The ginger pastilles were made in London by Smith amp; Co., recommended by another couple crossing to France with them, Sir Pulteney "Something Fruitish" and his wife, Lady "Starts with an I," both of 'em of the most extreme languid and lofty airs, the sort that set English teeth on edge. Worried about Caroline, Lewrie hadn't paid all that much attention to the social niceties and, once on solid ground at Calais, had been more than happy to decline an invitation to dine with the "Whosits," on account of Caroline's tetchy boudins… A further vague suggestion to meet again in Paris, he'd shrugged off, as well.
"Well, we're off," Lewrie said to fill a void as their coachee whipped up and set their equipage in motion.
"Once out in open country, and fresh, clean air, I expect that we shall enjoy this much better," Caroline opined, holding a scented handkerchief to her nose as she looked out the windows. "It will be a fine adventure, I'm bound."
"Sweeter smellin' than Calais, at any rate," Lewrie agreed with her. "Seaports always reek." Though he suspected that every French city or town would prove as noxious as Dung Wharf or the old Fleet Ditch in London, long ago paved over. And how the Devil did I end up chivvied into this? he asked himself for the hundredth time; guilt most-like. No one back in Anglesgreen had thought much of their jaunt to France. Well, Millicent Chiswick, Caroline's brother's wife, had deemed it a very romantic idyll, but she was about the only one.
Weeks of, well… not exactly harping and nagging had preceded the actuality. There'd been French maps and atlases turning up mysteriously, then a weedy university lad to tutor the children in French, though he and Caroline had somehow become pupils as well. Not that those lessons had done Lewrie's linguistic skills all that much good. He had a smattering of Hindi from service in the Far East between the wars in ' 84, a dab or two of French from duty in the Mediterranean in the '90s (and several good public schools from which he had been booted!), and a few words and phrases of Russian from dealings with the delectable Eudoxia Durschenko and her equally appalling papa, and his most-recent service in the Baltic.
Curse words, mostly, foul oaths and the sketchiest, rudimentary necessities such as "I will order the…, fetch me…, too hot, too cold, hello, good-bye, d'ye have any ale," and the ever-useful "fetch out yer whores." Schoolboy Greek was still a mystery, too, though he had done rather well in Latin… mostly due to all the battles described, and the lurid and scandalous poems.
Caroline heaved a petulant sigh and knit her brows, creating that vertical furrow that was usually a sign of her anger. Lewrie'd gotten very familiar with that'un over the years, and involuntarily crossed his legs to protect his "wedding tackle."
"Somethin' troublin', Caroline?"
"Oh, the children," she replied, fretful. "I know I thought our getting away would help, but… "
"They're havin' a grand time, dear," Lewrie told her. "Don't fret about them."
His father, Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, had agreed to spend most of the summer in the country, and would look out for the boys at his Dun Roman, with the help of his exotic "man," Trilochan Singh, a swarthy, one-eyed Sikh as randy and as dangerous-looking as the worst sort of Calcutta bazaari-badmash who'd cut your throat just to keep in practise. To corrupt Sewallis and Hugh even further, Liam Desmond and Pat Furfy would be near to hand with their seafaring tales, yarns, and Irish myths. And though his uncle Phineas Chiswick and his brother-in-law Governour Chiswick deplored it, Charlotte would be included during the days, though Governour had insisted that she reside with him and his wife… accurately thinking that exposing a girl to too much of Sir Hugo's past repute would quite ruin her. To irk Governour even further, Sir Hugo would take all three of them into town to play with Will Cony's children, a rambunctious and rowdy set as wild as Red Indians. Now, was Caroline having second thoughts?
"Oh, is that not the grandest chateau, Alan?" Caroline suddenly enthused, shifting over to the other side of the coach to goggle at a substantial manse surrounded by pasture land, vineyards, and manicured green lawns. "And… do I detect that our coach is travelling upon a very well-laid road? Perhaps one of Bonaparte's decrees."
"Pray God he's more interest in roads and canals than armies," Lewrie replied, though his professional sense was that armies marched faster and farther on good roads than bad.
"And the peasants!" Caroline further enthused as their coach passed a waggon heavily loaded with hay, drawn by a brace of plodding oxen, and goaded and accompanied by several French farmers, their wives, and children. "Are they not picturesque? Native costume, do you think?"
To Lewrie's eyes, what they wore looked more like a mixture of embroidered vests, straw hats, voluminous skirts, wooden clogs, and… rags. Rootless Irish mendicants could be deemed better dressed!
"Catch-as-catch-can, I'd s'pose" was his verdict.
"Why, one would imagine you had no curiosity in your soul!" his wife teasingly accused. "Or… is it that you have fought the French for so long, you can't fake interest?"
"So long as they ain't tryin' t'kill me, I'll allow that they are… colourful folk," he said with a smirk. "Given a choice though, Hindoos win 'colourful,' hands down."
And so it went, all the way to Amiens, where they laid over for the night in
a much cleaner travellers' hotel, where Caroline's appetite was much restored, and though the chalked menu, and the waiter's unhelpful explanations, might as well have been Sanskrit, they managed to order both excellent, hearty meals and a couple of bottles of very good wine. As for dessert, French apple pie was as succulent as English apple pie, and the Lewries went to bed in fine fettle just a bit past eight, ready for an early rising and the next leg of their trip to fabled Paris.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Lewries found good lodgings, a spacious appartement on the Rue Honorй, just a short stroll north of the Jardin des Tuileries and the Palais National and Palais de la Rйvolution. They found themselves a brace of English-speaking servants, a pleasant young fellow named Jules for him, and a dumpling of a girl named Marianne for Caroline. At Jules's suggestion, they engaged an English-speaking guide, too. Jean-Joseph, a very smooth customer and a veteran of the early Italian campaigns under the fabled Napoleon Bonaparte, led them to the best bank, where Lewrie exchanged a note-of-hand drawn on Coutts' in London, and his pound notes, for French currency, with a temporary account set up to cover their expected expenses. Then, with a programme of "sights" lined up by Jean-Joseph, they set off to experience Paris and its environs.
The Place de la Bastille, now an open space since the infamous old prison had been razed; the Faubourg du Temple, the Hфtel de Ville, and Notre Dame, of course, along with the Оles de la Citй, and the site of the Revolutionary Court and Palais de Justice. The Vieux Louvre of course, too, filled with artworks looted during many of Napoleon's famed campaigns. They did the Right Bank, all the grand churches and former palaces, the Champs-Йlysйes and Champs de Mars.
They did the Left Bank, cross the Pont Neuf; along the broad and impressive Quai d'Orsai and Quai de Voltaire, visited the Pantheon and the Cordeliers Convent, the Abbaye de St.-Germain-des-Prйs, the Luxembourg palace, and the massive Maison Nationale des Invalides. And every day-jaunt was interrupted with a fine meal at a restaurant, bistro, or cafй that Jean-Joseph just happened to know all about, and recommended highly.
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