"Son… who's t'say Charlotte'd forgive ye, anyway?" Sir Hugo pointed out with a sad shake of his head and a reassuring tap upon Lewrie's knee.
"Well… there's truth t'that," Lewrie had to agree after a long moment to think that over. "There is that."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
All worries about being turfed out of his home became moot just two days later, when Lewrie went down to the Olde Ploughman after his daily morning ride for a rum-laced coffee, and found his old Coxswain, Will Cony, waving to him and wiping his hands on his blue publican's apron. "Mail coach brought ya somethin', Cap'm Lewrie!" Will declared, coming to meet him near the doors. "Letter from Admiralty, th' most important! Want a drop o' somethin' warmin' whilst ya read it, sir? 'Tis a raw sorta day."
"Aye, Will, I'd admire rummed coffee," Lewrie replied, quickly taking his letters and ripping the official wax seal to read it before even taking a seat at a table. Idlers in the public house's common room turned in their chairs at that announcement, worried that a resumption of the war might be coming, though none of the newspapers had yet declared it.
They offered him a ship… another frigate of the Fifth Rate, a 38-gunner with 18-pounder main-battery guns; HMS Reliant, now lying in-ordinary at Portsmouth!
He sat down with a smile on his face, an expression that local people had not seen since he'd come home from Paris, closed his eyes and slowly nodded, as if in a brief prayer of thanks, before hungrily reading his letter again, just to make sure that it was real, that the offer of active commission was true, and not a fantasy.
"Is it war, beggin' yer pardon, sir?" Cony asked in a whisper as he returned with his coffee.
"It doesn't say, Will, but…," Lewrie informed him an a mutter of his own, "it may very well be, if they're re-commissioning me."
"There'll be a press, then. Soon," Will Cony speculated. "A hot press. Recruiters comin' t'town, from the Army, but what sorta lad'd go for a soldier when he kin be a sea-dog, by God! Lotta young lads hereabouts, Cap'm Lewrie… barely scrapin' by as day labourers, or down t'the tannery'r brick-works, since the Enclosure Acts took their folks' wee plots o' land, and the commons. I'd wager I could round up a couple dozen likely lads fer your new ship! What's her name, sir?"
"Reliant" Lewrie told him, "a Fifth Rate Thirty-Eight."
"A big frigate, aye!" Will Cony exclaimed for one and all in the common rooms. "HMS Reliant, the Cap'm's got, huzzah! Damme, did I have two feet t'day, I'd go back t'sea quicker'n ya kin say 'knife'!"
"Ye really think ye could?" Lewrie posed, knowing how hard it would be to recruit willing hands in a hard press, and thinking that a dozen or so volunteers from Anglesgreen, who'd known him and Caroline for years, might take the Joining Bounty as a way to get their revenge on the French for the murder of a local favourite.
"Even wif two feet, Will Cony, ye've too much belly t'shin up a mast these days!" a patron hooted.
"An th' Navy won't let ye sling a keg o' yer best ale aboard!" cried another.
"Cony takes th' King's Shillin', who'd make our ale, I ask ye?" shouted a third. "We got t'keep 'im here. Tie him up 'fore he gits away!"
Lewrie opened a second letter, this one from his old superior in the Adriatic in '96, and a senior officer in the close blockade of the Gironde coast three years before: Captain Thomas Charlton. He was being given a commission, a two-decker Third Rate 74 (he wrote) and, did Lewrie still have need for a Midshipman's berth for his son Hugh, then Charlton would be honoured to accept him. HMS Pegasus was lying in-ordinary at Portsmouth (happy circumstance!) so make haste, etc.
"And my son Hugh has a ship, too," Lewrie told Cony.
"Runs in the fam'ly, th' sea, it do, sir!" Cony beamed proudly.
"I'll be all night, writin' all the people I have to," Lewrie said, hurrying through his coffee, "and get letters off on tomorrow's mail coach. That's a temptin' idea, Will, our local lads. If I could get 'em past the Impress Service into Portsmouth without half of 'em being stolen."
"An' robbed o' their Joinin' Bounty, aye," Will Cony agreed with a growl.
"I'm off, and thankee!" Lewrie said, springing to depart.
He rode at a fast lope to Dun Roman to inform his father, spending perhaps an hour arranging for Sir Hugo to serve as his representative, should Phineas Chiswick press the matter after he departed. The next stop was home, his news a delight to Liam Desmond and Pat Furfy, who, no matter how pleasant their lives were on the farm, found that a chance to serve at sea again suited them right down to their toes.
Then it was finger-cramp, ink smudges, and hot sealing wax on his fingers all through the day and early evening, with only a few very brief breaks for dinner, supper, and trips to the "necessary." First came his reply to Admiralty, the next to Capt. Charlton, then to his solicitor, Coutts' Bank, Sewallis and Hugh, urging them to come down to London and lodge at the Madeira Club 'til he arrived, and informing Hugh that his fondest wish would soon be realised. After all those, he had to write all the other naval officers from whom he'd asked a place for the boy, telling him that Charlton would take him.
"Note for ya, sir," Mr. Gower intruded into the library office.
"Hmm?" Lewrie perked up. "This late? From whom, d'ye know?"
"Governour Chiswick, I reckon, sir," Gower replied.
Lewrie tore it open and read what Governour's wife, Millicent, had penned; Charlotte wished to sup with them and sleep over with her girl cousin. They would fetch her home by mid-morning tomorrow.
"Awf'lly damned high-handed of em," Lewrie muttered, thinking that a request sent much earlier would have been more polite, not this "oh, by the by… " note, as if they were her parents, not him.
Christ, she's been over there all day? Lewrie realised; I've eat dinner and supper and didn't even note she wasn't here? Well, maybe they are! Or will have t'be.
Charlotte couldn't stay at Dun Roman, not if his father was not present; nor could she reside with him in London, as the old rogue had made very clear. Somebody had to take her on! And who better than "family," her only kin… disagreeable as most of them were?
Have t'ride over there and see if they'll board her, permanent, he told himself; arrange for all her clothes, bed-chamber furniture and toys t'go with her. Have familiar things round her… poor tyke.
Or, he reckoned for a long minute or two, he could do the right thing by his children, turn down Reliant, thus ending his active Royal Navy career. He could go on half-pay the rest of his life, live here in Anglesgreen, as farm agent at Dun Roman, perhaps, with an occasional jaunt up to London and the Madeira Club when country living got too boresome.
"No," he whispered, sadly shaking his head in the negative.
"Sir?" asked Gower, who was still hovering.
"Thinkin' out loud, no matter, Mister Gower," he told him.
"Right ho, then, Cap'm Lewrie," Gower said cheerfully, doing a sketchy bow before slouching off to the kitchens.
Lewrie heated the sealing wax and daubed it on the flap of his final letter, then snuffed the candle heater and leaned back, with an ache in the small of his back from sitting hunched forward too long. He rose and arched himself to work out the kink, fists in the small of his back, and decided that he'd done a fair piece of work and was now well deserving of a healthy measure of whisky. The sun was not only far below the yardarm by then, it was two hours past sunset! Desmond and a stable boy were going round closing the outside shutters for the night. As he poured himself half a glass of bourbon, they closed the shutters on the French doors to the back-garden, leaving his office lit only by the candelabra on his desk and the glow from the fireplace.
He paused after his first sip, looking round slowly at all his books and possessions, his furniture, his weapons, and the hanger he'd recovered from Napoleon, now hung over the mantel, where it had lodged years before.
After another sip, he stepped out into the foyer, looking over the sideboard and mirror, the framed portraits, the Venetian bombй tables he'd brought back from the Adriatic, and… i
nto the parlour and dining room in the other wing of the house, and all those ghostly pale sheet-covered furnishings. There was a bit of a moon that night, and before Desmond and his lad began to close the shutters over all those windows, he got the shivery feeling that he was looking at a coven of spooks.
"I will never see this house again," he whispered, with a new shiver trilling up his spine. Back in service and out to sea within a month, he'd not return for years, and when he did, it would surely be Burgess's and Theadora's house, in freehold. He would be invited over to dine or dance, at holidays, but by then it would look totally different, done to Theadora's taste; the nursery might even be occupied by Chiswick children, there'd be new servants, a lot more of them, too.
Ask my father t'close it down and move everything over to his place, in storage, Lewrie decided, making a mental inventory of furnishings he could use aboard his new ship.
That sense of finality was not dread; he felt those shivers for an ending not like a premonition like the old adage of sensing that "rabbit running over one's grave." He knew what he was doing aboard a ship-even if he didn't know much ashore. Let the French try to do him in! He'd give them measure for measure, and more, to boot.
"Sorry, Caroline," he muttered, finishing his drink, and sure he would soon have another. "I'd've liked t'keep everything just as ye liked it, but… I can't. I can't live with all your ghosts, either."
Never see this place again? he asked himself; bloody good!
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was a toss-up as to who peered out from the coach's windows more eagerly as it began the long descent from Portdown Hill to Portsmouth proper-Hugh, Sewallis, or their father. The lads squealed and oohed at the sight of the harbour so crammed with warships at anchor, so many water hoys and supply barges working to succour them, and the lug-sailed or oared boats dashing back and forth like so many roaches scuttling from a sudden flood of light.
And once they were on level ground before the George Inn, the one Lewrie preferred most, the streets leading into HM Dockyards were even busier with dray waggons and seamen, with parties from the Impress Service chivvying along their latest catches to the tenders to ferry them out to the hulked receiving ships, with files of Marines tramping along at the Quick-Step, with officers strolling together in twos and threes for whispered conversations, or sharing cock-a-whoop japes.
"Stay close or get trampled, now," Lewrie chid his boys, leaving it to his father, Sir Hugo-who had coached down with them for the nonce and who would see Sewallis back to London and the diligence coach to his school, once the necessities were done-to deal with the driver of the dray waggon, which bore all his personal goods and furnishings and Hugh's sea-chest, and to supervise Desmond and Furfy's unloading.
Lewrie closed his eyes and sniffed deeply, feeling a swell of satisfaction as he realised how different a seaport smelled, and how much he had missed it. Other than the horse dung, of course.
There was the fishy smell of tidal flats and the kelp and hard marine life that clung to wood and stone piers at low tide, the scent of salt, of cable-lengths of hemp or manila, fresh from weaving at the ropewalks; hot tar or pitch, turpentine and rosin, and the sweetness of new-sawn wood and sawdust. New-baked ship's biscuit, small beer by the keg, the heady aroma of a leaking rum cask from a passing waggon.
And there were the sounds; mewing, crying gulls, the clatters of sail, signal or flag halliards on masts, staffs, or poles. Far-off rustles of loosed canvas from one of the nearer ships as its rusty or newly impressed crew went through an exercise in Harbour Drill. Roars and shouts, barked orders, fiddle music and laughter, and the rumbles of a great many men of a myriad of skills all congregating to launch a great enterprise, and the bulk of them knowing what they were about.
I think I'm home, Lewrie told himself, opening his eyes to take it all in; a damned deprivin' one, once were out at sea, but… home just the same.
"Yes well, let's see about our lodgings first, then we'll see my goods aboard Reliant" Lewrie said, abandoning his reverie. "I've written ahead, so the George may be able t'take us all."
"All of us, father? To go out to your new ship?" Sewallis asked him, looking more eager than was his usual wont.
"Aye, you can be there when I read myself in," he agreed.
And an hour later, with two hired boats to bear all his goods and the six of them, they went alongside HMS Reliant. She was still reduced "to a gantline" with none of her upper masts set up, and her gun-deck empty of artillery, riding high in the waters not too far off Southsea Castle, in the deeper water 'twixt Spit Sand and Horse Sand.
"Boat ahoy!" one of her Midshipmen challenged; pro forma, that, for there was no doubt that the first boat carried a Post-Captain, and the second his possessions.
"Aye aye!" their boatman shouted back, showing four fingers to declare that a Post-Captain was indeed aboard.
"Might ye have need of a bosun's chair, father?" Lewrie teased.
"Bedamned if I will!" Sir Hugo snapped back.
"Last in, first out," Lewrie said, laying a restraining hand on Sewallis's shoulder as he stood to grope for the main channel platform, the dead-eyed main-mast stays, and the man-ropes of the boarding-battens. "Sir Hugo next, then Hugh, then you, Sewallis."
He tucked his sword behind his left leg, stood on the gunn'l of their boat, and stepped onto the main channel, then the battens, making a quick way up to the starboard entry-port. He was greeted with a side-party of Marines, a Bosun and his Mate piping a long call, and two officers and a clutch of Midshipmen.
Once safely in-board, Lewrie doffed his hat to the flag at the taffrails, the officers, and the crew hastily assembled along both sail-tending gangways above the bare gun-deck, and in the waist.
"Captain Alan Lewrie, come aboard to command," he told his two Commission Officers. "Mine arse on a band-box!" he gasped a second later, though, quite ruining the solemnity of the occasion. "Mister Spendlove? Last I saw of you 'twas Ninety-Seven, when we paid off Jester! Congratulations on your Lieutenancy, sir."
"Thank you, sir!" Lt. Clarence Spendlove proudly replied.
"Geoffrey Westcott, sir," the older officer said. "It appears I'm to be your First Officer… unless Mister Merriman turns up and proves senior to me. Your servant, Captain Lewrie, sir."
"Mister Westcott, how d'ye do, sir," Lewrie said with another doff of his hat to match Westcott's. "Well, shall we get on with it?" He turned to see that Sir Hugo had scaled the ship's side right handily, and both Hugh and Sewallis were behind him, too.
"One of ours, sir?" Lt. Westcott enquired as the both of them walked to the hammock nettings at the forward end of the quarterdeck, and amidships.
"No, my son Hugh's down for Captain Thomas Charlton and Pegasus, a two-decker," Lewrie told him. "His first ship. I've never very much cared for kin on the same ship." Lewrie was too busy extracting his precious commissioning document from the safety of his coat to see Westcott's approving nod. He had eyes more for his sons and Sir Hugo, who stood off to one side, as he unscrolled his paper.
"Ship's comp'ny… off hats and hark to the quarterdeck!" Lt. Westcott ordered in a voice that would carry in a full gale.
"By the Commissioners for executing the office of Lord High Admiral of Great Britain and Ireland, and all His Majesty's Plantations and et cetera… to Captain Alan Lewrie, hereby appointed to His Majesty's Ship, Reliant… by virtue of the Power and Authority to us given, we do hereby constitute and appoint you Captain of His Majesty's Ship, Reliant… willing and requiring you forthwith to go on board and take upon you the Charge and Command of Captain in her accordingly. Strictly charging all the Officers and Company belonging to said Ship subordinate to you to behave themselves jointly and severally in their respective Employments with all due Respect and Obedience unto you, their said Captain, and you likewise to observe and execute such Orders and Directions you shall receive from time to time from your superior officers for His Majesty's Service.
"Hereof nor you nor any one of
you fail as you will answer the contrary at your peril. And for so doing this shall be your Warrant. Given under our hands and the Seal of Office of Admiralty, this Twenty-Fifth day of April, Eighteen-Oh-Three, in the Fourty-Third year of His Majesty's Reign," he concluded in a matching "quarterdeck" voice.
The ritual done, Lewrie rolled up the document and looked down at his hands in the waist, on the gangways. "Men! It seems that that Corsican tyrant… that ogre Napoleon Bonaparte hasn't learned his lesson yet. Like a wolf pretendin' t'be a setter, he'd like t'enter the house… pretend he can grin and wag his tail, and all the while just waitin' to eat up the whole house, and all of Europe, including our island. Your homes, your people, from Land's End to John O' Groats. Only problem is, nobody ever told Napoleon ye can't play-act a trusty setter if ye keep piddlin' on the carpet and shittin' in the parlour!
"We're called once again t'teach him proper manners," he told them as the laughter that his Billingsgate, not usually heard from a gentleman-captain, died away. "And if he can't learn t'live peaceful among the world's nations… then it's our job… the Royal Navy… this fine frigate… and every one of you, volunteer or pressed man, experienced tar or raw landsman… true blue hearts of oak… to put him down like a rabid stray, like a ravenin' wolf in the sheep fold that Napoleon is, and stop his business, all French business, for good and all!
"Before Reliant raises anchor and sets sail on the King's Business," he promised them in a slightly softer voice, "I, and your officers and mates, will make sure that ev'ry Man Jack of you know all you need t'know to work this ship, to sail her into any corner of the wide world over… as shipmates, as men who can boast that they're the best in the entire world… that they're British tars. Reliants!"
That raised a cheer, even from the dubious first draught of men from the Impress tenders and the receiving ships.
"That's all for now, Mister Westcott."
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