"As the French say, souvenirs," Twigg scoffed, though his eyes did glow with pleasure over his vast collection, worthy of a man who'd come back from India a full nabob, with an emperor's riches stowed on the orlop. Smugness of owning such grand things, perhaps with happy remembrance of how he'd acquired them. Or, the blood and mayhem required to do so!
"I can see why your grandchildren were loath to leave," Lewrie wryly commented. "My own children'd screech in bloody wonder to play amongst such a pirate's trove."
"Mementos of an arduous life," Twigg scoffed again, perhaps with long-engrained English gentlemanly modesty, "spent mostly in places so dreadful, the baubles were the only attractive things worth a toss. I assume you like goat. Do you not, it doesn't signify, for that's what we're having. Keep a flock to dine on… sheep, as well."
"But, no pork, nor beefsteaks, either, I'd s'pose," Lewrie said, with another wry scowl.
"Taboo to Muslims in the first instance, taboo to Hindoos in the second, aye," Twigg replied, his thin lips clasped together in the sort of aspersion that Lewrie had dreaded in their early days. "Old habits die hard. Well, don't just stand there like a coat-rack, sit ye down," Twigg snapped, pointing imperiously at a chair at the foot of the six-place table, whilst he strode with his usual impatience to the chair at the other end, and Lewrie almost grinned to see himself seated "below the salt," no matter there were only the two of them.
The elderly servant, Ajit Roy, bearing a brass tray on which sat two glasses of sherry, shuffled in, obviously waiting 'til they were seated before intruding. Twigg took a tentative taste, looking puckery, as if assaying his own urine for a moment, before nodding assent and acceptance, at which point Ajit Roy came down-table to give Lewrie his small glass.
"Laanaa shorbaa, Ajit," Twigg ordered, and not a tick later, an attractive Hindoo woman in English servant's clothing, but with a long, diaphanous shawl draped over her hair and shoulders, entered with bowls of the requested soup on another tray.
"Dhanyavaad, Lakshmi," Twigg told her.
"Thankee," Lewrie echoed in English. He'd never learned Hindoo as glibly as his father, Sir Hugo, and had ever sounded pidgin barbarian when he did speak it, but it was coming back to him, in dribs and drabs. She was fetching; did she and Twigg…?
"Ajit Roy's second wife," Twigg said, with a knowing leer after one look at Lewrie's phyz. "The first'un cooks. And no, I don't. My tastes these days, well… I also own a place in the City, quite near your father's new gentlemen's lodging club, in point of fact. His is at the corner of Wigmore and Duke streets, as you surely recall, while my set of rooms is nearby in Baker Street. We run into each other…"
"Oh, how unfortunate for you," Lewrie sourly commented.
"We speak rather often, act'lly," Twigg said with a mystifying smile. "Sometimes dine, drop in for a drink, or play ecarte with him at his club, with no need for its lodging facilities."
"And does he give you a discounted membership, sir? Or… does he make up for it by fleecing you at cards?" Lewrie cynically asked.
"My dear Lewrie… no one has ever fleeced me at ecarte… and lived," Zachariah Twigg drawled, with a superior simper. "Your father and I rub along quite well, together, act'lly. We're much of an age, and experienced much the same sort of adventures in exotic climes, so… absent the disputes resulting from, ah… 'boundary' friction in the expedition against Choundas and the La-nun Rovers… his concerns for his sepoy regiment, and taking orders from a Foreign Office civilian, we've discovered that we have a great deal in common. Having you and your, ah.. .follies in common, as well. How is your soup?"
"Simply grand," Lewrie sarcastically muttered, though the soup was as close to a Chinese "hot and sour" as a Hindoo cook could attain, and as tasty as any ever he'd had when moored off Canton in the '80s.
"Amazing, what a small world in which we live, Lewrie," Twigg went on, carefully spooning up his own soup, and slurping it into his thin-lipped mouth, then daintily dabbing with his napkin. "Sir Hugo is partnered with Sir Malcolm Shockley in his gentlemen's club enterprise… Sir Malcolm thinks the world of him, and of you, more to the point… though I've yet to see a valid reason why, other than gratitude for getting his wealthy arse out of Venice and the Adriatic before the French took it in '97. And, wonder of wonders, Sir Malcolm is wed to Lady Lucy Hungerford, nee Lucy Beauman, of the Jamaica Beaumans who wish you hung for stealing their slaves. Well, well, well! Quite the coincidence, what?"
"And Hugh Beauman's already written Lucy and told her all about it?" Lewrie said with a groan, feeling an urge to slide bonelessly or lifelessly under the table, and stay there, unfindable, for, oh, say a century or so. "Christ, I'm good as dead!" he moaned, his brow popping out a sweat that was not entirely the fault of the spicy soup.
"And… here comes the roast!" Twigg enthused as Lakshmi entered, bearing a tray of sliced kid goat, and a heaping bowl of savouried rice, mango chautney, and such. "Done to a. perfect turn, I am bound!" he added, not without a purr and glare that Lewrie took for sheer maliciousness-making him feel even more inclined to slink beneath the table, un-fed!
"I take it, an…" Lewrie managed to croak, "that Sir Malcolm's mentioned it to Father?"
"B'lieve so, Lewrie, yayss," Twigg responded in a further purr of hellish delight at his predicament, all the time hoisting slices of goat onto his heaping plate of rice and mild, baked red peppers.
Lewrie felt his face flush {not from the spicy soup!) picturing Sir Hugo's reaction to his folly, not so much anger or disappointment, really, for they'd never really been proper father and son, leaving it quite late-in India in '84 or '85-to tentatively reconcile, thence to keep a wary distance ever since, so whatever rage Sir Hugo might display was water off a duck's back. No, what upset Lewrie more was a firm suspicion that he'd chortled his head half-off that Alan had gone and done something so goose-brained, and been caught at it, red-handed!
"Damme… Lucy knows, 'tis a safe wager that all London knows, by now!" Lewrie muttered, dabbing his brow with his napery. "The hen-headed, blabbery… baggage!" he nigh-stuttered in new dread. " 'Tis a wonder I've not been taken up, already, with…!"
"One'd be surprised, Lewrie," Twigg loftily told him. "Do try the kid. There's a dahee to go with it, one of those yogurt gravies I recall you liking when in Calcutta. Tandoori-roast chicken to follow!"
"Christ!"
"You and Lucy Beauman were, at one time in your mis-spent youth, quite fond of each other, Lewrie," Twigg breezed on, come over all amiable, as he spooned spiced dahee on his goat and rice. "She went on to wed a rich'un she met at Bath, her first Season in England… dare we speculate on what is called the 'rebound' following her family showing you the door for the utter cad you proved to be, hmm? Lord Hungerford, Knight and Baronet, surely was a great disappointment to her, since he proved to be just about as huge a rake-hell and rantipoling 'splitter of beards' as you… though, Lady Lucy seems to have been spared revelations anent your poorer qualities, for some reason. The illogic, and the blindness, that the fairer sex possess towards their un-deserving men, no matter proof incontrovertible served up on a gilt platter, hah!
"She still has, as they say, Lewrie, a 'soft spot' in her heart for you, therefore, and, so far as I am able to ascertain, has yet to utter the first word to anyone, other than her husband, Sir Malcolm, of the matter."
"You must be joking!" Lewrie exclaimed, almost leaping from his chair in amazement at such a ridiculous statement. "Lucy is my prime suspect of writing scurrilous, anonymous letters to my wife, about my… overseas… doings…" he trailed off, blurting out more than he'd meant to.
"Ah, those letters!" Twigg said, brightening with cruel amusement. "Why must you suspect her?"
"You know of 'em?" Lewrie quailed, though he had to admit that Zachariah
Twigg had spent his entire life as a Foreign Office agent-he just had to know a bit about everything!
"Your father has, since the mutiny at the Nore, he said, so… knowing my old profession, he approached
me to delve into things, and discover what I could. 'Smoak out' the culprit. So far without joy. Why do you suspect her?"
"When we met in Venice in '96, years later, Lucy, I felt, was… still after me," Lewrie told him as he at last accepted a heap of rice, a slice or two of roast kid, and a dribble of the spiced dahee. "Even if she was married not six months, still on 'honeymoon' with Sir Malcolm Shockley, she was…"
"What a burden it is," Twigg amusedly drawled, "to be the romantic masculine paragon of one's age… and in such demand!"
"All but throwing herself at me, aye!" Lewrie retorted in some heat, and grovelling bedamned. "Her foot damn' near in my lap, even with her husband at-table with us, and when I wouldn't play, she took up with Commander William Fillebrowne, another officer from our squadron. There's another I suspect, the smarmy bastard! Our last words, Lucy caught onto my… involvement with a lady I'd rescued from Serbian pirates, and said-"
"Mistress Theoni Kavares Connor, the mother of your bastard," Twigg offhandedly interjected 'twixt a bite of food and a sip. "She of the Zante currant-trade fortune from the Ionian Islands."
"Er… yes," Lewrie barely squeaked, having been rein-sawed from a full gallop to a pale-faced, hoof-sliding halt, for a moment. "Well… Lucy said something very like 'I should write your wife and tell her what a rogue she wed'… playfully, but not without a bite to it. I told her what Sir Malcolm should know 'bout her doin's with Commander Fillebrowne, and that's where we left it, but…"
"And was she, in fact, involved with Fillebrowne?" Twigg asked.
"Well, o' course she was!" Lewrie snapped, hitting his stride, "I saw 'em for myself, spoonin' and kissin' on the balcony of a rented set o' rooms, just before we sailed the last time, whoever could notice 'em bedamned… only Dago foreigners, I s'pose they thought. An old friend of mine from Harrow, Clotworthy Chute, was with me, too! Chute was doing the Grand Tour of the Continent with Lord Peter Rushton, at the time. And… she gambles. Gambles deep," Lewrie added, recalling what that Flag-Lieutenant at Portsmouth said of Lady Emma Hamilton, as if that would be proof enough to sign, seal, and deliver the truth of his account.
Twigg cocked an eye at him as if he thought that Lewrie had lost his mind, and was about halfway towards laughing out loud at such rank priggishness, especially coming from one so "low-minded" as Lewrie.
"Do assay the wine, sir," Twigg instructed after a long ponder. "A Dago wine, how further coincidental. A Tuscan chianti, in point of fact, of a very dry nature, that complements the richness of the goat quite nicely. I can understand, on the face of it, why you might susect Lady Lucy, Lewrie, but… you say you also suspect that Commander Fillebrowne?"
"Well…" Lewrie elaborated, after a tentative bite of kid and rice, and a sip of the chianti, which brought back memories of Naples. "When we first met, he was anchored at Elba. Tupping a local vintner's wife, as I recall. Thought I'd take to him, at first, but in the space of a single hour, I came away a bit disgusted. Comes from a very rich family, treats the Navy like a place to kill time 'til his inheritance is come… all yachting, cruising, and claret, and his orlop the storehouse for art treasures he was buying up from refugee Royalist French. Boasted of it! Fillebrowne's family'd all done their Grand Tours, the war was his, and all he cared about was… 'collecting'!" Lewrie sneered. "He chaffered me, that very morning, with hints he'd taken up with my former mistress…"
Lewrie paused, waiting for Twigg to say, "Phoebe Aretino, better known as 'La Contessa,' Corsican-born, former whore, shrewd businesswoman, and collector, trader, and treasures-dealer in her own right," but Twigg kept his mouth shut, or busy with his victuals; and, for the sort of man whose very gaze could turn cockchafers "toes-up dead," his expression was a very bland "do tell" and say on.
"Threw it in my face, rather," Lewrie growled, shoving rice on his plate with an angry, scraping noise of steel on priceless china. "Nose-high, top-lofty sort, the greedy, callous bastard. Well, Chute saw through him. Clotworthy's a 'Captain Sharp,' makes his livin' by gullin' naive new-comes to London… ones who've just inherited some 'tin,' and such. When I told him that Fillebrowne thought himself an astute collector of fine art, Chute cobbled up a brace o' bronze Roman statues o' some sort, /never saw 'em. Amazin' what a week's soaking in salt water'll do t'make 'em look authentic, and Fillebrowne bought 'em, straightaway. Pantin' for 'em!
"I suspect Fillebrowne figured out he'd been finessed, sooner or later, learned that Chute and I were old friends… acquaintances, really… perhaps he and… my former mistress," he said, avoiding Phoebe's name, as if to deprive Twigg of un-necessary information… just in case, "had an angry parting? Sharp an eye as she had, when it came t'treasures, if she tipped him that they were frauds, he'd've gone off like a bomb on her. On me! And, he'd have seen, or heard, just enough needful t'pen scurrilous letters to Caroline, in revenge."
"One could see his reason for pique, yayss," Twigg mused, those long fingers of his steepled thoughtfully under his chin, not exactly mocking, at that instant. "Though, you do have that effect on people. But, was Commander Fillebrowne still possessed of active commission, I do not see how he could stay… current anent your, ah… pastime."
"There's been nothing… current," Lewrie querulously replied. "Not since I sailed for the Caribbean. Well, the last bits… about Mistress Connor lodging with me at Sheerness for a week before we departed…" he admitted with a squirm. "And, afore that, about the two-dozen doxies my solicitor was t'pay, for services rendered…"
"Two-dozen prostitutes?" Twigg barked, as if in breathless awe, going so far as to lay one hand on his heart. "What stamina! Damme, Lewrie, but I am impressed!"
"For helpin' me kill belowdecks mutineers, so I had enough true men t'take back my ship and escape the Nore Mutiny!" Lewrie retorted. " 'Wos innit f'me? Wos innit f'me?' " he snipped, impersonating lower-class dialect main-well, after twenty years of exposure to it. "They wouldn't've tried it on, else! Christ, my report to Admiralty got 'em letters of appreciation, ev'ry last one of 'em! And, I didn't lay one single finger on any of 'em, but someone twisted it into a scandal!"
Idly, and illogically, the face and form of the then-tempting young Sally Blue did cross his mind. Black hair, blue eyes, promising poonts, and a waist 'bout as slim as a sapling pine…!
"And was Commander Fillebrowne's ship at the Nore at this time?" Twigg pressed, looking grimly intent. "And, do you believe Lady Lucy was aware of your doings, as well?"
"No, don't think so," Lewrie had to confess, going as slack as a sail in the Atlantic Doldrums. "So, damme if I know who."
"No other suspects, then?" Twigg asked, one dubious brow raised.
"Well, in my madder moments, I sometimes fancy it was you!"
Both of Twigg's brows leaped upwards at that statement. He sat back so quickly in his chair that Lewrie could hear the joinings squeak in protest. Then, to make Lewrie feel even worse (was such a thing possible at that instant), Twigg quite uncharacteristically threw back his head, opened his mouth, and began to guffaw right out loud!
In an evil way, it went without saying.
CHAPTER SIX
L ewrie had to bite the lining of his mouth to keep a tranquil face on, as Mr. Twigg exhausted his highly-amused outburst; he eased off from red-faced brays to napkin-covered "titters," thence at last to a top-lofty and nose-high sardonically-superior air of very faint humour-lordly chuckles of the arrogant kind, which more suited Mr. Twigg's usual nature.
"Oh, Lewrie…" Twigg finally drawled, after a restorative sip of wine. "Believe me, sir, did I wish you destroyed, professionally or personally, such a nefarious ploy would never be required. All I'd have to do is sit back and watch you do in yourself! Besides… what reason would I have to attempt such… hmm? Merely because your ways of prosecuting the King's enemies now and then row me beyond all temperance?"
"Well…"
"Which they do… now and then," Twigg intoned, with a vicious twinkle in his eyes, as if he enjoyed turning this particular victim on his roas
ting spit. "Despite the mute insubordination you've shewn me whenever we've been thrown together… your truculent reluctance to sully your hands with underhanded duties that force you to get out of bed earlier than is your wont… or, out of some doxy's bed, more to the point… I have always been more than amply-gratified with the results you achieved, and have expressed my satisfaction with you, and your methods of fulfilling my aims, to your, and my, superiors following our ev'ry assignment.
"Secret reports, of course," Twigg added, with a casual wave of his free hand, the sort of gesture that put Lewrie in mind of someone tossing tidbits overboard to the sharks. "Bless my soul, must I have gushed? Does your long-held enmity arise from a lack of vocal praise? Was I remiss in not patting you on the back… or the top of the head? Would a box of sweets make up for it?" Twigg posed facetiously.
"Damn my eyes…!" Lewrie began to say.
"No matter what you've thought over the years, Lewrie, I admire your good qualities," Twigg stated as he reached for his knife and his fork once more. "On the, other hand, your good qualities have at times been rather damned hard to find, but…"
A mouthful of food, a cock of the head as he savouried it, then a palate-cleansing nibble of bread and a sip of wine followed Twigg's admission.
"I will confess that my sense of duty, and urgency in the fulfillment of that duty, might have given you the impression that you're little more than an occasionally borrowed gun-dog of doubtful lineage," Twigg said on, dabbing at his mouth with his napkin. "I have gathered that I sometimes do act more brusquely with others than they might've preferred, but… to use a military simile, it little matters to me do the officers' mess dine me in as a 'jolly good fellow,' just so long as they perform as required to attain success 'gainst our foes."
A King`s Trade l-13 Page 6
