A Fine Retribution

by Dewey Lambdin

  “I mean t’say … now the portrait’s done, we will not be required to see each other on an almost daily, ah … association, and I, ah…,” Lewrie stammered, feeling like the largest, calf-head cully, “and I must own that I will miss that a great deal, the ah … laughing and joking over tea, while I was posing, which must have been a trial to you, ’stead o’ sittin’ mute, and hindered your work?”

  Lewrie cast a quick glance over at Madame Pellatan, again, who was now sitting bolt upright with her eyes blared wide in surprise.

  “I have come, over our short time together, in your presence,” Lewrie bulled on, wondering if he was capable of making sense. “Ah, to have delighted in your company, enjoyed gettin’ t’know you, Miss Jessica, and…”

  “The dogs need to visit the back gardens, I think,” Madame Pellatan said, springing to her feet, sweeping out of the front parlour to the hallway, and coaxing Bisquit and Rembrandt to follow her.

  Thank bloody Christ for that! Lewrie thought.

  “Ah,” he began again, “I’m sure that your talents are in great demand, Miss Jessica, new clients for portraits, your own paintings, another book t’be illustrated, but ah … I would think it a shame do we not, can we not, continue to enjoy each other’s company, which has been … hang it!” He stumbled to a halt, phrases tangling in his head, and she was looking at him with a wide smile on her face, her dark blue eyes glittering, taking deep breaths, and he was sure that she was only being polite as she patiently listened to a capering lunatick in full rave in Bedlam.

  “I have come to like being with you, Miss Jessica, and I’d not wish to stop,” Lewrie baldly summed up. “Our rides in the park, walking the dogs, exhibitions, suppers, even taking a cup of tea or two.”

  Now she’ll laugh at me! he thought, visibly wincing; Go ahead, get it over with!

  “You cannot imagine how happy I am to hear you say that, Sir Alan,” Jessica said, instead, seeming to melt from trepidation to elation as she took a tentative step closer to him. “From the moment you came to collect Charley to take him to your ship, you have occupied my mind. And, as we began to exchange letters … such wonderful letters … you were always in my thoughts. And, when you asked me to do your portrait, I was over the Moon with joy.

  “I, too, have come to enjoy our time together, and would think it an honour, and a joy, to continue our merry and pleasing relationship!” Jessica declared, almost shuddering with emotion.

  “Thank God!” Lewrie breathed out in relief. “Even do I stumble and stammer like an un-prepared schoolboy unready to recite?”

  “Only if you do not expect me to become an expert horsewoman, Sir Alan!” she teased, stepping even closer, and Lewrie extended both hands to take hold of hers which were offered to him eagerly.

  “Ehm, I wonder, then,” Lewrie said, sure that he was grinning like the village idiot but at that moment didn’t care a damn whether he was, “if you would allow me to be less formal, and just call you Jessica. And, ‘Sir’ Alan sounds awfully stiff. If you could…”

  “Alan,” she replied with a sweet, fond coo.

  “Jessica,” he said in like fondness.

  “Oh, Lord, what must Madame Berenice imagine?” Jessica laughed as they swung hands. “She might think that you were proposing on the spot, without speaking to my father first!”

  Am I ready t’go that far, right now? Lewrie asked himself.

  “Well, it might help did we get to know each other a bit more, first,” he allowed. “Never can tell, I might change into ‘Wolf Head’ or ‘Bloody Bones’ after dark, and scare you and the dogs! Suppers, some balls, attending the theatre, riding in the park of course, just … being together.”

  “But of course!” Jessica exclaimed in delight. “And, properly chaperoned,” she added, remembering Society’s strict rules.

  “I’d never do a thing to harm your good name, Jessica,” Lewrie promised.

  “I know you won’t, Alan,” she replied, experimenting with the easy use of his Christian name and liking the sound of it, the taste of it. “Now, where shall we hang your portrait?”

  She looked happily playful, which gave Lewrie’s heart a lurch as he imagined what life might be like with her.

  “Hmm, since it’s the only artwork in the whole house at the moment, maybe over the mantel in the drawing room, I’d think,” Lewrie decided. “Can’t hang it in the dining room, that’d make supper guests think I’m boasting, or something. Like dronin’ on and borin’ ’em to death with my tales.”

  “But, what adventurous tales you have to tell, Alan,” Jessica assured him with a fond smile as they got the portrait down off the easel, as Lewrie called for Desmond and Deavers to come help with a hammer and nails.

  “Oh, believe me, you’d tire of ’em sooner or later,” Lewrie was quick to say. “‘What, that ’un, again?’ and you’d be rollin’ your eyes in embarrassment.”

  “I cannot imagine that ever happening, Alan,” she insisted.

  “Never can tell, five or ten years on,” he said, realising at once the implications of that statement.

  “Oh! And do you imagine that we will be together that far into the future, Alan?” Jessica said with an expectant hitch of breath.

  Oh, shit! he thought; I think I do! In for the penny, in for the pound.

  “Aye, I think we will,” he said in a sudden daze. “I hope we will, if you will have me, that is.” He sat the portrait down against his leg to prop it up, and took her hands, again. “I s’pose what I’ve been stammering round is … I’ve come to adore you, Jessica, and I’d be honoured beyond all measure if you’d…”

  “Yes!” Jessica exclaimed. “Oh, yes, Alan, yes! I will be honoured, and elated beyond all measure to be your wife!”

  For the first time they embraced properly, clinging to each other tightly, and Lewrie lifted her off her feet for a long moment, delighting in how light, how slim she felt, his head aswim with emotion.

  Did it, did it, anyway, and why the Devil not? he thought.

  “I love you,” he murmured into her hair, “I’ve been be-sotted since the moment I met you!”

  “Oh, that was the moment for me, as well, from the instant that you smiled, without even saying a word, Alan!” Jessica whispered harshly as she bestowed a kiss upon his cheek, and he could feel wetness on her face.

  “Oh, don’t cry, Jessica, I ain’t that bad!” he said.

  “I can’t help it,” she confessed, stepping back long enough to draw a handkerchief from a sleeve of her gown. “I love you, and you’ve made me the happiest…!”

  “Need some nails, sor?” Liam Desmond said as he and Deavers came into the parlour. “Oh, oops.”

  “We need help hanging my picture over the mantel in the drawing room, Desmond,” Lewrie told him. “Miss Jessica and I … we have just become, ah … engaged.”

  “Oh, good for you, sor! That’s grand, that is!” Desmond said.

  “Amen to that, Cap’m sir!” Deavers chimed in. “Aye, we’ll get it hung for you, straightaway, sir!”

  And Desmond and Deavers took charge of the painting to heft it upstairs for them, leaving them alone for a moment.

  “I suppose I now must speak with your father,” Lawrie said with a nervous laugh. “Ask my estate agent what this house may cost to buy outright … no sense in leasing. If you think it’s suitable to your tastes, my dear?”

  My dear! he thought; So easy a thing to say to one and all, with no meaning to it, but now…!

  “It’s a lovely house, Alan,” Jessica agreed with a vigourous nod of her head, still dabbing at her eyes, “a perfect house, where I trust we shall be immensely happy. Yes, do you speak with my father tonight, he could post the first reading of the banns this Sunday!”

  “Unless you’d prefer we coach to Gretna Green and wed instanter,” Lewrie teased, laughing, feeling happy and relieved at the same time.

  “Hah!” Jessica cried, throwing her head back, “Highly romantic, but most impractical. Father would die of apoplexy
did we do that! No, I have always imagined that I’d be wed at Saint Anselm’s, with my father presiding. Ehm, when you do speak with him, he’ll try to get you to promise to bring my painting to an end, what he’s always regarded as foolishness, most improper for a woman.”

  “And I’ll tell him I have no intentions to do so,” Lewrie vowed. “I’ll not be his instrument for breaking your dear heart, Jessica.”

  “Oh, Alan, you are the dearest, dearest man!” she cried, throwing her arms round him once more. “You make me so happy I could die!” And this time they kissed, at first tentatively, then with growing passion, one that made Lewrie’s head reel again. At last they stepped back, and she smoothed her hair, looking shy.

  “I suppose we must see to the hanging of the portrait,” she said, cocking her head in an endearingly impish way. “We must behave proper for the household staff.”

  “For a few more weeks, anyway,” Lewrie rejoined, leering a bit.

  *   *   *

  Minutes later, Desmond and Deavers trooped back down to the kitchens, where Yeovill was chopping salad greens, Pettus was folding fresh-pressed shirts, and Tom Dasher was blacking Lewrie’s boots.

  “What’s all that commotion?” Pettus asked, looking aloft where some womanly shrieks could be heard.

  “I owe ya a pound, Pettus me boyo,” Desmond said gruffly as he scooped up the spit-turning terrier. “Ya won yer wager, damn yer eyes.”

  “What wager?” Pettus asked, with a quizzical cock of his head.

  “Ya said Miss Chenery’d set her cap for th’ Captain, an’ I was of th’ opposite opinion,” Desmond replied. “Well, th’ Captain’s just proposed to her, an’ ya can hear how she took that!”

  “Th’ Cap’m’s t’marry?” Dasher marvelled. “Wot kinda cake will ya bake, Mister Yeovill?”

  “Well, well, well,” Pettus said, breaking into a wide smile. “I knew it. Anyone could see it coming from a league off. Good for him, and good for her! And if you don’t have a pound to spare, Liam, I’ll settle for a bottle of dark rum!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “So, who hates me that much?” Lewrie asked James Peel after a rather good meal at a chop-house conveniently near the Foreign Office.

  “Good Lord, Lewrie, who doesn’t?” Peel wryly rejoined as he had a last forkful of his figgy-dowdy pudding. “You could write your own list, I’d imagine. The people who’ve blighted your career most-like are the people you despise already.”

  “Well, hmm,” Lewrie grunted, mulling that over. “The first to spring to mind’d be Francis Forrester, the fubsy shit. A horrible mess-mate when we were Mids together in the old Ariadne, and a pompous ass, but he’s been ‘Yellow-Squadroned’ for years after he hared off to look for the French fleet, left his command at Nassau, then grounded his ship at English Harbour, Antigua.”

  “But still possessed of influential patrons,” Peel, the old spy, told him, “and all sure that he was done wrong. Go on.”

  Lewrie ticked off people he suspected; Captain Grierson, also from a spell in Bahamian waters, whom he’d embarrassed, and spoiled the man’s poor joke of sailing up to Nassau showing no colours, to be deliberately mistaken for the French. There had been a “grass widow” involved, too, that Lewrie was topping, and Grierson wanted.

  There was his son Hugh’s present Captain Richard Chalmers, a man who took his religion almost as seriously as the unfortunate Admiral “Dismal Jemmy” Gambier, who thought that Lewrie was such a sinner that he’d piss in the holy water font, and try to put the leg over the Virgin Mary.

  William Fillebrowne came to mind at once. He was from a very wealthy family, and had tried to emulate their Grand Tours of the Continent by using his ship as a store house for treasures bought off needy French émigrés for a shilling to the pound, a clench-jawed Oxonian “Mumbletonian” more interested in quim than duty, and with a curious penchant for pursuing Lewrie’s cast-off women; first his mistress Phoebe Aretino, then even one of his “cream pot” loves from his Midshipman days, Lucy Shockley née Beauman, the young wife of older Sir Malcolm Shockley, in Venice. Their last rencontre at Gibraltar had been so testy and insulting that it could have been a reason for a duel!

  There were a few other fellow officers that sprang to mind, but Lewrie could easily dismiss them for lack of rank and seniority, and he hadn’t thought that they had powerful patrons during the times he had worked with them. He tossed off a hopeless shrug, at last.

  “You forgot Admiral Tobias Treghues,” Peel said with that air of “I know something you don’t!” common to everyone Lewrie had ever met in the skulking-spying trade.

  “Christ, is he even still alive?” Lewrie gawped. “Last I heard, he was somewhere in the Far East, achievin’ very little, and makin’ everyone else miserable, Got his wits scrambled by a French gunner’s rammer during the American Revolution, and hasn’t been in his right mind, since, and you never knew whether he’d praise ye one day, then have ye mast-headed the next! He was a Bible-thumper, too, now that I recall. And he’s made Rear-Admiral? Gawd!”

  “Being out of one’s wits just might be a prerequisite for flag rank,” Peel said with a hearty chuckle. “Yes, he’s still alive, with his shrew of a wife carried aboard his flagship, and between them, they have lots of influence. Believe it or not, he prefers the East Indies, while most people will throw up their commissions to avoid it, so Admiralty lets him be.”

  “Anybody else to surprise me with, Jemmy?” Lewrie asked.

  “Your former Commodore, Blanding, who’s also a Rear-Admiral, now,” Peel said.

  “Blanding?” Lewrie exclaimed. “I pestered him half to death with suggestions when we were chasin’ that French squadron bound for New Orleans when Bonaparte got it back from Spain, but that’s of little reason t’hate me!”

  “I gather it’s more to do with your knighthood and being made baronet,” Peel told him.

  “But, that was King George havin’ a bad day!” Lewrie exclaimed. “And I still suspect that my knighthood wasn’t for beatin’ the French at the Chandeleur Islands, but some cruel reward for Caroline, my late wife, bein’ murdered by Napoleon’s police, and them tryin’ t’kill me … t’drum up patriotic rage to justify goin’ back to war with ’em.

  “Blanding wants to blame anyone, he’d best lay it at the feet of King George, and William Pitt,” Lewrie went on, “and the King getting ‘knight and baronet’ stuck in his head from the people in line before me. He almost took my ear off, swingin’ that sword about!”

  “He commanded your victory, and he was made Knight of the Bath, but you received what he imagines was his due, and he’s never forgiven you for it,” Peel said with a sad shake of his head.

  “D’ye think it’d made any difference if I wrote him and apologised?” Lewrie speculated.

  “I rather doubt it, at this point,” Peel brusquely said. “He’s festered on it far too long. Ehm, there’s another name that arose in my queries.”

  “Who?” Lewrie demanded.

  “Rear-Admiral Keith Ashburn,” Peel told him.

  “Keith Ashburn?” Lewrie almost yelped in shock. “But … he and I were friends, about the only friend I had in the Midshipmen’s mess back in 1780. In old Ariadne, he was practically my ‘sea daddy’ who taught me just about everything I didn’t know! Why, for God’s sake?”

  “I gather that he remembers how much you disliked the Navy in the beginning, how idle and arrogant you were, or seemed to be, about being completely ignorant, as a defence,” Peel said with a shrug. “I think the gist of what one of my listeners heard was that he thought you’ve been damned lucky, so far, too idle and … insouciant was the word … to be trusted with command of a rowboat, much less a warship, or a squadron, and that sooner or later you’d come a cropper and take a lot of good men with you when you fail. Sorry, but that’s what he said of you.”

  “Everybody else just envies me, or thinks me a sinful heretic?” Lewrie said with a dis-believing scowl.

  “Envy, yes, f
or certain,” Peel said with a faint grin. “You’re too damned lucky at prize-money, being in the right place at the right time, when they go years without firing a shot in anger, and winning your battles, winning fame and glory that should have been theirs, if God was truly just. It don’t look good. With so many pitted against you, getting a new active commission will be nigh impossible.”

  “Oh, my God,” Lewrie slowly breathed out, visibly sagging as he slouched deeper against his dining chair. “My father suggested that I enjoy my temporary retirement, rest on my laurels, but … dammit! I suppose I’ll have to, now.”

  “Oh, and there’s that fellow you relieved for illness just before the Battle of Copenhagen, Captain Speakes?” Peel added.

  “Dammit, I paid him for those Franklin stoves!” Lewrie growled. “Just ’cause his Purser sold ’em off when Thermopylae was laid up in-ordinary wasn’t my fault.”

  “And, his grand scheme to recoup his own career with those torpedoes failed,” Peel reminded him. “Daft idea to begin with, depending on tides and currents to float explosives with shoddy timers and detonators into enemy harbours. Speakes is a Second Class Commodore with a small squadron off Scotland, and the weather doesn’t suit his damned parrot. You let him down, didn’t believe in the project, and didn’t carry it through. He’s still a true believer.”

  “Bugger him,” Lewrie spat. “The damned things’d never work.”

  Oh, but that had been a dangerous Summer of 1805, experimenting with cask torpedoes and the later catamaran torpedoes jam-packed with black powder in vast quantities, with clock timers that wound trigger lines to flintlock pistol strikers that might work, if the powder did not get soaked from shoddy workmanship, if wind and tide wafted them in the right direction, if the damned devices went off at all, and if the enemy didn’t spot them. For all the work spent on developing them, only one wee French guard ship at Boulogne had been destroyed out of all the hundreds of invasion vessels, and only because her crew got curious and hauled it alongside for a looking-over.