“Cats, sir?” Lewrie supplied.
“Whores, I meant to say, such as that … that…!”
“Merely an old acquaintance and ally, sir,” Lewrie told him, wincing and wondering how much worse it could get.
“I dare say,” Strachan sneered with another disdainful sniff.
“There’s my father, sir, Major-General Sir Hugo Saint George Willoughby, retired,” Lewrie said, “who resides in London. At such short notice, I rather doubt one of my brothers-in-law and his wife could attend, but if he could get away from his regiment in time…”
Lewrie would not invite his other brother-in-law, Governour Chiswick, not this side of Hell, anyway, even if he and his wife, Millicent, could bring his daughter, Charlotte, from Anglesgreen in a day. She was too young to appreciate it. He didn’t need his disreputable old school chums, like Clotworthy Chute—who’d most-like fleece a naive peer of his year’s rents, or grope up a lady-in-waiting—or even Peter Rushton, now Viscount Draywick, who sat in Lords and got drunk and diddled regularly and was prone to giggle at the most inappropriate moments. Both his sons were at sea, more’s the pity.…
“The levee will include a great many who are to be ennobled or knighted, and will be bringing guests of their own, so it would be best did you limit your own … Sir Hugo Saint George Willoughby, did you say, sir?” Strachan looked as stunned as if he’d just been pole-axed at the knacker’s yard, so stunned that he did not notice Toulon standing up to paw at his silk breeches. “Him?” Stachan goggled.
Damme, but my father does get that reception whenever his name’s mentioned, Lewrie thought with a wry smirk; He’s heard of him, has he?
Strachan, Lord Ludlow, gave Lewrie another of his disdainful up-and-down looks, as if to say that the acorn didn’t fall far from the tree, and was the Crown aware of what a bad bargain they would be making by knighting the son of that rake-hell?
“The formal notice, and the requirements in our dress, shall be waiting at your lodgings at the Madeira Club, when you arrive in London, Captain Lewrie,” Strachan intoned; hard to understand, though, with his handkerchief to his nose and mouth. “I would advise you come up to the city early enough to consult a tailor for the necessary items?”
“Thankee for the kind suggestion, milord.”
“Good day to you, Captain Lewrie,” Strachan said, performing a graceful and languid “leg” in congé, sweeping off his hat again. That was too much temptation to Toulon, who, though “of an age,” still liked to play with strange things, and the egret feathers were simply too tempting, so he pounced at the perigee of the sweep. “Damn my eyes!”
“Good day to you, milord,” Lewrie said, making a “leg,” too, so he could hide his grin and stifle his laughter.
He’d quite forgotten Chalky, still teetering like a wren on a grass stem on his shoulder. With a petulant yowl, Chalky leaped for the deck … and found the hat and feathers intriguing, too.
“Side-party … departing honours,” Lewrie snapped.
“Gaah, you hellish damned…!” Strachan snarled as he put his hat back on his head, now minus an egret plume that Chalky had tugged loose and scampered away with, closely followed by Toulon, who wanted a bat at it, too.
Baron Ludlow, Sir Harper Strachan, glared hot-blooded murder at Lewrie, his shallow chest heaving in anger, before turning away for the starboard entry-port, whilst the bosun’s call trilled and trilled. He could not quite fathom how to leave, though, peering over to determine that the boarding battens were much too steep and shallow for a down-the-house-stairs descent. Strachan tucked his walking-stick, mace of honour, or whatever it was under his left armpit, at last, while Bosun Sprague went into his third repeat of a call, shuffled about to face in-board, and groped blindly with one foot for the first batten with his hands gripping the inner face of the bulwarks.
“We could prepare a bosun’s chair, sir, if you—”
“Garr!” was Strachan’s comment as he managed to get both feet on the top batten, and shifted his right hand to the after-most main-mast stay.
“Oh, mind the tar, sir, we—!” Lewrie cautioned.
“Gaah!” Strachan re-iterated as the fresh tar got daubed on his fingers, before he re-discovered the man-ropes. It took him at least a very long minute before his hat was below the lip of the entry-port, and Bosun Sprague could take his call from his mouth and catch a deep breath.
“Did he make it into his boat, Mister Grainger?” Lewrie asked. “I’m afraid to look.”
“Ehm … he did, just now, sir,” Grainger reported, after a peek over the side.
“Poor lubber!” Midshipman Rossyngton whispered gleefully. “My grandmother isn’t that clumsy!”
“Well now, Mister Sprague,” Lewrie said, turning to the Bosun, “and wasn’t that bloody disastrous? Congratulations on your lungpower, by the way.”
“Thankee, Captain,” Sprague replied, still looking a tad blown. “I gave him an admiral’s salute … four times over, sir. The feller didn’t get to the boat soon, I’d’ve trotted out the one to the King.”
Lewrie went back to the cross-deck stanchions and hammock nettings at the fore end of the quarterdeck, where Toulon and Chalky were footballing their prize and play-pouncing on the feather. They looked up at him … seemingly very pleased with themselves.
“That’s alright, catlin’s … I still love you, despite that,” he told them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Even with the great improvements in the nation’s road network, the prevalence of huge post-coaches and regular service, the growth of the canal system, and passenger barges, very few subjects of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland ever travelled much more than twenty miles from their home towns. It took money, and leisure time, for people to travel, so … though many wistfully hoped to see London one day, the number who did was but a fraction of the population of Great Britain.
Those who resided in London who ever traipsed west to the parks and The Mall, and the grandeur of the West End round St. James’s Palace, would represent about the same small fraction, for most folk lived and worked, ran their shops and such, in familiar neighbourhoods where they felt comfortable, perhaps even safe, and might never stray more than two miles from them, whether the neighbourhood was what was coming to be termed “respectable,” run-down and seedy but close to their employments, or a maze-like criminal stew.
The number of people of Great Britain who ever entered the Palace of St. James was an even smaller fraction. This cool but sunny morning, Alan Lewrie was one of them, for the first time in his life, and (most-likely) the last, he reckoned.
He had come up from Sheerness as an idle passenger aboard one of the larger brig-rigged packets; ashore by gig to board her, cross the Medway and the Nore to the mouth of the Thames, and up-river to the city. He and Pettus travelled together, for he needed a “man” to see to his things. Captain Blanding took a larger entourage, including his cabin steward and personal servant; all depended on the packet’s cook for their meals, which were quite toothsome since fresh food and fresh fish were available … as were lashings of drink.
The winds were contrary, as were the tides, so they all had to sleep aboard one night, Lewrie and Blanding given cramped dog-box cabins with narrow slatted berths, no larger than the accommodations that Lewrie had slept in when he was a junior Lieutenant. The berths were not the sort he was used to, either, for his did not swing from ropes bound to ring-bolts in the overhead deck beams, but was nailed to the inner hull plankings. Not only was the mattress as thin as a Devil’s bargain, little more comforting than two quilts doubled over, but the lack of swaying motion was irritating, and kept him up half the night. He had been rocked to sleep like a babe in its crib too many years … stillness felt un-natural, and he envied Pettus and his hammock on the lower deck with the other servants!
The morning brought a hearty breakfast, though, with kippers and eggs, thick toast, and scalding tea, and enough hot water in civilian measures for a scrub-up and a shave, with the
luxury of even more tea on deck afterwards, lazing in perfect idleness, even going so far as to lean on the bulwarks in lubberly fashion as the packet made the bend into Greenwich Reach and plodded along past the Naval Hospital, Observatory, and Deptford Naval Dockyards. If Captain Blanding had had trouble sleeping, he gave no sign of it, bubbling over with boisterous bonhomie, tucking away a large breakfast, then enthusing over all the new construction at Deptford, and expressing the hope that, once he had been honoured with his knighthood, one of the 74-gunned Third Rates on the stocks would soon be his.
“I thought you were immoderately proud of Modeste, sir,” Lewrie commented, “and her turn of speed for a sixty-four.”
“Oh, I am, Lewrie!” Blanding responded, laughing out loud. “But one aspires to greater responsibilities, a larger command, perhaps the charge of a squadron of Third Rates.”
“I s’pose I’m too used to frigates, and their freedom,” Lewrie confessed as a servant came round with a fresh pot of tea. “If Admiralty thinks me worthy of squadron command, I’d prefer it to be a frigate squadron, with me in Reliant, or another Fifth Rate thirty-eight.”
“Well, I dare say you’re a dashed good frigate captain now, sir,” Blanding allowed, “and you’ve done very well by me, but … promotion and greater responsibility comes to us all, sooner or later, should we live long enough … and not come a cropper sometime in one’s career. Reliant’s your third frigate?”
“Fourth, actually, sir,” Lewrie told him. “Though I had Savage only a year or so … before the trial, and my being relieved, and got Thermopylae as a last minute replacement for her captain when he fell ill. I’ve a year and a half left in Reliant before she’ll need to be put in the graving docks for a refit.”
“Make the most of it, then, Lewrie, for there’s most-like some Third Rate in your future,” Blanding said with a shrug. “Your family will be joining you at Court?”
“Only my father, sir,” Lewrie said. “He’s the only one in the vicinity, given the short notice we got. Yours, sir?”
“Oh, there’s the wife, and my eldest son … he’s just taken Holy Orders, and is still angling for a good parish. I’m assured he will find a post as a vicar, not a rector.”
Why’s that not a s’rprise? Lewrie cynically thought. Church of England politics and “interest” was as fierce as any, and one’s posting could be as profitable as a government office. Rectors were much like Lieutenants when it came to prize-money in the Navy; their share of the tithes, their salary, the size and profitability of the manse and the farm that came with it, the glebe, would keep a man in comfort, but it was the vicar who got the “captain’s” larger share of the tithe, and a share of the tithes from the rectors under him. The Blandings were ferociously well-connected and well-churched … look at Reverend Brundish, for instance, Captain Blanding’s personal Chaplain, who must be very well paid to come away from a profitable vicarage with all the huntin’, shootin’, dancin’, fishin’, and steeplechasin’ in which he revelled! God knows the Navy didn’t pay Chaplains pittance!
“My daughter will be there … she and the wife will take advantage of their time in London to expose her to Society,” Blanding went on, winking and grinning as he added, “And find her a suitable husband if the market’s good. Brundish’ll accompany us, o’ course … coached up to London two days ago, to prepare the ground, and see to the missus and my girl,” Blanding added when he saw Lewrie raise a brow in question. “Care t’dine with us beforehand?”
God, that sounds tedious! Lewrie thought.
“Perhaps after, sir. I’ve people to see. Solicitor, my bank, Admiralty, and some old school friends,” Lewrie begged off, hoping for a long delay before he would have to socialise with the Blanding clan. “And, there’s the mystery of what Sir Harper meant by ‘best uniform and Court dress.’ One hopes his promised letter sent t’my lodgings will be explanatory … and not too costly.”
“Where will you lodge, sir?” Blanding asked.
“The Madeira Club, sir,” Lewrie told him, explaining that the place was a bachelor’s refuge, respectable and clean, for the middling sort of gentleman. “Wonderful wine cellar and grand victuals, but not open to gambling. They retire early at the Madeira. You, sir?”
“Brundish’s brother Charles is a bishop at Hampstead, and has graciously offered us the use of his London house,” Blanding told him, “in Bruton Street.”
Lewrie tried to place Bruton Street, and thought it was south of Oxford Street, safely distant from his lodgings, unless Blanding was intrigued by the name of his favourite coffee house, the Admiral Benbow, at the corner of Baker and Oxford streets, and blundered in.
And why am I not s’prised that Brundish is kin to a bishop? he asked himself.
“Aye, after might be best, after all, Lewrie,” Blanding allowed with a sage nod. “Family to see, what? Doings to catch up on in my long absence? But! Once it’s done, I’d much admire could you and your father join us for a celebration supper … after we go to Westminster Abbey or Saint Paul’s to give thanks to the Good Lord.”
They let my sort in church? Lewrie wondered, but agreed to his superior officer’s suggestions, whether he cared for them or not.
* * *
“Thought we’d take a cabriolet this morning,” his father said as Lewrie descended the steps at the Madeira Club to the kerb, where a light, two-horse carriage awaited with its weather-proofed convertible top folded down above the boot. “And ain’t you a picture, what? Like a belle goin’ to a ball, haw haw!”
One more reason I don’t much like the old bastard, Lewrie told himself as a liveried footman opened the kerb-side door and let down the metal steps.
“Oh, stop yer gob,” Lewrie growled.
“Get up on the wrong side o’ the bed, this morning, did ye?” Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby gravelled as Lewrie got in. “Or are the breeches too tight in the crutch?”
Lewrie spread a clean-looking lap blanket on the leather bench seat before sitting down, just to be safe.
“At such short notice, they are a bit snug,” Lewrie admitted as the footman closed the door and folded up the steps. “Daft, too dear, and if God’s just, I’ll only wear them this once. Silk breeches, mine arse!”
“Just like a belle’s ball gown … daft, too dear, and good for only one appearance in a London Season,” Sir Hugo remarked.
After landing in the Pool of London, taking a hack to the Madeira Club, and un-packing, Lewrie had found the ornate formal letter that Sir Harper Strachan had promised. Immediately upon reading it, he had begun to curse blue blazes. He would need a new pair of shoes in that idiotic slipper style, new white silk stockings, these damned silk breeches, and all the help the valet staff of the Madeira Club could offer alongside Pettus’s best efforts. His best formal uniform coat, too long kept in a sea-chest, had to be aired out to rid it of ship-stink, but nothing could restore the gloss of its gold lace trim that had gone a sickly green at sea. A tailor who specialised in military and naval uniforms had to remove the old and sew on new, damned near overnight. Brushing it down, Pettus had gotten a whole handful of cat fur off it! He’d had to purchase two new epaulets to adorn his shoulders, too. A new silk shirt, a new black neck-stock, his best white waist-coat sponged down and pressed … the neck-stock, too, that very morning, after a wetting, a starching, and a time for drying before it was pressed with a hot iron.
“The latest thing, sir,” the borrowed valet told him, winking. “And all the crack about town, these days. All the dandies are trying to emulate some fellow name of Brummell when it comes to stocks, whose own’re marvels. Flat and sharp-edged, ’stead of ropy-looking after a bit. I’ll bind it on last, if you don’t mind, sir?”
He’d been in need of a haircut, long overdue, in point of fact, and a close shave that morning by another’s skillful hand, instead of shaving himself. There had been a vial of West Indies scent for his smooth-shaven cheeks … and a discreet dash or two on his coat, which was still redolent of salt, tar, pea
soup farts, and mildew. At least the scent was made from the leaves of the bay tree, and wasn’t all that sweet.
The one item over which he almost balked was the wig. “Look, I only need it the once, for God’s sake,” Lewrie had told the wig-maker after trying several on, and discovering to his chagrin that with one of those follies on his head, his hat wouldn’t fit! “I haven’t worn a wig since 1780! I look like a ‘Macaroni’!”
In point of fact, before his father had crimped him into the Navy that very year, sure that Grandmother Lewrie in Devon would turn “toes up” and leave a fair amount of her fortune to Alan and he could pay off his creditors with young Lewrie half the world away and all un-knowing, Lewrie had been a Macaroni fop, right down (or up) to the wee hat perched atop a too-big wig!
“Couldn’t I just rent one for a day or two?” Lewrie had pled.
“Now what’d my reputation be, did I allow that, sir?” the wig-maker had disagreed. “Letting wigs out and them coming back with fleas, or lice, and the next customer getting infested? No, sir. It must be purchase only. You’re to be presented at Court? I’ll not put shoddy on you, sir … what would people say of me? Try this one, pray do.”
He had found one that was sleekly swept back on both sides and allowed his hat to sit at almost the proper level, though Lewrie’s own sideburns and the short four-inch queue that he wore bound with black ribbon at the nape of his neck were visible. The wig-maker had suggested that he pin it on with ladies’ hat pins, just to be safe.
So that’s how Strachan did it! Lewrie had marvelled. Sourly marvelled, really.
So there he sat in an open carriage, on display to the world in his new finery, with his hundred-guinea presentation sword at his hip, the one awarded by the East India Company for saving the small homeward-bound convoy in the South Atlantic, a few years before, when he’d still had the Proteus frigate. His gilt buttons were polished to mirror-like gleamings, those silly shoes blacked and buffed nigh to patent leather shininess, and all his clothes so restored, or new, that he feared the young imps of the London Mob would delight in covering him with dung and mud before they’d gone half a mile.
The Invasion Year Page 17
