A King's Commander

by Dewey Lambdin

  Merciful God in heaven, he gasped to himself, quite nonplussed; nobody has poonts that big! The ethereal, bewitching beauty next to . . . ! “ Cara mia . . . Comandante Lewrie, capitano di ‘Asch-Emma-Essa’ . . . Jester . . . simile il motteggiare, hmm?” Senator di Silvano informed her, inclining slightly to her and leering with amusement. “Comandante Lewrie . . . Signorina Claudia Mastandrea.”

  “Your servant, signorina . . . ” Lewrie said with a deeper incline of his head and bow than his usual wont. So he could peer at those impressive tits directly, instead of ogling her under his lashes.

  I’ve died and gone to heaven, he exulted as she dropped him her curtsy, leaning forward a bit to incline her own head, and . . . ! And to rise from that curtsy to look him directly in the eyes and smile, curl the corner of her mouth up with a veiled, mischievous amusement, as if she knew exactly where his eyes had been. She kept her head inclined to the side, in wry acknowledgment, her entrancing amber-brown eyes twinkling as she looked him over as if taking his measure.

  “Uhm, aye . . .” he stammered, turning to lumber down the line.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Commander Lewrie,” she murmured in a more than passable English, in a surprisingly husky, seductive voice.

  “Pleasure was all mine, ma’am,” Alan assured her, fighting for an air of gracious, gentlemanly gravity. And to keep his hands to himself! He broke off, at last, wondering if he’d been slobbering on his shoes, feeling the urge to wipe his chin free of drool, to be introduced to the lesser lights. But could not help glancing back, furtively now and again, just to see . . . idly curious, no more’n that . . .

  Damme, he gasped again, feeling his innards lurch! She leaned forward a bit, past some shoulders and wigs, looking back at him. A miss-ish sort of minx might have ducked her head, hidden behind lashes or a fan. Nothing brazen about her, but . . . ! He met a hooded smile, a long, approving blink, which was as good as the nod, anytime!

  “Dear Lord,” he muttered, free of the line at last, desperately in need of drink, and male company, to buck up those tattering vows of his. “Mister Knolles!” he cried in relief, snagging a passing waiter with a tray of fine cut-crystal stems of spumante. “For you, sir?”

  “Thankee, Captain, I’m fair parched a’ready.” Knolles beamed, as he handed his first officer a glass. “Can’t they open some doors, some windows? So bloody hot in here . . .”

  “Must be his mistress, that, uhm . . . ?” Lewrie speculated. “D’ye think? That Claudia Mastandrea? Wonder if she’s his East wing or his West wing ride?”

  “Rich as he is, the Friday’un, I’d say, sir,” Knolles said with an appreciative leer of his own. “Were I that ‘John Company’ nabob-wealthy, I’d have one for every day of the week, save Sundays. Wonder what his wife’s like, if . . . ?”

  “I’ll lay you odds, Mister Knolles, we’ll not discover that!” he snickered back. “Doubt there’s even a miniature of her, hereabouts.”

  Gorgeous bloody creature, though, Lewrie thought; brown-eyed blonde, I’ll wager. Those eyebrows were . . . pale down on her arms . . . those catheads! He was forced to gulp again, and slosh back most of his champagne. And took another surreptitious look across the room.

  Most fashionable ladies he knew used tight corset laces to push themselves anywhere near such bounty, attain such a deep cleavage. Or crammed cotton stockings up underneath. He’d been rooked before, hey? Those few who had been so . . . blessed! he groaned . . . fought it, laced or banded themselves flat under a higher bodice so they’d not be taken for strumpets. Or fondled by the bully-bucks in the streets! This’un, though . . .

  He watched Signorina Mastandrea gaily swirl beside her keeper on the way to a wine table. Four or five inches shorter than his five-and-three-quarter feet, he recalled, almost petite, which was why her husky voice had surprised him, coming from such a slip of a girl. Woman, he corrected himself as he snagged another glass of wine. Styles changed, though, and he didn’t think a corset could explain her slim back, her narrow waist. Acres of underpinnings and petticoats were passé, as were hip pads and concealing whalebone frames. The way her matching white satin gown clung to her, swished against her limbs . . . why, she’d be slim as an eel, he speculated! Very slim legs, narrow hips, almost childish bottom . . . ! He’d seen a few like that, those who seemed overblessed by nature in one area, but deprived in the rest of their person. And that was a damned intriguing . . .

  Stop it, damn you, he told himself; take a deep breath, a round turn and two half hitches! Can’t keep a vow, with a pistol to my own head! Tup a senator’s doxy? Mine host’s doxy? Jesus!

  “Excuse me, sir, but . . . do you think there will be dancing later?” Midshipman Hyde asked at his elbow. He turned to give the wiry, ginger-haired lad a peek, but Hyde was casting a shy but ardent look off toward the walls; where stood a slim, light-haired beauty, perhaps no more than fifteen or so, in the tow of a female chaperone, who was gazing back at Hyde with wide-eyed admiration, the coy, covert art of a fan quite forgotten.

  “Close your mouth, Mister Hyde . . .” Lewrie chuckled. “Before a fly pops in. Aye, let’s hope there is dancing . . . for your sake. Just be careful. She more’n like don’t speak the King’s English. And they take the ravishin’ o’ their daughters more serious. Or promises, hmm? As in betrothals?”

  “God yes, sir!” Hyde replied, blushing furiously. Yes to what, Lewrie hadn’t a clue, and expected he’d prefer not to know.

  “Well, hold the British end up, Mister Hyde,” Lewrie warned. Lewrie expected there would be dancing, later. Large as Signore di Silvano’s town palazzo was, he could see no sign of a hall set for dining tables. Almost like a basilica, it was—a round central hall or rotunda, beneath a soaring dome with marble stairs and balconies up at least three stories, with three projecting wings. The longer two, to east and west, lay open to the rotunda, salons each as big as two 1st Rates lying hull to hull. One was lined with chairs around its entire girth, the handsome and intricate inlaid tile floor bare, with all the carpets removed. A chamber orchestra played from the balcony above its entrance. All they had do was turn their chairs to face the salon, to supply music for dancing.

  “Sparse damn’ place,” Lewrie muttered. In spite of all those rich silk hangings, the drapes, the wallpapers and such, it sported more dressed stone than people would be comfortable with back home . . . niches filled with rare old vases, amphorae and statuary that ran to the Classic, Heroic vein. Like a Roman basilica when they were homes or palaces, or imposing public buildings—before they’d been turned to churches. The matching salon on the other wing did seem to be the public offices, the parlors and libraries, the music room . . . lined up one after the other with all the massive, impressively tall doorways opened to flaunt and overawe. Marble columns, painted wood columns, arches, and insets . . . Some few civilians dared tread the carpets down that wing, oohing and ahhing—and careful with their drinks.

  The rotunda, though, held the food and drink. Table after table groaning under their host’s largesse; there a long table for twenty-four minus chairs, topped by a tapering pile of pastries, surmounted by a statuary group of winged cherubs and doves. Another bore taxidermied wild fowl, suspended on the wing or roosting in the branches of tree boles and short limbs—that was where the goose, duck, partridge, or pheasant meat could be found.

  Wine tables, too, each with a fountain plashing colored water— or real wine?—down a series of miniature waterfalls; each in the color of the wine offered. The white wines and spumante tables bore statuary carved from ice, resting against what looked to be snowfields in which spare unopened bottles chilled!

  A bit . . . gaudy, d’ye think? Cockburn commented to Nelson as they wandered by, nodding pleasantly to one and all. They’d sampled the victuals already, having visited the pork table, with its gigantic papier-mâché porker and nursing piglets, the fruit table with its titanic cornucopia, the fish table, the pasta, and made-dish table. Alan goggled in wonder, noticing that Cockburn and Ne
lson were eating from real gold plates, held gold-and-silver damascened utensils!

  “Knows how to impress, I must admit,” Nelson whispered back to Cockburn, using his free hand to pull at his nose, and play up a nasal Norfolk twang in ironic commentary.

  “Makes King Midas look like a publican at a two-penny ordinary,” Lewrie japed. “What fine greasy wooden trenchers you gentlemen hold. Anything particularly good, sir? Or merely showy.”

  “All quite good,” Nelson allowed, still too much in awe. “But do allow me to recommend the vinegared pressed beef. Levant-style, I was told. Particularly spicy and tangy.” Cockburn agreed, though he and Nelson both bore a dubious look, as if to say that an Englishman’d never act the fool so, as to lay on such a raree-show. It was heathen . . . Hindu Grand Moghul . . . and not quite the hearty country thing.

  The aromas, stronger and more alluring than those of the guests around him, drew Lewrie to the tables, where he began to graze, taking a small taste of everything before finding something exceptional that pleased him most. Nod, smile . . . shrug and chew. Nod, smile, shrug in perplexity . . . and take a sip of wine. Knowing Latin didn’t do him the slightest bit of good when it came to conversing in Italian; one word in twenty, perhaps . . . just enough to get him in trouble. All he could be was mutely agreeable.

  Making the rounds, he crossed Drake’s hawse, winced to watch him load his plate to overflowing, then tuck it in quickly, all the while gabbling and gesticulating with both hands in hearty conversation with the Genoese. Lewrie encountered Cockburn and Nelson again, hands free of plates, at last.

  “God, what a scruffy fellow,” Cockburn muttered. “I find it hard to believe that he isn’t some excellent imposter. A bosun’s mate who’s run, and gulled the Genoese, like Doctor Gulliver in Lilliput.”

  “Much my opinion, too, at first, sir,” Nelson confided to them. “Last year, his repute with these people was odious. Hasn’t a shred of respect from even the lowliest Genoese. Yet, sirs . . . one comes to discover he’s a man of more parts than a first impression might allow. I find him . . . like Sir William Hamilton at Naples . . . to be a fellow with whom I may do direct business. Some, less direct, do you follow?” he added with a cryptic smirk.

  “Oh, God!” Lewrie cried suddenly. “Shrimp, sirs. A whole fresh bowl of ’em. My soul is lost. You will excuse me, sirs?” A cauldron would have been more like it, which took two strong servitors to carry, abrim with peeled and boiled shrimp as big as his thumbs! He made his way to the fish table quickly, trying not to trample civilians to beat them to them.

  “Bloody marvelous!” He sighed, once he had a gold plate laden, with a fiery hot sauce in which to dip them. “What is it? How did . . .”

  “A sauce from the Far East, Comandante Lewrie,” his host said from across the wide table. Lewrie had been oblivious of everything, and everyone, his whole attention greedily focused on the shrimp.

  “The Far East, really, sir?”

  “They name it kai-t’sap, Comandante, ” Senator di Silvano told him with another smug expression, as if once more secretly amused with Englishmen in general, and Lewrie’s ignorance in particular. “Spices, peppers, vinegar. To which, Italia contributes its humble marinating tomato sauce. I see that you relish it, hmm?”

  Damme, the wretch speaks some English, Lewrie thought; huzzah! And his wench is with him, too. Huzzah, again!

  “Allow me to compliment you, signore, on the . . . kai-t’sap, and Italia’s improvements on it . . . and your remarkably skilled fluency.” He toadied. “And aye, I do relish it, most wondrously well. Almost as much as good old hot English mustard or Worcester sauce.”

  “But the Worcester sauce of which you speak, Signore Comandante, is not English,” Signore di Silvano chided him. “ Scusa, but when Roman legions conquered your island, they brought with them their garum, the salty fish spice. You English sweetened it by adding fruit, but it is still made the Roman way, first, Comandante. You still begin with the boiling and fermenting of the sardines.”

  We do? Lewrie wondered to himself. Feeling a touch of acid of a sudden. Well, wasn’t it said, one didn’t ever wish to see sausage, or legislation, made? It didn’t signify. He liked Worcester sauce.

  “My compliments, as well as my thanks, signore, ” Lewrie went on, fighting the urge to dart a glance at di Silvano’s bewitching mistress, “for your kind invitation, and the bounty . . . the excellence of the bounty, you put before us.”

  “Ah, bounty.” Senator di Silvano sighed, turning sad. “Thank you for your compliment, Signore Comandante. But I wonder . . . much as we enjoy ourselves tonight, as well as we fare . . . what do you call it . . . the short commons? Si, short commons? Grazie. The poor people of the Riviera. Do you believe they enjoy short commons tonight, signore? What hope do they have of ever eating half as well as they did before, as when you began your embargo?”

  Uh oh, Lewrie thought, casting his eyes about for Drake, Nelson, or a senior officer. But they were too far away from where he had been waylaid to aid him, sandwiched in between lash-fluttering ladies three tables or more off. Damn this bastard, Lewrie snarled to himself; he did this o’ purpose! Raised his voice, by design, to gather a crowd.

  And Claudia Mastandrea was gazing at him, quite coolly, waiting his reply, and how he’d handle himself. Bitch, he accused; in with the smarmy shit, aren’t you? Enjoying yerself, hmm?

  “Signore di Silvano,” he began carefully, “civilians are always the sufferers, in wars. Especially those occupied and enslaved by the plague of locusts we call the French. Do they ever hope to enjoy the fruits of their own harvests . . . they’d best do something to help beat the bastards. And pray God General de Vins and his Austrians crush the French soon. So they’re no longer saddled by a pack of robbers.”

  “Yet, what may they do, Signore Lewrie,” di Silvano posited in a hand-wringing gesture of seeming concern. “The little people, those paisans . . . ” Aye, he’d gathered a crowd of sycophants, Lewrie noted; there certainly by design. “Is their suffering, their starvation the only thing you wish of them? To be supine, and waste away?”

  “Perhaps arise, like Cincinnatus called from his plough, sir,” Lewrie suggested. “Resist, like . . . like Robin Hood did against Prince John, in Sherwood Forest.”

  “I cannot pretend to know English folklore, signore, ” his host said with a dismissive air, as if it was an Irish tale of fairy circles. “But I do know the fate of the Huguenots of La Rochelle . . . the fate of the Royalists of Toulon . . . the armed resistance offered by the Vendee, against French Revolutionary forces. Slaughter. Extermination!” he declared, switching to Italian to share the pith of his argument among the onlookers, who were properly outraged, and horrified.

  “Then pray for an Austrian victory to liberate them from ’neath the tyrants’ heels, signore, ” Lewrie rejoined. “Though, ’tis said . . . God helps those who help themselves. Were Genoa . . .”

  He bit the rest of that off; Genoa would never take up arms, too terrified of failing.

  “Ah, the Austrians. ” Di Silvano sneered. “You are a student of history, Comandante, to reach back to your own past?”

  “Somewhat, sir,” Lewrie answered. Though his school days had been a trifle spotty.

  “Are you versed in Italia’s past?” di Silvano queried. “With us, it has always been the Germans. Teutons against Marius . . . Goths, then Huns, Lombards and Vandals who conquered the Old Empire, made us broken pottery, so many little feuding kingdoms, unable to resist . . .”

  “Oh, much like the Holy Roman Empire in the Germanics, sir?” Lewrie pointed out quickly. “So fragmented and weak?”

  Score one for me, he thought happily, seeing di Silvano almost wince and grit his teeth in a too-wide smile.

  “Si,” the senator allowed grudgingly. “And like our Empire’s last decadent days, we must call once more upon our Goths to rescue us. Summon the barely civilized barbarian legions, accede to whatever they demand of us, to save us. But, signore, do not even y
ou deem what it is they do so far a very slow sort of rescue? How long, I ask you . . .”

  “First of all, Your Excellency,” Lewrie interrupted, quite full of himself by then, feeling able to hold the British end up. “Our Mister Gibbon writes that Rome was Christian, hardly decadent, when she fell. Your Gothic legions and generals prevailed because no one Roman cared to soil his hands with combat any longer. The Austrians, I am certain, are quite civilized enough these days. Does their campaign against the French go slowly, it is only because a successful campaign takes time to marshal and amass, Signore di Silvano.”

  There, that was safe enough, without implying criticism of an ally. General de Vins barely made half-a-mile a day, and that, mostly shuffling without actually advancing. Mostly sitting on his hands and decrying how badly he was outnumbered by the Frogs, he’d heard. Alan was quite grateful, though, to espy Mister Drake conferring with Nelson, pointing in the direction of the senator’s diatribe and loud questions. Aid was in the offing, he sighed!

  “Besides, Your Excellency,” Lewrie went on, basking in the intense regard of Signorina Claudia Mastandrea, who was following their wordplay closely. “One must recall that, do you fear a barbarian invasion into Italy again, the most-recent invaders who are sworn to conquer you and annex you to their new Empire of the Common Man, if I may so style it . . . were originally Franks. A Germanic tribe who came late to the party. And, like scavengers, took what they could. The leavings of those who preceded them. Franks, and Gauls. Julius Caesar’s bane, sir . . . Gauls. I should think any Italian, be he Genoese, Savoian, or Tuscan, Piedmontese, or Neapolitan, would prefer the whole of Italy be left alone, free of tyrannical Franks . . . and Gauls, signore. ”

  Oh, well shot, look at him squirm, Lewrie exulted!

  Senator di Silvano had gone as stern and choleric as a hanged spaniel, his tanned complexion suffused. Yet, of a sudden, he got a sly look. Hurry up, damn you, Lewrie urged Drake and Nelson.