Kings and Emperors (44 page)

“You weesh zhe grand tour,
senhores
?” Marsh offered, tittering and off in one of his guises, again. “I am expert guide!”

“Only if you can steer Westcott to the prettier whores, sir,” Lewrie said with a snigger.

“No, dear as I wish,” Mountjoy said, torn between finally seeing Lisbon's impressive attractions, and duty, “I must go talk with our generals, first. A tour, later, if you're still offfering, Romney.”

“My delight,” Marsh agreed, beaming.

“I suppose we should get back to the ship,” Lewrie told his First Officer. “Will you be staying on, Mountjoy, or should we wait for you and carry you back to Gibraltar?”

“Let you know later,” Mountjoy said, digging coins out to pay the reckoning. “I may only need to stay a day or two.”

*   *   *

“You'll not be haring off to see another battle ashore, will you, sir?” Lt. Westcott asked as they made their way back downhill to the seafront.

“Too far inland for me, if one comes, no, Geoffrey,” Lewrie scoffed. “I've seen my share, and those are enough.”

“If half of what Marsh says is true, I'd not wish to go off with our soldiers, either,” Westcott said, displaying a deep scowl that made some Libson passersby duck away from him, in fear of the Evil Eye. “Maybe General Moore should wait 'til Spring.”

“But, the
French
will be back by Spring,” Lewrie pointed out.

“Marsh,” Westcott mused aloud, still scowling, “do you really think he murdered that French officer as he claims?”

“We've only his word for that,” Lewrie replied, shrugging. “I always thought he was much like a half-insane version of Mountjoy, an inoffensive sort who perhaps enjoyed playing some great, dangerous game a tad
too
much, but … now I wonder if he is
indeed
capable of violence, like that old spy-master, Zachariah Twigg, who'd cut your throat just t'watch you bleed. You saw that look he gave you when you remarked about his clothes?”

“Aye, I did, sir,” Westcott heartily agreed, “and it made me wonder if there's a knife in my back, in future.”

“Tortas, senhores?”
an old woman in widow's black weeds cried from a
pastelaria
set between two tumbledown houses.
“Tortas laranja, de Viana, tortas de limao?”

“Tarts!” Lewrie enthused. “Orange, lemon, and I think some with jam fillings. We didn't have dessert, did we, Geoffrey? Ah,
senhora, queria dois, dois,
and
dois,
” he said pointing to each variety in turn.
“Quanto custa?”

“Eh …
vinte centimos, senhor,
” the old lady dared ask, not sure if that was too much in these troubled times.

“Twenty of their pence, is it?” Lewrie said, digging out his wash-leather coin purse; he had no Portuguese coin, but he did have two six-pence silver British coins, and handed them over. The sight of silver almost made the old lady faint.

“Aqui esta, senhor, bom apetite!”
she exclaimed, wrapping his selections in a sheet of newspaper.

“Obrigada, senhora,”
Lewrie replied, “thankee kindly.”

“Viva Inglaterra!”
she shouted in departure.

“I say, these are tangy,” Westcott said as he bit into one of the orange-flavoured tarts as they resumed their downhill stroll for the docks. “But, just when did you become fluent in Portuguese, sir?”

“Fluent,
me
?” Lewrie laughed off. “Not a bit of it, Geoffrey, ye know how lame I am at languages. But, the best place to learn a tongue, even a little, is with the help of a bidding girl.”

“So
I've
always thought,” Westcott said with a smug leer.

“Viva inglese, viva Inglaterra!”
a pack of street urchins began to chant, skipping and prancing behind them, and begging for
centimos.

“It appears we've made some Portuguese happy,” Lt. Westcott said, looking over his shoulder at them.

“For now, at least, Geoffrey … for now,” Lewrie mused.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“All this will fill the cisterns, sir,” Pettus commented as he came back into the great-cabins from the stern gallery, where he had been trying to dry some washing in the narrow, dry overhang of the poop deck above. “Still damp, sorry,” he said of Lewrie's under-drawers and shirts.

“Well, hang them up in here, then,” Lewrie told him, looking up from his reading, “and we'll hope for the best.” When last the planking seams of the poop deck had been stuffed with oakum and paid over with hot tar with loggerheads, some wee gaps had been missed, so spare pots and wooden pails stood here and there on the deck chequer, and the good carpets had been rolled up, to catch the dripping, and save expensive Turkey or Axminster rugs. He looked upwards as the incessant Winter rain increased and began to seethe on deck. It was December at Gibraltar, nigh Christmas, which usually had a mild Winter, but this year was damper, and colder, than what he'd experienced last year.

It wasn't raw or chilly enough to wish for a Franklin-pattern coal stove to heat his cabins, but Lewrie did his reading fully dressed, less uniform coat, and with a loose-sleeved, ankle-length robe made from a wool blanket. It was white wool with red and green stripes at both ends, and upon first exposure to cabin visitors, Lt. Westcott had japed that he looked like an Indian who'd swapped furs for a Hudson's Bay Company blanket.

The weather at sea had delayed many ships' arrival, but Royal Mail packets had managed to come in, bringing him letters from home, most of which were pleasant, and some outright delightful.

Both James Peel at Foreign Office Secret Branch, and his old school chum, Peter Rushton, had written of the scandal, and the court of enquiry, into that disastrous Convention of Cintra. Dalrymple had been removed from command in Spain and Portugal, his career at an end, and General Burrard had been reduced to domestic duties only, never to serve abroad again. Wellesley was the only one of them who had gotten off rather mildly, and the papers championed the real victor, claiming that Dalrymple and Burrard had ordered and brow-beaten him to sign the damned thing. He was idle in Dublin, with no real harm done to him.

Both of his sons were well. Sewallis was still on the Brest blockade, bored to tears with the incessant plodding in-line-ahead for months on end, standing off-and-on the French coast with no sign that the enemy would ever come out to challenge them, with only the rare week or so in an English port to re-provision and have a run ashore where, admittedly, he had taken strong drink aboard and attended some lively subscription balls; he boasted that he was one of the best dancers aboard, had instructed the younger Mids in his mess in the art, and had been quite taken by more than a few pretty girls.

His younger son, Hugh, was still in the Mediterranean aboard a frigate, and as he described it, a taut and happy ship led by an energetic and daring captain. They had done some cutting-out raids in Genoese harbours and had seized merchant prizes right from under the noses of the French and their grudging Italian allies, had made chase of several others off Malta, taken two more, and had fought a spirited action with a French
corvette,
made prize of her, and Hugh suggested that his father should look into the latest issues of the
Naval Chronicle
in which Midshipman Hugh Lewrie was mentioned by his captain as having shown pluck, courage, and skill!

There's one that didn't fall far from the tree!
Lewrie told himself with rightful pride.

There was a letter from his father, more an advertisment for the new plays, symphonies, and entertainments of the season. There was one from his former ward, Sophie de Maubeuge, now married to his old First Officer in the
Proteus
frigate, Anthony Langlie, with the thrilling news that her husband had been “made Post” and awarded the command of a Sixth Rate frigate, and would be home for a couple of months as she recruited and outfitted, after nigh a year of separation and anxiety.

There was nothing from his daughter, Charlotte, but, by then, he had no expectations that she would ever write him. Oddly, there was nothing about her from his former brother-in-law, Governour Chiswick's, latest letter, but then, Governour was all about himself and his new prospects; old Uncle Phineas Chiswick had finally died, and he'd left all of his estate to Governour, elevating him from a much-put-upon estate manager to master of all he surveyed, a wealthy man with thousands of acres. Old Sir Romney Embleton had also passed in the Autumn, so
his
son, Harry, was now Sir Harry, Colonel of the Yeomanry militia, and the borough's nigh-permanent representative in the House of Commons, for the very good reason that no one would dare run against him. With Harry so busy, Governour had been asked to be the local Magistrate in Harry's place, too.

God help Anglesgreen, then,
Lewrie thought with a scowl, in need of a brandy to wash the sudden sour taste from his mouth;
That brayin' bastard'll run his court like Tsar Ivan the Terrible!

The read and discarded letters were piling up beside Lewrie on the settee cushions, they were crinkly, daubed with patches of sealing wax, and … chewy. Chalky made a prodigious, tail-wiggling leap from the brass tray table to the pile like diving into a snow heap and pawed right and left, unsure which he'd shred first.

“Those ain't good eatin', Chalky,” Lewrie chid him, “better ye come here and keep me warm.”

Chalky would have none of it. The lure of wagging fingers to tempt him only prompted the cat to plop on his back and wriggle atop the letters, paws out to bat at him, his tail thumping on the papers.

“Have it your own way, then,” Lewrie said, opening the last of his personal correspondence. “Well, just damn my eyes!” he had to exclaim once he had opened it.

Percy, Viscount Stangbourne, had written him to announce that his self-raised light dragoon regiment had been selected to be part of General Sir David Baird's army, selected personally by Lord Henry Paget, one of England's most distinguished cavalry commanders, to be in his two-thousand-man brigade! He'd written from shipboard, just hours from sailing, about a fortnight before.

He's probably already ashore,
Lewrie thought.

Percy and his troopers were to land at Corunna in Northwest Spain, and march upon Salamanca, unless there was a change of plans, he'd penned; he was bursting with pride for his unit to be selected, to be given the chance to prove their worth, and his own, upon the field of battle, and meet the much-vaunted French cavalry, sabre to sabre! What a chance for glory had been missed, he thought, that at Roliça and Vimeiro, General Wellesley had had so little cavalry, else the battle would have been a clean sweep, and a joyous rout of the defeated French, and that ridiculous Convention of Cintra would not have even been contemplated!

Percy was now the proud father of two fine sons, Eudoxia was well and happy, his father-in-law, Arslan Artimovich Durschenko, was staying in England to recruit remounts to be shipped to Spain later, and that Horse Guards had seen fit to take his regiment into full military service, allowed its own home barracks and second battalion cadre to form a full-strength replacement unit recruited from the Reading and Henley-on-Thames region. He couldn't be prouder that his patriotic efforts, and his great fortune he'd used to raise, mount, arm and equip his regiment, had finally borne fruit!

By the way, he wrote, we're no longer Stangbourne's Horse but the 38th Light Dragoons. Oh, and Lydia is well and content living in the country, with all her childhood friends and their children to spoil, and her good works. She would have come to Spain, but …

Hmm,
Lewrie thought at the mention of his former lover's name;
I don't feel even the
slightest
twinge.

He had, at the time, been extremely fond of her, almost at the verge of real love, and even at the moment in that bleak Winter garden when she had rejected him and vowed to live alone, and safe, the rest of her life—the moment that he'd recklessly proposed marriage—had experienced the stumbling of his heart, the sinking of his stomach so keenly that he'd thought he would sicken of his loss.

Months later, after taking command of
Sapphire
and returning to the sea and an active commission, the pangs would disturb him … yet now? Lewrie glanced at Percy's letter once more, and found that Lydia had asked him to express her fond regards.

Fond regards, and it don't hurt. Well!
he mused. All he did was shrug. Chalky, tired of scattering paper, crawled into his lap with some mews for attention, and a
Mrrk
or two, and settled down to be stroked and petted, slowly beginning to rumble and go slit-eyed.

There was a rap of a musket butt on the deck, the stamp of the Marine sentry's boots, and a shout to announce Yeovill, his cook.

“Enter!” Lewrie called back, not rising.

Yeovill came in, shaking water from his tarred sailor's hat and dripping raindrops from his tarpaulin coat. Chalky perked up in a trice, uttered a glad mew of welcome, and went dashing to Yeovill; Yeovill was food, and good smells.

“Fickle,” Lewrie chid him after the cat leapt away. “What is it, Yeovill?”

“Ah, I was wondering about the holidays, sir,” Yeovill began, “and what you might have in mind to serve to dine in our officers and such, sir. With the trade cross the Lines so free, now, I can find almost anything you wish … hams, geese, ducks, even turkeys.”

“Hmm,” Lewrie happily pondered for a moment, “smoked Spanish hams are always fine, but … a really big Christmas goose'd go down well. Devil with it, you might as well pick up one of everything, and we'll have a two-day feast!”