Lydia Stangbourne, daughter of a Viscount, punched him in the stomach with a dainty kid-gloved fist! Lewrie had forgotten that she was stronger than most women, the result of strenuous outdoorsy activities in the country. She hunted and shot and fished, managed horses as good as any groom, and even took secret lessons from a swordmaster.
He stepped back to rub his belly. “Will you strike me, again, m’dear, or should I borrow one of the coachmen’s whips?” he asked.
The rant was over, though. Lydia put her hands to her face and lowered her head. When she looked up a moment later, she was weeping, with her face screwed up in misery.
“Oh, Alan!” she cried, and flung her arms round his neck.
“I am so sorry, Lydia,” he muttered into her sweet-smelling hair. “We could call it a comedy of errors, ’cept it ain’t all that funny. I’m sorry we ended up at cross purposes, missin’ each other coming and going, and might not be able t’see each other again for weeks more, if the Navy has their say in it. All I meant was to sit and talk, have a laugh or two, not … Hush now, dear girl,” he comforted her by swaying her slowly. “Don’t cry, Lydia. Don’t cry.”
She gave out a loud sniff against his shoulder.
“Have you a pocket handkerchief, Alan?” she softly asked. “I must look a fright, and what any passersby must think of me … like a jilted … trull!”
“A trull, you?” Lewrie tried to cajole. “A fright? No. You’re as handsome and fetchin’ as ever, Lydia. Remember what I told you the time we all coached down to Sheerness … that no one could ever take you for a doxy, or a trull. They’d think you a captain’s lady.”
She stepped a bit apart to dab at her eyes with the requested handkerchief, blew her nose, then broke out in a shy and embarrassed smile. She handed the handkerchief back, which act made her laugh as she did so. “Sorry about that, now it’s so damp.”
“Cherish it forever!” Lewrie quipped. “Have it framed—”
Her arms went round his neck again as she silenced him with a long and passionate kiss. Lewrie wrapped his arms round her to lift her off her tiptoes and drape her against him, and coachmen and servants be-damned. Their kisses were urgent, her breath hot and turning musky, and Lewrie felt a rigid awakening in the fork of his trousers.
Lewrie half-heard the clopping of a horse on the road.
“There’s rooms to let down the road in Liphook, don’t ye know!”
Lewrie broke off their kiss to scowl, discovering an older gentleman in corduroy, tweeds, top-boots, and a curl-brimmed thimble hat as their taunter, obviously a prosperous local landowner, who was in high humour, and sporting a wide leer.
“Sod off!” Lewrie called back, which made the older fellow snap his head about and almost rein in.
“Yes, just … sod off!” Lydia added, laughing out loud, then leaning close to Lewrie to whisper, “You must tell me later what ‘sod off’ means, Alan!” with impish delight.
“Happy to,” Lewrie assured her. “You may find it serves usefully in London, when anyone dares snub you.”
Both of them had stepped back, though still holding each other’s hands. Lydia looked up at him contemplatively. “This bottom-cleaning you speak of. It will occupy you fully? For how long?”
“Assumin’ there’s a free dock available, better than a week or two,” Lewrie told her, explaining how his frigate must be emptied of all her guns, stores, and munitions, her upper masts taken down “to a gantline” so she could be heaved over onto her side and stranded high and dry at low tide on one of the hards, or propped up in one of the graving docks. “If there’s no dock or stretch of beach available, we might sit and swing at anchor ’til they can get round to us.”
“You would have to remain aboard ’til the work begins, then,” Lydia said, beginning to look a tad bleaker.
“Aye, but, once it’s begun, I wouldn’t be captain of anything for at least ten days to a fortnight,” Lewrie said, hoping to cheer her up. “We’d have to take shore lodgings, every Man Jack. As soon as that’s begun, I’ll write you and let you know when to coach back down to Portsmouth, so—”
“No, Alan,” Lydia interrupted him, letting go his hands to take another wee step back from him, and crossing her arms. “Even did you find me temporary lodgings in a rented, private residence, I would not feel entirely comfortable with such an arrangement.”
“But, Lydia—”
“I fear I would feel much the same dis-comfort at the George Inn as I did at the Blue Posts,” she continued, her expression firmly determined.
“The ogling you got? The snickers?” Lewrie asked, worried by this sudden turn.
“That is part of it, I must own,” Lydia replied, looking down at her toes as she scuffed a pebble with her shoes, before returning a level gaze at him. “Another part of my dis-comfort is the feeling that I must dash off at a moment’s notice to your every beck and call. I would much prefer that you come up to London and call upon me, in a—hah!—proper manner,” she said with a wryly amused sniff. “I trust that, have you learned to know the least bit about me, you will understand my reasons why.”
“So we can scandalise your household staff?” Lewrie posed with a shaky laugh; this was turning serious! Their first night, they had left her brother Percy to gamble in the Long Rooms at the Cocoa-Tree and had coached to her house in Grosvenor Street in the wee hours, and had ended up in a spare bedroom after the house servants had gone to bed. “I suppose we could sit up stiff and proper in your parlour, and swill endless pots of tea.”
“There shall be times for such innocent primness,” Lydia said with a becoming blush, and another fond smile as she recalled what had passed between them, too. “Though, I was thinking more along the lines of the theatres, the symphonies, dining out—”
“God, not the bloody ballet!” Lewrie cringed.
“No, not the bloody ballet,” she reassured him, crinkling her nose in amusement, though she made no move to reach out to him.
“Where Society can point, snicker, and gossip about you?” he asked, perplexed why Lydia would wish more exposure and more risk of snubbing, when that was the very thing she said she had dreaded when in Portsmouth by herself. “Oh!”
“Oh, indeed,” she replied, waiting for him to plumb to it.
She wants t’be courted! he told himself; To do things proper!
“Then we shall do as you wish, Lydia,” he promised her, “even if that involves gallons of tea. Though, if Willis’s Rooms are out, and I lodge at the Madeira Club…” Their second night together, she had booked a suite of rooms at Willis’s, as a present.
“Lord, how stricken you look, Alan!” she said with a laugh as she came to embrace him, at last, and looked up at him most pleasingly adoring. “Neither of us can pretend that we do not share a powerful mutual … desire for intimacy. Trust when I tell you that I have longed for you every moment the Navy takes you away from me, and that this last, long separation has been almost more than I could bear! I long for you so much that I would join you this very instant…,” she said in a fret, turning her head to look about. “I would let you lead me behind that thicket, yonder, but for the witnesses.”
“The thicket ain’t that far off,” Lewrie said with a leer as he took a squint where she had indicated.
“We shall find a way, when you come up to London, Alan,” Lydia assured him with a solemn expression. “We may have to be most discreet, but … love shall find a way.”
Love? Christ, this is gettin’ damned serious! Lewrie thought.
“I s’pose love will,” Lewrie said in a pensive whisper as he pulled her into an embrace, which prompted another long and fervent kiss to which she responded just as eagerly. She stroked his cheek with a shuddery touch, looking as if she would begin to weep, again.
“I must’ve done somethin’ right,” Lewrie softly sighed, “for you t’take such a risk to your heart, given all that … you know.”