“Yes, you have, Alan,” Lydia whispered, “you certainly have.”
After another long minute of kissing, Lewrie leaned back from her a bit to joke, “Imagine all this, from a chance encounter on the road!”
“A most fortunate encounter,” Lydia heartily agreed, though she stepped back from him. “Brief it must be, though. I must get on to London, just as you must get on to Portsmouth. Someone must be the practical one, after all,” she teased, taking his hands at arm’s length as if they were dancing.
“Never gave a fig for ‘practical’,” Lewrie said. “Though I fear you’re right.” He offered her a polite arm to walk her back to her coach, handed her inside, and folded up the folding steps, then closed the door once she was seated.
He stepped back from the coach, but she leaned out the opened door window to reach out to tousle his hair and stroke his cheek one more time. Lewrie kissed her palm and her wrist.
“I will see you again, soon?” she asked, grinning.
“Count on it,” Lewrie promised. “I’ll write to let you know as soon as I know when I can get away, and for how long.”
“Adieu, dear Alan. Adieu, dear man.”
“’Til the next time, dear girl!” Lewrie replied as her coach began to rattle forward. He waved to her, waited to watch her coach head up the road, then turned and strolled back to his own, shaking his head in bemusement, part wistful, and part disappointed that she would not stay for even a cup of tea, yet …
He reached the open door of his coach and turned to look back up the road, and damned if Lydia was still leaning out the window and waving, so he used both arms to return a broad goodbye wave to her with a smile plastered on his phyz that he wasn’t sure what it meant.
Now, where did all that come from? he asked himself; I would’ve thought her so vexed with me that she’d write me off completely, yet … hmmm. Love, she said? Wary as she was, ’bout love and marriage, and trustin’ any man ever again … Gawd.
Did he wish to re-marry? he had to ask himself. If he did, he could do a lot worse than Lydia Stangbourne. As far as he knew, she was still worth £2,000 a year, and that much “tin” was nothing to be sneezed at! She was exciting, adventurous, nothing like the properly-mannered hen-heads and chick-a-biddies who populated most of the parlours in the nation!
Shame, though, Lewrie thought; I’m too “fly” a rake-hell for her. Sooner or later, she’d find me out and go harin’ for the hills!
“On to Portsmouth, coachman,” Lewrie said as he mounted the steps into his coach.
“Shouldn’t blaspheme, sir,” the dour stick grumbled.
“Damn me, did I?” Lewrie quipped as he pulled up the steps and shut the door. “Well, just bugger me! Whip up!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A light and misty October rain was falling, gathering on upper yards, and the rigging, and occasionally massing into larger drops of water that plopped on Reliant’s freshly holystoned decks, on the canvas covers of the stowed hammock racks, and Captain Alan Lewrie’s hat and epauletted shoulders as he and the First Lieutenant, Mr. Westcott, and the Bosun, Mr. Sprague, made a slow inspection of both the standing and the running rigging, and the set of the top-masts and yards.
Bisquit the dog paced slowly at their heels, on the lookout for attention, or the offer of a nibble of sausage or jerky. When one of the larger drops plopped on his head, he would shy away, then look up to spot whoever it was that was pestering him.
“The cats have more sense, ye know,” Lewrie told the dog. “They stay snug and dry below.”
“Enjoying their long naps,” Lt. Westcott commented with a grin as if he could relish an hour or two of idle snoozing. No one aboard had had much rest since Lewrie returned from London. To prove his sentiment, Westcott fought to stifle a jaw-cracking yawn.
“It appears we’re back in business, Mister Sprague,” Lewrie allowed once they had reached the bow hawses for a long look at the bowsprit and jib-boom rigging.
“Spick and span clean from keel to truck, again, too, sir,” the Bosun pointed out. He was a man who ever strove for order, neatness, and cleanliness, the hallmark of his exacting trade. “She don’t smell like a mud-flat any longer.”
Despite the orders which Lewrie had waved under everyone’s noses, there simply had been no space for them in a graving dock, so the frigate had been hauled over and her bottom cleaned, re-felted, white leaded, and re-coppered in places by a civilian contractor’s yard, on a sandy and muddy hard between the tides, and the reek of the beach, and white lead paint had been a long time departing her.
There had been planking in her “quick-work” badly in need of replacing, too. Some were riddled with teredo worms, and some gnawed thin from the inside, by rats that had the run of the orlop and bilges.
Once back on her bottom and upright, the contractor had suggested that their rat problem could be solved, at least temporarily, by the introduction of a pack of terriers, as many stray cats as could be had round the yard, and let them have the run of the ship for a few days … for which he would be paid, of course, a trifling fee.
“Saw more than one merchant ship and a sloop o’ war get sunk by her own vermin, sir,” the flinty shipwright had told them. “Starving rats’d eat anything, and usually gnaw through the hull planks down low where you can’t tell ’til the water’s pouring into the bilges.”
The ship’s boys had had a field day, following the terriers on their hunts, and collecting keg after keg of dead rats. They had hot been above doing slaughter of their own with hammers and middle mauls.
That vermin-free state would not last; it never would, of course. Ships stores, ration kegs, bales of clothing, and even gunpowder had to be brought back aboard from temporary storage at the warehouses at the naval dockyard, and even more stores sufficient for six months at sea, would bring pests with them, even was the ship anchored out and not right alongside a pier where rats would have easier access.
“How are the new hands fitting in?” Lewrie asked the Bosun.
“Them, God help us, sir?” Sprague said with a weary laugh of dismissal. “Two of the four Landsmen might as well be goony birds and the other two strike me as shifty … county Quota Men. The three rated as Ordinary are passable, but we only could scrape up two Able Seamen, One’s alright, but I’m keeping my eye on Shales, and so is the foremast captain. I expect he’s a ‘sea-lawyer’, sir.”
“No help for it,” Lewrie said with a sigh. The ship’s people had had to lodge ashore temporarily, and despite all the cautions that he, his officers, and petty officers had urged, despite all their watchfulness, eleven hands had deserted. Lewrie damned Lord Gardner’s office for issuing pay chits before the ship was fully back in commission and discipline. It made no sense to him that those eleven men would take “leg bail”, obtain a civilian’s “long clothing”, and run, sacrificing their claims to the substantial amount of prize-money that Reliant was due. And all of them had been aboard since May of 1803!
“For that matter, sir,” Westcott quipped, “how do you think our new Mid, Mister Shannon, is fitting in?”
“Oh, Lord,” Lewrie said, pulling a long face which made all of them chuckle. “No helpin’ that, either. He’s a young’un, no error.”
Midshipman Entwhistle had stood his oral exams before a board of Post-Captains while Reliant was on her beam-ends in the mud, and had been rated as Passed. Out of the blue, not a week later, he had been given orders into an 18-gun brig-sloop just fitting out and he, a newly “wetted down” Lieutenant and Commission Sea Officer, was gone, replaced with a twelve-year-old chub. There had been a tit-for-tat made; the Commissioner of the dockyards, Captain Sir Charles Saxton, Bart., had a distant nephew in need of his first posting, and Lewrie had a foul bottom, and no matter his urgent orders for the South Atlantic, things would go more swimmingly should Lewrie welcome the lad aboard.