"It would be educational for the boys," Caroline went on in an offhanded way. "Improve their French, which every civilised man must speak."
"Je suis un crayon, mort de ma vie," Lewrie quipped.
"Oh, tosh!" Caroline objected. "So you're a pencil, are you… death of your life?"
"Papa's a pencil?" Charlotte gawped, then burst into titters.
In point of fact, Lewrie's French was abysmal; execrably bad.
"I s'pose a tour o' France might teach 'em something, m'dear," Sir Hugo told her. "How vile are the French… so they hate 'em as bad as the Devil hates Holy Water, th' rest o' their lives, haw haw!"
"Perhaps as a… proper honeymoon," Caroline said, lowering her eyes and going a tad enigmatic. "As Sophie and Anthony did not have when they wed, with his ship ready to put back to sea as soon as the wind shifted. As short as ours was… recall, Alan?"
There had been one short night at a posting house in Petersfield and two weeks at the George Inn in Portsmouth, with him gone half the time fitting out little HMS Alacrity for her voyage to the Bahamas.
"Hemm," uttered both Lewrie and his father, for both knew what she was driving at, and the reason for it.
"You're sunk!" Hugh yelled. "I shot you clean through!."
"Did not!" Sewallis loudly objected. "I dis-masted you, so you can't move!"
"Can too!" from Hugh, face-down on the grass to shove his ship.
"Ships don't sink!" Sewallis insisted, shuffling on his knees to move his model frigate. Hugh's followed, at a rate of knots.
"Do too! They burn… they blow up! You're on fire!"
"Lads!" Lewrie barked, springing from his chair and scattering cats. "Leave off!" Another instant and they'd be rolling and pummelling each other. "Here, let me show you how things go."
Lewrie knelt on the grass, green stains on the knees of his old and comfortable white slop-trousers bedamned. "Now, which of ye is the enemy?"
Both pointed at the other accusingly, faces screwed up.
"Let's say the wind's from there, from the stables and the paddock," he instructed, "so you both should be sailin' this way, on the same course. Sewallis has the wind gage, aye, but his larboard guns can't elevate high enough to dis-mast ye, Hugh. You, on the other hand, in his lee, can shoot high enough… "
And, as he explained to his sons, a couple of curious setters, and both cats, that it was very rare for a ship to be sunk in action, that extreme pains were taken to prevent fires, and that it might take an hour or better to batter a foe into submission, Caroline looked on with a fond smile on her face, the very picture of contentment as she absently jammed a fresh scone for Charlotte.
"Ye look… pleased with life, m'dear," Sir Hugo pointed out.
"In the main I am, sir, thank you," she told him with a grin.
"France, though… Paris?" Sir Hugo queried with a scowl.
"Perhaps a second honeymoon,… as I said. A proper one this time," she answered, Though she was smiling, the determined vertical furrow 'twixt her brows was prominent. "After all I've had to put up with… I believe we owe it to each other. A fresh beginning."
"That he owes you, more t'th' point?" Sir Hugo leered.
"Indeed," Caroline rejoined with a slow, firm nod.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
This'll most-like put me in debtors' prison, 'fore we're done! Lewrie ruefully told himself as he delved into his wash-leather coin purse to tip the porters, once their luggage had been stowed aboard the hired coach- some in the boot and the most valuable inside the box. It was prime sport for vagrants and street thugs to slit the straps and leather covers of the boot and make off with the luggage, with the travellers all unsuspecting 'til they reached their last stop.
The porters were a surly lot, unhappy to accept British coinage and to deal with an Anglais, a "Bloody," a Biftec in pidgin French.
"All square?" Lewrie asked the porters. "Uh, c'est tout?Bon?"
"Uhn," growled one; "Grr," the other porter sourly replied.
"Au revoir, then," Lewrie concluded, boarding the coach. "And may ye all catch the pox… if ye ain't poxed already," he muttered under his breath after closing the coach door. "Such a warm and welcomin' people, the Frogs," he told his wife, Caroline, seated by herself on the forward-facing padded bench seat. "Feelin' a touch better, my dear?" Lewrie solicitously enquired.
"The ginger pastilles seem to have availed, yes," she replied.
The crossing on the small packet from Dover to Calais had been a rough one. They'd had bright skies and brisk winds, but the narrows of the Channel when a strong tide was running could produce a prodigious chop, and the packet had staggered and swooped over steep ten-foot seas with only thirty or fourty feet between the swells. The last time that Caroline had been at sea, returning from the Bahamas aboard the little HMS Alacrity, a ketch-rigged bomb converted to a shallow-draught gunboat that would bucket about in any sort of weather past placid, she'd suffered roiled innards for days before regaining the sea legs she had found on the stormy passage out in 1786.
The packet voyage had been so short that Caroline had had no time to acclimate, and she had spent most of the trip past the harbour mole by a bucket or the lee rails. Even last night, spent in a squalid Calais travellers' inn, she could tolerate nothing more strenuous than cups of herbal tea and thin chicken broth.
The ginger pastilles were made in London by Smith amp; Co., recommended by another couple crossing to France with them, Sir Pulteney "Something Fruitish" and his wife, Lady "Starts with an I," both of 'em of the most extreme languid and lofty airs, the sort that set English teeth on edge. Worried about Caroline, Lewrie hadn't paid all that much attention to the social niceties and, once on solid ground at Calais, had been more than happy to decline an invitation to dine with the "Whosits," on account of Caroline's tetchy boudins… A further vague suggestion to meet again in Paris, he'd shrugged off, as well.
"Well, we're off," Lewrie said to fill a void as their coachee whipped up and set their equipage in motion.
"Once out in open country, and fresh, clean air, I expect that we shall enjoy this much better," Caroline opined, holding a scented handkerchief to her nose as she looked out the windows. "It will be a fine adventure, I'm bound."
"Sweeter smellin' than Calais, at any rate," Lewrie agreed with her. "Seaports always reek." Though he suspected that every French city or town would prove as noxious as Dung Wharf or the old Fleet Ditch in London, long ago paved over. And how the Devil did I end up chivvied into this? he asked himself for the hundredth time; guilt most-like. No one back in Anglesgreen had thought much of their jaunt to France. Well, Millicent Chiswick, Caroline's brother's wife, had deemed it a very romantic idyll, but she was about the only one.
Weeks of, well… not exactly harping and nagging had preceded the actuality. There'd been French maps and atlases turning up mysteriously, then a weedy university lad to tutor the children in French, though he and Caroline had somehow become pupils as well. Not that those lessons had done Lewrie's linguistic skills all that much good. He had a smattering of Hindi from service in the Far East between the wars in ' 84, a dab or two of French from duty in the Mediterranean in the '90s (and several good public schools from which he had been booted!), and a few words and phrases of Russian from dealings with the delectable Eudoxia Durschenko and her equally appalling papa, and his most-recent service in the Baltic.