"Not 'til Mistress Connor offers apologies!" Lewrie shot back.
"What, the Greek baggage?" the neighbour said with a sniff.
" 'E's arter some furrin mort, 'e is," a milk-seller wench told a girl with a trey of posies and nosegays.
"She's tormented my wife with lying letters for years," Lewrie accused to the neighbour, whose wife had now joined him. "Daft stuff, imaginin' she's in love with me, 'stead of bein' merely grateful, sir! Spun moonshine 'bout us together, sendin' anonymous letters to drive my wife and me apart,… as if I'd ever leave my Caroline for the likes of her! I found out just yesterday who's been sendin' 'em, and I mean t 'get satisfaction!"
"Well, get it somewhere else, damn ye," the neighbour grumbled. "Sue the uppity foreign bitch, and leave off botherin' this neighbourhood, or I'll call the 'Charlies' on ye. Begone, sir!"
"Mus' be a mad woman, lives 'ere," the teenaged flower vendor told a pieman and a passing couple of strollers. "Thinks she's got 'is feller fer 'er 'usband."
"An' 'im already married, tchah!" the milk-seller said with a spit on the cobbles. "Ready fer Bedlam, she is."
"Furriners," the pieman commented. "Too damned many of ' em in England, ye akses me. Oughter be run out o' 'ere."
"You'll hear from my attorney!" Lewrie shouted one last time, shaking a fist at the windows of Theoni's parlour before departing.
Covent Garden Theatre, the biggest and grandest of all the play-houses in the district, was, thankfully, no longer staging Pizarro and had fallen back on a popular Sheridan play, a recurring staple, though the styles and colours of the fashionable ladies showed that the fads inspired by that play would be around at least 'til midsummer. Lewrie milled round the ornate lobby with a glass of a rather thin Rhenish in one hand, barely tasting it in tiny sips that only moistened his lips as he scanned the arrivals for his prey. And, feeling as nervous as a pick-pocket in a room full of justices, wondering if Theoni would actually dare show her face in Publick, after Twigg had exposed her maid, and he had staged his petty dramatics before her doors.
Nervous as he felt, though, it was hard to keep his mind on the matter, for there were rather a lot of most-attractive women entering the theatre that night, more than a few fetching courtesans and ladies of the demimonde strolling and trolling themselves before the gentlemen without partners, and even the girls who vended oranges and such… whose charms were as delightful as the high-priced courtesans, and whose morals were even lower than most actresses… seemed even more alluring than usual.
Lewrie bought himself a fresh glass of Rhenish, finding that he had drained the first without even noticing, and took an inventory of how long it had been since he had "put the leg over" anything.
Christ, has it been two bloody years? he gawped in wonder after he recalled his last amourous encounter; 'Tis a wonder I don't drool! Or squirt semen out my ears, from the pressure.
His free hand involuntarily went to a left-hand pocket of his waist coat. Aha… two cundums stowed away. Just in case… hmm. 'Long as I go armoured, would a whore be all that bad? he speculated.
Theoni would most-definitely be right-out, within the hour, he grimly determined, and even nuzzling Eudoxia's perfumed neck would be a death sentence. Caroline? The only reason his wife would ever let him under the covers with her again would be a ruse to whip out a very sharp knife and have his "wedding tackle" off, most-like! Even if she believed but half of what Mr. Twigg promised to tell her, there were a tad too many other women he could not explain away.
Must get a recent guidebook t 'London quim, he told himself, and began to regard the strolling women with sharper eyes.
"Dear Captain Lewrie!" a gay voice chirped in giddy sing-song. It was Mrs. Georgina Denby, damn her eyes, tricked out in a stylish satin gown of bright, shimmering blue, with rather more flesh exposed than Lewrie ever wished to see, earrings, necklace, and bracelet of a pale topaz set (if real, he speculated, gossip paid hellish-well!) and a pair of glasses perched on the tip of her nose. A reticule bag of pale blue satin hung from one elbow, and her hands held a small notebook and a pencil. "How delightful to see you, again, sir!"
"Ah, um… Mistress Denby… Georgina," Lewrie flummoxed and applied her first name at her coy prompting, The crowd in the lobby limited his movements, but he sketched her a bow. "You keep well?"
"Excellently well, Captain Lewrie!" she replied, dipping him a stumpy curtsy, then came quite close to mutter, "Has the bitch shown her face yet? Is this truly the appointed time and place?"
"S'posed t 'be, but…," Lewrie said with a shrug.
"Frightened off, most likely," Mrs. Denby whispered, leering and rolling her eyes. "I must circulate. Only here as a witness, not a fellow conspirator, la la!"
"I trust you will enjoy the play tonight, Ma'am," Lewrie said in a more-normal voice, with another brief bow.
"Ah, yes, Captain Lewrie, I am certain I shall," Mrs. Denby replied in her normal gushing tones. "Anything by Sheridan always proves immensely droll and amusing. Ta ta!" With that, she tottered away to smile and nod among the fashionable, and "dirt-worthy."
And there she was! The doorman bowed Theoni Connor inside; a very nervous-looking Theoni, no matter the exquisite care she'd taken with her appearance. Her placid smile simply would not hold for more than a few fleeting seconds, and her eyes had the look of a harried deer as she paused just inside the lobby and peered about to spot him, carefully tossing back the hood of her cape from an artful, bejewelled "do," and unfastening it from her throat.
If I didn't despise her so much, I'd be tryin' t'bed her, Lewrie told himself, for Theoni had come to impress, with a costly set of diamonds on fingers, wrist, and throat, that impressively bouncy bosom of hers a tad more exposed than most women present, and wearing a new gown of champagne and ivory figured satin, with a white lace stole over her shoulders.
She saw him, winced for the briefest moment, then plastered a hopeful smile on her phyz and threaded her way through the crowd in his direction. Lewrie stood stock-still and scowled, and, as she neared, her smile went even sketchier.
"Alan, I…," she said at last, with a nervous toss of her head.
"Madam," Lewrie intoned, still scowling. "I know what you did."
"Alan, if you would-"
"How dare you!" he barked, nigh to his quarterdeck voice. "Have you no shame?"
She squirmed as if looking for a hidey-hole, wringing her hands.
"There is no excuse for tormenting my wife with your anonymous letters, with your made-up lies, Madam," Lewrie harshly told her. "No excuse for besmirchin' me, and tryin' t'ruin my marriage with filth as you have. You'll write no more poison, hear me?"
This was as amusing as any Sheridan play, much like an entr'acte 'tween scenes on the stage inside, and the crowd of theatregoers in the lobby just ate it up, hushing breathlessly, then buzzing and whispering among themselves, all eyes on them.
"Damn you!" Theoni shot back, her artfully made face pale, and sounding breathless, like to swoon. "What of our son? What of all of our letters?"
"As for the letters, Madam," Lewrie replied, and one may trust that he'd thrashed that point out in his head beforehand, "after your rescue from pirates in the Adriatic, by my hand, you wrote me, and I wrote back, to be civil. As for your son, well… you have a son by someone, most-like your dead husband, is one charitable, for you were not that long a widow when I saved your life.
"Leave my wife alone, Madam," he quickly added, raising a hand to cut off her protest, as spots of colour dappled her cheeks. "We'll have no more of your imaginings. Get yourself a man of your own, and do not torment us further. I do not know you, Madam!" Lewrie said in a stern voice, turning away and giving her the "cut direct."
"Why, you…! Lying…!" Theoni spat, then made the worst of all errors one could make in England… in her shock and outrage, she lapsed into what Lewrie took for modern Greek, hurling curses at him, and, falling back on her upbringing on Zante in the Ionian Islands, she added several insulting hand gestures, of the maledictory variety, too.