“Oh, good ho!” Blanding said with a happy, satisfied snort.
They could not quite catch what Sir Harper Strachan was saying under his breath, or quite make out the sound of grinding teeth.
“Palace staff will now assist you with your appearances,” Sir Harper gravelled, “should you feel any adjustments are necessary.”
“The ‘necessary,’ aye, by Jove,” Blanding said, peering about for a door which might lead to a “jakes.” He was pointed to a door to one side of the room, and eagerly trotted off.
“Might I assist you, sir?” a catch-fart in palace livery asked Lewrie, a wee minnikin who barely came up to his shoulder.
“Just whisk the bloody hair powder off, thankee,” Lewrie told him. “Think I can manage the rest myself,” he added with a nod at the door, behind which Blanding was urinating as loudly as a heifer on a flagstone floor and humming a gay air.
“Quite so, sir!” the wee fellow happily agreed.
Once back in the hall, Lewrie got introduced to Mrs. Blanding, the Reverend Blanding, and Miss Blanding; the Reverend Brundish he already knew. The son was already as plump as his father and mother, and affected an Oxonian accent as irritating as Strachan’s. The daughter was somewhat pretty-she had not yet inherited her mother’s slightly raw and rosy complexion. Once the “allow me to name to yous” had been done, Captain Blanding launched into a paean of praise for how Lewrie had been so energetic and clever during their service together, which forced Lewrie to put on his false modesty (a sham at which he was un-commonly good, by then). It appeared that their fusses over his many “Submit” hoists, and all the woes of the convoy, were quite forgiven.
“Such an arduous task,” Miss Blanding piped up, sounding as she chanted. “As daunting as any labour of Hercules, to deal with so many un-co-operative merchant captains.”
“Like herding cats,” Lewrie rejoined with a grin and a wink.
“Or, much like the early years of King David, when he was but a humble shepherd boy,” the Reverend Blanding the younger added.
Oh, Christ, here come the bloody sheep, again! Lewrie cringed.
“First to slay Goliath, then to see his flock to safety, aha!”
“Quite so, Jeremy, quite so!” Chaplain Brundish praised.
“The slaying part was a lot more fun,” Lewrie told them.
“The French, of course,” Miss Blanding said, her cheeks colouring a bit at her daring to speak in company, no longer reckoned to be a child, who should be seen but not heard. “Father wrote us of your bereavement, Captain Lewrie, and, dare I note the satisfaction that the victory over them I would imagine provided you?”
“Well, a touch of mine own back, aye,” Lewrie gruffly answered.
He was saved by his father’s arrival, with a glass of wine in his hands, and it was Lewrie’s task to make the introductions all over again.
“You must be very proud of your son this day, Sir Hugo,” Captain Blanding purred.
“Indeed, Captain Blanding, indeed I am,” Sir Hugo boasted, rocking on the balls of his slippered feet. “Amazed, too, I must own, for I never thought he could direct his boyhood boldness into useful work… but, God help the French, hey? He ever tell you how he was sent down from Harrow, and why? Lord, but he was a caution in those days!”
“Why, no, I don’t believe so, Sir Hugo,” Blanding said, cocking his head to one side.
“My lords and ladies, gentlemen and gentlewomen… the King!” a functionary bellowed, with a thud of his mace.
Way was made to either side of the great hall, like the parting of the Red Sea for Moses; there was a fanfare, an end to the sprightly string music from the court orchestra, and a great deal of deep bowing and curtsying. Heads and gazes were lowered, but… some once-only guests like Lewrie did peek, as did the gossip-mongers, looking for a sign that King George was still in decent health, or fading fast; and to be sure, members of the Privy Council and the under-ministers of the latest Pitt administration searched for clues regarding the continuation of the present monarch, and their prestigious offices.
Well, he looks sane, Lewrie told himself; but, there’s no real way t’tell, is there? Whilst he was still in the West Indies, one of his father’s letters had noted that King George had opened Parliament in February by addressing the body as “my Lords and Peacocks”! Since Lewrie had never really seen him in the flesh before-a parade of fast-trotting royal coaches jingling through St. James’s Square where Lewrie had grown up (admittedly not the good side of the square, much like his family’s repute!), a hat in a window, and a glance of a pudgy and serenely bland face for an eyeblink-he had only the portraits in the gallery of Ranelagh Gardens to go by, and if he’d met him in a shop in the Strand, he wouldn’t have known him from Adam!
The King was looking a tad rickety. He’d always been a hefty fellow, as rotund as the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, as Captain Blanding and his brood, but now the King’s scarlet-trimmed and gold-laced dark blue suitings looked as loose and free as a flagging jib.
“Queen’s ill again?” he heard someone whisper. “Where’s she?”
“And, here comes Prinny,” another muttered.
“His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales!” the major-domo cried.
Down the crowd went again in bows and curtsys, as a lesser fan-fare sounded.
“Be the Regent soon, you mark my words,” someone snidely hissed.
“God help us, then,” a woman whispered back. And, once the King and the Prince of Wales had passed them, and they could stand upright again, the same woman remarked, “The Prime Minister’s in no better condition. He’s played out.”
“Well, we’ve Lord Canning and Lord Castlereagh,” her companion pointed out. “And a pack of ninnies. The William Pitt government now consists of William, and Pitt, and the scribblers,” he japed.
Sir Hugo’s letter had expressed concerns that when William Pitt had returned to office, he’d refused to find a position in his ministry for Addington, whom he’d supplanted, and refused his own cousin and friend, Lord Grenville. Pitt had even angered the Navy by turning out Admiral Lord St. Vincent, “Old Jarvy,” as First Lord of the Admiralty, just as his campaign to root out corruption, malfeasance, graft, and double-dealing in the Victualling Board and HM Dockyards had begun to solve some of the long-standing problems. He’d replaced him with a man who could have cared less, Henry Viscount Melville, Lord “Business As Usual”! Government was run by an un-talented pack of nobodys.
“Looks a tad off his feed, don’t he?” Sir Hugo whispered with a raspy sarcasm. “Though Prinny’s bulkin’ up nicely, good as a prime steer.”
“Where’d ye find the wine?” Lewrie asked.
“For you, that’s for after,” his father rejoined. “No matter do I get squiffy, but you… you’re the trick-performin’ pony in this raree-show.”
“Why’d ye bring up our Harrow bomb-plot?” Lewrie further asked.
Long ago, Lewrie at a callow sixteen, and a clutch of his fellow rake-hells at Harrow had decided to emulate Guy Fawkes’s plot to blow up Parliament, and had obtained the materials with which to lash back at the school governor by blowing up his carriage house. They’d been caught right after, of course, Lewrie with the smouldering slow-match in his hands, and expelled. It was a feat to be dined out upon, but not a fact to be blurted out to a superior officer who might imagine that Lewrie still harboured pyrotechnical urges.
“Gawd, you’re clueless!” Sir Hugo said with a snort. “See how Miss Blanding was makin’ cow’s-eyes? Ye told me they were stayin’ in London t’find her a suitable match. Want t’be that poor bugger?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, they couldn’t…!” Lewrie objected.