“Aye, she is… devilish-handsome and fetchin’,” Lewrie agreed most assuredly.
Peel’s response was a very broad smile and a nod of approval.
“Well-blessed with God’s own tremendous ‘dot,’ too,” Peel said.
“I don’t give a toss for her dowry,” Lewrie bluntly told him. “Percy’ll most-like gamble them into debtor’s prison, anyway.”
“Usually, when a man says a thing like that, that it isn’t about the money, it usually really is,” Peel said, chuckling in worldly-wise fashion. “You, though, Alan… I can take you at your word. I could… bank on it, what?”
“I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or not,” Lewrie wryly replied. “Too honest for my own good, or a bloody fool.”
“Contemplating marriage, though, are you?” Peel too-idly asked.
“No, and neither does Lydia,” Lewrie told him with a guffaw of denial. “Once bitten, twice shy for her, and me… well, I never got the hang of it, and if she wed me, her reputation’d be utterly ruined! Mean t’say, James… I’m a bounder, a cad, and a rake-hell.”
“Well, some might say you were made for each other,” Peel said with a shrug. “Both of you scandalous?” he added, with a twinkle.
“A bad marriage to a depraved animal was not her fault, and I think you demean the lady, Peel,” Lewrie shot back.
“My pardons, pray forgive me,” Peel quickly retracted, placing a hand on his breast, “for I only know what the papers made of it for years, the divorcement and all. I meant but to tease, but…”
“Forgiven,” Lewrie allowed, more slowly.
“Heard from your nautical sons, lately?” Peel asked, smiling benignly as he changed the subject.
“Aye, I have!” Lewrie enthused. “Hugh’s with Thorn Charlton, on the Brest blockade. Foul weather, cold victuals two days out of four, but he seems t’love it. Sewallis, well… he’s more guarded, yet he sounds as if he prospers. I’ve written his captain, an old friend, Benjamin Rodgers, to enquire, but… tentatively. Haven’t gotten his letter back, yet. You know that Sewallis got his place by fraud and forgery? So…”
“Your father, Sir Hugo, spoke of it to Mister Twigg, and Twigg related it to me,” Peel admitted. “Keep it in petto, sub rosa, what?”
Damme if he doesn’t know ev’rything ’bout ev’rybody! Lewrie had to tell himself; he cocked a wary brow over that admission.
“You have a letter sent to us, too,” Peel said, off-handedly.
Oh, shit, here it comes! The Secret Branch’s leash!
“Indeed,” Lewrie said over the rim of his tankard, keeping his phyz as inscrutable as he could.
“Recall I told you back in the summer how hard it is to maintain communication with people willing to keep us informed of doings over in France?” Peel said, beginning to peel the onion, at it were. “The French open and read every letter, and have cut off all correspondence with Great Britain?”
“Yes, I recall,” Lewrie stonily replied, refusing to be drawn.
“Yet, we still have ways… tradecraft which we hope keeps a step ahead of French snoopers,” Peel continued, shifting on the settee and making it creak; he was heavier than in his Household Cavalry days, or his early years with Foreign Office as Zachariah Twigg’s pupil. “Wee notes, some coded, sewn into shirt collar bands, pasted into book backs, that sort of thing?”
“Ah, cleverness,” Lewrie warily commented, heavy-eyed.
“As draconian as the French police-state is, with the guillotine the reward for espionage and treason against the Emperor Napoleon, there are few who’d dare keep us informed,” Peel continued, sounding like a chapman trying to flog a dubious product. “So we must do all we can to maintain contact with them, and at the same time do all we can to protect them from exposure. What they do for us is incredibly brave, and rashly dangerous, should they be discovered. Those brave few are rather admirable.”
“I doubt the Frogs’d think so,” Lewrie said, cracking a smile; a damned wee’un. “Depends on one’s point of view.”
“You are familiar with one of them,” Peel hinted, all a’twinkle again.
“I rather doubt it’s Guillaume Choundas,” Lewrie scoffed. “I think I put paid t’that ugly bastard.”
“No, not him!” Peel informed him, laughing. “Do you ever fight a duel, let me know when and where, so I can get a good seat, and see how accurately you shoot. The fall from that cliff would have killed him anyway, but that shot of yours, with a smooth-bore musket from a heaving boat at nigh an hundred yards, was spot-on, right in the fiend’s heart. We have that as Gospel… from a witness,” Peel hinted again.
“There were only two people I knew who were there when… No!” Lewrie gasped. “That murderin’ bitch?”
“Let us say that Mademoiselle Charite Angelette de Guilleri has lost her faith in the Revolution, in Bonaparte, and her raison d’etre, hey?” Peel said, smirking. “When Bonaparte sold New Orleans and all of Louisiana to the United States, he cut the very heart out of her, making the deaths of her brothers and her cousin, and their romantic but damn-fool revolt against the Spanish, and their piracy that funded it, meaningless.”
That had been Lewrie’s doing, requiring him to go up the Mississippi to New Orleans in mufti with a commercial trader/informant and sometime Secret Branch “asset” to “smoak them out,” then escape and use his Proteus frigate to smash the pirate encampment on Grand Terre, in Barataria Bay, slaying the lot and burning their vessels.
“The bitch shot me!” Lewrie exclaimed in heat. “With a Girandoni air-rifle like that’un yonder,” he said, jerking an arm towards his personal weapons rack. “Would’ve killed me, too, if the flask’d had enough compressed air in it!”
“For which the Crown, Mister Twigg, and I are grateful that she did not,” Peel said, sounding earnest.
“Broke her wee, black heart, did Bonaparte?” Lewrie sneered in baby-talk. “Bloody good! I hope she suffers! Dammit, Peel, she had a hand in killin’ my wife on that beach!”
“I know, Lewrie… Alan,” Jemmy Peel sombrely said. “And for her forlorn loss, her gallant stab at fomenting a French Creole revolution in New Orleans, Charite de Guilleri won the admiration of the finest salon society in Paris… admiration, pity, and entre, what? Lewrie, she rubs shoulders with French generals, admirals, the head of Bonaparte’s National Police, that brute Fouche. The Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, has tucked his arse under her sheets, and she has been to tea with anyone who’s anyone in French government… with Empress Josephine and Bonaparte himself!”
“Bloody good for her,” Lewrie sneered again.
“She’s the highest, and closest placed source, we ever could hope to have,” Peel pressed on. “She quite cleverly found a fellow in our… employ… and used him to get a letter out to us, offering to supply us with information.”
“Unless Fouche’s caught your ‘fellow,’ and is usin’ her access as bait,” Lewrie countered with scorn. “Use both t’feed you useless twaddle that’ll have ye runnin’ in circles.”
Like all the people who specialised in skullduggery for King and Country whom Lewrie had encountered, James Peel all but goggled at him, as if Toulon and Chalky had begun to sing “God Save The King” in perfect two-part harmony. No one ever thought Lewrie clever!
“We considered that, quite seriously, for a goodly time,” Peel confessed, after a long moment’s contemplation, “but decided that it would be too convoluted a scheme. Fouche, or his associate, M’sieur Real, are rather direct sorts. Do they find a spy, their usual course of action is round him up, his family too, torture them ’til they sing like larks, then behead them publicly as a warning. It’s not as if we have threesomes or larger groups of agents organised over yonder, for all of the exiled royalists’ schemes and gold. Bonaparte’s nailed the borders shut so tightly that sending funds to support espionage is out of the question… too damned heavy, for one.