"You are too kind!"
"Think nothing of it, ma'am. I would be only too happy to give you my every assistance," Lucy purred. She clapped her hands quite briskly. "Tyche?" she called without looking, and her black maid-servant came on the run to attend her. Lucy gave her instructions to allow Mrs. Hillwood the use of her toilet, and for Tyche to help her rearrange her habiliment. Mrs. Hillwood headed off for the stairs, and Lucy glared at him as he said his goodbyes.
"Alan, how could you?" she demanded in a soft voice, but one tinged with a certain menace.
"How could I what, Lucy?" Alan asked, wondering if he looked half as innocent as he was trying to look.
"Mrs. Hillwood is really the most despicable woman," Lucy told him with some heat. "I say woman rather than lady, despite her airs and her pretensions."
"Well, how was I to know that, Lucy?" Alan shot back. "I met her once before, near on two years ago at one of Sir Richard Slade's suppers."
"My God, it gets worse and worse!" Lucy spat. "The most infamous… I cannot find the strength to name the man's sinful predilictions… no proper lady could. And what were you doing in such a place?"
And just where did this termagant mort come from? Alan wondered, amazed at the change from the sweet and gentle and cooing lovely girl he thought he had known and desired.
"My captain in Parrot knew him from school, and I and another midshipman were invited to join him for supper." Alan shrugged it off.
"And were you not scandalized by all the goings-on?"
"I saw none." Alan tried to scoff. "We had a feed the like of which I had not seen since London, and the victuals held more interest. After a year of Navy issue, I'd have dined with the Devil himself if he set a good table." He chuckled.
"If you sup with the Devil, as you say, I trust you used a long spoon." Lucy fumed.
"Now look here, Lucy." Alan attempted to bluff it out when he saw that dumb innocence would not suit. "She came up to me and introduced herself. All I know of her was she was several chairs down from me at table nearly two years ago. I've probably gone into the same chop-house as notorious murderers back in London, but that don't make me guilty of murder. How could you think such a thing? As for this un-named prediliction of Sir Richard's, well, I know nothing of that, either. You use me rather ill, I think."
"Oh, Alan, I'm sorry." She mellowed suddenly, allowing him to offer an arm to lead her toward the buffet tables. "What must you think of me, to accuse you of encouraging such a woman. It is only that I have missed you so much. And I come back down to find you in the clutches of a trull whose reputation is no better than it should be. What a welcome I've given you. Please forgive me, but I was suddenly so jealous I could hardly utter a civil word, to her, or to you."
"Jealous, is it?" he coaxed gently.
"I shall own to it," she whispered, leaning close as they went to a side-board and began to pick at the delicacies to load on their plates. "After months of only letters from you, I could not let anyone steal one precious minute of our time. Perhaps the tales about Mrs. Hillwood aren't whole cloth, but you can understand why I was so uncharitable about her. Come to think of it," she smiled, poking him in the ribs with her fork, "you were not so charitable to those other young fellows I was with. Damn their blood, did you say?"
"And their eyes and kidneys, and anything else they have they can spare," Alan assured her.
"So you were jealous, too. Admit it," she prodded.
"I own to it, too," he muttered so others could not hear. "You don't know half of what I've been through since Antigua, with only your letters for comfort, and those months apart."
As soon as I decyphered 'em, he qualified to himself, for Lucy was what one could charitably describe as an inventive speller, with a quick, darting penmanship that started out in neat round (horribly misspelled) words, and when she got to the exciting bits, went mystifying as the scratches on Stonehenge.
"And you must tell me everything, darling Alan," she begged. "Was it really so terrible?"
"It was pretty rough," he allowed modestly. "There are some things you'd best never know, some of the things that happened during the siege, and during our escape are unsuitable for a lady to hear."
"And I wrote of silly social things while you were being racked by shot and shell." She sighed. "How could I have been so cruel or thoughtless? Yet I wrote you often. You did not get them?"
"Well, the mails never caught up with the fleet before we left New York, and then we were stuck in the Chesapeake," Alan told her. "The Frogs and the Rebels weren't about to trot out the penny post for us. There were dozens of letters to you I never could post myself, some the Rebels captured I suppose."
"You mean those uncouth, quarrelsome people have read my letters?"
Conversations with her take the strangest bloody twists and turns, he sighed to himself, and had to cosset her out of her pet. But for the rest of the evening, during the strolling about in the suffocatingly hot rooms, the dancing and the card games and a brief tour of the side-terrace for some air, where they could indulge their need to hold each other and kiss passionately, he managed to keep her happy and positively glowing. As he paid his respects to the family, they treated him as almost one of the family, though nothing concrete had been settled, but that was sure to come, in time.
All in all, except for walking back to the docks with an erection he could have doubled for a belaying pin, it was a good run ashore. And there was always Betty Hillwood and her invitation to "tea."
Chapter 4
There were a lot of "teas" in the next week or so. Once more Alan was thankful that in harbor officers stood no fixed watches, and once what few duties were done for the day, could absent themselves to their own amusements.
If I spend the rest of my career doing this, I shan't cry, Alan thought smugly as he lay back on the soft mattress, panting for air in the close tropical heat. The linens clung to them, crinkled with perspiration, and he fanned them with a corner of the sheet.
"You insatiable beast!" Betty Hillwood uttered with a gasp for air herself. "Pour us something cool, Alan dear, whilst I try to recover my senses."
He hopped off the bed and filled their wine glasses with lemonade-she was a lot more fun if he kept her out of reach of the gin, or at least cut down on her consumption during the early hours of their trysts. He stood over her and offered her a glass, enjoying the slim form, still beaded with mutual perspiration, and her incredibly soft skin reddened in all the most interesting places by having his body pressed so close to hers. Over forty or not, she was more woman than most men could stand and live to talk about.
"The pot calls the kettle black, love?" he told her as she took a sip. "Now who's insatiable, damn my eyes."
"You're even more impressive than I first remembered," she said, shifting to sit up on one elbow and pile pillows behind her head. She gave a delightful groan when she said it. "Before, you were a randy boy, for all your eagerness."
"Clumsy, was I?" he chuckled, climbing back into bed and laying against the footboard pillar so their legs entwined.
"No, my chuck, just… exuberant," she crooned, plying her toes around his groin playfully. "A year's hard service has made you even more a man to suit my taste. Harder… leaner… the most impressive and satisfying fuck I've known."
Once out of polite society, and her clothing, Betty Hillwood had always had the mouth of a farrier-sergeant. Perhaps it was the gin that loosened her tongue and her inhibitions, if she truly had any.
She demanded pleasure as her due, since she would not get it from her husband, who preferred to live inland on one of his plantations and bugger the field hands and the house-boys. There was no longer any coy pretense of seduction between them, no more teasing conversation or tea to be poured, no guests to shoo off so he could return after he had made a proper goodbye, so they could play innocent for Society. He came to her after a morning or afternoon with Lucy and her parents, sometimes came to her direct from the ship, and the black servant let him in and then took her leave. Betty Hillwood met him in morning gown or her bed-clothing, under which she tantalizingly wore nothing. They would have a drink, no more than one, while she let her clothing fall open, and they would be grappling with each other within a quarter-hour, making it to the bedroom at the back of her cool apartments most of the time but not always-there was a good assortment of settees and chairs to roger on, an escritoire of just the right height to support her small buttocks, and a marble-topped breakfast table by a shuttered window that made a cool change if the day was too hot.