“H’its damned crowded in there, Lieutenant, an’ there’s a mob o’ others already waitin’, so, ’less ye’ve been sent for…” he rasped.
“Heard it! Heard it!” Westcott hooted back with a grin.
CHAPTER SIX
“Anything for me?” Lewrie asked the club servant behind the anteroom desk as he shrugged off his hat and boat cloak.
“Ehm … yes, sir,” the desk clerk perkily replied. “A letter from a solicitor, a Mister Mountjoy?”
“Excellent,” Lewrie said, breaking the wax seal and unfolding the note on his way to the Common Rooms for a warm-up in front of the fireplace. “Ah hah!”
Mr. Matthew Mountjoy, his long-time solicitor and prize agent, wrote to inform Lewrie that he had just received a tidy sum from Admiralty Prize-Court, and that he had deposited it all at Coutts’ Bank for him. Even with all four ships of Captain Blanding’s small squadron “in sight” when they had fought and taken the four French warships off the Chandeleur Islands off the mouth of the Mississippi and Spanish Louisiana, in 1803, cutting each British ship’s share to a fourth of the total sum, Lewrie’s traditional “two-eighths” was still an impressive sum, and it had been Reliant alone that had run down and taken the other 74-gun ship which had been sailing en flute as a trooper, so her value, less the value of the removed guns, was another welcome amount!
Five hundred pounds to Coutts’, and the rest into the Three Percents, Lewrie determined, smiling in delight as he re-folded the letter and stuck it into a coat pocket. Tomorrow, he would call on Mountjoy, visit the bank, make the transfer to the Funds, then take out enough for a shopping trip. Once warmed, he summoned a club waiter and ordered a brandy. Some enterprising smuggler along the coast must have good connexions, for the club had obtained several ankers of French brandy.
The Three Percents, though; the thought of them brought the painful memory of his last conversation with Lydia Stangbourne’s brother, Percy, Viscount Stangbourne, at their vast house outside Reading.
“If Lydia is determined never to marry, Percy,” he had pleaded, “me, or anyone else, then she must be provided for. Perhaps you could set aside money in the Funds, in her name … some in a solid bank, too, so she’ll have independent means, the rest of her life.”
“Before I gamble it away, hey, Alan?” Percy had tried to tease, which effort had fallen flat. Percy’s new bride, Eudoxia Durschenko, had kerbed his penchant for gambling deep, fearing for the security of herself and her first child-to-be.
“Her two-thousand-pound dowry is her own, too,” Lewrie had stated.
“Christ!” he muttered, shaking his head, shaking off the memory, and brooded near the warm fire, slowly sipping his drink, putting off any thought of dressing in civilian clothes for the symphony that evening, or much of anything else.
* * *
Lewrie had written Lydia as soon as he had completed Reliant’s de-commissioning and had gone up to London to turn all the paperwork over to Admiralty, telling her of his possibly-crippling wound, and that he would go to Anglesgreen to heal up, if possible. Lydia had written back, promising to coach down, but he had asked her not to, in fear that seeing him in his current condition might make her think the less of him, and, once he had realised how he was received by his daughter and in-laws, allowing Lydia to face that same sort of reception was the last thing he’d wish for her.
Finally, round Christmas, he had given in to her continued invitations and had coached up to Reading for the holidays with what few suitable presents he had been able to purchase in the new shops in the town.
Foxbrush, the Stangbournes’ country estate, put any great house Lewrie had ever seen to shame. It was immense, a late-Palladian pile of three storeys, as long as a First Rate ship of the line and as deep, less the inset centre courtyard and carriage entry and broad steps to the front doors, as a frigate. It was spiked with over a dozen chimneys, all fuming in promise of warmth.
Flunkeys in blue-and-white Stangbourne livery had rushed down to Lewrie’s coach to fold down the metal steps, open the door, and hand him down, then gathered his dunnage from the coach’s boot.
The family descended the long flight of stairs more sedately, with Lydia in the lead, and Percy tending his pregnant wife, Eudoxia. Lurking astern of them was Eudoxia’s father, Arslan Artimovich Durschenko, the evil-looking one-eyed former lion tamer from Daniel Wigmore’s circus/menagerie/theatrical troupe, in which Eudoxia had once belonged as a trick shooter with muskets, pistols, and re-curved bow, and trick rider and ingenue actress. Her father wore his usual scowl of disappointment to A, clap eyes on Lewrie, and B, see that he was still alive! In his new role as Percy’s horse master and chief trainer to Viscount Stangbourne’s personally-raised cavalry regiment, the old bastard was looking particularly prosperous.
“Oh, God, you!” Lydia had cried, clinging to Lewrie, and almost sending him tumbling. “I am so glad you are finally, actually, here!”
“It’s been too damned long, aye!” Lewrie had breathed into her hair, leaned back to peer long and deep into her emerald-green eyes, then had given her another long and close embrace.
It had all started so jolly, at least.
There was his leg and his walking stick; there were those long and broad stone stairs, and once his set of rooms was ready, after a hot punch in the small salon (which was as big as his father’s grand ballroom!) there were the several flights and landings to the upper storey where he could un-pack, and rest before having to come back down for supper. That first meal, and the breakfast the next morning, had been just the intimate family circle. From there on, though, it was a constant round of holiday suppers, at Foxbrush, or at the houses of Stangbourne neighbours.
There were dances, in which he could not participate without going arse-over-tit. There were strolls about the property, shortened for his benefit, and morning or afternoon rides with Lewrie on an unfamiliar horse that was as spirited as his own, Anson, back home. And, there were steeplechases or cub hunts, in which he did not take a part at all, seeing them off from the bottom of those detested stone stairs, then returning to the interior of the great house to drink, read, and sulk whilst everyone else trotted off in a clatter to follow the hounds to gay “ta-ta-ras”.
Percy arranged shooting parties, even though he was a bit leery of women taking part, and it didn’t help that Eudoxia would insist on going along in her “condition”, then proving to be the most accurate of them all, with Lewrie second-best and Lydia sometimes out-shooting him.
The best of all was the late evenings after supper, when Lewrie could retire to his rooms, and, once the house was quiet with all but the scullery maids in the kitchens retired for the night, Lydia would make her stealthy way to his bed.
Lame Lewrie might have been, but at least his “wedding tackle” still worked!
* * *
“I still do not understand why you did not wish me to come down to see you,” Lydia had purred, snugly tucked into his arms with her head on his shoulder, and her hair the colour of old honey spilled on his chest. “One might imagine you would be ashamed of me, Alan.”
“Ashamed o’ me!” Lewrie had laughed off. “You think me a cripple now, you should’ve seen how lame I was a few months ago. My old Cox’n and the lads’ve worked me daily, and I’m still not my old self.”
“Well, in some things you are,” Lydia had purred, stretching like a cat against him. “You were afraid that if I’d seen you then, I would have thought the less of you?”
“Yes,” he had confessed. “If the bullet had hit me an inch or so off where it did, I’d be a peg-leg, not fit for anyone, or anything else. Can you imagine how useless and idle I would’ve been, then?”
“But, you are not, and do you continue on with your exercises, or whatever you’ve been doing, you will be completely whole by Spring,” Lydia had encouraged, then had gone sombre. “Then the Navy will have you, again, and you will be off to God knows where for several more years. I cannot bear the thought of that.”