" 'Scuse me, sir," another waiter intruded as the first began to scribble their desires. "You'd be bein' a Captain Lewrie, sir? Lady said t'give ye this, sir."
"A lady?" Lewrie found new cause to gawp aloud as he spun about on his chair and craned his neck to see who the lady in question was. All he could see in the chop-house's crowded tables, though, were men, and only the rare matron dining with her husband. He took the note and opened it, careful to act nonchalant; and not let either Burgess or his barrister get a peek at it over his shoulder.
The first couple of lines, though, were written in some incomprehensible script that put him in mind of his equally unfathomable lessons in Greek, long ago. For all he knew, it could be a bill from some foreigner's laundry service where'd he'd left a bundle years before and had never returned to reclaim, or pay for, yet…
Poor, darling man, I lern of trile to com, for taken Black felloes to mak them free, and am so angre they trect yoo so bad. Lern too yoo are
alone now.
I forgive yoo for break my heart.
Holy shit! he thought, stunned; it was Eudoxia who clobbered me!
I think much of yoo all time since yoo sail away to fite French. I miss yoor company and never we go shooting or hav outside dinner, race horses Ilk we say we do sum day in Africa. Time I see yoo last I say [something in Cyrillic] in yoor leters is paka snova… meaning is see you latter in Rossiya. Circus is winter over river. If yoo com I wood desire see yoo. New dramas and commedys. I hav the truble write in English, but may beyoo teech me beter? I pray for yoo and be in cort is trile begin.
Eudoxia
"A lady, hey?" Burgess enquired, trying not to sound too eager to know who it was from; he'd been in the middle of the lather 'tween Lewrie and his sister Caroline since getting back from India, and any new dalliance would only make things worse. Not that things were anywhere near good, already.
"An admirer who wishes me well in court, Burgess," Lewrie lied, folding over the note again and slipping it into a coat pocket; not before the final line he'd first missed caught his eye.
I hit with snoball good, yes?
"And did the lady request a reply?" Lewrie asked the waiter who still hovered expectantly.
"Nossir," the man said. "Jus' popped in long 'nough t'point ye out and gimme th' note."
"Thankee for deliverin' it," Lewrie told him, digging into his breeches pocket for his coin purse, and giving the fellow a crown coin. He turned his full attention, pointedly so, to the other waiter who held the slate menu. "Roast venison and jugged hare, did ye say? That does sound toothsome. Turtle soup for me, as well, t'begin with. Seeing it is Christmastime, I'd admire a bit of your goose with the raspberry jam sauce, somewhere along the way… a salad between, of course. Right?"
"Very good, sir."
"What?" Lewrie all but yelped once he looked up to his partners at the table, who were both eying him rather charily at that point. "A fellow can't have supporters, and admirers?"
"In your absence, Captain Lewrie," MacDougall sternly said with several slow negative shakes of his head, "Mister Twigg, your father, Sir Hugo, and Major Chiswick here have adverted to me that your relations with your wife are… strained. And, they had confided to me the reasons why, d'ye see, sir. As your legal representative in a serious matter, it is my professional advice to you, Captain Lewrie, that such doings must be kept strictly in check, and the Reverend Wilber-force and other supporters of yours, who are so far true admirers of yours, must not hear of any new escapades, so long as your trial continues. Else, they will withdraw all support… publicity tracts, favourable letters to the papers, and monetary aid, placing the financial burden of your defence upon your own purse."
"Ye mean they haven't heard already?" Lewrie gawped, finding it hard to believe that his father's formerly bad repute would not be enough to put them right off, and "the acorn don't fall far from the oak" and all that nonsense. Surely Twigg must have filled them in, somewhere along the line, he could not
help thinking!
"You are, sir, or so I have led them to believe with what little I have had to reveal," MacDougall most carefully said, "a victim of a jealous termagant." "Oh, I say!" Burgess disputed, in defence of his sister. "A Colonial Loyalist from the Carolinas," MacDougall prosed on, his voice low, and frowning heavily to show that it wasn't personal, as if he disagreed with a disagreeable charade. "Three children enough in her mind, and yet jealous in the extreme. And the long separation demanded by your service to King and Country hasn't helped her suspicions. Those anonymous letters, complete fabrications, have driven her to distraction, and you have been estranged from your wife almost since the war with France began. Primly moral the members of the Abolitionist Society, and the Clapham Sect, may be, but, they are also realists, at bottom, and know, as ministers of the Gospel surely must, the limits of a man's resistance to temptations of the flesh.
"They also know that such temporary dalliances, ones which don't result in rival affairs of the heart, and the rending of families, are sometimes unavoidable… as evinced by men of the upper class who take mistresses to spare their wives the perils of further childbirth. Deplorable, but sometimes necessary, d'ye see."
I can fuck, but I better not kiss on the way out the door? Lewrie thought in puzzlement; the ministers tolerate prostitution? Mine arse on a band-box! Missed that wheedle in the Good Book!
"I'm fine as a martyr to the cause of Abolition, ye mean, just shiny enough t'be their Paladin," Lewrie rephrased it most cynically. "So long as I don't blot my copy book before the trial."
"Uhm, that is pretty much it, sir," MacDougall confessed. "So, it would redound to your vast discredit should you, ah… dally with anyone so long as your legal proceedings last."
"Else they throw me to the lions, wash their hands like Pontius Pilate?" Lewrie pressed. "Hustle me to the gallows, themselves?" "Rapidly," MacDougall assured him with all gravity.
"I s'pose I can go out in publick, though, can I not? See some plays… dine?" Lewrie asked, trying to sound casual, and innocent as the driven snow outside… which, in point of fact, was turning into a grey slush from all the coal smoke and fly ash from the umpteen thousand chimneys in London. "Go see the circus, or…?"
"Oh, a very bad idea, Alan!" Burgess quickly cautioned, wincing, for he knew exactly whom Lewrie might run into; he had met met the lovely, lithe Eu-doxia in Cape Town. "Actresses and circus persons would be a real scandal! Better you take in the city's entertainments with Reverend Wilberforce … a pack of eunuchs."
"D'ye know where t'find some?" Lewrie quipped. "This side of the Ottoman Empire? Or a Venetian castrati choir?"
They peered at him like a brace of buzzards, eyes flinty-hard.
"Well… you're right, both of you," Lewrie finally answered. "I see the risk, and I thank you for your sound advice."
Still, he thought, with mental fingers crossed; they didn't ask me to swear an oath. My trial gets carried over … a continuance did MacDougall call it?… it'll be a long, boresome winter, and a spring too. Me… ashore… where I always get in trouble. Idle hands the Devil's workshop, all that. No wife, no visits home. No seein' the children 'til they're back at their school. No home-made Christmas pudding/ Would there be all that much harm if I saw the circus again, their new shows?