Текст книги "Hostile Shores"

Автор книги: Dewey Lambdin

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

At such short notice, hiring an elegant coach-and-four for the return to Portsmouth was out of the question, so what Pettus managed to turn up was a weather-beaten and drab coach with cracked or stained glass windows, ratty interior fabrics, and leather bench seats so hard that there might not have been any horse-hair padding left. To make things even worse, the team looked more due the knacker’s yard, maybe even overdue. The coachee was rail thin, taciturn, and sour, but swore that he was of the temperance persuasion, and a Methodist Dissenter.

“And here I’ve thought all this time that Methodists were prone t’leapin’ enthusiasm,” Lewrie chuckled after they rattled away from the Madeira Club’s stoop in the “early-earlies” in a light fog. “It must be the temperance part that makes him as dour as Wilberforce’s crowd.”

“Does he stick with cider instead of ale, sir, perhaps he will cost you less,” Pettus suggested. He was cringing in a corner of the coach’s front bench seat, shrunk up in mortification, looking even more abashed than he had when he’d overlooked Lewrie’s presentation sword. “And, twenty-odd miles on, there will surely be a better team.”

“Assumin’ these beasts live long enough t’get to the next posting house,” Lewrie said with a sigh and a roll of his eyes.

“Sorry, sir,” was all that Pettus had to say, in a mutter.

“Oh, worse things happen at sea, I’m told,” Lewrie rejoined in slight mirth. “Do you shuffle over to the starboard side, we can both keep watch for Mistress Lydia’s coach.”

*   *   *

Out in open country beyond London, on the way to Guildford, the traffic thinned out from the nose-to-tail crush of all the waggons and carts and drays bringing goods and produce to town. Even so, a fresh coach came along at least once every two minutes or so. Some were of local origin, light one-horse or two-horse carriages trotting along to carry country folk from one village or hamlet to the next. Every now and then, with a thunder of hooves, the cracking of whips, and the tara-tara warnings from the assistant coachees, much larger diligence coaches or regularly scheduled flying “balloon” coaches came dashing toward them with six– or eight-horse teams, swaying and pitching fit to throw passengers and luggage from the cheaper seats on the rooves, barrelling “ram you, damn you” and expecting anyone with the least bit of sense to get right out of their way.

There were young, flashing gentlemen, “all the crack and all the go”, driving their two– and three-horse chariots at similar paces as the passenger coaches, dust or mud flying in their wakes, and flashing past their own shabby coach with shouts of glee over how rapidly they could eat the miles, and how daring they were. Lewrie’s coach was passed by a pair bound South from behind them, two chariots racing wheel-to-wheel like ancient Romans in the Colosseum, and damning Lewrie’s equipage for a “slow-coach” as they careened around them!

Now and then, though rarely, a much grander coach-and-four came trotting toward them, with liveried coachmen in the driver’s box and in the bench above the coach’s rear boot. Most of those coaches bore no family crests on their doors, and those that did went by so quickly that it was hard for Lewrie and Pettus to discern even the colours or the shapes of the crests, and it was a rare coach with painted heraldry that bore a crest large enough to be recognised.

Lewrie tried to recall how large the Stangbourne crest had been and the colour of the coach they’d shared to Sheerness, the one she had taken the last time she’d come down to Portsmouth, and began to wonder if he would recognise it if it sat right in front of him, at full stop! As rich as Lydia and her brother Percy were, they might have more than a dozen carriages and coaches for every occasion!

Assuming that Percy hadn’t gambled them into debtors’ prison in the meantime!

They got to Guildford for a change of horses, and a chance to stretch their legs. The four poor prads were led off to rest and feed, heads hanging low, and as the coachman arranged a fresh team, Lewrie and Pettus had a quick breakfast of bacon strips and cheese on thickly sliced bread with smears of spicy, dark mustard, and pint mugs of ale. When offered, their coachman settled for a hard-boiled egg, toast, and hot tea … without sugar or cream.

“Evidently, cream and sugar are too luxurious for ‘temperance’ people,” Lewrie commented in a whispered chuckle. “God only knows what a cinnamon roll’d do … one bite, and he’d be found in a gutter with crumbs on his face, clutchin’ a bottle o’ rum, weepin’ for bein’ a back-slider!”

Once a slightly more promising team was hitched up, they were off once more, at a slightly better pace this time, for more peering at the passing traffic. They passed the turning for Chiddingfold, the narrow road that led to Anglesgreen and Lewrie’s father’s estate. He wished that he could spare the time to see his daughter, Charlotte, but … no, Lewrie sadly reckoned; that could only turn out stiffly, and badly. He had written her. That would have to be good enough.

*   *   *

A bit North of Liphook, Pettus pulled his head back into the coach to announce, “Here comes another coach-and-four, sir, with liveried coachee and all.”

Lewrie stuck his head out of the lowered door window, peering ahead. What he could see of the approaching coachman’s livery under his opened black great-coat looked like the royal blue and white trim that he remembered, the coach was very much like the dark green with discreet gilt trim one that Lydia had used in London, and had used to come down to Portsmouth before, and its wheel rims and spokes appeared to be the same jaunty canary yellow.

Lewrie leaned further out, half-standing with head and shoulders out the window, looking to see if the passengers were—!

“Lydia!” he bellowed as he espied a woman seated in the middle of the front-facing rear bench seat, a woman with loose and curly hair the colour of old honey. “Lydia Stangbourne! It’s me, Alan!”

“What the Devil?” the female passenger cried back, mouth agape in shock as her coach came level with his and whisked by.

“Driver, draw up!” Lewrie bellowed to their coachman, opening the coach door to hang out and look aft. In his loudest quarterdeck bellow, he shouted, “Lydia, draw up!”

Sure enough, the other coach was being reined in, and he could see Lydia leaning out an opened window. It was she!

“Draw up, did you say, sir?” their dour coachman asked.

“Goddamn right I did! Whoa, stop right now!” Lewrie exclaimed as he kicked the metal folding steps down with a booted foot. Before the coach could come to a full stop, he was jumping down and running back up the road. “Hoy, Lydia, it’s me!” he cried, waving madly.

He got to her coach in a trice and pulled down the door handle to whip it open.

“Good God!” Lydia gasped. “Where did you spring from?”

“God called away t’London, a bit after I sent you a letter,” he said, knowing that he was grinning like a loon and not caring if he was or not. He sprang inside her coach, ignoring her goggling maid-servant, and sat beside her. “I sent a note round your house, and got told you’d already left, so I was hopin’ t’run across you like this, somewhere on the road, at any rate … comin’ or goin’, no matter. You look simply … wonderful!”

And ain’t ye goin’ t’gush somethin’ back? Lewrie wondered at Lydia’s reticence. She was smiling, but it wasn’t the same sort of adoring look that he remembered. In point of fact, one of her brows was arched, as if nettled by his sudden appearance. And, she had yet to offer him even one of her hands, much less a cool peck on a cheek! He put that down to the presence of the maid-servant. Lydia could be warm, open, and girlishly animated in private, very quick to smile or laugh out loud. In public, though, her demeanour was arch and imperious, guarded, cautious, and aloof. Given that she had been the victim of nearly three years of scandal and newspaper gossip when she had pled for a Bill of Divorcement in the House of Commons, with charges and countercharges from her bestial husband almost a daily thrill for avid readers, it was no wonder that she had need to armour herself. During the procedure, and even after Parliament had voted her Divorcement and rejected her husband’s, Lydia had become a scorned and rejected woman to all but her closest old friends and her small family.

Lewrie had forgotten that in his eagerness, and silently chid himself for being so boyish.

“I tried to spot your coach on the way to London, but no luck,” Lewrie babbled on. “And now you’re returning to the city?”

“You were not in Portsmouth,” she replied, nigh accusingly.

“Admiralty,” Lewrie told her with a shrug. “They summon, I have to go, and I hadn’t gotten your reply to my invitation, so I could make no plans for your arrival ’till I knew where we both were, when you were coming down, if you would be coming at all.”

“The George Inn was full,” Lydia said, rustling her skirts in irritation. “I ended up spending the night at some place called the Blue Posts … full of Midshipmen and … eager young Lieutenants.”

Ouch! Lewrie cringed; Full o’ lusty young sprogs, she means, and her the only woman in sight!

“Sorry for that, Lydia,” Lewrie said. “That couldn’t have been enjoyable. Er … you’re not in a tearin’ rush t’get back to London, are you? Mean t’say, Liphook’s but a few miles away, and there’s an inn there.”

Her expression was stony, and her dark-emerald-coloured eyes bore a leery squint.

“We haven’t seen each other in ages, and at the least I could offer you dinner, or just a pot of tea, or…,” Lewrie offered, feeling his neck beginning to burn when he realised that he was pleading. “Talk things over? Catch up on the latest news since your last letter got to me in the Bahamas? The last I got was four months ago.”

“I would be getting into London a little after dark as it is, Alan,” Lydia said, turning her head away in contemplation for a moment. “Even if my coachmen are in Percy’s regiment, and go well-armed, he’d have a fit did I expose myself to the risk of highwaymen at night. I fear that I cannot accept your kind offer.”

At least she called me by my Christian name, he bemoaned.

“I will take a breath of air, and a stroll whilst we are here,” Lydia said to her maid. To Lewrie, with the beginnings of a smile at long last, she said, “If you will be so good as to hand me down, sir?”

Lewrie sprang from the coach to do the footman’s job of folding down the metal steps, then offered her a steady arm to support her as she descended. With her left arm atop his right, they began to stroll toward his hired coach. With fewer witnesses, Lydia leaned close to him, pressing her cheek to his shoulder for a second.

“It is so good to see you, too, Alan,” Lydia said with evident fondness in her voice, and looking into his face with a grin so wide that her nose did its usual, endearing, crinkle. “I, too, have most anxiously tried to spy you on the road, after I sent a note out to your ship, and your First Officer, Westcott, sent me a reply that you had gone up to London. I dearly wish that I could accept your invitation of dinner, or a pot of tea, but … I fear you must be back in Portsmouth by dark yourself, must you not?”

“True, I must,” Lewrie told her, explaining the sad condition of his ship’s bottom, and the urgency of her cleaning before joining Popham’s expedition. “The earlier it’s started, the earlier it’s ended, and we’ll be off.”

“To the South Atlantic?” Lydia gasped. “So soon?”

“I am so sorry, Lydia,” Lewrie said with a long sigh. “Barely back to England, and whish!—then God only knows how long we’ll be before Reliant is de-commissioned and paid off at home, again. Who’d be a sailor, hey? Or … someone who waits for one?” he asked as he gently slid his arm round her waist and drew her to face him.

“This is so cruel!” Lydia whispered, her eyes going moist. “God, how I’ve longed for you to return, and not knowing when that would be. I thought you were still on the other side of the ocean, then your note arrived saying that you were in Portsmouth, with no hint that you were returning!…”

“I’d have gotten back before any letter would have arrived, we left so quickly,” Lewrie explained. “The mail packet’d still be mid-ocean. Sorry about that.”

“How blissfully happy I was to know that you were back safely, and wanted me to come to you,” Lydia said, almost in a whimper. “And to dash off like a bloody … fool!… to find you gone, without one thought for me. No lodging arranged, not even an explanation left for me ’til I had to beg one from your Westcott. Damn you, Lewrie!”

Uh-oh! I’m in the “quag” up t’my neck! Lewrie cringed.

“I didn’t know you’d be coming down, so how could I…,” Lewrie tried to wriggle out, but stopped and peered into her eyes. “I’ve made you angry, haven’t I? Lydia, I am so sorry. Believe me, I wanted to see you just as desperately. If I’d been aboard to get word that you were coming, I’d have strewn the road with rose petals. I did not mean to seem like I ignored you. Don’t be cross with me, Lydia. If we have only a few minutes together here—”

“Yes, you have made me angry, Alan,” Lydia snapped with an impatient toss of her head. “Angry with you, and angry with myself for being such a bloody idiot! Angry for laying myself open to such disappointment. I am angry with you for having to spend a night being gawked at, goggled, and snickered over like a high-priced whore at that horrid lodging house. God knows, I should be accustomed to snickers, scorn, and snubs by now, but I find that I am not, and I did not care to be reminded of how scandalous people think me!”

Christ, I’ve opened Pandora’s Box! Lewrie quailed; She’s ventin’ hot as Vesuvius!

“Lydia, I didn’t mean for that t’happen, I could never—,” he tried to say to mollify her, but she was on a righteous tear, by then.

“Now, just because you ran across me on the road, you’d wish me to lodge with you in some ratty country inn, so you can use me for a convenient vessel for your pent-up lust?” she spat.

Thought of it, Lewrie qualified to himself; but I’ll not admit that to her, by God!

“That’s not what I intended, Lydia,” he lied, trying to assure her. “Just an hour or so of your company over tea, or– Oof!”

Lydia Stangbourne, daughter of a Viscount, punched him in the stomach with a dainty kid-gloved fist! Lewrie had forgotten that she was stronger than most women, the result of strenuous outdoorsy activities in the country. She hunted and shot and fished, managed horses as good as any groom, and even took secret lessons from a swordmaster.

He stepped back to rub his belly. “Will you strike me, again, m’dear, or should I borrow one of the coachmen’s whips?” he asked.

The rant was over, though. Lydia put her hands to her face and lowered her head. When she looked up a moment later, she was weeping, with her face screwed up in misery.

“Oh, Alan!” she cried, and flung her arms round his neck.

“I am so sorry, Lydia,” he muttered into her sweet-smelling hair. “We could call it a comedy of errors, ’cept it ain’t all that funny. I’m sorry we ended up at cross purposes, missin’ each other coming and going, and might not be able t’see each other again for weeks more, if the Navy has their say in it. All I meant was to sit and talk, have a laugh or two, not … Hush now, dear girl,” he comforted her by swaying her slowly. “Don’t cry, Lydia. Don’t cry.”

She gave out a loud sniff against his shoulder.

“Have you a pocket handkerchief, Alan?” she softly asked. “I must look a fright, and what any passersby must think of me … like a jilted … trull!”

“A trull, you?” Lewrie tried to cajole. “A fright? No. You’re as handsome and fetchin’ as ever, Lydia. Remember what I told you the time we all coached down to Sheerness … that no one could ever take you for a doxy, or a trull. They’d think you a captain’s lady.”

She stepped a bit apart to dab at her eyes with the requested handkerchief, blew her nose, then broke out in a shy and embarrassed smile. She handed the handkerchief back, which act made her laugh as she did so. “Sorry about that, now it’s so damp.”

“Cherish it forever!” Lewrie quipped. “Have it framed—”

Her arms went round his neck again as she silenced him with a long and passionate kiss. Lewrie wrapped his arms round her to lift her off her tiptoes and drape her against him, and coachmen and servants be-damned. Their kisses were urgent, her breath hot and turning musky, and Lewrie felt a rigid awakening in the fork of his trousers.

Lewrie half-heard the clopping of a horse on the road.

“There’s rooms to let down the road in Liphook, don’t ye know!”

Lewrie broke off their kiss to scowl, discovering an older gentleman in corduroy, tweeds, top-boots, and a curl-brimmed thimble hat as their taunter, obviously a prosperous local landowner, who was in high humour, and sporting a wide leer.

“Sod off!” Lewrie called back, which made the older fellow snap his head about and almost rein in.

“Yes, just … sod off!” Lydia added, laughing out loud, then leaning close to Lewrie to whisper, “You must tell me later what ‘sod off’ means, Alan!” with impish delight.

“Happy to,” Lewrie assured her. “You may find it serves usefully in London, when anyone dares snub you.”

Both of them had stepped back, though still holding each other’s hands. Lydia looked up at him contemplatively. “This bottom-cleaning you speak of. It will occupy you fully? For how long?”

“Assumin’ there’s a free dock available, better than a week or two,” Lewrie told her, explaining how his frigate must be emptied of all her guns, stores, and munitions, her upper masts taken down “to a gantline” so she could be heaved over onto her side and stranded high and dry at low tide on one of the hards, or propped up in one of the graving docks. “If there’s no dock or stretch of beach available, we might sit and swing at anchor ’til they can get round to us.”

“You would have to remain aboard ’til the work begins, then,” Lydia said, beginning to look a tad bleaker.

“Aye, but, once it’s begun, I wouldn’t be captain of anything for at least ten days to a fortnight,” Lewrie said, hoping to cheer her up. “We’d have to take shore lodgings, every Man Jack. As soon as that’s begun, I’ll write you and let you know when to coach back down to Portsmouth, so—”

“No, Alan,” Lydia interrupted him, letting go his hands to take another wee step back from him, and crossing her arms. “Even did you find me temporary lodgings in a rented, private residence, I would not feel entirely comfortable with such an arrangement.”

“But, Lydia—”

“I fear I would feel much the same dis-comfort at the George Inn as I did at the Blue Posts,” she continued, her expression firmly determined.

“The ogling you got? The snickers?” Lewrie asked, worried by this sudden turn.

“That is part of it, I must own,” Lydia replied, looking down at her toes as she scuffed a pebble with her shoes, before returning a level gaze at him. “Another part of my dis-comfort is the feeling that I must dash off at a moment’s notice to your every beck and call. I would much prefer that you come up to London and call upon me, in a—hah!—proper manner,” she said with a wryly amused sniff. “I trust that, have you learned to know the least bit about me, you will understand my reasons why.”

“So we can scandalise your household staff?” Lewrie posed with a shaky laugh; this was turning serious! Their first night, they had left her brother Percy to gamble in the Long Rooms at the Cocoa-Tree and had coached to her house in Grosvenor Street in the wee hours, and had ended up in a spare bedroom after the house servants had gone to bed. “I suppose we could sit up stiff and proper in your parlour, and swill endless pots of tea.”

“There shall be times for such innocent primness,” Lydia said with a becoming blush, and another fond smile as she recalled what had passed between them, too. “Though, I was thinking more along the lines of the theatres, the symphonies, dining out—”

“God, not the bloody ballet!” Lewrie cringed.

“No, not the bloody ballet,” she reassured him, crinkling her nose in amusement, though she made no move to reach out to him.

“Where Society can point, snicker, and gossip about you?” he asked, perplexed why Lydia would wish more exposure and more risk of snubbing, when that was the very thing she said she had dreaded when in Portsmouth by herself. “Oh!”

“Oh, indeed,” she replied, waiting for him to plumb to it.

She wants t’be courted! he told himself; To do things proper!

“Then we shall do as you wish, Lydia,” he promised her, “even if that involves gallons of tea. Though, if Willis’s Rooms are out, and I lodge at the Madeira Club…” Their second night together, she had booked a suite of rooms at Willis’s, as a present.

“Lord, how stricken you look, Alan!” she said with a laugh as she came to embrace him, at last, and looked up at him most pleasingly adoring. “Neither of us can pretend that we do not share a powerful mutual … desire for intimacy. Trust when I tell you that I have longed for you every moment the Navy takes you away from me, and that this last, long separation has been almost more than I could bear! I long for you so much that I would join you this very instant…,” she said in a fret, turning her head to look about. “I would let you lead me behind that thicket, yonder, but for the witnesses.”

“The thicket ain’t that far off,” Lewrie said with a leer as he took a squint where she had indicated.

“We shall find a way, when you come up to London, Alan,” Lydia assured him with a solemn expression. “We may have to be most discreet, but … love shall find a way.”

Love? Christ, this is gettin’ damned serious! Lewrie thought.

“I s’pose love will,” Lewrie said in a pensive whisper as he pulled her into an embrace, which prompted another long and fervent kiss to which she responded just as eagerly. She stroked his cheek with a shuddery touch, looking as if she would begin to weep, again.

“I must’ve done somethin’ right,” Lewrie softly sighed, “for you t’take such a risk to your heart, given all that … you know.”

“Yes, you have, Alan,” Lydia whispered, “you certainly have.”

After another long minute of kissing, Lewrie leaned back from her a bit to joke, “Imagine all this, from a chance encounter on the road!”

“A most fortunate encounter,” Lydia heartily agreed, though she stepped back from him. “Brief it must be, though. I must get on to London, just as you must get on to Portsmouth. Someone must be the practical one, after all,” she teased, taking his hands at arm’s length as if they were dancing.

“Never gave a fig for ‘practical’,” Lewrie said. “Though I fear you’re right.” He offered her a polite arm to walk her back to her coach, handed her inside, and folded up the folding steps, then closed the door once she was seated.

He stepped back from the coach, but she leaned out the opened door window to reach out to tousle his hair and stroke his cheek one more time. Lewrie kissed her palm and her wrist.

“I will see you again, soon?” she asked, grinning.

“Count on it,” Lewrie promised. “I’ll write to let you know as soon as I know when I can get away, and for how long.”

“Adieu, dear Alan. Adieu, dear man.”

“’Til the next time, dear girl!” Lewrie replied as her coach began to rattle forward. He waved to her, waited to watch her coach head up the road, then turned and strolled back to his own, shaking his head in bemusement, part wistful, and part disappointed that she would not stay for even a cup of tea, yet …

He reached the open door of his coach and turned to look back up the road, and damned if Lydia was still leaning out the window and waving, so he used both arms to return a broad goodbye wave to her with a smile plastered on his phyz that he wasn’t sure what it meant.

Now, where did all that come from? he asked himself; I would’ve thought her so vexed with me that she’d write me off completely, yet … hmmm. Love, she said? Wary as she was, ’bout love and marriage, and trustin’ any man ever again … Gawd.

Did he wish to re-marry? he had to ask himself. If he did, he could do a lot worse than Lydia Stangbourne. As far as he knew, she was still worth £2,000 a year, and that much “tin” was nothing to be sneezed at! She was exciting, adventurous, nothing like the properly-mannered hen-heads and chick-a-biddies who populated most of the parlours in the nation!

Shame, though, Lewrie thought; I’m too “fly” a rake-hell for her. Sooner or later, she’d find me out and go harin’ for the hills!

“On to Portsmouth, coachman,” Lewrie said as he mounted the steps into his coach.

“Shouldn’t blaspheme, sir,” the dour stick grumbled.

“Damn me, did I?” Lewrie quipped as he pulled up the steps and shut the door. “Well, just bugger me! Whip up!”