Tea, please, Abigail,” Lewrie requested, once he had shed his hat, coat, presentation sword, and snake-clasp belt. At least, he thought Caroline’s new maidservant’s name was Abigail; it was hard to recall, since he’d only clapped “top-lights” on her two days before . . . though for convenience sake, most housemaids got called “Abigail” no matter what their bloody names really were.
“Jane, sir,” the stout girl with a bulldog’s face meekly said.
“Jane, then, and yer pardons,” Lewrie corrected himself.
They’re gettin’ uglier, he thought as he steeled himself to see his wife. Evidently, Caroline would not trust him to keep his fingers off any live-in house-hold help but trolls, or the women who’d win the side of bacon at the annual village ugly-face contest without trying.
“Jane” returned with the tea, but Lewrie only had a sip or two to restore himself, and appear soberer after all that palaver with Mr. Twigg & Co., before Caroline emerged from her bedroom in an “at-home” dress and more comfortable slippers.
“You may go, Jane,” Caroline said in a level tone. “The children are now changed, and ready for a stroll. Take them, please.”
Yes’m.
Lewrie studiously applied himself to sugaring and creaming his tea, slurping down one cup as the children thundered from their rooms, and tromped noisily belowstairs for the outside world . . . and God help Jane, and Portsmouth . . . and got a second cup ready for consumption before Caroline swept to a settee and sat . . . arms crossed, her brow furrowed, and her gaze piercing.
“And what was of such import that required the better part of two hours, husband?” Caroline coolly enquired.
“Savin’ my bloody neck from the noose,” Lewrie told her. “That the Beaumans are in London, and what my attorney plans t’do about ‘em. How we’re t’go, and when . . .”
“You’re just dashing off again?” his wife scoffed. “When?”
“T’morrow, very early,” Lewrie told her. She wasn’t yet so hot she was throwing things, so he dared to amble over to a wing-back chair by the fireplace with his cup and saucer, and sit himself down. Not in easy reach, it went without saying!
“I see,” Caroline muttered with a nod of her head, then heaved one of her exasperated sighs. “I suppose I should expect no better of you, after all these years. Absence, and indifference.”
“I could stay with you here, dearest, but the next time ye saw me’d be swingin’ in the wind at Newgate,” Lewrie posed. “Rather see me hang?” he tried to jape, with a lop-sided grin.
“Hmm” was her answer to that.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Caroline!” Lewrie griped, crossing his legs and shifting uneasily on his chair. “We were makin’ some progress on a reconciliation. Now, you . . . you’ve been in a pet ever since you came down from home. What’s the matter? The weddin’s over, and it came off damn’ near perfect. I’d’ve thought ye’d feel relieved, ‘stead o’ . . .”
“It did,” Caroline said, with no joy of arranging a successful ceremony, breakfast, and beginning on good terms with the new in-laws. “Now I’m shot of her, and God help the Langlies. The coy . . . jade is now their worry,” she spat, and Lewrie could read “bitch” or “whore” in place of the term she chose.
“Caroline . . . there never was a single thing ‘twixt Sophie and me,” Lewrie assured her, as he had dozens of times before. “I made a solemn oath to a dyin’ man . . . a friend, no matter he was French . . . and I honoured that pledge. We honoured, rather, for ‘twas you, most of the time, who saw to her raisin’. Did she ever dally with anyone? You ever suspect Sophie’s morals, ever hear or see anything with your own senses that led you to believe she played either of us false?
“Or . . . do ye place complete trust in those damned letters?” he pointedly asked. He didn’t relish a fight with her, and knew that he had set one off, after months of tippy-toeing, but he was simply tired of being treated like a leper.
Her fierce frown, and the way one slippered foot and shin jiggled, was all the answer she made, and was all he needed to know.
“What, you’ve gotten another ‘un?” he tried to tease. “Darlin’, they’re all lyin’ packets!”
“Oh. Was your Corsican whore, Phoebe Aretino, a made-up fantasy, Alan?” was Caroline’s vexed reply. “Or was she real? In Genoa, there was a Claudia something-or-other . . . was she spun from thin air? That slutty mort who bore your bastard child, Theoni Kavares Connor . . . I read of you and her long before seeing them both in Hyde Park! Just fever dreams, were they, you . . . bastard}”
“Now, now . . . “Lewrie tried to shush her, setting aside his tea and pushing hands towards her. They’d never lodge at the George Inn again, if she went on like that, and as loudly!
“ Whore-monger . . . Corinthian . . . rakehelll” Caroline skreeched. “Just like your bloody father . . . like all your line, most-like! The other letters proved true, so why not the ones about your precious and sordid Sophie, hah? Like the one about that vulgar circus bitch!”
“What?” Lewrie gawped, rowed beyond genteel temperance and volume himself. “Eudoxia Durschenko? You must be joking! Or, somebody must. I told you, Caroline, she set her cap for me, but I never laid a fing—”
“Vain and prideful bastard!”
“You got a fresh letter, is that it?” Lewrie demanded. “Let me see it!”
“So you can destroy it, then call me ‘tetched’?” she accused.
“I’ve never seen one of ‘em,” Lewrie explained, getting to his feet. “I’ve told you and told you, ‘tis someone who despises me . . . thinks I done him wrong somehow, and is gettin’ his own back, through you! My father described one t’me, just after the Nore Mutiny. Fine bond paper, Spencerian copper-plate hand, all that? I’d hoped Mister Twigg could’ve found out more. I told him of ‘em last year, and—”
“Another of your circle of whore-mongers?” Caroline scoffed. “Why, does he wish to read them, late at night, Alan? Or, is he ready to swear on a Bible and lie for you . . . convince me that they’re all false . . . then laugh with you, at me, behind my back?”
She sprang from the settee and began to pace the room, and the proper “languid” graces bedamned. She was all but stomping.
“Caroline . . . Zachariah Twigg is most certainly no friend of mine,” Lewrie tried to explain, almost finding some faint amusement in the very idea. “His place at the Foreign Office is that of a spy, a meddler and intriguer overseas. Toppled rajahs and foreign princes who stood in England’s way . . . a cut-throat, an assassin, and probably still is, despite his official retirement. One of the most dangerous men ever I met, but . . . not a real friend to anyone, or me. He knows forgeries, hand-writing, or knows people who do. I thought that he’d be able to ‘smoak out’ the identity of your anonymous scribbler.”
That stopped her in her tracks, wide-eyed in surprise.
“I’ve been his gun-dog since ‘84, in the Far East,” he went on, sensing an opening. “Dancin’ t’Twigg’s music in the Med, and the West Indies, too. And, every time Twigg, or one of his agents, shows up with a scheme, I feel rabbits runnin’ over my grave. He finds me a . . . useful asset, Caroline,” Lewrie spat. “Still does, else I’d never have gained support from the Abolitionists t’defend me, nor gained such a good attorney. God help whoever it is writin’ those letters to you, my girl, if Twigg discovers ‘em. He can make an enemy just disappear, on the quiet. All the pain they’ve caused you . . . wouldn’t you desire t’know who’s plagued you, and have something done about it?”
“I . . . never knew,” Caroline softly replied, looking puzzled; not any less bitter, but it was a slight improvement.
“I was never at leave t’tell you, or anyone,” Lewrie said. “Now, show me this latest letter. As Twigg and I coach to London together, I can show it to him, and let him have a go at it. Please, Caroline?”
She took a long pause to think that over, her arms snugly tucked under her breasts, hands gripping both elbows, and looking at the floor, before making up her mind, and going to the bedroom to fetch it.
Damme, I think I know this hand! Lewrie told himself as he read the first, for Caroline had fetched not one, but two of those letters, both much crumpled in her past rages. From where, though, or when, I wonder? Still could be a man’s hand . . . or a woman s.
The oldest was about Sophie, full of scurrilous “observations” of her behaviour in London society, perhaps just after the time that she fled Anglesgreen and went for shelter with his father. Sophie was portrayed as frivolous, flighty, and “flibberty-gibbet,” openly flirting with the many beaus who sniffed about her, sporting, and playing balum-rancum on the sly with impressive bachelors and rich married men who kept her “under their protection” like a mistress or a courtesan, then creeping home to Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, into his bed where they whored together, and regaled each other with minute recollections of their latest conquests!
The anonymous writer included an allegedly overhead conversation ‘twixt Sophie and some other infamous young belle, about how she filled her days, and nights, but could not wait ‘til her “hero,” long out at sea, could return, so they could pick up where they’d left off, and continue their long affair . . . right under her Paladin’s roof!
“Caroline, this is utter, bloody . . . tripe!” Lewrie gravelled. “All the years Sophie lived with us, sweet and virginal, how can you believe she’d act so, or sound so, carnal? What girl, not a penniless waif, but damned-well supported and reared, would say such things to anyone if she had any hopes of makin’ a good match!
“This supposed overheard conversation . . . Sophie might’ve been heard talkin’ ‘bout Anthony Langlie . . . comparin’ dance partners, and tellin’ some other girl why she was so indiff’rent to ‘em, that’s all. Someone’s twisted it all round, and salted it with smut,” he told her.
Caroline had moved to the tea table, and had poured herself a cup. She sipped standing up, and looked over the cup’s rim at him in faint, mute agreement that his supposition might be correct.
The second about Eudoxia Durschenko was even more scandalous, more lurid. She was portrayed as an amoral Roosian foreigner, a jade who didn’t own the morals that God promised a stoat, a circus person who performed nigh un-clothed, and thought nothing of it, an actress!—which was a bare cut above a street prostitute, if the sum was right.
According to the scribbler, Lewrie and Eudoxia had rogered in his great-cabins, on long country rides, naked as earthworms right out in the open, in her private dressing room before and after performing.
Well, he’d fantasised such, but nothing like that ever happened . . . more’s the pity. Can’t be anyone from the convoys, aboard Proteus, who wrote this trash, he grimly thought; this is all made up, a fever-dream for certain. Worse ‘n a novel ‘bout a sultan’s seraglio!
And, how had the nameless writer discovered all this?
“. . . ‘introduced to her following a performance of Wigmore’s New Peripatetic Extravaganza,’ ” Lewrie read aloud, his scorn and sarcasm positively dripping on the threadbare carpets, “cross the Thames in Southwark, and, after complimenting her upon the heroism she and the circus performers had shown when assailed by a French frigate in the same South Atlantic battle in which her paramour won his latest fame, she thanked me prettily, but then began to regale me with tales of how she had emulated her Navy lover. Then, to my astonishment, told me of their lovemaking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, or so it might be to such a trull, who may not even be strictly allowed to be considered a Christian!’
“Damme, Caroline,” Lewrie spluttered, “she and her father were Roosian Orthodox! Arslan Artimovich slept with one eye open to keep her a virgin, with a dagger in one hand, and his bullwhip in t’other, and there wasn’t a man in their troupe who’d dare even let his glance linger! For someone t’know details . . . all of ‘em false, mind! . . . he had t’be close t’me this last year past, and . . .,” he paused to compare the handwriting of both letters, “and these letters are both done in the same hand. The one time . . . once, I tell ye, that Dan Wigmore invited me back-stage after the show in Recife, none of the performers had a dressin’ room t’roger in. Rickety foldin’ mirror tables, with a thin curtain t’dress behind, that was all! Eudoxia was never guested aboard Proteus, and you go aboard Savage tomorrow morning, you ask of anybody, from wardroom to gun-deck, they’ll tell you that! Can’t you see that someone is spinnin’ tales ‘bout Sophie, and Eudoxia, out of thin air? That this is all spite?”
“Though she behaved so fond of you, when I met her during the circus parade, right here in Portsmouth, Alan,” Caroline coolly said, seemingly intent on her tea as she slowly paced the rooms, slowly and more gracefully. “Rode right up onto the sidewalk, bent down to kiss you, in a most intimate fashion from horseback, did she not?”
“I was in all the papers after we anchored and paid off, she was famous, and saw a way to increase the audience by a public show,” he countered, managing to sound relatively reasonable about it. “And I introduced you and the children to her, did I not? Would a guilty man do that?”
“The slyest ones would, yes,” Caroline said, “and could. She flung herself upon you, you said, Alan. How much did she fling, hah?”
“We met aboard the circus ship, the time the dancin’ bear tried t’eat my hat and shins,” Lewrie replied, “I told you o’ that, and she found me amusin’ . . . what happened t’me, amusin’. Didn’t see her at all ‘til we anchored at Recife, and I went to the circus, and Wigmore invited me back-stage. I talked to a lot of circus people. He wanted me t’use what influence he thought I had with Captain Treghues to let Navy sailors have shore liberty, so they could attend his shows, makin’ him even more ‘tin.’ Faint chance o’ that, you remember Treghues. We sailed for Saint Helena, they put on the circus, and the comedies and dramas there, and I sat in the front row one night, and after the curtain call, she hopped off the stage and plopped herself in my lap, just as I told you . . . for a jape on her father, for the audience, ‘cause it was funny!”
“Ha . . . ha,” Caroline mocked.
“At Cape Town, I barely saw her,” Lewrie pressed on, going over old news of his innocence. “She stayed in Cape Town when others from the circus went inland t’hunt new beasts for their menagerie, and we were down at Simon’s Town, salvagin’ a new rudder. She rode out the mornin’ we set off, for target practice with her bow and her guns, and met us on the road . . . in front of a dozen sailors, and a dozen more drovers . . . and we talked for a bit as we rode along . . . Pennsylvania rifles and Fergusons, the Red Indian moccasin boots she got in Savannah, Georgia . . . a shootin’ contest, perhaps, then she galloped off to exercise that white trick stallion o’ hers, and that was all, dear.”
“Uhm-hm.” One brow was up, high, and her eyes were squinted.
“Your own brother met her,” Lewrie stanchly soldiered on with his protestation of innocence. “The mornin’ we were loadin’ the new rudder into a barge, she came down to the docks t’sight-see, Burgess came ashore off one o’ the home-bound Indiamen, and I had t’introduce her, or give her the ‘cut-direct.’ And, when I named him as my brother-in-law, she called me a slew o’ names, like I’d led her on false . . . tarakan . . . sikkim siyn . . . peesa . . . cockroach, son of a bitch, and well, ah . . . prick, if ye must know . . . pardons.”
“How discerning of her,” Caroline said quite brightly, faintly amused; though not that much. “My estimation of her, foreign or no, rises. Peesa, hmm. And, sikkim . . . siyn, is it? How apt.”
“One o’ my Black hands had run away with the circus hunters,” Lewrie confined, wondering if Caroline would go buy herself a stack of foreign lexicons, to find new ways to say what she couldn’t in public. “Mauled by a lion. Some of her fellow circus people had been killed, too, she’d come t’ask of her father, and she helped t’get my sailor to their own surgeon, who knew more of animal wounds than ours, and that was the absolute last time I saw or spoke to her ‘til that parade here in Portsmouth back in the spring, Caroline, and haven’t since.”
“Aplausible tale, Alan,” she coolly replied, after finishing her tea and pacing back to the settee, where she arranged herself most primly, her back erect, her gaze level and unrevealing, and her hands in her lap. “Even if nothing did pass ‘twixt you and that barely clad . . . creature, even if she was then, and still is, a naive and feckless young virgin in deluded ‘cream-pot love’ with you, I suspect it wasn’t for want of trying on your part. ‘Twas lack of opportunity.”
Knows me too damned well, she does! he sorrowfully thought.
“Caroline, we’d begun writing each other again,” Lewrie said in a soft and pleading tone. “God’s my witness, I’ll admit I was tempted sore, but . . . I . . . didn’t! And, not for lack of opportunity, for I’d hopes we might, you and me . . . all this about Sophie, or Eudoxia, are vicious, sordid lies. And that’s the truth.”
She looked down at her hands and considered that for a long bit. She then looked up, the simmering of anger back in her amber eyes, and with a most odd expression, as if she wished to believe him, but found past betrayals just too massive.
“Perhaps that is so, Alan,” she said, “and my nameless torturer has over-reached, at last, but . . . there are still so many others to explain. Do you deny your taking that Phoebe Aretino as a mistress?”
“Ah . . .,” Lewrie dithered, feeling like wincing, if he could get away with it and not doom himself and all his recent pleadings. “Six, eight months, and thousands of miles away from home, Caroline, and . . . a man has . . . well, I ain’t a saint, nor a tonsured monk.”
“Oh, how well I know that of you,” Caroline said with a bitter little chuckle. “Your Italian mort in Genoa?” she asked, nigh-gayly.
“Twigg . . . he ordered me to, and it was just the once,” Lewrie told her, chin tucked into his collars, and realising how lame that sounded, even as he said it. “S’truth! Claudia was a French spy, and go-between ‘twixt the Frogs and the cabal that wanted France to seize power! She got set on me, thinkin’ I was gullible enough t’blab just what they needed t’know, and Twigg used that . . . used me . . . t’feed her what he wanted ‘em to know, so we could lay a trap for their best . . . ye recall what I told ye of Guillaume Choundas?”
“Why, for King and Country, Alan?” Caroline sweetly said with a very false smile. “How patriotic of you! I may still be but a North Carolina country girl, but do not imagine that I am a total fool!”
“But it’s true, I swear it!” Lewrie protested. “Ask Twigg!”
“Hah!” was her opinion of that. Calming, she continued, as if she were the cat, and he the cornered mouse. “And what of the mother of your bastard, Alan? Theoni . . . Kavares . . . Connor,” she intoned as if savouring each scornful syllable. “After you rescued her, and her natural child, from those Serbian pirates, was she so enthralled, was she so grateful that she simply had to fling herself upon your manliness, and your sterling and heroic character?”
“It was, it . . .,” Lewrie stammered, totally dis-armed. This had simmered like an acrid pot between them, and finally, finally, there it was, served up like manure soup. “It happened, aye, no denyin’ it. In the Adriatic, after. I was wounded and groggy with laudanum, there wasn’t enough room aboard for all our British refugees ‘fore the Frogs took Venice, so . . .”
“And, in Sheerness, too, Alan?” Caroline remorselessly reminded him, as if he had need of reminding. “Before you sailed for the West Indies, the last time . . . a whole week with her, you spent. Sharing a lodging for all the world to see.
“Aye,” he had to confess, sitting down in his wing-back chair again, too limp with guilt to protest. “After you’d stormed off home.”
To Hell with more tea, for by now he was starkly sober, more in need of brandy, or Yankee corn whisky, could he find any. “After you threw me away, and wrote t’tell me I would never be welcome under the same roof with you, again, well . . .”
There; it was said, at long last. Out in the open.
“Port in a storm . . .,” he lamely tried to expound.
“Damn you!” his wife blurted. “Damn you to Hell, Alan!”
“Caroline . . . what d’ye expect a man to be} How much time have we had together since the war began? Two months, three, out o’ seven bloody years} Even before then, . . . swaddles and spit-ups . . . pantries and still-rooms, flower gardens . . . ‘not this time o’ month,’ you said. ‘Three children were enough,’ you said . . . ‘Perhaps,’ you said, if I’d employ protections, and Charlotte an accident, and nigh six months for nursin’ and celibacy after, and you blamin’ me for riskin’ your life t’child-bed fever one more time, and . . . !”
She flounced off the settee halfway through that, stamping the bounds of their lodgings, arms stiff at her sides and her small fists balled.
“Me, more like a burden than a loved husband,” Lewrie went on, spilling all his pent-up recriminations on how such a loving marriage, with so much spectacularly exciting intimacy, had become so drab and lacklustre. “Right, I’ll never be a farmer or a herdsman, we know it, but . . . you’re so complete to yourself and the children, and I—”
“Go!” she snapped at last, pausing by the one window, her arms across her chest once more, looking out, not at him. “Go up to London, to your damned ship, to your lovers! Go to the Devil, why don’t you?”
“Look, Caroline, Twigg’ll discover who’s been bedevilling you with these letters, and . . .”
“What bedevils me is you, you faithless, amoral bastard!” she shouted, turning about to face him. “I shall make your excuses to your poor children. God knows I’ve gained practice at doing so, these many years with you never at home . . . and day-dreaming about all your doxies when you were!”
“That’s not true, Caroline!” Lewrie insisted. “When I was home, and you were there for me, with me, I never . . . !”
“Do not try to beguile me, Alan,” she spat, fighting the tears that blinded her, striving not to lose her voice as her breath caught in hitches in her chest. “Just go! Go be your Navy’s hero, a hero to the anti-slavery people, preen all you wish . . . but you will do all of that without me! Go be tried without me . . . or hung without me!”
“Dearest . . . !”
“Hah!”
She picked up the first thing that came to hand, a cheap Toby Jug in honour of some ancient sea-victory of some kind, and hurled it blindly. It came within a bare inch of breaking his nose, and making his “bung sport claret,” had he not shied at the last moment.
Caroline darted for her bedroom door, flung it open, then shut it with a titanic bang. Bed-ropes creaked as she flung herself cross the coverlet and mattress.
Lewrie shut his eyes in pain, and utter defeat. He felt pain, because he’d caused her pain, but . . . oddly (perversely, more-like, he chid himself) he felt nothing much beyond that, at that moment; just a faint twinge of conscience. A touch of shame that he had brought it upon himself? Of a certainty, a tad of that. There was nothing more he could do; the woes in Pandora’s Box had already fluttered away, and there was no point in shutting it. Putrid old wine had been spilled, and there was no re-bottling it.
Perhaps there never had been a hope of reconciliation; the whole thing had felt forced and sham-ful anyway, a stiff and un-natural show for friends, family, and children, for Navy and Society. But there had been no warmth in it, not even a hint of the old intimacy, or the trust or the forgiveness, or . . .
Lewrie heaved a deep, resigned, and shrugging sigh. It was over, sure as Fate. He redressed in uniform, cocked hat, and sword, trying to compose his face as neatly as he could his clothes, looking round the set of rooms as if to discover a single thing that held even a jot of warmth, of comfortable familiarity . . . of Lewrie-hood, either his, or hers, and found nothing, for it was as empty and impartial as the yawning, gun-less gun-deck of a hulked warship.
Nothin’for it, he grimly decided, snatching up those damning letters and cramming them into a side pocket. Perhaps Twigg could do him proud. The identity of the mysterious writer would never bring his wife round, but . . . there was always his own vengeance to wreak. That might prove satisfying.
He’d coach to London to try to save his life and honour. She would coach to Anglesgreen, and erase him from her life, and there was likely an end to it.
“Give ye joy o’ the day,” Lewrie sadly whispered as he stepped out into the hall and softly shut the door. “For ev’ry weddin’ day is a time for good cheer.”