H. M. S. Cockerel, page 2
Over his head in the west wing was the nursery, the childrens’ small bedrooms and the governess’s quarters. Over the entry hall was their own spacious bedchamber and intimate study (actually, Caroline’s sewing room, so far). There were three more bedchambers for guests in the east wing—once again, vacant and unused. Hopefully, once the last Lewrie was out of “nappies,” they planned to convert the nursery into a classroom for a private tutor, with lodgings in the east wing.
“I’m home!” he called out hopefully as he entered through the garden doors to his cozy study. He sailed his wide-brimmed farmer’s hat at a wall peg and shrugged off his cloak, draping it over a wing chair near the cheery fireplace. Warmth was what he wished that instant, the Fires of Hell if he could get ’em. He raised the tails of his coat and backed so close to the hearth that his heels were almost between the firedogs.
“Didn’ ’ear ya come in, sir,” Will Cony said, entering from the central hall. “’Spected ya through th’ front, I did. I’ll take yer things, ’ang ’em up f’r ya, sir. Aye, ’ere’s ’at ol’ cat, Pitt, sir!”
The grizzled old battler shambled into the room, stalking slow and regal. William Pitt the ram-cat was getting on in years, spending most his days lazing in windows or patches of sunlight, but he still ruled the farm with fang and claw, and even the dogs slunk tail-tucked in terror when he was out and rambling.
Pitt’s haughty entrance was disturbed, though, by the arrival of his middle son, Hugh, who darted between Cony’s knees, leaped the cat, and dashed for him, whooping like a Red Indian. Sewallis, his firstborn, entered behind him. William Pitt, outraged and his dignity destroyed, turned, raked the air in Sewallis’s general direction, hissed and moaned before hopping up on his favorite wing chair to wash furiously. And Alan noted that Sewallis shied away from the cat, giving him a wide berth. That was all he had time for before Hugh tackled his leg, howling a greeting.
Alan laughed and reached down to pick him up, to lift him over his head and give him a light toss, making Hugh shriek with joy.
“There’s my bold lad!” Alan rejoiced. “There’s my dev’lish man! What mischief you been into today, hey?”
“Pwaying, Daddy!” Hugh wriggled as he shouted his reply.
“Good Christ, you’re in that much trouble again? I surely hope not! Oh , play- ing, you mean, ha ha. And here’s Sewallis. Come here, my boy. How was your day? Been keeping your brother out of scrapes?”
“Yes, Father.” Sewallis replied with his usual reserve. He cast a wary look over his shoulder in Pitt’s direction to determine how safe movement might be, then dashed with unwonted haste as Lewrie held out his arms. The boy came to him dutifully for a more sedate welcome-home hug, and a kiss on the forehead.
“Good to be home,” Alan told them both. “Cold as the Devil out tonight.”
“Wa’ yoo bwing me, Daddy?” Hugh coaxed in an almost unintelligible voice. He was only three, and still having trouble pronouncing his “R’s,” so much so that even a doting daddy, who should have been familiar enough with baby talk, had difficulty understanding him. The boy’s eyes gleamed, sly with expectation, clinging to Lewrie’s knees, his tiny fingers beginning to probe all the pockets he could reach.
Thievery, Lewrie thought: runs in the family, don’t it. Boy has a promising set of careers open to him, long as he doesn’t get caught. Few years practice, though . . .
“Why, I brought myself, boy!” Alan chaffered, kneeling to eye level with them. “You don’t get a pretty or a sweet every time I ride to town, do you?”
“Yess, ah doo! ” Hugh hollered.
“A body’d think I had to bribe you lads for affection.”
“No puddy?” Hugh gaped, beginning to screw his face up for a heartfelt bawl of disappointment. This was betrayal at its blackest.
“Don’t be a baby, Hugh, ’course he did.” Sewallis chid him with a very adult-sounding touch of vexation.
Alan glanced at his eldest. Both the boys were “breeched” in adult clothing: stockings, shoes, breeches and waistcoats, shirts and stocks, their baby hair grown long enough to be plaited or drawn into a man’s queue. But Sewallis suddenly sounded so very mature for his tender five years. Always had, Lewrie realized. Even young as Hugh, the boy had always been aloof, quiet and reserved (call it what you really think, dammit!)— timid —with none of the neck-or-nothing exuberance, the silliness or the folly of a normal boy. Scared of the cat? And for God’s sake, he hardly ever goes near the damned pony I got ’em. A Lewrie afraid of a horse? An Englishman shy of a horse!
“Of course I brought you something,” Alan announced, “just as Sewallis said, little man. Can you keep a secret?”
Hugh agreed with a firm nod as Alan peered into corners, like a housebreaker unloading his ill-gotten gains in a slum alley, an eye out for the previous owners.
“Rare treats,” he promised. Hugh was giggling now, dancing in impatience and wonder. Sewallis . . . well, he was a little wide-eyed, but ever the little stoic. “I made an arrangement with a pirate and a smuggler, lads. Fiercest, meanest set of blackguards you ever did wish to see. Off they went, far as the East Indies. Down to Malabar. Oh, ’tis a mysterious, fearsome place—elephants, and snakes thick as my legs, heathen princes and headhunters. The pirate, he took ’em, and the smuggler, he got ’em out, one step ahead o’ the headhunters. Then six months at sea on a tall ‘John Company’ ship they came, all the way from pagan Hindoo India. ’Round the Cape of Good Hope, over to the Argentine and the Plate for a slant o’ wind—”
“Mister Lewrie—oh, excuse me.” Mrs. McGowan, the cheerless governess, had entered the room. She didn’t approve of parents and children mixing except at teatime, perhaps after supper for an awkward moment or two of stilted conversation. Certainly not of parents who really wished to spend time with their children.
“Firewood and water, then off to St. Helena, the crossroads of the Atlantic, m’dears. Thence ’cross the Westerlies, daring all the French privateers, to Ushant. Up our good English Channel, into the Pool o’ London up the Thames. From mysterious Malabar. . . a delight fit for the mighty Moghuls themselves!”
He reached into his tail-coat pocket as the boys fidgeted.
“And here they be—cinnamon sticks!” he cried as he produced them, to howls of rapture and leaping, clutching little hands.
“Oh, sir,” Mrs. McGowan simpered. “You’ll spoil their supper. La, I do allow you cosset these lads something sinful. Come along, Sewallis, Hugh. There’s good boys. Wash up and dress. Sweets later, if you’re good. Waste no more of your father’s time. Mister Lewrie, sir, mistress says to tell you that table is set, and you may sup as soon as you’ve washed the road away. Come, lads. Now.”
“No, now!” Hugh demanded petulantly, but it was not to be. He saw his treat tucked into Mrs. McGowan’s apron pocket. Lewrie stood, with none of the magic of the moment left but the stickiness of the cinnamon sticks on his fingers. And feeling as ordered about as the boys did as they were chivvied off.
“Well, damme,” he groused, returning to the fireplace for a warmup. “Ain’t this my own house? Ain’t they my own lads, to cosset as I wish? Cosset ’em? Aye, damned right I will. And how dare that . . . that hired bitch gainsay me, hey?”
Cony only shrugged in reply. “Got water’n towels laid out, sir. Bit of a wash afore supper?”
“I suppose so, Cony,” Lewrie huffed. “Damn my eyes, but there’s a hellish lot of . . . domesticity about these days. Aye, I’ll come up. I’ll be a good boy. Ain’t we all learned to be such . . . good lads!”
“Ahum!” Cony coughed into his fist to hide a rueful grin of sympathy. “Aye, sir.”
Alan paused in the central hallway, though, peering at the two portraits hung there side by side; his and Caroline’s. His had been done in ’83, just after the Revolution, when he’d been a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant. Caroline’s had been painted by a talented (but annoying) artist in the Bahamas, just after they’d arrived in 1786, when she was twenty-three, and a newlywed.
Early morning tropical light, with her lush flower garden and the impossibly emerald and aquamarine waters of East Bay, which had fronted their small home as a backdrop, she in a wide-brimmed straw hat and off-shoulder morning gown, her clear complexion and her hazel eyes bright and dewy as West Indies dawn, and her long, light brown, almost taffy-blonde hair flowing carefree and loose, teased by the ever-pressing, flirtatious trades . . .
Had Caroline changed? Not in features, so much as . . . she was still lissome and slim, no matter birthing three children. She still rode almost every day, walked the acres, kept active as so many sparrows. Oh, there were laugh lines now around her eyes and mouth, more than before, her graceful hands and fingers sparer of flesh. Where, though, had that Caroline gone, he wondered?
And for himself, well, like it or not, not a fortnight before, on Epiphany, he had gone over the edge. He was thirty! Middle-aged, and Caroline soon to follow by spring.
As if I don’t have enough complaints, God help us, he thought.
He felt vaguely queasy and unsettled at the fetching of such a prominent seamark. Like espying the peaks of Dominica, which signified arrival on-passage to the Caribbean, yet knowing that whatever West Indies port of call one was bound for, no matter how joyous the passage, was no more than a week’s sailing down-wind. And no beating against the inevitability of those insistent nor’east trades had ever availed.
Lt. Alan Lewrie, RN, peered out at him from the picture with a hopeful grin, the hint of devilment in his eyes that were gray or blue by mood. Shiny, midbrown hair, sun-bleached to light brown and curling slightly at the temples and forehead, yet drawn back into a proper seaman’s plaited pigtail, lay over the ears and tumbled over the uniform coat’s collar. It was a youthful courtier’s lean face he saw, though tanned by blistering sun and sea glare beyond a courtier’s fashionable paleness. And the slight hint of the vertical scar upon one cheek—the result of a duel for another girl’s honour, a girl now long gone, in point of fact—the artist had wished to suppress that, but Alan had been quite proud of his disfigurement at the time and insisted it be rendered exactly. Just as they had disputed the teeth-baring grin, too; English gentlemen were supposed to be sober and dignified in life, and limned so in portraits for posterity.
Yes, he’d wash up, he decided, taking the first of the stairs. And see if he, at the advanced age of thirty, even slightly resembled the young “sprog” he used to be.
Thirty, Jesus, he thought! And he used to spurn women who had gotten a little long in tooth. If only he’d known then in his feckless days what he knew at present!
There, he thought, almost satisfied. His reflection didn’t vary much from the portrait downstairs after he had washed and toweled.
Much, he amended.
He’d been eating well, and even with rugged, outdoorsy country pursuits he was not exactly the lean-cheeked courtier of his youth, nor so pale as a titled lord. But it was near enough.
Cony finished brushing his coat and waistcoat and he redonned them. He’d slipped out of his top boots and exchanged them for a pair of indoor shoes, little more than soft-leather pumps, more like womens’ dancing slippers than anything else. Insubstantial though they felt, they were all “the go” lately.
Standing well back from Caroline’s dressing mirror, he perused his form as well. He had been eating well, after all, though there was no snugness to the sewn-to-be-snug, buff-coloured suede breeches beyond what fashion demanded. His bottle-green coat and waistcoat sat well upon him, he thought—though they were new, run up before Christmas, so what comparison would they be?
Well, there’s my uniforms, he sighed, almost relieved.
They’d changed the Regulations for Sea Officers’ dress in ’87, whilst he was overseas, and though he’d gone on the half-pay list as soon as Alacrity had paid off, he’d faced the expense of meeting the new dress regulations so he could call upon the Councillor of the Cheque each three months, about the time of the quarterly assizes, to prove that he was alive, that he still possessed all his requisite parts, that he was eligible for future sea duty, and to collect what was laughably termed “half-pay.” He’d just come back from the Admiralty in London, just before his birthday, and his uniform had fit him admirably well.
Damme, though . . . He frowned, lifting his coattails to study the heft and span of his buttocks. Hmmm . . . ?
“Supper is served, sir . . . mistress,” Cony announced at last, as the rum punches at the Olde Ploughman threatened to consume his stomach lining.
“My dear,” Alan beamed, rising to greet Caroline as she swept into the smaller second parlour, where he’d been kicking his heels.
“Sorry, dearest, but I simply had to stop by the nursery to look in on little Charlotte,” Caroline smiled in reply, coming to his arms for a welcome hug and an affectionate, wifely, kiss. Alan took her up off her feet, unwilling to let a pat and a peck on the lips suffice. Children be damned, servants be damned, he thought, I want a proper welcome!
“Alan!” Caroline chid him, but not sternly at all as she gave him what he demanded. He could hear Hugh blowing indignant bubbles of revulsion as they kissed again.
“Nothin’ to sneer at, Hugh,” Alan chortled softly as he let her go at last. “Take my word for it.”
There was a rare light in Caroline’s eyes as she knelt to give her sons a peck, too. “Ah, little Hugh. What? You’ll flinch from my kiss? And Sewallis, our little angel! That’s my little man, you’ll not wipe off your mother’s affections.”
“And how is Charlotte?” Alan asked as he offered his arm to lead Caroline into the informal dining room.
“Simply perfect, of course,” Caroline chuckled, filled with a maternal warmth. Baby Charlotte, named for her maternal grandmother, was barely twelve months old and still nursing.
Soon to stop, please God, Lewrie begged silently. No matter they could afford wet nurses, no matter how unfashionable for English ladies, Caroline had insisted upon it with every child, months and bloody months of nursing! Months and months of baby talk, billing and cooing between swaddled babe and doting mama, and God help the man who interfered or tried to conduct an adult conversation. Alan espied a tiny, darker damp spot on her demure woolen bodice—a dottle of lovingly egested milk, and noted the flush of pleasure she usually bore after a feeding.
Hugh made another blubber-lipped sound of disapproval as he was helped into a chair by the governess.
“You’ll appreciate girls in your own time, me lad,” Lewrie cautioned him. “Even a little sister.”
He pulled out Caroline’s chair to seat her at the foot of the table, saw Cony and Mrs. McGowan get the boys placed, and took his own seat at the head. Before he could unfold his napery, out rushed a maid with a steaming tureen of soup, and Cony was uncorking a bottle of hock with a cheery “thwocking” sound.
“Hearty chicken soup, with a dash of tarragon,” Caroline announced, urging them all to dig in. “Takes the winter chill away. Out it goes . . . then up? ‘As a ship goes out to sea, so my spoon goes out from me! ’ And young gentlemen never lean over their bowls, do they, Hugh?”
Hugh gulped what looked like a heaping shovel-full into his greedy maw, hunched over his plate with the spoon held like a ladle in a clumsy little paw. His cheeks puffed out like a squirrel’s as he tried to swallow, and a line of creamy soup frothed between his lips. Followed a second later by the entire mouthful, since it was so hot. He began to fan, buttock-dance on his chair and bawl.
“ Small sips, that’s the way, Hugh. Lord . . .” Caroline sighed, rising to rush to his side to sponge him down and comfort him. “See how Sewallis does it? There, there, Hugh, you’re not hurt. Take a sip of water, there’s my little baby . . .”
Oh, for God’s sake, Lewrie thought, eyeing them. One son prim as a parson, one looking like he’d just spewed a dog’s dinner, and a dowdy wife! A matronly wife! Definitely matronly.
Well, she is a matron, ain’t she, he qualified to himself. A young’un, thank the Lord. Seven years wed. Bloom off the rose, and all that. Still, she wore a fiercely white, starched mobcap, with her hair up and almost hidden beneath it; a heavy old woolen gown drab as a titmouse, with wrist-length sleeves and a high-cut bodice, totally unadorned by even a hint of lace; a pale natural wool shawl over her shoulders which plumped and disguised even more of her youth; and a bib-fronted, slightly stained dishclout of an apron, useful during child-rearing of an infant still incontinently in nappies, but Lord!
And that baby talk— all the time, he thought, feeling guilty and disloyal, comparing his (mostly) delightful wife to the fetchingly handsome girl she once had been.
“I’ll take them, ma’am,” Mrs. McGowan volunteered from the kitchen doors, summoned by the noises. “La, they’re too excitable for a sit-down supper. Not utensil trained, neither. Come, boys? We’ll finish supper in the kitchen. Let Mummy and Daddy eat their meal in peace, and you may see them later, before bedtime.”
“Perhaps that’s best . . .” Caroline surrendered, though she did cock a chary eyebrow in the governess’s direction, and furrowed her forehead in what Alan had long ago learned was simmering vexation.
“Good soup,” Alan commented a minute or two of weighty silence later. “Meaty. And the tarragon brings out the flavor wonderfully well. As do all your spices, dear.”
“I’m pleased you’re pleased with it, love,” Caroline smiled in reply, though with half her attention on the feeding noises from the closed kitchen doors.
“About Mrs. McGowan . . .” Alan posed in a soft voice. “I’m not entirely happy to have our own lives ordered about so. We are not her favorite sort of parents, and—”
