A King's Trade (9 page)

The elderly servant, Ajit Roy, bearing a brass tray on which sat two glasses of sherry, shuffled in, obviously waiting ‘til they were seated before intruding. Twigg took a tentative taste, looking puckery, as if assaying his own urine for a moment, before nodding assent and acceptance, at which point Ajit Roy came down-table to give Lewrie his small glass.

”
Laanaa shorbaa,
Ajit,” Twigg ordered, and not a tick later, an attractive Hindoo woman in English servant's clothing, but with a long, diaphanous shawl draped over her hair and shoulders, entered with bowls of the requested soup on another tray.

“Dhanyavaad,
Lakshmi,” Twigg told her.

“Thankee,” Lewrie echoed in English. He'd never learned Hindoo as glibly as his father, Sir Hugo, and had ever sounded
pidgin
barbarian when he did speak it, but it
was
coming back to him, in dribs and drabs. She
was
fetching; did she and Twigg…?

“Ajit Roy's second wife,” Twigg said, with a knowing leer after one look at Lewrie's phyz. “The first'un cooks. And no, I
don't.
My tastes these days, well… I also own a place in the City, quite near your father's new gentlemen's lodging club, in point of fact. His is at the corner of Wigmore and Duke streets, as you surely recall, while my set of rooms is nearby in Baker Street. We run into each other….”

“Oh, how unfortunate for you,” Lewrie sourly commented.

“We speak rather often, act'lly,” Twigg said with a mystifying smile. “Sometimes dine, drop in for a drink, or play
écarté
with him at his club, with no need for its lodging facilities.”

“And does he give you a discounted membership, sir? Or… does he make up for it by fleecing you at cards?” Lewrie cynically asked.

“My dear Lewrie…no one has
ever
fleeced me at
écarté…
and lived,” Zachariah Twigg drawled, with a superior simper. “Your father and I rub along quite well, together, act'lly. We're much of an age, and experienced much the same sort of adventures in exotic climes, so…absent the disputes resulting from, ah… ‘boundary' friction in the expedition against Choundas and the La-nun Rovers …his concerns for his
sepoy
regiment, and taking orders from a Foreign Office civilian, we've discovered that we have a great deal in common. Having
you
and your, ah…
follies
in common, as well. How is your soup?”

“Simply grand,” Lewrie sarcastically muttered, though the soup was as close to a Chinese “hot and sour” as a Hindoo cook could attain, and as tasty as any ever he'd had when moored off Canton in the ‘80s.

“Amazing, what a
small
world in which we live, Lewrie,” Twigg went on, carefully spooning up his own soup, and slurping it into his thin-lipped mouth, then daintily dabbing with his napkin. “Sir Hugo is partnered with Sir Malcolm Shockley in his gentlemen's club enterprise…. Sir Malcolm thinks the world of him, and of
you,
more to the point… though I've yet to see a valid reason
why,
other than gratitude for getting his wealthy arse out of Venice and the Adriatic before the French took it in ‘97.
And,
wonder of wonders, Sir Malcolm is wed to Lady Lucy Hungerfford,
nee
Lucy Beauman, of the Jamaica Beaumans who wish you hung for stealing their slaves. Well, well, well! Quite the coincidence, what?”

“And Hugh Beauman's already written Lucy and told her all about it?” Lewrie said with a groan, feeling an urge to slide bonelessly or lifelessly under the table, and
stay
there, unfindable, for, oh, say a century or so. “Christ, I'm good as dead!” he moaned, his brow popping out a sweat that was not
entirely
the fault of the spicy soup.

“And…here comes the roast!” Twigg enthused as Lakshmi entered, bearing a tray of sliced kid goat, and a heaping bowl of savouried rice, mango
chautney,
and such. “Done to a
perfect turn,
I am bound!” he added, not without a purr and glare that Lewrie took for sheer maliciousness—making him feel even more inclined to slink beneath the table,
un-fed!

“I take it, an …” Lewrie managed to croak, “that Sir Malcolm's mentioned it to Father?”

“B'lieve so, Lewrie, yayss,” Twigg responded in a further purr of hellish delight at his predicament, all the time hoisting slices of goat onto his heaping plate of rice and mild, baked red peppers.

Lewrie felt his face flush (not from the spicy soup!) picturing Sir Hugo's reaction to his folly, not so much anger or disappointment, really, for they'd never really been
proper
father and son, leaving it quite late—in India in ‘84 or ‘85—to
tentatively
reconcile, thence to keep a wary distance ever since, so whatever rage Sir Hugo might display was water off a duck's back. No, what upset Lewrie more was a firm suspicion that he'd chortled his head half-off that Alan had gone and done something so goose-brained,
and
been caught at it, red-handed!

“Damme…
Lucy
knows, ‘tis a safe wager that all
London
knows, by now!” Lewrie muttered, dabbing his brow with his napery. “The hen-headed, blabbery…baggage!” he nigh-stuttered in new dread. “'Tis a wonder I've not been taken up, already, with…!”

“One'd be surprised, Lewrie,” Twigg loftily told him. “Do try the kid. There's a
dahee
to go with it, one of those yogurt gravies I recall you liking when in Calcutta.
Tandoori
-roast chicken to follow!”

“Christ!”

“You and Lucy Beauman were, at one time in your misspent youth, quite fond of each other, Lewrie,” Twigg breezed on, come over all amiable, as he spooned spiced
dahee
on his goat and rice. “She went on to wed a rich'un she met at Bath, her first Season in England… dare we speculate on what is called the ‘rebound' following her family showing you the door for the utter cad you proved to be, hmm? Lord Hungerford, Knight and Baronet, surely was a great disappointment to her, since he proved to be just about as huge a rake-hell and rantipoling ‘splitter of beards' as you…though, Lady Lucy seems to have been spared revelations anent your poorer qualities, for some reason. The illogic, and the blindness, that the fairer sex possess towards their un-deserving men, no matter proof incontrovertible served up on a gilt platter, hah!

“She still has, as they say, Lewrie, a ‘soft spot' in her heart for you, therefore, and, so far as I am able to ascertain, has yet to utter the first word to anyone, other than her husband, Sir Malcolm, of the matter.”

“You
must
be joking!” Lewrie exclaimed, almost leaping from his chair in amazement at such a ridiculous statement. “Lucy is my prime suspect of writing scurrilous, anonymous letters to my wife, about my…overseas… doings …” he trailed off, blurting out more than he'd meant to.

“Ah, those letters!” Twigg said, brightening with cruel amusement. “Why must you suspect her?”

“You
know
of ‘em?” Lewrie quailed, though he had to admit that Zachariah
Twigg had spent his entire life as a Foreign Office agent—he just
had
to know a bit about everything!

“Your
father
has, since the mutiny at the Nore, he said, so…knowing my old profession, he approached me to delve into things, and discover what I could. ‘Smoak out' the culprit. So far without joy. Why do you suspect her?”

“When we met in Venice in ‘96,
years
later, Lucy, I felt, was …still after me,” Lewrie told him as he at last accepted a heap of rice, a slice or two of roast kid, and a dribble of the spiced
dahee.
“Even if she was married not six months, still on ‘honeymoon' with Sir Malcolm Shockley, she was…”

“What a
burden
it is,” Twigg amusedly drawled, “to be the romantic masculine paragon of one's age…and in
such
demand!”

“All but throwing herself at me, aye!” Lewrie retorted in some heat, and grovelling bedamned. “Her foot damn' near in my lap, even with her husband at-table with us, and when I wouldn't play, she took up with Commander William Fillebrowne, another officer from our squadron. There's another I suspect, the smarmy bastard! Our last words, Lucy caught onto my…involvement with a lady I'd rescued from Serbian pirates, and said—”

“Mistress Theoni Kavares Connor, the mother of your bastard,” Twigg offhandedly interjected ‘twixt a bite of food and a sip. “She of the Zante currant-trade fortune from the Ionian Islands.”

“Er…yes,” Lewrie barely squeaked, having been rein-sawed from a full gallop to a pale-faced, hoof-sliding halt, for a moment. “Well… Lucy said something very like ‘I should write your wife and tell her what a rogue she wed'…
playfully,
but not without a
bite
to it. I told
her
what Sir Malcolm should know ‘bout
her
doin's with Commander Fillebrowne, and that's where we left it, but…”

“And
was
she, in fact, involved with Fillebrowne?” Twigg asked.

“Well, o'
course
she was!” Lewrie snapped, hitting his stride, “I saw ‘em for myself, spoonin' and kissin' on the balcony of a rented set o' rooms, just before we sailed the last time, whoever could notice ‘em bedamned… only Dago foreigners, I s'pose they thought. An old friend of mine from Harrow, Clotworthy Chute, was with me, too! Chute was doing the Grand Tour of the Continent with Lord Peter Rushton, at the time. And…she gambles. Gambles deep,” Lewrie added, recalling what that Flag-Lieutenant at Portsmouth said of Lady Emma Hamilton, as if that would be proof enough to sign, seal, and deliver the truth of his account.

Twigg cocked an eye at him as if he thought that Lewrie had lost his mind, and was about halfway towards laughing out loud at such rank priggishness, especially coming from one so “low-minded” as Lewrie.

“Do assay the wine, sir,” Twigg instructed after a long ponder. “A Dago wine, how further coincidental. A Tuscan
chianti,
in point of fact, of a very dry nature, that complements the richness of the goat quite nicely. I can understand, on the face of it, why you might susect Lady Lucy, Lewrie, but…you say you also suspect that Commander Fillebrowne?”

“Well …” Lewrie elaborated, after a tentative bite of kid and rice, and a sip of the
chianti,
which brought back memories of Naples. “When we first met, he was anchored at Elba. Tupping a local vintner's wife, as I recall. Thought I'd take to him, at first, but in the space of a single hour, I came away a bit disgusted. Comes from a very rich family, treats the Navy like a place to kill time ‘til his inheritance is come…all yachting, cruising, and claret, and his orlop the storehouse for art treasures he was buying up from refugee Royalist French.
Boasted
of it! Fillebrowne's family'd all done their Grand Tours, the war was
his,
and all he cared about was … ‘collecting'!” Lewrie sneered. “He chaffered me, that very
morning,
with hints he'd taken up with my former mistress….”

Lewrie paused, waiting for Twigg to say, “Phoebe Aretino, better known as ‘La Contessa,' Corsican-born, former whore,
shrewd
businesswoman, and collector, trader, and treasures-dealer in her own right,” but Twigg kept his mouth shut, or busy with his victuals; and, for the sort of man whose very gaze could turn cockchafers “toes-up dead,” his expression was a very bland “do tell” and “say on.”

“Threw it in my face, rather,” Lewrie growled, shoving rice on his plate with an angry, scraping noise of steel on priceless china. “Nose-high, top-lofty sort, the greedy, callous bastard. Well, Chute saw through him. Clotworthy's a ‘Captain Sharp,' makes his livin' by gullin' naive new-comes to London… ones who've just inherited some ‘tin,' and such. When I told him that Fillebrowne thought himself an
astute
collector of fine art, Chute cobbled up a brace o' bronze Roman statues o' some sort,
I
never saw ‘em. Amazin' what a week's soaking in salt water'll do t'make ‘em look authentic, and Fillebrowne bought ‘em, straightaway.
Pantin'
for ‘em!

“I suspect Fillebrowne figured out he'd been finessed, sooner or later, learned that Chute and I were old friends…acquaintances, really…perhaps he and…my former mistress,” he said, avoiding Phoebe's name, as if to deprive Twigg of unnecessary information…just in case, “had an angry parting? Sharp an eye as
she
had, when it came t'treasures, if
she
tipped him that they were frauds, he'd've gone off like a bomb on her. On me! And, he'd have seen, or heard, just enough needful t'pen scurrilous letters to Caroline, in revenge.”

“One
could
see his reason for
pique,
yayss,” Twigg mused, those long fingers of his steepled thoughtfully under his chin, not
exactly
mocking, at that instant. “Though, you
do
have that effect on people. But, was Commander Fillebrowne still possessed of active commission, I do not see how he could stay…current anent your, ah…pastime.”

“There's been
nothing…
current,” Lewrie querulously replied. “Not since I sailed for the Caribbean. Well, the last bits… about Mistress Connor lodging with me at Sheerness for a week before we departed …” he admitted with a squirm.
“And,
afore that, about the two-dozen doxies my solicitor was t'pay, for services rendered….”

“Two-dozen
prostitutes?” Twigg barked, as if in breathless awe, going so far as to lay one hand on his heart. “What stamina! Damme, Lewrie, but I am
impressed!”

“For helpin' me kill belowdecks mutineers, so I had enough true men t'take back my ship and escape the Nore Mutiny!” Lewrie retorted. “'Wos innit f'me? Wos innit f'me?'” he snipped, impersonating lower-class dialect main-well, after twenty years of exposure to it. “They wouldn't've tried it on, else! Christ, my report to Admiralty got ‘em letters of
appreciation,
ev'ry last one of ‘em! And, I didn't lay one single finger on
any
of ‘em, but
someone
twisted it into a scandal!”