The Invasion Year (27 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

When rattling down Park Lane at a comfortable clip, their
cabriolet
had seemed fashionable enough for the occasion. The morning was clear and sunny, and those West Enders who had risen earlier than the norm were out in their own open-topped carriages, or on horseback for a canter through Hyde Park, to their right. Turning into Piccadilly, then turning once again into St. James Street, though, they found the way to the palace was lined with four-horse-teamed equipages, mostly closed, and with only their sash-windows down to acknowledge the season, all very much grander than their own. Sir Hugo began to work his mouth, squint, and grumble as they joined the long queue leading to the entrances, as if regretting his choice of conveyance.

“Might as well have hired a one-pony dog cart,” he groused.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lewrie told him. He could have given a bigger damn if they had had to walk, at that point, or had they been trundled up in a rag-picker’s wheel barrow. He’d
intended
to get a good night’s sleep, but some members of the Madeira CLub (the younger, still-single ones) had proposed more toasts than usual, posed more “a glass with you, sir!” individual toasts that had gone on in the Common Room long after the uncommonly good supper, with all
its
toasting, and the port, cheese, nuts, and sweet bisquits. Major Baird, their “chicken nabob” who’d come back from India with a middling fortune in loot and was
still
seeking a suitable mate (when not pursuing stand-up “knee-trembler” sex with the wenches who haunted the theatres), had even discovered a stone crock of American corn whisky, and had urged Lewrie to imbibe with him.

To say that Lewrie was a
tad
hung over would be an accurate statement; a bit too “blurred” to feel impatient, out-classed by others’ elegance, or anything much at all. Though there were some young women in the gawking crowd that usually thronged outside the palace on days when levees were held that were quite fetching. And, since Lewrie
seemed
to be Somebody of Note (he was in a carriage bound for the portico, wasn’t he; an officer, wasn’t he?), some of the bolder even cheered and tossed a flower or two. They surely wouldn’t waste flowers at a closed coach, where the top-lofty nabobs kept their aloof distance!

“P’rhaps it ain’t that bad, after all,” Sir Hugo said, leering across Lewrie at a round-faced teenaged beauty who was all but bouncing on her tip-toes in excitement. Sir Hugo even tipped his cocked hat to her and grinned. Which grin seemed to put her off and make her frown. The sight of a beak-nosed old goat, liver spots and all, ogling her like a vulture would a neglected beef roast would have put any young woman off … even if he
was
dressed in a general’s uniform, and might be as famous as the Duke of Cumberland after Culloden.

“Hmm. Pretty,” Lewrie commented, after a glance. “How do you keep yer wig from comin’ off when ye tip yer hat?” he asked.

“Glue,” Sir Hugo said with a pleased sigh, sniffing the flowers he had gathered from the floor of the coach. “There’s times when losin’ my hair’s a blessing … lots o’ scalp for the paste, heh heh. It washes off, later,” he added with a shrug.

The palace staff was very well organised. As each coach rolled up, one of the passengers, and the coachee, was handed a numbered ticket made of pasteboard. At the foot of the walk sat an easel with much larger numbers stacked up beside it, so that when the guests departed their number could be displayed to the throng of coaches waiting in a side yard, summoning the proper conveyance. The British Army should have been so efficient, but then … Army officers
bought
their commissions, and the palace staff were selected, and paid, for competence.

“Your invitations, sirs,” a grandly liveried flunky demanded, chequed them off a list, and bowed them onwards to the imposing entrance.

Did one ask Captain Alan Lewrie what he recalled of St. James’s Palace in later years, he could only shrug, cock his head to one side, and respond by saying, “Huge. Rather huge.” His hangover might have had something to do with it. There were grand marble staircases, and sumptuous carpetting, huge head-to-toe portraits, many times lifesize, framed in overly ornate gilt. There was a positive
shit-load
of gilt, Lewrie remembered. High ceilings, replete with angels and cherubs above him, thousands of candles burning, furniture lining the hallways and gigantic rooms, too grand to really sit on, and one long hall after another; he reckoned that he might have walked half a mile before reaching yet another hall where the levee was held, which was already thronged with the rich, the titled, the elegant and dashing, and those who would be honoured … and hopefully
become
titled, and elegant and
interesting
because of it … at least in part.

“Anyone you know, hey?” Sir Hugo asked after another liveried and white-wigged servant had taken their hats and presented them with yet another set of claim tickets.

“Hmm?” Lewrie responded, peering about owl-eyed.

“Damn my eyes, are ye foxed?” Sir Hugo grumbled. “Did ye take on a load o’ ‘Dutch Courage’ with yer breakfast?”

“Nought but coffee, lashin’s of it,” Lewrie told him. “Now, last night was another matter. No, I don’t think I do know anyone. Don’t even see the Blandings, yet. Do you?”

“None I know … but one’r two I’d
care
t’know,” Sir Hugo said as he raised a brow and put on a grin to a willowy and languid dame in her forties, one with dark auburn hair and a “come-hither” grin, who was gliding by on the arm of a much older and tubbier man. She seemed to look the both of them up and down, then smiled and played with her fan against her cheek for a moment. Flirtatiously?

“I’m out of touch,” Lewrie confessed. “Does that mean anything?”

“The key to Paradise,” Sir Hugo muttered back. “She’s took with one of us. Either that, or she had an itch needed scratchin’.”

Yet another liveried fellow came up to them as they neared the tall and wide doors to the hall proper. He seemed to know what he was about, and was all coolly buinsesslike.

“Captain Alan Lewrie … Major-General Sir Hugo Saint George Willoughby, aha,” he briskly said, “honouree and guest. In a moment, you gentlemen will be formally announced. Right after, Captain Lewrie, might you grant us a few minutes to explain the procedure, with some of the others?… Oh, good. Tea or coffee will be available, and there are side-chambers where any adjustments of your habiliments may be made … and last-minute needs may be answered in a ‘necessary.’ Once His Majesty has made his entrance, an equerry shall queue you up in order of honours to be presented.”

“I’ll take another number?” Lewrie asked, hoping that coffee would be shoved into his hands, instanter.

“In a matter of speaking, sir,” the courtier told him, grinning. He was an older fellow who had obviously supervised these ceremonies so often that he could have done them in his sleep.

Another queue as couples, or parties of three or more, waited to be announced and admitted. There were old hands at it who’d been coming to the palace for ages, along with nervous, coughing, and “aheming” throat clearers of both sexes. Husbands squeezed wives’ hands to reassure them; sons and daughters ranging from gawky teens to matronly women with flushed faces, all but squirming in un-accustomed finery to get more comfortable, some moving their lips over rehearsed phrases of greeting should they get a chance to be spoken to by their sovereign, and a pair of teen daughters practicing their deep curtsies, tittering at each other each time. There were men …

Christ, half of ’em look like brick-layers, or greengrocers!
Lewrie thought in wonder;
They handin’ out knighthoods for brewin’ a good beer? That’s how Sam Whitbread got his!

On closer inspection, even those who already wore signs of rank, ladies in tiaras and elegantly clothed men with sashes and stars, were not all
that
elegant or handsome, either.

At last, the haughty major-domo thudded his five-foot mace on the marble floor and bellowed (elegantly!), “Major-General Sir Hugo Saint George Willoughby, and Captain Alan Lewrie!” That drew no particular note from those already in the hall, though Lewrie plastered a smile to one and all on his phyz and looked the room over. There were thrones at the far end, atop a raised dais, with a cushioned kneeler before it; all adrip with even more gilt, red, purple cloth, with the Union flag, the ancient royal banner, and the flags of England’s subordinate lands, stood up behind. He admittedly gawked.

“If you would come this way, sir, ah,” a plummy Oxonian voice bade. It was Sir Harper Strachan, Baron Ludlow, again, dressed in an even grander suit of court clothes, wielding his mace-like cane, and scowling for a second as he gave Lewrie another of those up-and-down appraisals. “Quite a change for the better, hah,” he decided.

“Harper,” Sir Hugo said from the side, nodding in thin greeting.

“Hugo,” Strachan replied, just as coolly. There was evidently no love lost between them.

“Subalterns together … in The King’s Own,” Sir Hugo explained. “Ah … what memories,” he sarcastically added.

Strachan wriggled his nose and mouth in a petulant manner, then languidly extended an arm to steer Lewrie to a side-chamber.

“Oh, there you be, Lewrie!” Captain Blanding said as he spotted him. “Top of the morning to you!”

“And to you as well, sir,” Lewrie replied, bound for the side-board where a silver coffee pot stood steaming over a candle warmer. At last! After a sip or two of creamed and sugared coffee, he began to feel as if he was back in the land of the aware, and gave an ear to Strachan’s introductions and explanations.

There was a coal baron who would be made knight and baronet, a senior, doddering don from Cambridge who’d written something or other impressive who would be knighted, an unctuous younger fellow who was to be made a baron … from the names and hints he dropped, Lewrie got the impression that pimping for the Prince of Wales was going to be amply rewarded in a few minutes. There was a fellow retiring from the Foreign Office who would also be knighted. Disappointingly, there were no other officers from the Navy. There were none from the Army either, but they hadn’t done all that much but drill, drink, and dance since the Dutch expedition in ’98.

When summoned, once the attendees had had half an hour or so to mingle, they were to queue up in descending order: the pimp, the coal baron, Captain Blanding, then Lewrie, followed by the don and the old Foreign Office ink-spiller. When announced by name, they were to make their way to a particular rosette in the carpet and perform a graceful “leg”—a deep, long one, Strachan insisted (there would be time for them to practice)—then move forward to the edge of the dais before the thrones and stop. Head bowed still, in proper humility when named to the King ’til the Sovereign approached them with the Sword of State, at which time they should kneel on the cushion. Once the rite was done, it
was
allowed that one might express a
brief
sentence of gratitude, before rising, bowing again, then walk
backwards
away from the throne, counting the large rosettes in the carpet ’til they reached the third (where they had begun) and deliver a final “leg.”

“It is
not
done to break away and turn your backs on His Majesty,” Sir Harper cautioned in a stern, clench jawed drawl. “So long as he is present—”

“Doesn’t that make chatting someone up rather awkward?” Captain Blanding interrupted.

“One
may
converse with others, turned
somewhat
towards the Presence, but one must not face deliberately
away,
sir,” Strachan said in irritation.

“Lask to ’em on a bow-and-quarter line, sir,” Lewrie said with a tongue-in-cheek smirk. A third cup of coffee was doing wonders.

“Oh, good ho!” Blanding said with a happy, satisfied snort.

They could not quite catch what Sir Harper Strachan was saying under his breath, or quite make out the sound of grinding teeth.

“Palace staff will now assist you with your appearances,” Sir Harper gravelled, “should you feel any adjustments are necessary.”

“The ‘necessary,’ aye, by Jove,” Blanding said, peering about for a door which might lead to a “jakes.” He was pointed to a door to one side of the room, and eagerly trotted off.

“Might I assist you, sir?” a catch-fart in palace livery asked Lewrie, a wee minnikin who barely came up to his shoulder.

“Just whisk the bloody hair powder off, thankee,” Lewrie told him. “Think I can manage the rest myself,” he added with a nod at the door, behind which Blanding was urinating as loudly as a heifer on a flagstone floor and humming a gay air.

“Quite so, sir!” the wee fellow happily agreed.

*   *   *

Once back in the hall, Lewrie got introduced to Mrs. Blanding, the Reverend Blanding, and Miss Blanding; the Reverend Brundish he already knew. The son was already as plump as his father and mother, and affected an Oxonian accent as irritating as Strachan’s. The daughter was somewhat pretty—she had not yet inherited her mother’s slightly raw and rosy complexion. Once the “allow me to name to yous” had been done, Captain Blanding launched into a paean of praise for how Lewrie had been so energetic and clever during their service together, which forced Lewrie to put on his false modesty (a sham at which he was un-commonly good, by then). It appeared that their fusses over his many “Submit” hoists, and all the woes of the convoy, were quite forgiven.