The Invasion Year (59 page)

“Lord Percy Stangbourne and his sister,” Peel told him, looking waggish. “Leftenant-Colonel Lord Stangbourne, rather.”

“I thought Horse Guards had taken his regiment into service and sent him down to the Kent coast?” Lewrie said, puzzled, and trying to look innocent.

“Back in barracks ’til Spring,” Peel went on, “and back in his old haunts, like Boodle’s and the Cocoa Tree. His sister seems nicer than her repute. Rather fetching, in point of fact.”

Peel peered at him as if expecting Lewrie to gush like a schoolboy in “cream-pot” love, make quibbling noises, or half-heartedly agree with his assessment of her, shrugging it all off.

Damme, does he know everything about
everybody
?
Lewrie thought.

The letter he’d been writing had been to Lydia, whose latest post to him contained an offer to coach down to Portsmouth and spend a few days together—did he still wish? Damned
right,
he still wished and had already booked lodgings for her at the George Inn, and was writing to tell her so when Peel had intruded. Or, had he known that, too?

“Aye, she is … devilish-handsome and fetchin’,” Lewrie agreed most assuredly.

Peel’s response was a very broad smile and a nod of approval.

“Well-blessed with God’s own tremendous ‘dot,’ too,” Peel said.

“I don’t give a toss for her dowry,” Lewrie bluntly told him. “Percy’ll most-like gamble them into debtor’s prison, anyway.”

“Usually, when a man says a thing like that, that it isn’t about the money, it usually really is,” Peel said, chuckling in worldly-wise fashion. “You, though, Alan … I can take you at your word. I could …
bank
on it, what?”

“I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or not,” Lewrie wryly replied. “Too honest for my own good, or a bloody fool.”

“Contemplating marriage, though, are you?” Peel too-idly asked.

“No, and neither does Lydia,” Lewrie told him with a guffaw of denial. “Once bitten, twice shy for her, and me … well, I never got the hang of it, and if she wed me, her reputation’d be
utterly
ruined! Mean t’say, James … I’m a bounder, a cad, and a rake-hell.”

“Well, some might say you were made for each other,” Peel said with a shrug. “Both of you scandalous?” he added, with a twinkle.

“A bad marriage to a depraved animal was not her fault, and I think you demean the lady, Peel,” Lewrie shot back.

“My pardons, pray forgive me,” Peel quickly retracted, placing a hand on his breast, “for I only know what the papers made of it for years, the divorcement and all. I meant but to tease, but…”

“Forgiven,” Lewrie allowed, more slowly.

“Heard from your nautical sons, lately?” Peel asked, smiling benignly as he changed the subject.

“Aye, I have!” Lewrie enthused. “Hugh’s with Thorn Charlton, on the Brest blockade. Foul weather, cold victuals two days out of four, but he seems t’love it. Sewallis, well … he’s more guarded, yet he
sounds
as if he prospers. I’ve written his captain, an old friend, Benjamin Rodgers, to enquire, but … tentatively. Haven’t gotten his letter back, yet. You know that Sewallis got his place by fraud and forgery? So…”

“Your father, Sir Hugo, spoke of it to Mister Twigg, and Twigg related it to me,” Peel admitted. “Keep it
in petto, sub rosa,
what?”

Damme if he
doesn’t
know ev’rything ’bout ev’rybody!
Lewrie had to tell himself; he cocked a wary brow over that admission.

“You have a letter sent to
us,
too,” Peel said, off-handedly.

Oh, shit, here it comes! The Secret Branch’s leash!

“Indeed,” Lewrie said over the rim of his tankard, keeping his phyz as inscrutable as he could.

“Recall I told you back in the summer how hard it is to maintain communication with people willing to keep us informed of doings over in France?” Peel said, beginning to peel the onion, at it were. “The French open and read every letter, and have cut off all correspondence with Great Britain?”

“Yes, I recall,” Lewrie stonily replied, refusing to be drawn.

“Yet, we still have
ways
 … tradecraft which we hope keeps a step ahead of French snoopers,” Peel continued, shifting on the settee and making it creak; he was heavier than in his Household Cavalry days, or his early years with Foreign Office as Zachariah Twigg’s pupil. “Wee notes, some coded, sewn into shirt collar bands, pasted into book backs, that sort of thing?”

“Ah, cleverness,” Lewrie warily commented, heavy-eyed.

“As draconian as the French police-state is, with the guillotine the reward for espionage and treason against the Emperor Napoleon, there are few who’d dare keep us informed,” Peel continued, sounding like a chapman trying to flog a dubious product. “So we must do all we can to maintain contact with them, and at the same time do all we can to protect them from exposure. What they do for us is incredibly brave, and rashly dangerous, should they be discovered. Those brave few are rather admirable.”

“I doubt the Frogs’d think so,” Lewrie said, cracking a smile; a damned wee’un. “Depends on one’s point of view.”

“You are familiar with one of them,” Peel hinted, all a’twinkle again.

“I rather doubt it’s Guillaume Choundas,” Lewrie scoffed. “I think I put paid t’that ugly bastard.”

“No, not him!” Peel informed him, laughing. “Do you ever fight a duel, let me know when and where, so I can get a good seat, and
see
how accurately you shoot. The fall from that cliff would have killed him anyway, but that shot of yours, with a smooth-bore musket from a heaving boat at nigh an hundred yards, was spot-on, right in the fiend’s heart. We have that as Gospel … from a witness,” Peel hinted again.

“There were only two people I knew who were there when … No!” Lewrie gasped. “
That
murderin’ bitch?”

“Let us say that
Mademoiselle
Charité Angelette de Guilleri has lost her faith in the Revolution, in Bonaparte, and her
raison d’être,
hey?” Peel said, smirking. “When Bonaparte sold New Orleans and all of Louisiana to the United States, he cut the very heart out of her, making the deaths of her brothers and her cousin, and their romantic but damn-fool revolt against the Spanish, and their piracy that funded it, meaningless.”

That had been Lewrie’s doing, requiring him to go up the Mississippi to New Orleans in
mufti
with a commercial trader/informant and sometime Secret Branch “asset” to “smoak them out,” then escape and use his
Proteus
frigate to smash the pirate encampment on Grand Terre, in Barataria Bay, slaying the lot and burning their vessels.

“The bitch shot me!” Lewrie exclaimed in heat. “With a Girandoni air-rifle like that’un yonder,” he said, jerking an arm towards his personal weapons rack. “Would’ve killed me, too, if the flask’d had enough compressed air in it!”

“For which the Crown, Mister Twigg, and I are grateful that she did not,” Peel said, sounding earnest.

“Broke her wee, black heart, did Bonaparte?” Lewrie sneered in baby-talk. “Bloody
good
! I
hope
she suffers! Dammit, Peel, she had a hand in killin’ my
wife
on that beach!”

“I know, Lewrie … Alan,” Jemmy Peel sombrely said. “And for her forlorn loss, her gallant stab at fomenting a French Creole revolution in New Orleans, Charité de Guilleri won the admiration of the finest
salon
society in Paris … admiration, pity, and
entré,
what? Lewrie, she rubs shoulders with French generals, admirals, the head of Bonaparte’s National Police, that brute Fouché. The Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, has tucked his arse under her sheets, and she has been to tea with anyone who’s anyone in French government … with Empress Josephine and Bonaparte himself!”

“Bloody good for her,” Lewrie sneered again.

“She’s the highest, and closest placed source, we ever could
hope
to have,” Peel pressed on. “She quite cleverly found a fellow in our … employ … and used him to get a letter out to us, offering to supply us with information.”

“Unless Fouché’s
caught
your ‘fellow,’ and is usin’ her access as bait,” Lewrie countered with scorn. “Use both t’feed you useless twaddle that’ll have ye runnin’ in circles.”

Like all the people who specialised in skullduggery for King and Country whom Lewrie had encountered, James Peel all but goggled at him, as if Toulon and Chalky had begun to sing “God Save The King” in perfect two-part harmony. No one
ever
thought Lewrie clever!

“We considered that, quite seriously, for a goodly time,” Peel confessed, after a long moment’s contemplation, “but decided that it would be too convoluted a scheme. Fouché, or his associate,
M’sieur
Réal, are rather direct sorts. Do they find a spy, their usual course of action is round him up, his family too, torture them ’til they sing like larks, then behead them publicly as a warning. It’s not as if we have threesomes or larger groups of agents organised over yonder, for all of the exiled royalists’ schemes and gold. Bonaparte’s nailed the borders shut so tightly that sending funds to support espionage is out of the question … too damned heavy, for one.

“No, the ‘fellow,’ as you put it, is with the Treasury,” Peel revealed, “and Charité de Guilleri is with … everybody. But, before she begins to produce for the Crown, she wishes to hear from you.”

“What? Lure me t’the back o’ some deep inlet for a reunion?” Lewrie sneered. “No, thankee.”

“Nothing face-to-face, no,” Peel quickly countered. “That would be much too dangerous for the both of you. She wishes you to reply to her letter. She asks for your forgiveness,” he softly added.

“Forgiveness?” Lewrie exclaimed. “Not
this
side of Hell I won’t! There’s some things
un
-forgiveable.”

“Quite a lot hangs on it,” Peel pointed out.

“I know very well what you, and Twigg, and his ‘Irregulars’ can do … forgeries and such,” Lewrie gravelled. “If she ever saw a note in my handwritin’, it was seven years ago, and after what I did to her, her kin, and their scheme, I doubt she saved one out o’ sentiment! Why can’t
your
people cobble up a reply? She wouldn’t know the diff’rence.”

“Forging or altering documents or agents’ reports on military matters are one thing, Alan,” Peel gently objected. “They’re much too dry, concise, and impersonal, whereas personal thoughts and feelings are very hard to reproduce.”

“Surely ye forge credible love letters t’trip up traitors, and expose ’em,” Lewrie scoffed. “Or embarrass people who need t’be given a public ‘come-down.’ ”

“Yes, we do,” Peel cheerfully admitted, “but in those cases, we have samples from both parties, and can imitate their repartee. With you, we have nothing to work with. Oh, we
could
cobble up something … hire on a poor, unknown
romance
scribbler, and send her a letter full of high-flown tragedy worthy of Drury Lane dramas, but … after a third or fourth reading, it wouldn’t sound like
you,
it would not ring true, and she would know … mind, I told you she’s clever?… that it was a fraud. No, Alan, it must not only be in your hand, but from your mind … your soul.”

“I s’pose she wrote it in French,” Lewrie stated.

“Well … yes,” Peel said, his head cocked over. “Seeing as how she
is
French.”

“Peel … d’ye imagine, on your rosiest days, that I’m anywhere
near
fluent in French?” Lewrie wryly pointed out. “Christ, I was damn’ lucky t’get through Latin and Greek at school, and most o’ that was on paper, not spoken! I read French even worse than I speak it, and if ye wish Charité t’make heads or tails of it, I’d need a translatin’ dictionary
and
a bilingual tutor … first t’read hers, then t’write mine!”

Peel frowned heavily, and puffed out his cheeks in a long exhale of frustration; this was an
emmerdement
he had not pre-considered.

“Ehm … she knew of your lack when you spied on her in New Orleans?” Peel hesitantly asked, as if crossing his fingers.

“We spoke in English,” Lewrie told him. “With so many British or Yankee Doodles tradin’ in New Orleans, settlin’ up-river in the pine woods round Baton Rouge, she and her kin couldn’t
avoid
learnin’, but she despised them,
and
English. Fluent, though. Even in bed,” Lewrie added, with a faint smile of pleasant reverie.