The Invasion Year (60 page)

James Peel smiled back and raised an eyebrow in congratulatons.

“So … you
would
write her if you could,” Peel said. “Perhaps a reply in English, which she understands, would be more believable to her than any attempt on your part in French. Hmmm … too many grammatical errors and mis-spellings in your poor French might make you look weak and clownish. After all, she’s the one pleading with you for forgiveness. Hard to accept, from an illiterate fool.”

“Now, I didn’t exactly say I’d—!” Lewrie quickly objected.

“And, does she receive a letter in English, and if it is ever found on her person, in her effects, it would be a death sentence,” Peel cleverly pointed out, then pretended to think better of it. “No, we’d hate to lose her access just after we get it. Better we—”

“Alright,” Lewrie suddenly declared, liking the sound of “death sentence” and unable to think of anyone who could deserve it more.

“You will?” Peel asked, surprised.

“If it’s intercepted, and they lop off her head, that’d be fine with me,” Lewrie said in a level tone, though Mr. Peel, who had known him long enough to see the danger signs, noted that Lewrie’s clear and merry grey-blue eyes had gone as steely-grey as Arctic ice. “Damn the wishes of the Crown, or Secret Branch.”

“Well, I
was
going to plead that the intelligence she could give us would bring this war to a victorious end, bring down the French Empire, and put Napoleon Bonaparte before a firing squad, but … if you are amenable, I’ll not question your reasons,” Peel most-happily said, with a broad grin and an air of relief. “Uhm, when could I expect it?”

“Don’t press,” Lewrie sternly told him. “Findin’ forgiveness for what she did’ll take some time, and, as you say, it’ll have t’ring true. It wouldn’t, if it’s rushed. If my reply’s too quick, and smuggled to her a week or two later, she’d
know
I’m lyin’, and
then
where would ye be?

“I’ll think on it, tomorrow,” Lewrie said. “Once back at sea, I have more than enough time t’ponder it.”

“My dear Alan, I didn’t expect to coach back to London tomorrow with it in my hand,” Peel said with a laugh. “I, my compatriots, and the Crown will be deeply in your debt, though.”

There was a bustle at the forward door as Yeovill entered the great-cabins with a large covered metal barge. “Evening, sir! Supper is ready to be served.”

“Capital!” Lewrie declared before he tossed off the last dregs of his ale and rose to go to the table in the dining-coach. “I trust you’ve a hearty appetite, Mister Peel. Come take a seat.”

*   *   *

The rest of the evening passed in a much cheerier manner, with Peel regaling Lewrie with the latest London doings, and Lewrie describing the details of the raid on Boulogne, complete with all the bravery of his officers and Mids, and what a partially amusing folly it had turned out to be. In turn, Peel related a recent visit to Mr. Zachariah Twigg’s retirement estate at Hampstead, where Lewrie’s own father, Sir Hugo, had been visiting at the same time. Bitter enemies at logger-heads long before in the Far East in the late 1780s, they’d become the best of friends, as thick as thieves, in their later ages; Twigg, the old cut-throat Crown agent, and Sir Hugo, the rake-hellish, were mad for three-horse chariots, though they were both old enough to know better, and raced each other daily like the idlest, hen-headed young blades who thought themselves immortal, terrorising the county thereabouts. And all accompanied by shrimp
rémoulade,
a drippy-bacon salad, a guinea hen apiece, and a slab of beefsteak each, slathered with a
béarnaise
sauce that Yeovill had whipped up; washed down, of course, by several bottles of wine.

*   *   *

Peel departed a little before Lights Out, at One Bell of the Evening Watch, at 8:30
P.M.
, in fine fettle and halfway “foxed.” Lewrie took a last glass of brandy back to his desk in the day-cabin and sat, staring off at nothing while Pettus and Jessop finished cleaning up and stowing away, and readying his bed-cot for sleep. He brooded, shaking his head now and again in amazement that Peel would even think to ask him to write Charité de Guilleri; in even more amazement that he’d even
thought
to agree, much less to promise that he would.

Chalky gave out a preparatory “here I come”
murf
before leaping atop the desk, and butted under Lewrie’s free hand for pets. Toulon sat by Lewrie’s right boot, whining for a little co-operation, so Lewrie turned to offer his thigh for a stepping-stone. A second later, his heavier black-and-white ram-cat was in his lap, kneading the front of his waist-coat, purring lustily.

Lewrie gave up brooding to stroke them both, smiling, and glad to have their company and affection, and the chance to turn all of his attention to them and nothing else, for a long moment.

“Don’t chew on that, Chalky,” he chid the younger cat, which had flopped onto one side and begun to claw at his letter to Lydia, drawing a corner to his sharp-fanged mouth for a nibble: Chalky adored any balled-up sheet of paper, for footballs and chew-toys.

Lewrie took it away from him and held it at mid-chest to re-read what he had penned so far. He’d meant to finish it and send it ashore before Peel’s arrival.

… completed Victualling and taking aboard fresh stocks of shot and powder. Now that is done, I am promised by the Port Admiral that I can place the ship Out of Discipline for at least two days, giving the People a well-deserved and much-needed Carouse.

Most happily, the Weather remains bad and the Winds remain foul, “dead muzzlers” precluding sailing, so do come down, soonest, and I imagine that we will be in port even longer …

That was where he had been forced to break off when Peel arrived.

“Make way, lads,” Lewrie told the cats as he scooted his chair closer to the desk, opened the ink well, and took up his steel-nibbed pen once more.

These last few months had been a Trial, the details of which I cannot trust to paper, but will gladly speak of, do I have the Pleasure of imparting it all to you, one whom I trust has a sympathetic ear for a poor sailor’s tales—some parts may be deemed Amusing, now they’re past and done.

Most of all, I am in Need of your genial Company, whether my tales are amusing or not. Make all Haste, without risk to your pretty neck of course, I have arranged for shore Lodging for you. Know that I shall Burn with Anticipation ’til your Reply to my offer, and to your Arrival, should you agree to come down to Portsmouth.

Most Passionately and Affectionately,
Alan

Aboard HMS
Reliant

Portsmouth Harbour

November 17th, 1804

“Peace now, catlings,” he pled as he sanded and dried the letter, then folded it over. They sat as intent as buzzards over an expiring eland as he fetched sealing wax and his ornate new brass signet stamp from the desk, and melted a wax stick over the candle.

He got a large blob of red wax dripped over the corners of the folds, then pressed his stamp down into it, forming an emblem of shield topped with helmet. His bloody … escutcheon.

“I still think it’s damned foolishness,” he muttered, eying the result, before taking up his pen again to inscribe Lydia’s name and address on the back-side. As he brushed glue from a small pot on the last of his stamps, he thought of sending it ashore by the next passing guard boat, but … no. He would take it ashore himself, in the morning, to be sure that it went into the London mail bags, and not be lost in a Midshipman’s pockets or soaked illegible in the rain.

After stowing glue pot, wax, and stamp in the desk, he mused over the completed letter for a moment, before placing it out of harm’s way, in a drawer, too. He took a sip of his brandy as reward, feeling a stir of delight that he’d soon see Lydia, again. Which stir abruptly vanished, as he thought of that
other
letter he’d promised to write.

Tell that murderin’ bitch that I forgive her?
he gravelled to himself;
I
never
will! But …
He recalled a jape that he’d heard about what anxious Mommas told their virgin daughters of how to act on their wedding nights … “lay back and think of England!”

“The things I do for King and Country,” he whispered before he tossed off the last of his drink. “Lay back and think of England, indeed!”

AFTERWORD

Readers may recall in Lewrie’s earlier mis-adventures that the British spent a lot of time, effort, and lives trying to wrest Saint Domingue (Haiti) from the French, because its wealth in sugar and its other exports were worth as much as all the other British West Indies colonies combined. When the French completed their last evacuations in November of 1803, the general feeling was “sour grapes” and “If we can’t have it, then no other world power will, either—so there!” Henceforth Haiti would belong to its own people, to make of it what they would … which, as we’ve seen, hasn’t amounted to much since.

Yes, there
was
a Lt. Josiah Willoughby, a young officer whom William Laird Clowes, in
The Royal Navy, a History from the Earliest Times to 1900,
called “one of the most gallant officers ever to serve under the British flag,” an Acting-Lieutenant at the time, aboard the
Hercule,
74. He went aboard the grounded French frigate
Chlorinde
and worked her off before the Haitians could set her afire with heated shot. Imagine my delight to discover him with the same surname that I chose for Lewrie’s rake-hell father so long ago; imagine Lewrie’s wariness to address the shared relations; imagine Josiah Nisbet Willoughby’s dismay that he is (blessedly distant) kin to
two
utter rogues!

Before they gave up Saint Domingue as a bad go, the French
had
conducted a policy of genocide, intending to slaughter every dis-affected Black in the colony and replace them with docile new slaves imported from Africa; quite a change from the heady proclamations of the early Revolution, when Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were the watchwords, and slavery was condemned and intended to be abolished. Early French governors sent to the West Indies before the war began in 1793, some of them part-Black, had declared freedom upon their arrivals. In sad point of fact, though, the chaining together and drowning of several thousand Blacks right there in Cap François harbour really happened.

And, after the French were expelled, the victorious ex-slave generals, Dessalines, Christophe, Clairveaux, Petion, and Moise, turned on each other, as revolutionaries do, and in the process, all the
petites blancs,
the lower-class tradesmen and shopkeeper Whites who had stayed, hoping against hope, were massacred in turn.

*   *   *

When Lewrie and
Reliant
returned to England in the spring of 1804, the freedom and survival of the nation were very much in doubt, and England stood alone against the might of Napoleon Bonaparte and France. After the savage drubbings that Bonaparte had inflicted upon Britain’s continental allies, none of them were eager to jump into a new coalition against him, and Britain couldn’t
buy
support from the Austrians, or anybody else, no matter how much silver was offered to them. The Austrian Empire was licking its wounds, the Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies had been over-run, along with the rest of the Italian states, and some of them were firmly in Bonaparte’s camp, either from “progressive” Jacobin-Republican enthusiasm or from conquered subject states which went along to get along. The Netherlands was the Batavian Republic and at war with England, too. The Prussians had had the stuffing beaten from them and been rendered impotent. And Spain, which had been a British ally in the First Coalition, had early-on lost its zeal to crush anti-religious, anti-royalist “divine right of kings” and had become a French ally. The Royal Navy had cut off their control of Spain’s vast overseas empire, and all their trade, so Spain was sitting things out, too—though they would take hands with France, again, to their utter ruin in December of 1804 … the damned fools.

England
might’ve
turned to the Baltic states like Sweden, Denmark, and Russia under its new teenaged Tsar Alexander, had England not destroyed the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1801 and cowed the others (for details of which see
Baltic Gambit,
a preceding Alan Lewrie adventure, and a crackin’-good read, if I do say so myself!) into backing down from their League of Armed Neutrality. They were sore losers!

*   *   *

That summer of 1804, there sat Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, just a few miles across the English Channel, massed round Boulogne and adjacent harbours that were crammed to bursting with invasion vessels of all kinds and sizes, as I described. Those
caïgues, prames, péniches,
and what-nots had to be reduced in numbers … hence, torpedoes.