King, Ship, and Sword

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Huzzah, we've letters!" Lewrie cried as he entered the house after an hour or so at the Olde Ploughman. "Letters and newspapers."

"Who are they from?" Caroline asked, bustling into the foyer from the kitchens, pantry, and still-room, where Spring cleaning had kept her occupied.

"Uhm… one from Sophie and Anthony Langlie," Lewrie told her, shuffling through the pack, "one from his parents, too. Burgess has written us… one from my father… "

"Oh, give me Burgess's!" Caroline enthused, drying her hands on her apron as they went to the many-windowed office at one end of the house, for Charlotte was practicing with her music tutor in the formal parlour. The windows were open, the drapes taken down to be beaten on lines outside and air fresh, as were the carpets. After months with the house shut against winter's chill, the accumulated mustiness from candles, lamps, and fireplaces was being dispelled, replaced with the soft breezes of Spring that wafted in the scents of the first blossoms in the gardens, fresh-springing grass and leaves, the twitter of birds, and the soft cries from the nearest pens where sheep were lambing.

Along with the first wasps of Spring, which Lewrie spent time to swat or shoo before opening the letter from Sophie, their former ward, and his old First Lieutenant aboard HMS Proteus and HMS Savage.

"Yes!" Caroline shouted in triumph. "Alan, my brother is to be wed… The first banns were published last Sunday! Oh, how grand!"

"And good for him, at last," Lewrie heartily agreed. "When do we expect the wedding, and where?"

"What a splendid match!" Caroline further enthused before giving him the details. "Uhm… at the Trencher family's home parish, in High Wycombe,"

"Not so very far," Lewrie replied, more intent on the Langlies' letter. "Didn't know the Trenchers were landed. Still… rich as he is, I'm sure her father's found some 'skint' lord with a large parcel that ain't entailed, and willing t'sell up t'settle his debts."

England was crawling with "new-made men" of Trade and Industry, men risen from the middling classes who aspired to emulate the titled and long-standing landowners, with country estates and acres of their own without renting. The law of entail, though, awarded the inheritance of the income that land generated, not the land itself, to eldest sons, who could not dispose of it; nor could their sons. It was only the grandsons of the heirs who could sell off land, but a new deed of settlement could stave off that shocking event to that heir's grandson for another three generations, and it was a rare thing to see land be sold outright.

"Uhm… perhaps some former commons land, taken 'tween deeds of settlement, under an Enclosure Act," Caroline, ever practical-minded, idly commented as she squirmed excitedly in her chair. "Oh! The first Saturday after Easter! The boys can be home and attend with us! A suitable wedding present, though… over Christmas, Theodora told me her paraphernalia is quite extensive already, hmm… "

Beds, linens, plate, and a thousand pounds per annum, to boot, Lewrie idly thought, imagining that the lovely and charming Theodora Trencher might fetch along her own coach-and-four, thoroughbred saddle horses, a likely entry in the Ascot and the Derby, and a townhouse of her own in London. Lucky bugger, that Burgess, he told himself.

"Good God!" Lewrie exclaimed after scanning the first page of Sophie's letter. "Sophie… she and Langlie have just come back from France! From Paris, and her old lands in Normandy. Them and Langlie's parents, both!"

"From Paris?" Caroline gawped. "And they didn't lop off their heads? What risks they took!"

Lewrie had rescued Sophie, her mother, and her brother from Toulon before the besieged forces of the First Coalition had evacuated; the poor girl had been, for a brief time, the Vicomtesse Sophie, pitiful "meat" for the guillotine and the murderous wrath of the Jacobin revolutionaries who were red-eyed-mad for eliminating every "aristo" family, root and branch, and anything that smacked of nobility. Such revolutionary sentiment and old grudges, Lewrie imagined, still held sway.

"Surely not t'get her lands back," Lewrie said, reading on. "I doubt… aha. Damme if she don't say they had a grand time, a proper honeymoon month. Evidently, they took her for an English girl who-"

"Would that not be risk enough?" Caroline quipped.

"… who could speak fluent French. As Missuz Langlie, with an English husband, they hardly had a spot o' bother. Saw all the sights in Paris… ate well, attended balls and levees, all sorts of things. Hmm Lewrie said, reading off salient points. "And it now seems there's t'be a Langlie heir in the near future, Caroline. Sophie says to inform you she is… enceinte. Or grosse, d'ye prefer the colloquial French. Expectin', ha! Here, I'll let you read it for yourself."

"Later," Caroline demurred. She and Sophie: once one of those lying letters had arrived declaring that Lewrie had been topping her, too, Caroline had turned from fond to outright spiteful towards Sophie, spurring the girl to flee to London into the dubious aegis of Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, her adored, adopted grand-pиre. Even now, after Sophie and Anthony Langlie had wed and those slanders had been found to be utterly false, Caroline still seemed glad to be shot of her. Lewrie doubted if she would read that letter.

"What is the rest of the post?" his wife asked after putting the glad tidings from Burgess Chiswick aside.

"Oh, there's two from the boys," Lewrie told her, still engrossed.

"Oh, you!" she cried, only a tad vexed, springing from her seat to the desk to paw through the stack. "One would think you'd set them aside as if you were still captain of a ship! Official things first, and personal last. You'd deprive me of word from my dear lads?" she said, but it was a teasing, almost fond admonishment for his lapse.

"Apologies, m'dear," Lewrie told her.

"Hmm… dear old Wilmington?" Caroline puzzled, looking over a travel-stained letter. "Oh, your old friend, is he not engaged in business there? The one who sent a deposition for your trial?"

"Christopher Cashman, aye," Lewrie agreed. "He bought into an import-export and chandlery… Livesey, Seabright, and Cashman. Has offices and warehouses on Water Street, he wrote me. The sawmill on Eagle's Island cross the river… "

"Why, we knew the Liveseys… before the Revolution. Rebels, though decent people in the main," Caroline fondly reminisced of her girlhood home in the Cape Fear Low Country. "The only Seabright that I recall was a new-come from England… an officer of the Royal Artillery who'd emigrated for land. Married a Livesey, I think he did. He was a rebel, too. Helped manage the guns at Widow Moore's Creek bridge… when our friends and neighbours from the Scot settlements at Cross Creek and Campbelltown were slaughtered. Ah, well. And… who is Desmond McGillivery, from Charleston?"

"Say who again?" Lewrie started; he'd missed that'un when he'd hurriedly sorted through them, and, good as things seemed to be going with his wife, they could turn to sheep-shit the instant she learned that Desmond McGillivery was yet another of his bastards, a result of his brief, very unofficial "wedding" to a captured Cherokee slave of the Muskogee Indians when he'd been up the Apalachicola to entice them into war against the Yankee Doodle frontier. "Oh! I remember! He was a Midshipman in the American Navy I met back in Ninety-Eight. His uncle was captain of one of their cobbled-together warships going after the Frogs when America and France got huffy with each other. I felt sad for the lad… His mother was Indian, don't ye know. We've corresponded… on and off. Wonder what he's up to now?"

Caroline paid that letter no more attention, enrapt by those from Sewallis and Hugh, and thought no more about it.

Whew! Lewrie secretly gloated; cheated death again! He would reply to Desmond's letter… very much on the sly. And pay stricter attention to the senders' names the next time he collected the mails.