King, Ship, and Sword

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

This'll most-like put me in debtors' prison, 'fore we're done! Lewrie ruefully told himself as he delved into his wash-leather coin purse to tip the porters, once their luggage had been stowed aboard the hired coach- some in the boot and the most valuable inside the box. It was prime sport for vagrants and street thugs to slit the straps and leather covers of the boot and make off with the luggage, with the travellers all unsuspecting 'til they reached their last stop.

The porters were a surly lot, unhappy to accept British coinage and to deal with an Anglais, a "Bloody," a Biftec in pidgin French.

"All square?" Lewrie asked the porters. "Uh, c'est tout?Bon?"

"Uhn," growled one; "Grr," the other porter sourly replied.

"Au revoir, then," Lewrie concluded, boarding the coach. "And may ye all catch the pox… if ye ain't poxed already," he muttered under his breath after closing the coach door. "Such a warm and welcomin' people, the Frogs," he told his wife, Caroline, seated by herself on the forward-facing padded bench seat. "Feelin' a touch better, my dear?" Lewrie solicitously enquired.

"The ginger pastilles seem to have availed, yes," she replied.

The crossing on the small packet from Dover to Calais had been a rough one. They'd had bright skies and brisk winds, but the narrows of the Channel when a strong tide was running could produce a prodigious chop, and the packet had staggered and swooped over steep ten-foot seas with only thirty or fourty feet between the swells. The last time that Caroline had been at sea, returning from the Bahamas aboard the little HMS Alacrity, a ketch-rigged bomb converted to a shallow-draught gunboat that would bucket about in any sort of weather past placid, she'd suffered roiled innards for days before regaining the sea legs she had found on the stormy passage out in 1786.

The packet voyage had been so short that Caroline had had no time to acclimate, and she had spent most of the trip past the harbour mole by a bucket or the lee rails. Even last night, spent in a squalid Calais travellers' inn, she could tolerate nothing more strenuous than cups of herbal tea and thin chicken broth.

The ginger pastilles were made in London by Smith amp; Co., recommended by another couple crossing to France with them, Sir Pulteney "Something Fruitish" and his wife, Lady "Starts with an I," both of 'em of the most extreme languid and lofty airs, the sort that set English teeth on edge. Worried about Caroline, Lewrie hadn't paid all that much attention to the social niceties and, once on solid ground at Calais, had been more than happy to decline an invitation to dine with the "Whosits," on account of Caroline's tetchy boudins… A further vague suggestion to meet again in Paris, he'd shrugged off, as well.

"Well, we're off," Lewrie said to fill a void as their coachee whipped up and set their equipage in motion.

"Once out in open country, and fresh, clean air, I expect that we shall enjoy this much better," Caroline opined, holding a scented handkerchief to her nose as she looked out the windows. "It will be a fine adventure, I'm bound."

"Sweeter smellin' than Calais, at any rate," Lewrie agreed with her. "Seaports always reek." Though he suspected that every French city or town would prove as noxious as Dung Wharf or the old Fleet Ditch in London, long ago paved over. And how the Devil did I end up chivvied into this? he asked himself for the hundredth time; guilt most-like. No one back in Anglesgreen had thought much of their jaunt to France. Well, Millicent Chiswick, Caroline's brother's wife, had deemed it a very romantic idyll, but she was about the only one.

Weeks of, well… not exactly harping and nagging had preceded the actuality. There'd been French maps and atlases turning up mysteriously, then a weedy university lad to tutor the children in French, though he and Caroline had somehow become pupils as well. Not that those lessons had done Lewrie's linguistic skills all that much good. He had a smattering of Hindi from service in the Far East between the wars in ' 84, a dab or two of French from duty in the Mediterranean in the '90s (and several good public schools from which he had been booted!), and a few words and phrases of Russian from dealings with the delectable Eudoxia Durschenko and her equally appalling papa, and his most-recent service in the Baltic.

Curse words, mostly, foul oaths and the sketchiest, rudimentary necessities such as "I will order the…, fetch me…, too hot, too cold, hello, good-bye, d'ye have any ale," and the ever-useful "fetch out yer whores." Schoolboy Greek was still a mystery, too, though he had done rather well in Latin… mostly due to all the battles described, and the lurid and scandalous poems.

Caroline heaved a petulant sigh and knit her brows, creating that vertical furrow that was usually a sign of her anger. Lewrie'd gotten very familiar with that'un over the years, and involuntarily crossed his legs to protect his "wedding tackle."

"Somethin' troublin', Caroline?"

"Oh, the children," she replied, fretful. "I know I thought our getting away would help, but… "

"They're havin' a grand time, dear," Lewrie told her. "Don't fret about them."

His father, Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, had agreed to spend most of the summer in the country, and would look out for the boys at his Dun Roman, with the help of his exotic "man," Trilochan Singh, a swarthy, one-eyed Sikh as randy and as dangerous-looking as the worst sort of Calcutta bazaari-badmash who'd cut your throat just to keep in practise. To corrupt Sewallis and Hugh even further, Liam Desmond and Pat Furfy would be near to hand with their seafaring tales, yarns, and Irish myths. And though his uncle Phineas Chiswick and his brother-in-law Governour Chiswick deplored it, Charlotte would be included during the days, though Governour had insisted that she reside with him and his wife… accurately thinking that exposing a girl to too much of Sir Hugo's past repute would quite ruin her. To irk Governour even further, Sir Hugo would take all three of them into town to play with Will Cony's children, a rambunctious and rowdy set as wild as Red Indians. Now, was Caroline having second thoughts?

"Oh, is that not the grandest chateau, Alan?" Caroline suddenly enthused, shifting over to the other side of the coach to goggle at a substantial manse surrounded by pasture land, vineyards, and manicured green lawns. "And… do I detect that our coach is travelling upon a very well-laid road? Perhaps one of Bonaparte's decrees."

"Pray God he's more interest in roads and canals than armies," Lewrie replied, though his professional sense was that armies marched faster and farther on good roads than bad.

"And the peasants!" Caroline further enthused as their coach passed a waggon heavily loaded with hay, drawn by a brace of plodding oxen, and goaded and accompanied by several French farmers, their wives, and children. "Are they not picturesque? Native costume, do you think?"

To Lewrie's eyes, what they wore looked more like a mixture of embroidered vests, straw hats, voluminous skirts, wooden clogs, and… rags. Rootless Irish mendicants could be deemed better dressed!

"Catch-as-catch-can, I'd s'pose" was his verdict.

"Why, one would imagine you had no curiosity in your soul!" his wife teasingly accused. "Or… is it that you have fought the French for so long, you can't fake interest?"

"So long as they ain't tryin' t'kill me, I'll allow that they are… colourful folk," he said with a smirk. "Given a choice though, Hindoos win 'colourful,' hands down."

And so it went, all the way to Amiens, where they laid over for the night in a much cleaner travellers' hotel, where Caroline's appetite was much restored, and though the chalked menu, and the waiter's unhelpful explanations, might as well have been Sanskrit, they managed to order both excellent, hearty meals and a couple of bottles of very good wine. As for dessert, French apple pie was as succulent as English apple pie, and the Lewries went to bed in fine fettle just a bit past eight, ready for an early rising and the next leg of their trip to fabled Paris.