H.M.S. COCKEREL

'Small sips, that's the way, Hugh. Lord…' Caroline sighed, rising to rush to his side to sponge him down and comfort him. 'See how Sewallis does it? There, there, Hugh, you're not hurt. Take a sip of water, there's my little baby…'

Oh, for God's sake, Lewrie thought, eyeing them. One son prim as a parson, one looking like he'd just spewed a dog's dinner, and a dowdy wife! A matronly wife! Definitely matronly.

Well, she is a matron, ain't she, he qualified to himself. A young'un, thank the Lord. Seven years wed. Bloom off the rose, and all that. Still, she wore a fiercely white, starched mobcap, with her hair up and almost hidden beneath it; a heavy old woolen gown drab as a titmouse, with wrist-length sleeves and a high-cut bodice, totally unadorned by even a hint of lace; a pale natural wool shawl over her shoulders which plumped and disguised even more of her youth; and a bib-fronted, slightly stained dishclout of an apron, useful during child-rearing of an infant still incontinently in nappies, but Lord!

And that baby talk-all the time, he thought, feeling guilty and disloyal comparing his (mostly) delightful wife to the fetchingly handsome girl she once had been.

'I'll take them, ma'am,' Mistress McGowan volunteered from the kitchen doors, summoned by the noises. 'La, they're too excitable for a sit-down supper. Not utensil trained, neither. Come, boys? We'll finish supper in the kitchen. Let mummy and daddy eat their meal in peace, and you may see them later, before bedtime.'

'Perhaps that's best…' Caroline surrendered, though she did cock a chary eyebrow in the governess' direction, and furrowed her forehead in what Alan had long ago learned was simmering vexation.

'Good soup,' Alan commented a minute or two of weighty silence later. 'Meaty. And the tarragon brings out the flavor wonderfully well. As do all your spices, dear.'

'I'm pleased you're pleased with it, love,' Caroline smiled in reply, though with half her attention on the feeding noises from the closed kitchen doors.

'About Mistress McGowan…' Alan posed in a soft voice. 'I'm not entirely happy to have our own lives ordered about so. We are not her favorite sort of parents, and-'

'I have noticed,' Caroline sighed between dainty spoonfuls. 'I will speak to her. If she cannot alter her ways, well-'

'You are mistress in your own house, dear,' Alan comforted her. 'And a damned fine one, I assure you. I will not have your sensible ways upset, nor you distressed, by a mere servant.'

'Thankee, Alan,' Caroline beamed at him this time. 'I promise I will speak to her.'

'Damned good soup,' he commented again, raising an eyebrow. 'Too bad little Charlotte isn't ready for soup such as this. Think of what she's missing, poor tyke. Why, it may be a week or two more before she's even able to take mere gruels and paps, d'ye think, dear?'

Tell me I can have you back, hey? he pleaded, with the merest sign of innocent inquisitiveness on his phiz. Once Caroline put a child on a solid diet and left off nursing, he could play once more with those twin peaks of his delight. Once, that is, she stopped producing milk. He'd rushed it the week before, and still felt embarrassed by the almost perverse, cloyingly sweet taste of mother's milk which had flooded his mouth in the throes of passionate foreplay.

'Oh, I think more than a week or so, Alan,' Caroline told him, colouring herself at the memory. 'Perhaps another month. She will take tiny spoonfuls of thin paps now, but…' Caroline shrugged in explanation, which was no explanation at all, save for the heavy way her breasts brushed and lifted beneath her prim bodice. Nursing was a very private pleasure-almost as good a pleasure as mel Lewrie wondered. It seemed so. Domesticity, he groaned to himself, keeping his face bland as he hid behind a sip of hock. Ain't it grand, thankee Jesus!

'And how was the village?' Caroline inquired, changing the subject deftly.

'Quiet as usual. Same old complaints. Same old faces.' He grimaced slightly and laid aside his spoon. Caroline rang a tiny china bell for the soup to be removed and the mutton chops to be fetched in. 'Talk of the French. Bags of it.'

'Anything new?' she asked, frowning.

'Fear, mostly. Even the tenant farmers are getting worried all that levelling, Jacobin talk about equality will come here someday. Now they've murdered their king and queen-'

'Perhaps it'll die out, like Nootka Sound,' Caroline prayed. 'A great deal of commotion, then. It's been ten years since America went the same way, and nothing's come of that,' she stated, to reassure them both. 'Englishmen aren't as crazed as the French, thank God, nor as empty-headed as the Rebels were. There's nothing wrong with English society needs changing! Let the whole world turn upside down, we'll be here, season to season, sane and orderly, as usual.'

'We may, dear,' Alan countered gently. 'But the Germanies, the rest of Europe… First the Colonies went unhinged, now France, and as bloody as you could ask for. Didn't call it the Terror for nought, y'know. There were no aristocrats to butcher in the Colonies, and a fair number of them were Rebels to start with… My pardons.'

Caroline's brother George hadbeen butchered, by Chiswick relatives in the lower Cape Fear of North Carolina. And that pregnant woman murdered in her bed Alan had discovered outside Yorktown, before the siege set in, her unborn babe pinned to the log walls with a rusty bayonet!

'First the Colonies, then France, God knows where next- not England, o' course,' he reiterated after a bite of succulent mutton chop, heavy with hot mustard, Navy style. 'But if this plague spreads, how long before we're alone in a sea of hostile Republicans?'

'Pray God it will blow over like a summer storm, then,' Caroline shuddered, all but crossing herself. Cony fetched out a bottle of burgundy, more suited to mutton, to replace the lighter hock. 'And if you are called back, well, it would not be for long.'

Nootka Sound, '91: an incredibly petty spat between Spain and England over fishing and furs halfway 'round the world on the grim and forbidding coast of America, almost to the Pole, almost to northernmost Asia! The Fleet had been called up to prepare for war, ships laid up inordinary had been refitted, and new construction begun. Alan had spent six weeks in active commission, first officer into a 5th Rate thirty-six-gun frigate upriver at Chatham, before saner and cooler heads prevailed and the whole business had deflated like one of those Frogs', Montgolfier's, hot-air balloons.

'Another Nootka Sound, I'm certain, dearest,' he promised her.

Their bed-chamber was snugly warm, and Alan Lewrie was fighting the urge to yawn, to succumb to sleep- hoping for better things to do in the shank of a cold winter evening. They'd finished supper, taken the boys into the small parlour and let them prate, babble and play as wild as they wished for an hour before shooing them off to bed. Alan and Caroline had played a duet, a medley of reassuringly old country ballads- she on her flute, he on his cheap tin flageolet. Years of practice, and he still sounded so terrible he would not play for any guest. She'd beaten him four games out of seven at backgammon and finished the bottle of claret with him, flushed with victory, liquor and so much happily domestic contentment that she'd quite forgotten her previous worries.

The cook, governess, maidservant, his man Cony, the scullery wenches and the rest of their burgeoning household were all now belowstairs or tucked away in their garrets. Caroline was seated before a mirror at her dressing table, mobcap and dowdy woolen apparel gone, replaced by a flimsy dressing gown. Her hair was down and loose, long and shiny as she slowly and methodically brushed it.

Lewrie was under the pile of coverlets and quilts, with the steamy clothes-iron heat of the recently removed warming pan under his buttocks and back. The fireplace glowed cheery and hot across the chamber, its amber dancing flames reflected into the room by a brass backplate, throwing shadows on paneling and wallpapers.

Beneath his fine linen nightshirt he was happily encouraging a cock-stand.

He smiled in eager anticipation, admiring her reflection in the mirror as she smiled a pleased and secretive smile to herself. She posed her hair, arms lifted, exposing a graceful neck and slim arms, slim back shifting beneath her silken gown. She went back to stroking her hair, underbrushing now, with her head cocked over to one side. In her mirror, shadow breasts rustled against silk, fuller and heavier, so very much more promising than when she was girlish.

When they'd met in Wilmington, North Carolina, during the evacuation, she could not have weighed eight stone sopping wet, and that with half a dozen petticoats. Slim and coltish, still-not the usual apple-dumpling matron, after all. Perhaps a half stone more, Alan wondered? Just the slightest bit fuller in hips and upper thighs-but it was such succulent, acquiescent, yielding and secret excess. Sweeter, softer than ever before, as soft as gosling down.