Reefs and Shoals

When wakened at 4 A.M. at Eight Bells in his great-cabins aboard ship, anchored far out in St. Helen’s Road, it had taken a long look and a hard try to leave his hanging bed-cot. All his blankets and his coverlet, a quilt or two, and the furs he’d bought to brave the cold of the Baltic before the Battle of Copenhagen, and he had still been cold! His cats, Toulon and Chalky, had found it too nippy for them, too, and had burrowed under, for a rare once, and would not be turfed out, either. And the long, gusty sail to fetch alongside the King’s Stairs in a whistled-up bum-boat had left him chilled to the bone, with his teeth chattering halfway through breakfast and a whole pot of scalding hot coffee!

“Comfortable?” he asked her.

“Blissfully,” Lydia murmured back.

“Warm enough?”

“Delightfully so,” she assured him, then lifted her lips to his for a soft and gentle kiss. He stroked the length of her back and her flanks; her thigh thrown over his slid higher, but…

“Except for your feet, it seems,” Lewrie said, grimacing.

“I could say the same of yours,” Lydia replied, giggling as she slid her foot down next to his, wriggling her toes as if to grasp, or play at toe-wrestling. “Alan, I hate to ask, but… might you mind pouring me a cup of tea, with a dollop of brandy?”

He let out a theatrical groan and a weary “Well, if I must.”

Outside the bed covers, the room was merely cool, not frozen solid, but Lewrie made a quick chore of it, pouring tea, adding sugar and a splash of spirits.

“You are a dear,” Lydia vowed quite prettily as he handed her the cup and saucer, and hopped back into bed. She slid up to prop herself against the thick piilows, and drew the blankets up to her neck.

“Damned right I am, and I’ll thankee t’remember it!” Lewrie hooted, which brought forth a laugh. That was another point in her favour, in Lewrie’s books at least, that in private she allowed herself to be raw, open, and genuine, and to laugh out loud when amused.

In public, well… that was another matter, as Lewrie had seen early on in London. As late as breakfast here at the George Inn not two hours before, the difference between the private Lydia and the one which wore her Publick Face was as stark as night from day.

She’d been homely as a child, and still thought herself so. In her late teens, her first exposure to the “marriage market” of a London Season had been cruelly disappointing, even for a Viscount’s daughter with a dowry of ?500 per annum, and a future beau’s access to more land and property than most people had hot dinners. The beautiful, the giddy, and silly who’d only fetch ?100 had ruled the rounds of all the balls, salons, routs, and drums. Years later, at her lovely mother’s harsh insistence, she’d been placed on the block again, this time with ?2,000 for her “dot”, and Lydia had been knee-deep in slavering swains… most with the twinkle of golden guineas in their eyes, which had disgusted her to the point that she had treated them all most rudely, which only made the greediest declare her “modern” and delightfully “outspoken”!

And when she’d finally wed, quite late, her choice had been a man most vile, so secretly depraved that she’d run for her life, and had pressed her brother, now the third Viscount Stangbourne, to seek a Bill of Divorcement in the House of Commons. Two years or more of charge and counter-charge, made a scarlet hussy and a scandal in the papers before winning her suit, and she was still pointed out as that “Stangbourne mort”. No wonder Lydia was so guarded, so icily aloof and imperious in Publick, and preferred the safety of the country, and a very small circle of friends, where she could shed her armour.

She was now thirty-two, ten years younger than Lewrie, and most firmly determined never to place herself under another man’s control, definitely not as a wife-what man could she trust no matter his promises-or, so Lewrie suspected, allow her heart to be won by a lover’s blandishments. Once bitten, twice shy, she was. Yet…

Lydia found Lewrie’s company enjoyable, right from the first. He was a widower since 1802, his two sons were “on their own bottoms”, and his daughter, Charlotte, was with his former in-laws in the village of Anglesgreen, in Surrey. Lewrie also suspected that the reason that Lydia found him acceptable was the fact that he was in the Navy, and unless the war with Napoleon Bonaparte and France ended suddenly, he would be gone and far away for a year or more between rencontres.

Or, maybe it’s ’cause I’m nigh as scandalous as she is, Lewrie wryly told himself as he watched her sip her tea with a grin on his face. His father’s family, the Willoughbys, had always ridden their own way, roughshod, headstrong, and “damn the Devil.” His father, Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, had been a charter member of the Hell-Fire Club, for God’s sake, and Lewrie was his bastard. Like the old adage “acorns don’t fall far from the oak tree”, he could boast of two by-blows of his own… Did one dare boast of such things?

His nickname, gained early in his Lieutenancy, was “the Ram-Cat”, and that was not for his choice of shipboard pets!

“What?” Lydia asked of a sudden, peering at him.

“I was just enjoying watching you enjoying your tea,” Lewrie told her. “A little thing, but a nice’un.”

“I am pleased that you are pleased,” she said with a chuckle and a fond smile. “Though it’s no great skill or social art. What if I slurped or smacked my lips? Might you find that enjoyable?”

“I might draw the line did you belch,” Lewrie japed, “but, did you, I’m certain you’d do it… kittenish.” He leaned over to kiss the point of her bared shoulder.

“Oh, kittenish!” Lydia laughed again. “Like a proper lady’s sneeze? With a wee mew in punctuation? You are easily pleased.”

“Well, damme… yes I am,” Lewrie told her with a laugh and a grope under the covers. She finished her tea, handed it to him so he could set it on the night-stand, then slid back down into his embrace once more, giving out a long, pleased sigh. After several long and lingering kisses, Lydia settled down with her head under his chin.

“I suppose it’s too cold to even think of going out to that inn you told me of,” she murmured.

“Wouldn’t wish that on a hound,” Lewrie assured her. “Dinner at the George, here, will more than do, when you feel famished.”

“All those senior captains and admirals, and their wives,” she hesitantly replied, making a moue in distaste. “As dear as I wish the pleasure of your company, I’m surely bad for your repute in the Navy.”

“Didn’t know I had one,” Lewrie quipped, “and if I do, it’s as bad as it’s goin’ t’get. Personal repute, anyways. There’s none that can fault me when it comes to fighting, and that’s what counts.”

He sat up to look down at her.

“Your reputation’s more at risk for bein’ seen with me than I for bein’ with you,” he told her. “And I don’t give a damn for others’ opinions on that head. Bugger ’em. Feed ’em thin, cold gruel.”

She drew him down close, pleased by his statement.

Lewrie feared, though, that Lydia didn’t much care for how the other diners would stare, point with their chins, cut their eyes, and whisper behind their hands and napkins; the matronly proper wives’d be the worst. They were respectable, she was not, and they would find a way to make that tacitly clear.

“We could order in,” Lewrie suggested.

“And give the inn servants gossip to pass on?” Lydia said with a sour grimace, and an impatient shrug. “They probably have ties to the London papers!”

The many daily publications in London all had one or two snoops to gather spice for their reportage of Court doings, or the appearances of the famous and infamous. The morning after Lydia had dined out with him, there’d been a snarky item about them in several papers. No names were printed, but anyone who had kept up with Society reporting could make an educated guess about “… a recently divorced lady often featured in our pages the last two years running…” and the distinguished Naval Person she’d been seen with, ending with a smirky “… will the lady in question teach her Sea-Dog new tricks, or has our Jason found himself a fresh Sheet-Anchor?”

“‘Which infamous divorcee was seen dining, clad in nothing but her shift, with a dashing naval hero, similarly sans his small clothes at an inn in Portsmouth,’ d’ye mean?” Lewrie scoffed.

“Exactly so!” Lydia snapped.

“Then we’ll dress, and dine publicly,” Lewrie decided. “Much as I’d admire t’see you gnaw a chicken leg, nude.” He drew her back into a snug embrace and stroked her hair to mollify her.