Reefs and Shoals

and the town is mostly in the rice-exportin’ trade. I don’t even know if we have a consul there… and won’t, ’til we speak to our consul in Charleston.”

“Oh, here, you little pest,” Westcott said, surrendering to the cat’s manic intent to have the last bite. “You said the rest of your stay in Wilmington was less than satisfying, sir?”

“Well, Cashman’s wife-lovely and gracious woman from one of the finest old Cape Fear families, by the way-laid on a splendid supper party for us,” Lewrie said, making a wee wry grimace. “Took it a step too far, though. It was Cashman and his wife, our local consul, Mister Osgoode Moore, Junior, and his-”

“Junior, sir?” Westcott asked, looking askance.

“The American way of tellin’ father from son, I gathered. So, that made six of us, countin’ me and Mister Cadbury,” Lewrie went on. “But, to dine in a Knight and Baronet, she also had in one of the old partners in Livesey, Seabright, and Cashman, Mister Phillip Seabright himself, and his wife Bess… both of whom took active parts in the Revolution in their younger days. That made eight guests, but, apparently Mistress Cashman thought the balance ’twixt gentlemen and ladies was off, so, she whistled up one of her neighbours, a widow, and her spinster daughter.”

“And did you feel ‘buttock-brokered’, sir?” Westcott idly japed. “A knighted widower to be inspected?”

“No, none of that,” Lewrie said, with a sardonic laugh. “The widow lady was in her late fifties if she was a day, though the daughter was fetchin’ enough. Ah, thankee, Pettus,” he said as his cabin servant/steward fetched him a fresh mug of ale. “No, the problem was they were Chiswicks.”

“Ehm…?” Lt. Westcott posed in query, not tumbling to it.

“My late wife’s surname was Chiswick, and she, her parents, and her brothers were from the Cape Fear,” Lewrie explained with a wince. “Loyalist, Tory, supporters of King and Country during the Revolution, whereas these Chiswicks were the Rebel side of the family.”

“Well… after all these years, sir, does it really matter any more?” Westcott asked

“It don’t t’me, but it surely still matters to them!” Lewrie said, enlightening his First Lieutenant. “There I was, sponged off, clean-shaven, fangs polished, and my breath sweetened with a ginger pastille, just fit t’please. Even had my mind primed t’be tactful, witty, an’ charmin’, for God’s sake, as we gathered in the parlour for sherry or Rhenish. The Moores arrived, and it’s a fine beam reach and smooth sailin’, couldn’t be more congenial.

“The Seabrights arrive, and it comes out that I was once in Wilmington during the war, after Yorktown, for the evacuation of the British garrison and stores,” Lewrie went on, “and, ‘oh, hasn’t their city grown since,’ and ‘were you truly a witness to Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown?’, and I got off my tale of escapin’ the might before-tell ye that’un, someday-and ‘isn’t it wonderful t’be back at peace these many years?’, and then I asked about the grand old house that used to stand at the top of the hill on Market Street, and Mistress Seabright says that that was the house her father, Matthew Livesey, had built once the firm was profitable, before the war came, and I made the mistake of sayin’ that I’d known some people who lodged there just before the evacuation, and I felt the wind veer ahead to a close reach, and turn a tad nippy. The only people who lived there were Tarleton’s officers, and refugeed Loyalists, so Mister Seabright launched into a scheme by the local lights t’dam up New Inlet to deepen the channels of Old Inlet t’let in bigger ships. The cat was still in the bag, then, and the change o’ topic was welcome.”

“This was before the angry mob with torches and pitchforks came to the door, I take it, sir?” Westcott asked, tongue-in-cheek, enjoying his captain’s discomforture.

Lewrie gave him a scowl suitable to the occasion.

“In sailed the Chiswick ladies,” Lewrie continued his tale of woe. “Fusses, ados, bows, and curtseys, and the introductions, first, and the servants fetched round more wine. Now, Widow Chiswick started out as a pleasant old chick-a-biddy, all grand manners and sweet as your white-haired granny. Married into the clan just after the Revolution, but she must’ve swotted up on Chiswick lore from her teens. The spinster daughter was about nineteen… blond, blue-eyed, pertly fetchin’…”

“I see, sir,” Westcott said, rising to the description with an anticipatory grin… a rather feral one. Young ladies did that to him.

“… as miss-ish and coy as any ye ever did see, just primed to thrill… perhaps too much so, ’cause I see no other reason she hasn’t caught a beau, yet. Or, so I gathered,” Lewrie described. “She even paid poor Mister Cadbury a fair share of attention.”

“The lucky bastard, sir,” Westcott commented with a brief scowl of envy to have not been there.

“At last, the major-domo, or butler, or whatever they call ’em in America, says that supper is ready, so off we trot, two columns in line-abreast, find our seats, and I found myself cross from the Seabrights, with the widow lady abeam, and the daughter two points off my starboard bows,” Lewrie laid out, “and at first, things go swimmingly… ’til Mistress Seabright asks do I have family back in England, and do I miss ’em sore, and here it came, cat’s out o’ the bag, at last, with the ends knotted. Wife passed away three years before? Sugary expressions o’ sympathy. Daughter farmed out with my brother-in-law, two sons in the Navy… well, I had t’name ’em, didn’t I, and there went the Chiswick nape hairs!

“My eldest is named Sewallis Lewrie, for my late father-in-law, d’ye see, Mister Westcott, and my daughter’s named for my late mother-in-laws Charlotte Chiswick,” Lewrie painfully elaborated, shifting uncomfortably on the thin settee cushions, “and she’s stayin’ with brother-in-law Governour. After that, I didn’t have to say the name Chiswick, ’cause the family lore’s just bung-full about ’em. My father-in-law, with some other prosperous planter gentlemen, raised a single-battalion Loyalist regiment and armed ’ em with Ferguson rifles, and Governour and Burgess Chiswick were officers in that regiment. The old lady put it to me, ‘and was your wife from the Cape Fear, Sir Alan?’ and ye can’t lie about such a thing… much as I wished!… so I says that Caroline was, aye, and ye’d’ve thought I’d said that she was the bastard git of the Devil himself! A full gale smacked me fine on the bow, leavin’ me all a’back and ‘in-irons’”

Lt. Westcott had himself a serious wince, in sympathy, saying, “Sounds rather… awkward, sir. Ouch! Your own kin… of a sort.”

“Aye, one minute, it was all gushin’, and makin’ cow-eyes over me like I was the Prince of Wales, even if I am English… Cashman was right when he said that even Jacobins’ll go giddy over a ‘lord’,” Lewrie said with a mirthless laugh, “and the next minute, I’m a red-eyed Turk in a turban, Attila the Hun, and ‘Bloody’ Banastre Tarleton all rolled up in one! I got… lectured, Mister Westcott, on the barbarities of the British during the Revolution, and the atrocities committed by those who sided with the King, and nothing that my host and hostess, or the Seabrights could do to dissuade ’em. I had t’sit and take it, totally dis-masted, and all guns out of action.”

“Lord, how horrible, sir!” Lt. Westcott said, after a silence, and a sip or two of his ale. “Though… your predicament does have a certain bleak humour to it.”

“I’m glad somebody thinks so,” Lewrie gravelled. “Well, both the widow granny and the spiteful young mort gave me close broadsides for a goodly time, ’til they ran out of grievances… or air, one or the other,” Lewrie said, shaking his head with a bleak humour of his own. “Christ, what a litany! Every burned haystack, stolen horse, looted house, butchered cow, coin-silver punch bowl, or broken teacup… every torched house and barn, every dead Chiswick or their neighbours, who was imprisoned, whipped… but when they did run out of wind, I got my own back. Didn’t give a tinker’s dam for ‘tactful or diplomatic’, by then.”

“How so, sir?” Westcott asked, both rapt and darkly amused by the tale, by then.

“I told ’em that when I escaped Yorktown, got back aboard my own ship at New York, we sailed to Wilmington, and how I found the Chiswicks,” Lewrie said, lifting his chin with stubborn pride of the doing, “of how my future father-in-law was broken in body and spirit, and how penniless they were, the three of ’em, and their one loyal old slave cook and maid-of-all-work, and what little they’d managed t’salvage, were living in one small room, damned near at the edge of starvation, and, had it not been for my pleas to my old captain, and his generosity and pity, they’d not have been able to buy passage to Charleston, and temporary refuge.

“’Cause their own Chiswick kin, the ones who’d welcomed ’em with open arms t’settle in the Cape Fear country, and my mother-in-law’s long-settled kinfolk, burned them out, murdered the youngest brother, George, when he tried to defend them, stole their livestock and looted their possessions, stole their lands, and drove off their slaves,” Lewrie fumed in a dark taking. “And damned if they think to pretend that they were the ones with clean hands, or grievances!”