Far East shawls, saris, or vivid princes' surcoats did service as wall hangings, next to tapestries painted by native artists of parades, tiger hunts, leopard hunts, or court scenes, with gayly-decorated elephants bearing lords and ladies in howdahs. Some walls bore gaudy, silk mandarins' coats, stiff-armed with a dowel through the arm-holes, next to the little pillbox hats Lewrie had seen at Canton, with the pheasant tail-feathers and coral buttons on the top that denoted rank and importance.
It would seem that at one time Twigg had been a mighty hunter, himself, for there were boars' heads, leopards' heads, even a bear, its lips still curved back in his final fury. On a jungle-green wood platform there was a huge stuffed Bengali tiger-looking a little worse for wear, though, where someone's grandchildren had used it as a hobby-horse.
And, there were weapons galore: cirles of wavy-bladed krees daggers and knives about a crossed pair of parangs; assorted Hindoo edged weapons about a brace of bejewelled tulwars; lance-heads, javelins and pike-heads, billhooks, and other pole-arm 'nasties' that were favoured East of Cape Good Hope.
Behind locked glass cabinets were racks of firearms, from clumsy match-lock muskets and hand-cannon to long, slim, and elegantly-chased and intricately-engraved Indian or Malay jazzails, some so bejewelled that they'd fetch thousands; even humble flint-lock Tower muskets, St. Etienne or Charleville French muskets given or sold to native princes' troops had been turned into priceless works of art by Hindoo artisans. There were even wheel-lock pieces, musketoons, and pairs of pistols as long as Lewrie's forearms that the Czar of All the Russias might covet.
Armour? Take your pick: fanciful cuirasses, back-and-breasts and helmets, gilt or silver chain-mail suits, brass fish-scale armour over thick ox-hide; Tatar, Chinese, Mongol, Bengali, Moghul…
'Nippon, there,' Twigg commented, pointing to a stand that held a wide-skirted, glossily-lacquered set, seemingly made of bamboo, tied together with bright orange and red wool cords; there was a horned helmet with neck pieces and side flanges so wide and deep that the wearer could shelter from a hard rain under it, with a fierce, wild-eyed, and mustachioed face-mask bound to it. 'Them, too,' Twigg further stated, indicating a horizontal stand that held a long dagger, a short sword, and a very long sword, all of a piece, bright-corded, and their scabbards so ornately carved they resembled the jade or ivory 'boats' with incredibly tiny figures of oarsmen and passengers, all whittled from a single tusk or block of soft stone.
' Nippon?' Lewrie gawped. 'You mean Japan?'
'No White man has gone there, and returned to tell the tale, in three hundred years, Lewrie,' Twigg proudly said. 'Though, some of the hereditary warriors, the samurai, now and then lose their feudal lord, or… blot their copy-books,' Twigg added with a taunting leer at his guest, 'and become outcasts… ronin, I recall, is the term… some of whom leave their forbidden isles, entire, and take service overseas. Portuguese Macao is a port where bands of them may be hired on. Quite fierce; quite honourable if you pay 'em regular. This fellow, here… well, let us say he proved a disappointment, and committed ritual suicide to atone. Willed me his armour and swords.'
'Did you ever manage to land in Nippon?' Lewrie just had to ask.
'Of course not, sir!' Twigg hooted. 'I was bold in my younger days, but never that rash. Unlike some I know, hmmm?'
Swallow it, swallow it! Lewrie chid himself.
Another great room to pace through, this one filled with porcelain, niello brass, gilt and silver pieces, the most delicate ceramics, ginger jars, wine jars, tea sets, and eggshell-thin vases, from every ancient dynasty from Bombay to fabled Peking.
'Didn't know you'd always wanted t'open a museum,' Lewrie said. As they attained a smaller, plainer dining room that overlooked a back garden, barns, coops and pens, and a block of servants' quarters. It was where the house's owners would break their fast en famille, in casual surroundings and casual clothes, before they had to don their public duds and public faces to deal with the rest of their day.
'As the French say, souvenirs,' Twigg scoffed, though his eyes did glow with pleasure over his vast collection, worthy of a man who'd come back from India a full nabob, with an emperor's riches stowed on the orlop. Smugness of owning such grand things, perhaps with happy remembrance of how he'd acquired them. Or, the blood and mayhem required to do so!
'I can see why your grandchildren were loath to leave,' Lewrie wryly commented. 'My own children'd screech in bloody wonder to play amongst such a pirate's trove.'
'Mementos of an arduous life,' Twigg scoffed again, perhaps with long-engrained English gentlemanly modesty, 'spent mostly in places so dreadful, the baubles were the only attractive things worth a toss. I assume you like goat. Do you not, it doesn't signify, for that's what we're having. Keep a flock to dine on… sheep, as well.'
'But, no pork, nor beefsteaks, either, I'd s'pose,' Lewrie said, with another wry scowl.
'Taboo to Muslims in the first instance, taboo to Hindoos in the second, aye,' Twigg replied, his thin lips clasped together in the sort of aspersion that Lewrie had dreaded in their early days. 'Old habits die hard. Well, don't just stand there like a coat-rack, sit ye down,' Twigg snapped, pointing imperiously at a chair at the foot of the six-place table, whilst he strode with his usual impatience to the chair at the other end, and Lewrie almost grinned to see himself seated 'below the salt,' no matter there were only the two of them.
The elderly servant, Ajit Roy, bearing a brass tray on which sat two glasses of sherry, shuffled in, obviously waiting 'til they were seated before intruding. Twigg took a tentative taste, looking puckery, as if assaying his own urine for a moment, before nodding assent and acceptance, at which point Ajit Roy came down-table to give Lewrie his small glass.
'Laanaa shorbaa, Ajit,' Twigg ordered, and not a tick later, an attractive Hindoo woman in English servant's clothing, but with a long, diaphanous shawl draped over her hair and shoulders, entered with bowls of the requested soup on another tray.
'Dhanyavaad, Lakshmi,' Twigg told her.
'Thankee,' Lewrie echoed in English. He'd never learned Hindoo as glibly as his father, Sir Hugo, and had ever sounded pidgin barbarian when he did speak it, but it was coming back to him, in dribs and drabs. She was fetching; did she and Twigg…?
'Ajit Roy's second wife,' Twigg said, with a knowing leer after one look at Lewrie's phyz. 'The first'un cooks. And no, I don't. My tastes these days, well… I also own a place in the City, quite near your father's new gentlemen's lodging club, in point of fact. His is at the corner of Wigmore and Duke streets, as you surely recall, while my set of rooms is nearby in Baker Street. We run into each other…'
'Oh, how unfortunate for you,' Lewrie sourly commented.
'We speak rather often, act'lly,' Twigg said with a mystifying smile. 'Sometimes dine, drop in for a drink, or play ecarte with him at his club, with no need for its lodging facilities.'
'And does he give you a discounted membership, sir? Or… does he make up for it by fleecing you at cards?' Lewrie cynically asked.
'My dear Lewrie… no one has ever fleeced me at ecarte… and lived,' Zachariah Twigg drawled, with a superior simper. 'Your father and I rub along quite well, together, act'lly. We're much of an age, and experienced much the same sort of adventures in exotic climes, so… absent the disputes resulting from, ah… 'boundary' friction in the expedition against Choundas and the La-nun Rovers… his concerns for his sepoy regiment, and taking orders from a Foreign Office civilian, we've discovered that we have a great deal in common. Having you and your, ah.. .follies in common, as well. How is your soup?'
'Simply grand,' Lewrie sarcastically muttered, though the soup was as close to a Chinese 'hot and sour' as a Hindoo cook could attain, and as tasty as any ever he'd had when moored off Canton in the '80s.
'Amazing, what a small world in which we live, Lewrie,' Twigg went on, carefully spooning up his own soup, and slurping it into his thin-lipped mouth, then daintily dabbing with his napkin. 'Sir Hugo is partnered with Sir Malcolm Shockley in his gentlemen's club enterprise… Sir Malcolm thinks the world of him, and of you, more to the point… though I've yet to see a valid reason why, other than gratitude for getting his wealthy arse out of Venice and the Adriatic before the French took
