Troubled Waters

law, she called me a slew o' names, like I'd led her on false… tarakan… sikkim siyn… peesa… cockroach, son of a bitch, and well, ah… prick, if ye must know… pardons.'

'How discerning of her,' Caroline said quite brightly, faintly amused; though not that much. 'My estimation of her, foreign or no, rises. Peesa, hmm. And, sikkim … siyn, is it? How apt.'

'One o' my Black hands had run away with the circus hunters,' Lewrie con-tined, wondering if Caroline would go buy herself a stack of foreign lexicons, to find new ways to say what she couldn't in public. 'Mauled by a lion. Some of her fellow circus people had been killed, too, she'd come t'ask of her father, and she helped t'get my sailor to their own surgeon, who knew more of animal wounds than ours, and that was the absolute last time I saw or spoke to her 'til that parade here in Portsmouth back in the spring, Caroline, and haven't since.'

'Aplausible tale, Alan,' she coolly replied, after finishing her tea and pacing back to the settee, where she arranged herself most primly, her back erect, her gaze level and unrevealing, and her hands in her lap. 'Even if nothing did pass 'twixt you and that barely clad… creature, even if she was then, and still is, a naive and feckless young virgin in deluded 'cream-pot love' with you, I suspect it wasn't for want of trying on your part. 'Twas lack of opportunity.'

Knows me too damned well, she does! he sorrowfully thought.

'Caroline, we'd begun writing each other again,' Lewrie said in a soft and pleading tone. 'God's my witness, I'll admit I was tempted sore, but… I… didn't.' And, not for lack of opportunity, for I'd hopes we might, you and me… all this about Sophie, or Eudoxia, are vicious, sordid lies. And that's the truth.'

She looked down at her hands and considered that for a long bit. She then looked up, the simmering of anger back in her amber eyes, and with a most odd expression, as if she wished to believe him, but found past betrayals just too massive.

'Perhaps that is so, Alan,' she said, 'and my nameless torturer has overreached, at last, but… there are still so many others to explain. Do you deny your taking that Phoebe Aretino as a mistress?'

'Ah…,' Lewrie dithered, feeling like wincing, if he could get away with it and not doom himself and all his recent pleadings. 'Six, eight months, and thousands of miles away from home, Caroline, and… a man has… well, I ain't a saint, nor a tonsured monk.'

'Oh, how well I know that of you,' Caroline said with a bitter little chuckle. 'Your Italian mort in Genoa?' she asked, nigh-gayly.

'Twigg… he ordered me to, and it was just the once,' Lewrie told her, chin tucked into his collars, and realising how lame that sounded, even as he said it. 'S'truth! Claudia was a French spy, and go-between 'twixt the Frogs and the cabal that wanted France to seize power! She got set on me, thinkin' I was gullible enough t'blab just what they needed t'know, and Twigg used that… used me … t'feed her what he wanted 'em to know, so we could lay a trap for their best… ye recall what I told ye of Guillaume Choundas?'

'Why, for King and Country, Alan?' Caroline sweetly said with a very false smile. 'How patriotic of you! I may still be but a North Carolina country girl, but do not imagine that I am a total fool!'

'But it's true, I swear it!' Lewrie protested. 'Ask Twigg!'

'Hah!' was her opinion of that. Calming, she continued, as if she were the cat, and he the cornered mouse. 'And what of the mother of your bastard, Alan? Theoni… Kavares… Connor,' she intoned as if savouring each scornful syllable. 'After you rescued her, and her natural child, from those Serbian pirates, was she so enthralled, was she so grateful that she simply had to fling herself upon your manliness, and your sterling and heroic character?'

'It was, it…,' Lewrie stammered, totally dis-armed. This had simmered like an acrid pot between them, and finally, finally, there it was, served up like manure soup. 'It happened, aye, no denyin' it. In the Adriatic, after. I was wounded and groggy with laudanum, there wasn't enough room aboard for all our British refugees 'fore the Frogs took Venice, so…'

'And, in Sheerness, too, Alan?' Caroline remorselessly reminded him, as if he had need of reminding. 'Before you sailed for the West Indies, the last time… a whole week with her, you spent. Sharing a lodging for all the world to see.'

'Aye,' he had to confess, sitting down in his wing-back chair again, too limp with guilt to protest. 'After you'd stormed off home.'

To Hell with more tea, for by now he was starkly sober, more in need of brandy, or Yankee corn whisky, could he find any. 'After you threw me away, and wrote t'tell me I would never be welcome under the same roof with you, again, well…'

There; it was said, at long last. Out in the open.

'Port in a storm…,' he lamely tried to expound.

'Damn you!' his wife blurted. 'Damn you to Hell, Alan!'

'Caroline… what d'ye expect a man to be? How much time have we had together since the war began? Two months, three, out o' seven bloody years} Even before then, ..,. swaddles and spit-ups… pantries and still-rooms, flower gardens… 'not this time o' month,' you said. 'Three children were enough,' you said… 'Perhaps,' you said, if I'd employ protections, and Charlotte an accident, and nigh six months for nursin' and celibacy after, and you blamin' me for riskin' your life t'child-bed fever one more time, and…!'

She flounced off the settee halfway through that, stamping the bounds of their lodgings, arms stiff at her sides and her small fists balled.

'Me, more like a burden than a loved husband,' Lewrie went on, spilling all his pent-up recriminations on how such a loving marriage, with so much spectacularly exciting intimacy, had become so drab and lacklustre. 'Right, I'll never be a farmer or a herdsman, we know it, but… you're so complete to yourself and the children, and I-'

'Go!' she snapped at last, pausing by the one window, her arms across her chest once more, looking out, not at him. 'Go up to London, to your damned ship, to your loversl Go to the Devil, why don't you?'

'Look, Caroline, Twigg'll discover who's been bedevilling you with these letters, and…'

'What bedevils me is you, you faithless, amoral bastard!' she shouted, turning about to face him. 'I shall make your excuses to your poor children. God knows I've gained practice at doing so, these many years with you never at home… and day-dreaming about all your doxies when you were!'

'That's not true, Caroline!' Lewrie insisted. 'When I was home, and you were there for me, with me, I never… !'

'Do not try to beguile me, Alan,' she spat, fighting the tears that blinded her, striving not to lose her voice as her breath caught in hitches in her chest. 'Just go! Go be your Navy's hero, a hero to the anti-slavery people, preen all you wish… but you will do all of that without me Go be tried without me… or hung without me!' 'Dearest…!' 'Hah!'

She picked up the first thing that came to hand, a cheap Toby Jug in honour of some ancient sea-victory of some kind, and hurled it blindly. It came within a bare inch of breaking his nose, and making his 'bung sport claret,' had he not shied at the last moment.

Caroline darted for her bedroom door, flung it open, then shut it with a titanic bang. Bed-ropes creaked as she flung herself cross the coverlet and mattress.

Lewrie shut his eyes in pain, and utter defeat. He felt pain, because he'd caused her pain, but… oddly {perversely, more-like, he chid himself) he felt nothing much beyond that, at that moment; just a. faint twinge of conscience. A touch of shame that he had brought it upon himself? Of a certainty, a tad of that. There was nothing more he could do; the woes in Pandora's Box had already fluttered away, and there was no point in shutting it. Putrid old wine had been spilled, and there was no re-bottling it.

Perhaps there never had been a hope of reconciliation; the whole thing had felt