Troubled Waters

salad between, of course. Right?'

'Very good, sir.'

'What?' Lewrie all but yelped once he looked up to his partners at the table, who were both eying him rather charily at that point. 'A fellow can't have supporters, and admirers?'

'In your absence, Captain Lewrie,' MacDougall sternly said with several slow negative shakes of his head, 'Mister Twigg, your father, Sir Hugo, and Major Chiswick here have adverted to me that your relations with your wife are… strained. And, they had confided to me the reasons why, d'ye see, sir. As your legal representative in a serious matter, it is my professional advice to you, Captain Lewrie, that such doings must be kept strictly in check, and the Reverend Wilber-force and other supporters of yours, who are so far true admirers of yours, must not hear of any new escapades, so long as your trial continues. Else, they will withdraw all support… publicity tracts, favourable letters to the papers, and monetary aid, placing the financial burden of your defence upon your own purse.'

'Ye mean they haven't heard already?' Lewrie gawped, finding it hard to believe that his father's formerly bad repute would not be enough to put them right off, and 'the acorn don't fall far from the oak' and all that nonsense. Surely Twigg must have filled them in, somewhere along the line, he could not

help thinking!

'You are, sir, or so I have led them to believe with what little I have had to reveal,' MacDougall most carefully said, 'a victim of a jealous termagant.' 'Oh, I say!' Burgess disputed, in defence of his sister. 'A Colonial Loyalist from the Carolinas,' MacDougall prosed on, his voice low, and frowning heavily to show that it wasn't personal, as if he disagreed with a disagreeable charade. 'Three children enough in her mind, and yet jealous in the extreme. And the long separation demanded by your service to King and Country hasn't helped her suspicions. Those anonymous letters, complete fabrications, have driven her to distraction, and you have been estranged from your wife almost since the war with France began. Primly moral the members of the Abolitionist Society, and the Clapham Sect, may be, but, they are also realists, at bottom, and know, as ministers of the Gospel surely must, the limits of a man's resistance to temptations of the flesh.

'They also know that such temporary dalliances, ones which don't result in rival affairs of the heart, and the rending of families, are sometimes unavoidable… as evinced by men of the upper class who take mistresses to spare their wives the perils of further childbirth. Deplorable, but sometimes necessary, d'ye see.'

I can fuck, but I better not kiss on the way out the door? Lewrie thought in puzzlement; the ministers tolerate prostitution? Mine arse on a band-box! Missed that wheedle in the Good Book!

'I'm fine as a martyr to the cause of Abolition, ye mean, just shiny enough t'be their Paladin,' Lewrie rephrased it most cynically. 'So long as I don't blot my copy book before the trial.'

'Uhm, that is pretty much it, sir,' MacDougall confessed. 'So, it would redound to your vast discredit should you, ah… dally with anyone so long as your legal proceedings last.'

'Else they throw me to the lions, wash their hands like Pontius Pilate?' Lewrie pressed. 'Hustle me to the gallows, themselves?' 'Rapidly,' MacDougall assured him with all gravity.

'I s'pose I can go out in publick, though, can I not? See some plays… dine?' Lewrie asked, trying to sound casual, and innocent as the driven snow outside… which, in point of fact, was turning into a grey slush from all the coal smoke and fly ash from the umpteen thousand chimneys in London. 'Go see the circus, or…?'

'Oh, a very bad idea, Alan!' Burgess quickly cautioned, wincing, for he knew exactly whom Lewrie might run into; he had met met the lovely, lithe Eu-doxia in Cape Town. 'Actresses and circus persons would be a real scandal! Better you take in the city's entertainments with Reverend Wilberforce … a pack of eunuchs.'

'D'ye know where t'find some?' Lewrie quipped. 'This side of the Ottoman Empire? Or a Venetian castrati choir?'

They peered at him like a brace of buzzards, eyes flinty-hard.

'Well… you're right, both of you,' Lewrie finally answered. 'I see the risk, and I thank you for your sound advice.'

Still, he thought, with mental fingers crossed; they didn't ask me to swear an oath. My trial gets carried over … a continuance did MacDougall call it?… it'll be a long, boresome winter, and a spring too. Me… ashore… where I always get in trouble. Idle hands the Devil's workshop, all that. No wife, no visits home. No seein' the children 'til they're back at their school. No home-made Christmas pudding/ Would there be all that much harm if I saw the circus again, their new shows?

He seriously considered that Eudoxia's father, Arslan Artimovich, still had his daggers and his spine-cracking whip, and his lion cubs might now have grown so large that they could be sicced on him to drag him down and maul him to death! Yet, she did need help with her spelling…

'I worry about you, Alan. I really do,' Burgess told him.

'So do I, Burgess,' Lewrie ruefully rejoined. 'So do I.'

AFTERWORD

The criminal justice system of Georgian England was much like a description of most people's lives in those times, or of a winter's day… nasty, brutish, and short. Lawyers could 'double in brass,' first for the defence, then for the prosecution at their next trial. Fears of the Star Chamber, procedures where people were accused but never met their accusers face-to-face, never were told the charges against them 'til they were dragged into that infamous courtroom, held incommunicado and tried in secret (no Sunshine Laws then) with no access to capable legal counsel, and executed the next day or so, kept England from developing a permanent, standing District Attorney system for quite a long time. Witnesses and accusers still could not be cross-examined at the time of Lewrie's proceedings, and the accused could not testify for himself, but merely beg for mercy if the verdict went against him.

So I'd like to thank John Kitch, attorney-at-law here in Nashville, for enlightening me on the deadly maze of justice as it was practiced in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Believe it or not, he did it for free; quite unlike some learned, and tenured, law professors at one of our prestigious universities which shall remain nameless (three syllables, rhymes with Wilt) who, I was cautioned, would charge for their information by the billable hour (fifteen minutes equals an hour!), like I had staggered into a house and killed all eleven people inside, just because they were home… or needed another divorce!

Reference books to order, and keep forever as is my wont, on how English Common Law was practiced in court in those days are 'scarce as hen's teeth' as we say down here in the South, though Albion's Fatal Tree by Hay, Linebaugh, Rule, Thompson, and Winslow (Pantheon Books) was helpful, even if it dealt more with capital punishment than court procedures; as was a chapter in What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool (Simon amp; Schuster). Other than that, even the ever-helpful folks at Davis-Kidd Bookstores shrugged like Turkish rug merchants and went 'Ah dunno' after doing Books in Print searches for me. If someone out there knows of a better source, get in touch with me, for I fear that Alan Lewrie's legal troubles are not yet over, and he might end up in one of those hundred-year cases in Chancery!

I bludgeoned my editor at Thomas Dunne Books, John Parsley, to include a map of the mouth of the Gironde, and the southwestern coast of France this time (more like begged and pleaded, really), so readers could flip to it and mutter every now and then when a place-name was mentioned. So far as I know, there were no forts or batteries erected at the narrows of the Gironde during the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars… though had / been Napoleon Bonaparte, I would have insisted upon them, fitted with bloody-great 42-pounders, to boot. Medoc, Saintonge, and Aquitaine are rather flat, much like the Carolinas' and Georgia's Low