King, Ship, and Sword

Caroline's final journey to the Chiswick family plot in mossy old St. George's graveyard, in Angles-green, cutting a week off the time it would take to coach from Dover to Surrey.

In Portsmouth, one could also discover better carpenters who could fashion a finer coffin. There were more fabric shops for lining that coffin, and for a proper shroud, and professionals knowledgeable at the dismal death trade. And there would be perfume shops.

Lewrie had had no experience with shore funerals and the needs of the dead. When a sailor perished at sea, his corpse was washed by his messmates and the loblolly boys, sewn into a scrap-canvas shroud with rusty, pitted old round-shot at his feet to speed him to the ocean floor; a last stitch was taken through his nose to prove that he truly was gone. The sea-burial was done that very day, with the hands mustered, the way off the ship and her yards canted a'cock-bill; a service read from the Book of Common Prayer before the dead man was tipped off the mess table from beneath the flag, in brief honour.

In the heat of battle, sometimes the slain didn't even get that, and were passed out a lee gun-port so the sight of dead shipmates did not un-man or discourage the rest; then, only the names were read for their remembrance and honour.

There was no time for rot to set in.

Dear God, but that had been hard for Lewrie to bear! Despite a brief bustle of aid from the Plumbs, too damned many condolences and too much hand-wringing, 'can you ever forgive us?' once too often, and watery, goose-berry-eyed speculations on what had gone wrong for the first time in hundreds of successful escapes, it was up to Lewrie to see her home, on his own. With the liberal use of a whole bottle of eau de cologne and nigh a bushel-basket of fresh-cut flowers in the coffin with her, he had set off with a dray waggon, riding beside the teamster, whilst the Plumbs had set off for London-thank God!-swearing that the news of Caroline's murder would set the nation afire, that they would speak to their friend, the Prince of Wales, etc. and etc., 'til he was heartily sick of the sight of them!

Travelling on the waggon seat, necessity though it was, made him cringe and burn with shame, though, for… how could he wish to bolt from a loved one, how could he do all the proper things if he wished that he had been the swift rider sent on ahead to alert the family and the vicar at St. George's and his sexton, who would dig the grave, instead of making the trip with a scented handkerchief pressed to his nose and fighting the continual urge to gag?

Once he was in Anglesgreen, others thankfully took charge, and Lewrie had been spared any more of the sorrowful details 'til the morning of the church service, and Caroline Chiswisk Lewrie's burial beside her parents, Sewallis Sr. and Charlotte. Even her old, hard-hearted and skin-flint uncle, Phineas Chiswick, had appeared to be moved to tears… or a convincing sham for family and village, for he'd never cared very much to be saddled with his distant North Carolina relatives who had fled at the end of the Revolution and had showed up on his doorstep destitute and with nowhere else to turn.

There was yet another cause to make Lewrie squirm, to this day; in church or at the graveside, he could not mourn her death so much as he grieved for how he had failed her, that he had not been man enough, or clever enough, to save her, and… that he had not been husband enough to make her life content and easy! He could easily conjure that what their vicar had said was ruefully true, in a sense; that Caroline was now at peace in Heaven… a welcome peace to be shot of him, at last!

As common as death was, how she, Caroline, had perished had outraged everyone, re-kindling the instinctive mistrust and hatred of the French to a white-hot blaze in Anglesgreen, for Caroline always had been quite popular with everyone… with the possible exceptions of Uncle Phineas and Sir Romney Embleton's son, Harry, who had courted her after a fashion before Lewrie had come along and swept her away, and had never forgiven either of them for refusing what he had desired.

Lewrie suspected that it had been Harry who had started a rumour that her death had been Lewrie's fault for dragging her over to France and enflaming Bonaparte's wrath by being his usual head-strong and reckless self-a malicious slur that, unfortunately, had found a fertile field with Uncle Phineas, his brother-in-law Governour Chiswick, who'd never been in favour of the match, and, sadly, through Governour, his own daughter, Charlotte.

Lewrie had thought it done after a week, and all that was left was to order her headstone, but… people learning of her funeral too late to attend coached to Anglesgreen to console him. Anthony Langlie, his former First Lieutenant in HMS Proteus, and his wife, Lewrie's former orphaned French ward, Sophie de Maubeuge, had come up from Kent to see him. His other, much more likable brother-in-law, Burgess Chiswick, and his new wife, Theadora, had come a week after, his letter to them having arrived late at the barracks of Burgess's regiment.

And there were so many letters, some coming months later as word crept its way from London papers to provincial papers in the far corners of Great Britain, or overseas, each new missive clawing at the scabs, to the point that he dreaded the arrival of a post rider or a mail coach.

Old shipmates like Commodore Nicely from his days in the West Indies, Commodore Ayscough and Captain Thomas Charlton; people from his Midshipman days like Captain Keith Ashburn, former officers aboard his various commands, like Ralph Knolles, D'arcy Gamble, Fox and Farley of HMS Thermopylae, former Sailing Masters and Mids, even one or two Pursers had written, and, despite Lewrie's urge to crumple the letters and toss them into the fireplace, he'd kept them, pressed flat together in a shallow wood box… if only to save the home addresses after years with no correspondence for the lack of them.

His solicitor, his former barrister from his trial, his banker at Coutts', Zachariah Twigg and Matthew Mountjoy at the Foreign Office, even Jemmy Peel, still up to something shady for King and Country in the Germanies, had written. Eudoxia Durschenko had penned a sympathetic letter (her command of English much improved) just before the start of Daniel Wigmore's Peripatetic Extravaganza's first grand tour through Europe in years; Eudoxia was sure that the circus and theatrical troupe would score a smashing season. She said that her papa, Arslan Artimovitch, sent his condolences, but Lewrie thought it a kindly lie; the one-eyed old lion tamer hated him worse than Satan hated Holy Water!

Alan Lewrie sanded the last of his correspondence, then folded it and sealed it with wax. One last dip of the pen in the ink-well and the address was done. He looked up from his desk to a sideboard, on which rested a silver tray and several cut-glass decanters; one for brandy, one for claret, and one filled with Kentucky bourbon whisky. He glanced at the mantel clock. It lacked half an hour to noon. He shook his head, thinking that he'd done too much of that, of late, to fill the hours of solitary quiet… to stave off the feeling that he now resided in a mausoleum. Ring for a cup of coffee? No.

He gathered up his letters and went out into the foyer, on his way towards the back entrance past the kitchens, but paused, once there, looking into the parlour and dining room at the cloth-shrouded furniture. The heavy drapes had been taken down and beaten clean, and the lighter summer drapes now graced the windows, drawn back to let light in, and the shutters open for the day. For a brief moment, he considered selling up and moving on… to flee this house.

'Tween the wars, when it was built, it had been to her desires of what a proper home should be, when he'd paid off HMS Alacrity and settled in Anglesgreen. Caroline had made allowances for his need for that office/ study/library he'd just left, but the builder had deferred to her on almost everything else. She'd chosen the paint for all the rooms; she'd selected the new furniture and the fabrics for the new chairs and settees, the fabrics and colours to re-upholster their old pieces. They were Caroline's drapes, tablecloths, china pattern, and table ware, her collected knick-knacks and objets d'art, the paintings on the walls, of pastorals and Greco-Roman ruins, the portraits of the children and her kin; save for a couple of nautical prints and a portrait of Lewrie done way back when he was a Lieutenant on Antigua, there was little sign that he had ever lived there!

In point of fact, he ruefully thought, he had not lived there much. A few brief years from '89 to '93, and he was back at sea with active commissions, with barely six weeks at home between them. Last winter, before they'd gone to Paris, was the longest he'd spent under this roof in nigh twenty years!

Can't sell up, he realised; the children need their homeplace. Some roots, and a sense of place. Even if I… don't.