King, Ship, and Sword

himself to work out the kink, fists in the small of his back, and decided that he'd done a fair piece of work and was now well deserving of a healthy measure of whisky. The sun was not only far below the yardarm by then, it was two hours past sunset! Desmond and a stable boy were going round closing the outside shutters for the night. As he poured himself half a glass of bourbon, they closed the shutters on the French doors to the back-garden, leaving his office lit only by the candelabra on his desk and the glow from the fireplace.

He paused after his first sip, looking round slowly at all his books and possessions, his furniture, his weapons, and the hanger he'd recovered from Napoleon, now hung over the mantel, where it had lodged years before.

After another sip, he stepped out into the foyer, looking over the sideboard and mirror, the framed portraits, the Venetian bombй tables he'd brought back from the Adriatic, and… into the parlour and dining room in the other wing of the house, and all those ghostly pale sheet-covered furnishings. There was a bit of a moon that night, and before Desmond and his lad began to close the shutters over all those windows, he got the shivery feeling that he was looking at a coven of spooks.

'I will never see this house again,' he whispered, with a new shiver trilling up his spine. Back in service and out to sea within a month, he'd not return for years, and when he did, it would surely be Burgess's and Theadora's house, in freehold. He would be invited over to dine or dance, at holidays, but by then it would look totally different, done to Theadora's taste; the nursery might even be occupied by Chiswick children, there'd be new servants, a lot more of them, too.

Ask my father t'close it down and move everything over to his place, in storage, Lewrie decided, making a mental inventory of furnishings he could use aboard his new ship.

That sense of finality was not dread; he felt those shivers for an ending not like a premonition like the old adage of sensing that 'rabbit running over one's grave.' He knew what he was doing aboard a ship-even if he didn't know much ashore. Let the French try to do him in! He'd give them measure for measure, and more, to boot.

'Sorry, Caroline,' he muttered, finishing his drink, and sure he would soon have another. 'I'd've liked t'keep everything just as ye liked it, but… I can't. I can't live with all your ghosts, either.'

Never see this place again? he asked himself; bloody good!

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It was a toss-up as to who peered out from the coach's windows more eagerly as it began the long descent from Portdown Hill to Portsmouth proper-Hugh, Sewallis, or their father. The lads squealed and oohed at the sight of the harbour so crammed with warships at anchor, so many water hoys and supply barges working to succour them, and the lug-sailed or oared boats dashing back and forth like so many roaches scuttling from a sudden flood of light.

And once they were on level ground before the George Inn, the one Lewrie preferred most, the streets leading into HM Dockyards were even busier with dray waggons and seamen, with parties from the Impress Service chivvying along their latest catches to the tenders to ferry them out to the hulked receiving ships, with files of Marines tramping along at the Quick-Step, with officers strolling together in twos and threes for whispered conversations, or sharing cock-a-whoop japes.

'Stay close or get trampled, now,' Lewrie chid his boys, leaving it to his father, Sir Hugo-who had coached down with them for the nonce and who would see Sewallis back to London and the diligence coach to his school, once the necessities were done-to deal with the driver of the dray waggon, which bore all his personal goods and furnishings and Hugh's sea-chest, and to supervise Desmond and Furfy's unloading.

Lewrie closed his eyes and sniffed deeply, feeling a swell of satisfaction as he realised how different a seaport smelled, and how much he had missed it. Other than the horse dung, of course.

There was the fishy smell of tidal flats and the kelp and hard marine life that clung to wood and stone piers at low tide, the scent of salt, of cable-lengths of hemp or manila, fresh from weaving at the ropewalks; hot tar or pitch, turpentine and rosin, and the sweetness of new-sawn wood and sawdust. New-baked ship's biscuit, small beer by the keg, the heady aroma of a leaking rum cask from a passing waggon.

And there were the sounds; mewing, crying gulls, the clatters of sail, signal or flag halliards on masts, staffs, or poles. Far-off rustles of loosed canvas from one of the nearer ships as its rusty or newly impressed crew went through an exercise in Harbour Drill. Roars and shouts, barked orders, fiddle music and laughter, and the rumbles of a great many men of a myriad of skills all congregating to launch a great enterprise, and the bulk of them knowing what they were about.

I think I'm home, Lewrie told himself, opening his eyes to take it all in; a damned deprivin' one, once were out at sea, but… home just the same.

'Yes well, let's see about our lodgings first, then we'll see my goods aboard Reliant' Lewrie said, abandoning his reverie. 'I've written ahead, so the George may be able t'take us all.'

'All of us, father? To go out to your new ship?' Sewallis asked him, looking more eager than was his usual wont.

'Aye, you can be there when I read myself in,' he agreed.

And an hour later, with two hired boats to bear all his goods and the six of them, they went alongside HMS Reliant. She was still reduced 'to a gantline' with none of her upper masts set up, and her gun-deck empty of artillery, riding high in the waters not too far off Southsea Castle, in the deeper water 'twixt Spit Sand and Horse Sand.

'Boat ahoy!' one of her Midshipmen challenged; pro forma, that, for there was no doubt that the first boat carried a Post-Captain, and the second his possessions.

'Aye aye!' their boatman shouted back, showing four fingers to declare that a Post- Captain was indeed aboard.

'Might ye have need of a bosun's chair, father?' Lewrie teased.

'Bedamned if I will!' Sir Hugo snapped back.

'Last in, first out,' Lewrie said, laying a restraining hand on Sewallis's shoulder as he stood to grope for the main channel platform, the dead-eyed main-mast stays, and the man-ropes of the boarding-battens. 'Sir Hugo next, then Hugh, then you, Sewallis.'

He tucked his sword behind his left leg, stood on the gunn'l of their boat, and stepped onto the main channel, then the battens, making a quick way up to the starboard entry-port. He was greeted with a side-party of Marines, a Bosun and his Mate piping a long call, and two officers and a clutch of Midshipmen.

Once safely in-board, Lewrie doffed his hat to the flag at the taffrails, the officers, and the crew hastily assembled along both sail-tending gangways above the bare gun-deck, and in the waist.

'Captain Alan Lewrie, come aboard to command,' he told his two Commission Officers. 'Mine arse on a band- box!' he gasped a second later, though, quite ruining the solemnity of the occasion. 'Mister Spendlove? Last I saw of you 'twas Ninety-Seven, when we paid off Jester! Congratulations on your Lieutenancy, sir.'

'Thank you, sir!' Lt. Clarence Spendlove proudly replied.

'Geoffrey Westcott, sir,' the older officer said. 'It appears I'm to be your First Officer… unless Mister Merriman turns up and proves senior to me. Your servant, Captain Lewrie, sir.'

'Mister Westcott, how d'ye do, sir,' Lewrie said with another doff of his hat to match Westcott's. 'Well, shall we get on with it?' He turned to see that Sir Hugo had scaled the ship's side right handily, and both Hugh and Sewallis were behind him, too.

'One of ours, sir?' Lt. Westcott enquired as the both of them walked to the hammock nettings at the forward end of the quarterdeck, and amidships.

'No, my son Hugh's down for Captain Thomas Charlton and Pegasus, a two-decker,'