The Invasion Year

Hero of the Abolitionists like Wilberforce, or… I got knighted ’cause somebody in government’s feelin’ sorry for me for Caroline’s murder by the French!

It was hard not to grimace in anger and pain, and keep a sheepish grin of proper modesty on his face, after that realisation, even as he shook hands with the others and got pounded on the back; while the honour turned to ashes in his mouth!

Was it because he was… “well-known”? For a time, the Abolitionists had showered, papered, London and the nation with praiseful tracts of his theft of a dozen Black slaves from the Beaumans, long before the trial in King’s Bench which had acquitted him. His black-and-white portrait had been on sale, selling almost as briskly as Horatio Nelson’s for a month or two after, and God only knew how many of those, how many of the cartoons, how many illustrated tracts, he’d had to autograph for the adoring and supportive.

He had been turned into a commodity by the Abolitionist Society to further enthusiasm for the end of Negro slavery throughout the Empire, a larger-than-life symbol. And, in the Autumn of 1802, then in the Spring of 1803, in the run-up to the renewal of war with France (though he knew little of it on his tenant farm in Anglesgreen), there had been fresh tracts and portraits, sketches meant to horrify common people that the Corsican Ogre, Napoleon Bonaparte, would order the murder of a British naval hero and his wife over a trivial insult, or mis-understanding taken as an insult by the First Consul for Life of France. Someone in His Majesty’s Government had cynically found him useful… again!

Aye, I’m well-known, Lewrie miserably considered as he took a fresh glass of wine. He was a successful frigate captain. He was a rogue, a rake-hell, too, and known for that to some. The latter repute should have cancelled out any fame from the first, so who had put the idea of knighting him in the Sovereign’s ear?

If he ever had an honest shot at knighthood, it should have come in 1797, when he’d had Proteus, and had fought an equally-matched enemy frigate in the South Atlantic, a two-hour broadside-to-broadside slug-fest in the midst of a howling gale, to save an East India Company trade homebound for England, but… the Earl Spencer had been First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, Sir Evan Nepean his First Secretary, and both of them knew of his peccadilloes with other women, so there had been no hope, then.

Well, I do have allies, Lewrie told himself; sponsors, patrons, and influence. No one could hope to rise in English Society or a military or naval career without “interest,” not politics, or the Church, or trade, or…! There was his old school chum who’d been expelled at the same time as he had, Peter Rushton, now Lord Draywick, in Lords. In the Commons, there was William Wilberforce, Sir Samuel Whitbread, of the beer fortune, and many others of the progressive stripe; there was Sir Malcolm Shockley, married to Lucy Beauman, and in spite of her connexions to his old nemesis, friendly and supportive, too. Admiral the Earl St. Vincent? He was now First Lord of Admiralty, and he had always seemed well-disposed towards him, since the battle that had made him a peer; when Lewrie had been on half-pay, begging for a ship before the expedition sailed for the Baltic to swat the Russians, Swedes, and Danes under Parker and Nelson, it had been “Old Jarvy” who’d allowed him an interview, then surprised him with command of HMS Thermopylae and her solo scouting mission into the Baltic, before the Battle of Copenhagen!

Lewrie suspected a reason even more distasteful: that somehow some agate-eyed manipulators in Secret Branch of the Foreign Office, people very much like Zachariah Twigg, found him useful to the Crown and to the Country, once more, and were even now playing up his name, and Caroline’s death, to enthuse the populace!

Wonder if anyone ever refused one? Lewrie thought.

At least his knighthood was for a legitimate reason, he could tell himself, perhaps for cumulative duty? They handed the damned things out to poets, playwrights, painters, town mayors when a new bridge or town hall was opened, for God’s sake! Brewers, iron barons, and wool-spinning tsars!

Might as well go along with it, he decided; they won’t offer twice, and… won’t this put my father’s nose outta joint? Think o’ what Harry Embleton’ll make of it, or my brother-in-law Governour?

“Wet him down, instanter!” Lt. Gilbraith was crying, calling for more wine. “Won’t be official ’til your presentations at Court, but, perhaps we could make a start at modest celebration, what?”

“I believe we could, Jemmy,” Captain Blanding heartily agreed, lifting his glass in Lewrie’s direction. “Sir Alan?”

“Sir Stephen!” Lewrie responded, though he lacked the twinkle that danced in Blanding’s eyes.

CHAPTER NINE

A few more celebratory glasses of Rhenish put paid to Lewrie’s plans for his late morning. In addition to the routine paperwork of a fighting ship, there was a new pile of directives from the Admiralty to be read through, initialed, filed away, or answered; he, and almost every Midshipman he had ever known from his early days, had been laid over a gun to “kiss the gunner’s daughter” for the sin of reading one’s personal mail, first, and neglecting Words From On High… even were those words corrected sailing directives for the safe navigation of the Yellow Sea, which 99 percent of the Royal Navy would never even get close to, much less transit. To his cats’ dismay, Lewrie and his clerk, James Faulkes, spent the rest of the Forenoon sorting it all out, and penning responses, too intent to play with them, shooing them off the day cabin desk and protecting Faulkes’s feathered quill pens.

The musicians had struck up “The Bowld Soldier Boy” at half past eleven, at Seven Bells, and the Purser, Mr. Cadbury, Marine Lieutenant Simcock, and the Purser’s Assistant/Clerk, Bewley (better known as the Jack-In-The- Breadroom), had escorted the painted rum cask on deck for the mid-day issue; Faulkes had gone antsy to miss it, forcing Lewrie to suspect that it was not just rejected love that had driven Faulkes to sea.

“Well, I think that should do it, Faulkes,” Lewrie said at last, as the very last reply was sanded to dry the ink, carefully folded and sealed, then addressed. “Sorry it took so long. You might visit the galley and see Mister Cooke… he’s always a pint of something hidden away. Did you miss the issue, he’ll allow you a nip.”

“Thank you, sir, and I shall,” Faulkes said, departing.

“Well, lads?” Lewrie invited to his cats, who sprang atop the desk to prowl, bow their backs, yawn, and stretch, then nuzzle at his hands. “You just can’t play with the pretty feathered pens, it isn’t-”

“Hands is being piped to Mess, sir,” Pettus, his cabin servant, said, cocking an ear to the silver calls on deck. “A glass of wine, sir?”

“Cold tea,” Lewrie decided. “I’ve done that, this morning.”

“Aye, Sir Alan, sir,” Pettus said with a tight, pleased grin.

“Hey?” Lewrie scowled back.

“Well…’tis all over the ship, sir,” Pettus told him. “Soon as your boat crew was dismissed, they were all bragging on it.”

“It’s not official ’til we get back to England, Pettus,” Lewrie pointed out to him. “ ’Til then… ‘Captain,’ or a plain ‘sir,’ will suit. And, for a long time after. Damned silliness,” he scoffed.

“Well, sir… I’ve served a vicar, and a bishop, but they don’t hold a candle to a Knight of the Bath,” Pettus said, almost sulking to be denied.

“You served a parcel o’ drunks at that inn in Portsmouth, ’fore you came away t’rejoin, too,” Lewrie said with a wry grin, “and, most-like one’r two o’ them were titled, so it don’t signify. Unless it’d look good on yer references, do ye ever wish t’leave my service.”

“Why would I wish to do that, sir?” Pettus rejoined, in merry takings. “Being a knight’s ‘man’ puts me a leg up over most other gentlemen’s servants.”

“Cap’m’s cook… SAH!” the Marine sentry bawled, smashing his musket butt and boots on the deck outside.

“Enter!” Lewrie called back, rising to go to the dining-coach, and his table. “Come on, catlin’s… tucker!”