The Invasion Year

“The formal notice, and the requirements in our dress, shall be waiting at your lodgings at the Madeira Club, when you arrive in London, Captain Lewrie,” Strachan intoned; hard to understand, though, with his handkerchief to his nose and mouth. “I would advise you come up to the city early enough to consult a tailor for the necessary items?”

“Thankee for the kind suggestion, milord.”

“Good day to you, Captain Lewrie,” Strachan said, performing a graceful and languid “leg” in conge, sweeping off his hat again. That was too much temptation to Toulon, who, though “of an age,” still liked to play with strange things, and the egret feathers were simply too tempting, so he pounced at the perigee of the sweep. “Damn my eyes!”

“Good day to you, milord,” Lewrie said, making a “leg,” too, so he could hide his grin and stifle his laughter.

He’d quite forgotten Chalky, still teetering like a wren on a grass stem on his shoulder. With a petulant yowl, Chalky leaped for the deck… and found the hat and feathers intriguing, too.

“Side-party… departing honours,” Lewrie snapped.

“Gaah, you hellish damned…!” Strachan snarled as he put his hat back on his head, now minus an egret plume that Chalky had tugged loose and scampered away with, closely followed by Toulon, who wanted a bat at it, too.

Baron Ludlow, Sir Harper Strachan, glared hot-blooded murder at Lewrie, his shallow chest heaving in anger, before turning away for the starboard entry-port, whilst the bosun’s call trilled and trilled. He could not quite fathom how to leave, though, peering over to determine that the boarding battens were much too steep and shallow for a down-the-house-stairs descent. Strachan tucked his walking-stick, mace of honour, or whatever it was under his left armpit, at last, while Bosun Sprague went into his third repeat of a call, shuffled about to face in-board, and groped blindly with one foot for the first batten with his hands gripping the inner face of the bulwarks.

“We could prepare a bosun’s chair, sir, if you-”

“Garr!” was Strachan’s comment as he managed to get both feet on the top batten, and shifted his right hand to the after-most main-mast stay.

“Oh, mind the tar, sir, we-!” Lewrie cautioned.

“Gaah!” Strachan re-iterated as the fresh tar got daubed on his fingers, before he re-discovered the man-ropes. It took him at least a very long minute before his hat was below the lip of the entry-port, and Bosun Sprague could take his call from his mouth and catch a deep breath.

“Did he make it into his boat, Mister Grainger?” Lewrie asked. “I’m afraid to look.”

“Ehm… he did, just now, sir,” Grainger reported, after a peek over the side.

“Poor lubber!” Midshipman Rossyngton whispered gleefully. “My grandmother isn’t that clumsy!”

“Well now, Mister Sprague,” Lewrie said, turning to the Bosun, “and wasn’t that bloody disastrous? Congratulations on your lungpower, by the way.”

“Thankee, Captain,” Sprague replied, still looking a tad blown. “I gave him an admiral’s salute… four times over, sir. The feller didn’t get to the boat soon, I’d’ve trotted out the one to the King.”

Lewrie went back to the cross-deck stanchions and hammock nettings at the fore end of the quarterdeck, where Toulon and Chalky were footballing their prize and play-pouncing on the feather. They looked up at him… seemingly very pleased with themselves.

“That’s alright, catlin’s… I still love you, despite that,” he told them.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Even with the great improvements in the nation’s road network, the prevalence of huge post-coaches and regular service, the growth of the canal system, and passenger barges, very few subjects of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland ever travelled much more than twenty miles from their home towns. It took money, and leisure time, for people to travel, so… though many wistfully hoped to see London one day, the number who did was but a fraction of the population of Great Britain.

Those who resided in London who ever traipsed west to the parks and The Mall, and the grandeur of the West End round St. James’s Palace, would represent about the same small fraction, for most folk lived and worked, ran their shops and such, in familiar neighbourhoods where they felt comfortable, perhaps even safe, and might never stray more than two miles from them, whether the neighbourhood was what was coming to be termed “respectable,” run-down and seedy but close to their employments, or a maze-like criminal stew.

The number of people of Great Britain who ever entered the Palace of St. James was an even smaller fraction. This cool but sunny morning, Alan Lewrie was one of them, for the first time in his life, and (most-likely) the last, he reckoned.

He had come up from Sheerness as an idle passenger aboard one of the larger brig-rigged packets; ashore by gig to board her, cross the Medway and the Nore to the mouth of the Thames, and up-river to the city. He and Pettus travelled together, for he needed a “man” to see to his things. Captain Blanding took a larger entourage, including his cabin steward and personal servant; all depended on the packet’s cook for their meals, which were quite toothsome since fresh food and fresh fish were available… as were lashings of drink.

The winds were contrary, as were the tides, so they all had to sleep aboard one night, Lewrie and Blanding given cramped dog-box cabins with narrow slatted berths, no larger than the accommodations that Lewrie had slept in when he was a junior Lieutenant. The berths were not the sort he was used to, either, for his did not swing from ropes bound to ring-bolts in the overhead deck beams, but was nailed to the inner hull plankings. Not only was the mattress as thin as a Devil’s bargain, little more comforting than two quilts doubled over, but the lack of swaying motion was irritating, and kept him up half the night. He had been rocked to sleep like a babe in its crib too many years… stillness felt un-natural, and he envied Pettus and his hammock on the lower deck with the other servants!

The morning brought a hearty breakfast, though, with kippers and eggs, thick toast, and scalding tea, and enough hot water in civilian measures for a scrub-up and a shave, with the luxury of even more tea on deck afterwards, lazing in perfect idleness, even going so far as to lean on the bulwarks in lubberly fashion as the packet made the bend into Greenwich Reach and plodded along past the Naval Hospital, Observatory, and Deptford Naval Dockyards. If Captain Blanding had had trouble sleeping, he gave no sign of it, bubbling over with boisterous bonhomie, tucking away a large breakfast, then enthusing over all the new construction at Deptford, and expressing the hope that, once he had been honoured with his knighthood, one of the 74-gunned Third Rates on the stocks would soon be his.

“I thought you were immoderately proud of Modeste, sir,” Lewrie commented, “and her turn of speed for a sixty-four.”

“Oh, I am, Lewrie!” Blanding responded, laughing out loud. “But one aspires to greater responsibilities, a larger command, perhaps the charge of a squadron of Third Rates.”

“I s’pose I’m too used to frigates, and their freedom,” Lewrie confessed as a servant came round with a fresh pot of tea. “If Admiralty thinks me worthy of squadron command, I’d prefer it to be a frigate squadron, with me in Reliant, or another Fifth Rate thirty-eight.”

“Well, I dare say you’re a dashed good frigate captain now, sir,” Blanding allowed, “and you’ve done very well by me, but… promotion and greater responsibility comes to us all, sooner or later, should we live long enough… and not come a cropper sometime in one’s career. Reliant’s your third frigate?”

“Fourth, actually, sir,” Lewrie told him. “Though I had Savage only a year or so… before the trial, and my being relieved, and got Thermopylae as a last minute replacement for her captain when he fell ill. I’ve a year and a half left in Reliant before she’ll need to be put in the graving docks for a refit.”

“Make the most of it, then, Lewrie, for there’s most-like some Third Rate in your future,” Blanding said with a shrug. “Your family will be joining you at Court?”

“Only my father, sir,” Lewrie said. “He’s the only one in the vicinity, given the short notice we got. Yours, sir?”