King George looked down at Lewrie, then at the sword, with a bit of puzzlement, then tapped Lewrie once on each of his epaulets.

“Ahem?” from the courtier a little louder.

“Knight and Baronet,” King George III reiterated in a mutter, as if making a mental note to himself. “Knight and Baronet!” he said once more, as if that sounded better. He returned his placid gaze out to the crowd once more, grinning as if quite pleased with himself.

“I, ah… allow me to express my gratitude, sir… Your Majesty, mean t’say,” Lewrie managed to croak, sharing a glance with that courtier who was shaking his head, with his eyebrows up.

“What? Hey?” King George asked, looking back down at Lewrie as if he’d never seen him in his life, and how the Devil had he got there.

“Uh… that I’m proud and pleased to be so honoured, Your Majesty,” Lewrie tried again.

“Well, of course you are, young fellow, and well-deserving of it, too!” the King rejoined, beaming kindly; addled as an egg, Lewrie deemed him, but kindly! “Now, up you get!”

Lewrie rose to his feet, his mouth agape as he performed a departing bow. Though his head was reeling, he managed to pace back with measured tread ’til he reached the third-from-the-dais rosette in the carpet, made a last “leg” with his hand on his breast, then half-turned to sidle into the larboard half of the crowd, looking for Sir Hugo and Captain Blanding. When he found them, safely deep in the second or third row of onlookers, he spread his arms wide and blared his eyes in a cock-headed grimace of “what the Hell just happened?” incredulity. He was in serious need of a stiff drink, something stronger than the wine that his father had discovered!

“Lewrie, did he say…?” Blanding asked, looking aghast.

“ ’Deed he did, sir,” Lewrie replied, shaking his head. “It must have stuck in his head from yours, and he did it by rote. I’m sure it was a mistake, soon t’be corrected.”

Blanding’s wife was looking huffy, as if Lewrie had both insulted the Sovereign and diminished the grandeur of her husband’s investiture. Chaplain Brundish and the new-minted Reverend Blanding frowned as if someone-like Lewrie-had run stark naked through church, whilst Miss Blanding was making cow-eyes, as if actually impressed.

“Pity it won’t stick,” Sir Hugo drawled, looking wryly amused.

“Where’d ye find the wine?” Lewrie asked him. “And do they have brandy?”

Now the King was conferring honours on the Cambridge don, this time reading much more closely and sticking to the script. A polite round of applause followed. The Foreign Office chap got his knighthood-and no more!-and all applauded again, the tepid sort of acknowledgement preferred in Society; too much enthusiasm was deemed crude and “common.” Once the last claps died, the string music began again, and people began to mingle, filling up the lane between. Trays of wine began to circulate, and Lewrie excused himself from the Blandings to beat up to a liveried servant with flutes of champagne, threading his way between people in his haste, nodding and smiling whenever one of them addressed him as “Sir Alan” in congratulations. He almost snagged a glass, but for the interruption of the senior courtier who’d first steered him to the side-chamber.

“A word, if I may, Sir Alan? May I be the first to address you as such?” he asked.

“About the, ah…?” Lewrie asked with a knowing smile.

“Exactly so, sir. If you would be so kind as to come this way?”

He was led to the same side-chamber, where Sir Harper Strachan, Baron Ludlow, stood grimacing and working his mouth from side to side in agitation, as if he wore badly-fitted dentures.

“Hah! There you are, sir!” Strachan snapped, stamping his cane on the floor like a school proctor about to thrash an unready student, as if the gaffe was Lewrie’s fault, and doing.

“Aye, here I am, milord,” Lewrie coolly answered, wondering if he actually was in some sort of trouble.

“We feared you would get away before being presented with your patent, and your decorations, Sir Alan,” the senior courtier said with an Oxonian drawl much like Strachan’s, but much more pleasantly, as if trying to defuse the situation… or defuse Strachan. “If you’d be so good as to remove your coat for a moment, Sir Alan?”

Lewrie had not noticed before that a long side-board bore several shallow rectangular boxes, one of which the courtier opened. “Your sash, Sir Alan,” he said, producing a wide bright blue strip of satin which he looped over Lewrie’s chest from right shoulder to left hip.

Christ, this is for real! Lewrie realised as he put his coat back on, and the courtier brought out the silver-and-cloisonne star, which he pinned to the left breast of Lewrie’s uniform coat.

“Most wear the sash under the coat, sir,” the courtier informed him, “though there are some who wish their coats to be doubled over and buttoned, then wear the sash outside the coat, beneath the right epaulet.”

“Risky for gravy stains,” was the first thing to pop into Alan Lewrie’s head.

“Oh, indeed, Sir Alan!” the courtier agreed, simpering happily.

“Grr,” or what sounded like it, from Strachan.

“The documents will have to follow along, later, Sir Alan,” the courtier went on. “They must be amended, do you see as will the preliminary work of the College of Heralds, to reflect your baronetcy.”

“Amended? Mean t’say the King’s slip’ll…?” Lewrie gaped.

“Sir Alan,” Strachan interjected, high-nosed and arch, though striving for pleasance. “His Majesty, the Crown, does not make slips, as you term them. His Majesty does not err.” That word sounded more like “Grrr” without the G. “And, should our Sovereign, ehm… get ahead of himself, then it is no error.”

“Mine arse on a band-box!” Lewrie blurted, stunned. “Mean t’say I really did… the King really did make me a baronet, too?”

“That is the case, Sir Alan,” the courtier said, beaming.

“He did,” Strachan intoned, sounding imperious and angered.

“One must assume, Sir Alan, that His Majesty, on the spur of the moment, deemed your actions in the battle… the only noteworthy that occurred last year entire… so praiseworthy that he decided to name you Knight and Baronet in sign of royal gratitude,” the courtier conjectured with a hopeful note to his voice. “And, enfin, what’s done is done, and… to borrow the phrase from the Order of the Garter, Honi soit qui mal y pense, what?”

Lewrie goggled at him, dredging through his poor abilities with French for a long second or two before he twigged to it. Shame on him who thinks evil of it! he understood, at last.

“Grr,” again from Strachan, who was a Knight of the Garter.

“Mine arse on a…,” Lewrie croaked.

I’m in through the scullery door… or the coal scuttle, Lewrie thought, whilst the courtier beamed and nodded and Strachan ground his teeth. He shook his head in dis-belief that the King, who should have been better off in Bedlam by this point, could announce his marriage to his horse like the Roman Emperor Caligula, and the sycophants in the royal court would find an excuse for it, and ain’t he the wag, though?

’Twixt the King, the shaky Prime Minister William Pitt, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s threatened invasion, England’s in a pretty pickle, he sadly thought; pretty much up Shit’s Creek!

“Now I think I really need a drink,” Lewrie told them.

There was a soft rap at the door, and a servant whispered that the rest of the honourees were assembled for their presentations. The senior courtier nodded and bade them be sent in.

With them, thankfully, came another servant with a silver tray of wine glasses, yet another with a magnum of champagne (a war with the French notwithstanding), so that Lewrie could snatch one and press the second servant to top him up while the others were receiving the marks of their new distinctions.

“Gentlemen, a glass with you all,” Sir Harper Strachan said at last as the champagne circulated and Lewrie got his second. “Congratulations and happy felicitations on this day!”

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