The Invasion Year

After the toast, they were free to re-enter the great hall and circulate with their families and friends. Captain Blanding stuck to Lewrie for a bit on their way out.

“Sir Stephen, sir,” Lewrie said with a wink and a nod, raising what was left of his champagne in toast.

“Sir Alan, haw!” Blanding responded in kind. “Ehm… did they set things right?” he enquired, leaning close and looking concerned.

“In a manner o’ speakin’, sir,” Lewrie told him. “It seems the Crown don’t make errors, else they’d have t’admit that His Majesty is soft in the head, again, so… it’ll stand, can you believe it.”

That froze Blanding dead in his tracks, with a stricken look on his phyz. “Well now, sir… that’s simply… ehm.” It seemed that Blanding did feel irked by Lewrie being elevated to his own level; as if his own investiture had been diminished, and robbed him of all the joy of it. He recovered well-enough to say, “Well now! Congratulations to you, Captain Lewrie.”

“And mine to you, sir,” Lewrie replied. “You, at least, more than earned it,” he confessed.

“Ah, there’s the wife!” Blanding quickly said, looking away.

“And you must show her how well you look in sash and star, sir,” Lewrie said, looking for escape as much as Blanding.

“Aye, I shall. See you later, Sir Alan,” Blanding said.

“Sir Stephen,” Lewrie replied, tossing off a brief bow from the waist, and wondering if that promised celebration dinner and jaunt to Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral was dead-off.

Once he found his father, Lewrie could not help giving him a toothy grin and saying, “I out-rank you, now. Do we ever dine out together, I’ll precede you to the table.”

“Mean t’say yer baronetcy’ll stand?” Sir Hugo gawped, then was taken with loud laughter, the place and the august company bedamned. “Good Christ, but he must be deeper in the Bedlam ‘Blue- Devils’ than anyone thought. Sir Romney Embleton probably won’t mind, but, damme, will young Harry throw a horse-killin’ fit, begad!”

“Yes, he will… won’t he?” Lewrie smirked, savouring how it would go down with that otter-chinned fool to have a second baronet in Anglesgreen when his father passed on, and he inherited the rank.

“I must write Sewallis at once, and tell him he’ll be a knight when I am gone,” Lewrie said. “Now, where’s some more champagne?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Now, how does a baronet conduct himself? Lewrie asked himself as he made a slow circuit of the hall with a fresh champagne in his hand, and an eye out for the nearest refills. And for the comely young women present… so long as it wasn’t the Blandings’ mort. Sir Hugo had strayed away in pursuit of the auburn-haired woman they’d spotted early on; he wished him joy of it, though he smugly thought that she’d not had eyes for that old rogue. It must be admitted that, now that he was knight and baronet, even a back-door variety, he began to enjoy the rare chance to preen. It wouldn’t last, of course; within a few days he would be back in dreary Sheerness, back aboard Reliant, and in the minutiae of ship-board life, and his sash and star stowed away at the bottom of a sea-chest. The hall was not so crowded with people, nor was it as candle-lit as it might be for an evening event, that it had grown oppressively warm, and someone must have thrown up the many sash-windows and opened some glassed double-doors to let in the cool day’s wind.

“Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, sir!” someone called out in a braying voice, forcing him to turn and peer about. A tall fellow with a full head of long dark blond hair was beaming at him, a fellow garbed in a uniform of some cavalry regiment, and epaulets of a Lieutenant-Colonel.

“Sir?” Lewrie said, smiling back. “You have the better of me.”

“Percy Stangbourne, Sir Alan,” the dashing fellow said, coming to shake hands vigourously. “Viscount Stangbourne, but everyone calls me Percy. Congratulations on your knighthood, Sir Alan, and gaining a baronetcy.”

“Thank you kindly, my lord,” Lewrie responded, an idea nagging at him that he’d heard that name before, but…

“I bring felicitations from a mutual acquaintance of ours, too, Sir Alan,” Stangbourne teased. “Mistress Eudoxia Durschenko, of equestrian fame?”

Oh, he’s the chap Father wrote me of! Lewrie realised, wondering if he would be called out for a duel by a jealous lover.

“You are acquainted with her, my lord? Percy?” Lewrie asked as innocently as he could (he was rather good at shamming “innocent,” just as he was at portraying false modesty) yet thinking, Honest t’God, your honour, sir, I never laid a finger on yer daughter… sister… wife… mistress! And why the Devil ain’t he wearin’ a powdered wig, too?

“Mistress Eudoxia and I were fortunate enough to make our acquaintance during the last Winter interval, whilst riding in the park, and I have had the further great fortune to have obtained her father’s permission to call upon her, Sir Alan,” Lord Stangbourne blathered enthusiastically, like a teen in “cream-pot” love.

“He did?” Lewrie exclaimed, stunned. “If Arslan Artimovitch did, I’d have t’declare ye the luckiest man in all England!”

Probably showed him all his daggers, pistols, and his lions, to give him good warnin’, Lewrie thought.

“So I consider myself, sir!” Stangbourne boasted.

“Seen them lately?” Lewrie asked.

“Off on their Summer touring,” Lord Stangbourne said with an impatient shrug, “up to the reeky towns of Scotland and back.” He had to swipe at the romantic mop of hair that fell over his forehead. “We do write, twice weekly. Mistress Eudoxia had spoken so admiringly of you, sir, and of your splendid defence of their ship when they were returning from Africa some years back, so… when I heard your name called, I simply had to meet the man who saved my intended, express my thanks, and take the measure of so bold a fellow, ha ha!”

See if I’m a rival? Lewrie cynically thought; What? She’s his “intended”? Is he daft? Young lords sport with actresses and circus girls, they don’t bloody marry ’em!

Lewrie recalled, though, how zealously Eudoxia’s father guarded her innocence. Stangbourne would’ve had to propose just to get close enough to shake her hand or smell her perfume!

“Intended? Why, that’s marvellous for you, my lord!” Lewrie pretended to be delighted. “Percy, rather. When next you write her, please extend my best wishes… even to her father. You’ll wish her to leave the circus, o’ course. Is her father amenable to that, too?”

“They see the sense of it,” Percy Stangbourne said with another shrug, that one much iffier, as if he’d not dared broach the subject yet. “Ah, and here’s my sister!” He brightened, waving to someone. “I say, Lydia, come meet the hero of the hour, that Captain Lewrie that Eudoxia told us about… the one who saved their bacon in the South Atlantic several years ago!”

Lydia Stangbourne looked a tad less than enthused at the mention of her brother’s outre “intended,” all but rolling her eyes. During the naming to each other, Lydia Stangbourne wore a placid, bland, and almost bored-with-the-world expression, her mouth a bit pouty. That was a bit off-putting to Lewrie, though she had an odd sort of attractiveness.

Instead of dropping him a graceful, languid curtsy in answer to his how, though, she extended her hand, man- fashion.

Do I kiss it like a Frenchman, shake, or just stare at it? he wondered, compromising quickly by grasping her fingers. She found his response slightly amusing; one brow went up, her dark green eyes sparkled, and one corner of her lips curled up in what he took as a smirk.

“Sir Alan,” she purred, looking him directly in the eyes.