A King`s Commander - Dewey Lambdin

"We had no chance to dance at Portsmouth. And, with our kiddies along…" he felt emboldened to add. "I would request you save me at least the one turn around the floor, signorina. For a wondrous memory of Genoa, but… perhaps we should enter the salon. And dance?"

"So honorable," she whispered, so softly he had to lean to her to hear. "So decent an English gentleman," Claudia crooned, eyes wet in wonder. She glided a half step to him, her breasts brushing at his shirtfront and waistcoat buttons, her lips open in a half smile, her eyes going even wider and more besotting. Within inches of a first kiss, her lips opening. And Lewrie knew he was a lying hound, after all.

God, just a dab o' backbone, he pleaded, ready to succumb, in spite of his best efforts; I'm a cunt-struck cully, always was, always will be, I'm tryin' t'help meself, so where's yer…?

"Ahem, Commander Lewrie?" A very welcome voice intruded behind him, a very plumby, cultured English voice!

Thankee Jesus, Alan thought, whirling in alarm, and an immense relief. Which turned to wide-eyed amazement, seasoned with just the slightest dash of terror, when he beheld his rescuer.

How the Devil'd he get here? He gawped. And should I be glad or not.

"Allow me to name myself to you, sir." The impossibly tall and skele-tally lean old beak blathered on quickly, stalking up to offer a hand to be shook. Thin hair brushed back severely, above a weathered face that was all angles and hollows in the cheeks, temples, and eyes. Agate-y buzzard's eyes that glinted hard and merciless as gunflints over a long hawk's nose. "Simon Silberberg, sir. Your servant, sir. From Coutts's Bank, in London?" he purred as he shook Alan's quite-nerveless hand.

"Mister… Silberberg, sir," Lewrie continued to gawp, clapping his astonished mouth shut.

"Agent of the bank, sir," Silberberg rattled on. "In Genoa on business, don't ye know… commercial interests… well, when I heard we were both invited to the same ball, Commander Lewrie, I took it 'pon myself to make my acquaintance of you. Hoping we might meet… your solicitor Mister Matthew Mountjoy mentioned you to me, just before I sailed? Wished me to convey his greetings. Do you have a moment, sir? Just the one triflin' moment. Took it 'pon myself, sir, to list ev'ry bank customer in the Mediterranean, make them familiar with me, impart details of new services for serving officers on foreign stations." The lean old fellow in his "ditto" suit of somber black almost whinnied in shy urgency, playing the perfect overeducated, underemployed fool of a tradesman. "Can't hope to rise in Coutts's, sir, 'less…"

"Of course, Mister… Silberberg," Lewrie allowed. "This won't take much time, though, will it? The dancing, d'ye see."

"Of course not, sir. Won't interrupt yer pleasures," Silberberg promised, casting a sidelong, significant glance at Claudia Mastandrea.

"You will excuse me, signorina," Lewrie said to the mort. "Do save me at least the one dance, I pray you. Until later, hmm?"

"The night is young, Signore Lewrie," Claudia huffed, a bit beyond "cooled" from her ardor; downright snippy, in fact. "Perhaps you will accompany me later. Ciao, signore."

"Should I escort you…?" Lewrie offered, but she swept away.

"Up to your old tricks, are we, Lewrie?" Silberberg sniffed in aspersion, his lips suddenly hairline thin and cramped together. And suddenly not half the hand-wringing senior clerk he'd seemed.

"Up to yours, are we… Twigg?" Lewrie scowled back.

"Yes," the spy from the Foreign Office, the cold-blooded manipulator Lewrie had known in the Far East as Zachariah Twigg drawled in a toplofty sneer. "In point of fact… I am."

CHAPTER

"Silberberg?" Lewrie sneered softly. "However did you come by that? And, ain't you slightly out of your usual bounds, sir?"

"A half-addled banking clerk of the Hebrew persuasion may be an object of amusement, Lewrie… of some derision," Twigg replied with a conspirator's mutter, though sounding pleased with his alias. "Hardly one to suspect as a spy, though. We, after all, finance their wars for them. Apolitically, mind… with suspected loyalties only to the bank, the guinea, and one's tribe. As for my presence, the Far East became more a military, or a naval problem, of the overt sort. And, too, our last escapade made me too well-known there. With French influence limited to Pondichery or their Indian Ocean islands, their trade dried up, and with trade their hopes to service informers, agents provocateurs, pirates, well…"

Twigg shrugged expressively, then with the dropping of his arms he seemed to fall back into his assumed character. They paced toward a wine table, Twigg all but fawning and bobbing, anxious to please.

"You will remember it is Silberberg, not Twigg, from now on, I trust, sir?" He wheedled in a whisper, laying a finger to his fleshy-tipped nose, the end-pad of which would have made a walrus jealous. A louder voice for his next statement. "So very sorry to take you from your amusements, Commander Lewrie, but since you're so much at sea, I have so few opportunities. If not tonight, sir, perhaps you may do me the honor of allowing me to call upon you, aboard ship, before Jester departs? Oh my, sir… your account prospers, indeed it does. Prize money, the Four Percents. Though you are aware there is talk of a tax on income, sir?

Hideous notion, truly hideous, but there it is. Now, had we a moment, Commander Lewrie, I believe I may make to you such a proposition of investments to safeguard your farm income, making less of it subject to any future levy, as would warm the very cockles of yer heart. A glass of wine with you, sir? A true nautical hero? One such as I have so few opportunities… dine out on it for years, I could."

"Oh for God's sake," Lewrie whispered, frowning crossly. "Bit less of it, hey?"

The waiter turned away after pouring them each some claret, run in from France, of a certainty.

"Your ship, instanter," Silberberg hissed softly, as Twigg, a finger to his thin lips. "We have so much to discuss, sir. Oh my, yes!" He gushed for the waiter's benefit, as Silberberg.

"But…" Lewrie protested, as the opening strains of a gay air soared from the far salon to the rotunda. He knew there was nothing he could say or do, but go along with Twigg's dictate. Again!

"Your father's well, sir," Twigg told him as they tossed their hats and gloves in his great-cabins. "Made a brigadier, imagine that. He'll know of it, soon enough. This come from Leadenhall Street with me. Your brother-in-law Burgess Chiswick will become a major."

"That's gratifyin'." Lewrie sighed, opening his wine cabinet.

"So sorry to spoil your fun," Twigg posed, one brow lifted in amusement as Alan grudgingly gave him a snifter of brandy. "And, such bountiful fun it would have been, too."

"Didn't think a cypher such as you'd notice, Twigg," Alan spat.

"Au contraire, Lewrie, I have always had an eye for the ladies." Twigg chuckled. "Though I may hardly say that my face, or my choice of career, has ever stood me in such good stead as yours, in that regard. Such a splendid run of luck you've had, though. A lovely wife, truly lovely, is your Caroline. As is your Corsican doxy, the, uhm… shall I say the confessa Aretino?"

"Now why would you wish to know so much about me, Twigg?"

"I know a lot about everybody, Lewrie. That's my job."

"So you can use 'em, I s'pose. And that, most cynically," Alan accused. "Leave my wife and… mistress… out of this, Twigg."

"Only if you will, sir," Twigg shot back, even more amused with Lewrie's sullen truculence, his past grievances. "I will not use them, cynically or otherwise. I leave that to you, Lewrie. No matter. Now, sir.

Might you summon your clerk, Mister Thomas Mountjoy? I confess I was quite struck by your clandestine report to Nelson, in which Mountjoy played so prominent a part. I've gotten little from our Frenchman you captured, and I wish to go over that report, fleshing out the sparsity of the written account with both your recollections."

"Sentry?" Lewrie called to the Marine at the door. "Pass the word for my clerk. Come at once, tell him."

"Aye aye, Cap'um… SAH!" the muffled voice shouted back.

"Inconnu, my God," Twigg mused, slouching in the sofa cushions. "How dramatic. How French! Fellow could have put on a fool's face and gotten clean away, since he'd purged his own chest so thoroughly. That partner of his, he's the same stubborn sort. All fired with adoration for his Revolution. Might as well make a Hindu kill a cow, as get him to talk. Bloody amateur, in his own theatric."

"What did you learn of him?" Lewrie asked, wincing as he remembered Twigg on a captured Lanun Rover prao, with a wavy-bladed krees at a pirate prisoner's throat. Which Twigg had most dispassionately cut, after slicing and torturing what little he could from him. "And how? Up to all your old tricks, Mister Twigg?"

"And why not, now and again, sir?" Twigg allowed coolly. "I find they more than suffice. No, Lewrie, he lives. Shaken, one may hope, but no permanent harm done. An amateur, as I said. Marks on a pile of dirty linen, with several aliases, from several cities. Some of them most embarrassingly French. And caught red-handed, laden with gold, in a ship laden with military goods. Should have taken another vessel, traveled separately from his dead compatriot, that unlamented romantic, Inconnu. Secret writings… the lemon-juice variety 'tween the lines of innocent correspondence. Smell it, by God! A dead giveaway, everytime. No, a more elaborate cypher would have served them better, but I doubt the poor fellow in charge of French spies in the region has much to work with yet. And, he's no Richelieu, himself, exactly. Learnin'… give him that much." Twigg shrugged again, and took a sip to toast his worthy opponent. "Fellow'll be turned off in a fortnight, though. Hung for spying, soon as a military court at Corsica has him in."

"And the French midshipman?"

"That clumsy lout, God no, Lewrie! He's to be exchanged. Too many of our squirearchy's slack-jawed sons aboard Berwick, those with such a lot of 'interest,' are festerin' in France. Midshipman Hainaut will be reporting back to his masters, and the less said about me the better. Best he suffer an accident on the way, he knows too much already, seen too much, but…" Twigg sighed, as if to say "what can you do?" "Knows who you are, Lewrie, he does. Not as thickheaded a peasant as he looks. Scrub him up, dress his hair… a proper uniform, and the sky's the limit for him. His Die Narbe will take care of that, I assure you."

"Yer clerk, Mister Mountjoy… SAH!" the Marine shouted.

"Of Die Narbe, more later," Twigg promised smugly, rising for his introduction. Mountjoy, as usual, disappointed. He'd risen from a deep slumber, dressed haphazardly, and presented himself in a pair of bear-hide carpet slippers, bare ankles, and dark-blue slop trousers, into which he'd crammed the tail of his knee-length nightshirt, with a ratty old drab-brown wool dressing gown atop. Mountjoy still wore a tasseled sleeping cap over his unruly hair, too.