Kings and Emperors

“Late Ninety-Six,” Shirke said, turning wary. “You?”

“Spring of Ninety-Seven,” Lewrie said, and Shirke looked relieved. “How did that party end, by the way? I slipped out with my wench, through a side door.”

“Hah!” Shirke let out a bark of humour. “They turfed us all out in our small-clothes, the girls half-nude, and it was the Hue and Cry all the way back to the piers!”

Jemmy Shirke had put on a stone or two, and his smug face had thickened a bit, yet, for age, he appeared about the same as he had in the old days; a prominent forehead, a slightly pouted mouth, and a pair of clever brown eyes.

“Boat ahoy!” one of Newcastle’s Mids called to another approaching gig.

“Aye aye!” came the shout, signifying the arrival of another Post-Captain.

“That’ll be the Captains of Tiger and Assurance,” Shirke said. “Our frigates. Hayman, and Fillebrowne.”

“William Fillebrowne?” Lewrie asked, startled.

“I think he is, aye,” Shirke told him. “Know him?”

“We’ve … met,” Lewrie said through gritted teeth.

That arrogant bastard! Lewrie thought.

A moment later and there he was at the lip of the entry-port, taking the welcoming honours and doffing his fore-and-aft bicorne to the flag and officers. Fillebrowne came from great wealth, and was always elegantly tailored and expensively uniformed, the second or third son of immensely rich people. When Lewrie had met him at Elba in the ’90s, he almost took a liking to him in the first minutes, but Fillebrowne had revealed himself a tad too much, and Lewrie happily loathed him a minute after.

He’d had HMS Jester, Fillebrowne had had HMS Myrmidon, in Thom Charlton’s small squadron sent to the Adriatic to counter the French and disrupt their trade in oak for ship-building. Fillebrowne was more interested in using naval service as a chance to amass treasures, artworks, jewelry, and priceless relics from the impoverished French Royalist exiles than in seamanship. His elders had done their Grand Tours of the Continent and come home with Greco-Roman riches and grand art, so why could he not, as well?

Idle, flip, sure of his superiority, was Fillebrowne, a top-lofty sneerer, with a mumbling Oxonian accent; a lecher, too, almost as mad for quim as Westcott, but so arrogantly boastful about it.

The worst was Fillebrowne throwing his “acquisition” of Lewrie’s former Corsican mistress, Phoebe Aretino, in his face with a leer, and almost daring him to do something about it! In Venice, when the man had found that Sir Malcolm Shockley’s younger wife was known to Lewrie, Fillebrowne had gone out of his way to cuckold Sir Malcolm with Lucy, née Beauman, a love of his from long ago on Jamaica, to boot!

After taking the salute from the side-party, Fillebrowne took a glance aft, spotted Lewrie, and spread a slow, superior smile upon his phyz.

“Welcome aboard, Captain Fillebrowne,” Shirke said. “Allow me to name to you Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, Baronet, an old shipmate of mine. Captain Lewrie, I name to you Captain William Fillebrowne.”

“Lewrie,” Fillebrowne replied, un-graciously. “Been a while, has it not?”

“Willy,” Lewrie purred back. “Aye, it has.”

Fillebrowne was not used to people addressing him with the diminuitive of his Christian name, and that threw him off stride, making him clear his throat in sudden pique, and go red in the face.

Another officer came aboard to join them, a Post-Captain of less than three years’ seniority, with only the one epaulet on his right shoulder. John Hayman replied properly to the introductions, addressing Lewrie as “Sir Alan.” He looked to be a serious young man, but one with an unfortunately smallpox-scarred face.

“Well, sir, shall we go aft?” Shirke said, waving towards his great-cabins. As expected of a larger Third Rate 74, Shirke’s cabins were bigger than Lewrie’s, and leaned toward the Spartan plain-ness that the Navy approved, though the paint colour, the choice of furnishings, the style of carpetting over the painted black-and-white deck chequer, and the abundance of shiny pewter, polished brass, and fine crystal was quite tasteful, overall. Shirke had not mentioned if he was married, but Lewrie suspected a woman’s touch in the choices, right down to the upholstery, and the bed coverlet.

They were offered seats, and glasses of wine were produced at once.

“Seen Phoebe lately, have you?” Fillebrowne idly enquired with a taunting brow raised.

“‘La Contessa Phoebe Aretino was at a levee I attended at the Tuileries Palace in Paris during the Peace of Amiens,” Lewrie was glad to inform him, refusing to take the bait; that amour was long gone and done with. “She’s become the queen of the city’s parfumiers, and to the Empress Josephine. Still quite a delectable dish.”

“What, Paris?” Shirke exclaimed. “What the Devil were you doin’ there?”

“Tryin’ to swap dead Frog Captains’ swords for a hanger that I lost to Napoleon at Toulon,” Lewrie told him, leaning back in his chair, quite at ease, and paying Fillebrowne no further mind. He explained how his commandeered French razée, converted to a mortar vessel, had been sunk right out from under him by Napoleon’s guns, and a lucky hit in the forward mortar well, how he’d made his way ashore with the survivors, and been confronted by Bonaparte himself. “With so many Royalist French in my crew as volunteers, I couldn’t just abandon ’em, so I refused t’give my parole, and he rode off with it, just before some Spanish cavalry rescued us. The one Lieutenant Kenyon gave me, remember, Jemmy?”

“Vaguely,” Shirke replied. “I think you wore it at your shore party to celebrate your Lieutenancy, but that was ages ago. What did happen to Kenyon? I recall him from Ariadne. An odd sort, he was.”

“He perished in a raid on a coastal town in the Gironde, when we took on two forts,” Lewrie said, “and aye, he was an odd sort.”

A secret “Molly,” murdered by his own crew, and the least said of that, the better, Lewrie grimly thought. Kenyon’s brig-o’-war had been paid off, the crew scattered throughout the Fleet, and the whole unsavoury matter had been hushed up, for “the good of the Service,” and Kenyon’s cohorts of his same stripe never employed again.

“So, you have actually met Bonaparte twice, Sir Alan?” Captain Hayman tentatively asked, with a tinge of awe in his voice.

“Aye, Captain Hayman,” Lewrie told him. “The second time, in Paris, I must’ve rowed him beyond all temperance, for the next thing my wife and I know, we’re bein’ chased all the way to Calais by his police agents, lookin’ t’murder us.”

“Indeed,” Fillebrowne said with a lazy, half-believing drawl.

“It was in all the papers, just before the war began again,” Hayman said. “My condolences, sir, late as they may be.”

“Thankee, Captain Hayman,” Lewrie said with a grave nod.

Hayman noted his medals, and Lewrie explained his presence at the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent, and how Nelson’s ship had wheeled out of line and practically forced Lewrie’s Jester to go about, or be rammed, else, and join him in countering the Spanish fleet, just two ships in the begi

“I was at the Glorious First of June, too, sir,” Lewrie said, “but that was accidental. I was bein’ chased by two French frigates, and stumbled into it.”

“I was at the Nile,” Shirke a