When rattling down Park Lane at a comfortable clip, their cabriolet had seemed fashionable enough for the occasion. The morning was clear and sunny, and those West Enders who had risen earlier than the norm were out in their own open-topped carriages, or on horseback for a canter through Hyde Park, to their right. Turning into Piccadilly, then turning once again into St. James Street, though, they found the way to the palace was lined with four-horse-teamed equipages, mostly closed, and with only their sash-windows down to acknowledge the season, all very much grander than their own. Sir Hugo began to work his mouth, squint, and grumble as they joined the long queue leading to the entrances, as if regretting his choice of conveyance.
“Might as well have hired a one-pony dog cart,” he groused.
“Doesn’t matter,” Lewrie told him. He could have given a bigger damn if they had had to walk, at that point, or had they been trundled up in a rag-picker’s wheel barrow. He’d intended to get a good night’s sleep, but some members of the Madeira CLub (the younger, still-single ones) had proposed more toasts than usual, posed more “a glass with you, sir!” individual toasts that had gone on in the Common Room long after the uncommonly good supper, with all its toasting, and the port, cheese, nuts, and sweet bisquits. Major Baird, their “chicken nabob” who’d come back from India with a middling fortune in loot and was still seeking a suitable mate (when not pursuing stand-up “knee-trembler” sex with the wenches who haunted the theatres), had even discovered a stone crock of American corn whisky, and had urged Lewrie to imbibe with him.
To say that Lewrie was a tad hung over would be an accurate statement; a bit too “blurred” to feel impatient, out-classed by others’ elegance, or anything much at all. Though there were some young women in the gawking crowd that usually thronged outside the palace on days when levees were held that were quite fetching. And, since Lewrie seemed to be Somebody of Note (he was in a carriage bound for the portico, wasn’t he; an officer, wasn’t he?), some of the bolder even cheered and tossed a flower or two. They surely wouldn’t waste flowers at a closed coach, where the top-lofty nabobs kept their aloof distance!
“P’rhaps it ain’t that bad, after all,” Sir Hugo said, leering across Lewrie at a round-faced teenaged beauty who was all but bouncing on her tip-toes in excitement. Sir Hugo even tipped his cocked hat to her and grinned. Which grin seemed to put her off and make her frown. The sight of a beak-nosed old goat, liver spots and all, ogling her like a vulture would a neglected beef roast would have put any young woman off… even if he was dressed in a general’s uniform, and might be as famous as the Duke of Cumberland after Culloden.
“Hmm. Pretty,” Lewrie commented, after a glance. “How do you keep yer wig from comin’ off when ye tip yer hat?” he asked.
“Glue,” Sir Hugo said with a pleased sigh, sniffing the flowers he had gathered from the floor of the coach. “There’s times when losin’ my hair’s a blessing… lots o’ scalp for the paste, heh heh. It washes off, later,” he added with a shrug.
The palace staff was very well organised. As each coach rolled up, one of the passengers, and the coachee, was handed a numbered ticket made of pasteboard. At the foot of the walk sat an easel with much larger numbers stacked up beside it, so that when the guests departed their number could be displayed to the throng of coaches waiting in a side yard, summoning the proper conveyance. The British Army should have been so efficient, but then… Army officers bought their commissions, and the palace staff were selected, and paid, for competence.
“Your invitations, sirs,” a grandly liveried flunky demanded, chequed them off a list, and bowed them onwards to the imposing entrance.
Did one ask Captain Alan Lewrie what he recalled of St. James’s Palace in later years, he could only shrug, cock his head to one side, and respond by saying, “Huge. Rather huge.” His hangover might have had something to do with it. There were grand marble staircases, and sumptuous carpetting, huge head-to-toe portraits, many times lifesize, framed in overly ornate gilt. There was a positive shit-load of gilt, Lewrie remembered. High ceilings, replete with angels and cherubs above him, thousands of candles burning, furniture lining the hallways and gigantic rooms, too grand to really sit on, and one long hall after another; he reckoned that he might have walked half a mile before reaching yet another hall where the levee was held, which was already thronged with the rich, the titled, the elegant and dashing, and those who would be honoured… and hopefully become titled, and elegant and interesting because of it… at least in part.
“Anyone you know, hey?” Sir Hugo asked after another liveried and white-wigged servant had taken their hats and presented them with yet another set of claim tickets.
“Hmm?” Lewrie responded, peering about owl-eyed.
“Damn my eyes, are ye foxed?” Sir Hugo grumbled. “Did ye take on a load o’ ‘Dutch Courage’ with yer breakfast?”
“Nought but coffee, lashin’s of it,” Lewrie told him. “Now, last night was another matter. No, I don’t think I do know anyone. Don’t even see the Blandings, yet. Do you?”
“None I know… but one’r two I’d care t’know,” Sir Hugo said as he raised a brow and put on a grin to a willowy and languid dame in her forties, one with dark auburn hair and a “come-hither” grin, who was gliding by on the arm of a much older and tubbier man. She seemed to look the both of them up and down, then smiled and played with her fan against her cheek for a moment. Flirtatiously?
“I’m out of touch,” Lewrie confessed. “Does that mean anything?”
“The key to Paradise,” Sir Hugo muttered back. “She’s took with one of us. Either that, or she had an itch needed scratchin’.”
Yet another liveried fellow came up to them as they neared the tall and wide doors to the hall proper. He seemed to know what he was about, and was all coolly buinsesslike.
“Captain Alan Lewrie… Major-General Sir Hugo Saint George Willoughby, aha,” he briskly said, “honouree and guest. In a moment, you gentlemen will be formally announced. Right after, Captain Lewrie, might you grant us a few minutes to explain the procedure, with some of the others?… Oh, good. Tea or coffee will be available, and there are side-chambers where any adjustments of your habiliments may be made… and last-minute needs may be answered in a ‘necessary.’ Once His Majesty has made his entrance, an equerry shall queue you up in order of honours to be presented.”
“I’ll take another number?” Lewrie asked, hoping that coffee would be shoved into his hands, instanter.
“In a matter of speaking, sir,” the courtier told him, grinning. He was an older fellow who had obviously supervised these ceremonies so often that he could have done them in his sleep.
Another queue as couples, or parties of three or more, waited to be announced and admitted. There were old hands at it who’d been coming to the palace for ages, along with nervous, coughing, and “aheming” throat clearers of both sexes. Husbands squeezed wives’ hands to reassure them; sons and daughters ranging from gawky teens to matronly women with flushed faces, all but squirming in un-accustomed finery to get more comfortable, some moving their lips over rehearsed phrases of greeting should they get a chance to be spoken to by their sovereign, and a pair of teen daughters practicing their deep curtsies, tittering at each other each time. There were men…
Christ, half of ’em look like brick-layers, or greengrocers! Lewrie thought in wonder; They handin’ out knighthoods for brewin’ a good beer? That’s how Sam Whitbread got his!
On closer inspection, even those who already wore signs of rank, ladies in tiaras and elegantly clothed men with sashes and stars, were not all that elegant or handsome, either.
At last, the haughty major-domo thudded his five-foot mace on the marble floor and bellowed (elegantly!), “Major-General Sir Hugo Saint George Willoughby, and Captain Alan Lewrie!” That drew no particular note from those already in the hall, though Lewrie plastered a smile to one and all on his phyz and looked the room over. There were thrones at the far end, atop a raised dais, with a cushioned kneeler before it; all adrip with even more gilt, red, purple cloth, with the Union flag, the ancient royal banner, and the flags of England’s subordinate lands, stood up behind. He admittedly gawked.
“If you would come this way, sir, ah,” a plummy Oxonian voice bade. It was Sir Harper Strachan, Baron Ludlow, again, dressed in an even grander suit of court clothes, wielding his mace-like cane, and scowling for a second as he gave Lewrie another of those up-and-down appraisals. “Quite a change for the better, hah,” he decided.
“Harper,” Sir Hugo said from the side, nodding in thin greeting.
“Hugo,” Strachan replied, just as coolly. There was evidently no love lost between them.
“Subalterns together… in The King’s Own,” Sir Hugo explained. “Ah… what memories,” he sarcastically added.
Strachan wriggled his nose and mouth in a petulant manner, then languidly extended an arm to steer Lewrie to a side-chamber.
“Oh, there you be, Lewrie!” Captain Blanding said as he spotted him. “Top of the morning to you!”
“And to you as well, sir,” Lewrie replied, bound for the side-board where a silver coffee pot stood steaming over a candle warmer. At last! After a sip or two of creamed and sugared coffee, he began to feel as if he was back in the land of the aware, and gave an ear to Strachan’s introductions and explanations.
There was a coal baron who would be made knight and baronet, a senior, doddering don from Cambridge who’d written something or other impressive who would be knighted, an unctuous younger fellow who was to be made a baron… from the names and hints he dropped, Lewrie got the impression that pimping for the Prince of Wales was going to be amply rewarded in a few minutes. There was a fellow retiring from the Foreign Office who would also be knighted. Disappointingly, there were no other officers from the Navy. There were none from the Army either, but they hadn’t done all that much but drill, drink, and dance since the Dutch expedition in ’98.
When summoned, once the attendees had had half an hour or so to mingle, they were to queue up in descending order: the pimp, the coal baron, Captain Blanding, then Lewrie, followed by the don and the old Foreign Office ink-spiller. When announced by name, they were to make their way to a particular rosette in the carpet and perform a graceful “leg”-a deep, long one, Strachan insisted (there would be time for them to practice)-then move forward to the edge of the dais before the thrones and stop. Head bowed still, in proper humility when named to the King ’til the Sovereign approached them with the Sword of State, at which time they should kneel on the cushion. Once the rite was done, it was allowed that one might express a brief sentence of gratitude, before rising, bowing again, then walk backwards away from the throne, counting the large rosettes in the carpet ’til they reached the third (where they had begun) and deliver a final “leg.”
“It is not done to break away and turn your backs on His Majesty,” Sir Harper cautioned in a stern, clench jawed drawl. “So long as he is present-”
“Doesn’t that make chatting someone up rather awkward?” Captain Blanding interrupted.
“One may converse with others, turned somewhat towards the Presence, but one must not face deliberately away, sir,” Strachan said in irritation.
“Lask to ’em on a bow-and-quarter line, sir,” Lewrie said with a tongue-in-cheek smirk. A third cup of coffee was doing wonders.
“Oh, good ho!” Blanding said with a happy, satisfied snort.
They could not quite catch what Sir Harper Strachan was saying under his breath, or quite make out the sound of grinding teeth.
“Palace staff will now assist you with your appearances,” Sir Harper gravelled, “should you feel any adjustments are necessary.”
“The ‘necessary,’ aye, by Jove,” Blanding said, peering about for a door which might lead to a “jakes.” He was pointed to a door to one side of the room, and eagerly trotted off.
“Might I assist you, sir?” a catch-fart in palace livery asked Lewrie, a wee minnikin who barely came up to his shoulder.
“Just whisk the bloody hair powder off, thankee,” Lewrie told him. “Think I can manage the rest myself,” he added with a nod at the door, behind which Blanding was urinating as loudly as a heifer on a flagstone floor and humming a gay air.
“Quite so, sir!” the wee fellow happily agreed.
Once back in the hall, Lewrie got introduced to Mrs. Blanding, the Reverend Blanding, and Miss Blanding; the Reverend Brundish he already knew. The son was already as plump as his father and mother, and affected an Oxonian accent as irritating as Strachan’s. The daughter was somewhat pretty-she had not yet inherited her mother’s slightly raw and rosy complexion. Once the “allow me to name to yous” had been done, Captain Blanding launched into a paean of praise for how Lewrie had been so energetic and clever during their service together, which forced Lewrie to put on his false modesty (a sham at which he was un-commonly good, by then). It appeared that their fusses over his many “Submit” hoists, and all the woes of the convoy, were quite forgiven.
“Such an arduous task,” Miss Blanding piped up, sounding as she chanted. “As daunting as any labour of Hercules, to deal with so many un-co-operative merchant captains.”
“Like herding cats,” Lewrie rejoined with a grin and a wink.
“Or, much like the early years of King David, when he was but a humble shepherd boy,” the Reverend Blanding the younger added.
Oh, Christ, here come the bloody sheep, again! Lewrie cringed.
“First to slay Goliath, then to see his flock to safety, aha!”
“Quite so, Jeremy, quite so!” Chaplain Brundish praised.
“The slaying part was a lot more fun,” Lewrie told them.
“The French, of course,” Miss Blanding said, her cheeks colouring a bit at her daring to speak in company, no longer reckoned to be a child, who should be seen but not heard. “Father wrote us of your bereavement, Captain Lewrie, and, dare I note the satisfaction that the victory over them I would imagine provided you?”
“Well, a touch of mine own back, aye,” Lewrie gruffly answered.
He was saved by his father’s arrival, with a glass of wine in his hands, and it was Lewrie’s task to make the introductions all over again.
“You must be very proud of your son this day, Sir Hugo,” Captain Blanding purred.
“Indeed, Captain Blanding, indeed I am,” Sir Hugo boasted, rocking on the balls of his slippered feet. “Amazed, too, I must own, for I never thought he could direct his boyhood boldness into useful work… but, God help the French, hey? He ever tell you how he was sent down from Harrow, and why? Lord, but he was a caution in those days!”
“Why, no, I don’t believe so, Sir Hugo,” Blanding said, cocking his head to one side.
“My lords and ladies, gentlemen and gentlewomen… the King!” a functionary bellowed, with a thud of his mace.
Way was made to either side of the great hall, like the parting of the Red Sea for Moses; there was a fanfare, an end to the sprightly string music from the court orchestra, and a great deal of deep bowing and curtsying. Heads and gazes were lowered, but… some once-only guests like Lewrie did peek, as did the gossip-mongers, looking for a sign that King George was still in decent health, or fading fast; and to be sure, members of the Privy Council and the under-ministers of the latest Pitt administration searched for clues regarding the continuation of the present monarch, and their prestigious offices.
Well, he looks sane, Lewrie told himself; but, there’s no real way t’tell, is there? Whilst he was still in the West Indies, one of his father’s letters had noted that King George had opened Parliament in February by addressing the body as “my Lords and Peacocks”! Since Lewrie had never really seen him in the flesh before-a parade of fast-trotting royal coaches jingling through St. James’s Square where Lewrie had grown up (admittedly not the good side of the square, much like his family’s repute!), a hat in a window, and a glance of a pudgy and serenely bland face for an eyeblink-he had only the portraits in the gallery of Ranelagh Gardens to go by, and if he’d met him in a shop in the Strand, he wouldn’t have known him from Adam!
The King was looking a tad rickety. He’d always been a hefty fellow, as rotund as the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, as Captain Blanding and his brood, but now the King’s scarlet-trimmed and gold-laced dark blue suitings looked as loose and free as a flagging jib.
“Queen’s ill again?” he heard someone whisper. “Where’s she?”
“And, here comes Prinny,” another muttered.
“His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales!” the major-domo cried.
Down the crowd went again in bows and curtsys, as a lesser fan-fare sounded.
“Be the Regent soon, you mark my words,” someone snidely hissed.
“God help us, then,” a woman whispered back. And, once the King and the Prince of Wales had passed them, and they could stand upright again, the same woman remarked, “The Prime Minister’s in no better condition. He’s played out.”
“Well, we’ve Lord Canning and Lord Castlereagh,” her companion pointed out. “And a pack of ninnies. The William Pitt government now consists of William, and Pitt, and the scribblers,” he japed.
Sir Hugo’s letter had expressed concerns that when William Pitt had returned to office, he’d refused to find a position in his ministry for Addington, whom he’d supplanted, and refused his own cousin and friend, Lord Grenville. Pitt had even angered the Navy by turning out Admiral Lord St. Vincent, “Old Jarvy,” as First Lord of the Admiralty, just as his campaign to root out corruption, malfeasance, graft, and double-dealing in the Victualling Board and HM Dockyards had begun to solve some of the long-standing problems. He’d replaced him with a man who could have cared less, Henry Viscount Melville, Lord “Business As Usual”! Government was run by an un-talented pack of nobodys.
“Looks a tad off his feed, don’t he?” Sir Hugo whispered with a raspy sarcasm. “Though Prinny’s bulkin’ up nicely, good as a prime steer.”
“Where’d ye find the wine?” Lewrie asked.
“For you, that’s for after,” his father rejoined. “No matter do I get squiffy, but you… you’re the trick-performin’ pony in this raree-show.”
“Why’d ye bring up our Harrow bomb-plot?” Lewrie further asked.
Long ago, Lewrie at a callow sixteen, and a clutch of his fellow rake-hells at Harrow had decided to emulate Guy Fawkes’s plot to blow up Parliament, and had obtained the materials with which to lash back at the school governor by blowing up his carriage house. They’d been caught right after, of course, Lewrie with the smouldering slow-match in his hands, and expelled. It was a feat to be dined out upon, but not a fact to be blurted out to a superior officer who might imagine that Lewrie still harboured pyrotechnical urges.
“Gawd, you’re clueless!” Sir Hugo said with a snort. “See how Miss Blanding was makin’ cow’s-eyes? Ye told me they were stayin’ in London t’find her a suitable match. Want t’be that poor bugger?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, they couldn’t…!” Lewrie objected.
“You’re better off than most they’ll find,” Sir Hugo sniggered. “And a bloody hero, t’boot, with a knighthood and a bank full o’ prize-money. Well, God help ’em with that project, and pity the poor fool saddled with her, soon as she pups an heir or two, and ends as round as her parents. Best they know your warts, right off.”
“Captain Lewrie… sir,” Strachan intruded with an impatient schoolmaster’s “vex” to his languid purr. “Might you find the time to join us, sir? All are in place but for you.”
“Oh… coming,” Lewrie replied, following the equerry to the middle of the carpet to join the others. He stood by Captain Blanding, took a deep breath to settle himself, and did some last-minute tugging at his shirt cuffs and the bottom of his waist-coat to settle them.
“A grand moment,” Blanding whispered to him, grinning like Puck. “A proud moment, nigh the finest in my life, Lewrie!” He was almost overcome with emotion and awe of the occasion. “Well,” he quibbled, “there was my wedding day, and the arrival of the children, but… to be so honoured!”
“And Rear-Admiral sure t’come, soon after, sir?” Lewrie hinted.
“Oh well, aye, but… to stand before His Majesty, our Soveriegn, to converse with him!” Blanding went on, looking as if he would keel over in a faint, or whirl like an Ottoman Dervish and snap his fingers in glee.
Thud-thud-thud from a ceremonial mace, and a richly toned voice was calling for Captain Stephen Blanding of His Britannic Majesty’s Navy to come forward. For a stout fellow, Blanding did most of that ritual well; deep bow atop the third rosette in the carpet from the dais, advance, stop, and bow again; it was the kneeling part that gave him a spot of bother.
A senior courtier stood by King George to hold an unrolled parchment for him to read from. “Captain Blanding… Captain Stephen Blanding… in honour of your stellar career as a Commission Sea Officer in our Royal Navy, and in grateful recognition of your splendid victory over a French squadron at the Battle of the Chandeleur Isles, we name thee Knight and Baronet,” the King intoned, stumbling a bit over the words as if he missed his spectacles. Down came the sword to tap Blanding on each shoulder, and it was done. There were some words exchanged that hardly anyone ten feet away could catch, then Captain Blanding was up and bowing and backing away for the last bow on the proper rosette, and he half-turned to Lewrie, gaping with joy and with actual tears in his eyes.
Like he just got healed by Jesus, Lewrie thought, finding this ceremony, and the most un-godlike appearance of the King, a bit of a let-down. Blanding might be reduced to a quaking aspic, but for himself, Lewrie could only chide himself for a cynic and a sham.
“Captain Alan Lewrie, of His Britannic Majesty’s Navy, will come forward!” the courtier intoned.
Third rosette; Nice carpet, Lewrie thought, looking down at it as he made his formal “leg”; I like the colours. Then it was head-up and stride forward, looking over both the King and the Prince of Wales.
A bit drifty, Lewrie thought of the former, noting how George III was turning his head about like a man looking for where he had left his hat; Bored t’death, was his thought of the Prince. Was he got up too early this mornin’, or do his nails really need a cleanin’?
The last bow, then the kneeling, and the lowering of his head, but… he really was a tad curious to witness what was about to come, so he looked up without thinking… hoping that King George would be a mite more careful with how he slung that sword about.
“Captain Alan Lew… Lewrie,” the King began, leaning to peer at the ornate document the courtier held out for him, “in honour of your stellar career as a Commission Sea Officer in our Royal Navy…”
Christ, can’t anybody pronounce it right? Lewrie thought with a wince; It ain’t like he’s a foreigner, is it?
“… grateful recognition of your inestimable part which led to victory over a French squadron at the Chandeleur Isles,” the King said in a firm voice, though leaning over to squint myopically at the parchment the courtier held, then leaned back to conclude his words. “We do now name thee Knight and Baronet,” he said, looking out over the hall, over Lewrie’s head.
“Ahem?” the courtier tried to correct.
What the bloody…? Lewrie gawped; How’s that? Did he just…?
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!”
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?”