Much Ado About Lewrie

by Dewey Lambdin

  Lucy was put through the same questions and pointed out the men she recognised. Then it was Lewrie’s turn.

  He related the events of that morning, the urgent summons by one of his servants, Turnbow, and his rush with his other servants to the park, recovering his wife, the visit by the Physician, and the chase that Dasher had made to follow the cart, without luck.

  How did he find the criminal’s lair?

  Lewrie shared a look with the police chief constable who sat in the far side of the court, behind the prosecution table. How could he declare that he’d had government aid, in open court?

  “I was informed that the dog buffers’ manner of ransoming dogs was to send a child round with a verbal message, or a note, telling me to place an advertisement in a specific newspaper as if offering a reward for our dogs’ return, sir. If paid, our dogs would be returned,” Lewrie carefully laid out. “The next morning, a messenger did arrive at my house. Do I recognise her? It was a little girl, that’un in the box. I and my butler, Pettus, were in the entry hall when she handed over the note. I have it here, if you wish,” he said, pulling the folded-over scrap of foolscap from a waist-coat pocket.

  But, how did he discover their lair?

  “There was an itinerant young fellow by name of Haddock,” Lewrie slowly explained, “a knife grinder who does business in Dover Street and the neighbourhood. He struck me as a clever young lad, and he and I struck a bargain, that he would be at the servants’ and delivery entrance the next day, sharpening knives ’til the messenger arrived, then he would follow her. Haddock suggested that I hire on two girls, as well, one who sells posies in the parks and streets, and one girl who could pretend to be a beggar.

  “The three took turns trailing the messenger, followed her into Ormond Yard off Duke of York Street, heard the commotion of many barking dogs in an abandoned barrel works … and caught the smell of it, even stronger than the hackney stables nearby. They reported back to me, and I put a party together,” Lewrie said evenly.

  Who did he take? His son, his wife’s younger brother, his Cox’n, cabin steward, and cook. Armed? Of course. And why do so? Could you have not alerted the police?

  “I wanted our dogs back, sir,” Lewrie told the prosecutor, “but my wife had been assaulted and injured, her maid slashed at with a knife, and I could not let that stand,” Lewrie stated. “I wanted revenge.”

  And did the accused resist your entry?

  “They did, sir,” Lewrie told the court, “They would not give up their dogs. Including my two, there were fifteen in all held in there, representing at least one hundred and fifty pounds profit to them.”

  The audience, and the jury, found the image of Liam Desmond with a criquet bat for a weapon quite amusing, but then coughed into their fists and leaned forward, rapt, as Lewrie described the brief fight; pistols pulled and fired, Midshipmen’s dirks and sailors’ clasp knives whipped round, with butcher knives and fire pokers opposing them.

  “The big ugly brute yonder, the one with only one arm,” Lewrie said, jerking a hand at the box full of the accused, “he shot at me, and missed wide, then I shot him. He pulled a butcher knife off the table in his left hand, I sliced him cross the face with my old dirk, and dis-armed him.”

  In more ways than one, the prosecutor drolly commented, raising another laugh. The ugly brute snarled, doing his case no good.

  Then the prosecutor led Lewrie through what transpired after, the guarding of the dogs overnight, feeding and watering them, taking them for a leashed walk so their pens could be washed out, and the next morning, when the newspaper advertisements drew their owners to the barrel works, all at Lewrie’s cost.

  He was dismissed from the witness box and rejoined Jessica and Lucy and the lads as the barrister for the defence, a young and in-experienced fellow in a “stuff” gown, who might have been “eating his terms” in one of the Inns of Court not six months before, tried to put up a convincing argument.

  Just loving dogs and small animals, they took in strays and the runaways they found on the streets. Oh, fed them capital, yer honour! Good, safe, and snug pens for each dog. Knives? Being in Green Park? Oh no, sir! Attacking fine ladies? Not in their nature! The wee girl we let sleep there, for she’s no one and no home! She loves all dogs, too! She didn’t have no knife in her hands, nossir, when those fellows burst in with guns and wee swords, and what were we supposed to do in a situation like that, just throw up our hands and surrender? Why, it was likely it was dog buffers come to steal them!

  The jury was led out to make their decisions, and Lewrie and his party left the court room for a breath of fresher air in the halls.

  “What’s the verdict, father?” Hugh asked as he and Charlie, who had coached over separately, came up to them.

  “Aye, are they to be imprisoned?” Charlie Chenery pressed.

  “The jury just went out, lads,” Lewrie told them, peering about the vast halls in search of a pick-pocket. Years before, at his own trial for stealing a dozen slaves on Jamaica to crew his fever-ravaged ship, or “liberating them” as he thought of it, right after he had been acquitted, a young, presentable lady by name of “Three Handed Jenny” had lifted his pocket watch, and he only got it back through the good offices of Clotworthy Chute, who seemed to know a slew of unsavoury people. “Guard your wallets, coin purses, and watches,” he warned them. “There’s a lot of crime in the Old Bailey … real crimes.”

  There was a stand just outside the doors to the courtyard, where piping hot tea could be purchased, and they thought to go out and take a cup, but a court officer stepped out of the courtroom and bellowed that the jury was back, and all involved should re-enter.

  “My word, but that was quick,” Jessica said as they went back to their pew seats neat the prosecutor’s table.

  London might have a new-fangled, French-style police department, and the old night wardens called the Parish Charlies, but England’s justice was harsh and swift. Take anything valued more than fifteen shillings, and it was usually a hanging offence, or being transported for life to New South Wales, on the other side of the world.

  Take fifteen dogs ransomed on average for ten pounds apiece, and throw violence into the bargain, and it usually meant a ride in a cart to Tyburn to be hanged.

  The wee girl and the felon who had driven the cart were found guilty as abetting their crime; transportation for life.

  The one who had shown a knife and slashed at Lucy, and the big brute with one arm were condemned to death.

  “Ye moight’z well ’ang me, ye barst’d!” that man shouted at the judge, “f’r wot’d I do wif one bloody arm t’other side o’ th’ world but starve t’death! God rot an’ damn th’ lot o’ ye!” he added as he was hauled out by the bailiffs. “I gie ye my curse o’ death!”

  “Well, that was dramatic, I must say,” Hugh said with a nervous laugh. “Is anyone else hungry?”

  “Excuse me, Captain Lewrie?” a weedy fellow in a worn suit and crushed farm hat implored, following them out, “Sir Alan, if you can spare me but a few moments. I’m with The Times, and I wonder if you could speak with me regarding this crime, and your reaction to the verdict just handed down.”

  “My reaction,” Lewrie barked, frowning. “My feelings, d’ye mean?”

  He had an innate suspicion of newspapers, for they usually got things all wrong. Oh, whenever he sent an official action report to Admiralty, it was printed in its entirety, in proper Naval-ese in the Naval Chronicle and sometimes in The Gazette. The other civilian papers, though, were just too damned inventive, with a taste for gore by the hogshead, heads blown off in detail, limbs shattered, people cut in half by roundshot, and oak splinters flying as thick as raindrops, or the cloud of arrows the Persians shot at the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae! And they weren’t even there! No, some civilian clot grubbing at a corner desk amid piles of old papers, in the light of the single tallow candle that his miserly salary could afford, could spin a tale worthy of Don Quixote or Tobias Smollett, inf
lating a few broadsides into a storm of smoke, flame, and flying iron so loud and furious that coastal mountains shivered and slid into the sea! Fish leaped to their deaths in terror, to hear them tell it!

  “Your thoughts on it, Sir Alan,” the weedy fellow corrected himself, “Are you satisfied with the verdict?”

  “Well, aye, I am,” Lewrie allowed at last, “To my lights, Justice was done, though I do regret that that wee girl was convicted, for she’s had no chance in life, and was drawn to crime so young.”

  “Pardon me, sir, and allow me to name myself,” the reporter said, plucking off his hat, “I am John Wardell. I cover the courts. What you did to find and raid the miscreants is what our readers have come to expect of a naval hero such as yourself. I’m told that in the Navy you are known as the ‘Ram-Cat,’ Sir Alan?” For the way you go at our country’s foes?”

  “Oh, that,” Lewrie said with a grin, “it’s more for my choice of pet I keep in my cabins. When I was a new Lieutenant, I was aboard a hired-in brig, under an older fellow, Lieutenant Lilycrop, and he kept dozens of cats to keep the rats down, and he liked them a lot. I was continually going aboard any ship we spoke to offer litters of kittens or grown mousers. It does beat ‘Black Alan’ all hollow, though, I do admit.”

  “Liberating slaves as free men, liberating dogs now,” Wardell said with a hint of hero worship, hastily scribbling a thought onto a small ledger book with a stub of pencil.

  “Oh, let’s not go all adoring,” Lewrie warned. He had been the paragon for William Wilberforce and his Abolitionists during the trial, and still shivered with disgust for being labelled “Black Alan” Lewrie or “Lewrie the Liberator.”

  “Might you describe to me the raid on the thieves, Sir Alan,” Wardell pressed as Lewrie made a half-turn to walk away.

  “You were in court, sir?” Lewrie asked, turning stern. “You made notes? You can obtain a transcript? That’s all I’ll say about the matter. Now, if you will excuse us, Mister Wardell?”

  “But of course, Sir Alan,” Wardell said, bobbing like a robin on a worm and doffing his hat once more. “And thank you for your time.”

  I’m going to sound like Saint George slayin’ the dragon tonight, he sorrowfully told himself; Gad, it’ll be lurid! Three criminals’ll turn into a battalion of Bonaparte’s Imperial Guard by the time he’s through!

  “A cold collation, or a late breakfast?” Hugh tossed over his shoulder as he held the heavy doors so they could leave the Old Bailey to whistle up a hackney or two. “Who was that fellow, father?”

  “A writer for The Times,” Lewrie said with a groan. “Nothing good can come from that.”

  “He makes you sound like a hero, sir,” Charlie piped up, “that’s just proper. We all know what a scraper you are.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Lewrie groaned again, and felt like cuffing Charlie on the head, “do ‘piss down someone else’s back!’”

  “Alan!” Jessica snapped. “Such language!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Lewrie was right; that writer for The Times, Wardell, had waxed rapturous as he wrote up the results of the trial, and what he thought Lewrie had said to him. It was “Black Alan” Lewrie and “Saint Alan The Liberator” all over again, a recounting of his victories over the foes of his country at sea, mention of the “Ram-Cat” sobriquet among the Navy, his knighthood and baronetcy awarded by the King himself in 1804, and a suggestion that the nickname “Bulldog” be added for the tenacious way Lewrie had gone after the dog buffers, then paid for the advertisments to re-unite stolen pets with their owners out of his own generosity, and his own purse!

  “Oh, for God’s sake, what a lot of flummery!” Lewrie had groaned over breakfast the day the article was printed, wadding it up and tossing the whole paper at the dogs. “It’s embarrassing!”

  “Well, I hold that it does you justice, Alan,” Jessica sweetly praised. “It shows your nobility of character, and your courage.”

  “I never wish t’see that rot again, my entire life!” he declared.

  No fear of that happening, though, for Jessica sent Margaret, one of their maids, out to buy up five copies of the morning’s Times, and snipped the article out of each one to press into a large ledger that she termed her memory book.

  Thankfully, not everyone in London read The Times, preferring the other dailies, or their trade papers, but when Lewrie was sent out on errands or shopping for the up-coming wedding, there were more than enough of them in the shops and stores to gasp at the mention of his name, clap hands to their mouths, and fawn over him, and even rudeness didn’t put them off their hero-worship. Evidently, the West End was simply stiff with Times readers, or people who’d moved their humbler establishments there and thought that some ton came with it, now that they had made it into the fashionable set!

  And the wedding was another of Jessica’s projects. Oh, she’d consult Lucy or Pettus as to their tastes, but the menu for the wedding breakfast … the most important part … and its location would be more a reflection of her, as if she’d been given a new dollhouse to furnish and fill with stuffed creatures to play with.

  Take the oysters, for one example.

  Pettus expressed his liking for fresh oysters, revelling when he could get them at a dozen at a sitting, and, during his talks in the kitchens with Yeovill and the lads, and the maids, so did the rest of them. They were cheap and plentiful in the Billingsgate Fish Market.

  “Oh, Alan,” Jessica said, though, frowning with one brow up in faint distaste, “Oysters, I ask you? One might as well serve bread and cheese, an apple and a pot of ale.”

  “I like oysters, common as they are, dear,” Lewrie told her.

  “Yeovill tells me that he could boil shrimps and serve them with a spicy red sauce and lemon,” she suggested, instead.

  “Pettus and Lucy don’t even know what shrimp are, Jessica,” he countered, “it’d be like trottin’ out a bowl of spaghetti, some beef kebabs from the Middle East, or a Hindoo curry. They can’t be expected t’experiment with foreign kickshaws on their wedding day. Let ’em have oysters to begin with, and follow it up with good, English food.”

  “Besides,” Lewrie added, “with boiled shrimp, you have t’pull the heads off and peel the tail t’get at the meat, and that’d be very messy. I’ve had ’em at Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah, and I know. Oysters can be slurped off the half shells.”

  “But…” she tried to protest.

  “Slurp slurp … yum yum,” Lewrie japed. “It’s their day.”

  “I know, Alan,” she almost wailed, fretting, “but I want it to be perfect, and memorable, and…”

  “Believe me, dearest love, it will be,” Lewrie reassured her, reaching cross the breakfast table to take her hand and squeeze.

  Then, there was the matter of where the wedding breakfast would occur. Jessica thought that the banquetting hall where they had held theirs would be grand. Too grand, perhaps, Lewrie thought. When they wed, there had been an host of guests from Jessica’s side of the family, and all her girlhood friends and their husbands to accommodate, along with many parishoners of St. Anselm’s who had been sent invitations more for political or social reasons than kinship or close relationships.

  How many guests would there be? Pettus’s family lived far down South round Brighton, and they rarely exchanged letters since the day he’d been swept up by the Impress Service and sent to sea years before. Lucy’s parents, two brothers and a sister, lived in London. Outside of them, there was only the house servants she worked with, Agnes and Martha and Margaret, Yeovill, Deavers, Desmond, and Dasher and Turnbow. Reverend Chenery had to be there, of course, and they could count on Sir Hugo, Hugh, and Charlie Chenery, plus the Lewries themselves, say, a total of twenty?

  Once again, it was Pettus and Lucy who suggested a hall in Old Bond Street that they saw on strolls on their one day off each week, a much smaller and older place, but more to their liking after attending the Lewries’ wedding at the grander place.

/>   “I suppose you’re right, Alan,” Jessica gave in, slumping on the settee as they had their afternoon tea in the drawing room. “You have looked into it?”

  “Pettus and I went there to ‘smoak’ it out,” he assured her with a firm nod, “It’s clean, they do a lot of weddings, and they have the kitchen space, and cooks on staff to prepare almost anything we wish. I checked out their plates, glassware, and utensils, too, and it’s all good quality. The room’s large enough to handle a long table for all, sitting on one side and at each end, with lots of space left for musicians and dancing, if anyone feels like it. They can even hire on the musicians, if we like.”

  “Hmm, Old Bond Street isn’t all that far from Saint Anselm’s,” Jessica allowed after a moment of thought. “We could almost walk.”

  “Nonsense!” Lewrie hooted in mirth. “We have t’hire hackneys, so everyone can hang out the windows and shout the chivaree. Tie old shoes to their coach … beat drums, tootle on tin horns…”

  “Oh, Alan,” Jessica despaired, putting a free hand to her brow, “it’s beginning to sound as if the constables will turn up and read us the Riot Act!”

  Buffer the kitten took that moment to leap into her lap, almost spilling her cup of tea, and meowing right loudly in hopes of getting a bite of human food to eat. Buffer didn’t quite know what scones and jam were, but if people were eating, shouldn’t he?

  “You named him wrongly, Alan,” Jessica said, nipping a bit of scone off and offering it to him. “I would have called him Oh Be Q.”