“I regret that I must inform you that Thad Purnell passed over to the Yellow Jack on that same voyage, ma’am.”
“Oh, how terrible.” She frowned, dropping her teasing air. “He was a dear friend of yours. So young, too.”
“That seems to be the way of the world, ma’am,” Alan agreed somberly.
“Once you sailed, I never heard from you again,” Mrs. Hillwood went on. “I am sure so much of note has happened to you. You must let me entertain you, perhaps come for tea, and tell me all about what you have been doing since last we had the pleasure of each other’s company.”
Damned if she hadn’t been one hell of a bare-back rider, bony about the hips or not, chicken-chested or not, Alan remembered. It had been two months since he had even gotten a whiff of womankind, and he would not be doing much more with Lucy than holding hands and sighing a lot, he realized. Memories sprang up, like how predatory she looked with her face beaming a wicked smile up from his groin as they lay in bed and she coaxed him into just one more bout; the noises she made as she rode St. George on his member and stirred her hips and belly like an island woman grinding corn.
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” he told her, and she grinned in delight, curving up those talented lips. In repose, her face, with an unfortunately hawkish nose her only mar, could appear fierce, but a smile restored the great beauty she had once possessed.
“I am certain it would, Mister Lewrie,” she cooed softly, as she toyed with her fan, using it to touch him on the cheek by his faint scar. “And you must tell me all about that. Your address?”
“The Shrike brig.”
“You mind where I live?” she asked. “Not quite? How forgetful of you. I trust I shall not have to write it down more than this once.”
“I am certain you shan’t.” Alan grinned at the meaning of that threat, and his groin got tight just thinking about it. “And Mister Hillwood is still inland, I trust, being—agricultural?”
“As far as I know,” she sighed. “His particular passions require greater secrecy than mine.”
“Ah, Alan,” Lucy said as she re-emerged from the house in a new gown of creamy pale yellow satin with gold bows and trim. Her hair had been let down and brushed dry as well.
“A few minutes, hey?” Alan teased. “Half a dog-watch, more like. Lucy Beauman, I believe you know Mrs. Hillwood?”
“We have not had the pleasure, though the name is familiar to me,” Lucy replied, looking somewhat vexed. “How delighted to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Hillwood.”
“And I yours, dear. My, what a lovely gown. You are fortunate not to have gotten it wet in the rain showers,” Mrs. Hillwood cooed.
“I had to change.” Lucy frowned.
“Would that I could, my dear. Or at least sponge this down.”
“I would be happy to offer you the use of my chambers. Did you bring your maid with you?” Lucy suggested.
“You are too kind!”
“Think nothing of it, ma’am. I would be only too happy to give you my every assistance,” Lucy purred. She clapped her hands quite briskly. “Tyche?” she called without looking, and her black maid-servant came on the run to attend her. Lucy gave her instructions to allow Mrs. Hillwood the use of her toilet, and for Tyche to help her rearrange her habiliment. Mrs. Hillwood headed off for the stairs, and Lucy glared at him as he said his goodbyes.
“Alan, how could you?” she demanded in a soft voice, but one tinged with a certain menace.
“How could I what, Lucy?” Alan asked, wondering if he looked half as innocent as he was trying to look.
“Mrs. Hillwood is really the most despicable woman,” Lucy told him with some heat. “I say woman rather than lady, despite her airs and her pretensions.”
“Well, how was I to know that, Lucy?” Alan shot back. “I met her once before, near on two years ago at one of Sir Richard Slade’s suppers.”
“My God, it gets worse and worse!” Lucy spat. “The most infamous … I cannot find the strength to name the man’s sinful predilictions … no proper lady could. And what were you doing in such a place?”
And just where did this termagant mort come from? Alan wondered, amazed at the change from the sweet and gentle and cooing lovely girl he thought he had known and desired.
“My captain in Parrot knew him from school, and I and another midshipman were invited to join him for supper.” Alan shrugged it off.
“And were you not scandalized by all the goings-on?”
“I saw none.” Alan tried to scoff. “We had a feed the like of which I had not seen since London, and the victuals held more interest. After a year of Navy issue, I’d have dined with the Devil himself if he set a good table.” He chuckled.
“If you sup with the Devil, as you say, I trust you used a long spoon.” Lucy fumed.
“Now look here, Lucy.” Alan attempted to bluff it out when he saw that dumb innocence would not suit. “She came up to me and introduced herself. All I know of her was she was several chairs down from me at table nearly two years ago. I’ve probably gone into the same chop-house as notorious murderers back in London, but that don’t make me guilty of murder. How could you think such a thing? As for this un-named prediliction of Sir Richard’s, well, I know nothing of that, either. You use me rather ill, I think.”
“Oh, Alan, I’m sorry.” She mellowed suddenly, allowing him to offer an arm to lead her toward the buffet tables. “What must you think of me, to accuse you of encouraging such a woman. It is only that I have missed you so much. And I come back down to find you in the clutches of a trull whose reputation is no better than it should be. What a welcome I’ve given you. Please forgive me, but I was suddenly so jealous I could hardly utter a civil word, to her, or to you.”
“Jealous, is it?” he coaxed gently.
“I shall own to it,” she whispered, leaning close as they went to a side-board and began to pick at the delicacies to load on their plates. “After months of only letters from you, I could not let anyone steal one precious minute of our time. Perhaps the tales about Mrs. Hillwood aren’t whole cloth, but you can understand why I was so uncharitable about her. Come to think of it,” she smiled, poking him in the ribs with her fork, “you were not so charitable to those other young fellows I was with. Damn their blood, did you say?”
“And their eyes and kidneys, and anything else they have they can spare,” Alan assured her.
“So you were jealous, too. Admit it,” she prodded.
“I own to it, too,” he muttered so others could not hear. “You don’t know half of what I’ve been through since Antigua, with only your letters for comfort, and those months apart.”
As soon as I decyphered ’em, he qualified to himself, for Lucy was what one could charitably describe as an inventive speller, with a quick, darting penmanship that started out in neat round (horribly misspelled) words, and when she got to the exciting bits, went mystifying as the scratches on Stonehenge.
“And you must tell me everything, darling Alan,” she begged. “Was it really so terrible?”
“It was pretty rough,” he allowed modestly. “There are some things you’d best never know, some of the things that happened during the siege, and during our escape are unsuitable for a lady to hear.”
“And I wrote of silly social things while you were being racked by shot and shell.” She sighed. “How could I have been so cruel or thoughtless? Yet I wrote you often. You did not get them?”
“Well, the mails never caught up with the fleet before we left New York, and then we were stuck in the Chesapeake,” Alan told her. “The Frogs and the Rebels weren’t about to trot out the penny post for us. There were dozens of letters to you I never could post myself, some the Rebels captured I suppose.”
“You mean those uncouth, quarrelsome people have read my letters?”
Conversations with her take the strangest bloody twists and turns, he sighed to himself, and had to cosset her out of her pet. But for the rest of the evening, during the
strolling about in the suffocatingly hot rooms, the dancing and the card games and a brief tour of the side-terrace for some air, where they could indulge their need to hold each other and kiss passionately, he managed to keep her happy and positively glowing. As he paid his respects to the family, they treated him as almost one of the family, though nothing concrete had been settled, but that was sure to come, in time.
All in all, except for walking back to the docks with an erection he could have doubled for a belaying pin, it was a good run ashore. And there was always Betty Hillwood and her invitation to “tea.”
Chapter 4
There were a lot of “teas” in the next week or so. Once more Alan was thankful that in harbor officers stood no fixed watches, and once what few duties were done for the day, could absent themselves to their own amusements.
If I spend the rest of my career doing this, I shan’t cry, Alan thought smugly as he lay back on the soft mattress, panting for air in the close tropical heat. The linens clung to them, crinkled with perspiration, and he fanned them with a corner of the sheet.
“You insatiable beast!” Betty Hillwood uttered with a gasp for air herself. “Pour us something cool, Alan dear, whilst I try to recover my senses.”
He hopped off the bed and filled their wine glasses with lemonade—she was a lot more fun if he kept her out of reach of the gin, or at least cut down on her consumption during the early hours of their trysts. He stood over her and offered her a glass, enjoying the slim form, still beaded with mutual perspiration, and her incredibly soft skin reddened in all the most interesting places by having his body pressed so close to hers. Over forty or not, she was more woman than most men could stand and live to talk about.
“The pot calls the kettle black, love?” he told her as she took a sip. “Now who’s insatiable, damn my eyes.”
“You’re even more impressive than I first remembered,” she said, shifting to sit up on one elbow and pile pillows behind her head. She gave a delightful groan when she said it. “Before, you were a randy boy, for all your eagerness.”
“Clumsy, was I?” he chuckled, climbing back into bed and laying against the footboard pillar so their legs entwined.
“No, my chuck, just … exuberant,” she crooned, plying her toes around his groin playfully. “A year’s hard service has made you even more a man to suit my taste. Harder … leaner … the most impressive and satisfying fuck I’ve known.”
Once out of polite society, and her clothing, Betty Hillwood had always had the mouth of a farrier-sergeant. Perhaps it was the gin that loosened her tongue and her inhibitions, if she truly had any.
She demanded pleasure as her due, since she would not get it from her husband, who preferred to live inland on one of his plantations and bugger the field hands and the house-boys. There was no longer any coy pretense of seduction between them, no more teasing conversation or tea to be poured, no guests to shoo off so he could return after he had made a proper goodbye, so they could play innocent for Society. He came to her after a morning or afternoon with Lucy and her parents, sometimes came to her direct from the ship, and the black servant let him in and then took her leave. Betty Hillwood met him in morning gown or her bed-clothing, under which she tantalizingly wore nothing. They would have a drink, no more than one, while she let her clothing fall open, and they would be grappling with each other within a quarter-hour, making it to the bedroom at the back of her cool apartments most of the time but not always—there was a good assortment of settees and chairs to roger on, an escritoire of just the right height to support her small buttocks, and a marble-topped breakfast table by a shuttered window that made a cool change if the day was too hot.
Every visit was a revelation, a learning experience in just how many ways two people could give each other pleasure, and Alan Lewrie was all for education—look how much the Navy had taught him already. It beat whores all hollow, in his estimation, didn’t cost him more than “fiddler’s pay”—compliments and wine—and took the rapacious edge off his manners with Lucy Beauman, whom he would have ravished by this time if he had not had another outlet for his frustrations. Being around, and tantalisingly near, such a delectable young girl with no chance to grapple would have killed lesser men by this time. One could hardly be considered a respectable suitor to conjoin with such a fine (and wealthy) family if he spent all his time goggling at Lucy’s breasts, or fondling her on the sly. Not that they hadn’t played lovers in daring, and heart-breakingly brief, moments of privacy. The common wisdom said that too much spending of one’s vital fluids in fornication made a young man spineless and weak—his breath shallow, his eyes watery, and his general condition little better than a victim of consumption—but Alan was of the opinion that too little spending made one so full of humors that one would explode if restrained from the sport too long. Either that or begin to squirt semen from one’s ears. If too much spending led to pathetic lunacy, then so be it; he could drool and cackle with the best of them, sooner or later.
“I have something for you, my chuck,” Betty whispered, once she had gotten her wind back. She slunk out of bed, brushing her body the length of his, kissing him open-mouthed, then skipped coquettishly out of reach and down the narrow hall to the parlor as he grabbed at her. She returned with a small package and held it out to him, then busied herself at the bedroom wine-table to pour herself a drink while he undid the ribbon and opened it.
It was a watch-chain, a particularly fine one, with rectangular links of small and cunning workmanship. Depended from it was a braided band on which rested a small fob of silver and gold damascene worked in a fouled anchor over crossed cannon. It was beautiful. More to the fact, a well-made chain from an expert craftsman could cost more than a watch did.
“God’s teeth!” he exclaimed in delight. The silver and gold chain, the dark blue ribbon, and the silver and gold fob were magnificent, and he told her so. “Whatever possessed you to do me so much honor?”
“You’re truly pleased?” she asked, flinging her arms around him and drawing her delightful body the full length of his.
“And flabbergasted,” he admitted. “It’s so damned grand! How may I ever thank you for it?”
“By doing what earned it in the first place, my chuck.” She nibbled on his ear, reaching down with one hand to dandle his member against her belly. “You have given me so much pleasure, and so much delight, I had to reward my darling lad. Ah, there’s a stirring of gratitude, methinks? Shall I be rudely speared for my pains to please?”
“Methinks milady is right,” Alan growled, seizing her buttocks and hauling her in closer.
“Pitiful, tearful beseechings have no avail,” she whispered as she steered them backward toward the bed once more. “Even offers of gold cannot soften the heart of a barbarian bent on rapine.”
Damme, here she goes with another of her bloody fantasies, he thought, more than willing to oblige, but tiring of her ripe imaginings in which he had to play so many parts.
“A tender senator’s wife, with Hunnish blades at her children’s throats. Tender white skin assaulted so wickedly by callused hands and brutal urges … ah!” she urged, playing at fending him off. “No, please … Rome lies open at your feet. Spare me this, I beg you!”
“You lay open to me!” Alan grunted, trying to be rudely Germanic.
“No, please!” she cried, but not too loudly. They mock-fought, and she fell face down across the mattress, and Alan knew his duty. He flung himself down on her, forced her legs apart, and entered her dog-fashion, gripping her hips and lifting them up off the sheets, and she panted and pretended to weep until the “virtuous Roman senator’s wife” was overcome with pleasures she had never experienced on the bridal couch, and the game had its usual ending. Betty groaned and sobbed, rolled her hips and thrust to meet him as he knelt between her thighs, tore at the bed-linens with her nails until she shivered and cried out in ecstasy, gasping for air once more, and dropped away limp.
“Oh God, but you’re a bloody st
allion, dear Alan!” she sighed in a swoon. “So long and thick and hard, and …”
He rolled her over, and she chuckled as he lay down between her legs, which flopped aside in exhaustion.
“Alan!” she protested as he raised her knees and slid back into her hot wetness. “I am spent, truly.”
“Hermann ist gut, ja? Hermann not through.” He grunted as he began to plunge at her again for his own satisfaction, which she finally shared, all protests aside, and she clawed at his back and shoulders and uttered a thin keening cry until they lay still once more.
They finally rose and sponged down with a bucket of cool water left standing by the shuttered bedroom windows, snacked on some cold tongue and chilled hock for him, some “Blue Ruin” for her in a large glass. They lay down together to nuzzle and purr until the urge came on them again.
“Would we could do this always,” she said softly.
“I have to sail eventually,” Alan whispered back. “Or at least I hope we do. This idleness isn’t doing the crew much good.”
“To where?”
“Oh, up around Cuba or the Florida Straits, maybe over to the Windward Passage.”
“And how long would you be gone, dear?”
“Near on three months if we don’t take prizes to sustain us,” he reckoned, half asleep. “Back in two weeks if we take enough ships to deplete the hands for prize-crews. Wish we could—I could use the money.”
“You are short of cash?”
“Well, not short, really. I was thinking of after the war when I’ll go back to England. London wouldn’t have gotten any cheaper. I’ve enough now for my needs, what with naval pay and my remittance.” He shrugged and snuggled closer. “Enough as long as I stay at sea three months out of four, that is.”
“Perhaps I can help,” she told him, rolling over to look down on him. “I have money of my own, and as long as my dear husband may indulge his pleasures in discretion, and I play the proper wife, he allows me to spend as I will. He has bags of money. Perhaps the only endearing side to him,” she concluded sourly.
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