The King's Commission

by Dewey Lambdin

  “You shall regret this,” she rasped, her face paling. “I thought you were a young man of my own tastes, grown beyond the petty strictures of our hypocritical society. But I now see you’re just another common sort. A secret hymn-singer with no courage to live his own life.”

  “Better that than a draggled whore who has to hire men to top her.” He grinned, finished his wine and flung the glass across the room to shatter on the stuccoed wall. “Damme, have I ruined the set? A pity, ain’t it. Bye, love.”

  On his way to Hugh Beauman’s town house, he bought a light gutta-percha cane, little thicker than his index finger. When the servant announced him, Anne came running out into the front hall.

  “Hugh is not here, Alan. And you should not be,” she warned.

  “Where is he, then?” Alan asked. “I have things to discuss with him.”

  “He went to father Beauman’s. Oh, surely, you won’t fight him! He’s ready to kill you! Do anything but fight him.”

  “When he asks, tell him this. You took the risk to your repute to warn me off Betty Hillwood, do you understand?” Alan told her. “You knew, you would have sent me a letter, but you saw me in town and took the risk. There is nothing between us and you touched my hand once.”

  “He would not believe me,” she almost wailed, sure that blood would be spilled before the day was out.

  “Blame it all on Betty Hillwood, remember that. She started the rumor, her or her friends, to get even with me.”

  “He will not speak to me, so how may I tell him anything?”

  “Because of Captain McIntyre?” Alan asked.

  “How … Oh God.”

  “I’ll not see you hurt any more, Anne,” he promised. “I’ve most like lost any chance with Lucy, but I’ll get you out of this. Remember what I said.”

  “Lieutenant Alan Lewrie, sirs,” the butler announced, and Alan stalked past him to confront Hugh Beauman and his father, both of whom looked shocked that he would even dare show his face to them. But after they got over their shock, their angry expressions prophecied a hanging.

  “There, sir,” Alan said, flinging the gutta-percha walking stick to the parqueted floor at Hugh Beauman’s feet. “If you feel the need to use that on me, feel free. Should you wish it occur in the main plaza, we may go there, and I shall be completely at your disposal. I shall not defend myself.”

  His boldness disarmed them, as he thought it might, allowing him to present his case before they dredged their thoughts back into order.

  “Mister Beauman, Master Hugh, I have been a complete, callow fool, and I humbly beg your forgiveness for any taint of scandal that might have touched your family. But I assure you as God’s my witness Mistress Anne Beauman is completely blameless. If you will indulge me?”

  “Um, yes, little privacy, what?” Beauman, Sr., stammered, waving his hand towards a small parlor or study off the main hall. Once the doors were shut, Alan took the offensive once more.

  “I would take a public whipping to settle this if that is what it takes,” he repeated.

  “You squired my wife about the town, sir,” Hugh began, working up his anger once more, now that they were in private. “You were seen fondling her, sir. What manner of man would expose a proper lady to that, dragging her into a public-house, sir?”

  “Because I needed warning, sir, and she took the risk to her reputation to repair a greater risk to the Beauman family reputation. You should be thanking her, as I do.”

  “Warnin’?” the older man scoffed. “About what?”

  “About Betty Hillwood, sir,” Alan replied. “That’s what I was a fool about. I was visiting her, to work off the humors of the blood.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Beauman coughed. “I see. You an’ … at clicket, eh?”

  “Like foxes, sir,” Alan admitted with a worldly smile. “Better her than a public-house whore—less chance of the pox.”

  There was a chance they would understand; the Beaumans were an earthy lot. From what he had heard of them, they could empathize.

  “Being in the company of such a beautiful young lady as your Lucy raised my humors to the boiling point, and I thought it best to release that tension, sirs. And if my suit was to be a long one—and you note I use the past tense, sirs, since my foolish behavior has raised such a tempest I doubt you could entertain my hopes further—I feared the frustration would cause me to do something untoward.”

  “Damme, you’re a bold ’un!” Mr. Beauman gaped. “You sport with another woman to avoid rapin’ my daughter if your … bloody humors … get outa hand, and I suppose you think we should be thankin’ ya?”

  It was the longest and most complete sentence Mr. Beauman had ever uttered, and it stopped Alan cold in his tracks for a moment.

  “What man, faced with a long courtship of a sweet and proper young lady, could do otherwise, sir, and retain his sanity?” Alan asked them. “In your own courting days, Mister Beauman, was there no release for you? Did not the long delay of hoped for satisfaction drive you to distraction?”

  “Well, there was a tavern wench’r two …” the older man began to maunder.

  “Father, that’s not the bloody point! He’s ruined Anne’s good name, and I want satisfaction,” Hugh barked, bringing them back to the meat of the matter.

  “But Mrs. Hillwood is the point, sir,” Alan doggedly went on. “Who do you think started the rumor in the first place? Her and her friend Mrs. Howard, sending their servants to peep and pry and report back with gossip to liven their lives, or give them an advantage. I met Anne as I was leaving Mrs. Hillwood’s. She would have warned me off with a letter, but she took the risk to accost me, then and there. I rode in her carriage down to the dress-maker’s and went inside with her. I stood by the door, feeling like a damned fool to even be in the place. Not a word, not a gesture of anything improper occurred, sir. We then went for something cool to drink to revive her as she was wilting in the heat, and to find a place where she could impart her timely warning that I should best stop visiting the woman, not only for the good of the Beauman family name, but for mine own. To stress how important it was, as she spoke of her fondness for Lucy and the Beauman family, she touched my wrist once. And as I poured out my own problem with Mrs. Hillwood, I admit to taking her hand and beseeching her what to do about the mess I had made. That is all that passed between us, Master Hugh. I did not think that an establishment so seemingly refined as the Frenchman’s … what you may call it … a restaurant … would be looked upon as a public place. Back in London, it has become the custom that ladies may frequent eating establishments, as long as they do not contain rooms to let. All the quality do so, and I didn’t know it was any different here on Jamaica.”

  When in doubt, trot out the aristocracy as an example, he told himself. No one wants to appear out of the latest fashion.

  “You swear on your honor?” Hugh Beauman demanded, unready to relent.

  “For a gentleman to say it is to swear to its truth, sir,” Alan shot back, a little high-handed at the slight of his honor, though he sometimes doubted if he truly had any to slight or get huffy about. “If you demand more, then I swear on my honor as an English gentleman and as a commission Sea Officer that events happened as I said.”

  “What problem with Betty … Mrs. Hillwood, sir?” the older man asked.

  Thank bloody Christ for you, Alan though gratefully. “The lady became a bother, Mister Beauman. She took a greater fancy to me than I thought was good. She gave me this chain and fob, and promised more of the same, if I became her kept man and topped her regular. When I told her no, she vowed to get even, no matter who got hurt. If not by this rumor she spread about me and Anne, then by another means, a letter I was foolish enough to write her.”

  “What sort o’ letter?” Mr. Beauman asked, fetching out a squat brandy decanter and beginning to pour himself a drink.

  “A rather risqué … no, I don’t think risqué does it justice. Pornographic, would be more like, sir,” Alan confessed, putting on hi
s best shame-face and hoping they would eat this up like plum duff. “She dictated it, I wrote it. As a game, you see. Between bouts.”

  “Ah?”

  “In her bed, sir.”

  “Aha!”

  “With her belly for a writing desk, sir,” Alan finished with a shrug of the truly sheepishly guilty, a gesture he had practically taken patent on in his school days.

  “God’s teeth!” Mr. Beauman, Sr., exclaimed, settling down into a chair with a look of perplexity creasing his heavy features. “With her belly … on her belly, sir? Well, stap me! Don’t see how it can be done, damme if I can. ’Course, I never tried writin’ down there.”

  “It’s a rather firm belly, sir,” Alan commented.

  “Aye, that’d help, I suppose,” the man nodded, beginning to grin slightly at the mental picture.

  “Father, for God’s sake!” Hugh exploded. “Whatever the reasons, no matter how innocent they were, people have taken a tar-brush to our family’s good name and reputation, our social standing!”

  “Start some gossip of your own, sir,” Alan suggested.

  “Damn you, sir!” Hugh Beauman snarled. “We’ll decide what’s best for this family, not you. You’ve done enough.”

  “And I would be willing to do anything to assist you, sir.”

  “What sort o’ rumor?” the father asked, slopping back a large swig of brandy and waving the bottle at them in invitation, which Alan agreed to readily; he was dry as dust from nerves, and three men drinking together and consorting on how to solve something were not three men who would be trying to stick sharp objects into each other.

  “It was Mrs. Hillwood’s pride and vanity that brought this about when I rejected her offer,” Alan said, taking a pew on the corner of a desk with glass in hand, though Hugh Beauman was still averse to showing him any leniency. “She didn’t want me paying any attention to Lucy. I think the woman was jealous of anyone younger or prettier. Not so much that she was truly in love with me, but she disliked losing, d’ye see. And I don’t think she cares much for the Beauman family in general, if you can believe the things she told me, trying to destroy my respect for the lot of you. Terrible things best left unsaid.”

  “Like what, sir?” Hugh required. “Speak out.”

  “She called you ignorant ‘Chaw-Bacons’ and ‘Country-Harrys.’ People with more money than style. She’d have me believe there’s not a Christian among you, a one to be trusted. She blackened every name in the family with some back-stairs scandal. You, Hugh, Anne, Floss’ husband … even Lucy. She intimated all your morals were nonexistent.”

  “Goddamn the bitch!” the father roared. “She said all that?”

  “Not in one session, sir, but over the course of time.”

  The Beauman men looked righteously outraged, but a little queasy as well; they knew their own sins well enough, and knew that Betty Hillwood was probably privy to most of them.

  “Show me claws, would ya, hedge-whore?” Mr. Beauman ranted. “I’ll give ya claws right back. Blacken me children, will ya? I’ll hurt ya where it hurts the most, by damn if I don’t!”

  “In her pride, sir,” Alan prompted, feeling safe now from physical harm. “She wouldn’t like people in her circle to know that she had a lover spurn her, or that she had to buy his affections and then threaten so much to get him back, no matter who got hurt. It may not matter to anyone about Mistress Anne—anyone would have done for her purpose to try and ruin me, d’ye see. Clearing Anne’s good name is only incidental, too.”

  “It’s not to me, damn your blood!” Hugh barked.

  “If the gossip sounds like an attempt to clear Mistress Anne, it will fail, sir,” Alan told him, familiar enough with what stuck in the mind in all the scandals he had chuckled over back in London. “It will ring false. But, if enough shit flies and sticks to Betty Hillwood, Anne becomes an innocent victim in contrast. A month from now, they’ll still be chewing on la Hillwood’s bones, and if they ever think of my part in the affair, or Mistress Anne’s, it will be favorable. If the affair is handled properly, of course.”

  “Aye, t’would kill her soul, the crafty old witch!” Beauman, Sr., chortled with a cruel grin of anticipated pleasure at Betty’s demise in Society. “Why, we’d skin her alive!”

  “My God, you’re too clever by half!” Hugh marveled, disgusted.

  Alan didn’t know quite how to answer that, so he kept silent for once. People with brains were usually mistrusted when they showed off.

  “Perhaps it’s best this happened after all, if only to spare us a son-in-law so scheming, father,” Hugh added, smiling slightly in some form of satisfaction that he wasn’t going to be related to anyone as “smarmy” as Alan Lewrie. “You must know that you have totally ruined your hopes of eventual marriage with Lucy, no matter how this comes out.”

  “I do realize that, sir,” Alan nodded, suddenly sobered. “And I must say it is the greatest regret of my life, and hopefully shall be from this moment on. I truly love her, you see.”

  The frank admission shut them all up for a long moment, broken only by the sounds of brandy being slurped, as they all looked away and communed with their own thoughts, abashed by such a personal revelation usually left unspoken by English gentlemen, who would be the last men on the face of the earth to confess their love for anything other than horses, dogs or some institution larger than themselves.

  “If there is some way you could convey to Lucy my regrets as to how this came about, and how I feel about her …” Alan whispered, going for the brandy decanter unbidden. “And to Mistress Anne my regrets as well that she had to involve herself at such a risk. And my undying thanks, tell her.”

  Would they relent, he wondered with a final tug of hope? Was there some way he could still see Lucy in future, once this was all blown over? He had spoken the truth (mostly), and he had couched events in such a way that he did not appear a total rake-hell; a young and foolish buck, but not a complete wastrel.

  “Aye, I’ll tell her,” Mr. Beauman intoned sadly. “’Twasn’t all your fault, though ya did show bad judgement. Like Hugh says, fer the best, mayhap. Few years from now, who knows? Good lesson fer ya, what?”

  “Aye, sir,” Alan replied with a sad shudder of his own. “Well, I’d best be going then.”

  “Father,” Hugh said as Alan finished his drink and picked up his hat from a side table, “if we mean to save our good name, we cannot send Mr. Lewrie away in shame.”

  “Hey?”

  “At least escort him to the docks. Make a show of being fond of him, a public show. Otherwise it still looks like we have a reason to duel him, or whip him,” Hugh went on, distaste curling his mouth at his own words. “Not that he’s welcome here in future, but …”

  “Best for Anne, aye. Best for us,” Mr. Beauman concurred.

  They rode in an open carriage, to outward appearances a dumb show of three gentlemen of like minds, cracking japes and laughing together in public before the startled eyes of the quality who had business about the town. They dined at the Frenchman’s, shared some wine, and saw Alan into a boat out to his ship, waving goodbye chearly with bonhomie plastered on their phyzes like a painted chorus seeing off a hero in some drama. But it was very final sort of good-bye.

  Alan gained the deck, took his salute, and went aft where the captain was lazing about under the quarterdeck awnings, slung in a net hammock of island manufacture, with one of the half grown kittens in his lap.

  “Come aboard to join, have you, Mister Lewrie?” Lilycrop asked with a droll expression as he walked up and saluted him.

  “Sir?”

  “We’ve seen so little of you,” Lilycrop teased as he dandled a black-and-white tom-kitten. “Wasn’t sure if you’d jumped ship or been transferred.”

  “Sorry, sir, but there were some … personal problems ashore.”

  “Woman trouble, I heard. Finished, is it?”

  “Finished, sir. Yes, woman trouble. A devilish power of ’em.”

  “A d
ay’r two of pushin’ does for most of us, you know.” Lilycrop smirked. “No need to make a meal of the doxies. Saves you from angry daddies an’ husbands, too.”

  “Aye, sir, I shall remember that from now on.”

  “God knows, they’re mostly only good for one thing, an’ you may rent that,” Lilycrop went on. “Give ’em guineas enough an’ they’ll be fond of you for as long as you want, then take your leave before they turn boresome. They’ve no conversation worth mentionin’, so why go all cunt-struck by some mort who’ll most like put horns on you the minute you’re out of sight?”

  “Surely not all women, sir,” Alan sighed, about as deep into the Blue Devils as a young man could be over a girl.

  “Aye, there may be a gem somewhere, but the likes of me never could afford ’em or run in the right circles to find ’em. No loss at this stage of the game. So you’re back with us for a while? The delights of Kingston have lost their luster, I take it?”

  “Aye, sir. I could use a few months at sea. God help me, I never thought I’d say this, but is there any way we could sail, sir? I stay out of trouble at sea, mostly.” Alan groaned with a heartfelt ache of desire to escape into Duty, to lose his crushed hopes in a long spell of seamanship and possible action.

  “Well, top up your wine cellars, Mister Lewrie!” Lilycrop said with a bright smile, rolling out of his hammock and handing Lewrie the kitten as he adjusted his uniform. “Admiral Sir Bloody Joshua Rowley remembered we’re in his bloody squadron after all. Had you been around, and had an ear cocked like a real first officer, you’d’ve heard of it before. We have orders to head for Cuba, to harry coastal shippin’. Let us go aft and I’ll show you the orders. Then you can indulge another form of lust, on our good King’s enemies.”