Free Hostile Shores by Dewey Lambdin Page B

heaved a silent “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
    “The first time, I was his prisoner, temporarily.” Lewrie was more than happy to relate how Bonaparte, then a mere general of artillery, had blown up his mortar vessel east of Toulon, and had ridden down to the beach where the survivors had staggered ashore.
    “Didn’t make a bold picture,” Lewrie chortled, “breeches drainin’ water and my stockings round my ankles. He came to gloat and call for my parole. I told him I couldn’t, for half the crew and gunners were Spanish or French Royalists. I swore the French were from the Channel Islands and really British, so they wouldn’t be butchered on the spot, or guillotined later, and I handed him my sword, a rather nice hanger gifted me years before. We’d have been marched off, but for the arrival of a squadron of ‘Yellow-Jacket’ Spanish cavalry, so I got rescued. He’s about four inches shorter than me, is Boney, a dandy fellow with clear skin … not the yellow or Arabic brown in the caricatures, with blue-ish eyes. The second time we met, in Paris during the Peace of Amiens, he’d put on a little weight, but…”
    It did not take any arm-twisting for Lewrie to relate how he and his late wife, Caroline, had taken a second honeymoon to Paris to see the sights— everyone was doing it!—and of how he had taken several swords of dead French captains in hopes they could be returned to the families. It was a young, ambitious chargé d’affaires from the newly-reopened British Embassy who had managed to arrange an exchange of those swords for his old hanger, from Napoleon’s own hands in the Tuileries Palace.
    “Didn’t go well, at all, ” Lewrie laughed. “Bonaparte showed up in a general’s uniform and raved about why we hadn’t sent him an Ambassador yet, even if his was in London, why we hadn’t evacuated Malta like we promised, and that we had no business tellin’ him to get out of Holland and Switzerland, I don’t recall what all. To boot, Caroline and I were the only British there, and we got stared at and ogled like a pack o’ rabid wolves. Just after that, we got word from another English tourist that Bonaparte had sicced his secret police agents on us, and we’d best flee France instanter.”
    He told them of fleeing in several sets of disguises, arranged by the other English couple, who had smuggled French aristocrats out to safety from prison or the guillotine, how they had almost gotten to a waiting rowboat on a remote beach near Calais.…
    “There were cavalry and police on the bluff above,” Lewrie said more somberly. “We made a mad dash for the boat, but, just as I was hoisting Caroline in, she was shot. She passed away in the boat, not a minute later.”
    That drew an aubible gasp and rumble of mutters. Even Grierson was wide-eyed. “Foul murder … Bonaparte a criminal, too … damn the French, root and branch … could be made out, here and there.
    “Now, both my sons are in the Navy, Hugh was always to be, but his older brother, Sewallis, was so hot for revenge that I feared that he would enlist as a private soldier, or ship before the mast, did I deny him,” Lewrie sadly said. Truth was, Sewallis had forged his way to sea as a Midshipman! “My daughter lives with one of my brothers-in-law in a little village, Anglesgreen, in Surrey. Though my father has a small estate there, he’s mostly up to London and has little to offer towards a young girl’s raising. Too old, now, to tend to a young’un.”
    No, Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, damned near a charter member of the old Hell-Fire Club, liked young, so long as the girls were over eighteen, and obliging!
    “So, when I received orders to Reliant in April of ’03, I was more than ready to sail against the French once more,” he concluded.
    “A toast! A toast!” a youngish gallant cried, standing, and drawing others to their feet. “To the gallant Captain Lewrie, a man of grand adventures!”
    Lewrie sat modestly