H. M. S. Cockerel Read Online Free Page B

dear,” Alan comforted her. “And a damned fine one, I assure you. I will not have your sensible ways upset, nor you distressed, by a mere servant.”
    â€œThankee, Alan,” Caroline beamed at him this time. “I promise I will speak to her.”
    â€œ Damned good soup,” he commented again, raising an eyebrow. “Too bad little Charlotte isn’t ready for soup such as this. Think of what she’s missing, poor tyke. Why, it may be a week or two more before she’s even able to take mere gruels and paps, d’ye think, dear?”
    Tell me I can have you back, hey? he pleaded, with the merest sign of innocent inquisitiveness on his phiz. Once Caroline put a child on a solid diet and left off nursing, he could play once more with those twin peaks of his delight. Once, that is, she stopped producing milk. He’d rushed it the week before, and still felt embarrassed by the almost perverse, cloyingly sweet taste of mother’s milk which had flooded his mouth in the throes of passionate foreplay.
    â€œOh, I think more than a week or so, Alan,” Caroline told him, colouring herself at the memory. “Perhaps another month. She will take tiny spoonfuls of thin paps now, but . . .” Caroline shrugged in explanation, which was no explanation at all, save for the heavy way her breasts brushed and lifted beneath her prim bodice. Nursing was a very private pleasure—almost as good a pleasure as me? Lewrie wondered. It seemed so. Domesticity, he groaned to himself, keeping his face bland as he hid behind a sip of hock. Ain’t it grand, thankee Jesus!
    â€œAnd how was the village?” Caroline inquired, changing the subject deftly.
    â€œQuiet as usual. Same old complaints. Same old faces.” He grimaced slightly and laid aside his spoon. Caroline rang a tiny china bell for the soup to be removed and the mutton chops to be fetched in. “Talk of the French. Bags of it.”
    â€œAnything new?” she asked, frowning.
    â€œFear, mostly. Even the tenant farmers are getting worried all that leveling, Jacobin talk about equality will come here someday. Now they’ve murdered their king and queen—”
    â€œPerhaps it’ll die out, like Nootka Sound,” Caroline prayed. “A great deal of commotion, then. It’s been ten years since America went the same way, and nothing’s come of that,” she stated, to reassure them both. “Englishmen aren’t as crazed as the French, thank God, nor as empty-headed as the Rebels were. There’s nothing wrong with English society needs changing! Let the whole world turn upside down, we’ll be here, season to season, sane and orderly, as usual.”
    â€œWe may, dear,” Alan countered gently. “But the Germanies, the rest of Europe . . . First the Colonies went unhinged, now France, and as bloody as you could ask for. Didn’t call it the Terror for nought, y’know. There were no aristocrats to butcher in the Colonies, and a fair number of them were Rebels to start with . . . My pardons.”
    Caroline’s brother George had been butchered, by Chiswick relatives in the lower Cape Fear of North Carolina. And that pregnant woman murdered in her bed Alan had discovered outside Yorktown, before the siege set in, her unborn babe pinned to the log walls with a rusty bayonet!
    â€œFirst the Colonies, then France, God knows where next—not England, o’ course,” he reiterated after a bite of succulent mutton chop, heavy with hot mustard, Navy style. “But if this plague spreads, how long before we’re alone in a sea of hostile Republicans?”
    â€œPray God it will blow over like a summer storm, then,” Caroline shuddered, all but crossing herself. Cony fetched out a bottle of burgundy, more suited to mutton, to replace the lighter hock. “And if you are called back, well, it would not be for long.”
    Nootka Sound, ’91: an