H. M. S. Cockerel (23 page)

C H A P T E R 6

H
ad
a hole in me, I think; hollow leg, or something. But, Lord!
It was all so bloody good! So grand!

Minestrone,
the plebeian vegetable and pasta soup—even that was head and shoulders above Navy fare. Meat-stuffed pastas, layered with a tomato sauce, dripping with melted cheeses! Veal marinara,
game fowl jugged in a wine sauce, domestic chicken breasts done in a cream sauce with wide egg noodles. More fried fish, more grilled goodies. God knew how they'd done it, but there'd been ices with the fruit for a last course, tart and sweet sorbets, and creamy—what'd they call 'ems?—
gelati?
And for the levee preceding the actual promised stuffing—
antipasti.
Lovely cheeses, thin-shaved prosciutto; and, of course, the sybaritic pleasures of fresh-baked bread, piping hot, crusty and white milled flour, with dollops of churned butter!

Wines, too. Sweet Marsalas and sweetish, sparkling spumantes. Then butter-smooth, aged reds that rivalled the best Cabernets France could boast. Thank God for the food, he thought; I've taken a barrel aboard, feels like. I'm well and truly foxed!

A minor kingdom, in the greater scheme of things, Naples might be, but King Ferdinand's
palazzo
was a bejeweled, begilt faeryland of high, ornate baroque ceilings, well-figured marble walls awash with statuary and gigantic tapestries, overscale paintings (dead relations, mostly—or hunting scenes), shiny with Chinee wallpapers, glittering with crystal sconces, chandeliers, glowing amber with a shipload worth of real beeswax candles, festooned with silver and gold, niello or cloisonné, strewn with furniture too precious to sit upon. It was so grand, so showy, after half a year of those wooden walls of his, so different from his bleak daily vistas of rolling sea. And the music!

A chamber orchestra still sawed away in an upper gallery, just as they had through the levee and the supper. Light, airy, delightful stuff—sonatas by Giovanni Gabrieli, Giovanni Battista Fontana, and Marco Buccolina. Or so he'd been informed.

If Naples was not indeed Heaven, it was very close to it, Alan determined. With a traitorous snifter of French Armagnac in his hand, he let go a more than gentle burp of contentment.

The supper was over, the
écarté
and music was winding down, and it was too late for the last guests to stay and dance. Sir William and the prime minister were gone somewhere. King Ferdinand had spoken some brief last words to him and had plodded off, too.

Have their three heads together over the treaty, I expect, Alan thought; thankee, my boy, but we'll take it from here. Oh, well.

“Scusi, signore tenente Lor . . . L . . . Liri,”
a white-wigged footman announced by his side. He was holding a six-armed candelabra.

“Lewrie,” he muttered, barely glancing at him, searching for Emma Hamilton, who had also scampered off somewhere.

“Si, signore tenente Liri,”
the servitor persisted, “you pleaseah toa follah me,
signore tenente?
I lighta you . . . up . . . toa bed,
signore
.”

Well, shit, he sighed to himself. Right, then . . . I should have known better.

His chambers were magnificent. The night was warm and fragrant; the two pairs of doors which led to a wide, fret-stoned balcony were open. The suite was as large as an admiral's great-cabins. There were side tables bearing cloisonné, gilt and silver gewgaws, a writing desk of tortoise-shell mottled wood, heavily inlaid with ivory, urns filled with fresh-cut flowers everywhere he looked, an expansive wine cabinet big as a duke's sideboard, an intricately carved armoire big enough to hold a corporal's guard, and a bedstead as wide as a quarterdeck, with silk sheets and satin coverlet already turned down, the two pair of pillows plumped up invitingly.

“Willa they bea anythin' elsea youa wan',
signore tenente?
” the footman intoned, sounding both hesitant and grim. Lewrie glanced at him and noted his lips moving after his statement; probably in rote rehearsal of his little English over the most probable statement he might next make.

“Anything else?” Lewrie grinned.

“Si, signore tenente Liri,”
the man answered, then repeated with effort: “Willa-they-bea-anythin'-elsea-youa-wan',
signore?
”

“Dancing girls,” Lewrie bade, tongue in cheek, just to see how the poor fellow might handle the unexpected. “A string quartet. Some courtesans. And magic. I insist on magic.”

“Uh, scusi, signore tenente . . .”
Sweat popped on his upper lip as he flummoxed. “Willa-they-bea-anythin'-elsea,
signore tenente?
” he reiterated, sounding a bit desperate.

“No, nothing else,” Lewrie relented. “Thank you. Goodnight. Or how you say . . . ? Uhm. No,
grazie. Buona notte
.”

“Ah, si, tenente!”
The man bobbed with relief, bowing himself out quickly.
“Si, grazie. Buona notte, signore. Buona notte!”

“Call me at first light,” Lewrie insisted. “Sunrise.
Giorgno?
First sparrow fart? Bloody . . .” He pointed at an ormolu clock, stuck his hands in his armpits, and crowed like a rooster. The footman came back, pointed to the Roman numeral
V
and shrugged quizzically. Alan pointed to the
VI,
mimed shaving and washing.

“Ah, si, signore.
Awakea you . . . 'ota wat'r.
Buona notte!”

“Damme,
another
bloody foreign language I have to learn,” he groused softly as he stripped off his own coat and waistcoat, ripped his laced stock from his throat and unbuttoned his shirt collar. A peek into the various chambers of the suite revealed that his kit was already stored in the armoire. He hung his things up, found the necessary closet and, much eased, padded in bare feet to the wine cabinet. It may have been French, but there was Armagnac, sweeter and mellower than any brandy or cognac. With his snifter topped up he went out onto the balcony, not feeling treasonous at all to drink it.

Heaven, Naples might seem, but it reeked, as did any city with a large population. Night soil dumped out chamber windows, animal ordure, rotting garbage, and too many people who bathed too infrequently crammed into too small an area. But the palace's flower gardens atoned for all.

There was something else, too, as if antiquity had a scent, dusty and sere, as if a thousand years of living, breathing history, and aeons of Mediterranean sunshine could have a mellow, dryold-wine aroma. Alan could identify woodsmoke, sour, water-staunched charcoal cooking fires. Wine and laundry, tanneries and hot iron, the aftertaste of succulent spices. The wind off the sea . . .

Naples lay spread at his feet, beyond the palace grounds and the protective walls. Vesuvius was over his left shoulder, gently fuming a thin, indistinct pipesmoker's pall. Dark slopes tumbled to the fields where Pompeii and Herculaneum once stood, and from Torre del Greco, all ephemeral with dusky blue moonlight. Umber walls and terracotta roof tiles shone icy with moonlight, rendered snowy blue white or black now. Tiny amber sparks on the hills, on the flatlands far away, in the town, marked country crofts, villages, or late-night taverns. To the west, the Bay of Naples shimmered on the moonglade, in silver and black, and ships lay still as discarded playthings on a nursery room floor below him, bare-poled and silent, with only faint glims by belfries and taffrails. H.M.S.
Cockerel
lay off to his right, silhouetted ebony on flickering argent waters which reflected pale yellow cat's-paws on a quicksilver moon trough, brushed by the light night breeze. Squinting, he almost thought he could espy a pattern to it, a chimera about to rise, like an ever-pirouetting dancer. To the sou'west, there was a darker hump on the sea's horizon, the steady, measured flick of a lighthouse. Capri. Tucked like an apostrophe near the tip of a finger of distance-grayed land, at his angle of view.

“Punta Campanella,” Lewrie murmured with pleasure in the novel and alien, savouring the taste of its strange wonder on his tongue as he recalled the peninsula's name. Along with the heady fumes and bite of the Armagnac. And that tiny smear of light, that sleeping village on the peninsula's north shore which faced his balcony?

“Damme, I had a squint at the chart. So what's the bloody place called? Sam . . . Ser . . . S, something.”

“Sorrento,” a soft voice said behind him.

He started with alarm, spun about to spy out who his tutor was.

“Sorrento,” Lady Emma Hamilton whispered as she emerged from the darkness of the far end of his balcony. Came near enough to take the snifter from his nerveless fingers and drink deep. “A lovely town, is Sorrento. There are some who like the Bay of Salerno, beyond the Punta Campanella. But I
much
prefer the Bay of Naples. Don't you?”

“Immensely,” he assured her, getting his poise back.

“When Goethe was here, not long ago, he told me . . .”

“You
met
Goethe?” Lewrie marveled.

“But of course, Alan.” she laughed low in her throat. “Everyone comes to Naples, sooner or later. Goethe said, ‘Naples is a Paradise. Everyone lives, after his manner, intoxicated in self-forgetfulness.' Languid . . . romantic beyond words . . . tolerant and accepting. I've been here for years. I cannot imagine living anywhere else.”

“In self-forgetfulness,” he prompted and smiled.

She lifted the snifter, drained it to heel-taps, and set it on a marble-topped wrought-iron wine table beside her. Then slipped into his embrace boldly. She turned her face up to his, pressing her lips first warm and inviting, then fierce, turning her head and groaning as their mouths parted, as eager breaths mingled.

“How did you manage . . . ?” he murmured against her throat, as he lifted her dark, curling hair to kiss her below her ear, to devour her neck and soft bared shoulder.

“Palazzi . . .”
she chuckled, with more than amusement, writhing against him. “Passages, vacant adjoining suites . . . unseeing servants. Hurry!”

He frog-marched her backwards into the suite, across the room and onto the edge of the high bedstead, all the while fumbling with the buttons and hooks of her sack gown, with her strong, capable hands on his breeches flap and belt in a fury. They tumbled onto the piles of goose-down mattresses, his feet still just touching the floor. Up went his hands, searching and hungry, lifting skirts and petticoats, sliding needful and possessive along her silken knee hose, up along the outside of her thighs, bare and soft, so milky white and malleable.

“Caution,” she insisted, lifting his head from his delightful work, whimpering and panting with want of her own, taking his face in both hands and raining wide-mouthed, writhing, dewy-wet kisses on him. “Caution. A moment. Have you . . . ?”

Bloody Hell, what if I don't, he groaned silently. Kissing her one last time, he shucked his breeches and strode in his shirttails to the armoire, digging into his shore kit.

God, thankee, Cony, you still know how to pack for me! Shaking out one of Mother Jones's very best (guinea the dozen) lambskin cundums from the Old Green Lantern in Half Moon Street, he went back to her.

She'd snuffed candles, all but the last on the nightstand, and shed her gown and petticoats and chemise. Almost demure, tucked into bed beneath the silk sheets, her mass of ebon curls spilling stark on the shining pillows.

He slid into bed with her, sinking into the mattresses, sliding together as the center gave and the edges rose to enfold them in sleek luxury. She raised a thigh, hugged him fierce again and let him roll atop, between . . . enfolding him with her own soft, yielding flesh. He went back to her shoulders, her breasts, sliding down to render total worship, but she almost dragged him to a stop, reached down, dandled his manhood, and chuckled deep in her throat as her hands surveyed his size and strength. Helped him with their “caution,” then guided him . . . guided him . . .

“Ah, God!” she muttered huskily, straining with him, lifting her legs high about him, pressing her ankles and heels into his buttocks, rocking her hips to exact his last, full measure, to the very depths of her. “Lord, yes, I . . . !”

“Emma!” he panted, against her mouth, cupping his hands over her shoulders, sinking into her, losing himself in her.

“Gawd,” she cooed, bemused by her own responses as she clasped him snug and rocked him, thrusting upward to meet him, “I'll never in my life know . . . what it is . . . 'bout me and sailors!”

He felt insatiable. Lucky for him, Emma Hamilton was a perfect match. Though she did tend to babble more than he liked, between bouts.

He learned, whether he cared to or not, that she'd been born a village girl, one Emma Hart, daughter of a smith in Neston, Cheshire. Close enough to Liverpool, so her first lover had been a sea officer, when she was in her mid-teens. Then had come London, and the stage . . .

Or at least something
close
to theatrical, Lewrie smirked, in fond remembrance of the “actresses” who plied their wares about his old haunts of Covent Garden and Drury Lane.