A Jester’s Fortune - Dewey Lambdin

"As long as they aren't on the carte de menu, sir," Fillebrowne commented, pointing out the two dozen cats that sat, lay or gamboled just without the doorway.

"Known for its seafood, I was told, sir," Charlton rejoined. "And 'tis hard to disguise cat-meat as cat-fish, d'ye see, haw haw? The aromas fetched 'em, I shouldn't wonder. Fetched me, at any rate."

Charlton put a hand to that pocket, that slim notebook once more creasing his brow in remembrance, as if to dredge up some fact he'd read from it, like a mentalist performing a parlour-trick, or a raree-show.

He's never been here, either, Lewrie told himself. Yet he's determined to play the knowing host; the experienced guide!

"… city's nigh awash in cats. A thousand-thousand of'em, I wouldn't doubt. Living along a canal, at water-level," Charlton went on genially, "they must be worth their weight in gold, in holding down the rat population. Your sort of town, I expect, hey, Commander Lewrie?"

"It could grow on one, sir," Lewrie allowed, as a half dozen of the more active beasts came to twine about his ankles, scenting a mark of his Toulon on his stockings, shoes and breeches.

An adequate supper-more than adequate, really. There'd been huge shrimps, cuttlefish stew, stuffed green crab, stuffed sole, with a gigantic mullet big enough for all. And oceans of wine to slosh it all down with. Then, it was off they went for a ridotto. Charlton explained that their diplomatic gestures would be made with Venetian authorities there, instead of being invited to dine.

"Too busy celebrating, sir?" Lewrie asked, cocking an eyebrow at that news. "They won't sup with us, but they'll have us in for an hour or so at a casino?"

"Just so, Commander Lewrie," Charlton sighed. "Just so."

"An infuriating damn people," Fillebrowne sneered in sympathy.

They were just about the only people in the palatial ridotto not in costume or masks. Those Venetians who hadn't tricked themselves out as Moors, fanciful beasts or clowns, and wore normal clothing, might as well have been in costume, for their dresses and suitings were as overly ornate as Court-dress at Versailles before the French Revolution. They might dress more soberly during the daytime, but at night, in a casino, they went all-out, as colourful and fanciful as an entire flock of peacocks. About half not in full costume still clung to a black-and-white mask, no two alike, from what Lewrie could see-or posed and preened with filigreed, lacy butterfly-like eye-masks on sticks, which could be purchased or rented, holding them to their faces like quizzing glasses.

Cloth-of-gold, cloth-of-silver, lacework so intricate, so laden with tiny seed-pearls or German glass they appeared to shimmer as they strolled, and almost reflect whatever they passed! Men's suitings so snugly tailored, so embroidered, so flounced with lace, they resembled the parody of a proper suit that had delighted Lewrie back in his teens in London-before his father had press-ganged him into the Navy, o'-course!-the old "Macaroni" style. And those men… piss-proud, as toplofty as lords, the few unmasked faces frozen into masklike coolness, just at the instant before a sneer. Foppish, weak, limp, languid… or overpadded, full-cheeked and looking so smugly satisfied with their lots. Or, Lewrie speculated, so magnificently bored, rather!

"Uhm… a bit gaudy, would you say, sir?" Ralph Knolles said in a quiet whisper from his larboard side. "My oath!"

That last comment came at the sight of a pair of harlequins pawing each other as fond as lovers, tilting their infernal beaked masks out of the way to exchange a playful kiss. Under the voluminous costumes, it was impossible to see were they man and woman-or another sort of combination.

"Never catch English folk capering like this, sir," Lieutenant Knolles declared firmly.

"Be surprised, Mister Knolles." Lewrie smirked. "Not at home, at any rate. Overseas, now… in a flock o' foreigners… with no one they know watchin'…"

"Have to be drunk as badgers, sir, e'en' so," Knolles countered.

"That, too, sir." Lewrie chuckled wryly. "Or that first! And then… out comes the bed-linen, and it's a Roman orgy!"

Sumptuary laws were being flouted on every hand, the strictures against ostentatious display of wealth broken by every hemline. Lewrie felt, even in his very best shore-going dress-uniform he was pretty much like a sopping-wet wharf-rat among these glittering, preening peacocks. A liveried servant's uniform was more ornate, more impressive! And he wondered when he or Captain Charlton might be instructed to go fetch a fresh tray of drinks… or clean up someone's mess!

The ridotto was another Trieste, though, when it came to bodily odours. As grand as a king's palace though it was, as high and baroque its ceiling, well… it was quite close, the air still, and filled with hundreds of revelers, strollers and gamblers, and the only breeze came from idly waving hands, the coquetry of ladies' fans or the uprush of wind from a full thousand flickering candles.

For a people supposedly "married" to the sea… and all the water that went with that, Lewrie smirked… the Venetian aristocracy didn't seem to hold much with water! No matter how layered in Hungary Waters or Colognes, they were a pretty stale bunch!

The landing-party strolled, glasses in hand, trying to be pleasant, searching for the officials Charlton had planned to meet. Knolles, free of his arduous, unending duties as First Officer for a rare evening, and the other lieutenants or midshipmen, who were rarely let off the leash of Duty, either, ogled the women. Alan saw that Commander Fillebrowne was nodding, raising an appreciative eyebrow, smiling a rogues smile for every likely-looking lady-all but stroking a moustache he didn't have, in fact! All to no avail. "Ahem!" that worthy coughed finally, frustrated, his neck aflame below his fair hair.

Damme, the Venetians think we're funny! Lewrie gawped silently.

He took a diffident stance, their second tour of the gigantic salon, returning the cool, imperious, nose-high glances of the Venetians with a matching coolness, striving for Distant-But-Charming. But he saw amusement, a flicker of faint disgust-a subtle tilt of their heads, a tiny lift of expressive brows, or eyes that crinkled in mock horror to discover barbarian foreigners among the privileged. And it was the women most of all whose moist ruby lips cocked at one corner in faint revulsion. Worse, Lewrie could conjure… scant pity for the rude, crude, party-crashing English interlopers!

"Uhmm, this feels like a rum go, sir, why don't…?" Alan said from the corner of his mouth to Captain Charlton as he came level with his, shoulder.

"Cuts a bit rough, I know, Lewrie, but…" Charlton said with a shrug, his own face frozen in a polite smile for one and all.

"Well, I've run dry, sir," Lewrie whispered, tilting his stem-glass. "You'll excuse me for a moment, so I may put in to 'water'?"

He broke formation and headed for a long buffet table where the wine was cooling, to snag a glass of something to soothe his bruised ego. It wasn't that he was trolling a line to hook a new doxy, after all, he told himself; that madness with Phoebe Aretino had been daft enough, thankee! Isn't as if I've been soundly rejected by Venetian ladies if I wasn't tryiri to put the leg over one of 'em, now, is it?

Still, he felt abashed and curtly dismissed. Like a stable man allowed in the parlour for the first time, stead of the kitchen garden. He wondered if he should pull a forelock of hair, or…

No, lads, you haven't a hope, he sneered, as he watched some of the junior officers craning their necks to look at a pair of approaching beauties. Neither have I, mores the pity. Oh, well… I s'pose that's best. Last thing I need is another dalliance, really. Another mistress, specially a rich Venetian one. The Venetians have covered their bets on amour round here.

He got a second glass of wine, savouring this one more slowly, as he began to observe the social doings of the Venetian elite; for his own edification, naturally… nothing more than that. How would the most beautiful women in Europe, in the most romantic city in the entire civilised world, carry off their affairs? he idly wondered.

After a few minutes, though, he cocked an eyebrow in wry amusement of his own. "Romantic, mine arse," he whispered softly. "Seen more enthusiasm from Greenwich pensioners!"

Lewrie had been raised in London, in Saint James's Square (not the good side, admittedly) under the indifferent care of his sire, Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, in a house where a pretty chambermaid had two choices-getting "stuffed," or developing a fair turn of speed. In those times before Sir Hugo had gone smash, when they'd had "blunt" and some measure of social acceptance, he'd had entrй to routs, drums, balls, salons and teas among the better sort. Well, perhaps not quite the better sort-rather the ones who'd admit the bastard son of the bastardly Sir Hugo.

When he wasn't being bounced from one public school to another, and that the result of his own actions, the result of drink, idleness and low companions (though he did post some rather good marks before the usual ouster!), he'd been under a rough sort of tutelage, when Sir Hugo could spare the time away from his usual pastimes-such as quim, money, gambling, quim, profit, pleasure, brandy and quim. Along with huntin', quim, shootin', fishin'… and quim. There were Belinda and Gerald, his half-sister and half-brother, as examples, too. One now a high-priced Drury Lane trollop, the other a sodomite, and, if God was just, still a press-ganged landsman in the Royal Navy-after Lewrie had discovered him in a London Docks buggery-hell, and pressed Gerald himself! Dead-drunk, conked on the noggin to begin with, and tattooed with fouled anchors before being delivered downriver to the Nore. It was the best three shillings, for that tattoo, that Alan had ever spent!

Anyway, with that family of his as tutors, Alan had come early to a prodigious knowledge of pleasure and romance, of the eternal verities of Love, such as… "Always get yer cundums from the Green Lantern in Half Moon Street. Sheep-gut's best. You get a maid 'ankled'-it's twenty pounds. You get a spinster girl of a good family pregnant, and I'll bloody kill you! Widows're best, 'grass' or real 'uns."

So he knew what flirtation looked like, what veiled passion or desire looked like. And this wasn't it.

Oh, there were men and women strolling together, heads close in simpering whispers. Fans, brows, mouths and lashes fluttered in what seemed the age-old game of Eros. Yet they looked so unutterably and listlessly bored by it all! As if just going through the motions of coyness, seduction, betrayal or flattery. To be polite, so please you!

No, the only thing that seemed to set their blood truly aflame were the gaming-tables. That was the only sport in the house that set bosoms heaving, lips atremble or breaths ashudder; made those painted, rouged, pasty-pale mannequins of men roar or whimper. Only a roll of the dice, a good card to take a trick, made women cry out in pleasure or distress. No, the gaming-tables were the only animated sign of natural life in the great-hall!

Romantic Venice! Lewrie sneered to himself. Awash in, and tolerant of, cats or not, the city was turning out to be…

"I say, there!" someone shouted. Actually shouted-and in an imperious, aristocratic English drawl, too! "You there, sir! One in the sailor-suit!"

Lewrie swiveled about, trying to espy who was calling, and just who in a "sailor suit" he was jibing!

"Is that a man, wearin' King's Coat?" A tallish fellow in the Venetian tricorne hat and hood-the bauto-disguised by a black-and-white bird-beaked mask, waved. A shorter, squarer version stood at his side,» draped in a cape that seemed to hide a beef-cask figure. "Or is that King's Coat wearin' the man, hah?"

"What the…!" Lewrie began to growl.

Until the taller figure first-then the shorter-ripped off their bau-tos and masks to come forward, hands extended.

"Alan Lewrie, you old rakehell, sir!" The taller one gushed. "What are you now, a bloody post-captain? Recall me, do ye?"

"Peter?" Lewrie exclaimed in shock, and stupefied to discover an "old school chum" in Venice, of all places. "Peter Rushton? And… damn my eyes, if that ain't Clotworthy Chute with you!"

Speakin' o' low companions, Lewrie cringed to be reunited with the idlest of the idle, the most Corinthian of Corinthians, boon companions of bottle, brothel or deviltry…! Was this a good idea? Or was Dame Fate slipping him another spoonful of "the dirty"?

"Give ye joy, Alan, me lad!" Peter Rushton shouted for all the world to hear, as he came up to embrace him like the Prodigal Son just come back from the swinery. "Give ye joy!"

CHAPTER 6

Peter Rushton and Clotworthy Chute, of all people! He hadn't seen or heard from them in years-for which he'd thanked a Merciful God more than once. At Harrow, Peter had been the Honourable, a second son not in line to inherit estates or peerage, dissolute and devilish, and out like most second or third sons to enjoy life to the dregs, instead of becoming boresome-but-proper firstborn heirs. The Navy, and the King's Regiments, were positively stiff with such young wastrels. Peter would have gotten the lesser title once his father had gone toes-up-Sir Peter Rushton, Bart., hereditary knight and baronet. Whilst his older brother-from what Alan could recall of a visit from that worthy to Harrow, in the short term Lewrie had spent there, a rather grim and forbidding hymn-singer-would rise from his current knighthood to be the next true baron, heir of all and a true peer of the realm. And Peter would remain on a short leash and a miserly annual remittance for the rest of his natural life-if his stern father and dour brother had any say in the matter! When flush, Peter tended to spread himself rather wide cross the world, beyond even his own rather thin-stretched bounds of sanity, in an orgy of Spending and Getting, rantipoling and gambling, a true Buck Of The First Head who made even the most dissolute and depraved gawp in awe of his daring. Last Alan knew, Peters short leash was Ј1,000 a year-a sum that could go in a single evening.

Clotworthy Chute, well… Clotworthy had always been the oily young swine, who could toady to his betters with the latest jest or the juiciest gossip, could badger and terrorise his inferiors, knew where and how to obtain drink, whores, copies of exams or alter test results, made small loans or steered fellow students who were "skint" or overextended to usurers of his own ilk. Tuppence here, sixpence there… then on to shillings, half-crowns and pounds. Last he'd seen of Clotworthy in London, winter of '84, he'd become a polished "Captain Sharp" who lured newly inherited young "Chaw-Bacon" heirs, or "Country-Put" heiresses into both vice and poverty, posing as their smiling guide to what was Fashionable and Fast; finagling a hefty commission for his services, if not a loan he'd never repay. Chute knew to the pence just how much a body was worth, at first sight-and exactly how much he'd be able to "touch" them for.