"And the French midshipman?"
"That clumsy lout, God no, Lewrie! He's to be exchanged. Too many of our squirearchy's slack-jawed sons aboard Berwick, those with such a lot of 'interest,' are festerin' in France. Midshipman Hainaut will be reporting back to his masters, and the less said about me the better. Best he suffer an accident on the way, he knows too much already, seen too much, but…" Twigg sighed, as if to say "what can you do?" "Knows who you are, Lewrie, he does. Not as thickheaded a peasant as he looks. Scrub him up, dress his hair… a proper uniform, and the sky's the limit for him. His Die Narbe will take care of that, I assure you."
"Yer clerk, Mister Mountjoy… SAH!" the Marine shouted.
"Of Die Narbe, more later," Twigg promised smugly, rising for his introduction. Mountjoy, as usual, disappointed. He'd risen from a deep slumber, dressed haphazardly, and presented himself in a pair of bear-hide carpet slippers, bare ankles, and dark-blue slop trousers, into which he'd crammed the tail of his knee-length nightshirt, with a ratty old drab-brown wool dressing gown atop. Mountjoy still wore a tasseled sleeping cap over his unruly hair, too.
"You sent for me, sir?" he said, yawning and blinking from the sudden change to lanthorn light in the great-cabins. Scratching a bit, too, it must be admitted.
"Good God, what's that?" Twigg growled, stiffening.
"Mountjoy, my clerk," Lewrie puzzled.
"No, I mean that, Lewrie!" Twigg grumbled, pointing.
"That, sir… is a cat," Lewrie enlightened him. "You know… fells domesticas? Name's Toulon. He's the same sort o' disaster."
"I despise cats!" Twigg glowered, hellish-black.
"We wake you up from a good nap… sweetlin'?" Lewrie asked of Toulon, bending down to scratch the top of Toulon 's head, concealing a small smirk of sudden pleasure.
"Mister Mountjoy, the name that you are to remember, on pain of your life, sir… is Silberberg. Simon Silberberg," Twigg began, and riveting Mountjoy's attention, turning the beginnings of a yawn into a gape of awe. "From Coutts's, do you follow? A representative of your captain's bank, do you understand, sir? But… and this you will forget immediately I'm gone… damme!"
Toulon, following the perverse wont of his tribe, had gone for Twigg immediately, purring with secret, malicious delight to discover a cat-hater-to twine around his ankles, sniff at his shoes and silk stockings, which were new, fascinating… and perhaps might require a sprayed marking… or a few clawed snags to make 'em simply perfect]
"Get that… that… beast away from me, Lewrie!" Mister Twigg demanded, skittering as if he were going to do a dance to Saint Vitus-or hop atop the sofa like a lady who'd seen a mouse.
"Here, Toulon. Mousey," Lewrie tempted, fetching out the wool scrap toy on a length of small-stuff. "Leave the bad old man alone." He singsonged to his ram-cat, which was a perfect excuse to expose a childlike smile of fiendish glee.
Think I really love you, puss, he thought quite warmly.
Twigg, in his guise of Simon Silberberg from Coutts's, had been in Leghorn and Porto Especia, with an occasional jog inland to Florence, as a commercial representative ought, when Mister Drake had sent a messenger to him, regarding the seizures of II Furioso and II Briosco. He'd not found ships registered as Tuscan under those names, indeed, had not discovered any public record of a trading company calling itself the Compagnia di Commercia Mare di Liguria.
"No public stock offer on what passes for their exchange, sirs," Twigg/ Silberberg told them over an eye-opening glass of brandy. "Nor any articles of corporation filed with their government. Pretty much the same murky situation as obtains here in Genoa that so puzzled Mister Drake. It was helpful in the extreme, though, Mister Mountjoy, to receive a fair-hand copy of the entries in that small ledger book you found. Cryptic as the headings were, still I was able to form an educated guess as to the identities of the principals."
"Guilio Gallado, sir?" Mountjoy inquired eagerly, quite awake by then, though they'd been at it for at least an hour.
"To the tee, young sir," Twigg replied quickly, with an admiring smile, though a damn' thin'un, as was his wont. "Unfortunately, I cannot 'front' him in any fashion, and he's much too prominent for me to… uhm, spirit away, for a probing interrogation. Though, I'm told he was quite upset, and shaken, by his capture so early on in the life of their venture. I have arranged for his correspondence to be intercepted, and read. More of the vinegar or lemon-juice secret writing, as I mentioned earlier, you recall, Lewrie?"
"Uhm," Alan commented, feet up on his desk and slouched down in a padded chair, with Toulon now quietly napping in his lap.
"Unfortunately, too," Twigg went on, as if he, and ergo them, had all the time in the world, though it was growing quite late. "I cannot substitute correspondence, either overt or covert, to cause confusion. Indeed, until we are certain of all the principals, we cannot strike at any of them."
"There is the niggling problem that they're neutrals, citizens of a sovereign Tuscany," Lewrie pointed out. "But that never stopped you much before."
"My Lord, this is fascinating, sir!" Mountjoy cried, wriggling in his chair with excitement.
"You do me too much injustice, Lewrie, 'deed you do, sir," the old spy carped. "Why, were I a passionate man, I'd take a grave exception to it. Though fencing words with you is amusing, at times…" He tossed Lewrie a beatific smile; another damn' brief un. "No, I fear I can do little, for the nonce. It will be up to you, and your Nelson, to… how did Captain Ayscough put it, Lewrie? That I should hold his coat, and let another batsman have his innings? No, to lop off conspiracy at the root may be beyond us, but I shall be quite content should your squadron take as many of their ships as possible, cutting profits to nil… and disabusing the conspirators of the notion that they may aid France and prosper. Or that France will aid them in their plans."
"So it goes beyond profit, sir?" Mountjoy gushed.
"Indeed it does, Mister Mountjoy. Lewrie, I'm told you have a wager with Captain Cockburn? He'll buy you that shore dinner. May I suggest roast crow for him? No, sirs. This exceeds humanity, or care for their fellows, from the Genoese. Or for the neutrality, the very sovereignty of Tuscany. Pignore Gallado, I have learned, is part of a salon group of like-minded progressives, quite taken with the American Revolution, and with its ideals. Overeducated, overwealthy dilletantes and intellectual wastrels. Idealists, some of them."
"Perhaps they see in French occupation a new order, sir?" Alan asked, reminded of his talk with Senator di Silvano earlier. Or, with his besotting mistress, at the least. "Mean to say, surely there are some benighted fools who believe all this Democratic, Mob-ocracy cant. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity… the franchise given to just anybody."
"Granted, Lewrie," Twigg allowed. "Rather perceptive of you, I must say. Yes, sirs… even at home, well. Priestley and those of his ilk, the gimlet-eyed… Reformers. Fortunately, they're not rich enough to afford private armies and mobs of thugs, nor do they possess constitutions of an active nature that might allow them to conspire… beyond printing a few odd penny tracts. And we've shut all that down, quite successfully. In Ireland, there are more worrisome combinations… but then in Ireland, there bloody always are! Gallado is, for his rather advanced age, very active in certain societies…"