Agamemnon thought Clytemnestra'd be glad t'see him, too, Lewrie sourly told himself as he alit on his own land for the first time in years; wonder if I should tell Cassandra t'wait in the carriage, like he did. And it came to him, a most apt snatch of classical Greek play that he'd stumbled over in his school-days, from Agamemnon, in point of fact:
It is evil and a thing of terror when a wife
sits in the house forlorn with no man by, and hears
rumours that like a fever die to break again.
CHAPTER NINE
He thought it good policy to knock, not just barge in. It took a long two minutes, though, before anyone responded to the rapping of his doorknocker. A sour-looking older woman in a sack gown and mob cap opened the door, looked him up and down as she might inspect a drunken, reeling house-breaker, and in a pinched-nostriled and pursed-lipped impatient way, haughtily enquired, "Yes? And what is it that you want of this house, sir?"
"I live here…… It's mine" Lewrie snarled back. "Step lively and tell Mistress Lewrie that Captain Lewrie's home," he said, walking past the mort, swirling off his boat-cloak, and sailing his gilt-laced cocked hat at the hall tree. "Now?" Lewrie prompted the woman who was balking in prim outrage. "Devil take it… hulloa, the house!" Lewrie bellowed in his best quarterdeck voice. "Anyone to home?" He barely had time to take in the black-and-white chequered marble of his foyer, the family portraits on the walls, the twin Venetian bombй chests at either side of the staircase, before chaos befell him.
First, bugling in alarm, came a setter belonging to his elder son, Sewal-lis, closely escorted by a fluffy, yapping ball of fur he thought was a Pomeranian, with his younger son, Hugh, galloping down the stairs and squealing in eleven-year-old glee, whooping like a Red Indian!