Claimed by the Rogue

Acknowledgements

Publishing a book truly does take a village, and how fortunate I am that mine is filled with so very many generous and gifted people. I name but a few of them here.

To my editor, Amy Sherwood for her patience in waiting for the novel to be born as well as for her artful stewarding of the work from the first draft onward.
 

To my agent, Louise Fury of The Bent Agency, for being so unfailingly smart, supportive—and well, great.

To Tom Wareham, Curator of Maritime and Community History, The Museum of London, for his kind and comprehensive responses to my emailed questions on maritime routes between England and India during the Regency as well as his enormously helpful explanations on sundry and fascinating aspects of London’s Docklands. Any errors here are, of course, wholly my own. (To wit, Regency enthusiasts will no doubt note that the Serpentine Bridge in Hyde Park was erected in 1826, six years after the start of my story proper).

Also, to my former research assistant and always friend, Julie—Jules—Kendrick, I will always cherish the memories of our days of historical fact-finding online in the pre-Google era.

Finally to my family, both biped and quadruped, for putting up with my disappearing into my office for hours—sometimes days—on end. As much as I adore hanging out with my swoon-worthy heroes and intrepid heroines, no creature of fiction can begin to touch my joy in spending time in the Real World with all of you.

Prologue

The East India Docks, Blackwall, London, April 1820

Home, finally I’m home.

Captain Robert Lazarus, formerly known as Robert Bellamy, stood on the ship’s bridge. A hand upon the rudder, he steered the East Indiaman through the narrow neck of waterway leading into the harbor, prompting cheers of “Land, land!” and much waving of caps and brawny arms among his men. Once they’d made Spithead, he’d dismissed his pilot and taken the tiller himself. This was his last voyage, his swan’s song upon The Swan—or so he hoped—and he’d felt a deep need to pilot her into his home port himself.

Ahead, the lock gate lifted. Beyond it, the bustling diorama of the London Docklands unfolded. Merchantmen similar to his craft crammed the berths, their cargo of sugar and spices, tea and Madeira wine offloaded under the watch of armed militiamen wearing company coats, the burly stevedores bearing their burdens toward the warehouses fronting the quay. Everything seemed busier than he remembered and vastly bigger. Was it truly so? He couldn’t for certain say. Six years away had muddied his memory, erasing all but the most vital details—the silken feel of Phoebe’s skin beneath his fingertips, the way her eyes mirrored the shifting hues of the London sky, the tangy taste of her tears when last they’d kissed, a kiss meant to convey not farewell but a brief goodbye.
 

And now he was finally home, home to England and, please God, home to Phoebe too, assuming she would have him. His welcome was in no way certain, his homecoming entirely unannounced. The letters he’d meant to send before setting sail from Madras had all perished before posting, crumpled balls of contrived explanations and tangled, torn-asunder half truths tossed missile style upon his cabin floor. Just as well. How
did
a man go about informing the woman he loved, the woman who’d waited not for the promised six months but instead six years that he wasn’t drowned, dead, after all?
 

He would discover soon enough. Once he saw her, he would have his answer not from her lips but from her eyes. Phoebe’s lips had been known to tell a fib or two in the service of saving someone’s feelings, but her eyes never lied. Needing to see them now, he reached up and tugged his neck cloth free, fingertips feeling for the silver chain buried beneath the stock, the padlock-shaped locket housing his beloved’s portrait in miniature resting against his breastbone. The keepsake, a match for the one he’d given her before leaving, had not left his person for six years barring the one terrible time when it had been torn from his throat.

“She’s a pretty piece, your woman.” Beneath the black satin mask, the corners of the pirate captain’s mouth lifted. “What’s her name?” he asked, toying with the locket lying open in his gloved palm. Though the band he led was Malagasy, his voice carried the vowels of Northern England.

Trussed, Robert managed to twist his head away from the slimy cabin wall. “I wouldn’t have you foul it with your tongue.” He gathered what precious little spittle he had left and spat, striking his tormentor square in the eye.

Not even the swathe of mask could conceal his captor’s welling rage. The pirate wheeled about to the deckhand wielding the whip. “Lay on him and see you don’t let up until he surrenders the slut’s name or his last breath.”

Fifty lashes in Robert broke. “Phoebe Tremont, Phoebe Tremont, Phoebe Tremont,” he called out again and again, singsong fashion, almost as if he were a child reciting a nursery rhyme. Having finally succumbed to betraying her, he couldn’t seem to stop. Laughing, they cut him down, dragged him back to his cell, and tossed him inside. Fevered and bleeding, he lay belly down on the filthy straw-strewn boards, his back on fire, the fractured remains of his half-mad mind fixed on a single thought.

I deserve to die.

Robert gripped the ship’s wheel hard, squeezing the smooth wood until his tanned knuckles turned white, willing the damnable memory to retreat. Utter erasure, he owned, was an impossible dream. But there was one dream yet left to him, one that was as yet pure and untainted and unequivocally good.
 

Phoebe.
 

He slid the chain over his head and used the callused edge of his thumb to pry open the locket’s hinged casing. His beloved’s weather-spotted miniature stared up at him, the oval-shaped face by now as familiar as his own if not more so, the quicksilver gaze gentle yet direct, the high brow and aristocratic nose softened by a rosebud mouth parted in the slightest of smiles.

“So you won’t forget what I look like,” she’d said on their last day together in London before he’d let stubborn pride and the sea carry him away.

Swearing seamen’s curses, Robert snapped the case closed and slipped the chain over his head. What a bloody idiot he’d been to even think of leaving her, an absolute fool to have done so. But he had. And now the dewy-eyed boy Phoebe had once loved enough to want to wed was every whit as dead as if he were indeed buried at the bottom of the sea. The man returning in his stead might wear his face and bear his name, yet he was a different beast entirely. A man who’d survived torture and near death to be sold at market like so much chattel, who’d labored as a beast of burden for more than two years before a kinder enslavement intervened, and had managed to survive it all, battered but not broken, dented but not done in. Could Phoebe learn to love
that
man? Would she be willing to try?

Hoping so, Robert steered them into the dock basin. The lock lowered behind them, the barrier blocking off any last possibility of a hasty, reconsidered retreat. For a brief, dizzying moment he once more knew what it was to be caged, not by pirates or slavers or sinking ships but by the finality of his own irrevocable choices. In a few short hours he would stand face-to-face with Phoebe, not her silent, inanimate portrait but the living, breathing
her
. The thought sufficed to suck the moisture from his mouth, leaving his lips and tongue dry as sun-bleached bone. And yet in the midst of his mayhem, he allowed he wanted neither to retreat nor run, not now, not ever again.

The vacant berth lay just ahead. Resolved, he steered toward it. As he did, he felt a familiar presence at his back.

Without turning, he said, “Home, Caleb. This is my home, or at least it was.”
 

The turbaned Arab approached, more than six feet of bronze skin and broad shoulders and communicative dark eyes; the latter served for the tongue the torturer had cut out. Since meeting in a granite quarry in Madagascar, they’d shared a food trough, a slop bucket and a mutual responsibility for one another’s lives.

Joining him at the rail, Caleb acknowledged the statement with the barest of nods. Having met after Caleb’s muting, Robert couldn’t be certain of how much English his friend knew, yet the sympathy in the dark eyes meeting his seemed to say that “home” was understood.

Robert turned his gaze back to the harbor. It had been years since he’d prayed but now he sent up his silent plea to the heavens, to whatever deity yet might bide there.

Dear God, let her be well.

Dear God, let it not be too late.

Dear God, let her want me still.

Chapter One

Hanover Square, London

Phoebe poked another pin into the coil of wheat-colored hair at her nape and regarded her reflection in the cheval dressing glass. “Why Aristide must have a masque for our engagement ball baffles me utterly.”

The costume ball may have been her betrothed’s idea, but casting the entire Tremont family as personages from the Elizabethan era was her mother’s doing. Phoebe’s ensemble, a brocaded Italian silk meant to convey the character of the Scots Queen Mary Stuart, was proving to be both cumbersome and confining. The crinoline bolstering the bell-shaped skirt would make dancing a misery.

A dramatic sigh rose from the bed. “I think it’s dreadfully romantic.” Sprawled belly down on the quilted counterpane, her baby sister Belinda absently twirled the costume wig whilst from the floor Phoebe’s spaniel Pippin monitored the spinning hair with rounded eyes. “I don’t see why Mama must be such a stickler and banish me from attending. I
am
almost seventeen.”

Phoebe studied the mutinous face in the mirror. With her honey-colored tresses and golden brown eyes, Belinda was a coltish beauty on the cusp of womanhood.

At times such as this she was also a royal pain in the rump.

Reaching for patience, Phoebe answered, “You should be counting your kind fortune. This costume is perfectly miserable. You could take my place for all I care.”

Belinda’s gaze lit. “Do you mean as Queen of Scotland or Countess of Beaumont?”
 

“That is the outside of enough. And by the by, do stop tormenting my dog.”

Belinda snorted. “Egads but someone’s touchy.”

Phoebe turned back to her flushed reflection, alarmed by how Belinda’s teasing had rattled her. Despite Aristide’s pressing, she had yet to settle on a wedding date. Once their betrothal was announced at midnight, she would not be able to put him off any longer. She asked herself why she should wish to do so.

Because you’re in love with a ghost
, her inner voice answered for her.

Robert
. Her heart hitched, the pain every whit as knife-sharp as it had been on that terrible day six years before when a representative from the East India Company had materialized on her doorstep bearing tidings of her beloved’s demise. Robert’s ship, The Phoenix, had foundered somewhere off the Comoros Islands. Her last correspondence from him had come by way of Capetown.

But time sallied forth, or so her mother never tired of telling her. Her little sister, Belinda, was little no longer. The girl would make her come out the next season. It was difficult to fathom. Phoebe’s own presentation to society felt as though it had taken place merely yesterday for all that it had been eight years. How brimming with hope she’d been back then, how certain that a fairytale future was hers. Only the fairytale had ended the day Robert had boarded the doomed ship at Gravesend along with the Company’s other new recruits, troops and supplies.
 

With two broken betrothals behind her, the courtship of Aristide Bouchart, Count of Beaumont, was greeted as a godsend and not only by her mother. They’d met at Almack’s during the Little Season. The dashing French expatriate had settled his dark gaze upon her, forded a path across the crowded assembly room to where she’d stood holding up the wall with the other long-toothed misses and eagle-eyed matrons, and bespoken a dance.
’Tis my fortune he’s after,
she’d told herself even as she’d allowed that the solid warmth of his hand at her back had felt uncommonly fine. Her mother’s hasty conference with one of Almack’s senior patronesses had laid that fear to rest. Unlike so many French émigrés fleeing Bonaparte’s despotism, the count had managed to bring much of his wealth with him, which he’d invested in a profitable wine-importing venture. Strictly speaking, he’d gone into trade. But even a notorious snob such as Lady Tremont had been willing to overlook that less than desirable detail in the service of saving an elder daughter from spinsterhood.