Claimed by the Rogue (12 page)

“I’m all ears. Who is ’e?”

Aristide took a long drag of his cheroot, exhaling before answering, “Robert Bellamy, lately known to the Company as Robert Lazarus. His ship, The Swan, is berthed at Blackwall amongst the import vessels. According to my fiancée, he is likely biding with his sister and brother-in-law in Berkley Square.” Eking the information out of Phoebe had proven on par with straining pudding through a skein, but in the end her guilt had proven his ally.

Picking at his gold-capped front teeth with a blackened fingernail, Payne appeared to weigh his latest “assignment”. “Berkley Square, eh? Fambly must be top drawer.”

Aristide tapped ashes into a pewter bowl. “His sister made a fortuitous marriage, as I mean to do. For now, find out his familiars, his habits, where he sleeps, with
whom
he sleeps.”

Sucking on his teeth, Payne asked, “What do you want me to do with him—or should I say
to
him?”

Aristide ground his cheroot to ash. Imagining it was Robert Bellamy whose light he snuffed, he replied, “Nothing—for now.”

Upon leaving Phoebe, Robert headed for the Board of Admiralty, where Phoebe’s brother Reggie served as a clerk in the service of the Lords Commissioner
.
Among its mandates, the Board was charged with enforcing the Piracy Law and keeping a record of violations thereof.

Walking his horse through the classically styled entrance screen, Robert called on his courage to do that which had been delayed for far too long. He dismounted, turned his mount over to a porter and headed up the steps of the U-shaped brick building.

Reggie’s suite of offices was on the uppermost floor. Upon stating his purpose to one of the guards posted inside the entrance, Robert ascended the grand staircase. Stepping off the landing, he passed the boardroom, its floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto Whitehall, and continued through the warren of intersecting corridors and enclosed offices to Reggie’s door.
 

You can do this, Bellamy. You must do this.

Several sharp raps brought the door opening. Bleary-eyed and brandy-breathed, Reggie stood back to admit him. “Bellamy, splendid to see you. Sorry if I’ve kept you waiting.”

“Not at all,” Robert lied, doing his damndest not to mind the guiding hand Reggie laid upon his sleeve. “How is civil service treating you?” Stepping to the side, he moved beyond arm’s reach.

Reggie closed the door behind him and turned about. Catching a strong whiff of spirits, Robert studied him. Six years ago they hadn’t been friends, but they hadn’t been enemies either. Blessed with the same thick blond hair and slate blue eyes as Phoebe, once Reggie might have passed for her twin rather than her senior sibling. Now he looked nearer to forty than thirty. Judging from his pink-shot eyes and high color, his rakehell ways were more than fleeting youthful folly.
 

“Nothing near as noble or colorful as I venture to say your years away have been. My days are an odyssey of endless minutia—reports, meeting minutes, correspondence that must be answered and filed—utter enslavement.”

Biting back the temptation to inquire if Reggie might prefer splitting rocks instead, Robert said, “I regret that I must add to your burdens.”

A gentleman born and bred, Reggie shrugged aside the suggestion. “Sit, please,” he said, waiving him toward a high-backed chair covered in leather.

Though Robert would have rather said his piece standing, he reminded himself that he was no longer aboard ship. On land and in London, there were proprieties to be observed, implicitly understood rules of engagement every whit as codified as the protocol for a sultan’s court.
 

“So,” Reggie began, observing Robert overtop his tented hands, hands marked by slight but telling tremble. “I suppose felicitations on your resurrection are in order.”

Robert inclined his head. “I fear your mother is less than elated.”
 

Reggie did not dispute him. “I marvel your ears haven’t singed to cinders from her rant at breakfast the next morning, not to mention the clamor across the St. James’s clubs. You should know that you’ve been officially entered in the betting book at White’s.”

“That’s one way of getting in, I suppose,” Robert remarked. How ironic that the club that once had declined him as a member should include him now in their infamous book. “And what, if I may ask, is the nature of the wager?”

Reggie hesitated. “Whether you’ll, er…win Phoebe back to you or leave London with your, er—”

“Tail between my legs in deep disgrace?” Robert finished for him.

Reggie had sudden difficulty meeting his eyes. “Something along those lines, yes.”

“And which outcome have you wagered upon?”

Toying with the feather of his quill, Reggie answered, “This once I have laid my money on the same outcome on which I’ve set my heart—on you and Phoebe—though I warn you, it shan’t be easy. As the savior of my sister’s prospects, the Frenchman can do little wrong in our household. The other evening’s farcical masque is but one example of the sway he holds and not only over Mama.”

Robert’s back stiffened. “You speak as though Phoebe is a wizened crone.” Was six-and-twenty truly so damnably old?

Reggie shrugged. “Not wizened, but tarnished to be sure. Two failed engagements, first to Anthony and then to you, are a lot for a woman’s reputation to weather.”

Phoebe had said as much the other evening and Chelsea had echoed her, but ere now, Robert had been too angry and hurt to give the complaint much credence. He did now. An unwed Englishwoman might enjoy greater freedoms than her female counterpart in the East, but her worth was every whit as weighted by her chastity and breeding capability. For the first time he fully owned the severe social straits in which his six years away had stranded Phoebe.

“Granted it’s not very sporting to slip out on your sister’s betrothal ball,” Reggie continued, “but the truth is even before you returned I wasn’t overly keen on her choice of husbands, at least not this time ’round.” He added the latter with a crooked smile that likely had persuaded many a misused mistress to forgive him his faults.
 

So there was at least one Tremont who was less than enamored of Phoebe’s Frenchman. Tucking away that bit of intelligence for later, Robert came around to his purpose. “I haven’t come to speak of your sister, but to make my official report. As the sole survivor of The Phoenix to make his way back to England, that grim duty falls to me.”
 

What had taken place aboard the doomed East Indiaman wasn’t only Robert’s story. He shared it with men like the ship’s portly purser, Bob Snow, who’d suffered the hacking off of all ten fingers and toes, one digit per hour, before blessedly bleeding out. He shared it with the ship’s middle-aged cook, Nate Blount, who’d met his end submerged headfirst in a boiling cauldron of his own soup. Deemed too fat or old for enslavement, their screams and pleas for mercy would haunt Robert until his dying day. They were his brethren now, their kinship steeped in suffering and bathed in blood. It fell to him to stand as their witness.
 

He drew a bracing breath, calling upon his courage. “The Phoenix wasn’t sunk by foul weather as is commonly credited. She was done in by pirates.”

Reggie’s ruddy complexion drained. “Piracy, bloody bad business that.” His gaze went to an adjoining door, which Robert surmised led to an interior office. “I’ll just call in my secretary, and he’ll jot this all down.” He pushed back from the desk and started up.

“No!”

Robert’s command, issued in a tone similar to the one he used aboard ship, sent Reggie sinking back into his seat. “But I’ve a dashed dodgy hand and—”

“I make my report to you alone or I walk away.” It would be challenge aplenty to say what he must to Phoebe’s brother. He’d yet to begin and already his chest was tightening as though leather straps once more cinched him. The prospect of baring his blackened soul before some likely bespectacled, beetle-browed stranger was beyond conceiving.

Reggie reached for a sheaf of paper. “Very well, as you wish.” Dipping his pen’s nub into the ink well, he looked up. “Let us begin at the beginning, shall we?”

“Mark me this is my official report which I am making to you in your official capacity. You’re not to speak a word of it outside this office.” Robert stabbed a finger into the space separating them.

“Not even to Phoebe?”

“
Especially
not to Phoebe.”

Focusing his gaze not on his confessor’s countenance but on the wavering pen, Robert began. Unlike his previous two expurgated recitations, this time he held nothing back. The beatings by fists sheathed in brass knuckles and boots bearing razors at the tips, the whippings and brandings, the mastheading and starving, the sundry psychological tortures used to break his will whilst leaving sufficient of his body intact for the slavers, all poured out of him.

Five sheets of paper in, he finally finished, sweat sheathed and shaking. Only then did he dare lift his gaze from the quill feathers to Reggie’s face. The clerk’s cheeks had gone as chalky as the Cliffs of Dover.
 

Reggie raised his shocked gaze to Robert’s. “Good God, man, I’d no notion.”
 

Robert rolled his shoulders, willing the bunched muscles to ease. “Why would you?”

“How much does Phoebe know?”

“Beyond the ship sinking, nothing—and I mean to keep it that way.”

“You should tell her. It would…that is to say it might make all the difference.”

Adamant, Robert shook his head. “My sister made a similar case, and my answer to her was the same as it is to you. No. And you are not to tell her either. Breathe a bloody word that’s on those sheets, and I’ll have you before your superior.”

Reggie put down the pen. “Draw it mild, old boy, I shan’t say a peep, not to Phoebe nor anyone beyond official channels. But should you change your mind—”

“I won’t.” As much as Robert wanted her back, the possibility that she might return to him out of pity was beyond his ability to stomach.

“Still, old sod, give it a think. Despite the stiff upper lip she’s grown, Phoebe’s still got the same dashed soft heart. If you don’t believe me, you should see her with those ragamuffins she’s taken beneath her wing, especially that recently arrived little blonde imp. Her ‘working’ is all but driving our mother to Bedlam, God bless her. Takes some of the parental vigilance from me,” he added with a grin. “Otherwise I might find myself disowned.”

Robert stood to go, legs as shaky as though this was his first footing upon land after a long sea voyage. He’d kept the truth bottled up for so long that, having released it, he wasn’t certain what to do about the sudden sinking emptiness.

Reggie rose as well. “Now that you’ve sworn me to silence, is there anything I can do for you, anything at all? If so, you’ve only to name it.” Crossing to the front of the desk, he clapped a hand to Robert’s shoulder.
 

Robert fought the urge to knock it off. Pinning Phoebe’s arms the other evening hadn’t been solely from anger. Earlier on the balcony, allowing her to touch him had been a test he’d passed but barely. And yet despite the disastrous turn their reunion had taken, there was no denying that kissing her had fed the starved space inside him.

“There is something you can do, though I shan’t hold you to your promise.”

Dropping his hand, Reggie said, “Name it.”

“I should greatly appreciate being made privy to your sister’s social calendar for the following fortnight.”

Chapter Five

Almack’s Assembly Rooms, King Street, One Week Later

The ball and art auction to benefit the Foundling Hospital was a veritable crush. Persuading all seven patronesses of Almack’s to open their hallowed hall for other than the weekly Wednesday night subscription dances had required patience on par with pushing a bill through Parliament, but Phoebe had persevered. The club’s cachet virtually guaranteed success despite the rooms being drafty and lukewarm lemonade the sole beverage served; still, with its floor-length velvet draperies, inlaid pier glass wall panels and double-tiered crystal chandeliers, the great room made a magnificent sight. Standing on the outskirts of the dance floor greeting guests, her arm linked with Aristide’s, Phoebe conceded that her last-minute “guest” deserved much of the credit for the unprecedented crowd. Robert’s return was the preeminent topic of gossip in every West End drawing room. She’d even heard a rumor that there was some sort of wager going at White’s, though Reggie refused to confirm or deny it.
 

Yet again her gaze strayed to Robert. Positioned on the far side of the dance floor almost directly across from her, he stood stoic in the face of the goggle-eyed stares and high whispers directed his way. So far as Phoebe could say, he hadn’t budged since his arrival, barring his eyes, which seemed to follow her everywhere. One arm folded behind his back, he looked stiff and out of sorts—and breathtakingly handsome. With his unruly waves tamed by pomade and combed back from his square-jawed face and his brawny body sheathed in expert tailoring—he’d even worn the requisite knee breeches!—he stood apart from the other gentlemen and not only because of his sun-bronzed skin or the diamond ear stud he still stubbornly wore.