Elizabeth Mansfield (3 page)

“Papers?” The lieutenant looked nonplussed. “What papers?”

“If you’ll permit your men to untie my hands, I’ll show you.”

Mr. Benson looked over his shoulder for guidance. The captain nodded, and the lieutenant motioned to the guard with the knife to slice the straps. Then Tom reached into his coat and pulled out an oilskin packet. He was about to untie the strings when the lieutenant reached out his hand. “Here, give it to me.”

Mr. Benson nervously undid the strings as if he feared a snake might emerge and sting his finger. He pulled out the contract which Tom had signed with the captain of the
Triton
, and his eyes slid over the closely-written words. Then, biting his lip, he looked hesitantly over his shoulder. With a sigh of annoyance, the captain came up behind him and picked up the document.

After a quick scan of the papers, the captain looked up at Tom, his lips twisted in a small smile. “So,” he said with quiet menace, “you’re a mate, are you? Well, well! You
have
brought me a good haul this time, Moresby. It’s not often we get recruits who know the difference between main and mizzen.”

“But you can’t recruit me,” Tom argued. “Those papers prove I’m exempted by law—”

“Papers?” the captain asked. “What papers?” He ripped the document in half and then in half again. “Did you see any papers, Mr. Benson?”

The lieutenant smirked. “No, Captain.”

“Did anyone here see any papers?” Captain Brock asked, looking around at all the faces pleasantly, all the while tearing the precious sheets into shreds.

“No, Captain,” the sailor-guards said in unison.

Captain Brock turned and walked back into the shadows, reappearing again with a washbowl in his hand. He placed the bowl on the deck before Mr. Benson and threw the shreds of paper into it. “Burn it,” he said curtly, turned on his heel and strode off to his inner cabin, slamming the wooden door behind him.

Every man around the desk watched soundlessly as Tom’s papers burned. They all knew that a man’s future was going up in smoke. But Tom felt no emotion but a sharp, alert tension.
There’ll never be a better time
, he thought, and he pressed down hard on Daniel’s foot while, at the same moment, he snatched up the flaming washbowl and smashed it down on the lieutenant’s head. “Use the log book!” he shouted to Daniel, and he ducked down and lunged at the legs of the guard closest to him.

Daniel, with a cry of elation, snatched up the heavy volume and swung it at the head of the guard at his right, while the other one was busily occupied putting out the fire on the desk. Tom, meanwhile, from his place at the top of his first guard, grabbed the legs of the second and pulled him down. Before they’d recovered from their surprise, he scrambled to his feet in time to see the King’s officer advancing on him with a drawn cutlass. Again he ducked and dived for the fellow’s midsection. They toppled over in a heap, the officer waving his deadly implement wildly in the air. Tom grabbed at his wrist, for the
officer was trying urgently to hack him to pieces. Suddenly Daniel loomed above them and, using the log book as a broadsword, knocked the cutlass out of the officer’s hand and sent it spinning across the floor. The fellow cried out in pain. Tom seized the moment and administered a smashing right to his jaw, while Daniel used the log book to good effect on the heads of the two tackled sailors who were just getting to their feet again.

Tom leaped up, fists ready, but only Daniel was still erect, his breast heaving and his eyes shining with the glow of victory. Tom chortled in delighted surprise at the sight of six men sprawled about in various degrees of semi-consciousness. “We
did
it!” Daniel crowed, hugging Tom and slapping him on the back.

“Don’t congratulate yourselves too soon,” came the captain’s icy voice from the shadows, and they wheeled about to see him step into the light, pointing at them with the black, ugly barrel of a very long pistol.

“Go ahead and shoot, Captain Brock,” Tom said, moving in front of Daniel and motioning behind his back for Daniel to edge toward the cabin’s outer door. “I’d rather be dead than serve under you.”

“But you’ll live,” the captain muttered with chilling calm. “You’ll live … and you’ll serve!”

Tom wished he could look up at the lantern to gauge its distance accurately, but he knew that if he moved his eyes from the captain’s face he’d give his scheme away. “
Duck
, Daniel!” he shouted and swung his arm at the lantern.

A shot rang out, and he felt the ball whiz by the side of his face as the lantern swung across the desk, a glowing missile aimed right for the captain’s head.

They didn’t stay to watch it reach its mark but bolted for the door. The companionway was already filling with sailors who’d heard the noises, but they were either too startled by the sudden appearance of the fleeing men or too sympathetic to their plight to grab hold of them. “Head starboard,” Tom gasped as they broke onto the deck. They ran across the deck, meeting with no obstruction in the darkness, and came to the railing near the stern. With the sounds of shouts and running footsteps hot behind them, they climbed up on the railing and, with one quick look at one another, leaped overboard into the black water.

Camilla stared out of the library window at the sunny lawns and chaste gardens of Wyckfield Park (a vista which had been acclaimed for generations as the most beautiful in the county) and admitted to herself that she hated the very sight of the place. The entire world might admire the grounds—those lawns which were mowed, edged and cultivated until they resembled lush velvet; the hedges which were clipped, trimmed and manicured until there was not a twig that would dare to pop crookedly out of place; the fall flowers which were lined up below her window in rigid neatness, each row bearing blooms of only one color so that the rows of reds could never presume to mix with the pinks—but
she
found nothing admirable about the view.

The carefully tended, rich and spacious grounds of Wyckfield Park were an anathema to her. To her eyes they seemed a travesty of natural beauty—a place where the Goddess of Nature had been bound, shackled and restricted at every turn. Nowhere on the estate’s vast acreage had any living thing been allowed to develop in its own way. Each hedge and shrub had been made to conform to the Wyckfield’s grand plan, every natural instinct compelled to yield. That was why Camilla hated the grounds—they were a monument to repression.
Like my own life
, she thought, crossing her black-clad arms over her chest as if to ward off a cold draught.

“What’s the matter, Mama?” came a child’s voice behind her.

Camilla put on a smile and turned to face her ten-year-old daughter who was curled up on the sofa with a copy of
Evelina
on her lap. “Matter? Nothing at all. What makes you ask?”

The child looked over the spectacles perched on her nose and fixed her blue eyes on her mother’s face with a gaze that was unnervingly mature. “You sighed three times,” she accused.

“Did I?” Camilla’s smile lost its strained insincerity and widened into a grin. “Have you been sitting there counting my sighs?”

The child grinned back. “It’s no great task to count to three, you know.”

“True, but I thought you were absorbed in your reading.”

“I was, until your heartrending breathing distracted me.”

“Heartrending?
Really
, Pippa!” Camilla couldn’t prevent a gurgling laugh from welling up into her throat. Her daughter, Philippa, was her joy—the only real joy that life had ever offered her. Small in size but gifted in intellect, the child was the only creature in the household whose development had been miraculously unaffected by the repressive atmosphere. Pippa was perhaps too bookish and precocious, but her nature had a pervasive serenity and self-confidence. She was capable of such outpourings of affection and good cheer that the cold aridity of the Wyckfields seemed unable to penetrate her spirit.

To Camilla, her daughter was a miracle. Pippa’s father, now deceased, had been cold as steel, his sister Ethelyn rigid and forbidding and Oswald, Ethelyn’s husband, weakly indifferent. Each of them had attempted to control the child’s growth, yet Pippa had developed a clear-eyed optimism, an honest, straightforward way of thinking and an amazingly strong spirit. In this house of gloomy religiosity and fanatical repression, the little girl had learned to laugh.

Best of all, in Camilla’s view, was the combination of precocity and innocence in Pippa’s character. It was a combination so charming that even Ethelyn couldn’t bring herself to scold the child with nearly the animosity with which she scolded the rest of the world. No matter how angry Ethelyn would become at one of Pippa’s blithe infractions of the rules, Pippa could turn the wrath aside with her sturdy, unafraid, logical explanations. Camilla wished that she herself had been gifted with some small part of the child’s courage and ability to adapt to these sterile surroundings.

Camilla sat down beside her daughter on the sofa. She hated to see the little girl clad in the depressing mourning dress, but Ethelyn insisted that they both wear black until the entire year of mourning had passed. Camilla put an arm about the little shoulders and drew Pippa close. “Why are you studying me so speculatively, love?” she asked. “Miss Burney’s tale must be disappointing to you if your attention is so easily diverted by my sighs.”

“I
love
Miss Burney’s story,” Pippa declared earnestly, snuggling into the crook of her mother’s arm, “but I
don’t
love to hear you sighing. You can tell me, you know, Mama, if something’s troubling you. I’m quite good at understanding worldly problems.”

“Are you indeed?” she squeezed Pippa’s shoulders affectionately. “Are you trying to make a romance out of my breathing, my dear? If you’re looking for worldly problems, stick to Miss Burney’s book.”

The bright, spectacled eyes turned up to Camilla’s face with a look of disdain. “You needn’t try to put me off, Mama. I know you’re worrying about something.”

“Perhaps I am, but even if I
did
have ‘worldly problems,’ I shouldn’t wish to burden you with them. I’ve no intention of permitting you to grow old before your time.” She planted a light kiss on the girl’s brow. “You’ve plenty of time to cope with worldly problems when you’re older.”

“If your problem concerns Aunt Ethelyn, I can help, you know,” the child insisted.

“Hush, dear. Do you want Uncle Oswald to hear us?”

Pippa and her mother both turned their eyes instinctively to the huge wing chair near the fireplace across the room. Oswald Falcombe, Lady Ethelyn’s lethargic husband, was slumped upon it, fast asleep, the handkerchief still spread over his face as it had been for the past two hours. “He’s sleeping quite soundly,” Pippa whispered reassuringly. “You can see it in the way the handkerchief pops up and down with his breath.”

“You seem to have made quite a study of breathing,” her mother said drily.

Pippa giggled. “It’s just observation, Mama. Keen observation.” Her smile faded, and she sat up straight and looked at her mother in mild rebuke. “That’s how I know that something is bothering you. Observation.”

“You, my girl, are a persistent little
witch!
I’ve already told you that I don’t intend to discuss my problems—if there
are
any—with you. You are not to worry about me, Pippa! I’m perfectly capable of handling my problems without the advice or assistance of a ten-year-old, even if she
is
a prodigy.”

“I’m not certain you
are
capable of handling them, Mama, if they require facing up to Aunt Ethelyn.”

Camilla drew herself up in mock affront. “Is that so?”

“Yes, it is. You’ve been trying for two months to convince her to let us put off these mourning clothes, and you still haven’t succeeded,” the girl pointed out frankly.

“I know.”

“After all, it’s been almost a year since Papa died—”

“Passed to his reward,” Camilla corrected in perfect imitation of Ethelyn’s words and manner.

Pippa laughed. “Passed to his
just
reward,” she amended with an almost equal talent for mimicry.
“Aunt Ethelyn is a great stickler for rules, isn’t she? Everything must always be exactly proper … proper dress, proper demeanor, proper wording. I wonder why she thinks the longer phrase ‘passed to his just reward’ is better than just saying he died?”

“I don’t know, love. Perhaps she thinks ‘died’ is too blunt … or too disrespectful to God.”

“You mean ‘Our Blessed Lord,’” Pippa quipped, using her aunt’s tone again. “
Is
it disrespectful, Mama, to speak bluntly? To say ‘God’ or ‘died’ straight out?”

“I don’t think so, dear. It’s just that your aunt is … well, a stickler as you said.”

Pippa made a face. “A
real
stickler. That’s why we’ve had to wear black for so long. I wish she’d change her mind and let us put off full mourning. I don’t think wearing black helps one to remember Papa any more than one would if one were wearing
pink.
To tell the truth, I barely remember his face any more.”

“
That
, Philippa Wyckfield,” came an ominous voice from the doorway, “is a
sinful
thing to say!” And Lady Ethelyn Falcombe, her large frame draped in a round-gown of heavy black bombazine, her wiry grey hair rolled up in a knot at the back of her head and looking like a twenty-gun frigate ready for battle, sailed into the room.

“Eh? What’s that?” muttered Oswald, shaken awake by his wife’s booming voice and pulling the handkerchief from his face.

“Come now, Ethelyn,” Camilla said placatingly, “what Pippa said was only natural—”

“As if that excuses it! If we all were permitted to give in to our natural instincts, we’d still be
savages.
How
dare
she say she’s permitted herself to forget her father!”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Ethelyn,” Pippa said, calmly cheerful. “I didn’t say I’d forgotten Papa. I said I’d forgotten his
face.
” She got up from the sofa and took her aunt’s hand affectionately. “It’s quite the truth, you know. I’ve tried to remember his face, but I can’t seem to bring it to mind. Can you?”