I Married the Duke (3 page)
“I can cook and clean,” she said. “If you prefer labor to coin, I will work for my passage to Saint-Nazaire.” Her voice grew firmer. “But my body is not for sale, Captain.”
Governess and mind reader at once, it seemed.
“I don’t want that,” he lied. His hand slipped along the edge of the linen wrapped about her head. Her eyes were wide but she remained immobile as his fingertips brushed the satiny nape of her neck. Her hair was like silk against his skin, the bundle inside the linen heavy over his knuckles. Long. He liked long hair. It got tangled in all sorts of interesting ways when a woman was least aware of it.
“Then . . .” Her lips parted. Kissable lips. He could imagine those lips, hot and pliant, beneath his.
Upon him
. She would be hot and pliant all over. He could see it in her flashing eyes and in the quick breaths that now pulled her gown tight over her breasts. Cool and controlled she wished to appear, but that was not her true nature.
Her true nature wanted his hands on her. Otherwise she would be halfway across the tavern by now.
“What do you want?” Her words came unsteadily again.
“Aha. Not as starchy as she appears, gentlemen,” he murmured beneath a burst of rough laughter from a table of sailors nearby.
“What do you know of gentlemen?”
Too little. Only those moments during the war when Christos was safely stowed at the chateau and Luc had been able to enjoy the company of his fellow naval officers, as the lord he had been born to be.
“An expert on the subject, are you?” His fingertips played.
“No. What do you want?” she repeated flatly.
“Perhaps this?” His thumb hooked in the ribbon about her neck. She gasped and tried to break free. He twisted the ribbon up and the pendant popped from the gown’s neck.
Not a pendant. A man’s ring, thick and gold with a ruby the size of a six pence that shimmered like blood.
“No.”
She slapped her hand over the ring.
Luc released her and stepped back. Lovely, yes indeed. But she did not look like a man’s mistress. She was too plainly dressed and far too slender to please any man with money to spend in bed.
But appearances could deceive. Absalom Fletcher had looked like an angel.
“What is it?” he said. “A gift from an appreciative patron?”
She seemed to recoil. “No.”
“He has poor taste to give you his ring instead of purchasing a piece for a lady. You should have thrown him off much earlier. Or haven’t you? Are you going to him now?”
The cornflowers shuttered. “This ring is none of your business.”
“It is if you intend to carry it aboard my ship. That’s no mean trinket you have there. Where are you going with it?”
She stuffed it back into her dress. “I am traveling to a house near Saint-Nazaire to take up a new position at which I must report before the first of September. And what do you think you’re doing, reaching down a helpless woman’s gown? You should be ashamed of yourself, Captain.”
“If you are helpless, madam, then I’ve something yet to learn about women.”
“Perhaps you should learn generosity and compassion first. Will you take me aboard?”
Beautiful face. Gently bred. Desperate for help. A rich man’s cast-off mistress. Eager to leave Plymouth. Had she stolen the ring?
He didn’t need this sort of trouble.
“No,” he said. “Again.” He headed toward the door.
A
GREAT STONE
seemed to press on Arabella’s lungs. It could not end like this, rejected in a seedy tavern by a man that looked like a pirate, and all because she had been foolish enough to miss her ship.
But she could not have left those children alone, the little one no more than three and his brothers trying so valiantly to be brave while frightened. The eldest, dark and serious, reminded her of Taliesin years ago, the Reverend’s student and the closest to a brother she had ever known. She could not have abandoned the children like their mother did, even if she had known it would cause her to miss her ship.
The ship that would take her to a prince.
He would not remain at the chateau long. The letter of hire said the royal family would depart for their winter palace on the first of September. If she arrived after that, she must find her own way.
She always sent all her spare funds to Eleanor; she had no money to spend on more travel. And she simply must make an excellent impression. She would prepare the princess for her London season. Then perhaps—if she were very lucky and dreams came true—the prince would come to admire her. It would not be the first time one of her employers had turned his attention toward her, liking the pretty governess a bit too much. Not the first by far.
This time, however, she would welcome it.
She twisted her way through the crowded tavern in the captain’s wake. His back was broad, his stride confident, and men made way for him.
“I beg you to reconsider, Captain,” she called to him as he passed through the door to the street. Her fists balled, squeezing away panic. “I must reach the chateau before the first of September or I will lose my new position.”
He halted. “Why didn’t you book passage on a passenger ferry?”
“I did. I missed my ship.” She chewed the inside of her lip, the only bad habit from childhood that she had not been able to quell. The public coach from London had rattled her bones into a jumbled heap. But anticipating the sea voyage proved so much worse. For two decades her nightmares had been filled with swirling waters, jagged lightning, and walls of flame. She’d been tucked in a corner of the posting inn’s taproom, struggling to control her trembling, when the call for her ship’s departure sounded. She had forced herself to her feet and out the door by sheer desperation to know once and for all who she really was.
Then, in the inn yard, she encountered the children.
“I had a matter of some importance to see to,” she evaded.
Lamplight cast unsteady shadows across the captain’s face. Probably it had been a very handsome face before the scar disfigured it, with a strong jaw shadowed now with whiskers and a single deep green eye lined with thick lashes. His dark hair caressed his collar and tumbled over the strip of cloth tied about his head.
“A matter of more importance than your new position at a
chateau
?”
He did not believe her.
“If you must know,” she said carefully, “I have three children I must take to their father this evening before I travel to France.”
He looked blankly at her. “Children.”
“Yes.” She turned and gestured to the curb beneath the eave of the tavern. Three little bodies huddled against the wall, their eyes fixed anxiously upon him. “Their father awaits them across the city. While I was attempting to contact him, my ship departed without me,” taking with it her traveling trunk, another trouble she could not think about until she solved her first problem. But the daily cruelties of the foundling home had taught her resourcefulness, and working for spoiled debutantes had taught her endurance. She would succeed.
“I am relieved—” Captain Andrew’s fingers crushed his hat brim, the sinews of his large hand pronounced. “I am relieved to learn that you take pride in your progeny even as you abandon them.”
“You have mistaken it, Captain,” she said above the clatter of a passing cart, making herself speak as calmly as though she were sitting in an elegant home in Grosvenor Square recommending white muslin over blush silk. “They are not my children. I encountered them only in the posting inn yard. Their mother had abandoned them, so I determined to find their father for them.”
The captain turned toward her fully then, his wide shoulders limned in amber from the setting sun that lightened his hair with strands of bronze. In his tousled, intense manner, he was not commonly handsome, but harshly beautiful and strangely mythic. His dark gaze made her feel peculiar inside.
Unsolid
.
His lips parted but he said nothing, and for a moment he seemed not godly but boylike. Vulnerable.
She tilted her head and made herself smile slightly. “I can see that I have surprised you, Captain. You must reevaluate matters now, naturally. But while you are doing so I do hope you will reconsider the plausibility of me being mother to a twelve-year-old boy.” She paused. “For the sake of my vanity.”
He grinned, an easy tilt of one side of his mouth that rendered a pair of masculine lips devastatingly at the command of a grown man indeed.
“How callous of me.” He crossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the doorpost. “I beg your pardon, madam.”
“Without any sincerity whatsoever, it seems. I pray you, sir, will you take me to Saint-Nazaire?”
The grin slid away, leaving the vibrant scar dipping over his right cheek yet more pronounced. He must have suffered the injury recently. The war had been over for a year and a half, but he bore the erect carriage and authoritative stance of a naval commander.
It wouldn’t matter if he were the head of the Admiralty and his vessel a hundred-gun ship of the line, as long as he carried her swiftly to her destination.
“How did you determine the location of their father’s home?” he said.
“I asked about. I can be persistent when necessary.”
“I am coming to see that.” He pushed away from the doorway and started off along the street. “Come.”
“Come?”
She gestured to the children and hurried after him.
He looked down at her as she awkwardly tried to match his long strides, and he halted mid-street. He did not seem to heed the traffic of horses and carts and other pedestrians, but stood perfectly solid before her like he owned the avenue. His eye glimmered unsteadily, a trick of the setting sunlight, she supposed. It was a very odd sight. He seemed at once both in thorough command and yet confused.
He pointed at a building across the street. “Give my name to the man that you find on the other side of that door and tell him that I said he is to escort you to the children’s home and return you to your inn tonight.”
“But— No.” Arabella’s cold hands were pressed into her skirts. “You needn’t. That is to say—”
“He is a good man, in my employ, and you and the children will be considerably safer crossing this town with him than without.” He scowled again. “You will do this, Miss Caulfield, or I will not take you to Saint-Nazaire on my ship.”
Her heart turned about. “You will take me there?” Upon his ship. Upon the sea.
She must
.
He scanned her face and shoulders. “To whose home are you traveling, little governess?”
He was no longer teasing. She must be honest. “I am going to Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux. It belongs to an English lord, but the Prince of Sensaire is in residence there and he has hired me to teach his sister before her debut in London society at Christmastime.”
“Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux,” he only said.
“Do you know it, Captain?”
“A bit.” His brow cut downward. “Miss Caulfield . . .”
“Captain?”
“My ship is not a passenger vessel. There will be no other women, no fine dining or other amusements. Aboard it, you will be at my mercy. Mine alone. You do understand that, do you not?”
“I . . .” She hadn’t given it thought after so many people in port recommended him. Naïvely, she had assumed it meant he was a gentleman. But gentlemen had lied to her before.
She had no choice. “I understand.”
“We depart at dawn, with or without you.”
He moved away, and Arabella released a shaking breath. Forcing a bright smile, she pivoted about and beckoned the children to her.
M
r. Miles, the captain’s cabin steward, was a neat little person with a starched cravat, velvet lapels, and high-heeled shoes. When he greeted Arabella as she boarded the
Retribution,
he peered at her gown as though it were made of sackcloth. “You haven’t any luggage, madam?”
“My traveling trunk departed for Saint-Malo without me. I must purchase new clothing at Saint-Nazaire.” With funds she did not have. After she paid Captain Andrew his fee, she would have one pound three shillings in her pocket, enough to hire a coach to drive her to the chateau. She would arrive wrinkled and filthy, but she would arrive on time.
“The leddy’s a sight for weary eyes, Mr. Miles.” The day was gray and cool, but the smile of the Scotsman who approached was broad, his sea-weathered skin crinkled about his eyes. He bowed. “Gavin Stewart at yer service, Miss Caulfield. Ship’s doctor and sometime chaplain, though o’ the Roman persuasion.”
“Sir?” she said, uncertain of his meaning.
“Father,”
Mr. Miles corrected with a pinched nose, turned about on his heel and clip-clopped across the deck, weaving through the dozens of sailors who were preparing the ship for departure.
“Aye, lass. Ma French father had a quarrel with the Presbyterians, ye see, so he raised us Catholic. But I niver mind it, ’cept when there be a bonnie lass aboot.” He winked.
She smiled. “I don’t suppose you typically have women aboard, do you?”
“Niver.”
Her amusement faded. “Never?”
“No’ a one, lass. Ye must have a way with persuasion.” He offered his arm. “Nou, allou me to see ye to yer quarters. ’Tis a sennight’s trip ahead o’ us at least, an’ it’s smelling like rain. Ye’ll want to be comfortably settled afore that.”
“Rain?”
He patted her hand upon his arm. “No’ to worry ye, lass. ’Tis a fine strong vessel.”
Her mother had probably thought the same of the ship upon which she put her three daughters to sail to England.
Arabella walked along the deck, averting her face from the open water beyond the busy port and restraining herself from clamping on Dr. Stewart’s arm like a frightened child. The farther she moved from the gangplank, the more her stomach clenched.
Everyone else aboard seemed at ease and active. A boy leaned against the deck house, whittling a stick. The others all worked at ropes, planking, and sails, most of them laboring at a massive pulleylike device, hauling barrels from the dock to the deck. They chanted a song that matched the rhythm of their footfalls. Weathered like Dr. Stewart and dressed simply, to a one they looked like ruffians, with missing teeth and scruffy whiskers. But they worked diligently as the breeze sheering off the channel snapped at ropes and sails. Each cast her a quick glance and some tugged at cap brims in greeting then returned to their tasks. Only one young man did not; his attention never wavered from the pile of canvas he was stitching with bony hands.
Dr. Stewart guided her down a steep stairway onto a deck lined with enormous cannons: silent waiting warriors. At one end a narrow corridor gave off onto small curtained chambers to either side and one door directly ahead.
Mr. Miles threw open the door. “Captain, your guest,” he said primly.
Captain Andrew sat at a writing desk, his left shoulder to a window, his brow bent to his palm and fingers sunk in his hair. In his other hand was a pen, and upon the desk an ink pot and ledger opened past the first folios. The scents of cheroot smoke and salt mingled with the decidedly masculine furnishings of a dining table, chairs, and a single sitting chair. Beside a mounted sword and a brass mechanism of some sort, only two pictures adorned the walls, one of a ship flying the British flag, the other a charcoal drawing of a boy standing in the corner of a dark chamber.
He turned to look over his shoulder at her. His jaw was darker with whiskers than the night before.
He frowned.
She lifted her chin.
“Ma’am.” He stood, the top of his head brushing the ceiling beam. “Good day,” he said in a perfectly flat tone. He wore a loose-fitting coat with a waistcoat and plain neck cloth, a pistol strapped to a sash across his chest and a sword at his side. His hair was tousled and a scowl lurked at the corner of his very fine mouth.
She walked toward the lion in his den.
“Good day, Captain.” She extended her hand. “Here is the fee I agreed to pay you.”
He looked briefly at the purse dangling from her fingers then at Mr. Miles. The steward came forward and took it.
The captain’s attention fixed on her again. “Welcome aboard, Miss . . .”
“Caulfield.” Her cheeks warmed.
Cretin
.
“Caulfield,” he murmured. “I see you’ve met Dr. Stewart, whom some of my crewmen believe is also a man of religion.”
“An’ those gadgies in Rome,” the Scot mumbled with a grin.
“I have,” she said, feeling befuddled and like a complete fool for it. She had dined with heiresses, dressed baron’s daughters, and schooled future countesses in comportment. It was idiotic to be tongue-tied in the presence of a rough, crude merchant ship captain, even if the daylight enhanced the wolfish glint in his eye and he looked at her as though he knew her thoughts. “He has offered to make me acquainted with my quarters.”
He gestured toward a door to his right. “Be my guest.”
Mr. Miles darted forward with a clippity-clop and opened the door. The cabin within was narrow and curved on one side along the curve of the ship. A long cot with wooden sides built into the wall, a small ledge, and four clothing pegs were its only furnishings.
“Will it suit you, Miss Caulfield?” the captain said at her shoulder.
“But— Is it your bedchamber?”
“It was.” His smile was slow and his emerald eye danced with deviltry. “Now that you have paid for it, it is yours.” His gaze dipped to her lips.
“But—”
“I told you this is not a passenger ship, Miss Caulfield. Bunks are few aboard, and the mattress in my cabin is the most comfortable of those few. Do you concur, Mr. Miles?” he said without removing his attention from her.
“Entirely, Captain,” the English Napoleon said.
Dr. Stewart chuckled.
They were enjoying this
.
“I cannot—” She had been forced to face plenty of indignities as a servant, but this was outrageous. “That is to say, it would not be proper for—”
Captain Andrew lifted his brow.
“I cannot deprive you of sleep, Captain,” she said firmly.
“Dinna fret, lass. He’ll sleep fine and dandy with ye in his bed.”
Dr. Stewart could not mean what she imagined. He was a priest, for heaven’s sake.
The captain slanted him an odd glance.
“Gentlemen,” she said, “if gentlemen you can be called,” she added under her breath, “this is insupportable, and you know it as well as I.”
Captain Andrew laughed softly. It was a wonderful sound—deep and warm and confident and appreciative.
She forced herself to look him in the face. “Captain?”
“I am afraid I’ve nothing else to offer you, little governess, but a hammock on the gun deck with the crew or a straw pallet with the goats and sheep below. Would you prefer one of those?”
“Not precisely.”
“Ye’ll have ma cabin, lass,” Dr. Stewart said, and went toward the door. “The bed’s no’ so soft, an there be no door to lock. But ye’ll have the privacy a leddy needs.”
She released a breath and slipped by the captain to follow.
Dr. Stewart shook his head. “I warned ye she woudna take to it, lad. Some wimmen dinna care to be teased.”
“Seems so,” the captain said quietly.
She glanced back. He was no longer smiling, but watching her with that same intensity he had revealed for a moment on the street the night before, like he knew not only her thoughts, but also her fears.
Like he was a wolf, and she the lamb.
W
ITHOUT ANY FANFARE
of trumpets, the ship drew away from the dock with a sudden sway that left Arabella’s joints loose and her limbs trembling. Dr. Stewart invited her to the main deck to watch their departure. She declined and instead sat on her borrowed cot, clinging to its sides, eyes clamped shut, and thought of her sisters, Ravenna’s bright smile and Eleanor’s arm wrapped about her shoulder. Her heartbeats were frantic. Her palms grew slippery on the wood.
She opened her eyes and reached for the shutter over the window. She folded it open. The sea stretched before her in undulating swells of white and gray.
She slammed the shutter closed.
A miniature bookcase beside the cot and bolted into the wall held several dozen well-worn volumes. She snatched up the closest, opened it, and read.
When Mr. Miles scratched on the curtain with her dinner, her stomach was too tight to accept food.
Eventually, she slept, restlessly, and dreamed of storms. She awoke to the steady drum of rain on the ceiling above her head. Mr. Miles brought her breakfast. She left it untouched.
Her second day at sea proved equally eventless and equally exhausting. Her nerves were raw, her skin clammy, her belly cramped. She needed distraction. Not, however, in the form of a wolfish ship captain, whose deep voice and confident tread she occasionally heard through the wall shared between the cabins.
But she was unaccustomed to inactivity. On her third morning aboard she ventured out of the doctor’s cabin to stretch her legs and seek out a hiding place aboard that would not put her in sight line of either the captain or the water that surrounded them completely now.
A sixty-five-gun merchant ship, however, while considerably larger in volume than the London town houses in which she had worked, posed a challenge when it came to places a woman could stroll or sit unnoticed. After ducking around barrels and lurking behind cannons to avoid the captain, she found an ally. The cabin boy had been following her about on her tour of the ship’s nooks and crannies.
“If you’re wantin’ someplace to set, miss,” he said, “you’ll like Doc’s place. It’s warm and dry, though it rocks somethin’ fierce in a storm, seein’ as it’s in the bow.”
He guided her to the infirmary, dropped to his behind on the floor outside the door and pushed his cap over his brow.
“Won’t you follow me inside like you have followed me everywhere else this morning?”
He shook his head. “No, miss. I’ll catch a wink while you’re in with the doc, if you don’t mind.”
“I do not.” She laughed. “But do tell me your name so that I might wish you pleasant dreams.”
“Joshua, miss.”
“Pleasant dreams, Joshua.”
Dr. Stewart welcomed her and she settled on the extra chair in his infirmary, a book on her lap. She was no scholar like Eleanor, and when they hadn’t turned her stomach, the doctor’s tomes on the treatment of shipboard ailments had nearly put her to sleep. Today, however, she had unearthed quite another sort of book from the captain’s day cabin while Mr. Miles served her breakfast—a peculiar book for such a man to own.
Dr. Stewart had set a vast wooden chest atop the examination table and was drawing forth bottles of powders and liquids, making marks in a ledger, then returning the bottles to the chest.
“Ye canna be comfortable there, lass,” he said. “ ’Tis no place for a leddy to set. Allou me to have the boys set up a canopy for ye atop where the light’s better and ye can take the fresh air.”
The wooden chair was a torture only less noxious than sight of the sea. “It is quite comfortable, in fact.” She turned a page in Debrett’s
New
Peerage
. “I am quite well.”
“Aye, I can see that.” He smiled as he placed a bottle in its rightful nook in the case.
She bent to her book. All of her former employers had a copy, so she had long since memorized every page. She folded it closed in her lap. “What do you have in your medicine chest there?”
“Cures that a man might need at sea.”
“Two bottles have skulls and crossbones on the labels, I noticed.”
Suitable for a pirate captain
. But now she was being ridiculous. “What need do you have of poisons?”
“Arsenic, taken in wee doses, aids the nerves. Otherwise ’tis for the rats. ’Tis a powerful poison.”
“Best then that you keep a lock on that chest.” She opened her book again. “With a captain such as yours, passengers mustn’t be given any opportunity for mutiny, must they?”
The doctor chuckled. Bottles clinked.
“He intrigues ye, daena he?”
Her head snapped up. “What?”
A sympathetic twinkle lit the Scot’s eyes. “Ye’d no’ be the first, lass.”
“Doc?” A sailor stood at the door, a young man of no more than seventeen, clutching his cap in his hand. He was the sailor who had not looked at her on deck when she arrived, nor since, as he avoided her gaze now. His hair was filthy, his sun-darkened skin draped over knobby cheeks and hands.
“What do ye need, lad?” The doctor went to him.
The youth’s hollow eyes were fixed on the medicine chest.
“Got me a nasty toothache, Doc.” His accent was English—Cornish—the accent that the Reverend Caulfield had drummed out of Arabella after their four years at the orphanage. Young ladies did not speak like peasants, he had scolded. But he was not naturally a harsh man; only her misbehaviors had roused his irritation. Only her. To him, gentle, studious Eleanor could do no wrong. Always off in the stables or woods, Ravenna had rarely ever come under his notice. Only Arabella with her fiery hair and too-pretty face made him fret.
“Can ye gimme somewhat for it?” the young sailor asked the doctor.
“It may have to come out, lad.”
The sailor clutched his cap over his jaw. “Naw, sir. Me mum said as I’d best come home with all me teeth or I’d best not come home at all.”
“Begging yer mither’s pardon, lad, but if it’s paining ye, it may need to come out or it’ll take the whole bone.”
The youth shook his head. With a last quick glance at the medicine chest, he disappeared.
Dr. Stewart shrugged. “Some dinna know what’s best for them.” He cast her a knowing grin. “Both sailor lads an leddy governesses.”
But Arabella had no attention for his teasing. The young sailor did not have a toothache. With the same keen sense of people that made her so good at her work, she knew it of this youth. He wanted something else in Dr. Stewart’s medicine chest. Something he could not simply ask for. He had lied.