Mrs. McVinnie's London Season (16 page)

“
If
this isn’t beyond enough,” Jeannie declared in round tones as she
set down the candle in her hand and went in the next room. Without
a word, she picked up Clare from the bed and sat down with her in a
chair close to the window. Still in silence, Jeannie pulled Clare’s
head down until she rested against her. Jeannie wrapped her arms
around the child and held her close.

A log dropped on the
fireplace in the other room. Through the open door, Jeannie watched
as the nursemaid leapt to her feet, squeaking in surprise at the
sight of Captain Summers seated in the chair opposite and staring
at her.

“
I
wondered when you would wake,” he said, cutting the air with his
words. “It would seem that you are singularly useless as a tender
of children.”

Clare stared and then
burrowed deeper in Jeannie’s arms when she heard the woman’s voice
in reply, arguing that she only followed Lady Smeath’s orders.

“
Sh,
little one,” Jeannie whispered as Clare began to whimper. “My dear,
I think you have come to the end of your lonely nights.”

Clare watched Jeannie’s
face several long moments. She must have finally been satisfied
with what she saw, because she closed her eyes and was soon asleep.
Jeannie remained where she was, holding the sleeping child close to
her.

The voices were much
lower in the next room, the captain doing much of the talking. When
he was done, there was another spell of silence and then the door
closed. Jeannie smiled in satisfaction to hear the quick footsteps
of the nursemaid receding down the hall. She waited another minute
and then the captain entered the nursery.

Jeannie put her finger
to her lips. The captain scooped the sleeping child from her arms
and put her back in bed. Clare cried out, and the captain knelt
beside her, his hand gentle on her back, until she closed her eyes
again, and her breathing became regular. When he was sure she
slept, he covered Clare with a blanket and left the room, motioning
Jeannie to follow.

He closed the door
behind them and added another log to the fireplace in the nursery
sitting room. Without a word to her, he stayed by the fire, holding
his hands out to the warmth that grew as the log caught.

“
I
have dismissed her, that miserable excuse of a nurse,” he said
finally. “She will cry and object to Agatha, and I expect there
will be a mighty scene in the morning, but she will not stay.” He
still did not turn around. “I am only sorry that I did not do it
sooner, Jeannie—Mrs. McVinnie.”

Now that the woman was
gone, Jeannie could feel some generosity. “I am sure that you did
not realize how things were for your daughter, Captain,” she said.
“And now that you know—”

“
She
is not my daughter,” he interrupted, and sat down beside
her.

“
But I
thought …. Didn’t Pringle say—”

“
I am
sure many think that may be the case,” he interrupted, and made a
dismissing gesture with his hand. “At one time, I thought it to be
so, too, or else she would not be here.” He noted the question in
Jeannie’s eyes and spread out his hands. “I suppose I should
explain.”

Jeannie had left her
shoes outside the door to Edward’s room, and her feet were cold.
She tucked her legs under herself, not taking her eyes from Captain
Summers’ face. He looked no less harsh in the half-shadow of the
nursery sitting room, but she could not see the color of his eyes
in the gloom, nor the restlessness in them that was becoming so
familiar to her, even in the short space she had known him.

He rose again and stood
with his back to the fireplace, his hands clasped behind him. “Do
you know what it feels like to be lonely?”

His abrupt question
startled her, and she made a small sound of protest. Good God, she
thought, do
I
know what lonely feels like? How dare he? She
noted again the starkness of his face and swallowed the angry words
that rose to her lips. She nodded. “I have some small idea,” she
said, unable to keep all the bitterness from her voice.

“
You
are lonely now,” he said, watching her face closely. “But you have
not always been lonely, and you will not be lonely for long, I
fancy.”

“
I
suppose it is so,” she replied, remembering her thoughts, half in
jest, at Abbey Head as she considered the possibility of
remarriage. She wondered at the sorrow of his words and quite
forgot her own irritation.

“
I
have always been lonely, Jeannie McVinnie,” he said softly. “And by
some rare and stupid failure of character—which, I must add, is
entirely pleasing to me most of the time—I have bound myself to the
loneliest position in a solitary profession.”

The fire was growing
hotter; he moved away from the hearth, but came no closer to her,
sitting down in a chair opposite. Jeannie watched him, a little
smile darting about her lips. In a moment now, he will spring up
and pace about. I do not think I have ever seen him decorate a
chair for more than five minutes at a stretch.

He rose to his feet
even before the thought left her mind, and he leaned one hand
against the mantel. “Blockading is dirty business, Mrs. McVinnie,
dirty business. It’s month in and month out, tacking and wearing
off a hostile coast, watching, all the time watching, for a ship to
bolt the harbor or another to seek entry. It means fanning out over
an empty ocean in all weathers, watching for … what? Watching
all sides, maintaining a vigilance so compelling that after a while
you cannot sleep.”

It was almost the same
speech that he had made to Lady Jersey, but there was bite in back
of it this time, and a war weariness that reminded her so much of
Tom and Galen McVinnie that she felt the familiar prickles down her
spine.

She nodded. “I know
what it is not to sleep, Captain,” she said, her voice low and
scarcely to be heard above the crackle of the logs in the
fireplace.

He did not seem to hear
her. “And then, when you cannot take one more night of it, the
flagship signals you in, and you make for a port and meat that
doesn’t crawl off the plate and water that isn’t green and as thick
as porridge.” He turned back to the fireplace, unable to meet her
steady gaze. “And other pleasures, the kind that let you sleep. Ah,
God.”

He leaned both hands
against the mantel and stared down into the flames. “She was the
wife of a Portuguese merchant in Oporto.” He shook his head and
managed a small laugh. “While he was busy cheating my first
lieutenant in the harbor, I was in bed with his wife. I supposed
there was some justice in that, Jeannie. One seldom gets something
for nothing.”

He looked at her then,
as if wondering about the effect of his words on her.

“
One
never gets something for nothing, Captain,” she responded, keeping
her voice light, so he would continue. “At least, that is how
things are in Scotland.”

He nodded and backed up
to the fire again. “And so it was. She told me she was with child
before I left the port. Told me she loved me. No one ever told me
that before. Not even my own mother.” He sighed and clapped his
hands together in that familiar gesture of impatience. “And then it
was back to the blockade for another year. Do you know how slowly
time can pass?”

Oh, I do, Captain, she
thought. Each hour is a year long, and the clock wears out with
being stared at. Time hangs so heavy that it almost becomes an
effort to breathe. “I have some notion,” she said.

“
Letters would come for the others, but never for me. I did not
know that she could even write.” His voice turned musing with the
memory. “We didn’t spend overmuch time in her husband’s
library.”

“
And
then?” she prompted when he fell silent.

“
Then
it was to Oporto, finally, a year later.” With a visible effort, he
continued. “The quarter where she lived was practically
leveled.”

Jeannie’s eyes grew
wide. “Napoleon?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No,
not there. Not then. It was an earthquake. The coast is prone to
them, regrettably. The servants told me that she was dead but that
the child was alive and in a convent.”

He sat down then, but
that lasted no longer than a few breaths and then he was on his
feet, this time to pace the room in that slow, deliberate stride
that she could imagine on his own quarterdeck. “I learned all this
from servants, who directed me to the convent. I took the child,
named her Clare after a favorite aunt, and saw to it that she was
sent to England and Lady Smeath.” He looked at her. “What else
could I have done?”

“
Nothing, Captain. But didn’t you say—”

“
That
she wasn’t my daughter?” He laughed, and the prickles traveled her
spine again. “The merchant got his due, Mrs. McVinnie. And here I
thought he was so stupid! A few months after Clare was in Suffolk
at the family estate, I received a letter from my Oporto lady love,
stating that she was very much alive and demanding a king’s ransom
to hush up the whole affair.”

He shook his head,
unable to meet the expression in her eyes. “I had been gulled like
my lowest-rated seaman. No telling how many times she had played
that game on unsuspecting, randy captains.” He rubbed his chin and
Jeannie could almost see the gleam that she knew was in his eyes,
only this time the mockery was turned inward. “I suppose she and
her bandy-legged little goat of a husband had played that trick on
other captains with sirs in their names, captains with wives high
in the instep, hopeful children, and honor to worry about.” He
chuckled. “I had none of those things, so what did it matter? She
had the wrong man this time.”

“
Except that you thought she loved you.” Jeannie spoke into the
early-morning quiet.

“
So I
did,” he agreed. “What a fool I was.”

“
What
did you do?” she asked, and went to the fire herself to warm her
hands.

“
I
wrote back to say I wouldn’t pay a farthing, no matter who she
told.” He rubbed his hands together and turned to the fire, too.
“Her last letter came last year after La Coruña to inform me that
my mother’s ancestry was questionable and that I was a pernicious
captain with less honor than a slaver. And by the way, the child
living in such comfort in Suffolk was only a waif from the streets,
orphaned by the earthquake, and what did I think of
that?”

The chill went to
Jeannie’s heart. “How can people be so cruel?” she asked out
loud.

“
I
suppose that sailors have been duped like that since the first
Carthaginians got out of sight of land.” He sighed and leaned his
shoulder against the mantel. “No, the real cruelty lies in what I
did then to Clare. I made a dreadful mistake.”

She couldn’t even bring
herself to ask, because she already had a terrible inkling.

The captain was
watching her face, and he spoke slowly, weighing out his words like
tea by the ounce. “You’ve guessed it, haven’t you? I made the
mistake of confiding in a letter to Agatha that Clare really wasn’t
my daughter, after all.”

He went to the door of
the nursery then and opened it, peering in at the sleeping child.
“That damnable letter was the end of any exertion Agatha ever made
on Clare’s behalf. And you see the consequence before you. Clare
seldom speaks and glides around hugging the walls, her eyes too big
for her head. Poor waif. She is being raised as I was raised, with
no one to love her.”

Jeannie reached out and
touched the captain’s arm. “No one, Captain?” she asked softly.
“Not anyone in your whole life?”

He shrugged. “My mother
was quite taken with George, because he was the first son, even
though a bigger block I never met.” He smiled at the expression on
her face. “God knows I was not a lovable little chap—all ears and
elbows if you will but look at that portrait in the long gallery
back in Suffolk. And I was endless trouble. You may ask anyone on
the estate. Always restless, always running away.”

And why ever not? she
thought.

He strode to the window
and pulled back the draperies. “Look now, the night is going fast.”
He let the curtain fall. “There was one who loved me, and bless us
both, it was Jeannie McVinnie. How curious this whole thing is
becoming.”

Jeannie stared. “I
truly do not understand, Captain Summers,” she said finally. “Galen
McVinnie tells me that his aunt Jeannie wrote of you in her
letters. I believe he said that the kindest thing she ever called
you was a ‘hell-born babe.’ ”

He smiled. “You have
hit upon it. But I knew she loved me, especially that day when she
let me out of the cellar where I had been locked for some
infraction or other, gave me her quarterly earnings, a push out the
door, and told me to run off to sea.”

“
She
didn’t!”

“
She
did! Oh, I was brought back soon enough, but she was gone by then,
dismissed without character. And then it was only a matter of time
before Papa finally stirred himself enough to get me a midshipman’s
berth. I was twelve.”

“
Good
God,” she said.

“
Now,
Mrs. McVinnie, mind your tongue,” he chided.

“
And
that was why she was dismissed,” Jeannie said, wonder in her voice.
“Galen did have his questions. I believe the whole family did.” She
put her hand to her mouth to hide the smile, and laughed in spite
of herself.

“
It
was sound, Scots advice. See how successful I am. I am a posted
captain, and rather higher on the ratings lists, a Knight of the
Grand Cross of Bath for some tom-fool thing I did that I never
would have done had I allowed discretion to rule over valor. And I
am a wealthy man from prize money. I am a sea captain of no
uncommon skill and ability.” He turned back to the window again and
watched the pink dawn sneaking in under the cover of darkness. “I
only wish …. Well, I don’t know what I wish, and see here,
Mrs. McVinnie, I have kept you up all night with this idle
chat.”