Regency Christmas Gifts (10 page)

He turned around. “I have a big black bruiser
of a hound that patrols the compound at night. Between you and me,
he is a soft old brute, and your daughter will love him, but he
looks like Beelzebub himself. You’ll be safe here, and I’m right
next door.”

She followed Thomas up the flight of stairs,
and walked, open-mouthed, through four spacious rooms, already
furnished, right down to dishes in the cupboard.

“
I suspect that his son lived here
until his final illness,” Thomas said. “Rugs on the floor, too.
What do you think, Mrs. Poole?”

Hang professionalism. Hang serenity. Mary Ann
burst into tears and threw herself into his open arms. She sobbed
until he picked her up, walked through the connecting rooms as she
wailed, and sat down with her on the sofa. She cried until her
tears had soaked through his waistcoat to his shirt underneath, but
he didn’t complain.

He found a handkerchief when her nose started
to run, and made her blow it. He folded it over and gave it to her.
“Happy Christmas,” was all he said, but it set her off again, which
made him laugh and hold her closer.

After she had subsided to an occasional sob
when she breathed, she sat up and tried to dab at his
shirt.

“
When was the last time you cried,
Mrs. Poole?” he asked gently, taking her hands away.

“
When I watched them bury Bart,” she
said.

“
Don’t wait so long next time,” was
all he said, before he held her close again and sat with her in
silence.

T
wo days later at seven in
the morning she started work as victualling clerk for Robert Beazer
and Son. Their few clothes and possessions were arranged in the
upstairs rooms, and a monstrous geriatric hound possessing few
teeth but a fearsome bark already followed Beth everywhere.

When he stopped by to check on them a day
later, Thomas told her to keep Beth by her side for a few days,
maybe a week. “I’m going to London today, first to the Navy Board,
to beg and plead and grovel for a ship’s berth. After that—and I
intend to be successful—I’m going to Trinity House, where I will
not leave until the Elder Brothers agree to install Beth at St.
Clements.”

“
You amaze me,” she said. “You did
all this because you were bored?”

“
Aye, Mary Ann, and a monumental
boredom it was,” he assured her, sounding more Welsh than usual,
which amused her. “Suzie is not at all happy with me running away
to the sea again. I have bullied her into keeping my house open,
because I’ll be in port now and again. By the way, she wants you to
come to dinner tonight. She’ll probably tell you awful tales about
me, but she’ll get over it.”

He was about to leave, then turned back,
reaching for something in his waistcoat pocket. She sucked in her
breath when he pulled out her mother’s gold chain. “How did you
know?” she asked, taking it from him.

“
Suzie and I were afraid you were
going to spend your money on watercolors and walk back to Haven in
the dark,” he explained. “I followed you and saw you in the
stationery store. Hand it to me.”

She did as he said, wordless as he looped it
over her head and opened the clasp. She closed her eyes, memorizing
the feel of his breath on her neck, hoping she would remember it
forever.

“
I’ll pay you back over time,” she
said. “It belonged to my mother.”

“
It’s a Christmas gift,” he told
her. “You can’t pay me for it.”

She turned around to face him. “Is there any
point in arguing with you?”

“
None that I know of,” he said
cheerfully.

She walked him to the door of the warehouse and
gave him a kiss on one cheek, and then the other. “From Beth and
me,” she said simply.

He stared long and hard at her, as though he
wished to say something, but he gave a gusty sigh instead. He
walked away without looking back, which made her heart crack around
the edges just a little.

She had no more time to think about him,
because Mr. Beazer kept her busy, showing her how to do double
entry bookkeeping, and explaining the details of running such a
massive operation. To her relief, Beth watched intently on her
other side, so she knew she had an ally, should she forget
something important.

She followed Mr. Beazer through the warehouse,
tablet in hand, as he pointed out where everything from salt to
salt pork was stashed. To her relief, he cast a murderous glare on
his warehouse employees and carters, threatening them with
transportation to Australia if they so much as looked cross-eyed at
the Poole ladies.

Luncheon with Meggie Beazer was pure delight.
The food was good, and the woman kept up a constant chatter while
Mr. Beazer sat back, puffed on his pipe and watched his wife with
no small affection.

Hand in hand, Mary Ann walked with Beth to 34
Notte Street after work and discovered with a pang that the house
seemed devoid of furniture, rugs, pictures, and knickknacks because
Thomas Jenkins wasn’t there.

I don’t like this
, she thought,
distressed at the loneliness that filled her entire body and brain.
She had been too busy to think about anything but work, but Thomas
was gone.

Suzie didn’t look too pleased, either, and she
said so. “Little brothers are a trial,” she told Beth. “Be grateful
you don’t have one.”

There must be something she could salvage from
what had turned into a dismal evening. “We need to be happy that he
knows what he wants and is headed to sea again,” Mary Ann said,
feeling like the last cricket of summer chirping alone on the
hearth.

Suzie stood up and paced back and forth.
“That’s the trouble, my dear. He has no idea what he wants!” She
plumped herself down again. “Do you?”

“
Me
?” Mary Ann stared at her
and felt heat rush up her body to bloom on her face. “Do I know
what he wants, or … or ….” She couldn’t even say it.
Do I know what I want?

By the time they had walked back to the
warehouse, she had a headache that threatened to crack her skull
open, and the undeniable, uneasy conviction that she loved Thomas
Jenkins to complete and utter distraction.

She couldn’t even compose her mind to tell Beth
one of her patented prince and princess bedtime tales. They said
their prayers, then lay side by side, both of them staring at the
ceiling.

“
I miss him,” Beth said finally in a
small voice. “Do you?”

Mary Ann nodded, knowing that if she said a
word, she would cry again, which would be no fun at all, because
Thomas wasn’t there to sit her on his lap.

When Beth slept, Mary Ann walked through her
lovely flat—employed, well-fed, and discontented beyond all limits.
Had she been this miserable when she knew she loved Bart Poole?
Surely not. What was different this time?

She was different—Mary Ann Poole, a grown
woman, with a grown woman’s needs and desires and not a green girl.
She had found the most wonderful man in the world for her twice
now, and she wanted to thrash this one into February for thinking
he needed the stupid old ocean.

I am an idiot
, she thought, then said it
out loud, to remind herself that he had done her an enormous favor
because he was bored. That was it. He was affectionate to her
because that was part of his gregarious nature. He was there when
she needed him, and he had solved all of her problems and left a
bigger one behind.

She loved him.

When Thomas Jenkins, sailing master retired no
longer, came out of the Navy Board office after two days of intense
discussion, he wondered why he was not so pleased. He looked
around, finding no pleasure in London, which surprised him, because
he enjoyed the bustle of the metropolis occasionally.

The HMS
Revenge
was a new-built frigate
44, slid off the ways and waiting for sails and sheets in the
Portsmouth ship yard. He was to report there in two weeks, orders
in hand, and do what he did better than almost any master in the
entire Royal Navy.

He should have been leaping like a gibbon from
street lamp to street lamp, overjoyed to be reinstated and
preparing to sail again. The rigging would take a month, as the
ship was victualed and prepared for sea. The shakedown cruise was
to the United States and back, carrying a diplomatist to
half-burned Washington, DC.

If the
Revenge
proved shipshape, he
would consult with Captain Frears, an old friend, and they would
set a course for Rio de Janeiro. He’d be gazing up at the Southern
Cross again, one of his favorite constellations. The plan was to
venture around the Horn and follow the Pacific coastline of the
United States, trying to see just how far the reach of that upstart
bunch of quarrelsome colonies had advanced. Frears said to plan on
a year’s voyage, which would be heaven, indeed, since no one would
be throwing cannonballs their way or plotting other
evils.

He knew he should feel better, but all he could
think of was the way Mary Ann Poole, tears and all, had fit so
nicely on his lap. And when she leaned against him and soaked his
shirt—mercy, but she felt so soft and bendable in all the right
places.

He was way too old to be dreaming about Mary
Ann with just her shimmy on, wasn’t he? And who could sleep
thinking about her employment, and was she safe in an empty
warehouse at night, and would she maybe write him if he asked
her?

The next day he talked to his shaving mirror,
his old friend, and reminded the man in the mirror with bags under
his eyes that Trinity House was going to bend to his will and let
Beth Poole attend St. Clement’s School in Plymouth. He had a draft
for two hundred pounds from Carter and Brustein Counting House in
Plymouth to sweeten the deal and make them somehow overlook that
Second Lieutenant Bart Poole, as dead as a man could be in service
to his nation, was army.

He did have some satisfying moments at Trinity
House, pleased to learn of the expansion of a school for navigators
working primarily in the unpredictable waters of the North
Atlantic. He had some ideas to contribute that brought pleasant
smiles to the faces of men he admired, those Elder Brothers of
Trinity House who did their monumental work so quietly and so well,
even if most Englishmen were none the wiser about all their unsung
achievements.

Maybe he knew just enough of the Elders to
grease a wheel or two. After only one day of arguing on Beth
Poole’s behalf, he was handed a letter allowing her admission to
St. Clement’s, where he knew she would be taught well, if the
mathematics teacher could keep up.

After that day’s effort, and even less sleep
that night because Mary Ann Poole simply refused to keep her dress
on in his dreams, he had achieved precisely what he set out to do
in London.

Without question, he was the most miserable
happy man of recent acquaintance.

Thomas dragged himself back to his hotel in the
pelting rain, ready to growl and snap if anyone on the crowded
street bumped into him. He had his orders to report to the
Revenge
in a fortnight and a letter of admission to give to
Mary Ann for Beth. True, he was two hundred pounds poorer, but that
hardly mattered. Beth was worth that and more. He should have been
floating on little fairy wings.

He kicked off his shoes and flopped on his bed,
discouraged beyond everything he had ever experienced. This was
even worse than peace breaking out. Maybe he was so tired tonight
that he wouldn’t think of Mary Ann Poole, and her pretty blond hair
and dark eyes, and hint of a dimple in her right cheek, and soft
bosom and little waist, and her courage and virtue and
resourcefulness and love of her daughter, her gallantry and
kindness to her old landlord and her love of cake and her way of
making him laugh.

I could never be so tired that I would not
think of Mary Ann
, he told himself, and realized his problem,
because underneath it all, he was a fairly intelligent man. Mrs.
Poole had cured his boredom and then made herself
indispensable.

He loved her.

Lying on his back, he reached for his orders to
the
Revenge
. He read through the formal, familiar words of
“requested and required to join the HMS
Revenge
.” He thought
of the ships he had sailed straight and true, the battles he had
fought, and the exorbitantly high cost of war. He realized with
perfect clarity now that he had not been able to move beyond that
cost until he saw Mary Ann Poole in his sitting room with an opened
package in her hands.

They are not going to be happy when I show
up tomorrow morning at the Navy Board
, he thought. After one
more long look, he put the orders back in the envelope, never to
open them or any like them again. He was about to burn his last
bridge with the Royal Navy. He waited for the knowledge to cause
him pain, but it didn’t.

After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and black
pudding, Thomas Jenkins walked to the Admiralty, reneged on those
orders, and received a massive reaming out from the Navy Board. The
officer in charge tore his orders into little bits of confetti and
tossed them out the window, which seemed a bit dramatic to
Thomas.