Regency Christmas Gifts (5 page)

With real trepidation he answered aye. “Then
you’ll sit in on every class of mine,” the man growled. “I’ll tell
the boatswain that you’re mine now.”

So began Thomas Jenkins’s steady rise to the
top of his profession in the Royal Navy. Talent, hard work, and
good fortune had kept him employed mainly aboard frigates, which
meant a growing one-eighth share of prize money from every enemy
vessel captured and sold into the fleet or as salvage. Thanks to
the curse of a long war, he was well off.

Now he stood staring at his lathered face in
the shaving mirror, wondering just how he could worm his way into a
little family of two and make their life better. Suzie warned him
about propriety, so he knew that he must be circumspect. When he
suggested that
she
do the probing and inquiry, his sister
just smiled at him and shook her head.

“
I
am not bored, Tommy,” she
told him. “In fact, I am becoming excessively diverted.”

He felt too grouchy to demand that she explain
herself, or perhaps he was too shy, he thought later, wondering
when a stable sort of man, which he was, had turned so moody. It
was painfully evident that he was missing the sea, and so he told
Suzie. She just smiled in the same maddening, big-sister way that
used to irritate him no end when he was eight.

After breakfast, Thomas rewrapped the package
and allowed himself the luxury of hiring a post chaise for the day.
“We’ll be driving around Haven is all,” he told the manager of the
posting house, who provided him a chaise and only one post rider.
Who needed two for such a short jaunt?

His first stop was 29 Dinwoody, arriving at a
respectable hour to hand over his calling card to the maid, explain
himself, and be ushered into the sitting room. Mrs. Myrna Poole
entered the room in good time, offered him tea, which he accepted,
and expressed her pleasure at being reunited with the ivory-back
comb and brush set that had belonged to her mother.

Small talk, small talk
, Thomas advised
himself as he drank tea, listened to the old lady praise her new
house in Haven, the village of her youth, then inquire how he and
his sister were settling into her old house in Plymouth. He assured
her that all was well, then segued into the part where he explained
why he had come in person with the comb and brush.

It was easy enough to describe the younger Mrs.
Poole and her charming daughter Beth. The tricky part was to feign
merely casual interest in Mrs. Poole’s employer, Lady Naismith. He
must have done well, because Mrs. Poole launched into a graphic bit
of local gossip about the very
common
Lady Naismith, whose
husband had clawed and scratched his way to the top of a fishing
fleet.

“
There is great wealth in herring,”
Mrs. Myrna Poole told him with a straight face. “And don’t you
know, he made enough money to attract the attention of our Prince
Regent. That led to a loan, which the Prince of Wales paid off with
a paltry title,” the old lady informed him. “I am told it happens
often.”

Thomas’s heart sank as he heard the woman’s
tidbits about Lady Naismith’s meanness and nipfarthing ways. “My
neighbor says she is a martinet and no one wants to work for her,”
Mrs. Poole continued. “I feel sorry for those who must.” She sighed
with so much drama that Thomas wondered how she had avoided a life
on the wicked stage.

Then came the
coup de grâce
, when Mrs.
Poole leaned closer and whispered that her maid had told her that
another maid had told
her
that Lady Naismith was sacking her
overworked secretary, an upstairs maid, and one of the scullery
girls. She leaned closer still to add, “Rumor says that Sir Edwin
Naismith is taking too great an interest in those women to suit the
old witch.” She sat back in triumph, her dose of gossip
finished.

“
Wait? What?” he had asked, stunned
by the news. “Lady Naismith is letting go of her secretary …
and the others?”

“
On Christmas Eve,” Mrs. Poole said,
almost as if she savored bad news. “I call that heartless, but what
can anyone do about it?”

The thought that Mary Ann Poole, lady with a
heart of oak herself, must put herself in soul-sucking employment
just to survive made Thomas wonder about his nation. It was beyond
him that widows and orphans must continue to suffer long after the
last signature on the treaty, the congratulatory victory balls, and
the departure of kings and rulers for their own countries. And now
Mary Ann Poole was soon to be unemployed. No wonder every pence
mattered. He thought of her in the stationers’ shop and saw her
purchases for what they were: a little light illuminating a growing
world of darkness.

“
These are trying times, are they
not?” Mrs. Poole said to him, she who had likely suffered little or
not at all.

He agreed that they were, which allowed him to
turn the conversation to the poor, and then St. Luke’s charity
school. That Thomas moved easily from one topic to the other gave
him confidence that he was getting better at
skullduggery.

“
More tea?” Mrs. Poole asked before
launching into additional gossip about how little the vicar knew on
any subject. “But the poor must take what they can, eh?”

Even the talented ones who exhibit early
signs of mathematical genius
, he thought, wondering how many
promising minds and ideas had been snuffed out by poverty. His
might have been numbered among those, had he not taken a chance on
the deck of the
Agamemnon.
Young girls had even less chance,
and it chafed him.

By the time he left, Thomas’s head throbbed. He
wanted to snatch Mary Ann and Beth Poole away from Haven and the
hand that had been dealt them, just grab them up, hold them close
and promise them something much better, even though he had no idea
what it was or how he could achieve it. He gave his head a rueful
shake—which didn’t help the pounding within—and wondered if perhaps
boredom was easier than action, and less hard on the
heart.

Instead, he directed his post rider to a vague
address that included Carmoody Street and a row of four houses
close to a shoe factory. Smoke curled up from three of the
one-story row houses, telling him that the fourth one must belong
to a working woman and her daughter at school.

That bit of detection gave him three doors to
knock on. The first was opened by a woman with a nursing baby at
her breast who slammed the door in his face. The second attempt
introduced him to Sharlto Laidlaw, landlord, and an old Ancient of
Days.

This meant more tea, a further trial to his
already overloaded plumbing, and more information about the widow
and her daughter next door.

Thomas invented some fiction about looking for
his distant relative, a Lieutenant Poole survived by a widow and
infant child. When Thomas mentioned that he planned to return in a
few hours and invite his second cousin’s widow and child to dinner,
Mr. Laidlaw brightened.

“
That will be a rare treat,” he
said. “You will be the first visitor they have ever
had.”

With no more encouragement than an inquiring
look—my, but he was getting good at effortless detection—Thomas
learned that Mrs. Poole’s father had been a clerk in a woolens
warehouse in Northumberland, where woolens were surely
needed.

“
She married the youngest son of a
vicar, who had a paltry living on the estate of a marquess who
spent his days running from creditors.” Mr. Laidlaw stared into his
teacup as though he were reading his neighbor’s destiny. “She came
here to watch the lieutenant buried in Plymouth, and then she was
taken in childbirth. For all I know, she’d like to return to
Northumberland, but that would take money and she has
none.”

Thomas sipped his tea. “Did the vicar and his
wife think to do right by their son’s widow and child?”

“
Mary Ann said they never looked
with much favor on her marriage. They hounded him because he
married for love, and not with an eye to finding a lady with enough
inheritance to support them both. I hear that army careers aren’t
cheap.”

“
Mrs. Poole told me her husband was
convinced he was destined for greatness in the army,” Thomas said.
“His parents won’t help her?”

“
Can’t now. Both dead,” Laidlaw
said.

They sat in silence, each aware how seldom does
greatness touch the deserving, but meanness seems to linger
forever.

Mr. Laidlaw brightened then, and pointed to a
pencil drawing over his mantelpiece. “Mary Ann drew that for me
last Christmas. I told her how much I liked a good piece of beef
and dripping pudding.”

They laughed together.

“
She said if she ever got some
watercolors, she would steal in here and touch it up.” His eyes
grew wistful. “I hope she does. That’s as close as
this
old
body will come to such a feast.”

“
I beg to differ, Mr. Laidlaw,”
Thomas said, his mind made up. “When Mrs. Poole finishes work
today, I propose to take the three of you to a good restaurant for
just such a meal. Do you think she will agree to my
scheme?”

“
If I assure her that I won’t get to
go if she doesn’t!” the old fellow declared. “I intend to be most
persuasive.”

Thomas left it at that, bidding the man good
day and promising to return at six of the clock, when Mary Ann
Poole trudged home from a job where she had to do as Lady Naismith
told her without catching the eye of Sir Edwin. And look forward to
no employment after Christmas Eve, a worse prospect than her
current lot.

Thomas was a man with a good imagination, but
he could not begin to grasp how frightened she must be right now.
Yet in no way had she indicated her fears.
Well certainly not to
you, you simpleton
, he berated himself.
She probably doesn’t
want to terrify Beth, and it’s none of your
business
.

Acutely aware of the desperation Mary Ann Poole
must be feeling and finding himself powerless to think of a
solution, he spent the next few hours back in Plymouth, closeted
with the headmaster of St. Clement’s School, arguing the merits of
accepting as a student the daughter of an army man dead at
Corunna.

“
It isn’t done,” the man assured
him. “Females, yes, but she must be the poor child of a Royal Navy
man.”

“
Could it be done if I donated a
whacking amount of money to St. Clement’s?” he asked bluntly, out
of patience with nitpicky rules.

“
We will see about it,” the old
priss said quickly, and dismissed him.

And then what? Suppose he succeeded in getting
Beth enrolled in a far better school than the one in Haven run by
an idiot? He couldn’t kidnap Mrs. Poole and drag her to Plymouth to
do … what with her? He wondered if she would consent to moving
into his house under his sister’s charge, but that idea strangled
itself at birth. Although he planned to be at sea soon, Mary Ann
Poole would probably never consent to such an arrangement out of
pride, or fear that what might have happened to her in Lady
Naismith’s employ might be repeated in his own establishment. He
knew it would not—he was a man of honor—but society would never
countenance such a solution.

He stewed some more, and then got back in the
post chaise for the little drive to Haven, an unhappy
man.

“
I am far from bored,” he announced
to the world at large, which happened to be a cat slinking down an
alley. But was worried any better?

A
lthough she would not miss
her current position as secretary to an ungrateful employer, Mary
Ann dreaded Christmas Eve, when she would dot her last
i
for
Lady Naismith and close the door on her miniscule income.

Walking slowly past Christmas carolers, she
stopped for a moment in appreciation and tugged her muffler
tighter. They sang of a baby’s birth, shepherds minding their own
business on a Judean hillside, and angels with something miraculous
to tell the world.

She decided that on Christmas Eve—rather than
stay at home and dread what was about to happen to them—she would
take Beth and tag along with carolers. They could sing and take
away the fear for a few hours.

Christmas Day would bring revelry as Haven’s
citizens partied and prepared to welcome a new year—1816—fresh with
promise and absent war for the first time since the French
revolution began. Perhaps if it wasn’t too cold, she and Beth could
walk through one or two neighborhoods and watch the people inside.
Mary Ann was past those days of wishing she were among the
company.

As much as she enjoyed being home before Beth,
she took a moment to sit on one of the benches for old people and
think through the pleasure of Saturday’s visit to Thomas Jenkins
and his sister in Plymouth. She tried to imagine the sheer delight
of sharing her burdens with another adult. Such a novelty was hard
to conjure up, because the experience had never been hers. She had
gone from daughter in a modest household to bride, with a brief
five days in Portsmouth to love her new husband and wave goodbye to
him from the dock as the transport pulled away for Portugal and
war.

She never saw Bart Poole alive again. From the
time he waved goodbye and blew her kisses, she had worked and
contrived and struggled to make ends meet by herself. She tried to
imagine what it would be like to sit at home, safe and protected by
a husband who submitted his body to toil, as Shakespeare put it, so
she could welcome him home and ease both their lives. If hard times
came, they would share them.