The Admiral's Penniless Bride (20 page)

Starkey looked fuddled, which Charles found secretly pleasing. ‘Aye, sir. Beg pardon, sir.’

‘Who is here?’

‘Sir Wilford Cratch, Admiral.’

Charles handed Starkey his hat and shrugged out of his overcoat. ‘Wilford? He is still secretary to the First Lord, is he not?’

‘Aye, sir. He’s waiting for you in the sitting room.’

Hours later, Sophie walked home slowly, every bone in her body tired. Helping the younger Brusteins’ wives pack Rivka’s effects had worn out her mind even more. She fingered the paisley shawl that Jacob himself had put around her shoulders, telling her that Rivka told him to make sure she received it.

Sophie stopped in the long drive, looking up at the first stars, grateful beyond measure for the Brusteins’ love, for Charles’s love. He was probably watching for her now, ready to open the door and welcome her back into his arms. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she knew she had to tell him about Andrew and try to explain why she had not said anything sooner. It couldn’t wait now, not after she had confessed her love for him. He would understand.

The front of the house looked dark. She frowned and hurried faster, wondering why none of the servants had thought to light the lamps. She turned the handle on the door, but it would not open. She tried again, then knocked, her heart in her throat. She knocked again, alarmed, but heaved a small sigh when the door opened.

Starkey stood there. He did not move when she tried to enter. She stared at him, aghast at his insolence, but not reassured when he moved slightly aside, so she could barely edge past him. ‘Starkey, where is my husband?’ she asked, when he just stood there grinning at her.

He gestured with his head. ‘In the bookroom. Knock hard.’ He turned on his heel and left her in the empty hall.

Sophie took off her cloak slowly, leaving it on a chair
by the front door, which Starkey hadn’t bothered to close. She removed her bonnet and set it there, too, great disquiet growing in her stomach. Where
was
everyone? Her footsteps seemed to thunder as she walked the length of the hall to the bookroom. She stood a moment to collect her jumbled thoughts, then opened the door.

Her husband looked at her, his expression blank. She stared in horror at what he was doing—ripping to pieces the memoir that she—they—had laboured at and laughed over all summer. The sound was so obscene that she put her hands to her ears.

‘Close the door.’

Unnerved, she did as he said, then sat down in a chair closest to the door because her legs would not hold her. Eyes huge in her head, she watched him methodically rip the memoir to shreds, then rise and throw it in the fire with such force that she gasped.

Still he said nothing. He sat again at the desk and took a closely written sheet out of an envelope on his desk bearing the crest of the Royal Navy. She had seen the crest often enough in her home in Portsmouth with Andrew.

He pushed it towards her, as though he didn’t even want to touch the paper when she did. ‘I don’t understand,’ she began. ‘What is wrong, Charles?’

‘Read it.’

She picked up the sheet and sat down again. The light was not good, but she had no urge to move closer to the lamp by her husband. Sophie began to read. She felt the blood drain from her face, and then the words came at her in small chunks as though the admiral were hurling them at her. She dared only one look at him as she read, but that was enough; his expression was wintry.

There it was, spread out before her in totality: the polite introduction, the news that the First Lord wished
to strenuously warn him about his wife, the former Sally Paul, who was in reality Sally Daviess, widow of as rank a criminal as ever served the navy. She could hardly breathe as she continued down the page, which listed all her late husband’s crimes and misdemeanours and stated that his wife had disregarded the Admiralty’s admonition that she inform them always of her whereabouts. Since they had never recovered any of the money Andrew Daviess had stolen, she must have secreted it somewhere.

She took a deep breath, and then another, her eyes beginning to smart as she read the final paragraph, warm in its approbation of John Starkey, who had taken it upon himself to ferret out this information and relay it to the First Lord. ‘Your manservant has saved you from terrible shame and ruin. We trust you will compensate him accordingly. What you do with that woman is your responsibility.’

Not daring to look at her husband, Sophie set the letter back on the desk. She shivered.

‘Have you nothing to say?’

She had never heard a colder voice, not even when listening through the doors during her husband’s trial. Was this the same man who had told her he loved her, only that morning? She had deceived him and now her folly had come home to roost in terrible consequence.

She cleared her throat and tried to speak, but nothing came out. He slammed his fist on the desk and she jumped.

‘Say something!’

She slowly raised her eyes to his, deriving tiny satisfaction that he looked away first, until it struck her that she had shamed him in front of his peers and his subordinates and he could not stand the sight of her. Her heart in her shoes, she realised it didn’t matter what she said.

‘What can I say?’ she managed to tell him. ‘You have
already condemned me. If I tell you there is more to this than you think, you won’t believe me.’

She hung her head and rose to her feet, feeling older than dear Rivka, now dead, and wishing herself beside her in the coffin.

‘How can there possibly be more?’ he asked, his tone so full of scorn that she knew he did not expect an answer.

She had to try. ‘There is. If you would let me—’

He slammed his hand on the desk again and she stopped, her heart in her mouth, so great was her terror.

‘Get out.’

‘Charles…’

She shrieked when he threw a paperweight at the door where it shattered, covering her with glass. She heard him shove back his chair, but she was out of the door then and running down the hall. Rivka’s paisley shawl tore as she caught it on the newel post and she left it there, desperate to escape to her room, where she could at least turn the key in the lock.

She collapsed in a heap inside her door, reaching up to turn the key. She sat there huddled into a ball until she felt her breath return to normal. She listened for his footsteps, and slowly willed herself into calm as the upstairs hall remained silent.

Sophie crouched there, afraid to move, numb with Starkey’s betrayal, mentally whipping herself because she had not been brave enough to reveal the whole story sooner. She had thought Charles would never know. She had not reckoned on a servant’s jealousy.

When she felt strong enough to rise without falling down, she unbuttoned her dress, jerking away the two blasted buttons she could never reach. She took off the dress, holding it away from her so she would not get any more glass shards on her. She carefully shook her head
over the wash basin, listening to the shards tinkle into the bowl. She dabbed at her face, grateful the glass had not penetrated her skin beyond a few places around her mouth.

She sat at her dressing table, taking the pins from her hair and then brushing it, stopping once to sob out loud, thinking of the moment only yesterday when Charles had brushed it for her. She grabbed the brush and dragged it through her hair ferociously until all the glass was gone, along with her anger.

What remained was sorrow of the acutest kind, a pain as deep as though someone had rammed a spike into her back, then twisted it up and down her spine. She sat there a long moment in her chemise, shivering and looking at her face, her expression desolate.
I loved that man
, she thought.
God help me, I must have loved him practically since our wedding. Now he thinks I am lower than dirt. I wish I had died with you, Peter and Andrew. We would still be a family.

She went into her dressing room to get the dress she had been wearing when she sat so alone in the dining room at the Drake, a woman with no expectations. She put on the dress, then took it off again and removed her lovely chemise, standing there naked until she remembered where she had left her old chemise, the one she had patched and repatched. It felt almost like an old friend and she sighed. Her old dress went on again, and the patched stockings and shoes with a hole in the toe.

When she had dressed, she went to her writing table and took out several sheets of paper. She knew he would not listen to her. Perhaps he would read a letter, telling him that when they met and she introduced herself as Sally Paul, it was only what she had done for five years without a thought. If he had not proposed and she had not accepted,
she would never have thought another thing about it, so acclimated she was to her maiden name again. It was an honest mistake. Her folly lay in saying nothing later.

She could explain that in a letter. There probably was no point in declaring how much she loved him, but she might anyway. He would likely destroy the letter without reading it. She could probably say whatever she wanted.

She began to write. It occupied her most of the night. And then she was gone.

C
harles remained an angry man for a long time, sitting in the bookroom and staring at the dent on the door where he had thrown the paperweight. He listened for any sounds from upstairs, but there were none, not even footsteps. He nearly rang for Thayn to check on her, but set his mind against it.
I am the wronged party
, he thought, in high dudgeon.
By God, I will not go snivelling above deck to determine her welfare.

He stayed in the bookroom and seethed, when he wasn’t fairly choked with the shame of having a visit from Sir Wilford Cratch—Cratch, the old man milliner!—who came only to sniff, judge and condemn, and who even went so far as to scold him—Charles Bright, a respected admiral of the fleet—for his unfortunate choice in females. Just the thought of this yanked Charles out of his chair to stalk around the bookroom.

As the hours passed, he began to regret the paperweight and his devilish aim. He meant to do nothing more than throw the blamed thing against the wall, but he had nearly
hit her with it. No wonder she had nearly torn down the door in her desperation to escape from the bookroom.

Escape from him, more like. By midnight, Charles was up and pacing again, this time in shame for what he had done. Suppose he had actually struck her with the paperweight? The damned thing lay in thousands of pieces now. It would have fractured her skull. Just the thought of that brought him up short. He stood in front of the fireplace—cold long hours since—as some better portion of his brain reminded him—
sotto voce
, thank God—that this was a woman he had made love to with fierce abandon only that morning, and who had returned his love with equal fervency.

Come to think of it, nothing had prepared him for the depth of her love, if that’s what it was. Considering how anger consumed him, this wasn’t a notion he cared to entertain for any longer than it took to consider it. He resumed his restless pacing, but stopped again, dumbfounded by the blatant fact that only that morning, she had told him she loved him.

‘And you threw a paperweight at her,’ he said out loud, as the clock struck two. ‘What were you thinking, idiot?’

He remained still. At no point since his last view of her terrified face had he heard a single noise from above. What if he had killed her? What if a shard of glass had entered her eye? Good God, she could be lying in a puddle of blood. She could be blind.

Charles opened the bookroom door and ran down the hall. He stopped at the stairwell, looking up into the darkness. He had heard the servant girls go upstairs to bed earlier, but there was no light in the hall. The whole house seemed to be on edge and silent, afraid of him. He sat down and removed his shoes, tiptoeing up the stairs to stop outside her door. Nothing. He listened, his ear close to the
door panel, and thought he heard the faintest scratching. He couldn’t tell what she was doing, but at least she wasn’t dead. He went down the stairs again, stopping once when he stepped on glass fragments that went into his stockinged foot. He cursed and removed the glass, not even wanting to think about the paperweight.

The bookroom seemed so small. He went to the fireplace, staring down at the edges of the manuscript that he had ripped to pieces and thrown into the flames. Only tiny scraps remained. He picked up one charred corner, where only a few words were visible in her pleasing handwriting.
Why did I do that?
he asked himself.
All that work. All those hours she took my scattered ramblings and turned them into a fine document. We were nearly done.

He sat down in his chair again and put his head down on his desk, pillowed in his hand. He had no intention of ever apologising—he was by far the wronged party, after all—but he could be generous enough to take a cup of tea to her in the morning. By God, that was more than most men would do, when so put upon, tried and wronged.
I’m doing that wretched woman a favour
, he thought. His eyes closed and he slept.

Charles woke after dawn, cross and creaky from sleeping in a chair. His discomfort was her fault, too. Since she had been doing the writing, he had adjusted the chair to her height. While close to his height, there was just enough difference to cause a backache of monumental proportions.
God’s wounds, the trouble she has been to me
, he thought.
I’ll fetch her tea this morning, but ever after, it’s her responsibility. She knows where the breakfast room is.

Breakfast was ready. He frowned at Etienne’s usual excellent spread on the sideboard, especially the cheesy,
cakey things that Sophie enjoyed so much. Maybe he would take her one of those, along with the tea. It wasn’t a peace offering, mind you, no such thing, but she did like them. He had noticed yesterday morning when they lay twined together that her bones had more covering to them. Her face wasn’t so thin any more, either, but more round and smooth, the way a goodly nourished woman’s face should look. And it had never hurt that she was such a pretty thing, too.

He glanced at the mirror over the sideboard and frowned at his bloodshot eyes and whisker-shadowed face. That was bad enough, but he could almost see Sophie’s terrified expression again, reflected in the breakfast-room mirror. He looked away, uncomfortable with the view.

He left the room, carrying Sophie’s tea and breakfast, uneasy because the hall was still so silent. Usually he felt like he was tripping over servants, but no one was about.
They’re afraid of me
, Charles thought. Well, he could probably hear Sophie out. She would apologise again, and he would be magnanimous; maybe even forgive her some day.

Charles knocked on the door, surprising himself by the eagerness he felt to hear her footsteps crossing her room and the door opening on her sunny face. He liked the untidy way her hair curled about her face. He could almost feel the glory of it when he buried his face in her neck and served her every bodily need, along with one or two of his own.

There were no footsteps. He knocked again, pensive this time, and willing to be understanding. She was going to make him set down the cup and saucer and turn the handle himself. Perhaps she deserved her irritation over his behaviour, no matter how well deserved his reprimand had been.

Still nothing. Balancing the cup and saucer, he slowly lowered them to the floor, then turned the doorknob. The room was empty, the bed not even slept in. The black dress she had worn to the Brusteins’ lay in a circle on the floor, as if she had just stepped out of it. Maybe she was in her dressing room. He opened the door and took a long look before closing it and leaning against it. He glanced around the room. One of the little girls had brought the brass can of hot water. He went to it and touched it. Still hot. Where could Sophie be?

He went to the fireplace, still swept clean from yesterday morning’s little fire. Head down, he was forced to remember that last night before she came home, and after Sir Wilford had left, he had ordered the upstairs maid not to lay a fire.
You’re a spiteful bastard
, he thought, looking at the clean hearth.

When he sat down in the chair by the fireplace, he saw the sheets of paper on her writing desk. He leaped to his feet and sat at her desk, horrified to see both of her wedding rings resting on the folded sheets—the one good enough for The Mouse, and the other fit for the beloved wife of an admiral. Good thing he was sitting down; Charles felt all the air go out of his lungs.

She had written his name on the folded paper. As he stared in disbelief at it, he realised what had caused the scratching sound in the early morning hours. He picked up the letter, several pages thick. His hand shook as he opened it, to see her salutation, ‘Dearest Charles’.

He couldn’t continue looking at the words, and glanced at the wire wastebasket instead, overflowing with nearly blank sheets of paper. He fished them out; open-mouthed, he stared at all the salutations she had considered and discarded: Dear Charles, My Love, Dear Admiral Bright,
Dear Sir Charles. His eyes teared up at Dear Charlie. He swept the pile back into the wastebasket.

He sat a moment, working up his nerve, then took the letter back to the chair by the fireplace. He couldn’t even get through the first paragraph without dabbing at his face. ‘Dearest Charles,’ she began, ‘I apologise for wasting all of your good writing paper, but I wasn’t certain how to start this. I suspect you won’t even read it, but just throw it in the fire, so it hardly matters what I say. I should have thought of that before I wasted the paper.’

He put down the letter, scarcely able to breathe, then picked it up again. She began by begging his pardon, but urging him to understand that hers was an honest mistake. ‘When you introduced yourself in the dining room, I naturally replied my name was Sally Paul, because I had been using my maiden name for five years. It would never have mattered, but you chose so impulsively to propose, and I so impulsively accepted, never thinking about the thorny business of my name, and the scandal attached to it, until the next morning. Fearing you would not understand, I went early to the vicar at St Andrew’s and gave him my deceased husband’s death certificate to record, ahead of our wedding. I should have said something then to you, but I felt the moment had passed when such a confession was appropriate. And truly, Charles, I did not want to go to the workhouse. That was to be my destination, had you not found me in the church that night.’

Me or the workhouse
, Charles thought.
Dear Lord in heaven, she had no choice.
‘Oh, Sophie,’ he whispered. He kept reading, even though each line of the missive seemed to grind into his flesh like the shards of the paperweight. ‘For a while, I thought my deception would do no harm. You plainly spelled out that ours was to be a marriage of convenience, something to keep your meddling sisters at
bay while you did whatever it was you were inclined to do. I am still not certain what that is. I did want to uphold my part, and reckoned that writing your memoirs would be useful. I wish you had not destroyed the manuscript. I put a lot of myself into it.’

Charles wasn’t a man easily made ill. He had stood on plenty of bloody decks with bodies and parts of bodies around him and never blinked. This was different; this was worse, because his memoirs had become her labour of love. He might as well have ripped her heart from her body and thrown it on the flames. Setting down the letter, he barely made it to the washbasin before he vomited. He wiped his face and went to the door, closing and locking it, before returning to her desk.

His eyes wet, Charles continued, sobbing out loud at her sentence on the next sheet: ‘The situation changed completely when I fell in love with you. I knew then that a true wife would not keep such a confidence from her husband. I can understand your anger. But please believe me, I meant you no harm.’

‘You’re kinder than I am, Sophie,’ he muttered, when he could speak. ‘I cannot condone my rage. It was shameful.’

Numb now, and practically forcing himself to breathe, Charles read on. Sophie had changed to the subject of her late husband. ‘That man you so quickly dismissed as a glorified, greedy clerk and a weasel was never given a fair trial.’

Willing to be reasonable now, Charles read through her account of Andrew’s felony—his suspicions that his supervisor, Edmund Sperling, brother of Lord Edborough, one of the Admiralty Lords, was raking money from the victualling department by countermanding Andrew’s invoices for proper supplies and seeing that substandard
food went into the kegs. ‘Sperling pocketed the difference. He was well known to have gambling debts a-plenty. Andrew remembered daily visits to the victualling yard by Sperling’s creditors.’

Charles set down the letter and rubbed his eyes. He could think of other chicanery from men who thought to line their pockets at the navy’s expense, but this case went much higher than all of them. No wonder no one felt inclined to believe a lowly superintendent. He continued Sophie’s letter, where she wrote of his despair, and his earnest effort to bring Sperling to account. ‘My husband was too trusting, Charlie,’ Sophie wrote. ‘He took Sperling’s own forged and altered notes and invoices to the man himself, thinking he would see the error of his ways and make it right. Sperling took the notes and invoices and they were never seen again. When accountants finally uncovered the scheme, after all those unfortunate men were dead of food poisoning, Sperling had no trouble casting all the blame on Andrew.’

Charles took the letter and went to the window, sitting down and leaning back against the little pillow Sophie had placed there, because this was one of her favourite places in their house. He opened the window, almost desperate for the comforting smell of the sea, even though the air was chilly. He took several deep breaths and returned to the letter. Sophie described the trial, which he remembered well. He sighed, thinking how troubled his wife had been the day he had brought up the matter for his memoirs, and his own rude remarks about her late husband. She was not allowed in the courtroom, but sat outside day after day, as her husband was excoriated, blamed, condemned and sentenced.

‘He hanged himself in an outbuilding behind our home. One of our neighbours found him. The Admiralty was
furious with him, so his body was taken and hanged again, then burned. Surely you remember this,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t know where they dumped his ashes; they were never given to me.’

He did remember the sorry affair, and he remembered his anger that the coward Andrew Daviess had got off so easy. ‘God help me, Sophie,’ he murmured.

There was more to read, even though he was reading through a film of tears now. She said she truly had been deceptive, as far as Admiralty House was concerned, because they had charged her to keep them informed of her whereabouts. ‘Since none of the money Andrew had supposedly stolen was ever recovered, they were convinced that I knew where it was, and would some day retrieve it. Charlie, would I have let my beloved son starve to death if I knew where
any
money was? Ignorant men. Changing my name kept them from hounding me. I would do it again, so I shan’t apologise for that, too.’