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“You will leave, then, Captain My Lord?” she asked, the relief in her eyes strangely sad. “You will be gone from Feversham?”
He nodded, wishing for her sake that the truth didn’t feel like deceit. He would leave, but he meant to return, and then he wouldn’t leave again until he’d new orders from his admiral. He would always come back to Feversham because, like every wandering sailor, at last he’d found his home. He’d prepared for the worst, and been granted better than he’d ever dreamed.
He’d found perfection.
Chapter Three
Fan stood on the bench and gazed out over the score of expectant faces turned up towards her, her hands clasped before her to hide any trembling. The candlelight from the lanterns flickered with the drafts that found their way in through the barn’s timbers, and the men of the Company were waiting so quietly that she could hear the horses at their hay, rustling and nickering in their stalls behind her.
“I know there’s talk at the tavern in town,” she began, “and I’m not the kind to pretend otherwise. The hard truth is this—that a Londoner came to look at Feversham with an eye towards buying it.”
She let the muttered oaths and exclamations settle before she continued. “But this fine gentleman found the house old and inconvenient, with much lacking,” she said, adding a bit of purposeful scorn to her voice for extra emphasis, “and I do not expect him to bother with us again.”
“You didn’t show him this barn, did you, mistress?” called one man to the raucous delight of his friends. “He wouldn’t’ve found much lacking there if’n you had.”
“Nay, Tom, not the barn, nor the privies, either,” she answered dryly. “I kept our secrets to ourselves, where they belong. But I did take care not to show him the house in the best of lights, just to be sure. The sight of old Master Trelawney’s moldy stuffed pigeons seemed enough to send him racing back to London, his driver whipping those hired horses for all he was worth.”
They laughed again, as much from relief as from amusement, and pushed and shoved at each other, as if to prove that way that they hadn’t been worried, not at all. But Fan knew she wasn’t entirely free of the questions, not as long as Bob Forbert stood in the front of the crowd, chewing on the inside of his mouth and shifting nervously from one scrawny leg to the other.
“The boy that watered the coachman’s horses, mistress,” he said, his voice squeaking as he strived to make himself heard. “The boy said the man weren’t no regular Londoner, but a fancy lord and a king’s officer, a Navy man in a coat all glittering with gold lace. Do that be true, mistress? That some bleeding gold-lace officer was here poking his long nose around our affairs?”
Instantly the laughter and raillery stopped, and all the faces swung back towards Fan for an answer.
“Yes,” she said slowly, carefully. “He was Captain Lord George Claremont of His Majesty’s Navy, but all that interested him was the house.”
Smuggling took money from the king’s pockets, and in turn the king took catching smugglers most seriously. Officers like Captain Lord Claremont were sworn to capture smugglers as enemies of the crown, especially now with the country at peace with France. Such an officer could destroy her life as well, if he learned of her role in the Company, and there wasn’t a man in the barn who wasn’t thinking the same.
How simple it sounded that way, how clean and uncomplicated, when in fact the captain’s visit was still twisting away at her, as sharp as a new-honed knife. When she’d received the letter from the Trelawneys’ agent in London, she’d imagined the captain to be the model of Navy cruelty, with a twisted, squinting face as weather-beaten as a cliff to reflect the wickedness of his personality.
But an aristocratic captain: what could possibly make for a worse combination? To be sure, she’d next to no experience with arrogant noblemen, though she’d heard enough tales of how they were all riddled with the pox and fat from too much drink and wickedness. And considering this one’s reputation as a famously daredevil frigate captain—the agent had made quite a point of that—he’d likely also have lost an arm or leg in battle, or be hideously seamed with scars. She had pictured the visitor like this in alarming detail, steeling herself for the unpleasant task of showing him the house.
But what she had never imagined was the reality of Captain Lord Claremont who had presented himself on Feversham’s doorstep.
She had, quite simply, never in her life met such a gentleman, let alone found one standing on the doorstep before her. He was appallingly handsome, tall and broad-shouldered and lean, and the dark blue coat and white breeches of his uniform were so closely fitted that she’d no more need at all for her imagination.
It wasn’t just that he had all his limbs, unlike the Captain Claremont she’d been picturing in her mind. This Captain Claremont stood before her with an assurance that was new to Fan, a kind of unquestionable confidence that came from inside the man, not from any tailor’s needle. She could see it in his eyes, his smile, even the way his dark hair waved back from his forehead. She’d known her share of brave men, but their bravery had come from muscle and force, while this one—this one would have the same muscle and force, true enough, but it would be his intelligence and his conviction that he would win that would always give him the advantage.
And God help her, he already had it over her. He had begun by treating her like the lowliest parlor maid, and she had responded as was fitting for the housekeeper of Feversham: dignified and aloof, and justly proud of her position and the old house. He’d respected that, or so she’d thought at first.
But somehow things had shifted between them while she’d shown him the house. He’d challenged her, dared her, badgered her, until she’d done it all back to him, and not only in defense, either. She’d enjoyed testing herself against such a clever man: that was the horrible truth of it. She’d enjoyed the banter, and she’d enjoyed being with him. By the time they’d reached the bedchambers, he’d been out-and-out flirting with her, and, wretched creature that she was, she could only smile and blush like some simpleminded maid.
Her only solace came from knowing Captain Claremont had left Feversham the same day he’d come, and wouldn’t return. He’d made that clear enough, hadn’t he? She’d made a shameful fool of herself once, but at least she’d be spared doing it again. And if she let his handsome, smiling face haunt her dreams, then that would be her penance.
That, and the questions and doubts of the men before her.
“But why Feversham, mistress?” called Will Hood from the back, and others rumbled along with him in a chorus of uncertainty. “There’s scores o’ other grand houses for the likes o’ him. Why’d he come here if he’d no reason?”
“He wished a house by the sea,” answered Fan, raising her voice, praying she sounded more sure of herself than she felt. “That is what the Trelawneys’ agent in London wrote to me. He saw a drawing of Feversham, and was much taken with it. But he found the real house much lacking and inconvenient, and left disappointed, determined to find another.”
She was unwisely repeating herself, and she saw the uneasy glances passing back and forth.
“Captain Lord Claremont saw nothing to make him wish to return,” she continued, “nor anything of our affairs here. None of this barn, or your ponies, or the boats near the stream.”
“This Captain Lord Claremont, was he the same captain what made all the fuss last year?” asked Hood. “The one what stole all that silver from that dago treasure-ship? Was he your gentleman here?”
“He’s not my gentleman,” said Fan quickly, but no one else noticed the distinction, or cared.
“Likely this Claremont’s friends with the old bloody Duke o’ Richmond, too, may his bones rot in the blackest corner of Hell,” said Forbert darkly. “All them nobles are kin, aren’t they? I say this one’s come to see us broke and strung up for the gulls to pick apart, like they did to those poor blokes on Rook’s Hill near Chichester.”
“And I say you’re daft, Forbert, making no more sense than a braying jackass,” said Hood, wiping his nose with a red-spotted handkerchief. He was a sensible man, an old friend of her father’s, one she trusted and one the others listened to as well. It was also whispered in awe that Hood was strong enough to row single-handedly across the Channel to France, which doubtless added extra weight to his opinions. “Those black days o’ Richmond were your grandfather’s time, not ours.”
“But who’s to say they won’t come back?” demanded Forbert peevishly. “Who’s to say they’re not here now?”
“Because they’re not.” Impatiently Fan shoved a loose strand of her hair back under her cap. “Do you think I’d purposefully lead you astray, Bob Forbert, just for the sport of it? Do you think I’d put my own neck into the noose first? You know I’ve ways to tell Ned Markham to keep back his tea for another week if the customs men are here. Why would that be changing now?”
Hood nodded. “And mind, we’re a small company, and always have been. No high-and-mighty lord-captain’s going to bother with us, not when he can go fill his pockets as deep as he pleases catching dagos and frogs. Mistress here will tell you the same. We’re not worth the bother.”
Forbert gulped, his Adam’s apple moving frantically up and down. “But there’s a peace now,” he persisted, “and if this captain is idle, then—”
“The peace won’t last, not with the French,” said Fan quickly. “The London agent said so in his letter. He said Captain Claremont wanted to find a house at once, since he expected to be sent back to sea soon. Ned Markham’s said that, too, that the word of a Frenchman’s not worth a fig.”
“Well, then, there you are,” said Hood. “And if mistress says this lordly bloke’s not coming back, then he’s not, and that’s an end to it.”
“Yes,” said Fan, her old confidence beginning to return. Captain Claremont was no more than a single day’s inconvenience in her ordered life. Why, in another week, she’d scarce remember the color of his hair, let alone the way he’d grinned to soften his teasing about the mistress’s bed. “That is an end to it, Bob Forbert, and to Captain Lord Folderol, too. Let him take his Spanish dollars and settle in China for what I care, and a pox on anyone who says different.”
Hood nodded, the lines around his mouth creasing through the graying stubble of his beard as he smiled.
“True words, mistress, true words,” he said, clapping his hands. “How could it be otherwise with you, considering what the Navy would do to the likes of us if they could? Ha, that old bastard of a captain-mi’lordy’s lucky you didn’t shoot him dead there in his fancy carriage, just because you could!”
The others laughed, pleased by the vengeance Hood was imagining. But while Fan laughed, too, her conscience was far from merry.
Shoot the bastard dead, that’s what they wanted, dead on the step of his fancy carriage.
And forget forever the way he’d smiled, just for her, just for her….
George sat in the small office, ignoring the dish of tepid tea that the bustling clerk had brought, and considering instead the murky fog in the street outside. Though landsmen failed to mark the difference, London fog was nothing like the clean, salty fog at sea. The stuff that clogged the London air was gray and heavy as a shroud, so weighted with coal smoke and grime that he wondered the people who lived in the city could breathe it without perishing.
Not that any of them seemed to notice it, let alone complain. That in itself would set him apart from the true fashionable Londoners like his older brother Brant, His Grace the Duke of Strachen, as much at elegant ease in the chair across from him as George himself was not. If it weren’t for his uniform, George wouldn’t have the slightest notion how to dress himself, while Brant not only knew the fashions, he set them, from the precise width of this season’s waistcoat lapel to the cunning new way to wear a peridot stickpin in the center of one’s cravat.
Once again George smiled to recall how blithely Miss Winslow had lumped him in with the other Londoners, and smiled, too, to remember how she’d lifted her chin with such charming defiance when she’d done so. Yet he’d felt more instantly at home in that windswept corner of Kent than he’d ever felt in his family’s vast formal house on Hanover Square—a contradiction he intended to correct as soon as possible.
“Ah, ah, Your Grace, Captain My Lord!” exclaimed Mr. Potipher as he scurried into the office, bowing in nervous little jerks like some anxious little waterfowl in old-fashioned knee-breeches and steel spectacles. “I am so honored to have you here, so very honored!”
George didn’t even give him time to circle around to his desk. “I have come about Feversham,” he declared. “I have decided to take it.”
“You have?” exclaimed Potipher, so shocked that he briefly forgot his manners. “That is, Captain My Lord, you have found the property pleases you?”
“I have,” George answered without hesitation. “And I wish to buy it outright, not merely let it. The house requires so many improvements—which, of course, I intend to make at my expense—that it would be imprudent not to.”
“You would buy Feversham outright, Captain My Lord?” asked Potipher, shocked again. “You would make an offer this day?”
“Indeed, I will make it,” said George, “just as I expect it to be accepted. I understand the family that owns the property has had little interest in it for years, and should not be overly particular.”
“No, no, no, they shall not,” agreed the flustered agent, taking down a wooden box from the shelf behind him and rustling through the sheaf of papers it contained. “Yes, here we are. You are quite right about the Trelawneys, you know. Times being what they are, I am sure they shall be delighted to accept whatever you offer.”
George nodded, and smiled with satisfaction across the room at his brother. Brant had always been the one among the three brothers with a head for business and investments, and Society had long ago dubbed Brant the “Golden Lord”, after his ability to draw guineas seemingly from the air, while their brother Revell had been called the “Sapphire Lord” for his success in India.
It had, of course, followed that George would be labeled the “Silver Lord” on account of that single stupendous capture, a title that George himself found wretchedly embarrassing. But after today, he’d have more than that ridiculous nickname. When he left his office, he’d no longer be just a rootless, roaming sailor, but a Gentleman of Property.
But Potipher was scowling through his spectacles at a paper from the box. “You should know that there is one small consideration attached to this property, Captain My Lord.”
“My brother’s credit is sufficient for a score of country houses in Kent,” drawled Brant. “That should be no ‘consideration’ at all.”
“Oh, no, no, there was never a question of that!” Potipher smiled anxiously, the plump pads of his cheeks lifting his spectacles. “It is the housekeeper, Miss Winslow. I believe you must have met her at your, ah, inspection of the house, Captain My Lord?”
George nodded, striving to remain noncommittal. The last thing he wished was to confess to this man, and worse, to his brother, that he’d been thinking of that self-same housekeeper day and night since he’d returned, with no end to his misery in sight.
“Then I am certain you shall be willing to oblige this request from the current owners, Captain My Lord,” said the agent, his lips pursed as he scanned the letter in his hands. “Miss Winslow’s father was the house’s former caretaker, and most kind and useful to old Mr. Trelawney before his death. But it appears that recently Mr. Winslow himself has met with some manner of fatal misfortune.”
At once George thought of the young woman’s somber dress, how she’d said her father was only away, and how long it took for her to smile.
“I am sorry, on Miss Winslow’s account,” he said softly. “She is young to bear such a loss.”
“Then you will honor the Trelawneys’ request that she be assured her position as long as she wishes to retain it?” asked Potipher hopefully. “They have made it a condition, you see, Captain My Lord, having great respect for the father’s services as well as regard for Miss Winslow’s own abilities. She would certainly ease your entry into the neighborhood, recommending the best butchers and bakers and such.”
George sat, suddenly silent. To keep a lone young woman in the house once he’d settled it with his own men from the Nimble, his steward and other sailors who knew his ways and would readily adapt them to land—it would not do, it would not do in the least. He was certainly fond enough of pretty women, but he hadn’t lived in the same quarters with a female presence since he’d been a child, and to do so now could bring nothing but absolute, appalling trouble.
And then he remembered the wistfulness in Miss Winslow’s face when they’d stood together in the last bedchamber, when the view from the windows had convinced him to make the house his own. He’d realized then that she’d saved the best for last, at once hoping and dreading that he’d love it the same way that she did. Clearly she did love the weary old place as if it were her own, and he understood the depth of her sorrow at seeing it go to another. She’d already lost her father, and now she was faced with losing her home as well. He understood, and he sympathized, a good deal more of both than was likely proper.
And now there was this damned clause imposed by those damned Trelawneys, tying his hands and hers too….
“I shall leave you to consider it, Captain My Lord,” said Potipher as he rose behind his desk and began bowing his way towards the office’s door. Feversham had sat empty for years, and clearly the agent meant to be as obliging as possible if it resulted in a sale. “Pray take as long as you need to reach your decision. But I fear I must remind you that there is not another property with Feversham’s special charms in all my lists, and keeping the housekeeper is such an insignificant, small condition for such a fine estate!”
“‘Special charms’, hell,” grumbled George as the door clicked shut. “The place is such a rambling, ramshackle old pile that they should be paying me to relieve them of it.”
Not that Brant cared one way or the other. “The housekeeper, George?” he asked, pouncing with un-abashed curiosity. “You’ve been keeping secrets from me again, brother.”
George sighed mightily. “No secrets, Brant, for there’s nothing to tell.”
“Nothing?” repeated Brant archly. “I’d wager ten guineas that this Miss Winslow isn’t the sort of black-clad old gorgon who ruled our youth with terror, else you would have already described her to me in the most shuddering terms. Instead you haven’t even mentioned her existence, which tells me infinitely more than any words.”
“You will make a wager of anything,” grumbled George. This was precisely the kind of inquisition that he had wished to avoid. If there was one area where Brant delighted in displaying his superiority over his younger brother, it was his far greater experience with women—a markedly unfair advantage, really, considering that George had spent most of his adult life at sea and far from any females at all, while Brant, with his fallen-angel’s face and a peer’s title, had absolutely wallowed in them in London.
“Well?” asked Brant, undaunted. “Is she?”
George glared. “Miss Winslow is neither old, nor is she a gorgon, though she was dressed in black.”
Brant waved his hand in airy dismissal. “Black can be an elegant affectation on the right woman.”
“Not if it’s mourning,” said George sharply. “You heard Potipher, Brant. The poor woman’s just lost her father.”
But Brant would not be discouraged. “Is she sweetly melancholy, then? A delicate beauty, shown off by that black like a diamond against midnight velvet?”
“You would not find her so,” said George, his discomfort growing by the second. He’d never cared for Brant’s manner with women. True, his brother’s attitude was shared by fashionable gentlemen from the Prince of Wales downward, but the way Brant combined a connoisseur’s fastidious consideration with a predator’s single-mindedness seemed to George to include almost no regard or respect for the lady herself.
Which, of course, was not how he’d felt about Miss Winslow. “She is tall,” he said, choosing his words with care, “and handsome rather than beautiful. Dark hair, fair skin, and eyes the color of smoke.”
“Ah,” said Brant with great satisfaction as he settled back in his chair, making a little tent over his chest by pressing his fingertips together. “You sound smitten, George.”
“She is not that kind of woman, Brant,” said George defensively. “Put a broadsword in her hand, and she’d become St. Joan and smite her villains left and right, but as for leaving a trail of swooning beaux in her wake, the way you’re saying—no, not at all. She’s prickly as a dish of nettles.”
“But you are intrigued,” insisted Brant. “I know you well enough to see the signs. You’ve had the sweetest cream of fair London wafting before you this last month, and not one of them has inspired this sort of paeans from you as does this housekeeper.”
“Paeans?” repeated George incredulously. “To say she is prickly as a dish of nettles is a paean?”
Brant smiled. “From you it is, my unpoetic Neptune of a brother. I say you should take both the house and the housekeeper. Regardless of her housewifery skills, she shall, I think, offer you other amusements.”
“Amusements, hell,” said George crossly. “That’s not why I’m taking the blasted house.”
“Oh, why not?” said Brant with his usual breezy nonchalance. “Our dear brother Rev has gone and married a governess, and now you fancy a housekeeper. I’ll have to look about me for a pretty little cook to become my duchess, and make our whole wedded staff complete.”
“Just stow it, Brant,” growled George. “Just stow it at once. Potipher!”
The agent reappeared so quickly that George suspected he’d been poised on the other side door, listening.
“You have reached a decision, Captain My Lord?” he asked, hovering with cheerful expectation.
“I have not,” growled George. “What if Miss Winslow wishes to leave my employment, eh? Is she a slave to the wishes of these blasted Trelawneys as well?”
Potipher blinked warily behind his spectacles. “Oh, no, Captain My Lord, not at all. Miss Winslow will be under no obligation to remain whatsoever.”
George sighed with a grim fatalism, drumming his fingers impatiently on the arm of his chair. At least that was some small solace. He would not wish any lady, especially not one as fine as Miss Winslow, to be obligated to stay with him. Yet if he wanted Feversham—which, of course, he did, now more than ever—then he was trapped into keeping Miss Winslow with it. George did not like feeling trapped, but least Potipher was also offering him a way out: what respectable woman, young or old, would wish to remain long beneath the same roof with the crew of the Nimble?
But then George thought again of the way Miss Winslow had smiled at him, bright and determined, as if she’d enjoyed their skirmishing as much as he had himself. Although he’d nobly scorned Brant’s suggestion that he “amuse” himself with the housekeeper, he couldn’t keep from considering all the wicked possibilities and justifications the circumstances would offer, and he nearly groaned aloud at the willfulness of his wayward thoughts and willing body.
Blast, he didn’t even know her given name….
Abruptly he rose to his feet. “Then it is decided, Mr. Potipher,” he said. “I shall take Feversham, and Miss Winslow with it.”
And trust the rest to fate.
“Ooh, miss, those look most wonderful fine on you!” exclaimed the girl behind the counter of the little shop as she held the looking-glass for Fan. “They say all the noble ladies be wearin’ such in London and Bath.”
Fan turned her head before the glass, making the gold earrings with the garnet drops swing gently back and forth against her cheeks. While her Company specialized in bringing in tea, there were others along the coast that carried more jewels and lace from France than in most of the shops in the Palais Royale, and even here in the tiny harbor village of Tunford, not three miles from Feversham itself, Fan could let herself be tempted by earrings that likely were the same as the noble ladies in London were wearing.
“You’ll fetch yourself a handsome sweetheart with those a-glittering in your ears, miss,” promised the girl, nodding with mercantile wisdom. “Less’n you already have a good man, and you want me to set these aside for him to come buy for you.”
Wistfully Fan touched one earring, catching the sunlight in the faceted stone like a tiny ruby prism in the golden filigree. She’d never had a sweetheart, old or new, let alone one to give her anything like these earrings. Father hadn’t permitted it, claiming that all the Tunford boys were beneath her. Fleetingly, foolishly, she now let herself imagine what kind of roses and jewels Captain Claremont would lavish on his lady, just like the heroes in ballads.
