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For that matter, Fan couldn’t recall the last time she’d bought something so frivolous for herself. Instead she’d always dutifully put her share of the company’s profits into the double-locked strongbox inside the wall of her bedchamber against hard times, the way Father had instructed. She was always conscious of that, of how she wasn’t like other women with a husband to look after her. She’d no one now but herself to rely upon for the future. She’d no one to blame, either, if she died in the poorhouse, or if some cowardly fool like Bob Forbert finally decided to turn evidence against her to the magistrates.
Yet the earrings were lovely things, and Fan let herself smile at her reflection as the red-tinged sparkles danced over her cheeks.
“Them garnets are as right as can be for you, miss,” coaxed the girl. “You won’t find any finer on this coast, not in Lydd nor Hythe, neither, and I vow—la, what be that ruckus?”
The girl hurried to the shop’s doorway, the looking-glass still in her hands, and curiously Fan followed. Tunford was a small village with only a handful of narrow lanes, sleepy and quiet the way country villages always were.
But it wasn’t quiet now. Two large wagons piled high with barrels, trunks, and boxes were coming to a noisy stop before the Tarry Man, Tunford’s favorite public house, their four-horse dray teams snorting and pawing the rutted soil while their drivers bawled for the hostler. Dogs raced forward, barking and yelping with excitement, and children soon came running along, too.
Even before the wagons had stopped, the eight passengers who’d been riding precariously on top began to clamber down, laughing and jumping to the ground as nimbly as acrobats. They were strong, sinewy, exotic men, all burned dark as mahogany from the sun, with gold hoops in their ears and long braided queues down their backs: deep-water sailors, man-o’-war crewmen that were seldom seen in a group like this outside of the fleet’s ports.
“What d’you make of all that, miss?” marveled the shopgirl. “Looks like half the Brighton circus, come here to Tunford!”
But it wasn’t the Brighton circus, half or otherwise, thought Fan with sickening certainty as she watched over the other woman’s shoulder. Over and over she had told herself this wouldn’t happen, until she’d let herself believe it. What was arriving in Tunford, and soon after at Feversham, was going to outdo any mere circus, and cause a great many more problems.
Because there, riding on a prancing chestnut gelding as he joined the wagons carrying his belongings, was Captain Lord Claremont.
Chapter Four
It took considerable determination for Fan to make herself walk slowly across the lane towards Captain Claremont, as if she’d been planning all morning to do exactly that. What she really wished to do, of course, was to race back to Feversham, lock every door, and bury her head beneath her bed pillow upstairs like a terrified cony in her burrow. But Father had taught her that danger was best confronted face-to-face, and so she did, even managing a polite smile to mask the thumping of her heart.
“Good day, Captain My Lord,” she called as he swung down from his horse. “I did not expect to see you again so soon.”
Clearly surprised, he turned at her voice, ducking around the chestnut’s neck to find her. He smiled warmly as she came closer, and swept his black cocked hat from his head to salute her, there in the middle of Tunford.
“Miss Winslow,” he boomed, his voice so cheerfully loud that she was certain they must be hearing it clear in Portsmouth. “Good day to you. I did not expect to see you here, either.”
She’d forgotten how very blue his eyes were, as if they’d stolen the brightest color from the sky above, so blue that she had to look away, towards the wagons and the grinning sailors watching them with undisguised curiosity.
“You are making a journey, Captain My Lord?” she asked, foolishly saying the obvious as she hoped and prayed he was going somewhere on the far side of the world.
“I am,” he declared, the sunlight glinting off the gold buttons on his coat. “And likely you have guessed my destination as well. Feversham, Miss Winslow. Feversham, my new home port. You have received the letter from Potipher, I trust?”
“No,” said Fan faintly, the awful certainty knotting tightly in her stomach. “I have had no letter from anyone.”
“No?” The captain frowned, his blue eyes clouding. “Potipher was to have written to you. So you’d know, you see. So you’d be prepared.”
“No letter,” she said again, and swallowed hard as she tugged her shawl higher over her shoulders. She didn’t want to know, and she didn’t want to be prepared. “I’ve had nothing from—”
“Miss Winslow!” The shopgirl came puffing up beside them, her expression as stern as her round face could muster. “Miss Winslow, if you don’t be wanting them garnet ear-bobs, then I must be taking them back to the shop.”
“Oh, I am so sorry!” Fan flushed, her fingers flying guiltily to the earrings. “I forgot I even had them on. Here, take them back, if you please. I do not think they suit me after all.”
“I think they suit you vastly well,” said the captain gallantly. “A spot of color is just the thing for you.”
The flush in her cheeks deepened, more scarlet than any miserable garnets, and hastily she pulled the earrings from her ears.
“Thank you,” she said, pressing them into the girl’s waiting palm. “Besides, they’re too dear for me.”
“How dear can they be?” asked the captain. “What’s the price, missy?”
“Twenty-five shillings, M’Lord,” answered the shopgirl, simpering up at him as she brazenly tripled the price that she’d asked of Fan earlier. “They be French garnets and filigree-work.”
“And now they shall belong to Miss Winslow,” he said, reaching into his waistcoat pocket for the coins, “for I cannot imagine them hanging from any other ears than hers.”
“No!” gasped Fan. True, she’d been fancying them, but fancies didn’t account for gossip, or whispers, or how accepting such a gift from him would rob her of all respect from the men in the Company. “You cannot! I will not take the earrings! That is—that is, it’s not proper for me to accept such a gift from you!”
His face fell, and he rubbed the back of his neck, a rare, restless little gesture of indecision for a man like him.
“It is not intended as a gift such as that,” he explained. “Not as a gentleman to a lady, that is. I meant it to make up for Potipher not sending that dam—that letter to you, as he ought to have.”
“Why?” she demanded, though she was already guessing—no, she already knew—the truth. He would be the new master, for as long a lease as the Trelawneys would grant him.
“Because I haven’t just let Feversham, as I’d first intended,” he said, unable to keep the satisfied pride from his voice. “I’ve bought it outright.”
She stared at him, dumbstruck. He’d bought Feversham? Had his captain’s share of that Spanish treasure ship truly been so vast, or were even younger sons of dukes wealthy enough to make such a purchase with ease?
“That is where I’m bound now,” he continued, “to take possession. There’s nothing to be gained by wasting time, is there?”
Aware of her shock, his smile turned lopsided as he answered quickly to fill her silence. “No, no, there isn’t, not at all. But this will be easier for us both if we—”
“No.” Abruptly she turned away from him. Everything in her life would be changed by this impulsive purchase of his, from warning the men, to changing the place along the stream where their tea was landed, to making sure no further messages were delivered to her at Feversham.
Oh, yes, and more change as well: she must leave the house where she’d been born and find a new place for herself to live. No wonder she was walking so fast now she was nearly running.
“Hold now, Miss Winslow, don’t flight off like this,” he said, his long stride easily keeping pace with hers. “We’ve matters to discuss.”
She kept her gaze straight ahead, quickening her step. “We do not.”
“And I say we do.” He wheeled around, blocking her way. “Isn’t there some place more private than the middle of the street where we can talk?”
“I told you,” she said, trying to step around him, “there is nothing to be said!”
“But there is.” He caught her arm to stop her, his grasp through the rough linsey-woolsey of her sleeve hard enough to make her gasp indignantly. “I don’t give a tinker’s dam if we talk here where the whole world can listen. But knowing these are your people, I’d think you’d want it otherwise.”
Fan glared at him and jerked her arm free, rubbing furiously at the spot where he’d held her as if to wipe away his touch. What he said was true; there was never much privacy to be found in a village like this, where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Even now she and the captain were drawing a sizeable audience, curious faces peering from open windows and over walls, and she didn’t want to think what sort of tales the company men would be hearing.
“This way, then,” she said curtly, heading across the lane and leaving him to follow her into the yard of the little church, stopping when they were surrounded only by overgrown headstones of long-dead villagers and the empty graves of sailors who’d perished at sea. “There’s no one here who’ll spread gossip.”
“Very well,” he said, glancing dubiously around at the old slanting headstones, the carved names and dates softened by the wind and patched with moss and lichen. The breeze from the marshes and the sea blew more insistently here in the open, tossing the heavy tassels on her shawl against her hip and ruffling his hair across his forehead. “Dead men tell no tales, eh?”
“Why should the dead trouble you?” she demanded bitterly. “Considering your trade’s as much killing as sailing, I’d vow that you’d be more familiar with the dead than the living.”
“You cannot have life without death,” he said quietly. “One goes with the other, doesn’t it?”
A chill shivered down her spine. No matter how often she’d pleaded with him to stop, her father had often spoken that way of death as well, as if he almost wished to court his own end. How was she any better, speaking like this while standing among so many graves?
“Life goes with death, yes,” she countered, striving to put her darker thoughts aside, “but few can find as much profit in it as you have.”
“Luck is as unpredictable as death, you know. I could as easily have been shot to pieces by French guns as be standing here with you now.” He tried to smile, but his expression seemed clouded now, without the earlier happiness, and she wondered if he, too, felt the grim pull of the burying ground. “You are angry because I have bought the house you regard as your home.”
“It is not my place to be angry,” she said sadly, for of course he was right, “even if you are taking away the only home I have ever known.”
He shook his head, frowning. “Hold now, I’ve not said that.”
“You didn’t need to say a word, not when your actions are so clear!” she cried forlornly. “You’ve no use for our old ways here, and you’ve even brought your own people as servants. What place can there be left for me at Feversham?”
“Have I asked you to leave?”
“Have you needed to?” She lifted her chin, determined to not let him see her cry. “I’ll not trouble you overmuch, Captain My Lord. That’s not my way. I shall gather my things and be gone by nightfall, and you’ll need not give me another thought.”
“The hell I won’t,” he said sharply, his frown deepening. “You’re not to leave, not unless you wish it. I’ll have need of your special knowledge of the house, the tradespeople in this county, the neighbors—a thousand things, I’m sure, if you’ll but share them. I’ve no intention of sending you out of your home, especially not with your father gone.”
“My father’s not dead,” she said quickly, shoving aside a piece of hair that had blown free of her cap and across her forehead. “I know it. He will come back.”
“I’m sure he will,” he said with gruff kindness. “And he should find you at Feversham when he does.”
Her resolution wobbled, and tears stung behind her eyes. How long had it been since anyone had shown her any manner of kindness at all, gruff or not? To take her father’s place leading the Company, she’d had to appear twice as competent, twice as emotionless as Father had ever been. Such leaders didn’t expect sympathy or kindness, nor did they get it. To feel it now, standing in the windswept burying ground and from this man, was almost more than she could bear, and far more than she could wish.
“Father would never look for me anywhere else,” she said softly. “I was born at Feversham, you see. My mother was the cook, when the old master still had guests to look after. Not that I can remember those times, or my mother, either.”
The captain nodded, more understanding than she’d expected. “I can scarce recall my mother, either, she died so young.”
“It fell to my father and my aunt to look after me,” she said. She didn’t know why she was telling him this, for surely these ordinary details of her life would be of no interest to anyone else. “My aunt was the housekeeper before me, and trained me well in the skills and arts of running Feversham. ‘The mysteries’, she called them, as if she were a very witch, and not the most pious woman in the parish.”
He smiled, the lines crinkling around the corners of his eyes the way she’d remembered. The last time he’d smiled at her like this had been when she’d shown him the mistress’s bedchamber, and he’d teased her about trying the bed. He’d made her heart thump and her thoughts race off in all kinds of wrongful ways.
“I expect you were the most attentive and adept of students,” he was saying now, “whatever the day’s mystery.”
“Oh, hardly,” she said, recalling how often her aunt had rapped her knuckles with the long handle of a wooden spoon. “Aunt called me Miss Fan Fidgets, on account of my never paying proper attention. I always longed to be out-of-doors when I was little, you see, and didn’t always heed her explaining how to take the tea-stains from the Irish linen and mildew from the plaster, or how always to speak as much like the gentry as I could.”
“That’s what your aunt called you? Miss Fan Fidgets?” His smile widened with obvious relish. “I can’t repeat any of the names my brothers called me, they were so foul. It’s quite astounding how many mangled versions of a simple ‘George’ boys can concoct when they set their minds to it.”
She smiled then, too, more amazed that he’d confide in her that his brothers had teased him with foul names when they’d been boys. She couldn’t picture having such a conversation with any of the other men she knew, even the ones she’d known since they’d been children together. Perhaps this was another way titled gentlemen were different than ordinary men, or perhaps, more dangerous for her, this was simply the way this particular titled gentleman behaved with her.
“I was the only child of the household,” she confessed wistfully, “which made me more at my ease around my elders than the lads and lasses my own age.”
He glanced at her sideways, beneath the brim of his hat, as if to show how thoroughly he doubted her. “Though surely that is no longer the case.”
She shrugged, twisting her hands into the ends of her shawl. She’d already told him more than enough; he didn’t need to know how few her friends of any age were, or how lonely she often was, or, most revealing of all, how much pleasure she was finding in this conversation with him.
“How fortunate for you to have had brothers!” she said with the wistfulness of an only child. “To have them to count on, to know you are always bound together by blood and birth no matter how you stray apart—what a rare, wonderful thing that must be!”
“Oh, aye, the Duke of Strachen’s three sons, as wild a little pack of ruffians as you can imagine,” he said fondly. “We fair raised ourselves in the country, you know, without much guidance or interference, and turned out deuced fine in the end, too.”
“Surely your father could claim his share of the credit,” she said, only half in jest. His father had been a duke, after all, a peer, and only a step or so below the king himself.
But clearly he didn’t agree. “My father had other occupations that kept him in London,” he said, his expression abruptly losing all its merriment and closing against her. “His sons were not among his favorite interests.”
“I am sorry,” she said softly, realizing too late that she’d inadvertently misstepped. “The love of your parents—that’s a precious fine thing for a child.”
“I would not know,” he said curtly, his face once again the stern officer’s mask, impersonal and un-emotional. “Shall you accompany me to Feversham now, Miss Winslow?”
“Have I a choice, Captain My Lord?” she asked, made wary by his sudden shift of moods.
“You are a servant, not a slave,” he insisted impatiently, though that insistence was enough to make her believe otherwise. “This is England, not the Indies. But you will oblige me greatly by remaining as Feversham’s housekeeper.”
A servant, not a slave, and the formality of obligation: how quickly things had changed between them, and how wrong for her to dare dream they’d ever be anything else. She sighed, looking away from him and out towards the sea.
She wanted to stay at Feversham, not only because it would make her work with the Company easier to continue, but also because, in her heart, she could not imagine herself anywhere else. Besides, where would she go with her little chest of gold and silver coins, squirreled away against the future? The captain had been right when he’d said her father would expect to find her there when he returned, and she wouldn’t dare disappoint him.
Yet what would it be like to live in the same house with this man—a man this handsome, with moods and a temper as unpredictable as the weather, a man whose authority would pose a constant risk to her and the others in the Company, a man whose charm had already made her drop her careful guard with unsettling ease?
A man who would hold all the keys to her life in his palm, and not even realize it?
“You will, of course, continue with the same wages, as well as the same quarters and entitlements,” he was saying, in the brusque voice that she was sure he used for giving orders on board ship. “There is much to be done at Feversham, and at last there will be sufficient hands to do it. That much at least you should find pleasing. You may also find changes in how the house is governed and arranged that may be less agreeable, and I trust you shall adjust. But as you have noted yourself, Miss Winslow, Feversham has always been your home, and I won’t have it said that I drove you away.”
Her smile was tight and sad, regretting what she could never have. It didn’t matter how many brothers he had, or what they’d called him as a boy. He was still Lord Captain Claremont, and she was still a servant, and so it would always be.
“You are kind to think of me, Captain My Lord,” she murmured. The kindness and understanding he’d shown her was still there, if not the fleeting, misinterpreted friendship. “I am grateful for the concern you show to me.”
“Kindness, hah.” He shook his head, as if to shake away the very notion of such a maudlin weakness. “What has kindness to do with any of this? It is the Trelawneys who have tied our hands together, Miss Winslow, those blasted Trelawneys and their confoundedly meddlesome interference. Surely you are sensible enough to see that.”
“The Trelawneys?” she asked, surprised once again, something that seemed to happen far too often with him. “The Trelawneys have never interfered in anything to do with Feversham.”
Another puff of wind tugged at his hat, and irritably he shoved it down more firmly onto his head.
“They have in this,” he answered, “as you would have known if Potipher had bothered to write that infernal letter. The Trelawneys had such regard for your loyalty that they refused to sell Feversham to me or anyone else unless I agreed to keep you on as long as you pleased. There, that’s the cold truth of it, and God take me for a simpleton this instant for having signed my name to such a scrap of foolery.”
“Then that is the only reason I am to stay at Feversham?” she asked, not wanting to believe what she couldn’t deny. “Because you could not have the house unless you took me with it, like any other old kettles and dunnage?”
“I told you earlier, Miss Winslow. I won’t have it said that I turned you out from your home.” He held his hand out to her. “Now will you come with me back to Feversham?”
She looked at his offered hand, more imperious than gallant, the way she supposed he’d always been if she’d but bothered to see it.
“Thank you, no, Captain My Lord,” she said, already turning to leave him, the way she should have done an hour before. “I have my own pony waiting for me. For you see, I won’t have it said that I’ve ridden with you.”
With a glass of the fine French brandy he’d found in the kitchen cradled in his fingers, George sprawled in a leather armchair before the grand sweep of windows in his bedchamber, the same windows that had convinced him to buy Feversham. The view of the Channel and everything else he could see now belonged to him, as much as the sea ever belonged to anyone. But this room, and the chair in which he sat, and the rest of the timbers and stone and plaster around him were indisputably now his. This was what he’d wanted, what he’d dreamed of, what he’d had to suffer and survive a great many years of war and hardship and receive a huge dollop of luck to achieve.
So why, then, did it all feel so damned hollow?
“Do that be all for the night, Cap’n My Lord?” asked Leggett, waiting by the door with the tray from supper in his hands. A stout, ginger-haired seaman of indeterminate age from Northumberland, Leggett had been George’s manservant since he’d made captain and become entitled to such a personal luxury. Like most seaman turned servants, Leggett was more independent than his landlocked counterparts, and considerably more outspoken, believing it to be his entitlement as a free Englishman to tell his captain what he needed to hear.
And from the way Leggett was now scowling and puffing out his ruddy cheeks, George was sure he was going to exercise that right once again.
“That will be all for the evening, Leggett,” said George wearily, hoping that might be enough to stall the man’s comments until morning, for he was in no humor for either company or conversation. “You and the others turn in. We’ll begin in earnest in the morning.”
“Beg pardon, Cap’n My Lord,” said Leggett, purposefully ignoring George’s broad hint. “There be one thing the lads wanted me to say.”
