Читать книгу A Regency Officer's Wedding - Carla Kelly - Страница 9

‘You want to marry me?’

To Mrs Paul’s immense credit, she listened without leaping to her feet and slapping him or falling into a dead faint.

She thinks I am certifiable, Bright thought, trying to divine what was going on in her mind as he blathered on. He was reminding himself of his least favourite frigate captain, who spoke faster and faster as the lie grew longer and longer. Dash it, this is no lie, he thought.

‘You see before you a desperate man, Mrs Paul,’ he said, wincing inside at how feeble that sounded. ‘I need a wife on fearsomely short notice.’ He winced again; that sounded worse.

He had to give her credit; she recovered quickly. He could also see that she had no intention of taking him seriously. Her smile, small though it was, let him know precisely how she felt about his little scheme. How can I convince her? he asked himself in exasperation. I doubt I can.

‘Mrs Paul, I hope you don’t think that through England’s darkest hours, the Royal Navy was led by idiots.’

Her voice was faint, mainly because she seemed to be struggling not to laugh. ‘I never thought it was, Admiral,’ she replied. ‘But…but why on earth do you require a wife on fearsomely short notice? Now that you are retired, haven’t you leisure to pursue the matter in your own good time?’

‘I have sisters,’ he said. ‘Two of ’em. Since I retired last autumn, they have been dropping in to visit and bringing along eligible females. They are cornering me and I feel trapped. Besides, I am not convinced I want a wife.’

The look she gave him was one of incredulity, as though she wondered—but was too polite to ask—how a grown man, especially one who had faced the might of France for years, could be so cowed by sisters. ‘Surely they have your best interests at heart,’ Mrs Paul said. She seemed to find his dilemma diverting. ‘Do you require a…a nudge?’

‘That’s not the issue,’ he protested, but he admitted to himself that she did have a point. ‘See here, Mrs Paul, wouldn’t you be bothered if someone you knew was determined to help you, whether you wanted it or not?’

She was silent a moment, obviously considering his question. ‘May I be frank, Admiral?’

‘Certainly.’

‘There are times when I wish someone was determined to help me.’

She had him there. ‘You must think me an awful whiner,’ he admitted at last.

‘No, sir,’ she said promptly. ‘I just think you have too much time on your hands now.’

‘Aha!’ he exclaimed, and slapped the table with his hook, which made the tea cups jump. ‘It’s my stupid sisters who have too much time! They are plaguing my life,’ he finished, his voice much lower.

‘So you think proposing to me will get them off your back?’ she asked, intrigued.

‘You are my backup, Mrs Paul.’

Oh, Lord, I am an idiot, he thought. She stared at him in amazement, but to her credit, did not flee the dining room. Maybe you think you owe me for a meal, he thought sourly. Humouring a lunatic, eh?

‘Backup? There is someone else who didn’t deliver?’ she asked. Her lips twitched. ‘Should I be jealous? Call her out?’

She had him again, and he had to smile. In fact, he had to laugh. ‘Oh, Mrs Paul, I have made a muddle of things. Let me explain.’

He told her how in desperation because his sisters would not leave him alone, he had contacted the captain of his flagship, who had a sister withering on the matrimonial vine. ‘I made her an offer. It was to be a marriage of convenience, Mrs Paul. She needed a husband, because ladies…er…don’t seem to care to wander through life alone. I was careful to explain that,’ he assured her. ‘She agreed.’

He looked at the lady across the table from him, amazed she was still sitting there. ‘It is foolish, isn’t it?’ he said finally, seeing the matter through her eyes. ‘I have been stewing about in this dining room for hours, and the lady has not appeared. I can hardly blame her.’ He looked at his hook. ‘Maybe she doesn’t care overmuch for hooks.’

Mrs Paul put her hand to her lips, as though trying to force down another laugh. ‘Admiral, if she cared about you, a hook wouldn’t make the least difference. You have all your teeth, don’t you? And your hair? And surely there is a good tailor in Plymouth who could—’ She stopped. ‘You must think I am terribly rude.’

‘No, I think you are honest and…dash it, I have all my hair! I did lose a tooth on the Barbary Coast—’

‘Careless of you,’ she murmured, then gave up trying to hold back the mirth that seemed to well up out of her.

Her laughter was infectious. Thank goodness the dining room was nearly empty by now, because he laughed along with her. ‘What is the matter with my suit?’ he asked, when he could talk.

She wiped her eyes on the napkin. ‘Nothing at all, Admiral, if only this were the reign of poor George III, and not the regency of his son! I realise you have probably worn nothing but uniforms for years. Many men would probably envy your ability to wear garments from the turn of the century, without having to resort to a shoehorn. I am no Beau Brummell, Admiral, but there is a time to bid adieu to old clothes, even if they do fit.’

‘I was never inclined to add pounds,’ he said, trying not to sound sulky. ‘A tailor would help?’

‘Perhaps, but he won’t solve your problem of sisters,’ she said sensibly. ‘Suppose I agreed to your…er…unorthodox proposal, and you fell in love with someone? What then?’

‘Or suppose you do?’ he countered, warmed that she still seemed to be considering the matter.

‘That is unlikely. I have no fortune, no connections, no employment. I had a good husband once, and he will probably suffice.’

She spoke in such a matter-of-fact way that he wanted to know more, but knew he didn’t dare. ‘Did you tease him as unmercifully as you have teased me? “Careless of me to lose a tooth?” Really, Mrs Paul.’

‘I was even harder on him, sir,’ she said in good humour. ‘I knew him better and everyone knows familiarity breeds content.’

You’re a wit, he thought in appreciation. ‘I have no skills in searching for a wife, Mrs Paul. I never thought to live that long. I will blame Napoleon.’

‘Why not?’ she said, her voice agreeable. ‘He had his own trouble with wives, I do believe.’ She leaned forwards. ‘Admiral, I know nothing of your financial situation, nor do I wish to know, but surely a visit to Almack’s during the Season would turn up some prospects that would satisfy even your sisters.’

Mrs Paul obviously noted the look of disgust on his face, but continued, anyway. ‘If you’d rather not chance Almack’s, there is church. Unexceptionable ladies are often found there.’

‘You’d have me endure sermons and make sheep’s eyes at a female in a neighbouring pew?’

She gave him such a glance that he felt his toes tingle. ‘Admiral! I am merely trying to think of venues where you might find ladies—suitable ladies! Were you this much trouble in the fleet?’

‘This and more,’ he assured her, warming to her conversation. By God, you are diverting, he thought. ‘Mrs Paul, do you ever talk about the weather?’

‘What does the weather have to do with anything?’ she asked.

‘Good books?’

‘Now and then. Do you know, I read my way through the family library of the lady I worked for in Bath. Ask me anything about the early saints of the church. Go on. I dare you.’

Bright laughed out loud again. ‘Mrs Paul, mourning is well and good, I suppose, but why hasn’t some gentleman proposed recently? You are a wit.’

He wished he hadn’t said that. Her eyes lost their lustre. ‘It is different with ladies, sir. Most men seem to want a fortune of some size, along with the lady.’ She looked in her reticule again and her look told him she was determined to turn her wretched situation to a joke. ‘All I have in here is an appointment book, the stub of a pencil and some lint.’

The last thing you want is pity, isn’t it? he told himself. ‘So here we are, the two of us, at point non plus,’ he said.

‘I suppose we are,’ she replied, the faintest glint of amusement returning to her eyes.

‘And I must return to my estate, still a single gentleman, with no prospects and a cook on strike.’

‘Whatever did you do to him?’

‘I told him my sisters were coming to visit in two days. They order him about and demand things. Mrs Paul, he is French and he has been my chef for eleven years, through bombardment and sinking ships, and he cannot face my sisters either!’

‘What makes you think matrimony would change that?’ she asked sensibly. ‘They would still visit, wouldn’t they?’

He shrugged. ‘You have to understand my sisters. They are never happier than when they are on a mission or a do-gooding quest. With you installed in my house, and directing my chef, and having a hand in the reconstruction, they would get bored quickly, I think.’

‘Reconstruction?’ she asked.

‘Ah, yes. I found the perfect house. It overlooks Plymouth Sound, and it came completely furnished. It does require a little…well, a lot…of repairs. I think the former owner was a troll with bad habits.’

Mrs Paul laughed. ‘So you were going to marry this poor female who has cried off and carry her away to a ruin?’

Bright couldn’t help himself. He wasn’t even sure why he did it, but he slipped his hook into the ribbons holding Mrs Paul’s bonnet on her head. She watched, transfixed, as he gave the frayed ribbon a gentle tug, then pushed the bonnet away from her face, to dangle down her back. ‘Are you sure you won’t reconsider? I don’t think you will be bored in my house. You can redecorate to your heart’s content, sweet talk my chef, I don’t doubt, and find me a tailor.’

‘You know absolutely nothing about me,’ she said softly, her face pink again. ‘You don’t even know how old I am.’

‘Thirty?’ he asked.

‘Almost thirty-two.’

‘I am forty-five,’ he told her. He took his finger and pushed back his upper lip. ‘That’s where the tooth is missing. I keep my hair short because I am a creature of habit.’ He felt his own face go red. ‘I take the hook off at night, because I’d hate to cut my own throat during a bad dream.’

She stared at him, fascinated. ‘I have never met anyone like you, Admiral.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘I think it is good.’

He held his breath, because she appeared to be thinking. Just say yes, he thought.

She didn’t. To his great regret, Mrs Paul shook her head. She retied her bonnet and stood up. ‘Thank you for the luncheon, Admiral Bright,’ she said, not looking him in the eyes this time. ‘I have had a most diverting afternoon, but now I must go to the registry office here and see if there is anything for me.’

‘And if there is not?’ It came out cold and clinical, but she didn’t seem to be a woman searching for sympathy.

‘That is my problem, not yours,’ she reminded him.

He stood as she left the table, feeling worse than when he waited for The Mouse. She surprised him by looking back at him in the doorway, a smile on her face, as though their curious meal would be a memory to warm her.

‘That is that,’ he said under his breath, feeling as though some cosmic titan had poked a straw under his skin and sucked out all his juices. It was an odd feeling, and he didn’t like it.

With each step she took from the Drake, Sally Paul lost her nerve. She found a stone bench by the Cattewater and sat there, trying to regain the equilibrium that had deserted her when she was out of Admiral Bright’s sight. The June sun warmed her cheek and she raised her face to it, glorying in summer after a dismal winter of tending a querulous old woman who had been deserted by her family, because she had not treated them well when she was able and could have.

Let this be a lesson to me, Sally had thought over and over that winter, except that there was no one to show any kindness to, no one left that being kind to now would mean dividends later on, when she was old and dying. Her husband was gone these five years, a suicide as a result of being unable to stand up to charges levelled at him by the Admiralty. The Royal Navy, in its vindictiveness, had left her with nothing but her small son, Peter. A cold lodging house had finished him.

She sobbed out loud, then looked around, hopeful that no one had heard her. Even harder than her husband’s death by his own hand—mercifully, he had hanged himself in an outbuilding and someone else had found him—was her son’s death of cold and hunger, when she could do nothing but suffer alone. She had been his only mourner at his pauper’s unmarked grave, but she had mourned as thoroughly and completely as if a whole throng of relatives had sent him to a good rest.

There was no one to turn to in Dundrennan, where her late father had been a half-hearted solicitor. The Paul name didn’t shine so brightly in that part of Scotland, considering her father’s younger brother, John, who had joined American revolutionaries, added Jones to his name and become a hated word in England. This far south, though, it was a better name than Daviess, the name she had shared with Andrew, principal victualler to the Portsmouth yard who had been brought up on charges of pocketing profit from bad meat that had killed half a squadron.

She had no other resource to call upon. I could throw myself into the water, she told herself, except that someone would probably rescue me. Besides, I can swim, and I am not inclined to end my life that way. I could go to the workhouse. I could try every public kitchen in Plymouth and see if they need help. I could marry Admiral Bright.

She went to the registry first, joining a line by the door. The pale governess who had shared a seat with her on the mail coach came away with nothing. The bleak expression on her face told Sally what her own reception would be. The registrar—not an unkind man—did say Stonehouse Naval Hospital might still be looking for laundresses, but there was no way of knowing, unless she chose to walk four miles to Devonport.

‘It’s a slow season, what with peace putting many here out of work. You might consider going north to the mills,’ he told Sally. When she asked him how she would get there, he shrugged.

Dratted peace had slowed down the entire economy of Plymouth, so there was no demand for even the lowliest kitchen help in the hotels, she discovered, after trudging from back door to back door. One publican had been willing to hire her to replace his pots-and-pans girl, but one look at that terrified child’s face told Sally she could never be so callous. ‘I won’t take bread from a baby’s mouth,’ she said.

‘Suit yourself,’ the man had said as he turned away.

Evensong was long over and the church was deserted. She sank down wearily on a back pew. When her money had run out two days ago, she had slept in Bath’s cathedral. It had been easy enough to make herself small in the shadows and then lie down out of sight. St Andrew’s was smaller, but there were shadows. She could hide herself again.

And then what? In the morning, if no one was about, she would dip her remaining clean handkerchief in the holy water, wipe her face and ask directions to the workhouse. At least her small son was safe from such a place.

There were several prayer books in their slots. Sally gathered them up, made a pillow of them and rested her head on them with a sigh. There wasn’t any need to loosen her dress because it was already loose. She feared to take off her shoes because she knew her feet were swollen. She might never get them on again. She made herself comfortable on the bench and closed her eyes.

Sally opened her eyes with a start only minutes later. A man sat on the end of the row. Frightened at first, she looked closer in the gloom at his close-cut hair and smiled to herself. She sat up.

He didn’t look at her, but idly scratched the back of his only hand with his hook. ‘The Mouse still hasn’t turned up.’

‘You have probably waited long enough,’ Sally said as she arranged her skirt around her, grateful she hadn’t removed her shoes. ‘I don’t know what the statute of limitations is on such a matter, but surely you have fulfilled it.’

He rested his elbows on the back of the pew, still not looking at her. ‘Actually, I was looking for you, Mrs Paul. The waiter informed me that you left your valise in the chair.’

‘I suppose I did,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing in it of value.’ She peered at him through the gloom. ‘Why did the waiter think I was your responsibility?’

He glanced at her then. ‘Possibly because earlier I had told him you were my cousin, and we were on the outs, and I was hoping to get into your good graces by buying you dinner.’

‘That was certainly creative, Admiral,’ she said.

‘Dash it all, how am I supposed to approach a single female I have never met before?’ he said. She couldn’t help but hear the exasperation in his voice. ‘Mrs Paul, you are more trouble than an entire roomful of midshipmen!’

‘Oh, surely not,’ she murmured, amused in spite of her predicament. She glanced at him, then stared straight ahead towards the altar, the same way he stared.

There they sat. He spoke first. ‘When you didn’t come out of St Andrew’s, I thought you might not mind some company.’ His voice grew softer. ‘Have you been sleeping in churches?’

‘It…it’s a safe place.’

He hadn’t changed his position. He did not move any closer. ‘Mrs Paul, my sisters are still meddlers, my chef is still on strike, I can’t get any builders to do what they promised, the house is…strange and I swear there are bats or maybe griffons in the attic.’

‘What a daunting prospect.’

‘I would honestly rather sail into battle than deal with any of the above.’

‘Especially the griffons,’ she said, taking a deep breath. Am I this desperate? Is he? she asked herself. This man is—or was—an admiral. He is either a lunatic or the kindest man in the universe.

‘What say you, Mrs Paul?’ He still didn’t look in her direction, as though afraid she would bolt like a startled fawn. ‘You’ll have a home, a touchy chef, two dragons for sisters-in-law, and a one-armed husband who will need your assistance occasionally with buttons, or maybe putting sealing wax on a letter. Small things. If you can keep the dragons at bay, and keep the admiral out of trouble on land, he promises to let you be. It’s not a bad offer.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ she replied, after a long pause in which she could have sworn he held his breath. She just couldn’t speak. It was beyond her that anyone would do this. She could only stare at him.

He gazed back. When he spoke, he sounded so rational she had to listen. ‘Mrs Paul, The Mouse isn’t coming. I want to marry you.’

‘Why, Admiral? Tell me why?’ There, she had asked. He had to tell her.

He took his time, exasperating man. ‘Mrs Paul, even if The Mouse were to show up this minute, I would bow out. She’s a spinster, and that’s unfortunate, but she has a brother to take care of her, no matter how he might grumble. You have no one.’ He held up his hand to stop her words. ‘I have spent most of my life looking after England. One doesn’t just chop off such a responsibility. Maybe it didn’t end with Napoleon on St. Helena and my retirement papers. Knowing your dilemma, I cannot turn my back on you, no more than I could ever ignore a sister ship approaching a lee shore. You need help. I need a wife. I don’t think I can make it any plainer.’

‘No, I suppose you cannot,’ she murmured, but made one final attempt to make the man see reason. ‘Admiral, you know nothing about me. You truly don’t.’ It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him, but she found she could not. Coward, she thought.

He looked at her then, and his face was kind. ‘I know one thing: you haven’t wittered once about the weather. I suppose marriages have started on stranger footings. I don’t know when or where, but I haven’t been on land much in the past twenty years.’

‘I suppose they have,’ she agreed. ‘Very well, sir.’