Unlikely Spy Catchers (St. Brendan Book 2)

by Carla Kelly

  “What is so damned amusing to you in this situation?” Sir B exclaimed. “Out with it.”

  Able leaned closer and told Sir B about easy forgery and polar bears. He was rewarded with a crack of laughter that cleared the air between them.

  “Pitt did want to know enough to satisfy the Blakes, but our Trinity House warden also has a genuine interest in St. Brendan’s,” Sir B said, resuming his thoughts. “I’ve told Mr. Pitt a few things, and he knows Thaddeus Croker well. Our headmaster should have been here, but alas, mumps.” He grimaced. “And so we thrust you upon the stage, with little John Mark. I knew both of you would acquit yourselves well, and then you were smart enough to insist upon Meridee’s presence.”

  “She does have a disarming way about her,” Able said, after a glance at his nearest and dearest, who was starting to fidget. He knew what she was like when her milk started to flow and there was no Ben around to do his duty. Time to move this conversation along handsomely.

  “She does.” Sir B lowered his voice still farther. “Now the Brethren know what we are about, and have set us the task of watching the hulks for signs of trouble. They seem to have wind of something, although I do not know what. Can we do it?”

  “We can,” Able said. “We’ll organize a watch.”

  “Hurrah for St. Brendan’s. I put you in the hot seat and you didn’t scorch yourself.” The captain glanced at Meridee. “Neither did she. You two were obviously made for each other.”

  “Without a doubt.” Able interpreted the current darts his dear wife was throwing his way. “Even now, I know precisely what she is thinking.”

  “Surely not.”

  “I do. She is tugging at her bodice most discreetly, but I know she wants to skedaddle home to our heir and offspring, and nurse him.”

  “Take her home before she bursts.”

  Able laughed and stood up.

  There was scarcely time to analyze what happened next, but it probably hadn’t taken a minute: a startling exchange on a busy London boulevard, followed by a sudden curse and a shove that sent Able sprawling toward the street. Meri shrieked as she reached for him. He flailed and struck her by accident, dragging her down with him. His utter humiliation in front of the people he most admired. The look of distress on John Mark’s face. The realization that his world would never be fine, fair or easy.

  Chatting there with Sir B, Able caught only a glimpse of the red-faced Elder Brother who had never changed his expression from one of active dislike. If anything, the look of extreme dislike had only intensified, after Mr. Pitt announced the annual stipend to St. Brendan’s. The man had flung himself out of the assembly room and made a great clatter on the stairs. Good riddance, Able had thought.

  But here he was, barreling down the shallow steps, the loathing on his face probably visible to ships at sea, like one of Trinity’s famous lighthouses.

  Able’s first instinct was to step in front of Meri. For once in his life he wasn’t fast enough. With a grunt, the Elder Brother slammed into him and pushed him and Meridee into the street. She crumpled under Able’s weight and landed in the gutter.

  All attention turned to his wife as he slid away and swiveled to help her, then cover her with his body as the enraged man kicked at them.

  “Sir! Stop!” he gasped, grabbing for Meridee, who tried to crawl under him again for protection, her hand to her face where Able had accidentally struck her as he fell.

  “Get out, you bastard!” the man roared. “How dare you think to come into a place so far above your station? You have less standing than a garden slug! I think my Brethren have lost their senses!”

  The man looked around wildly, as if seeking another target. He found it in Sir B, and pointed a shaking finger at him. “If you were not a cripple I would call you out. This was probably all your idea! Can’t you leave dregs like this in workhouses where they belong?”

  “You, Captain Ogilvie, are either drunk or mad. Leave now and nothing will be said about this.”

  Sir B spoke in a low voice, a dangerous voice that Able had heard before, once in an Asiatic port full of cutpurses and assassins and another time from the quarterdeck at a minor South Pacific fleet engagement when matters were at their worst. Able turned to help Meridee to her feet. She grabbed him, then pushed him toward the man in the wheeled chair. “I am fine,” she quavered, even though he knew she was anything but fine. “Stand by Sir B.”

  “Help the cripple, help the cripple,” the captain mimicked. “You, Mrs. Six – what a stupid name – may pretend to be a lady, but no lady would come within a barge pole of a workhouse bastard putting on airs! You are no better than he is!”

  “That’s enough,” Able said, his brain absolutely silent now, as if all the polymaths and geniuses inside were wondering what he would do, too. He looked around for a weapon, anything, to beat the man senseless for his rudeness to the dearest wife a man could possess. Nothing.

  His face registering shock, William Pitt hurried over. The captain threw off Mr. Pitt’s hand on his shoulder, glared at the former prime minister as if he wanted to thrash him, too, then took off at a fast walk down the side street, turning back once to glare at them all and mutter, “Bastards all. So ye shall remain. Ye can’t put a bonnet on a pig.”

  “Should I summon the watch?” Grace Croker asked. Her arms were tight around John Mark, who had turned his face into her skirt. “Steady now, Mister Mark.”

  “I will kill him,” the boy said. “Only let me go.”

  “He is not worth anything that dignified, John,” she said in her firmest teacher voice. “I am not turning loose of you until you promise me you will not go after him.”

  “John Mark, as you were,” Able snapped. “This is not your fight.”

  “Yes, it is,” the boy argued, his voice scarcely audible from the depths of Grace’s skirt. “You’re a Gunwharf Rat, too.”

  “So I am,” Able said, humiliated and wondering where to turn. He couldn’t bring himself to look at anyone but his wife, who held her arms out to him. He walked into them and let her hold him.

  “Meri, you love me, don’t you?” he whispered, for her ears alone.

  “My goodness, such a question,” she whispered back. “I love no one else. Well, I love Ben, too, and Able, I’d better get to him quickly.”

  “Able, come here a moment,” Sir B commanded.

  He shook his head. “Not now, sir. Maybe later. We’re going to Curzon Street and home tomorrow.”

  “Gervaise, wheel me to that stubborn man over there, the one St. Brendan’s cannot manage without.”

  Leave me alone. Able wanted to shout the words, but Meri was smoothing his hair now and murmuring something that sounded like her conversations with Ben. His celestial mentors crowded back into his head, but he didn’t want them. “Tell them to go away, Meri,” he said.

  Bless her, she understood. She put her hand over his eyes. “Just leave him alone for now,” she said softly into his ear. “He’s busy, can’t you see?”

  Apparently they could. All he was conscious of was Meri’s heart beating too rapidly against his chest and it felt wonderful. He sighed and relaxed.

  “You know, it’s within my capacity to prosecute the man,” he heard Mr. Pitt say to Sir B. “What could he have been thinking?”

  “Change is hard for some,” Sir B replied. “We can probably arrange for Captain Ogilvie to return to sea sooner than he anticipated. In fact, I would recommend it.”

  “It could not happen too soon for me, Sir B.”

  “Yes, dreadful business,” his captain said. He shook his head as though he couldn’t believe what had happened. “I know Ogilvie well enough. He can be impetuous and thoughtless, but I never knew him to be cruel. I wonder what else is afoot.” He managed a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Master Six, in this case, all’s well that end
s.”

  Able turned around then, able to face the others because Meri held his hand. “I can resign my appointment at St. Brendan’s and return to the fleet, if I am an embarrassment, Sir B.”

  “That’s the last thing I want right now, with the possible exception of dysentery,” Sir B said. “No one said this …this…whatever it is we are engaged in was going to be easy. Mrs. Six, do you need a poultice for your eye?”

  Able took a good look at his darling. “Oh horror, I did that when I landed on you,” he muttered. “Seriously, are you all right?”

  “My dress is a bit of a ruin, but it was too tight anyway,” she said, and took him by the arm. “And look – here is our carriage.”

  When the coachman, a quizzical expression on his face, let down the step, Able helped her in. When John Mark started to follow, Grace took his arm.

  “I have a much better idea,” she said. “I think that without too much effort, you and I could talk Sir B into escorting us to Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre tonight. We will even invite Mr. Pitt, if he doesn’t mind low company.”

  “I don’t, as it turns out,” the statesman said. “Sir B, I believe we are going to crowd into your carriage and eat at your table before we set out for the circus. Don’t wait up for us, you Sixes.”

  — Chapter Ten —

  Their ride home was a silent one, Able’s expression set in stone, except for the muscle working in his jaw. Meridee leaned against his shoulder and he finally put his arm around her, which relieved her heart as nothing else could.

  “I don’t understand what happened,” he said.

  “It was obvious he wasn’t in agreement with anything Mr. Pitt or Captain Rose said,” she replied. “Able, has something like this occurred before?”

  “Oh, now and then.”

  She watched his expressive face, seeing and hearing the bitterness that startled her, because her husband was a realistic, cheerful man, most days. But not all days.

  He visibly gathered himself together. “I don’t mean to be sharp, my love,” he told her. “I need a thicker skin, perhaps.”

  She took his hand and kissed it, then pressed it against her heart, so he could feel the constant beat. He smiled after a long moment. “Do I ever mutter in my sleep about Harvey’s treatise on the circulation of blood and how the heart pumps?”

  “Oh, now and then,” she teased in turn, without the bitterness.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes, looking old and weary until he dozed, to her relief. She knew him. When he opened his eyes again, he would be more his usual self.

  He was, but it took longer. The humiliation lingered in his eyes. Still, he made an effort, helping her from the vehicle. He started to chuckle when the butler, looking a bit fine drawn around the eyes, ushered them into a townhouse filled with indignation from a small set of lungs.

  “I sense a career in the Royal Navy,” Able said. “He’ll be heard above all storms at sea.”

  Meridee rushed directly to the kitchen, unbuttoning her bodice as she went, because Ben’s peremptory summons waited for no one.

  “Not a moment too soon,” her housekeeper said. “He did enjoy his cream pudding, but that only lasts so long. Mrs. Six! What happened to your eye?”

  “It’s a long story I don’t have time for right now,” she said. “It will keep.” Meridee gave her housekeeper a meaningful glance which she knew would suffice, because Mrs. Perry was swift to understand.

  Meridee sank into the comfortable chair Mrs. Perry had vacated. Able propped a hassock under her feet and held their squalling son while she undid her corset in record time, and held out her arms for her baby. Silence reigned, as Benjamin Belvedere Six nursed and patted her breast. All was right in his world. If only things were right in Able’s world.

  She concentrated on the relief to her body as Ben did his duty. Able sat beside her for mere moments, too restless to remain still. Mrs. Perry watched him as he paced the floor, opening her mouth once with a question, then closing it when Meridee shook her head.

  “I’m going for a walk,” he said finally.

  “Not too late, I hope?” she asked, trying to keep her voice light, even though she knew he could see through that façade and spot the worry underneath.

  “No. Trust me.” He blew a kiss to her and left the kitchen.

  As soon as the door closed, she told Mrs. Perry everything that had happened. She watched the housekeeper’s eyes narrow into malevolent slits until she began to fear for the odious Captain Ogilvie, should he ever dare venture near St. Brendan’s.

  “I wish I could protect my husband from ogres like the captain,” she said. “Why should a man’s birth dictate how he is treated all his life?”

  “I asked myself that same question once, Mrs. Six, when I stood naked on an auction block and felt men’s hands all over me,” Mrs. Perry said quietly.

  “Oh, dear, I have fumbled, haven’t I?” Meridee asked.

  “Not really,” her servant replied. “You told me once how awful it felt when you realized that without a dowry, you would never marry.”

  “It doesn’t equate,” Meridee argued.

  “It does.” Mrs. Perry touched Ben’s hand and smiled when his white fingers curled around her black one. “This will be the lad who knows better fortune than all of us. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Meridee nodded, too ready for tears to speak. She sighed with relief when Mrs. Perry applied a cool, damp pad to her throbbing eye, then prepared a sandwich so she could keep up her strength.

  “All I want to do is take care of my baby and my husband,” she said, when Mrs. Perry handed her a glass of milk to accompany it. “Mrs. Perry, is there something wrong with me?”

  Meridee handed Ben over for a final burp and pulled herself together, but looser this time. Tight corsets were no longer her friend.

  “Wrong with you? Hardly,” Mrs. Perry said. She cradled Ben’s head in her large hand and put him in his crib. They both watched as he settled himself into sleep. “You’re doing precisely what you want to do, aren’t you?”

  “It’s so ordinary. A husband and children are all I ever want.” Meridee leaned closer. “Do you think Able will get bored with me? My aims and goals aren’t exactly lofty, are they? I know I can never even approach his brain power. Do you think he will wish for someone more like him? I worry sometimes.”

  “No one can approach that mind.” Mrs. Perry gave her a gentle look, the sort of regard that Portsmouth’s butchers, bakers and hangabouts would never credit from such a formidable mountain of a woman. “Mrs. Six, you are exactly the woman such a man needs and craves, and he knows it,” she said. “I doubt he wasted a single second in courting you, back when he was poorer than a church mouse and had no expectations whatsoever.”

  It wasn’t that long ago and she couldn’t deny it. “Not a moment,” she said. Meridee drank the milk dutifully. Mrs. Perry handed her a sliced apple next, which she polished off. “I think I am eating more than both Nick and John combined,” she protested, and shook her head at a chocolate biscuit. All that earned her was a glare of no trifling size, so she ate it, too.

  “Of course you are eating more!” Mrs. Perry said. “You’re feeding a future sailing master in the Royal Navy.”

  “Or maybe a surgeon or a mechanist,” she teased, then regarded the woman who meant far more to her than a servant. “Ben will be anything he wants to be. I suppose you’re right. I am happiest when Master Six and Ben are close to me.”

  “And so is Master Six. Even a blind man could see his regard for you.”

  “I hope he will not walk too long tonight. I want him here.”

  Able returned long after Grace and John Mark came home from the circus, the boy bursting with enthusiasm and anxious to tell her everything, even as he scrubbed at his eyes and yawned.

  “John,
it will keep until you ride home with us tomorrow,” Meridee said.

  The boy yawned again. “P’raps.”

  “I am afraid you will be without John Mark for another day,” Grace Croker said, as she sat on the sofa beside Meridee. “Wouldn’t you know it, but there is a balloon ascension tomorrow morning in Hyde Park and Sir B insists we attend with him. You and the Six men will take my carriage back to Portsmouth, and we will ride with Sir B the day after.” She patted John’s shoulder. “Right, John? John?”

  A quiet summons to the butler found the sleeping lad in capable arms and on his way up the stairs. Grace leaned back, a smile on her face.

  “I had the most delightful time of my life, just watching one child’s enjoyment,” she said. She held her hand out to her friend. “Meridee, you and Able are going to have so much fun taking your little ones to circuses and balloon ascensions and picnics.” She stopped, her expression contemplative bordering on regretful. “And here I thought Grace Croker should enjoy being a spinster with a fortune of her own, and no one to control her or dictate her life in any way.”

  “Don’t you?” Meridee asked, surprised. This Grace seemed different from the Grace who was quite prepared to brazen her way into Trinity House, should it have proved necessary, or had no qualms about teaching workhouse children in a private academy. This Grace even looked a little wistful.

  “I’m not certain anymore,” Grace said. “Forgive me for silently laughing at you because your dresses don’t quite fit now, or teasing about your fidgets because you are ready to nurse and there is not a baby nearby.”

  Meridee smiled at that. “It would never do for me to snatch up someone else’s infant on the street and relieve the strain, now, would it? And as for my dresses, Able told me to be patient.”