The Silver Lord

by Miranda Jarrett

  “Here, let me take that,” he said, his voice gruff, almost sheepish, as he lifted the tray away. “I’ll make a place for it here on the end. So I won’t, as you fear, have to eat on the floor like the old dog that I am.”

  With his forearm he shoved aside several of the books, clearing just enough to space to balance the tray on one corner of the table.

  “I didn’t intend to call you a dog,” she said quickly, clasping her hands before her to give them something to do. “I meant only that you deserve better than to eat like one, from the floor.”

  “At least I have obeyed you like a good dog, haven’t I?” He smiled crookedly, raking his hands back through his hair with haphazard abandon. Ignoring the tray, he leaned over the papers on the table once again, the red silk of his dressing gown fluttering around him like the robes of a mystical conjurer at the fair.

  “This much should please you, Fan,” he explained, oblivious to her uneasiness. “I’ll grant you that, as calculations go, this sort of ciphering isn’t a quarter as interesting as determining a course at sea, but it will determine our course here at Feversham.”

  She wished he’d tied the sash around that dressing gown. Instead he merely held up the paper for her to see, the sheet covered with unexpectedly tidy rows of numbers.

  “This sum shows what I have already spent to acquire this glorious pile of a house,” he continued, “and this shows what I have spent thus far on the barest outfitting, for linens and cookpots and such. Ah, Fan, you cannot guess what a favorite I have become among the shopkeepers!”

  “No, likely not,” she murmured, striving to concentrate on the sheet with the numbers instead of his bare chest behind it. “Forgive me, My Lord Captain, but you—you—it isn’t proper for you to call me by my Christian name, any more than I should call you by yours.”

  He paused, and frowned. “I cannot help it,” he confessed solemnly, shaking his head so his dark hair flopped across his forehead. “‘Miss Winslow’ is far too pompous for you. Fan is your true given name. You told me so yourself, and as names go, it suits you infinitely better. I much prefer it.”

  She nodded reluctantly. “I should not have shared such—such a confidence with you.”

  “What, by telling me your name? That was a confidence?”

  “What I told you in the burying ground, about my childhood and such—I shouldn’t have burdened you with that, My Lord Captain. I forgot my place.”

  “Place, hell,” he said impatiently. “You spoke of your childhood, and I spoke of mine. It was mutual, and it was agreeable, or at least it seemed so to me.”

  She raised her chin defensively, refusing to be bullied. “I’m speaking of what is improper, not agreeable.”

  “But matters are already improper enough between us, aren’t they?” he asked. “You’re more Feversham’s servant than you’ll ever be mine. You may take your leave of me whenever you please, but I can’t dismiss you. Not that I would, but still, there you have it. If that’s not one-sided and improper, then I don’t know what the devil is.”

  George smiled, realizing he’d delivered more of a lecture than he’d intended or she’d deserved. He wasn’t on his own quarterdeck, and Fan certainly wasn’t one of his crew. In a way he rather wished she were, for at least he would have known precisely how to treat her. The Navy’s regulations were always useful that way. But with Fan, he felt completely at sea, without a paddle, rudder, or star to guide him.

  He could surely use any of the three now. He still could not believe he’d taken her hand and kissed it last night, and the memory of her touch, her scent, had kept him awake most of the night. He’d sworn to his brother that he wished the housekeeper gone from Feversham, but when Fan had said she’d leave, he’d practically begged her to stay.

  No, he had begged her. He should be honest, at least about that, just as he should be honest about how much he had wanted to kiss her mouth after her hand, and tumble her on her back on that creaking old bed after that: shameful, wicked thoughts for any honorable man to have for his housekeeper. No surprise that he’d determinedly ignored that same bed and set his thoughts to the chilly rigor of mathematics.

  It had worked, too, until Fan herself had appeared at his door, his dreams brought to life with the same suddenness that she’d startled him last night. Yet even with her now standing here before him, the hand he’d kissed folded modestly over its mate, he still marveled at the power of her attraction for him. He couldn’t explain it except in parts—say, how she’d narrow her gray eyes at him, appraising him through her inky-black lashes, or the curve of her waist in the black gown—but there was so much more that he couldn’t understand, let alone put into words.

  Especially not now, when she was doing that wicked business with her eyes slanted towards him, skeptical and seductive and none-of-your-nonsense all bundled in one.

  “So we can agree that we are properly improper,” he said, hoping he sounded as if everything were settled, “or improperly proper, or however else you wish to describe it.”

  He smiled again, and turned towards the breakfast tray with a certain cowardly haste. As a captain, he was accustomed to having every detail neatly arranged and ordered, but he couldn’t help but feel now that matters with Fan were neither arranged nor ordered, nor in the least neat. He lifted the cover from the plate with the bacon and shirred eggs arranged on toast, and sighed blissfully.

  “My highest compliments to you, Fan,” he said as his favorite scents wafted upward. “This is the sort of breakfast that makes a man rejoice to face another day.”

  “It’s also a breakfast that I did not make, not one morsel, which you know perfectly well.” She took the cover and clanged it back over the plate. “Your one-legged cook understands your tastes far better than I ever shall.”

  “Ah.” His bliss vanished as fast as his breakfast had. “You have met Small, then?”

  “Of course I have,” she said. “He is your cook, and a most accomplished and able cook at that.”

  He waited cautiously, unsure of what would come next. Like most galley cooks, Small could be prickly and territorial, and while George expected Fan could hold her own, he wished he’d been present to help ease that first meeting between housekeeper and cook.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “Small does know his way about the galley. His father was a cook for a tavern on one of the stage routes to the north, and Small mastered his cookery before he ran off to sea.”

  “He also knows how to work a chocolate mill,” she said, her unhappiness visibly growing with each word, “which I do not. He knows you prefer your eggs shirred in butter to simmering soft in the shell, and he knows how to cook bacon the way you like it best, which I most obviously do not.”

  “I’m sure he could show you how,” suggested George. “I will have him do so this morning.”

  It had seemed like a logical enough idea. But bright pink patches appeared on Fan’s cheeks and her chin had risen another fraction, the same that had happened when he’d offered to buy her the earrings yesterday.

  And a sure sign, George, my lad, of rough weather ahead.

  “Forgive me for speaking plain, My Lord Captain,” she said, so curtly that George couldn’t help but imagine how exceedingly disastrous that first meeting with his cook must have been. “But I do not believe that your Mr. Small would agree with you, not in the least.”

  “He wouldn’t have to agree,” said George. “Damnation, he’d only have to obey.”

  But she’d stopped attending, frowning instead, with her head turning away from him towards the open door.

  “Smoke,” she announced. “I smell smoke.”

  “Oh, blast.” He could smell it now, too, faint and acrid: the most ominous scent of all to a sailor on a wooden ship in the middle of the sea, and not much better on the upper floor of a house built of ancient, dry timbers. Swiftly he snuffed all but one of the candlesticks on his desk, taking the one for light as he took her by the arm. “Come, Fan, hurry.”

>   “It’s from the kitchen,” she explained as they hurried down the stairs. “It’s the oven.”

  “I don’t care if it’s the devil’s own cook-stove,” he said grimly, the smoke thickening the farther down the stairs they went. “From this morning onward, I want fire-buckets stowed in every room. I won’t be roasted alive in my own house, mind?”

  But even if it wasn’t the devil in the kitchen, it certainly sounded that way from the crashing and thumping and coughing and swearing coming from the bottom of the stairs. He could just make out Small, flailing a flat wooden peel to clear the air, and his young cook’s mate Danny swinging the door to the yard back and forth trying to do the same.

  Coughing and squinting as the smoke stung his eyes, George paused to cover his mouth and nose with a handkerchief. Fan didn’t wait, fearlessly charging in ahead. Holding the hem of her apron over the lower half of her face, she dodged Small and his peel and hurried directly to the small bake oven built into the side of the hearth. More smoke billowed from the oven’s open, arched door, smelling of wood and coals and burning bread. Swiftly Fan took the long-handled coal-rake from the hearth and with one hand thrust it deep into the stove, jabbing it back and forth.

  At once the smoke began to thin, then clear, as with obvious experience she flipped the rake over in her hand and one by one drew out the charred, crumbling bricks that had once been loaves of bread. Carefully she balanced each smoking, blackened loaf on the teeth of the rake and carried them through the kitchen, and past both Small and George before she heaved them out the open door and into the yard.

  It was, decided George, one of the most efficient and deliberate celebrations of an enemy’s defeat that he had ever witnessed.

  And he also knew what Fan wanted more than a thousand pairs of garnet earrings.

  “If you had but asked, Mr. Small,” she said, the rake still in her hands and her smile at once triumphant and disarming as they all stood in the yard to let the air clear inside, “I would have showed you how willful this oven can be. Unless the coals are placed to the back corner of the stove and the door kept ajar a fraction, whatever you put inside will burn, and the coals shall smoke. Unless, of course, you do not know how to build a proper fire for baking.”

  Small sputtered, his round face streaked with soot and his eyes bright red as much from indignation as the smoke. “If I had a true oven, missy, and not your heap o’ witch’s stones, why, then I’d—”

  “You’d bake as perfect a loaf of bread as Miss Winslow herself would here,” said George evenly. “I’ve been proud to know you many years, John Small, and I know you to be a fair, honest man who’d never fail his mates or his ship.”

  “Aye, aye, M’Lord Cap’n,” said Small cautiously. “No one can say otherwise, true enough.”

  “And no one shall, either,” continued George, feeling more like a judge than a captain, as he bowed slightly in Fan’s direction. “Though it is not quite the same as the Nimble, this house is my command now, and as Feversham’s housekeeper, Miss Winslow is as good as my first lieutenant, with those responsibilities and respect.”

  Small grimaced, unconvinced. “Aye, aye,” he grumbled at last. “If you say so, Cap’n M’Lord.”

  George didn’t smile. “Heed her, Small. She knows this vessel better than all of us together. We need her unless we want to go up in flames the next time you bake bread. Must I continue, or do you understand?”

  “Aye, aye, M’Lord Cap’n,” Small answered with glum resignation. “Lieutenant Miss Winslow it be.”

  “Very good, Small.” Now George tried not to grin, feeling every bit as wise and clever as old Moses himself. “Now you and Danny go along and clean up this wretched mess directly.”

  The two men nodded and retreated, doubtless to grumble about the unfairness of their life, but George didn’t care. The rosy new sun was just rising clear of the horizon, the air was fresh and chill off the water to clear his head, and Fan—Fan was standing before him with soot on her cheeks and complete wondering amazement on her face.

  “So, Miss Winslow,” he said. “Must I remind you, too, to be honest and fair, if you wish to keep on as my lieutenant?”

  But for Fan the new morning seemed every bit as perfect. What finer sight could there be than to have such a handsome man standing there before her, his head thrown back to greet the rising sun and the red silk whipping around his long, lean body like a scarlet banner? And how nothing, absolutely nothing, could make it better than realizing how amazingly he understood her?

  “You don’t need to tell me anything more,” she said, the words coming in a heady rush. “You’ve already told me more than I ever dreamed to hear, and—and—I thank you, George!”

  She laughed, so overwhelmed she was almost giggling. Before she lost her nerve, she leaned up on her toes and kissed him on his stunned, stubbled mouth. His beard was rough, his lips surprisingly warm and soft, his scent undeniably masculine, and she laughed again, giddy at her own boldness. Kissing him like this, using his name as freely as he wanted to use hers, went beyond improper to reckless, and with the panicking realization of what she’d down, she scurried off towards the dairy. With the baking rake still clutched tight her hand, she leaned against the whitewashed brick wall and closed her eyes, her breath coming in heady gasps of shock and delight and shame and joy and bewilderment.

  She heard a footstep on the slate floor and her eyes flew open with expectation. No one else would come here; though all the buckets and white earthenware bowls remained in place, the dairy had not been used for milk and cheesemaking in years.

  “Have you more to ask of me, then?” she asked breathlessly. “Have you followed me for that?”

  “Aye, mistress, I have,” said Will Hood grimly, “and a good thing it be for the Company’s sake that I did. Answers, mistress, that’s what I want, honest answers, and I’ll not be leaving without them.”

  Chapter Six

  “You’ll have to ask your questions first, Will Hood,” said Fan, trying, and failing, to make herself sound stern and forthright and leader-like, and not just some other giddy, light-heeled country girl meeting her sweetheart in the dairy house. “I can’t give you answers without questions, can I?”

  “Faith, mistress, I scarce know where to begin.” He shook his head, his pale eyes chilly beneath the brim of his hat. Hood had been her most loyal supporter in the Company, but now, for the first time since her father had disappeared, she was no longer as confident of Hood’s loyalty or as sure of his trust. How much had he seen, she wondered desperately, what had he heard?

  “Then begin at the beginning,” she said. She was woefully conscious of the smudges on her apron and the untidiness of her hair, all visible cracks in her usually impeccable appearance. She was also suddenly aware of how very much larger Hood now seemed in the narrow dairy room, looming over her with his famous shoulders and arms strong enough to row to France. “But be swift about it, Will. You shouldn’t be here in the day like this, and I’ve other tasks waiting for me in the house.”

  “Oh, aye, I’ll warrant you do, mistress.” He sighed again, sadly, as if the sarcasm had been unavoidable. “You told us this lord captain wouldn’t be troubling us. You told us he’d not want Feversham, that he’d choose another house, and now here he is, a hungry red fox plumped down among us poor pigeons.”

  “He’s not like that, not at all,” she answered quickly, her voice echoing off the slate floors and marble slabs used for dairying. “I swear I didn’t believe he would take the house, else I never would have told you so. But now that he has, he wishes it only for pleasure, a gentleman’s retreat from London. He has no eyes for us, nor our trade.”

  Hood’s mouth twisted, skeptical. “But he’s a king’s man, mistress, a king’s man through and through, and he’s bound to see things that others might overlook. He’s sworn to make things black and white, right and wrong, and straight to the devil with anyone who crosses his path. That’s his trade, and we’ll be nothing more than h
is quarry for bounty.”

  “And I tell you, Will Hood,” she insisted, drawing herself up straight, “that he took so much of that Spanish king’s silver that he has no interest in anything save how to spend it. All he wished to speak of this morning at breakfast was the new roof he is planning for Feversham, and the other improvements he wants to make.”

  “At breakfast, you say,” repeated Hood softly, hearing only the part of her words that mattered to him. “Ah, mistress, what would your poor father make of that? You taking breakfast so cozy with a king’s man, making chitchat over the kettle with a duke’s son, your own new master?”

  She gave a little gasp of outrage. “It isn’t like that, Will Hood,” she said warmly, “so don’t you go spreading tales about that haven’t a dewdrop of truth to them. I am the housekeeper of Feversham, and Captain Lord Claremont is my new master, same as old Mr. Trelawney was in his time.”

  “’Cepting that old Mr. Trelawney was an old bag of bones halfway in his grave,” noted Hood bitterly, “and Claremont’s a handsome young buck in his prime and without a lady-wife, and rich and titled in the bargain.”

  She flushed then, unable to help it. Clearly Hood had been watching her and George in the yard, and just as clearly he’d misinterpreted what he’d seen. That quick impulsive kiss had been meant as thanks for George’s understanding, his kindness, and for giving her place in the household the authority it had lacked—that was the reason why she’d kissed George, and no other.

  Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

  But it had happened once, and, now, with Hood before her as a reminder of how much was at stake—the Company men, their wives, their children—she told herself fiercely, regretfully, that it must never happen again.

  She thumped the long handle of the rake on the flagstones with frustration as much as for emphasis. “The Company always comes first with me, just as it did with my father, and his father before him, on and on clear back to when this house was new. That’s what you can tell the others, Will Hood, the truth, and nothing more—that they should be ready for the run this Friday night, at the time I tell them, same as always.”