“You sure did.”
“I didn’t know that.” He sounded faintly pleased. “And you went lookin’ for me?”
“I did.” Carefully, Malachai guided Peavey into the room and across to a fancy overstuffed chair, depositing him on the crushed velvet fabric without a thought to dirt or bloodstains. To hell with the Fairfield’s furniture. With the money they charged, they ought to be able to clean any number of overstuffed chairs.
For some reason, his mind returned to Loretta Linden telling him that Tillinghurst was a self-serving oppressor of the masses, and he grinned in spite of himself. Damn, he hated rabble-rousing women. Even shapely ones with big brown eyes that sparkled at him from behind the lenses of their eyeglasses. Especially those. They were dangerous, those ones.
“Thankee, Cap’n. That were right nice of you.” Peavey sniffled and wiped away a stray tear with the back of a filthy hand.
“Hell, Peavey, you’re my best man. Can’t let you disappear, now can I?”
With a smile full of teeth that, while yellow, were still straight and, wonder of wonders, all there, Peavey said, “Reckon not, sir.”
“You’re going to stay here tonight, Peavey, in this room. Tomorrow, we’ll go out looking, and you can tell me if you spot the castle you were held in.”
Even as he spoke the words, he knew them to be futile. There was no castle, and there was no dungeon, and Derrick Peavey was a mental case. Malachai probably should stop using him. But he was a damned fine seaman, and he knew his job. It was only while on land that Peavey faltered.
Yet he didn’t know what else to do, except talk to Peavey some more. That would probably be futile, too, damn it.
“Look in your pockets and see if you can find your room key, Peavey. If you can find it, I’ll go next door and fetch you some clean clothes.”
Without answering in words, Peavey began turning out his pockets. Two gold coins spilled out onto the Fairfield’s thick woolen carpeting. Peavey stared at them stupidly. “Moors,” he said. “It was the Moors done it.”
“Yes,” Malachai said, “It was the Moors.”
“But I don’t know how they got in my pocket. Them coins, I mean. Ain’t no Moors in there.”
Malachai shook his head. “No. There aren’t any Moors in your pocket. But I don’t know how the coins got there, either.” He feared it would be hard going to discover the answer to that one.
A key fell out of Peavey’s other pocket and clanked against the coins. “Damn. Is that the key, Cap’n?” He bent to pick it up, groaned, and sat up straight again, his hand pressing his bandage. “Head hurts,” he explained simply. “Cause of the dungeon.” He squinted into space for a second, thinking hard. “Nor it waren’t the dungeon. It were the place where the pretty lady fed me the soup.”
Malachai picked up the key and the coins. After giving the matter some thought, he decided to follow up on this thread, however feeble. At least Peavey seemed to be making connections. “Why were you still there, Peavey? In the lunch place with the pretty lady.”
He made an effort and didn’t snort over this description of Miss Linden. However apt it was, it failed to take into consideration all of her other, less endearing qualities. The trouble with women was that a man couldn’t tape their mouths shut while accomplishing the only act in the world women were good for.
“I weren’t with her, Cap’n!”
Malachai regretted having shocked his crew member. “I meant, where the lady served you the soup. Why were you still there?”
“Still there?” Peavey looked blankly at his captain.
“Didn’t you go outside again after you ate your lunch?”
“Uh . . .” Peavey scratched his bandage.
“Did you stay in the soup kitchen? After you ate your lunch?” Malachai cursed himself for straying from the dungeon. He didn’t really care why Peavey had ended up getting himself coshed in the soup kitchen. He needed to know where the stolen artifacts were.
“Oh.” Slowly, Peavey nodded. “It was ‘cause them Moors was after me. I think.” His brow furrowed as he pondered his last statement. Poor Peavey. Thought didn’t come easily to the fellow. “Nor it wasn’t the Moors. It must’ve been them Spaniards. They was the ones after me. To get the treasure back.” He nodded, as if proud of having acquitted himself well during the past painfully contemplative minutes.
Suppressing his frustration, Malachai asked gently, “Is that why you stayed in the soup kitchen after lunch? Because you were afraid the Spaniards were after you?”
A grin split Peavey’s face. “That’s right! I hid out behind the counter in the kitchen. Them Spaniards, they was chasing me ‘cause I took some of the coins to show you.”
“Ah. I see.” He saw absolutely nothing, except that poor Peavey had evidently been followed from his fictitious dungeon where he’d discovered the stolen artifacts to the soup kitchen where he’d had lunch, hidden behind a counter, and been knocked unconscious.
But who had followed him? And where had he been? Figuring it was probably useless but worth one last shot, he said, “And you don’t remember where the dungeon was? The dungeon where you found the coins?”
“Uh . . .”
Malachai watched the man closely and knew he was thinking as hard as he could. Poor Peavey. Thought wasn’t exactly his best friend.
Because he hated watching a man suffer, especially one whom he knew to be a good, if dim, bulb, Malachai finally said, “Go in the bathroom and take a bath, Peavey. I’ll get you some clean clothes.” Remembering an admonition from Dr. Abernathy, who, Malachai conceded, seemed competent in spite of his overt fondness for Loretta Linden, he added, “Don’t get your bandage wet.”
“Aye-aye, Cap’n.” Gingerly, Peavey levered himself out of the chair. He glanced a question at his captain, who pointed the way, and Peavey slowly and carefully took himself to the bathroom.
As Malachai studied Peavey’s unsteady progress, his mind unwillingly returned to Loretta Linden. As much as he hated to admit it, he’d rather enjoyed crossing verbal swords with her. It was just as well that he’d never see her again. If there was anything he didn’t need to get entangled with, it was a respectable female. They were dangerous, respectable females, because if a fellow allowed himself to get carried away and have fun with them, they were likely to anchor him for life.
He shuddered eloquently, thinking he should thank his lucky stars he’d escaped that fate. He’d avoided it for nearly forty years now. It would be a shame to let his guard drop now.
Nearly forty years.
The captain frowned and shrugged off his cape, the same cape he’d wrapped around Loretta Linden earlier in the evening. He sniffed, but caught no traces of her scent lingering on the garment. It was just as well. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he went to hang the cape up in one of the Fairfield’s abundant closets, he decided he still looked pretty good for an old salt.
True, he had a couple of silver threads intermingling with the dark brown on his head. And his face had been battered by the weather for so many years, it was lined. But he remained good looking, in a rugged sort of way. Malachai had heard that many women favored rugged men over those soft specimens who toiled in banks and offices.
He couldn’t help but wonder if Loretta Linden did.
# # #
Loretta stamped her foot, and then felt silly. She wasn’t generally given to childish displays of temper. “Leave me be, Marjorie! I shall wear my eyeglasses. There will be no one at this stupid party whom I should wish to impress with my loveliness.” She sniffed. “Besides, if a gentleman doesn’t find me attractive merely because I need spectacles in order to see properly, he’s not the gentleman for me.”
She didn’t bother to say that she was nearing thirty, far past her prime and on the shelf, as it were, and that no man would want her anyway, eyeglasses or no eyeglasses. Loretta seldom felt sorry for herself, deeming self-pity unworthy of a true woman of the modern age, and it galled her that she’d been
feeling the least little bit blue-deviled since her encounter with the detestable Captain Malachai Quarles. She told herself it was because she wanted to set him straight on a number of issues and would now be unable to do so. She was honest enough to admit, if only to herself and only occasionally, that there were other reasons she’d like to see the captain again.
Marjorie MacTavish, elegant this evening in a green ball gown that Loretta had given her and that brought out the green in her eyes, frowned at her employer. “Codswallop. I dinna understand why you canna lower your standards for one wee tiny evening. After all, it’s your parents’ ball. Don’t you owe them the respect of looking your best?”
Marjorie’s sensible speech only served to infuriate Loretta. She whirled on her secretary. “It is from my parents that I inherited these eyes, Marjorie MacTavish! If they don’t like the fact that I can’t see clearly without my spectacles, they should blame themselves, not I!”
“Piffle.”
But Marjorie knew when to back down, thank God, or Loretta might have had to chastise her severely, and Loretta hated doing that. Poor Marjorie carried enough burdens already, with her death-grip on conformity and her various and sundry neuroses and phobias. Loretta knew that she tried her secretary daily with her outré notions and free-thinking ways.
Nevertheless, Marjorie seemed to feel compelled to complain, if about another of her millions of grievances against her employer. “I dinna know why you’re making me attend the ball. I’m a secretary, not a social equal.”
Ah, good. A chance to lecture. Loretta always felt better when she was imparting her philosophy of social parity unto a fellow woman. “That’s utter nonsense, Marjorie, and you know it! It was an accident of birth that decreed I be born into a family with money and you into one without wealth. Wealth has nothing to do with worth! And furthermore—”
“Tell that to the king,” Marjorie muttered under her breath. “And I hate going to grand balls. I feel completely out of place.”
Wagging a finger at her secretary, Loretta said, “That’s because you’ve fallen victim to the prevailing attitude that social position is a state of affairs bestowed upon us by God, instead of a system of social injustice cooked up by men. Men are never happy unless they’re grinding others beneath their boot heels. Now if women ruled the world—”
But she didn’t get to finish her lecture because she and Marjorie were interrupted by a knock on her door.
“Loretta, darling, are you ready?”
Her mother’s sweet voice made Marjorie smile. It made Loretta stick her tongue out and roll her eyes. Oh, Loretta loved her mother, all right, but Mama was so utterly conventional. The poor woman should have given birth to Marjorie. The two were exactly alike.
She found that notion so amusing, it cheered her up, and she didn’t regret too much having her lesson to Marjorie interrupted. “I’m ready, Mama.” She added, perhaps because she knew it would vaguely irritate both her mother and Marjorie, “and so is Marjorie.”
A soft sound came from Marjorie, although Loretta couldn’t exactly describe it. A huff of annoyance perhaps?
“Let me see you, dear,” said her mother, wisely overlooking the secretarial issue. “Are you wearing the rose silk?”
“Yes, Mother.” Loretta heard the note of resignation in her voice and bucked up. It wouldn’t do to allow her mother to believe she’d won a point, so she aimed to pretend it was her own idea to wear the lovely ball gown, rather than one of her less conventional creations. “I’m also wearing my spectacles.”
Silence met this declaration. Marjorie made a face. Loretta marched to the door and flung it open. Her mother, a small, vague, pretty woman from whom Loretta had inherited her abundant brown hair and myopic brown eyes, smiled at her anxiously. “Well,” said that lady, “I wish you wouldn’t wear them, but you still look lovely, darling.”
Deciding a graceful acknowledgment of her mother’s praise would not compromise her position as an independent, free-thinking woman in this oppressive man’s world, Loretta said, “Thank you, Mama,” and kissed the older woman on the cheek.
Giving up on the eyeglasses issue as well as the secretarial one—she had long since given up attempting to change her daughter’s political attitudes—Mrs. Linden said, “Will you stand in the reception line with your father and me, darling? For a little while, at least?”
Loretta submitted to this request, too, with only a longsuffering sigh to let her mother know how silly she considered reception lines. Her friends, the actors, poets, communists, authors, columnists, artists, activists, and others Bohemian souls dear to Loretta’s heart, had long since abandoned reception lines as the relic of a bygone era.
She turned toward her secretary. “Come along, Marjorie. The guests are arriving.” She took Marjorie’s arm and dragged her out into the hallway. If she hadn’t done so, Marjorie might well have remained in Loretta’s childhood bedroom for the rest of the evening. Loretta called this sort of behavior on her secretary’s part “skulking out of sight like a subservient lackey without a brain to call her own.” Marjorie called it sensible secretarial behavior.
With a sigh of her own, Marjorie said, “Yes, Loretta.” She and Mrs. Linden exchanged a glance of commiseration.
# # #
The evening was cool and breezy. No fog polluted the air, which was crisp and smelled vaguely of the sea. Malachai breathed in a lungful of it and wished he were elsewhere in San Francisco, a city he had come to like a lot.
“I hate these damned society parties,” he grumbled as he and William Frederick Tillinghurst mounted the stairs leading up to a grand mansion’s front porch. He stared up at the imposing structure with disfavor mixed with interest.
After years at sea, he was now in a position to settle down. Thanks to his own efforts in the line of treasure-hunting, as well as a number of shrewd business investments, he could retire from his hard life and relax a bit. What’s more, he wouldn’t have to skimp if he decided to build a home of his own. He’d almost decided San Francisco was the city to do it in, and, thanks in part to Derrick Peavey’s supposed dungeon, he’d been inspecting the various mansions in and around San Francisco for several days. This place was a little old-fashioned and Baroque for his taste.
“We’ve got to civilize you, Quarles.” William Tillinghurst, a small, pinch-faced man who reminded Malachai of a weasel, gave him a sour smile. “You’re society’s darling at the moment. Act like it, will you?”
“Hell.” The thought of being anyone’s darling gave Malachai the willies and the creeps.
“Anyhow, we need these people, so act like a gentleman for once, if you can’t actually be one, will you? If it weren’t for investors like these, where would our expedition be?”
“It wouldn’t be,” conceded Malachai grumpily.
“Then behave yourself. It won’t kill you to act agreeable for a few hours.”
Malachai wasn’t sure about that. “Who’d you say these people are?” He stuck a finger between his neck and the starched collar of his starched shirt and wished he hadn’t knotted his cravat so damned tightly. He’d have a rash by morning.
“Linden. Albert and Dorothea Linden. They’re nice people, and Albert is the man whose bank lent us the money to proceed with the expedition.”
Malachai stopped short. “Linden?”
Tillinghurst glanced over his shoulder. “Yes. Why? Do you know him?”
Could it be? Could the annoying Loretta Linden be the daughter of all this . . . this . . . Malachai took another gander at the Linden’s mansion . . . opulence? Pomposity, rather.
He grinned and hoped so. “Never heard of him.”
With a grunt, Tillinghurst yanked on the bell pull. Instantly, a liveried footman opened the door. He told the minion, “Tillinghurst and Quarles. Captain Quarles.” The servant bowed and ushered them inside.
They were late, or they’d undoubtedly have been greeted by an open door, blazing lights, and even more liveried servants. Malachai allowed
his hat and cape to be taken by yet another servant, and glanced around. Nice place. If Miss Linden did belong to this house, she wasn’t hurting for money. That made sense, since she obviously volunteered at that soup kitchen, and only women with money could make pests of themselves in that way.
“If you please, sirs.” The door-opening servant—was he a butler? Malachai had never seen a real, live butler until he’d partnered up with Tillinghurst—bowed. “Come this way.”
The two men followed the butler, who looked ever so much more comfortable in his uniform than Malachai felt in his. Music and chatter grew louder as they approached the ballroom of the mansion. The butler—if he was a butler—opened the massive double doors and announced, “Mr. William Tillinghurst and Captain Malachai Quarles.”
The reception line had long been abandoned, and nobody heard him, which was fine with Malachai. He didn’t like it that Tillinghurst was right about him. He was society’s current darling, and he was sick to death of being fawned over by flirtatious females who wanted a fling with the dashing captain, and stuffy males who only wanted the captain to know they were above him socially. Malachai didn’t give a tinker’s dam about social position. He only went to these functions because Tillinghurst said it was good for their project and, while he didn’t much care about Tillinghurst, he cared passionately about his work.
He followed Tillinghurst into the room, then stood at the top of the short staircase and scanned the crowd for a small, brown-haired woman with abundant curves and a hellish disposition.
Chapter Five
Even Loretta had to admit that her parents’ ballroom looked rather like her idea of a fairy kingdom, thanks to all the tiny electrical lights twinkling everywhere. There was a lot to be said for electricity, she thought, although candles were probably more romantic. Then again, Loretta, as an aging spinster with no men lurking on the horizon, had no use for romantic trappings. She told herself it was just as well, and knew in her heart she lied.
Perfect Romance Page 5