This was likely a lie, but Violet admired it immensely, and smiled at Lavay encouragingly.
“We do not issue rations in fractions. We’ll deduct her breakfast from your rations,” the earl said briskly. As if solving a problem of interest to everyone.
Violet had the curious sensation that entire portions of the conversation were somehow magically being held out of her earshot via steely male stares and shared personal history.
“Perhaps you need to take a double portion of rations this morning, Captain Flint, as your mood calls to mind a hibernating bear awakened well before spring.”
Said with that smooth, exquisite politeness, but barbed all around as chestnut pods.
Surprisingly, only a short silence followed. The earl didn’t immediately challenge Lavay to a duel.
“Thank you for your suggestion, Mr. Lavay. I shall take it under advisement,” he said surprisingly easily. “Please meet me on the foredeck at half past the hour to discuss our supply circumstances and the charts. You will excuse me, as I now need a word with our…guest.”
Captains, it was to be expected, always had the last word. Not to mention captains who also happened to be earls.
“Thank you again for seeing to my breakfast,” Violet said hurriedly, before Lavay, her ally, departed.
“My sincere pleasure, Miss Redmond.” He left behind his charm like a sparkly little gift, then Lord Lavay bowed with swift elegance, to both of them, and Violet curtsied.
She was alone with the earl.
“Why don’t you eat your breakfast whilst I shave, Miss Redmond? It’s porridge.”
It was really more of an order than a suggestion. Like as not he spoke to everyone in just that tone.
Violet lifted the dome and peered beneath.
It was indeed porridge. Accompanied by what appeared to be a pale rock. She poked the rock. It rolled on the tray. She sniffed the porridge. It had virtually no scent. Unless beige could be considered a scent.
A mug of tea alongside both smelled mercifully familiar. She sipped it first. It was bracingly black and bitter as a punishment. There was nothing with which to sweeten it. She didn’t mind in the least. She sipped at it and shuddered as it surged its way through her veins. Very reviving.
“Haven’t you a valet?” she said to the earl, surprised.
He threw a baleful sideways glance at her as he strode across the room with the soap in hand. “‘Haven’t you a valet?’” he mimicked girlishly under his breath, shaking his head. He ducked slightly to avoid brushing his head on the ceiling, and peeled off his coat, folding it neatly and placing it over the back of a chair, and rolled up his sleeves, revealing hard brown forearms covered in coppery hair. He splashed his face with basin water. He twirled the brush into the soap vigorously then painted the bottom half of his face with soap. He whisked the razor up and tugged his cheek taut, and scraped the blade over it.
Violet spooned in porridge. She tried not to stare. Watching a man casually take off his coat and then whiskers seemed almost as intimate as watching him disrobe completely.
The porridge was nearly flavorless, though perhaps a bit of bacon fat had been stirred in. The rock, she finally concluded, was a sort of bread. It was about the size of her fist. She hefted it gingerly in one hand and tapped it with the finger of the other. It even sounded very like a rock.
He watched her experiment with the food in his mirror as he shaved.
“Likely the weevils were cooked from it before it was brought to you. They stalk off the bread when it’s heated, you know. Disgruntled, I imagine, at the indignity of being so treated.”
She froze. Her fingers loosened in horror on the bread, which suddenly seemed alive and pulsing. She would rather have died than drop it, however.
“Do you fire these from cannons at enemies?”
Insulting it would have to do.
“When we’re out of shot,” he said easily. “They taste a bit like mustard,” he said cheerily. “Weevils do. Can’t harm you if you bite into one. So tuck in.”
Tuck in. How American he sounded.
She held the thing gingerly. She cleared her throat.
“How did I get to the bed?”
“Well, of a certainty you levitated, Miss Redmond. Angels such as yourself would surely never do anything so gauche as walk to the bed.”
He turned as he said this, patting his face dry. His eyes glinted a wicked blue above the towel. He pulled the towel down, drying his hands, hiked one brow, unabashedly enjoying her discomfiture. Shrugged at her silence; conversation was of no consequence to him.
The hard angles of his face were even more pronounced now that they’d been polished clean of whiskers.
He’d carried her to the bed, and yet she couldn’t remember it. She looked down, disoriented by a rush of blood to her head, imagining herself dead to the world, at his mercy in that moment, she who had truly never been at anyone’s mercy. Had he slung her over his shoulder like a sack, or carried her in his arms, in the manner of fainting maidens hauled out to the garden during ton crushes?
The sharp, masculine scent of whisked shaving soap was now everywhere in the room, a sensual assault. But then, for some reason every one of her senses seemed heightened; every impression—sight, sound, smell—leaped out at her in stark relief now. She was strangely, startlingly conscious of her physical self and of his physical self.
He turned back to the mirror, deftly folded the towel, cleaned his brush and razor, set them aside. Somehow he imbued even these small acts with regimented authority and purpose, and yet they were so homely and intimate it was profoundly clear he didn’t care in the least that she was watching.
She, in other words, didn’t signify in his world. She would cease to be his problem soon enough, is how he viewed it.
She had other plans.
He rolled down the sleeves of his shirt and those hard brown forearms disappeared. He slid into his coat and buttoned it. Every inch the master and commander of this ship.
Wicked man. Very unlike Mr. Lavay.
He said, “Eat the rest of your bread, Miss Redmond. Lest you want Mr. Lavay’s empty belly on your conscience. Rations are apportioned according to the number of crew members aboard, they are indeed finite, they cost money and weigh down the ship, and we all eat the same food. Nothing more will be forthcoming until lunch.”
He watched her impatiently.
She resisted with difficulty the impelling force of his order. Something about his sense of command communicated somehow to one’s reflexes more quickly than one’s brain. She lifted the bread up. She imagined weevil corpses speckling it the way currents dotted a Christmas pudding. Mustard, she thought.
She stared at him defiantly. She opened her mouth.
And sank her teeth in.
Or tried. On first attempt, they merely skated across the surface.
She tried again.
In this manner she cracked the top of it in increments. Her molars finally got some purchase after she nearly unhinged her jaw.
She was finally forced to tear into it with a great undignified toss of her head. Like a dog with a chop.
She came away with a piece dangling from her lips. It flapped indecorously about her chin, until she darted out her tongue to fetch it in.
He watched all of this as avidly as though she were a pantomime he’d paid good money to see. His eyes glinted unholy hilarity.
“Are you going to chew?” he asked mildly.
She put up one finger: momentarily. She began the process of chewing. Her jaw clicked with the effort, like a wagon wheel struggling over rutted roads.
Mercifully flavorless, that lump. A bit like gnawing soggy paper. And not even a hint of mustard.
After three or four chews, she reached for her tea, and gulped it down. Where it sat in her stomach, solid as a fist.
“Don’t forget to finish the rest. You can dip it in porridge or tea, you know, to soften it.”
Now he decided to mention it.
“Suit yourself. I’ll have Corcoran bring a jug of heated water into your quarters so you can perform your own ablutions if you wish, Miss Redmond. I’ll remind you once again that these are my quarters. You’ll return to yours and stay there until I decide what to do with you. I’ll escort you to them now, but you will not be up on deck without an escort, and I cannot spare a man to mind you at all times.”
She placed her tray carefully aside, taking great care not to disturb the chessboard. And cleared her throat.
“I should like to discuss the continuation of my journey on The Fortuna.”
“Under no circumstances will you stay beyond the next port,” he said absently, shooting the cuffs on his coat.
“Captain Flint. I was quite serious when I said I believed you were in pursuit of my brother.”
“If by ‘serious’ you mean ‘delusional,’ then I’m inclined to believe you, Miss Redmond.” He was already at the door, hand on the knob.
“How long has Le Chat been capturing ships and stealing cargo?” she asked desperately.
He paused. “Over the span of a year.”
“And why has no one definitively identified Hardesty as Le Chat?”
The earl was brisk and rote. “The evidence we have is circumstantial. A resemblance, a description of his ship, Mr. Hardesty’s appearance in ports from where the pirated ships have sailed; he has the same knowledge of the cargo, and then the ships are attacked by night with a small crew when Hardesty is said to have sailed away. A woman said he muttered about The Olivia in his sleep. Someone reported that Hardesty sold silks allegedly stolen from one of the sunken ships.”
She didn’t like the idea of Lyon muttering in his sleep next to a strange woman. “And he looks like my brother Jonathan.”
The earl waited impatiently.
“Here is my suggestion. I can assure you that my brother Lyon is fiercely protective. If he is indeed Le Chat, and word reaches him that you have his sister in custody and are considering…”
She seemed unable to choose the most appropriately appalling word.
“Defiling her?” he suggested brightly.
“If you wish.”
“You’re not a blusher, are you, Miss Redmond?”
She ignored this. “If you do suggest it, you may be able to flush him out. As Lyon would never tolerate it.”
“At which point, when he is flushed out, you shout and wave, ‘Run, Lyon! Run for your life!’”
She sighed impatiently. “He’s much cleverer than that. He survived my father, you know.”
“Not to mention you. Or is that why he fled?”
She ignored him. “If it is indeed Lyon, I’ll find him and extract an explanation from him about why he’s gone and if he is indeed doing what you allege, and at which point he’ll explain to you that what he’s about isn’t what you think it is. The pirating. Because I know my brother, Captain Flint, and I know there’s more to this than meets the eye. He hadn’t gone mad and simply begun stealing and sinking ships.”
Though a tiny part of her wasn’t one hundred percent certain of this.
It changed nothing at all, however, such was the nature of her loyalty.
“I don’t know how in God’s name it could be anything other than what it appears to be. He boards ships, seizes cargo, and sinks them. Seems simple enough to me. The motive is generally greed and opportunity.”
“But has anyone been killed in the process? Does he blow up the ships with men aboard?”
He hesitated. “He puts men in boats and sends them out to sea. As much as the cargo as possible is seized and transferred to his ship, The Olivia. Not all of the men have been rescued or reached shore before their supplies ran out, which means some here nearly perished. And not every man has been found, either.”
“What manner of cargo has been seized?”
“Rice. Cotton. Silk several times. Tea twice.”
“Captain Flint. Here is what we know. My brother Jonathan could be the twin of this Mr. Hardesty. And he resembles Lyon closely. The pirate’s name is Le Chat. Is not a lion a big cat? Perhaps this is no coincidence. Perhaps it’s a…message of some sort? And his ship is named The Olivia. I don’t believe you can afford to ignore these clues, Captain, circumstantial or no, since your charge is to find him.”
A great exasperated breath filled his lungs. She watched with fascination as his big chest swelled like sails, then sank again in a sigh.
“Miss Redmond, you simply…can’t sail with us. I cannot allow it. For one, I would wager you know nothing of the world. I’ve been nearly everywhere on that map. You’ve no sense of the rigors of sea travel, you’re bound to starve because the food is vile, you’ll take ill because you’ll never get a decent night’s rest in the vole hole because I can assure you that’s where you will be sleeping, one of the men is bound to offend you greatly, another is bound to at least attempt to defile you, and do tell me the farthest you’ve been away from home?”
She hesitated.
“Italy,” she mumbled.
“Oh! Italy. That heathen land.”
She glared at him.
“You will be a hindrance, Miss Redmond. Evidence or no, you are ballast now, and we must be shed of you post-haste.”
Violet was not so easily deterred.
“Even you once had a first voyage. I have not yet been seasick, Captain.”
“There is time,” he said with grim cheer.
“I can choke dow—that is, happily eat whatever rations are made available. I shall pay for my accommodations on The Fortuna if you wish. I am made of sterner stuff than you think.”
His slow, thorough look seemed to count her eyelashes and her hairpins, to take in the unscuffed toes of her slippers, her flawless, straight hem unsullied by dust or mud, every perfect, tidy stitch in her expensively tailored dress, every tender, creamy unblemished inch of exposed skin, which was indeed only her clavicle upward but which immediately heated as though he’d drawn his hand across the tops of her bosom.
It was a look both instructive and purely frivolous. He was making a point, and he was taking his inventory of her as a woman.
He, of a certainty, didn’t find her wanting.
He did, however, find her superfluous and absurd.
“Nonsense,” he concluded. His voice was strangely gentle. “You are not made of sterner stuff, Miss Redmond. But as you have pointed out to me, you do not need to be. I should not, if I were you, wish to be, because ‘sterner stuff’ is usually forged by hardship. Besides, every land has its own customs, Miss Redmond, and you are entirely accustomed to shaping the world to suit you. You would adapt poorly. And we don’t know yet where our travels will take us, or how far. We might end up in darkest Africa.”
He could very well be right about all of it. Odd to discover how desperately she hated losing, however.
She glanced at the little painting on the wall. “Isn’t that Africa?”
A triumphant flare in his eyes. With a sinking feeling, she realized she’d just proved his point.
“Morocco. The home of my mistress, Fatima.”
Fatima. His mistress. She was not so worldly she could hear this without blinking. Or without a rogue violent wave of curiosity that contained a bit of jealousy.
She was certain he knew, too. And yet he continued watching her with that maddening air of detached patience.
“I know more of geography than you think,” she lied desperately.
“Oh, a scholar, are you?” He was distantly amused now. He knew she was lying. His fingers dandled over the doorknob thoughtfully, longingly, she thought, as he studied her.
All of a sudden his eyes brightened with a speculative light that made her wary. He’d apparently had an inspiration, because he wandered over to the globe perched on its stand, ran his fingers over it.
And then he pulled open his bureau drawer
and came out with a fistful of pointed feathered objects.
So that was where he kept his darts.
“Since you think you can travel the world, Miss Redmond, I have a proposition. Close your eyes and throw a dart at the map. I have been nearly everywhere a dart may possibly strike. If you can tell me two salient facts about the place your dart lands—be it land or sea—you can sleep in the captain’s quarters again tonight, you may come ashore with us at the next port to meet with our contacts there, and I shall not leave you there ten pounds poorer than you were when you boarded.”
“Ten pounds! It was five pounds yesterday!”
“We know at least your arithmetic isn’t faulty. I’ve decided to up the ante, Miss Redmond—the ante is upped, for we will have fed you”—he spared an ironic glance for the lump of bread in her fist—“and housed you for additional days, as well as seen to your comfort, and I will have spent more patience upon you than I feel I can reasonably afford. And by ‘salient’ I mean some fact unique to the place. Not ‘the inhabitants build their own dwellings’ or ‘the sun comes up in the morning.’ Specifics, please. And if you fail, you will sleep in the vole hole and I will abandon you at the next port in the manner I have previously described, sans escort. I am busy. And I am weary of games.”
She stared at the map stretched out across the wall, a big beige geometry of continents and islands speckling the vast open space of a sea.
In seconds she knew hope was lost.
Chapter 8
It wasn’t that she wasn’t intelligent. God only knew she could outthink most of the men and women of her acquaintance. It was just that the need to do so arose very, very seldom in the ton. She preferred to collect knowledge as needed rather than hoard it indiscriminately and spill it forth at the slightest provocation the way her brother Miles did. She liked to think that learning as she went added a frisson of excitement to daily life.
She still recalled her governess’s undisguised eye-roll when she presented this as a defense against doing her lessons.
She stared hard at the map until it began to blur before her eyes, and understood all too well what he meant her to: he was master and commander of this ship, which meant the world she saw before her was his world, and he guessed—rightly, as it turned out, though she wasn’t about to admit this to him—that she wouldn’t be able to tell him the first thing about any of it apart from the insular, glittering world of the ton and everyone in Pennyroyal Green.
I Kissed an Earl Page 9