Poetic Justice, a Traditional Regency Romance (Regency Escapades)

by Alicia Rasley

  "Fortune hunting?" Parham had enough reasons to prefer the poet. John wasn't about to start making them up. "No. I've got plenty of my own funds. There's twenty thousand or so just in the ships and their cargo, and another twenty probably in art. And stocks on the 'Change. I don't need to marry an heiress."

  "Don't you want the Parham collection?"

  "That's Jessica's. If your brother had a particle of sense, he would have left it to her outright. She'll do well by it, if she gets it."

  "You'd like to advise her on it, though, wouldn't you?"

  John kept a stubborn silence. Jessica and he had their own agreement. Parham didn't need to know about it.

  "Come, Dryden, she's a bright girl, but she hasn't any experience. You'd like to counsel her, wouldn't you?"

  "If she needs advice, I'll give it to her."

  "You don't think that would be a trifle awkward, considering your feelings toward her?"

  John turned away, but he could feel Parham's scrutiny on his back. "I'll learn to live with it."

  "What are your feelings, by the way?'"

  There was a limit to duty, and he had fulfilled it. Parham had gotten his pleasure; Jessica no doubt would get her poet. John just wanted out. "My feelings are of the usual sort."

  "Usual? That's all?"

  Two more minutes, that's all he'd stay. John started counting off the seconds, watching the spasmodic little hand on the mantle clock. It said twenty-nine when he said thirty. Two seconds lost every minute; that would be two minutes every hour. A very poor chronometer—

  "Dryden, are you paying attention? I said, I don't think your feelings are the usual sort at all."

  "You needn't call me a liar on top of all the rest."

  "Now, boy, take that scowl off your face. I'm not calling you a liar. A lover, that's all. You want to tell me, don't you, that if I refuse you you'll run off with her anyway. Even if she wouldn't agree, and she wouldn't. She can't afford my disapproval."

  The two minutes up, John started for the door. But Parham's genial voice followed him. "I can sense these things, you know. Not many men would subject themselves to this kind of humiliation, you know, not a man with your kind of pride. There's a sacrifice involved there, don't you think I don't know it. You'd like to fling all my questions back in my face, wouldn't you, and just walk out. But you won't. Have to play it out, don't you? For her sake."

  "No." John got his hand on the doorknob, but didn't turn it. He just stared at his scarred hand, fisted around it. "She deserves to inherit the library. You know that. It means the world to her. She's played by these rules of yours. Now it's time to let her win."

  "You're right." Parham rose and approached him, nodding all the way. "All right, young man. You have my consent. You'd best get down and post those banns. If you do it right away, you can be wed before her birthday."

  Anguish, injustice—these vanished into shock. He whirled around. "You mean—wait. What about the poet?"

  "Blake?" Parham shook his head. "No. His feelings for my niece really are the usual sort, however he pretties them up in verse. And he knows her naught, does he, though he's known her all her life. Gives her sonnets, he does. You bring her old books. She ought to prefer the other, I suppose, but Jessica doesn't like to do as she ought. She wants the old books. You know her better."

  "But—" It was all too much to take in, this hearty Parham clapping him on the back, this unrequested consent—well, not unrequested, but undreamed.

  "No time to waste, lad. She's outside in the garden, I think. Go make your proposal to her. Not that she's likely to turn you down, with the collection at stake. But this is a ritual, and you have to play it out."

  He kept hearing that as he walked to the garden. Not that she's likely to turn you down, with the collection at stake. Parham had gone mad, of course, approving this marriage, but in that much he was correct. Jessica couldn't afford to refuse. And John wouldn't let her, were she mad enough to try.

  The sunlight glancing off her hair was like a beacon, lighting his way to shore. He located her sitting on a blanket in the little arbor, frowning at a book—the Hannah More book, with Aphra inside. When she saw him she smiled, and he saw in her face relief mixed with trepidation. What was she worried about? She would get her wish, one of them anyway.

  Mindful of eavesdroppers among the gardeners yanking weeds, he pulled her to her feet and out to a distant corner of the garden. In a low angry voice he explained that he had just met with Parham about their proposed marriage.

  She sat down hard on a stone bench. "Proposed? John, I never meant for you to do that. You said you would pretend to court me, not propose marriage. Why did you do that? It must have been horrid."

  "It was. It was." Her confusion made him angry, if he needed any more excuse for that. "I thought you understood. I had to request your hand to force his hand. To force him to do better for you than this, if he cared at all for you."

  "But you shouldn't have done it. I didn't want him to insult you again."

  Pity was worse than the rest. "I complete my contracts, and I will complete this new one also." Furious now, he grabbed her hand. "I haven't a ring yet, but I'll get one this afternoon."

  "A ring?" She shook her head, as if he had awakened her from a deep sleep, and focused all her attention on the hand that held hers. "Oh, I see. You've lost your ring."

  Through gritted teeth, he said, "I didn't lose the ring. It's just gone. And I'm not talking of that ring anyway, but a betrothal ring. I'll post the banns this afternoon. You'll want St. George in Hanover Square, I make no doubt."

  "You don't want—John, what are you saying?"

  "I'm saying—" He broke off and took a deep breath to cool off his voice. "Your uncle approved my suit. God knows why. Lunacy runs in your family, I've always suspected. So we'll have to marry."

  She went utterly still, and savagely he realized he'd made a hash of it, that she hadn't understood until just then that they would be marrying. "Do you realize what I'm saying? Your uncle approved it. We'll marry. You'll get the collection."

  "John, I didn't mean for this to happen, you know it."

  "It happened. Accept it. He's not going to approve the poet now. You have no choice in the matter. "

  "No choice?" She was still very quiet, still staring down at his hand. She rubbed with her thumb at the white circle on his ring finger, as if it were just paint and would come off with a bit of effort.

  He jerked his hand away and rose. "I'm not going to be the cause of you losing your inheritance. And I'm not going to have it said that my behavior was less than that of a gentleman. I'll call on you tomorrow to get the arrangements started."

  When he looked back from the garden path, she was still sitting there, her full mouth more mutinous now. But there was still that dazed look in her eyes, as if he'd struck her instead of proposed to her. He felt a stirring of guilt. She deserved better, he supposed, than all this. Tomorrow he would take time to make it up to her, to explain all the benefits of this arrangement, to assure her he'd do his best to make her happy.

  But today he had to find a church and post the banns.

  He was so preoccupied that he hardly heard the carriage lurch to a halt beside him. But he turned when he heard someone leap out of the hackney and call his name. He had just an instant to see the cool intent in the other man's eyes and reach for his knife. But an instant wasn't long enough. The assailant already had his truncheon lifted, so it was only a matter of bringing it down with sufficient force. And that he did, connecting smartly with John's head. John's last thought was regret that he hadn't turned back to conciliate Jessica, that she hadn't run after him to witness this, that he wouldn't get the banns posted this afternoon after all.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I have great comfort from this fellow;

  Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him;

  His complexion is perfect gallows.

  Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging!...

  If he be not
borned to be hanged,

  Our case is miserable.

  The Tempest, I, i

  Suddenly it was morning, the sun appearing from the gray sea with an almost audible pop. Dawn came early and swift in the northern seas, John recalled, flexing his aching hands on the ship's wheel. Another night gone, another day begun, and London and Jessica were ever farther behind him.

  Six days out of Chatham, the Araminta (a sloop, they called her, in that absurd argot of the Royal Navy; with her two masts, she was a brig by any other name) was being shoved slowly easterly, into the sun, by a wicked finger of a wind. Her captain wasn't much of a navigator, and the master had taken ill and been left behind in port, so there was little chance the sloop would be put through the complex maneuvers that might send it more truly northward.

  John knew this route well, having made several summer trips to St. Petersburg on behalf of the Foreign Office, and he might have been able to plot a better course. But he was hardly going to volunteer to move them farther faster. In fact, he had spent the night making minute adjustments in his steering to slow the sloop's progress, navigating by the stars and the direction of the spray against his face. He might have been hanged for this, except the captain was an amiable dunce who didn't know enough about his vessel to know when it was being reined in.

  But John would never get back to London at this rate. Ever since he had awakened four days ago in the sickbay, with an opium hangover and the clothes of a quartermaster named Jem Mercer, he had thought of nothing but Jessica, waiting there for him to come back and wed her. Now her birthday was less than a fortnight away and he was halfway to Denmark, filling the role of another man.

  At least it was a slow progress, given the erratic and unreliable breezes here on the continental shelf that linked Britain to the rest of Europe. This was the shallowest of seas, with treacherous sandbanks and shoals even a hundred miles from land. John gazed ahead into the pale dawn, scanning for a chance to ground the sloop. But he knew he couldn't do it. He loved ships too much to deliberately damage one. He'd have to find another way home.

  At eight bells, the dawn quiet was broken by the boatswain's piping and the thunder of feet as the starboard watch came on deck. Another quartermaster's mate came up behind him and checked the log, squinting to see the chalk marks in the early light. "Relieving you, Mercer. Easy night of it, I hope."

  John had long since given up declaring that he wasn't Jem Mercer, able-bodied seaman and quartermaster's mate on transfer from the Berendt. A ship's company tolerated all sorts of eccentricities, and so they took little note of John's insistence that he commanded his own ship, or that he was an art dealer in London and not a quartermaster's mate at all. Occasionally a sailor would waggle a finger at his temple, pantomiming a lunatic, but no one even blinked at John's demand to be sent home immediately. This was the softest of walls, but as effective as brick in preventing his return.

  "Easy enough. We've made about three knots steadily, but are a bit off-course, I think. You might bear a degree or two southerly. Shallow water, this."

  "And chill." Genially, his replacement eased him aside and took over the wheel. "Go on below till breakfast, lad. And before you get into the hammock, you change into dry clothes, won't you? Wouldn't want you to take a chill from the spray."

  It was annoying to be treated as a dimwit, but he supposed that he had invited it with his behavior early in the week, when the residue of concussion and rage had made him refuse even to eat. That had ended when he realized malnutrition could be a liability. Now he was eating again, but lightly. He hoarded the extra biscuits and salt-pork, hiding the bundle of food in an old cask, ready for the time he made his escape.

  As the lowliest of the sailors crawled around him, holystoning the deck, John walked back across the stern, pulling his salt-wet shirt off over his head. Leaning on the rail, he gazed at the wake spreading out behind them like a bird's tail feathers. He imagined it leading all the way back to England, an unbroken line between him and Jessica.

  "Lend a hand, mate," someone called from below. The captain's launch, its single sail furled tight, was tethered directly under the stern. A gunner's mate clung one-handed to the ropes a few feet down the hull, holding out a fishing net squirming with fish. John grabbed the net and hauled it aboard as the other sailor scrambled nimbly onto deck. "Best fishing waters in the north. We'll breakfast well this morning."

  John watched him go below, then looked back at the launch, trailing behind in the middle of the wake. It was a capacious enough boat, meant for a four-man crew but sailable by one, as the fisherman had just proved. He turned and looked into the sun, calculating silently from the last reckoning of their position. They'd travelled two hundred thirty miles from home, give or take a league or so. It was a long, difficult voyage back, but John knew his strengths and thought he could do it. Captain Bligh, after all, sailed ten times that far in an open boat, across cannibal-infested waters.

  It was just a matter of good luck and good sailing skills, and John knew he possessed at least one of those. He grabbed up his shirt and headed below decks to the tiny rectangle of floor reserved for his—or rather, Jem Mercer's—sea-chest. All around him the men of the larboard watch were slinging hammocks, ready for a few hours sleep before breakfast was piped in the forenoon watch. Turning his back to block their view, John grabbed up a change of clothes, a boat cloak, and a few other essentials and stuffed them in an oilcloth bag. It was only a matter of minutes before the boat crew pulled in the launch, so he did no more than retrieve his food hoard and sling a jug of water from a leather thong over his shoulder before returning to the stern.

  The infernal noise of thirty men pumicing a deck drowned out the sound of John's escape. He dropped down into the boat and undid the knots that connected it to the Araminta. Crouching down near the tiller, he waited till he saw the watch, high above on the mast, train his spyglass eastward. Then, as silently as he could, he fixed the oars and began rowing away from the ship.

  He had pulled all the way out of the wake, away from the sloop's powerful draw, before the man on watch turned back. John knew to the instant when he had been spotted, and was ready for the pursuit when the cry of "On deck!" blazed over the distance. Abandoning any attempt at secrecy, he set the sail to take the best advantage of the fleeting breeze.

  The sloop was small enough that turning about was the work of a few moments, and even as John added his rowing to the force granted by the wind, he knew it was futile. His luck was out, as it had been for a month or more. Still he kept rowing, stopping only to wipe the seawater out of his eyes or to work the tiller. He mostly kept his head down, concentrating on the arduous task. But when a shadow cut off the light of the rising sun, he looked up. The sloop bore down on him like a great seabird, canvas spread like wings and blocking the sun.

  His muscles burned so much that he could only swing an oar at the boathook as it caught his prow. Over the roaring of blood in his ears, he could hear the cheers of his shipmates. He didn't know, and didn't care, if they cheered him or the marines who grabbed his aching arms and hauled him back on board.

  The captain, that genial fool, was waiting at the rail when John was tossed aboard. He was doing his best to look like an Old Testament prophet of wrath, but his face didn't mold into wrathful lines. "Don't you know desertion's a hanging offense? I could have you flogged around the fleet!" There was a murmur from the assembled ship's company, of approval or disapproval even the captain didn't seem to know. "We punish on Tuesday. Shackle him until then."

  One marine consoled John, as they dragged him down the stairs, "Don't you be worriting none, mate. The captain's not a hanging sort. And if he means to punish you Tuesday, it won't be flogging around the fleet neither. We shan't catch up to the fleet till the Skagerrak at least. A dozen stripes, he might order you. But he's not the sort to hurt a poor loon like you."

  A poor loon like you. John laughed weakly as he was left alone in the damp hold, the shackles chill and wet around his
wrists and ankles. He supposed he should be grateful for the sympathy of his shipmates, and he was, especially when several appeared during the course of the next few hours to slip him a cup of grog or an ungnawed seabiscuit. It was just so ironic, that all his life he had lived on his wits, put all his pride into his sharp intellect, and now everyone thought him a lunatic.

  And after a day or so, he decided he might become one. The hold was an unpleasant place, with water sloshing in whenever the sea got rough and the old timbers groaned, with rats the size of cats eying him speculatively, with the shackles and the salt wearing holes in his wrists. When his lamp sputtered out after a few hours, the darkness dug into his eyes as the damp dug into his bones. But he could live with that. He'd suffered nearly as much indignity as a boy in a China-bound privateering vessel.

  No, it was the realization that he was indeed a fool that drove him nearly to despair. He had underestimated Wiley. And given his experience with other collectors, other obsessives, John should have known better. He had presumed that Wiley wasn't a killer, and so dismissed him as any kind of physical threat. He had presumed that his vast experience would protect him, but he had never imagined being so distracted by his emotions that he wouldn't hear an approaching attacker in time to parry him. It was a mental mistake, and he was being properly punished for it. The injustice of it was, though, that Jessica was being punished too, and she was blameless in this.

  What would she do, when she realized he was gone? She would suspect right away that his pre-wedding absence was involuntary. Would she be valiant and foolish and confront Wiley? Or would she turn pragmatic and persuade her uncle to approve another marriage, to that poet, probably?