My Saving Grace

by Harmon, Danelle

  Akers went to the side, purposely turning his back to Del in unspoken insult as he helped get Lady Grace into the sling, then scrambled down the side to the waiting boat. There, the Falconers had already found seats. The girl was hoisted up and out, her gloved hands gripping the ropes, her smile a bit strained as she looked down at her feet swinging out over the water so far below. A gust of wind batted at the hem of her skirts and wrapped it around her ankles, defining their slim perfection. Del’s throat went dry. He watched her for a moment and turned abruptly for the entry port so that he could be in the boat when she arrived there.

  It was a relief to be off Ponsonby’s command and into the smaller vessel. Akers was already there, looking up at Lady Grace as she was lowered down. There was something in his eyes that Del didn’t like. Something sinister. Something hard. Something ugly.

  That one bears watching, he reminded himself, and took a position so that he would be the one to assist the lady, not Akers.

  The bosun’s chair and its precious cargo reached the boat. The girl’s cheeks were flushed a pretty pink, her eyes sparkling. Del took a firm grasp of her arm to steady her as she was released from the sling and helped settle her onto a thwart, choosing a spot near the bow where she’d be out of the way of the oarsmen.

  He could feel Akers’s gaze burning a hole in his back.

  “Oh, Captain Lord!” She tilted her head back, shading her eyes from the emerging sun as it found its way past the brim of her bonnet and struck her in the face. “This is going to be great fun!” And then, leaning closer, so close that her shoulder brushed his own and he caught the tantalizing essence of lavender and soap, and even the sweet scent of her skin, she whispered, “When do you think Captain Ponsonby will be joining us?”

  “As soon as he secures his ship, I should think.”

  She was quiet for a moment. And then: “You don’t like Captain Ponsonby very much, do you?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  She shrugged. “When I say his name, you tense up and your face changes. It’s quite noticeable, really, though you probably don’t realize it. Did something happen between the two of you at some point, to make you dislike him?”

  “Captain Ponsonby is a fine man,” he said tightly.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “And I am not one to speak ill of another officer.” Even if I’m more than a wee bit jealous, as Mama would say.

  She studied him for a moment, her head slightly cocked to one side, her eyes beginning to sparkle and the corners of her mouth lifting in that way that, indeed, made him “tense up.” It meant that she was noticing something. Something about him.

  He decided to deflect whatever was about to come out of that pretty bowed mouth that everything about him wanted to kiss senseless.

  “So,” he said briskly, “Are you feeling quite restored to health, Lady Grace?”

  She regarded him for a long, thoughtful moment longer, and then something in her eyes changed. The sparkle went out of them and a shadow moved across her fine blue irises. A flash of pity. Sorrow. Despair. He couldn’t quite pin it down.

  But Grace knew exactly what she was feeling.

  Sympathy. Regret. And a shattering realization.

  Captain Lord was jealous.

  Not of Sheldon Ponsonby himself, but the fact that he was the one who owned her heart. And he had meant every word of the flirtatious things he’d so quickly denounced, indeed even brushed off, the previous day.

  The knowledge sobered her, complicating the situation and stealing the joy out of what had been shaping up to be a fine and greatly-anticipated afternoon.

  I must not flirt with him. I must pull back, pull back even from my friendship with him, as he’s only getting ideas that will lead to his own heartbreak. He is kind and gallant and good. I can’t do that to him.

  The boat began to move. Her gaze moved to the smartly-dressed oarsmen with their jaunty hats and kerchiefs, their arms all moving in unison as their powerful strokes sped the boat to shore. Water slid past them, the bow slicing through the gentle swells and every so often sending spray up into the boat. Her skirts were suddenly wet. Captain Lord took off his coat and offered it to her with a word that she should cover her lap with it.

  She declined.

  There was the landing growing closer, now rising above them, its slippery wooden stairs ascending from the water.

  Shouted commands. Akers trying to impress Sir Graham with the smart precision of his oarsmen. One of the twins starting a war with the other one (Grace could not tell them apart very well) about who would get to go up first. Ned trying to mediate before relinquishing the task to the nanny. The nanny also failing, until Maeve Falconer herself had a word with the two, which cut short the rising argument but did nothing to quell the glares of promised retribution between the two combatants. The boat was made secure, bobbing in the swells. Grace could smell the mix of salt and mud and briny dankness, of wood that never had the chance to dry, and on the breeze, the scent of a working shipyard — tar and lumber, paint and hemp.

  Sir Graham, one of the twins tucked securely under his arm, went up the steps. His wife followed him, holding the baby. The other twin hooked her little arms around Ned’s neck, and riding piggyback up the stairs, stuck her tongue out at her sister as they reached the top.

  “That’s not faaaaair!” screamed the one her father had carried up.

  “It is too, you got to go first so I got a piggyback!”

  “Papa, I want a piggyback! If she had one, I get to have one!”

  “You can’t!”

  “Papaaa!”

  Grace stole a glance at Captain Lord. He had looked away so that his admiral, trying in desperation to ward off yet another fight, would not see his helpless grin.

  Grace caught his eye and returned the grin.

  Yes, Captain Lord liked children.

  The fight above them escalated, and Captain Lord’s strong, muscular hand came up to push helplessly at his mouth, as though trying to wipe away his rising humor.

  “We might as well go up and give your uncle some reinforcements,” he said. “The insult to young Mary will not be soon forgotten.”

  Indeed, young Mary’s indignant shrieks were drowning out the screams of the gulls now wheeling above.

  “I don’t know what the two of you are laughing about,” snapped Akers, just behind them. “That racket is giving me a headache. A most hideous display of spoiled indulgence, if you ask me!”

  “Nobody did ask you,” Captain Lord snapped back, and reached a hand out to Grace.

  The stairs leading out of the water were too narrow for him to accompany her up them. He bade her to sit still and climbed over the gunwale, taking care to keep his shoes from the water swirling on the lowest step. Already, the incoming tide was swallowing the strip of wood and reaching for the next one.

  Grace watched him go. Sat patiently as he helped Polly out of the boat and up the stairs. She felt the enmity radiating from Lieutenant Akers, the sullen contempt in which his oarsmen held him. She could just see Akers out of the corner of her eye. His narrow face was pinched, his lips cast in a perpetual sneer. But Captain Lord was above her now, reaching down to help her up the steps. Grace stood up, her balance unsteady, and took his outstretched hand, feeling it firmly clasp hers. She allowed him to steady her, and as she took that long step from the boat and over the gunwale and onto the pier, trying vainly to keep her balance, it happened.

  A tugging, the sound of a sharp, rending tear, and then a sudden release. Cool air swept up the back of her legs and she lurched upwards into Captain Lord’s arms. She heard a cry of horror and realized it was coming from her own mouth.

  “Oh!!!”

  The gown had snagged on something, and everything she owned from her ankles to her upper thighs was suddenly bared to the grinning tars in the boat below.

  23

  Del immediately saw what had happened.

  As he’d reached down and grasped
Lady Grace’s small, gloved hand, as he’d held her steady as she’d been about to step from the boat to the stairs, her skirts had caught on something in the boat.

  He was quick to act. Quick to get her safely onto the narrow step below him, quick to doff his coat, quick to let his mariner’s sharp gaze sweep the thwarts, the hull, to see what she might have caught her hem on.

  Nothing.

  He glared hard at the tars in the boat, one or two of whom were smirking; to a man, they all turned away, recognizing his authority.

  And then his gaze settled on Akers.

  Akers, who returned his stare with mocking triumph.

  Beside him, Lady Grace crowded close, desperate to preserve what was left of her pride and modesty. Del covered her with his coat, his temples pounding with building fury. He may not have seen what had happened to the lady’s gown as she’d moved to join him on the stairs, but Captain Delmore Lord was half-Irish, and he had feelings about things. Feelings that were, almost always, correct.

  And as he looked at Akers’s barely-contained smirk, Del suddenly knew what the man had done.

  He saw the raging contempt there. The loathing. And he knew.

  To her credit, Lady Grace managed to keep her head high, and despite the humiliation of the moment, bravely attempted to joke about it.

  “There I go again, always so clumsy! How you must tire of me, Captain Lord!”

  But Del barely heard her. He was thinking of Akers and his oarsmen and knowing that each and every one of them was savoring the memory of Lady Grace’s legs suddenly revealed to their prurient stares.

  All of them except Akers whose tastes, Del also intuited, did not run toward women at all.

  Rage filled him. He wanted to wrap the girl in his arms and carry her away from all humiliation, insults, indignation. He wanted to protect her against everything the world and the more base creatures who inhabited it, threw at her. And clumsy or not, he wanted to protect her against herself.

  Mostly, though, he wanted to put his fist into Akers’s face with force enough to break every tooth in his head.

  He took a firm hold of the girl’s elbow as they traversed the wet and slippery stairs. She looked small and lost within his coat.

  Sir Graham was waiting at the landing.

  Frowning.

  An unhappy admiral was never a good thing. But Del would not share his suspicions about what Akers had done, quite so publicly.

  “What just happened, Del?”

  “The lady caught her dress on something in the boat, sir.”

  Sir Graham’s frown deepened.

  “Grace?”

  “I don’t know, Uncle Gray. But Captain Lord was quick to lend me his coat. It’s all right. I’m decently covered, and all in one piece.”

  The admiral’s eyes, the same deep azure as his niece’s, went to Del’s and held. Hard.

  What happened down there?

  I don’t know, sir. But I will do my best to find out.

  The admiral’s sharp gaze moved to the boat and its occupants, and narrowed. Akers, preparing his men to head back to the frigate, did not see that hard perusal, but Del did.

  Vice Admiral Sir Graham Falconer didn’t have an Irish bone in his body.

  But even he had intuited that something wasn’t quite right here, that Akers was somehow involved.

  The admiral looked back at his flag captain.

  “Keep an eye on things. A close eye,” he said flatly.

  “Aye, sir. You can depend on it.”

  * * *

  Following the horrifying incident with her gown, it had taken every ounce of Grace’s courage to maintain her composure, and as they all waited to get into the coaches that would take them out to Burnham and the horse farm owned by Captain Lord’s brother Colin and his wife Ariadne, she had time to wonder, indeed, just what had happened back there.

  She was prone to accidents that resulted in embarrassment.

  She was prone to mishaps that resulted in mortification.

  But this... this had been something more, and her suspicions were confirmed by Captain Lord’s entire demeanor.

  He was sullen, preoccupied and brooding. His jaw was tense, the line of his mouth, hard. He smiled when he addressed her, but she sensed a bristling and dangerously contained fury within him and a remoteness that did not invite conversation.

  Their trunks arrived on the shoulders of several burly seamen. Captain Ponsonby was with them, looking no less diminished without a quarterdeck under his feet. Lieutenant Akers immediately left them to join his captain, occasionally directing a subtle smirk in Grace’s direction that confused her all the more. An ostler brought a pair of horses, both tacked up and ready to go. The admiral and his family, the twins making faces at each other behind their mother’s back, lined up to get into the first coach. Word had spread of their arrival and a crowd of townspeople had gathered, their faces curious and excited. Sailors and fishermen, artisans, shopkeepers and vendors, respectable wives and daughters, even children— all of them were eager to catch a glimpse of Sir Graham Falconer, one of England’s heroes. Grace could not help feeling a certain pride in her uncle. In Captain Ponsonby as well, who was at his radiant and compelling best as he raised his hat to acknowledge the crowd’s excitement and praise. And then she looked at Captain Lord standing silently nearby, his civilian clothing making him invisible, insignificant, to the onlookers.

  How must he feel to be so overlooked?

  Was he a hero, too?

  Indignation seized her. Of course he was a hero! Her hero! An overwhelming wave of protectiveness rose within her. Whatever he might’ve done for England mattered little compared to what he had done for her.

  He saved my life. Certainly once, maybe even twice.

  She adjusted Captain Lord’s tailcoat around herself, grateful that it afforded her decency, if not proper fashion. As soon as they got to their destination, she would change into a fresh gown.

  The first coach rattled off, carrying the Falconers. She moved with Polly to the second one, sucking the heavy salt air deeply into her lungs as it drove in off the nearby marshes. Captain Ponsonby and Lieutenant Akers were already astride the two horses. Funny, Grace mused, she’d been so engaged in pondering Captain Lord that she hadn’t even thought to watch Ponsonby swing up into the saddle. Now, he made a splendid sight as the bay mare pranced beneath him, tossing her head and eager to be off.

  Their coach awaited. The team sweated in the sun, their tails swishing at flies, their pungent odor familiar and sweet. The steps were let down, and Captain Lord offered his elbow. Grace was glad it was a mild day, for he was now in shirt and waistcoat and she would not have wanted him to be cold because of her. She tried not to notice how dark his overly-long, wildly curling hair looked against his white shirt and necktie, how neat and precise he was in his dressing. There was something solid and reassuring about him, as though he were a man that a loose end would never dare trouble, a man whose natural competence was something that he, and perhaps those who knew him well, took for granted. A reassuring discipline. All in its place.

  Right now, still a bit shaken from her incident in the boat, Grace was grateful for that natural competence. Grateful for the fact he positioned himself behind her, blocking her mortifying dishabille from others.

  Grateful for him.

  And to him.

  She settled herself on the squab and waited while he handed Polly up to join her. Then he ducked in, taking the seat opposite, and closed the door.

  That pleased Grace.

  “No horse for you?” she asked chidingly, trying to soften the tension that clung to him. The anger she couldn’t understand.

  “No.”

  She couldn’t blame him. He was not the accomplished horseman that Ponsonby was. Perhaps he didn’t want to suffer the inevitable comparison to a man he already seemed to despise.

  He took off his hat and laid it in his lap. The confines of the coach were suddenly quite small, and Captain Lord seemed t
o fill almost all of it. His long legs intruded into the area her own occupied, though he tried to minimize their impact by slanting them off to one side. He cast his gaze out the window as they waited for the coach to get underway.

  Polly caught her eye. She, too, noticed his dark and dangerous mood and quietly shook her head in warning.

  Best to leave him alone, milady.

  Grace ignored the silent advice. “Are you all right, Captain Lord?” she asked softly.

  He gaze swung from the window and to her, his gray eyes coming into focus and back to the moment. They were hard. Cold. Unsmiling. “Am I all right?” he asked harshly.

  “Well yes, you.”

  “You are a kind soul to show such concern for my welfare when it’s yours that has suffered a grievous insult!”

  “My welfare is quite fine. It’s my gown that has suffered the insult.”

  He said nothing and just returned his glare to the marshes outside the window.

  “However,” Grace prompted, “you can ask me about my welfare if it will restore you to a better mood.”

  “I was not aware that you’d noticed my mood.”

  “I notice a lot of things, Captain Lord.”

  “So do I.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing.” His lips were clamped into a hard line, and she saw a muscle clench in his jaw. And then he turned the full force of those gray eyes upon her, eyes that were so chilled that the color had become like ice— crystalline and cold and hard— and she caught the controlled emotion in his voice.

  “I failed you,” he said with unbridled fury. “I should have done a better job at protecting you.”

  “Protecting me? From what, myself?” She grinned. “I have a history of accidents. You should know that by now.”

  He just looked at her, and she could not know that Del was thinking a lot of things, none of which he was inclined to say, none of which he was inclined to share, none of which were worth putting on her, a gently-bred lady who didn’t need something more to worry about when he, as her self-appointed protector, should be worrying about them for her.