by Carla Kelly
“Aye, sir. I’ll bed in the stables with t’others.” The man scratched his chin. “You’re the one who might not be so lucky, beggin’ yer pardon.”
He feared the man was right. With no allowance for argument, Lynch told the Partlows to move along smartly and follow him inside. He started across the yard, leaning against the snow and wind, and wondering as he had before on the Portsmouth docks if they would follow him. He slowed his steps, hoping they would catch up with him, but they did not, hanging back, not wishing—he was sure—to trouble him beyond what they were already doing.
Hoping for the best, even as he suspected the worst, he asked the innkeep for two rooms and a parlor. “Sorry, Captain,” the man said, properly cowed by what Lynch suspected was the height of his fore and aft hat and gold braid, if not the look on his face. The keep glanced beyond him, and he felt some relief that the Partlows must have followed him inside.
His relief was momentary. The keep asked him, all hesitation and apology, “Can ye share a room just this once with your son and daughter?”
“She’s not my daughter,” he said before he thought.
“Sorry, sir,” the keep apologized. “Then you and your lady’ll have to have”—he hesitated, as if trying to determine the relationship—“the boy on a pallet in your room, I’m thinking. There’s no parlor to be had. Once you take that room, there won’t be another for anyone else, it’s that full we are.”
“Very well,” Lynch said, disconcerted right down to his stockings, but determined not to make it worse by saying more. “It seems we have no choice.”
“None, sir,” the keep replied.
Lynch was too embarrassed to look at Sally Partlow so he ignored her and followed the keep’s wife up the narrow stairs to a room at the back of the inn. Again he listened for the Partlows behind him, because he knew that only the weather outside was keeping them tethered to his side.
The keep’s wife apologized for the size of the room, but he could find no fault with the warmth from the fireplace and the general air of comfort in small places that he was used to, from life aboard a frigate. When the woman left the three of them, Sally removed the plaid about her head, shook the flakes into the fireplace, and put the shawl on the narrow cot.
“I was thinking I should take that berth,” he told her. “You and Tom can have the bed.”
“Nonsense. I am fully a foot shorter than you, sir,” she said, and nothing more; he had the wisdom not to argue.
He knew he would dread dinner in the common parlor, but he did not, even though the setting was not one he was accustomed to. No matter how rough his life at sea, his infrequent sojourns on land, in whatever port of the world, had always meant private parlors and deference. He sat at the long table next to Sally and followed her lead, passing the common dishes around to the next diner and engaging, eventually, in small talk with the farmer to his left, an act that would have astounded his late first mate. He decided to enjoy conversation about crop prices, and even yielded far enough to tell a sea story.
He never embellished tales, and he did not now, so he was amazed that anyone would care to listen to his paltry account of life at sea. Maybe he was trying to explain himself to the Partlows; he didn’t understand either, beyond a sudden need to offer some accounting of himself.
When dinner concluded, he could beat no retreat to a private parlor; before he could say something about sitting for a while in the public room, Sally told him that she was going to settle Tom upstairs in bed. “It was a long day, sir,” she murmured, and he realized with a start that it was only the second thing she had said to him since his unkindness at noon.
I suppose it was a long day, he thought as he watched her escort her brother upstairs, her hand upon his back, her motion on the stairs so graceful that he felt like a voyeur. He went into the public room, content to prop his booted feet by the fender and enjoy the warmth of the fire. He even leaned back against the settee and called it a luxury.
He had thought that his hearing was going after years of cannonading, but he knew her steps on the stairs when she came down later. Before he could say anything—had anything occurred to him—she was out the door and into the snow. He debated a moment whether to follow—surely she would never leave her brother behind—and then rose, pulled his cloak around him, and head down, went into the snow after her.
He could barely see her in the dark, but he watched her pause at the fence beyond the high road. The wind swirled the snow, but she raised her face to it, as though she hated super-heated rooms as much as he did. He walked across the road to stand beside her.
“I was not running away, Captain,” she said without looking at him.
“I know that. You would never leave Tom.”
“It is just that I do not like being an object of charity, sir,” she said.
The candor of her words startled him, until he recalled her uncle, who never feared to tell him anything. “Who does, Miss Partlow?” he asked. “May I remind you that you can repay me when your uncle’s funds on ’Change are probated.”
“There won’t be any funds, sir.”
She spoke so firmly that he did not doubt her.
“How is this?” he asked. “He has always had his share of the salvage.”
“Uncle Partlow sent his money home for my father to invest.” She hesitated, took a deep breath, and forged on. “My father had no more notion of wise investments than a shoat in a piggery.” He could hear the tears in her voice. “He wrote such glowing letters to Uncle Partlow, and truly I think Da believed that he could recoup his losses. Year after year he thought so.” She sighed and faced him for the first time. “We are objects of charity, Captain. What will you do with us?”
“I could leave you here and continue by myself in the morning,” he said. “Every town of any size has a workhouse.”
The look on her face told him that was exactly what she expected him to say, and her assessment of him bit deep. She did not flinch or try him with tears, but merely nodded and turned back to the fence to lean upon it again, accepting this news as though he told her that snow was cold and winter endless.
“But I won’t leave you here,” he assured her. He surprised himself and touched her arm. “I have a confession of my own, Miss Partlow.”
“You have not been home in years and years,” she said. “Mrs. Brattle told me.”
He leaned on the fence, same as she, and stared into the snowy field. “I have not,” he agreed, perfectly in charity with her as though they were of one mind. What happened just then between them he never could have explained, not even at a court of inquiry convened by the Lords Admiral themselves.
“I suppose I should hear the gory details,” she said at last, and he could not fail to note the amusement in her voice.
“Not out here in the snow. Your feet would freeze before I finished my tale of family discord, love unrequited, and blood in the orchard,” he replied, turning toward the inn. He shuddered in mock terror and was rewarded with a small laugh.
Funny, he thought as they ambled back together, but I have never made light of this before. Could I have made too much of it through the years? Surely not. He stopped her with one hand and held out the other one to her, which she took. “Let us be friends, Miss Partlow,” he said and shook her hand. “If you will help me keep my temper among my relatives, all of whom may wish me to the devil, I will figure out something for you and Thomas to do that won’t involve the slave trade.” It sounded so lame, but he had nothing else to offer that was remotely palatable. “Come, come, Miss Partlow, it is Christmas, and we just shook on it. Have a little charity.”
She laughed, and he knew he was backing off a lee shore. “This could be a Christmas of desperate proportions, sir,” she joked in turn, and his relief increased. “Oh, very well, then!”
Once inside, he told her that he would remain in the parlor and give her time to prepare for bed. She thanked him with that dignity he was becoming accustomed to, and went upstairs. Wh
en he retired a half hour later, the room he shared with the Partlows was dark and quiet. By the light of glowing coals in the hearth, he undressed and lay down with a sigh, content to stare at the ceiling. His years at sea had conditioned him to brace himself against the ship’s pitch and yaw, but the only movement was Tom sliding closer, seeking his warmth. He smiled and stretched out his arm and the boy curled up beside him. He slept.
Nightmare woke him an hour later or so, but that was not unusual. He lay in bed, his heart pounding, his mind’s eye filled with explosions and water rising and the ship—his first ship, well before the Admirable—slowly settling in the water: the usual dream, the usual time. After the moment of terror that never failed him, he closed his eyes again to let the dream fade, even though he knew he would not sleep again that night.
He opened his eyes in surprise. Miss Partlow had risen from her cot and was now perched on the side of his bed. Without a word, she wiped his face with her handkerchief and then pinched his nostrils gently with it until he blew his nose. His embarrassment was complete; not only had she seen his tears and wiped them away, she had made him blow his nose like a dutiful child.
“I would have been all right, Miss Partlow,” be said in a whisper, unwilling to add Thomas to the audience. “Surely I did not cry out. I… I don’t usually.”
“You weren’t loud, Captain,” she whispered back. “I am a light sleeper, perhaps because I took care of Da for months before he died. Go back to sleep.”
So he had cried out. The devil take her, he thought. He wanted to snap something rude at her, as he had done innumerable times to his steward, until the man never came into his quarters, no matter how intense the nightmare. But his steward was dead now, and he held his tongue in time.
“I thought your father was your ruin,” he said without thinking.
She stared at him as if he had suddenly sprouted a dorsal fin. “And so why was I nice to him?” she whispered, after a moment in which she was obviously wondering what he was saying. “Captain, you mustn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater! He had his failings but he was my Da.” She rested her hand for too short a moment on his chest. “Have you never heard of forgiveness this far south?”
“See here, Miss Partlow,” he began, but she put her hand over his eyes and he had no choice but to close them.
“Good night, Captain.”
He must have dreamed the whole matter, because in the morning, Miss Partlow made no mention by blush or averted eyes that he had roused her from her bed. When he and Tom trooped downstairs to the common washroom, leaving her to complete her morning toilet in the privacy of the chamber, she was seated by the window, Bible in her lap. When they returned, she was still seated there, but her marvelous hair was now captured in a bun and she wore a fresh dress. And she looked at him—he couldn’t describe the look, except that it warmed his heart.
He waited until they were some hours into their journey and Tom was dozing before he explained himself. “You wanted the gory details, Miss Partlow,” he began. “Let me lay the bare facts before you.”
She looked down at her brother, whose head rested in her lap. “Say on, Captain Lynch.”
He told his story for the first time in twenty-two years of avoiding any mention of it, astounded at how easy it was to talk to this sweet-faced woman. “I was young and stupid and hotheaded, Miss Partlow, and quite in love with my brother Oliver’s fiancée,” he told her.
“How old?”
He almost smiled, because in the actual telling, it seemed almost ridiculous. “Fourteen, and—”
“Heavens, Captain Lynch,” Sally interrupted.
“Yes, fourteen!” he retorted. “Miss Partlow, have you never been in love?”
She stared back at him and then smiled. “Not at fourteen, sir!”
“Is it warm in here?”
“No, sir.”
“Miss Partlow, you are a trial. Amelia was eighteen, and I was a slave to her every glance. Did a boy ever fall so hard?”
“You were young,” she said in agreement. “And did she… did she encourage you?”
“I thought she did, but I may have been wrong.”
He sighed, thinking of all the years he had hung on to that anguish and wondering why now it felt so remote. “At any rate, Oliver found out and challenged me to a duel.”
She looked up from her contemplation of her sleeping brother and frowned. “That does seem somewhat extreme, sir.”
He nodded. “I can’t say that Oliver and I ever loved each other overmuch before, and certainly not since. Twenty paces in the orchard with our father’s dueling pistols. I shot him and ran away.”
“Worse and worse,” she murmured. When he said nothing more, she cleared her throat. “Possibly you could discard economy now, Captain, and fill in the narrative a little more?”
He could, but he didn’t want to tell her about foggy days shivering on the Humberside docks at Hull, wondering if his brother was dead, wondering how soon his father would sic the Runners on him, and all the while eating potato peels and sour oats gleaned from ashcans in a city famous for its competitive beggars. He told her, and not even all his years, prizes, and honors could keep the distress from his voice.
As he spoke, Sally Partlow slipped out from beside her sleeping brother and came to sit next to him. She did not touch him, but her closeness eased the telling. “It’s hard, not knowing what to do,” she commented. “And to be alone.” She looked at Tom and smiled. “I’ve been spared that.”
And why do you seem unafraid? he wanted to ask her. Your future is even bleaker than mine was. “The magistrate nabbed me after a week of dockside living,” he said instead.
“And returned you home?”
He shook his head. “Father would not have me. He wrote that Oliver was near death, and what did I think of that?”
“Was he?”
“No.” He looked down at his hands where they dangled between his knees. “I learned that much later from the vicar, who also told me that Oliver from his bed of pain had assured my father that the duel was all my idea, and that I was a demon, impossible of correction.” He clapped his hands together. “That ended my career as son and brother, and I was invited—nay, urged—at age fourteen to seek a wider stage beyond Lincolnshire.”
He could feel Sally’s sigh. “The world can be a frightening place, eh, Miss Partlow?” he said. He hesitated, and she looked at him in that inquiring way. “Actually, I sometimes wonder if I even shot him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, when the smoke cleared, Oliver was on the ground. I just ran, and do you know, I heard a shot when I was on the edge of the orchard.” He shifted in the seat, uncomfortable as though the event had just happened. “I sometimes wonder if he shot himself after I left. You know, just the veriest flesh wound to paint me blacker than I already was.”
She stared at him with troubled eyes and then leaned against him for the smallest moment. Or perhaps the chaise lurched in the slushy snow; he couldn’t tell.
“My father—bless his nipfarthing heart—did buy me a midshipman’s berth with Nelson’s fleet, even though I was a little beyond the usual age.” He couldn’t help a laugh, but it must not have sounded too cheerful, since it made Sally put her hand on his arm. “In the first and only letter I ever received from him, he said he was in high hopes that I could not long survive an adventure with the Royal Navy.” Another laugh, and the pressure of her hand increased. “Deuce of it was, I did. I hope that knowledge blighted his life, Miss Partlow.”
“Oh, dear, no,” she whispered.
“He was a dreadful man!”
“He was your father.”
On this we will never see eye to eye, he thought. He turned to face her, sitting sideways. “I wrote to my mother every time we made landfall, but never a word in reply did she send. It is likely that there will be no welcome for me, even at Christmas, even after all these years. I have wanted Oliver to suffer every single day of those twenty-
two years.” He wished he had not moved, because she had taken her hand from his arm. “If that is the case, then Miss Partlow, I’ve put you in an uncomfortable position.”
“We can go to a workhouse and you can go back to sea, Captain,” she said as calmly as though they discussed whether to take tea in Barton or Fielding. She leaned toward him slightly. “But to harbor up such bitterness, Captain! Has your life been so horrible since that duel?”
What a strange question, he thought. Of course it has. Under her steady gaze, he considered his life again, his thoughts directed down an avenue he had never explored before and even less considered. “Well, no,” he told her finally after he had thought through twenty-two years of war at sea, shipwreck, salvage prizes, foreign ports, exotic women, rum from tin cups, and the odd cat curled and warm at the end of his berth. He smiled. “I’ve actually rather enjoyed the Navy. Certainly I have done well.” He lowered his voice when Tom stirred. “I doubt that Oliver’s led such an exciting life.”
“I daresay he has not,” Sally agreed. “Uncle Partlow’s letters were always interesting enough to share with the neighbors.” She touched his arm again. “Think what a nice time of year this would be to let it all go, sir, and forgive Oliver.”
“You must be all about in your head,” he blurted without thinking. “Never, Miss Partlow. Never.” He made no effort to disguise the finality in his voice, which he knew sounded much like dismissal. She sat up straight again and directed her attention to something fascinating outside in the snow.
“It was just a thought,” she said quietly, after some miles had come and gone, and then she said nothing else.
“Rather a totty-headed one,” he growled back and then quickly gave himself a mental slap. See here, he thought, irritated with himself, can you not remember for half a minute that she is not a member of your crew and doesn’t deserve the edge of your tongue?
Furious with himself, he looked at her and noticed that her shoulders were shaking. And now I have made her cry, he thought, his mortification complete. His remorse grew, until he noticed her reflection in the glass. She was grinning, and for some odd reason—perhaps he could blame the season—that made all the difference. I see before me a managing woman, he thought, observing her reflection. We scarcely know each other, and I know I have not exactly been making myself charming. Indeed, I do not know how. She is a powerless woman of no consequence, and yet she is still going to make things as good as she can. I doubt there is another woman like her.