She wanted to believe it. She had been awake for more than a day and a night, and had eaten nothing in forty-eight hours; and there was her father huddled in a corner suffering the pains of his rheumatism.
If she accepted this man’s offer and Benji and Mr. Cheap did not come back—and the chances were looking smaller with each passing hour—she must also accept his advances. She could not pretend naïveté and cry off, not after attempting to pick pockets in front of him.
Such an act, even born of desperation, would put Sparhawk out of her reach forever.
The flexible ladies of Salem would tell her it was a good bargain. He was not only clean, he was handsome. Slighter perhaps than Sparhawk, whose perfection had printed itself in her memory, but just as well-proportioned and just as lean. Rich, almost certainly, to judge by the embroidered silk waistcoat and clocked stockings, and quite senior in the service to judge by the amount of bullion he wore. He was older than she, but his exact age was impossible to determine. There was no silver in his thick black hair. He wore a signet ring on his left hand, but it was the only jewel on his person. He had the robust physique of youth but the sun-crinkled eyes of a seaman. He might be a weathered thirty or a youthful forty.
If the circumstances were different, she expected she would find him attractive.
“Allow me to propose this,” he said, breaking into her thoughts. “I have a chamber spoken for upstairs—don’t look so alarmed. I had intended to repair there and take my dinner in private, but did not. Perhaps your father, who appears to be a seafaring gentleman of some years, might enjoy resting there for a few hours. There is a good bed and a fine chair for the young man. And you and I can sit here in the taproom and await your brother.”
She longed to accept. If she did so, if Benji did not return, and this man propositioned her later, she would be in no position to refuse. She must make her decision knowing this.
Appearances, of course, could deceive. Micah Wild had been wholesomely handsome and selfish as sin. James Sparhawk had been too gorgeous to be good; yet he had treated her with nothing but affection and honor. The man before her was as striking as James Sparhawk, if not as sublimely beautiful, and he projected an aura of confidence and command.
It occurred to her then that there was a certain freedom in poverty and obscurity. Micah’s machinations had been about her money and the Sally. There was nothing she had to offer a rich and powerful man now besides her body, and there was only so much use one man could make of it in a single night.
She made her decision. “Yes. That would be acceptable.” Not the most gracious of thank-yous, she conceded.
“You still don’t trust me,” he said. “Is it customary in these parts for a man to proposition a lady with her father in the room?”
“Yes,” she said. “Quite. It is called a betrothal.”
He laughed out loud. “So it is. Landlady,” he called. “Ah, Mrs. Brown. Please help the gentleman . . .”
“Captain Ward,” Sarah supplied.
“Captain Ward, up to my room. His son will assist you.”
“Very good, Captain,” she said through clenched teeth, plastering a false smile across her face. Abednego stirred only briefly as they led him to the hall.
Sarah turned to confront her dubious benefactor. He pulled out a chair for her and she sat. It was cushioned, unlike the bench along the wall where she had spent most of the day, and she could not resist sighing with pleasure at the very feel of it, molding to her bones and curves.
“You have a lovely smile,” he said. “I am glad to be the cause of it.”
“The cushion is the more direct cause,” she said, “but I have you to thank for that, Captain.”
He pursed his lips. It would be a womanish gesture on anyone less masculine, but his square jaw and wide, expressive mouth were undeniably male, and undeniably appealing. After her experience with Wild, she had thought her appetite for physical passion forever extinguished. She had been wrong. James Sparhawk had brought desire roaring back to inconvenient life in her.
And now he was missing.
“We have not been properly introduced,” said her rescuer. “My name is Anthony Trent.”
“I’m Sarah Ward, Captain Trent.”
“Alas, I am commander of nothing bigger than this table at the moment. I brought the Charybdis over from Portsmouth, but the navy yard fitted her out so shoddily that we had three men at the pumps at all hours, and when we dropped anchor in Boston, her keel split. The Americans will not sell Admiral Graves the necessary lumber to repair her, and she is, I fear, a lost cause. That is my sad story. What is it that brings you to Boston?”
“Rebels confiscated our cargo of tea and burned our house down,” she replied baldly.
“I am so very sorry,” he said. “In England it is believed that all the trouble is in Boston, that these riots are instigated by saucy boys and slaves and city rabble, and that the country people are not infected with sedition. And that it will take only a firm hand, a little hardship, to bring them to heel. This is what Parliament believes, because no one in Parliament has ever been to America. It is a peculiar notion, that a people who have tamed a wilderness should be so much softer than native-born Britons. Ah, Mrs. Brown.” The publican’s abandoned wife had returned. “Will you bring Miss Ward some supper?” Trent asked. “And a glass of brandy. Or would you prefer small beer?”
“Tea, if they have it,” Sarah said. He had proved himself an observant and dangerous man. She must keep her wits about her.
“I’m so sorry, Captain, but we’re done serving. There’s nothing but bread and butter.” For the likes of these, her tone indicated.
“There was rabbit on offer at dinner. She will have some of that. Hot. And a pudding. The brown one that you served earlier, with cream. And the same for her father and the boy,” said Trent. His tone brooked no argument.
“Of course, Captain,” said Mrs. Brown, with a smile that told Sarah he would be charged double for it.
The rabbit, when it arrived, was hot and succulent, the meat falling off the bone into a puddle of rich buttery sauce. The pudding was cornmeal scented with nutmeg and cloves and sweetened with molasses that lingered on her tongue.
She licked her sticky lips, and Trent shifted in his chair. He intended to seduce her then. The pudding, she thought with giddy resignation, might just have been worth it. Mrs. Brown cleared the dishes and brought the brandy. Trent poured her a glass and pushed it across the table.
“Go ahead,” he said. “You need it.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she said.
He smiled. “If it had been my aim to debauch you, I would have approached you earlier, when you were tired and hungry and afraid for the boy and your father. It would have been easy then, to press a glass on you, and other things.”
He was right. She drank the brandy.
To her surprise he did not take the opportunity to move closer to her when they repaired to the bald velvet wing chairs by the fire, nor did he pour her a second glass. Instead, he asked her about what kinds of books she liked to read—novels, she admitted—what her house in Salem had been like—old but well loved; her eyes watered when she described the keeping room and parlors, gone now—what Ned’s schooling had been so far—Latin, mathematics, geometry, a little Greek—and if he would go for a sailor.
She discovered that Trent had been married and widowed, had no living children, was somewhat older than she had estimated—forty-four, in fact—and feared he might not get another ship in North America, as there were no seaworthy vessels to be had in the squadron.
Then there was a ruckus at the door. Mrs. Brown had locked it for the night. When she lifted the bar and opened it a crack, Benji burst through in an agitated state, bellowing for his sister. He took one look at Trent, Sarah, and the empty brandy glasses and reached for the sword that no longer hun
g at his hip.
The conclusion he leapt to made her angry. Her stupidity with Micah Wild colored even how her own brother saw her.
“The captain was kind enough to offer Father his room and intervene with the innkeeper when she might have thrown us out,” Sarah said. She had no intention of mentioning the Redcoats or her attempt at petty thievery. She hoped Trent wouldn’t either.
He didn’t. Instead he said, “It is your sister who was kind, to keep an old salt company through a dull evening. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Trent.”
Her benefactor offered Benji his hand.
Sarah saw recognition in her brother’s keen eyes—though none of the fear those young officers had exhibited—and something else: calculation.
“I thank you, then, for your care of my sister,” Benji said. “I had gone to find my friend, Ansbach, but his ship, the Hephaestion, is anchored out in the harbor, and it took me all day just to discover this.”
“And will he help us?” Sarah asked. They were in desperate straits if he would not. They could not get into Boston to seek the king’s protection from Micah Wild and the Rebels. Sarah had just antagonized yet more of the king’s officers, and they were defenseless and friendless in a half-abandoned town where only predators roamed at night. They had no safe place to lay their heads.
“I paid a fisherman to take a message to him, but I did not receive a reply,” said Benji. “I fear there is no help for the widow’s son.”
He said it pointedly, as though Trent should take some meaning from this doggerel, and evidently, Trent did.
“Charles Ansbach is like a brother to me,” said her rescuer. “I am certain that he would wish me to open my home to you, and that he would do the same if he were to encounter friends of mine in distress.”
Trent arranged rooms for them for the night in the Three Cranes, as everyone agreed that Abednego should not be moved until morning, and there was the matter of passes to be obtained from the governor. And Sarah still held out a faint hope that Mr. Cheap would return.
Her room at the Three Cranes was clean and private with a stout lock on the door, but she could not sleep that night, worried about what had become of Sparhawk and what Trent might expect from her in exchange for his kindness. But in the morning, seeing her father already much restored, she quelled her own misgivings about the sort of man who would invite a pickpocket into his home. If she had not spurned Micah’s advances, their own home would still be standing.
A bright yellow carriage with black lacquer trim called for the Wards just after breakfast and carried them over the neck and through the gates of Boston, past the waiting carts and long line of supplicants from the countryside.
Their benefactor had rented a house on the Common that was almost as fine as the Rebel Hancock’s abandoned mansion next door. Finer, in one sense, as the pretty white fence with its swags and urns was intact here, whereas Hancock’s had been hacked to pieces by angry army officers returning from the fight at Lexington. Trent’s home was three stories, brick, and elegantly trimmed in granite, with a marble entrance hall and double parlors on both sides, receiving rooms and bedrooms upstairs, and French wallpapers, English carpets, and silk drapes throughout.
Sarah’s room was papered in pale blue and green stripes alternating with flowers on a cream background. It was carpeted in the same colors in a pattern of cascading cubes, and all the furnishings were upholstered in silk damask with cotton ticking covers for the sticky summer heat. There was a gilt mirror over the fireplace, and a washstand inlaid with yew and satinwood.
The ewer and bowl were Chinese brown glaze ware, like the teapot she had been forced to sell in Salem.
The view had no doubt been more pleasant when cows grazed the Common instead of Redcoats. Their tents stretched in long unbroken lines from the top of the hill down to the mudflats of the Back Bay. When Colonel Leslie’s column of regulars had marched to Salem in search of Rebel arms last February, and turned back at the drawbridge after a long negotiation with the Reverend Bernard, she had fumed at the injustice. Now she thought Naumkeag might have had a narrow escape.
All of it—the carriage; the house; the peaceful, orderly soldiery—felt curiously unreal to Sarah. She had arrived after a sleepless night at the Three Cranes in a dreamlike stupor, and when she sat down upon the feather bed with its dimity curtains and canopy, her heartbeat slowed and her eyes fluttered shut; the next thing she knew it was evening and she had slept ten hours in her tattered clothes.
During that time a maid had come and gone, leaving water and soap for washing and a pile of clothing. The clothing turned out to be respectable, practical garments borrowed from one of the better servants. There was a linen petticoat, tack-hemmed to about the right length, a pair of wool stockings, a linen chemise, and the roomy kind of jacket she often wore about the house, although hers, when they had money, had been cotton and silk. This was the homier sort of homespun, with an unfortunate accumulation of slubs in the weave at the elbows.
If Trent was fitting her out for seduction, he had prosaic taste indeed. She was both relieved and amused.
She went downstairs to discover her father in the parlor with Captain Trent replaying the battle of Quiberon Bay with the tea dishes. A night’s rest and a decent meal had much restored him.
The housekeeper replaced the cakes and the tea periodically. In the afternoon, Trent took Ned to the Common to watch the army drill. Benji, she noted, was absent all day.
Mr. Cheap turned up just before supper with a cut lip. Sarah threw herself into the grizzled sailing master’s arms and received one of the gruff bear hugs he had not dispensed since her childhood. Relief washed over her. If Mr. Cheap was back, perhaps Sparhawk would appear as well.
Trent endeared himself to Sarah by inviting Mr. Cheap to share brandy and tell his tale in the parlor.
The sailing master had offered his services unloading a boat of rice from the Carolinas. A press gang had swept the docks with a party of marines who meant business. No billy clubs or fisticuffs—they had taken him and thirty others at the points of their bayonets. He’d spent the night locked in a warehouse on the docks, but when the marines attempted to move the Americans to their boats, Cheap had instigated a general riot and escaped.
Trent promised Mr. Cheap papers of immunity from the press, thus rising a little higher in Sarah’s estimation.
In the evening, a new servant appeared, a crisp cheerful woman not much older than Sarah, with a husband in the navy, and two children who went to her mother during the day so she could earn extra money. Prices were rising daily in the city. She straightened Sarah’s room, carried water for Sarah’s bath, and left an enormous parcel on the bed before disappearing to the kitchen.
The parcel on the bed did not contain sober respectable garments. There were two silk petticoats with tape waists, obviously from a mantua maker’s ready—but very expensive—stock. They had been hemmed to match the length of the tattered garments in which she had arrived. There were two polonaise gowns in coordinating colors with laced fronts and pinned stomachers. They were slightly snug through the shoulders, breasts, and hips, but the silk had some give, and the gowns had obviously been constructed by an expert hand. And there were two pairs of silk shoes and a rainbow of clocked silk stockings.
Unless she wanted to wear the clothes on her back indefinitely, she must accept the gowns and the stockings and petticoats. She could not go down to dinner in her servant’s linen jacket now without offending Trent. And she would not risk her father and Ned being turned out on the street. But as she drew the chemise over her head and felt the silk whisper over her body, she knew that she could not go to Sparhawk now, not dressed in finery provided by another man.
After dinner, Sarah cornered Benji in the little Chinese parlor with its pagoda-papered walls and fretwork sofas.
“The gifts worry me,” she said.
“We arriv
ed in rags. The man is widowed. And rich. He’s a baron, actually—the arms on the carriage should have told us as much—though you are not to call Trent ‘my lord.’ Ansbach tells me that Lord Polkerris does not like to be addressed as such. He gave Ned and Father new suits as well. It is generosity, nothing more.”
Someone had given Benji new clothing as well. He wore an embroidered waistcoat trimmed in silver lace, and a diamond pin in the folds of his neck cloth. His knee buckles glittered with a fire that did not come from paste.
“Linen is generous,” she said. “Silk is profligate.”
“Linen is suitable for servants. Silk is suitable for a young lady. And that is what you are, Sarah.”
She could not say, Trent knows I am not; he saw me pick a man’s pocket. But she did say, “It is convenient for you, isn’t it? To live under the roof of a naval captain who talks freely about the state of the squadron and its disposition. Do you write it all down in your little book?”
“Has Trent made any demands on you?” he asked, deflecting her question.
“No.” But Trent had told her, sitting at that table at the Three Cranes, how easily he might have done it.
“Nor will he,” said Benji. “Our English lord provided help for the widow’s son. That means he is a Mason, Sally. And as such he will not seduce the wife, mother, sister, or daughter of a Brother, which is what I am—in this regard at least—to him. I am sure you are quite safe from forcible seduction. Any other sort is entirely your own lookout.”
“It is the other sort that worries me.”
“He bought you gowns and petticoats. When he buys you gossamer night rails,” Benji said, “that is when you may worry.”
A week later they were still with Trent. With his ship a hopeless wreck and no prospect of a new one, he was put on half pay and had the leisure to devote to entertaining the Ward family. In the mornings he provided unflagging good company to her father, with whom he shared a surprising number of disreputable naval acquaintances. At noon he tutored Ned in astronomy and navigation. After lunch he took Sarah for walks on the Common and through the nicer parts of town.
The Rebel Pirate Page 14