Scandal's Heiress

by Amelia Smith

  He drew back a fraction, his eyes running over her face as his arms loosened. She did not relinquish her grip. He gazed at her slack-jawed then suddenly his lips were on hers, hungry, pushing them open.

  Hyacinth let go of everything else, even with her mind, and sank into his embrace, warm and hard at the same time. She reached for him, into him, though they were already touching. She felt the boards of the deck she sat on, heard the gurgle of the sea behind them and the creak of the rigging and felt him there upon her, so strong and slender and unlikely in his barely-concealed grief. She opened her lips to him, shutting her eyes tight against the reality of what they were doing.

  He kissed her. It was more, other than she had thought a kiss would be. All the blood in her body seemed to rush to her lips. His hand ran along her arm, up to her shoulder, rippled down the small of her back. He cupped her buttocks and hoisted her closer. He held her tightly against his groin, hard angles and heat and the smell of wine on his breath. He pulled away, turned her over, and was on top of her, plunging his tongue into her mouth, pushing his hand up into her hair, undoing her.

  And Hyacinth dug her hands into his back and pulled him closer, crushing herself into the deck, wanting more.

  He reached down and began to draw up her skirts, so the warm breeze circled her thighs. He grunted. Far away, a bell tolled.

  Abruptly, he pushed himself away. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Your father had the right of it, at least with regards to most of my family. I had hoped not to become like them.” He stood up and turned his back to her.

  “Goodnight, Miss Grey,” he said, and stumbled off to his cabin, not so much as offering to help her to her feet.

  Hyacinth lay there on the deck, frozen in place, for a long time after he had gone. The storm turning inside her would have swallowed up the afternoon’s squall whole and made it look like nothing, nothing at all, she thought. She had not known what it would feel like, had not guessed. She had been kissed before, once, briefly, coldly, indifferently. She’d had no idea.

  Eventually, she stirred herself up to a crouch on the rolling deck and rested her head on her arms. She hid from herself, and from the sailors making their rounds, until she began to shiver in her light cloak. At last she went back to her cabin, finding the oblivion of sleep as dawn streaked the sky.

  #

  He would have to marry her, Thomas thought, waking up to the clamor of midday. It was the only honorable course. The prim Miss Grey, with all her prying, schoolmarmish questions, had more than curiosity bottled up inside her tall, slender form. The memory of her lithe body underneath his sent his blood coursing, as if he had no more self-control than Captain Grey had credited him with.

  Whatever had prompted Captain Grey’s censure, he’d just earned every speck of it. Worse, he’d begun to like the girl. If she’d been a man, he could have admired her wit at the dinner table, and probably would have found much to laugh about in the similarity of their circumstances. As it was, she was a lady, and a particularly pretty one at that, even if her clothes were not.

  She was nothing like Sarita, of course. Sarita had been round and warm, always smiling, easily pleased. She was everything a man would want in a mistress. And she had been his mistress, not his wife. There was no changing that in death.

  He rolled over onto his other side, as if he still might sleep. Miss Grey was nothing like Sarita, and she was an English gentlewoman, even if she didn’t entirely realize what that meant. Everyone on the ship treated her as such, with the exception of young George. And himself. She would have to marry him. As he drifted off to sleep, he found that prospect strangely comforting.

  #

  “You seem a little pale today,” Mrs. Hotham said. “Are you quite well?”

  “I am fine,” Hyacinth lied, staring out the window at their wake. She had been on the deck just above last night. The planks in the ceiling stared down at her accusingly. Her head pounded as if she'd spent most of the night drinking old wine instead of just that one, deep drink from the bottle. In the night, the trade wind had carried them up into the Bay of Biscay, nearly to France. “I suppose it’s just that I’m worried,” Hyacinth said.

  “Dear, Hyacinth.” Mrs. Hotham set down her embroidery and got up to rest her hands on Hyacinth’s shoulders. “You mustn’t trouble yourself about the boy. He will be fine. You said yourself that he’s only a little chilled.”

  Hyacinth smiled wanly. “Oh, he’ll be hale enough soon,” she said. “It’s only that there’s Father to contend with, and whether Captain Hotham… what the captain will decide to do when we reach Portsmouth.” She felt sick just thinking of it. “He threatened George with a trial in England, if the law allowed it.”

  Mrs. Hotham shook her head firmly. “He most certainly will not be sent to trial. Henry doesn’t have the heart for it. We admire and rely on your father, and the boy scarcely knows his own mind. Henry might threaten a trial, but I believe that every sailor on this ship will say that any falling overboard was purely an accident.”

  “Will they?” Hyacinth asked. It gave her a little hope for George, even if though where she herself was concerned, all was lost, if Mr. Smithson said anything. “Will the men really say that it was an accident?”

  “Of course they will!” Mrs. Hotham assured her. “No one with any sense at all would jump off a good, safe ship! Especially not into rough seas like that. They’re already saying so. They likely think it quite harsh that the Captain is keeping him confined with his schoolbooks.”

  Hyacinth’s smile was still weak.

  “I might be confined to my parlor all day and night, but in the past year I’ve come to know this boat and these men as well as I ever knew my own brothers,” Mrs. Hotham said. “They’re fair, and soft on the young ones. They will give your George the benefit of the doubt, and he'll be grateful to them for it.”

  “Yes,” Hyacinth said, “I’m sure he will be grateful, to all of you.”

  “And especially to Mr. Smithson, I would think,” Mrs. Hotham said, her eyes twinkling. She turned to face Hyacinth, looking into her eyes. “I do hope you’re softening towards him, dear,” she said.

  Hyacinth’s blush was so deep that she felt sure it told every detail of her night’s misadventures. She bit her lip and evaded Mrs. Hotham’s gaze until she mastered herself.

  “He is quite brave,” she conceded. He was more than that, too, not just a dashing adventurer. He was also a man whose passions… but it really wouldn’t do to think of that, not with Mrs. Hotham watching every twitch of her eyelashes. Hyacinth bent resolutely back over her embroidery.

  Fortunately, Mrs. Hotham was taken up in her own flights of fancy, so she barely noticed Hyacinth’s discomfiture. “Brave, and so handsome,” she sighed, smiling as if she were praising a pretty garden on a sunny day, and nothing more.

  Mr. Smithson had spoken of the woman he’d left behind far more tenderly than Hyacinth would have expected him to, but he could not be loyal to his mistress's memory, not if he was kissing her on the darkened deck. Maybe her father had been right about him after all. He might speak of his love for his mistress, but he was already a traitor to her memory. He had kissed her, Hyacinth Grey. He had taken her into his arms instead of that woman, wherever she was, far away in a lonely grave on the subcontinent. She couldn't shake the image from her mind, a woman gunned down in the street, left to lie there in her own blood until the tropical flies circled her, and her lover carried her home.

  “Dear?” Mrs. Hotham’s voice cut through her reverie. “Are you sure you’re quite all right?”

  Hyacinth looked down at her embroidery. Her stitches had gone awry, overlapping each other in all the wrong directions. She shook her head.

  “I should go look in on George,” she said. She put down her needle and tucked her work away as quickly as she could. “He should have done his calculations by now.”

  “Have a rest instead!” Mrs. Hotham said. “You are quite grey around the gills. I’ll have
cook send you a posset. Don’t worry yourself so much over that boy,” she said. “It won’t do to have you arrive in England looking tired and worn out already! You have a whole Season ahead of you.”

  “A season, yes,” Hyacinth sighed. “I suppose I should look forward to it. The prospect of a posset is far more appealing to me today.”

  “I’ll have it sent along,” Mrs. Hotham said, reaching for her bell. “You go straight to bed, Miss Grey.”

  Hyacinth agreed, and gratefully closed the door behind her. In her own cabin, she leaned against the bulkhead and shut her eyes. Mrs. Hotham knew nothing. No one knew anything. If Mr. Smithson were any kind of gentleman, he would say nothing, either, and she would not be ruined. She would only be deeply ashamed… and hungry, longing as she never had before for a touch she shouldn’t even have tasted. She must not let it happen again.

  She would have to stay away from him, even more so than before. Her father had done well to warn her. She didn't want to arrive in England leg-shackled already, before she'd had a taste of the freedom her grandmother had bequeathed to her.

  #

  Late that afternoon, after a few hours’ rest, Hyacinth was awoken by a knock on her door.

  “Miss Grey?” Maria said.

  “Come in,” Hyacinth said, sitting up in her bunk and straightening her shawl.

  Maria slipped in. When she saw that Hyacinth was in her bunk she hurriedly closed the door. “Are you well?” she asked.

  Hyacinth shook her head ambiguously. “I am… I did not sleep well,” she said.

  Maria looked over her shoulder. “The man, Mr. Smithson. He has just come to our cabin to see George. He wants your permission to see how the boy fares.”

  Hyacinth put her fingers to her temples. She was going to get a headache. “I don’t know. What do you think, Maria?”

  “It’s for you to decide,” Maria said, “George will be happy to see him.”

  Hyacinth frowned. “Too pleased, I think. He should be made to see that what he did was no good, no good at all. Tell Mr. Smithson to go away.”

  “Are you quite sure?” Maria asked. “You don’t seem well.”

  “I think I have a headache.”

  “But you never get headaches! This is very serious!”

  “It is only a headache,” Hyacinth said. “Do tell Mr. Smithson to go away. George cannot see him today. Perhaps tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Miss Grey,” Maria said. She slipped out the door.

  Then Hyacinth, despite her better judgment, got out of bed and tiptoed to the door. She leaned against it, listening.

  “And may I see Miss Grey?” he was asking.

  “No! You may not,” Maria said, a little too emphatically. “She is not well. Head ache. You can come tomorrow, and ask again.”

  “I will,” he said. “Give my regards to Miss Grey, and if there is anything I can do…”

  “We have everything we need, thank you,” Maria said icily.

  Hyacinth slumped to the floor at the sound of his footsteps walking away down the deck.

  The knock came at her door again and Hyacinth leaped back into bed, turning her face to the wall before Maria came in.

  “He will come tomorrow,” Maria said.

  “I know,” Hyacinth groaned. “I heard.”

  “He is a very handsome man,” Maria said.

  “Yes. Mrs. Hotham says so, too, at every chance she gets. It is a pity.”

  “And Captain Grey?” Maria hesitated. “He told you something, when he saw that Mr. Smithson was on this ship. What did he say?”

  “To cut him a wide berth,” Hyacinth would never be able to think of Mr. Smithson again without remembering him huddled against the deckhouse, hiding from his future, mourning his past.

  “You look very pale,” Maria said. “The ship’s surgeon can come?”

  Hyacinth shook her head. “People have headaches all the time. We are at sea, after all. I simply took a slight chill. But…”

  “Yes, miss?”

  “Would you send word that I’d prefer to have my dinner here tonight? I don’t think I’m well enough for company.”

  “Of course!” Maria said.

  “And bring George’s books in to me when he’s done with his sums. I will see him in the morning.”

  #

  Small wonder she wasn’t feeling well, Thomas thought. She had stood out in the rain all afternoon, and probably hadn’t slept a wink longer than he had, though she hadn't had nearly as much wine as he had. He had that to blame for his fuzzy vision and pounding head, never mind his battle with the waves the afternoon before.

  If he were a different man, he might have blamed the wine for making a cad of him, but he knew himself better than that. Men blamed drink for the secret desires of their hearts, but his passions were his own. If he had drunk enough to unleash them, it was his own fault, though he hadn’t thought Miss Grey was their object. He had thought that he would return to his cabin and be tormented again by dreams of a shady bungalow under coconut palms, with his mistress's familiar hands massaging away his cares. After all, he had dreamed of her through his whole long journey across the Indian Ocean, across Arabia and the Mediterranean.

  But that was not what had happened after he staggered out of the moonlit night. Instead, he’d lain back on his bunk only to replay the last half-hour, over and over again – especially the way she had looked, standing at the rail in the moonlight, like a ghost of things yet to come. He could not fathom what had compelled him to reach for her. Was it loneliness? That wasn’t justification enough. Affection? Perhaps, but it was misplaced affection, affection that belonged to a woman who was dead and in her grave. He would never feel Sarita’s touch again.

  When he reached for those happy memories, as he always did on waking in the morning, he found that they had grown slippery in his thoughts. Her face had blurred. He could not remember where, exactly, the mole on her neck had sat, or how it had felt. Thomas's journey of exile, back to his homeland, had taken the better part of three months already. He would have thought that those years would stay with him for at least as long, a decade, at least. It had all seemed clearer than the daylight until yesterday, but now the images of his life in India took on the quality of a dream, slipping away in the morning light.

  #

  Miss Grey did not come to the table for dinner that night. In the absence of the ladies, the men’s talk turned to coarser subjects.

  “So tell us, Mr. Smithson,” the navigator said, “about the ladies in India.”

  “Mr. French!” the first mate exclaimed. “I’ve been waiting ever since Cadiz for those tales. Do tell, Mr. Smithson.”

  Thomas bit his lower lip. “The ladies do have a civilizing influence on proceedings, do they not?”

  “Indeed they do,” Captain Hotham chimed in. “Though I confess, I don’t mind it.”

  “Nor do I,” Thomas said, breathing a quiet sigh of relief. “I have been on far too many ships in recent months with nothing but a lot of scurvy Arabs to look at. It’s quite refreshing to see a pretty female across the table instead of a man in a turban who’d sooner kill you than take a drink.”

  “Aye, so it is,” the second mate agreed. “Those Arabs are odd ones, aren’t they?”

  With that, the talk turned mercifully to the strange customs of foreign sailors, and if Thomas pecked at his meal like an invalid, no one saw fit to comment.

  #

  Chapter 5: Sailing On

  Thomas knocked at George’s cabin the next morning, and again he was turned away.

  “And how is Miss Grey this morning?” he asked the maid.

  The maid put on such a sour look that Thomas almost laughed.

  “I suppose it’s none of my business, but do send her my rega…” He stopped himself. It would not do to simply send his regards. He could do better than that. He excused himself and returned to his cabin, where he rummaged around in his trunk until he found what he was looking for. He took out a piece of good writing pape
r and composed a short note, then tied a piece of twine around the lot and considered it ready to deliver.

  #

  After a day’s rest, Hyacinth felt well enough, physically, but she still couldn’t bear the thought of going out on deck. Mr. Smithson had been in and out of his cabin a dozen times already. She could hear him coming and going, every creak of the hinge and click of the latch. He went so often that she hadn’t even dared go over to George’s cabin to give him his lessons. She thought of slipping through into Mrs. Hotham’s sitting room, but then she would know that she was better, and urge her to go to dinner with the officers and Mr. Smithson.

  So she waited. She re-read a bit of Ovid that she was thinking of having George work on. She unpicked a bit of her disgraceful embroidery from the previous afternoon. The sun crept slowly up the sky. She felt as if Mr. Smithson were hovering outside her door. Perhaps he wanted to apologize, she thought, but that would mean a word in private, which in itself might be a compromising situation, and besides, she wasn’t at all sure what she would do in that situation. She might throw herself straight back into his arms, which wouldn’t do at all. No, it wouldn’t do at all. She picked up the book again. She would memorize a poem, that’s what she would do.

  Maria knocked at the door, interrupting Hyacinth’s self-imposed studies. She was sure that it wasn’t time for luncheon yet.

  “Come in,” Hyacinth said.

  Maria entered with a stern frown on her face and a square bundle in her hands.

  “Miss Grey,” she said, “that Mr. Smithson came and asked about you. I didn’t say anything, then he ran off into his cabin. He brought this out and said to give it to you.”

  Maria held out the bundle, string tied around cloth, with a note attached. Even before she touched it, Hyacinth could tell that the purple-grey fabric would be meltingly soft. She sat up and took it in both hands, letting her fingers sink into the incomparably fine wool.