by Dare, Tessa
“That, and Marigold needed a graze.” Penny scratched the nanny goat between her ears.
Alex whisked the letter from Nicola’s hand, unfolding it to read for herself. It was so brief, scanning the contents took but a second. “Oh, it’s a boy,” she said. “How wonderful. I assume he’ll be called Richmond, as it’s the courtesy title. There’s no mention of his Christian name.”
“It’s a terrible letter,” Nicola said. “Ashbury wrote it. Never trust a man to write about babies.”
“No descriptions whatsoever.” Penny sighed. “How are we to know what he looks like? Which of his parents does he favor? What about his temperament?”
“He’s probably pink, wrinkly, bald, and hungry, like all newborn babes. I doubt he’s had time to declare a political affiliation.” Alex folded the letter and gave it back to Nicola. “We’ll have to be patient. Emma will write when she’s well rested, and she’ll tell us every detail.”
“Speaking of details,” Nicola said meaningfully, “I believe a certain governess owes us a few.”
“Yes.” Penny released Marigold’s leash and took Alex by the arm, dragging her to the nearest bench. “Tell us everything.”
They didn’t have to ask Alexandra twice. She unburdened herself of a fortnight’s thoughts. She told them all about Rosamund and Daisy. The daily doll funerals, the petty theft, and the five accomplishments she had been given ten weeks—now eight—to help them master.
“The poor dears are hurting,” Penny said. “They need snuggles, not lessons.”
“I know. But preparing them for school is the task I’ve been employed to complete. If I don’t succeed . . .” Alex propped her elbows on her knees and let her chin fall into her hands. “They’ve no interest in needlework. They’re immune to bribery. And how am I supposed to teach Daisy penmanship when she doesn’t even know her letters?”
“I wish we could be of more help to you with the governessing,” Nicola said, “but traditional ladylike accomplishments aren’t our strong points, either.”
“I know,” said Alex. “That’s why I treasure you.”
They were friends precisely because they didn’t fit in with the finishing school set. They were different, and unashamed of it. The same could be said of Rosamund and Daisy. The world would try to tell them they weren’t good enough, and Alex hated participating in that effort.
Penny lunged to catch the goat’s leash. “What of the Bookshop Rake? Has he confessed his love for you yet?”
“No,” Alex replied. “No.”
“That disavowal was entirely too vehement to be believed.”
“I spend my days with the girls in the schoolroom,” she insisted. “I scarcely cross paths with the man.”
Except for a few minutes every morning, when he holds my hand in his. Oh, and that one foolish, fumbling kiss in the kitchen.
“Come now,” Penny wheedled. “We’re your closest friends. If he’s romancing you, you must tell.”
Nicola groaned. “If he’s harassing her, you mean.”
“There is nothing to tell,” Alex insisted. “Nothing romantic. Nothing villainous. Nothing at all.”
Alex didn’t even consider her statement to be an untruth. This never happened, he’d said. And so it hadn’t. That kiss in the kitchen was the last time she would let herself be carried away. From now on, practicality reigned.
“Believe me,” she insisted once more for good measure. “I’m more likely to find my future in the stars than in the arms of Chase Reynaud.”
Nicola perked. “Oh, I nearly forgot.” She untied her bonnet and removed it carefully, withdrawing a packet wrapped in brown paper, which she handed to Alex. “I finally got the lavender-vanilla shortbread right. Took me seven attempts, but at last I made a batch that didn’t taste like soap.”
Alex accepted the packet. “You carried them here in your bonnet?”
“The goat kept trying to snatch them from my hand, and Penny said she’s not allowed sweets. When are you sending that animal back to the country, anyway?”
“When she’s healed, of course. Marigold has sensitive digestion.”
“Obviously,” Nic said dryly, looking on as Penny coaxed the animal away from a half-eaten shrub. “A delicate stomach indeed.”
Clutching the packet of shortbread in both hands, Alex kissed Nicola on the cheek in farewell. “Thank you. This was precisely what I needed.”
“It’s only shortbread,” Nicola said.
Alex smiled. “Never underestimate the power of biscuits.”
Once her friends had gone, Alex hurried upstairs, entered the nursery, and went directly to the slate.
Seven attempts. Nicola had needed seven different attempts to make edible shortbread before she’d found success. Alex needed to follow her example. These five subjects chalked on the schoolroom slate weren’t the right recipe for an education. They were like Nicola’s first six batches of lavender-vanilla shortbread. Put together, they tasted like soap.
She wiped the slate clean. “No more maths and etiquette. We have a new set of lessons.”
“What are you on about?” Rosamund asked.
“You wanted to buck all the rules, Rosamund? See the world? Be free? Then you have only one option.” She wrote a single word at the top of the slate and underscored it with a thick, decisive line. “Piracy.”
“Piracy?” Rosamund sounded skeptical, but intrigued.
“These are your new lessons.” Alexandra wrote five topics on the board. “Log keeping. Plunder. Navigation. The Pirate’s Code.” She ended the list. “And needlework.”
“Needlework?” Daisy made a face. “Why would a pirate need serviettes?”
“They don’t. But every sailor, law-abiding or otherwise, must know how to work a needle and thread. On the open sea, no one else is going to mend a sail or darn a sock.”
Rosamund’s suspicion won out. “Never mind her, Daisy. It’s only a trick.”
Alex forged ahead, pretending not to hear her. “We’ll have our own ship. Right here in the nursery. I’ll be captain, of course. Rosamund, you’re first mate. You’ll be responsible for log keeping and the money.”
“What about me?” Daisy asked.
“You,” Alexandra said, crouching close, “will be our quartermaster. That means you’ll ration food and water for the crew. And since we’re so undermanned, you’ll also take on the most important duty of all: ship’s surgeon. There are oh so many diseases and maladies that afflict pirates. Scurvy, malaria, tropical fever . . .”
Daisy’s eyes lit up. “Plague?”
“Yes, darling. Even plague.”
Poor Millicent had rough seas ahead.
Alex stood. “What say you, Rosamund? Are you joining our crew?”
Rosamund peered at the slate. “How do you mean to teach us all those things?”
“Personal experience. From the time I was younger than either of you, I was climbing the ratlines. I know how to set a course to Barbuda, I know the worth of a Spanish real in shillings, and I can barter in Portuguese.”
“Does our guardian know you’re proposing this?”
“Not at all.”
“He’s not going to like it.”
Alex lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Pirates don’t ask permission.”
She’d been hired to teach these girls, and she meant to fulfill that duty. Her financial circumstances wouldn’t allow her to do otherwise. But she was going to accomplish it on her own terms. Rosamund and Daisy needed encouragement, not etiquette. Confidence, rather than comportment.
And whether Chase Reynaud wished it or not, Alexandra would make certain they received it. She would not participate in transforming them into well-mannered, empty-headed, docile young ladies who wouldn’t cause him any trouble.
She’d help them become women who couldn’t be ignored.
“Well, Rosamund?”
After a pause, Rosamund set aside her book. “Very well.”
Alexandra suppressed a triumphant grin.
The girl was humoring her, and probably out of sheer boredom, but it was a start. “Then we have a great deal to do. To start, we’ll have to rig our ship.” She went to the window and yanked the curtain from its rod. Not precisely sturdy canvas, but for their purposes, it would make an adequate sail. She looked at Rosamund. “Do you know where we might find a coil of rope?”
Chapter Eleven
“Lie back on the bed for me.”
From his seat on the edge of the mattress, Barrow regarded him. “That is not in the terms of my employment.”
“Just do it, will you?”
Barrow complied. “Mind, I am only doing this because it’s five o’clock, and I value being on time for dinner more than I value my pride.”
“No, no. Not like that. On your side, facing me. Prop yourself on one elbow and rest your head on your hand.”
“Are you going to draw me like one of your French girls?”
“And keep your boots off the mattress. It’s new. Finest quality a shameless rake can buy.”
Barrow rolled his eyes.
“Now.” Chase lifted a gilt-framed mirror and positioned it on the wall opposite the bed. “Tell me, can you see yourself?”
“Partly.”
“Which parts? The good parts?”
“That’s it.” Barrow rolled to a sitting position. “I’m done.”
“Come along, man. I can’t do this by myself.”
“Well, I can’t run the Belvoir estate by myself. You’re the one with power of attorney.” He sighed and gave in. “A few inches to the left. Now up. A bit more. No, no. That’s too much.”
Chase strained under the weight of the mirror. “Hurry up, would you?”
“Tilt it forward a smidgen . . . There.”
“Took you long enough.” Chase drew a nub of chalk from his pocket and marked off the corner. Then he set the mirror down with a groan of relief.
“Now,” Barrow said, “we need to discuss the land steward at Belvoir Manor. He might be a wizard with crop rotation, but he can’t write a report worth sheep dung. You need to pay him a visit yourself and sort matters.”
Chase checked his marks with a level, then hammered two hooks into the wall. “We have a hundred other matters needing attention. The planting’s done for the summer anyhow.”
“In point of fact, the planting was not yet done when I first raised the subject. In February. You’ve been avoiding the discussion for months.”
“I have not been avoiding the discussion.” He hefted the mirror again, hanging it on the hooks. “I’ve been avoiding my uncle.”
“The duke’s too ill. He won’t even know you’re there.”
“He’ll know I’m there,” Chase said softly. “He always knows I’m there.”
Eager to change the subject, he turned and propped his hands on his hips, surveying his handiwork. The Cave of Carnality was finally complete. Now it could start living up to its name.
“Very well,” he told Barrow. “I’ll make the journey to Belvoir soon.”
“Excellent. I will pin a date to that promise, I hope you realize.” Barrow rose from the bed, reached for his hat, and headed for the door. “But it will wait for tomorrow. I’m late getting home as it is.”
“Give Elinor a kiss for me.”
“The hell I will,” Barrow said, shutting the door behind him. “Find your own wife.”
That wouldn’t be happening. But a little matrimony had never stood between him and a kiss.
God, that stupid kiss. Days ago now, and he remembered the taste of Alexandra as clearly as he recalled his own name. Fresh and sweet. Like cool water straight from a mountain stream.
Enough.
He left the retreat through the kitchen, locking the door after him, and mounted the stairs to his bedchamber, intending to change for the evening.
He hadn’t even reached the first landing when a piercing cry pulled him to a halt midstep. It was followed by a blood-chilling scream. Not a girlish scream, but a womanly one—coming from the direction of the nursery.
Alexandra.
He jogged up the remaining flights of stairs, pausing on the third landing for breath. The silence was ominous.
Dear God, they’d killed her.
He took the last flight of stairs at a sprint, rushed down the corridor, and flung open the door to the nursery, steeling himself for the sight of her bloodless corpse splayed on the floor.
The scene that greeted him, however, was anything but lifeless.
“Ready the cannon.”
They took no notice of his entrance. Chase used the following moments to survey the nursery. At least, it had been a nursery. He wasn’t certain what it had become since Millicent’s funeral early that morning.
The girls’ beds had been pushed side by side, with a gap of merely a few feet between them. The curtains had been removed from the windows and strung from the bedposts. Standing amid it all, Daisy squinted into a spyglass fashioned from a discarded paper cone, and Rosamund brandished a crescent-shaped object that resembled nothing so much as a cutlass.
Millicent sat on the opposite bed, wearing a paper sailor’s hat and, as was her usual, an unsettling smile.
Rosamund slashed her blade through the air. “Fire.”
From behind them, Miss Mountbatten made a series of the most fantastic noises. A boom, then a whistled glissando, followed by a rumbling crash that she accompanied with a brisk shake of the bedpost.
The girls gave a rousing cheer.
“Dead-on hit to the broadside,” she declared. “Bring the ship about and ready the plank.”
Rosamund yanked on a curtain tie, and a white “sail” unfurled from the top of the bed frame. Meanwhile, Daisy reached for a board that looked to have been ripped from a crate and cobbled together with rope.
“Ready for boarding!”
She scrambled from one bed to the next and held the cutlass to Millicent’s throat. “Hand over the plunder!”
Chase had seen enough. “Ahem.”
All three of them froze. Four, if he counted Millicent. The room went silent, save for an audible gulp from Miss Mountbatten.
“What is going on here?” he demanded.
Daisy spoke first. “Millicent’s been wounded.” She drew the “blade” across the doll’s neck. “Kerchief, please. She’s losing a great deal of blood.”
Chase ignored the doll’s death throes and stalked across the room to have a word with his governess.
“I can explain,” she said.
“You had better.”
“The girls and I . . . Well, we’re playing a game, you see.”
“You weren’t hired to play games.”
“But this is an educational game.”
“An education in cutlasses?”
She bit her bottom lip. “Only partly.”
Her eyes flitted toward the slate, and he followed her gaze. “Piracy?” He read the word aloud with horror. “You’re instructing them in piracy.”
“It isn’t how you’re thinking. I—”
Chase caught her by the elbow and guided her to the far side of the room. He needed space to berate her properly. “You are meant to be teaching them to be proper young ladies.”
“They’re not ready to be young ladies. They’re girls. They need to play, and they’ve forgotten how.”
“They need to learn their lessons. Letters, numbers, stitching samplers with misshapen flowers and dire Bible verses.”
“They are learning.” She directed his attention to the world map on the wall, where a series of pins guided a string from England to the West Indies. “We’ve plotted a course to Tortuga. There’s geography.” From there, she walked to the slate and pointed to a stack of figures. “Calculated the length of the journey, how many days it will take. How many rations we’ll need aboard. That’s arithmetic. I’ve even taught them a bit of French.”
Chase read aloud from the board. “‘Donnez-nous le butin, ou nous vous ferons jeter par-dessus bord.’ What does that mea
n?”
She hedged. “Hand over the booty, or you’ll walk the plank.”
“Millicent’s dead,” announced Daisy. “It will have to be a burial at sea.”
Chase rubbed his temples. “Right. This little game of yours stops. At once.”
“If I’m the governess, I must be allowed my own methods.”
“I’m your employer. You’ll do as I instruct.”
“Or what? You’ll hire another of the candidates queuing up for the post?” She made an exasperated gesture. “I’m succeeding where all the others have failed. How many is it you’ve been through again?”
“Fifteen,” he replied. “But I can always find the sixteenth. London is rife with women who’ll happily submit to my wishes.”
“No doubt it is. I’m not one of them.”
They stood locked in a stalemate. Dangerously close together. Perhaps it wasn’t that he was unwilling to step aside. Maybe he didn’t want her to get away.
Maybe he wanted her closer.
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than he got his wish. He felt a tight cinch about his rib cage. She made a startled cry.
In the space of a moment, they’d grown very close indeed. Indecently close. Chest-to-chest close. And if not for a few layers of fabric . . . the kind of closeness that meant skin on skin.
God.
Baffled, he attempted a self-protective step in retreat. A force resisted. “What the devil?”
His hellion wards collapsed on the bed with laughter.
He looked down. They’d been tied together with a length of rope. Tied and knotted, it would seem. Apparently while he’d been lost in her fiery eyes, the girls had managed to loop a rope about the two of them—and then cinch it tight.
“Oh, dear.”
“You little . . .” Chase wriggled, attempting to turn and chastise them. He succeeded only in craning his neck. “Come back here at once.”
“Daisy, do you think there’s cake in the kitchen?”
“I heard there’s jam, as well.”
The girls linked hands and skipped toward the door.
“Don’t you dare.” Chase hopped in their direction, dragging Miss Mountbatten with him. “Get back here, or I’ll—”