Midnight Mistress

by Ruth Owen

  “Alice is ever so much better, thanks to you, miss. And you wouldn’t recognize my Josh. That mutton stew you gave me last fortnight made him grow a foot taller. And those sweetmeats you sent were a glorious treat. You’re an angel from heaven to send them, and that’s a fact,” Lettie said, bobbing a shaky curtsy. The reason for her awkwardness was all too apparent. The girl’s thin body was several months gone with child.

  Lettie was only nineteen, little more than a child herself, and yet she had given birth to three children, including a stillborn daughter. Now there was another on the way. Meg handed over the bundle of clothes and food. “I don’t know if I can come again. I had to cry sick tonight to get away, and I cannot keep doing that. I do wish that you could come to the house. I could give you so much more if I didn’t have to carry—”

  The distant jangle of reins silenced her. Lettie glanced down a nearby alley, then turned back to Meg, her eyes wide with fright. “I got to go, miss. My man’s waitin’.”

  The girl turned to leave, but Meg caught her hand. “Ask him if he’ll bring you to my house, Lettie.”

  “He won’t. You know he won’t. My man can’t show his face.”

  “Then you come. Lettie, I have friends. You and the children don’t have to stay with that—”

  “I got to go, Miss,” Lettie cried, pulling out of Meg’s grasp. She ran into the shadows, clutching the bundle to her chest. A few moments later Meg heard the shrill creak of a dogcart’s rusty wheel—followed by the sound of a brutal slap.

  Meg hugged her middle, fighting an almost overwhelming sense of futility. Girls like Lettie knew only one means of staying alive, and that way broke their spirit a little more every day. And there were hundreds of Letties in this city. Thousands.

  “Aye, what a we got ’ere?”

  She whirled around, and came face to face with a large man in a laborer’s coat and a polka dot neckcloth. He looked as if he’d been carved from a block of granite—with very little cut away.

  “I come to check that my shop’s locked good and proper, and find myself a not-so-good and not-so-proper miss. This is turning out to be a right fine night.”

  He took a step closer. Meg took a step back. “My good man, you have mistaken me for … well, I am not who you believe me to be. However, I can understand how you could make such an error, and I forgive you for it. Now, if you will be so good as to step out of my way—”

  “Ooh, pretty manners, too. Like she was a real lady. Well, I can play His Nibs as good as any.” He swept off his hat and made an elaborate, mocking bow. “Would her ladyship cares to join me for a cup of the creature at the Pulteney’otel, afore we retire to my rooms for a bit a sport?”

  “Sir, you compound your error! Pray do not further embarrass yourself.” With a huff of exasperation Meg pushed by the man and stepped into the street.

  His arm snaked out, yanking her against him so hard that it drove the air from her lungs. “I ’ad enough of your games, ducks. Now if you don’t want to go to my rooms, that’s jack with me. My shop’s right here.”

  She struggled against his punishing hold. “Let me go. You’ve made a mistake!”

  “The only mistake I made is wastin’ time on your games. Now stop your wiggling—at least until we get insi—”

  The man’s words ended midsentence. Meg pushed herself out of his arms, not understanding his sudden silence—until she spied a darker shadow behind the man, and the faint glint of light off the edge of a knife.

  “My friend, you appear to be hard of hearing. The lady has said she is not interested in your advances. You shall apologize to her at once.”

  “Apologize? To a bleeding whor—” The man grunted as the dagger poked into his ribs. “Er, I’m sorry”

  “Très bien. Now, I advise you to find your way out of this street … for I fear this blade has a taste for blood.”

  The man didn’t need to be asked twice.

  Meg could not see her rescuer’s face in the shadows, but there was something vaguely familiar about his accent. “I am in your debt, sir.”

  “The man was a pig, fit only for the roasting spit,” the Frenchman commented as he returned his blade to its sheath. “Did he hurt you?”

  “No,” she said thoughtfully. She had definitely heard his voice before. “Are we acquainted?”

  “Mais non. Certainement, I should have remembered meeting so charming and valiant a mademoiselle.”

  Meg looked down, glad that the night shadows hid her blush. “I fear that I am neither charming nor valiant. And I feel like an utter cake for letting that man sneak up on me.”

  “Un cochan. Such a man takes pleasure in fear,” the stranger replied, barely hiding his disgust. He bowed and nodded down the street. “If you would do me the honor, I should be pleased to accompany you to safety.”

  She took his offered arm and started down Curzon Street, feeling unaccountably at ease with him. In substance, her situation had not changed. She was still alone on a deserted street with a complete stranger—a stranger who wielded a dagger as if it were his own hand. It made no sense, and yet she trusted him as she trusted her own heart—a heart that was beating unusually fast at the moment. Away from the shadows of the market, she could see more of his profile, including his handsome, striking features and his impressive mustache. That too triggered a memory.

  As if sensing her perusal, the man pulled up his collar and turned away. Meg blushed anew. It was quite not the thing for a girl to stare at a gentleman, even in such particular circumstances as these. Especially when the girl was as relentlessly plain as she was.

  The Frenchman put his hand over hers. “But you slow your walk. Are you sure the bully did not—”

  “No, he did nothing,” she said, praying that she did not sound as breathless as she felt. “I was just … thinking of Lettie. She and her children are in such a desperate state.”

  “Ah, la malheureuse. You are kind to help such an unfortunate.”

  They were nearing the end of Curzon Street, where it crossed Bolton and turned up toward the well-lighted Berkeley Square. In a few minutes she would be at the Jollys’ house. And it was quite possible that she would never see this handsome stranger again. Perhaps it was that prospect that made her tell him things of her past that she would never have dreamed of sharing with a gentleman to whom she had not been properly introduced.

  “Lettie is not just any unfortunate. We grew up together—her mother was the wardrobe mistress for my father’s acting troupe. Several years ago her mother remarried and Lettie’s stepfather took them to London. We lost touch, but when I arrived here I made it a point to look her up. She was … well her mother had died and her worthless stepfather had cast her off. She lives a wretched and desperate life.”

  The gentleman shrugged. “Un conte tragique. And sadly common. But there are places for such unfortunates—charities and workhouses. A lady such as you should not trouble her lovely head over such matters.”

  “A lady such as myself,” Meg repeated with a humorless smile. “Sir, you mistake me for someone of consequence. I have no family, no fortune, and—despite your kind compliments—I have no beauty to recommend me. In truth, if not for the kindness of Commodore Jolly and his family, it is quite likely that I would have suffered the same fate as Lettie.”

  The man stopped dead in his tracks and looked at her in horror. “C’est impossible!”

  Lord, what had she done! She had foolishly revealed the truth of her pitiful circumstances to a gentleman she barely knew. A gentleman of obvious breeding and sensibility. A gentleman who was easily the most handsome she had ever laid eyes on.

  Such a man might call on a gently bred miss, but he would never deign to associate with a woman who had narrowly escaped the poorhouse, even if she was the ward of a commodore. Hopes she did not even know she was nurturing crumbled to dust.

  Embarrassed at her idiotic confession, she turned on her heel and dashed across the square. Unfortunately, her exit suffered as she sl
ipped on a patch of ice and stumbled forward, an awkward move that sent her spectacles clattering to the cobbles. A new blush suffused her cheeks as she knelt down and began to feel blindly across the stones.

  She felt him kneel down beside her. He took her hand in his gentle grasp, handling her as if she were made of china. Without a word he scooped up her glasses and placed them in her palm, his caring touch lingering for moments longer than necessary before he rose and slipped behind the concealing curtain of fog.

  And then she knew.

  Connor had faced ruthless pirates, bloodthirsty corsairs, South Seas savages, French cannons, and a host of other dangers. He would have gladly taken on any one of them over Mrs. Jolly.

  “You have sat there for nearly three-quarters of an hour,” the lady said as she gave him a glance that drilled him more sharply than any pistol. “And yet you have told me nothing except some business events that could not be of any possible interest to me. And you have told me nothing of yourself but some fairy tale that even the most backward child could not believe.”

  Connor had worked long and hard on “Captain Gabriel’s” history, but under Mrs. Jolly’s scrutiny it seemed as false as—well, as false as the fabricated tale it was. “Madam, I can only tell you the Admiralty has complete faith in my word.”

  “Yes, and we know what towering intellects they are. Most of them are more interested in earning a voucher to Almack’s than earning medals, and the rest are sunk in a game so deep that even I have trouble divining it. I wonder,” she mused as her eyes narrowed with sharp scrutiny, “into which camp you fall.”

  “Perhaps into the camp that cares only for an end to this bloody war.”

  If Mrs. Jolly regarded his answer, she made scant show of it. Instead, she smoothed her lace cap and pointed to a porcelain ewer and pitcher on her cherrywood dresser. “All this nonsense has parched my throat. Be so good as to pour me a cup of water before we continue.”

  Connor wondered what the woman was up to. In all his travels, he’d rarely come across a more astute mind, and she was far too clever to waste their time together on a frivolous gesture. Nevertheless, he gave a gentleman’s nod and went to the pitcher.

  “Hmm. It takes a bit of walking to show the cut of a man’s livery,” she remarked as she accepted the glass. “That coat is the work of Weston’s in Conduit, is it not?”

  “I believe so,” Connor replied as he retook his chair. He vaguely remembered the shop where he’d been measured and poked for what had seemed like an eternity. “I don’t recall.”

  “A proper gentlemen would recall not only the tailor, but the day and the hour of his latest fitting. The ton have a spanking fine memory for details—except when it comes to the bill, of course.”

  Connor’s expression edged into a smile. He realized that he liked Mrs. Jolly and that in another time and place they might have been friends. “We were talking about my fitness as a manager—”

  “We were talking about your spending so much time with my lamb,” she countered sharply. “ ’Tis said that well-cut clothes can hide any fault, and that’s true enough when it comes to a plump belly or narrow shoulders. There’s some who call a tailor’s shop a ‘court of miracles’ for all the wonders done with sawdust padding and whalebone corsets. But they can’t disguise a man’s stance, or the subtle shift of his weight when he walks.” She leaned forward and peered shrewdly at Connor. “I’ve seen only a few others who shift their weight as you do, as if the irons were still on your legs. What were you in prison for?”

  Connor felt as if he’d taken a punch to his gut. “Madam, I fear you are mistaken—”

  “No, you are mistaken if you think you can flummox me. Tell me the truth, or I assure you that by tomorrow evening every member of the Upper Ten Thousand will know that your whole tale is Banbury.”

  Connor raked his fingers through his hair. His only recourse was the truth. Or at least, as much of it as he dared. “You are correct, madam. I did serve time, but ’twas on a ship, not in a cell. She was named the Absalom.”

  Mrs. Jolly raised her hand to her throat. “Heavens, that filthy scow was decommissioned fifteen years past, and her brutish captain drummed out of the service along with her. I thought both had long since gone to Davy Jones’s locker. How could you have taken up with such a wretched man?”

  Connor fingered his scarred cheek, recalling the wretched bar in Kingstown where the Absalom’s mate had plied a lonely, heartbroken boy with cup after cup of grog. The next afternoon he’d woken in the stinking belly of a ship already under way, with iron shackles around his legs. “I had little choice, madam.”

  The woman gasped. “Shanghaied! ’Tis our country’s shame that some still sanction that deplorable practice. But as a rule, only criminals and malcontents are taken, not stalwart men and boys. You are too young to be a quota-man. The captain had no right—”

  “The captain had no right to do any of the things he did,” Connor stated in an emotionless voice. “But there was no one to speak for me, no one to miss me. I was on that ship for ten months.”

  “You are fortunate to be alive.”

  Fortunate? Connor was not so sure. During those months he had been treated like an animal, and he had become an animal in order to survive. He closed his eyes and felt the horror of those months rise in him like a choking wave. No matter how many years passed, he would never be free of the memories. “You are correct about one thing, madam. Both the ship and the captain are no more. The ship sank in a battle off the coast of Patagonia. The captain … drowned.”

  Mrs. Jolly searched his face, expecting more. He gave her nothing. The silence stretched between them like a rigging line, pulling tauter with each passing minute. In the end Mrs. Jolly had looked away, though not before he thought he caught a shadow of regret in her eyes.

  “You have weathered a hard life, boy. It is to your credit that you have risen up from such desperate circumstances to the position you now enjoy. But do not mistake my respect for my acceptance.” She reached over to her nightstand and extracted a package of letters. “Mr. McGregor has written me everyday of the progress of the Marquis Line. It appears that Juliana’s progress has been quite remarkable. It strikes me that she no longer requires a manager. I think it is high time you secured yourself another position.” Connor had thought the same, but having someone else tell him raised his hackles. “Madam, I make my own decisions.”

  “Captain, almost no one makes their own decisions, even when they believe they do. We are all slaves to the circumstances of our pasts and the limited choices in our present. And your best choice is to leave the Marquis Line and allow Lady Juliana to renew her friendship with her peers.”

  Her peers, Of which Connor would never be one. His eyes narrowed to a dangerous gleam. “And if I refuse?”

  “I do not believe you shall. During my observation, I noticed something else about you, something not so obvious as your scarred face, but just as much a part of your character. You may play the ruthless privateer in public, but underneath you have a noble heart. And I would be willing to wager my husband’s pension that that heart beats only for Juliana.”

  Connor’s confidence crumbled. “That is … absurd.”

  Mrs. Jolly waved away his protests. “Oh, stop trying to gammon me. But do not worry. I doubt anyone besides myself has the least suspicion, including the lady. Yet we both know it is true.”

  Connor shifted uneasily in his chair. “If such a thing were true … and I am not saying it is. But if it were—why would you think I would willingly leave the lady?”

  “Because you love her. Because you know in your heart that, as much as you love her, you could never be the man that a girl as fine and true as she is deserves.”

  With one well-aimed thrust she had cut his dreams to shreds. For the first time in years he had looked forward to the sunrise, because it meant another day with Juliana. He reveled in their battles, he enjoyed her neat parries and her quick intelligence, and he treasured the occas
ions when she gave him a rare, glorious smile. Helping her to realize her father’s dream had brought more pleasure to the wreck of his life than he’d thought possible. But until that moment, he honestly hadn’t realized that his pleasure had slipped quietly, irrevocably, and hopelessly into being in love. You’re a fool, Connor. A bloody, idiot fool.

  He rose from the chair and gave Mrs. Jolly the efficient nod of a man facing a firing squad. “You have made your point, madam.”

  “I never doubted it. Now, I suggest you sever your relationship as quickly and painlessly as possible. A note of resignation delivered to the Marquis Line on the morrow should take care of the matter.”

  Connor’s mouth ticked up. “If you think that, then you do not know Juliana. She’ll want answers.”

  “Then give them to her. You are a privateer, and have stayed in port for over two months. You can say that you wasted enough time with the Marquis Line when there is profit to be made elsewhere. You can say that you missed the open sea. You can say that you had a monstrous craving for deep-water mackerel. Say anything you like, but leave the girl behind. ’Tis the course you would have taken eventually anyway, is it not?”

  Eventually. But not while he could still plunder a few more precious hours with Juliana. He would have traded a year of his life for every day spent with her and counted himself lucky in the bargain. But the lady was right. He was just delaying the inevitable. And possibly damning Juliana’s reputation beyond repair.

  He rose from his chair and walked to the window, peering out into the empty night. “There is a convoy—a supply run to Lisbon. It leaves within the week. I am confident that I could arrange for my snow to sail along as protection.”

  “It might be harder to arrange than you suppose. Such a task is fit more for a fourth-rate brig than a yar schooner. The Admiralty is loath to put war heroes in biscuit runs.”

  “Have no fear, madam. I have resources at my disposal that can secure me whatever voyage I wish—even ones fit for a fourth-rate brig. Who knows—it might even have the added advantage of casting me as a coward in Juliana’s eyes.”