by Carla Kelly
THE UNLIKELY MASTER GENIUS
The St. Brendan Series
Volume One
Carla Kelly
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Camel Press
PO Box 70515
Seattle, WA 98127
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Sabrina Sun
The Unlikely Master Genius
Copyright © 2018 by Carla Kelly
ISBN: 978-1-60381-683-0 (Trade Paper)
ISBN: 978-1-60381-684-7 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959752
Produced in the United States of America
* * * * *
To Heather Brown Moore, who asked me to write a short story, which led to this book. I owe you, Heather.
To Euclid, too, of course.
But Love is a durable fire
In the mind ever burning
Never sick, never old, never dead
From itself, never turning.
Sir Walter Raleigh, “Walsinghame”
* * * * *
Chapter One
Twenty-one years after his first classroom flogging in a Dumfries, Scotland, workhouse, Sailing Master Able Six had forgotten neither the pain, nor the surprise.
He was five years old, ragged and hungry like all the other boys. There were workhouse girls, but he never saw them in a classroom. Girls mattered for naught beyond kitchen duties, sewing and ironing, and probably jollying the workhouse master, likely against their will.
From the perspective of two decades, Able suspected that the teacher who had seemed so old then hadn’t been much beyond his twenties, if that. More specifically, Able remembered the pointer he carried and tapped in his hand, the gesture both mesmerizing and menacing.
But what was Able to do? The teacher had written the sentence, “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” on the blackboard, a mere bit of black paint over rough boards.
Young Able had flinched along with other pupils each time the teacher slammed his pointer against each word on the blackboard. In terror, poor Jedediah Winkum had pissed in his pants and sat in misery throughout the classroom ordeal. Maybe what he smelled was more than piss; who could tell? They all stank.
The boy directly in front of Able had fidgeted, or scratched, or held his mouth wrong, or done something to attract the teacher’s attention. The master pounced on the unsuspecting child, a boy with not much wit to begin with, even though he must have been two or three years Able’s senior.
“Read this sentence, bastard,” the master demanded. He pushed his pointer under the unfortunate child’s chin and raised his head. “Stand ye up!”
The boy did as ordered, shaking visibly. He stared at the words, shook his head, and the pointer slammed down on his shoulder. The boy cried out as he sank to his knees.
When the teacher raised the pointer again for another blow, some power he did not understand made Able Six leap to his feet. “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” he sang out at the top of his voice.
A blow to his ribs knocked the wind from him. Able wavered, but righted himself, an ability that would serve him well in the coming years on pitching, yawing ships.
Able should never have looked in the teacher’s eyes. He was used to disgust and neglect and being called a bastard, even though at the time he wasn’t certain what it meant. What glared back at him was hatred. Not too many years later, Able came to understand that the hatred was likely directed inward rather than at the five-year-old staring back with a grave expression.
Standing there, the focus of a miserable man’s undivided attention, Able gathered he had committed another sin: he knew too much.
“Ye can’t read yet, bastard,” the man said, his voice neutral in that danger zone of bullies. The teacher’s sad eyes flicked across a row of cowering older boys in the front row. “Which one of ye told him? Trying to make a fool of me?”
Already in pain, already terrified, Able saw no need to involve others. They probably all knew what the sentence said, but were wiser than he, because they remained silent. How did he know how people learned anything? He was but five.
“No one told me, sir,” Able said.
“Impossible!” The brute slammed down the pointer again and Able gasped in agony. “You’ve only been in this class two days.”
Able put up his hands to protect his face as the pointer whisked down once more. Years later in the fleet, a ship’s surgeon had remarked on Able’s forearm, which was slightly crooked. “Master, you had an early injury, didn’t you?”
“It works fine,” was all Able said, still unwilling to discuss the event that changed his life. How could a surgeon, a well-educated man, understand that a child could look at letters and know what they meant?
He had fainted from the pain and woke up in his bed in the room he shared with twenty-five other bastards, foundlings plucked from church steps, hedgerows, and noisome rooming houses in Scotland’s southern districts. Someone with more sympathy than skill stuck a piece of wood next to his forearm and wrapped it with a few twists of a stinking sheet. He lay there, stunned by what had taken place, only to be scolded by the boys around him, demanding that he not say one more word, even if he could read.
“Don’t be smart,” one of the older boys warned, a boy Able looked up to because he sometimes shared bits of food finessed from the kitchen where he washed dishes. It was a plum job, one the other lads envied. “We’ll all get in trouble.”
“I thought everyone could read it,” Able had whispered.
He heard that infernal pointer whistling down even now, as he lay wide awake in his comfortable room in the vicarage of St. Matthew’s Parish. The unfailing clock in his remarkable brain told him it was thirty minutes past midnight, and he faced a busy day of travel from rural Devonshire to Portsmouth on the mail coach.
Time to sleep, if he could. He had no trouble redirecting the chaos of his brain to a more recent memory, when Meridee Bonfort kissed him while her sister’s back was turned and wished him a shy goodnight.
He smiled in the dark, wondering if Meridee tossed and turned as he did. He knew the answer to such a simple question, so he sat up, looking around for his trousers. In his stocking feet, Able crept down a flight of stairs and tapped on Meridee’s door.
She opened it so promptly that Able knew she had not been asleep, either. She gratified him with a kiss, and then another. She gently rubbed her cheek to his as he held her close, then supplied her own admonition, far more pleasant than anything he had heard in his nine years in the workhouse.
“Master Six, two more weeks,” she whispered in his ear as she stood on tiptoe and he generously held her up a little higher. “Last Sunday’s banns and two more Sundays. Go back upstairs.”
He had only known this woman for a month, this darling who was going to become his wife, even though he was a sailing master too young to have any prize money yet, thrust ashore on half pay because of the damned Treaty of Amiens. As much as he wanted her, he wasn’t planning any stress on her virginity. That would wait, because he understood rules. That had been another hard-earned workhouse lesson.
Still, a man could try for sympathy. “I’m afraid,” he said, because it was true.
For several years after his
encounter with that classroom sadist, Able Six had not looked anyone in the eye. Once in the fleet, the bosun’s mate had taken him aside and declared, “I see real promise in you, lad, but you need to look at people addressing you.”
“Sir, that earned me beatings,” he replied, because Able Six never forgot a single event.
“I was a workhouse brat, too,” the bosun’s mate informed him. “You can practice by looking me in the eye.”
And so he looked in Meridee Bonfort’s lovely eyes. “Aye, lass, I am afraid.”
To his relief, she took his hand, tugged him into her room, and closed the door. He hadn’t been there before so he glanced around and saw her travel trunk open. She had only just returned from Portsmouth herself.
“You’re certain the headmaster at St. Brendan’s will see me as an answer to prayer? I’d be lying if I told you I had no doubts, ” he confessed.
He felt as alone as any man in the universe who realizes he will soon be supporting another creature in this harsh world. “I’m on half pay. What am I doing?”
“Marrying me,” she said calmly and kissed him.
He had kissed other women in bedrooms before. Christ’s bones, he had done more than that in back alleys just off wharfs, moments after leaving a frigate, hull-barnacled and back from a two-year voyage. Meridee Bonfort was different, so he gave her a clinical kiss and held her off by the shoulders.
She appraised him, and to his continued amazement, seemed not to find him wanting, even though it hadn’t been much of a kiss. Her hands went to his face.
“What you’re doing is taking the mail coach to Portsmouth in the morning, where you will meet with Captain Hallowell and accompany him to St. Brendan’s School,” she said. “You know how to teach young lads.”
Doubting Thomas, get thee behind me, he thought. “I have been instructing two well-behaved pupils in a vicarage—why, mercy, this one,” he reminded her with a smile. “Meri, I know workhouse brats. They are cut from different cloth.”
“Precisely,” she said, apparently unwilling to even consider that if he failed to impress the headmaster, there was no way he could afford the upkeep of a wife. As it was, the pennies for an outside seat on a mail coach were going to tax his purse to its skinny limits.
“You will know what to do, Master Six,” Meridee said.
She spoke with the same sincerity he had heard in her voice from their first conversation. He felt sudden awe at the bedrock certainty she meant every word. “Where you doubt, my love, I will supply twice the confidence.” She touched his face again. “When I have doubts, you can do the same for me.”
“Aye, lass,” he told her, feeling better. “Give me another cuddle and I’ll go back to bed.”
She held him close, her arms tight around him, this gentleman’s daughter who saw something in him to love, even once she understood his special gift. If he found himself with a free moment in Portsmouth, he would write a letter to Lieutenant Caldwell, comrade from the frigate now in ordinary, waiting out a doomed peace treaty. Caldwell had informed him of a temporary position teaching two sons of a country vicar too busy during Christmastide to continue their lessons. Able should thank him.
He had another question for this lovely lady in his arms. “Meridee,” he said, holding her off because it seemed safer, “how in the world did you figure out my secret?”
“I watched your eyes in my brother-in-law’s study,” she said. “You weren’t looking at him. You were scanning every single title in the bookcase behind him. You did it in under five seconds.”
“I can’t help myself. You know that,” he said. “But why were you looking at my eyes?”
She laughed softly, the kind of intimate laugh reserved for bedrooms, which was precisely where they were. I am an idiot, he thought, mildly put out with himself. The door, Durable Six, the door. Head toward it. Two more weeks and she’s yours, provided you do not make a fool of yourself in Portsmouth.
“Able, you’re the handsomest man I ever saw,” she told him simply. “I couldn’t help watching your face.”
“I think my mother’s name was Mary. I have no idea who my father was,” he reminded her. “Was he from Greece or Italy? Spain or God-help-us France? One thing more: why doesn’t this bother you? Meri, I’m a bastard. You know that.”
Undeterred, she walked him to the door. “I am your keeper, Master Six. Captain Hallowell told me so. Goodnight.”
Chapter Two
Was there any place colder than the top of a mail coach in December? Thank God he had not pawned his boat cloak, no matter how desperate he was for the few coins it would bring. Able hunkered down to endure, something he was good at.
He touched the ragged copy of Euclid’s Elements in his pocket, knowing that if the cold overwhelmed him, he could warm himself by reciting a random proposition and devising mental exercises. Shivering inside—never a good sign—he tried it now.
Despite the cold that clawed at his temples, he relaxed as Euclid’s grand work unrolled in his mind like a scroll. Ah, Prop Eight: If two triangles have two sides equal to two sides respectively, and have also the base equal to the base, they will have the angles equal which are contained by the equal straight lines.
How could a man not feel better, with Euclid on his mind? They were friends of long standing. He saw the diagrams clearly in that mind’s eye Shakespeare wrote of in Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2. Once he considered all the geometric angles, Able started at the beginning of Hamlet and thought his way through the play as the mail coach trundled toward Portsmouth.
By the time his brain brought down the curtain on Hamlet with the arrival of Fortinbras, prince of Norway, the mail coach stopped for victuals. Able ate inside the coach, since Meridee had kindly packed him a lunch.
He wasn’t alone. An angular lady, sharp-chinned and all elbows, ate her own lunch on the seat across from him. A sociable man, Able wanted to speak to her, rather than eat in silence rendered embarrassing because they were both too poor to eat in the public house. With no introduction, he maintained his silence. Each tried to ignore the other.
He eyed her skimpy meal, grateful Meridee Bonfort was concerned for his welfare. He polished off two boiled eggs and one sandwich thick with meat and cheese, a feast compared to the lady’s one carrot and single cracker with a nearly invisible skiff of butter.
He had another sandwich, but could not eat it, not with the lady eyeing it when she thought he wasn’t watching. Her silent desperation reminded him forcefully that being poor in England was much harder on women.
Are you a man or a mouse, Durable Six? he asked himself. He cleared his throat. She glanced up, and the hope in her eyes nearly broke his heart.
“Miss, we have not been introduced, but this extra sandwich is too much. I know it won’t keep. Would you ….”
She blushed but did not look away. “I would, sir.”
“There’s this egg,” Able added, encouraged. “Take it, please.”
She did, with no hesitation. Looking into the canvas bag Meridee had packed for him, he was happy to see some sort of bread pudding, the substantial kind that would help keep out the cold when he climbed back on top of the mail coach. He munched on the tasty thing, trying not to listen to the small sounds of appreciation coming from the unlucky lady, heading somewhere alone.
Meri, I promise you will never be alone and hungry, if you hitch your wagon to my decidedly ramshackle horse, he thought. We’ll manage somehow.
The lady cleared her throat. “I am Miss Mercer,” she said, even if there had been no real introduction. “I am going to an estate near Sidmouth to become a governess.”
Fair enough. “I am Sailing Master Six, hoping for a teaching position at a boys’ school in Portsmouth. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
He watched a cloud fall over her face. Perhaps he shouldn’t have spoken. A governess might think she outranked a sailing master. She surprised him.
“Master Six, my brother served the guns on the Triumph at Camperdown,�
� she said. He saw the pride in her eyes, as well as sorrow.
“Captain Essington’s ship,” he said. “They fought well. I was on the Powerful.” Should he ask? “Where is he now?”
“It was his last fight,” Miss Mercer said softly.
“I’m sorry, Miss Mercer,” he replied. “These are trying times.”
“They are,” she agreed, and pulled her threadbare dignity in the form of a cloak tighter about her.
He was spared thinking of something else to say as the more fortunate riders left the public house, ready to journey on. He nodded to Miss Mercer and climbed up to his cold seat. When the coach stopped at Sidmouth, she waved to him.
He waved back, watching her struggle with a valise against the winter wind. He didn’t see a vehicle waiting for her so he turned away, much as he might turn away from an abandoned pup when he could offer no help. He could do nothing for Miss Mercer except resolve to manage his life so Meri never had to resort to the half-life of a governess. Meri might call herself his keeper, but in Sidmouth he decided that he was hers, too.
Euclid didn’t tempt him then; neither did Shakespeare. Until they stopped for the night in Poole, he warmed himself by thinking of all the ways he loved Meridee Bonfort, a charming spinster of one month’s acquaintance. Funny how a man could bumble along, never considering there might someone waiting just for him.
In his line of work, wives were a luxury. War and more war poured out by an upstart Corsican had effectively shunted aside typical avenues of sociality that often led to matrimony, people being what they were. In the fo’c’s’le and later the wardroom, he had listened to the complaints of fellow seamen, grousing because life at sea was no way to meet anyone of the fair sex, let alone contemplate the future.
He had another strike against him, one that came with having been born in a back alley in Dumfries, Scotland, and then abandoned and found, nearly frozen, on the steps of St. David’s Church. He had risen to the top of his profession as a sailing master at the unheard of age of twenty-two. That could have assured him the respectable hand of a shopkeeper’s daughter, or even the offspring of another warrant officer like himself, but it would never happen because he was still a bastard, worlds without end, amen.