You May Kiss the Duke

by Charis Michaels

  Sabine’s heart had begun to pound like she was running a race. This conversation felt very much like a race. They had begun to walk, and then he walked faster, and then she walked faster, and then he had begun to run, so she began to run, and now they were both sprinting side by side, trying to keep up.

  “I swear,” Jon Stoker said slowly, and Sabine thought, My God, what if this actually works?

  It had been a true statement; Stoker did not strike women. Also true, she could not remain here. But he’d lost track of whether he was trying to convince her of something, or she was trying to convince him.

  You will save her by marrying her, he thought.

  She will die if you do not.

  “This is madness,” she said, letting out a little laugh, and she turned away. Stoker felt something like panic rise in his throat.

  “I will take your dowry and go,” he rushed to say. “You have my word.”

  She turned back. “You require the dowry money so badly?”

  This, he elected not to answer.

  She continued, “Or has your misspent life treated you with such callousness, you have no aspirations to real happiness? You can simply marry anyone, no bearing on your future. It simply won’t matter.”

  Stoker was not accustomed to women weighing his aspirations or his happiness. He also was not accustomed to lying. He was many regrettable things, but never dishonest. He opened his mouth to say, I don’t require the money, not in the way my partners do, but the look on her face caused him to close it. He paused.

  Stoker and his partners were embarking on an import voyage to bring guano fertilizer to the farms of England. It was new and untried and potentially a windfall beyond their wildest imaginings, but they could benefit from some financing to raise a crew and provision. They’d considered the girls’ advertisement because their dowries would finance the first expedition and then some.

  That is, his partners had considered the girls’ advertisements. His partner Joseph had fallen into something like love-at-first-sight with his potential bride. And Cassin really did need the money.

  Stoker was not in love nor destitute. But what if he married as a way to end the exhausting business of saving people?

  No more Stoker as hero, Stoker as savior, Stoker as someone else’s deliverance from . . . whatever.

  The sacrifice of marrying Sabine Noble—of marrying anyone at all—would be so great, he could retire.

  After her, he could walk away.

  It was helpful that the marriage described by Sabine was meant to be completely detached, with oceans between their lives, and wholesale unaccountability. It was really no marriage at all, except by name.

  Stoker took a deep breath. He looked her over once again, and she raised up to her full height. She hiked her chin. He felt something twitch and sink inside his chest, like sand dropping into a hole on the beach.

  This was a woman who had choices, he thought. She could have her pick of men. The dowry she advertised was significant and her beauty was dark and rare and, if he was being honest, took his breath away. Coal-black hair, long lashes that shielded emerald eyes, perfect nose, perfect mouth—perfect everywhere. Even beaten by her uncle, even desperate, he could not look away.

  “Mr. Stoker?” Sabine prompted. “Why would you marry a stranger, if you’ve sworn never to marry?”

  “For the dowry money,” he heard himself say. He would blame it on the money but know it was one final act of altruism for a pretty girl in a bad situation.

  “Right,” she said, her voice tentative but also official. “You will do it for the money, and I will do it to leave Sir Dryden. I suppose it’s all settled.” She took two steps back.

  “Do you have to gain your uncle’s permission to leave home and marry? Does he control the dowry?”

  She shook her head. “No. My father prepared the dowry years ago, thank God. Sir Dryden may remain locked in the cupboard until he rots, for all it would affect me.”

  “Are you safe from him tonight? Eventually, a servant will release him.”

  She shrugged. “I think we should do it as quickly as we can. I can go to my friend Willow’s aunt’s house in Belgravia. This has been Willow’s plan. Let me speak to my mother. She has a devoted lady’s maid who will see to her care when I go. She will miss me but be relieved that I am free of him.”

  “Right,” Stoker said, working to keep his voice normal. “We shall do it as quickly as we can.”

  Chapter One

  August 1834

  London, England

  Four years later

  Some eight miles outside London, rising from the banks of the River Thames, Greenwich is a sprawling, leafy antidote to the crush of the city.

  This former royal retreat is the first glimpse by which seaborne travelers view London, but landlocked visitors may explore it in person.

  The royal palaces, now recommissioned for use by the Royal Navy, are open to the public and home to hundreds of maritime paintings. The so-called “Painted Hall” dazzles visitors with a floor-to-ceiling mural of ocean squalls, sea serpents, and nude sailors in repose.

  Admission 1d. Royal Palaces closed Tuesdays and Sundays.

  —from A Noble Guide to London by Sabine Noble

  Sabine Noble reread her last line and contemplated the prudence of “nude sailors in repose.”

  Too provocative?

  Potentially, but she’d counted no fewer than thirty-five naked seamen in the overwrought mural, far too many not to mention. Sabine’s travel guides had become best-sellers due in no small part to her plain speaking, not to mention her instinct for attractions that would stand out to rural visitors, in particular. Naked sailors fell well within this category.

  Sabine left the phrase in and roughed out the sketch that would become the map that accompanied her description of Greenwich. The descriptions amused Sabine, but her true passion was the maps. Part illustration, part functional guide, Sabine filled each Noble Guide to London with eye-popping cartography. Not simply maps, but colorful works of art that told a story about each of London’s many boroughs and neighborhoods.

  “I think we have it, Bridget,” Sabine said to the dog resting at her feet. “Measure twice, sketch until it leaps from the page.”

  The dog, a patchy, one-eared mongrel with a perpetually bared incisor, scrambled to her feet and stabbed her nose to the air, searching for threat. Few things triggered the dog’s vigilance like the words I think we have it.

  I think we have it meant the boring, civilized portion of their day was over, and the excitement would, at long last, commence. Little of interest happened while they surveyed serene parks and hushed museums, but what came after could be very exciting, indeed.

  Packing away her drafting kit, Sabine turned her back on the stately order of Greenwich and squinted at the River Thames. Downstream, not a quarter mile away, bobbed the hulking, three-deck warship known as the Dreadnought. The boat had been decommissioned in 1831 and anchored in Greenwich to serve as England’s floating maritime hospital. The ship took in gravely ill English seamen who had made their way to home to recover (or die) on its bed-lined decks.

  Sabine had been mindful not to mention the Dreadnought in the Noble Guide’s entry on Greenwich. Famous warship or not, a hospital was no draw for holiday seekers. Visitors to the Dreadnought came to call on the bedside of sick relations, not tour the sights.

  Today, if she was lucky, Sabine and her dog would call on ten or eleven sick relations—or rather, she would feign some relationship to a dozen sick sailors on board.

  “You must pretend to be very excited to see these men,” Sabine told Bridget, striding down the riverbank to the looming, ark-like figure of the Dreadnought. “I’ve made an actual script today, loose though it may be. And you are the star.”

  Too much advanced planning, Sabine had learned, was a threat to flexibility, and flexibility was what allowed her to drift in and out of places that a lady would ordinarily never drift. She had become a rather
accomplished snoop, which fit ever so nicely with her other identity as bestselling travel writer. She could pass a morning mapping a given area, making notes about statues and Norman churches, and then devote the afternoon to infiltrating a nearby dark alley or, in this case, a looming hospital ship. If she was detained or challenged, her alibi was the true story of her own life. She was the author of a popular travel guide, and she was in the area for research.

  Sabine’s father, the famous explorer Nevil Bertrand Noble, had enjoyed the dual role of adventurer and cartographer, so travel writer and snoop felt quite natural to Sabine, if considerably less esteemed. But Sabine couldn’t care less about esteem. She wanted only two things: revenge against her uncle and to finally return home.

  She’d arrived in London four years ago from her home in Surrey so very angry, reeling from what had become of her life. Her father had died and her uncle had moved into their family estate and turned on her. Touring the streets of the city had soothed her. She had walked and walked and walked, tears burning her eyes, thoughts racing, railing at the injustice of it all. But also making sketches, each one a little more detailed than the next, of the neighborhoods and boroughs she toured. Soon A Noble Guide to London was born.

  Her father’s map engraver agreed to publish the first installment, and they had invoked Nevil’s reputation to promote the book. In no time at all, readers were clamoring for Sabine’s clever writing and beautiful maps. By the second installment, bookshops were doing a booming business. By the third, the engraver was begging her to feature every borough and attraction of London in new installments of her Noble Guide.

  Sabine had complied, choosing parts of town that would be of most interest to tourists. For weeks, she had prowled London’s landmarks and hidden treasures, until one day, quite by chance, she crossed paths with one of her father’s former apprentices. The young man had been a favorite of the family, and he and Sabine took tea in a café to commiserate about their lives since the great explorer’s death.

  Amid the pleasantries and remembrances, the young man bemoaned the fact that Sabine’s uncle had cut ties with all of her father’s students and turned them out of the student cottage at Park Lodge.

  “But for what reason would Dryden dismiss you?” she had asked incredulously. “The engraver was paying your stipend, not Dryden. And when Papa’s final maps are published, the estate will enjoy the profits. Your work would be a windfall for my cursed uncle.”

  The apprentice had shrugged. “Cannot say, madam, but he was quite emphatic about it. Between you and me, we students believe he has some alternate plan for the maps. He asked for every sketch, every note, every slip of parchment from our desks. He searched the cottage and our belongings, making sure we stole away with nothing. The same morning that servants carried every folio and map to your father’s old library, new locks were installed. I was in the middle of a measurement when they swept through, and they wouldn’t permit me to finish the line.”

  “But it makes no sense to stop work that would eventually bring more money,” Sabine had said. “And Sir Dryden had no real interest in Papa’s work.”

  The student had shrugged. “Before we left, I saw that Sir Dryden had guests to the library, a crowd of men in three carriages. He herded them inside and slammed the door.”

  “What manner of guests?” Sabine had asked.

  Another shrug. “Older gentlemen. No one I’d seen before. No one from the world of cartography or engraving, I’ll tell you that.”

  Sabine had left the encounter reeling. She’d raged at the sky and complained to her friends and walked the streets of London for half a day. Ultimately, she’d written to her lone, reliable source at Park Lodge, the longtime lady’s maid of her mother, a woman called May. Sabine asked specifically about new guests to Park Lodge and the eviction of her father’s students. May had dashed off a quick and detailed reply—names, dates, snatches of conversation overheard from the dining room—and Sabine’s search for evidence against her uncle had begun.

  Why were her father’s students dismissed? What would become of their work? Who were these men, visiting Sir Dryden? How often did they turn up? What endeavor had Sir Dryden embarked upon using her father’s unpublished maps?

  Beginning with names provided by her mother’s maid, Sabine began to nose around London for details. She hadn’t known precisely how she would exact revenge against Sir Dryden, but a clearer picture fell into place, clue by clue, every day. One man worked in shipping. Another, munitions. A third man was a chemist. Sabine vowed not to rest until she could determine Dryden’s business and return to Surrey to stop him.

  Now she tossed a piece of bacon to Bridget and stared up at the Dreadnought. Somewhere inside were a dozen scurvy-ridden sailors who could fill in the gaps of her latest discovery. One of Dryden’s known associates was, she had discovered, a London-based shipper. The man himself had proven impossible to interview and his sailors were, unfortunately, almost always at sea. But Sabine had learned that this particular crew had contracted scurvy and were, at the moment, laid up on the hospital ship. Pity about their health, Sabine had thought, but also perfectly situated to answer some pointed questions about their employer and his expeditions.

  “We must be very charming and lovely, Bridget,” Sabine reminded her dog, dropping another piece of bacon.

  Bridget regarded every morsel of food as if it were her last, and she attacked the treat.

  “You are not even trying, I see.” She shaded her eyes, staring at the ship.

  Sabine’s capacity to beguile was nearly as limited as her dog’s, but unlike Bridget, her face and body tended to take over where flirtation failed. Green eyes and sable hair had that effect on men, whether she wanted it or not.

  But who would they beguile if no one was on deck? The Dreadnought, which she knew to be packed with ailing sailors, looked abandoned in the bright afternoon heat. Sabine’s overt sweetness, already in short supply, was rapidly draining away. She ruffled her dog’s ears and scanned the area again. In the distance she spied a lone uniformed crewman slouched against the trunk of a tree. His rank was undistinguishable, but he was young. He was savoring a smoke with an expression that Sabine would best describe as blankness. Perfect.

  “Hello?” Sabine called, approaching the man with a shy wave.

  He looked up, sliding his gaze from the top of her hat, down her face and body, and up again. “Hello yourself,” he said hopefully.

  Bridget growled deep in her throat. Sabine slapped a handful of skirt over the dog’s snout.

  “Are you,” she asked, “a member of staff on the hospital ship?”

  “Not for five minutes, I’m not,” the man said. “Break.”

  “Oh, a break, of course. Good for you. But are you . . . a doctor?”

  “Right, that’s me. Doctor.” He laughed. “Deck steward, more like. Who wants to know?”

  “Steward? Oh, lovely, perhaps you can help me. Can you tell me how the patients are housed on the ship? That is, are they arranged by condition, or name, or perhaps the severity of their ailment?”

  “Searching for a sweetheart, are you?”

  Sabine shook her head vigorously. “Oh no, I’m a married woman.” About this detail, Sabine never pretended.

  Her wedding ring was concealed by her glove, but she raised her left hand by force of habit.

  After the obvious escape from her uncle, the two most useful things about Sabine’s hasty marriage to Jon Stoker were the wedding ring and the words I’m a married woman.

  “My husband is a sea captain, in fact, but he is out of the country at the moment.”

  The third most useful thing about her hasty marriage to Jon Stoker was that he was always, always, out of the country. In fact, the last time she’d seen him had been more than a year ago, and even then, their exchange had been limited to a few pleasantries in the street. They did trade letters on occasion. Their correspondence had not been planned, but Stoker had business with an impoverished aristocrat tr
ying to claim a familial relation. It was an old duke trying to finagle a piece of Stoker’s growing fortune. At Stoker’s request, Sabine sent clippings about the old man from London papers and had even done some snooping around town. She described what she learned in letters and posted them to whatever foreign port Stoker was due to drop anchor.

  “Married?” the steward repeated resentfully.

  “Quite, but I’m seeking several members of a ship’s crew. They’re meant to be patients on the Dreadnought. They . . . they’d all succumbed to scurvy when they were admitted, I believe.”

  “Which crew? You’ll have a list of their names, I hope?”

  Sabine was a miserable liar, but she could hardly reveal that she had no such list. She knew only the name of the last ship on which they sailed.

  “Actually, the crew is attached to this dog . . .” she said gainfully, gesturing to Bridget. “She was their unofficial mascot on a particularly harrowing voyage. She has been left in my care while they recover. Scurvy, as I’ve said. It would bolster them to see her.”

  The steward squinted at the dog, who, with narrowed eyes and bared teeth, looked like no mascot. In truth, the dog looked a little scurvy-ridden herself.

  “Mascot, you say?” he said.

  “Indeed. Beloved and sorely missed, I should think.”

  “How did you come to mind her?”

  “My brother was among the crew.”

  And now the lie grew. Sabine spoke more quickly, trying to prevent the story from taking a life of its own. “He died at sea, sadly. But the crew members who survived left the dog in my care. I promised to bring her to visit.” She swallowed and added, “As my brother would have wanted.”

  Sabine snapped her fingers, and Bridget reluctantly lowered herself into a dejected squat, sitting in a crooked approximation of docility. Sabine smiled a sad, wistful smile and batted her eyelashes.

  To further distract, she added, “But what is the nature of your work as steward? Do you care for all the patients?” She fidgeted with the button on her glove, flashing the pale skin of her wrist.