I Kissed an Earl

by Julie Anne Long

  “Captain’s horders, Hercules. Miss Redmond is to be cook’s mate.”

  Hercules released a string of dark Greek utterances, and then sighed theatrically.

  Granted, it was undeniably interesting to see how willingly these men followed captain’s orders, no matter how distasteful they found them.

  “Geev me your hands, Miss Redmond.”

  She slowly extended her hands, suspiciously eyeing the cleavers lined on the long, thick-topped tables forming an L for a workspace.

  He took them in his, surprisingly gently given all the shouting he was doing.

  He examined their fronts. Then turned them over and examined their backs. As though they were chops he contemplated purchasing. He lifted each up and squinted at her fingertips.

  Greeber squirmed enviously. “Perhaps ye’d like my opinion o’ them, too?” he suggested. He bent to peer at Violet’s hands.

  Hercules scowled at him and swatted him away with one hand.

  Then he all but tossed Violet’s hands back to her. “Useless! Soft, like butter, like kid, like supple, supple kid! Zeez hands are useless.”

  “Supple, sup…” Greeber trailed, sounding light-headed. “Mayhap ye’d like me to take a look, too, Miss Redmond?” He held out his hands hopefully for hers.

  Violet discreetly put her hands behind her back and eyed both men warily.

  “They are the hands of a lady, Mr. Hercules,” she informed him icily.

  Her eyebrows went up, and so did his. He had the blackest, thickest eyebrows she’d ever seen, and his nose was a stately potato, and his long arrogant mouth was turned down in a marvelously malevolent frown.

  They disdainfully took each other’s measure.

  “Oh? What can zey do, zeez hands of yours? Flutter fans?” He locked his thumbs and fluttered his fingers beneath his chin in imitation. “Pull bells to summon ze servants?” He imitated this, too, giving a great yank to the air.

  “Yes,” she agreed calmly. “That’s all they can do.”

  He paused. Then narrowed his eyes at her.

  Damn. He was smarter than she’d hoped.

  “Everyone works on a ship, or you are extra ballast and we throw you over the side,” he lied shrewdly.

  They stared at each other icily again. He needed to crane his head up to see her, his cap sliding back over his bald head, as it could get no purchase on the slippery, perspiring surface.

  Greeber looked worried, his gaze bouncing from one to the other and back again.

  “Aye! Very well, then! I am rude! Rude!” Hercules conceded unapologetically, finally. “I am a busy man and I need to feed the crew and I do not wish to pamper a princess of no experience. Rathskill, he was clumsy, he nearly take off his limbs, he spill the soup, and now you! You will take off your soft white fingers with a cleaver for certain, and the men will find them in the soup and they will complain!” He whirled on Greeber. “You!” he wheedled hopefully. “You can peel a potato! You will help?”

  He sounded so desperate Violet almost pitied him.

  “I’m quartermaster’s mate, Herc. Sorry. Go on, gi’ the lass a chance. Captain’s orders, Hercules, and ’es no fool, our Captain Flint.”

  A tricky bastard, surely, but no fool, Violet thought sourly, all of her formerly conflicting, scattered emotions regarding the man momentarily congregating in unity into a single one: resentment.

  “Honestly, If ’twere up to me, Miss Redmond, I’d carry you about in a litter all day and feed sweetmeats to yer,” Greeber said sincerely. Every one of his freckles glowed earnestly.

  Good God. She wondered what on earth Greeber was reading in his spare time, or to whom he’d been speaking.

  “Er…thank you, Mr. Greeber.”

  “But captain’s orders.”

  “And if the captain ordered you to dive over the prow?” she asked acidly.

  “Well, I’d get wet then, wouldn’t I?” he said cheerily. “Off I go now fer he burns me ears fer skippin me duties! Good luck! Hope I dinna see ye in the surgeon’s, Miss Redmond.”

  And off he did go.

  Leaving Violet and Hercules to stare at each other in peevish silence.

  Her hands still clasped behind her back as though Hercules might seize them and begin using them to do things without her permission, Violet looked about. The galley featured a long stove, a great thick-topped, iron-legged table, hacked and stained where doubtless potatoes and vegetables and the body parts of animals had been prepared for consumption, along with rock biscuits. The galley was hot and close and reeked of years of sailors’ meals. Not a terrible smell. Just an emphatic, omnipotent one.

  Sacks of grain leaned drunkenly against each in the back; bins, likely barrels hacked in two, held potatoes and onions. There were a number of other barrels. One was called “beef” and the other “cabbage” according to big black letters stamped upon them. Huge pots for boiling things sat on the stove. She suspected every meal was boiled, given that every meal arrived in a bowl.

  She did know more than a bit about running a large property, given that her mother had tutored her in the ordering about of servants and the purchasing of supplies. The food, however, generally appeared magically, prepared by their temperamental cook—were they all temperamental? Perhaps their tempers were forged as a result of all the time spent over a stove—or cookfire?—and born in by footmen.

  She wouldn’t know where to begin.

  “That’s a very fine stove,” she ventured.

  She knew absolutely nothing of stoves. She did know about men, machines, and idiosyncrasies, however. And this, of a certainty, was an idiosyncratic man.

  He eyed her warily. “It is a very fine stove. Lamb & Nicholson. Three burners! Can boil the meat and potatoes separately.”

  “Well, thank goodness for that!”

  She hadn’t the faintest idea why this was an advantage.

  He approved of her enthusiasm. His complexion faded to a degree paler than choleric. “And it can distill water. Four gallons at time!”

  “Better still!” she encouraged.

  He stared at her a moment longer, his frown fading.

  He reached into a barrel, pulled something out that made a hideously damp squishing noise, gave a mighty whack to hew it into smaller pieces. Meat for stew.

  She winced as it spattered.

  “Is your name truly Hercules?” she asked tentatively.

  “Nay, they call me Hercules because they are witty and I am small,” he said matter-of-factly. “Small and terrifying.” He grinned at her. He had all of his teeth save one in the top row, unusual for sailors, it would seem. “My wife in Cyprus, she has no complaints,” he said with an utter absence of humility. “Why are you called Violet? You are not small like the flower.”

  Clearly Hercules had no vested interest in charming her.

  “Because I smell wonderful.”

  His cleaver hovered mid-whack. And he stared at her. Then he laughed boomingly. “Peel then, my blossom!” He gestured at the bins of potatoes and onion with a meat-dampened hand. “Peel!”

  Hercules had whacked a few more sections out of the beef before he realized she hadn’t yet moved.

  The cleaver hovered again, mid-chop.

  “Do you…know how to peel a potato?” Oh so hesitantly he said it. Weakly. As though he dreaded the answer, would simply be unable to bear it.

  “No,” she admitted.

  He unleashed a muttered string of Greek prayers for strength or epithets or slurs against her parentage, and then sighed dramatically.

  “It is like this.”

  He scooped a potato out of a bin, slapped it into one of her hands, inserted a small sharp knife into her other hand, then positioned himself for all the world behind her like a stallion preparing to mount a mare, and unselfconsciously covered her hands with his own.

  And this is what the earl saw when he appeared in the galley seconds later.

  Violet and Hercules froze. His Greek groin remained pressed against her rump and
his hot fingers remained over hers.

  The three stared at each other for a shocked moment.

  “It’s nothing animalistic,” Violet hastened to reassure the earl, her voice faint.

  “You sent me a maiden who cannot peel a potato,” came a voice from behind her.

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Hercules certainly knew how to nurse a grievance.

  “And so you…decided to attack her from behind out of pique, but you armed her first so the fight would be fair?” the earl guessed.

  She’d known him but a few days but she recognized that cold, steady voice and straight spine as displeasure.

  So did Hercules.

  “I show her how to peel,” he said defensively. “My hands on hers. Like so.”

  Not just your hands, Violet would have said, and knew this was what the earl was thinking.

  “It’s a very viable method,” Violet defended. Realizing Hercules was still pressed up against her rump. Between the earl and Hercules, she’d decided to side with Hercules, as he possessed the knife currently and the earl, after all, was responsible for sending her to Hercules in the first place. To work. Bloody man.

  “Viable?” He made the word sound like scorpion.

  The earl held out his hand. “Give me the potato. And the knife.”

  “You should not trouble yourself, Captain.” Hercules handed over the knife, looking troubled himself; Violet relinquished the potato.

  He hefted the knife and potato in his hands.

  “I certainly shouldn’t,” he agreed in an indecipherable tone.

  The cook and Violet eyed him warily.

  “Now…how were we going about showing her again? I’m to stand like…so?”

  Hercules stepped aside, and the earl took his place behind her.

  He hovered a silent moment.

  A peculiar silence followed.

  “She says she smells wonderful,” Hercules volunteered. “But I did not sniff her.” He said it as if encouraging the earl to do so.

  She wished she could see the earl’s face. Because she could feel him breathing. She could feel the in-out sway of his chest against her back, lulling as the sea. And she wanted to close her eyes.

  As if in a dream, she watched his arms slowly, irrevocably come around her from behind. His arms were stunningly hard, their strength was unnervingly apparent. She remembered how his fingers closed around her arm had seemed like a shackle only days earlier.

  But he was so careful. So gentle. It was ridiculous, and it was devastating. She felt fragile—she was decidedly not—and protected. Not the way her family protected her, by reigning her in, but the way sturdy buildings sheltered. His fingers were long, surprisingly elegant. The heat of his body made her want to sink into him the way water sinks into earth, and she fought the sensation as though she’d been unwillingly drugged.

  It was quiet for a bit longer than was comfortable for anyone.

  When he spoke, five soft words fluttered her hair.

  “Take the potato, Miss Redmond.”

  She could feel the words vibrating in his chest.

  “Oh.” She took it slowly out of his fingers. It was already warm from his hand.

  An absolutely motionless Hercules watched all of this with huge, fascinated eyes.

  “Now take the knife,” the earl suggested lightly. Very softly.

  A moment’s hesitation later, she slipped the short sharp knife from between his fingers.

  “Carefully, now.” The warning seemed less about the knife and more of a note to himself, as that’s when his bare hand slowly wrapped hers, enclosing it completely.

  She stared at it, as amazed as if she’d never seen a hand before. Rivers of heat shivered through her limbs, fanning from where he touched her. Enclosed by his arms, and then by his hands, it was now impossible not to imagine what it would be like to be enclosed, taken by his entire body.

  She understood at last what was happening between them:

  More chess.

  In place of queens and knights the two of them had, from the first moment, deployed jasmine blossoms and potatoes and preening in low-necked gowns in midnight-shrouded terrace gardens.

  How did one win at this?

  “Push the knife away from you, like so.” More breath than words when he said them. His words so close to her ear sent gooseflesh over her as though he’d issued another instruction entirely.

  Slowly he guided her hand with his, and together they stripped off a precise, curling, tissue-thin strip of peel.

  Violet felt as if she were being shown the slow, inexorable precision with which he would strip her naked at the earliest opportunity.

  I can take you whenever I please.

  But then why hadn’t he kissed her in the garden?

  Everyone, absurdly, admired that peel for a long, silent time. Hercules stood on his toes to see it.

  Flint cleared his throat. He straightened abruptly. He stepped out from behind her blinking, as though waking after sleepwalking, surprised to find himself among potatoes.

  When he looked at her, it was oddly, faintly accusatory. Warily assessing.

  “Everyone should feel necessary, Miss Redmond,” he said finally. Softly. He nodded abruptly, and then turned left the galley.

  Hercules turned and stared at Violet. He pressed his lips together speculatively; his formidable brow beetled. Then he shrugged.

  “Now you do and I watch,” he ordered.

  Her hands shook—the earl’s presence was wearing off only like laudanum—but she managed to pare a strip away all on her own under Hercules’s beetling, watchful eye.

  He sighed and turned away. “Try to do the whole thing. If you cut yourself, do not bleed in the food.”

  He set to work hacking at things again and measuring out grain to grind while Violet laboriously peeled one potato, then announced that she was finished. Hercules insisted upon inspecting it. He was gravely disappointed.

  “See, you take more potato than peel! Look at this sad narrow little thing!” He held up a sad narrow potato. “Do not be afraid of the knife!”

  “I shouldn’t encourage me to be unafraid of the knife if I were you,” she said darkly. She was unaccustomed to being critiqued, let alone for potatoes.

  He merely raised those furry brows. “Try again.”

  He returned to his work and began singing. God help her, it was a tune she recognized, perhaps the most ubiquitous song in the world. The song about Colin Eversea escaping from the gallows.

  Oh, if you thought you’d never see the last of Colin Eversea…

  In the end, Violet was a Redmond, and like her brother Miles, had a respect for precision and detail that rarely found its way into anything other than her embroidery or her grooming, and God help her, she did want to be the best at everything. Her second potato was cleanly, ruthlessly skinned.

  Hercules turned it over and over in his hands critically, as though searching for a way in.

  “It is a beautiful thing,” he pronounced happily. “You must go faster now. We need to feed a score of men with stew.”

  Gradually the shock at being impressed to peel potatoes gave way to a peculiar, reluctant satisfaction in the rhythm of the endeavor. Naked potatoes piled up, Hercules whacked them into cookable, edible portions, and she felt so ridiculously pleased with her contribution to the proceedings that she was emboldened to hold a conversation.

  Naturally she had a specific topic in mind. “How did you come to work for the earl?”

  “Oh, he take me from prison.” Whack!

  “Prison! What did you do?” Please don’t say you killed someone with a meat cleaver.

  “We both were in prison. In Turkey. And then we”—he waved his cleaver about, illustrating a sort of fight, presumably involving swords or knives or cleavers—“escaped. I had a bad leg, aye?”

  Good God. The earl’s life story clearly rivaled that of Ulysses.

  She could hardly get the words out when she asked them. “Very well. A bad leg. B
ut what were the both of you doing in prison?”

  “We serve on a ship captured by pirates. They took all the cargo, aye, and threw the men into prison. They hope for a ransom, but we are both poor bastards, Flint and I, and so the rest of the crew they leave; we rot there. Me, I cannot walk so well. Shot in the leg. Captain? He wounded, but he not so bad. He could escape any time. The guards, they are stupid, they are lazy, they are violent. Pah! No match for Flint. But he would not leave me. For a year, almost?”

  “Behind bars? You were in prison for a year? And he wouldn’t leave you.”

  She couldn’t picture that larger-than-life man who freely roamed the seas trapped in a cell made of stone.

  “Very few bars. Mostly walls. A window this size.” He paused to shape something like a two-foot square with his arms, cheerily. “But they allow us to walk in the courtyard. We see the sun once a day. We made our own weapons, aye, from bits of stone that fall from the wall? Each night we sharpen them.” He gestured again with the cleaver to illustrate. “Against the wall. Until they are good for killing. And then we finally go over the wall one night. Attack with hands and feet and our weapons. Kill only two guards.”

  She felt woozy again. “Only two?” she repeated ironically. Men.

  And this was the man who was in pursuit of her brother. Where other men saw walls he clearly saw opportunity.

  Hercules missed the irony. “Captain Flint, he knew I could fight and he knew I could cook and he knew I would follow him anywhere. And so I am here.”

  He cannot help the saving of things. Because no one had ever saved him? Then again, she’d leaped to his defense.

  She’d do it again.

  But what if Lyon was the one attacking him?

  Oh God. She squeezed her eyes closed momentarily, appalled by the vise of her circumstances. How had it come to this?

  “What did you do in prison?” She wondered if it was anything like being imprisoned in Sussex.

  “Oh, he read books. And read them and read them. The prisoners, they come and go, aye? Some are gentleman captured, then ransomed and freed. They leave books behind. Flint, he read them to me. He gulps them down like meals, the words. Becomes a learned man. I learn English. He learn many languages, our captain. In many countries. Mostly very naughty words.” He winked exaggeratedly. “They are the most useful to sailors.”