“Does it matter?” Ben asked, addressing the question to Dacre, to himself, to God, to any other benevolent presence who might see fit to provide guidance. “Does it matter what it’s called?” He genuinely didn’t know, had indeed deliberately avoided thinking about what it might mean to find love and companionship and desire all in the same person, because to form that thought would mean to acknowledge a future he would never have.
“Goddamn it, yes!” Dacre nearly roared, and then fell silent. “Christ, Sedgwick,” he said in a different, lighter tone. “I’ve never talked about that and never will again. Do me the favor of not mentioning this.”
“Naturally,” Ben said, ashamed to have been the recipient of regretted confidences.
By noon the following day, Phillip hadn’t caught a glimpse of his children. They might spend the next two months hiding from him, and he would have wasted his entire leave. As little as he liked it, he was going to have to try a different strategy. And for that, he needed Sedgwick’s help.
“Mr. Sedgwick will be in the barnyard, sir,” a footman said when Phillip asked where the vicar might be. “Playing with the ducklings, like as not.” An indulgent smile flickered across the servant’s face.
Phillip blinked. He was about to enlist the help of a madman, it seemed. Well, if that was his only option, then so be it. He put on his sturdiest boots and walked to the part of the home farm that he recalled being used to raise poultry. Indeed, there was Sedgwick, kneeling on a patch of muddy earth and coaxing a pair of ducklings up his arm with a trail of seeds that led all the way to his shoulder.
“You’ll spoil them,” Phillip said nonsensically.
Sedgwick looked up, and he smiled as if he were happy to see Phillip, and it was the first time anyone had even pretended to be glad to lay eyes on him since he had returned. That smile was so honest and warm it was somehow shocking. Phillip nearly caught himself smiling back, the corners of his mouth twitching up involuntarily. He couldn’t remember the last time he had smiled.
“I had no idea your philosophy of discipline extended to barnyard fowl,” the vicar said. “Or that you knew anything about newly hatched ducklings.”
“We had chickens on the ship,” Phillip protested, before realizing how asinine it was to argue on those grounds, or any grounds, about so trifling a subject.
“I didn’t realize I was dealing with an expert. Hop to it, ladies, you’re being watched by a master. You’ll make me look very stupid if you dawdle like that. Come on, Louisa, step lively, there is no way you don’t want that tasty seed that’s waiting for you on my elbow.” He went on in this manner until both the ducklings were on his shoulder.
Phillip had to bite his lower lip to keep from laughing. It was absurd. Sedgwick raised his eyes and must have seen how close Phillip was to bursting out in laughter, because he grinned. Unless Phillip was mistaken, there was a touch of triumph in the vicar’s smile, as if he had been desperate to wrench that reaction out of Phillip. Phillip couldn’t remember the last time somebody had tried to amuse him. Impress, yes. Please, certainly. But amuse? Out of the question. Amusement was the sort of thing men wiped off their faces at Phillip’s approach, not something they tried to cultivate in him.
Then one of the ducklings realized its path of seeds had come to a dead end, and got the inspired idea to see if additional treats awaited her at higher ground. With a squawk and an ungainly flap of the wings, she landed on the vicar’s bare head.
“No, that’s not at all the thing, miss. You’ll make a spectacle of me, I’m afraid.”
Phillip could hardly stand it. He wanted to swat the birds away so he and the vicar could have some semblance of a normal conversation. He couldn’t be serious and stern with a man who had ducklings in his hair, or who talked to baby birds like they were guests at a tea party, or who seemed to dearly want Phillip to smile.
But at the same time he wanted to take a step forward and pet the birds, and maybe run his fingers through Sedgwick’s hair, too, and see if it was as soft as the feathers. It was ridiculous.
He kept his feet planted firmly on the ground and resolved not to take a single step closer. “I came to ask for your help.”
The vicar bit his lip. “You’re fascinated by my skill with barnyard fowl and wish me to teach you my mysterious ways?”
Phillip strove for some sort of customary chilliness, just enough to see him through this nonsense. “Be serious for half a moment. I implore you.”
“All right.” The vicar scooped up the ducks and placed them gently on the ground. “Have at it.” He spread his arms wide, inviting Phillip to hurl accusations or insults at him. But his eyebrow was arched ever so slightly, as if he and Phillip were in on the same joke, as if that were even a possibility.
With the force of a slap in the face, Phillip realized it would be terribly easy to develop a tendre for Sedgwick. He was all easy charm and raw good looks; after last night’s conversation he had to know exactly where Phillip’s interests lay, but he didn’t seem repulsed or scandalized. Indeed, Phillip recalled something Sedgwick had stammered about his own experiences at school.
As Phillip continued to stare wordlessly, Sedgwick’s smile dropped and he looked down at his feet, as if he knew exactly what Phillip was thinking. Phillip prepared himself for the inevitable distancing, the slight flicker of disgust. But then he lifted his eyes to Phillip and—oh hell, was he blushing? That just wasn’t fair.
Phillip’s prick had been all but asleep for fourteen months, and it chose this moment to remind Phillip of its continued existence, the stupid thing.
Well, it needed to settle down. Phillip was done with trying to get people into bed. He had learned his lesson after McCarthy died; all those nights of closeness had left him with feelings he could hardly name, had hardly even acknowledged to himself until after McCarthy was dead and at the bottom of a stormy sea. Their coupling had been convenient and discreet, which was all he usually sought in such arrangements. Hell, it was all he had ever hoped for. But then McCarthy was gone and Phillip, whose mind drifted so easily to sorrow and darkness, found himself not only regretting the loss of his lover but also regretting everything he hadn’t said, everything he could never offer a lover anyway.
Phillip was done with convenient tumblings or any tumblings whatsoever. He wasn’t equal to the emotions that came along with simple, honest fucking. Like bloody stowaways, and just as much of a hassle to deal with.
“I require your help with the children,” he said frostily. “If you can get them to supper, we can come to an agreement afterward.” He turned on his heel and walked swiftly back to the house, trying not to think of the look of disappointment on the vicar’s face and what that might mean.
“Disgraceful,” Mrs. Winston said, picking a feather out of Ben’s hair. “A man of the cloth, wandering around out of doors bareheaded and acting like a simpleton. Ducklings, indeed. I brought you a tart.” She added this last sentence as if it might present a solution to the problem.
“Thank you,” Ben said, taking the dish from his housekeeper’s hands and balancing it on a fence post, “but didn’t I tell you that you might as well have a holiday while I was up here at the hall?” Her daughter was married to a brewer in Keswick, and Ben quite clearly remembered suggesting that Mrs. Winston pay a visit while her services weren’t required at the vicarage.
Mrs. Winston snorted. “As if I’d leave you and Franny Morris to see to the captain. She may know how to dress a joint, or she may not, but she doesn’t know how things ought to be in a gentleman’s house. And as for you . . .” She looked at Ben and shook her head in plain sorrow.
“Mrs. Morris is a very good cook.” Mrs. Winston shot him an aggrieved glance. “Not as good as you,” Ben hastily added.
“In any event, the hedgerow behind the church has more gooseberries than I know what to do with, so might as well put them to good use. Make sure that tart finds its way onto the captain’s supper table. And I brought another one for your father.
” She balanced this dish on top of the other and wiped her hands on her apron.
“For my father?” Ben repeated stupidly. “Why?”
“Doesn’t he eat pie?” she asked, a hand on her hip.
“Well, yes, but—”
“Then take it to him. Your knees are twenty years younger than mine, so you can stand the walk better than I can.” Then, in a less annoyed tone, “Always did have a sweet tooth, your father.”
Ben wanted to know how Mrs. Winston knew anything of Alton Sedgwick, who surely didn’t number village housekeepers among his acquaintances. He preferred lunatic aristocrats and opium-addicted paupers but not much in the way of a happy medium. But before he could think of how to delicately frame the question, she produced a jar from her apron.
“Jam for the Farleighs. I suppose you’ll be going up there too?”
“Naturally. Do you have any other errands you require of me before I attend to my duties?” he asked, feigning more irritation than he felt.
“Hmmph,” she said, and stomped back towards the village.
Ben attempted to gather the two pie tins and the jar of jam into his arms and safely convey them into the house.
“I’ll help,” said a small voice. It was Jamie, and he seemed almost entirely composed of dirt.
“Do sweets summon you out of thin air, I wonder? Yes, take this dish, but you’ll have to wait until supper to have any. Which, you’ll notice, means you need to attend supper.”
“Doesn’t really,” Jamie said. “I can steal some later on.” He was honest, if nothing else.
“As a personal favor, please come to supper. If your father attempts to do anything drastic, I’ll help as best I can, but we need to show him that we’re all going on swimmingly and don’t need to be ordered about.”
Ben thought of Captain Dacre’s demeanor in the barnyard that morning, a reluctant good humor so plainly at war with the urge to be cold and imperious. Dacre hadn’t known what to do with himself, and Ben had seen it, and felt the power of it.
He had also felt Dacre’s gaze on him, heavy with an intent that Ben might even have understood without the context of last night’s confessions. He had felt the power of that too. He had felt the heat of that gaze on every inch of his skin, and he had been tempted to see what might have happened if he had stepped forward. But he hadn’t, and he wouldn’t, not with Dacre, not with anyone. He wasn’t ashamed of the dark desires that plagued him when he couldn’t sleep; Ben had never seen the point of shame and hair shirts. Maybe it was his unconventional upbringing, or maybe he had been lucky to meet men at university whose ideas of sin and salvation would have been thought blasphemous a generation earlier, but his susceptibility to men had always seemed a minor irritation, like a tendency to faint at the sight of blood, rather than anything concerning his soul. Nothing to worry overmuch about, especially if one avoided the situation in the first place. There wasn’t going to be any avoiding Captain Dacre, though. They’d be thrown together for the remainder of his leave.
Ben could not afford a deviation from the path he had chosen; his future and his peace of mind required a home, a family, a sense of permanence and certainty that he craved with a bone-deep longing. There was no place for heated gazes or tempting thoughts in his future, and he was determined to be absolutely content with that.
Chapter Six
Dinner went as well as could be expected, which was to say it was just this side of a nightmare.
With a bit of judicious bribery, Ben had gotten the children to the table. But once there, they had all three steadfastly refused to speak English. This was a strategy they had used with some success in tormenting former tutors. During the first few days of Ben’s residence at the hall, the children spoke French with one another until it was clear that Ben wasn’t going to force them to speak English. He understood enough French to feel confident that they weren’t summoning devils or plotting treason, so he thought that if they wanted to practice the language together, it basically counted as a French lesson, and he couldn’t complain. Of course he wasn’t fool enough to let them know that he spoke any French. That would have utterly ruined their fun and likely inspired them to greater feats of mischief in their campaign to alienate him.
Their father was evidently not of the same mind.
Peggy was cheerfully and revoltingly describing the events that transpired after she and Jamie gorged themselves on green apples, when Captain Dacre interrupted. “Speak English, Margaret,” he said, making no effort to conceal his frustration. “And do confine your conversation to more genteel topics.”
Ben suppressed a groan as the children exchanged wary looks. Really, Captain Dacre was dedicated to setting his children against him. Ben dug around in his coat pocket for a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper, and covertly scribbled a note to the captain under the table: For heaven’s sake, pretend not to speak French. He folded it into a compact square and slid his hand along the table until his hand touched the captain’s, tucking the note under the other man’s palm.
He thought he did a fairly good job of ignoring the thrill that ran up his arm at the contact. Ben had no business feeling an attraction to this man.
He tried to push those thoughts to the side as he always did, something to acknowledge only when he could no longer avoid it. That, he was fairly sure, was what a man was supposed to do with any lustful inclinations, regardless of their object: ignore them in the way a sloppy housekeeper might ignore ashes in the grate, pretending they weren’t there until their presence made it impossible to get anything else done. And then he indulged in a fit of barely satisfying pleasure before returning to his safe, predictable, orderly life.
At the slight touch of their hands, the captain went very still. Which was to say, even more stonily rigid than he had been before. But then, noticing the tightly folded square of paper beneath his hand, he did the stupidest thing imaginable. He tucked it into his breast pocket without even bothering to unfold it, let alone read it. Dolt. Ben gritted his teeth. It was a miracle England had defeated Napoleon if men with so little sense of strategy were in charge of the navy. That idiocy quelled Ben’s improper thoughts, however.
“You look cross, Mr. Sedgwick,” Jamie said.
“I am cross,” Ben replied levelly. “I thought you might show some manners to your father. And we all know he cannot speak French any more than I can,” he added pointedly, “so perhaps we could speak English together. Just as a novelty this one evening.” He carved himself a piece of mutton. “Although I must say, it was very kind of you to present your father with a pet.”
“A pet?” Peggy asked incredulously. Her hair, Ben noticed, was in plaits that had been quite neat a few days ago but were now positively disreputable. He had caught Captain Dacre staring at the twins in open dismay at their dishevelment. “We did no such—ow!” She glared at Jamie, who had evidently kicked her under the table.
“The dormouse, of course,” Ben said mildly. “It was very clever of you to realize that your father was likely quite lonely after you absconded into the wild, leaving him alone and with nobody to talk to after two years at sea.” The children all looked down at their plates. Out of the corner of his eye, Ben could see the captain’s gaze steadily on him. He tried to ignore it but Captain Dacre wasn’t the sort of man you could simply stop paying attention to.
The children sat sullenly. Ned poked at his mutton with the edge of his knife while Peggy loaded her spoon with mashed peas, positioned it like a catapult, and aimed it at her twin. Jamie saw this happen and looked ready to duck.
“There’s a gooseberry custard tart on the sideboard, but something went terribly wrong when Mrs. Morris sliced it,” Ben said to no one in particular. “She cut it into eight slices.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jamie watch him intently. Jamie knew this as the preamble to one of his favorite games. “That’s fine by me,” Jamie said. “Peg won’t get any if she launches those peas at me, which leaves two slices each for the rest of u
s.”
“Quite right, but she isn’t going to launch peas or anything else.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Peggy rest her spoon on her plate.
“One and three-fifths of a slice for each of us,” Jamie said promptly.
“But what if I decide to allocate the pie according to weight? That seems only fair. I’d say I’m about twelve stone, and so is your father.” The mere estimation of what the captain might have beneath his clothes by way of sinew and muscle was enough to make Ben’s cheeks heat. “You and Peggy are maybe four stone apiece and Ned’s about seven.”
“That’s about a tenth of the pie each for me and Peg.”
“Ah, but I don’t have tenths, I have eighths.”
Jamie made an impatient sound. “Remove a quarter of an eighth and you’ll have a tenth.”
“Which is grossly unfair because I don’t even care for gooseberry tart and I don’t see why I ought to have twice as much—”
“Three times as much,” Jamie corrected.
“—as you and Peg. So let’s come up with a better model of distribution.”
They went on like this for the remainder of the meal. Sums kept Jamie’s mind busy, and a busy Jamie didn’t set fire to things or get suspected of poaching by evil-minded neighboring landlords. Peggy, if her brother was content, was less inclined to divert attention with her own antics, so there was peace in the kingdom. And, frankly, Jamie was very clever at maths and Ben wanted to encourage the child’s gift, especially since the boy was eight years old and could hardly read a word. Ben didn’t know why he couldn’t read, or if it was possible to teach him, only that it was a chip on the lad’s shoulder and Ben couldn’t blame him. So he did what he could to help Jamie use his mind in other ways.
If Ben had to guess, he’d think that the children had banded together to rid themselves of any adults who might make Jamie suffer for his illiteracy. Schoolmasters and tutors likely came down hard on him. Ned and Peggy had probably decided to protect their brother by driving off anyone who might discover he couldn’t read.
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