by Carla Kelly
“Aye, sir,” she managed to say.
He made a shooing motion. “Take her upstairs, Tommy! Give me your address in Haven, Mrs. Poole, and I’ll send one of my carters ’round tomorrow to pick up your effects.” He bowed, a funny little bow from a man who would never be mistaken for a gentleman, but who had just changed her life. “I’m going home to my dinner now. Just leave your direction on the desk. That’ll be your desk, by the way.”
He turned around. “I have a big black bruiser of a hound that patrols the compound at night. Between you and me, he is a soft old brute, and your daughter will love him, but he looks like Beelzebub himself. You’ll be safe here, and I’m right next door.”
She followed Thomas up the flight of stairs, and walked, open-mouthed, through four spacious rooms, already furnished, right down to dishes in the cupboard.
“I suspect that his son lived here until his final illness,” Thomas said. “Rugs on the floor, too. What do you think, Mrs. Poole?”
Hang professionalism. Hang serenity. Mary Ann burst into tears and threw herself into his open arms. She sobbed until he picked her up, walked through the connecting rooms as she wailed, and sat down with her on the sofa. She cried until her tears had soaked through his waistcoat to his shirt underneath, but he didn’t complain.
He found a handkerchief when her nose started to run, and made her blow it. He folded it over and gave it to her. “Happy Christmas,” was all he said, but it set her off again, which made him laugh and hold her closer.
After she had subsided to an occasional sob when she breathed, she sat up and tried to dab at his shirt.
“When was the last time you cried, Mrs. Poole?” he asked gently, taking her hands away.
“When I watched them bury Bart,” she said.
“Don’t wait so long next time,” was all he said, before he held her close again and sat with her in silence.
CHAPTER TEN
U
Two days later at seven in the morning she started work as victualling clerk for Robert Beazer and Son. Their few clothes and possessions were arranged in the upstairs rooms, and a monstrous geriatric hound possessing few teeth but a fearsome bark already followed Beth everywhere.
When he stopped by to check on them a day later, Thomas told her to keep Beth by her side for a few days, maybe a week. “I’m going to London today, first to the Navy Board, to beg and plead and grovel for a ship’s berth. After that—and I intend to be successful—I’m going to Trinity House, where I will not leave until the Elder Brothers agree to install Beth at St. Clements.”
“You amaze me,” she said. “You did all this because you were bored?”
“Aye, Mary Ann, and a monumental boredom it was,” he assured her, sounding more Welsh than usual, which amused her. “Suzie is not at all happy with me running away to the sea again. I have bullied her into keeping my house open, because I’ll be in port now and again. By the way, she wants you to come to dinner tonight. She’ll probably tell you awful tales about me, but she’ll get over it.”
He was about to leave, then turned back, reaching for something in his waistcoat pocket. She sucked in her breath when he pulled out her mother’s gold chain. “How did you know?” she asked, taking it from him.
“Suzie and I were afraid you were going to spend your money on watercolors and walk back to Haven in the dark,” he explained. “I followed you and saw you in the stationery store. Hand it to me.”
She did as he said, wordless as he looped it over her head and opened the clasp. She closed her eyes, memorizing the feel of his breath on her neck, hoping she would remember it forever.
“I’ll pay you back over time,” she said. “It belonged to my mother.”
“It’s a Christmas gift,” he told her. “You can’t pay me for it.”
She turned around to face him. “Is there any point in arguing with you?”
“None that I know of,” he said cheerfully.
She walked him to the door of the warehouse and gave him a kiss on one cheek, and then the other. “From Beth and me,” she said simply.
He stared long and hard at her, as though he wished to say something, but he gave a gusty sigh instead. He walked away without looking back, which made her heart crack around the edges just a little.
She had no more time to think about him, because Mr. Beazer kept her busy, showing her how to do double entry bookkeeping, and explaining the details of running such a massive operation. To her relief, Beth watched intently on her other side, so she knew she had an ally, should she forget something important.
She followed Mr. Beazer through the warehouse, tablet in hand, as he pointed out where everything from salt to salt pork was stashed. To her relief, he cast a murderous glare on his warehouse employees and carters, threatening them with transportation to Australia if they so much as looked cross-eyed at the Poole ladies.
Luncheon with Meggie Beazer was pure delight. The food was good, and the woman kept up a constant chatter while Mr. Beazer sat back, puffed on his pipe and watched his wife with no small affection.
Hand in hand, Mary Ann walked with Beth to 34 Notte Street after work and discovered with a pang that the house seemed devoid of furniture, rugs, pictures, and knickknacks because Thomas Jenkins wasn’t there.
I don’t like this, she thought, distressed at the loneliness that filled her entire body and brain. She had been too busy to think about anything but work, but Thomas was gone.
Suzie didn’t look too pleased, either, and she said so. “Little brothers are a trial,” she told Beth. “Be grateful you don’t have one.”
There must be something she could salvage from what had turned into a dismal evening. “We need to be happy that he knows what he wants and is headed to sea again,” Mary Ann said, feeling like the last cricket of summer chirping alone on the hearth.
Suzie stood up and paced back and forth. “That’s the trouble, my dear. He has no idea what he wants!” She plumped herself down again. “Do you?”
“Me?” Mary Ann stared at her and felt heat rush up her body to bloom on her face. “Do I know what he wants, or … or …” She couldn’t even say it. Do I know what I want?
By the time they had walked back to the warehouse, she had a headache that threatened to crack her skull open, and the undeniable, uneasy conviction that she loved Thomas Jenkins to complete and utter distraction.
She couldn’t even compose her mind to tell Beth one of her patented prince and princess bedtime tales. They said their prayers, then lay side by side, both of them staring at the ceiling.
“I miss him,” Beth said finally in a small voice. “Do you?”
Mary Ann nodded, knowing that if she said a word, she would cry again, which would be no fun at all, because Thomas wasn’t there to sit her on his lap.
When Beth slept, Mary Ann walked through her lovely flat—employed, well-fed, and discontented beyond all limits. Had she been this miserable when she knew she loved Bart Poole? Surely not. What was different this time?
She was different—Mary Ann Poole, a grown woman, with a grown woman’s needs and desires and not a green girl. She had found the most wonderful man in the world for her twice now, and she wanted to thrash this one into February for thinking he needed the stupid old ocean.
I am an idiot, she thought, then said it out loud, to remind herself that he had done her an enormous favor because he was bored. That was it. He was affectionate to her because that was part of his gregarious nature. He was there when she needed him, and he had solved all of her problems and left a bigger one behind.
She loved him.
T
When Thomas Jenkins, sailing master retired no longer, came out of the Navy Board office after two days of intense discussion, he wondered why he was not so pleased. He looked around, finding no pleasure in London, which surprised him, because he enjoyed the bustle of the metropolis occasionally.
The HMS Revenge was a new-built frigate 44, slid off the ways and waiting for sails and she
ets in the Portsmouth ship yard. He was to report there in two weeks, orders in hand, and do what he did better than almost any master in the entire Royal Navy.
He should have been leaping like a gibbon from street lamp to street lamp, overjoyed to be reinstated and preparing to sail again. The rigging would take a month, as the ship was victualed and prepared for sea. The shakedown cruise was to the United States and back, carrying a diplomatist to half-burned Washington, DC.
If the Revenge proved shipshape, he would consult with Captain Frears, an old friend, and they would set a course for Rio de Janeiro. He’d be gazing up at the Southern Cross again, one of his favorite constellations. The plan was to venture around the Horn and follow the Pacific coastline of the United States, trying to see just how far the reach of that upstart bunch of quarrelsome colonies had advanced. Frears said to plan on a year’s voyage, which would be heaven, indeed, since no one would be throwing cannonballs their way or plotting other evils.
He knew he should feel better, but all he could think of was the way Mary Ann Poole, tears and all, had fit so nicely on his lap. And when she leaned against him and soaked his shirt—mercy, but she felt so soft and bendable in all the right places.
He was way too old to be dreaming about Mary Ann like this, wasn’t he? And who could sleep thinking about her employment, and was she safe in an empty warehouse at night, and would she maybe write him if he asked her?
The next day he talked to his shaving mirror, his old friend, and reminded the man in the mirror with bags under his eyes that Trinity House was going to bend to his will and let Beth Poole attend St. Clement’s School in Plymouth. He had a draft for two hundred pounds from Carter and Brustein Counting House in Plymouth to sweeten the deal and make them somehow overlook that Second Lieutenant Bart Poole, as dead as a man could be in service to his nation, was army.
He did have some satisfying moments at Trinity House, pleased to learn of the expansion of a school for navigators working primarily in the unpredictable waters of the North Atlantic. He had some ideas to contribute that brought pleasant smiles to the faces of men he admired, those Elder Brothers of Trinity House who did their monumental work so quietly and so well, even if most Englishmen were none the wiser about all their unsung achievements.
Maybe he knew just enough of the Elders to grease a wheel or two. After only one day of arguing on Beth Poole’s behalf, he was handed a letter allowing her admission to St. Clement’s, where he knew she would be taught well, if the mathematics teacher could keep up.
After that day’s effort, and even less sleep that night because Mary Ann Poole simply refused to stay out of his dreams, he had achieved precisely what he set out to do in London.
Without question, he was the most miserable happy man of recent acquaintance.
Thomas dragged himself back to his hotel in the pelting rain, ready to growl and snap if anyone on the crowded street bumped into him. He had his orders to report to the Revenge in a fortnight and a letter of admission to give to Mary Ann for Beth. True, he was two hundred pounds poorer, but that hardly mattered. Beth was worth that and more. He should have been floating on little fairy wings.
He kicked off his shoes and flopped on his bed, discouraged beyond everything he had ever experienced. This was even worse than peace breaking out. Maybe he was so tired tonight that he wouldn’t think of Mary Ann Poole, and her pretty blond hair and dark eyes, and hint of a dimple in her right cheek, and soft skin and little waist, and her courage and virtue and resourcefulness and love of her daughter, her gallantry and kindness to her old landlord and her love of cake and her way of making him laugh.
I could never be so tired that I would not think of Mary Ann, he told himself, and realized his problem, because underneath it all, he was a fairly intelligent man. Mrs. Poole had cured his boredom and then made herself indispensable.
He loved her.
Lying on his back, he reached for his orders to the Revenge. He read through the formal, familiar words of “requested and required to join the HMS Revenge.” He thought of the ships he had sailed straight and true, the battles he had fought, and the exorbitantly high cost of war. He realized with perfect clarity now that he had not been able to move beyond that cost until he saw Mary Ann Poole in his sitting room with an opened package in her hands.
They are not going to be happy when I show up tomorrow morning at the Navy Board, he thought. After one more long look, he put the orders back in the envelope, never to open them or any like them again. He was about to burn his last bridge with the Royal Navy. He waited for the knowledge to cause him pain, but it didn’t.
After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and black pudding, Thomas Jenkins walked to the Admiralty, reneged on those orders, and received a massive reaming out from the Navy Board. The officer in charge tore his orders into little bits of confetti and tossed them out the window, which seemed a bit dramatic to Thomas.
In the privacy of his office, Thomas told his only friend remaining on the Board what had precipitated this decision. The man laughed until he had to loosen his neckcloth. When he calmed down, he told Thomas precisely who to speak to at Chancery Court and wished him well. “Bring her around here when you’re next in London,” his friend said as he slapped his back and gave him a shove toward the door. “If she is as pretty as you say, the other board members won’t lob too many marlinspikes and shells in your direction.”
The next matter was accomplished before lunch and left him lighter in the pocket book, but he couldn’t help smiling, even though it was raining again. Some Londoners walking by him on the street seemed not to have recovered fully from Twelfth Night. What a sour bunch, he thought, then had the honesty to remind himself that he had looked even worse yesterday, before his epiphany.
He planned only to stay a few minutes at Trinity House to pick up the voucher for Beth, but he was collared by a delegation of Elder Brothers who sat him down and made his life complete.
He had to stare a minute and shake his head to make sure he understood what they were proposing. “You want me to serve as headmaster for the navigational school?” he asked.
They were patient; they were kind. Yes, that was precisely what they wanted, and named a salary that made him start to sweat. They sweetened it further with a furnished house and servants right here in London. To his query about good schools for a young girl, they just chuckled and assured him he need not fear on that stead.
“Of course, you will take your students out on occasional cruises to the Baltic to test their skills, but that is nothing,” the principal Elder Brother said. “Yeah or nay, Master Jenkins?”
T
He slept the sleep of the reasonably virtuous on the post chaise from London to Plymouth, despite the roll and dip, or maybe because of it. He understood motion better than most men. Mary Ann cavorted through his dreams and bothered him not a whit.
He arrived a day later and had the post riders drop him off at Beazer and Son. Rob Beazer stood at the lading dock, and hurried over to tell him what a jewel Mrs. Poole was. Thomas listened, nodded, and wondered just how long the old fellow would hate him when he spirited Mary Ann away to London. The telling could wait until he knew how the wind blew.
Fully clothed and not in the shift of his dreams, Mary Ann sat at the tall desk. He smiled to see that she had dropped one shoe and the other one was about to come off. She was writing in a ledger and dabbing at her eyes with her apron. He wondered if she had a cold.
“Mary Ann.”
She looked up, her eyes huge in her face. She got off the tall stool and didn’t bother with her shoes.
“Did … did you get a ship?” she asked, her voice barely audible, even though he stood close to her now.
He nodded and she began to sob. He touched her shoulder and she shook him off. “I’m so happy for you,” she wailed.
“I turned it down.”
She blew her nose on her apron, the only thing handy, and stared at him.
“I couldn’t go to sea and
leave you behind. I’m forty-three,” he added, and felt like a fool. “I absolutely love you.”
“I’m thirty-two and I don’t care how old you are, Thomas Jenkins. I love you, too.”
That tall desk was no place to propose, so he took her hand and towed her to a wooden crate with dried herring stenciled on it in large letters. He sat her on it, and himself beside her. He took three documents from his coat pocket, and handed them to her one at a time.
The first was the voucher for Beth to enroll at St. Clement’s School. She nodded her head. “She will make us proud.”
Us? he thought and felt delight cover him like warm tropical rain, the kind found at about twenty-three degrees and twenty-six minutes in the Tropic of Cancer.
Next he handed her the letter of appointment from Trinity House. She read it, then read it again, her breath coming in little gasps until he told her to breathe deeply.
“I’ll be at sea occasionally on training cruises,” he explained. He pointed to one of the closing paragraphs. “They already took me by our house. You’ll like it.”
“I will if you’re in it,” she told him, which made years of war and disappointment and terror and exhaustion fall right off him like discarded clothing.
He handed her the last document, which made her smile and nod. “We probably can wait for three weeks and cry banns,” she said, practical to the end. “I’ve heard that special licenses are expensive.”
“Twenty guineas plus a four-pound stamp,” he told her. “I am now an expert.”
She gasped.
“I am not waiting three weeks. I told you I was forty-three!”
That must have satisfied her because she kissed him. She wasn’t any better at it than he was, but they had a lifetime to achieve perfection. What she did excel in was the way she slid her hand inside his waistcoat.
“Will you marry me tomorrow morning, Mary Ann?” he asked. “In romantic January snuggle weather?”
“Will Beth be disappointed about St. Clement’s?” he asked when she finished kissing him, getting better already.
