But that was not entirely fair. She had known warmth in the weeks since leaving Antigua. Which had only added to her problems. Heat still pooled in secret places and flared in her cheeks whenever she thought of Andrew’s touch.
It was to that forbidden warmth she owed her greatest anxiety. Every day that ticked by made it more difficult to ignore the very real possibility that she might be carrying Andrew’s child. By itself, the idea did not frighten her as much as it probably ought. If necessary, she would find a way to manage without a husband, even if it meant fabricating one who had died on the journey back to Antigua. Only a faux marriage would protect the inheritance that, as Edward warned, must come into her hands and no one else’s. Even Andrew was a risk: She could not tie herself to a man who would inevitably resent being tied down.
Then again, if there were a child, that tie would exist between them, whether they had solemnized it or not.
Oh, how foolish to parse the future in that way. The tie was already there, with or without a child. No matter if it should be so. And because of it, she who had lived her life to ensure the freedom of others would never be free again.
No, Edward decidedly would not approve of the way the captain had handled the cargo with which he had been entrusted.
Before she could resume reading, Hannah entered from the dressing room. Reluctantly, Tempest rose from the floor, folded the half-finished letter, and tucked it away in a little writing desk a few steps from the hearth. “I suppose it is time to dress for dinner?”
“Yes, miss,” replied the maid with a rather saucy bob. “Only I didn’t know which dress you’d like.”
“Which dress?” Tempest glanced down at the skirt of her traveling dress, speckled with mud and thick with dog hair. “I cannot wear this. That leaves only one other.”
“Didn’t Mrs. Beauchamp tell you, miss? Come and see.”
Tempest followed Hannah into the dressing room and saw a gown of dark red brocade picked out with gold thread that shimmered and sparked like wine in a crystal goblet. As her eyes darted from hem to bodice, she felt Hannah watching her, waiting for her reaction. The maid no doubt expected tears of joy, but Tempest felt on the verge of shedding tears of frustration.
“The blue, please.” Each word was as expressionless as she could make it, the terseness itself coloring her answer more than she had intended.
Hannah looked as if she would like to argue, but she managed to swallow her disappointment and helped her to wash and dress. Although Hannah had trimmed her cropped hair into something slightly more stylish, it required little attention, so Tempest was ready and waiting when Mrs. Beauchamp came to walk with her to dinner.
She expected Emily to offer some words of wisdom about dealing with her grandfather, or to ask after the contents of Edward’s letter. Instead she said, with a contrite, nervous smile, “Can you forgive me? About the dress, I mean.”
“You shouldn’t have,” Tempest began to scold. Had she had even an inkling of Emily’s plan, she would never have countenanced such an expense or indulged herself in such a fashion. When Emily’s face fell, however, Tempest’s heart sank with it. Today ought to have taught her a lesson about implacability. “But it is lovely,” she whispered and squeezed her friend’s hand.
Together, they made their way to the dining room and stopped to wait for the footman to open the door. Sir Barton’s voice could be heard within, although to whom he spoke was not immediately clear. Not a servant. Her grandfather did not seem the sort who entertained his neighbors. Who could be joining them, then? At first the thought of a stranger at dinner irritated her. But really, was her grandfather any less a stranger to her? Perhaps a fourth would help smooth the conversation.
With a firm grip on Emily’s arm and a smile stretched across her lips, she stepped across the threshold, her eyes seeking her grandfather. The room was large, stately, with bronze-colored draperies, sparkling chandeliers, and a table that might seat twenty. At last she spotted him on the far end of the table’s polished mahogany length, standing near the sideboard, handing a glass of bloodred wine to his guest. As she followed the movement of the goblet to its destination, her knees buckled.
“Why, Miss Holderin, is something the matter?” Emily gasped, plying her other arm around her waist to steady her.
Tempest straightened and shook her head, as if she could wish away what she saw. Surely, her eyes must be playing tricks on her. Fatigue. Or the false glow of too few candles.
Because it looked from here for all the world as if Lord Nathaniel Delamere had come back from the dead.
* * *
If all had gone according to schedule, they were in Yorkshire. At this very moment, Tempest might be in her grandfather’s welcoming embrace, rethinking her decision to fly away at the first opportunity. Perhaps, even now, the miracle his mother had promised was beginning to take shape . . .
Thud.
Farrow dropped another stack of ledgers on the center of the desk, turning an already tottering pile into an avalanche.
Andrew lifted one brow. “Mrs. Beauchamp read all these, did she, before talking with Milligan about the West India docks project?”
“Not all at once, sir,” Farrow explained with a sniff of disapproval that made Andrew wonder whether he and Williams were somehow related. “She had some years with which to familiarize herself with their contents.”
“Ah.”
Choosing a volume at random, Andrew thumbed through its pages. Each book was a chapter in an ongoing saga of profit and loss, and truth be told, the story interested him more than he had imagined it would. He’d already looked at the maps, walked to the suggested site one damp morning, read Milligan’s proposal to the board. The case for the new docks was clear and convincing, but like his mother, Andrew still felt some niggling doubt. If the plan failed, investors like Beauchamp Shipping stood to lose far more than they gained. With public support for the project, however, the risk could be dispersed among all those who stood to benefit from better access to the goods brought from corners of the globe to the pounding heart of Britain’s economy.
While he chewed over the likelihood of securing such support, he heard a commotion in the outer office. In another moment, the doorway was filled by the broad-shouldered frame of Frederick Clarkson, admiral in His Majesty’s Navy.
“Now, that’s a sight I never thought I’d see,” boomed Clarkson in his laughing baritone, stepping forward to take Andrew’s outstretched hand.
“A sight a great many men never thought they’d see,” Andrew conceded. “Myself included.”
Suddenly embarrassed by the disorder in front of him and wishing for some distraction, he began to stack the ledgers. Farrow clucked and immediately began rearranging Andrew’s feeble efforts according to some other organizational scheme.
“What’s all this?” Clarkson asked, his eye drawn to the desktop by their movements.
“The West India Merchants have it in mind to build a new dock for ships coming in from the Caribbean. I’ve been weighing the strengths and weaknesses of such a scheme.”
“Well, you’re well-suited to the task, I’d say. Some of those chaps have never even set foot on a merchant ship, I’ll wager. You’ve done a sight more than that.”
“Aye,” Andrew acknowledged absently.
“You can set ’em straight as to what would work for their ships and what wouldn’t, what the real risks would be. They’re too used to dealing with numbers on paper, rather than dealing with people,” he said, folding his arms behind him and rocking back slightly on his heels. “’Course, most of them are men of property. Planters. Their motives might be rather different from yours. It’d be ideal if some of your adventures had parlayed into real connections in the islands, some arrangement that would make an overseer or a manager inclined to do business with Beauchamp alone. Then the others would sit up and take notice.”
Andrew’s first thought was of Tempest. He tried and failed to imagine them as mere business partners, trie
d and failed to imagine Cary agreeing on her behalf to the sort of contract Clarkson proposed.
Once his mind had been given permission to wander in her direction, of course, he had the devil’s own luck trying to rein it in. He would like to witness firsthand her triumph at Harper’s Hill. He would like, just once more, to see her in her native environment. Those copper curls under a Caribbean sun, the scent of jasmine in the air, on her skin.
Could doing his duty by Beauchamp Shipping give him an excuse to maintain some connection with her even after she returned to Antigua? And if it did, should he?
“I’ve been thinking a great deal about the slave trade of late,” he said after a moment. “Or, more accurately, the abolition of it. Will it happen, do you think?” He had been pleased to discover, in his perusal of the books, that Daniel’s ethics had kept Beauchamp Shipping out of the trade, despite its profitability.
Clarkson scratched his chin and considered the matter. “It’d be deuced hard to enforce—keep my boys busy, no doubt. And Wilberforce has been beaten back more than once.” Andrew gave a reluctant nod of acknowledgment. The West India lobby, of which he must now consider himself a reluctant part, had proved powerful, while Parliament had been regrettably weak, despite the efforts of staunch abolitionists like William Wilberforce. “But his side’s not out of it entirely,” the admiral added. “It’ll happen, I think. One day.”
“That would change everything,” Farrow interjected, a squeak of something like alarm in his voice.
“That it would,” agreed Andrew. “That it would. Well, but you didn’t come to talk business,” he said to the admiral, rousing himself. “What brings you here?” he asked his unexpected visitor as he stepped away from the desk and left Farrow to his work.
“Merely hoping to see that the rumors were true,” Clarkson replied, clapping Andrew on the shoulder the way he had done when Andrew was a boy, although he had to reach up to do it now.
It was on the tip of Andrew’s tongue to caution him against hope, to explain that the arrangement was merely temporary, but the broad grin on the face of the man who had been one of his stepfather’s dearest friends silenced his protest.
Then Clarkson’s face sobered. “A pity Daniel isn’t here to crow about it.”
“A great pity.”
“Not that he wasn’t proud of you,” Clarkson insisted. “ ‘My brave boy,’ he used to say. He understood your desire to see the world. Well, of course he did. He shared it.”
Genuinely taken back, Andrew could not speak.
“Why, when we were boys at school,” Clarkson reminisced, “Daniel and I had grand plans to join the navy together. ’Course my future had already been decided, but he felt certain the sea was in his blood, too. He even asked his father to buy him a pair of colors. In the end, though, his mother forbade it. Said the risk was too great.” His voice was tinged with regret. “Can’t blame her, of course,” he conceded, shaking off that long-ago disappointment. “It’s a mother’s duty to worry.”
Andrew’s head was spinning with the revelation. Was it possible Daniel had shared his father’s wanderlust without indulging it? Was it possible that stern exterior had masked a face Andrew would otherwise have recognized in an instant, like looking in a mirror?
“He might have gone anyway,” he pointed out when the answers to his inner questions proved uncomfortable.
“No,” Clarkson demurred. “He started Beauchamp Shipping instead. Every shore leave I got, I knew I could find him right here, staring at that wall with a gleam in his eye,” he said, gesturing toward the map of the world that filled one side of the office, dotted with red and blue and green pins marking the route of every Beauchamp ship. “Watched every ship that sailed off, every ship that returned. Fretted over those that didn’t.”
“Like the Colleen?” Andrew asked, speaking around a sudden ache in his throat.
“For one.” Thankfully, Clarkson did not move his gaze from the map. “I hear she was shaken up a bit in her last voyage. Nasty storm, by all accounts.”
“Aye.” A fellow sailor would understand his taciturn response.
Indeed, the single word seemed to convey more to the admiral than any lengthy description could have done. “Well, you survived it,” he said easily, after a moment. Another might have taken his tone for dismissive. “Part and parcel of your legend now.”
Andrew swore he could actually hear Farrow’s ears prick up with interest. “Leave the account books, if you please,” he said, nodding toward the door with a gesture of dismissal for the manager. Although obviously disappointed, Farrow bowed and left, closing the door behind him. “My reputation has not preceded me into this office,” Andrew said, turning back to Clarkson, “and I would prefer to keep it that way.”
“Can’t think why,” Clarkson said, spurning Andrew’s offer of a chair in favor of standing in a sailor’s customary spread-legged stance, a position that many years had made more comfortable to him than sitting. “Say the word and I’ll see that His Highness hears about your assistance in running all those Caribbean pirates to ground. Why, if you hadn’t alerted us to their ships and their plans, think of the merchant vessels that might have been lost. Think of the risks you spared my men by telling us what you saw.” After a slow shake of his head, he lifted his brows and added encouragingly, “There might be a knighthood in it, you know.”
Andrew scoffed. “I doubt the king likes to hear an Irish name preceded by ‘Sir.’ Besides, you know my motives were hardly pure. It was all to find Stratton.”
“If that were true, you would never have bothered with the rest.”
Andrew balked. Certainly he had never thought of it that way. The discoveries had been incidental, their revelation a matter of dropping a word or two into the right ear in some dockside pub or an alley behind the wharves. Most often, the lips from which those words had dropped had not even belonged to Andrew. How the informing had been traced back to him was something of a mystery. Only Jeremiah Bewick had known it all, and he was as tight-lipped an old tar as any—
“Damn him,” Andrew muttered under his breath.
The curse seemed a matter of perfect indifference to Clarkson. Or perhaps he had not even heard it, for he continued as if uninterrupted. “A pity you did not succeed.”
“How’s that?” Andrew snapped to attention, retracing the conversation. “Stratton is dead,” he insisted. “The Justice went down in that storm. I watched it with my own eyes.”
The admiral pressed his lips together and gave a compassionate nod. “It did that. But the Vernon picked up a couple of survivors from that wreck. Found ’em floating on a spar. Half-dead, to be sure. But not entirely.”
“And was one of them Stratton?” Andrew demanded, taking a restless step toward the door.
Suddenly Admiral Clarkson’s stiff authority gave way to sheepishness. He shrugged. “I can’t say for certain, but based on the description I heard, old Lazarus had another resurrection up his sleeve. ’Course, he gave a false name, and the boys on the Vernon didn’t recognize him. When they landed in Portsmouth, he disappeared.”
“When?”
“A week ago.”
A tremor started deep in Andrew’s gut. Anger? Fear? Almost certainly some of both. “He might be anywhere by now.”
“He might,” Clarkson conceded. “But I have a theory.”
“What’s that?”
“What really brought you here?” the other man asked with a tip of his head toward the laden desktop.
The indirection caught Andrew off guard, and it took all his considerable strength to keep his hands at his sides, not to grab the admiral’s gold-trimmed lapels and send him into the wall in an attempt to bring him back to the point. “Family ties,” he ground out when he had found sufficient self-control to produce the words.
Love, his conscience whispered.
He had learned something about duty in the last few weeks. He had come here for his stepfather. For his mother. To see for himself if he could
do this thing.
For Tempest.
“Just so,” agreed Clarkson. “There’s usually something that calls a man home after so long away. A wife. A child. Something draws a man back to his roots.”
“You’d have me believe that Lazarus Stratton has a family somewhere?” Somehow Andrew had always imagined him having sprung from the murky depths, like some mythical sea beast.
“He does,” the admiral insisted. “Or did, at least. In Hull.”
“Hull. In Yorkshire.”
“Don’t know of another.”
“Farrow!”
The bellow seemed to startle Clarkson. “You’re not thinking of going after him?”
“No.”
“Good, good,” he said, visibly relieved. “It’s only a theory. Might lead you on a wild goose chase. And by the looks of things, you’re wanted here.”
Farrow must have been standing quite near the door, because he was through it before the admiral had finished speaking. “Yes, sir?”
“Call for a hack. And send a message to Milligan telling him something’s come up. I’ll meet with him when I return.” Something in Andrew’s tone must have conveyed the seriousness of the matter. Farrow showed no sign of arguing, but turned around immediately and sent a clerk scurrying to the street for a cab.
“Just a minute, now,” Clarkson cautioned. “You’ve just said you weren’t thinking of going after him.”
“I’m not thinking of it,” Andrew said, shrugging into his greatcoat. “I’m doing it.”
“See reason, my boy,” the admiral urged. “Daniel Beauchamp—”
“This isn’t about Daniel,” Andrew cut across him. “Or my father,” he added before Clarkson could. “This is for me. Now if you’ll excuse me, sir,” he said, brushing past him without waiting for a reply.
Still, he felt a hint of hesitation about the decision.
To Tempt an Heiress Page 21
