by Laura London
Then, “Do you imagine I’m pining over my little brother’s wife?” Morgan’s tone was quizzical.
“Well, now. Are ye?” Sails asked, continuing to stare placidly at the melting flames.
A pause. “They began to love as soon as they saw each other. How could I have interrupted that?” Morgan smiled carefully. “And what the devil would I have done with an eighteen-year-old girl?”
“Aye, there is that, of course,” the old sailmaker admitted. “But it does seem hard that ye’ll be losing all the little ones at one time. I know ye can’t but feel that Cat belongs to his father, and I won’t be arguing with ye, but it’s my belief the boy will pine. And now he’s to go to Oxford, by all that’s holy.”
Raven’s reaction to that announcement had become one of Morgan’s more cherished recent memories. He could still hear the horror in the soft drawl when Raven said, “Oxford! You mean Cat’s to be forced to a university? Captain, I never thought to see the day you’d do a thing so coldhearted!”
Morgan came to lean against the table edge by the fire, his hands thrust relaxedly in his pockets, though his voice had the trace curtness of withheld emotion. “It won’t be easy for Cat. I don’t know if he’ll ever adjust completely to his position, but he has Merry and Devon as well as Cathcart. And if he doesn’t learn to know his father now, he may never do it, and that would be a pity, because there’s no other way for him to learn to understand the gentle side of his own nature. Have no fear. I won’t let him languish.”
“I know ye too well to think that” was the calm answer.
There was a companionable silence that had stretched for some few minutes before Morgan recalled the small oval locket his grandmother had given him, and he withdrew it from his pocket and flipped open the golden cover to study the miniature portrait within.
“And what might that be?” Sails asked.
“Hmm? Have a look.” Morgan handed him the locket.
The locket carried the likeness of a boy of about thirteen years, with dark silky curls, wary blue eyes, and a determined chin.
Morgan said, “That unfortunate youth has recently inherited an earldom covering half of Worcester, and if the old duchess is to be believed, he’s doing his best to leave it on the gaming tables. I take it he’s some sort of a grand-nephew to her. In any case, he was left in her guardianship and doesn’t appear to have benefited much by it. He has a woman living with him that Letitia calls ‘that French hussy.’ ” Morgan leaned back against the table with his hair flowing in magnificent black waves from his temples, and a peculiar smile came to his wide lips. “It only seems—” she had said. “Well, what’s the good in having a pirate ship if you can’t send wild youngsters there for a year or two and turn them into something worth inviting to dinner?”
Sails was still looking at the portrait. “An orphan, is he?”
“He is,” Morgan agreed.
“Shall we go have a look at him, then?”
Morgan shook his head, standing abruptly, a fathomless boredom settling into the depths of his heavy-lidded eyes. “Worcester is too far out of the way. I’ve got other things to do with my life than reordering other people’s misreckoned adolescents.”
The morning air had a snap to it, and the hills rolled with brilliant color when Morgan and Sails walked their horses through the village toward the post road. A grain mill stood on the village edge, its sails turning slowly, and within a pretty cottage garden nearby a tiny girl with a lamb stood behind a whitewashed picket fence. She stared at Morgan as he passed, in that bold, curious way children sometimes have. When he dismounted and came to her, she showed him solemnly she had new shoes, and when he asked her how old she was, she carefully displayed three dimpled fingers and told him the lamb’s name was ’Tawberry. Smiling, he admired Strawberry, and her shoes, and the age of three and then touched her cheek with a gentle finger. Innocence—how does one preserve it? How does one give it back when it’s lost? And then he thought of Devon and Merry, and how he had seen them in the garden at Teasel Hill, clinging to each other as though they were one person, laughing like children about some silliness only they understood.
The horses were fresh, and above the horizon Rand Morgan could see the slow rise of a bright sun. Worcester suddenly did not seem so far away.
The kiss of frost had turned the great lindens into clouds of rich sunny yellow. Translucent leaves fell in a sun-sprinkled mist over Devon and Merry beneath. He sat drawing on a sketch pad, one knee drawn up and his back against a tree. She sat on the high bronze back of the unicorn statue. Her hair was loosely flowing except for a single braided coronet plaited with violet mallow flowers. Her feet, softly shod in white slippers, swung slowly together against the unicorn’s massive belly as she worked on a sketch of her own, and her white skirts waltzed and lifted in the breeze.
When she had completed her drawing, she smiled up at Devon and said gaily, “Are you finished? I am!”
“I finished a long time ago.” He stood and came toward her, and as he did she turned her sketch pad to show him a cleverly detailed picture of himself riding the unicorn.
He stared at it with a laugh and a grimace and said, “Dear God, am I really that pretty?”
So she hit him playfully over the head with her sketchbook. “Let’s see yours, then! You told me you’d inherited your skill with the pencil, and since you’re the son of Jasper Crandall, who was one of the world’s greatest painters of natural subjects—” She broke off with a light exclamation as he turned his drawing and she could see his work. After staring at it a moment she let out a peal of sparkling laughter because his pen had made her a stick figure with corkscrew curls, and the unicorn appeared very like a mastiff with a tusk. With laughing reproach she said, “I fear you’ve been sadly deceptive, sir.”
“No, I haven’t. I told you I inherited my skill at drawing, and I did—from my mother. And there you see the extent of it.” He removed the sketchbook from her hand and set it beside hers on the grass and then came to stand before her, smiling in a way that made her heart fill up with love that was like nectar. With softened eyes they held each other’s gaze until her hands came gently to rest on his shoulders, and she bent forward to find his lips. Their touch was light, the searching breath of morning upon spring’s first blossom. Her hair draped over one shoulder and moved in a sweet-scented caress all over the side of his face and his hair and upper arm.
She lifted her head, just a little, to look into his eyes and saw the wealth of love and gentleness there, and he lifted his hands to her palms, entwining their fingers.
“Each day seems to make our love stronger,” he said softly.
She answered, “How lovely our years will be. I give you my life and all the moments in it.”
“And I give you mine, in peace, and if it comes, in hardship,” he murmured. “I give you my soul.”
And the leaves were gliding in floating, downward circles around them, to wink and glisten as she laid her cheek on his hair and made him the promise, “My love, I will have it with me always, and keep it safe.”
Also by Laura London
A Heart Too Proud
The Bad Baron’s Daughter
Gypsy Heiress
Moonlight Mist
Love’s A Stage
Sunshine and Shadow
The Testimony
The Golden Touch
An odd quirk of fate gave her a gambler for a father and made her all but an orphan. But it was an even odder twist that put her in the hands of Lord Linden, London’s most wicked rake…
Please turn this page for an excerpt from
The Bad Baron’s Daughter.
Chapter 1
Outside the gin shop lay one of the most wretched slums in London; it was an area of boarded windows, barefoot begging children, and the desperate hacking cough of consumptives. The dirty winding alleys teemed with pickpockets, and prostitutes with matted hair plucked slyly at the sleeves of passersby and exchanged insults with men and wome
n sitting slumped in doorways or lounging against the rough-grained brick buildings. The stucco frame of the gin shop sat squat between two of these raw brick giants with the half-mischievous, half-bored air of a schoolboy squashed between two plump matrons on a public carriage. A rectangular wooden sign hung outside the doorway announcing The Merry Maidenhead in amateurish italic lettering with the line drawing of a bottle labeled “gin” below.
It was, without doubt, the last place anyone would expect to find a young lady of gentle birth, and yet there was Baron Kendrick’s daughter standing behind the French-polished mahogany bar, her head framed on either side by an assortment of bottles with such titles as “The No-Mistake,” “The Real Knock-Me-Down,” and “The Out-and-Out.”
The evening was unusually humid for May, and moisture from the still air had settled into her hair, causing springy ginger wisps to curl damply against her high forehead. There were freckles on that forehead and across the short, shapely nose and soft cheeks, too, scattered in a soft radiant dappling. Her mouth was wide and untemperamental, and her eyes, now darkened slightly with apprehension, were the soft pastel blue of a robin’s egg. She was tallish and fine-boned, so slender that the casual observer might be pardoned for thinking that he beheld a boy, particularly as the young lady was indeed dressed in men’s clothing: gray leggings, breeches of indeterminate color with one patched knee, an old-fashioned tricornered hat, an olive jacket riddled with grease spots, and a square apron tied around her waist. It was haute couture from Mrs. Coalbottom’s second-hand clothing cart on Monmouth Street.
The young lady, Kathleen Janette Kendricks, as she had been christened; Katie, as she was known, was engaged in a careful survey of the gin shop, or at least what she could see of it, for the sun had fled some hours past and the only light in the narrow, high-ceilinged room came from the smelly tallow candles set in brass sconces widely spaced along the smoke-discolored walls. The Maidenhead was crowded on Katie’s first night on the job; the airless tenements had disgorged their contents into the streets and gin rooms.
At the end of the room, the doors swung in soft rhythm from the steady arrivals and unsteady departures of the patrons. A group of truculent Irish laborers had staked out a territory in the far corner and were alternately boasting, toasting, and threatening to carve one another. Occasionally the group would band together and hurl loud insults at the nearby table, where some sailors on shore leave were beginning to relax, adding dribbled tobacco juice to the salt stains on their tight-fitting reefer jackets. A few scattered clusters of students were enjoying the ambiance; their blasé expressions were belied by the speculative looks they directed at the table where a convivial band of gaudy prostitutes camped. As Katie watched, the oldest prostitute, gray-haired and naked to the waist like her younger sisters, collapsed face forward on the table, upsetting her flagon. She was none too gently conveyed by her friends to the pile of straw at the rear of the room to join others in her condition, where she restlessly nodded off into an alcoholic dream of what might have been and certainly never was.
If you hadn’t any dreams of your own, The Merry Maidenhead could supply them. For the price of one penny, you could get drunk, for two pennies dead drunk. Some called it Blue Ruin, some called it Strip-Me-Naked, but it was little more than raw alcohol flavored with juniper. Katie’s responsibilities in the scheme of things had been summed up thus: “Fill their empty flagons, collect their money ’n mop up the floor after they casts up their accounts.” This occurred frequently, but not as often as the foul quality of the brew merited, thought Katie. She would have as soon drunk sewage.
The swinging doors opened again, causing a wash of moist night air to freshen the atmosphere in the shop, and a group of young men entered. The impeccable cut of their clothes, the polish of their boots, the snowy whiteness of their cravats, and the self-assured arrogance with which they carried themselves marked them, even to Katie’s inexperienced eyes, as slumming aristocrats. Her attention was drawn to one man in particular. That he was a figure of some distinction was obvious. He attracted deferential attention from his companions, and was popular with the crowd, who cheered his arrival and opened ranks magically, allowing him to make his way, accompanied by his cohorts, to a corner table.
He was the most attractive man Katie had ever seen. Once, as a little girl, when Katie’s father had been teaching her how to ride, typically on far too large and temperamental a horse for her tiny size, he had sent her to jump a five-barred gate. The horse had refused, sending Katie flying to the ground with a force that drove the air from her lungs. She felt that same breathless confusion now, as the crowd parted to allow her a clear line of sight.
His face was too young to look so cynical. There was restless intelligence in the rich brown eyes, and a contemptuous tilt to the unsmiling lips. The copper candlelight warmed the crisp onyx curls that fell over one eye.
He took his place, having dislodged a sleeping old man, and crossed his long legs on the table in front of him, causing a clatter of overturned empty bottles, then rocked back on the hind legs of his chair, seemingly oblivious to the stir his entrance had created. A large plebian crowd quickly gathered to watch as a pair of dice rolled out onto the table, the tattered clothing of the spectators contrasting with the cut and color of the gentlemen’s attire. Shouts of laughter and excited comments arose from the throng as the dice began to tumble and pound notes began to flash.
Katie had been leaning her elbows on the smooth surface of the bar, her small chin cupped firmly in one palm. She was joined by a tall, twentyish youth, clad, as she was, in a bartender’s apron. His thinnish black hair hung lank to his shoulders where it curled under slightly against a gray cotton shirt with cutoff sleeves. He tugged at the dirty blue and white dotted kerchief knotted around his neck, regarding Katie with amusement in his cunning gray eyes.
“Hankering after the nation’s heartthrob, eh, Katie? You and every other female in London.”
“Was it so obvious?” asked Katie. “Who is he, Zack?”
“That’s Lesley Byrne, Lord Linden. His earldom’s English, of course, but his mother’s from the old French aristocracy—hates Bonaparte. Linden’s our latest romantic hero, back from the French wars, where he was pursuing a line of God knows what skullduggery on behalf of His Majesty. That was until he almost got himself killed about a dozen times. He’s a prime favorite with the prince, and old ‘prinny’ decided that good drinking companions were harder to find than good spies and ordered Linden home. But damned if it wasn’t a lot easier on Merry Old England when Linden was off among the Frenchies. Like caging a panther, if you ask me. The boy’s a regular hellion. Been back only two months and already he’s killed a man in a duel, seduced a string of society lovelies, and caused more riot and rumpus than Beelzebub spittin’ in holy water.” Zack rubbed a hollow cheekbone with the back of his hand and began wiping down the bar with a bleached muslin rag.
“Zack, do you think Lord Linden is like Papa? Easily bored, I mean?” asked Katie.
“Ain’t no doubt o’ that. Rumor barely gets out that Linden’s playing with one woman, but what she’s dropped and he’s picked up someone else.” Zack collected the empty bottles from the bar and bent down to put them into a wooden crate. “Still worrying over your papa’s absence, are you? The baron’ll turn up, Katie, he always does.”
“You can call it absence, if you please to, but I call it disappearance,” said Katie unhappily. “He hasn’t sent me a letter in weeks, not a line, not a word. And if even you don’t know where he is… Zack, something’s happened, I know it.”
Zack straightened and gave Katie a few consoling swats on the shoulder. “Oh, aye, something’s happened, like a cock fight or a boxing match or a congenial card game. Katie, you know your old man has no more sense of time passing than the rock of Gibraltar. And if you think that because he and I crony around together he keeps me informed of his every turn and sway, then you’re dead wrong. The last I heard from him he was off pursuing some
damned intrigue or other with a married woman in Dorset.”
“Zack, if only you knew her name, then we might…”
“Oh, no, we might not!” said Zack quickly. “Your father wouldn’t thank us for bustling into his affairs, and anyway, I don’t know the wench’s name. Damme, Katie, do you think I keep a list of your father’s particulars?”
Katie transferred her chin to her other palm. “No. But Zack, perhaps if you thought very hard, you might remember the lady’s name? I mean, this is an emergency. I’ve been evicted from our cottage in Essex for nonpayment of rent. Not only do I not have a penny to my name, I’m monstrously in debt to the tune of ten thousand pounds to that man with the gold tooth who came to the cottage and said that he would put Papa in prison if I didn’t give him the money immediately. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t given me this job in your shop. I know you didn’t want to on account of your not hiring women, but thanks.”
“I could hardly throw you out on the street, could I? Your old man did keep my mother in style for a few years. While the winnings lasted.” Zack took a coin from a customer’s grubby hand and slid a glass of gin across the bar.
A lanky, doe-eyed girl with a red kerchief on her head came up and leaned over the bar with one hand on her hip, a saucy smile revealing the lack of one front tooth.
Zack leaned over the bar on his elbows and met the new arrival’s offered lips with a quick kiss of greeting. “Hullo, Winnie. How goes the revolution?” said Zack.
“Not as good as th’ gin business looks. ’N ya can stop makin’ fun o’ me chosen avocation. Ain’t ya interested in th’ struggle fer th’ rights o’ man?” replied Winnie.
“There’s only one man’s rights I’m interested in,” said Zack. “My own.”
“Aye, it’s a ’eartless self-seeker, y’are,” said Winnie, mischievously. She turned to look at Katie. “Oi see ya changed genders since oi left this afternoon. Are ya all rested up from yer ride out from Essex this day on ’at rattle-trapsy stagecoach? Was a fair piece ta come by yerself, wasn’t it? So. You talked Zacky around ta employin’ ya ’ere.”
