Marrying the Captain

by Carla Kelly

  “Captain, were you never in love?”

  Nana’s breath was warm on his cheek. He thought of all the cold winds from the Channel to the Bering Sea that had scoured his face. He prided himself on knowing how to keep his ship aright and sail close to the wind. How could he explain that Nana’s breath on his cheek gave him more heart than any breeze from any point of the compass?

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I was in love once,” he whispered back. “What about you, Nana? Lost your heart yet?”

  “Yes,” she answered, her voice so soft. “It’s a dreadful business, isn’t it?”

  “There will be another one along someday, Nana,” he said, and hated himself.

  “I doubt it,” she replied. She looked at him, and he could not help seeing the tears in her eyes. “How…how did you get over her?”

  I can’t, he thought. I won’t.

  Marrying the Captain

  Harlequin®Historical

  Praise for Carla Kelly, recipient of a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times BOOKreviews and winner of two RITA®Awards

  “A powerful and wonderfully perceptive author.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Mary Jo Putney

  “A wonderfully fresh and original voice.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “Kelly has the rare ability to create realistic yet sympathetic characters that linger in the mind. One of the most respected…Regency writers.”

  —Library Journal

  “Carla Kelly is always a joy to read.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “Ms. Kelly writes with a rich flavor that adds great depth of emotion to all her characterizations.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  MARRYING the CAPTAIN

  Carla Kelly

  Available from Harlequin®Historical and CARLA KELLY

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  To my dear sisters, Karen Deo and Wanda Lynn Turner,

  who showed me Plymouth.

  Said the sailor to his true love, “Well, I must be on my way,

  For our topsails they are hoisted and the anchor’s aweigh;

  And our good ship she lies awaiting for the next flowing tide,

  And if ever I return again, I will make you my bride.”

  —“Pleasant and Delightful”

  English folksong

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Prologue

  After five years in Plymouth following her 1803 expulsion from Miss Pym’s Female Academy in Bath, it still burned Nana Massie to be an Object of Charity.

  She closed the door to the Mulberry Inn behind her and looked down at the hand-lettered placards in her hand. In these hard times of war, made harder for Plymouth by the blockade of the French coast, the innkeeps at the bigger inns closer to the harbor still had no objection to the placards, even though everyone knew there was no need for them, because there was no overflow of clientele.

  We Massies are engaged in a great deception, Nana told herself as she hurried toward the harbor, blown along by the stiff November wind. She glanced back at the Mulberry, knowing Gran would be watching her from an upstairs window. Nana waved and blew her grandmother a kiss. This grand deception is for my benefit entirely, she thought, and I am hungry.

  She was cold, too, even though she wore Pete’s cut-down boat cloak and two petticoats under a wool dress. She knew Gran was knitting her a cap to cover her short hair, and it wouldn’t be done a moment too soon. After a look of deep worry when Nana returned from the wigmaker last week with short hair and a handful of coins for the more pressing bills, Gran had turned straight to her knitting.

  Even though Nana could see one small frigate bobbing in anchor at the harbor below, Gran and Pete both had insisted it was time to take placards to the large inns. Time meant noon, when the inns would be serving dinner. Those two old conspirators knew the keeps and cooks would see that their darling Nana ate.

  The sailors were seldom allowed off the warships, but the officers and petty officers were usually free to go ashore and stay in Plymouth’s inns. Many ships meant more officers. If the larger inns were full, some could be persuaded to stay at the Mulberry on far-distant Gibbon Street, if there was a placard announcing the little inn’s existence.

  Nana almost turned around after she passed St. Andrews Church. The matter was hopeless because the admiral of the Channel Fleet, in his wisdom, had decreed that his warships would not leave their watery stations for anything except dire emergency. They were to be revictualed at sea—with food and water—and remain there, because of Boney and his threats.

  One frigate in the harbor. Nana stopped and nearly crammed her signs in a bin, then reconsidered. Gran would be devastated if she returned from the harbor unfed, and would see right through a lie to the contrary.

  Besides, the wind carried the fragrance of sausages from the Navy Inn, her first stop. Nana wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and let the wind coax her along.

  There was a sausage for her at the Navy Inn, with a crunch when she bit into it that nearly brought tears to her eyes. She went through the charade of protesting when the keep insisted on wrapping an extra one in oiled paper, then hurried to the Drury Inn, where she left another placard and sat down to potato soup with hunks of ham and onion, bubbling in the broth of cream flecked with butter.

  The keep even handed her a pot of it to take along, declaring the soup would just sit around, uneaten and unappreciated, if she didn’t take it back to the Mulberry. Maybe Gran or Pete could have it, if Nana was full. She accepted it with a smile, even as her face burned from shame.

  At Drake’s Inn, the bill of fare was pasties, as she had hoped. Mrs. Fillion, the keep, insisted she eat one quickly, before it went bad, then packaged two more for her, all the while complaining about an admiral so mean-spirited as to keep his ships from Plymouth and make life a trial for the quayside merchants.

  “Well, we are at war, Mrs. Fillion,” Nana ventured.

  Mrs. Fillion sighed. “You’d think in the year of our Lord 1808 we could have f
igured out some way to abolish such stupidity.”

  She took a placard, but gently informed Nana that the Drake had already received the frigate’s surgeon, both lieutenants and captain.

  She slid another pasty on Nana’s plate. “At least we’ll have Captain Worthy when he returns from Admiralty House in London in a day or two. His sea chest is already here.”

  “That’s his frigate in the Cattewater?” Nana asked.

  “Aye. The Tireless, a thirty-four, and bound for dry docks,” the keep said. She snorted. “Not even an admiral can figure out how to repair a frigate in the Channel.”

  Nana glanced out the window and let Mrs. Fillion run on, declaring how she would run the war and the Royal Navy, if put in charge. Maybe the rain would stop by the time the keep ran out of words.

  It didn’t. Mrs. Fillion handed her a bag to hold the pasties and the other food Nana had accumulated. “Just return it next time you’re in the Barbican, dearie,” she said. She shook her head. “I wish I could send you Captain Worth, but we need the trade. He’s not a bad-looking man, if you could get him to smile. ’Course, nobody’s smiling much.”

  At least I never ask for anything, Nana thought as she excused herself and started for the Mulberry. There was food enough for supper now. She paused to look at the Tireless, noting the listing main mast, and what looked like canvas draped across the stern. “Dry docks for you, Captain Worthy.”

  And who knows what for me? she considered. She couldn’t help but think of her father, William Stokes, Viscount Ratliffe, and his devil’s bargain, which had sent her fleeing back to the safety of Plymouth, Gran’s protection and more uncertainty.

  “I may be hungry now,” she whispered, “but if you think I ever intend to change my mind, dear Father, you’re as wrong now as you were five years ago.”

  Her anger—or was it fear?—made her speak louder than she intended. As a child of Plymouth, she knew the prevailing winds were speeding her words to the French coast. No one could hear her. Beyond Gran and Pete, she knew no one cared.

  Chapter One

  Twelve hours into the return journey from Admiralty House, Captain Oliver Worthy felt the familiar but unwelcome scratchiness in his throat and ache in his ears. “Oh, damn,” he whispered. This was no time to be afflicted with the deep-water sailor’s commonest complaint—putrid ear and throat.

  He tried to get comfortable in the chaise, mentally ticking off a long list of duties upon arrival in Plymouth, all of which trumped any ailments. The dockmaster was waiting for his final appraisal and list of repairs to the Tireless. The warped mast—the result of patching two splintered ones together—was bad enough. Even worse, the inept captain of the Wellspring, who had crashed his bow into the Tireless’s stern, caused more damage to a vulnerable part of the ship. Welcome to life on the blockade.

  He had to make arrangements with the purser to complete the laborious resupply lists that ran on for mind-numbing pages. The chances of receiving all requested stores were slight, but he had to apply anyway. He also intended to release his crew, a few at a time, for shore leave. Oh, Lord, details and paperwork.

  Right now—nauseated from the post chaise’s motion, his head pounding and his throat as painful as sandpaper grating on bruised knuckles—all he wanted was a bed in a quiet room, with the guarantee not to be disturbed for at least a week.

  Even more than that, all he wanted was a glass of water, and then another one, until he no longer felt that his insides were coated with slimy water stored months in a keg.

  No landsman who took a drink of water for granted would understand the feeling of thirst beyond belief, as he stared long and hard at a cup of water, green and odorous. After a month or two, the water would even begin to clump together, until swallowing the offending mass was like choking down someone else’s spittle. After only a few years at sea, he developed the habit of closing his eyes when he drank water more than two months old.

  Then there were the days of thirst, especially in winter, when the water hoys from Plymouth were delayed because of stormy weather. Days when even a drop from the malodorous kegs—now empty—would have been welcome relief. Like all the others on the Tireless, he tried hard not to think of water, but surrounded by water as they always were, such a wish was not possible.

  Past Exeter, where the view of the ocean usually made his heart quicken, he began to reconsider his impulsive agreement with Lord Ratliffe. The whole thing was odd. At Admiralty House, he had made his report of Channel activity, this time to William Stokes, Viscount Ratliffe, an undersecretary more than usually puffed up with his own consequence, and someone he generally tried to avoid.

  Oliver had been irritated enough when Lord Ratliffe tried to pry into his Spanish sources, something no captain—even under Admiralty Orders—would ever reveal. And then the damned nincompoop had asked for a favor.

  Maybe it was Oliver’s own fault. He shouldn’t have admitted the Tireless would be in dry docks for at least a month. But the undersecretary had picked up on it like a bird dog.

  “A month?”

  “Aye, my lord.”

  “Not going home to your family?”

  “I have no family.” Too true, although why a country vicar and his wife should succumb to typhoid fever in dull-as-dishwater Eastbourne, when their only child had survived all manner of exotic ailments from around the world, was still beyond him. No family. A wife was out of the question. He seldom met women, and he was too cautious to trouble any with a seafaring mate. In these times of war, he might as well hand over a death warrant with the marriage lines.

  “I want to show you something.”

  Ratliffe had picked up a miniature from his untidy desk and handed it to Oliver, who couldn’t help but smile.

  It was the face of a young lady approaching—or smack on the edge of—womanhood. Her hair was the same shade as Ratliffe’s, but he could see no other resemblance. The miniaturist had dotted tiny freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  Her eyes had caught and held him: brown pools of melting chocolate. He glanced at the viscount’s eyes. Blue.

  “She resembles her mother.”

  After another look, Oliver handed back the miniature.

  “Pretty, isn’t she?”

  More than pretty, Oliver thought.

  “She’s old now. Twenty-one. This was painted when she was sixteen.” Ratliffe sighed heavily, almost theatrically, to Oliver’s ears. “She lives in Plymouth in a run-down inn owned by her grandmother, Nancy Massie, a regular shrew. Twenty-two years ago, I was in Plymouth. I made the mistake of dallying with the shrew’s daughter. Eleanor is the result.”

  Oliver couldn’t think of anything to say. “So you fathered a bastard?” hardly seemed appropriate, and to offer his condolences seemed even less palatable. He knew the viscount would continue, however.

  “I did the right thing by Eleanor,” Lord Ratliffe said, putting down the miniature. “As soon as she was five, I had her sent to a female academy in Bath, where she was raised and educated.”

  Oliver hoped he covered up his surprise. The country must be full of by-blows, and his superficial acquaintance with the viscount gave him no inkling Lord Ratliffe was one to own up to his responsibility. Imagine, he thought, bracing himself for whatever favor Lord Ratliffe had in mind.

  Ratliffe threw up his hands. “When the child was sixteen, she suddenly bolted from Miss Pym’s school and returned to Plymouth! I had made her an excellent offer regarding her future, and she thanked me by leaving my care and bolting to that wretched seaport!” He glanced at Oliver. “You’re a man of the world. You know what Plymouth is like. Imagine my distress.”

  Oliver could, even as he could also feel his suspicion growing. Although he had only been a post captain for two years, he had commanded men for many more. Something in Ratliffe’s tone did not ring true.

  “Would you do me the favor of staying at the Mulberry Inn—that’s the name of it—during your time in Plymouth? Look things over and let me know
how things are with Eleanor.” He leaned closer. “I am certain a few days would suffice to get the drift of matters. I could not bear it if Eleanor has fallen on hard times.”

  “I usually stay at the Drake, my Lord,” Oliver temporized. “My sea chest is there already.”

  Ratliffe sighed again, which only irritated Oliver. He was ready to say no, when the viscount shifted his position, and there was Eleanor Massie smiling up at him from the desk. Captivated in spite of himself, he wondered how an artist could capture such youthful promise in so small a space. A moment earlier, he might have just felt old. Now he felt something close to joy. For all he knew, the earth’s axis had suddenly shifted under Admiralty House. Was the Astronomer Royal aware?

  What harm would it do to stay a week at the Mulberry? He could look over the situation, make sure the shrew wasn’t beating her granddaughter twice a day before breakfast, pen a report to the viscount and retreat to the Drake.

  “I’ll do it, my lord,” Oliver said.

  The viscount looked for a moment as if he were going to take Oliver by the hand, but he refrained. “Thank you, Captain Worthy. You’d probably understand my concern better if you had a daughter.”

  That will never happen, Oliver thought, as he returned his attention to the November scenery outside the post chaise window. Only a crazy woman would marry a captain on the blockade. And only a crazier captain would ever offer.

  He closed his eyes after Exeter, deciding to abandon Miss Eleanor Massie to her fate. But as the post chaise stopped in front of the Drake later that afternoon, he knew he couldn’t go back on his word, no matter how much he wanted to.