by Carla Kelly
“And have you tumbling arse over teakettle because you’re too sick?” Pete scolded. “I’m not in your navy now, sir, so I can speak plainly.”
“Indeed you can,” Oliver agreed, chastened. “And you’re right.” He finished and handed back the urinal. I can be matter-of-fact if you can, he thought. I just hope I don’t have to see Nana Massie again for the next three and a half weeks.
She was at the door and knocking, only moments after Pete left. She had a tray in her hands, and it occurred to him that he was more hungry than embarrassed. So much for the delicacies.
She came close to the bed and set the tray at the foot, then picked up the extra pillow from the side table by the window. He sat up so she could place it behind his head, and then adjust the table over his lap.
“It’s cod and leeks, cooked in cream. Mr. Proudy said you liked it, and Gran said it will go down easy.”
He was almost afraid to look at her, but he had to. He knew he would always have to. There was nothing missish about her expression. Well, if she doesn’t mind I am human, I suppose I shouldn’t, either, he decided, as he picked up a spoon.
It was delicious, and flowed easily around the boulder in his throat. “My compliments to the chef,” he told her, pleased to see her smile.
“Gran made it, but I watched. I think I can do it now.”
She sat down, then got up again to tuck a napkin in the front of his nightshirt. She pulled the tray a little closer, then picked up another bowl and spoon. He hadn’t realized she was planning to eat with him.
“This is so you’ll know I’m eating, too,” she said. “So are Gran and Pete and Sal. We made plenty for us all.”
So the inmates of the Mulberry had come to an understanding. Good. “Who is Sal?” he asked between mouthfuls.
“Our scullery maid.” She looked at him, and seemed to know what he was thinking. “We couldn’t let her go when times got tough, Captain. She said she’d rather take her chances with us than return to the workhouse.”
“Wise choice.”
He knew she would leave when he finished, so he ate slowly, savoring the company as much as the cod. She cleaned her bowl, which had been as full as his. He decided he liked a woman with a good appetite.
When he finished, she took the tray from his lap, but stood there, indecisive. He could tell she had something more to say, and allowed her time to work up to it. Her sentence came out in a rush.
“You absolutely cannot go to the dry docks tomorrow, Captain. I forbid it.”
He would have laughed, except that the serious look on her face touched him as nothing else could have. He noted how tight together her lips were, and how she gripped the tray, as if ready to spring into all kinds of defiance, if he argued.
“I won’t then,” he assured her. “You’re right. I’ll never get better if I don’t stay in bed.”
“You’re worrying me, Captain,” she said, her voice no louder than a whisper. “I…we want you to get well.”
“I promise I will. Cross my heart.”
She relaxed then. “Sir, if you need anything in the night…anything. Pete and I will take turns sleeping on a cot by your door.”
He started to protest at that, and the look he got in return was nearly mutinous. He nodded instead.
“Good night, sir,” she said, and left the room.
He woke up once in the night, stirring about enough to wake Pete, who came in with the urinal, and another dose of his patented draught, good enough to raise the dead and cure the world.
Toward morning, he woke again. His throat felt moderately better; the boulder in his throat had shrunk to a rock. He thought he could even manage the chamber pot this time. He got up quietly and used it, pleased with himself. Before he got back in bed, he went to the door and opened it, just to see who was on duty in the corridor.
Nana slept on the cot this time, balled up tightly enough to tell him that she was cold. He went to the clothespress in his room and pulled out a blanket, returning to the hall and covering her with it. She stirred, but did not open her eyes. He watched her, and in a few moments, she straightened out her legs and returned to a deeper sleep. Impulsively, he touched her head.
He could have watched her the rest of his life.
Chapter Five
Her years in Bath notwithstanding, Nana was a true daughter of Plymouth. Since she was a small girl, she had known almost by instinct to hold officers in awe.
One of her earliest Plymouth memories—she must have been all of four—centered on a post captain staying at the Mulberry, when post captains used to do that. He had been talking in the hall with Gran, who held her hand. From her viewpoint much closer to the floor, Nana had looked up and up, and burst into tears before getting much beyond the gilt buttons. It was all too much.
Her first glimpse of Captain Oliver Worthy—tall beyond tall from his high fore and aft hat, and majestic down past his boat cloak to his buckled shoes—had given her no reason to change her mind. There was an aura well-nigh impenetrable about the navy. These were hard men in a hard service, deserving of her respect.
Maybe it was the matter of the pansies. It could have been when she put the wheat poultice around his neck that first night. Possibly even—blushes—when she knew he needed some help with a urinal. At some point in only a very few days, she fell in love.
She didn’t know what to call it at first. She had fancied herself in love when the brother of a fellow student at Miss Pym’s had sent her a ridiculous poem about eyes that eventually rhymed “brown” with “crown,” then took a tortuous leap to “drown.” The infatuation had passed with his bad spelling, but not before she had allowed him to kiss her on the cheek during a supposed visit to his sister.
She had admired a hemp vendor a few years ago when he spent a week at the Mulberry, extolling the virtues of his product at the rope walk near the dry docks. She had laughed at his humor, and he seemed to like her company, but he had never returned to the Mulberry. She had moped about for a week, but a month later when she couldn’t even recall his name, she decided it wasn’t love.
Captain Worthy was different. Maybe it had happened when she woke up in the corridor, covered with the blanket she knew was from the clothespress in his room. She lay there in her sleep fog, wondering if he had actually touched her head last night, or if she imagined it. She put it down to imagination, but the touch seemed to linger in her heart.
She tried to put the matter out of her mind and nearly succeeded. Gran would never countenance any connection with a navy man, not after what had happened to her own daughter. There was no way she could casually ask, “Gran, what does it feel like to be in love?” without arousing suspicions of the most dire sort. She had to work through the matter on her own.
There was so much she wanted to know about him, and no way to find out. It was impossible even to know how old the captain was, because men of the sea didn’t age well. For all she knew, he could have been twenty-five, except she had enough knowledge of the fleet to know that men didn’t often become post captains at such an age. She reckoned he might be thirty; he could have been much older. She decided she didn’t care.
Even setting aside her own mother’s disastrous ruin, she was fully acquainted with the folly of loving a navy man. From earlier, more prosperous days at the Mulberry, she remembered the wives of naval officers who had gathered in port when portions of the Channel Fleet were due.
She had never forgotten the night a message came to one of the waiting wives. Her screams echoed and reechoed through the inn at the news her husband had died of ship’s fever miles away in Portsmouth, where his ship had put in, instead of Plymouth. The new widow’s hysteria so terrified Nana that she had to sleep with Gran until she returned to Bath.
As she lay on the cot that morning, she remembered the incident, but it didn’t seem to matter. All she really wanted to do was get up, walk into Captain Worthy’s room and climb in bed with him.
Thanks to Gran’s blunt education
, she had a good idea of what men and women did in bed; the urge she felt was more than intimate physical comfort. She wanted Captain Worthy to wrap his arms around her and keep her safe from a world at war. She was too much of a realist to think blockade, hunger, cold, uncertainty and doubt would disappear, just because she was in the arms of someone stronger than she was. She just knew vicissitude would be easier to bear. That was all, but it was more than she had ever dared hope for, until his arrival at the Mulberry.
There was a greater issue, one that cast her own needs into a shadow and made her come to a right understanding about love: more than anything else, she wanted to protect him from the horrors of his own duty.
That she could protect anything was ludicrous in the extreme. She was just a woman, poorer than many, more vulnerable than most because of her questionable lineage. Laying all that aside, she knew she had within her the power to help that man—to love him whenever his duty let her; bear and nurture his children, even if he was far away or dead; make him laugh; keep him safe in her arms.
Think it through, she ordered herself, and stayed where she was. She knew nothing about the captain’s background, except that he had no family living. She also knew that officers in the Royal Navy usually arrived at their posts through diligence and influence. Like other navy men—Lord Nelson’s father may have been a clergyman, but his uncle was comptroller of the navy—Captain Worthy was probably well-educated and well-connected. Men like that didn’t take illegitimate brides.
Funny that a quirk of fate could render her unfit for the kind of company that her Bath education had taught her to believe was her right and privilege. Too bad she should have to feel less worthy than even a fishmonger’s child, dirty and speckled with scales from life on the dock, but possessing parents married to each other.
She knew any connection with Captain Worthy was out of the question, so the matter of making sure she really was in love took on moot qualities. In the cold morning light, Nana resolved no one would ever know. The Tireless would be at sea again in three and a half weeks. If she could not survive such a paltry amount of time, considering the whole history of the world, then she was a fool.
Nana decided not to think about life at the Mulberry, or even life in general, after the Tireless sailed back to the blockade of the Spanish coast. She knew a huge emptiness would be her purgatory for loving someone out of her reach, both by birth and by the terrible times they lived in.
Nana got up quietly and folded the blankets before tiptoeing down the stairs and into the family quarters. Gran was humming and stirring porridge on the Rumford. Nana went to her silently and just leaned against her arm. Gran inclined her head toward Nana.
“Did you get any sleep, dearie?”
“Yes. I think Captain Worthy is still asleep.”
There now; that was easy. She didn’t give his name any more inflection than she would have had he been one of twenty lodgers, and more than unusually critical. Nana knew that although Gran had no great skill with books or writing, she was shrewd and wise concerning life’s labyrinths. Nana also knew by some instinct that speaking of Captain Worthy too much would invite suspicion. Better to say next to nothing, beyond what her conversation should contain about any Mulberry lodger.
Easier said than done, she decided, especially when Gran insisted on talking about the man.
“Listen for him, Nana,” Gran instructed. “When you hear him moving about, ask him if porridge will do again for breakfast, or if he wants anything else.”
“Do we have anything else?” Nana asked, surprised.
“Indeed we do. Just this morning, the butcher delivered a dozen lamb chops, some bacon and a quarter of beef. I have made muffins, and there are eggs, too.” Gran moved the porridge onto the warming shelf. “The butcher said the meat was compliments of Captain Worthy. Nana, what a kind man he is.”
“Yes,” she responded. She could tell from the look on Gran’s face that she expected more of a favorable reaction. Gran, you’re going to make forgetting him difficult, she thought. “What a kind man.”
Nana dressed quickly, looking in the mirror long enough to wish her hair would grow back overnight, and wondering what cruel fate had decreed freckles on her nose. Since Sal was busy with dishes, Gran gave her a can of warm water to carry upstairs, and a towel.
She went lightly up the stairs, listening for their boarder, and was rewarded with the sound of coughing, followed by “Damn!”
The captain was sitting up in bed, his hand on his throat, a frown on his face. To her gratification, his expression lightened when he saw who it was. He spoke, and his voice was hoarse.
“What a predicament, Miss Massie. If I lie completely still and do not cough, I feel perfectly sound. Otherwise, I’m a medical calamity.” He sighed. “At least Mr. Childers will be relieved I am staying in bed today.”
She set down the water can and towel on the washstand. “Why would that be, Captain?”
“I think no shipwright bent on repairs wants a captain breathing down his neck, even if it is a requirement of the Admiralty.”
“Too many cooks, eh?”
“Precisely.”
He gestured for her to come closer and indicated the chair by the bed, to her way of thinking, much as he would make demands of a crew member. The thought diverted her; she sat down.
“My plan today is to remain in bed, but I daren’t be idle.” He glanced at her. “And none of those mutinous looks, Miss Massie! The war won’t wait on a putrid throat.”
I’m certainly going to have to watch my expressions around this fellow, she told herself, amused. “I know Pete still expects you to do your duty regarding his draught.”
“Very well. I will concede that point. I am going to write a note which I hope he will take to dry docks.” He looked at her, one eyebrow raised, and she felt her heart turn over. “No, Miss Massie, you are not to deliver the note. It is no place for ladies.”
“I will concede that point,” she teased, and he smiled.
“This note will be addressed to Matthew, one of my powder monkeys. He can’t read, so it is up to Mr. Ramseur to do that. I am going to make Matthew my errand boy for today and possibly tomorrow. If Mr. Childers has any communication for me, Matthew will deliver it. I also will have notes for the harbormaster and my purser, which I am trusting to his attention. I will place a hackney at Matthew’s command, which will please him no end.”
“Most certainly,” she said, “if he is like most boys. How old is he, sir?”
“I believe he is eleven. If not, then nearly so.”
“So young.”
The captain settled himself back against his pillows. “He came to the gunnery deck when he was eight.”
“Heavens!” she exclaimed, unable to help herself.
“I was twelve when I become a young gentleman,” Captain Worthy said. “I have been eighteen years in the navy, Miss Massie. The younger, the better. We aren’t the army, praise the Almighty.”
So you are thirty, she thought. You were at sea when I was three years old.
He shifted slightly so he was looking at her again. “I have a favor to ask you regarding Matthew.”
Anything for you, she thought. She didn’t know why he began that restless memorization of her face that was flattering and disconcerting at the same time. Perhaps he was feeling less sanguine than he let on.
“In five days’ time, it will be Matthew’s turn for shore leave. He came from the workhouse in Portsmouth, which is no place an alumnus ever wishes to revisit. Could he come here?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “He won’t mind staying in our family quarters, will he? I know we have plenty of rooms upstairs, but it would be lonely.”
He nodded. “I was hoping you would say just that. You can put him to work, too.” He chuckled. “He’s a dab hand at running powder from the powder locker to the guns without blowing up any of us, if that’s a skill you can use in your grandmother’s kitchen.”
She joined in his
laughter, amazed at how easy it was to enjoy his somewhat morbid humor. “If he knows how to sew, he can do my mending.”
“He has been learning to repair sail. I can’t recommend him for delicate work.”
It wasn’t her business, but she wanted to ask, anyway. “Your other powder monkeys? What about them? They could come here, too.”
“That’s kind of you,” he said. “One is on leave right now at his mother’s house, about three blocks from the Barbican. The other two are twins, and their father is my gunnery mate. All sons of the gun, Nana.”
He must not have realized he used her nickname. She couldn’t think of any reason she wanted to correct a captain, especially since her name seemed to come off his tongue so easily. If he did it again, she knew she wouldn’t mind.
“Is there a subscription library in Plymouth?” he asked.
“Yes, but…but…our subscription has lapsed,” she replied, embarrassed.
He seemed not to notice. “Just take some coins from my purse in the top drawer. I want you to get me Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the fifth volume. I have read one through four, and six, but number five ended up at the bottom of the Caribbean.”
“Since you have already read volume six, Captain, you already know how those Romans declined,” she said, unable to keep from quizzing him.
He laughed, then winced and put his hand to his throat. “Of course I know how it ends. Perhaps I have a tidier mind than yours.”
She brought his purse to the bed. “I don’t wish to pick your purse, sir. You do it.”
He handed some coins to her, then gave her the purse, which she returned to the drawer.
“Now, are you ready for porridge?”
“I thought you would never ask.” He handed her another coin and the note to the shipwright. “Have Pete deliver this himself in a hackney, and wait for Matthew to join him.”
“Very well.” She looked toward the washstand. “There’s hot water, Captain.”
