by Gaelen Foley
BARE-KNUCKLE CHAMPION OF THE EPSOM DOWNS
MATCHES
MAY 10, 1792
HEIGHT: 6’4", WEIGHT: 15 STONE.
Goodness, the man had been a giant. Though, on second thought, the captain himself was probably about that size.
Of course, so many years ago, Jack would only have been a young boy, maybe ten years old. She let out a soft “Hmm,” and furrowed her brow, pondering the prize, but could arrive at no explanation for why Lord Jack might have this. Perhaps some revered male figure in his youth had taken him to the boxing match. Perhaps he had bought it more recently, as an admirer of the Irish pugilist.
Shrugging off the question, she picked up one of the letters that had lain over it. She bit her lip, fingering the letter in temptation. No, I can’t possibly read this, she thought, but when she noticed that it was in a woman’s round, frilly handwriting, curiosity got the best of her. It could be from that girl he loved when he was a young lad—Lady Maura? The one who wouldn’t marry him…
Seized with a desire to find out if Lady Maura had lived to regret her choice, given the magnificent specimen that Lord Jack had become, she turned the letter over furtively only to learn that it wasn’t from Lady Maura at all.
Ah, it seemed Lord Jack had a sister!
Wide-eyed, Eden could not help herself. She spent the rest of the afternoon reading. His sister’s name was Jacinda, and she had written her errant brother volumes about their family, their ever-growing ranks of new babies and little children, and all their glittering adventures in Society. Though scarcely older than herself, the picture that emerged informed Eden that Lady Jacinda was nothing less than a leading hostess of the London ton. Tea in the Queen’s drawing room! A private ball at Devonshire House! The races at Ascot!
Jacinda’s accounts were far more authentic than the journalists’ secondhand reports about Society’s world in La Belle Assemblée. She sounded like an entirely warm, charming, and elegant personage—exactly the sort of lady Eden only wished she could become. It became clear that Jack’s whole family moved in the first circles of Society.
She could hardly believe it.
Indeed, she was in raptures reading about their amazing lives. Jacinda’s sparkling descriptions brought each of Jack’s siblings to life in her imagination. The proud lords did not sound quite so intimidating through the eyes of their little sister: Robert, the impeccable Duke of Hawkscliffe, champion of noble causes in the House of Lords and musical collector of fine pianos. His Grace lived in splendor in the heart of London with his beautiful and, by the sound of it, saintly duchess, Bel.
Next came the brave twins, Damien and Lucien—one raising thoroughbred racehorses for a hobby, the other raising eyebrows with all his controversial opinions. Damien, “our Colonel,” as Jacinda called him, proved to be a distinguished war-hero, while the mysterious Lucien worked in some vague capacity for the government. Jacinda told Jack that no one was quite sure what Lucien did, nor was he allowed to talk about it.
Then there was the charming Lord Alec, man about Town, who had just won the girl of his dreams along with an enormous fortune at the gaming tables. Jacinda also wrote about her best friend Lizzie, who seemed to be as close to them as any family member; newly married to a viscount, Lizzie, whoever she was, was expecting her first child. Noting the date of the letter, which was a few months old, Eden wondered if Lizzie had birthed the babe yet, and if it had been a boy or a girl.
As for Jacinda herself, Eden learned that she was married to a marquess she called Billy and who she swore was the dearest, handsomest, most wonderful being on the face of the earth; Jacinda said she was sure Jack would approve of him for reasons she would not commit to paper. Above all, she wrote paeans of love about her wee son, Beauregard. Beau’s first solid food. Beau’s first step. Beau’s first puppy. Beau escaping up the aisle in the middle of church, and everybody at the service vowing the golden-haired tot was the most beautiful child they’d ever seen. Beau was the apple of his papa Billy’s eye….
Through a mist of sentimental tears, Eden shook her head and slowly let the final sheet of thick linen paper drop to her lap.
Every letter from Lady Jacinda had ended the same way: Thank you for the gifts you sent, my dear brother. Please come home soon. We’d love to see you anytime. Your devoted sister, Jas.
Jacinda had not come out and said it, but the young woman clearly wondered why little Beau’s Uncle Jack did not wish to be part of the toddler’s life—of all their lives.
If I had a family like this, Eden thought, I’d never leave.
It was obvious Jack felt differently. Even in Jamaica, he had a reputation as a notorious loner. By the sound of it, the second-born Knight brother was as much of an exile from the mainstream of humanity as Eden’s own papa. But why?
She shook her head, troubled by the question as she put the letters away again and replaced the weapons, the boxing cup, and the black wool greatcoat over all. But after reading those letters, one fact had become very clear.
Tempting as he was, she could not let Jack kiss away her senses with seduction, for if things went too far and she ended up having to marry him, she saw now that she would only wind up sharing in his isolation, just the way she had endured Papa’s.
Like her father, he was too strong a man for her to harbor any illusions about changing his ways. You had to take or leave a man for what he was.
Eden knew what she wanted. She wanted life—normal life. Everyday things. She wanted people. She wanted crowded streets and chaos and grime and laughter and gossip and news. She’d had enough of pristine solitude; she was positively bursting with enthusiasm to rejoin the world again.
She felt drawn to Jack—she could admit that—but she had to protect herself. If she wound up in a situation where she had to marry him, to cast in her lot with another exile, then she might as well have stayed in the jungle and agreed to marry Connor.
The only difference was she felt safe around Jack, while Connor left her cold.
The sharp crack of a fowling piece and a burst of brutish laughter from the taffrail broke Dr. Farraday’s concentration.
Seated in the shade of the quarterdeck atop a mound of old netting, he looked up from his book of Wordsworth’s poetry, which he’d been reading to try to distract himself from wild worry over his daughter.
Squinting through his spectacles against the sun, he glanced toward the stern only to discover they were using frigate birds for target practice again. Victor pursed his mouth and fumed, feeling impotent, but he dared not stop them.
Connor and he exchanged a guarded look. Fortunately, he had already lectured his assistant on minding his bad temper lest he get them both killed.
It was just their luck that they had wound up procuring passage to England on the very ship of the damned.
Another frigate bird exploded in midair and rained a burst of blood into the sea, and Victor looked away, heartsick. Yes, the creatures were common enough and a nuisance, to boot, ever lighting on the spars and swirling about the masts, but they couldn’t be eaten and there was no reason whatever to kill them.
No reason but that doing so helped their drunken captain stave off boredom.
He searched his considerable intellect for some means of distracting the man, but God knew self-preservation forbade him from uttering a protest. He was quite sure that any complaint would have gotten him promptly thrown overboard, aye, and then the crew of lost souls should have had more sport laying wagers on how long it would take him to drown.
With a disheartened sigh, he closed his book of poetry and shook his head, wondering if humanity had improved one iota in the twelve years since he had fled it. For his daughter’s sake, he now had no choice but to face the harsh and grating noise of humanity again, as Wordsworth put it.
Certainly, if this ship was a fair sample of the ways of men, he still had no use for civilization.
The vessel was a very bad business all around, and Victor was almost ready to admit that it would have been be
tter to have gone with Jack Knight.
They had found Eden’s farewell note some hours after she had run away. By that time, it had been too dark to follow her; to embark on the river at night in their low-slung canoes would have been suicide, with the crocodiles in season. So they had been forced to wait ’til morning to go after her, and had spent the whole night hastily packing up their camp. That was to have been her job.
Connor, of course, had been beside himself, but Victor had somehow staved off panic. He had wanted to wring her neck, but somehow he could not escape the sense that he’d had this coming.
Besides, he possessed great faith in his daughter’s survival skills and her adventuring spirit. He held onto hope that she perhaps had changed her mind, that after a good cry and a few hours to sulk, they might still find her on the coast, lounging on the beach, perhaps, and begrudgingly ready at last to journey with them into the Amazon.
No such luck.
They had found her abandoned canoe hidden amongst the mangroves, but there was no sign of Eden nor The Winds of Fortune. Trudging along the sand in search of her, shouting her name, they had almost immediately run afoul of the Spanish forces patrolling the coast.
They had been stopped and in short order found themselves detained by officials of the Spanish navy. Taken into custody, they were put in separate cells for three days and interviewed at length by various mid-ranking officers in the service of King Ferdinand.
After a sennight, their identities and the purpose of their expedition into the Delta were finally verified when their papers were found, documenting their right to be there by the express permission of Spain’s designated Viceroy in Caracas.
By that time, many of their carefully preserved scientific samples had been compromised by the soldiers rummaging through their traveling chests, searching for any signs of criminality, but at last they were released and politely advised not to come back.
This was precisely what Victor had feared, but expulsion from his paradise no longer signified when his sweet child was out there somewhere without him, at large. The days to brood alone in his cell had awakened every fatherly instinct within him. He had lost his wife and would not, by God, lose his child as well. He blamed himself for her running off, as well he might.
More than anything else, he was glad that in those tense, hair-raising moments just before their capture, as the Spanish soldiers had closed in on them, surrounding them on the beach with guns drawn and bayonets bristling, he had managed to make Connor listen. Speaking swiftly under his breath to the outraged Australian, he had succeeded in convincing Connor to deny any knowledge of Jack Knight’s visit to the jungle, or rebel activity up at Angostura, or anything at all besides insects and reptiles and plants. “We know nothing, do you hear me?”
Connor had merely growled in thwarted fury, leaving Victor to wonder in their separate cells if his assistant had told the Inquisition anything or not. It had not gone well for Connor on the beach, and frankly, Victor marveled that they had not shot him on the spot.
Connor had gone a bit mad when they came to put him in shackles—rather like a wild animal backed into a corner, Victor thought uncomfortably. The Australian had even thrown a punch, but the Spaniards had held their fire.
Instead, half a dozen of them had leaped on the big man and had pummeled him down into the sand.
Now, four days later, Connor still had bruised ribs, a black eye, and a jaw that clicked when he moved it, but he informed Victor that he had said nothing of Jack. Thankfully, he understood as well as Victor did that the Spanish would have immediately sent a few of their galleons after Jack to investigate his suspicious visit to Angostura, and the sea battle that would have no doubt ensued would have put Eden in unacceptable danger.
Their terrifying ordeal behind them—so they thought—they had hastened to British-held Trinidad and had sought passage on the first boat they could find heading for England.
The one-eyed, one-legged captain, more than happy to take advantage of their desperation, had accepted in lieu of gold coins the naturalists’ expensive scientific equipment, which he could later pawn. As The Sea-Witch was the only vessel to leave Trinidad for some weeks, Connor and he had taken their chances.
At first glance it had been obvious that all was not well aboard The Sea-Witch, a leaky, squalid twenty-gun frigate with filthy decks and tattered sails. Her ostensible line of work was running sugar and tobacco to England from the West Indies, but Victor had a feeling that darker business was afoot somewhere out of sight. If this was so, he did not want to know it.
His only interest was to find his daughter safe. Until he held her tightly in his arms once more, the good of all mankind could go hang. He asked no questions, and this pleased the captain, too.
He and Connor had been prepared to endure dreadful accommodations, musty cots, tainted water, awful food—the only ones who ate well were the ship’s cats, thanks to a large supply of rats—but they had only sailed a few days out from port when it became apparent that the situation was even worse than they had feared.
The captain was every bit the crude, abusive ruffian they had suspected, but the crew eyed their master in surging hatred and Victor could already smell a mutiny brewing.
Perhaps the captain feared it, too, for he spared no man for even minuscule infractions.
One sailor had already been keel-hauled and another two flogged, but the captain, ever clunking up and down the decks on his wooden peg, spewing abuses, relied on his first mate to protect him, a man with the face of a rapist.
Even during more tranquil hours, the mood of cruelty was palpable aboard the ship—dark, untempered passions—violence that might flare out at any time. Connor and he had been appalled to watch the men beat to death a rat that had scampered across the fo’c’sle. The crewmen’s jovial laughter at the game was still ringing in Victor’s ears a few days later, when the first mate climbed out onto the bowsprit and shot the pair of dolphins swimming alongside the ship for the spectacle of watching the great sharks come and feed.
More disturbing or, rather, threatening even than this, however, was the change that Victor sensed coming over Connor with each day that passed.
He was keenly aware that the brawny Australian was all that stood between the vicious crew and himself, a small-framed, weaker man of poor vision and advanced years. Victor knew he was at risk, though had more brains than the whole of the crew put together.
Moreover, he could smell the mutiny coming and when violence broke out, he feared that his weakness would make him a natural target. He needed Connor’s protection now more than ever, but these days, he thought uneasily, his fellow naturalist did not seem entirely right in the head.
Trying to get the man to speak of what ailed him was as useless as ever, especially in their current situation. Victor could do nothing but watch his young friend with a scientist’s keen powers of observation in an effort to discover what was wrong, but he still could not quite put his finger on the nature of the problem. He had a terrible foreboding sense that something was…building in Connor.
Something that must eventually explode, like the crew’s churning hatred.
Perhaps with her woman’s intuition Eden had sensed the shadow in him, too; perhaps, Victor thought with a pang of regret, that was why she had refused the match.
In any case, he vowed to himself that from now on, he would listen to his daughter in a far more serious way than had been his habit in the past.
“Victor?”
Connor’s low query stirred him from his musings.
“Yes, my boy?”
Connor was staring down at the deck before him as though the answers he sought might be written there, if he could only make them out.
Victor took off his spectacles and turned to him with a worried frown. “What is it?”
“It’s…my fault she’s gone,” he forced out in a struggling tone.
“Now, now, my lad, we are both to blame—”
“No.” Connor se
nt him a tortured glance and shook his head slowly. “If I were different—better—but she did not want me and that is why she left.”
Victor looked at him sadly. He did not know what to say. Emotions had never been his strong suit, after all.
“You know this man, Jack Knight.” Connor sent him a penetrating look. “Will he hurt her?”
Victor knew the answer at once and shook his head, easily recalling the worshipful protectiveness with which the young Lord Jack had shielded Lady Maura’s every step. “No. Not if there’s the merest remnant of the lad I once knew beneath that hard outer shell. Not a chance.”
“I pray you’re right,” Connor said, staring forward. “Because if he harms one hair on her head, Jack Knight is a dead man.”
By evening, the whole ship buzzed with the sailors’ high-spirited but raunchy discussions of how Cap’n Jack would have his fun tonight with the tasty morsel locked up in his cabin. There were no wagers on if he would bed the wild redhead, only on how many times, and whether or not there’d be any girlish screaming.
Given their fair stowaway’s fierce display on deck this afternoon, the men hoped he’d stay on his toes with the wench, for she’d surely try to slit his throat if he laid a hand on her. If he was wise, a few opined, he’d tie her up before he climbed aboard.
Yes, they were princes, the lot of them, Jack thought wryly, ignoring their ribaldry with an occasional scowl here and there to silence them. God knew, the lusty images they concocted did nothing to help the underlying level of arousal that had gnawed at him all day after Miss Farraday’s lovely bath.
How he was going to keep his hands off her, he did not know, but Jack clung to his earlier decision to resist temptation. She was luscious, yes, and could breed him strapping sons, but lust aside, she was not at all what he had in mind.
When it came time for him to take a wife, he would choose someone docile. Someone tame. Someone who’d never dare question him, but would follow his orders as assiduously as if she were but an extension of himself.
