How to Be a Proper Lady

by Katharine Ashe

  “Except their captain.”

  “Rumor is as rumor does. Some men’s bound to change.”

  Viola slanted her quartermaster a narrow look, unwinding her thick cravat and scratching her neck, her legs steadying to land slowly. The ten-week cruise had not wearied her. She would appreciate a hot bath and clothes washed in fresh water, but she was anxious to get back aboard her ship and head south.

  To Aidan.

  She was nearly five-and-twenty, and she had decided to tell him she was willing to live on land for at least six months every year. This time, he would marry her. He would.

  “Think your wife will take you in this time, Crazy?”

  He rubbed his hand across scruffy white whiskers. “Said she would when I left last time, but she’s none too consistent, you see.”

  “Good luck to you. We’ll pick you up when we return in August.”

  “Heading on to Port of Spain, then?”

  Viola passed her hand across her brow, shoving back matted hair. Everything was damp, from her coat to-oddly-her anticipation.

  “Mm hm.” She stared at the torchlight illuminating the doorways along the street. But she would not find answers there, only in the bright Caribbean sun.

  “Haven’t heard from Mr. Castle lately, now, have you?”

  “Not since December.”

  He cleared his throat. “Them planters gets busy sometimes. And he’s still learnin’ the ropes, mind you. ’Taint every day a sailor sets onto land to farm.”

  “It’s hardly a farm, Crazy.” With the money Aidan had saved from six years as lieutenant aboard her father’s ship, he had purchased fifty acres of sugarcane.

  His brow frazzled. “You go on down there and see what’s what.”

  “Will you check up on my house on your way home? The renters are good folk, but I should see if they’ve need of anything.”

  “You won’t be pushing off for another fortnight. Why don’t you take a stop by yourself?”

  “Too much work to do here unloading the cargo we took on, and refitting. I won’t have the time.” Or the will.

  “Got no fond feelings for that old house, have you?”

  “You know about that jail we just sent those boys off to?” She gestured. Crazy nodded. She lifted a brow.

  He chuckled. “Never did like to be left there, did you, Miss Violet?”

  “No, sir.” But her father had left her there nonetheless, for months on end with her aunt and three baby cousins while he’d gone off smuggling, then in 1812 when the war began, privateering for Massachusetts. Viola had never cared for cooking or washing or sewing. She’d only liked to read the newsprints and, when she could get her hands on them, stories of adventure.

  Every spring when he’d taken her back aboard, he swore she was born to it. He couldn’t keep her ashore.

  Serena had always said she would take to sea life like a natural. Serena… her beautiful, sweet elder sister who long since believed her dead, just like their mother. Who probably never thought of her at all now. Who would be shocked to see how her little sister had turned out, tanned and uncouth and leading a scruffy band of seamen working for Americans.

  For years after her father stole her out from under her sister’s eyes, right off the property of the man she’d always thought was her father, Viola had hoped to return to England. She had written letter after letter, sending them off when her real father wasn’t ashore so he wouldn’t know and be hurt by it. For a hardened sailor, Fionn Daly had a heart of jelly when it came to the females he loved-his widowed sister, Viola, and Viola’s mother, whom he never gave up on despite the fact that she married another man. Right up to the day his extravagant devotion killed her.

  Serena never replied to Viola’s letters, not one in six years. So at sixteen Viola ceased writing. But sometimes she still wondered, and wished she had a spyglass that reached all the way to Devonshire. Serena would surely be wed now, with a handful of babies of her own…

  But Viola might never find out. She was going to marry Aidan. Since he refused to go back to England until he made his fortune, she wouldn’t be going there anytime soon either. Her life was here. In America. With Aidan.

  “Good luck with the missus, Crazy. Hope she takes you back this time.”

  “God willin’, miss.” He chuckled. “Could use the extra prayers if you got the time.”

  “Oh,” she laughed, “God doesn’t listen to me about that sort of thing any longer. Hasn’t for years.” She waved and continued on to the boardinghouse. On a quiet, narrow street removed from the bustle of the docks, it boasted the peace and quiet she never got on board her ship. She couldn’t stand it for more than a fortnight or so at a time.

  A withered old lady answered the door.

  “Mrs. Digby, your apple cobbler has beckoned me back once again.”

  “Miss Violet.” The woman’s eyes crinkled. “Welcome home.”

  Hardly home. But the linens were always dry and hadn’t any bugs.

  “For your trouble.” Viola pressed a dozen coins into the proprietress’s shaky palm and climbed the stairs to her room. She couldn’t afford extravagance, but Mrs. Digby kept her in reasonable comfort.

  In her chamber she stripped off wool and linen thick with rain and salt and sweat. The serving girl came to make up the fire and Viola gave her a penny, then stood in a tin basin with a pot of hot water to wash. Before the hearth she dried her hair, finger combing out the knots, then fell into bed. She would sleep till Sunday if she didn’t have to rise early the following morning to see to the April’s cargo.

  Before her eyelids fluttered closed, her gaze rested on a tiny statuette on the table beside her bed. Her most prized possession except for her ship.

  Her father had traded a whole set of silver plate he’d taken off a Dutch merchantman for this treasure, her thirteenth birthday present. About the length of her forefinger, it was intricately carved and painted with graceful precision. Gold, red, blue, green, yellow. A tiny figure of an Egyptian king.

  A pharaoh.

  Years later, when she first heard of a pirate with that name-a sailor so brutally successful even Spanish buccaneers feared to cross him-she wanted to meet him, to see with her own eyes the man who was bigger than life. A real legend. Recently, when talk at dockside taverns said the Pharaoh had turned to wrecking pirate vessels exclusively, she wanted to meet him even more.

  Now she had.

  And because of her, a mere woman, the mighty Pharaoh was sleeping in a jail cell tonight. Also because of her, come the morning, he would be free. If he kept that gorgeous mouth shut.

  She fell asleep smiling.

  Jin awoke shivering.

  He clamped down on his body’s reflexive reaction. Not to the cold. To the iron bars hovering before his eyes.

  He shrugged up straighter against the wall, pulling in long, chest-deep breaths, willing away the crawling damp of his flesh and the throb of panic weakening his limbs. Dawn light filtered through the tiny square of a window just above a man’s head in the ten-by-ten cell. About him and in the adjoining cage his crew slept or slumped on the musty floor. The lot of them rested soundly anywhere. So could Jin. Usually.

  He hadn’t been behind bars in twelve years, since he was seventeen. On that occasion, two men had paid for his liberty. At his hands. With their lives.

  Eight years before that, with wrists in irons, he’d been dragged fighting onto an auctioneer’s block in the blaze of the Barbadian sun. That time a boy had paid for Jin’s freedom. With gold. A twelve-year-old boy to whom Jin owed his life. Each day of freedom since then still seemed like a stolen gift.

  A steady, muted click turned his head. In a corner of the cell across the way, Little Billy knocked a battered wooden die against the wall. His neck craned up and he flashed a quick grin.

  “Mornin’, Cap’n.” At sixteen, Billy had not yet outgrown his name; short, skinny, gangly, and grinning like a lad. “Ready for the judge?”

  “There will be no judge, Bil
l.” Jin ran his gaze along the walls and bars of the port jail cell, searching for weakness in the structure. Out of habit. He needn’t. They would be released within hours. He had already heard it from the harbor officer the night before when the fellow delivered the rags Jin and his crew now wore in lieu of their own clothes. The April Storm’s master had lied to the port master about him and his ship.

  She was mad. He would be taking a madwoman back to her respectable family in England.

  Beside him Mattie expelled a great cavernous yawn. Lifting hands as big as hams, he rubbed them up and down his face and shook his heavy head, then set a glowering look on Jin.

  “What’s the plan, Cap’n?”

  “I am working on it.”

  “Why don’t you just pays these fellas for her, Cap’n?” Little Billy scuttled toward them and gestured to the ceiling, apparently intending to indicate the coastal officials. “Take her off their hands, like?”

  “You ain’t thinking straight.” Mattie slugged the lad on a bony shoulder. “That mort ain’t nobody’s property.”

  “Didn’t matter with that gal he took up with back in Coruna.” Billy’s pale brow wrinkled.

  “What’d you know ’bout that?” Matouba’s bass sounded from his barrel chest. Across the narrow cell, his round eyes were two spots of white in his ebony face. “You weren’t but a mite at the time.”

  “He didn’t take up with that one,” Mattie grunted. “And she weren’t free. Master Jin bought her off that bloke as was beating her.” He turned his head to Jin. “Whatever happened to that little Spanish girl?”

  Jin shrugged. But he remembered. He remembered every one of the people he freed, their faces, their names. He had found that girl a post as a domestic servant in an old spinster’s house. The woman was ancient but respectable. It was the best he could do in a foreign city. In ports he knew better, he had an easier time of it.

  It didn’t matter. Every time he bought someone’s freedom, another chip of the hard, cold stone of rage and old despair inside him fell away. But they were, each one of them, tiny chips indeed, and the stone still quite large. He had a thousand more to go before the rock finally disappeared.

  “I sez you buy yourself ’bout four ships, Cap’n, maybe five or six, and stock ’em with crews,” Matouba intoned. “Then you sneak up on that April Storm in open water, close her in, and ’scort her to England like that.”

  “No.” Jin shook his head. “She must come willingly.” A woman like Violet la Vile would not come any other way, unless he tied her up and stuffed her in the bilge for the month’s journey. But Jin did not treat other human beings like that. Not any longer. “No,” he repeated. “I have another plan.”

  When he first started searching for Viola Carlyle, he had harbored hope he would find her holed up in some little house ashore, anxious to return to England, merely lacking the resources or even the gumption. But after months of searching, when clues finally led him to the privateer captain Violet the Vile, he had been forced to reevaluate. Her real father, Fionn Daly, had been first a barely successful smuggler then an even less successful privateer. He probably only allowed her aboard for practical purposes-to see to the domestic tasks so he would not have to pay a sailor for it. No doubt she’d be glad to return to England and society, Jin guessed.

  He’d guessed wrong. The captain of the April Storm-confident, brash, and nothing like a lady-quite obviously would not come easily. Jin must convince her. But he had spent a lifetime alternately lying and knifing his way to victory after victory. In the end, Miss Viola Carlyle would sail to England with him of her own accord and take up again the life she was born to live. He had no doubt of it whatsoever.

  Neither did he have a choice.

  Twenty years earlier Alex Savege had bought his freedom and saved his life. Nearly a decade after that, when Jin had been nothing but a thieving, scrapping ball of anger directed against the whole world, Alex again offered him another option. He had taken him aboard the Cavalier and shown him how to be a man. Alex’s new wife still believed her half sister to be alive. A lord now, Alex did not need Jin’s money or even his assistance with his ship any longer. All Alex cared about now was his wife’s happiness.

  And so, unbeknownst to either Lord or Lady Savege, Jin had set out to find Viola Carlyle. To repay his debt. He would return her safely to the bosom of her family, or he would finally die trying.

  The harbor constable pursed his lips, looked Jin up and down for the third time, and demanded gold.

  Jin produced a vowel. The port master’s lips curved upward. He locked the office and went to the bank himself. Jin waited without concern. The Massachusetts Bank account of Mr. Julius Smythe, merchant, boasted a hefty balance.

  In short order the port master returned, all smiles.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Smythe.” He bowed as though Jin were actually the gentleman he pretended to be when he did business at the bank. “You and three of your men may go free.”

  Back on the docks with the late-spring morning sun shining through masts and rigging onto worn planks, he told Matouba, Mattie, and Billy to take themselves off until he needed them. The boy and Matouba went off bickering as usual. Mattie cast Jin a dark look, then lumbered away as well.

  He walked down the quay, scanning the scene already busy with the traffic of carts, sailors, and merchants, and found what he sought: a sparkling new vessel, the railings not yet even affixed. The sounds of hammers smacking at wood echoed from atop. A pair of boys sanded the main deck, still fresh wood without varnish or tar.

  She was not the Cavalier. Nothing would ever be the Cavalier. But she was a beauty, small and fast, just as he’d heard she would be when he passed through Boston six months earlier and saw the plans for her. She would suit his needs perfectly.

  But a man could not purchase a ship appearing as though he’d spent the night in jail. He turned and made his way toward his bank.

  Two hours later, freshly shaved and clothed, Jin folded the letter that had awaited him at his bank these four months, and tucked it into his waistcoat. He nearly smiled. The Admiralty occasionally managed to send him correspondence via commanders in the field. This letter, however, had not come from the navy.

  Viscount Colin Gray was still looking for him.

  For years Jin had labored on behalf of another servant of the crown than the Admiralty, a secret organization buried deep in the Home Office, known to only those who required its assistance. The Falcon Club.

  The Club had disbanded the previous year-rather, nominally so. Only five of them to begin with, four yet lingered. Jin’s fellow agent and sole contact with the Club’s shadowy director, Colin Gray, had not given up on the organization’s mission, a mission dedicated to seeking out lost souls and bringing them home. Not any lost souls, though; the Falcon Club’s quarries were those whose disappearance, even existence, threatened the peace of the kingdom’s most elite and whose absence and recovery must not become public knowledge. For the safety of England.

  Jin had not quit-not in so many words. But for the present, he hadn’t the time or inclination to humor either Gray or the Admiralty. He had finally found the quarry he had chosen for himself two years earlier. Another lost soul. A woman gone for so long that she no longer knew she was lost.

  Moving along the quay, he came to the ship that had brought him into port. Resting in her berth like a swaybacked carriage horse in the traces, the April Storm had to be twenty years old if she was a day, a mid-sized brig, square rigged for speed but too heavy in the hull for true maneuverability.

  His gut ached. Having been taken by such a ship after outrunning nearly every other vessel on the Atlantic was nothing short of travesty.

  His gaze alighted on a girl working at a pile of rope on the dock beside the ship, and his jaw relaxed. She bent to her work, her back to him, revealing a backside perfectly rounded for a man’s hands. Snug breeches encased thighs that stretched sweetly to shapely calves. A white linen shirt pulled at her shoulders as
she worked, defining delicate bones and slender arms.

  His boot steps sounded on the planking and she glanced over her shoulder. She paused. Then, straightening, she drew off her hat and passed the back of her hand across her damp brow.

  Jin’s blood warmed with the appreciation of a fine woman, all too infrequently enjoyed these days since he had bent to his current mission. Her brow was high and clear, dark eyes large and shaded with long lashes, nose pert, and her mouth a full, rosy invitation to pleasure. Strands of richly brown hair curled upon her brow, the rest of the long, satiny mass pulled back in a leather thong. She looked vaguely familiar. And pretty. Far too pretty to be laboring dockside.

  “Is the master of this vessel about?” He gestured to the April Storm.

  She nodded. Her eyes seemed to sparkle in the spring sunlight. Jin smiled slightly. It was an age since he’d had a woman beneath him, and the way this one stared him straight in the eye looked promising.

  “Fetch her then.” He allowed his grin more rein. “And be quick about it.”

  “I can be quicker than you imagine, sailor. She’s already standing in front of you.” Her voice was as smooth as her satiny hair. She set her fists upon her curved hips and Jin’s gaze dropped to the dark spot just beneath her lower lip.

  His grin faded.

  A smile like Christmas cake curved across Viola Carlyle’s alluring lips.

  “So they let you go free, did they? More the fools they.” She laughed, then turned back to her work. “I see you found some clothes.”

  “I did indeed.” And hers still clung to her damnably feminine body the same as a moment ago when he did not know she was a madwoman and a lady. “I bought my way free.” Along with Mattie, Billy, and Matouba. The rest of his crew would have to wait. He could not be seen to be throwing about gold too freely. But they were accustomed to tight quarters, and without charges to hold them the harbor master would release them soon enough.