Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch. Miranda JarrettЧитать онлайн книгу.
mother, the dowager countess, still lives, though she is very old and not well. I’ve never been presented to her. Before I was Frederick’s wife there wasn’t any question of it, but when she learned we planned to wed, she left England for Naples so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge me. It was—is—very painful for Frederick, though of course I understand entirely.”
Yet the way Caro looked down at her hands, rubbing one thumb against the other, told Jeremiah that she didn’t understand at all, and that the elder Lady Byfield’s scorn wounded her every bit as much as it did Frederick. Pompous old bitch, thought Jeremiah angrily. His sister had told him how she herself had been snubbed in certain aristocratic circles simply for being an untitled American who’d had the audacity to marry the younger son of an English lord, and he imagined what those same overbred vultures would make of poor Caro.
“Two years ago this summer Frederick’s mother finally agreed to see him again,” she continued sadly, “and with great joy and eagerness he booked his passage to Naples. She specifically excluded me from her invitation, but Frederick held great hopes for their reconciliation. I wept for days and days after he sailed. We had never been apart, you know, not since my fourteenth birthday.”
Jeremiah nearly choked on his ale. He’d known she’d been young, but fourteen, for all love!
“I had one letter from him,” she said, unaware of his reaction, “brought by another ship that had met his, and then nothing more because—why is everyone running away?”
All around them men were shouting and abandoning their drink and their women to crowd out the back door, some not waiting their turn and climbing through the windows instead.
A laconic barmaid reached over to take Caro’s empty plate and swipe a rag across the tabletop. “It’s the pressgangs again, lamb,” she explained. “They’ve been at it so hot all this week that the few men left run like frightened coneys at the very hint o’ a lieutenant an’ his bullyboys.”
Slowly the woman straightened, hands on her hips and her full breasts jutting out above her bodice as she languidly surveyed Jeremiah. “Best tell your pretty sailor man here to turn tail with the others ‘less he wants to spend the next seven years servin’ against the French.”
Caro gasped and shoved her bench back from the table. “Oh, Captain, she’s right! There must be three score navy vessels in the harbor now—I saw them from the window at George’s house—and they’ll all be looking for men! Come, hurry, you don’t want them to take you!”
“Hush now, lass, they’ll not take me.” He caught her wrist and gently forced her back down to her seat. “I’m an American, mind?”
The barmaid sniffed. “Don’t be so sure, Yankee. There was two New Yorkers here the other night had their protections torn up right afore their eyes. The lieutenant called them bloody liars an’ read them into the king’s service anyways.”
Alarmed all over again, Caro tugged at Jeremiah’s hand. “Hurry, then, there’s little to be gained taking chances like this!”
“There’s no chance to it, Caro,” scoffed Jeremiah, touched and pleased by her concern. “I’m an American, and I’m a captain and owner of my own vessels. Six of ‘em, last I counted. They can’t touch me.”
Pointedly the barmaid studied how he was dressed and sniffed again, not believing his claim for a moment. “Please yerself, Cap’n,” she said with a dismissive shrug, “for here they be now.”
Abruptly the fiddler stopped playing in the middle of his tune, and every one of the people who remained—women, toothless old men and those missing limbs, sailors already serving with a ship and watermen protected by the crown—turned to stare in hostile silence at the six men standing in the doorway. At their head was a young navy lieutenant in a blue coat and two marines in red, and behind them stood three more seamen, clearly chosen for their size and fearsomeness.
The lieutenant scowled as he scanned the room. Empty seats with half-full tankards and tumblers before them were testimony enough that they’d arrived too late to find any useful men.
“An empty net tonight, eh, Lieutenant?” taunted one old man, his cackle echoed by the others. “The fish all slipped through yer net again?”
Angrily the officer searched the room for the man who’d mocked him. His gaze stopped when he spotted Caro and Jeremiah at their table near the far wall, and with a tight-lipped, predatory smile on his face he headed toward their table. One of the bad men, decided Caro uneasily, one of the ones who only wanted to hurt.
“You there, skulking behind the petticoats!” he said sharply. “What ship, eh?”
Her anxiety mounting, Caro watched as Jeremiah slowly rose to his feet, using his height to his advantage as he towered over the others. It seemed to her he was twice the size of the little lieutenant, and despite his rough, common clothing, there was more authority in him alone than in all three of the uniformed Englishmen combined.
The lieutenant knew it, too, and didn’t like it. “I asked you your ship, you insolent dog.”
“I’m not a dog, but a captain,” answered Jeremiah with a mildness that didn’t fool Caro. She thought of the pistols in his belt beneath his coat and the knife at his waist and who only knew what else, and prayed he wouldn’t be halfwitted enough to use any of them now.
“An American captain,” continued Jeremiah, “a shipmaster and an owner of nearly twenty years’ standing. I stood my own quarterdeck before you were breeched, you English puppy, and I’ll thank you to remember it before I report you to your betters for ill breeding.”
The others in the room hooted and laughed derisively. “Silence, all of you,” bellowed the lieutenant as his men raised their cudgels around him, “or I’ll have you all taken in for disrespect to an officer of the crown!”
The cudgels, not his threats, brought an uneasy silence, and the officer turned back to Jeremiah. “You claim to be an American captain. What ship? What port? Where, sir, are your papers?”
“I am Captain Jeremiah Sparhawk of Providence, in the State of Rhode Island in New England.” There was no mistaking the pride in his voice as he handed the lieutenant a document with a heavy red seal stamped into one corner. “Most recently of my own brig the Chanticleer.”
“The Chanticleer? I know of no ship by that name in port.”
“She was lost,” said Jeremiah softly, “last November.”
The lieutenant grunted as he took the document. “That’s convenient, isn’t it?”
Caro held her breath as the officer scanned the paper, his lips moving slightly as he read to himself. If what Jeremiah said was true, then the man must be satisfied and leave them alone.
But instead he tossed the paper scornfully onto the floor at his feet. “A Yankee forgery, and an amateurish one at that. Were I in Boston, I’ll wager I could buy another like it for half a crown. But I don’t even believe you are American. Sparhawk, that would be a Scottish name, wouldn’t it?”
Caro could see Jeremiah tense, how he consciously flexed his hands at his sides to keep them from making fists.
“In Cromwell’s time, it was English,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm, “but it’s American now, and has been since we tossed your kind off our shores twenty years ago.”
“He lies, sir,” spoke up one of the marines, his role obviously rehearsed. “The rascal’s from Greenock, sir. I knew his people there.”
The lieutenant smiled with triumph. “Then he shall do his duty in the maintop of the Narcissus, or be flogged for the lying, sneaking Scotsman he is. Seize him, before he makes off!”
But outnumbered though he was, the fury in Jeremiah’s green eyes kept the Englishmen at bay. “If you do not choose to believe me, then perhaps you’ll believe the word of Vice Admiral Lord