Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch. Miranda JarrettЧитать онлайн книгу.
name, Jeremiah?”
He turned his head away, confused. “Mama?”
“You all lived together on the farm on the island, didn’t you, Jeremiah?” she said softly, coaxing him to trade the terror for happier memories. She wasn’t sure it would work, but she wasn’t going to sit by and let him drop back into the black torment again without trying. “Your Mama and your father and your little sister Desire?”
“No.” He covered his eyes with his hands and the deep, shuddering sigh that racked his body was almost a sob.
She leaned closer, her voice more urgent. “I know you remember the farm, Jeremiah. The grand house on the hill near the water? You told me before it was the grandest house in the colony when you lived there.”
“But not with Mama.” He took his hands from his eyes, stretching his arms out over his head, and for a long time stared, without seeing, at the rough planks of the bunk above him. “Father took us to live with Granmam and Granfer at Crescent Hill after she died.”
“Oh, Jeremiah, I’m sorry!” She’d meant to turn his mind down more pleasant paths, not to this.
“At least she didn’t live to see what the British did to Newport during the war. She died soon after Obadiah was born, from the fever, I think.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“I don’t, at least not anymore.” His voice was flat, wrung clear of emotion, but at least the blind panic had left his eyes and his breathing had slowed. “The English killed Obie, just as they killed my father. They’re all dead now. Desire and I are the only ones left. And, of course, the children she has with Jack, though because of him they’ll be raised English, not American. In England there’s more to being the son of a lord than a Sparhawk.”
His regret touched her. “You never thought to marry and have children yourself?”
“Never found a woman mad enough to take me.” He sighed and tapped his fingers against the bulkhead. “My mother’s name was Elizabeth Pattison Sparhawk. She had red-gold hair and clapped her hands when she laughed.”
“She laughed often?” asked Caro wistfully.
“All the time when Father was home. She loved him, said Granmam, as much as any woman could. He wept at Mama’s burying, the only time I ever saw him do it.”
He rolled over onto his side, propping his head on his elbow to look at her. He was, she knew, trying very hard to look as if nothing had happened, as if his face weren’t still pale and lined with suffering, and though she’d never humiliate him by saying so, her heart went out to him for wanting so badly to hide his weakness from her.
“But here I am babbling about myself as if it’s the word from the mountain,” he said. “What’s more boring than another family’s history?”
“Oh, but it’s not boring at all!” Suddenly conscious of being in her nightgown, Caro sat back on her heels and tugged the fabric modestly over her knees. “I have no family of my own, you know. Orphans don’t.”
He raised one brow in question. “Someone raised you on that Hampshire farm.”
“Not my mother,” she said, and quickly looked away. “She died when I was quite young, just as yours did. I can scarcely remember her at all.”
Jeremiah knew she was lying, and too late he remembered what his sister had told him of Caro’s mother. If the old gossip was true, then it wasn’t that Caro had forgotten her mother. Instead, he guessed, she remembered too much.
He reached out and gently took her hand in his, lifting her fingers to his lips. “What a pair we are, eh, Caro?” he said wearily. “Both of us plagued by a past that cannot be undone.”
“What a pair, aye,” she whispered with an infinite sadness beyond tears. She slipped her hand free of his and rose, glancing over her shoulder at the lantern. Though she did not move herself, the shadows from the lantern swinging back and forth made crazy patterns across her fine-boned face. “Will it trouble you if I keep the lantern lit? All the sounds of a strange place make me uneasy in the dark.”
“No, sweetheart, it won’t trouble me at all,” he said softly. “Whatever you please.”
The swinging light caught and framed her smile, a glimpse of bittersweet empathy for him alone. For him, from her. And he knew then, as somehow he’d always known, that she was the only woman he would ever love.
Alone in his cabin, Bertle grumbled angrily to himself as he refilled the battered pewter tankard with rum and lime water. He should never have agreed to have the woman on board, no matter how much gold the husband had flashed in his eye. Since Eve in the garden, women had brought nothing but sorrow and grief and discontent to mankind, and this pretty little chit with the silver-blond hair and bullyboy husband were no different than the rest. Damned impudent bastard, challenging him like that on his own quarterdeck like some Yankee fighting cock in spurs!
Muttering another oath, Bertle reached into the tankard, fished out a lime slice between his thumb and forefinger, and lowered it carefully into his mouth. Sucking noisily, he pulled the heavy leather mail pouch from his sea chest and dumped the contents onto his desk.
The letters slipped and scattered like a little drift of snow, and with both hands Bertle sorted through them. The smallest ones, addressed in dainty hands and reeking of scent, would be from ladies to their sweethearts, mostly sailors serving in the English ships stationed at Naples, and Bertle put them aside. Later in the voyage, when he needed amusement, he might turn to them; some of those dainty ladies wrote the most lubricious love letters imaginable.
But tonight the letters Bertle sought would be from men of business or in the government, the letters with information that could do him the most service. Some of his most profitable ventures had come from just such information, that little extra advantage over his competitors, and Bertle smiled with satisfaction at the large pile of business letters before him now. With the situation with France so uncertain, every worried merchant in Portsmouth had taken what could be the last opportunity to write to his factor or agent in Italy.
With a surgeon’s delicacy Bertle slid a thin-bladed knife beneath the seal of the first letter and worked it free without cracking the stiff blob of stamped green wax. The sender’s name had meant nothing to him, but the recipient’s—that ancient harridan of a countess, Lady Byfield—had attracted Bertle’s attention immediately. The countess was said to have the ear of the Queen of Naples herself, which in that court was far better than the king’s. News sent to her might be interesting indeed.
But Bertle’s hopes fell as he scanned the letter. Only some impoverished grandson living beyond his means and begging for funds, whining over a horse gone lame at Newmarket and a dispute with an aunt who’d refused him money, as well. Nothing useful, nothing interesting. But just as Bertle was ready to toss the letter aside, a sentence caught his eye. The tightfisted aunt had run off with her lover, abandoning her husband and his fortune to the hopeful avarice of the letter’s writer and, he prayed, to the rejoicing of the countess. The missing aunt’s name was Caro, the present Lady Byfield, her lover a huge, violent outlaw, and where they had so completely vanished to was anyone’s guess.
Anyone’s guess, and Bertle’s surety. He plucked another wedge of lime from the tankard, savoring both the rumlaced juice and his own revenge. As tempting as it would be to confront that Yankee braggart, it would be better still to wait until Raleigh reached Naples.
He would call on the countess himself, pay his respects, tell her how honored he’d been to carry Lord and Lady Byfield themselves in his sloop. He’d tell her how he’d naturally respected their wish for anonymity and accepted the false surname they’d used, but the lady’s breeding was unmistakable. As for the so-called husband—well, he’d let the man’s real identity be discovered soon enough, and decide at the time which would pay the best, a reward for his honesty or blackmail for silence. Either way there would be gold, gold guineas and plenty of them.
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