Marriage of Mercy. Carla KellyЧитать онлайн книгу.

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       Prologue

      Robert Inman, sailing master, had a cheery temperament. He had always been inclined to take the bitter with the sweet and chalk everything else up to experience. Still, it was a hard slog to reconcile himself to another year of captivity in Dartmoor, a prison newly built but scarcely humane.

      Recently, among the Orontes survivors, he had noticed a change in conversational topics. A year ago in 1813, conversation had been almost exclusively of their capture off Land’s End, where they had been toying with British merchant shipping.

      With a monumental sigh, Captain Daniel Duncan had handed over his letter of marque and reprisal to the victor. The captain of the Royal Navy’s sloop of war was a mere ensign, but regrettably had had the weather gauge, so capture had come as a matter of course. Rob had felt a serious pang to see the triumphant crew haul down the Stars and Stripes and fly British colours from the elegant, slanted mast of the privateer Orontes.

      When the humiliation of capture turned to resignation, tongues loosened up. The powder monkey boasted there wasn’t a jail in England that could hold him long. Duncan’s first and only mate declared that war would end soon and their discomfort would be a mere annoyance.

      Both the powder monkey and the mate had been wise beyond their years, apparently. No jail held the monkey long. He claimed the distinction of being the first to die, courtesy of an infected tooth that the prison governor felt deserved little attention, since it resided in an American mouth.

      The first mate’s discomfort—indeed, his final one—had proved to be a serious annoyance after rampant scurvy opened up an old wound inflicted by Tripolitan pirates. The scar in his thigh had separated, gaped wider until blood poisoning accepted the invitation and waltzed in, a most unwelcome guest.

      As for the war ending soon, no one’s expectations were high. The carpenter keeping the calendar had to be reminded to cross off yet another day on the wall, one very much like the day before, with thin gruel for breakfast, and gruel and a crust of bread for supper, and nothing in between.

      Earlier conversations had revolved around food and women, as in what each seaman would eat, upon liberation, and just how many women he would sport with at the first opportunity. Food was too tantalising to discuss any more, and women not even a distraction, not to starving men. Rob had spent one fruitless hour trying to remember the pleasures of the flesh, only to realise he had not enough energy for what would follow, even in his generally fertile imagination.

      For the most part, everyone sat in silence all the day. Evenings were reserved for night terrors ranging from rats on the prowl to memories of battle, near drownings to other incarcerations during this pesky war brought on by Napoleon. Those were the good dreams. Worse was the reality of scarecrow prisoners crawling among the men, preying on the more feeble.

      The eternal optimist, considering his origins, Rob knew things could be worse. He had to say one thing about Dartmoor: the place was built solid, one cold stone on top of another. The wind found its way inside, though, through iron bars that no warden thought should be covered in winter, because that would be too great a comfort for prisoners.

      And that was the problem for Robert Inman, sailing master. More than food and women’s bodies, he craved the feel of wind on his face, but not the wailing wind that filtered into the prison over high walls. He knew what the right wind could do to a sail. He knew he could stand in one spot on any slanting deck and know precisely what to do with wind. In Dartmoor, he could only dream about wind on his face—the fair winds of summer, the fitful puffs of the dog latitudes, the humid offerings of southeast Asia.

      All he wanted was the right wind.

       Chapter One

      If Grace Curtis, formerly known as the Honourable Miss Grace Curtis, had decided to waste her life in fruitless self-pity, she knew several genteelly poor persons to use as her character models.

      Agatha Ralls lived in rented rooms over the Hare and Hound, a steep decline from her childhood in Ralls Manor, a structure built during the reign of one Edward or the other, which now housed bats. Family fortunes had taken a dismal turn when a now-distant earl had backed the wrong horse in the era of Cavaliers and Roundheads. That the family’s resounding crash had taken some 150 years was some testament to earlier wealth. Now Miss Ralls lived on very little and everyone knew it.

      Or Grace could have looked to the ludicrous spectacle of Sir George Armisted, who maintained a precarious existence on the family estate, when it would have been much wiser to sell it to a merchant with more money than class. Instead, Sir George sat in threadbare splendour in a leaking parlour.

      Grace had watched her own father shake his head over Sir George, asking out loud how such a fool justified the expensive snuff he dipped and wine he decanted. That Sir Henry Curtis was