A Scandal to Remember (25 page)

“What is this?”

Jane glanced over her shoulder, to find the captain sniffing at the steam curling from the spout of the teapot. “Tea, sir.” She had brewed up her most aromatic blend and sweetened it strongly in the hopes that it would tempt the older man—as her grandfather had aged, Jane had noticed that he liked things more strongly flavored.

“Hmm.”

It was not exactly a sound of approval, but neither was it disapproval, and if nothing else Jane had learned that it was easier to ask forgiveness for something one had already done than to get permission to do it in the first place. “Here, sir. Let me pour that for you.”

She did so, and put the cup in his shaky hands. “That’s warm, sir. Mind yourself.”

“I’ll mind myself,” the old man groused. “You mind yourself.”

“I will, sir.” Really, with all his superficial grumbling, he
did
remind her of her great-grandfather. “I’ll just have these windows done in half a jiffy, or less than that. And then you’ll have more light to see by. And won’t that be a better thing?”

He did not comment, but sipped the tea, and watched her progress from pane to pane until she was done.

“There, sir. Isn’t that brighter?” Jane also cracked the windows to chase away the stale odor with a whiff of fresh air, which riffled a loose pile of papers sticking out of a portable writing desk set to the side. “That’s a lovely light to read your correspondence by.”

“I suppose.”

Another idea of how she had managed her great-grandfather entered her mind. “And I’ll just clear this mess away then, won’t I, so you’ll have things nice and tidy again.” Jane collected a few more of the assorted dirty neck cloths and shirts she found kicked into the corners, but there was no real hope that the place could be made tidy with anything other than a thorough clean out with a scrub brush and a bucket of lye. “There, sir, that’s cheerier.”

“Is that what you think you’re doing, cheering me?”

“Am I, sir? That’s nice then. But I thought maybe what I might do was read for you. My father used to want me to read to him of an evening. Books, and sometimes letters, or the Bible if he’d a mind for scripture. And it looks like you’ve a powerful lot of correspondence here that needs some reading.”

“There used to be a man who saw to my correspondence.”

“Well, I might not be so good as a
man,
but I did used to manage my father’s correspondence. We’ll just give it a try, sir.” Jane obtained her object with the simple expediency of slipping the first letter off the top of the file. “And you can stop me if I don’t read well enough for you, sir.”

She was into the fourth letter from a creditor—this from his tailor, Mr. “Old Mel” Meredith in Portsmouth, when the captain’s steward interrupted bearing his own pot of tea. But his, Jane noted with a disapproval bordering on disgust, was redolent of the astringent juniper berry that could only denote the presence of gin.

“What’s this then?” the steward asked, his voice full of suspicion, like an animal who puffs up his feathers at finding his territory invaded by another species. “The captain doesn’t like to be bothered.”

The captain made no defense of what he liked or didn’t like, so Jane lofted her eyebrow and gave the man a calmer response than his insolence deserved. “It has been no bother. Just a bit of reading. And tea.
Real
tea.”

Manning’s glance slid to the captain, before he answered in a low voice. “I just bring what I’m asked.”

“You shouldn’t have to be asked to pick things up, and clean up the place,” she answered just as quietly, but she impressed her vehemence upon Manning by her insistence. “You should be ashamed you let it get to such a state. Ashamed. I daresay the insides of those great guns on the deck are cleaner than this day cabin.”

Manning’s response was a sullen, “I only do as I’m told.” And Manning had weapons of his own. “Does Mr. Ransome know you’re here?”

Nothing could be so guaranteed to put her on guard. Jane had thought Ransome conquered, but her chin rose along with her trepidation. “I fail to see how what I do with my time is any concern of either yours or Mr. Ransome’s.”

The steward shook his head. “He won’t like it.”

An interesting understatement, to be sure. Mr. Ransome seemed to have a rather sharp interest in everything that went on onboard
Tenacious.
“Then I suggest you don’t tell him.”

“Not worth my life to keep that from him. And he’d find out anyways. Has his ways, Mr. Ransome does.”

He certainly did. Underhanded ways. But so did she. “Then you may tell him we are reading.”

“Reading?”

“Yes, reading books.” Even Ransome could not object to such an innocuous activity. Jane tucked herself comfortably into the stern gallery bench, fished out her copy of Sir Walter Scott’s adventures of young Edward Waverley, who was entering into a world which was beautiful because it was new, and raised her voice so the captain could hear her.
“It is then sixty years since Edward Waverly took leave of his family to join the regiment of dragoons in which he had lately obtained a commission.”

The captain said nothing, but since he did not object, Jane took his silence as tacit approval and read on. And as she read the long, picaresque story, she was amused to find her own thoughts wandering from the wild and windswept hills of the Scotland in the story, to the wild, windswept, coast of South America. In the gray light, the wilds off the starboard quarter were less than hospitable; she found them interesting and beautiful all the same in the long, gray, afternoon light.

Jane took a fresher look out the window into the dusk. “Has it gone as late as that?”

“No,” the captain insisted. “It’s not late. Keep reading.”

There was such warm insistence in his voice that she turned to him. And that was when she saw it. With the captain’s face illuminated by the flat gray light from the windows, she saw the milky opalescence in his old blue eyes.

There was a reason he had not continued reading on his own. The same reason that he had not paid his bills, or read his correspondence. The reason he liked to stay in the close confines of his own cabin. “Oh, sir. Your eyes.”

Chapter Fifteen

Jane sought Dance out immediately after quitting the cabin, and found him on the quarterdeck, where he looked as if he were trying to drive himself to an early grave with his ceaseless work and worrying about the ship. Jane had no idea if her news would aggravate or relieve him, but bad news ought to be told as soon as possible.

Because bad news it was—she felt as if the unrelenting grayness of the ocean and the skies had dripped its way down into her soul.

“Lieutenant Dance? I need to speak to you.”

Whatever he heard in her voice sharpened his attention, and he looked at her with that probing singularity of focus that made her so uncomfortable and so pleasantly agitated all at the same time.

“Jane,” he asked, not even lowering his voice in front of the others. “What is it?”

It was remarkable how his use of her name undid her with such devastating swiftness. She had to shake her head and brush her eyes with the back of her hand and smile—a polite negation in front of the crew, who seemed to have eyes everywhere.

Jane lowered her voice. “It’s about the captain.”

His scowl only deepened. “What about the—”

Whatever the lieutenant might have said was cut off when the deck beneath their feet seemed to lift and shudder from the crashing report of a gun. From directly below.

Lieutenant Dance called to Mr. Lawrence, “You have the deck,” and was clattering his boots down the ladder to the gun deck, as Mr. Denman came running up from below. Though the ship continued to sail on, rolling up and down the churning waves as a fresh rain squall started to slant across the open waist, the men had all frozen at their work, looking and waiting as Dance followed the sound of the report to the captain’s stern cabin.

Jane crowded down the companionway with the others, but she could see little between the men’s shoulders.

“Guard the door.” That was Dance, speaking to the marine sentry stationed outside the captain’s cabin—the same young man who had been dozing in the doorway when she had left the cabin not twenty minutes ago.

From what she could see, the cabin was cloaked in darkness—the lamp she had left burning had been extinguished.

“Get a light,” came Dance’s order. “Sir? Captain Muckross, sir?”

They could hear nothing. Jane, along with the men congregated in the companionway, pressed closer to the door, listening and looking into the dark doorway.

Which was abruptly filled by the lieutenant, who, if he had looked like hell earlier, now looked five times worse—hollowed out as if he had taken some great blow.

“No one in or out,” he instructed the sentry, “except by my order.”

“What is it, Lieutenant?” someone asked.

Dance shook his head—a mute, emphatic negative. “Pass word for Manning,” was all he said before he shut the door.

In the absence of facts, rumor rose up in its place. “It was a gunshot,” someone in the muttering crowd stated. “I heard it plain as day.”

“Who d’ye think he shot?”

“Ransome,” was the name muttered under more than one breath.

“What’s that?” The crowd turned and edged back from the big, dark bosun, like ninepins moving away from a heavy bowls ball.

Jane ducked behind Mr. Parkhurst’s narrow back.

“Nothing, Mr. Ransome,” came the quick denial from the crowd, before another, smarter soul thought to change the subject. “There’s doings up the captain’s cabin.”

“I’ll see to it,” was Ransome’s confident assertion as he made his way forward. “Stand aside.”

The sentry swallowed so nervously, Jane thought his Adam’s apple was going to bounce out of his throat. “Lieutenant said no one out or in, except by his order.”

“Well, that doesn’t include me,” Ransome countered.

The sentry held his ground, but was saved the necessity of challenging Ransome by the appearance of Manning.

“Make way,” he cried, as he rushed up from somewhere below.

The sentry knocked the butt of his gun against the door with obvious relief that he had an appropriate excuse to call forth the lieutenant to deal with Ransome. “Manning, sir.”

The door opened to admit Manning, but when Ransome tried to follow, the lieutenant blocked his way. “Ransome.” Dance all but looked through him. “Pipe all hands to muster in the waist.”

Around Jane, there were mutterings about the lashing rain at such an order, and Ransome, perhaps with an eye out for winning favor with the men, tried to change the lieutenant’s mind. “Awful bad weather just to muster the men. You can tell us whatever you need to tell us now.”

Dance stepped forward out of the doorway until he loomed over Ransome. But even in the dim light of a single lantern, Jane could see he had shed his coat, and his hands were covered in blood.

Jane felt herself go cold at the sight, as if she had already been doused by the cold rain. Dance’s gaze was just as cold, moving slowly from Ransome to the men crowded round. His eyes found hers and paused briefly before they moved on, and back to Ransome. His voice was a rusty scratch. “Muster in the waist.”

He led them out into the rain-lashed deck, and then slowly ascended the quarterdeck ladder. Jane hung back under the shelter of the starboard gangway, where Punch somehow found her, and handed her her thick wool cloak. “Thank you,” she said, but there was not enough worsted wool in all the world to warm her, or buffer her from the dread of what was to come.

Lieutenant Dance did not mince his words, but gave them the terrible truth straightaway. “Your captain is dead. He killed himself this evening, for reasons unknown to us, and known only to God. We will bury him at dawn, and trust that God will have mercy upon his soul.”

Jane tried to pull the edges of her cloak closer to shut out the driving rain, but it did no good, because the cold was from inside—reaching within like the icy fingers of a frost. Pity and horror clamped down her throat, chilling the air with every breath she struggled to take.

And all she could think was that this was wholly and entirely her fault.

*   *   *

Dance stayed on deck for hours, pacing the quarterdeck, up and back, up and back until he could no longer feel the cold cutting rain. Until he was as numb in body as he was in spirit.

But he could not rest. He could not put what he had seen from his mind. He could not.

Dance was no stranger to injury and violence. He had spent half his youth in the navy that had seen the bitterest fighting of a generation culminate in Trafalgar, and the other half of his young manhood forcibly defending the British peace. He had seen more than his share of death. But he had never, in all his days, seen anyone do such irreparable, violent harm to himself.

And because he had not seen it coming, and had done nothing to ease the old man’s distress, he walked.

It was Punch who finally stopped him. Sometime in the dark of the night, the wardroom steward brought him his hat and cloak, and after another few hours of watching Dance try to wear his guilt out on the quarterdeck, Punch planted his pegged leg across his path and simply said, “It’s a bad day all right, but that’s enough of that, Captain.”

The word hit Dance with the force of a wayward cannon shot—he was now the captain in name as well as in responsibility. The authority that he had been trying to assume for all these weeks was well and truly his. And he needed to act accordingly. “Who has the deck?”

“Simmons, sir.” Able Simmons stepped away from the shadow of the mizzenmast where he must have been keeping himself out of Dance’s way. “I have the deck, Captain.”

Captain. It was only a courtesy. It was only temporary. Such an appointment could only be officially made in London—he would have to make a report, and hope to come upon another British ship lying for London. The possibility seemed remote at best.

But in the meantime, he now had full command of his ship and all the souls in her.

Devil take them all.

But he was her commander now, and couldn’t let his misgivings show. “Thank you, Mr. Simmons. Carry on.”