Claimed by the Rogue (9 page)

She hesitated. “Love is a strong word. I believe she is…fond of him. In many ways, Aristide’s courtship brought her back to life. It and her work with the orphans gave her renewed zest.”

He set aside the knife and looked up. “Phoebe
works
?”

Chelsea’s gaze narrowed. “Yes, she does, and quite indefatigably. That surprises you?”

It did. The Phoebe he’d known had rarely risen before ten. It wasn’t that she was indolent, more a matter of her having nothing of any pressing import to do. Like most gently bred young ladies, she’d filled her hours with shopping, making the social round of roués, soirees and musicales, and perfecting her needlework, watercolors and pianoforte playing. Still, how taxing could it be to wipe a few snotty noses and sing a lullaby or two? Rather than say so and risk inciting Chelsea’s wrath, he asked, “What sort of…work does she do?”

She thought for a moment. “She reads to the younger children, tutors the older ones in history and literature, science, mathematics and geography.”

“Geography?” When he’d first announced to Phoebe that he’d bought colors in an East India Company regiment bound for Calcutta, he’d had nearly to drag her over to the globe in her father’s study.

Ignoring his interruption, Chelsea continued, “She also devotes considerable time to organizing social functions to raise funds—lectures, art auctions, the occasional charity ball. Last autumn she approached the Foundation Members of the Royal Academy of Arts and persuaded them to make a loan of some of their collection’s finer works. The special exhibition fetched nearly seven thousand pounds.”

“Phoebe does all that?” Robert shook his head, struggling to reconcile the pampered miss of his memory with the industrious and capable woman Chelsea described.

Chelsea nodded. “She does indeed though sometimes I think she’d rather pay a visit to the tooth puller than accept praise for her accomplishments.”

“She’s not terribly keen to accept praise or anything else from me at the moment. She told me in no uncertain terms that she expects me to leave London—and her—well alone.”

Brow furrowing, Chelsea shot him a hard look. “Really, Robert, did you expect that she would sit by for six years stitching her sampler whilst you were off…adventuring?”

“Adventuring!” There it was—that word again. He was half-tempted to tear off his shirt and show her just what his
adventuring
had brought him, but he held back, settling for blowing seaman’s curses beneath his breath. “Damn it, Chelsea, I expected…well, I didn’t expect her to take up with some Frog exile. Arachnid, what the bloody hell kind of name is that anyway? Sounds like a damned spider.”

“It’s
Aristide
, and if we’re going to talk about…him, we’re going to need this.” She reached into her robe pocket and brought out a monogrammed silver flask. Passing it over, she admitted, “It’s Anthony’s, but he won’t mind.”

“Thanks.” He uncapped the bottle and took a long pull, the brandy burning its way through the pain. “What do you know of Bouchart?”

That he was Phoebe’s betrothed made him Robert’s enemy, but there was something more, something endemic to the man that didn’t settle, something lurking beneath the surface that had caused Robert’s gut to tighten and the hairs at the back of his neck to bristle.

She hesitated. “Not all that much, I’m afraid. His family is an old one, quite ancient actually. Before the Revolution, they had an estate and vineyards in Normandy. During the Terror, they lost their lands and nearly their lives along with so many others. Aristide joined with the British to fight against Napoleon. He served in Nelson’s navy for more than two years. Afterward he settled in London and established a successful wine importing business.”

“Since when does Phoebe’s mother accept a tradesman as a son-in-law? I was at least landed and yet she treated me scarcely better than a chimney sweep.” The inherent injustice made Robert hard-pressed to hold back from grinding his teeth.
 

Chelsea sent him a measured look of sympathy. “He still holds the title if not the lands and, well, Phoebe is coming on twenty-six. I suspect her ladyship is relieved not to have a spinster on her hands especially as she still has Belinda to bring out.”

It was the second time that night Phoebe had been consigned to near-spinster status, the first such assertion having been made by Phoebe herself. Beyond frustrated, Robert brought his fist down upon the table, scattering crumbs to the four corners. “This isn’t some grizzled, bent-backed crone of whom we speak. It is Phoebe, and if she isn’t tenfold lovelier than when I last left her, then by God, I haven’t eyes. As I see it, she and I are still betrothed. I still mean to marry her, but first I need to break whatever hold that Frog dandy has upon her and persuade her to marry me instead.”
 

If only matters might be made so simple. The bungled reunion forced him to acknowledge that winning Phoebe back would be less of a single battle and more of a prolonged campaign.
 

Unruffled by his display of temper, Chelsea looked at him askance. “Oh, is that all? First things first—I want to know why you’ve stayed away all this time without a word.”

Unfurling his fist, Robert hesitated. How much to reveal, how much to hold back and, dear God, where to begin? The earlier recitation to Phoebe should have made answering easier—only it hadn’t. “You know The Phoenix floundered off the southeast coast of Africa?”

She nodded. “The shipping log showed you’d last put into port at Capetown, but there was no record of after. Was it foul weather?”

He shook his head. “Pirates.”

Her eyes rounded. “But The Phoenix was en route to India, not returning. What cargo could she have carried worth plundering?”

“Cargo is not limited to precious metals and gemstones, textiles, saltpeter and spices.” Rather than risk revealing more, he quickly added, “We carried arms and munitions bound for Fort William.”

In reality the ship’s hull filled with flintlocks and gunpowder hadn’t been what the pirates were after. Slavers in Tripoli, Tunis and other locales in North Africa and the Western Indian Ocean relied upon pirates to supply them with a steady stream of stock, both African and European. An able-bodied young man fetched a hefty price at market—even one with putrid wounds running blood and foulness down his back.

To his relief, she moved on to ask, “Were there other survivors?”

He lifted his mug and took a swallow to sooth his throat’s sudden cinching. “A handful of us survived to be sold as slaves. Our captain and most of the crew were killed in battle as I would have been had I not been too ill to rise from my berth.”

Who would have guessed that a bad bout of seasickness would save his life? Preoccupied with puking, he hadn’t realized anything was amiss until he’d heard the cannon boom. By the time he’d staggered on deck with his pistol, the battle was done, the planks blood-soaked, the fallen officers dying or dead, the few survivors, most of them injured, corralled like cattle and marched toward the cargo hold. Robert had found a cubby in which to conceal himself and stayed hidden there for hours, ears ringing with the pirates’ soused singing—and the screams of those apparently deemed too wounded or weak to be put upon the auction block. Eventually he too had been found. The cocked pistol clapped to his chest had forestalled any fancies of running. The nightmare that had ensued had eradicated any hope of a swift or even foreseeable homecoming.

Chelsea clearing her throat carried him back to the present. “What happened after—”

“I’m back now,” he barked, suddenly aware he was perspiring though they sat some distance from the fire. “Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
 

“Must we?”

He rested his elbow atop the table and fitted a hand to his brow. “Chels, please don’t press me for more. I simply…can’t give it, not now, perhaps not ever.”

“All right, we’ll leave sleeping dogs lie—for now.”

“Thank you,” he said, lifting his head to look at her. The sweating had subsided, but he still felt the telltale trembling in his limbs as though he were once more hung out to dry from the pirate ship’s masthead, so sun-blistered and thirsting he’d feared swallowing his tongue. “Thank you. I mean to go to the Admiralty and make my report. Perhaps I’ll let you read it someday, though I rather think not.”

“You do realize you’re going to have to tell Phoebe the whole truth, not only the bits you’ve made due for me?”

Much as he now meant to make Phoebe his bride, he wasn’t prepared to stoop to winning her with pity. “There are other ways of wooing,” he said, thinking of earlier when for a precious few moments he’d succeeded in melting both body and her will. He swung his legs over the bench and stood. Turning back to her, he asked, “Where precisely does Phoebe engage in this worthy work of hers?”

Brow furrowed, she looked up at him. “The Foundling Hospital on Guilford Street but why?”

Rather than reply, he took a moment to reconstruct a mental map of the city. “That’s in Bloomsbury, isn’t it?” He held out a hand to help her up.

Waving it away, she braced her palms upon the table and pulled herself up. “It is but barging in unannounced won’t endear you to anyone, least of all Phoebe.”

For the first time since he’d discovered Phoebe was betrothed, Robert found his smile. “Who’s to say I haven’t grown a sudden passion for philanthropy myself?”

Chapter Four

Three Days Later

Standing behind the lectern, the schoolroom slate mounted on an easel behind her, Phoebe did her best to pretend that it was any ordinary day, as if Robert’s turning up at her betrothal ball after six years “dead” hadn’t upended her world. That he hadn’t sought her out since was as much an occasion for pique as relief. First he set her life at sixes and sevens and then he ignored her, the audacity!

Then again, she had been the one to send him away—this time.

Placing the peeled hardboiled egg atop the narrow-necked beaker as she had many times before, she looked out onto the classroom. “As you can see, children, there is positively no way this egg shall ever fit through this bottleneck…or is there?”

Hoping to instill some small appreciation for the “magic” of science, she stopped to survey the fascinated faces staring back at her from the queues of classroom benches. Ordinarily such a fine spring day saw her staving off pleas to forsake lessons for forays out-of-doors, but Newton’s classic illustration of the relationship between matter and space rarely failed her. Even eight-year-old Johnnie, a terrible fidget, had abandoned his nose picking to attend to the lesson.

Satisfied that she’d allowed the suspense to sufficiently build, she removed the egg, picked up a flat wooden stick and lit it from the lamp. She tossed the stick into the beaker, replaced the egg atop the glass mouth and stood back. A sucking noise, a tremor of motion and
voila
, the ovum slipped through, landing at the bottle’s bottom with an audible plop. Predictably, her pupils squealed with surprised delight. Phoebe hid a smile.

From the rear of the room, a boy hissed, “Bleedin’ parlor trick, that’s all ’tis.”

Peering out to the final queue, Phoebe traced the caustic comment to fourteen-year-old Billy slouching upon his bench. She might have known. The source of spiders set upon her chair and ink poured into her tea mug, Billy required more of her time and patience than the other children en masse.

Reining in the reprimand that rose to her lips, instead she called out, “Are you quite certain of that,
Billy
?”

As if startled at being singled out, Billy bolted upright. Shoving a hank of hair out of his eyes, he answered, “Aye, I am. Just because we’re poor and no one wants us don’t make us daft.”

Phoebe had long suspected that surliness was the boy’s defense against being born with a lazy eye and a foster father who’d squandered his Hospital stipend on gin. “So you believe this was a magician’s trick and that the egg will fall back out?”

He nodded. “Aye, I do.”

Heartened by his uncharacteristic interest, however rudely displayed, she pressed on, “In that case, why don’t you come up and have a try?”

Red-faced, he stood. “All right, I will.”

By now, all heads were turned to Billy. Hands stuffed into his trouser pockets, he loped up the aisle to the front of the class. Phoebe picked up the beaker and held it out. He hesitated and then took it.
 

He tried upending the vessel to dislodge the egg, shaking it vigorously, but by now the glass had cooled. “Blimey, it’s really stuffed in there,” he said, lifting sheepish eyes to Phoebe.

She suppressed another smile. “Indeed it is. As Newton’s experiment demonstrates, altering one’s environment can make the seemingly impossible possible. Exposing this bottle to heat caused the glass to expand just as exposing ourselves to new thoughts and ideas broadens our minds. But tell me, what made you so certain I was out to dupe you?” she asked, reaching out to reclaim the bottle.

Handing it over, he shrugged. “You’re the Quality, ain’t ’ee? Besides, bleedin’ lessons is for children with parents, not for us lot,” he added, kicking at the desk leg.

Phoebe set the experiment aside. “Nonsense, learning is for everyone. Sir Isaac himself hailed from quite humble circumstances. His father was a farmer who couldn’t so much as sign his name, but mind the success his son made of himself through education.”