A Scandal to Remember (24 page)

“Rather a different instrument than the low rumble of your baritone, Lieutenant. But it suits my mood, for I find I must thank you again for defending me.”

Dance felt the dangerous pleasure of her gratitude and admiration fill his chest. “You seemed to have done well enough on your own. The facts always speak for themselves.”

“One might hope they would, but alas…” She let the rest die away. And then she said, “I understand your anger at me the other day now. How you have to watch your step. It was frightening enough for me to be the source of the captain’s displeasure. But for you…”

The pleasure that soaked through him like a warm brandy was only relief at being understood. But that she might also be worried for him was too much. His pride would not allow it. “There are sources enough of his displeasure.”

“But to accuse you of mutiny”—she lowered her voice to whisper the word—“when you have clearly been the one holding life and limb together here. Five watches out of six you are the one on deck, working, checking, finding work for idle men.”

Dance shook his head, and pitched his own voice lower. “Careful you don’t put that abroad, Miss Burke, as it might be seen as evidence
for,
rather than against the captain’s claim.”

“And has he made such a claim before? Or was that just a drunken rumble?”

“Careful, Miss Burke. I beg you.”

“I am not a member of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, Lieutenant, I have taken no oath, and I think I may call the man a drunkard based on the evidence of my own eyes. And nose. He stank like a gin mill.”

Her outrage somehow soothed the constant coil of worry twisting up his gut. He could feel a smile sliding across his face. “And what would you, Miss J. E. Burke, conchologist and self-professed spinster from the Isle of Wight, know of gin mills?”

His tease amused her enough to thaw away some of her indignation. “Nothing, I’ll grant you.” Her smooth cheeks creased with a mischievous dimple. “But I’ve heard talk. And he certainly did not smell like rum—like the men at their tot of grog—or brandy, which I certainly have smelled, and even tasted before. I must say, he smelled rather strangely antiseptic, like a hedge.”

Damn but she was clever. He liked her all the more for the preciseness of her scientific mind. “How observant you are. That’s the juniper berries in the flavoring of the gin.”

“Ah. Thank you. It’s nice to know that even though I am a provincial, self-professed spinster, I can get some things right.”

She got a lot of things right. That dimple for starters. And even though he could not afford to like her and keep his head and his commission, he wanted to keep the fragile accord between them. “More than right, Miss Burke. More than right.” He checked the compass by the wheel in passing. “How do you progress with the devious barnacle? Has Punch supplied you with fresh subjects?”

“He has. And I have made progress enough. I’m particularly interested in the plates that form the aperture at the top of the creature’s carapace. So much more like crustaceans to my way of thinking. So very intriguing.”

What was intriguing was the smile that stole slowly across her face. It made Dance feel warm and silly and slightly off-kilter. As if the deck were tilting onto its beam ends instead of staying placidly level in the light breeze.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I always liked shells for their beauty—the subtle colors, the interesting and fragile curls. But this plain little barnacle is proving entirely fascinating. I never would have thought. But I fear it also means that I shall want to scrape more of them off your hull.”

Poor Miss Burke seemed entirely oblivious to the innuendo in her words. But Dance was not. And he very nearly grew hard at the words. As it was, he had to give the stubble rising across his chin a hard rub to keep his countenance. “Miss Burke, you must scrape the barnacles off my hull as much as you like.”

She turned that frank open face to his, a pale moon in the low lantern light. “Thank you, sir,” she said solemnly. “I think I will.”

Very, very soon, he was going to have to kiss her. He did not see how he could not. It was inevitable. And utterly impossible.

Because he had a ship that was falling apart around him, a crew that was on the verge of running amok, and a captain spouting accusations of mutiny. He could not afford even so much as a glance at her invitingly soft pink lips.

But she was so very tempting, as she slipped ever so slightly closer, and lowered her quiet voice even more. “But you have distracted me from the thing I wanted most to say.”

Devil take him, but he hoped it was more of the same. More of the pleasurable palaver that held the rest of the world at bay. “And what was that?”

“That I had a quiet chat with Mr. Honeyman.” She closed her eyes and gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head—a visible shudder. “He was most fearfully cut up.”

She meant to take him to task after all. He straightened, and let his gaze make a check of the compass heading. “It is a harsh world we inhabit, Miss Burke. The navy is not a nursery.”

Those blue eyes sparked with more than mere indignation now. “But neither should it be a slaughterhouse.”

It certainly had been at times—in his memory, Trafalgar had been nothing so much as a charnel house. But he could not argue with her. That passionate adamance he admired was back in her voice.

“Mr. Ransome laid into that boy for his own pleasure. And his own guilt. Mr. Honeyman did not take that drawing, and neither did he ransack our rooms. Mr. Ransome only made him take the blame for it.”

She could not be right. Hadn’t the bosun just pledged his loyalty to Dance and
Tenacious
? She had to have it wrong.

“Miss Burke, you are simply too tenderhearted to be taken in so. The boy would say anything at this point to keep from any greater punishment.”

“He said what was liable to get him in even greater trouble if you will not choose to see the truth of it.”

“Miss Burke, I know you would like to help, as you said earlier, but you cannot help in matters of ship’s discipline. And that is an end to it.”

“I spoke to Mr. Ransome, Lieutenant. And he admitted it. Though he said he sent the note to warn me away from the boat for my own good.”

Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck all.

Every time he thought he had
Tenacious’
s problems sorted, and knew what was going on, and knew how to handle it, something else came along to prove to him that he was hopelessly and utterly wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, damn his eyes.

“Ship,” he corrected without thought. “It’s a ship.”

“Yes, yes, your precious bloody
ship.
But it was Mr. Ransome who sent that note—for my own good, he told me, as he should hate for me to wind up tipped over the side some dark night. It’s a big empty ocean out there, he told me, and a little bit like me’d get gobbled up by the sea in no time. No one would ever know I was gone.”

Dance could not tell which astonished him more—her swearing again so freely, or her perfect imitation of Ransome’s style and cadence of talking. Ransome really had spoken to her.

“And what is more, he appeared everything sincere and concerned. But I cannot like it. The question is not if he is really sincere—for that I don’t think I can ever really know—but if he has some ulterior motive in warning me away.”

It was near enough to the same question he had asked himself that Dance was brought to a complete standstill. Right there in the middle of the bloody South Atlantic, with the lee shore full of jagged rocks. It was an apt metaphor for his life—there were perils at every turn, and he could not afford to waver. Indecision would put him on the rocks just as surely as the wrong decision would.

Dance wanted to box his own ears to punch some sense into his head, but he already felt as if he had been clouted by a block, and could not think fast enough.

“And which is worse,” Jane went on, “he beat that boy to a bloody pulp to cover his own misdeeds, which is disgusting, not to mention a gross misuse of his power.”

There was clearly some very great misuse going on here. But to what purpose? And for whose benefit?

Clever, insightful Jane Burke’s mind was turning along much the same lines. “What I don’t understand is why he should go to such lengths to frighten
me
—which despite my best effort to appear calm and rely upon my friends, he has most assuredly done. I will admit to being very tempted by his offer to see me quietly off without anyone the wiser.”

“He offered what?” The hair on Dance’s neck bristled in instinctive discomfort, warning him to pay attention.

“Yes.” Jane nodded, seeing the connection as clearly as he. “He said he would see me off the
ship
with no one the wiser. Rather like your three deserters of the evening, don’t you think?”

“I do think.” Fuck all. It was too similar to be a coincidence.

“But why?” Miss Burke was not done examining this specimen of Ransome’s perfidy. “Why should he care that the men don’t like me? Why should he care if I get off? What purpose could it possibly serve?”

The answer hit Dance like a boarding ax between the eyes—cleaving everything he had thought in more than two bitterly sharp pieces. Because Ransome—damn his canny eyes—was neither suicidal, nor incompetent—he was ambitious. Dance should have seen and understood that.

Ransome and Givens had had near complete control of the ship before Dance had arrived to upset their schemes. And Ransome wanted that back. He wanted his pride.

Jane Burke was just a tool, like Midshipman Honeyman, and perhaps even the captain, for Ransome to use to get at Dance, and undermine his authority. To take back control of the ship. It was all of a piece, Jane Burke and
Tenacious
.

Dance let the hot rage that rose within him burn down to a cold blue flame of purpose. He would see Ransome in chains, damned if he wouldn’t. He would disrate the man, or simply put him off, and have done with him, the way he should have in Portsmouth, the moment he had instinctively known Ransome was dirty. There was no room on a ship for such conduct, and it was his responsibility to see justice was done.

But while Dance certainly had all the responsibility, he had very little of the authority—the captain’s accusations had made that clear. Dance might disrate Ransome, but the authority to put the man in chains or put him off rested solely with the captain.

But determined, steely, soft Miss Burke who held his hand when she was afraid was now too angry to be dismayed. “I will conquer Mr. Ransome. A man like that, who uses his authority and his cane so freely, has enemies. But more importantly, a man like that has no true friends. I shall have to see what I can do about that, and arrange things differently.”

“Not everything can be ‘arranged,’ Jane. You would be safer, and much better served, to stay as far away from Ransome as possible.”

“But it is not possible. You are the one who told me that there would be both hardship and very real danger, Mr. Dance. I believed you then, but I understand you now. And I’ll be damned if I will let fear stop me from trying.”

She gave him one last look over her shoulder. “And I told you, Dance. I’m very, very good at arranging things.”

*   *   *

Jane left Mr. Ransome to be dealt with by Lieutenant Dance, and abandoned her barnacles to concentrate all of her energies upon her new plan—winning both the men and the captain over to her side. Well, more correctly to Lieutenant Dance’s side, as the man was doing himself no good of his own. He continued to push the men, keeping them always hammering away at the repairs, and recaulking every seam until the ship resounded with the incessant pounding of mallets, and stank with the heavy smell of tar and pitch.

He certainly did not make any friends when he growled, “You’ll be glad of a tight ship when you’re rounding the cape.”

However true it might be, the men only muttered that they would be best served
not
going around the cape at all, but heading back to England, where they had all been happy rotting in Portsmouth’s harbor.

But Lieutenant Dance did not turn them back. He put
Tenacious
to sea—or
proceeded to sea
as Punch told her was the correct nautical phraseology—and pointed her only slightly less leaky bow south down the green coast of the huge continent.

So while Lieutenant Dance concentrated on making his ship sail, she concentrated on making friends by spending every hour she could stand in the close confines of the sick bay, plucking their splinters, binding the bruises, and soothing their burns—hot pitch was a pitiless injurer—and dispensing vast quantities of willow bark tea. And slowly, day after day, it began to work.

Within a few weeks men nodded and smiled and tipped their tarred hats to her when she walked by, armed against detractors with her now-famous medicinal tea, and even her nemesis Mr. Ransome—against whom she had remained especially vigilant—seemed to treat her with new respect. By the end of the month, she was emboldened enough to slip past the dozing marine guarding the captain’s stern cabin, and knock on the cabin door.

“What do you want now?” came the querulous answer.

“I want to bring you some tea, sir.” Jane let herself through the door, and stepped for the first time into the captain’s filthy day cabin. “Goodness, sir. You need a good clean out.”

“The hell you say. Who the hell are you?”

Jane had decided upon the same fearlessly straightforward approach she had learned to apply to her crotchety great-grandfather, the Duke of Shafton. “I’m Jane, sir. I’ve brought you tea.”

“I don’t like tea. Go away,” he ordered before he seemed to think better of it. “Where did you come from?”

“From the Isle of Wight, sir. It’s beautiful there. And there is very good tea.”

The man made a sound of disbelief, or displeasure—she couldn’t tell which because he resolutely turned his back so he could watch the dark Atlantic Ocean pass by the stern windows, as if she were of no account to him.

Or would have, had those windows not been absolutely filthy. “Well, it’s no wonder everything is so dim, with the state of these windows.” Jane put the teapot and tray before him on the table, and took up the first rag she could find discarded in a messy corner, and immediately began to scrub the accumulated grime off the windows. “I’ll just spruce these up for you, sir, so everything will be brighter, and then be on my way.”