A Scandal to Remember (7 page)

“Aye. Most, miss. But if you like, I can do for you—as best I’m able.” The splash of darker color chasing up the old man’s ruddy cheeks told her that clearly some tasks—the more intimate tasks a maid might perform, like dressing her mistress—were well beyond him. He covered his unease by adding, “I imagine the lieutenant will sort it out. A demon for sorting things out, is the lieutenant.”

“Lieutenant Dance?” Jane could not yet tell from his easy tone if the old sailor admired or reviled the lieutenant. For herself, the lieutenant certainly was a demon of some sort, with his green eyes and wry smile. He certainly discomposed her.

But he had not put her off the boat.

And that told her that he was at least a fair-minded man. Not that she knew much about men. If today’s experience had taught her anything—beyond her own astonishing ability to lie—it had taught her that she was so very much further out of her depth than she could ever have imagined.

She—who had never so much as gone to a village assembly, or chatted with a young man after church—had now deposited herself in a world made exclusively of men. A world with such sights and smells and looks she knew nothing about.

But she was clever and capable, and she could learn. “How long have you served on
Tenacious
?”

“Just took me on today, the lieutenant did, miss. I’d been put ashore, you see, for the peace. Found some work in an inn, but…” Punch shook his head. “I be right happy to take the lieutenant’s shilling, and be back where I belong since it was him doing the asking.”

“So you knew the lieutenant by reputation before today?”

“Bless you, yes, miss. Knowed him back in the day, when he were just a young midshipman on
Audacious.
We was in Trafalgar together on
Audacious.
Got the medal to prove it an’ all.”

So the lieutenant was a veteran of the great battle of Trafalgar. Perhaps the experience of having survived such a battle was what gave him his cynical, barely civilized air. “You are to be congratulated. And thanked. Is that how you lost your leg?”

“Bless me, no, though there were plenty of legs, and arms, and lives as well, gone that day. No, it were years before. That’s why I be a steward, see, miss, and not an able seaman. But I know the way of things on ships. You can count on your Punch to see to you.”

“Oh, yes, thank you. I see. I hope you do not mind me asking you all these questions, for I most assuredly don’t know the way of things on ships.”

“Bless me, I don’t mind in the least. Happy to do for you, miss. Happy to. Unless the peg puts you off, as it does some people, and you’d rather I found someone else as could do for you?”

“No. Not at all.” Jane made sure she smiled to show him that if he did not mind his infirmity, she could certainly have no objection. She was a scientist who found as much beauty and interest in the plainest of shells as the elaborate ones. It was probably the reason she was so interested in the plain but fascinating barnacle. “I’m sure we’ll get along swimmingly.”

Punch responded with a gap-toothed smile of his own. “Don’t know how to swim myself. There, miss, you’ll be all right and tight here.” He held open the batten-and-canvas door to her small cabin, and knuckled his forehead. “I’ve cleared away all the lieutenant’s things.”

“Oh, yes, thank you.” The short period of time they had been conversing hardly seemed long enough to clear out all of a man’s personal belongings. It had taken her days to secretly sort out which of her own belongings to take with her from home, and many surreptitious hours to arrange and pack them carefully away. It would probably take her an hour or more to unpack and settle herself in. Yet a few minutes had seen the lieutenant’s dunnage, as he called it, summarily packed away and into the chest that now rode comfortably on Punch’s shoulder. The thought made her inexplicably sad.

And that would never do. Jane cheered her voice. “Thank you, Punch. I am very much obliged.”

She stepped tentatively into the small, dim cuddy, and found the room to be as dark, dank, and cramped as the root cellar at home, though it smelled vaguely of tar and oak and spice instead of dust and must. The only furniture besides her trunk were a small washstand with a tin enameled basin and ewer, a small built-in cupboard which the steward had opened in order to remove the lieutenant’s clothing, and a rectangular canvas and rope cot hanging suspended from bolts in the ceiling beams overhead.

A very long canvas cot. Tall Lieutenant Dance’s cot.

A tingling shiver—that awful feeling of being so out of her element—skittered across her skin. Jane had never slept in any bed but her own. No, not true, she chided herself. She had slept in the guest bed her aunt Celia kept for her at her sunny house in Somerset, and she had twice slept in a bivouac cot when she had gone collecting with her father. But she had certainly never slept in a bed knowing that a man the likes of Lieutenant Dance had slept there before her.

Jane gave the stiff canvas a gentle push and watched it sway to and fro. The steward had taken away his bed linen, but the lieutenant’s particular scent of soap and lime and something else still clung to the canvas. Jane leaned closer to try and identify the spice.

“Miss Burke, are you quite all right?”

Jane leaped back as if scalded, and smacked her back against the curved side of the hull. And perhaps she had somehow been scalded, judging from the heat streaking across her cheeks.

The lieutenant’s tall unbending form stood outlined by the lantern light. “Miss Burke?”

No. It was not the lieutenant, but Mr. Denman, who had doffed his round brimmed hat, and stood waiting to speak with her on the other side of the door frame. “Mr. Denman. Please forgive me.”

“Not at all. I’ve been learning from our good man Punch here, as well.” He extended his hand, and Jane was pleased to find his grasp firm and friendly. Indeed, everything about Mr. Denman was friendly, from his tousled hair to his warm gray eyes, which wrinkled in easy humor behind his spectacles. Quite unlike the lieutenant. “Are you quite all right?”

“I…” There was nothing she could say that would not be ridiculous. “I was just … acquainting myself with the accommodations. Everything is so strange and new.” The ship was nothing like she could have imagined. But then her expectations had been based on sheer imagination and hopefulness, without any drop of reality to leaven her fantasies.

“New? But I thought you told Sir Richard that you had undertaken previous expeditions?”

“Yes. Indeed.” Jane lifted her chin, and made herself smile more confidently. “But never one on a Royal Navy ship. I fear I shall have to rely a great deal on Punch here, to help me along.”

From behind Mr. Denman, Jane heard the steward chuckle. “Don’t you worry, miss. I’ll see to things. That be why Mr. Dance brought me aboard.”

And speaking of tall Mr. Dance. “And now that I have taken his cabin, where, if I may ask, will the lieutenant go?”

“Dunno, miss.” Punch scratched his ginger beard. “I’m sure he’ll make do. He’s that sort of man.”

Jane had so little experience of any sort of man, that the lieutenant remained an enigma to her. Unlike the quiet scientist at her door, who seemed much easier to fathom. “Mr. Denman, I must thank you for assistance in convincing Sir Richard to let me come aboard. He certainly seems to value your opinion.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Mr. Denman’s modesty was visible in the way he wrung the brim of his hat in his hands.

“I thought it very clear in his deference to your opinion, though Sir Richard has been appointed our leader.” Well, thus far Lieutenant Dance had more clearly been the leader, but among the members of the Royal Society’s expedition, there was a very clear hierarchy she knew would need to be maintained. But even she, who lived at the edge of nowhere, had heard and read of the famous anatomist Jackson Denman. His lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons in London were famed in scientific circles, and praised as packed affairs with young students cramming into the operating theater to hear and see his work. “Have you known him long?”

“No. We’ve only just met a few days past. It chanced that we were staying at the same inn in advance of coming aboard this morning.”

“And what brings such an august anatomy scholar as yourself on this expedition?”

“Ah. I see my fame—or infamy—depending upon your point of view—”

“Fame, surely, Mr. Denman.”

“You are too kind. Suffice it to say that I found myself in need of a change—in want of a surfeit of life as an antidote to the close study of death. This expedition to sunnier climes seemed a very good opportunity.”

His words gave Jane pause. She had been so preoccupied with her own perceived impediments to her career, that she had never considered that even without impediments of gender and lack of opportunity, scientific inquiry came at a mortal cost of its own.

“I see,” she finally said, only because she knew she must say something, and she wanted to allay whatever demons had driven Mr. Denman to this point. “That sounds like an excellent plan.”

“I mean to make a physiological study of the natives we encounter. Drawings and the like. And I must say that I have seen
your
new monograph,
The Conchology of Britain,
and was impressed by your most exceptional specimen drawings. I’d be interested in speaking with you about your techniques for drawing in the field. I’m always looking for instruction or information to improve my own techniques.”

Everything within Jane eased and lifted. This—this lovely feeling of quiet elation—was exactly why she had dared to come aboard, and exactly what she had hoped for. The regard and acknowledgment of her colleagues was everything she wanted—that an accomplished, even famous man such as Mr. Denman should compliment her for her work.

She did not have to force the smile to her lips. “Certainly, Mr. Denman. I should like nothing more. I take it you make specimen drawings as well?”

He smiled, though he looked slightly less comfortable again. “Yes, I do. Well. I’ll leave you to settle in then.”

“Oh, yes.” Jane recalled herself to her manners. “And thank you again”—she extended her hand once more to Mr. Denman—“for your kind interference on my behalf.”

He shook her hand cordially. “You are welcome. I am only sorry that any interference might have been necessary. But I fear we men are a hidebound lot.”

Jane could only agree, but it was refreshing to hear a gentleman like Mr. Denman voice such an opinion. “You don’t seem particularly hidebound, Mr. Denman. You spoke up for me when others would not.” To be fair, the lieutenant had not spoken
against
her. But he certainly had not been entirely supportive.

“Yes. I should like to think I’m a fair-minded man who can weigh the evidence with his own eyes, and not rely upon others to tell me what to think.”

Jane could feel a genuine smile cross her lips. “How very scientific of you.”

His sober look lightened as she had hoped it would. “Yes, I am nothing if not a man of science. Sometimes I fear to the exclusion of all else. Which is one of the reasons I joined this expedition. To take myself out into the world again.”

“Yes. I too.” Although she was really going out into the world for the first time. At least the first time entirely on her own. It was both a heady and a terrifying thought. “Sometimes we must stretch ourselves to learn new things, lest we stagnate from staying put without fresh ideas or fresh experiences to prod us along.”

“Very well said, Miss Burke. Stagnate. I think you have the right of it.”

“Thank you. I hope I do.”

“Well.” Mr. Denman folded his hands in front of himself, as if he had run out of conversation.

“I’ll just settle myself in then.”

“Oh, yes. I’ll leave you to it.” And with that, Mr. Denman ended their mutual awkwardness by raising the hat in his hands in farewell, and exiting into the small cabin right next to hers. How nice. He was sure to make a pleasant, congenial neighbor.

Jane returned to investigating her own little space without an audience this time. The only light came from the lantern the steward had thoughtfully hooked to the low ceiling beam. Indeed, the ceiling above was so low that Jane could nearly reach the beams that arched up from the side of the ship and held up the ceiling with her upstretched hand. She was quite sure no one as tall as the lieutenant could ever be able to stand in such a small space. Certainly the mirror, tacked to the wall well above her head, was his, hung so high it was of no use to her.

The thought made her uncomfortable again—knowing that it was his, knowing that he hung the mirror close to where the lantern hooked onto the beam so he could shave by its light, his chin tilted high. Uncomfortable because she oughtn’t be thinking such intimate thoughts about a man she had just met. A man who was all but a stranger to her.

She would have to ask Punch if there were another hanging cot available for her use. And certainly Mr. Dance would need his own long bed back at some point. Or she might see if Mr. Denman next door might need it. He certainly was tall and would need a long bed. And he certainly didn’t smell in a way that was unsettling and disconcerting. Mr. Denman smelled pleasantly of— wax and paper? Oh, she didn’t know. It was just that he didn’t smell like the lieutenant, that was all.

But she would think of the lieutenant no more. She needed to be practical and quiet and organized and keep herself from his attention, and Sir Richard’s attention, at all costs if she were to stay aboard. She would have to be less trouble than anyone else.

What had her aunt Celia always said? That to succeed, she would have to be twice as smart and useful and learned as anyone else. And do her work in half the time. Being twice as smart was going to be difficult at best—for she knew full well that all of the other naturalists on the expedition were first-rate scholars. But since she appeared to be the only conchologist aboard, there was at least no one who could question her abilities.

But useful—useful was going to be very, very difficult indeed. Especially useful enough to please the all-seeing, green-eyed lieutenant.