Almost a Scandal (30 page)

“You needn’t worry, Col. I know my duty. And we both know that our duty comes first.”

She hadn’t understood his meaning, but he was glad she understood that nothing could change between them at present. They still had an enormous task to do. “Yes. It does.” Was that relief, the cool feeling washing through his gut? “I’m glad you understand.”

“I’ve always understood that, Col. Now what have you got planned?”

It
was
a relief to move back to the solid ground of duty. “I’ve been thinking about the captain’s desire for us to make the French put to sea. I don’t like the idea generally, but I’m convinced what will do the most damage is a fireship.”

“Why don’t you like it?”

He waved her question away. It would take too long to explain his almost irrational, visceral dislike of the destruction of a ship by fire, when he was only too happy to destroy any number of French ships by blasting them to pieces at point-blank range. “The problem is that we’ll need two ships, one for the fire and the other as a prize, to get us back to
Audacious
. Not to mention a boat to get us out to the ships in the first place.”

“Three vessels then. But for the last, something like a ketch or a sloop, that can sail close to the wind and make it out through the narrows of Le Goulet into the teeth of these devilish prevailing westerlies?”

“Exactly.”

Col moved toward the open window, where the daylight proved that the rise did indeed provide a view to the south, all the way across the expansive roadstead of the bay, and east toward the city of Brest. From their vantage point, they could count the number of sail at anchor, and observe the movements and manning of the enemy vessels. He turned to retrieve his satchel, only to find Kent handing him his telescopic glass.

He didn’t even have to explain. He could rely on her. He had been relying on her all night to get him across the countryside. God only knew what he would have done had he been on his own, or with someone less clever than Kent. “Tell me what you see.”

She was already focusing her glass on the harbor, counting with minute nods of her head. “Twenty … one sail of the line. Lord, what a fleet. Four three-deckers, four frigates, two corvettes, two brigs, and one cutter. The ships of the line seem to be anchored close in to one another. But we’ll have to find a fairly large ship to fire in order to put the cat amongst the pigeons.” She swept the glass to the east side of the bay.

Col followed suit, focusing on a worn-out-looking ketch apart from the others. “Do you see her, the
Belle Ile
? She should do to set afire. Doesn’t look like much crew, if any.” His gaze swung back to rake the beach front, taking note of the activity, which in the heat of the day wasn’t much. Some of the French people’s ardor for the Grand Empire seemed to have worn off in the waning days of the autumn.

“What about the
St. Etienne
? Off the west side of the city, the part they call Recouvrance? A
chaloupe
rigged for coastal trade. You could use her to take another vessel.”

Col swung his glass back. “Call it a sloop, damn you.” But he hoped there was warmth in his voice, as he only meant to tease her. “She will do well. Let us pray she remains there tonight. But if we draw enough people off the beach, or at least into the city, we should have our pick.”

“How do you plan we do that?”

“We’ll do to the city what we will do to the harbor—fire it. We’ll set fires as we go.”

“We’ll have to make it through the gates first, with our satchels and weapons. That will only work with the clothes.” She gestured to the neat pile of purloined clothing.

“We’ll never make it through the gates, even in purloined clothing. Not with your red hair.”

She was nothing if not stubborn. “These Breton are Celts. There may be redheads among them.”

“Too chancy. I’d rather see if we can get a boat upstream and ride it inconspicuously downriver into the city. But you are right. The uniforms must go.”

The smile she gifted him with was his reward for being perceptive. She pulled some clothes out of the bundle. “Here. These might do for you, if you’ll have them.”

It was a tightly knitted jersey of faded blue-gray and a pair of equally faded, wide, dark trousers—what any fisherman or sailor of this coast might wear. He felt a right idiot in clothes other than his own, and it occurred to him that for the past twelve years he had never worn anything but his uniform. But evidently, the time had come.

The jersey fit, mostly because it stretched, but the wide trousers were going to be too broad and short by half. But if he used his sword belt to cinch them up, they would serve. Or at least keep him from being spotted for a British officer. “I feel naked without my uniform. Like a knight without his armor.”

“Lord. What a pair we make.” Behind him, Kent’s voice sounded quiet, subdued somehow. “I—I’m not sure what I can do with my sword. Or the gun. I didn’t think of that, when—”

“My God.” He hadn’t meant to say anything, but it just came out. He might have felt naked—she all but was.

She looked the same, and yet remarkably different. She looked, without the uniform that had turned her into one of a set of six midshipmen, unique and decidedly feminine. The neckline of the bodice was scooped, and for the first time, he saw the long elegant line of her neck slide down to her shoulders. The delicate knobs of her collarbone framed the speckled swath of skin above the rounded rise of her breasts, and he wanted to touch her there, along the fragile ridge of her shoulder, and let his fingers sweep down to dip beneath the edge of the bodice.

Her hair was tumbled over her shoulders and her mouth was open, ever so slightly, in an unspoken question, and her lower lip looked plush and soft, and it made him wonder how anyone could not see what was to him so obvious.

“What’s wrong?” Her forehead was pleated with concern, as if she thought him still weak and unsteady.

He shook his head to negate such a thought, all the while letting his eyes wander down her form, over the worn cotton shift and faded bodice of indeterminate color and undoubted antiquity, to the shabby quilted cotton petticoats and apron that did remarkably little to hide the fact that she was an enormously attractive, well-formed girl.

It wasn’t jealousy that licked its greedy flames at his gut this time, but something stronger. Something that made him want to wrap her up in the obscuring folds of his sea cloak rather than let any other man see what he ogled so voraciously.

It was possessiveness, pure and raw and anything but simple.

“Everything is wrong. We’ll never pass unnoticed with you looking like that. The damned Frenchmen will be all over you like musket fire.”

She did not mistake his meaning. She wasn’t coy, his Kent. Only the fact that her wide, happy smile was all for him appeased him. “But you’ll be my Frenchman. And you’ll keep their eyes from me.”

“I may be able to keep their hands off, but I’ll never be able to do anything about their eyes. We’ve got to make you more unattractive.”

She took him seriously. “Some dirt should suffice. But I’m sure the long walk to the river north of here will get us hot and sweaty enough to look rumpled. And from a small boat, in the dark, it shouldn’t matter. We’ll put the weapons in the bottom, along with the clothes.” She spoke slowly, as if she were reckoning it out as she went. “I should row, so you can look ahead, with you—how can we disguise your intent? The wine bottle perhaps, so you’ll appear drunk. Yes, drunk and singing, and lolling about the stern, letting me do all the work. Yes! Can you not see it?”

He could, damn her clever eyes. Her enthusiasm was potent and her logic hard to resist. Everything about her, especially dressed like this earthy French girl, made her hard to resist.

He should have been sated. He should have been so replete with satisfaction that thoughts of the pleasure he had received from her body ought not even cross his mind. He ought to have been self-disciplined enough to haul such thoughts back into line.

But when she poured the greater part of the stolen bottle down the front of his jersey, and advised him to gargle with the rest—“So you’ll smell like stale wine”—he gave in to his lesser instincts.

“You’d better kiss me before I do. For good luck.”

He meant it to be brief and easy—a quick smacking kiss. But she was sweet and solemn when she walked to him, and touched his face, and rose on her tiptoes to kiss him. The moment her lips met his, he became hungry for her again, for more of the drugging softness, more of the pleasure that streamed through his veins like an opiate.

God help him or the devil take him, if he could bottle her, he would, so he might take a taste of her every day for the rest of his life. Because they didn’t have the luxury of time. Their future was as precarious as a jury-rigged sloop.

“Kent, we shouldn’t.”

“I know, but I want to anyway. Is that very bad?”

“Very. But I’ll tell you what, Kent. Help me burn down Brest, or blow a ship up, and I’ll make love with you for a very, very long time as a reward.”

She laughed with all the glee only she could feel at the thought of such wanton destruction. “Done.”

Col helped her gather up the weapons. “I hope to hell I don’t regret this.”

Chapter Eighteen

It had sounded so simple in the shelter of the barn. Their improvised plan began well enough, though she was as tense as a racehorse, heading down the river with her load of ridiculously grumpy-for-no-particular-reason lieutenant. He was only meant to
act
drunk and ornery.

She was meant to look as old and worn as an ill-used donkey, so she kept her head down and rowed, letting the flow of the water push them downriver as dusk began to darken the sky, while she reviewed their tentative plan—to stop wherever the quays were deserted and set opportunistic fires nearby as a diversion, before they found a ship to fire and send at the French fleet.

“Remember,” Col repeated Captain McAlden’s words, as they rounded the last bend in the river and approached the ramparts denoting the heart of the city, “anything to cause confusion.”

The plan was like Col, sound and effective. But at the moment he looked neither.

He was arrayed in a drunken sprawl in the stern, humming away like the sot he was meant to be, though he kept a careful watch on the river at her back as she rowed.

“Pull a little bit harder for the west bank. If I look hard enough, I can see your breasts through your bodice.”

“Chut.”
She tried to make a French sound of dismissal, before she lowered her voice. “You’re meant to be too drunk to notice such things.”

“A man is never too drunk to notice such things.” His green eyes were bright and shining with something sharper than simple lust. “It only helps a little that you’re as dirty as a coal barge.”

“
Merci, mon coeur.
Now,
chut,
” she hissed. Over her shoulder the ramparts of the city walls loomed over the river. She began to mutter to herself in French, in hopeful imitation of Gallic invective. “
Cochon.
Pig.
Peste.
”

There were two guards stationed on the ramparts’ water gate, leaning against the wall and talking to each other. She was trying to keep well out of the pockets of illumination from the great torches set into the side of the battlements, but Col spoke low and urgent.

“Handsomely now, Kent. Let them see you. Slow down and act tired. You have nothing to hide. Except, of course, your breasts.” Though he did casually kick the bundle of their uniforms deeper under the stern sheets.

Sally did as he bid, kept her shoulders hunched and her head down.

“Alors, ma belle,”
a suggestive hail came from somewhere above, high on the walls.
“Votre homme—il est mort?”

“He wants to know if you’re dead,” Sally translated quietly for Col. “And at the moment I’m tempted to oblige.” In answer to the hail, she shifted her shoulders theatrically, in hopes of achieving the casually callous indifference that was the Gallic shrug.
“Mort de vin,”
she slurred as sourly as possible, before she shot a look at Col. “Dead drunk,” she whispered. And kept on rowing.

Low hoots of laughter followed them, but they were past. As night settled low and dark into the fortified city, she followed Col’s instruction to steer them alongside a quay on the west bank. She would have tied the boat off but Col whispered, “Don’t make the painter fast. Just hold it steady and be at the ready to shove off.”

He made a show of heaving himself up onto the quayside, and made his misguided way across the open space with the unsteady, rolling pace peculiar to drunken sailors the world over, and turned down an alley, presumably to answer the call of nature.

Sally was torn between wanting to watch for him, and keeping herself as inconspicuous as possible, slouching low against the quayside to avoid the gaze of both the soldiers on the rampart beyond and anyone passing by. But as the first few minutes passed with no sign of Col, her nerves began to get the better of her. A bell from a nearby church began to toll the hour, and by the time twelve full strokes had rung out over the city, Sally’s heart was pounding in time with every clang.

Col finally appeared, wandering seemingly aimlessly back out across the open space, walking in an unhurried, uneven fashion toward Sally and the boat, even though she could see the licking flames of fire beginning in the alley behind.

But still he came slowly, until she thought she would scream, before he finally dropped into his posture of drunken relaxation in the stern of the boat. “Pull hard downstream.”

Sally bent to the oars for all she was worth, until she was nearly out of breath from the combination of fear and excitement, and the strange exhilaration of watching Col tackle both his role and his duty with such daring élan. Yet, she could only see behind, and she was transfixed as the eerie orange glow grew brighter, leaping from one thatched or tiled rooftop to another until it seemed to consume even the massive city ramparts.