Laura Kinsale (3 page)

So he stood, drifting in his mind and soul, until Mr. Campbell excused himself to go inside, and their host addressed Gryf.

“You’re quiet, Captain. Will you have another port?”

Gryf looked through the darkness toward Taylor, who was seated in a wicker chair, visible only as a silhouette with a glowing pipe bowl. “Thank you, no.”

“I fear that we’re boring you with local politics.”

“Not at all,” Gryf said honestly. He was not paying enough attention to them to be bored.

The older man was silent for a moment. Gryf labored to bring himself out of his trance, not wishing to appear impolite. He had taken a cautious liking to Taylor. The
consul seemed to have assumed control of the late earl’s affairs with a competent hand, and to Gryf’s surprise and relief had evidenced no curiosity about the
Arcanum
and her questionable British registration. He could only wish that the earl’s Nassau agent had been as easy to deal with.

As if the consul followed Gryf’s thoughts, Taylor said suddenly, “Tell me, Captain Frost, what did you think of Jerome Gould?”

Gryf wet his lips, brought back to reality with a jolt. He tried to read the disembodied voice for nuance, unsure whether the question was rhetorical or serious. If Gould had been playing games with the earl’s accounts, Gryf had no desire to be implicated. Nor was he in a position to be making accusations. Even though he had done an honest job for Morrow, Gryf’s own reputation was not exactly spotless. Stirring up the water around somebody else was a good way to get muddier himself.

“We didn’t always see things from the same point of view,” he said finally. There was no use pretending peaches and cream; the man had only to question Gould to find the truth of that.

“Is that so?” Taylor said, with no emotion that Gryf could discern. “And you’re loaded with cotton now?”

Gryf’s hand tightened a little around his glass. That was indeed a rhetorical question. Taylor knew exactly what the
Arcanum
was loaded with, and how much of it, except for rubber. “Yes, sir.”

“I’ve been impressed with the job you’ve done for the earl, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir.” What the devil was the man getting at? “We’ve been lucky.”

The pipe glowed brighter for a moment. “Perhaps. Come over here and sit down, away from the window. I have a favor to ask of you.”

Damn, Gryf thought. He obeyed uneasily, seating himself on the edge of a chair and waiting.

“In my capacity as Lady Collier’s trustee, I’d like to keep you on for a while. Would you be willing?”

Gryf hesitated. He didn’t want any more blockade work, and he’d certainly had enough of Jerome Gould, but after this trip, Gryf would be without cargo and beyond the edge on cash. Stranded. The problem had been haunting him from Nassau: here was the answer.

“Yes, sir, I would.”

“Without even knowing what I’d like you to do?”

“Try the blockade again, I assume, Mr. Taylor.”

“You are either a very brave man or a desperate one, as the saying goes.”

That cut a little too close. Gryf was left without a plausible answer, and so kept an uncomfortable silence.

“I don’t want you to risk your ship again at that, Captain. The earl is gone, and his estate has been left to his daughter in my trust. But I must act exclusively within her wishes, and she has expressed no interest in continuing the blockade work.”

Gryf looked into the darkness at his feet. Easy come, easy go, he thought wryly.

“I would like you to stay in England for a time. Do you have relatives there?”

Gryf looked up, startled, and hoped that his voice did not shake. “Not any longer.”

“No? Well, you may have to manufacture some.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

The consul sighed audibly, and the pipe faded to a barely perceptible glow. “I knew Robert Collier a long time, Captain. Since Eton. He was not a…conventional man. I don’t suppose he really thought like the rest of us. He loved his daughter; he took care of her, in his own way. But until the end, I don’t think it had ever
occurred to him that he had done her a grave disservice by taking her away from her home, and from any chance at a life of her own, without making serious provisions for her future.”

Gryf waited. He had no idea what this explanation had to do with him.

“When Morrow fell ill,” Taylor continued after a moment, “he apparently realized his mistake. He did what he thought he could; he wrote something of a will, leaving his estate to Lady Tess as her separate property, and naming me as the trustee. And he made her promise, on his deathbed, that she would marry as soon as possible.” Taylor stood up abruptly, and rapped his pipe on the railing. Tiny sparks flared and fell down into the shadows below. “Unfortunately, an unwitnessed will made under such peculiar circumstances does not give Lady Tess much protection. A husband could easily find grounds to contest the trust. If it was held invalid, the estate would still be hers, but under the common law of England, her husband would control it.”

Gryf was beginning to wish he were somewhere in the moonless dark off Charleston, running into port dodging Yankee gunfire. There was no reason for Taylor to discuss the legalities of Lady Collier’s inheritance with an outsider, unless he planned to get that outsider seriously involved.

Taylor turned away from the rail, and took a step closer to Gryf. The consul’s voice lowered earnestly. “In deference to my old friend, to the charge he put upon me with this trusteeship, and also to my own deep affection for his daughter, I must do my utmost to see that she does not marry a man who will take advantage of her.”

Gryf cleared his throat. “You’d better explain just what it is you want me for.”

“I need your help, Captain,” Taylor said. “Your experience and judgment. In spite of her station and inheritance, Lady Tess will be virtually unprotected when she returns to England. She has naught but her mother’s sister and her husband—a stiff-necked pair with more respectability than common sense—and a brood of brainless young cousins. She’ll be a fish out of water, and an extremely plump and juicy one to every gazetted fortune hunter east of Land’s End. She’s rich, beautiful, intelligent, and utterly naive. It’s a fatal combination.”

A slow horror crept over Gryf as he pieced the plan together. “Surely you’re not asking me to—”

“Indeed I am, Captain Frost. I want someone to look after her, to make sure she doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, so to speak. I’ll pay all your expenses; give you letters of introduction, so that you can move in the right circles. Until she becomes properly engaged, I’d like you there to look over any prospective suitors.”

“I can’t believe you’re serious,” Gryf stammered.

“Quite serious. I would go myself, but my wife…” Taylor stopped and then went on. “Unfortunately, with her illness, it is impossible for me to travel. I can handle the financial aspects of this trust from a distance, but I cannot give Lady Tess the guidance she will need. I’m willing to pay you double what we paid for each blockade run, on a monthly basis, and dry-dock charges for the ship as long as she’s in port. Or wages for a substitute captain if you’d like to keep her working.”

Gryf took a deep breath, trying to steady his fingers around the glass of port. “Mr. Taylor,” he said softly. “I don’t know why you’re offering me this job, but I can assure you that you have the wrong man.”

“Hearing you say that only strengthens my opinion.”

“But—”

“Captain. Please. I need someone whom Lady Tess
can trust, someone she can think of as a friend. She’s not to know of this agreement, of course.”

Gryf clutched at that straw. “I thought you were obliged to act within her wishes.”

“Or her father’s. It was the earl who suggested you. Lady Tess brought the letter to me still sealed.”

Gryf’s mind had begun working again; he thought of the money, and his other gloomy prospects. Twice the blockade pay would buy him cargo—put Grady at the helm and keep the ship moving on top of what Gryf made. Two months of that and he would be even; four months and he would have a stake to work with; six, and he could buy into one of the China tea routes if he kept his purse strings tight.

He thought of the
Arcanum
as she had been just three months ago: hard-driven and shabby, her teak decks unvarnished, and leakage rotting the woodwork. She was in perfect condition, for once. Barring catastrophe, she wouldn’t need any major maintenance for over a year. The offer was beginning to sound appealing.

“Why me?” he asked finally, slowly, because he was afraid he was going to say yes to this insane idea instead.

Taylor did not answer immediately. Instead, he walked back to the rail, where a faint light from the waning moon glazed his shoulders with silver. “For one thing, I haven’t many choices. I need a man who can conduct himself in society, can befriend Lady Tess with some degree of sincerity and offer sensible advice…most importantly, I need someone who can be objective about Lady Collier and her inevitable suitors. Call it intuition. The earl liked you…I find that I like you. I believe that you can do it.”

Gryf had the urge to laugh—or weep—at a description that seemed to fit anyone but him. Objective he
could not be: he suspected he was half in love with Lady Collier already. His store of sensible advice for a young gentlewoman was extremely slim, consisting mainly of the firm conviction that she ought to stay clear of people like himself, and his half-forgotten knowledge of conduct in polite society was so shaky that he had hardly dared open his mouth since stepping inside the Taylors’ door for fear of making a fool of himself.

“You really are my last hope, Captain,” Taylor went on. “When Lady Tess sails with you, she’ll be beyond my protection. I have written several friends in England to ask them to watch over her, but of course they’ll not be in a position to dispense advice, or to—shall we say—make the intimate acquaintance of any young man she seems seriously interested in.”

“You place a great deal of trust in someone you hardly know,” Gryf stalled.

“Actually, I feel I know you rather well, Captain. For instance, I’m aware of the fact that you’re carrying twenty tons of india rubber which is not on the cargo list.”

It knocked Gryf off-balance, made his heart speed a little. Another blackmail? No…there was nothing really illegal about carrying off-list cargo: the worst they could do would be to fine him. Which was bad enough, considering his cash reserves. “Yes, sir,” he said faintly. “I am. Would you like me to take it off?”

Taylor did not answer directly. “When I looked back over some of the previous reports, I found a curious discrepancy between the capacity of the
Arcanum
on her blockade runs and her capacity now.”

Gryf sat silent, trapped, and ashamed he was trapped, stripped of his meager disguise as a gentleman and shown to be dishonorable before a decent man.

“Is the rubber yours or Mr. Gould’s, Captain?”

“Mine.”

“You changed the load lines on the ship.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Gryf swallowed, and then suddenly felt angry. He was tired of being taken, and doubly tired of taking the blame for every circumstance that drove him to the wall. “Mr. Gould overloaded me every run,” he said evenly. “I knew he would do it again. I could risk it on those shorter legs, but not transatlantic.”

“So you saw your chance when overhauling your ship to do something about it? Assuming rational discussion with Mr. Gould would not solve the problem?”

“Mr. Gould and I seldom had rational discussions.”

“But he understood that he was overloading your ship?”

Gryf allowed himself a humorless smile in the dark. “Oh, yes. He knew it.”

“Even on this latest voyage, when the marks had been changed, he overloaded the ship according to the bogus marks?”

“The load lines show we took on a quarter too much.”

“Is the ship overloaded now, Captain?”

“No.”

“Then I think you are the kind of man I want looking after Lady Collier.”

Gryf blinked. “Because I duped your agent about the load lines?”

“Because you are a pragmatist. A more honest man might have come running to tell—a more dishonest one might have risked his ship and split the profits. Lady Collier must have someone close by with a realistic view of the world, who knows that people are not always what they seem and knows how to deal with them.”
Taylor paused, and took a long puff of his pipe. “If it helps you to make your decision, please recall the considerable sum that Collier put out to refurbish your ship.”

Gryf turned sharply, staring toward Taylor through the darkness. “Pardon me?”

“Come now, Captain, I’m not a man to mince words. You’ve come out of this deal quite handsomely, with the blockade pay and an overhauled ship besides. Surely you would like to continue to do business with us?”

Gryf was hardly listening. He sat back in his chair and swore softly, consigning Jerome Gould to the deepest, darkest, hottest pit in Hell. A sham, a cheap trick, all Gould’s talk about the Yankees—and Gryf had fallen for it! Lord, his stupidity, his utter gullible imbecility, to have believed a word of the Nassau agent’s chicanery. All Gryf’s precious, hard-earned cargo stake—given away like candy to a dirty lying cheat.

“Captain?” Taylor prompted.

“Sir.” Gryf took a deep breath to keep the quiver of rage from his voice. “
I
paid for that overhaul.”

A silence heavy with significance stretched between them. Taylor pulled at his pipe, then grunted and said, “So one of us has been misled.”

“You might say that,” Gryf answered dryly. “And I suspect it was me.”

“You’re understandably angry.”

Gryf gave a short, flat laugh. “Or just unbelievably stupid, to let Gould deduct the expenses from my account. Apparently I’m not as clever as you thought.”

“I should reimburse you for your loss.”

Gryf took note of that: the offer, and the implication that it was indeed himself who was out the money. He knew what was coming next.

“I will reimburse you,” Taylor said, and paused. Gryf
smiled sourly at the accuracy of his own prediction. He would have given ten to one odds that Taylor’s next word would be “after.”