The Silver Lord. Miranda Jarrett

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СКАЧАТЬ said hurriedly, wishing so clearly to move from the topic of the bed that he almost—almost—regretted twitting her about it. “Most of you Londoners ask after that.”

      He glanced up towards the ceiling, where the white plaster was stained yellow from obvious water damage. “I assume that there is one?”

      “Of course,” she said. “It is made of tiles, to replace the old thatch.”

      “And does it leak, Miss Winslow, this tiled roof?”

      She looked upward, too, following his gaze. “Rain is a part of our life here, Captain My Lord. Raindrops and sea-spray—why, we scarce notice them, nor the marks that they leave.”

      He smiled, knowing inevitably what would come next. “But the Londoners notice?”

      “Oh, yes,” she said with undeniable triumph in her voice, and for the first time she smiled in return, quick and determined, in a way that seemed to link them together for that instant. “They do. Here is the last room for you to see, My Lord, the master’s chamber. You shall understand for yourself why it is the most perfect room in the entire house.”

      His own smile lingered as he followed her, thinking of how that grin of hers was already as close to perfection as anything he’d see today. He’d tolerate a good winter’s worth of water-marked plaster to be able to see her look at him like that again.

      But as soon as she pulled back the heavy velvet curtains, he forgot everything else but the view that rolled away before him. Here the old-fashioned diamond panes had been replaced with newer casements, freeing the landscape. The overgrown remnants of a garden huddled close to the house, then a band of wind-stunted oaks and evergreens that ran to a ragged edge of sandy land, and then—then lay the restless, shimmering silver of the sea, the horizon softened on a gray day like this so the waves and sky blended into one. What he would see from these windows would never be the same twice, just like the sea itself, and just like the sea, he’d always be drawn irresistibly back to it.

      “Mark what I say, Captain My Lord,” said Miss Winslow swiftly, realizing too late the cost of sharing perfection. “There is so much wrong with Feversham that you cannot see for yourself, not in so short a time! Every chimney needs repointing, and every fireplace smokes. I cannot count the panes missing from the windows, the lead in the mullions having gone so brittle. The last cook left over how the bake-ovens are crumbling to dust from the inside, and there’s so many bats living in the attic that they’d come down into the servants’ quarters, too, making the maidservants all give notice from fright.”

      He was only half listening, because none of it mattered. He would make whatever was wrong into right, wouldn’t he? There’d be no better way to spend his Spanish silver than this. He would have the curtains taken down from these windows, and he would never replace them. He would want to wake to this, his own private square of sea, and he would want to fall asleep to it each night as well.

      “Shall I call your carriage, Captain My Lord?” the gray-eyed woman beside him was asking. “You should begin your journey now, before it grows later. Your driver will not wish to take his horses on our roads after dark.”

      “Thank you, Miss Winslow,” he said gently. He could hardly fault her if she wished to keep such a magical place as this to herself, could he? But if he hadn’t come, then someone else would, and at least he would be sure to give her and her worthless old father a handsome parting settlement when he let them go. “Tell the driver I shall be ready in half an hour’s time.”

      “You will leave, then, Captain My Lord?” she asked, the relief in her eyes strangely sad. “You will be gone from Feversham?”

      He nodded, wishing for her sake that the truth didn’t feel like deceit. He would leave, but he meant to return, and then he wouldn’t leave again until he’d new orders from his admiral. He would always come back to Feversham because, like every wandering sailor, at last he’d found his home. He’d prepared for the worst, and been granted better than he’d ever dreamed.

      He’d found perfection.

      Chapter Three

      Fan stood on the bench and gazed out over the score of expectant faces turned up towards her, her hands clasped before her to hide any trembling. The candlelight from the lanterns flickered with the drafts that found their way in through the barn’s timbers, and the men of the Company were waiting so quietly that she could hear the horses at their hay, rustling and nickering in their stalls behind her.

      “I know there’s talk at the tavern in town,” she began, “and I’m not the kind to pretend otherwise. The hard truth is this—that a Londoner came to look at Feversham with an eye towards buying it.”

      She let the muttered oaths and exclamations settle before she continued. “But this fine gentleman found the house old and inconvenient, with much lacking,” she said, adding a bit of purposeful scorn to her voice for extra emphasis, “and I do not expect him to bother with us again.”

      “You didn’t show him this barn, did you, mistress?” called one man to the raucous delight of his friends. “He wouldn’t’ve found much lacking there if’n you had.”

      “Nay, Tom, not the barn, nor the privies, either,” she answered dryly. “I kept our secrets to ourselves, where they belong. But I did take care not to show him the house in the best of lights, just to be sure. The sight of old Master Trelawney’s moldy stuffed pigeons seemed enough to send him racing back to London, his driver whipping those hired horses for all he was worth.”

      They laughed again, as much from relief as from amusement, and pushed and shoved at each other, as if to prove that way that they hadn’t been worried, not at all. But Fan knew she wasn’t entirely free of the questions, not as long as Bob Forbert stood in the front of the crowd, chewing on the inside of his mouth and shifting nervously from one scrawny leg to the other.

      “The boy that watered the coachman’s horses, mistress,” he said, his voice squeaking as he strived to make himself heard. “The boy said the man weren’t no regular Londoner, but a fancy lord and a king’s officer, a Navy man in a coat all glittering with gold lace. Do that be true, mistress? That some bleeding gold-lace officer was here poking his long nose around our affairs?”

      Instantly the laughter and raillery stopped, and all the faces swung back towards Fan for an answer.

      “Yes,” she said slowly, carefully. “He was Captain Lord George Claremont of His Majesty’s Navy, but all that interested him was the house.”

      Smuggling took money from the king’s pockets, and in turn the king took catching smugglers most seriously. Officers like Captain Lord Claremont were sworn to capture smugglers as enemies of the crown, especially now with the country at peace with France. Such an officer could destroy her life as well, if he learned of her role in the Company, and there wasn’t a man in the barn who wasn’t thinking the same.

      How simple it sounded that way, how clean and uncomplicated, when in fact the captain’s visit was still twisting away at her, as sharp as a new-honed knife. When she’d received the letter from the Trelawneys’ agent in London, she’d imagined the captain to be the model of Navy cruelty, with a twisted, squinting face as weather-beaten as a cliff to reflect the wickedness of his personality.

      But an aristocratic captain: what could possibly make for a worse combination? To be sure, she’d next to no experience with arrogant noblemen, though she’d heard enough tales of СКАЧАТЬ