A Scandal to Remember (26 page)

Instead of proceeding down the second ladder to the berth deck, Punch paused outside the captain’s cabin. “I know you gave orders that no one was to go in but Manning and Mr. Denman, sir, but Manning needed help putting things to rights, and him’n Mr. Denman judged I was the man to do it.”

“Thank you, Punch. I would not have asked that of you.” Dance had long ago learned that there were some things that a man couldn’t unsee. Things like Trafalgar, when he had been a sixteen-year-old boy, and the gun captain in his division had been cut in two at his feet—that moment stayed in his mind as fresh as the moment it had happened, though many other memories of that time had long since faded.

“I’m happy to do my duty for you, sir.” Punch nodded emphatically, as if to say that was the last he was going to speak on the subject. “Now, we’ve sewn up the shroud, and put Captain Muckross’s body in the sleeping cabin, where Manning said as he’ll sit with the body tonight.”

There was nothing more to be done. “Thank you, Punch. I’ll see myself to the wardroom.”

“Cap’n? I’ve moved most of your dunnage into the day cabin for now, sir, until we bury the man proper, but—”

“No.” Dance shook his head, unwilling—or perhaps simply unprepared—to take over the stern cabin at so early a pass. It seemed … wrong. As if he were in some ungodly rush to take over for the man. Nothing could be further from the truth. He had simply wanted Captain Muckross to do his job, not to leave it all to him.

Devil take him, but what a coil. And he certainly had no desire to revisit the stern cabin today. “I’ll stick with the wardroom as long as I may.” Until there was no choice but to assume all aspects of this ill-fated captaincy.

Punch stepped closer, as if he feared being overheard. “But Miss Burke, sir. She said she needed to talk to you. Seemed important. So I let her in to wait for you”—the steward tipped his head to silently indicate the captain’s day cabin—“seeing as it’s more private than the wardroom.”

Funny—all he had wanted for days and days was a chance to be alone with Jane Burke. And now that the moment presented itself, he was dragging his feet. Trying to think of a way to put it off. Because he knew that everything had changed, and that he
had
to be thinking of his men and his ship and the steady push of the contrary westerlies working against
Tenacious
’s bows, instead of taking comfort in Miss Jane Burke.

But she was already waiting. And he was in sore need of comfort.

“Thank you, Punch.”

“Right, sir. I’ll bring you and the lady a hot brandy to chase away the chill of the deck, as well as hot washing water.”

“Thank you.” Dance was never more grateful for the man’s simple, dutiful competence. It was a small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.

Dance stripped off his sodden cloak and coat as he entered. The cabin had been restored to order—No. It had in fact been improved upon. In the warm light from the oil lamp, the room looked as if it had been given a thorough scrubbing—as if even the walls had been holystoned. And that change he could not attribute solely to the competence of Punch—and certainly not Manning—but to the exhausted woman curled up in a ball in the far corner of the stern gallery bench.

Dance knew that he ought to wake her, and say something to her, but he had no words, nothing that would give her any comfort, and so kept his quiet, and let her sleep. Because just the sight of her gave him solace. He eased himself down onto the other end of the curved bench seat so he could watch the quick rise and fall of her breath, and the way her apricot lips fell ever so slightly open as she exhaled.

He laced his hands behind his head so he wouldn’t be tempted to try and touch her—to test the silken fall of her hair between his fingers—and tried to close his own eyes. He could hear every creak and groan in the vessel, and knew what each one was—the straining of the bowsprit, continuous slow seep of water into the bows, the taut strain of the foretop.

“Dance?”

“Yes.” Dance tipped his head to regard her, but kept his voice low—Manning was only a few feet away, behind the batten wall of the sleeping cabin, and sound traveled strangely in a ship.

“Are you—” Jane’s soft questions came in fits and starts as she pulled herself up out of sleep. “Is it true?”

“Yes.” There was no other answer he could give. “He killed himself.”

“Oh, dear God.” Her voice cracked with anguish, and she covered her face with her hands. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. This is all my fault.”

Dance might have expected that there was only one other person in the whole of the ship willing to share that responsibility with him, however wrongly. “Jane, you couldn’t possibly arrange for the captain to kill himself.”

“Oh, no. Not exactly. But I should have left well enough alone. I should never have said what I said.”

Dance was too numb and exhausted for alarm, but he felt his whole body tense as if in preparation for a blow. He unlaced his hands from behind his head, and slowly sat up. “What did you say?”

His question made her cover her face again, and she shook her head. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble. I thought I was helping.”

“Jane.” He could not stop himself from taking her hand in his. “What did you do? What were you trying to help?”

She gripped his hand hard, just as she had at the table that night, when he had first felt the same messy surge of need and protectiveness rise up in him like a rogue wave. “Us. Him.
Tenacious
.”

“Jane.”

“I read to him, the way I had been used to do for my grandfather. His correspondence was in as bad a shape as the rest of his cabin—an intolerable mess.” She gestured to the now neatened writing desk. “And so I organized it. Sorted it out.”

He did not ask how she had gotten the captain to agree to such a thing—that she had a talent for arranging people as well as projects, he did not doubt. “Jane.”

She shook her head again, as if she could put off the inevitable moment of truth just a little while longer. “Some of the letters went back years.” She left him to go to the writing desk in question, and show him the contents. “But much of it remained unread, and unanswered. Unopened even.”

“I know.” He had noticed the mess of letters and torn paper when he had made his daily reports—which the captain had simply tossed atop the tottering pile. It seemed the man had taken as little interest in his personal affairs as he had the running of his ship. “What of it? What did you find?”

“You know?” Jane was startled out of guilt and into astonishment. Accusation laced her voice. “If you knew, why did you not do something about it? He had bills and debts that added together must be staggering. It’s no wonder he never wanted to leave his ship or even put up sail. He never even read any of these official-looking packets from the Admiralty.”

Tenacious
’s sailing orders, still in their unsealed packets at the bottom of the now neat stack.

Dance took the packet and broke the seal. The Admiralty’s detailed plan of sail had never even been read. Dance was relieved to find that he had instinctively followed fairly closely to the orders—they were to have proceeded to sea and made as directly as possible to Rio de Janeiro, and then around the Horn to Valparaiso before turning west for the Samoan Islands navigated by Cook some thirty-five years earlier.

He felt a return of some of his confidence in the easing of his lungs. “Thank you. You didn’t by any chance happen to also find his logs? Although I am not altogether sure if he even kept one.”

“Oh, yes. They were in his trunks. I persuaded Manning to give me the key so I might pack away his traveling desk, when I saw them.”

Of course she had. Of course, she was just that organized and efficient.

She continued to be so, pulling the log out of the trunk placed against the wall, and passing him the book bound in the familiar marbled paper of Waterlow and Sons, the Admiralty’s preferred stationer in London. Dance had a store of five such volumes at the bottom of his own trunk.

He opened the pages to find the volume had been begun nearly a year ago, in January of 1815, when
Tenacious
had been on the West Indies Station. Page followed after page of neat daily notations of wind and weather, barometer and temperature readings, noon sightings and calculations of latitude and longitude, as well as the set of the sails and speed of the vessel through the water. And interspersed with those facts were meticulously inked charts of various harbors.

Jane ran her finger along the edge of the drawing. “They are quite good, are they not? Such a loss.”

“Yes. He seems to have been a competent captain, and an able officer as little as a year ago.”

But the logbook showed the men’s physical deterioration graphically, as the notations became gradually less and less legible, until they ceased altogether in September when
Tenacious
had come into Portsmouth harbor.

Dance had never thought of the reasons why the old man might not want to do his duty, only that he hadn’t. “You are right. I should have done better. He had entrusted the ship’s funds and bills to the purser, who absconded with the money, much as he did with the funds you and the other members of the Royal Society’s expedition paid to him to share the captain’s table.”

Belated understanding lit her face. “Is that what happened? And he—the captain—had no money to feed us, and so you did. Why did you not tell me?”

Dance pushed his free hand through his short-cropped hair and tried to remember the reasons that seemed wholly insufficient now. “Many reasons. Duty to my ship. Loyalty”—such as it was—“to my captain.” A selfish loyalty, he could see now. “I suppose he had also entrusted his personal debts to the man.” He had only thought of
Tenacious
’s missing funds, and the expense to himself.

“Yes, but did you not ask yourself why? Why would a man who had risen through merit in his profession—for there is no other way to advance in the navy, is there not?”

“Preferment helps, but only to a certain point.” It had been one of the banes of his own career that he had no family to help him along, unlike his friend Will Jellicoe, whose father the Earl Sanderson had seen that his son had always benefited from the family connections. To be fair, Will was as brilliant and able as any frigate captain—with the exception of Captain Muckross, who was no longer anything of the kind—and had always been generous in helping his friends.

But not even Will could have foreseen how this voyage would see Dance promoted to his long-sought captaincy.

“But again, why?” Jane persisted. “What made him stop being so competent? What made him stop reading his correspondence and paying his bills?” She came back to the gallery bench, her eyes wide and imploring, asking him to see what he could not. Or would not.

“Gin.” It was the most obvious answer. There were enough ruined drunks crawling the gutters of London to prove that the drink was the ruin of many a man, captain or no.

“But what would drive him to the drink in the first place?”

At the moment he did not care about Muckross. Because she was close enough that he could smell the subtle scent of lemons and roses that had clung to her bedding. The same scent he had noticed that very first day she had come aboard, getting underfoot and under his skin.

Dance wanted to shut his eyes, and take a deep breath of her—as intoxicated as if he had taken gin. “Does there need to be a reason?”

“Yes.”

He could not miss the passionate insistence in her voice. “Jane, what is it?”

She let out her breath as if she had been holding it in. “It was because he had been slowly going blind. By now, I think he could barely even see.”

The grinding gears in Dance’s mind fell into place like a trap springing closed. It fit together perfectly—how the captain might have started to rely on Givens. How he might have neglected his correspondence and bills, then his appearance and his cabin, and finally, how he would have turned to the bottle for solace from a world he could no longer control. All because he could no longer see.

And the old man had been helped along his path to blue ruin by an indifferent crew led to idleness by thieving warrant officers. The image of Givens rose like a specter in Dance’s mind.

“I should have seen it.” Granted, Jane Burke was an extraordinarily observant woman, a scientist trained to look critically at things. But he was a man whose job it was to notice each rope out of place, each slackened line. He should have looked at the old man more closely, beyond the disheveled clothing, and bulbous red nose. He should have asked himself why the old man drank rather than just be irritated that it meant more work for him.

Jane shook her head, but she was just as self-critical. “I did see. But I should have shut my mouth. I should never have said so to him. He must have thought I would tell everyone. But I didn’t tell anyone. It seemed too private, too mortifying to make known abroad.”

“I wish you had told me.” He would have acted differently. He would have seen the captain’s infirmity for what it was, and not just an inconvenience to him.

Or at least he would have liked to think he would. But he’d never know now.

Jane’s thoughts were much the same. “I was going to.” She turned that wide moon of a face up to him. “I meant to. But it’s too late now. I’m too late.”

She would have covered her face again if he had not taken her hand. But when he felt the tremor in her hand, and heard the quiet sobs, he pulled her into his arms. Jane—his stalwart, positive Jane—was dissolving in tears.

He pulled her down to sit next to him, hugging her against his damp chest, and hoping that the comfort he might give her would outweigh the impropriety. But there was nothing of propriety about their situation. And if she had been concerned with propriety, she wouldn’t have come to his cabin. Indeed, she would never have come aboard
Tenacious
in the first place. She would never have faced down Sir Richard, or braved Mr. Ransome’s threats. She would have never tried to befriend the captain.

“It’s all my fault,” she gasped against his shirtfront.