A Scandal to Remember (42 page)

Dance straightened his shoulders. “I welcome any inquiry, sir. My conduct will speak for itself.”

“Will it? A ship has been lost. Your former captain is dead. Accusations have been made.”

“By whom?” Dance belatedly tried to amend the vehement heat in his tone. “If I may ask, sir?”

“By your former crew.”

There was only the one. “I take it you refer to Mr. Ransome.”

“I do. A man with some twenty-six years of experience in His Majesty’s service, and who spoke very highly of his former captain, Captain Muckross.”

“While Captain Muckross was indeed a fine man, before his death by his own hand, Captain Muckross did not concern himself with any aspect of running his ship.”

Sir David Douglas pushed himself away from his table, and slowly sat back in his seat. “That is an alarming accusation.”

“It is not accusation, it is fact. Duly noted by both the officers, and many members of the crew.” Devil take him, here he was, already lying to save his salt-tanned hide. While it was true the officers, especially Mr. Whitely, knew of Muckross’s drunkenness, Dance had very deliberately tried to keep the fact from the crew.

“A fact which cannot be substantiated, as only one man of your crew has survived. The other are all, we must presume, lost. As are all the records of your ship. Mr. Ransome says he makes his accusations in the memory of his lost shipmates, and to right a very great wrong.”

It was on the tip of Dance’s tongue to correct Sir David’s misinformation, but something—something that was bloody, damn well angry at being brought back to the ship by marines, and being kept from Jane—held him back. He had the log—it was surely in all of the gear that Jane would see was stowed carefully aboard.

Unless Ransome knew something he didn’t.

Dance’s mind flashed back to the fire, and Jane sifting through the ashes. And Ransome’s triumphant look. Had he burned the log?

Fuck all.

There was nothing he could do but rely on sixteen hard years of training, and brazen it out. “I am sure that recounting suits Mr. Ransome’s version of events. Mine is, however, quite different.”

He would speak to Jane at the first opportunity that presented itself—which he hoped was immediately after the conclusion of this interview. He missed her already. His hands felt empty, and his heart off kilter. And his head—he needed to keep his head and his wits about him for the present interview.

“I had no doubt it would be.” Sir David merely lifted his eyebrows. “Ransome’s version of events, as you call it, includes an accusation of both incompetence and gross misconduct on your part.”

Dance looked Sir David in the eye. “I have no doubt that Mr. Ransome feels that he should have made a better commander of
Tenacious
than I. But as first lieutenant, that responsibility fell to me. And I executed those duties in the manner I saw fit, in accordance with our official orders, which were to conduct a scientific survey of the greatest number possible of Pacific islands. Orders, I might add, I was not privy to until the death of the captain.”

“What do you mean? Do you mean that Captain Muckross did not tell you, the first lieutenant, the sailing orders, even when, as you allege, he did not concern himself with the day-to-day work of his ship?”

“Yes. sir. That is correct.”

Sir David pushed back his chair. “Extraordinary.”

Extraordinary
was actually a tame word for the events of the past few months. Dance had never spent so much toil for so little return, except in the rather extraordinary reward of Miss Jane Burke.

The captain’s mind was running down the same stream. “And you say you saved this Miss Burke from the wreck?”

“Miss J. E. Burke. A conchologist with the Royal Society’s expedition. A rather extraordinary, and extraordinarily resourceful individual. And my betrothed.” He said it again, as if mere repetition of the word could convince Sir David.

Who regarded Dance with decided disfavor, his lips in an elegant curl. “You were alone with her for quite some time?”

“Forty-seven days, sir, from the moment I pulled her out of the shipwreck, where I will again remind you, some member of my crew maliciously locked her below decks, either so she might drown, or so I would in trying to save her.”

At last Sir David’s arches rose in perfect horror. “Captain Dance, you astonish me.”

“It has been an astonishing cruise, sir. An extraordinarily astonishing expedition.”

Chapter Twenty-five

The ship set sail as soon as she was brought aboard with the charred remains of all her work. Of Dance, she saw nothing, and heard less. Not in the hour after she was given a comfortable cabin just forward of the large stern cabin. Not in the afternoon when she was sent tea on a tray by a tight-lipped servant. And not the following day, when she forced herself to spend her time sewing herself proper clothes made from the bright calico of the purser’s slops rather than go crazy staring at the walls and worrying about what they had done to Dance.

If she looked like a strange version of a bright-shirted topman, it did not matter—there was no one to see her. She was kept most carefully to herself until she was finally called before the captain.

“Miss Burke.” Captain Sir David Douglas stood and did her the courtesy of bowing over her hand, after he deigned to invite her to take a dish of tea with him one afternoon after they had been at sea more than a few days. “I knew your grandfather. We were briefly at school together before I came into the navy. And I have a great regard for His Grace, your great-grandfather.”

So much for the relative anonymity of being J. E. Burke, conchologist. “Thank you, Sir David. But my concern is all for Captain Dance. I am anxious to see him.”

“Best not, Miss Burke. Best not,” he informed her over the top of his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Young Dance is in quite serious trouble, which I feel certain His Grace of Shafton should want you to be kept clear of.”

“What sort of trouble?”

If Sir David found her tone pert, he only elevated that prodigious nose and looked down upon her from it. “The sort of trouble a captain earns when he loses one of His Majesty’s vessels.”

Jane raised her own chin a notch. “I feel certain His Majesty would approve of the way Captain Dance fought to keep that vessel afloat.”

“Fought?”

“Yes, fought. Worked, as you navy men call it, watch on watch when others wouldn’t or couldn’t. When Captain Muckross was too blind and drunk to do his duty.”

“I will do my best to forget that you said that, Miss Burke. I feel certain your grandfather would want you to forget such a sentiment as well.”

“It is not a sentiment, Sir David. It is the plain truth of the matter. A truth I will swear to, if need be.”

“And how do you think that would look, Miss Burke? A young, unmarried woman, who had been so rash as to take herself out upon the seas in a ship full of men, and who was stranded upon an island with a man she was not married to.”

Jane felt her face flame as hot and red as if she had been sunburned. “Captain Dance was a perfect gentleman.”

“Be that as it may, no one will believe you. A man with no family. I will not scruple to tell you, Miss Burke, what Dance assuredly did not. He is a nobody—a talented officer, perhaps—but he has no family, no name. He is the bastard son of God knows who. And if he knows, he is not saying. No, for your family’s sake, I will not allow you to make a scandal of yourself.”

Jane found herself propelled to her feet. “Captain Dance was kind enough to inform me of his ancestry, which I assure you troubles me not in the least. And if I should want to associate with him, that is for me to choose, sir, and not you.”

“You are quite wrong, my dear girl. It is for me to choose. I am the captain, and what I say goes. It shall be as I say. Keep yourself quiet, and put Captain Dance completely from your mind.”

*   *   *

In due time, all of which was spent in the close confines of her own small cabin, or in the superintending presence of the captain,
Centaur
was brought into Valparaiso, and Jane was whisked off the ship in the captain’s gig, and taken to the palatial home of a British merchant who lived halfway up the sloping hillside of the city where the Pacific breezes were said to cool the air.

“Mr. Balfour, of the merchant house Balfour Williamson, is an esteemed friend, and happy to make himself useful both to me and to His Grace of Shafton. And he is a man whose discretion I can trust.”

Sir David showed her through the doors of an imposing stone mansion overlooking a fountain plaza, and immediately withdrew himself, pleading Admiralty business. Jane was conducted above, and shown into a beautifully furnished soft green room that was astonishing in its opulence after her travels and travails.

Shown in, being a polite way of saying
shut in.
She heard the lock turn behind her with no instruction of what she was to expect, and no invitation to join the family, or view the house’s public rooms. She was quite effectively cut off, just as Captain Sir David Douglas had, no doubt, intended. There was not so much as a piece of writing paper in the ornamental desk set before the tall windows.

But she did have an excellent view of the plaza and fountain. Jane tossed her much abused cloak on the desk chair, and pushed the heavy wooden shutters wide. She refused to be entirely closeted away like a naughty child, all because she had chosen to take a scientific journey on her own, and been shipwrecked with a man who might not prove to be a gentleman.

No. Jane rejected the thought, just as she had rejected Sir David’s directive to put Dance from her mind. It was impossible. He was everything she thought of, everything she wanted—every comfort and joy. Every need. And nothing, not even the loss of all her other dreams, could compare to the hole in her heart—her very soul—without Dance.

No. She firmed her resolve. She would not be so disloyal.

But there was precious little she could do short of climbing out the window—though the drop did look formidable.

Jane retreated to the velvet-upholstered desk chair, and sat, listening as snatches of chatter in Spanish and Portuguese and English, as well as several other, unrecognizable languages, fluttered up from the street—the clatter and calls of maids as they shook out rugs and emptied pails, or hurried with their baskets toward what looked to be a market at the very far end of the street.

A snippet of a song filtered up from the cobbles, and echoed around the high, painted ceiling—such a large lovely room within which to be jailed.
“But stout and strong cider are England’s control—”

“Give me the punch ladle,”
Jane found herself humming along,
“I’ll fathom the—”

Dear God. She would know that Welsh tenor anywhere. “Punch!”

She bolted for the window and levered herself out over the sill, scanning the street for the familiar ginger beard. There, on the corner. “Punch!”

The one-legged old tar immediately raised his hand in silent greeting, as if he weren’t in the least bit surprised to see her. He hop-skipped his way under the window, and asked in a low voice, “Can you come out?”

“No.” She shook her head as she mouthed the word, and then, because he was right beneath her, and she had never been so glad to see an old friend in all of her life, and because she had no better idea of what to do, Jane took a deep breath to hide the hard hammering of her heart, and climbed straight out the window.

Punch wasn’t fazed in the least. “Get that railing there, miss,” he instructed. “And see if you can hang down from it there. That’s it. We’ve got you.”

Stout hands grasped her by the waist and lowered her down, but the moment her feet hit the pavement, Punch was hustling her across the plaza and out of sight down a winding street.

“Are you all to rights then, miss?” Punch took in her strange calico dress.

“Yes, now that you’ve found me. And how did you find me?”

“Had my ear to the ground, so to speak. And the chatter up the market there was that good Mr. Balfour had some duke’s granddaughter at his house. And knowing that the cap’n would have taken good care of you, and hoping it might be you, I came to see for myself. But them being mighty high in the instep”—he hooked his thumb over his shoulder at the house across the plaza—“they wouldn’t tell me, nor take a note in to you. So Flanaghan here suggested a song.”

Jane looked behind her to find the former topman, who tugged his forelock. “Mistress.”

His choice of words made Jane flush with heat to the roots of her hair, but he meant it kindly enough.

“Come to fetch you, we have.”

“Thank you,” she said, even though she seemed to have fetched herself out the window. “I’m so glad you did. How did you get here? How did you survive? Who survived?”

“All that stuck together, miss.” Punch answered the last question first. “Mr. Whitely and Mr. Simmons, when he recovered himself, headed us out of the gale and found us a Yankee whaling ship that brung us here safe enough.”

“And Mr. Whitely, and Mr. Simmons and Mr. Denman? Where are they?”

“Inn not too far from here.” Punch pointed down the road. “Been taking their time reporting to the Admiralty, letting Mr. Simmons recover hisself a little better.”

“Oh, thank God. Let us go to them this instant.”

“And the captain?” Punch asked, as he looked back at the house across the plaza. “Where is he?”

“Oh, Lord. I was hoping you knew. They won’t tell me anything. Captain Sir David Douglas, who brought me here, said he was to be brought before a court-martial for the loss of
Tenacious
. And Mr. Ransome has accused Dance of murdering Captain Muckross.”

“God’s balls,” said Punch.

“Exactly, Punch. My sentiments exactly.”

*   *   *

Dance was brought to court-martial for the loss of
Tenacious
with alarming swiftness. Immediately upon their arrival in the port of Valparaiso, a board of three post captains was convened upon
Centaur
under the authority of Captain Sir David Douglas, who as senior, acted as both president and judge-advocate.