Almost a Scandal (2 page)

Captain McAlden was working at his table in the gray light from the wide bow of the stern gallery windows. He wore the less formal, undress uniform of a post captain with seniority, his blue coat practical and unadorned by gold braid. Yet the lack of finery did not equate with a lack of ambition or acuity. Just the opposite. The man was as sharp and instinctively incisive as a shark.

Col came smartly to attention. “Compliments of the deck, sir, the new staysail jib has been bent on, and we now carry a full company of men, including our last young gentleman, just arrived.”

With his cool blue eyes and reserved demeanor, Captain McAlden had a reputation for being a cold man. But Col knew it was his decisive self-control, and steely determination that daunted lesser, less perceptive men.

The captain’s gaze cut quickly from Col to Kent, and then away and back, to hold for a long moment of consideration, as if he had just come to understand who the young gentleman was. He chipped the ice from his voice. “Was there some problem?”

The captain’s gaze stayed with Kent, and Col could hear the boy’s long inhalation, steadying himself to explain why he had been so damnably late to report for his duty.

Col spoke before Kent could answer. Though he had sworn not to, Col took pity on him. For his family’s sake. “No, sir.” He heard the words come out of his mouth with his usual calm, measured deliberation, though he felt anything but sure of what he was doing.

“Very good, Mr. Colyear. And the powder?”

“I’ve made the signal, and the barge is due to be alongside by six bells in the afternoon watch. I’ve also had tarpaulins rigged in anticipation, to keep the powder as dry as possible in this weather.”

“Well done. Let us hope the rain will abate. Thank you.” The captain returned his cool, probing gaze to the boy. “Mr. Kent, is it?”

The boy was smart enough to keep his answer brief and his eyes on the deck beams overhead. He nodded sharply in acknowledgment. “Captain, sir.”

Captain McAlden eyed young Kent closely, the way a cook might look at a fish lying on a bed of ice, searching out the whiff of rot. “You’ve the look of your father, all right. But a bit old for volunteer midshipman, aren’t you?”

The boy brought his gaze level with his captain. No shrinking, no flinching. Good. “Fifteen, sir.”

“Most of my young gentlemen come aboard when they’re twelve or thirteen. Your father’s left it a bit late. Not like him.”

“He wanted me to finish my studies, sir.”

Actually, Col knew from Matthew Kent’s letter that Captain Kent and Richard had been arguing for years about the boy taking his place, ever since Richard had first declared his ambition to take holy orders. The whole family had taken sides, and needless to say, family opinion had not erred on the side of the church. Matthew, Owen, and Dominic Kent had been scathing in their description of what they saw as their youngest brother’s shocking lack of enthusiasm for the navy. Richard had been the one to insist upon his precious schooling.

The captain considered Kent for another long moment before he checked his gaze over to Col, to see if he had anything pertinent to add. Col gave the captain a small shake of his head in negation. He wasn’t going to be the one to spill any Kent family secrets.

“I’m sure book learning has its place—and you’ll get plenty of schooling and study here as well,” Captain McAlden continued. “But what a young man needs in order to undertake this profession is experience. And that’s what you’ll get, and plenty of it.”

The captain looked down at the papers on his desk for a moment before he spoke again. “I had the honor of being asked by your father to put your name on my ships’ books to reserve a place for you some time ago. What, if I may ask, made you finally resign your ambitions to the sea, Mr. Kent?”

“Family tradition, sir. I expect I’ll come to like it.”

“Like it?” Captain McAlden’s voice subsided into an amused growl. “A man who will go to sea for his pleasure will go to hell for his pastime! We none of us have to like it, Mr. Kent, we just have to endure it.”

The boy managed to reef down his smile, but he made no sound, although his intelligent gray eyes were dancing with laughter.

“Family tradition and service aside,” the captain continued in a more serious vein, “I’ll warn you, you’ll get no special treatment here. In fact, as the son of Captain Alexander Kent, more will be expected of you. Your father is held in great esteem by all who know him—everyone from me and the Lords of the Admiralty, down to the larboard gunners. He’s a damn useful man with a frigate. One of the best.” He pinned Kent with a slow, penetrating stare. “I’ll expect you to be useful as well. On a frigate of war every man must have several stations, and I will expect you to learn them all. I’ll make you a credit to your father, whether you will it or not. No easy task, as you look a pretty, soft sort of boy.”

Col nearly smiled. As it was, he was obliged to look out the stern gallery at the rain, and swallow hard to keep down the laugh that threatened to rise in his throat. His memories of the youngest Kent, along with Matthew’s letters, had put him in expectation of a reedy, whining sort of boy. The specimen in front of them was lean, straight, and unflinching in comparison to what Col had expected. But, he had to admit, with his mischievous urchin’s face, he
was
a pretty sort of boy.

Captain McAlden leveled his last instruction at Kent. “I advise you to put any thought but that of the strictest obedience from your brain, and turn yourself diligently to this profession. Your father has entrusted your training into my care, and I mean to make both a sailor and a man out of you.”

Something that could not possibly dare be a smile floated across the boy’s wide mouth.

“I will apply myself with all diligence, sir.”

Chapter Two

Well. It was lucky Captain Sir Hugh McAlden hadn’t actually gotten Richard, wasn’t it? If the captain thought Sally “a soft sort of boy,” what on earth would he have made of Richard, for Sal was easily twice as hard as her missing younger brother?

Perhaps she ought to be worried about what might have become of Richard, of where he might have gone to hide, or if he were safe and well, but the cold fact of the matter was that she was now far too busy trying to keep her own head above water to worry about where Richard might have chosen to swim.

“Follow me, Mr. Kent.”

At that moment, Sally was actually rather glad Richard had so perversely refused to accept his responsibilities, for if he had not, she would not be following such a man as David St. Vincent Colyear down the companionway to the orlop berth. Following Mr. Colyear—and she must endeavor to always think of him as
Mister
Colyear and not Col, though he
was
taking up more of his valuable time to escort her to her berth—was infinitely preferable to any of the useless activities she had been supposed to be doing at home.

She had no talent for the sort of decorative idleness that passed for accomplishment in a female. She had a talent for sailing. And by God, she was finally free to use it.

Free to follow David St. Vincent Colyear below, to the gun deck.
Audacious
was a well-kept ship, and as they descended into the hull, the dense, oily smells of tar and oakum enveloped her. To Sally, the pungent scent was headier than any perfume. It was a balm to the disquiet in her soul.

Below, the pummeling quiet of the gray, streaming top deck gave way to boisterous celebration. On the gun deck, where the majority of the ship’s crew messed and hung their hammocks, was a riot of blue jackets, red kerchiefs, and tar-smeared, wide trousers. The low space rang with a cacophony of song and fiddle playing, card gaming, and catcalling, as the men made the most of their last day in port. Sally could only assume most of the men had been confined to the ship for fear they would desert once ashore, or render themselves stupefied with drink.

Although there seemed to be plenty of that on board as well. Loose behavior seemed to be the order of the day, and Sally was surprised, and more than a little curious, to note the presence of more than a few rowdy-looking women of the sort who frequented the waterfront taverns. Her father had never allowed such women on his ship while Sally and Richard had lived aboard with him—at least as far as Sally knew—but on
Audacious,
tarts seemed to be everywhere, their garish clothes and painted faces filling up the dim spaces like gaudy lanterns.

Mr. Colyear appeared entirely unperturbed by the hurly-burly atmosphere. He passed easily through the men without breaking into their pleasures, acknowledging their knuckled salutes by name, speaking with a short nod as he passed. “Wharton. Hayes.”

Though he was second in command of the ship only to the captain, Col’s authority seemed to come all from who he was, and not from his rank. There was admiration and respect on both sides. Mr. Colyear was well-liked.

What an interesting man David St. Vincent Colyear had become.

A man still very much on duty. “Unlike other frigates, on
Audacious
you’ll be housed in the orlop deck cockpit with the other midshipmen.” Mr. Colyear’s low voice rumbled back to her as he moved down another companionway ladder with the rolling, well-coordinated speed of one long accustomed to shipboard life. “The senior warrant officers share the gunroom with the commissioned officers. And here the warrants with wives—the bo’sun and the gunner—take the space normally alloted to midshipmen.”

His voice was rough and warm all at the same time; it sounded as if it came from somewhere deep in his throat but was softened by the journey to his mouth. Like a cannonball loaded with cotton batting, tamped down and ready.

Ready for anything. Especially masquerading midshipmen. Sally shrugged her loose coat up around her ears.

Mr. Colyear and his battered but well-fitted coat were far too outsized for the low clearance belowdecks. He took up the entire breadth and depth of the cramped companionway as he led the way below, forced to stoop to make his way, his lean shoulders blotting out what little light filtered down between the deck timbers. He did as Sally had been taught from childhood to do, and trailed a hand along the posts and braces, or the deckhead, the underside of the deck beams overhead, to feel his way along. Counting the wooden frames, so even in the intermittent light of the lower deck, he might know at any moment exactly where in the architectural map of the hull he stood. His long fingers brushed across a knee timber with the same sort of offhand, instinctive caress a sailor gave to the living ship he loved.

The strangeness of the thought made her skin feel warm and tight, as if her coat and shirt were no longer falling in loose drapes, but pressing tenaciously to her body beneath their folds. Devil take her. Her face was sure to be flaming with telltale heat.

She batted all thoughts of
Mister
Colyear and his long, capable fingers roughly aside. If she was to survive aboard
Audacious,
she had to guard against such ridiculously weak, girlish thoughts.

“Tell me what you know of my ship, Mr. Kent.”

My ship
. Mr. Colyear’s choice of words revealed a very great deal about him, and his ambitions. The manning of
his
ship, the calling of watches, and the way the men performed their assigned tasks were all the responsibility of the first lieutenant. The tall, implacable, ambitious first lieutenant.

But while her mind was busy canvassing Mr. Colyear’s ambitions, Sally recited her reply by rote, pulling the answer to his question easily out of the seemingly fathomless supply of naval facts she had accumulated in her brain since childhood.

“Apollo class frigate of thirty-six guns, built at Buckler’s Hard by Henry Adams in 1803. Runs one hundred forty-five feet, two inches at the gun deck and one hundred twenty-one feet, eleven and three-quarters inches in keel. Thirty-eight feet, two and one-quarter inches in beam. The guns are comprised of twenty-six eighteen-pounders on the upper deck, with a further two nine-pounders and ten thirty-two-pounders on the quarterdeck, while the forecastle is armed with two nine-pounders and four thirty-two-pounder carronades. She carries a full complement of two hundred sixty-four men.”

And just one girl.

And one tall, ambitious, handsome, stony-eyed first lieutenant, who paused and turned to regard her with wry, penetrating amusement during her recitation. The stern set of his mouth never varied, but his eyes—those glittering eyes that made the backs of her knees wobble like loose canvas sails—glinted like beacons in the dark. Mr. Colyear’s sharp eyes raked her meticulously, making note, she was sure, of every telltale mistake of her obvious imposture.

In the passageway between decks he was so close—too close—that she could smell the rain evaporating off the heat of his body. A jangle of warning shook through her, but she wanted to back away and step closer all at the same time. She wanted to draw that rainy scent of him deep into her lungs and hold it there, even as her head told her feet to move away, to stop leaning toward him, to preserve her own ambitions from discovery. But neither her feet nor her lungs were functioning properly. She couldn’t draw a proper breath, as if Mr. Colyear had sucked all the air out of the passageway and left her nothing but the curious pressure building in her chest.

No. It was only that she had drawn the bindings around her breasts too tight. But whatever it was that made her heart tumble within her chest, it was heady. It was dangerous and reckless, unnerving and undoubtedly rash.

And in that moment, with Lieutenant Colyear looking at her with those cooly penetrating eyes, it was exciting. It was exciting to think that she might fool him, and fool them all.

She had not felt this alive, this happy, in years.

Devil take her. Sally clamped her mouth down to keep from grinning like a bottle-nosed porpoise. She had to allay his suspicions. She had to be Richard. Or at least a better version of him. “Mr. Colyear”—she firmed her voice—“I know what you must be thinking, sir. I—”

“Do you?” His expression didn’t change, but his eyes seemed to grow brighter and more glittering, as if she had awakened instead of dampened his curiosity. “I think not.”