Almost a Scandal (22 page)

“And what is it you think I want?” Gamage’s face was twisted up with bitter scorn.

“The same thing I want.”

Gamage’s eyes got strangely wide and almost liquid. As he searched her face he looked … frightened. And vulnerable.

“Mr. Kent.” Lieutenant Colyear appeared in the doorway, like a beacon from the gloom of the empty companionway. “Is there a problem here?”

“There’s your boyfriend now, come to save you,” Gamage muttered for her ears alone.

But with his face inches from her own, Sally could see the flicker of fear press white marks into the corner of Gamage’s mouth. It gave her strength. “No, Mr. Colyear,” she said succinctly. “There is no problem.” Sally made her voice confident and answered without letting her own gaze move an inch from Gamage’s. “We were just discussing my helping Mr. Gamage with his course of study for his lieutenant’s exam.”

Over Gamage’s shoulder Mr. Colyear’s eyebrows rose as slowly as his unperturbable drawl. “Really?”

But Mr. Colyear’s astonishment, and his wariness, were nothing compared to Gamage’s. The older midshipman drew away from her sharply, as if her very touch might now be poison. “What are you about?”

“I’ve helped pass four older brothers, Mr. Gamage. I know my way around both the mathematics and the sailing questions you are likely to get. Mr. Colyear can attest to my brothers all having passed.”

“That I can.” Mr. Colyear looked at her for a very long time in that minutely considering way of his, before he smiled. That same small, one-sided, begrudging smile. “As you don’t require any further assistance, Mr. Kent, you will excuse me.” Mr. Colyear nodded his head to her, and moved back into the gloom beyond the cockpit door.

Once the first lieutenant was out of sight, and more importantly out of earshot, Gamage came back at her hard, snatching up her coat by the lapels. “If you’re thinking to make a fool of me, I’ll have your guts—”

Sally fought the urge to tug at the fist gripping her collar. “No joke, Gamage. It’s the one thing you want, but you haven’t got, isn’t it? And I can help you get it.”

The slow gears of Gamage’s brain ground together to try and figure out what was to his best advantage.

She pressed her advantage. “I can help you, Gamage. I can help you pass. I give you my solemn promise, and I never break my word.”

“You’ll make me pass for lieutenant or you’ll be sorry.” His voice was still belligerent and he rattled at her collar for good measure, to show her, or more likely himself, that he was still in charge.

“No.” Sally wouldn’t blink. She would not give up any of the advantage she had so painstakingly gained. “Kindly leave off your attempts at shredding my uniform. Thank you.” But instead of falling back, as he expected, she took a step closer to him, forcing
him
to take a surprised step back. “I’ll help you pass for lieutenant—I’ll help you study and prepare—only if you behave. Only if you leave off badgering and intimidating the midshipmen. And if you so much as make Ian Worth whimper in his sleep, I’ll make it my life’s work to see that you
never
get put up for that exam. But as you so cogently observed, I do have a great whopping number of family in the navy. And they do have a great deal of influence. And the three that are already post captains have a great many places for lieutenants. Think about that for a moment.”

She let that sink into his thick mind for a long moment while he struggled to weigh his interests against each other.

“If you’re at leisure right now, we can start. A Board of Examination can convene in any convenient port, or wherever three post captains can be gathered. It could be at anchor off Brest as easily as Portsmouth, so you need to be prepared as soon as possible. Have you your books? I’ll need to take a look at your journals, to see what areas of weakness you may need to work on.”

“No.” Gamage was walking away from her, turning his back. Hiding. “I haven’t bothered to keep a logbook in years.”

“Why not?” Even as she asked, the answer whispered at the back of her mind. Matthew had been much the same as a boy. Though she had been younger, she remembered her brother’s struggles to read, though he had been, and remained, as clever as they came in other ways—in the actual doing of things. Perhaps Gamage was the same.

Gamage tried to hide behind callous indifference. “Why should I?”

“Because you will be required to produce a book as documentation at your exam. Along with a recommendation from your captain. All right, I can help you with the journal as well. I’ve a few tricks to make it easier that I learned from my brother Matthew. He wasn’t one much for writing and ciphering, either, but he’s done very well for himself, so you can, too.”

“I haven’t said yes.” Gamage clearly didn’t like this feeling that he wasn’t in control.

She wouldn’t let him back out. “Then say yes, and get it over with, for God’s sake, if not your own. This is your chance, Gamage. I’ll not offer again, and the alternative is too depressing to contemplate.” Sally went to her own sea chest to rummage around until she found what she was looking for.

“Here, you’d best work from my books instead of your own. I’ve made copious notes in the margins from my brothers’ experiences, especially Matthew’s. You can see here, no, here.” She turned to an illustrative page, where the margins were filled with her notations. “Some of the questions they were asked at the examination, as well as my own observations when I sailed with my father when I was younger.”

When Gamage swiped the book out of her hand, she knew she had him. Even with his attempt to appear casually indifferent as he flipped through the pages, she could see his frightened, almost desperate interest.

“Who the devil is Sarah Kent?”

Oh, the devil surely had already taken her. She had forgotten that it was her own copy of
The Elements of Navigation
—inscribed in her round, childish hand with her proper name, Sarah Alice Kent—that she had packed for Richard in the hopes that it would give him some assistance.

“My mother.” She had no idea why on earth that particular lie popped out of her mouth. But there it was. Perhaps, contrary to Mr. Colyear’s opinion, she was getting better at lying, at last. “She sailed a great deal with my father when they were first married. Before we were born. She passed it to each one of us in turn.”

Sally looked down at her feet in case the lie showed in her face. Gamage was stupid in a great many ways, but he was a cunning fellow and might find her out yet. But instead of giving him any chance to remount his metaphoric guns, she would keep him on the defensive. “Make up your mind, Gamage. That’s my offer. Take it or leave it. I won’t offer again.”

It was terrible, watching him try to decide. Excruciatingly slow. But finally, Damien Gamage held out his hand. “I’ll do it. You’ll do it. You’ll pass me for lieutenant.”

She accepted the hand he offered. “So help me, I will.”

Or, she suspected, die trying.

*   *   *

Kent blew into the gunroom like a breeze on a bright summer day. The girl—how could anyone who had eyes not see her for a girl, though the bruise on her cheekbone lent her a disreputable, boyish cast—was toting her own sea chest, with ancient Angus Pinkerton, looking as mournful as an old hound, carrying the other end.

She certainly didn’t look any worse for wear from her latest set-to with Gamage. She looked to be the same bright, cheerful, neck-or-nothing tumultuous girl she had been before Will Jellicoe and Ian Worth had barged into the gunroom begging for his assistance to keep Gamage from killing her. But she hadn’t been killed. Far from it. When Col had arrived to rescue her, she was handling Gamage with a remarkably brilliant solution. Brilliant, but untenable, in Col’s opinion, for Gamage was too thick a plank for even her to help.

But that was her way. And her charm. She would rely on her unshakable belief in her abilities, until Gamage came to believe them as well. And then, once he started to believe in her, the possibilities were endless. She was nothing if not entirely full of the power of possibilities.

And she was delectable because of it. Her rosy, gamin face was glowing with satisfaction, exertion, and enthusiasm. He wanted to—

No. Col shut his eyes and turned away. That way lay madness. And the loss of his career. And the loss of his friends. He busied himself for a moment in taking off his coat and settling it carefully over the back of the chair before he let himself take another look.

“You’ll be in Mr. Rudge’s old cuddy, young Kent,” Pinkerton was saying.

“Oughtn’t I to get the last room?” She pointed to the cuddy nearest the gunroom’s door. “Oughtn’t Mr. Horner move up to Mr. Rudge’s room?”

If only life followed all the rules. All the rules that kept one safe and secure and from going out of one’s mind with undisciplined want.

“No,” Lieutenant Horner himself answered. “I asked the captain if I could stay put. All the cuddys are the same size—there are no guns—but I just didn’t want to shift my dunnage. And when Mr. Rudge comes back, he’ll want his old room back. I hope you don’t mind.”

Kent had accepted the change without any further comment, though she did venture to dart a quick questioning look Col’s way. “That seems eminently logical. Mr. Rudge’s room it is.”

Col was the only one who minded. The rest of them were impervious to his dilemma. Just as they remained impervious to Kent’s identity.

But Col was as impervious as a leaky boat. Now that he knew she would be quartered not less than two feet from his door, something more unruly than alarm hit him deep in his gut every time he looked at her. Everything about her screamed out,
Girl, girl, girl
.

How could they not see it? Even now, as she manhandled her sea trunk into the cuddy, a lock of hair escaped from her short queue and fell across her cheek. That hair, the blazing ginger of the Kents. They all had it—from Captain Alexander Kent down to the boy Richard—that distinctive hair.

She wore it as her brothers had, in an old-fashioned queue, clubbed back with a black ribbon. Col wore his own hair much the same way. They were sailors and were immune to the tyranny of fashion.

But he remembered Sally before, from that summer, when her hair had been long and flowing. She had been too young to put it up, and he recalled a moment of strange, desperate need, when he had surreptitiously touched the long fall of her hair to see if it felt as silky as it had looked. A strange wordless compulsion. He could still recall the slide of the thick, almost lively hair, as it had fallen through his fingers.

Col gripped the back of his chair to stifle the urge to do the same, to test if it still felt like liquid silk. While the other denizens of the gunroom crowded around to welcome Mr. Kent, Col held himself rigidly away, knowing if he did not curb his instincts each and every living and breathing second, he would inadvertently try to touch her.

“The men will be happy tonight with the thought of fresh prize money,” Mr. Charlton was saying. “I’ll wager they’ve already taken the measure of that xebec like Admiralty clerks, figuring their shares out to the shilling.”

Lieutenant Horner was drawn back into the conversation. “How much do you think it will be, Mr. Charlton?”

“I am not an Admiralty clerk, but I should guess…”

The conversation went on around him, but Col did not attend. Every nerve, every sense, every thought was turned to her. Waiting for her.

Even though he did not look, but kept his eyes assiduously turned away from her cuddy, he felt her arrival at the table when she came out at last to take her leisure with the rest of them. The others seated at the long table built into the base of the mizzenmast included the surgeon, Mr. Stephens, and Lieutenant Horner, as well as Mr. Charlton. When Charlton offered Kent a drink, Col found he could no longer keep his shrieking curiosity silent.

“So, Mr. Kent, pray tell us how you fared with Mr. Gamage?”

His fellow officers seemed not to mind his change of conversational direction, for they were all as curious about the confrontation as he was. As Col had so often observed, there were few secrets on a frigate, and far fewer when the midshipmen of the orlop had so publicly and so loudly burst in upon the gunroom to plead for the first lieutenant’s assistance.

Her lovely, freckled face flushed a darker shade of coral. “Very well, actually. I’m optimistic.”

“About Mr. Midshipman Gamage? You’re joking,” the surgeon scoffed.

Her confidence remained undaunted. “I am not.”

Mr. Charlton spoke. “Forgive us for intruding, Mr. Kent, but that last time you and Mr. Gamange had a ‘conversation,’ it ended with you being mastheaded for a great many hours.”

That made her smile, and Col was almost blinded by the brilliance of her mirth. “I have reason to expect a better outcome this time. I thank you for your concern, but it has all turned out for the best.”

“I’ll want more explanation, Kent.” Col stated it matter-of-factly. Given their history, hers and Gamage’s, Col prayed the other officers wouldn’t make any more out of it than that.

Jack Horner said flatly, “Only way it would be for the best was if you dumped him over the side.”

“No.” Her grin got even wider, if such a thing were possible. And she laughed. A full-throated peal of laughter that hit him straight in his gut. How could anyone look at her gamin face and not see her for the delightful girl she was?

“I will say, I’m rather proud of myself. But Mr. Colyear must get the credit, as he told me I’d never get anywhere going up against Gamage the way I was doing. That I needed to learn to read him. And so I have. I have offered to tutor him in his studies so he can pass his exam for lieutenant.”

“Impossible.” Mr. Charlton was full of not a little professional skepticism. “Mr. Gamage has no mathematical abilities whatsoever.”

“That will make it more difficult…”

But not impossible
. Col could hear the thought even if she had not spoken it out loud. She was nothing if not an eternal optimist. No, it was not just optimism. It was unshakable confidence. She believed she could get Gamage to pass. And if she believed it, she would try, through sheer force of personality and determination, to make Gamage believe it. “How do you plan to accomplish what others could not?”