Home From The Sea (3 page)

“Then, your father’s …?” Toby was at the door, looking into the kitchen, which Mrs. Clitheroe had left clean and tiny enough to pass muster at a butler’s inspection.

“My father’s also in the churchyard, with Charlie and his ma.” Jim thrust platters and dishes at Toby, and gestured at the tall pitcher of water.

He watched as Toby
brimmed
a dish for the spaniel. The man had fine, long-fingered hands and they were not battered, like those of a seaman, nor scarred like a soldier’s hands, nor blue with gunpowder embedded under the skin, like the hands of a naval gunner. They were the hands of a musician, and Jim could easily imagine them playing another kind of music on his own skin.

The thought inspired a shiver and he stepped back out of the way as Toby set down the bowl. Bess lapped noisily, messily, and Toby scratched behind her ears. Jim felt a rush of heat in his cheeks, and covered the moment of vulnerability with activity. He pushed rabbit pie and plum pudding at Toby, and fetched his own, and Bess’s.

The man had not been joking when he said he was starving. For some time Toby Trelane was so intent on the food, he did not even notice Jim’s scrutiny, though Jim took him apart bone by bone, missing nothing from the windblown tangle of the hay-
colored
hair to the dull, scuffed leather of boots that had seen many a mile.

The dog was little less hungry, and Jim guessed Toby made sure Bess ate even when he was down on his luck himself. Without any doubt, he had arrived here expecting Charlie Chegwidden to have something for him, and Jim felt a pang of regret. Toby was almost certainly down to the last tuppence in his pockets, and he did not have the look of a seaman or a farmer, so work was not going to be so easy to find – at least, not in this area.

The thoughts preoccupied him and he did not notice the wide blue eyes on him until Toby demanded, “Did I sprout a wart on my nose?”

“No!” Jim chuckled and ate a little. “You said you’ve just come over from Exmouth.
From a ship?”

“Yes.” Toby took a drink. “It’s the first time I’ve been back in the country for a long time.”

“But you’re not a sailor,” Jim observed.

“I’m not?” The edge was off Toby’s hunger now, and he divided his attention between Jim and the food. “Who says I’m not?”

“Your hands do.” Jim gestured at them. “They’re not the hands of a seaman –
nor a fisherman, nor
a farmer!”

“You’re sharp.” Toby gave him a rueful smile.

The kind of smile that filled a man’s belly with butterflies.
Jim was trying hard to see the signs, but this Toby Trelane was not so easy to read and for the moment he bided his time. Better to say nothing than to say the wrong thing. If Toby were the God bothering kind, he would march away in a righteous temper; and if he were furious enough, insulted enough, he might march right to the lieutenant at the local garrison, and Jim Fairley could be looking at the inside of a prison cell.

“So you’re … a scholar?” he guessed.

“Balladsinger.”
Toby gestured at the mandolin. “I can play a madrigal, sing a hundred shanties and love songs from France, Spain, Italy, and tell the brand of stories that’ll earn me dinner. And a bed,” he added with a note of wry
humor
. “You, uh, don’t have a use for a balladsinger?”

“To entertain the kind of rummies who get falling-down drunk in here?”
Jim was about to say his customers would not have known a sonnet from a psalm and Toby was wasting his time, but the morning light was just then gilding the man’s face, shining on the big brass ring he wore in the lobe of his right ear, and he bit off the words. “You can try your luck, if you like,” he offered. “I can’t promise you a round of applause for your efforts, much less a shower of coins at your feet, but …” He gestured at the corner between hearth and windows. “Pull up a stool, tell my old rummies a lively tale tonight,
see
what happens next.”

What should happen next, he thought, was a rousing cheer for the
traveling
storyteller, a great deal of ale swilling, and then the customers would go reeling home while the proprietor and the balladsinger would climb the steep, creaking stairs up to the little room over the kitchen where Jim had a goose feather mattress, and –

“I’ll do that,” Toby was saying. “The worst I can do is
get
them so bored they shout at me to shut up!” He sopped up the last gravy with a wedge of pie crust. “So Charlie stayed here till he died?”

“He was sick when my dad and
me
got here,” Jim told him. “Too sick to keep the tavern for his own, but smart enough to write his room and board into the bill of sale. He had a bedchamber upstairs, and he’d sit at the table there, by the window, and he’d … watch.”

“Watch what?” Toby wondered.

Jim’s shoulders lifted in an eloquent shrug. “I used to wonder. I thought, maybe he was watching the sea.
Or the path.
Like he was waiting for something.”
Or
someone
.
He lifted a brow at Toby. “You knew him well?”

“As well as a young man could get to know an old man, when they were on the same ship,” Toby said doubtfully.

“But you’re not a seaman,” Jim protested.

“Not now.” Toby made dismissive gestures. “I was only at sea for one voyage and it was … quite a short one, as voyages go.” He pinned on a smile and answered Jim’s frown with a shrug. “It came to nothing. I might still have been at sea, but Dame Fortune had her own plans for me. So Charlie was sick?”

“Sick as a dog.
Something to do with his guts, or maybe his heart, or perhaps both.
We never knew. One day he just fell on his face, right there on the floor. I sent a boy to
run,
fast as he could, for John Hardesty, the doctor, but Charlie was stone-cold dead before the man got here and they buried him the next day.”

“Ah.” Toby had switched his attention to the figgy duff and the dollop of cold custard and was chewing slowly, thoughtfully, now his hunger was mostly appeased. He looked up at Jim with a speculative expression. “He, um, he had … things?”

“You
mean,
possessions?” Jim’s brows rose. “Everyone’s got things.”

“Then, if his old ma was already passed over,” Toby mused, “what became of his possessions?”

It was an extremely good question, and Jim had no idea of the answer. “My father took care of all that. I never saw what happened to Charlie’s stuff, but I don’t remember it being sold and nobody ever beat down the door, demanding anything to settle debts. My father would have tossed out his things, if they were trash, or we could still be using them around the place, if they were any good.” He sat back with the mug of rum and cocked his head curiously at Toby. “Charlie had something belonging to you.” Not a question.

“You could say that.”

“Something very valuable?”

But Toby only shrugged and looked away, which was as evasive a gesture as Jim had ever seen.

“Something secret, then?” he guessed.

“
Something
, at any rate.”
Toby spooned a large chunk of pudding into his mouth, and seemed to use it as an excuse not to talk.

“Well, I hate to disappoint you,” Jim said honestly as he pushed up to his feet, “but if Charlie’s stuff is still here, I have no idea what it’d be, or where. Would you recognize it, if you saw it?”

“Oh, yes.” Toby’s voice was dark, heavy. “Look, I’m sorry, Jim, it was just a bit of business between Charlie and me, and I daresay it died with him. I didn’t mean to bring bad news to your door.”

“You haven’t.” Jim had reached for the poker, which stood in the corner of the hearth with the set of fire irons, and was raking over the coals. They were
smoldering
low, in need of attention. “It’s not your fault Charlie was sick. And I wish I could tell you I had a tavern crowd that liked a song and a story, but they’re a boozy lot in here.”

“But then again,” Toby argued, “
you’ve
probably never had a proper balladsinger, have you?”

“Never
had
one of any description.”
Jim’s eyes drifted over Toby’s slender, rangy limbs. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Then … I’ll try my luck tonight.” Toby finished the pudding in one bite and gathered up the dishes, and Bess’s. “I’ll wash these up, and I’ll chop you some fresh firewood, and I can polish those windows.”

“You don’t have to,” Jim began.

“Let me pay for luncheon before I do something honest to earn dinner,” Toby said slowly.

And Jim could have sworn he was looking over the proprietor of The Raven from the buckle shoes to the brown britches and the pale green shirt which was open at Jim’s throat, showing a generous expanse of his chest. Jim could not recall having been stripped naked by a man’s eyes quite so comprehensively, and his throat squeezed.

But then Toby was moving, before Jim could make anything of the moment, and for the fifth time he smothered a curse. Toby Trelane was damnably difficult to read, and the price of making a mistake was dangerously high. It was one thing to daydream about a big, good-looking Dutchman, but quite another to breathe a word about such fancies to any man, unless you knew him better than you knew your own brother. Jim had a healthy fear of the magistrate – the bastinado, shackles and stocks and prison walls.

So he clenched his teeth and retreated behind the bar for the afternoon’s ritual of polishing tankards while he waited for Mrs. Clitheroe to arrive and start the evening’s pies and puddings. And he settled himself to watch Toby closely before he said a word or lifted a brow at him.

The woman arrived an hour later, already singing tunelessly as she bustled in from the tavern yard in the back. She thumped down a basket of meat and vegetables and shouted through in a voice made hoarse by thirty years of smoking tobacco and sipping gin.
“’Tis only me, Master Jim!”
And without waiting for an answer she began to murder an old Irish tune as she slammed salt pork and potatoes into the roasting pans and raked out the hearth.

The sound of an axe took Jim to the windows in the corner of the taproom. From there he could watch Toby work, and he whistled softly. The woodpile stood in the lee of the tavern, where the building kept out the wind and rain. It was a suntrap, and at eleven in the morning already
warm
enough for a man to work up an honest sweat. Toby had taken off the waistcoat and the patched cream linen shirt, and he knew how to swing an axe. He was facing Jim as he worked, keeping up a steady rhythm, and Jim watched for the pleasure of it until Mrs. Clitheroe bawled his name.

“Master Jim, these onions is all gone black-rotten in the sack ’ere. Will I go to market for fresh
uns
, or will
thee
?”

“I’ll go,” Jim offered, grateful for the opportunity to get out for a while. He made a grab for coat and hat, which hung on a peg to the right of the door, searched the pockets for coins, and found three pennies and a few assorted ha’pennies and farthings.
More than enough for a sack of onions.
“I’ll be back in an hour, Mrs. Clitheroe.”

“Take thy time,” she shouted, “
I’s
got plenty to do afore I gets to onions. Give old Joe me best.”

She meant old Joe Flynn, the farmer from the high side of
Littleham
, who sold vegetables from a stall every afternoon. His wife was sick, his eight children were working the farm and the eldest sons, Christopher and William, were smuggling, running the gauntlet of the Revenue men two or three times a month. The Flynn boys would be lucky to see twenty years of age, but with work so scarce in the area and the only alternatives the army, the navy or, worse, a merchantman, their options were few.

Shrugging into the coat, which was new just last winter and the
color
of a red deer, Jim rounded the corner of the tavern. Toby was still working, while Bess sat panting in a patch of shade. Jim watched the axe swing for a few moments – watched the sun gleam on pale honey skin, and when Toby paused to take a breath he said,

“I have to walk over to Salterton market, if you want to stroll along.”

Toby drew a sinewy forearm over his face and considered the suggestion before he shook his head. “I’ve just walked over from Exmouth, and I’d rather get through these jobs.”

“Jobs you gave yourself,” Jim observed. “I never asked you to cut wood, nor polish windows.”

“No, but if your local drinkers are as tone-deaf and dense as you think they are, it’s an honest way to earn a crust and a place to sleep,” Toby said with dust-dry
humor
.

It was on the tip of Jim’s tongue to tell him, there were other ways – easier and far more pleasurable – to secure dinner and a mattress, but he would not say it. Few men would be seduced by the suggestion of whoring for their supper; even fewer would take the remark as a jest.

“As you will,” he told Toby. “Take your time. Grab yourself a mug of ale to wet your throat when you’re done here. I’ll be back in an hour, in any case.” He looked over Toby’s long, lean body, which did not seem to own an ounce of spare flesh. “They haven’t been
overfeeding
you, have they? Watch yourself, if you stay here for long. Mrs.
Clitheroe’ll
have you fattened up like a piglet.”