The Ugly Duchess

Page 29

Griffin and James were sprawled in Griffin’s cabin, celebrating their latest conquest with a glass or two of cognac. After that first night together, they had not overindulged again; it wasn’t in their natures.
“We’re surprisingly alike,” James said, following that thought to its logical conclusion.
“Damn good sailors,” Griffin replied. “Just when I think that the P-Two can’t possibly sidle up where I’d like her to, you manage it.”
“Pity about those men.”
“The dead ones?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t lose any of our own. And the crew of the  Dreadnaught were feared through the East Indies,” Griffin pointed out. “We’ve done the world a favor. Another favor, given that we scuttled the Black Spider last month. And may I point out that the Dreadnaught gained her reputation by capturing a passenger ship bound for Bombay and walking every single man, woman, and child down the plank?”
“I know it,” James said. All his research on pirates and their routes had served them well in the last few months. The Poppys were now as feared by pirates as pirates were feared by trading vessels.
“We’re bloody Robin Hoods, we are.”
“With the tiny exception that we don’t give to the poor,” James said dryly.
“We returned that golden statue to the King of Sicily. We could have sold it.” Griffin was not one for the magnanimous gesture.
“Ferdinand’s letter giving us the right to fly his flag as privateers is worth more than Saint Agatha, even if the statue wasn’t hollow—which it was, may I point out.”
Griffin just shrugged. He didn’t like giving anything away for free, but even he had to admit that privateers lived an easier life than pirates, though the distinction was certainly a foggy one.
“What are you going to do with all that fabric you put in your cabin, by the way?” he asked. “Are you planning to lure a woman on board? The men won’t hold with it. The first storm that hit, you’d look around for your popsy and find they’d tossed her overboard to appease the sea devils, or Poseidon, or what have you.”
“I thought I’d send the fabric to my wife. She always talked about cloth more than she did dresses themselves, and the silks are lovely. The Dreadnaught must have caught a silk trader.”
“Why on earth would you do such a thing?” Griffin asked, clearly astonished. “She booted you out the door, and quite rightly, from what you said. Why remind her of your miserable existence?”
“Good question,” James said, throwing back his cognac. “Forget the fabric; we must do something with the gold.”
“Bank it,” Griffin said promptly. “When I think of the way I used to simply stash it in a cave before you came along, it makes me twitch all over. Shall we stow it in Genoa or open a new account somewhere else?”
“I’m worried about our account in that Paris bank, given Napoleon’s sticky fingers,” James said. “I think we’d better head there and close that account. We’ll put the lot in Genoa.”
Griffin put his empty glass to the side and stood. “Look, James, I have some bad news. The bos’un on the Dreadnaught was taken on in Bristol two months ago, and he had this.”
He walked to the sideboard, picked up a newspaper lying there, and handed it to James. A black-bordered notice announced that the Duke of Ashbrook had died suddenly.
James stared down at the paper. His father was dead, and had been for two months. Just like that, his world changed. Then, after a few seconds, he rose, quite calmly, and said, “I’ll go back to the Poppy Two and tell the men that we’re en route for Marseille. We’d better swap out the sails and turn into privateers.”
Griffin gave him a swift punch in the arm. “Don’t think I’m going to ‘Your Grace’ you. Do you suppose the men will catch on if we announce your name is changing to Duke? Earl doesn’t really seem fitting for one of your grand stature.”
James didn’t bother to answer. He climbed the stairs wearily. They had a crew member whose only job was to row back and forth between the Poppys, and a moment later he was once again crossing the short distance. Dusk had fallen, and the ocean seemed drained of color and detail, as if the rowboat plowed through a gray mist.
Back in his own cabin, he felt so exhausted that he dropped on the bunk without undressing. It had been a long, grueling day: from the moment a pirate ship was spied, he and the other men often didn’t sleep for forty-eight hours, a period of tense watchfulness that generally culminated in a bloody battle. Pirates always fought hard, and beating them was a ruthless, hand-to-hand business. Today’s taking of the Dreadnaught had followed the pattern.
Despite his physical exhaustion, his mind felt frozen, unable to think of anything but his father’s death. His man appeared with a basin of hot water before quietly departing. James heaved himself from the bunk and stripped off his clothing, memories ricocheting around his brain.
He had spent a good deal of his life loathing his father, but he had never thought of him not being there. Never. The duke wasn’t terribly old, but then James remembered the purple color in his cheeks during his attacks of rage. His heart had burst, no doubt.
And yet . . . and yet for all his father had done, James had never truly questioned whether he loved him, James, his son and heir, his only child. The duke was a fool, a gamester, a reckless man who trampled the feelings of those around him. And yet he did love James. The fact that he had died without knowing that his son was alive or dead: that felt like a knife under James’s ribs.
The memories flooded in, and not those to do with stealing Daisy’s dowry or anything like that. No, they were the way his father used to burst into the nursery and swing him onto his shoulder; the way he’d let him hide under his desk so that his tutor couldn’t find him; the way he’d show up at Eton completely unannounced and use his title to bully his way into the classroom and then take James and all his friends out boating on the river Thames.
Grief was locked together with guilt. The two emotions sat at the base of his chest like a stone, telling him that his father died broken-hearted.
He knew it.
He should have . . . He should have . . . What? It hardly mattered now. He had done nothing. And the duke was gone. As lost to James now as his mother was.
Daisy would have managed it all, the funeral, and the rest of it. Daisy would have made sure her father-in-law, no matter how despised, had a proper monument.
His sponge bath finished, he stared at the pile of fabric in the corner as he dried himself. He was desperate to think about anything other than his father’s death.
The fabrics glimmered like the souks of North Africa and the bazaars of India from which they’d come. His gaze fixed on one cloth that captured the pale blue of a hot summer day in England, when the sky seems so high and far away that it might as well be heaven.
Even as he stared, willing his mind blank, he could almost hear his father screaming at him, telling him to stop being a horse’s arse and come back, face his responsibilities, take over the dukedom.
Yet now that voice was forever silenced. James’s memories of his father felt useless and far away, as if England were no more than a kingdom under the sea, a land of fishes where he would fit in as well as a trout behind the pulpit of St. Paul’s.