An Improper Proposal (18 page)

But Mrs. Peabody, in her romantic imaginings, wasn’t completely wrong:

Payton
was
the root of all the trouble in the family.

“The convent,” Ross declared suddenly, stopping in his tracks and pointing an accusatory finger in Payton’s direction. “That’s where I’m sending you, the minute we get home!”

“No convent would take ’er,” Raleigh drawled, from the windowsill.

Hudson agreed. “She’s too foulmouthed for any convent, Ross. The nuns’d send her packing at the very first ‘bugger’ that came out of her mouth.”

“Well, what am I to do with her, then?” Ross turned around, and continued pacing the length of the hearth and back again. “She’s made a laughingstock of herself. I’ll never be able to get her married off now. It’s going to be all over London in a matter of weeks, the way she stopped Drake’s wedding.”

Payton, who’d been listening to complaints along this line for the better part of the afternoon, could contain herself no longer.

“Well,” she said, from the depths of her armchair, “at least I was right. I did see Miss Whitby talking to Marcus Tyler in the hedge maze.”

Ross’s voice was so loud, it sounded like thunder. “I don’t recall giving you permission to speak!”

Payton, disgusted, looked back at the roof beams, which she’d been examining at some length for the past hour. There didn’t seem to be anything she could say to make her family understand why she had felt compelled to stop Drake from marrying Miss Whitby. They all thought she’d done it out of some perverse need to avenge herself for the loss of the
Constant
. Payton hadn’t tried very hard to dissuade them from this notion. She certainly couldn’t tell them the truth—that she loved Connor Drake to distraction, and even if she hadn’t spied Becky Whitby in the hedge maze with Marcus Tyler, she probably would have tried to stop the wedding anyway.

What were they so angry about, anyway? It’s not like it mattered. As soon as the couple set foot in Nassau, they were going to be married by the first clerk they could find. Or at least that’s what Drake had said.

So what was everybody so angry about?

Of course, Payton had been a little afraid, when Miss Whitby had first fallen down upon the chapel floor, that the good Lord had finally answered her prayers, and had struck the bride down dead. But she realized she hadn’t been so lucky when she saw how easily Miss Whitby was revived after Raleigh and Hudson—who’d happened to catch the bride as she fell—carried her into the vicar’s study. The vicar’s wife had simply waved some smelling salts under her nose, and Miss Whitby woke, albeit haltingly. Even semiconscious, Miss Whitby had looked quite beautiful, lying there with her ruby lips parted, her heavy bosom rising and falling as she breathed in shallow gasps.

Of course, the minute Payton saw she wasn’t dead, she knew the bride was faking a faint. If the smelling salts had not brought her round with satisfying speed, Payton had already volunteered to pinch her back into consciousness. Miss Whitby must have overheard this muttered threat, since she’d immediately opened her jewel-like eyes and inquired breathlessly, “Oh, where am I? What happened?”

It was the vicar’s wife who’d said, kindly, “You fainted, my dear. You’re in the village chapel. May I get you something? Some brandy, perhaps?”

Miss Whitby declined that offer, then, blinking groggily, looked up at Drake, who stood a little apart from everyone else, and cried, “Oh! How I’ve wronged you!”

Miss Whitby then turned her face away, as if she couldn’t bear to look him in the eye.

“There, there, my dear.” The vicar, not wanting to be left out of the little drama unfolding before him, had taken over for his wife, and now knelt beside the couch where Miss Whitby lay, and patted her hand. “There, there. I’m sure you’ve a perfectly reasonable explanation, haven’t you? Am I right? A perfectly reasonable explanation for the charges against you?”

Miss Whitby nodded. “I …”

Everyone leaned forward, eager to hear Becky Whitby’s perfectly reasonable explanation of why she’d been in the hedge maze w it h Sir Marcus. All except for Payton, of course, who had by that time realized that Miss Whitby fully intended to lie. She stood back, a little apart from the group—almost as far back as Drake, who also hadn’t leant forward, and his grandmother, who had pressed her lips so tightly together, they had all but disappeared. This, Payton figured, was going to be good.

Miss Whitby did not disappoint. It was good, a riveting story, actually, which featured her, Becky Whitby, as its heroine, and Sir Marcus Tyler as it’s cold-hearted villain. If Payton had tried, she couldn’t have made up as good a story. Lord, Payton thought in disgust. Wasn’t there anything this girl couldn’t do?

Sir Marcus, it appeared, had approached Miss Whitby one morning in Hyde Park, early on during her stay at the Dixon town house, whilst she’d been out riding the mare Miss Dixon had so generously loaned her. Sir Marcus had had a proposal to make to the penniless orphan, and it was a proposal any penniless orphan would have been hard-pressed to turn down: in exchange for supplying him with a certain piece of paper, which could be found in the possession of Captain Connor Drake, current guest
—
as Miss Whitby was—in the Dixon household, he was prepared to pay her the astonishing sum of five thousand pounds.

“And what,” the vicar had very rightly asked, ” was this piece of paper that was worth such a vast sum to Sir Marcus?”

“Well,” Miss Whitby said with a sniffle. “I hardly know. But Sir Marcus described it in such a way as to lead me to believe it might be a map.”

“A map?” The vicar had looked very perplexed, indeed. Sir Marcus Tyler was prepared to pay what amounted to a small fortune, all for a single map?

“Well,” Miss Whitby went on to explain tearfully, “it’s the only map of its kind in existence.” A map, she told them, that Sir Marcus had said Captain Drake had drawn up the summer before.

At this point in Miss Whitby’s narrative, Ross had sworn quite colorfully, and Hudson and Raleigh had groaned. Only Drake appeared unmoved, leaning against the mantel, his arms, like Payton’s, still folded across his chest.

The map Sir Marcus wanted, Ross explained to the bewildered vicar, when asked, was a map of the seven hundred or so islands of the Bahamas. No such map, other than Captain Drake’s, existed: the islands were simply too scattered, the area too full of dangerous reefs, for anyone to have ever fully explored it.

Before Captain Drake’s expedition, the previous summer, that is. The map was of inestimable value to merchant shipping companies, like Dixon and Sons, who did business in the Bahamas. But even more so, its existence was sorely resented by the piratical scum that made their homes in and about those seven hundred islets. Previously, they’d been able to disappear between the shoals, without fear of pursuit, since no clipper-sized ship dared risk running aground upon some islet or reef. With Drake’s map, however, anyone could navigate, with a pirate’s ease, in and out of the treacherous waters.

Dixon and Sons, being Drake’s employers, owned exclusive rights to the map, and their competitors—Sir Marcus Tyler, for instance—would stop at just about nothing to get their hands on it.

Even attempting to bribe a pretty, penniless orphan like Becky Whitby.

“I see,”  the vicar said slowly. “And did you give him the map, then, child?”

Everyone—with the exception of Drake and the Dixons—leaned forward to hear the answer to that one. But Payton already knew what Miss Whitby was going to say. The map was resting in a safe in her father’s administrative offices. A few copies had been distributed to the Dixon and Sons Shipping captains who sailed in those waters, but unless Drake had carelessly left a copy lying around his room, there was no way Miss Whitby would have been able to get her hands on one.

And Connor Drake was many things, but careless was not one of them.

But the rest of the people in the room weren’t aware of that, and let out a collective sigh of relief as Miss Whitby, shaking her head, said, “Oh, no! But I didn’t want to anger Sir Marcus, you know, so I put him off for as long as I could. I kept telling him I was looking for it, and couldn’t find it. He kept telling me to look harder. When 1 finally left London for Daring Park, I was so happy—I thought at last I was rid of him. But as you know from Miss Dixon, he followed me even here, and sent a note, demanding to see me this very morning.
I—I
was too frightened to say no to him. I slipped outside after breakfast to tell him I still hadn’t found the map. We’re leaving—” She lifted wounded blue eyes toward Drake at that point. “We were going to leave for New Providence straightaway after the wedding breakfast, so I thought I might never have to see Sir Marcus again. But I suppose he would have found me, even there.”

Miss Whitby’s tone was so mournful, her voice so filled with shame, that for a moment, Payton found herself actually feeling sorry for her. But a glance in Drake’s direction showed her he was suffering from no such weakness. He was regarding his bride-to-be—if she still was his bride-to-be, which Drake’s expression left somewhat in doubt—stonily, the corners of his lips at a definite downward slant.

“Well,” the vicar said. “This is all very illuminating. But what I don’t understand, child, is why didn’t you turn to your friends for help when this man first approached you? Surely, the Dixons were very kind to you. Why couldn’t you have gone to them, and told them of Sir Marcus’s offer? You clearly had no intention of taking his money. You seemed to know that what he was asking you to do was not only illegal, but immoral, as well. So why didn’t you tell anyone about it?”

Here Miss Whitby had hung her head. It shamed her to say it, she confessed, with a sob, but Sir Marcus’s offer had not only included five thousand pounds if she produced the map. It also included a punishment if she did not. And that punishment was that Sir Marcus intended to reveal something to her new friends that Miss Whitby wanted very much to keep hidden from them.

This bit of information, of course, caused everyone in the room to hold his or her breath, anticipating a very succulent piece of information, indeed. But unfortunately, the vicar decided that the only persons to whom it was necessary for Miss Whitby to reveal it were himself and the man who’d intended to marry her—rather to the fury of that man’s grandmother, who did not take it at all well when the vicar attempted to shoo all other parties from the study—including his own wife, who looked considerably put out at not being able to hear the end of Becky Whitby’s poignant story.

Out in the churchyard, where the congregation had gathered to discuss the morning’s extraordinary events, no one actually walked up to Payton and offered his congratulations. She rather fancied Lady Bisson might, since she’d done exactly what that lady had asked her to do—stop her grandson’s wedding. But Lady Bisson didn’t say a word. Instead, she walked into the graveyard, and stood gazing at Sir Richard’s tomb, looking not a little forbidding.

Still, Payton had thought somebody might have offered her some congratulations. After all, she was a bit of a hero for having saved not only Drake, but Dixon and Sons’ interests in the Bahamas, as well. But nobody said a word. Payton, feeling for the first time that perhaps she’d done something wrong, felt tears smart her eyes. Well, damn them all! What did she care what they thought, anyway? All that mattered was Drake. Somebody had had to save Drake. She’d been proud to do it, glad to do it. She’d do it again, too, if she had to.

So it was something of an anticlimax when the vicar emerged from his study to inform them that the couple were leaving at once for Portsmouth, where they would board the
Constant
and head for the islands, where they would be wed, instead of pursuing marriage in England, where there appeared to be too many … complications.

Complications. Never in her life had Payton thought Connor Drake might refer to her as a complication.

But it appeared that he had. Not only that, but he was fleeing the country, apparently in an effort to rid himself of her.

There’d been talk, of course. A good deal of talk, first about what it could have been that Sir Marcus knew about Miss Whitby that was bad enough she’d go to such extraordinary lengths to avoid his revealing it to her friends—but that, when revealed to her intended, had not affected his decision to marry her in the least. It could not, Payton heard guests hypothesizing, have been that Miss Whitby was pregnant with the captain’s child, because surely, as this hasty marriage illustrated, he knew that already. So what could it have been? Something Miss Whitby didn’t want anyone else besides Captain Drake to know.

But what was so bad about the fact that she was marrying, as the French said,
enceinte
? It was a little shocking, of course, but it happened. It would have been a good deal more shocking if Captain Drake had refused to marry her, for all she was carrying his child. But the fact that he was ready to admit the child as his was no reason for shame. Such weddings took place every day.

The whole matter was decidedly perplexing, and extremely unrewarding for those guests to whom a good piece of gossip was worth it’s weight in gold. They went away disappointed—though none as disappointed as Lady Bisson, who called for her carriage and left for Sussex without another word. Still, it had to be admitted, although they weren’t privy to the details, the performance itself had been quite memorable. And the part Payton Dixon had played in that performance was something few guests were likely to forget. It seemed that the Honorable Miss Payton Dixon would go down in history not as one of the first lady ship captains, but as the girl who had tried to stop Sir Connor Drake’s wedding.

It was not a title Payton much relished.

Her family was none too pleased about it, either.

“If the convent won’t take ’er,” Ross said at length, “perhaps America will.”

That was enough to drag Hudson’s attention away from the window.

“You can’t be serious, Ross,” he said. “Send Payton all the way to America?”

“Why not?” Ross, still pacing, seemed to like the idea. “We’ve got cousins in America, I understand. Boston. I say let’s send Payton to Boston. No one there will have heard of Connor Drake. We ought to be able to marry her off to an American.”