How to Marry a Highlander (15 page)

“Madam—”

“Go, child,” she said harshly, and drew down her veil. “Go find your prince.”

Arabella met her sisters by the great oak aside the horse corrals around which the fair had gathered for more than a century. Eleanor stood slim and golden-pale in the bright glorious light of spring. Sitting in the grass, Ravenna cuddled the puppy in her lap like other girls cuddled dolls. Behind Arabella the music of fiddle and horns curled through the warm air, and before her the calls of the horse traders making deals mingled with the scents of animals and dust.

“I believe her.”

“I knew you would.” Eleanor expelled a hard breath. “You want to believe her, Bella.”

“I do.”

Eleanor would never understand. The reverend admired her quick mind and her love of books. But the Gypsy woman had not lied. “My wish to believe her does not make our fortune untrue.”

“It is superstition.”

“You are only saying that because the reverend does.”

“I for one think it is splendid that we shall all be princesses.” Ravenna twirled the pup’s tail with a finger.

“Not all of us,” Arabella said. “Only the one of us who marries a prince.”

“Papa will not believe it.”

Arabella grasped her sister’s hand again. “We must not tell him, Ellie. He would not understand.”

“I should say not.” But Eleanor’s eyes were gentle and her hand was cozy in Arabella’s. Even in skepticism she could not be harsh. At the foundling home when every misstep had won Arabella a caning—or worse—she had prayed nightly for a wise, contemplative temperament like her elder sister’s. Her prayers were never answered.

“We will not tell the reverend,” Arabella said. “Ravenna, do you understand?”

“Of course. I’m not a nincompoop. Papa would not approve of one of us becoming a princess. He
likes
being poor. He thinks it brings us closer to God.” The puppy leaped out of her lap and scampered toward the horse corral. She jumped up and ran after it.

“I do wish we could speak to Papa about it,” Eleanor said. “He is the wisest man in Cornwall.”

“The fortune-teller said we must not.”

“The fortune-teller is a Gypsy.”

“You say that as though the reverend is not himself a great friend to Gypsies.”

“He is a good man, or he would not have taken in three girls despite his poverty.”

But Eleanor knew as well as Arabella why he had. Only three months before he discovered them starving in the foundling home, and Eleanor about to be sent off to the workhouse, fever had taken his wife and twin daughters from him. He had needed them to heal his heart as much as they needed him.

“We shan’t have to fret about poverty for long, Ellie.” Arabella plucked the ring out of her pocket and it caught the midday sunshine like fire. “I know what must be done. In five years, when I am seventeen—”

“Tali!” Ravenna’s face lit into a smile. A boy stood at the edge of the horse corral, shadowy, in plain, well-worn clothes.

Eleanor stiffened.

Arabella whispered, “No one must ever see it but the prince,” and dropped the ring into her pocket.

Ravenna scooped up the puppy and bounded to the boy as he loped forward. His tawny skin shone warm in the sunlight filtering through the branches of the huge oak. No more than fourteen, he was all limbs and lanky height and underfed cheeks, but his eyes were like pitch and they held a wariness far greater than youth should allow.

“Hullo, little mite.” He tweaked Ravenna’s braid, but beneath a thatch of unruly black hair falling across his brow he shot a sideways glance at her eldest sister.

Eleanor crossed her arms and became noticeably interested in the treetops.

The boy scowled.

“Look, Tali.” Ravenna shoved the puppy beneath his chin. “Papa gave him to me for my birthday.”

The boy scratched the little creature behind a floppy ear. “What’ll you call him?”

“Beast, perhaps?” Eleanor mumbled. “Oh, but that name is already claimed here.”

The boy’s hand dropped and his square shoulders went rigid. “Reverend sent me to fetch you home for supper.” Without another word he turned about and walked toward the horse corral.

Eleanor’s gaze followed him reluctantly, her brow pinched. “He looks like he does not eat.”

“Perhaps he hasn’t enough food. He has no mama or papa,” Ravenna said.

“Whoever Taliesin’s mama and papa were, they must have been very handsome,” Arabella said, fingering her hair. She remembered little of their mother except her hair, the same golden-red as Arabella’s, her soft, tight embrace, and her scent of cane sugar and rum. Eleanor remembered little more, and only a hazy image of their father—tall, golden-haired, and wearing a uniform.

The fortune-teller had not told her everything, Arabella was certain. Out there was a man who had no idea his three daughters were still alive. A man who could tell them why the mother of his children had sent them away.

The answer was hidden with a prince.

Arabella’s teeth worried the inside of her lip but her eyes flashed with purpose. “One of us will wed a prince someday. It must be so.”

“Eleanor should marry him because she is the eldest.” Ravenna upended the puppy and rubbed its belly. “Then you can marry Tali, Bella. He brings me frogs from the pond and I wish he were our brother.”

“No,” Arabella said. “Taliesin loves Eleanor—”

“He does not. He hates me and I think he is odious.”

“—and I aim to marry high.” Her jaw set firmly like any man’s twice her age.

“A gentleman?” Ravenna said.

“Higher.”

“A
duke
?”

“A duke is insufficient.” She drew the ring from her pocket anew, its weight making a dent in her palm. “I will marry a prince. I will take us home.”

C
HAPTER
O
NE

The Pirate

Plymouth

August 1817

L
ucien Westfall, former commander of the HMS
Victory
, Comte de Rallis, and heir to the Duchy of Lycombe, sat in the corner of the tavern because long ago he had learned that with a corner at his back he could detect danger approaching from any direction. Now the corner provided the additional benefit of a limited landscape to study.

On this occasion the landscape especially intrigued.

“Ye’ve got the air o’ a hawk about ye, lad.” Gavin Stewart, ship’s physician and chaplain, hefted his tankard of ale. “Is she still looking at ye?”

“No. She is looking at you. Glaring, rather.” Luc took up from the table the letter from his uncle’s land steward, folded the pages and tucked them into his waistcoat pocket. “I think she wants you gone.”

“Wants to get at ye. They all do. ’Tis the scar.” Gavin lounged back in his chair and scratched his whiskers, salty black and scant. “Wimmen like dangerous men.”

“Then you are doomed to a lonely life, old friend. But you were already, I suppose.”

“Hazard o’ the vows,” the priest chortled. “Bonnie lass?”

“Possibly.” Pretty eyes, bright even across the lamp-lit tavern, and keenly assessing him. Pretty nose and pretty mouth too. “Though possibly a schoolteacher.” A cloth cinched around her head covered her hair entirely, and her cloak was fastened up to her neck. Beneath it her collar was white and high. “Trussed up as tight as a virgin.”

“The mither o’ our Lord was a virgin, lad,” Gavin admonished. Then: “An’ what’s the fun if a man’s no’ got to work for the treasure?”

Luc lifted a brow. “Those were the days, hm, Father?”

Gavin laughed aloud. “Those were the days.” He was broad in the chest like his Scottish forebears, and his laughter had always been a balm to Luc. “But since when do ye be knowing a thing about schoolteachers?”

Since the age of eleven when Luc had escaped the estate where their guardian kept him and his younger brother and blundered onto the grounds of a finishing school for gentlewomen. With a soft reprimand, the headmistress had returned him home to a punishment he could not have invented in his worst nightmares.

Luc had not believed his guardian’s rants about the evils of temptation found in female flesh. Of course, he hadn’t believed anything the Reverend Absalom Fletcher said after the first few months. Bad men often lied. So he escaped the following day and ran to the school, hoping to find the headmistress out walking again, and again the following day, and again, seeking an ally. Or merely a haven. Each time the footmen dragged him back to his guardian’s house, his punishment for the disobedience was more severe.

He had borne it all with silent tears of defiance upon his cheeks. Until Absalom discovered his true weakness. Then Luc stopped disobeying. Then he became the model ward.

“I know about women,” Luc grumbled. “And that one is trouble.” He took a swallow of whiskey. It burned, and he liked that it burned. Every time she looked at him he got an awfully bad feeling.

Her movements were both confident and compact as she surveyed the crowded dockside tavern with an upward tilt of her chin as though she were the queen and this a royal inspection. Clearly she did not belong here.

Gavin set his empty tankard on the table. “I’ll be leaving ye to the leddy’s pleasure.” He dragged his weathered body from the chair. Not a day over fifty, the Scot was weary of the sea that he had taken to for Luc’s sake eleven years earlier. “Don’t suppose ye’ll be wanting to have a wee bit o’ holiday at that castle o’ yours after we leave the crew off at Saint-Nazaire? Visit yer rascally brother?”

“No time. The grain won’t ship itself to Portugal.” Luc tried to shrug it off, but Gavin understood. The famine of the previous year was lingering. People were starving. They could not halt their work for a holiday.

And, quite simply, he needed to be at sea.

“Grain. Aye,” Gavin only said, and made his way out of the tavern.

Luc swallowed the remainder of his whiskey and waited. He did know women, of all varieties, and this one wasn’t even trying to feign disinterest.

She wove her way through the rowdy crowd, taking care nevertheless to touch no one in her approach. Only when she stood before him on the other side of the table could he make out her eyes—blue, bright, and wary. The hand clutching the cloak close over her bosom was slender, but the veins beneath the pale skin were strong.

“You are the man they call the Pirate.” It was not a question.
Of course it wasn’t
.

“Am I?”

A single winged brow tilted upward. “They said that I was to look for the dark-haired man with a scar cutting across his eye on the right, a black-banded kerchief, and a green left eye. As you are sitting in shadow, the color of your eye is not clear to me. But you bear a scar and you cover your right eye.”

“Perhaps I am not the only man in Plymouth that answers to such a description.”

Now both brows rose. The slope of her nose was pristine, her skin without blemish and glowing in the fading sunlight slanting through the window at Luc’s back. “There aren’t any pirates now,” she said, “only poor sailors with peg legs and patched up faces from the war. It is very silly and probably disrespectful of you to call yourself that.”

“I don’t call myself much of anything at all.” Not Captain Westfall, and not the Duke of Lycombe’s heir. The latter was an unstable business in any case. Luc’s aunt, the young duchess, had never carried an infant past birth, despite five attempts. But that did not mean her sixth could not now survive. So in the year since he had left the navy to pursue another noble goal, he’d gone only by Captain Andrew of the merchant brigantine
Retribution
. Simple and without any familial complications, it served his purposes.

The Pirate was a foolish nickname his crew had given him.

“Then what is your real name, sir?” she asked.

“Andrew.”

“How do you do, Captain Andrew?” He nearly expected her to curtsy. She did not. Instead she extended her hand to shake. She wore no ring. Not a war widow, then—the war that for years had kept his brother, Christos, safely hidden in France beyond their family’s reach.

He did not take her hand.

“What do you want of me, miss, other than to lecture me on the evils of war, it seems?”

“Your manners are deplorable. Perhaps you are a pirate after all.” She seemed to consider this seriously, chewing on the inside of her lower lip. The plump lip was precisely the color of raspberries.

Tastable
.

Luc had not tasted a pair of sweet lips like that in far too long.

“I suppose you are an expert on manners, then?” he said with credible disinterest.

“I am, actually. But that is neither here nor there. I need passage to the port of Saint-Nazaire in France and I have been told that you depart for that port tomorrow. And that . . .” She studied him slowly, from his face to his shoulders and chest, and soft color crept into her cheeks. “I have been told that you are the most suitable shipmaster to transport a gentlewoman.”

“Have you? By whom?”

“Everyone. The harbormaster, the man in the shop across the street, the barman at this establishment.” Her eyes narrowed. “You are not a smuggler, are you? I understand they are still popular in some ports even since the war ended.”

“Not this port.” Not lately. “Do you believe the harbormaster, shopkeep, and yonder barman?”

Her brows dipped. “I did.” A pause, then she seemed to set her narrow shoulders. “Will you take me to Saint-Nazaire?”

“No.”

Her jaw took on that determined little tilt that made Luc’s chest feel a bit odd.

“Is it because I am a woman and you will not allow women aboard your vessel? I have heard that of pirates.”

“Madam, I am not—”

“If you are not a pirate, why do you cover your eye in that piratical manner? Is it an affectation to frighten off helpless women, or could you only find black cloth of that width and length?”

Clever-tongued witch
. She could not possibly be teasing him. Or flirting. Not this prim little schoolteacher.

“As I believe the scar makes clear, it is not an affectation, Miss . . .?”

“Caulfield. Of London. I was recently in the personal service of a lady and gentleman of considerable status.” Her gaze flittered down his chest again. “Whom I don’t suppose you would know, actually. In any case, they employed me as a finishing governess for their daughter who is—”