“I’m sure the
Amorata
’s fate is not so dire as one might think. A few repairs and she’ll be like new again.” Then he turned the glass of wine on the table, and turned the conversation. “So you no longer worry about Sarah, the way you initially did?”
A look was exchanged between husband and wife. While Lord Forrester looked dubious, Lady Forrester was stern, commanding. Then, she—not he—answered with a bright smile. “A parent always worries about her children. But even you must see that Sarah has nothing in the way of depressed spirits, or low attitude.” These words were spoken with force, as if she willed them to truth. “Why, she has transformed herself!”
Indeed, he did see. But how much had she changed? Not only from the enjoyable, precocious child she had been, but from the bright, hopeful, open young woman he knew intuitively that she had grown up to be? Because that person—the one he read about in the letters he received from Lady Forrester, the one who had enough poise and confidence at nine years old to talk him into playing pirates in a meadow, the one with an inner light of optimism and mischief—was nowhere to be found on Upper Grosvenor Street.
He decided to find out the next morning over breakfast.
He’d seated himself at the table, at what he considered a terribly luxurious hour—half past nine—and waited. And waited.
He read the paper cover to cover while waiting for any of the Forresters to arrive, but it seemed they had adjusted themselves very definitely to town hours. It was eleven o’clock before anyone made an appearance.
And surprisingly, it was Sarah.
“Oh!” she gave a surprised little sound. Then her brow came down, calculating. “Everyone thought you had gone.”
“Gone? Where would I go?” Jack replied quizzically.
“To the naval offices?” she shrugged. “You do have a ship to check up on, do you not?” She smiled at him when he looked nonplussed.
Before disembarking, he had been taxed by Captain Healy—as Healy was headed to his daughter’s home in Kent—to stay informed about anything related to the
Amorata
. Jack knew this meant checking in daily on the proceedings.
“The naval offices are right next to the Historical Society at Somerset House,” Sarah continued, very polite, very correct. “Father would be more than happy to take you there after breakfast.”
His eyes followed her as she filled a plate. “I know. He made such an offer last night. What do you mean, ‘everyone’ thought I left?”
Again she shrugged. “I suppose I just meant me. After all, why would you hang around here all morning? Surely you have better things to do.”
“I intend to ‘check up on my ship,’ as you so eloquently put it. Other than that, I have few obligations.” Then, deciding the niceties were enough, he began his first test. He slid the newspaper across the table to where she was seated. She slid it back.
“Since when do you not read the paper?” Jack asked, startled. “Did your mother’s scolding finally take effect?”
When they were younger, Lady Forrester used to admonish Lord Forrester for letting the girls read the paper—it bordered on bluestocking behavior, and lead to bad eyesight. But Lord Forrester would always sneak Sarah the paper anyway. Sarah—the real Sarah—would have jumped at the chance to read the day’s events.
But instead, Sarah threw her head back in laughter. “Goodness no! My mother never managed to break us of that.” She smiled at him. And it was the first time since he’d arrived that he felt he’d seen the Sarah of old. But the new, cool Sarah came back before the clock could tick once. “I decided a few months ago that there was simply nothing worth reading in there.”
His eyebrow went up, and she continued. “It’s always something about British India, followed by something about parliament, and then you get to the society pages, and its ever so dull reading your name over and over again, recounting
what you did yesterday. Especially when one has far too much to do today.”
She looked at him then. He remained silent. And then he saw it. The moment that she realized she had lost control of the conversation, and had to get it back again.
Because that’s what she’d had ever since he’d first seen her admiring herself in the hallway. Control.
“Have you any friends in town that you can call on?” she asked politely, turning the conversation back to an interview of him, instead of the other way around.
“I have a few friends … but having been on board a ship for as long as I have…” he replied, letting her draw her own conclusions from his dropped sentence.
And draw conclusions she did. “Well, I shall simply have to introduce you to some of mine. We’ll have ever so much fun while you’re in London. Let’s see, there are the races in a few days. The Whitford banquet on Saturday. And oh, the boys—you met them, the ones that hang about the front door—they always make sport of themselves when we go riding in Rotten Row, trying to impress me.”
“I’ll likely be busy at the naval offices…” Jack tried, wanting to see what she would do when she was refused.
But what she did was not what he expected.
She leaned over in her seat, and placed her hand on his. Her shoulders came forward, vulnerably—not to mention emphasizing the neckline of her fashionable day dress. “Oh, but, Jack, wouldn’t it be fun to spend some time together? You and me? Like old times.”
She looked him dead in the eye as she spoke, her lashes only fluttering the slightest bit at the end. Jack felt an extreme reaction from where her hand brushed against his to his very center. She was flirting with him.
A slight smile reached the corners of her mouth. Definitely flirting with him.
Trying to seduce him into her control.
“Don’t do that,” he warned quietly.
She flinched back, blinking. “Do … do what?” she stuttered innocently, bringing her hand away from his.
But by the red that flushed up her cheeks, she knew the answer.
She
had
been trying to control him. She likely did it to all men and, given her beauty and notoriety, met with uncommon success. But by her reaction, she was new enough to the gambit to be embarrassed by failure.
However, whatever recovery she might have made was to remain a mystery, because just then Lord Forrester entered the breakfast room, and her face went stony once more.
“Ah, there you are, my boy!” he declared heartily, as he made his way to the sideboard of egg, sausage, and kipper-based dishes. “I was afraid you had left without me.”
“I, too, thought he had vacated the premises, Father,” Sarah replied, her voice coming back up to that place where it held only sharp wit and ice. “Perhaps there is something about him that makes one overlook his presence.”
No one remarked on that little dig—Lord Forrester barely glancing at his daughter’s impertinence. She simply smiled and returned her attention to the eggs on her plate, and gave them each a little smile.
“Now, Jack, my boy,” Lord Forrester addressed him, “I’m afraid I am not acquainted with many military men, but I will introduce you to who I know, and do my best for you. But in the meantime, you should have some fun in London, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know if Lieutenant Fletcher is adept at fun,” Sarah interjected again. “But by all means, do try.”
“Well, I can think of one thing fun,” Lord Forrester said, rubbing his hands together with glee. “Coming to see the new Holbein the Historical Society has acquired!”
As Lord Forrester waxed rhapsodic about his idea of fun, Jack tried to meet Sarah’s eyes, but she studiously avoided his.
Over the next few days, Jack found enjoying London was no easy feat, for one simple reason: He was too adept at reading the weather.
And he could tell that the wind had shifted.
Long days on board ship, having to deal with the insular politics of commanders and men, and Jackson knew one thing for certain: The men with the highest ranks weren’t always the ones in charge.
And in the Forrester household, it became very clear that Sarah was the one dictating their lives.
She was the one in control.
She decided that they would not forgo Sir Leighton’s card party for a family meal at home, and so they went. She dictated that her mother should not wear a certain shade of green the next night out, and so she did not. She dictated that they attend this Whitford banquet for no other reason than it was the Whitford banquet and she had decided to go. So … they did.
In fact, over the last few days, without intending to, Jack had begun to catalogue all of Sarah’s interactions, whims, and behaviors, much like the naturalists who flocked to Brazil to study life in an untouched setting. (Pure observation was aided by the fact that she found herself irrevocably busy, with little time to engage with him.)
He watched as she laughed and cajoled her somewhat awestruck parents into letting her stay out at never-ending parties with only Lady Worth as chaperone.
He watched as she cruelly cut down a suitor, whose hair might have been a shade too gray, by asking after his grandchildren.
He watched as that man was reeled back into her fold with a smile and a caress, thanking him for punch.
Perhaps it was his unique perspective that kept him from falling under her sway—he was, after all, the only man in London who had opportunity to observe Sarah Forrester at home and in the wild. Perhaps it was his own worries that fogged his mind and didn’t allow him to be diverted. But either way, the idea that she had the entirety of London under her spell completely baffled.
“Do you think you could introduce me?” Whigby asked suddenly, his eyes alight. “Then my aunt might forgive me for breaking that vase … although who leaves a vase on a shelf in a hallway, honestly?”
Jack looked up at his friend, his eyebrow cocked in disbelief. Apparently Whigby was one of the spellbound.
“I didn’t mean to break it. I sort of bumped into it—” Whigby began, and Jackson decided not to correct his assumption as to what he found unbelievable.
Before Jack could even begin to roll his eyes, he was jostled again, as another young lady with ever-widening sleeves tried
to pass by him in the crush of the party. The young lady gave him a sparingly apologetic glance, before squeezing through the other people standing in the hall, turning her head as she did so—and hitting Jack across the cheek with a feather.
Slapping him out of his Sarah Forrester reverie.
“Take care, Mr. Fletcher,” Whigby said, having been quick enough to dodge the offending feather. “A slap from a feather is akin to that of a glove—or so my aunt says.”
“I can’t imagine what I’ve done to be slapped by a feather.” Jack drawled, leaning his frame against the wall. It went against his years of training to not stand at full height while in uniform, but it seemed easiest to getting out of everyone’s way. “Other than have the gall to be in the hallway.”
“In the hallway in uniform,” Whigby drawled.
“What do you mean?” Jack sent him a questioning look.
Then, Whigby said something so practical, and so cruel, that Jack thought for a moment that his silly friend had been having a go at him for the whole of their acquaintance. “Only because it marks you as a fortune hunter.” He shrugged, another little bite of food in his mouth—apparently he had grabbed a handful of them in the last pass.
“A fortune hunter?” Jack recoiled at the thought. “Just because a man wears a lieutenant’s bars and happens to not have a position on a ship does not make him a fortune hunter.”
“It does in this ballroom.” Whigby wiped the crumbs from his fingers on his coat pocket.
And suddenly Jack could see only red around the edges of his vision.
He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be on board the
Amorata
; he wanted to be darting in between the islands of the East Indies, eating fruit, bored, and not worrying about his future any further than the next eight bells. But here he was, in a ballroom, being told with glances and feathers that he was not welcome.
“Lucky you have your position secured then, and can wear your uniform without being slapped by a feather,” Jack bit out. But thankfully, good old Roger Whigby never seemed to notice his moment of jealousy.
“I’d have to, in any case!” Whigby said with a mournful sort of good humor. “My uniform is the only suit of clothes I
have that fits—my aunt says I’d pop the buttons on my civilian coats, and she may have to have them let out.”
That made Jack laugh. And he would have laid money it was the outcome Whigby had wanted, because he thumped Jack’s shoulder with aplomb.
“Besides, you’re not in so bad a situation—being in the same house as Sarah Forrester. Half the clubs’ betting books have you married off to her already.”
Jack felt for the barest of moments like his entire body was going to fall through the floor or pop out of his uniform or something equally horrifying.
“You cannot be serious.”
Whigby smirked. “Of course I can. On occasion. I find being serious sets people back on their heels.”
“Mr. Whigby—”
“Oh, all right,” Whigby replied on a grin. “It’s not half the betting books. But it
is
on the books in my uncle’s club, he showed me.” Whigby caught Jack’s outraged stare and shrugged. “I would be lying if I said that your relationship with the Forresters was not a matter of speculation in certain quarters.”
“Why?” Jack asked, frustrated. “Why would anyone possibly care about me staying with the Forresters? And what business is it of theirs?”
“Because you’re a bachelor and she’s … the Golden Lady.”
Jack’s gaze moved from where Sarah was holding court, to any of the other hundred people in the room. He could feel it now. Their gazes, their glances. Their suspicions and speculations. The movement of a fan over the wide-sleeved lady’s mouth as she whispered to a friend and then laughed, as they very consciously didn’t look his way.
For the entire course of the evening, Jack had been wishing himself anywhere else. But he’d managed to swallow the feeling, keep it at bay, letting it only eat at the edges of his resolve. But now … goddamn, but he was weary of this.
“How about that drink, Mr. Whigby?” Jack commanded more than asked. “I find myself compelled to forego this hell for a different one.”