Nicola Cornick, Margaret McPhee, et al (28 page)

‘Steady now, miss, steady,’ he said, protective as he clasped her
gently by the shoulders. ‘No need to crash about, eh?’

‘No need!’ she exclaimed, too horrified by how close she’d come
to genuine disaster to realise that he was still holding her. ‘You very nearly
broke this Attic black-figured vase, sir!’

‘Like a great lumbering bull, I am,’ he agreed ruefully. ‘But
didn’t I say all this rubbish belonged in a dusty attic?’

‘No, no,
no
!’ she cried, turning her face up towards his.
‘I meant the vase was made in Attica, the region surrounding ancient Athens,
not—not—’

How could she think, let alone speak, when he insisted on smiling
down at her like that, his hands still resting on her shoulders and only all
those gold buttons and the little statue between them? She forgot Attica, and
Athens, and the Apollo in her arms, and thought only of how she’d never stood
so close to a gentleman like this before, nor realised quite how confusing it
could be. Confusing, and unseemly, too. And by the single candle’s light she
felt her cheeks grow hot.

‘Forgive me, sir, for prattling on so,’ she said, her voice oddly
breathless. ‘I shouldn’t presume that you’ve any interest in antiquities. Most
people don’t.’

‘If you’re interested, miss,’ he declared gallantly. ‘Then so am
I.’

She felt her flush deepen more. If he wasn’t going to end this
foolishness, then she must. ‘That is very—very kind of you, sir. But I must ask
you to release me so that I can—’

‘Oh, aye—aye, miss. Forgive me.’ Chagrined, he took a step back
from her, his hands flying from her shoulders as if they’d been burned. ‘I
should know better than that. It’s been so long since I’ve been in the company
of an English lady that I’ve forgotten how to behave, haven’t I?’

He began to bow again, putting another tall standing pot behind
him into peril.

‘Oh, sir, don’t!’ She darted around him to catch and save the
pot. ‘I am sorry, sir, but I’m afraid that I must ask you to leave, before any
damage occurs to Sir William’s collection.’

‘I never intended—’

‘No, sir,’ she said quickly. She had to be firm. She had to be
resolute, to remember how important cataloguing Sir William’s collection had
been to Father, and forget how charmingly this officer had smiled at her. ‘I
believe if you proceed down this hallway to your left, you’ll find Her
Ladyship’s parlour. You need only follow the voices of the other guests to find
it, sir.’

‘Which is exactly what I could have done in the beginning,
couldn’t I?’ He grinned, and held his crooked arm out to her. ‘You will join
me, miss?’

But Abigail only shook her head, clutching the Apollo more
tightly, as if to keep her hands from betraying her. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I’m
not Lady Hamilton’s guest. I’m employed by Sir William as a scholar to
catalogue his collection—or rather, I hope to be, if he finds me satisfactory.’

‘Satisfactory, miss?’ His grin turned endearingly lop-sided. ‘Ah,
miss, how could he not find you so?’

‘He could,’ she said, too unsure to acknowledge the compliment.
‘He could indeed.’

‘But he won’t. Not if he’s any sense.’ He lowered his arm to his
side, and began to back slowly towards the open door. ‘Scholar or guest, I will
see you again.’

It wasn’t a question, but a statement, and bold enough to make her
blush all over again. ‘I cannot say, sir.’

‘I can, miss,’ he said softly, pausing in the open door. ‘I can,
and I assure you I will.’

J
AMES
stood on the tavern’s narrow balcony,
gazing out over the tiled rooftops of Naples to the villas that loomed ghostly
pale over the water. This wasn’t where he’d planned to spend his first night in
port—not at all—but after what had happened earlier in the evening, at the house,
he found he no longer had any interest in those grand, gaudy plans. Now the
wine was bland, the food indifferent, and, though the company in the room he’d
just left included two of his closest friends on this earth, he wasn’t in the
mood for their bawdy good humour, or the girls that they’d bought with the
wine.

He drew out his pocket watch to check the time. It was barely
midnight; they weren’t due back on board the ship for another four hours, in
time for him to take the first watch.

‘Why the devil are you skulking about alone out here,
Richardson?’ demanded his friend and fellow lieutenant John Beattie who reeled
out onto the balcony to join him. ‘Why disappoint the ladies, I ask you?’

James glanced past him to the three laughing young women sprawled
across the benches in the private dining room. ‘They’re hardly ladies,
Beattie.’

‘But they are
willing
,’ Beattie said earnestly. ‘What else
have we been speaking of these last weeks, eh?’

James shrugged, unwilling to explain what he didn’t entirely
understand himself. ‘Some other night.’

‘“Some other night”?’ Beattie frowned. ‘What’s this about? Are
you daft? Did you eat something dicey at Sir William’s table?’

‘Don’t
you
be daft,’ scoffed James. ‘We ate the same, side
by side, didn’t we?’

‘Not quite.’ Beattie slung his arm across James’s shoulder. ‘I
should’ve guessed you’d found another amusement when you disappeared before
dinner. A parlourmaid, was she? Or a serving girl?’

‘Hardly.’ James slipped free of his friend’s arm and turned to
face him. ‘Not that I’m about to tell you one word further about the lady.

‘A lady?’ Beattie asked, clearly mystified. ‘There weren’t any
ladies in the house tonight save Sir William’s own—and even she’s not exactly a
thoroughbred.’

‘No.’ Despite her demurring about not being a guest, the
dark-haired girl he’d met among the statues was ten times the lady that Lady
Hamilton could ever be. It was no secret that Sir William’s much younger wife
had first been the cast-off mistress of his nephew, and before that had toiled
both in a brothel and as an artist’s model. ‘The lady I met was in
mourning—which was likely why she wasn’t at dinner, even though she’s English.’

‘An English widow?’ At once Beattie’s round face grew sombre.
England had been at war off and on for as long as either of them could
remember, and young widows had become far too common. ‘Was her husband an
officer, then?’

‘I didn’t ask.’ He wouldn’t have, either; such things were better
left for a lady to volunteer. He’d taken care to be respectful, considerate of
her sorrow, even as he’d noted that her black dress was so faded that her grief
couldn’t be fresh, either.

But, widow or not, there had been something about the girl that
had affected him, affected him strongly. He couldn’t say exactly what it had
been: how her blue eyes had widened when she’d looked up at him, or the way
she’d managed to be both shy and forthright, or how she’d defended Sir
William’s musty old rubbish as determinedly as any ship-of-the-line? Perhaps it
had simply been her very Englishness that had reminded him of the home he
hadn’t seen for years, yet still risked his life to defend.

No, he wasn’t good at explaining such things. Never had been.
Yet, whatever the reason, he’d been unable to put the girl from his thoughts
ever since he’d left her in that cluttered storeroom.

Nor, really, did he want to.

Noisily Beattie cleared his throat, making it clear that James
had, in Beattie’s opinion, taken longer to reply than was decent between
friends.

‘Well, now,’ he said heartily, ‘I can understand why such a lady
would distract you, but there’s no point in letting her spoil your sport, is
there?’

‘You stay,’ James said. ‘I’ll hire a boat to carry me back to the
ship.’

‘You would leave these pretty little doxies for a widow you may
never see again?’

‘I’ll see her.’ James was confident of that, even though to his
chagrin he realised he’d never asked the girl so much as her name. ‘I’ll see
her again, and soon.’

‘But not tonight.’ Beattie waved his hand towards the women
waiting inside. ‘Recall what the wise man said about a bird in the hand,
Richardson. I’ve heard these Neapolitan doxies do tricks with their tongues
that can make a man weep.’

‘Then I’ll leave it to you to discover the truth.’ James set his
tumbler with the unfinished wine on a nearby chair, and placed his hat back on
his head to leave. ‘I’ll have to contain my curiosity until you can tell me in
the morning.’

‘
If
you’re there on board,’ Beattie said. ‘More likely
you’ll be with the admiral, hauled ashore once again and back to Sir William’s
for breakfast.’

James frowned. He was the
Vanguard
’s first lieutenant now,
and the admiral had as much as told him he was next in line for a command of
his own. His place in the morning should be back among the other officers on
board, overseeing the repairs to the fleet. Yet if he
were
again
accompanying the admiral, then he’d have another opportunity to find the little
widow. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I don’t have to
say
a blessed thing,’ Beattie said. ‘We
both saw what we saw with our own eyes, didn’t we? Lady Hamilton throwing
herself at the admiral, brazen enough to shame her poor old husband? Not that
the admiral minded, did he?’

‘No.’ There was no point in denying it. Every man on board had
witnessed Lady Hamilton’s hysterical welcome. Nelson was a genius at sea, and
as close to a bonafide hero as James had ever served beneath, but the man was
so scarred and frail that it was hard to imagine him fascinating the
still-beautiful Lady Hamilton. It hadn’t mattered, either, that the admiral had
a wife waiting for him in England—much as Lady Hamilton had had Sir William
beside her. ‘She did make her interest known.’

‘In a manner, aye.’ Beattie retrieved James’s half-full wine
glass from where he’d abandoned it, holding it up to the light before he
emptied the contents himself. ‘No wonder he wants us to stay in this harbour
until after Christmas, with her ladyship offering so much cheer.’

‘We’ve seen far worse harbours,’ James said, glancing out over
the nodding palm trees and the calm waters of the bay beyond: hardly the sort
of snowy Christmas scene he remembered from his boyhood in Devon, but he’d take
peace and calm waters over ice and snow any day. ‘If this is what comes of her
ladyship’s Christmas cheer, than so be it.’

‘Oh, aye, her
cheer
.’ Beattie snorted with amusement.
‘They say the admiral took her fancy years ago, back when he had two eyes and
she weren’t so blowsy, but it’s still more’n I want to consider. Cupid’s a
peculiar little fellow, ain’t he?’

‘Deuced peculiar,’ James said, even as he thought again of how
the fierce little widow with the candle in her hand was worth more than all the
doxies waiting inside. ‘Take care that Cupid doesn’t send his arrows towards
you while you’re in this place, mind?’

Beattie laughed. ‘No question of that,’ he said with a wink. ‘But
watch yourself, Richardson. Who knows what might happen with your little widow
at the Hamiltons’ between now and Christmas?’

James laughed, too, but his mood was less raucous. ‘Who knows?’
he said softly. ‘Who knows, indeed?’

With a pair of silver tongs, Abigail carefully placed a slice of
toasted bread onto her plate, then turned to find a place for breakfast. She
had her choice: though the long mahogany table was beautifully set, with a fine
linen cloth and silver baskets filled with fruit, not one of the two dozen
chairs was taken. Nor were there any signs of the house’s other occupants
appearing. Given how the laughing voices and the music from the parlour had
continued long into the night, Abigail was not surprised. A maidservant had
informed her that her presence was requested at breakfast at half-past seven,
but clearly in Naples half-past seven meant something different than it did in
Oxford.

Tentatively Abigail sat at the far end of the table, near the
armchair that must belong to Sir William’s lady. She’d stayed up most of the
night herself as well, writing a proposal for Sir William based on what she’d
seen in his gallery, and now all she could do was wait for his final decision.

She might have no company, but at least the view from the tall
windows before her as she nibbled her toast was breathtaking: framed by the
red-flowered vines curling over the balcony’s rail, the deep blue bay was
bright in the morning sun, with the city curled around it and Mount Vesuvius
with its mist-shrouded crown in the distance.

A beautiful view, even a romantic view, and for the first time in
her life she let herself imagine sharing such a small pleasure with a
gentleman. An officer in the King’s service, a lieutenant like the
golden-haired one who’d surprised her last night, caught her when she’d
stumbled, and—

No.
She closed her eyes against the seductive view and the
memory of the officer.
That
was not why she’d come this far. She was
here to carry on her father’s work, not to engage in a—a
flirtation
with
a man who’d sail away without a second thought. Likely he was already gone.
Likely she’d never see him again.

And foolishly, she wished it weren’t so.

‘Miss Layton?’ The lady entered the room as if she were coming
onto a stage, her face raised and her hands held out from her sides, palms
turned up, so her elegant Kashmir shawl drifted dramatically behind her. She
was tall and plump, and past her first youth, but a breathtaking beauty still,
with flawless creamy skin and masses of chestnut hair, and her smile was so
genuine that Abigail seemed to feel its warmth like the sunshine on her skin.

‘I am Lady Hamilton,’ she said as she came towards Abigail. ‘I
feel perfectly dreadful for not welcomin’ you myself last night. Are you
feelin’ better? Your room suits you?’

Hurriedly Abigail rose and curtseyed. Lady Hamilton looked like a
lady, and her welcome was as warm as her smile, yet to Abigail’s confusion her
voice was a dreadful low-born squawk, her accent more fitted to a fishwife than
an ambassador’s lady.