Neat walkways, well-tended courtyard … She didn’t know what she had expected, but it hadn’t been this. She counted ten substantial buildings connected by covered walkways of Italianate style. That’s intelligent, she thought. Patients with contagion can be isolated in distinct buildings.
The administration building appeared to be a warren of small offices and cubicles, staffed by a flotilla of clerks. Other than a glance or two in her direction, none of the men she passed seemed interested in offering help, so she continued down the hallway to a large desk, where another clerk sat.
“Good afternoon. I am looking for Matthew Pollock, a powder monkey from the Tireless,” she said, determined not to feel intimidated by the way he looked at her over the rim of his spectacles.
“Are you a relative?” the man asked.
“No. I …”
“Then there are no visitors.”
The clerk turned his attention to the ledger in front of him, as though she had already vanished. When he looked up again and saw her still standing before him, he even appeared surprised.
“I can’t disappear like an apparition,” Laura told him. She set down her valise. “I still want to see Matthew Pollock.”
A door opened down the hall and a man came out, resplendent in blue, with gold bullion and lace on his sleeves and collar. The clerk stood up at once.
She didn’t know his rank, but his appearance indicated someone considerably more exalted than the clerk. She wanted to speak to him, but he surprised her by striding directly to her and standing too close for comfort.
“You’re a day late.” He sniffed the air. Laura resisted a powerful urge to slap his face. “You don’t smell of gin, at least. You were to report to the clerk in room 15. Are you illiterate, as well as tardy? Well?”
He was too close. She was a tall woman, but she stepped back, reminded too much of her own father and Sir James, with their shouting and demands. She wanted to turn and run down the corridor and out into the quadrangle. Not this time, Laura, she told herself. Not ever again. Putting her hands behind her back so he would not see them tremble, she stood her ground, not moving an inch.
“You have me confused with someone else.”
The clerk gasped. Obviously no one else had ever contradicted this exalted personage before. It’s high time someone did, she told herself, even as her stomach began to churn.
“I don’t make mistakes.” He bit off each word like a dog snapping a bone for the marrow.
“I never knew that the Lord Almighty wore a naval uniform,” she snapped back.
She heard a strangled sound from the clerk, but knew better than to take her eyes off the man intimidating her. Maybe this was what she had wanted to say to her own father. Maybe she had stored it up in her heart and mind, waiting for the opportunity.
“I’m sacking you before you even begin!” the officer roared, perhaps thinking he was on a quarterdeck of a most unfortunate ship and she was his lowliest powder monkey.
“You think I came here for employment?” She pitched her voice deliberately low, so he was forced to listen. “I wouldn’t work for you if I was starving, and I most certainly am not.” She unclenched her hands from behind her back and brought them around to her front, so she could fish in her reticule.
She yanked out a sheet of paper. “My brother-in-law, Captain Oliver Worthy of the Tireless, thought I might need this. I told him it wouldn’t be necessary, but he insisted. Obviously he knows you better than I do.”
With a loud exhalation of air, the officer stepped back, as though propelled by his own breath. With a thunderous look at his clerk, he grabbed the note and read it.
Laura jerked the strings of her reticule together, wishing they would make a loud noise like a thunderclap, instead of a harmless little whish. Maybe I am like my sister, tough as a Cornish tin-pit pony, she thought. Wasn’t that what Lt. Brittle said about Nana? Couldn’t I use a champion, about now?
No champion appeared, but none was necessary, not after Captain Worthy’s brief note apparently. As the officer’s complexion turned from red to a mottled gray, she felt her own composure returning. She didn’t know what Oliver had written, but she suspected the note involved Lady Taunton, rather than plain Mrs. Taunton.
“Lady Taunton, a mistake was made,” the officer had the grace to say. It wasn’t much of an apology, but couldn’t have been easy, not with his clerk right there. “We must be so careful here.”
“I understand completely,” she replied, in what she hoped was her kindest voice. Then she could not resist. “I imagine there are female spies who attempt to weasel their way into naval secrets by talking to powder monkeys. Wise of you to be so cautious.”
She assumed what her late husband used to call her “pudding face,” and smiled at the officer, who wasn’t quite certain if he had just been held up to ridicule. Pudding face, indeed. Even her late husband—he who only complained—would have been impressed with the bland face she presented to the stuffed shirt in epaulets harassing her now. “Sir, I wish to know whom I have been addressing.”
Reminded so gently of his dereliction, he bowed again. “Admiral Sir David Carew at your service,” he replied. “I am chief administrator and physician.”
She curtsied again, thinking that if he could make a better beginning, she could, too. “Sir David, can you kindly direct me to the office that knows where such a little powder monkey might be found? He serves … served … on the Tireless.”
The physician indicated a door back down the corridor. “Room 12, my lady,” he said. “Let me escort you there.”
“I needn’t take you from your work,” she said, not wishing his escort at all.
“It is of no consequence,” he assured her.
She had no choice. She did manage to catch the look that passed between the clerk and admiral; the admiral gave the poor man such a glower that Laura was almost certain that no word of what had just happened would ever leave the clerk’s lips. The poor clerk would probably be set adrift in a lifeboat on the Amazon River at the mercy of headhunters, Laura thought, as she reassumed her pudding face.
The clerks in room 12 appeared astonished to see their chief administrator, which made Laura suspect Sir David seldom did his own legwork. And why should he, she thought. He is the Lord Almighty, after all. She managed to turn her laugh into a cough.
Flip, flip went the pages in a ledger, while another clerk ruffled through a stack of cards in a small wooden box as though his life depended on it.
“He is a new arrival,” Laura offered, not wishing to have so many men in pain on her behalf, not with the admiral standing there, looking ready to pounce. “The Tireless sank in Plymouth Sound on Sunday night,” she added, remembering what Oliver had told them that morning over breakfast.
“Ah, yes,” one of the clerks said, and turned to another ledger. He ran a trembling finger down a column. “Ward Block Four, second floor, Ward B, ma’am.”
“Just point me in the right direction.”
Again, Sir David would have none of that. “I will take you there, Lady Taunton.”
In the corridor, she looked down to see her valise, which—perhaps not wanting to be abandoned in such a place—must have crawled after her or been deposited there by a clerk. She knew this was a dilemma for the admiral. If she were to pick it up, he would be forced to take it from her. And from the looks of him, he did not carry parcels and certainly not valises. She hoped he was not one to carry a grudge, either.
He stared at the valise as though someone had dumped out a chamber pot right at his feet. For the sake of his staff, Laura put him out of his