He’d found perfection.
Chapter Three
Fan stood on the bench and gazed out over the score of expectant faces turned up towards her, her hands clasped before her to hide any trembling. The candlelight from the lanterns flickered with the drafts that found their way in through the barn’s timbers, and the men of the Company were waiting so quietly that she could hear the horses at their hay, rustling and nickering in their stalls behind her.
“I know there’s talk at the tavern in town,” she began, “and I’m not the kind to pretend otherwise. The hard truth is this—that a Londoner came to look at Feversham with an eye towards buying it.”
She let the muttered oaths and exclamations settle before she continued. “But this fine gentleman found the house old and inconvenient, with much lacking,” she said, adding a bit of purposeful scorn to her voice for extra emphasis, “and I do not expect him to bother with us again.”
“You didn’t show him this barn, did you, mistress?” called one man to the raucous delight of his friends. “He wouldn’t’ve found much lacking there if’n you had.”
“Nay, Tom, not the barn, nor the privies, either,” she answered dryly. “I kept our secrets to ourselves, where they belong. But I did take care not to show him the house in the best of lights, just to be sure. The sight of old Master Trelawney’s moldy stuffed pigeons seemed enough to send him racing back to London, his driver whipping those hired horses for all he was worth.”
They laughed again, as much from relief as from amusement, and pushed and shoved at each other, as if to prove that way that they hadn’t been worried, not at all. But Fan knew she wasn’t entirely free of the questions, not as long as Bob Forbert stood in the front of the crowd, chewing on the inside of his mouth and shifting nervously from one scrawny leg to the other.
“The boy that watered the coachman’s horses, mistress,” he said, his voice squeaking as he strived to make himself heard. “The boy said the man weren’t no regular Londoner, but a fancy lord and a king’s officer, a Navy man in a coat all glittering with gold lace. Do that be true, mistress? That some bleeding gold-lace officer was here poking his long nose around our affairs?”
Instantly the laughter and raillery stopped, and all the faces swung back towards Fan for an answer.
“Yes,” she said slowly, carefully. “He was Captain Lord George Claremont of His Majesty’s Navy, but all that interested him was the house.”
Smuggling took money from the king’s pockets, and in turn the king took catching smugglers most seriously. Officers like Captain Lord Claremont were sworn to capture smugglers as enemies of the crown, especially now with the country at peace with France. Such an officer could destroy her life as well, if he learned of her role in the Company, and there wasn’t a man in the barn who wasn’t thinking the same.
How simple it sounded that way, how clean and uncomplicated, when in fact the captain’s visit was still twisting away at her, as sharp as a new-honed knife. When she’d received the letter from the Trelawneys’ agent in London, she’d imagined the captain to be the model of Navy cruelty, with a twisted, squinting face as weather-beaten as a cliff to reflect the wickedness of his personality.
But an aristocratic captain: what could possibly make for a worse combination? To be sure, she’d next to no experience with arrogant noblemen, though she’d heard enough tales of how they were all riddled with the pox and fat from too much drink and wickedness. And considering this one’s reputation as a famously daredevil frigate captain—the agent had made quite a point of that—he’d likely also have lost an arm or leg in battle, or be hideously seamed with scars. She had pictured the visitor like this in alarming detail, steeling herself for the unpleasant task of showing him the house.
But what she had never imagined was the reality of Captain Lord Claremont who had presented himself on Feversham’s doorstep.
She had, quite simply, never in her life met such a gentleman, let alone found one standing on the doorstep before her. He was appallingly handsome, tall and broad-shouldered and lean, and the dark blue coat and white breeches of his uniform were so closely fitted that she’d no more need at all for her imagination.
It wasn’t just that he had all his limbs, unlike the Captain Claremont she’d been picturing in her mind. This Captain Claremont stood before her with an assurance that was new to Fan, a kind of unquestionable confidence that came from inside the man, not from any tailor’s needle. She could see it in his eyes, his smile, even the way his dark hair waved back from his forehead. She’d known her share of brave men, but their bravery had come from muscle and force, while this one—this one would have the same muscle and force, true enough, but it would be his intelligence and his conviction that he would win that would always give him the advantage.
And God help her, he already had it over her. He had begun by treating her like the lowliest parlor maid, and she had responded as was fitting for the housekeeper of Feversham: dignified and aloof, and justly proud of her position and the old house. He’d respected that, or so she’d thought at first.
But somehow things had shifted between them while she’d shown him the house. He’d challenged her, dared her, badgered her, until she’d done it all back to him, and not only in defense, either. She’d enjoyed testing herself against such a clever man: that was the horrible truth of it. She’d enjoyed the banter, and she’d enjoyed being with him. By the time they’d reached the bedchambers, he’d been out-and-out flirting with her, and, wretched creature that she was, she could only smile and blush like some simpleminded maid.
Her only solace came from knowing Captain Claremont had left Feversham the same day he’d come, and wouldn’t return. He’d made that clear enough, hadn’t he? She’d made a shameful fool of herself once, but at least she’d be spared doing it again. And if she let his handsome, smiling face haunt her dreams, then that would be her penance.
That, and the questions and doubts of the men before her.
“But why Feversham, mistress?” called Will Hood from the back, and others rumbled along with him in a chorus of uncertainty. “There’s scores o’ other grand houses for the likes o’ him. Why’d he come here if he’d no reason?”
“He wished a house by the sea,” answered Fan, raising her voice, praying she sounded more sure of herself than she felt. “That is what the Trelawneys’ agent in London wrote to me. He saw a drawing of Feversham, and was much taken with it. But he found the real house much lacking and inconvenient, and left disappointed, determined to find another.”
She was unwisely repeating herself, and she saw the uneasy glances passing back and forth.
“Captain Lord Claremont saw nothing to make him wish to return,” she continued, “nor anything of our affairs here. None of this barn, or your ponies, or the boats near the stream.”
“This Captain Lord Claremont, was he the same captain what made all the fuss last year?” asked Hood. “The one what stole all that silver from that dago treasure-ship? Was he your gentleman here?”
“He’s not my gentleman,” said Fan quickly, but no one else noticed the distinction, or cared.
“Likely this Claremont’s friends with the old bloody Duke o’ Richmond, too, may his bones rot in the blackest corner of Hell,” said Forbert darkly. “All them nobles are kin, aren’t they? I say this one’s come to see us broke and strung up for the gulls to pick apart, like they did to those poor blokes on Rook’s Hill near Chichester.”
“And I say you’re daft, Forbert, making no more sense than a braying jackass,” said Hood, wiping his nose with a red-spotted handkerchief. He was a sensible man, an old friend of her father’s, one she trusted and one the others listened to as well. It was also whispered in awe that Hood