Stephen could hardly believe it. If anyone had done that on board his ship, they’d have been thrown into the ship’s brig. And when they were let out, made to scrub the decks with a tiny scrub brush until they gleamed.
Jilly leaned against the bookshop door and took a deep breath. Captain Arrow was a dangerous man. Thank God he was leaving Dreare Street soon.
Dancing on stage had made her giddy with delight. So had dropping bags of water out the window. Even walking home with the captain had made her happy. Possibly because he was breathtakingly handsome. And funny. He’d made clever jokes all night long, the kind that sometimes took a minute to ponder because his sense of humor was so dry.
Of course, she’d ignored them. She didn’t want him to think he was entertaining in the least.
She was on to his strategy: he’d confessed it himself. He wanted her to fall in line, to make her more malleable, to turn her over to his way of thinking. He believed one could take part in revelries whenever one wanted to, whether one had obligations or not. He wanted her to stop complaining and join his party indefinitely!
Thank God she’d not succumbed.
“Oh, dear,” she muttered, and put her fingers to her lips. She couldn’t help thinking about how close she’d come to seeing things his way, when he’d put his mouth so close to the crack in the door and said the word
For a split second, she’d had visions of them doing just that. But then she’d remembered.
Hector.
She was married already, and to a cruel, stupid man—a distant cousin, actually—who’d delighted in making her miserable while running through her father’s fortune. From his deathbed, Papa had acknowledged Hector was a crude sort of man, but he was also the true heir. He was kind to marry Jilly and not force her out of her own home, wasn’t he?
Jilly shuddered. If only Papa had known Hector’s true nature. He was the opposite of
Jilly’s mother had owned a small property independent of her husband’s estate. Thanks to the discretion of her family attorney, Hector had known nothing about it. Jilly had sold it off, along with a steady stream of precious family heirlooms, behind Hector’s back, to raise the funds to buy Hodgepodge.
And then she’d run away—in the middle of the night.
She’d been terrified, but the closer she’d come to London, the more exhilarated she’d become.
It was a new life for her. A new life for Otis, too.
Now she yawned and crawled into bed, comforted by the thought that someday she’d be able to go long lengths of time without thinking of her husband.
But she found she couldn’t sleep, and not because she was thinking of Hector. She was thinking about Captain Arrow again. They’d never gotten around to making those toasts to Dreare Street, had they?
“And we probably never will,” she whispered softly to herself. “Not if his aim is to ply me with punch.”
Even as she said it, she felt regrets about what couldn’t be. Because the evening had been unlike any she’d ever known. Diverting, joyful.
With many
She thought back to the sheer exuberance she’d felt dropping those bags of water. And before that, the dancing between the flaming candelabra, surrounded by men in grass skirts.
Hector would have hated every minute of it.
But thinking of him again made Jilly’s chest tighten with fear and loathing, so she closed her eyes and clutched her coverlet close, only to slip into a dream about coconuts and drums.
CHAPTER FOUR
The next morning, a slant of sun—real sun—peeked through Stephen’s window. He felt as comfortable and lazy as the ship’s cat that used to sleep on top of his charts on his desk in his cabin.
“Late to bed, late to rise,” he said out loud, his humor fully restored in spite of his rejection by Miss Jones the evening previous, “makes a man—”
Makes a man what?
Happy?
Relaxed?
He threw off his quilt, and—
The bed promptly collapsed on the floor.
What the devil?
Thoroughly jolted, he was now at a ridiculous angle, his head down, and his feet up. Gingerly, he rolled off the side of the mattress. He’d just bought the frame from a well-respected furniture dealer. It was sturdy and new, of the finest maple.
He leaned over to examine the legs at the top of the bed. Good God, they’d fallen through the floor! Two floor planks had given way. No doubt the gaping hole accounted for the shouts coming from below in the breakfast room, where Pratt, his former ship’s cook, had been charged with the daily morning chore of frying up a rasher of bacon and several dozen eggs, as well as toasting a loaf of bread and making a pot of tea.
Stephen froze, wondering if his legs were to go through the ceiling next. Carefully, he walked over the seemingly sturdy planks to the door of his bedchamber and looked back at the slanted bed.
Odd, that. Very odd.
He shrugged. Nothing he could do about it at the moment. Might as well have breakfast, if there was any left that didn’t have plaster in it.
“You’ve got woodworm in a beam.” One of his friends winced as he looked up at the hole in the ceiling through pince-nez missing a lens; it had been lost last night in a playful brawl on the roof. “One rubbery creature fell on my toast.”
Gad.
The other men looked near to being sick.
“I’m sure it’s only in that portion of the beam,” Lumley added, his face rather green and his eyes a bloodshot red. “Otherwise, we’d be seeing it everywhere. And we haven’t.”
Stephen eyed the row of beams above his head. The others, if in good condition, would support the ceiling very well, but his chest tightened, nevertheless. “The executor of my cousin’s will told me the house was worn in places, but one doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I’d planned to have it inspected at my leisure.”
Another friend added a few dollops of brandy to his empty teacup and drained it. “I’m sure it’s fine. Except for that one beam, it appears in excellent shape.”
Frying pan in hand, Pratt was none the worse for wear. Always impeccably groomed, this morning he wore one of his more intricately embroidered waistcoats when he slid three eggs and a side of bacon onto Stephen’s plate. “No house is, what you call,
The whole table seemed soothed by his smooth Italian accent.
“It’s nothing I can’t take care of.” Stephen picked up his fork and looked round the company as if daring anyone to disagree.
“Aye,” whispered one dapper fellow who’d had both eyebrows shaved off but didn’t know it yet. “If I were you, Arrow, I’d hire a reputable carpenter, the best in London.”
There was a low, miserable chorus of assents.
Stephen was aware none of the men at the table had done an ounce of hard labor in their lives. They were all sons of noblemen, accustomed to having everything done for them by servants and skilled laborers—especially Lumley, who was so rich, if a coin fell out of his pocket he could hire someone to pick it up for him if he
