I am confident that Mrs. Perceval’s patronage will benefit your enterprise. I am always ready to assist such worthy causes as this. Now, this is the one in Camden Town, is it not? And run by Mrs. Butters’ family from Bristol?

“Yes ma’am, and the sewing instructress is Miss Price, a niece to Sir Thomas Bertram.”

“Of course. I think I once met Miss Price, very briefly. A pretty, civil-behaved young lady. Ah yes, I have heard about this niece to the Bertrams. I suppose Mrs. Butters will need to find a new instructress soon.”

“Ma’am?”

“Miss Price’s aunt—the other one—not Lady Bertram—what is her name—lives at Mansfield—”

“Her aunt?”

“Oh yes, Norris. Yes, Mrs. Norris. She told me Miss Price will soon marry a curate--in fact the curate engaged by the academy. It must be the same curate who gave an interminable speech when Mrs. Perceval visited. Mrs. Perceval told me about the curate, too! ‘An unforgettable oration,’ I think she termed it. You look surprised, Mr. Gibson.”

“Ah... perhaps I am, a little, your ladyship. When did you learn this news?”

“Only last week, when Lord Delingpole and I were last at Mansfield. Mrs. Norris said the Bertrams would be well pleased if Miss Price could marry so respectably. Well, I wish them both very happy, of course. Not every woman would care to be married to someone who so loves the sound of his own voice, but there you are.”

“Yes. Yes, indeed ma’am. There I am.”

*    *    *    *    *    *    *

Of all the duties which Lieutenant Price had undertaken in Africa, none pleased him so much as the expedition up the Pongus River, with a small detachment of British and African sailors, to destroy every slaving station they found. Confronted with William’s schooner, armed with two small cannons and a crew of torch-wielding Kru tribesmen, the slave-masters abandoned their houses (some astonishingly large and luxurious). Their homes and their warehouses were set ablaze, the slaver’s crews were overcome, the slave masters taken as prisoners, and their captives released.

William had seen action against the French, but the pleasure to be had in visiting sheer destruction upon one’s enemy was a new sensation for him. When the fires consumed the thatched roofs of the barracoons, when they collapsed in a roar with a shower of sparks, and the Kru men ululated and exulted, he very much wanted to join in their war cries, to pull off his uniform and dance naked upon the deck of the schooner as they did. When he watched the reflection of the flames on the sluggish river, he thought it was no unfair representation of the state of his soul; externally placid, he was in tumult inside himself; angry, rebellious, and resentful at being denied his best chance for happiness in this world.

He thought back to his Latin lessons with his friend William Gibson; to his efforts to gain education and refinement, to his wish to become an acceptable son-in-law to Sir Thomas Bertram! And now here he was, covered in soot and sweat, speaking the crude patois of the Sierra Leone colony, eating, sleeping, and working with half-naked savages. So far away from tea and cucumber sandwiches on soft white bread, and croquet on the lawn, and talking about the weather: “Would it rain? Perhaps a little? Ought we to venture out?”

At Mansfield Park he had sometimes felt like a graceless, ignorant, clumsy imposter. Here, in charge of his schooner and his little crew, in the middle of the jungle, he felt strangely at home. Here was reality. “Detached service” they called it, and it was a fitting signifier for William’s state of mind; detached from his past, detached from all he knew and loved.

Africa was no kinder to the ships of the West African Squadron than it was to their men. The sails rotted in the humid air, the hulls became fouled with worms, the beer went sour and the butter rancid. Upon his return from the Pongus River, William joined the men invalided off the Kangaroo—that is, those well enough to stand up without holding on to something, who were all pressed into service to help repair the HMS Protector.

Captain Irby, delighted with the intelligence, bearing and resourcefulness of the young lieutenant, requested William’s transfer to the Protector, and so it was that William departed Sierra Leone to make one more patrol for slaving ships. The subsequent capture of the Portuguese slaver Maria Primero off of St. Thomas and the rescue of almost five hundred Africans was a handsome reward for the crew.

In March, the Protector took on six tons of elephant tusks to be imported to England, and William left the African coast only eight miserable months after he had sailed out of Portsmouth on the Kangaroo. He had done well in the way of prize monies, and might be supposed—by some—to be eligible to address the daughter of a baronet. But he clung to his fears for Julia’s safety, and the dying words of his captain, and refused to consider the idea.

And further, he told himself, a young lady as amiable, as beautiful and accomplished as Julia must by now have found new admirers; gentlemen of education, birth and refinement, whose claims would render his own pretensions worthy only of mockery.

Chapter Sixteen

Julia turned the letter from her father over and over in her hands. Had Sir Thomas found some just objection to Mr. Meriwether, or did he approve of her suitor? Her imagination could not supply the answer, but she knew what she wished it to be.

She left the breakfast table without saying a word to Edmund. Outside, in the solitude and tranquillity of her little garden, she found the courage to open the note.

My dear Julia,

You will not be surprised, I believe, to learn I have received an application of a most particular kind, from a gentleman who

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