Sophie’s friend, Miss Lydia Howick, stepped forward and took both of her hands. “You are a very special lady to lead the charmed life of belonging to one of the men of the squadron. And I am so envious of how much you know about medicine. Dr. MacCloud should be over the moon to have you as his partner.”
Willa bit back a smile when she contrasted Miss Howick’s breathy, non-stop chatter with the stoic young naval man at her side who had been introduced as Captain George Neville, head of the Royal Marine contingent aboard Captain Bellingham’s ship. Even though Lydia and Captain Neville were very different in temperament, the affection they shared warmed the air around them, like a bright brazier full of coals on a winter’s eve.
Willa reflected on the chasm between herself and the other women. She would be spending the next few years in service at the St. Helena station at her husband’s side. Would she and Cullen continue their formal, collegial relationship, or would they become something more to each other? She reached down into a well of conflicting emotions gnawing at her insides. Her own heart had become an infernal mystery.
Whereas, the other two women clearly were already dreading the day when their men would have to return to sea…without them.
Cullen sat next to his unbending bride and wondered. He wondered how his life could have been completely upended in the course of a few weeks. He wondered how the tall, slender creature next to him with the mesmerizing gray eyes had slept in the tiny surgeon’s cabin aboard the Arethusa without him ever suspecting what lay across the scant few feet between their bunks.
It was hard to grasp the idea that he was now married to a woman who might never share a bed with him, yet made it impossible for him to bed any other woman, either. His old devil-may-care life had come crashing down in the blink of an eye.
Chapter Nine
Captain Arnaud Bellingham sat across from Miss Lydia Howick and his Marine Captain George Neville in the comfort of the Howick family carriage. Miss Howick made frequent trips from London to Portsmouth laden with food and provisions for the newlywed Bellinghams, a flimsy ruse for also seeing more of Captain Neville before he left for a long tour of duty off the coast of West Africa.
Next to him, Sophie patted Arnaud’s arm and smiled at her old friend, Lydia. “What a lovely breakfast Dr. MacCloud’s kinsman managed for us in such a short period of time.”
“Does anyone know what happened to cause this sudden union in the middle of the night? I have to confess I always thought Dr. MacCloud was a confirmed, fusty old bachelor.” Lydia, as usual, was spilling everything in her head out through her mouth.
Arnaud coughed and found something intensely interesting outside the carriage windows. Captain Neville’s face and neck reddened to compete with his regimental uniform.
“George, breathe,” Lydia admonished, and gave him a smart thwack against his back.
Sophie gave Lydia a fond, indulgent smile. “Dr. MacCloud is definitely not a fusty, old anything. He’s been married to the Royal Navy, like these gentlemen.” She swept her hand around to encompass her husband and Captain Neville.
“But why in a rush, overnight?”
Arnaud wisely remained silent, curious as to how his wife would explain Cullen’s precipitous marriage.
“There were, ah, extenuating circumstances.”
“She’s with child?” Lydia sucked in a quick breath, her blue eyes wide.
Now it was Neville’s turn to choke, and Arnaud struggled to control the flame of embarrassment creeping up his own neck.
Sophie leaned across to the seats on the other side of the coach and placed her hand over Lydia’s. “We must not speak of this anywhere outside this carriage.”
“Of course. You know something.” Lydia paused a moment. “The cards. You saw something in the cards.”
“No, no.” Sophie shook her head hard.
“Then how do you know there were ‘extenuating circumstances’?”
“Cullen came to us a week ago to talk about problems he was having with the son of the dead surgeon he replaced.”
Lydia’s head quirked to the side like a small cat, momentarily sidetracked by the sight of a yarn toy. “But what does that have to do with his new wife?”
“Lydia, think. Think what you might do if you suddenly had no family and the only family you’d ever known was your father. Your father who had kept you by his side and taught you everything he knew about medicine. But your father was a physician aboard Royal Navy ships, where growing up as a woman would be a liability. I suspect the choices Willa and her father made were difficult, but seemed the only possible solution at the time.” Sophie leaned back heavily against the squabs. “Now, try to imagine what would happen when that carefully built world collapsed with your father’s death. You live in a world where women are neither allowed to train in, nor practice, medicine. What would you do?”
Lydia had nothing to say in reply, her mouth agape at Sophie’s words.
“But what does that have to do with Dr. MacCloud?” she finally managed.
Arnaud took over. “Cullen had never met Willa before his father used his influence to have him assigned aboard the Arethusa. However, both Willa’s deceased mother and her father were well known to his mother’s MacKenzie clan because of the work Dr. Morton and his late wife did twenty years ago during a measles epidemic. So…when Cullen wrote to his Aunt Elspeth complaining about Dr. Morton’s son, ‘Wills,’ she immediately ordered him to join her in London, claiming she was ill.”
“And they made Cullen marry her,” Lydia finished.
“Yes, that’s exactly what happened.” Arnaud sighed and settled back into the cushions next to his wife.
“But Willa is so pretty,” Lydia insisted. “How did Dr. MacCloud ever believe she was a man?”
“That is the mystery,” Neville
