Chapter One

North Kent coast, 1805

At first, Jules thought the blow on the head had robbed him of his sight. As he surfaced from the weight of the enormous headache that pinned him to the stone floor, he decided darkness was a more likely explanation. He moved cautiously, with protests from the bruises and aches left by the various kicks and blows the slime ball smugglers had landed.

His sword was gone, and his purse. But they’d left the bun and cheese he’d shoved in his pocket for later, and they’d missed the tiny knife in the sheath built into the sole of one boot. It didn’t take long to grope his way around the small uneven rock cave in which they’d placed him. It was featureless but for a sturdy wooden door and he was alone.

Time crawled by as he waited for something to happen; time enough for hunger and thirst to gnaw away at his usual blithe disregard for his own mortality. The bun weighed heavy in his pocket, but eating it would increase his thirst. He’d wait, and see if they brought him something to drink.

He was sitting with his back against the wall, contemplating the mistakes that had brought him here, when he heard other humans, so close they were almost in the room with him.

A groan. Then a girl’s voice, light and high. “Are you awake, Papa?”

The light came as a surprise, shining like a beacon from the other side of a barred opening set high up in one wall. Standing, Jules managed to reach the bars and pull himself up. Beyond was another cell very like his own. A man lay still, curled on a mess of rags and clothing. His eyes were shut, and he had not responded to the girl who crouched beside him. She was a skinny child, still boyish in shape, but Jules did not suppose that would discourage the smugglers from making use of her body or selling her to someone for that purpose. He made an instant vow to save her, whatever the cost.

The girl held a candle so it cast its light without dripping its wax, and used her other hand to brush back the hair that fell over the man’s forehead. “Oh, Papa,” she said, her voice trembling.

“Miss,” Jules hissed. The girl startled back from her father. Her face, already white, turned whiter as she faced the door, putting her body between herself and the unconscious man.

“I’m a prisoner,” Jules reassured her. “In the next cell.”

The girl lifted the candle high as she stood and peered towards the sound of his voice. He kept talking to guide her. “Lieutenant Julius Redepenning of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, at your service, Miss. I am going to get out of here, and I’m going to take you and your father with me.”

The face turned up to him was just leaving childhood behind, but the eyes shone with intelligence and her response indicated more maturity than he expected. “I hope you can, Lieutenant, but if your cell is as sturdy as mine, I beg leave to reserve judgement.” She sighed. “I am sorry for your predicament, but I will not deny I am glad to have company.”

“May I borrow the candle?” Jules asked. Her eyes widened in alarm and he rushed to add, “Just for long enough to check my cell. They left me without light.” Without food or drink, either, but he would not tell her that. Perhaps the smugglers intended to supply him, and if they didn’t, he would not take the supply she needed for herself and her father.

She passed the candle up, her worry palpable, and he hoisted himself higher with one hand so he could stretch the other through the bars. “I will be careful, Miss, I promise.”

“Euronyme Stirling,” she said, “and my father is William Stirling. Please, call me Mia. Formality seems out of place, here.”

He returned her smile. She was a brave little girl; he had to find a way out for her. “Call me Jules,” he offered, “as my friends do.”

He rested the candle—a stubby bit of wax with a rope wick—on the sill between the bars and he dropped, shaking the ache out of the shoulder that had taken most of his weight. When he reached the candle down, a sound followed it through the bars and into his cell: an involuntary whimper at the loss of light.

“I have it safe,” he soothed. “You shall have it back in a minute.”

“I do without it most of the time,” she replied. “It’s just—I have always known I could light it again.”

Most of the time? “How long have you been here?” Jules asked, keeping his voice light and casual against the lump in his throat at her gallantry.

She answered a question with one of her own. “What is today? Tuesday? Or later?”

“Tuesday, probably. It was late Monday evening when I came across the smugglers. They knocked me out, but surely not for long.”

“The tenth of June? It was the seventh when Papa and I…” she trailed off, a small gulp the only sign of her distress.

Three days. Perhaps four. “How long has your Papa…?” Surely, she had not been nursing a sick man all this time?

“They hit him when they attacked us, but I think—I wonder if he has had an apoplexy, Lieut– Jules.” She took a deep shuddering breath and spoke again, her voice once more under her control. “He has not woken since that day. I have managed to get some water into him, but…”

“Nothing to eat,” he guessed.

“They have given us nothing to eat.”

Bastards. They’d left her mostly in the dark, with no food, little water, and a dying father. He had been exploring his cell while they talked, and found no comfort in it. The door was firmly set, its hinges on the outside where he couldn’t reach them, though he ran his knife through the gap between the wood of the door and the stone of the walls, and guessed the hinges were iron by the sound they made. The door had a small hole, just big enough for someone outside to peer in, or for food or a small mug to be passed through. He pushed the shutter that blocked the hole from the other side, but it didn’t shift.

The only other gap in the stone was the high barred window between his cell and Mia’s. He put the candle up on the sill, and then added the bun, still wrapped in his handkerchief. That meant pulling himself up by the bars at the other end of the window, and the one closest to the edge shifted slightly as he put his weight on it.

“I think I’ve found a weakness,” he said cautiously, then picked up the wrapped bun and held it out through the bars. “Here, Mia. Something to eat.”

She took the package eagerly and unwrapped it. “I will save you some,” she offered.

“It’s for you, Mia, but make it last. We don’t know how long it will take to get out.” He dropped back down on his own side and stretched his arms, flexing his muscles before lifting himself up again.

Yes. The loose bar wobbled when he pulled at it, and a closer examination by candlelight showed that it and the next one had wider sockets than the others, the edges crumbled as if someone had patiently chipped them away. An earlier prisoner? Hoping for what? This would get Jules access to Mia’s cell, but they would still be trapped.

Still, the smugglers would be expecting her to be unprotected and vulnerable. He might be able to take advantage of that.

He wriggled the bars again, but they weren’t loose enough to slip out.

A rattle at Mia’s door had him handing the candle down to Mia and dropping back on his own side, listening hard.

“Water, girlie.” Jules could have stayed. From the sound, the water carrier had not entered the cell, but was using a hole like the one in Jules’s cell door.

“My father is very sick. He needs a doctor,” Mia begged.

The only answer was the rattle of the shutter sliding back into place, blocking the hole in her door.

Jules waited, but apparently watering the naval officer was not on the list of tasks for the day.

He pulled himself back up on the bars, to find Mia waiting for him, lifting up the candle so he could reach it.

“I have been thinking, Jules,” she said. “How did they get the bars in?”

He frowned at them. She was right. How did they get them fixed top and bottom when the bars were longer than the gap? He could see no cement.

Mia was still a step ahead of him. “Try lifting the bar,” she suggested.

Of course. He gripped the loosest bar and lifted it, and it worked! It slipped up into the socket above, giving him just enough clearance to slide the bar out of the bottom hole. He passed it down to Mia. It would make a hefty weapon.

The next one took a stouter tug, the bottom hole being less chipped, but he managed it. The third wouldn’t shift. Perhaps if he had not been dangling from one arm while lifting and tugging with the other—but two bars might leave him enough space to wriggle into the next cell.

It took some contortions, and he didn’t make it without adding further scrapes and bruises to his collection, but at last he dropped down beside Mia, who threw herself into his arms and kissed his cheek, then drew back flustered.

“I beg your pardon. I do not know what came over me.”

Jules reassured her. “We’re celebrating our win, Mia, and quite right, too. Have we not already decided we shan’t stand on ceremony?”

He knelt down beside the man on the floor. Up close, he could confirm what his ears had already told him. Stirling was not long for this world, his breathing shallow and irregular, his skin pallid and cold. Jules shrugged out of his great coat and placed it over the poor man, tucking it around him. It wouldn’t help, but it might make Mia feel better.

“He is dying, isn’t he?” Mia said, a catch in the last words betraying the matter-of-fact tone she attempted.

He honoured her courage with the truth. “I’m sorry, Mia. I believe he is.”

She bit at her lip, then said, “We should blow out the candle to save what is left.”

She settled next to Jules, holding her father’s limp hand, and suited action to words.

In the sudden darkness, Jules reached for her free hand and she tucked it confidingly into his larger one.

“Tell me about yourself, Mia. Do you live near here?”

Bit by bit, they shared stories. Mia and her father rented rooms in Margate, but were seldom in residence, since Dr Stirling was an archivist, making his living—a meagre one, Jules guessed—by applying his knowledge of books and the classics to the book collections of the great houses of South East England.

It must be a lonely life for a girl; three months in one house, four in another, two in a third; not part of the family nor one of the servants. She was used to it, she said, and sometimes the people were nice.

Jules talked about what he was doing in England instead of on the other side of the world, where he had been posted for the past eight years with the Far East Fleet. His trip home as Master and Commander of one ship in a fleet of captured vessels, had let him catch up with his father and sister, but he was anxious to get back to Madras, where his mistress waited.

“Kirana was with child when I left, and will have given birth before I arrive home,” he fretted, and then apologised, remembering too late that he shouldn’t be discussing his informal relationships with a female of his own class, and a child at that.

But Mia brushed off the apology. “We are friends, are we not?” she reminded him. “Kirana—is that a Hindi name?”

“Batavian,” he explained, and he found himself telling her about rescuing the daughter of a Dutch official and his Batavian mistress when the Dutch pulled out of Ceylon, leaving the English to take over.

“And you…” Mia paused, searching for words. “You made a home with her.”

He smiled in the dark at her delicate tact, but corrected her assumption. “She was little more than a child. My captain of the time said he’d make sure she got back to her family.” A bereaved little girl, who had watched her mother and her twin sister die in a vicious attack. Very like Mia, whose father was dying as they sat here beside him. He silently repeated his vow to rescue this child, and see her safe—safer than Kirana had been after he abandoned her to the non-existent mercies of his captain.

“Then how did she come to be in your keeping?” Mia wondered. “I know. You never forgot her, and when she was old enough, you went to find her.”

Not quite, but he couldn’t tell the whole story. Mia didn’t need the ghosts that haunted him crowding into this darkness. “I met her years later when I was sent back to Ceylon during the war with the Kandian Empire. By then, she was on her own again.”

They were both silent for a while. Jules was thinking of all he’d left out—a heap of painful detail that had ended in him facing disciplinary action for punching the man who had once been his senior officer. He’d do it again, too, under the same circumstances, but maybe not in front of a flotilla of fleet captains. His righteous indignation at the man’s despicable behaviour towards Kirana and her babies had not impressed his superior officers, though the fact that Hackett was no longer in the navy helped. So did Jules’s connections into the highest levels of the Admiralty, the Horse Guard and the aristocracy. His punishment was commuted from dishonourable discharge to demotion and a posting to a packet ship sailing the tedious mail route around the Indian subcontinent.

He’d installed Kirana and her surviving child in Madras, and come home to her between voyages. Since then her warmth and support had bolstered his determination to rebuild his career until the incident two years ago was nearly forgotten.

Mia hadn’t spoken for some time. Had he shocked her, speaking of his sweet Kirana? Most of his class regarded kept women with contempt, even those men who were more than happy to take advantage of the comfort they offered. “She had no choice, you know,” he told her, his voice stiff. “She is a gentle, loyal person, and a good woman.”

But this unusual girl surprised him again. “I was just thinking how close I am to sharing her fate, and hoping that I fall into the hands of a kind man like you.”

Jules wasn’t sure if the lump in his throat was admiration at her courage or pain at his memories of the suffering he had seen—and not just Kirana’s. War was hard on unprotected women. Hell. Life was hard on unprotected women.

He put his arm around Mia and squeezed her shoulder. “I will get you out of this,” he promised.

“Thank you. I trust you to try, Jules, but you must not blame yourself if you fail. Papa and I were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

They had been fossil hunting, she explained. “Papa has frequently managed to sell some of the curiosities we have found in the cliffs and on the shore.” She sighed. “It has been several months since our last engagement, and the rent must be paid regardless.”

They had found a whole skeleton of a large toothed creature, and stayed late to dig it out. Too late, as it transpired, because when they’d completed their digging, they were surrounded. “Why did they not just leave us alone?” Mia asked Jules. “If they had stayed out of sight, we would have gone home none the wiser.”

“I think they must have something important planned,” Jules told her. He’d wondered the same about his own capture—he’d stayed too long in Essex visiting friends, and thought to cut the travel time in half by borrowing a sailing skiff to skim around the coast to the mouth of the Thames. Had the vessel that cut him off just continued past, he’d not have given it another thought. “If so, they’ll be waiting for a dark night.”

“A smugglers’ moon,” Mia commented.

“Which is to say, no moon at all,” he agreed. “Soon, in fact. If it is Tuesday, the moon will be a mere sliver and won’t rise till after midnight, and if it’s Wednesday, tonight will be perfect for them.” If it was Wednesday, he would be in trouble for failing to report for duty. But he couldn’t worry about that now.

Mia yawned. The poor girl had probably slept little, if at all, in days. “Put your head down and sleep, Mia,” Jules invited. “You’ll need your strength for our escape.”

She obeyed, curling into a ball and using his thigh as a pillow. “I have my toes tucked under your coat,” she confided, and yawned again. “Good night, Jules. I am so glad you are here.”

With no way to mark time in the darkness, he could not have said whether minutes or hours crawled by as he listened to Stirling’s irregular breathing, and felt the girl shifting softly in her sleep. He sat and let his mind wander where it would. Kirana. The ship he had sailed to England and the one he would be taking back to Madras. The friends he had seen in Essex. His father, sister, and brothers, who would be upset if he disappeared without a trace.

Catching a gang of smugglers would help mitigate his failure to re-join the fleet in time. They were west of Margate, Mia had said. His godmother had a residence somewhere near, which might be helpful if they could get free.

He began to turn over plans, none of which had the least chance of working if he couldn’t get that door open.

Deep in thought, it took him a while to notice the change. Stirling had stopped breathing. He fumbled for the man’s hand, which Mia had been holding when she fell asleep. Yes. There it was. Sure enough, he could not feel a pulse.

“Jules?” He had disturbed Mia. The weight of her head lifted from his thigh. “Jules, what is happening? Is it Papa?”

“I’m sorry, Mia. I think he is gone.”

Her hand—the one that held Stirling’s—shifted, groping for the man’s cold wrist. He waited silently while she searched unsuccessfully for the pulse he’d already failed to find. She moved again, fumbling to strike a spark to light the candle. There. The flame lit her face, tears running disregarded down her cheeks.

She ignored Jules and leaned over her father, placing a thread teased from the seam of her coat across his open lips. It lay still, unmoving. “Oh, Papa.” It was almost a wail, and she turned into Jules’s waiting arms, buried her head on his shoulder, and let the tears flow.

She cried almost silently, her shoulders shuddering with her grief, and he held her, patting her back but saying nothing. What words could he offer, locked with her in the flickering light of single candle, not knowing what tomorrow would bring? Even so, he would not deny her any comfort she took from his touch.

After a while, she cried herself to sleep, and she wasn’t disturbed as Jules set about making them both more comfortable. He managed, without letting her go, to blow out the candle, retrieve his great coat from the dead father to keep the living daughter warm, and wriggle a foot or so backwards until he could lean against the wall. At last he relaxed, and slept himself.

They woke and talked, slept some more, and woke again. “What chance do we have?” Mia asked.

“Our best opportunity will be when they come to get you out,” Jules said. “I’m hoping they’ll come for you first, and won’t be expecting me. We have weapons—the bars and my knife. They won’t expect that, either.”

He and Mia would have the advantage of surprise. Whether that would tip the balance in their favour would depend on the number of men sent to fetch Mia. Once again, Mia showed she was following the same train of thought. “Perhaps most of them will leave with the shipment. After all, how much fight will they expect from a sick old man and a little girl?”

“We’ll show them, won’t we, Mia?” Jules said.

She managed a chuckle.

“And then what?” he asked. “You have someone to look after you, do you not? An aunt or an uncle?”

She was silent for a long time, and when she spoke, her voice shook. “I am sure I shall be perfectly fine. Perhaps Mrs Wilson, in my village, might take me on as a junior schoolmistress. I have helped before, and she says I am very good with the little ones.”

It sounded like a gruesome fate. Perhaps Jules’s father could find something better for the brave child. The duchess! Surely, he would have time to talk to his godmother before he reported for duty?

Mia correctly reported his lack of response. “You must not worry about me. Why, I expect my father’s personal collection of fossils might fetch as much as thirty pounds! I shall be fine.”

“I am confident you will.” Jules would make sure of it.

“What of you?” she asked. “Where will you go when you are free? Back to Madras?”

“That’s the plan,” Jules agreed, accepting the change of subject. “Back to the Far East fleet.”

“And to your family there.” Mia’s hair brushed his cheek as she nodded. “Kirana will have had her baby, you said. When was it due?”

“Sometime this month.” It was his turn to sigh. “I wish I was with her. I left money, and I made arrangements for her to get more if anything happened to me, but I should have told my father about her. He might not approve of me keeping a native mistress, but if I was gone, he would make sure she was looked after, she and the children.” Mia had made such a valiant effort to choose a cheerful subject, and he’d turned the mood gloomy again. “Don’t mind me, Mia. We’ll get out of here.”

“We must,” Mia agreed. “You need to go home and look after Kirana.”

Brave girl. Jules hoped she had people who would look after her.

“Where will you go when you are free?” he asked. “Do you have family?”

“Do not worry about me, Jules. I will think of something.”

That would be a no, then. He changed the subject. “What would you do if you could do anything in the world?”

“Travel,” she declared, without hesitation. “I would love to see the places I have only read about in books. Greece, and Rome. Egypt and the pyramids. Persia, where Alexander went with his armies. India! Jules, tell me about India!”

He was in the middle of a story about hunting tigers from an elephant’s back when the now familiar rattle came from the door, and the grating voice. “Water, girlie. Come and get it.”

Mia stood and made her voice tremulous. “Please. Won’t you help? My father… he is very sick. He needs food, and blankets.”

Clever girl. If her plea worked… Jules slipped his knife from his boot before taking station beside the door, hefting one of the bars in his other hand.

“Won’t be long, girlie,” their jailor replied. “We’ll have you out of there in the morning—you and your Pa.”

“Even just a blanket,” Mia pleaded. “I’ll do anything.”

Muttering from beyond the door. Two of them, arguing in low tones a few paces from the door. Jules heard a word, a phrase, another word. “Cap’n said…” “won’t know” “virgin price”. Then the original speaker, just outside the door again. “We won’t spoil the little skirt. Just have a bit of fun. Are you in?”

Jules offered a quick prayer Mia had no idea what these sea-scum had in mind, though without much hope. Her ungoverned reading through the classics and her own sharp intelligence gave her more knowledge than his mother would have considered suitable for a young lady.

“Girlie? We’ll give you a blanket if you’re nice to me and my mate.”

Mia’s voice cracked when she tried to reply, and she gave a hard gulp before asking. “Just the two of you?”

“Aye,” the jailor agreed. “Just the two of us.”

If he told the truth, Mia and Jules were luckier than Jules expected.

“Blanket first,” Mia bargained. “If I’m not worrying about my father, I can…” she trailed off.

“Fetch a blanket,” the jailor instructed his mate. “Fetch two. We can leave one with the little skirt after.”

Moments later, the scraping of metal on metal spoke of bolts being drawn back. Jules stood ready. He’d have to let them both pass, and attack fast enough that no sound escaped to alert others in the cave system.

Light flooded into the cell ahead of the two smugglers—a lamp, bright after the extended darkness. A quick glance in Mia’s direction showed her standing just beyond her father, her hands clenched at her sides, half hidden in her skirts. Jules’s greatcoat was nowhere in sight, and his admiration of the girl’s quick thinking went up another notch.

“See, now, girlie,” the jailor’s voice was wheedling. “A blanket for your Da. There’s a good sweeting.”

“What…?” Mia’s voice cracked again. “What do you want me to do?”

“Got more’n one ’ole, ent she?” the other man suggested coarsely. “Pull up yer skirt, lovey, and bend over.”

Mia blanched and swallowed, then began to gather her skirts as the two men crowded into the cell, the rear one putting down the lamp without taking his gaze from the girl. Anger fuelled the sweep of Jules’s dagger across the coarse man’s throat. The leading man swung around at the escaping gurgle, throwing himself at Jules while Jules was still entangled with the coarse man’s body.

Jules swung the bar, but his foe shrugged off the glancing blow and grabbed Jules by the neck. A moment later, the smuggler crumpled. Mia stood over him, the bar she held in both hands matted with hair and blood.

Jules leant over the collapsed smuggler. “Not dead,” he said, resisting the urge to complete the task she’d started. He wasn’t a cold-blooded killer who would slit a man’s throat when he was already unconscious, whatever the man had done. Instead, he picked up the smugglers’ lamp while Mia touched a kiss to her father’s forehead before leading the way out of the cell. Jules bolted the door, and for good measure turned the heavy key in the lock, withdrew it, and put it in his pocket.

Hand in hand, they crept through the tunnels, following the hint of light to a large cavern that showed signs of recent occupation: a cooking fire, boxes for seats, crates and barrels in stacks around the edges, but no other people.

A rivulet ran from a pool on one side of the cavern and out through another tunnel, where it bordered a well-worn track.

“Let me go first,” Jules said, and he handed her the lamp so he could lead the way with his bar in one hand and his knife in the other.

They encountered no one as they crept down the slope from the cavern, finally turning a corner to come out through a tall slit opening onto a small sandy area with sky above, and rock ahead.

The path skirted the rock, and brought them out to the beach. Mia doused the lamp before Jules had time to suggest it. Somewhere ahead of them in the darkness, the low hum of voices competed with the soft sound of waves brushing the shore. Here and there, a light glowed for a moment and went out. A crash followed by an oath, quickly shushed, told the story of something dropped.

As their eyes adjusted, they could see the dark shapes of the smugglers at the water’s edge and in a cordon across the beach to the right. Not that way, then. Wordlessly, he took Mia’s hand and led her to the left. They hurried as fast as they could, keeping in the shadows of the cliffs, careful to make no noise, until Mia stopped and pulled at his hand. He bent to let her whisper in his ear.

“I think I know where we are. I used to play on this beach with my friend Kitty when my father was cataloguing the Duke of Haverford’s library. That’s Haverford Castle up there!”

She pointed up to the bluff that rose above other cliffs and curves, and the dark geometric shape that crowned it, dominating the coastline for miles in both directions. He knew it well. The lady of the castle was a close friend of his father’s and his own godmother.

“If we get separated, go there and seek help,” he ordered. She squeezed his hand, but nodded. “The path should be just up here,” she said, leading the way.

“Oy!” The shout came from ahead, and in moments Jules was fighting a burly man with a club—one, furthermore, who was shouting for help. Absorbed in the fight, he still spared a moment to pray Mia had got past, that she would obey him and keep going to the Castle, that someone there would listen to her and keep her safe.

As footsteps thudded behind him, and blows began to rain on his shoulders and head, his last thought was to hope he had bought enough time for Mia to get away.

 

Chapter Two

Jules surfaced to pain. Someone was beating his head with a mallet from the inside, his shoulders and hips throbbed with dozens of bruises, and so did his torso. He’d have guessed that several ribs were broken even without the tightly-bound bandages. He cautiously cracked open one eye. The room was dim, and he opened the other. He was in a clean bed, and he knew the man seated beside it reading by the light of a lamp that was considerately shielded so Jules did not look into the direct flame. If the Marquis of Aldridge was here, he must be in Haverford Castle, for the Merry Marquis was the Duke of Haverford’s heir. Which meant that Mia had succeeded.

“Mia?” he asked. Croaked, rather, his dry throat adding a burning sensation to the catalogue of his other ills.

Aldridge looked up from his paper work. “Miss Stirling is in bed. Asleep, I hope. She has had a trying time.” A trying time! That was a typical Aldridge understatement.

“The smugglers?”

Aldridge put his papers to one side and crossed to the bed. “A drink? The doctor left laudanum to help you sleep, but I thought you might prefer brandy. Your choice.”

Turning his head, Jules could see a glass, a bottle, and a decanter waiting on the table beside the bed. “Brandy,” he confirmed. “The smugglers, Aldridge?”

Aldridge poured a generous serve of brandy into the glass. “We captured most, and their cargo. I’ve men out searching for the rest.”

Jules voiced his suspicion. “French spies?”

“As you say. I’ve sent messages to the Admiralty and the Horse Guard.” He helped Jules to sit up against the pillows, and offered the glass, then rescued it when Jules’s grip faltered. “I have the smugglers and their passengers locked up in the Haverford Castle dungeons, though I had to gently remind the Preventives of the social and political order here in our lands.”

Jules sipped from the glass held to his lips. He wished he had witnessed what had probably been a fiery confrontation. The Preventives could be prickly about their authority, but they’d be no match for this duke-in-waiting claiming the ancient rights that had lost none of their power for being no longer official; the rights that had made the Haverford ancestors all but kings in this corner of England.

“So, all is well,” Aldridge assured him. “Relax. Sleep. You have nothing further to do tonight. Your Miss Stirling is safe, your villains are captured, and the threat to the Realm has been neutralised.”

As he spoke, the Marquis helped Jules to drain the glass, and moments later the darkness claimed Jules again.

Next time he woke, the room was flooded with daylight. His bladder woke him, screaming to be drained, a pain clamouring more insistently than a dozen others. Jules tried to swing his legs out of the bed, and sucked in a deep breath when the pain ramped up a notch.

His near whimper brought Aldridge’s attention from the meal he was eating at a table by the window, to protest, “What are you up to, Lieutenant? Ah. You need the convenience?” He collected a gourd-shaped china receptacle from the cupboard of the room’s wash stand, and brought it over to the bed, handing it to Jules. “Can you manage? I will hold it for you if you wish.”

“No need,” Jules insisted, and was pleased to find it was true.

“How is Mia— Miss Stirling?” he asked once Aldridge had removed the full receptacle and dealt with it by the simple method of replacing it in the cupboard.

“Still asleep. I shall be informed when she leaves her bedchamber. Do you know, both times you have awoken, your first thoughts have been for her?” Aldridge sat back at the table by the window, but kept his attention on Jules. “I don’t blame you, mind. She is a revelation, that child. Smart as a whip, and will be a beauty in a year or two. Brave, too. Her only fault appears to be her belief that you walk on water and pull swords from stones.”

Jules dismissed that piece of exaggeration with a shake of his head. “She had as much to do with my rescue as I did with hers. Did she tell you she lured our guards into our cell, and she knocked out the man who was trying to strangle me?”

“And you locked him in with two dead bodies, where we found him. Mr Stirling is laid out in the family chapel, by the way, and we will hold his funeral tomorrow. No, she didn’t tell us the part she played in your escape.”

Jules smiled, remembering her courage. “She fled when I told her to run, and came to get you. Lucky for us you were here, by the way. I thought she might have trouble convincing anyone at the castle to take action.”

“Hmmm.” Aldridge picked up his fork and then put it down again. “Lucky for you, certainly. I could have wished she had not arrived in the middle of a—er—a garden party, shall we say?”

Jules could make no sense of that through the throbbing of his head. “A garden party? In the middle of the night?”

Aldridge raised an elegant eyebrow, his lips curving in a saturnine smile. “It was not the usual kind of garden party. Indeed, Miss Stirling’s common sense first impressed itself upon me when she refused to be distracted by the—er—activities taking place around her, and insisted on gaining my unfocused attention to her need.”

Oh. That kind of a garden party. The kind that got the Merry Marquis his reputation. “Her father was a classics scholar,” Jules explained. “She is rather more widely read than most fourteen-year-olds.”

“That may explain it,” Aldridge agreed. “It is unfortunate, Jules. I wish I could be confident that neither the servants nor the guests would speak of her arrival, but…” he waved one hand. “You know what people are.”

Jules frowned, but before he could comment, there was a knock on the door, followed by the entrance of a maid, who curtseyed to the Marquis and said, “The little Miss is awake, my lord. She is asking after Lieutenant Redepenning.”

“Of course she is,” Aldridge agreed. “Tell her the Lieutenant is awake, and is about to have breakfast. You would like breakfast, would you not, Jules?”

Would he? He wasn’t sure, but perhaps the hollowness in his middle was hunger rather than incipient nausea. Jules nodded as the servant scurried off, and Aldridge went to the door to give orders to someone outside.

Aldridge helped Jules don an ornate brocade dressing robe over the bandages that wrapped his naked torso from chest to hips. “For I can’t have you offending the sensibilities of my mother’s maids,” the Marquis explained, every bit as if he had not been holding an orgy in the garden just the previous evening.

“Where are your ‘garden party’ guests?” Jules demanded. He would not have Mia subject to insult.

Aldridge grinned. “Protective of our little lady, aren’t we?” he mocked. “It’s all right, Sir Galahad. I sent them into Margate. Miss Stirling is quite safe.”

A succession of servants interrupted before Jules could respond, bringing in enough food for a small army. Aldridge had them set it on the table, and was beginning to serve Jules a plateful when Mia arrived, the maid who had been watching over her fluttering in her wake.

With a huge smile for Jules, Mia curtseyed to the Marquis. “My lord,” she said, “Polly here said you and Lieutenant Redepenning were having breakfast, and that I have to eat too. So here I am, ready to have breakfast with you.”

Aldridge cast his eyes up to the ceiling. “It is probably too late to make a difference,” he observed, then fixed Polly with a stern look. “Polly, you will stay with Miss Stirling at all times.”

In just a few bites, Jules decided that eating had been a bad idea, and lay back on the pillows, his stomach lurching as his head reeled. Mia noticed first, and instructed him to go back to sleep, abandoning her own breakfast to come and take his plate. “You need a lot of rest when you are healing,” she said. She placed a hand on his forehead and he closed his eyes, revelling in the cold touch of her palm. “He is burning up, Lord Aldridge,” she said.

Jules felt another hand brushing his cheek and then Aldridge spoke. “Send for the doctor, Alfred. The lieutenant is unwell.”

The voices came and went, now at a great distance and then loud in Jules’s ears. “I could stay here and watch over him.” That was Mia, once again holding his hand.

“I do wish you would not require me to preach propriety,” Aldridge complained. “I am quite unsuited to the job. No, Miss Stirling. You may not stay in a gentleman’s bedroom. Do not fret for your lieutenant, however. He will have someone with him at all times.”

“I do not see the sense in you keeping me out,” Mia objected. “We were alone together for a day or more in the smugglers’ caves.”

She should not have said that in front of the servants, Jules thought, but he could not remember why. His thoughts scattered, and the voices, the bedroom, even the pain all faded away.

He swam in and out of consciousness, not always sure what was a fever dream and what was really true. Kirana could not be here in this cold English castle. Mia could, holding his hand and anchoring him to the world. Aldridge, too, joking with a man who examined him with swift competent hands. Fleming, one of the captains assigned to the fleet he ought to be sailing with, must be halfway to the Canaries by now, not at Haverford Castle. Nor would his father or his sister be here. What would they be doing in Kent, all the way east nearly to Margate?

But when his head cleared at last, he recognised the voices of his family, before he opened his eyes a slit to see Aldridge, Father, and Susan, his sister, talking quietly by his window.

“Mia sees that marriage is her only chance of surviving the rumours and restoring her reputation, but still refuses.” That was Susan. Jules frowned, trying to make sense of it. Mia was to be married? But to whom?

“What is her objection?” Father sounded bemused. “She clearly adores the boy. Thinks the sun rises and sets in him.”

“That is why,” Aldridge suggested.

None of this made sense, and nor did Jules’s surge of protective jealousy. What boy did Mia adore? Whoever it is, he had better be worthy of her.

“Aldridge is correct, Papa. She thinks marrying would spoil Jules’s life. She told me all about his mistress and children in India, and wants him to be free to return to them.”

Jules squeezed his eyes shut, thinking about that. He was the one Mia adored? As a result of which she wouldn’t marry him? Wait. She was ruined without marriage?

Father was replying to Susan. “She cannot think he plans to marry his mistress? A native woman at that? Perhaps he could carry it off without the black marks already against him, but as it is? It would be the end of his career.”

Jules hadn’t thought of marrying Kirana. He hadn’t thought of marrying anyone. He liked his life as it was! Besides, Father was right. Twenty years ago and more, many Englishmen in India took local wives, and still remained part of Society. But increasingly, they and their children were isolated and ignored. Worse, he would have to go wherever the navy sent him. Could he bring Kirana to England as his wife? He didn’t doubt his father would accept her for his sake, however he might disapprove. But the rest of his social class? Never.

Nor did Kirana think of marriage. Her history—wouldn’t that give the gossips a field day if it came to light? That foul sewer-swimmer who’d debauched her was alive to tell the tale, so it would come to life. Her history had made her, in her own mind at least, unfit for a life more respectable than the one he tried to give her.

But then what of Mia? The twisted mess made his head pound again.

“Nothing can be decided until your son returns to the land of the living, Uncle Henry,” Aldridge said. “We have a bride, a license, a chaplain, and a chapel. It is for Jules to decide whether we have a groom.”

“Tell me about the rumours,” Jules commanded.

The three gathered around his bed. Susan fussed over helping him to sit then left the room so the men could see to his comfort. She returned to say she had sent for breakfast. “Just a coddled egg and some thinly cut slices of bread, Jules. Nothing to inflame your fever again.”

“Tell me,” Jules repeated.

“Eat first,” Father suggested, “and get a little of your strength back.”

From what he’d heard, Jules would need it.

The egg and bread came with a few mushrooms, some bacon, and a cup of warmed milk flavoured with honey and spices. Jules rejected the drink and demanded some of the coffee that had been fetched for the other three. “Now tell me what they are saying about Mia,” he demanded. “Surely people realise the circumstances? She was trapped with me, yes, but her father was there too, and she is, after all, just a girl.”

“Gossip,” Aldridge said. “Rumour paints her as your lover, of course, but worse is being said.” He held up a hand. “Not my servants. They know how to be discrete. It seems a mix of village small-mindedness and a couple of females who should never have been invited to one of my parties. I am sorry. They shall be, too, but not soon enough to undo the damage.”

Jules turned to Susan. “How bad is it? She hoped to be able to return to her home.”

“She insisted on going,” Susan said. “It was not a happy experience. Apparently, the rumours had arrived first. Thank goodness I persuaded her to allow me to go with her. Her landlord has evicted her, and even the woman who runs the local dame school…”

“She believed the gossip?” Mia had spoken so highly of the woman.

Susan shook her head. “Not at all. But she depends on the money she receives from the parish and the wealthier parents.” She shrugged.

“It is the other two roles ascribed to her that have done the damage,” Aldridge explained. “Mutually conflicting, but when was the mob ever rational?”

One story said she was a member of the smugglers’ gang (and whore to one or more of those ruffians). “She fell in love with your pretty blue eyes and killed several of the smugglers, including her lover, to free you,” Aldridge explained. “The number of people she killed in order to get you out of your cell grows with each repetition of the story. The latest round has her father cast as the smugglers’ secret leader, and accuses her of parricide.”

Jules and his sister snorted in disgust, and the marquis quirked one corner of his mouth in a twisted smile. “People are idiots,” he agreed.

“The other story has her providing entertainment at Aldridge’s party,” Susan added. “Some have to invent a whole new messenger to tell Aldridge about the smugglers, and some knit the two stories together to say she sold herself to Aldridge in return for help to rescue you. Either way, she purportedly accompanied the Marquis to the rescue, on his horse, semi-clad.”

“Partly true,” Aldridge conceded. “Not the semi-clad bit, obviously, but she did come on my horse.” At identical glares from Lord Henry and Jules, he held up defensive hands. “She would not take no for an answer, and I certainly couldn’t leave her at the castle until my guests had departed. Not those guests.”

“Jules,” Father said gravely, leaving the point, “her father appears to have been her only family. She has been left near destitute and with her reputation in ruins. But she refuses the remedy that would save her.”

“I heard,” Jules said. “Marriage to me. Because of Kirana.” He met his father’s gaze, his own solemn. “Kirana and I have two children, Father, if all went well with her lying in. I cannot desert them. My life is in Madras. I am posted to the Far East fleet, and should have been on my way back days ago. In addition, Mia is a child—just fourteen. Her peculiar upbringing has made her mature in many ways. Even so, she is not ready for marriage.”

“Mia is…” Susan began, but Father waved her to silence, leaving Jules to finish his own arguments for and against.

He was thinking about what his life might look like with Mia as his wife. He could think of worse fates. As Aldridge had implied, she would be a magnificent woman when she grew up. “Can I leave her with you? If I marry her… Would you take her in as a daughter and look after her until I come home?” Which could be years from now, and anything could happen. He was going back into the war. He might die. Any of them might.

Yes. He would marry Mia and let the future look after itself.

It happened quickly after that. Mia argued when he proposed, but he assured her he was not being coerced. She studied him gravely as he explained his proposed arrangements for leaving her in England, and agreed. “That would be best, I expect. Kirana would not wish you to arrive home with a wife.”

Would Kirana be upset? He worried about that for a moment, then put the thought aside. He was doing the best he could for everyone, and they would just have to cope with it.

Fleming, who turned out to be here in person and not just in his dreams, claimed the right to stand up as his best man. “My ship is anchored off Margate, Redepenning. The Admiralty will give you your wedding night, and then we’ll up anchor and catch up to the rest of the fleet.”

“We’ll go straight after the wedding, Fleming,” Jules declared. “My wife is fourteen. A wedding night would be premature.”

“Mia is fifteen,” Susan corrected. “Yesterday was her birthday.”

A birthday. Jules had to send a footman to Margate chasing after Aldridge, whom Jules had commissioned to buy Mia a wedding present, with instructions to buy a birthday present as well. Aldridge returned triumphant with a pretty wedding ring, a locket, and a carved dressing table box.

By early afternoon, Jules was standing in the chapel, with Fleming and Father ready to catch him if he collapsed.

Mia didn’t keep him waiting. She walked down the aisle with Susan as her attendant, her expression stoic. She put her hand into Aldridge’s, and he smiled down at her. Jules soothed the possessive desire to punch the rake with the assurance that Aldridge’s smile was fatherly.

In a grown-up gown hastily altered to fit Mia’s slender form, she looked younger than fifteen, a little sprite playing dress up in silver lace over gold silk, with a diaphanous shawl across her shoulders. She wore the locket he had sent up to her ten minutes ago, and touched it with her other hand as she gave Jules a tremulous smile.

Aldridge declared himself the person who was giving the bride to be Jules’s wife, and passed the little cold hand into Jules’s keeping.

A stray sunbeam shone through the windows down the side of the church, striking Mia’s hair and touching the brown with shades of auburn and gold. Jules looked into her eyes as they repeated the vows that would bind them together for life. He had promised to keep her safe. Now he made more promises, wondering how on earth he was going to keep them. Later. He would be a good husband to her later. When she was grown.

The Haverford chaplain pronounced them man and wife. It was done. Jules pressed a kiss to Mia’s forehead, then turned to accept the congratulations of his friends and family, blinking to hear Aldridge and Fleming address Mia as Mrs Redepenning.

He and Fleming left shortly after. Mia stood at the top of the steps with Father on one side and Susan on the other. “Will you send me a painting of you to keep in the locket?” she asked.

“I will,” Jules agreed, “and you send me one of you. You will write and let me know how you go on?”

“And you will write back and tell me more stories of the wonderful places you are seeing.” Mia managed a beaming smile, though tears stood in her eyes. She had buried her father not three days earlier, lost everything she knew, and been handed over to strangers, and still she smiled. His heart full, Jules promised to write and gave her a hug. Another hug for his sister. He shook hands with Father and Aldridge.

“Coming, Redepenning?” Fleming shouted from the carriage.

Jules gave Mia one more kiss, stooping to plant this one on her cheek.

“Look after her,” he charged his father, and hurried down the steps as fast as his healing ribs would allow. He stopped at the carriage door and turned back to wave. “I’ll be back, Mrs Redepenning,” he promised.

As the horses drew them down the carriageway, he repeated the words in his own head, a solemn vow to add to the others he’d made on this day. “I’ll be back.”

 

Chapter Three

Cape Town, South Africa, 1812

“Soonest done, best begun, Mrs J.,” her maid Hannah Cottle said. “Time to go in.” Hannah’s voice startled Euronyme Redepenning from her reverie. Had she really been standing in this dusty Cape Town street long enough for Hannah and the hire carriage driver to stack their trunks on the platform by the front door?

The stoep. That’s what Kirana called it in her letter telling her about the house. Even as she let her mind drift to vocabulary Mia knew it was yet another excuse to hesitate. It was all very well for her husband’s mistress to be friendly by letter, but would Kirana really welcome Mia into the home she had made for Mia’s husband?

Enough of this prevarication. Mia nodded to Hannah, who stood with her hand on the knocker, waiting patiently. Hannah rapped the knocker several times, a sharp sound that breached the silence of this residential street. Mia skirted the luggage that contained their immediate needs: two trunks, two duffel bags, a hat box, the bag with her folding desk.

Captain Jason Thrushmore, a friend to her brother-in-law Rick Redepenning and a courteous host on the trip from England, had assured her the rest would be delivered. Did he discern her doubts about her welcome?

Moments later, the door opened, but only enough for the opener to fill the gap with his body, one hand on the door jamb, and the other wrapped around the door. Mia had expected the Tamil butler described in Kirana’s letters, but this man was surely not he. Skin such a dark brown that the white teeth he showed in a flash of a grin seemed larger than mouth sized in his narrow face. Black hair in dark curls forming a close cap on his head. Only a little taller than Mia who was under five feet, whereas Kirana had said the Tamil was taller than Jules, who was over six feet. Perhaps the butler was on his day off.

“Yes’m?” The servant’s voice lifted in a question.

“I am here to visit Kirana Redepenning,” Mia said. Seven years of apprenticeship with Susan Cunningham and her other sisters-in-law ensured that none of Mia’s doubts expressed themselves in her posture or voice. She took a step closer to the door, and the servant flinched but stood his ground, his face twisted in a worried frown.

“She not receiving. Miz Kirana, she’s sick.” He made to shut the door, but Hannah put her shoulder against it and pushed, and Mia put her foot over the door step.

“You do not understand.” She waved towards the luggage, and the servant’s eyes widened. “I am Mrs Julius Redepenning, and I have come to stay.”

Wordless, the servant backed out of her way. Mia entered the relative coolness of the hall, Hannah following close on her heels.

At a glance, Mia could see why the large entrance hall was used as entertainment space. It was of excellent proportions, taking up more than half the width of the house. Double doors to the right, according to Kirana’s description, opened to a more private parlour, while matching doors to the left led to the master’s bedchamber. Kirana’s room adjoined it, so Mia led the way through the wide doors opposite the entry, into another space of equivalent size to the front room. This one let out onto a small outside courtyard through a wall of doors.

Mia turned left, but the servant darted in front of her, his arms wide. “Missus can’t go in there,” he said. “Missus go away. Come back another day. Captain wouldn’t like it.”

She raised her brows and glared. “The Captain is my husband, which makes this my house. Out of my way. Now.”

The glare, copied from her more formidable sisters-in-law, did the trick. He faded sideways.

“And you can make yerself useful,” Hannah said, “by bringing in Mrs Redepenning’s luggage before every street scamp in the town takes off with it.”

Mia had her hand on the door handle before the servant mustered another protest, and had turned it by the time he finished. “Miz Kirana, she not there.”

One glance in the room made that clear. The door to what must be Jules’s room stood open. A European girl lolled on the bed of this one, spooning fruit and cream into her mouth from a bowl—Scots or Irish by her pale skin and flaming red hair. She was much of an age with Mia, at a guess, whereas Kirana was Eurasian, and in her early thirties, only a few years younger than Mia’s husband.

The girl confirmed her origins when she opened her mouth, her Irish accent plain. “Who’re ye, bustin’ into me bedchamber? Japheth, you half-wit, who is this gobermouch? And why did ye let ’er in?”

“I am Mrs Julius Redepenning,” Mia said in her driest tones, “and you, I take it, are my husband’s most recent bed partner.” She ignored her sinking heart. It had been easy to overlook Jules’s attachment to Kirana, who had been his mistress for two years before Mia met him. This was more challenging. Were her hopes of making a real marriage to founder before she had a chance to even see him again?

A harrumph from Hannah. Her low opinion of men made her dubious about that part of Mia’s mission, but Mia would not give up. Not yet.

She scanned the room, untidily strewn with clothing and jewellery. The woman had clearly been trying on garments in front of the large mirror before dropping onto the bed.

“Tidy up in here before you leave the room,” Mia instructed. “Do not think to take a thing that is not your own. My husband no longer requires your intimate services.”

She turned her glare on Japheth. “Take me to Kirana.”

A widening of his eyes and a flinch warned her to duck before the bowl sailed past, breaking against the door jamb and splattering fruit and cream across the floor and walls. Mia lifted the hem of her dress and examined the stain there before looking at the thrower. The red head crouched on the bed, her face drained of colour, the whites showing around her pale blue irises.

Mia dropped her voice to little more than a whisper. “Clean that mess up, too. I want this room ready for my occupation by the time I return.” Then the bullwhip of a near shout. “Now!”

It worked. The woman leapt from the bed and began picking up the nearest discarded pile of silk on the floor. Silk pantaloons of some kind. Kirana’s surely? Or did Jules require all of his mistresses to wear eastern garb?

Japheth led the way across the house, corralling another servant on the way to send him to bring the luggage into the entrance hall. On the pattern of the first level, the second had two adjoining reception areas, one overlooking the courtyard and one the street. Japheth took them to a hall running down the side of one wing, lined with windows onto the courtyard on one side and doors on the other.

He opened the second door, and stood to one side. “Miz Kirana, she’s very sick,” he mumbled.

The room was small, the tiny single window shrouded in heavy drapes that kept out air and light. Even in late winter, the room was oppressively hot. It contained a narrow bed and a single bedside table, on which sat an empty jug and glass. The bed’s occupant had been tossing so the sheet that covered her was tangled around her legs. When they entered, she tried to sit up, and the movement set her coughing. She bent in half with the strength of the spasms, and the cloth she held to cover her mouth sprouted new splodges of red blood.

“Hannah, get those curtains down and the window open. Japheth, fetch something for Mrs Kirana to drink. I will also need a bucket of hot washing water, soap, a flannel, clean night clothes… Hannah, you know. Go with Japheth. Kirana, it is Mia. I have come to look after you.”

***

Japheth watched the diminutive English woman out of the corner of his eye as he led her to the kitchen. The other lady—the Captain’s lady—was in charge, beyond a doubt, but he’d not needed more than a few words from the one she called ‘Hannah’ to know she was a force to reckon with. At last! He and Pranisha had feared they’d have to wait for the Captain to get home and deal with Maureen and her lover, Dench, and Miz Kirana might not have that long. She failed day by day.

“Get Miz Hannah what she ask for,” he told the maids, “and do what she tell you.” He squatted down on his haunches to look past Pranisha, the cook, who stood guard before the door to the store room. “Missy Ada? Missy Marsha? Miz Captain come to look after your Mami,” he told the girls hiding inside. “Everything going to be fine now.”

Pranisha did not loosen her grip on her largest soup ladle. “Is this Missus Captain?” She squinted suspiciously at Hannah. “Our captain’s missus?”

Japheth was unsure how to explain Hannah, but the woman herself arrived at his elbow, having sent Maria and Rosa scurrying to fetch what she needed. Perhaps she saw part of a dark head and the flash of an eye as Miss Ada, always the bolder of the two girls, peaked out from behind a sack of flour to see what was going on. Perhaps she just took her cue from his words. In a softened voice, she spoke, keeping her eye on the interior of the storeroom as she held out a hand to the cook.

“I am Hannah Cottle. I came with Mrs Julius Redepenning to help look after Mrs Kirana and the children. I am their new nanny.”

Pranisha introduced herself, still suspicious but warming.

Hannah smiled. “Mrs Redepenning wants us to help make your lady comfortable, and move her to a clean room, but after that, I would like to come and meet my new children. Would they like that, do you think?”

She did not wait for an answer, but turned back to the maids, and asked Rosa to find clean night clothes for Miz Kirana. Ada peeked after her.

“What of that Maureen?” Pranisha asked Japheth in a hushed whisper.

Japheth met Ada’s eyes as he told the cook, “Miz Captain tell her to get out,” he said, not bothering to hide his pleasure.

***

Within a couple of hours, Kirana was settled in a sunnier, more airy room on the upper floor at the far end of the other wing. Hannah had led a team of servants to scrub it top to bottom, removing drapes, the rug, and most of the furniture to leave a clean bare room. Mia had commandeered a large and comfortable bed from a guest room and had it made up with fresh linen and stack of pillows. The room smelled of soap and the flowers that Hannah had found somewhere and arranged on a wooden table in easy line of sight from the bed.

Mia had bathed Kirana and changed her soiled night gown for a fresh one that an eager maid fetched from the room she first visited. Maureen, the redhead, had apparently commandeered all of Kirana’s possessions when she had ordered the sick woman removed from the room adjoining that of the master of the house.

Hannah retrieved Kirana’s daughters from the kitchen, where Maureen had sent them after ousting their mother. They had been well enough treated, and had been creeping in to sleep with Kirana at night. Still, the second sudden change in status in just a few weeks set the seven-year-old Marshanda crying and Adiratna, who was five, skipping around the room.

Kirana made no complaint, but Mia could see she found the sudden change nearly as overwhelming as her daughters. At her signal, Hannah took the girls away to check that their nursery was as they had left it.

Kirana told Mia the story between bouts of coughing and rests between words to take in more air. The pretty children’s nurse had insinuated herself into Jules’s bed during his last shore leave. “I was glad, Mia. I would not have ordered it, for even a servant should be free to choose. But if it was what she wanted, I thought it a good thing, since I could no longer meet the needs of his body, and I would not have him risk disease going to the places men visit, or taking up with a society woman who might object to his household.”

Mia made no comment, busying herself with making the former mistress comfortable. It took Kirana nearly half an hour to tell her the rest, a phrase or two at a time.

“He is not such a fool as to think the baby Maureen carries is his, for she must be four months gone, and he has had her no more than twice, and that less than two months ago. He was at sea when that baby was made. Yes, and when he went back to sea, his sail had no sooner disappeared from view than she was turning me from my room and keeping my children from me. The Captain will set it right when he comes home, I thought, for all the servants supported her, and I had no strength to fight.”

Hannah had learned that the butler and his wife, the children’s nurse, were gone—left just a few months ago for their beloved India. The only one still remaining of Kirana’s original household was the cook, Pranisha. Otherwise, surely Maureen’s coup would have failed.

Kirana was no more than skin stretched over bone. She was still the beauty Jules had spoken of seven years ago when he and Mia first met, but turned ethereal as her illness consumed her from within.

“I was wrong to encourage Maureen, but how could I know she would turn against us so? And for what? The Captain would have reversed it all when he returned, if you had not come first.”

Kirana squeezed Mia’s hand, and Mia squeezed back, smiling, hiding her doubts. Would Maureen have exiled Kirana without Jules’s approval? Surely not. Unless she hoped that Kirana would die before he returned, as she may well have done in that horrible little cell of a room.

She offered Kirana another drink from the fresh jug, and held her friend while she coughed after drinking.

“I am so glad you have come. You will look after my girls; I know that. Jules means well, but he must go where he is sent, and I fear for them while he is away. What would happen to my babies if the Dutch woman from Madagascar has the chance to take my place? She was determined to have him, Mia. Still is, so I am even more grateful that you have come.” Kirana stopped talking as her body was racked by another bout of coughing.

“Rest, Kirana,” Mia soothed, hiding her rising anger and making a mental note to find out more about the Dutch woman. How many mistresses did Captain Julius Redepenning have? One less than this morning, anyway. The Irish girl had absconded, taking with her some of Kirana’s jewellery and money from the safe in the master’s bedroom.

“Start as you mean to go on,” her sisters and cousin had advised. Mia wondered if Jules had any idea of the wife he’d created by leaving his forlorn child-bride to be raised by his redoubtable female relatives. She left Kirana clean, comfortable, and asleep, watched over by the two little girls and Hannah, and made her way to the kitchen wing.

The walls were whitewashed and the furniture painted, but the quality of workmanship remained as high as in the family and public rooms. Mia stopped and checked the top of a window frame with her finger, and then the back ledge of a wooden seat against one wall. No dust. The kitchen was well kept, despite the neglect of other parts of the house and the revolution that had toppled its mistress in the absence of the master.

The servants were all waiting in the kitchen, watching the door, their faces anxious or impassive according to their natures. She took her seat in the chair set ready for her, following yet another piece of sister-in-law wisdom. “When seeking to overawe servants who are taller than you, sit while they are standing.”

Hannah had started the impressing, when she conveyed Mia’s command to gather here. The servants mostly looked down at their feet as she examined them in silence.

The large brown woman in the wrapped silks of a Hindu would be the cook, Pranisha; only one remaining of the servants who came with Jules and Kirana from Madras. Pranisha had cared for the two frightened little girls and kept them safe.

The remaining cook’s maid would be the one female Mia had not met. Just into adulthood, plump and pretty. Most of the others, all the other women and two of the men, she had encountered as they came in and out of Kirana’s room under Hannah’s direction.

The three house maids, one young and two middle-aged, had willingly and efficiently prepared the new room, and had all taken a moment to assure Kirana of their support, though with an anxious glance at Mia out of the corner of their eyes.

So, who had been in favour of Kirana’s eviction from her place? Japheth, perhaps. The doorman, they called him here. He answered the door, ran messages, and served at table when they had company.

The other two men as well? They worked mostly outdoors, Mia had been told, looking after the household’s garden, its carriage and two horses, and any handyman tasks inside and outside of the dwelling. One of them was as black as Japheth, and she had been given his name as Fortune. The other, the only European, was the one servant who had not helped with the move; the one servant who now met her eyes, his mouth stiff with contempt, his eyes filled with scorn. William Dench.

A woman-hater? Maureen’s accomplice?

Mia let her gaze fix on each servant in turn, speaking their names out loud. Pranisha the cook and her helper Sunny. Pranisha nodded gravely, with measurement in her calm brown eyes. Sunny’s glance was quick and anxious.

The maids, Maria, Lijsbeth and Rosa. Maria turned to Lijsbeth for reassurance, and Rosa managed a fleeting smile.

Japheth, who met her eyes and bowed. Fortune, the black groom, who shot a fearful glance at Dench then looked down again.

Dench exploded as soon as she said his name, as if being addressed set a match to a smouldering temper. “And who are you?” he demanded. “This idiot,” he struck out at Japheth, who ducked so the blow meant for his ears whistled harmlessly over his head, “says you’re the Captain’s wife. Never heard the Captain had no wife, except that useless yellow bint upstairs.”

“Control yourself, Dench,” Mia advised, “and keep a civil tongue in your head when you refer to the Captain’s friend.” She swept her gaze over the assembly again. “I am Mrs Julius Redepenning, the Captain’s wife. I have come to care for my friend Kirana in her illness and to look after her children—and I can see that I have arrived just in time. I cannot imagine that the Captain will be pleased to know the condition in which I found his beloved friend, but we will–”

Dench, flushed red, broke in again, taking a step towards her with his fists clenched. “See,” he said, addressing the other servants. “She’s no more the Captain’s wife than I am. What English wife would ‘look after’ her husband’s whore, except the way she ‘looked after’ Maureen, throwing her out in the street, and her carrying the Captain’s baby? What has she got planned for those poor little girls? That’s what I want to know.”

Mia remained outwardly calm as the other servants exchanged uncertain glances. Would they come to her rescue if the man attacked? She should have brought her little gun downstairs; the one her sister-in-law Ella insisted that she have and learn to use.

“Miz Kirana, she say this Miz Captain Redepenning,” one of the maids volunteered.

“Kirana Didimoni write Miz Captain many years,” Pranisha observed. “Miz Captain, you write back, yes?”

Mia inclined her head. “For seven years, yes. I did not, by the way, ask Maureen to leave. And I certainly did not throw her out. Nor did I invite her to help herself to the valuables she took with her.”

“Lies!” Dench shouted. “Maureen ain’t no thief, and she wouldn’t have gone without…”

This time, his wild swing was towards Mia, but he stopped it before it struck, and she responded, not measuring her words. “Without telling you? You are her baby’s father, are you not? Kirana said she is too far gone for the child to be the Captain’s.”

Dench swung around and thumped the wall, a stout blow that must have bruised his knuckles and jarred his arm. The bang continued to echo, until Mia realised that the continuing sound was the front door knocker.

“See who that is, Japheth,” she ordered, and they all waited as if frozen out of time while the doorman hurried through the house to do his duty.

“Captain Thrushmore, ’m,” he reported, a few minutes later. “He brung the rest of Miz Redepenning’s things from the ship. Wants to speak with you, ’m. Fortune, Maria, you come help me with Miz Captain’s luggage.”

Jason had called to assure himself of her welcome in the household of her husband’s mistress. Mia didn’t tell him that his arrival had swung a tenuous balance. She would have no further trouble now.

Sure enough, Hannah later reported that each of the servants had assured Hannah they played no part in Kirana’s ill-treatment, and were glad that Mrs Captain had come to make things right again. Except for Dench. Dench was not seen again that day, and by the following morning, it was clear that he, too, had gone.