Angelique wasn’t the only bossy one.
“It’s a shame,” she said, her tone light, her grip firm. “I am here tonight because I came to look inside my inheritance, the building adjacent. But I’m not certain Dot and I should venture into it on our own. Since I am a bit naive and unfamiliar with the hazards that may await in this part of town. And do call me Delilah.”
Angelique narrowed her eyes.
She clearly suspected Delilah of a tactic.
The reason Delilah was so very good at hiring the best staff (with, perhaps, the exception of Dot, and the traitorous butler, her husband’s choice) was because she understood that everyone, to some extent, needed to be needed and appreciated for the things they liked best about themselves, and for fine qualities they might not even realize they possessed.
“Well, then,” Angelique finally said, “do you care to pull one of your hatpins, Delilah, so that we have a fighting chance against rats?”
Chapter Five
On his first day as blockade commander, Tristan had ordered the burning of every single sailing vessel in Hackbury.
He’d stood there, cold-eyed and stone-faced, on a gray morning in Sussex, staring down the villagers through the flames as his men torched the boats, one by one. And there had been defiance in some of the villagers’ eyes, but not one of them dared say a word. They knew their days of lending horses for late-night smuggling runs in exchange for a cask of contraband rum, of ferrying contraband tea along secret cart tracks toward London, of rowing out to reel in casks of goods sunk near shore brought in by boats painted black, of piloting their own black boats, were over. Every last sailing vessel in Hackbury had been used in smuggling somehow. They were, in fact, getting off lightly.
Next time they would not.
Hardy is ruthless.Word spread quickly: he was a different sort of blockade commander. He taught his men to be relentless. Organized. Thorough. And tactically, skillfully violent. They slashed open coiled ropes on ships to find the tobacco hidden within. They found the false bottoms in barrels where illicit liquor was stored; they once even hacked apart the mast of a cutter to find it hollow and stuffed with silks. They were everywhere, day and night, haunting the country and coastal byways on horseback and watching it in towers. They could not be bribed, like blockade runners of yore. They were zealots and they were heroes. Because while some villagers were willing participants, more of them were terrorized into silence or participation by increasingly murderous gangs. Smuggling had held them captive, and Hardy’s men were setting them free.
He was born for the job. Tristan understood smugglers. How they thought, and how they survived. Like cockroaches, when dispersed, they ran for the baseboards, the cracks of England: the tunnels, the byroads, the tributaries, the caves. And recongregated.
But they were no match for a commander who’d survived his first ten years in St. Giles slums. He was fueled by a cold hatred for those who preyed on the defenseless. In St. Giles he’d known terror and ugliness; withstanding them was the foundation of his own courage. He’d learned to fight, to hide, to steal, to strategize. And while he’d never known his father and he’d been orphaned when he was eight, from one or both parents he’d inherited a conscience and a wily intelligence and perhaps, after a fashion, luck: he’d stumbled into a position as a naval captain’s assistant when he was ten years old. He rose ceaselessly in the ranks from that point on. The navy knew what they had in him.
Hardy had nearly broken the back of smuggling gangs in England.
All save one.
He stared out at the water now, black and oily smooth, at the ship he’d arranged to buy before Lord and Lady Millcoke’s house had burned to the ground, killing them and their young children. All because Millcoke had refused to allow the Blue Rock gang to conscript their horses to transport contraband cigars.
He’d sent Massey back to the Stevens Hotel to get some sleep and to await further orders from him.
“I’ll have a word with Derring’s solicitor. And we might as well try to track down his widow, too,” he’d told him.
Massey had told him he was going to stay up for a few more hours trying his hand at writing a poem about his sweetheart.
Tristan had furrowed his brow. “What is your sweetheart’s name?”
“Emily, sir,” Massey had told him tolerantly.
Tristan knew her name, of course. Emily Emily Emily Emily Emily Emily. For God’s sake. That was the whole of Massey’s conversation when they weren’t catching smugglers.
He did like to tease his very patient and literal lieutenant.
“Sometimes it’s too much, sir, the feelings, and you just have to try to write a poem,” Massey said earnestly.
Whatever on earth that meant. Sticky sentiment was a foreign language to Tristan. His own carnal education had taken place at the hands of generous whores and willing widows, and his one foray into actual courtship had been an illuminating lesson in how one’s heart, loins, and social status could conspire to hand him a rare and shocking defeat. He was, he understood now, much better off. And much wiser.
“Do not inflict that poem upon me if you do write it,” he warned Massey.
“Of course not, sir,” Massey soothed. He’d tried that once before. He’d learned his lesson.
Massey was a brutally talented soldier and a loyal right-hand man and, after a fashion, a friend.
But he, too, dreamed of the next part of his life.
Which is what Tristan was doing here at the East India docks, staring at theZephyr, the ship he intended to purchase. Staring into the abyss—or rather, the Thames—helped him think.
