Tristan kept the obvious question to himself, which was: If we’re all required to gather in the drawing room, why is the tenant of the large suite exempt? He would find out soon enough.
A little silence fell.
“So. Got a sweetheart, Hardy? A wife? Perhaps on a distant shore?”
“I am unmarried.”
“I’ll wager it’s difficult for an old sea dog like you to settle down. You ought to get yourself one. A woman. Fine respectable bloke like yourself.”
“I shall give your advice due consideration, thank you.”
“Harder for a chap like me to find just the right one, you see.”
He didn’t expound, but neither did Tristan disagree.
Nor did he tell him what he thought: that it was equally hard for a chap like him, who didn’t fit precisely into any defined social strata. A chap whose ways had perhaps calcified. A chap who had learned to trust no one completely, because he’d learned that people would do just about anything, and when someone did not precisely fit a niche people became uneasy. It had, in part, been the downfall of his very first courtship.
“What do you think of our fair proprietresses, Hardy? Brownie and Goldy?”
He half hoped he’d get to see their faces when Delacorte trotted out those nicknames in mixed company, which seemed inevitable.
“They seem to have created a comfortable place here,” he allowed, cautiously.
“Well, just between you and me...”
He lowered his voice, and Tristan braced himself for another startling profane assessment, or perhaps a thrilling revelation.
“I think they’re ladies through and through. Too good for the likes of you and me! Ha ha ha!”
Tristan leaned back a little too late to avoid getting a moist “Ha!” in his ear.
“Just look at what they did! Sewed my buttons on as good as if they were stitched on there with steel.”
He gave a mighty tug on his waistcoat buttons, which were indeed taxed, and his face was luminous with the miracle of it. “Didn’t come off in my hand!” he marveled, with awed sincerity. He strummed a hand down them, as though they were an accordion. “They said they’d help give me hair a trim, too. I can sew a button, mind you, but there’s just something about a woman’s touch.”
Tristan was oddly, ever-so-slightly, very surprisingly, moved. And pleased for him.
“Congratulations, Delacorte. That’s a fine thing.”
He supposed it sometimes was the small things like buttons that would keep your waistcoat closed that made the world feel secure and like a gentler place, a place in which people cared enough about you to make sure you weren’t bursting through your clothes. Just as the smallest tasks on a ship—ensuring bolts were tightened and wood was cleaned and waxed and oiled and sails were neatly mended—were the ones that made it possible for him to bring criminals to justice in the name of the English empire.
It was the first time he’d considered that strength was only allowed to exist by virtue of something like gentleness.
Vividly now, he suddenly recalled Lady Derring’s face as he’d left the room with Delacorte: a sense of mischief—which he now understood more thoroughly—and a sort of hope. He suspected she was trying to create something in particular here at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
But why?
And at what cost, if shewereabetting a smuggler?
If shewasa smuggler? It was very difficult to imagine a woman who had those soft eyes, and whose emotions moved across her face so easily, engaging in something so nefarious and sordid.
She had an epithet jar, for God’s sake.
But desperate people do desperate things.
He recalled, with a pang, that flare of hunger in her eyes when she’d seen those twelve pounds.
“Hasn’t been easy for me to find a wife or a sweetheart,” Delacorte said. “I’m an old-fashioned sort. I know I’m a bit much to take. Got loud from having only meself to talk to when I’m on the road, I suppose. Drown out the silence. I expect you got a bit quiet from the noise of sailors, eh?”
