Harry stared at the scruffy pile of luggage in resignation.
How typical of Flora to leave for an ocean voyage without her baggage.
“Fetch someone with a large cart and pay the fellow whatever he needs to drive this lot overnight to Tilbury.” He checked his left pocket watch and did some quick calculations in his head. Assuming high tide was in around four hours, and they could find a cart quickly—and the wind was behind it, the road was good, and they all prayed for a miracle—it might just get there in time. “Although knowing my sister, she’ll pass it on the road when she realizes she left everything here, and we’ll be stuck with her for days while she waits for the next ship to leave because she’ll have missed the first.”
Because of course she would.
That was Flighty Flora all over, and yet she would still find the wherewithal to laugh about it. His big sister found humor in every single catastrophe she created, whereas he would be having palpitations if he ever failed to make a sailing. Not because the Royal Navy did not take kindly to one of its most trusted officers going absent without leave—the top brass would have his guts for garters if he ever contemplated that again—but because he personally could notcope with tardiness in any way, shape, or form. Where the rest of his family would be late for their own funerals, and thanks to a rogue April blizzard, his father had been, Harry would have to arrive at least two hours early. Probably even six, just to be certain, as time had a habit of filling itself and his was always all accounted for.
That was precisely why he always carried two pocket watches with him wherever he went. Just in case one stopped ticking and he momentarily lost track of the time and missed doing something important. As Nelson had so aptly once said, time was everything and five minutes could make the difference between victory and defeat.
Or words to that effect.
It wasn’t so much the exact words of the great military minds of the past that enthused him so, it was more the sentiment, and old Horatio’s were on the nail regarding time.
He sincerely doubted Flora, like their mother before her, had one working clock in her anarchic home on the Devonshire coast, or even owned a clock at all, for that matter. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to wind the blasted thing because she’d have lost the key, and any and every subsequent replacement. He and Flora had always been chalk and cheese despite the scant and unseemly nine months of difference in their ages.
It never ceased to amaze him that two children who came out of the same womb in such quick succession could be so different. Harry had always been an ordered, neat, and logical individual exactly like their grandfather, the admiral, had been, whereas Flora and her offspring were as different to that as it was humanly possible to be. She was all the worst bits of their mother and father combined. Scatterbrained, impulsive, and bohemian. With no respect for rules, routines, time, or boundaries.
No wonder the poor maid hadn’t heard him when he had arrived. If the Pendletons had been in his shipshape drawing room for so much as ten minutes, it would be a miracle if it wasn’t a scene of total and utter carnage.
He was too blasted busy to deal with all that malarkey now. He barely had time for dinner, let alone uninvited, unruly houseguests.
Uncharitably, he immediately contemplated how much it would cost to charter a vessel at Tilbury to take her to Egypt to save him the inconvenience of hosting them for a single night. Probably an arm and a leg, but it would be worth it. For the sake of his blasted sanity alone, it would be worth mortgaging this house if he had to, simply to be shot of her…
Something about Simpkins’s agitated manner set a distant alarm bell ringing. His normally unflappable butler had a distinctly odd look about him. A look of foreboding which Harry had never witnessed before in the decade he had known him. They had sailed the seven seas together, for pity’s sake, so he knew all of Simpkins’s expressions well, and this new one made him panic. “What do you know that I don’t?”
“Your sisterhasher luggage, sir, and so does her husband. This…” He wagged a nervous finger in the direction of the baggage heap. “… belongs to your nieces and nephews who, I was reliably informed by a most insistent Lady Pendleton, will be staying with their favorite uncle for the duration of her trip abroad.”
“I’m sorry?” That raised every single one of Harry’s battle-honed hackles. Surely he hadn’t heard Simpkins right?
“Did you not get the urgent express I sent this morning stating as much, sir? The one where I asked you how you wished me to proceed?”
“Do I look like I know what the blazes you are talking about,Simpkins!” Although now that he came to think upon it, there had been an urgent express, he now remembered. An express his clerk had brought to him the second it had arrived, and instead of opening it, as he patently should have, he had put it to one side. In his job, there were always expresses and most of them were storms in teacups which sorted themselves out before he needed to intervene, so Harry had ignored it. Had intended to read it in a free moment. Except there hadn’t been any free moments thanks to the bloody work-shy layabouts who were supposed to be building the bloodyBoadiceaand all the other insurmountable problems the Admiralty kept sending his way. When he became admiral of the fleet, he would ensure there were at least ten men employed to do his job. Harry was spread too thin and stocking all those ships should not have rested on the shoulders of just one man!
Simpkins wrung his hands and began to pace, and that was yet another new and worrying behavior Harry had never witnessed before. Even under heavy American bombardment at the ill-considered and ill-fated Battle of Baltimore when he had been an exasperated lieutenant on the verge of mutiny and his butler had been the ship’s quartermaster. “It was all in the message, Captain. I assumed you would come home to deal with it the second you received my missive as there really was nothing I could do to dissuade her. Lady Pendleton not only outranks me; she was resolute. She did not think it was prudent to drag them all over Africa at this time of year, especially with malaria so rife and with all the crocodiles, so she has left her children with you, sir.”
“What!” It was a bloody miracle the top of Harry’s head didn’t explode with the volcanic fury of his anger. “Suddenly, after thirty-one years of possessing absolutely no common sense whatsoever, my sister has the gall to becomeprudent?” He began to stomp in outrage.“What was she thinking?” Before Simpkins answered that, he stayed him with an abrupt raised palm. “She wasn’t thinking, was she? Because Flora doesn’t bloody well think! At least not rationally.” One of these days, he was actually going to kill her. “I have a job, Simpkins! A career! People depend on me at the Admiralty, and I have a promotion to secure!” One which was long overdue but well earned. “I don’t have time to look after her blasted children until blasted August!” No matter how much he loved the little monsters. Being a doting uncle whenever he saw them was one thing. Being left with them all alone, quite another.
“I said as much sir, but she said that she was due an adventure.”
“Well, I suppose that makes this gross inconvenience all right, then!” His sarcasm came out high-pitched because blasted Flora and her bloody adventures had always been the bane of his life.
As children, she had insisted on dragging him on them too. Which was why he knew what it felt like to be trapped in a pitch-black cave overnight while the tide lapped at his toes. Why he had fallen thirty feet out of the oak tree she had insisted they build a treehouse in and had broken his arm. Why he had lost both his eyebrows during a failed alchemy experiment to turn a lump of pilfered lead pipe into gold. “I shall drop everything, let down everyone who depends on me, simply because my irresponsible sister is due another adventure! Does she not know that it is my job to feed the blasted fleet?”
“I did mention your enormous responsibilities, sir, but Lady Pendleton was confident that if anybody could juggle so many things in her absence, it would be you. She also thought the experience would be good for you.” His butler instinctively backed away, in case Harry threw something in temper, to tell him the next bit. “Practice, she called it. To encourage you to get back in the saddle.” Simpkins winced in apology because they both knew that hideous topic wastotally out of bounds—to everyone, apparently, except blasted Flora. “Seeing as it has been four and a half years since your last fateful gallop…”
Before his head actually exploded in outrage under the fresh assault of those bad memories, the maid chose that moment to leave the drawing room. Much like him, she appeared to be at her wit’s end. “I still can’t get the jam out of the Persian rug, Mr. Simpkins. I’ve tried everything we have, but it’s going to take more than soap to get that black currant off. But I did manage to scrub it out of the curtains.”
“Which idiot gave them jam and allowed them to take it intomydrawing room?” Harry stared first at the maid and then at Simpkins. “And please tell me that somebody is currently in the drawing room with the little vandals.”
“In the absence of any alternative orders, I took it upon myself to put the children to bed, sir. Just before you arrived home. After the long journey here, they were exhausted and after several hours of trying to keep the unruly scallywags entertained, so was I.” Simpkins squared his shoulders, a most stubborn glint in his eye. “If you had read my missive, the black currant could have been avoided and your sister would have been sent away with a flea in her earandher children. Instead, she is already on board her ship and her children are now our problem until she returns in the summer.”
“Over my dead…” The plaintive howl of what sounded like a wolf coming from the direction of the kitchen cut him short, and this time both Simpkins and the maid cringed as it continued unabated. “What the hell is that?”
“That would be Norbert, sir. The Pendletons’ new dog.”
“She’s left me with a bloody puppy too!” If the reminder that he hadn’t so much as fallen off the saddle as been kicked off it four and a half years ago hadn’t been incendiary enough, then this was thelast straw. Harry stalked down the hallway toward the howling as his butler scurried behind.
