“That will take several weeks.”
Tristan opened his hand. The bracelet lay across his palm, glittering with cold little sparks.
Several weeks. More than enough time to find a woman without a name.
“So be it.”
“But that won’t do at all,” Lorenzo said. “If we leave now, we arrive in time for the hunting at Capodimonte. I made plans. There is fishing in the bay, and my cousin has a summer ball, and my mother has already instructed three aunts and at least one terrifying godmother to approve of you.”
“A calamity narrowly avoided.”
“You are not listening.” Lorenzo stepped closer, his voice losing its polish. “You should see it, Tristan. The bay in the morning. Vesuvius. The light on the water. The streets. The music. The people shouting because they are happy, angry, hungry, in love, who knows? Everything there is alive. You have been walking around this frozen island as if life were a punishment one must endure with correct posture. Come home with me.”
Home?
Tristan gritted his teeth. “I will stay in Brighton until Resolute is fit to sail. You will accompany the ship to Plymouth, Lieutenant.”
The gulls screamed overhead. Below, the harbor resumed its noise with obscene cheer—water slapping stone, sailors laughing as if nothing of consequence had broken on the quarterdeck.
Lorenzo stared at him, mouth parted, eyes wide.
Tristan didn’t regret it. He was doing Lorenzo a kindness. Better to cut this foolish family bonding before it took root. If Lorenzo meant to have any future in the Navy, he would learn now what every captain learned sooner or later—weight dragged men under. Affection made hands slow. Kinship was no use aboard a warship if it taught a man to hesitate when a line had to be severed.
Lorenzo folded the assessment paper carefully, smoothing the crease with his thumb. When he looked up again, his face had closed into courtly brightness, the worst kind, the kind that made no claim at all.
“As you command, Captain.”
The title should have pleased Tristan. It had been what he demanded. Lorenzo bowed with perfect correctness. Then he turned away to carry out the order.
Tristan watched him go across the quarterdeck. His brother’s shoulders remained straight. His steps remained light. Only once, near the ladder, did Lorenzo pause as if he might turn back and make some ridiculous remark about English cruelty or Italian tragedy or the moral failure of men who refused summer balls.
He did not.
Tristan looked back at Brighton.
The bracelet had bitten crescents into his palm. He opened his hand and watched the stones catch the sun again. Somewhere in this bright, deceitful town, she moved beyond his reach. He had delayed the ship. He had bought himself time. He had cut away the one man who wanted to stand beside him in Naples, and he told himself the deck was clearer for it.
Chapter four
HMS Resolute waited beyond the muddle of boats and shouting men. Marguerite stopped. Three masts climbed into the pale Brighton sky, crossed and webbed with so much rope that the heavens appeared to have been captured, knotted, and pressed into naval service.
“What are them little windows?” Elsie asked, pointing toward the gunports, open in a row of dark mouths.
“Cannons, Elsie. Those are cannons.”
Elsie gave the frigate a long look, then slid a surreptitious glance toward the hackney coach that had brought them to the docks, as if calculating whether it might still be persuaded to take two women somewhere safer, such as a debtors’ prison. “Seems like the Sea Wolf ain’t very diplomatic either.”
Marguerite drew Elsie’s arm closer and pressed it with a reassurance she did not entirely feel. “The war is over. Those cannons will be silent now, I assume. Think of this ship as one very large stepping-stone to Naples.”
It turned out the stepping-stone was more difficult to step onto than she had anticipated. First, one had to convince a fish-smelling boatman to take them to the ambassador’s frigate. Then one had to endure four sailors rowing as if ladies requesting passage to Naples were ogle-worthy oddities rather than rational creatures pursuing a reasonable objective. Lastly, one had to sit still while the aforementioned frigate, which had looked almost manageable from a distance, grew larger with every pull of the oars, rising out of the water like a setting from Judgment Day.
Its black side towered above the water, slick and immense. Gulls shrieked overhead with the nasty pleasure of creatures who had never paid a hotel bill.
The boat bumped alongside.
“Here we are, miss,” said the boatman, pointing to a ladder as if it were the front door.
Marguerite looked up at the narrow insult composed of rope and wet wooden rungs. Hung against the frigate’s side, it swayed with the ship, slapped the hull, and descended toward the boat with the confidence of a thing that had ruined better women than she.
