What the Duke Doesn't Know Read online

  James braced to jump down and help, but the men knew their business. In short order they had stopped the chaise and captured the unharnessed horse. Then they bent together over the traces, examining the damage.

  James sighed as he went to join them. By his calculations, they were almost precisely halfway between the first posting house and the second, as far as they could be from efficient help. This was the trouble with traveling in a hired carriage. You never knew how any particular inn cared for their tack, or their horses. And even with the best, the harness got hard usage. Mishaps like this happened all the time. If he’d ridden, alone, he’d be farther along right now. He wouldn’t be fighting to keep his hands off Kawena either. But would she listen to reason about this probably futile journey? No. Reason did not appear to be one of her strongest characteristics.

  “Can it be mended?” he asked one of the post boys.

  “Well, yes, sir. ’Course,” was the reply. “But not at the side of the road, like. With no proper tools.”

  It was only the answer he’d expected.

  Kawena appeared at his elbow, which surprised him for a moment. A genteel English girl would naturally have left this matter to him, sitting meekly in the carriage until informed of the plan for her succor. But Kawena had to have her hand in everything, of course, even when she had no hope of understanding.

  Close beside him, their shoulders almost touching, she looked down at the trace. The leather had clearly stretched under constant tension, and then parted. “Couldn’t we tie it together?” she said.

  The postilions looked amused, and rather smug with it. “It wouldn’t hold,” James replied. “Leather’s too weakened. Why don’t you just wait in the carriage until—”

  “Not the leather,” she interrupted. “If you used a length of rope, and tied a double sheet bend here and here.” She indicated spots where the trace was still sturdy. “It might be good enough until we reach the next inn, don’t you think?”

  James was amazed to hear her name a knot often used aboard ship. What girl knew a thing like that? And why hadn’t he thought of it himself? It seemed he’d been wrong to doubt her ability to reason.

  “Do you have some rope?” she asked the post boys.

  “In me bag,” said one. “Never travel without it.”

  “What’s a ‘sheet bend’?” asked the other.

  “It’s a knot used for joining broken sheets—lines—on a sailing vessel,” James told him. He couldn’t help a perplexed glance at Kawena. How did she know about knots?

  “My father equipped trading ships,” she reminded him in response. “I learned a lot about how they worked.”

  “Did you indeed?” She was a continual surprise. A delightful one.

  “I cannot actually tie a sheet bend,” she admitted.

  James burst out laughing. “I can.”

  The postilion fetched his bit of rope. James fixed the ends to stronger lengths of the trace with the suggested knots, which were designed to tighten when subjected to strain. He was rather pleased with the result, as he hadn’t done rope work for some years. None of the party was knowledgeable enough to appreciate the neatness of it, however.

  They set off again, more slowly at first, but the makeshift harness worked quite well. Gradually, the post boys risked greater speeds, until finally they were barreling along almost as fast as before. James hung on, contemplating the idea that he hadn’t imagined a pretty young woman could also be so practically competent. Growing up in a houseful of brothers, he’d formed the notion that girls were delicate creatures, more likely to moan and complain about the delay or the boredom of crawling across the countryside than to offer solutions. Of course, his mother wasn’t one to sit helplessly and wait for rescue, but she was…unique, in his opinion. He sometimes thought she could read minds.

  James looked over at Kawena. She clearly couldn’t, or she wouldn’t be looking so serene. She was intelligent and levelheaded, though, on top of gorgeous and delectable. James again felt the comradeship that had surfaced between them during their time at Alan’s house. “That was a clever thought,” he acknowledged.

  She smiled at him.

  James blinked. Comrades were not dazzling, in his experience.

  “It was a simple idea,” Kawena replied, though she was warmed by his praise.

  “But you thought of it,” he said. “I didn’t. And I’m the sailor.”

  Kawena smiled again, enjoying the effect it seemed to have on him. The desire to tease him was nearly irresistible. His reactions were…exciting. But she still worried that he’d end the journey if she gave in to her impulses. She groped for a safe topic of conversation. “You must have seen all the ports we called at on my journey to England,” she said. “They seemed such amazing places. I wanted to explore every lane and market, but I had to stay on shipboard most of the time, so as not to be exposed as a female.”

  “Ah, I wondered how you managed that,” James replied. Ships’ quarters were cramped and offered very little privacy.

  “The captain of the ship was an old friend of my father’s. I’ve known him since I was a child. When he arrived at the island soon after the theft was discovered, I asked for his help.”

  “I’m a bit surprised he gave it.” James wouldn’t have taken such a passenger on his own ship. The situation was primed for complications, or worse. Of course, his had been a navy vessel, not a private trader.

  “I had to persuade him, and my mother, and others. It wasn’t easy.”

  James tried to picture the mother of any girl he’d ever met letting her sail off dressed as a grubby lad. He couldn’t.

  “Finally, they saw that I was going to fight for my future, whatever it took. The idea that I had lost everything worked on them.”

  She held her chin high and looked utterly determined. James was impressed. “So this captain kept your secret?”

  “He was very kind. He gave me a cabin of my own, with a lock, and enlisted some of his officers in my cause. I suppose the crew must have figured out my secret, eventually, but they didn’t speak of it. The captain was securely in control of his ship.”

  “As he must be.”

  “It was difficult, sometimes,” Kawena added.

  James suspected this was a considerable understatement.

  “But it worked. One of the hardest things, though, was not being able to look around the ports. The bits I could see from the ship were so interesting. I had imagined that the journey would let me visit many foreign lands, as I always wished to do.”

  James nodded. He understood her urge to travel. It had been one of the things that drew him to the navy in the first place.

  “Were you often at Madras?”

  “Quite often,” he answered. “It’s an important naval base in that part of the world, as well as the British administrative center for southern India.”

  “I know many traders go there. Is it a beautiful place?”

  James thought about it. “The area around Fort St. George looks rather like home. Farther out, there are native temples, which are quite a sight. They’re shaped like a pyramid, but covered with rows and rows of figures…” He remembered the nature of some of those figures and stopped.

  “I visited one of those in another place,” Kawena responded. “I thought some of the carvings were rather like those they make on the island. They were more intricate, of course.”

  She spoke without a trace of self-consciousness. Remembering the very graphic male figurines he’d seen on her island home, James discovered another way that Kawena was unlike a sheltered English girl. She seemed perfectly familiar with…certain bits of anatomy, and not at all embarrassed by the idea of them. His neckcloth felt tighter all at once. “Umm, you must have sailed south from Madras,” he said.

  “Yes, we went down the coast of Africa, but the stops were brief. I didn’t see much else un
til we reached the Cape colony.”

  “There’s a lovely spot,” James said.

  Kawena nodded. “The cliffs rising above the sea took my breath away. And it was thrilling to think that two oceans met in the waters offshore.”

  What other girl would think of that? James wondered. He remembered a day of mountainous waves as his ship rounded the horn of Africa and passed from the Pacific into the Atlantic.

  “The one place I got to go ashore for a while was Gibraltar,” Kawena went on. “Captain Pierce thought I’d hardly be noticed among all the different sorts of people there.”

  James nodded. The Mediterranean base was chock-full of Italians and Portuguese and Spaniards, not to mention the Jews and the Moors. “It’s almost like a masquerade ball,” he commented, recalling the rainbow colors of the costumes he’d seen there. Robes and skullcaps, along with bright British uniforms and kilts.

  “Like nothing I’d ever seen,” she agreed. “I stood in the square and watched a British officer slouching at a corner, looking with such scorn at all the people shouting and gesturing as they bargained.”

  She smiled at James, and his pulse raced.

  “Some bowed with one hand to their chest.” She demonstrated. “There were men in turbans sitting cross-legged, selling slippers or oranges or I don’t know what. The din was tremendous. I felt I’d really made it to the other side of the world at last.”

  How well he knew that feeling, James thought. It was part of the adventure he’d dreamed of all his life—to see places and peoples unlike his own. He seldom met anyone who truly understood it. His family didn’t. They were rooted in England, in their different ways, and content to be. Even Sebastian. His cavalry regiment might be ordered abroad, and he would go full willingly, and do his duty. But he didn’t hope to be shipped to the Antipodes. He didn’t anticipate the call as a rare opportunity.

  A great many of James’s countrymen who went off to serve the empire, or themselves, in far lands kept their minds and hearts in England, he’d found. They didn’t share his delight in difference. Yet here, in the form of this lovely young woman, was a kindred spirit.

  He met her eyes, and saw that she recognized it, too. Similar impulses moved them, deep down. With that realization came a touch of comfort, a sharper stab of longing, and a whiff of danger. This trip was becoming more and more complicated. He really wasn’t certain how he was going to get through the rest of it.

  Seven

  The main road to Portsmouth took them through Winchester, and as they stayed the night in that town, Kawena had the chance to go out and look at the cathedral early the next morning. She’d been urged to do so by the innkeeper, who’d told her that it was very ancient, built in the reign of some long-ago king.

  As she stood before the towering edifice, gazing up at spires that seemed to reach the sky, an old man in priest’s garb paused beside her. “There’s been a church here since six forty-two,” he said.

  “Six forty-two what?” she asked.

  “The year six forty-two.”

  Kawena worked out the mathematics of this in her head. Lord James walked up as she completed the sum. “More than a thousand years?” It was difficult to think of so much time, and of all the life that had passed before these walls.

  The old man nodded like a schoolmaster pleased with his pupil. “This present building was consecrated in 1093, however. Saint Swithin is buried here, as well as a number of Saxon kings.”

  Kawena was looking confused. James wasn’t much better off. “The ones before the Norman Conquest,” he ventured, and saw that this didn’t help her.

  “It took them fourteen years to build it,” said their volunteer guide with satisfaction. “They say the stone came all the way from the Isle of Wight. Later bishops added bits on, here and there. The priory was demolished because of all that nonsense with Henry VIII.” He didn’t appear to approve of this revolutionary monarch.

  The old man came with them as they strolled through the cathedral. James tried to hint him away once or twice, but he was oblivious. Thus, he was at Kawena’s side when they stopped to contemplate a wall of carved images.

  “That looks rather like a temple in India,” she commented.

  “India?” said the old man.

  “No, it doesn’t,” said James, noting the stiff saints and figures praying with clasped hands. It was nothing like the twisting, posturing dancers in India, particularly not those engaged in…activities that would scandalize any local churchgoer.

  “They’re all in rows, one above the other,” Kawena argued. “Just like—”

  “Not the same,” James interrupted, afraid the old priest was going to ask for details. “We must get on the road.” The design did have similarities, he admitted as he pulled her away, though of course the ideas behind it were totally different. He didn’t think he would have noticed that on his own.

  Travel was slow that day, as they hit a long stretch of muddy road, turned to mire by recent heavy rains. Twice the chaise bogged down, and the second time James had to join the post boys in putting a shoulder to the rear of the carriage to help the team pull it out. Kawena offered to push beside him, but there James drew the line. Some things women simply did not do. It was enough that one of them should be spattered with muck, he told her as he scraped what he could from his boots.

  At last they made it through to drier surfaces and passed into Southampton, near the end of their journey.

  “Is this Portsmouth?” Kawena asked, looking out over the many boats moored in the harbor.

  “No. Those are mostly rich men’s yachts, not navy vessels.”

  “Yachts?” She hadn’t heard the word before.

  “It’s what they call pleasure craft.”

  “Why?”

  James shrugged. “It’s just the name used for boats kept for the occasional sail out into the Channel. Perhaps a run to France, now that it’s open to us again.”

  It seemed a waste, keeping a boat as large as some of these to be used so seldom. Not even for fishing. But Lord James spoke as if it was commonplace. “Does your father, the duke, have a yacht?”

  He turned from the carriage window to look at her. “No. Why would you think so?”

  “I supposed he was a rich man.” She’d been thinking about such matters as the trip continued, all the similarities, and differences, between them. Their backgrounds could hardly be more unlike—their families, upbringing, expectations. They might have tastes in common, but the more time she spent here, the more she saw that English society would never see them as equal. The idea was annoying, and curiously disturbing. She wondered how he saw it.

  Lord James shrugged off the question of riches. “He has no interest in keeping a yacht.”

  “You are the only one of your family who likes boats then?”

  He laughed. “On the contrary, we had a sailboat on the lake at Langford. Well, it’s still there, though not used so much now. Father taught us all to sail it.”

  “All?”

  “Me and my brothers. It’s nothing like the sea, of course, but if there was a spanking wind, you could get a bit of excitement out of her. When you could manage a turn at the tiller, that is. Everyone wanted to be captain. Nathaniel finally set up a regular schedule for us to follow.”

  “He is the eldest,” Kawena remembered. Lord James looked younger as he spoke of this. She glimpsed the grinning, mischievous boy in the man. It was easy to imagine him racing to be the first into their sailboat.

  He nodded. “Not that we paid his lists any mind. Me in particular. I was out the door and onboard whenever I could manage.” He laughed again. “Papa nearly beat me once for taking that boat out at night. Even after I pointed out to him that there was only a gentle breeze and a full moon to sail by.”

  “That must have been beautiful,” said Kawena.

  He stared at her briefl
y, as if her response surprised him. “It was.” He paused, seemed about to speak, then looked away. “It wasn’t as if I could be washed out to sea or shipwrecked on our own lake. I could have walked home from any part of the shore.”

  “You could have drowned, and no one would have known.” Kawena didn’t think this had been likely, but she could imagine a parent’s worries.

  “I can swim better than any of my brothers. Papa made sure we all could paddle from the center of the lake to land before we were allowed to take the boat out alone. I was best with the sails, too. Never got becalmed like Robert. Without the oars, the booby.”

  It sounded like a large lake, and all part of the duke’s estate. “Langford must be a big place,” Kawena remarked.

  “It’s a rambling old pile,” Lord James replied. “Every generation seemed to want to add their own bits. Rather like that old priest was saying about Winchester.”

  That he could compare his home to a vast building like the cathedral told Kawena more than any wealth of detail. And he didn’t seem to notice the implication. Langford must be as different as a house could be from the small, palm-thatched place where she’d grown up. She’d seen English thatched cottages along their route; their inhabitants seemed to be farm laborers, very far from the family of a duke.

  And what did it matter? she asked herself impatiently. As soon as they accomplished their mission, she would be leaving, and Lord James would be reabsorbed into the life of the English nobility. It wasn’t as if they’d ever see each other again.

  Although, he was still in the navy. Might his next ship not call at Valatu? But when she imagined greeting him at their small dock, welcoming him to her mother’s house…the picture broke down. She couldn’t make the pieces of that story fit together.

  * * *

  They pulled into Portsmouth in the early evening, after three days on the road. Lord James engaged rooms at a fine-looking inn, and all would have been well if Kawena had not overheard him ask the landlady to give them chambers well separated from each other. He also requested that she and her maids take special care of his “sister.” Kawena suspected that money changed hands then, though she couldn’t see from the hallway. Very likely he was plotting to leave her here while he went out to make inquiries, she thought. Did he imagine she could be so easily fooled? But no matter. She had plans of her own.