him, sir,’ she said in good humour. ‘I knew him better and everyone knows familiarity breeds content.’
You’re a wit, he thought in appreciation. ‘I have no skills in searching for a wife, Mrs Paul. I never thought to live that long. I will blame Napoleon.’
‘Why not?’ she said, her voice agreeable. ‘He had his own trouble with wives, I do believe.’ She leaned forwards. ‘Admiral, I know nothing of your financial situation, nor do I wish to know, but surely a visit to Almack’s during the Season would turn up some prospects that would satisfy even your sisters.’
Mrs Paul obviously noted the look of disgust on his face, but continued, anyway. ‘If you’d rather not chance Almack’s, there is church. Unexceptionable ladies are often found there.’
‘You’d have me endure sermons and make sheep’s eyes at a female in a neighbouring pew?’
She gave him such a glance that he felt his toes tingle. ‘Admiral! I am merely trying to think of venues where you might find ladies—suitable ladies! Were you this much trouble in the fleet?’
‘This and more,’ he assured her, warming to her conversation. By God, you are diverting, he thought. ‘Mrs Paul, do you ever talk about the weather?’
‘What does the weather have to do with anything?’ she asked.
‘Good books?’
‘Now and then. Do you know, I read my way through the family library of the lady I worked for in Bath. Ask me anything about the early saints of the church. Go on. I dare you.’
Bright laughed out loud again. ‘Mrs Paul, mourning is well and good, I suppose, but why hasn’t some gentleman proposed recently? You are a wit.’
He wished he hadn’t said that. Her eyes lost their lustre. ‘It is different with ladies, sir. Most men seem to want a fortune of some size, along with the lady.’ She looked in her reticule again and her look told him she was determined to turn her wretched situation to a joke. ‘All I have in here is an appointment book, the stub of a pencil and some lint.’
The last thing you want is pity, isn’t it? he told himself. ‘So here we are, the two of us, at point non plus,’ he said.
‘I suppose we are,’ she replied, the faintest glint of amusement returning to her eyes.
‘And I must return to my estate, still a single gentleman, with no prospects and a cook on strike.’
‘Whatever did you do to him?’
‘I told him my sisters were coming to visit in two days. They order him about and demand things. Mrs Paul, he is French and he has been my chef for eleven years, through bombardment and sinking ships, and he cannot face my sisters either!’
‘What makes you think matrimony would change that?’ she asked sensibly. ‘They would still visit, wouldn’t they?’
He shrugged. ‘You have to understand my sisters. They are never happier than when they are on a mission or a do-gooding quest. With you installed in my house, and directing my chef, and having a hand in the reconstruction, they would get bored quickly, I think.’
‘Reconstruction?’ she asked.
‘Ah, yes. I found the perfect house. It overlooks Plymouth Sound, and it came completely furnished. It does require a little…well, a lot…of repairs. I think the former owner was a troll with bad habits.’
Mrs Paul laughed. ‘So you were going to marry this poor female who has cried off and carry her away to a ruin?’
Bright couldn’t help himself. He wasn’t even sure why he did it, but he slipped his hook into the ribbons holding Mrs Paul’s bonnet on her head. She watched, transfixed, as he gave the frayed ribbon a gentle tug, then pushed the bonnet away from her face, to dangle down her back. ‘Are you sure you won’t reconsider? I don’t think you will be bored in my house. You can redecorate to your heart’s content, sweet talk my chef, I don’t doubt, and find me a tailor.’
‘You know absolutely nothing about me,’ she said softly, her face pink again. ‘You don’t even know how old I am.’
‘Thirty?’ he asked.
‘Almost thirty-two.’
‘I am forty-five,’ he told her. He took his finger and pushed back his upper lip. ‘That’s where the tooth is missing. I keep my hair short because I am a creature of habit.’ He felt his own face go red. ‘I take the hook off at night, because I’d hate to cut my own throat during a bad dream.’
She stared at him, fascinated. ‘I have never met anyone like you, Admiral.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘I think it is good.’
He held his breath, because she appeared to be thinking. Just say yes, he thought.
She didn’t. To his great regret, Mrs Paul shook her head. She retied her bonnet and stood up. ‘Thank you for the luncheon, Admiral Bright,’ she said, not looking him in the eyes this time. ‘I have had a most diverting afternoon, but now I must go to the registry office here and see if there is anything for me.’
‘And if there is not?’ It came out cold and clinical, but she didn’t seem to be a woman searching for sympathy.
‘That is my problem, not yours,’ she reminded him.
He stood as she left the table, feeling worse than when he waited for The Mouse. She surprised him by looking back at him in the doorway, a smile on her face, as though their curious meal would be a memory to warm her.
‘That is that,’ he said under his breath, feeling as though some cosmic titan had poked a straw under his skin and sucked out all his juices. It was an odd feeling, and he didn’t like it.
With each step she took from the Drake, Sally Paul lost her nerve. She found a stone bench by the Cattewater and sat there, trying to regain the equilibrium that had deserted her when she was out of Admiral Bright’s sight. The June sun warmed her cheek and she raised her face to it, glorying in summer after a dismal winter of tending a querulous old woman who had been deserted by her family, because she had not treated them well when she was able and could have.
Let this be a lesson to me, Sally had thought over and over that winter, except that there was no one to show any kindness to, no one left that being kind to now would mean dividends later on, when she was old and dying. Her husband was gone these five years, a suicide as a result of being unable to stand up to charges levelled at him by the Admiralty. The Royal Navy, in its vindictiveness, had left her with nothing but her small son, Peter. A cold lodging house had finished him.
She sobbed out loud, then looked around, hopeful that no one had heard her. Even harder than her husband’s death by his own hand—mercifully, he had hanged himself in an outbuilding and someone else had found him—was her son’s death of cold and hunger, when she could do nothing but suffer alone. She had been his only mourner at his pauper’s unmarked grave, but she had mourned as thoroughly and completely as if a whole throng of relatives had sent him to a good rest.
There was no one to turn to in Dundrennan, where her late father had been a half-hearted solicitor. The Paul name didn’t shine so brightly in that part of Scotland, considering her father’s younger brother, John, who had joined American revolutionaries, added Jones to his name and become a hated word in England. This far south, though, it was a better name than Daviess, the name she had shared with Andrew, principal victualler to the Portsmouth yard who had been brought up on charges of pocketing profit from bad meat that had killed half a squadron.
She had no other resource to call upon. I could throw myself into the water, she told herself, except that someone would probably rescue me. Besides, I can swim, and I am not inclined to end my life that way. I could go to the workhouse. I could try every public kitchen in Plymouth and see if they need help. I could marry Admiral Bright.
She went to the registry