Marrying the Captain. Carla Kelly

been talking in the hall with Gran, who held her hand. From her viewpoint much closer to the floor, Nana had looked up and up, and burst into tears before getting much beyond the gilt buttons. It was all too much.

      Her first glimpse of Captain Oliver Worthy—tall beyond tall from his high fore and aft hat, and majestic down past his boat cloak to his buckled shoes—had given her no reason to change her mind. There was an aura well-nigh impenetrable about the navy. These were hard men in a hard service, deserving of her respect.

      Maybe it was the matter of the pansies. It could have been when she put the wheat poultice around his neck that first night. Possibly even—blushes—when she knew he needed some help with a urinal. At some point in only a very few days, she fell in love.

      She didn’t know what to call it at first. She had fancied herself in love when the brother of a fellow student at Miss Pym’s had sent her a ridiculous poem about eyes that eventually rhymed “brown” with “crown,” then took a tortuous leap to “drown.” The infatuation had passed with his bad spelling, but not before she had allowed him to kiss her on the cheek during a supposed visit to his sister.

      She had admired a hemp vendor a few years ago when he spent a week at the Mulberry, extolling the virtues of his product at the rope walk near the dry docks. She had laughed at his humor, and he seemed to like her company, but he had never returned to the Mulberry. She had moped about for a week, but a month later when she couldn’t even recall his name, she decided it wasn’t love.

      Captain Worthy was different. Maybe it had happened when she woke up in the corridor, covered with the blanket she knew was from the clothespress in his room. She lay there in her sleep fog, wondering if he had actually touched her head last night, or if she imagined it. She put it down to imagination, but the touch seemed to linger in her heart.

      She tried to put the matter out of her mind and nearly succeeded. Gran would never countenance any connection with a navy man, not after what had happened to her own daughter. There was no way she could casually ask, “Gran, what does it feel like to be in love?” without arousing suspicions of the most dire sort. She had to work through the matter on her own.

      There was so much she wanted to know about him, and no way to find out. It was impossible even to know how old the captain was, because men of the sea didn’t age well. For all she knew, he could have been twenty-five, except she had enough knowledge of the fleet to know that men didn’t often become post captains at such an age. She reckoned he might be thirty; he could have been much older. She decided she didn’t care.

      Even setting aside her own mother’s disastrous ruin, she was fully acquainted with the folly of loving a navy man. From earlier, more prosperous days at the Mulberry, she remembered the wives of naval officers who had gathered in port when portions of the Channel Fleet were due.

      She had never forgotten the night a message came to one of the waiting wives. Her screams echoed and reechoed through the inn at the news her husband had died of ship’s fever miles away in Portsmouth, where his ship had put in, instead of Plymouth. The new widow’s hysteria so terrified Nana that she had to sleep with Gran until she returned to Bath.

      As she lay on the cot that morning, she remembered the incident, but it didn’t seem to matter. All she really wanted to do was get up, walk into Captain Worthy’s room and climb in bed with him.

      Thanks to Gran’s blunt education, she had a good idea of what men and women did in bed; the urge she felt was more than intimate physical comfort. She wanted Captain Worthy to wrap his arms around her and keep her safe from a world at war. She was too much of a realist to think blockade, hunger, cold, uncertainty and doubt would disappear, just because she was in the arms of someone stronger than she was. She just knew vicissitude would be easier to bear. That was all, but it was more than she had ever dared hope for, until his arrival at the Mulberry.

      There was a greater issue, one that cast her own needs into a shadow and made her come to a right understanding about love: more than anything else, she wanted to protect him from the horrors of his own duty.

      That she could protect anything was ludicrous in the extreme. She was just a woman, poorer than many, more vulnerable than most because of her questionable lineage. Laying all that aside, she knew she had within her the power to help that man—to love him whenever his duty let her; bear and nurture his children, even if he was far away or dead; make him laugh; keep him safe in her arms.

      Think it through, she ordered herself, and stayed where she was. She knew nothing about the captain’s background, except that he had no family living. She also knew that officers in the Royal Navy usually arrived at their posts through diligence and influence. Like other navy men—Lord Nelson’s father may have been a clergyman, but his uncle was comptroller of the navy—Captain Worthy was probably well-educated and well-connected. Men like that didn’t take illegitimate brides.

      Funny that a quirk of fate could render her unfit for the kind of company that her Bath education had taught her to believe was her right and privilege. Too bad she should have to feel less worthy than even a fishmonger’s child, dirty and speckled with scales from life on the dock, but possessing parents married to each other.

      She knew any connection with Captain Worthy was out of the question, so the matter of making sure she really was in love took on moot qualities. In the cold morning light, Nana resolved no one would ever know. The Tireless would be at sea again in three and a half weeks. If she could not survive such a paltry amount of time, considering the whole history of the world, then she was a fool.

      Nana decided not to think about life at the Mulberry, or even life in general, after the Tireless sailed back to the blockade of the Spanish coast. She knew a huge emptiness would be her purgatory for loving someone out of her reach, both by birth and by the terrible times they lived in.

      Nana got up quietly and folded the blankets before tiptoeing down the stairs and into the family quarters. Gran was humming and stirring porridge on the Rumford. Nana went to her silently and just leaned against her arm. Gran inclined her head toward Nana.

      “Did you get any sleep, dearie?”

      “Yes. I think Captain Worthy is still asleep.”

      There now; that was easy. She didn’t give his name any more inflection than she would have had he been one of twenty lodgers, and more than unusually critical. Nana knew that although Gran had no great skill with books or writing, she was shrewd and wise concerning life’s labyrinths. Nana also knew by some instinct that speaking of Captain Worthy too much would invite suspicion. Better to say next to nothing, beyond what her conversation should contain about any Mulberry lodger.