Victoria and the Rogue Read online

  Victoria sent the young man what she hoped he’d read as a scornful look. It was impossible to say what Captain Carstairs would make of her expression, however, since he persisted in seeking her acquaintance despite everything she’d done to discourage him.

  “Tigers?” Mrs. White looked horrified. “Really, my lady? I must say, I… Tigers? Fearsome creatures, I understand. Are you saying you encountered them? Regularly? How ever did you manage to get away?”

  “I shot them, of course,” Victoria replied with some asperity, and, at Mrs. White’s gasp, flicked an irritated glance in Jacob Carstairs’s direction. Honestly, if he wasn’t poking fun at Victoria’s suggestion to Captain White that the decks be swabbed with lye instead of vinegar so that they’d get cleaner, he was making light of her assertion that lemon juice made the best rinse for ladies’ hair. Apparently lemons were not as bountiful in England as they were in India. But how was she to have known that? He seemed to have an opinion on everything, and not the least compunction about sharing those opinions… most especially those for which he had not been asked.

  As if this were not irritating enough, Mr. Carstairs had the added fault of looking exceedingly agreeable, despite his distressingly low collar points. His coats and breeches were impeccably tailored, his Hessians highly shined, and his dark hair neatly trimmed. It was quite objectionable that so maddening an individual should be so attractive.

  How very different Jacob Carstairs was from a certain other young man Victoria could—but wouldn’t, for propriety’s sake—name! As different as day and night, though the other gentleman was every bit as handsome… but certainly better skilled at turning his shirt collar, as well as holding his tongue.

  It was unfortunate that Victoria had not quite mastered that particular art as well, since Mrs. White was all in a dither over her tiger remark.

  “Shot them!” Mrs. White cried, her face going white as the lace inside her bonnet. “My lady! With a rifle?”

  It occurred to Victoria a bit belatedly that proper young English women did not as a general rule make a habit of going about and shooting wild animals, and that she really ought to have kept this particular talent of hers secret—rather like she was trying to keep secret that particular moonlit night off the coast of Lisbon… no thanks to Captain Carstairs, who was forever reminding her of it, as he did so now.

  “Oh, Lady Victoria is as skilled at firing a rifle as she is at winning hearts. She has as many tiger pelts as she does marriage proposals,” he said with a wink—an actual wink!—in Victoria’s direction. “She collects them. Don’t you, my lady?”

  Victoria was convinced that if there were a ruder young man in all the world, she had yet to encounter him. It was on the tip of her tongue to point this fact out to the impertinent Captain Carstairs when Mrs. White’s husband, who’d gone portside to supervise the lowering of the longboat, suddenly reappeared with the announcement, “Lady Victoria, if you are quite ready, the swing has been prepared.”

  Victoria, still smarting over Jacob Carstairs’s reminder of the tender scene he’d so rudely interrupted the other night, replied, without stopping to think what she was saying, “I shan’t need the swing, Captain. I am perfectly able-bodied, and shall climb the ladder down to the longboat like everyone else.”

  Young Captain Carstairs raised his dark eyebrows upon hearing this, but for once said nothing. It was Mrs. White who looked likely to suffer an apoplexy over Victoria’s announcement.

  “The ladder?” she cried. “The ladder? Oh, my lady, you can’t know… you must not be aware… the ladder will never do at all. Oh, no, not at all. I cannot allow it. I simply cannot.”

  Stuff and bother. Belatedly, Victoria realized she had, once again, committed a faux pas. Young English ladies did not apparently climb down ladders, any more than they went strolling around the decks of sailing ships after dark with young men to whom they were not related—as she had had pointed out to her several times, and to her everlasting chagrin, by Jacob Carstairs. It might, Victoria reflected, have been nice if her uncles had warned her of these things before they’d so unceremoniously shipped her off to this bizarre and foreign land.

  A glance at Jacob Carstairs, however, showed Victoria that she could not back down now. His gray eyes looked more mischievous than ever, and his mouth was distinctly curled up at the corners.

  “Tut, tut, Mrs. White,” he said. “Lady Victoria, take the swing? Swings are for mealymouthed misses who swoon at the sight of a shark fin. Lady Victoria is made of much sterner stuff than that. Why, I’d pit her against a shark any day of the week.”

  Victoria narrowed her eyes at the odious Captain Carstairs. Really, but he was extraordinarily full of himself! Back in Jaipur, if any of the young officers had addressed her in such a manner, Victoria’s uncles would have had the unfortunate young man stripped of his rank.

  To show Mr. Carstairs that his teasing did not bother her in the least, Victoria turned to Mrs. White and said calmly, “I shan’t bang about on a swing in this wind. I’d be dashed along the side of the ship. The ladder will do for me nicely, thank you.”

  Mrs. White fluttered her hands. “Oh, but my lady, really, I feel I must… as your own dear parents are no longer with us, and your uncles appointed me as your guardian for your journey, I feel I must act in their stead, and say that it is truly not at all seemly—”

  “Stuff and bother,” Victoria said sharply. How tiresome these English ladies were! “Show me the ladder and let us have done with it before the rains come.” For the sky overhead definitely looked threatening to Victoria, no matter what anyone else might say, and she did not want her new bonnet, which she’d saved for this very day, to be ruined.

  Upon being led to the ladder, however, Victoria found that her enthusiasm for it waned somewhat. It really was quite a long way down, and the ladder was, after all, made only of rope and wood. But, she told herself staunchly, so was the swing, and at least on the ladder she would be in command of her own destiny, whereas the swing would be dropped down by crew members… some of whom Victoria feared were not altogether as committed to their duties as one might hope.

  Accordingly, she hiked up her skirt and pelisse—causing Mrs. White to gasp, as if the glimpse of a woman’s ankles were quite the most offensive thing in the world. It was a good thing, Victoria thought, that Mrs. White had never been to Jaipur, where women and girls—including Victoria—regularly went about with their feet and legs bared to the knees, and she swung a leg over the ship railing. She teetered there for a moment while her foot sought purchase on the first rung of the rope ladder, and happened to glance down again….

  And realized this was a mistake. The men in the boat below looked very small indeed. It was a long, long way down to the water’s choppy, whitecapped surface. Such a long way down, in fact, that Victoria began to feel strangely hot, though the wind that was nipping at her skirts was quite brisk. Her pulse, she was convinced, had begun to stagger, and her mouth had gone suddenly very dry.

  Victoria froze where she was, beginning to think that the swing might not be such a very bad thing, as at least she could keep her eyes closed all the way down. She was trying to decide how she might broach this subject to the people in front of whom she had only too recently scoffed at such an idea, when she felt a hand, warm and reassuring, upon her gloved fingers.

  She opened her eyes to see the odious Captain Carstairs hanging above her, the corners of his lips, as usual, twisted into a smile… only this one was not scornful, but rather kind.

  “Don’t look down,” he advised her gently, “and you’ll be all right.”

  Victoria swallowed—a difficulty given the dryness of her throat—and nodded, not trusting her voice. There was nothing for it now. She had no choice but to climb down, as she had apparently lost all ability to speak, and could not ask for the swing.

  Down she accordingly went, carefully keeping her gaze on the side of the ship as she climbed. She could hear the men below shouting encouragingly
to her—“Easy does it, m’lady,” and “Nice ’n’ slow now”—and she was quite grateful to them, since their voices made the roaring in her ears, which had nothing to do with the sea, seem less oppressive.

  And then finally, sooner than she might have suspected, she felt their hands on her elbows and waist, and she was lifted from the ladder and put down inside the longboat… which was a good thing, since her knees gave out completely the moment her feet touched the boat’s bottom, and she knew she would not have been able to walk to her seat unaided.

  There were some cries of “Hurrah!” from the ship’s deck, impossibly high above her head, and Victoria began to feel the blood move inside her veins once more. La, she thought. Why, that was nothing at all! Imagine having been afraid of a little climb like that!

  By the time poor Mrs. White—who, of course, opted to descend by the swing—joined her in the longboat, Victoria had forgotten all about her own fear and could not help feeling annoyed at the other woman’s theatrics. For, despite Mrs. White’s assertions that the swing was perfectly safe, she shrieked quite hysterically all the way down, before collapsing completely once she was safely inside the longboat. Victoria was forced to wave hartshorn beneath the lady’s nose before she became sensible—quite a deplorable way to behave, Victoria could not help thinking, for a ship captain’s wife. She could not see why Captain White bothered to let his wife come along during his voyages at all.

  Captain Carstairs, who descended by ladder a few moments after Mrs. White was safely delivered, had nothing but admiring looks for Victoria—something she noted with a good deal of relish. It was a shame about Jacob Carstairs’s collar points—and his character, of course, which was of far too teasing a bent to be desirable—because in every other respect he was quite an agreeable young man. In fact, if she hadn’t met Lord Malfrey first, Victoria thought she might have found herself in some danger of falling for the dashing captain….

  Except, of course, for his grating personal manner, which made any such match unthinkable.

  Still, he could be nice enough when he put his mind to it, as he’d illustrated in his sensible advice to Victoria earlier on the deck about not looking down.

  At least, that was what Victoria was thinking until the young captain noticed the hartshorn she held to Mrs. White’s pale face. For some reason it compelled Captain Carstairs to remark in a cheerful tone, “Well, you must be feeling very happy indeed, Miss Bee. Finally a chance to be useful to someone!”

  From that moment until they safely reached the dock, Victoria had nothing but dark looks for Jacob Carstairs, who enraged her further by seeming only to find her snubs amusing, instead of being upset enough by them to apologize for his rudeness, as any other young man would have done. He showed not the slightest inclination to throw himself overboard in penance for his mistake, either.

  As if this were not bad enough, Victoria, upon arriving at last upon the very dirty and disrespectable-looking dock she’d observed through the captain’s spyglass, found herself being exhorted by Mrs. White not to stare at the prisoners being loaded onto a ship headed for the penal colonies, something Victoria found very hard not to do, for when else was she ever going to get another chance to look into the face of a tax evader?

  But it was not seemly for young English ladies, Mrs. White informed her, to show such avid interest in convicted felons. Back in India, Mrs. White understood, things like public hangings were commonplace, but in England such barbarous activities were no longer tolerated, and hangings took place in prison yards where they belonged, and it was considered rude to stare, even at tax evaders headed for the opposite hemisphere.

  What dull creatures the English were! Victoria could not help thinking. Really, but she found it very difficult indeed to believe she would ever fit in with these colorless, bland people. But she supposed that if she was to be married to one of them—though no one could ever think of Hugo Rothschild as bland—she had better start trying, at least, to get along with them.

  But Victoria felt her patience was being too severely tested when the loud clattering of horse hooves sounded on the cobblestones nearby, and she heard her name being called… only, to Victoria’s mortification, it was not her given name being called out, but her nickname.

  “Vicky! Vicky!”

  Victoria, glancing out from beneath her bonnet brim, saw a large barouche draw as close to the pier as the street would allow. Then, before the driver could descend to open the door, it burst open, and what appeared to be a veritable flood of children, small animals, and a bare minimum of adults came spilling out. All of them began scrambling toward her, a formidable wall of humanity, screaming her name.

  Victoria, had she been made of less sturdy stuff, might have turned tail and run from this familial tidal wave. But she managed to remain calm, and only stepped a little away from Mrs. White, in order to keep that good lady from being knocked over in the sea of arms and legs and upturned faces that soon engulfed Victoria.

  “Vicky!” One of the adults, whom Victoria immediately recognized as her mother’s sister, her aunt Beatrice Gardiner, flung her arms around her and pulled her into a rib-breaking embrace. “Look at you! Just look at you, all grown up, and looking so very elegant!”

  Elegant Victoria supposed she might have looked before that embrace, but she felt her new bonnet slip back from her head just as she was thrust away and held at arm’s length by her shoulders while her aunt swiftly assessed her.

  “You’re every inch of you your father,” Mrs. Gardiner exclaimed, her blue-eyed gaze sweeping her niece up and down. “I don’t see a single hint of Charlotte in her, do you, Mr. Gardiner?”

  Victoria’s uncle Walter Gardiner, who had not thrown himself wildly at her like the rest of his family, had instead stood to one side, sucking on his pipe. Now he said only, “Hmmm,” and that seemed to be enough to satisfy his wife, who had moved her hands from Victoria’s shoulders and was now, to Victoria’s abject mortification, running them along Victoria’s arms, through the material of her pelisse.

  “Look how thin,” Mrs. Gardiner exclaimed, with what appeared to be a good deal of satisfaction. “Did your uncles not feed you properly? Oh, I knew it was wrong to leave you there with them. I knew it! And you’re so dark! Why, you’re tanned dark as a Gypsy! Did your uncles fail to provide you with proper sunshades? And she’s so small! Look how small she is, Mr. Gardiner! La, I’d swear she’s smaller than Becky, and Becky was the smallest girl at her school. I could put you in my pocket, my dear, and carry you home! And she’s still got her father’s eyes, I see. Neither brown nor green, but a little of both, as if the good Lord couldn’t make up his mind on the matter. And your hair, Vicky, which was so blond when we saw you last. It’s turned completely brown! There’s not the slightest chance of you and Becky passing for sisters anymore. You’re nowhere near alike. Not alike at all!”

  While Mrs. Gardiner had been announcing all of this, Victoria was suffering silent throes of agonized embarrassment. It was bad enough to be exclaimed over in such a manner in the privacy of one’s own home, but it was ten times more humiliating for it to occur in public… and particularly in the presence of one Jacob Carstairs. For Captain Carstairs, Victoria knew—though she dared not glance his way—was somewhere about, and was undoubtedly watching the scene with his customary smirk. To hear her aunt’s voice shrieking out her physical flaws like that— and Victoria was very aware that she did have flaws, though she did not consider them quite so serious as her aunt evidently did; she was well aware of her lack of stature, and while she did not think of herself as too thin, she knew she was wanting in certain areas where it was in vogue for young ladies to be well padded—was quite mortifying enough. But to know that Jacob Carstairs could hear her…Well, if Victoria could have chosen to expire on the spot, she would have.

  Her cheeks, she knew, were glowing beneath her tan, and she no longer had the brim of her bonnet nor her parasol to hide them beneath: her bonnet was hanging by its ribbons around her nec
k, and her parasol had been knocked from her hand by her aunt’s enthusiastic embrace. She could not, even if she’d wanted to, have raised her gaze to meet Captain Carstairs’s, because she would not have been able to see him, so much were her enthusiastic relations crowding her. Her gown and pelisse were being tugged at by a dozen eager hands, as her young cousins vied with one another for her attention. Only one of those cousins did she recognize… indeed, the vast majority of them had not yet been born when last Victoria had seen their parents, and that was her cousin Rebecca, who was closest to her own age. It was Rebecca with whom a four-year-old Victoria, along with their parents, had traveled to India, in order that their mothers, who were sisters, might visit their four brothers, stationed in Jaipur with the British military.

  Sadly, it was during that visit that a malarial outbreak had taken the lives of both of Victoria’s parents, causing Rebecca’s parents to flee with their daughter back to England, leaving behind a sickly and contagious Victoria, who was not expected to survive.

  Survive Victoria had, however, and no amount of across-the-sea cajoling had been successful in inducing her uncles to send her back to England to live with their sister, who thought it quite unsuitable for a young lady—particularly the only daughter of the Duke of Harrow—to be raised by three young bachelors. It was only now that Victoria had reached marriageable age that her mother’s brothers had decided to relinquish their guardianship… a decision Victoria could not help noting coincided with her growing disgust for and complaints about their sometimes scandalous behavior. For example, she had never been able to get a single one of her uncles to refrain from putting his feet upon the table after a heavy meal.

  Victoria could only dimly remember her own parents, and recalled the Gardiners just as vaguely. She had a distant memory of Rebecca joining her in a mud-pie-building contest. Now a golden-haired beauty of seventeen, Rebecca, Victoria could not help noticing, looked perfectly unlikely to take part in any such activity. She had not even deigned to join her family’s undignified greeting of their cousin from India. Instead she’d stood a little apart, spinning a parasol in one hand and smiling rather coquettishly. It took a moment or two for Victoria to realize whom Rebecca was directing that smile toward, and when she did, she felt stunned. Why, it was none other than Captain Carstairs at whom Rebecca was smiling! And that gentleman, Victoria noticed with disgust, was smiling back! It was clear that the two of them had met before, because Victoria heard Rebecca call, over the din her younger brothers and sisters were making, “Good afternoon, Captain Carstairs!”