A Scandal to Remember (44 page)

“Dead,” spat Ransome. “Devil take his soul.”

“And how did he die?” the quiet judge asked.

Ransome blinked, and put his tongue out to lick his lips before speaking. “In the boat. From exposure and thirst. He weren’t a strong man.”

“And yet you allege that he was strong enough to pull out repairs—extensive repairs made by the carpenter—and attack a fit man such as Lieutenant Simmons?”

Ransome would not give up. “Crazed he was, I tell you.”

“Mr. Ransome.” The sharp post captain leaned forward over the table. “I must warn you that your answers stink strongly of lies.”

“I’ve heard quite enough.” Sir David rose in order to stop the spilling over of so much dirty laundry. “Gentlemen.” He addressed his fellow adjutants. “If you will follow me.”

The men filed out of the room to consult, and a heavy hush descended upon them. No one spoke. And Dance could only look at Jane, and hope that his thanks, and more, was visible upon his face. Because there was no time or opportunity for anything else. The panel of judges was already back.

And in less time than they had taken to deliberate, Captain Sir David Douglas took up his charge.

Everything that was within Dance contracted into a single tight knot. He felt almost dizzy, as if the blood were being squeezed out of him—his palms pricked and tingled as Sir David adjusted his spectacles and took his blasted time finding his place on the paper before him.

Get on with it, man, Dance wanted to shout.

Sir David cleared his throat. “The court having maturely and deliberately considered the evidence, finds these charges against Lieutenant Charles Dance not proved.” He paused and looked over his spectacles. “Lieutenant Dance, do you wish to accuse the bosun, George Ransome, of neglect of duty and willful misconduct, as well as false testimony?”

Blood and air and gratitude pounded back into Dance’s lungs all at once. He heard the murmured approval of his officers, and Jane’s sharp intake of breath, but had to steady himself before he could say, “I do.”

“So you have.” Sir David leveled his steely gaze at Ransome. “It is the judgment of this court that you, George Ransome, be reproved for the false witness you have given this day. You are stripped of your warrant, and are hereby dismissed from the service. Let some merchant take you off the service’s hands, but you will not find employment among honest men.”

And so it was done.

But not to Ransome. He turned on Dance. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you? You couldn’t let things be easy as they were. You had to meddle and prod and go where you weren’t wanted.”

Dance drew himself up. “What I did, Mr. Ransome, was my duty.” And so he had.

“Duty!” Ransome spat on the deck timbers at the judges’ feet. “Duty can hang. What has duty ever got for men like me? Twenty years in the king’s service, and put ashore for the peace with nothing to show but the clothes on my back. I was only after taking what was mine. What I earned for twenty years of backbreaking work of saving my bloody country.”

Ransome’s words hung in the air for a long stunned moment before Sir David spoke. “It is your good fortune that you have been dismissed from the service, Ransome, as duty would not have hanged, but you most assuredly would. Now get this man from my sight, and put him off my ship.”

And so it really was done. Ransome was taken up by the marines, and dragged, cursing, from the ship.

Despite his acquittal, Dance felt like he had been keelhauled and flogged round the fleet. Even his brain felt tender and sore as he shook hands with Sir David and the other adjutant captains, and endured the hearty congratulations of Denman, Whitely, and Simmons.

But there was only one person he wanted to see, and she was slipping out of the cabin, and headed for the entry port.

“Jane!” He ran after her, and took her arm in a firm grip. He had thought he had lost her twice before, and he was not going to let go of her now. “Where do you think you are going?”

She looked up at him with her honest blue eyes and said. “I hardly know.”

“I do.” He was all serious, impulsive decision. “We are going to get married. Right now.”

Jane looked up at him with those marvelously bright eyes, and smiled that smile that warmed him like nothing else. And then she looked down at her strange calico dress. “Right this moment?”

“Yes.” He took her other hand just in case she did not understand him. “I refuse to spend another day apart from you.”

“Do you?” She looked at him from under her brows, the mischievous warmth lighting her eyes. “And in what manner have I given you to think that I would marry a man like you, with no fortune and no name?”

He refused to think that she was doing anything but flirting with him. He refused to be intimidated, though her great-grandfather was the Duke of Shafton, and she did deserve better. So did he—he deserved
her
. He had earned her. “My dear Miss Burke. I cannot possibly make a list of such things in public.”

Her smile was like the sun on a cloudy day, breaking through all his unspoken doubts. “Might you be persuaded to make such a list in private?”

“Most emphatically. But we cannot easily be private until you have married me.” It was all he could think of—all he had thought of for days. He had been delivered from his accusers by her hand, and that hand he would make his own.

But she was not so impetuous. “And this is your proposal?”

He stared at her. “Yes.”

She looked at him with those forthright eyes. “It is a very bad one. You haven’t at all arranged things in the proper manner.”

“Jane. Nothing we have done, from one end of this voyage to the other, has been done in the proper manner. What on earth makes you think I am about to start doing so now?”

“Well,” she objected. “You have done a few things in the proper manner, I suppose. A very few things.”

Few?

“Jane.” He tried to invest his voice with a wealth of warning, but she was his Jane, and she was not in the least intimidated by this captainy growl.

“If I marry you, and go on your ships with you, will you promise to let me have access to all your barnacles?”

He thought he was going to expire on the spot. “Oh, yes, Miss Burke. Oh, yes. You will have free and unlimited access to each and every one.”

She gave him her very sunniest smile. “Then yes, Captain Dance. I will.”

Epilogue

They were married on a rare sunny day by the Reverend Mr. Phelps who was not best pleased to find himself after the fact, but as the typhoon that had separated Dance and Jane from the others was an act of God, their being thrown together on the island was also an act of God, and who was he to object to the Almighty’s sovereign will?

The ceremony in the
Centaur
’s wide stern cabin—Sir David not wanting to pass up an opportunity of making himself useful to the Duke of Shafton—was entirely private, consisting of only the reverend, and themselves, and Sir Richard and Mr. Parkhurst—who, with all their precise interest in the strange weather, had determined its cause to be an ash cloud from an explosion of the volcano Mount Tambora in the Lesser Sunda Islands of the Dutch East Indies, where they were now bound to investigate—as well as Jack Denman. And
Tenacious
’s officers, of course, and Captain Sir David Douglas as official witnesses. And Punch, who was kind enough to give her away. And a few sailors who proved remarkably sentimental about a shipwrecked bride—they passed her various trinkets and pieces of carved ivory, and bid her hold them for good luck.

But Jane did not need good luck. She had Dance, and he was all the luck she would need.

If Jane had ever dreamed of something grander than the quiet words said in borrowed clothes, she forgot it, and learned to fill her dreams with other things.

Because Dance had made plans.

As soon as the Reverend Mr. Phelps had finished reading out the words, and made a written record of the event in his logbook—and Dance had made the august notation in his—her husband let her be kissed by her friends, and then ushered her into a boat.

Though Jane would rather have done almost anything than get into another boat, she tried for patience. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.” He smiled though he did not look at her.

In fact, Jane thought, he smiled and would not
let
himself look at her, lest he tell all. “Dance?” she wheedled. “Tell me.”

“We are going there.” He pointed across the water to a trim schooner anchored some distance off.

His answer was not at all as she had expected. “I thought you said they had posted you to a frigate.”

“They have. But not quite yet.”

“Not quite? Dance?”

“Patience,” was all he would say, until the gig slid alongside the low, sleek hull and Dance stood—impervious to the motion of the sea—and handed her aboard. “Up you go, madam.”

The flush-decked, two-masted ship was beautiful in and of herself, with her polished wood and brass gleaming in the sunlight. Her husband—her husband, hers and hers alone—made a quick inspection of the vessel, until he finally asked, “What do you think of her?”

He was wearing that strange little half-smile of his—the cynical-looking one, that she had not seen in quite some time. It worried her. “I hardly know what to think. She is a very beautiful vessel. Very American, I should think, with this efficient fore and aft rig. But hardly a suitable command for a post captain.”

“But she is my command. At least temporarily.” And now his smile spread full across his face as if he could no longer contain it—as if he no longer
wanted
to contain it. “Sir David Douglas has gifted her to us for a honeymoon.”

And now Jane could not contain her smile. “How thoughtful.” It would be wonderful to have someplace private to be together at long last. Somewhere they could touch and hold hands and sleep curled against each other. “It will be heaven.”

“Exactly,” Dance confirmed. “Because that is where we shall be going. But I shall need your help to make sure everything is packed in readiness, and arranged just so.”

For a moment Jane’s face burned with the thought that he was speaking metaphorically, and that he thought to return them to that state of connubial bliss they had enjoyed on the island, but the look in those green eyes of his was too open, too literal—

“Dance? Do you mean—” Jane squashed her hand over her mouth to keep the words in. She could hardly dare hope.

“For your honeymoon, Mrs. Dance, I mean to take you to a very private place I know of at approximately twenty-four degrees latitude and one-hundred twenty-four longitude.”

“We’re going
back
to the island?”

“We are, and you are going to find those giant bivavles, and tritons, and cone shells and whatever else were going to make you the most famous conchologist and discoverer of shells the Royal Society has ever known, so you can replace each and every one of the drawings that Ransome destroyed.”

“Dance.” Her voice had gone all hot and soft, and her vision of him was clouded by an astonishing press of hot tears. “I can’t—”

“What do you mean you can’t? I thought— Jane. What is the matter? Why are you crying?”

“Because I’m happy.”

He looked at her with that stunned, uncomprehending expression she so loved. “Now you cry because you are happy? You who have endured more hardships than even Sir Richard might have imagined—superstition, near drowning, and shipwreck, not to mention the loss of your book, which I know you feel more keenly—without so much as a single tear?”

“Yes.” Once she had started she could not seem to stop.

So many things, so many hardships and changes—the tears flowed until she knew her cheeks were wet and her eyes had gone red from the stinging tears. Because she wouldn’t change a thing. “Because I would endure it all again this instant if it would bring me you. Nothing, no shell taxonomy, nor mention by the Royal Society, will ever mean as much to me as you.”

Dance took her face between his big hands, and thumbed away her tears, and pressed a single, solitary kiss upon her forehead. “I don’t know what I have ever done in my life to deserve you.”

“You saved me from drowning, for one thing—and that counts a very, very great deal with me. But you know you could have stopped me that morning. You know you could have simply shaken your head, and told me to be off, and never let me board, and I would have slunk home across the Solent in my pinnace, and none of this ever would have happened. But it did, all thanks to you. Because you said yes.”

“I never actually said yes.”

“Dance. Shut up. You are ruining a perfectly good, sentimentally heartfelt speech.”

“Good. I deplore sentiment. And I have a much better way of shutting up your mouth, my dear Mrs. Dance. Just the way you like it.” He looked at her then, in that way that made her feel as if she were the only person in the entirety of the world—as if they were the only two people in creation, and they had all the time in creation to simply be together, in love.

She took firm hold of his hand. “Do you, Captain?”

And so he kissed her, to end all doubt. Firmly and tenderly and with hunger. Just the way she liked it.

Also by

Elizabeth Essex

Almost a Scandal

Breath of Scandal

Scandal in the Night

After the Scandal

Novella

The Scandal Before Christmas

Praise for Elizabeth Essex’s Reckless Brides series

Almost a Scandal

“Essex will have readers longing to set sail alongside her daring heroine and dashing hero. This wild ride of a high-seas adventure/desire-in-disguise romance has it all: nonstop action, witty repartee, and deft plotting. From the bow to the mast, from battles to ballrooms, Essex delivers another reckless bride and another read to remember.”

—
RT Book Reviews

“Elizabeth Essex will dazzle you with her sophisticated blend of vivid historical detail, exquisite characterization, and delicious sexual tension.
Almost a Scandal
is a breathtaking tale of rapturous romance and awe-inspiring adventure!”