“Damn and blast!”
The old musket landed with a clatter on the library table. How was a woman to protect what she loved most with needlework, the pianoforte, or the choice of the proper bonnet when the skill she really needed was how to turn a little round ball and some foul-smelling powder into something useful?
Her grandfather had set store by two things and two things alone—hunting and reading. As such, Emmaline Peachum did not understand why the dear man had not one book in his entire library on how to load a gun. Then again, as his love of hunting was in the tramping about through field and forest from dawn until dusk, it should be no surprise at all. His love of reading was more akin to Emmaline’s. He preferred literature, philosophy, and above all, art. A book on how to load a gun was far too practical for a library dedicated to life’s finer pursuits.
“I do not have time for this,” she muttered as she perused the shelves of books in search of something, anything to aid her cause. Not that she knew the precise time. The clocks had been taken by the bailiff and his men yesterday. A spectacle every resident of Sloane Street had witnessed in a bee swarm of whispers and an entire pantomime of blank stares. Emmaline had not shed a tear, not even when that horrible, red-faced man had come back and snatched Mama’s little pocket watch from its place on the drawing room mantel.
She was near to tears now, however, and all for want of a book on how to load a gun. Reginald Peachum would have been more likely to have a book on the subject. Had he considered a book anything more than a great bloody waste of money. No, Papa was not one for the written word unless it might be used to swindle his fellow Englishmen out of their hard-earned money. The books covering every shelf in the library had belonged to her grandfather, and they now belonged to her. As did the musket Emmaline had tried to make ready for the last half hour.
One by one she picked up and discarded the array of bits and bobs she’d found in the box with the musket. The musket balls and the odd-shaped pouch of gunpowder made perfect sense to her. If only she might decipher the mystery of how to get them into the gun to make it fire. And fire it she would, if it came to it. She had no choice. She’d never had a choice in life, not really. Until now. And she’d made it.
She’d stood by and watched her home of the last fifteen years stripped bare of every single possession therein. Taken by the bailiff and his men to pay for her father’s crimes. The furniture, the paintings, every pot and spoon in the kitchen, even the chamber pots had all been stacked onto carts and hauled away the day her father’s trial had ended. They’d come back a few weeks later to take their clothes, her jewelry, the bed linens, and even the rug at the kitchen door. Thank goodness, they’d not thought to look in the cupboard under the stairs, where she’d found her grandfather’s gun.
Emmaline had raised neither hand nor voice in answer to these removals. Men had lost their last penny and a few had taken their lives thanks to her father. The sale of the household goods would do little to compensate those he’d wronged. But she’d not begrudge them the few pounds each man might receive once the last vestige of her former life had been put to the gavel.
They would come for the last of it today. And if Sir Stirling James did not show up soon, Emmaline had no choice but to defend the love of her life with an unloaded gun, a viper-tongued maid nigh on to forty, and as much bluff and bluster as she might conjure. Another skill women needed to be taught, to be sure.
“Right, then.” Emmaline scrunched her damp eyes with the backs of her hands. She ran her palms down her last clean pinafore and shoved the table a bit closer to the doors. A soft snick behind her announced Birdie’s quiet entrance from the servant’s passage set into the faded, green silk wallpaper at the back of the library.
“Did you manage to load it?” Birdie came to stand beside her and nodded at the musket on the table.
“No.” Emmaline sighed. “For all the good it would do us. It would only fire once before they took it away from me. And one member of this family living and dying in the criminal ranks is quite enough.”
“So you say, Miss Em.” Birdie picked up the musket and handed it to Emmaline. The sound of heavy boot-clad feet scuffing the maid’s scrubbed parquet floor rumbled toward the library. “But you don’t have to shoot the blighters. Just make them think you will.” She crossed her arms and eyed the locked library doors. They shook in their frame against the pounding fists on the other side. “If they think you’re a bit mad, per’aps they’ll go away and come back tomorrow.”
“With the men from Bedlam, no doubt.” Emmaline raised the musket and snugged the stock into her shoulder the way her grandfather had shown Ned when they were children. A pang settled beneath her breast. Ned. A room of old books and a decrepit musket were all she had left of the fleeting happiness of their childhood together. Loud voices added to the din. Quarreling about the best way to break in and toss her out into the street—books, maid, musket, and all. One final act to the Cheltenham tragedy her life had become. At least the neighbors would be entertained. Again.
“You will cease this harassment at once. The lady and everything remaining in this house are in my charge now.”
One voice rose above the others. Not by volume, but by the sheer strength of command in every syllable and word. And there was something disturbingly familiar about that voice. Emmaline and Birdie gawked at each other and then looked back at the doors.
Doors that gave way… with a boom.
Somehow, Emmaline had been knocked flat on her back.
The noise was deafening.
Had they used explosives? All over an on-the-shelf spinster and some books?
Thick smoke permeated the room. Emmaline began to cough. Her shoulder ached like the devil. As did her head where she’d landed on the floor. Her ears rang, but she still heard Birdie’s frantic cries.
“Miss Em! Miss Emmaline! Are you hurt?”
She was lifted, none too gently, to her feet. She blinked and realized she held the musket clenched in her hand. She realized because someone was prying her fingers off and handing it to the man standing behind him. Him. The man with the dangerous misty grey eyes. All of him was misty now. No. Wait. Smoky. There was a smoking tear in the arm of his jacket. It was a very nice jacket too. The fabric felt expensive. Felt? Oh dear. She was clutching his arms for dear life. What had she done?
“I shot you.” Well, that was the understatement of the century. The smoke in the room had invaded her head.
“Think nothing of it, Miss Peachum.” His lips kicked up on one side. The tall, quiet navy man was smiling at her. Sort of. And speaking to her. Apparently, all it took was a little gunfire. Who knew? “I’ve been shot at before. Rather used to it actually.”
“Then you must learn to keep a better class of company, sir.” She sounded mad as a March hare. Emmaline reached for the hole torn in his jacket. He caught her hand and patted it.
“I will take that under advisement, Miss Peachum.” He turned to the bailiff and his men. They stood in the corridor and gaped at her. Well out of the line of fire, she noticed. “You men still here? I ordered you to leave. Be about it. Now.”
She had never seen such large men leap over each other to leave a place. His voice, so rich and crisp, yet so assured of obedience—Emmaline nearly scarpered out of the room herself. Wait. This was still her house, no matter what he’d said… before she shot him. She stifled a groan.
“Are you in pain, Miss Peachum?”
What? Oh no. Apparently, she hadn’t stifled that groan completely. And now his eyes bored into hers, half in concern and half in amusement. Amusement? At her. She’d had quite enough of this.
“Who are you, sir? And what is your purpose here?” Good grief, Emmaline. A little civility wouldn’t hurt. Then again, she’d never shot a man. How had she shot him?
“My purpose? Other than serving as a target for your shooting practice?”
“I didn’t know the gun was loaded. I couldn’t find a book on the subject.”
“That is good to know. I should hate to think you ruined my best Weston on purpose.”
She heard Birdie snickering none to quietly behind her.
“Who. Are—”
Sir Stirling James stepped around his friend and placed the musket back onto the library table. “Miss Emmaline Peachum, may I make known to you Captain Lord Arthur Farnsworth. As promised, I have found you a husband.” The Scotsman was quite handsome when he beamed at her like a benevolent—
What?
Husband?
“Cor’, Miss Em. I’ll say he has. Can you find me one, sir?”
Emmaline gasped and rounded on her maid with a pointed glare. Birdie glared back, unrepentant, and nodded at the criminal handsome navy man. No, at the captain. She’d been right about him when she saw him in the cemetery. Arthur Farnsworth. Powerful hands, clad in the softest leather gloves, grasped her cold, bare fingers. She had no choice but to turn back and meet his depthless grey gaze. For a moment, a single moment, she allowed herself the luxury, the sheer indulgence of feeling safe, as if one day her life might be ordinary.
“For a gentleman known as The Marriage Maker, you are of little account dealing with a lady’s sensibilities, Sir Stirling,” Captain Farnsworth said, his little promise of a smile tilting his mouth. Still holding her hands, he drew Emmaline to the far end of the library. They stopped next to her grandfather’s huge old library globe. The wood of the heavy mahogany stand in which it sat glowed dark red in the light from the morning sun. The drapes in this room had been the first to fall to the bailiff’s men.
Where had that thought come from? Emmaline tried to settle her sights on anything and everything save the serenely strong man cradling her hands in his. She failed miserably and finally gave in to the urge to find his face, to search his expression for some clue as to his character. His intentions. Anything about him at all. Birdie was right. It was a crime to be this handsome.
“Miss Peachum.” He squeezed her hands. “I know this is all very untoward. I fear your situation is such there is no time for a great many niceties.”
Emmaline snorted. “I have not had niceties in my life for quite some time now, Captain. I don’t remember them well enough to miss them.” She hoped he did not hear the regret in those words.
“Practical. Good.” His expression grew solemn, save for those stormy blue-grey eyes. “Still. Miss Emmaline Peachum, will you do me the honor of accepting my hand in marriage?”
Her life to this point raced through her mind, a runaway carriage of schemes, scandal, deaths, all the things she’d been forced to do, and all the ways she was never enough. For her mother. For her father. For society. For herself. And now one more person for whom she’d never be enough invited her to believe she might at least survive. She’d traded so much for the illusion of safety. Was this man simply one more illusion?
“Miss Peachum?”
“I am trying to decide what you are, Captain Farnsworth.”
“What I am?”
“A madman? A fiend? I know you aren’t a fortune hunter.” His mien never wavered. His calm, his way of looking at her made her stomach tighten. Something was falling away from her. She had no idea what.
“A madman? Not enough to draw attention to myself. A fiend? Only to the men who served on my ship. A fortune hunter? Not all fortunes are silver and gold, Miss Peachum.”
“Oh.” The word left her in a whoosh of air. Her cheeks blazed with heat. “You don’t know anything about me, save my father was the most notorious swindler in all of England, and he died in prison. Why would you tie yourself to a name as scandalous as mine?”
“Has she said yes yet, Captain?” Birdie called across the room. Sir Stirling shook with laughter. Emmaline clapped a hand across her eyes and hung her head.
The captain used two fingers to slowly raise her chin. “You are not your name… Emmaline,” he said in that dark rumble of a voice. “You are a woman who refused Sir Stirling’s marriage auction, because no matter how desperate your circumstances, you still know your worth. That is good enough for me.”
Oh, he was good. Truly. He was aloof, and charming, and clever enough to know he’d win her better by flattery and making himself appear harmless. And he was her only hope. Her strength, stretched like antique lace over watered silk, was set to tear and unravel at any moment. She didn’t have to trust him to marry him. What a sad testament to a supposedly romantic event.
“Then God help you, Captain Lord Arthur Farnsworth,” Emmaline said as she squared her shoulders and tugged her hands from his. “I accept your proposal.”
“God help us both,” he murmured as she walked back toward Birdie and the mad Scotsman who had set this plan in motion.