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  The Covert Captain

  Or, a Marriage of Equals

  Jeannelle M. Ferreira

  Copyright © 2018 by Jeannelle M. Ferreira

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design and formatting by Beehive Book Design (www.beehivebookdesign.com).

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  For Sonya, who sang it from ballad to page

  and

  For my wife, who is gently tolerant of the voices in my head

  Chapter 1

  Her head was full of noise; her eyes burned full of smoke. She was shouting as she stood in the stirrups, her voice too small to save any of her men. The lancers came on, and the horses screamed, and the men in the saddles did not have time. She saw Sherbourne go to earth with his sabre broken back at the hilts; she was bleeding herself, where her forearm had turned a lance. In her heart she knew they would never, never get out.

  You cannot pretend yourself whole. You never left that road by Genappe; you are back there, dead, dead in a charge with half the Lilywhite Seventh, and so you shall always be. And if a bit of you came back alive to England? You know yourself a coward, Fleming.

  “Fleming? Fleming, where the deuce’ve you got to?”

  She bolted up from the sofa, savaging old hurts. The major had shouted, so he was still below; she had time to brush her cheeks with her palms, and finding them damp, to smooth back her queue. She checked her silhouette in the long glass over the chimneypiece, buttoned her frock-coat anew and twitched her cravat.

  “Here, Major! Just here.” Her voice shook not a jot.

  “Come down! Bloody frog bloody porters in bloody Calais have made a muck of the baggage. The campaign chests are well enough, but none of the bloody tack’s arrived!”

  “Hush, Sherry,” said another, a woman. “You won’t bring it here from Paris bellowing.”

  Fleming took the stairs with as much speed as she dared—she had grown unused to marble—and stopped herself clicking her heels before the major, just in time. This was peacetime, and a house deep in the country, and she was a guest.

  “All right, Fleming? Look as though you’re about to cast up your accounts.”

  The lady at Sherbourne’s side hit him, right out, with her knuckles and not her fan. She was not young, perhaps, but none of them were young. She was dressed very comme il faut, in white lawn with a sash of periwinkle, with a matched fillet to hold her dark curls from her forehead; but her shoes were frankly worn at the toes, and she had a sensible face.

  “Fleming, may I present my sister, the Lady Harriet.”

  Fleming bowed low and kissed the proffered hand, rising to find the other woman’s expression had gone opaque. She knows. I’m caught out. She must know. Nonsense. Jesus.

  “And Harriet, this is Captain Nathaniel Fleming, with me in the Seventh since…since a damn long time ago, anyway.”

  “Welcome home, sir,” said Sherbourne’s sister.

  Someone already rustled the morning papers, and the scent of boiled coffee had begun to lose its edge. It was only half eight—a blistering hour to stand in one’s clothes, in peacetime—but the major was mad for the hunt, and had tried to rouse his captain an hour before. It was queer to move through a house so very quiet, so surrounded from every window by trees, and lawns, and the distant crash of the sea. Fleming felt out of sorts and alone, with a turnout of frock coat and breeches instead of regimentals, breathing in the homely smells of English food and English furniture-polish. She loitered outside the breakfast room, not quite pacing, neither advancing; she could not yet shake herself into the part of plain Nathaniel Fleming, gentleman’s son, all out of wars to fight and peace to keep. She touched for the hilt of her sabre three times before she quite knew it was no longer there.

  It was hunger kicked her over the threshold; Fleming gave a moment’s heed to her tailoring, smoothed her waistcoat, made her back straight and lifted her chin.

  “Give you good morning, Sherry,” said the captain, and made the best of it.

  It was not Sherbourne behind the Observer. “Belinda, stay, please, so that Captain Fleming may breakfast.”

  “I have no wish to be de trop, Lady Harriet,” Fleming halted, cringing as the downstairs girl dropped the kedgeree spoon on the carpet.

  “My brother called you here to shove us together like bundling cottagers, so you are most decidedly de trop, but he is off torturing birds at the end of a gun; so the duty is mine to invite you to breakfast. Unless you prefer to take pie and porter and seek him in the grounds?”

  To all this Fleming said nothing, only took up a cold roll and the marmalade knife.

  “Lord Sherbourne thinks me too decorative to notice a plot against my freedom, Captain Fleming, but I have had the measure of this since he told me his wounded war dog—”

  “I beg your pardon, lady, but I am cluttering your country house because I have—at present—nowhere else to go. As for your freedom, I have no designs on it. As for your brother, I believe he appraises you ‘deuced clever.’”

  “You are under a mistake, Captain. My father did not require cleverness of his daughters.”

  A quick, queer twist of Fleming’s countenance startled Harriet; she forgot to retreat behind the paper. Before she could speak again, the report of fowling shot made the mirrors and platters tremble.

  The captain’s shoulders hunched. “Your servant, madam,” muttered Fleming, and fled the room.

  Chapter 2

  I must beg a truce of you, Captain Fleming.”

  Bagatelle in A minor broke off with a sproink of keys; the captain scrambled to bow. “My lady?” He cast a look to the corridor, sending careful copies of Mr. van Beethoven under the instrument, over Harriet’s feet. She had not meant to go creeping—not precisely—but he had seemed to her so intent on his music, from his fingertips on the ivory keys to the toe of his boot keeping time, that for some time she had not wished to draw attention.

  “My cousin arrives this evening. It is your fault, and I require an ally.”

  “…Madam?”

  “As you have quite sensibly refused to go grousing, Sherbourne has sent for Viscount Beauchamp. I am thus afflicted with his wife, cousin Dorcas Beauchamp: fickle, fecund, and feeble of wit.”

  “I am ever at your service, my lady, but I cannot make small talk, or draw, or cheat at cards.”

  “Bother cards. I want the pianoforte, so I needn’t hear her speak. Motherhood is her life! Ah, the happy home! She has seven living children, do you know? And if she’d gotten any of them by her husband, she’d be locked up with the French disease.”

  The captain colored, coughed, and stooped to gather his music.

  “It shan’t be onerous. She never rises before eleven.”

  “But the seven children?”

  “All at home in Town, Captain, with the governess!”

  “I see.” He still coughed, perhaps on the dust of the room, as he endeavored to make his face straight. “I will play for you gladly, so
long as the major…”

  “Never mind Sherbourne. He goes in fear I shall murder cousin Beauchamp in the cow-pond, as I have threatened since before our coming out. And—and I shall tell him to beat the bounds for his silly grouse, if the shooting troubles you so near.”

  “It is kindly said, my lady, but a soldier should not fear a fowling piece.” The expression upon the captain’s face might have been, in a younger man, a grin, but it never reached his eyes, or the lines about them. Without comment as without rudeness, he stepped round Harriet and bowed, leaving the stacked music, the shut pianoforte, and a sheet from the Contredanses still under Harriet’s slipper.

  She did not see him again until the bell had rung for dinner. Looking at him then, in company with her brother Sherbourne, the bilious Viscount, and the centerpiece festooned with one of the day’s trophies, it was easier to see how the captain might fade from a room. His regimentals were new and bright, but he was not so tall by a head as Sherbourne, nor a quarter as broad as the Viscount. Because her cousin dropped her fan for him, Harriet knew him handsome enough; but she would not have called it quite that, though his fair queue was smoothly drawn and not so silver-tipped as Sherry’s, and his face was—well, it was. Sherbourne had gone into the tableau vivant of the affable officer, pumping the Viscount’s hand and drawing him along to the table, and Captain Fleming was quiet as ever.

  “Come then, old Spaniel, no one’s going to bite you; and if they do, you have ranking officer’s leave to bite back! Beauchamp, let me acquaint you Captain Nathaniel Fleming of the seventh Hussars, an excellent honorable fellow. Captain Fleming, my very dear cousin, the Viscountess Beauchamp…”

  There were war stories enough, though Viscount Beauchamp had been as far from the Peninsula as decency let him get, that Harriet did not hear the captain speak until well into the entremets.

  “I was not there, I’m afraid. I was still mucking about in a field hospital in ’sixteen, and that was a dashed hungry winter.”

  Dorcas Beauchamp looked up from her dacquoise as though the captain had not said hungry, but spotted pink. “Captain! Surely there was enough for the ranking men to eat!”

  Fleming cleared his throat. “It is an officer’s duty to look to his enlisted men. Do you not think so?”

  “Oh! I am sure it is as you say, Captain, but dear Beauchamp never wrote a word to me of hunger!”

  “Captain, please, spare our coz the pangs of do you think so.” Harriet was seated just across him, close by Sherbourne at the head of the table, but only five dined, and all could hear it. “No one is hungry now, thank God, and we have had nearly enough of history for one night.”

  “Nearly enough, madam?”

  “You must favor us, first, with why Sherry calls you Spaniel, of all things.”

  The captain shrugged forward, the curls of his queue nearly skirting his chocolate-bowl. “I misremember, madam. I suppose because I kept watch upon the wounded.”

  “It was only Thaniel, at first,” Sherbourne said. “Deuced hard to bellow the whole name out in a firefight. It was Spaniel when he set his teeth in and would not let me die.”

  “Heavens, Major,” replied the Viscountess. “You must tell us that, and from the beginning!”

  Sherbourne went on, obliging his audience, as Fleming grew fascinated with the napery. “You know, my dear, it is the task of the cavalry to charge a line of men until it breaks. There are times… Good men, and brave beasts, find themselves too deep in the line to come safely back.”

  The Viscountess Beauchamp gasped aloud, but Lady Harriet was straight and set-lipped, white as though Death had touched her on the hand.

  “It was only a charge gone badly, dearest, not a six-pound ball in my lap. It was not worth troubling you by the post.”

  “Sherbourne,” said Harriet, not in acquiescence.

  “Well. With God’s grace and Fleming’s, no one came to very much harm.”

  Her hands were cramped and sweated round the embroidery frame, and under Harriet’s cap her curls lay draggled. Her cousin was dozing, from warmth and shandy, and the Viscountess’ girl was blind-busy with a sea of the seven children’s mending; the afternoon was bright, the heavens unmarred blue. Harriet nudged the window wide, and leant out.

  Horses enough came up the looping gravel drive at Bournebrook, when her brother the Earl was at home, that Harriet no longer remarked their hooves’ noise, but on a sudden there was such a crunching and a clatter that she gave a glance below.

  “Captain Fleming, what on earth!”

  “Your brother Sherbourne, madam!” The captain called up to the window. “Has bought—himself—a hunter!” The horse was black as the devil, gleaming with exertion. Captain Fleming was hatless, and his hands were bound up in the reins, but he sketched a courtesy and beamed a smile. Then he was gone, his coat flying behind as the horse leaped the carriage-drive, turned the corner, and—supposed Harriet—went at a tear for the kitchen garden. A moment later he was back, near standing in the stirrups as the horse paused, then reared up sharpish as if at Harriet’s sight.

  “Has he bought another uncontrollable horse?”

  “No, my lady,” Fleming replied, in as courteous a shout as possible. “Now then, my boy, my boy!”

  The stallion’s front legs crashed down, and the rear flew up. Harriet shut her eyes and braced for Fleming’s fall.

  “If the beast cannot be controlled—”

  “One is endeavoring to so do, madam!”

  “But he is running away, Captain!” She shouted to the captain’s back as the horse gamboled, then wheeled, and flew.

  “…only running,” drifted up to the window. Harriet saw the captain flatten down in the saddle, to miss the lowest limb of Bournebrook’s sentinel oak. Then they were away in earnest, into the fields and out of sight.

  “Harriet Georgiana, what are you doing? Hanging from that window like a charwoman!”

  “It was so dreadful close, cousin. I felt I must breathe a moment.”

  “He is rather pleasant, is he not? With those cavalry shoulders, and eyes a very gentian. But only think what his pension must be, dear cousin, if he is compelled to horse-break for Sherry.”

  “I cannot think—dear cousin—that his pension is any of my concern. I do not believe he draws one. Sherry does not.”

  “Sherry is not a third son, or a captain, on half-pay.” The Viscountess returned to her needlework with a smile that might have dripped goose-grease. “You are twenty-six now, I think?”

  “Twenty-eight, coz dear.”

  “You have left it rather late. Sherry indulges you, letting you sit so on the shelf—but even you might do better than a Waterloo Medal, and a tarnished one at that.”

  “Dear Dorcas, you must have forgotten; Brother Sherbourne indulges me, as you say, but I have only two hundred pounds a year.”

  “You have one other commodity, I hope.”

  “Thank you, cousin. I dare say you will find the room a touch less warm without me,” Harriet said, and brought the window sharply shut.

  She went out into the grounds with cheeks still flaming, still in spencer and slippers and pinner-cap; she was over the wicket gate and half across the first field before she felt the wet grass against her feet. Harriet cursed aloud and flung the useless shoes over the stile.

  “Come now, eternal damnation for old slippers?”

  She gave a ridiculous scream and something like a hop. The captain leant against one of the great oaks nearest, the murder-horse’s reins thrown over his shoulders, and the beast quite still at his side. He peeled an old apple with a clasp-knife and fed slices to the horse. When the apple was gone, he closed the knife and put it away, scratched the horse along the withers and then said, finally, “My lady.”

  “The horse,” answered Harriet, taking a step away.

  “Oh, he and I have reached a gentleman’s understanding,” Captain Fleming said. “It rests chiefly upon apples. Shall you come riding?”

  “And be killed!” r />
  Fleming put his head on one side, as the horse might, and his look was half puzzled, half grave. “He will bear two as easily as the wind might bear a leaf, and I will not see you hurt. I am sorry—I would walk him for you as long as you wished, but he is not broken to a lady’s saddle. If you are fond of hacking, I will try to use him to it.”

  Harriet laughed. “What, sitting aside?”

  “You might be broken to sitting astride, I gue—” Fleming’s hand flew to cover his mouth. He strangled a moment, and colored up to the hair.

  Harriet ventured a timid length toward the horse. “He is very beautiful. But I cannot believe he is gentle.”

  “Stay there; wait.” Fleming ducked under the horse’s neck, casting the reins back into place as he did so. He put his foot in the stirrup and swung to mount, seemed to rock a moment in the saddle so that its weight moved over the stallion’s left flank, and—most terribly high off the ground—dropped his left foot from the stirrup and tucked his right calf close by the left stirrup-strap as a lady might. He sat facing Harriet, aside, and then he patted the horse. It moved—Harriet lost some few steps’ ground—and the captain kept his seat. The stallion went a neat ring around Harriet and the oak and then, on a moment, Captain Fleming’s boots touched the turf at her side.

  “Whirlaway is no trouble, madam.”

  She laughed again; she must. “What nonsense do you call him?”

  “No more nonsense than Sherry called him, upon my word. Black Turk! What a clodding name for such a beast!” Fleming was in the saddle again before Harriet could reply. “Will you come up, or shall I take him back to the grooms?”

  Harriet swallowed, wiped her palms dry, and reached up her hands. She had not thought of gloves, either, but she had little enough time to berate herself; she braced her bare foot upon the captain’s boot, and then the leather band of his breeches at the knee, and then she was looking down from the warm, rising, falling, ever-moving back of the horse.