Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

F lora had no real experience with brazen.

But she had never had any experience with being intimate with a man and look at how delightful that endeavor had turned out to be. She felt positively aglow with good feelings.

Christmastide was growing on her after all.

She linked her arm with Jack’s and let the captain steer them where he would.

In another few moments, they reached the top of the stairway. Jack covered her forearm with his and bent his head low, as if they had been strolling along, wrapped up in the most intriguing conversation.

“Ready?” he asked. “Here is our useful fool, Colonel Crathie. Like this—” He raised his voice, so their conversation became audible. “No, no! That was back in the year ought, I’m sure. Let’s ask, the colonel, here. Crathie, my good man, wasn’t that in the year ought? You’ll remember, of course, the Corsican was up to his neck with revolts in the West Indies, was he not?”

“Certainly,” was the colonel’s staunch reply.

“Good man, Colonel.” Jack patted him on the back. “And there you have it.” And onward he led her, taking the whole time. “I was in Excellent at Cape Saint Vincent, you see, Miss Conway. Have you any great knowledge of that glorious battle? No? Well, you see?—”

When at last they had made a full circuit of the drawing room, he lowered his voice. “And that is how you avoid the bores—by becoming one. Idiocy is a marvelous charm. People are afraid they’ll catch it, so they move off as soon as possible.”

“You really are incorrigible, Captain.”

“Thank you. I do try.”

“You succeed.”

“Not yet,” he muttered under his breath. “One more turn of the room should do it, Miss Conway,” he advised. “Then you’ll go get yourself your single glass of wine and?—”

“My single glass of wine? How did you know that I?—”

“—and if Lady Ivers is serving smuggled French wine,” he went on quickly, as if he were determined to divert her attention from the fact that he seemed to know her habits too well. “Please be so kind as to not tell me. Take your supper with Lady Ivers—there is an empty seat next to her—and I will come and join you in good time.”

“I will not inquire as to how she has maintained her cellar,” Flora pledged with a smile. But it was another moment of education. How had she never thought where her glasses of wine came from? How had she never thought about how the hundreds of bottles her Papa had stored in the cellar at Kirk Brae Head might have arrived there during the years and years that the Royal Navy had been blockading Revolutionary, and now Napoleonic France?

She certainly thought about it now, as footmen circulated about the house, their trays laden with all manner of imported libations while she filled a plate from the laden table. Though her curiosity was high, she quietly slipped into her seat, and kept her musings to herself.

That was until Lady Ivers turned to her. “Good Lord, Flora, where have you been? No,” the lady immediately contradicted, holding up her hand. “Don’t answer that.”

“I am right here,” Flora attempted to follow Jack’s direction to brazen it out, lying with a laugh. “Where else would I be?”

“Gone for an intolerable length of time,” was the lady’s pert answer.

Flora tried in vain to keep herself from blushing. “I must have…”

“Lost track of the time. Yes, certainly.” Lady Ivers supplied the lie even as she shook her head. “You did right, coming to sit with me. It will make the talk die down.”

“What talk?” Flora immediately looked around her.

“No, don’t look,” Lady Ivers contradicted. “And don’t be obtuse. Did I not just tell you an hour and a half ago not to fall for the man? And what do you go and do—fall, clearly. You’ll have to stay here, of course. We will make some excuse that you retired to your room to attend to a ripped hem. I’ll have a footman take word up to Kirk Brae Head that you are staying here with me tonight, so that your own people will not worry.”

“I don’t think?—”

“No, you didn’t think, which is fine in its place, but that place is not my home. And that time was not tonight. I warned you!”

There was nothing Flora could say but, “Yes, my lady. I am sorry.”

“Yes, well. Finish up your supper and then stay with me whilst I begin to see my guests—including a certain captain of the Royal Navy—off for the evening.”

A word that might have been, “No,” tried to escape her lips, but Lady Ivers’s answering stare was unwavering. “Trust me to know what’s best,” the woman instructed, “though I daresay you like it not. But Rome wasn’t conquered in a day—it took a steady campaign so that the day the barbarians arrived at the gates, they fell with ease. Not that you’re a barbarian, Flora dear. Nor Jack either, but you take my point.”

Flora did not, exactly, take her point. But what she did take was that it was again her turn for being told off. “Yes, my lady.”

Lady Ivers finally nodded in satisfaction. “Good girl.”

In another half hour, after the first of her ladyship’s guests began to take their leaves, that lady summoned a footman. “Find Captain Balfour and bring him to me posthaste, there’s a good man.”

And when Jack dutifully appeared a few minutes later asking, “How can I be of service, my lady?” the lady was characteristically direct.

“You can do me the honor of taking the advice I, in my greater wisdom and infinite patience, have taken the time to give you, Jack. And you, Flora. She is not for you,” Lady Ivers told Jack. “Spare yourselves the inevitable disappointment and torture of falling in love. It simply won’t do. Now, take your leave like a gentleman before you make me regret this unfortunate need to give you a talking to.” And then she belied her stern words by kissing him on the cheek and saying. “Content yourself with sending flowers and be done. I’ll see you on Thursday next at Lady Cairn’s, of course. Goodnight, Jack, darling. Off you go.”

Jack donned his cynical hauteur along with his well-worn sea cloak. He was everything gentlemanly as he accepted Lady Ivers’s directive as well as her embrace, making them an elegant leg before he raised her ladyship’s hand for a kiss, though he used that moment to shoot Flora a look from under his furnished brows.

“I’m sorry,” she mouthed wordlessly from behind Lady Ivers’s back, both embarrassed and delighted to be doing something so school-girlish.

“An honor as always, my lady,” Jack addressed to their hostess, before he turned to Flora with something like amused regret in his eyes. “Miss Conway, a very great pleasure to converse with you, however briefly. Good luck in your quest for purpose. I’m sure you’ll find it.”

It was exactly the right thing to say. “Thank you. And the same good luck to you, Captain.”

“And I thank you.” He jammed his battered tricorn on his head. “I’m going to need it.”

“Yes,” she said nonsensically, grasping for something, anything else to say. “I hope we will see you back in the city for Green Night,” as Lady Cairn was calling her winter solstice celebration.

“Perhaps,” was all he would commit to in Lady Ivers’s presence.

And with that, he touched his hat and was away.

Flora watched him stride off, down the stairs and despite all her protestations of independence and no regrets, she could not but yearn to follow him. To see him in his own familiar surroundings. To find out every last shred of information about who he was when he was not roguishly propping up drawing room walls or bringing her to the peak of physical bliss.

The door closed behind him and Flora attempted to shake off the feeling of loss and call her good sense into order, only to find Lady Ivers regarding her through narrowed eyes.

“It is clearly even worse than I thought,” the lady sighed. “Come along.”

Orders were given and hasty preparations made and before Flora knew it, she was being ushered into a very pretty, silk-lined bed chamber, where quilts were being turned down on a very soft bed, and a fine linen sleeping shift was being warmed in front of the fire by a maid.

Lady Ivers fussed and clucked like a mother hen. “I hope you will be comfortable in here. This is Elspeth’s room when she comes to stay.”

Flora could not help the thought that materialized in her brain of the delights Elspeth might have experienced in the room—if the goings on in the conservatory were any indication of her amorous pursuits—though she endeavored to keep her embarrassment from her voice. “It is exceptionally lovely.”

Lady Ivers dusted a nonexistent speck of dust off the silk coverlet. “Make yourself comfortable. If you need anything, you have but to ring for it.” She gestured to the bell on the bedside table before going to the door. “I hope you sleep well.”

“Thank you, my lady.”

At the portal, the lady paused, as if in thought, before she turned. “And I hope, my dear, Flora, that he was worth it.”

Flora, who had decided that trying to lie to Lady Ivers was a fool’s errand, gave her the truth. “Most assuredly, my lady, he was.”

“Good.” The canny old woman’s smile was as wide as it was sly. “I had very great hopes that he would be.”