Chapter Seven

in which sam mourns

I’m afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety. —Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

The man calling to Fenton huffed toward us, three harried ladies bobbing hurriedly in his wake. They looked like nothing so much as aggrieved ducklings under their bill-like bonnets and swaddled as they were in heavy gray cloaks. They also each looked too much like Fenton for me to presume anything but a familial relationship. Mother. Two sisters. Did that make the man a brother-in-law?

“Fen!” he called again, shoving between the rank and file of the naval men, who were extremely annoyed by his impertinent line cutting—especially since he wasn’t in dress blues himself.

He wore all black, save for the exertion red of his cheeks and the sharp white of his neckcloth. His hat was expensively dapper but too small for his head, and he had to keep one hand on the brim as he trotted along, paying no heed to the puddles he stepped in or the hems he trod on.

He wasn’t unattractive , but his snubbed nose combined with his padded jowls gave him an unfortunate roundness of face that the high collar could disguise only so much, and his short-cropped hair was so light in color that it appeared as if it was thinning. He gave the impression of a soft teddy bear of a man trying too hard to disguise his physique in fashions that made him look fat, rather than leaning into the advantages of his barrel-chested frame.

As a woman who was significantly curvier than the runway sample size, I sympathized. It was hard to feel good about how you looked when everything was designed to shame you into succumbing to diet culture.

“Lewis!” Fenton said. The men shook hands and slapped shoulders. Lewis towered over both of us, and the way he squeezed Fenton’s hand gave the impression of a former high-school quarterback star who hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact that both his metabolism and his glories were a thing of the past. “Miss Samantha Franklin, may I introduce Judge George Lewis.”

“Miss Franklin,” he said jovially, giving me the kind of up-and-down look that I might have flipped him off for in another era. His gaze lingered on the way I had my arm linked through Fenton’s.

“Your Honor,” I replied with a curtsy.

Fenton made a stifled noise of frustration, but my apparent etiquette breach just made the judge chuckle. He had a charming, comforting smile.

“We’re not in court today, Miss Franklin. Just my lord will do.”

“Ah.” Embarrassment flagged hot across my cheeks. “I don’t meet many judges.”

“Is that so? Good at staying out of trouble are you, little miss?”

It was supposed to be teasing. Instead it came out as condescending.

“No. It’s just that no one’s caught me yet,” I teased back, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Lewis seemed delighted by my sass, at least, which was more than I could say for Fenton.

By then the three ladies had caught up, and a woman I assumed was Fenton’s mother bypassed the rest of us to embrace her son hard. I stepped back to give them room. She was a compact, stocky thing smothered in black lace frippery, and barely came up to his shoulder. She had on fingerless lace mittens, and the black contrasted starkly with Fenton’s tanned face when she cupped his cheeks to hold him still for a good long look.

“Hello, Mother,” Fenton said warmly. “I’m very happy to see you well.”

“And you, my courageous boy,” Mrs. Goodenough said tearfully. “We’ve been reading the most dreadful things about the fighting in the newspapers.”

“It’s not as bad as all that.” Fenton downplayed, but the way he flicked his eyes up at one of his sisters, the blond one, made it clear that there was at least one family member with whom he shared the real horrors of war. She rolled her eyes at him but otherwise didn’t comment.

Oh, I liked her already. She was cute. I mean, not pretty , not in the soft round way that her brother, sister, and mother were. She was lean to the point of being androgynous, her chin stubborn, her nose strong. But her sharpness was tempered by the soft wisps of the yellow-gold hair that framed her face under her bonnet, the roses in her cheeks, and the twinkling smile in eyes the same shape as Fenton’s. She was fascinating.

“My little brown-winged hawfinch,” Mrs. Goodenough warbled, patting his cheek and moving aside so each of his sisters could greet him with a warm, “Welcome home, Finch.”

“Finch?” I asked. “For serious?”

Lewis and I shared a glance of humor, but Fenton was gawping with no little bit of horror.

“Oh, Miss Franklin, no,” he said, but it was too late.

“Finch!” I repeated. “ Captain Finch!”

“Miss Franklin, please ,” Fenton pleaded. “It is a childhood endearment. If it got around London—”

“I promise, I won’t use it. Cross my heart and hope to die.” I ran a finger along my chest in an X , then mimed zipping my mouth shut. Neither gesture meant anything in particular to my companions, but they got the general idea.

The family reunion done, the ladies turned curious eyes to me.

“Sisters, this is Miss Franklin. Miss Franklin, my sisters, Mrs. Kempel and Miss Goodenough.”

“If you’re to call our brother Finch, then you must call us Marigold,” the blond one added promptly, gesturing to her sister and then to herself, “and Daisy.”

I stuck my hand out to shake, and when that was met with raised eyebrows, dropped it quickly to offer head bobs instead.

“Then Sam for me,” I said to cover my gaffe.

“Daisy was kind enough to agree to allow me to escort her,” Lewis whispered loudly enough that everyone around us could hear. “And of course, both Marigold and your mother being widowed, I couldn’t let them attend alone.”

Ah, he was one of the braggart Nice Guy types.

“Good of you to escort them, Lewis, thank you,” Fenton said. I couldn’t help but notice that he was sticking to the formal mode of addressing his friend, while the judge was splashing around given names like an overloaded paint roller.

Fenton must have caught my disapproval because he immediately looped Lewis and his mother into a conversation about how very good it was of Lewis to help his family find a place to stay in town, when the lodgings were crammed with everyone in the country come to see off Nelson.

“Our brother’s rank and special permission to enter among the first being, of course, only of secondary motivation,” Daisy murmured behind her scarf to her sister as soon as the men were distracted.

Marigold chuckled, then caught herself and admonished her with a low, severe “Daisy! What will Miss Franklin think.”

I sidestepped closer, and their eyes widened as I leaned in to whisper: “She’ll think it’s both hilarious and accurate.”

Marigold reared back, unimpressed. With her round chin, dark hair, and doe-brown eyes, she was the spitting image of Fenton at his most disapproving. But Daisy immediately curled her arm around mine and pressed against my shoulder.

It jostled my wound but I swallowed back the wince. It wasn’t like she had done it on purpose. This close, Daisy smelled of violets. Her eyes were the color of a luminous, snow-laden winter sky. She must have favored her late father. I didn’t see much of Daisy’s statuesque facial structure in Marigold, Fenton, or their mother. Daisy was taller than me too; enough so that she had to lean down to whisper in my ear.

“I do believe we may become very good friends, Miss Franklin.”

“Sam,” I insisted again, maybe more flirtatiously than I should have, but my gosh, was she captivating. You couldn’t blame a gal. Besides, she wouldn’t know what I meant by it.

“Sam,” Daisy repeated with an inscrutable narrowing of her eyes and a mischievous curl of her mouth. “How sweet.”

“Funny, I was thinking the same for you three. Marigold, Daisy, Finch.”

“Mother is an Iris,” Daisy offered quickly.

“You’re a garden of delights,” I purred.

Some of the aloofness Daisy had arrived with melted away, and she pressed against my arm. Her breasts were soft and enticing against my shoulder. In a dance club, I would have turned my head and focused on her mouth so she knew exactly what I thought about that, before leaning in to try for a kiss. Instead, I laid my hand over hers on my elbow and forced myself not to think salacious things about a woman I was angling to make my sister-in-law.

Marigold looked between us sourly, irritated at being excluded from the banter. “How are you finding England, Miss Franklin?” Marigold asked, peevishly sticking to my surname.

“Cold, Mrs. Kempel,” I offered, leaning back and opening my body language to make sure Marigold was included in our tête-à-tête.

“I hear the winters are harsher in the colonies.”

It was a dig at what I was wearing. I let it pass. “True,” I allowed. “But we dress more sensibly for the weather.”

“Yes, I had noticed,” Marigold said with a sniff.

Oh, two could play at that game.

“Also, my university built underground passages so we wouldn’t have to go out in the snow.”

“You attended university?” Daisy asked with awe.

“I did—”

“And did they not finish you?” Marigold interrupted, trying for witty but coming across as petty.

“Tch,” Daisy clucked at her sister. “Why talk of fashion and finishing when Miss Franklin, pardon, Sam , has been to university. And to sea.”

“Have you never?” I asked. “Been on the water, I mean.”

“No, save for the little boat that the Gales have on their charming duck pond.”

“Which is treacherous enough,” Marigold said in a tone that made it clear that this was a threadbare argument.

Water, closing over my head, pressing against the back of my throat, salt in my lungs, hacking, burning—

“Miss Franklin?” Daisy said, but her voice seemed to come from the end of a tunnel. “Sam?”

“Mfine,” I lied, clearing my throat. My heart raced so hard I thought Daisy might be able to feel it in the throb of the artery at my elbow. “But I’m with your sister on this one.”

The sisters exchanged a look that made it clear that they didn’t believe me, but Marigold tactfully changed the subject anyway. “It is very bold of you to take passage alone.”

“How adventurous!” Daisy enthused. Fenton must have softened the telling of how I had come aboard quite a bit in his letters home. “Who are you to meet, now that you’ve arrived?”

I cleared my throat again. “Well. I’ve met you and Judge Lewis.”

“Have you no relations nor friends in England?” Marigold asked in a tone that said she thought my deliberate misunderstanding of the question was tedious.

“None,” I crackled, through a swell of grief like broken glass on my tongue. Daisy’s hand squeezed comfortingly. “But that’s part of the fun, eh? I get to . . . start over.”

“Oh,” Daisy said, reading the sadness behind my bravado. “You’ve nowhere to stay?”

“Daisy,” Marigold cut in warningly. “I know we discussed taking in a lodger—”

I laughed, trying to put on a good face. “I don’t think I’ll need to.”

“Oh?” Daisy asked, intrigued.

I sent an admiring glance at Fenton in his stupid hat. “Your brother and I have gotten close. I like him very much.”

“Oh,” Daisy repeated, pulling back, the peaks of her cheekbones pinkening. “Yes, of course.” She almost sounded disappointed.

My BiFi pinged hard. I was good at reading the signals in a century where I was familiar with them, but she knocked me off kilter. There was no way she was throwing off enough bandwidth for me to be picking it up. Could she?

No fucking way.

Daisy?

The squirmy, tight thing in my guts creaked and tightened further. It didn’t matter if Daisy was like that. It wasn’t like there was anything she could do about it. Not now. Not here.

How tragic.

How terrifying .

“Miss Franklin, you should know that Finch—” Marigold began, but we were interrupted by Lewis’s brash laughter.

“Be serious, Fen,” Lewis howled.

“I am. Miss Franklin is the young lady I wrote to you about,” Fenton said. Lewis’s expression turned shrewd.

Without warning, Mr. Lewis seized my left arm, detaching me from Daisy. He pulled the muff off and showily pressed a kiss to my hand. I was too surprised to be embarrassed. The ladies looked away, mortified. Fenton was the only one who didn’t look shocked.

“Hmm,” Mr. Lewis said as he ran a finger up my sleeve. He found the knot of bandages under my arm, and pressed down.

“Ouch!” I said, more of a warning than an exclamation of pain. “What the hell?”

“It is not so bad as you had me believe in your letter,” Lewis went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Judicious use of shawls will hide the damage nicely in the warmer months. What is she?”

“Invisible, apparently,” I snapped, trying to disentangle myself.

Lewis took this as his sign to instead swoop in and take both my hands between his, like a lover in a pantomime. His smile was thin. I thought: He should be wearing a trilby instead of a top hat . Lewis had a firm grip, and I didn’t think I could shake him off without causing more of a scene than we were already producing.

“Samantha,” he began, as if I was a misbehaving kindergartener who really should know better. I bristled.

“Miss Franklin, thank you,” I cut in. “I don’t remember giving you permission to use my first name, my lord .”

He laughed dryly. “Apologies, Miss Franklin. I do believe I’ve made a very bad first impression in my eagerness to make your acquaintance. It is not every day that a man has the pleasure of meeting a mermaid.”

“I’m not a mermaid. I’m a Canadian.”

He laughed again, loud and performative. I turned to Fenton for a rescue. He said nothing, but his ears flushed. I couldn’t make out his expression under the brim of his taco-hat. Fucker better not have been laughing.

Before I could find a way out, there was the bang of a wooden bolt being pulled back and the creak of the doors of the hospital being thrown open. The crowd surged at our backs.

“Ah, finally!” Mr. Lewis exclaimed, elbowed in between Daisy and me, and took my right arm without so much as a may-I. Pain shot up my neck from the healing wound. “O woe! The doors part and the weeping nation enters through. Let us gaze upon the fallen hero together, Miss Franklin.”

“Wait a sec—” I tried to protest as he dragged me forward, cutting in line ahead of the more deserving officers. “Aren’t you supposed to be escorting Miss Goodenough?”

“She has her brother to watch over her,” he said, but partiality over his shoulder, making it clear it was as much an admonishment for Fenton as it was an excuse for me.

Daisy and I exchanged helpless looks as we were separated by a sea of blue wool.

Lewis bowled us into a grand hall. Each tug sent new waves of pain sweeping up my nerves. I decided that there was nothing for it but to let Lewis have his way, get this over with, and get back to more sensible company. The only other option was to pitch a fit, and I wasn’t going to let that blow back on Fenton.

Lewis marched us across marble flooring to the far side of the hall. We stopped at a modest dais that was separated from the crowd by a waist-high wall.

I was afraid the body would be out in the open air. Thankfully, Lord Nelson was ensconced inside a black coffin with gilded edges and images of battle etched onto its panels. The coffin itself was draped with white fabric, sheer enough to let me appreciate the detailing on the wood beneath. A canopy of rich black swagging hung overhead. Painted cherubs and angels peered at the assembly from their aspects on the ceiling. The walls were draped with mind-bogglingly massive captured flags—tattered and singed from the shipboard skirmishes that had won them—medals and battle trophies, battered sails, swords, and tridents. All of it on a more epic scale than I’d expected, but then again, as my tour of the Salacia had proven, warships were huge.

It wasn’t a funeral, it was a spectacle .

The coffin was flanked by two sailors, faces grim and uniforms spotless. They were probably present to keep souvenir seekers at bay, and the thought of someone making off with Lord Nelson’s finger or a clipping of his hair was enough to make my stomach turn.

“There he is,” Mr. Lewis hissed in a deliberate pitch that allowed him to be overheard. “Our great Lord Nelson, dead as a doornail. Blooming shame.”

Around us, other mourners hissed their disapproval. I felt the back of my neck get hot, a hundred eyes on it, blaming me for the behavior of the man who had seized hold of me. But I couldn’t have stoppered up his irreverence any more than I could have parted the seas.

“Push to the front, darling,” Lewis said, his wide hand on the small of my back. “Get a good view.” Two hundred years from now I might not have thought anything of it, but now, after months of having nobody but Fenton touch me, it felt shockingly obscene. I tried to wriggle to the side but his hand followed.

I did move, but only to get away from him.

Once there, I saw that the lid of the coffin was partially glass (pickled, still!), and Lord Nelson’s face was visible through a small window. Oh god. He was pallidly bloodless. Already the skin was pulling back from his teeth, sinking against his cheekbones and deepening his eye sockets. A dip in brandy hadn’t done enough to fend off natural decomposition.

I fought the urge to gag, and even though the room was clear of any scent of rot, I could recall it. It was the smell that had wafted from the ocean the day after I’d been pulled out, thick and sweet with death, moldering flesh in the creeping gloom. I clapped my hand over my mouth.

Please don’t let me puke on Horatio Nelson’s coffin, I thought. That would be so uncool.

That would be no way to honor a man who had died at the same moment I was meant to.

The twisting thing inside me wrenched so suddenly and so hard that a cracking seemed to fill the vast, echoing hall. The world swirled, black at the edges and painfully bright in the center. Voices swarmed, like air bubbles speeding past my ears.

“No,” I said.

“No what, darling?” Lewis asked. His bulk was the shadow of a shark passing beside me, the brush of a sinking corpse.

“No,” I said again, but what I was denying I didn’t know. I gripped the sides of my head, body checked Lewis to the side, shoved my way through the mass of people stinking of sweat and rosewater, sweet meats and dirt, pipe smoke and life.

I tumbled into the outside air, pushed to the edge of the great crowd still waiting to get into the hospital, and found myself knee-deep in a snowbank. The cold didn’t hurt. I sucked in a great lungful of air, but it wasn’t fresh, wasn’t the relief I needed. It was cloying, seasoned with the grease of frying food and horse manure.

And there was no car exhaust, no aggressively sterile hospital smell, no commercial perfumes.

Horatio Nelson was dead.

And I was alive.

I was alive, here, now, when he should be. Maybe even in his place. Christ. I was in 1806. I was lost. No. Worse. I had no control. I was at the mercy of everyone around me, men who knew nothing, and believed nothing, and understood nothing .

I was trapped .

~

I don’t know how Daisy found me. I don’t even know how I’d gotten where I was, sitting in some half-frozen slush puddle out the back of a building reeking of piss and garbage.

Her hand on my shoulder was gentle.

“Samantha?” Daisy said, her voice the soothing softness used on startled horses and frightened children.

“Daisy.” The hitch in my voice made me realize that I was sobbing. The tears clung to my cheeks, frozen, burning .

She tugged me upright. I leaned back against the filthy wall. I covered my face, ignoring the gritty gray wet that clung to my hands. Looking at her right now seemed like it would . . . I don’t know, be the final nail in the glass, or crack in the coffin, or something like that.

“You’re frozen through,” she said. She stripped off her cloak and slung it over my shoulders.

“I’ll get it dirty,” I said, which was really a rather stupid thing to be concerned about. Hypothermia, that had to be it. My brain couldn’t seem to process anything beyond the immediate.

“And we can clean it.” She helped me work the muff back down my arm so I could tuck both of my filthy hands into it. “Let’s get you by a fire, silly thing.”

I flinched. Was I silly? Or had I gone mad?

I was fucked, that was what I was.

“I’m in the wrong place, Daisy,” I blurted.

“In that, we both agree,” she replied, distracted with navigating us both out of the alley without fouling our hems any further.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to be . . . be this . . . be you .”

“Be me ? Whatever do you—”

“Lord, there you are,” Fenton said from the mouth of the alley, interrupting whatever Daisy was about to say. He heaved a sigh of profound relief and irritation. “Miss Franklin, what am I to do with you and your queer fits.”

“Ha-ha, queer.” I snorted, and neither sibling was amused.

“Into the hackney with both of you, now,” Fenton snapped, gesturing at a genuine horse and bloody carriage.

“Bossy,” I said as he handed me up into the box, trying to smother my freak-out with humor. Fenton was in no mood for banter, though. The cab filled with his petulant, disapproving silence.

The carriage lurched into motion and after a few turns, Daisy frowned at the passing streets and said: “This is not the way to our lodgings.”

Fenton’s lips thinned peevishly. “Lewis is hosting us for dinner.”

“All of us?” Daisy asked, startled.

“Just Miss Franklin and me,” Fen said with a tone heavy with meaning I couldn’t parse.

Daisy could , though. “He wishes to dine with Miss Franklin . Not me.”

“No, not you,” Fenton assured her.

Daisy’s eyes widened with first surprise, then understanding, and I caught a flicker of relief before her expression turned carefully bland. A frisson of worry shivered up my nape.

What were they hiding? And why wasn’t Fenton looking at me? What had happened to the tactile, gentle, smitten man I thought I’d managed to wrap around my finger?

He’d vanished the second we’d set foot on English soil.

Deluded, I scolded myself . Smug. Stupid. You thought just because you were from the future you were what, smarter than everyone around you? Thought you could just swan in and manipulate everyone to do whatever you wanted? Idiot. Ask them. Ask them what they really mean. Just ask—

The cab stopped alongside a tidy, wide row of ostentatious white-stoned townhouses. Fenton banged out of the carriage sourly and gestured impatiently for me to follow.

“What if I don’t want to have dinner with his lordship either?” I asked, feeling like the ocean was closing over my head again.

“Miss Franklin, I hesitate to put so crude a point on it,” Fenton growled, “but after everything that has occurred on our voyage, this is the least that you can do to repay me.”

Goddamnit.

I pulled off Daisy’s cloak and laid it over her lap, then stepped onto the curb. Fenton had the door closed and the coachman sent on his way before I could even turn to say good-bye. Daisy watched us through the back window, expression tightly shuttered, until the cab turned a corner and was out of sight.

“Come along, Miss Franklin,” Fenton said, heading for the door.

“That’s a lot of house to clean,” I said, frowning up at the ostentatious neo-Grecian exterior. “I feel sorry for his wife.”

Fenton stopped, his hand poised above the knocker, eyes going round.

“What did I say?”

Fenton cleared his throat. “Nothing. I thought perhaps . . . it’s quite my own fault that I’ve failed to inform you. You . . . ah—” He rubbed his hand along the back of his neck, a nervous gesture that I found, god help me, cute. “Mrs. Lewis passed away last year.”

“Oh. That’s . . . I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” Fenton said, softening. “You could not have known. My dear, Lewis can be uncouth, but please do try to be pleasant with him. He is my very particular acquaintance and he is quite fond of you.”

“He’s literally just met me,” I scoffed. “He can’t be that fond.”

“His first impression of you was helped along by my letters, I’m sure,” Fenton said, a bit cagey. Had I upset him? Maybe fondness was something important for first impressions?

“Okay. Only because he’s your friend.”

“I did not say friend ,” Fenton corrected, knocking.

I didn’t have the chance to ask what he meant because the door opened. We were treated to a blast of warmth and light from within, partially blocked by a grave butler in a severely pressed suit.

“Captain Goodenough,” he said, with a formal nod to Fenton. He moved aside to let us in, taking our outerwear and saying absolutely nothing about the state of my shoes and skirts.

We were shown into something he called a private parlor. Fenton and I entered, and I couldn’t help the stupid, relieved grin that flitted across my face when Fenton placed his hand at the small of my back. When Lewis had done it, it’d been creepy. But from Fenton, it felt like a return to our shipboard dynamic.

Lewis was sitting in a wingback chair near a fireplace on the far wall. To the left was a bank of windows looking out over the quiet square as it grew dark with the setting sun, and to the right was a wall painted a rich dark green and dotted with what I assumed were family portraits. He held another of those comically small cut crystal glasses of something darkish brown—sherry? brandy?—and his cheeks were already flushed with it.

Was his alcohol tolerance that low or had he just been at it for a while?

“That is not Miss Goodenough,” Lewis grunted as Fenton and I took our seats. I chose the end of the small sofa farthest from them both, sliding a doily from the arm under my dirty dress discreetly to preserve the upholstery.

“There’s been a change,” Fenton said, with such a studied air of nonchalance that even Lewis was startled into silence. It didn’t last long, though.

“The announcement is drafted and set to be delivered to the papers this evening,” Lewis said waspishly. “You don’t truly wish for me to have to sue you for breach of promise on top of what you owe me for—”

“No, no, of course not,” Fenton stuttered, his bluff called. His face turned ashen so quickly I feared he was about to faint. “You will have what we agreed in recompense. You need only replace the name in the announcement. It is otherwise precisely the same.”

Lewis looked intrigued. “The name?”

“Miss Samantha Jayne Franklin.”

“I’m sorry, what is going on?” I interrupted.

“And who are you to dispose of her thusly?” Lewis went on, as if I hadn’t spoken.

“‘Dispose’ of me?” I repeated darkly.

Fenton flinched at my tone but steadfastly did not look at me. “I am her rescuer. She has no family to speak of, she has assured me as much. No brothers, nor father to broker with. I stand for her.”

Lewis laughed, and it was an ugly, self-satisfied sound. “You mean you pulled her like flotsam from the sea and take ownership by law of salvage?”

Clearly the comparison was as distasteful to Fenton as it was to me. “Yes. Quite.”

“Absolutely not!” I snapped, jumping to my feet.

Lewis’s lips twisted meanly. “You seek to offload your nuisance on me.”

“She is educated,” Fenton said hastily. “She reads finely and writes in a tolerable hand. She dances, speaks very keenly on a great many topics, and is happy to be taught the proper ways of things when they are beyond her understanding.”

“ Stop ignoring me—”

“She has a passion for righting injustices, and as you are a judge, I cannot help but feel that she would be a better intellectual match for you than my sister.”

“She is nobody.”

Fenton dipped closer to him, entreating. “She is whoever you need her to be. She is a blank slate. She has no family, no one to question your affairs or methods, nor even your . . . proclivities. She’s of greater social advantage to you than Daisy ever would be, and—”

I took a step toward them. “I’m gonna punch you if you don’t explain —”

“And,” Fenton added, face flushing scarlet and voice lowering even more, so I had to strain to hear, “her prowess in the married arts is unparalleled.”

I froze, jaw dropping in mortification.

Lewis finally acknowledged that I was in the room, and then only with a long, lewd up-and-down stare ten times more telling than the last one. “Train her yourself on the trip home, did you, boy?”

Fenton cleared his throat, his ears going pink. “I did not have to.”

“My, my,” Lewis said with a salacious grin. His next words were aimed at Fenton but he turned his mean little eyes directly to me when he said them: “What would your fiancé say if she knew, Fen?”