Sam looked across the table, laden with platters of roast mutton, game hens, potatoes with butter sauce, pickled onions, French beans, and crusty bread. Mrs. Grissom had done her best to compensate for the mud and the pigs and the cramped attic room by making sure he did not also go hungry. Sam had dug into the hearty meal with relish, but noticed that the duchess ate very little.
“What’s the matter, my girl?” he asked. “You do not like Mrs. Grissom’s cooking? No doubt you have become accustomed to finer cuisine.”
She looked up and smiled. “I employ a French chef who would swoon at the sight of that leg of mutton and those soupy potatoes. In fact, he often travels with me, but since we were visiting Lord and Lady Thayne, who keep an excellent chef, I sent him on a well-deserved holiday.”
“And so you are forced to endure a plain meal without elegant French sauces or exotic seasoning. Poor Willie.”
She laughed. “I am not so spoiled as all that. I can manage an indifferent meal from time to time. I’m just not very hungry.”
“The food may seem indifferent to you, Your Grace, but after so many years of salt pork out of a beer keg and hardtack biscuits that could chip a tooth-once you’d first banged them on the table to chase out the weevils-I can assure you that a good English roast leg of mutton is nothing short of heaven to me.”
His comment steered the conversation back to tales of Sam’s life at sea, which seemed to fascinate her. Wilhelmina peppered him with questions throughout the meal, and even the grinding monotony of the blockade began to take on a more adventurous turn in the telling. She showed a particular interest in his rise through the ranks, something even she recognized as unusual for an impressed seaman.
“I had been sublieutenant until Aboukir Bay when more officers were needed,” he said, slicing an apple into sections and offering her one. “I had the honor of serving as a full lieutenant in that great battle, under Captain Lewis of the-”
“The Alexander.”
His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “How do you know that?”
Willie clicked her tongue. “Really, Sam, do you think I do not read? The Battle of the Nile was second only to Trafalgar in importance. It was written about in great detail in all the newspapers and magazines. I even decorated my drawing room in the Egyptian style. It was all the rage.”
“But how did you know that I served on the Alexander? Surely a pup of a lieutenant was not mentioned in the Morning Chronicle.”
“I saw your name in the navy lists.”
He gazed at her in astonishment. “You read the lists?”
She smiled sheepishly. “I have followed your career ever since you showed up alive, and full of vinegar, that night at the theater, five years after I thought you’d died. I know you sailed on the Alexander, then the Pegasus, I believe. You were given command of the Libra, and one more I think, but the Dartmoor was your first post ship, as full captain. And your last ship was the Cristobel.”
Sam sat back and stared at her. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You see, I never forgot you, Sam. You carried a piece of my heart, whether you knew it or not, and I always liked to know where it was.”
His own heart swelled a little and flooded him with warmth. “You never cease to surprise me, Willie. With your full life-the salons, the gaiety, the luxury-I never imagined you spared a thought for me.”
“You have never been far from my thoughts, Sam. Just as you said earlier this afternoon, one never forgets one’s first love.”
Her words moved Sam more than she could possibly imagine, and the fact that she had followed his career so closely must mean that she still cared for him, even a little, despite all that had happened between them. But it was the way she looked at him when she said it, the melting heat in her eyes, that was almost his undoing.
He looked around at the other occupants of the room. A group of four men sat at one end of a long table, laughing and talking loudly, clanking their tankards together as they proceeded to get drunk. A quieter pair at the opposite end played a game of backgammon, and two elderly chaps had pulled chairs close to the hearth, where they sat and dozed. A middle-aged couple of matching stout proportions in one of the other alcoves silently shared a large currant pudding.
Sam and Willie had been private enough in their own alcove, but there were some things he wanted to say, and do, without the possibility of an audience. He could not in good conscience ask to go to her bedchamber, though God knew he wanted nothing more. Since his own room was little more than a garret with a narrow bed and a thin pallet, the best he could do was to take her outside, into the moonlight.
She accepted his invitation, and within a few minutes, under the bright full moon, they were seated on an old tomb in the churchyard where they had walked earlier. He wanted to kiss her again, but kept thinking of tomorrow and Miss Fullbrook and her family’s expectations. But that was tomorrow. For tonight, he was with Willie. And she looked so beautiful in the moonlight that he was not sure he would be able to keep his hands off her.
Every time he’d seen her, even that first time when he was so furious and heartsick at how she had degraded herself, he’d still wanted her. He’d wanted to possess her, body and soul, just as he had at eighteen. But too many others had possessed her, and his pride-and pain-would not allow him even to consider it.
Until ten years ago, when he’d been prepared to toss aside all his fine scruples for her.
And here he was now, wanting her again, on fire for her again, and a whole new set of scruples niggled at the edges of his conscience. Those scruples kept him talking. Talking was safer than kissing. And so their conversation, which had continued with few interruptions since shortly after noon, the conversation that had been more than twenty years in the making, continued as they sat side by side on the tomb of some poor unknown soul.
“Tell me about Tom,” she said.
He smiled, and was sure his pride gleamed bright in his eyes. “He’s a wonderful boy. A young man, I should say. He’s nineteen, and already a lieutenant making a name for himself in the lists. He was active in the blockades, and is now in the East Indies, the Java Sea.”
“Do you see him often?”
“Not often enough. The problem with a naval career is that one is never in one place for very long. I missed so much of his childhood. After his mother died, he went to live with her sister’s family in Somerset. But he was sea-mad even then, and bristled at being away from the shore. He wrote plaintive letters begging to be taken aboard ship, to train for a midshipman’s berth. I finally capitulated when he was twelve. Within two years he was wearing a midshipman’s jacket. And passed the lieutenant’s exam when he was seventeen. His will be a more traditional career than my own. He will no doubt achieve admiral before he’s forty.”
She smiled wistfully. “You should see your face when you speak of him. You are such a proud papa.”
He laughed. “I am indeed. He’s a good son. A good-looking boy. As tall as me, though still too thin. All elbows and knees, long-legged and lanky.”
“Just like his father was at that age.”
Sam smiled and nodded. “He even has my coloring. Not a trace of poor Sarah in him, except now and then about the mouth. I wish we’d had more children, perhaps a daughter with Sarah’s fair coloring. But it was not meant to be, I suppose. And what of you, Willie? Any children tucked away somewhere?”
Her face paled slightly, save for two bright splashes of color high on her cheeks, and he felt her stiffen beside him. A frown marked her brow, and Sam knew he had said the wrong thing. They had once talked, in the way young lovers do, of having a brood of perfect children, pretty little girls and mischievous boys. Willie had wanted children. But perhaps she had discovered she was barren. Or had lost a child. Or, because a child would have been an inconvenience in her style of life, she might have had children and given them away to be raised by others. Whatever the reason, he had certainly trod on unwelcome ground. Damnation. He would have bitten off his tongue if he could, for he might have just ruined a near-perfect evening with his clumsy inquiry.