Regency Christmas Gifts Read Online Free PDF Page B

the
sun with a sextant. Not one of the students had seemed willing to
make an acquaintance with Euclid, so it took all of Thomas’s
discipline to scrub away, but not too fast, while he listened and
absorbed sines, cosines, and tangents.
    He might well be an able-bodied seaman yet,
except that when the midshipmen straggled away, leaving the
improvised classroom empty, he had boldly gone up to the blackboard
and finished the equation no one had understood. He knew he was in
for trouble when the sailing master returned to retrieve his
blackboard, found the correct answer, and demanded to know who had
done it.
    With real trepidation he answered aye. “Then
you’ll sit in on every class of mine,” the man growled. “I’ll tell
the boatswain that you’re mine now.”
    So began Thomas Jenkins’s steady rise to the
top of his profession in the Royal Navy. Talent, hard work, and
good fortune had kept him employed mainly aboard frigates, which
meant a growing one-eighth share of prize money from every enemy
vessel captured and sold into the fleet or as salvage. Thanks to
the curse of a long war, he was well off.
    Now he stood staring at his lathered face in
the shaving mirror, wondering just how he could worm his way into a
little family of two and make their life better. Suzie warned him
about propriety, so he knew that he must be circumspect. When he
suggested that she do the probing and inquiry, his sister
just smiled at him and shook her head.
    “ I am not bored, Tommy,” she
told him. “In fact, I am becoming excessively diverted.”
    He felt too grouchy to demand that she explain
herself, or perhaps he was too shy, he thought later, wondering
when a stable sort of man, which he was, had turned so moody. It
was painfully evident that he was missing the sea, and so he told
Suzie. She just smiled in the same maddening, big-sister way that
used to irritate him no end when he was eight.
    After breakfast, Thomas rewrapped the package
and allowed himself the luxury of hiring a post chaise for the day.
“We’ll be driving around Haven is all,” he told the manager of the
posting house, who provided him a chaise and only one post rider.
Who needed two for such a short jaunt?
    His first stop was 29 Dinwoody, arriving at a
respectable hour to hand over his calling card to the maid, explain
himself, and be ushered into the sitting room. Mrs. Myrna Poole
entered the room in good time, offered him tea, which he accepted,
and expressed her pleasure at being reunited with the ivory-back
comb and brush set that had belonged to her mother.
    Small talk, small talk , Thomas advised
himself as he drank tea, listened to the old lady praise her new
house in Haven, the village of her youth, then inquire how he and
his sister were settling into her old house in Plymouth. He assured
her that all was well, then segued into the part where he explained
why he had come in person with the comb and brush.
    It was easy enough to describe the younger Mrs.
Poole and her charming daughter Beth. The tricky part was to feign
merely casual interest in Mrs. Poole’s employer, Lady Naismith. He
must have done well, because Mrs. Poole launched into a graphic bit
of local gossip about the very common Lady Naismith, whose
husband had clawed and scratched his way to the top of a fishing
fleet.
    “ There is great wealth in herring,”
Mrs. Myrna Poole told him with a straight face. “And don’t you
know, he made enough money to attract the attention of our Prince
Regent. That led to a loan, which the Prince of Wales paid off with
a paltry title,” the old lady informed him. “I am told it happens
often.”
    Thomas’s heart sank as he heard the woman’s
tidbits about Lady Naismith’s meanness and nipfarthing ways. “My
neighbor says she is a martinet and no one wants to work for her,”
Mrs. Poole continued. “I feel sorry for those who must.” She sighed
with so much drama that Thomas wondered how she had avoided a life
on the wicked stage.
    Then