Chapter 3
There were sixteen casks of Rhenish wine in the Pomeroy House kitchen, which, frankly, was sixteen more than Archer had been expecting.
“For fuck’s sake,” he said, “how did you even carry them all?”
Lamentation had his arms crossed over his chest and an expression on his face that read, Criminally underappreciated. “You said to bring the wine up from the cove after Oliphant’s crew dropped it off. Which we did. From four o’clock in the morning until noon.”
“It’s not noon. It’s ten.”
Lamentation’s scowl deepened. “Oh, I’m sorry, Cap. Gerry and I have only been at this thankless task for six hours and not eight. My mistake.”
Gerry hadn’t yet said anything, which was typical for Gerry.
Unfortunately, he looked vaguely wounded, which was less typical. Usually, in the presence of Lamentation, Gerry’s face evinced nothing so much as besotted happiness.
“All right,” Archer said. “All right. I’m sorry.
Thank you for cleverly and uncomplainingly bringing the wine up from the cove.
I don’t”—he passed his hand over his face and shoved his hair out of his eyes—“I wasn’t expecting casks, that’s all.
We’ll have to figure out some way to transport them. Or decant them. Or something.”
Smuggling had been a hell of a lot easier when he’d been transporting goods that weren’t illegal.
He’d had a real, actual bill of sale from Gravesmuir for the statues—along with a hell of a lot of Greek documents that Eugénie had forged—all of which had proven extremely useful every time they’d been stopped on the road between Dorset and London.
But in the two months since the Quenby scheme had dissolved, he’d been forced to pursue other avenues of financial gain.
He’d taken charge of selling the illicit goods that Gill Oliphant’s men brought in surreptitiously from the Continent, and then, under Oliphant’s guidance, started to make Channel crossings with his own crew.
In the preceding weeks, they’d smuggled French silk gloves sewn in the hems of their trousers and ostrich feathers in their shirtfronts.
Last week, Archer had discovered that several bolt holes on the Delphinium could have their bolts replaced with cigars, with no obvious ill effects on his beloved tub’s ponderous progress.
On one trip, every drum of wax had been cleaned out and filled with brandy instead, a stratagem that had proven shockingly effective. The brandy had tasted a trifle odd afterward, but Archer had convinced seven different tavern keepers that it was typical of a Gascon Armagnac.
Hiding the smuggled casks of wine would be considerably more difficult. Casks tended to look a great deal like casks, no matter how one attempted to disguise them.
“Should we leave them in here?” Lamentation looked only slightly mollified. “I would’ve asked you when we started bringing them in, but we couldn’t find you.”
Archer had been down in St. Petroc’s, the tiny but bustling port village near Pomeroy House.
He’d met up with Oliphant at the tavern to pay for the wine, and then spent the morning delicately ascertaining the tavern keeper’s feelings about dodgily imported alcohol at excellent bargain prices while also trying not to let the grizzled old pirate drink him under the table.
In retrospect, he’d had the morning a lot easier than Gerry and Lamentation.
“The kitchen’s fine for now,” he said. “We’re not anticipating guests.”
The lack of guests—and his powerful need for funds—had made Archer’s transformation from steward to smuggler rather easier.
Two years ago, he had become the Pomeroy House steward through the intervention of his former rear admiral, Jack Penney, with whom he still occasionally visited, even though Archer’s naval career had smashed itself to bits like a hull meeting a rock.
Penney mixed with people like the Monfalcone royals now, ever since his elevation to baronet after the war.
He’d mentioned the house to Archer because he and Archer had once spent five months patrolling the south coast of Cornwall.
They’d reminisced over quite a lot of expensive brandy about furious chases on cliffs, and the time Archer had surprised a bull in a patch of gorse, and the enthusiastic vicar’s widow who had taught Archer far more in one night than he would have supposed vicar’s widows to know.
Penney had mentioned the empty house and the job opening, and Archer, warm with drink, had thought: I could do that. Why not? He’d captained a ship for five years—how different could a country mansion be?
It had been because of the brandy that Archer had asked Penney to put in a good word for him. He would not, normally, have asked it. Had he been cold sober, he would not have let the thought creep across his mind—that Penney owed him a favor.
But it had. And he’d asked. And Penney had done it, and Archer had intended, for at least four or five days, to do everything by the book.
His good intentions, as usual, hadn’t lasted long.
The problem—then and now—had always been money.
The Monfalcone royal family had hired him alone, and Archer, ever since the disastrous end of his naval career, came as part of a set.
He had persuaded the royal family’s majordomo that he needed to hire a groundskeeper too, but he’d been afraid to ask for further auxiliary staff.
No one would benefit if the Monfalcone royal family suspected that he was embezzling the Pomeroy House budget.
Which, he supposed, he was. But it was for the very good cause of keeping his crew housed and fed.
They had a safe place to live in Pomeroy House. Free from the prying eyes of strangers, Gerry and Lamentation could love each other as they had back when all of them had been together on the Swallow.
All Archer had to do was make sure the money kept flowing.
And God. He was trying.
He turned back to Lamentation and Gerry.
“Have you seen Eugénie? Perhaps a fake bill of sale can save us from eager excise officers.” He rubbed at his jaw, which had grown thick with whiskers since he’d given up the Quenby scheme.
“If she can write us up some receipts that say we bought the casks in Wales, we can at least avoid the import tax.”
Lamentation still looked skeptical. “Do they make wine in Wales?”
“Oh Jesus.” Archer scratched at his beard again. “I have no idea.” He peered at Gerry, who shook his head.
“Don’t look at me, Captain.” Gerry spoke rarely, and when he did, his voice was a deep bass rumble. “I’m from Shropshire.”
“It’s awfully close,” Archer said. “Do they make wine in Shropshire?”
“I think the Romans did.”
Archer blew out a breath. “Oh good. Maybe we can have Eugénie write the papers in Latin.”
“Does she speak Latin?”
“Not that I know of. But neither does your average English exciseman, so I collect we could get away with it. Where is Eugénie?”
At this direct inquiry, Lamentation began to look extremely innocent beneath his cherubic blond curls. “I understand Eugénie and Wall went down to the butcher.”
Archer paused. “Again? That’s thrice in three days. Is it for dinner or—”
He broke off. He’d heard . . . something . . . coming from the casks. A sound as of tapping.
Lamentation made a gesture somewhere between a wince and shrug. “I don’t think it’s for dinner, Cap. I think it’s for the puppies.”
Archer felt his teeth click closed, and he forced his jaw open with a creak. “What. Puppies.”
The tapping sound, which had tapered off, started up again as if in response to Archer’s ground-out inquiry. He crouched beside the barrels and shoved his hand into the shadowed gap between the staves and the cool kitchen wall.
He withdrew a small black puppy.
“No,” he grated. As a protest, it lacked vigor, being drowned out by the sound of tiny canine squeaks. “How many times have I said it? No more dogs!”
Another damp black nose emerged from the shadows, and Archer very seriously considered weeping.
On the Swallow, Wall had been the ship’s surgeon. But after he had left in the wake of Archer’s disgrace, Wall had turned his skill from humans to his real passion: veterinary medicine.
At the time, it had seemed a most excellent idea.
Archer had proposed a number of strategic moneymaking schemes that involved extracting exorbitant fees from ladies of leisure to attend their beloved pets.
In practice, however, Wall had not found the time to travel to London and fleece aristocratic ladies of their coin, because he was too busy providing inexpensive veterinary care to every animal in the surrounding villages.
He and Eugénie—his wife and their crew’s talented forger—had also proven quite competent at rearing orphaned puppies. There was, Archer felt, a veritable epidemic of puppies in Cornwall. Most of them now seemed to be living in his house.
He stuffed the puppy in the pocket of his trousers and reached into the shadowed gap behind the barrels, where his hand promptly encountered a second warm, squirming form, and then a third. Bloody Christ.
“Only three, I think,” Lamentation said brightly.
“Three new ones,” Gerry clarified. “On top of the five we already had.”
Lamentation shot his beloved a hasty glance of betrayal.
Archer stuck the second puppy in his other pocket, where it wriggled and bit his thigh. He carefully extricated the third puppy, at which point he realized that he was out of pockets.
He considered wrapping it about his neck like a stole, and then decided not to, if only because Wall would have an apoplexy if he saw Archer doing any such thing.
“Outside,” he said. “If we’re going to feed and house every orphaned dog in Cornwall, we can at least keep them outside.”
He was halfway to the rear exit, his right pocket nearly torn off by minuscule needle teeth, when he heard another unfamiliar sound.
Not tapping this time. More of a pounding, really.
At the front door.
“What the devil,” he muttered and reversed course. Were Wall and Eugénie back so soon? And why were they knocking?
A brief vision of excise officers flashed through his mind, and he thought of the casks of smuggled Rhenish wine currently in plain sight in the Pomeroy House kitchens. He tucked the third puppy under his arm, ran his fingers through his hair, and recalled himself to his position.
He was the steward of Princess Serafina of Monfalcone. His position at Pomeroy House was entirely legal and sanctioned by the royal family. If British officers had descended upon the mansion, he would send them on their way on behalf of House di Sangro.
He tried to remember his few words of Italian and flung open the door.
Before him stood a trio of women. They were young, richly dressed, and apparently mid-argument. The tallest one had her fist upraised as if to continue pounding.
Barring some massive changes in the British military he’d not heard about, Archer felt fairly certain these were not excise officers.
He dropped his voice, made it smooth and mannered. “Good morning. Are you ladies in need of some assistance?”
The ladies stared blankly at him for a long moment.
Or—no. Perhaps they were staring at the puppy under his arm.
He smiled brilliantly at them and attempted to look as though small dogs were typical accoutrements for Cornish stewards. The projection of confidence, Archer had found, seemed to go a long way toward convincing people that he wasn’t lying through his teeth.
Which he was. Usually.
Finally, the tallest of the ladies—reddish-brown cropped hair, her face scattered with freckles—cleared her throat. “Ah—perhaps. Is this . . . this is Pomeroy House?”
Archer tried not to let his surprise show on his face. He’d supposed these three—with their gowns and hats that probably cost more than his annual salary—were victims of some carriage accident. He’d not imagined they were at the estate on purpose.
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
As if in punctuation, the puppy in his right pocket finally won her victory over the worn-out fabric. His pocket came free with a sound of tearing, and then he felt the slow drag of the puppy’s nails as she slid down his leg and emerged at the level of his boot.
“Oh,” said one of the ladies faintly. This one looked exquisitely fragile, with black hair and enormous blue-green eyes that Archer imagined had inspired flights of fancy from a whole legion of Byronic suitors.
She glanced from the puppy to the inside of the house. “It’s not quite how I pictured it.”
Archer didn’t have to turn around to know what she meant. The front parlor was home to a vast array of veterinary supplies and also five more dogs.
His gaze fell to the final woman. She was considerably shorter than the other two, with buttery-yellow curls beneath a jauntily angled straw hat. Her cheeks were pink, and so was her frock, and her pointed chin lifted as she met his gaze straight on. She was . . .
Archer felt cold wash over him, freezing his legs, rooting him where he stood.
She was The Woman From The Party. The sparkling little confection who had revealed Archer’s Quenby scheme, wrecked six months of his planning, and caused the chain of events that had led to sixteen casks of smuggled wine in his kitchen.
Oh, he thought. Fuck me.
It was due entirely to a lifetime of practice in lying that Archer managed to retain command of his face. He smiled wider even as his brain suggested, Time to run away, you thrice-damned fool.
Instead he said: “How may I assist you?”
The girl’s chin went somehow higher. “I am Lady Ruby Ballimore,” she said, “and these are my companions, Lady Alice Eppington and Miss Tamsin Drake. We are the Princess Serafina’s ladies-in-waiting.”
Archer seemed to take in the words very slowly, as if they were poured through syrup.
The Princess Serafina’s.
Ladies-in-waiting.
“I see,” he choked out. “Welcome. Have you . . . come to view the estate?”
“After a fashion. The Monfalcone ambassador has asked us to reside here. Indefinitely.”
Archer wondered if he was hallucinating.
This was, beyond all shadow of a doubt, the same woman. She had the same fussy white gloves on, with what must be far too many pearl buttons for one woman to manage. She looked precisely as he recalled her: sweet and vaguely edible, until one came to her eyes.
They were gray-blue. Confident. Penetrating. Her gaze seemed to fix him where he stood, and he had the strange sense that this woman could see right through all his layers of falsehoods and charm. All the way down to his guts and his bones and the blackened corners of his too-soft heart.
He had, he realized, lost control of his expression. When the puppy underneath his arm bit him straight through his shirt, he realized he had not moved or spoken in a very long time.
“Lovely,” he croaked, and stepped back to let them in. “Welcome to Pomeroy House.”