1. Chapter 1 #2
The pirate reached out. Marguerite sucked in a breath as he plucked the toupée from her bodice with two fingers, as if removing a dead bird from a dinner plate. Then he crossed to the window and flung it into the night.
Marguerite stared. First at the stranger. Then at the black rectangle of night beyond the terrace doors. Her passage to Naples had just flown out of her grasp again.
The pirate dusted his palms against each other, then offered her his arm.
"Now, you may thank me with a dance."
Marguerite gaped at him. There were moments in life when a woman of education, elegance, and diplomatic discipline found herself called upon to respond with grace.
This was not one of them.
She lifted her skirts and ran. She was already across the ballroom, cutting between a shepherdess and a monk, past a startled harlequin, past Hamlet—who looked relieved to witness a tragedy not his own—and through the open doors at the far end of the gallery.
Panting, Marguerite flew down the marble stairs into the garden, silver skirts gathered in both hands.
Cold air struck her cheeks. She scanned the gravel path, the damp grass, the stone border of a fountain where a nymph poured water eternally from an urn with the calm of a woman who had never needed an introduction.
Where was the damn wig?
She bent near a rosebush and lifted a branch. No orange curls, only thorns, black leaves, and the faint smell of wet earth.
The toupée had to be here. It had not sprouted wings during its flight from the window. Lord Pulteney would never forgive her. Men forgave sins more easily than ridicule.
She pressed one hand to the cold stone urn and forced air into her lungs.
She would have to say goodbye to Naples.
A life where affection did not have to be negotiated, priced, protected, or rationed.
Her throat tightened. Ridiculous. She did not cry.
Not since Karl. Not since the letter. Certainly not now. Certainly not over a toupée.
"Come out," she whispered, hating the tremor in her voice. "Please."
"Madam?"
Marguerite sprang upright. The pirate stood several paces away, one hand braced against the trunk of a yew as if he had stopped there some time ago and decided, with unusual good sense, not to interrupt a woman pleading with shrubbery.
His grin was gone. That should have pleased her. It did not. Without the grin, he looked less like a charming nuisance and more like the sort of man who noticed things.
Terrible quality in a stranger.
"Why are you here?" she asked.
“I saw you flee and decided the ballroom had become less interesting.”
"I did not flee. I made a strategic withdrawal."
His brows drew together beneath the black mask. "Because of the wig?"
"The toupée," she corrected, because precision was all that remained between her and collapse.
"And no, not because of the toupée. Because of what it represents.
You cannot simply strike a vain man in public, launch his most cherished ornament into a woman's bodice, allow him to march away unknowing before half the Foreign Office, then throw the object in question into a garden and call it rescue. "
"I begin to see that."
"No, you do not." Her voice shook, and she hated him for hearing it.
"A man may lose money, judgment, moral standing, or France, and still dine out on the story if he tells it first. But ridicule?
" She swallowed. "Ridicule leaves no room for negotiation.
Smirk all you want, sir. You cannot know what that blasted orange thing represents to me. "
"What does it represent?"
Marguerite laughed once. It came out too sharp. "Everything."
He said nothing. That was worse. Silence invited explanation, and explanation was a door. Once opened, who knew what might escape?
The pirate moved closer and set his hands on her arms. Her body, traitorous in every department, shuddered.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I thought I was removing an inconvenience."
Because he was sorry, because he did not laugh, because his hands were steady and her own were not, the tears came nearer. She blinked them back.
"There," he murmured, brushing her arms up and down. "Now. Everything is going to be fine."
It was a foolish thing to say.
Marguerite stepped back. "I beg your pardon?"
"The admiral is bald. Half the Foreign Office has seen it. By Thursday, no one will remember."
"By Thursday," she said carefully, "I will be in a boarding house in Brighton with no passage, no introduction, and a rear admiral who believes I arranged the entire incident to humiliate him."
"Then go back in and tell him you didn't."
She pressed her fingers to her temple. "You cannot simply walk up to a vain man and tell him his toupée is in the garden.
In front of witnesses. Right now, he is bald and does not know it, which means he still has dignity, which means he is still manageable, which means there is still a version of this evening in which I leave with what I came for.
The moment he knows — the moment anyone says the word toupée within his hearing — that version disappears entirely. "
The pirate looked at her for a moment. "Why all this effort to protect a man's ignorance?"
"It is a great deal of effort," she said. "That is rather the definition of diplomacy."
"Diplomacy should solve problems."
"Indeed. But carefully. With attention to what the problem actually is, and not what it appears to be on the surface."
He crossed his arms. "The problem is exactly what it appears to be on the surface. It is the solution that people complicate."
She laughed — a short, disbelieving sound. "You cannot run a life like that."
"You cannot run a ship any other way."
The garden settled between them, the waltz slipping through the open windows. Marguerite had said more in the last two minutes than she had intended to say to anyone at this ball, or possibly this season.
"Well. You have been very educational, sir. And I must go back inside and undo what education costs." She stepped back.
The pirate's hand closed around hers. "You cannot leave now."
Marguerite looked at his glove, then lifted her gaze to his face.
"Sir, I do not know what constitution governs pirate society, but Mr. Thomas Paine has written most persuasively on the rights of man, and though he was criminally inattentive to the rights of women, I am prepared to extend his principles in my favor. I possess the right to come and go at—"
"The wig is over there." He pointed past her shoulder.
The toupée hung from the branch of a small ornamental tree, laurel wreath and all, its orange curls caught among the leaves with the furtive plumpness of a squirrel that had chosen acorns over empire.
For several seconds, she could only stare. "Lord Pulteney's hair is in a tree."
He grinned. "It took the high ground."
She shot him a look, but he was no longer laughing openly, which was either mercy or self-preservation. She gathered her skirts and hurried toward it, shoes slipping on the damp grass.