10. Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Lorenzo della Rocca escorted Marguerite below by the worst possible route. This became clear after the second steep companionway, the third narrow passage, and the fourth obstacle he pointed out cheerfully.
“You must duck here,” he said, indicating a beam placed at precisely the height required to test feminine dignity. “My brother says the ship was built for war, not comfort. Of course, war is often more comfortable.”
“How reassuring.”
“And mind this step. It has murdered three midshipmen and one very fine boot.”
Elsie, following behind with a small bag clutched to her chest, muttered, “I knew Italy was too far.”
Marguerite kept her gloved hand against the wall.
“You will notice,” Lorenzo continued, “that the overheads are low, the air is stale, the floors are rude, and the walls have the elegance of a moldy crate.”
“I see,” Marguerite said. “In Italy, do gentlemen always criticize a man’s ship while he is absent, or is this a courtesy reserved for brothers?”
He looked back at her, blue eyes bright. “Ah, but Captain Blackmere is everywhere on this ship. If I criticize with sufficient feeling, perhaps he will materialize and throw me overboard.”
“That would be inconvenient.”
“For you?”
“For the man required to retrieve you.”
His smile widened. “You wound me, signorina. I thought perhaps you had developed affection.”
“I am a great admirer of brotherly loyalty.”
“Then you will enjoy me. I am loyal in the most irritating possible way.”
Yes, Marguerite thought. That much had become evident.
He was trying to unsettle her. He had the too-casual air of a man performing lightness for a purpose, turning every rotting plank and narrow passage into a warning. Why?
Marguerite adjusted her grip on the rail. “Brianza is near the lakes, is it not?”
Lorenzo’s step faltered. “You know a great deal about Italian families for an English lady.”
“I have friends in Naples.”
They turned down another passage, narrower than the last, until Lorenzo stopped before a small door.
“Here we are,” he announced. “The palace.”
He opened it. Marguerite stepped inside and felt her heart sink with embarrassing speed.
The cabin was stark. A narrow bed fixed to the wall.
A small table bolted to the floor. A chair that looked as if comfort had offended it personally.
A washstand. Hooks. Shelves. A stern window admitting a thin slice of gray light.
The walls were plain wood, scrubbed, bare, and disciplined into usefulness with almost moral severity.
Three weeks. Marguerite was to spend three weeks here.
Elsie stepped in behind her and stopped. “Oh,” she said.
That single syllable contained disappointment, accusation, and the death of several Italian fantasies.
Lorenzo leaned one shoulder against the doorframe with theatrical sympathy.
“You see? My brother is a duke in England, yes, but English dukedoms are expensive creatures. They eat roofs, tenants, repairs, taxes, servants, debts, and any small hope a man may have of wearing new boots. This ship is not a pleasure yacht. He has little enough for himself.” He tilted his head, inspecting her expression.
Marguerite crossed her arms and lifted her brows.
“You do not sound moved,” Lorenzo murmured.
“I am considering the direction in which I am being moved.”
“Signorina, I only mean that if you imagined—”
“A marble stateroom? A gilded bed? A captain feeding me sugared figs while I recline on velvet?”
His smile flickered. “Some ladies do imagine such things. When a man is a duke.”
“And you have taken it upon yourself to protect your brother from ladies with imaginations.”
His expression sharpened beneath the charm. There it was. At last. Not the laughing brother, not the penniless count, but a guard dog.
“If you wish to leave,” he said, lowering his voice, “I can help you do it before we sail. No shame. No fuss. The boat that brought you can return. Really, you would not want to—”
“The day Marguerite d’Ailes retreats from Naples because of poor upholstery,” she said, “will be the same day a della Rocca successfully passes for a pauper.”
Lorenzo stopped as if she had struck him with a rolled chart.
Elsie’s head snapped around.
The ship creaked. Somewhere beyond the wall, a sailor laughed. Inside the cabin, all cheerfulness abandoned Lorenzo’s face with the speed of rats leaving a kitchen.
“Me? Rich?” He touched his chest with insulted innocence. “I am the poorest—”
“You are a della Rocca. Your mother is almost certainly the Duchess of Castelvecchio, unless my memory has become lazy, which it has not. Your family holds land near Monza, villas near the lakes, and at least one palazzo in Milan. You may be poor in the way princes are poor when they cannot immediately purchase Austria, but do not stand in a cabin and tell me you are penniless.”
Lorenzo looked toward the passage. “Would you lower your voice?”
Elsie, who had never been more alive, whispered, “A rich Italian… and handsome to boot.”
Lorenzo stepped into the cabin and shut the door, separating Elsie from the conversation. Then he exhaled and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.
“You are more intelligent than I expected,” he said.
“How discourteous. I expected you to be clever at once.”
He sighed and settled against the wall with the ease of a man who had decided to stay a while and was making the best of the architecture.
“Very well. I will tell you a story.”
“Must you?”
He crossed one boot over the other. “Once upon a time, there was a duke.”
She perked up. “Tristan?”
“Heavens, no. To tell Tristan’s story, one requires thunder, tragedy, and a bass voice deep enough to frighten chandeliers. I am, alas, a baritone through and through.”
Marguerite did not sit.
“A very charming duke,” Lorenzo continued.
“A man of curiosity and wit and extraordinary leggerezza. One day, he looked at the house, the accounts, the tenants, and the roof, and he decided he could not deal with all that ancestral obligation anymore… So he left. But he had a son. A boy of seventeen. Alone, the boy decided to enter the navy.”
Marguerite could well imagine Tristan choosing prize money because roofs leaked, tenants needed grain, and fathers left.
“He was remarkable,” Lorenzo said. “He took prizes other men said could not be taken. He sailed ships other men said could not be sailed. He won engagements against odds other men calculated and declined. Every coin went to the estate. The roof was repaired. The tenants were kept. The accounts became less catastrophic than before. And the duke’s son became the Sea Wolf. ”
Marguerite remembered Tristan on deck, pressing the key into her hand, and her chest tightened.
“Meanwhile,” Lorenzo said, “the duke was having adventures of his own. And in Italy—” He opened his hands.
“He found my mother. He fell in love with her. He stayed, and he was happy in the way of men who follow their nature without too many concessions to obligation. He wrote to the boy in England. Letters. Money, when he had it. He meant well. But he was—” Lorenzo sighed. “Insufficiente.”
Insufficient. How many lives were made from insufficient love? It came in letters, explanations, intentions, gifts sent late, but never in the quantity needed to keep a child warm.
“And then,” Lorenzo said, “in this warm Italian life, there was another son. Growing up in a house full of marble and sunlight, hearing stories about the Sea Wolf.”
He went still for a moment.
“Two years ago, the duke died. I was left with everything except—” He looked down at his hands. “The brother I had never met. And I felt that he was missing from me. Lui mi mancava,” he said, and his voice sounded graver in Italian.
Marguerite’s throat closed. How very Italian.
To miss someone who had never given him anything, never promised anything, never even known he existed.
Her eyes stung, and she lowered them quickly, smoothing one thumb over the seam of her glove as if the leather held some secret. “So the prince set out to find him?”
He nodded, the fairy tale closing in on itself.
“And the Sea Wolf?” she asked.
Lorenzo looked away. “The Sea Wolf was in the market for prizes, not brothers. The prince, being incredibly intelligent, understood Tristan’s philosophy.
Cut excess when sailing in a gale. Cut the mast if the ship must live.
Cut sentiment before it weakens discipline.
Cut everything superfluous.” He looked at her then.
“A brother he had never asked for, arriving with a fortune? Superfluous.”
The word struck harder than he had made it sound.
“So,” Lorenzo said, “I found the door that was open. I told him I needed employment. He did not let me in, but he let me stay.”
She sighed before she could stop herself.
Lorenzo looked up quickly. “Are you sighing for me?”
“I am sighing because men are exhausting.”
“Ah. Then yes, for me.” Lorenzo studied her for a moment. “So you will keep my secret?”
“It is not my secret to tell.”
His shoulders loosened.
“But you should tell him.”
The looseness vanished.
“Not until he accepts me as a brother. If I tell him first, then he has another reason to send me away. I prefer to remain employed until he accidentally becomes fond of me.”
“That is a terrible plan.”
“It is the only plan he has not yet cut loose.”
Marguerite looked at him and felt her chest squeeze in a place she had not meant to use.
She knew something about fighting for crumbs of affection.
Negotiating for them. Making oneself useful, agreeable, dazzling, necessary, anything that might cause another person to look up and say, Yes, you may remain.
How fortunate, she thought, that she was not in the market for a Sea Wolf.
“I wish you luck,” she said.
“Grazie, signorina.” Lorenzo’s eyes softened. “Now. Since you are very determined to stay aboard this floating monastery, I should show you something.”
“Must you? I have only just survived the cell. If you reveal a hair shirt or a rack for improving moral character, I may yet take the boat back.”
Shrugging, he crossed the cabin and set his hand against a narrow seam in the wall. He pressed a latch, and a partition swung open.
Behind lay civilization. Folded blankets. A small rug. A cushioned chair wedged sideways. A box of candles. A writing case. A shelf of porcelain cups wrapped in cloth. A kettle. A screen. Two soft pillows. And, gleaming at the back with indecent promise, a copper tub.
Marguerite stared at it all. Then she turned very slowly to Lorenzo. “How do you say rascal in Italian?”
His smile bloomed with shameless delight. “Furfante. Though if you wish to wound me properly, briccone has a charming music. And you must not fear wounding me. I have been called worse by women less beautiful.”
“You showed me the ugliest possible route, the worst of the ship, the starkest possible cabin, and allowed me to believe I would be sleeping inside a wooden sermon. Why?”
He placed a hand over his heart. “You see the lengths Lorenzo the Knight will go to fight gold-digging dragons . . . It is exhausting work, really, and completely unrewarded.”
“You thought I was a fortune hunter?”
“I thought you were a beautiful woman seeking passage with a duke who has a ship, a title, a wounded heart, and the self-preservation of a man who swims toward cannon fire.”
“I am seeking passage to Naples.”
“Yes. And I am seeking brotherhood. We are all innocent here.”
“Go away, Prince Lorenzo, before I box your ears.”
He leaned slightly nearer, lowering his voice to a scandalous softness. “Would you kiss the hurt later?”
Marguerite marched to the door, opened it, and fixed him with a look that would have singed lace.
“Such cruelty. My mother would adore you.”
“Out.”
He stepped into the passage, still smiling. Elsie entered, giving him a cautious look.
Just before Marguerite closed the door, he looked at her once more, and the brightness gentled into something almost solemn.
“He is not poor in the ways that matter,” he said. “But he has spent a long time believing everything soft must be cut away before it sinks him.”
The words struck too near something tender. Marguerite tightened her hand on the door. “And you believe I am soft?”
“No,” Lorenzo said. “I believe you are dangerous because you are not.”
Then, before she could answer, he grinned again, bright as a coin flipped in sunlight.
“Enjoy the tub.”