take, tutors who plied the stick again and again, trying to force a decent sentence from my pen. Boy can speak, ergo he should read and write. Truth was, I could barely speak. Mixed up words, sounds. Couldn’t read my lessons. Couldn’t read time from the face of a clock. Couldn’t even say what was left or right. Devil of it was, nobody’d acknowledge it. None of ’em wanted to admit the Masinter family had produced a bona fide idiot. Except Seraphina. She tried to help. Number of her books I ruined, throwing them at walls . . . Finally got myself out of there. Ran to the closest port. Signed on to a ship.”
“You ran away from home? When?”
“New Year’s Day, seventeen ninety-nine.”
“But—You could not have been—”
“Twelve.”
A gasp escaped her.
“Plenty of war makes plenty of work at sea, Elle.”
For a moment her throat was too tight to allow speech. She traced the edge of the ship’s log with her fingertip.
“You succeeded,” she finally said.
“Battle opens up the ranks quick. The Admiralty needs men with experience during wartime.”
“I mean that you succeeded in making yourself understood.” With such casual panache, carelessly to the point of charm. But perhaps not actually careless. “Your usual speech, the incorrect grammar, it is not sailor’s cant as I assumed, or even fashionable insouciance, I think,” she said. “You have cultivated that speech to deflect attention from actual mistakes that you might accidentally make. Haven’t you?”
He did not respond. She looked up and saw in his eyes the truth of her words.
“In fact you succeeded enormously,” she said. “How did you do it?”
“Hundreds of hours on my knees swabbing decks, daresay. Makes a man desperate to improve himself.”
“Captain.”
He blew out a voluble breath. “Picked up tricks here and there. Navigator on my first cruise was a capital fellow, shared a few ideas. Passenger on my second cruise happened to be a linguist. Said he’d known a boy like me in Ireland, two more in Wales. He was glad to work his experiments again. And I’d time. Plenty of it. Most days at sea are hours and hours of nothing. I would’ve been an even greater idiot not to have succeeded, at least some.”
“You are trying to lessen your accomplishments. That isn’t right. You should be proud. You should shout it out to the world that you were able to overcome this impairment.”
He lifted his hands, his strong, calloused palms facing up, and Elle abruptly needed air. She was probably falling in love with his hands. It was positively ridiculous, but there it was. Then he tugged the cuffs of his shirtsleeves out from his coat. Embroidered into each cuff was a tiny block letter, on the left a P, and on the right an S.
“Port,” he said, spreading the fingers of his left hand. “Starboard.” His right hand stretched wide. “Cob started sewing them in years ago. The old salt said it’d be better to cheat than to mistake it during battle.” He chuckled, then shook his head. “I haven’t overcome it, Elle. Just found ways of getting around it.”
“That is what everyone does when beset with challenges.”
“You don’t. You don’t lie.”
“I lied to a bishop today!”
“I lied to everyone for years.”
“No one knew?”
“Cob. And my first lieutenant.” He gestured to the logbook. “And now you.”
“No one else?”
“Bedwyr. And Westfall, commander I served under during the war.” His head was bent. “Seraphina, of course. The rest of our family, too, but they don’t think a naval officer needs to know how to read and write anyway.” The pleasure returned to his eyes. “Truth of it is, half of the time, he don’t.”
“Doesn’t.” With a gasp, she bit her lips.
He laughed softly. Then his face grew sober again. “Are you disgusted?”
“Why would I be? Because the hero of the Bombardment of Algiers does not always dot his I’s and cross his T’s?”
“Bit more than that.”
“I am not disgusted, Captain.” He had overcome this to succeed. It gave her hope that miracles were possible. “Far from it.”
“If the Admiralty knew, they wouldn’t have given me a command.”
“Then it is a very good thing for Britain that the Admiralty did not know.”
“You’re not angry?”
“I have just said—”
“Angry that an illiterate fool can climb to the top of the ranks while you, clever, articulate, are trapped in the back room of a shop working for men who don’t appreciate you.”
Clever. Articulate.
“I do not feel trapped. With each of Lady Justice’s pamphlets that crosses my table I am doing a