The Scoundrel and I - Katharine Ashe Page 0,4

the card table, though, John had not enjoyed himself. He had lost himself.

Two years later, it killed him.

“Previous engagement.” A funeral. He climbed to his feet. “Much obliged, though.”

“Anthony,” she said. “What troubles you?”

His own idiocy.

“Naught that I can’t fix, my lady.” He bowed. His stomach ached. His head ached. His chest ached. By God, this was almost worse than war.

He took his leave of the countess, barely seeing the familiar street as he mounted his horse, or the people he passed who greeted him. Across his vision instead were Mrs. Park’s horrified eyes the night before as he’d told her to hurry, her threadbare gown, the shabby flat, and the three urchins crying for her attention, all of them bone-thin because their father had spent his every penny—and more—on the tables.

If John had come to him earlier, he could have helped. He could have done something. If he’d only known before yesterday…

But he had not. He hadn’t even seen John Park since January, when they brought the Victory into port.

Now he would do the honorable thing. Now he would make it right.

After the funeral.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow he would ask his former first officer’s widow to marry him.

~o0o~

The orbs of Elle’s eyes would not function properly. Her gaze stuck as though by glue to the drainage grate cemented into the cobbles of the alley before her toes.

Fifty-three.

The number of pieces of type irretrievably lost.

Fifty-three.

Not five. Or three. Either of which might be overlooked. Perhaps. But fifty-three.

At both dawn and dusk the day before when the traffic was light, then again this morning, she had searched in every crack between cobbles. In vain. So she had returned to the shop and repaired the frame. Then she had reset the text of Lady Justice’s latest broadsheet perfectly, down to the exact mistakes recorded on the proof-corrected page she had read to her grandmother.

Mr. Brittle did not allow her to set type. Of course she knew how to do it. Even before she took the position at Brittle & Sons her grandfather, a pressman in the governor of Virginia’s printing shop for thirty years, had taught her everything he knew. At his knee, her bedtime stories had not been about knights or princesses, but quoins, scrapers, ink-balls, tympans, formes, and platens.

At Brittle & Sons, it was Charlie’s task to compose the type, and occasionally Jo Junior’s. Despite Elle’s eight years at the shop, Mr. Brittle Senior did not believe that women were intelligent enough for the task. The press was far too valuable, he said.

Far too valuable.

Thirty-nine individual letters, two common words, four spaces, and five punctuation marks were still missing. And the most distressing part: three pieces of type she had recovered were mangled, crushed beneath the hooves of the scoundrel’s horse.

Fifty-three pieces in all.

For fifty-three scraps of metal she would lose her position and be sent to prison. She had no doubt Jo Junior would make it so.

Sitting on her haunches in the deepening shadows, staring at the grate through which the missing pieces had tumbled, as numbness settled in she wondered if Mr. Curtis would take in her grandmother, perhaps into some unused corner of the foundling home attached to the church. He was a kind man. He would not allow Gram to be sent to the poorhouse. Not now. Perhaps just until…

She squeezed her eyes shut.

Hooves clopped onto the cobbles at the far end of the alley, echoing between the close walls of the buildings to either side. They grew louder as they neared, moving slowly. As the rider passed by a yard away, Elle glanced up. She recognized the horse. And her numb body lit like dry kindling.

The tight springs of her knees uncoiled.

“Why couldn’t you have walked by two nights ago?” It was more accusation than query.

The hoof clacks halted, the animal’s tail swished back and forth once, and the rider swiveled his head and looked directly at her.

Handsomer than she remembered.

Of course he was. Handsome men were the most heedless of others.

Then she saw the uniform: blue and white, medals pinned across his chest, a gold epaulette on one shoulder, a plumed hat, right down to a bejeweled sword on his hip.

“You are a sailor?” She did not know where the words came from. She had never spoken to a man in this manner. Not even Jo Junior. “I might have known.”

For a moment he stared blankly at her with those violently blue eyes. Then the light in them changed, as though he were bringing her into focus.

“Beg