before the fireplace where a chessboard lay waiting to be used. Someone had tossed embroidery to the side, and a piece of knitting had fallen to the floor.
Even more telling, a toy ship lay on its side, surrounded by a scatter of tin soldiers. The ship was flying a tiny Jolly Roger.
His wife had moved on.
“She can’t have married someone else,” he muttered, half to himself. “I would know. Pettigrew would have told me. She’d have to have declared me dead.”
“No sign of a man,” Shark said from his right shoulder. “The little one and herself, I’d guess. No pipe. No brandy.” He nodded toward the side table. “That’s sherry.”
“Don’t spit,” Griffin said. “Spitting is not allowed in a gentleman’s house.”
“I wasn’t going to spit,” Shark said, offended. He’d spent the last two months soaking up all the information he could from a sailor who had once worked in a noble residence. “I’m just saying that yer missus has got a child, but she don’t—doesn’t—have a man.”
“Or she hasn’t brought him into the house,” Griffin said, through clenched teeth.
He backed into the hall again. The next two doors opened, respectively, into a dining room and a small, very feminine sitting room.
The fourth door—the one the boy had fled through—opened, unexpectedly, into a courtyard shaped by two backward-extending wings of the house. It was charming, paved in uneven bricks, with a couple of trees providing shade. On the far side he could see a broad lawn spreading down to a lake.
“There he goes,” Shark said, laughter rolling in his voice.
A small figure was tearing down the hill, his legs pumping. At the water’s edge, there was a flutter of white skirts and a parasol.
Griffin stepped forward into the courtyard but immediately realized he couldn’t walk to the lake. By the time he reached the bottom of that hill, he’d be sweating and shaking. His leg was already throbbing, thanks to the steps leading to the front door.
“You can sit over there,” Shark said, jerking his head toward a table with a crowd of serviceable chairs. It stood to the side of the courtyard under the shade of a spreading oak tree. Griffin sank into a chair with a sigh of relief.
For some time, nothing happened.
They sat and listened to birds singing. At sea, the ship was accompanied by seagulls’ wild shrieks. By comparison, these birds sang Mozart arias, speaking to each other in trills and tremolos, performing elaborate courtship dances on the branches over their heads.
Minutes passed. Apparently, Poppy had paid no heed to the boy, who by now must have told her that pirates had taken over the house. You could hardly blame her for ignoring his nonsense. Yet it wasn’t safe to have a house open like this, a house without, as far as he could see, any male servants. What if robbers stopped by? Marauders?
After a while he couldn’t take it any longer. “See if she’s coming,” he growled at Shark. “And if she isn’t, step down the hill and ask her if she would be so kind as to greet her husband.”
Shark walked over and looked toward the lake. “She’s coming up the hill,” he said. Then: “You never mentioned your missus was such an eyeful.”
Griffin narrowed his eyes, and Shark shut his mouth, retreating to a chair.
He should probably send the man off to the servants’ quarters, except there didn’t seem to be any servants. And Shark would undoubtedly send the cook into hysterics if he strolled in without introduction. The saber scar on his chin lent him a particularly ferocious air.
Griffin sighed and pounded his aching thigh again. Shark had no need to remind him that Poppy was beautiful. Her face was pretty much the only thing he remembered about their wedding night. There he had been, all of seventeen years old and skinny as a twig, whereas she had been an older woman of twenty: exquisite, shapely, utterly beautiful. Terrifying.
The outcome was hardly unexpected.
He’d left a virgin wife behind, though it appeared she hadn’t stayed that way. The wave of anger he felt was unfair to her, and he knew it. A man couldn’t leave for fourteen years and expect his wife to remain faithful.
Though wasn’t Penelope faithful to Odysseus?
Odysseus probably satisfied his wife before he took off for war. Likely gave her some children. Griffin had read Homer’s tale so long ago that he couldn’t quite remember.
Still, he had never imagined that his wife might take those unconsummated wedding vows as lightly as