The Very Daring Duchess Part 5

He didn't smile-in a perverse way she would have been disappointed if he had-but the throat-clearing growl he made instead was telling enough.

"My waistcoat, Signora Robin, is incidental," he said sternly. "What I meant is that every item and person on a ship serves a single purpose, dedicated to the furtherment and efficiency of the whole."

"But if that is true, then you cannot deny that your waistcoat is an item on board your ship," she countered, tipping her head to one side, "and therefore its purpose, too, must be that same furtherment and efficiency. Otherwise over the side it should go, my lord captain, and into the ocean, and leave you to your furthering in your shirtsleeves. That is what most seamen do, isn't it? Toiling most efficiently beneath the sun in no more than trousers and a neckerchief?"

Lady Hamilton laughed heartily, and poked her finger into the captain's arm. "Ooh, we ladies should all enjoy that, wouldn't we, my lord? Every one of the king's officers dressed in scarce more than the uniform G.o.d gave them?"

But again the captain didn't laugh, his expression if anything more serious than before. "If one takes away all the signs of rank that come with uniforms, my lady," he argued, "then one might as well be a G.o.dless French republican, and declare all men equal regardless of merit or accomplishment."

"Because they are naked, my lord?" asked Francesca, unable to resist. "I should rather think men in a natural state are far less equal than when they are clothed."

He frowned, his brows pulling sharply together. "Signora Robin, I do not think-"

"Oh, stop calling her that, Captain Ramsden," ordered Lady Hamilton cheerfully. "She's no more a signora than I am. Her father was as English as John Bull, and so you must address her as miss. Miss Robin. If she were a true Italian, then she'd be Signora Pettirosso-that's what robins are named here, you know-which is far too great a mouthful for any lady as young and fair as my dear little Robin. Miss Robin: try it now, my lord, just to oblige me."

"Miss Robin, then," he said with a slight bow toward Francesca. "Your servant, Miss Robin."

A servant who wished to throttle her, decided Francesca as she nodded in return. What was it about the man that made her behave so badly?

"Quite properly done, my lord captain," said her ladyship, her chuckle rich with earthy indulgence. "Though I should say she's bettered you and gotten your worm, the way any good little Robin should."

Francesca smiled, though she felt her cheeks warm. His worm, indeed: She'd never intended matters to slip to that level, any more than she wished to be reminded of her English blood and surname. But then she should have known better than to let herself be tempted into this sort of ribaldry with her ladyship, who was infinitely more worldly and experienced at it.

And was she really that eager to humiliate herself like this before Captain Ramsden again?

"We were speaking of waistcoats, my lady," she began more tentatively, "and not of-"

"I know exactly what we were discussing, little Robin," interrupted her ladyship again with a wink, "and I know what his lord captain wished-oh, fiddle, what is it now, Rudolpho?"

There was a hurried, whispered conference between the footman and Lady Hamilton. To avoid meeting the captain's gaze again, Francesca briskly folded her smock and stuffed it into her workbag with her chalks. It was time she left, anyway. On this short winter day, the sun had nearly set, a bright red circle sliding into the bay beyond the balcony, and it was not wise for her to walk home alone after dark or to squander her hard-earned money to hire a chair or cart.

"My lord captain, my dear little Robin, you both must excuse me," said her ladyship with an overwrought sigh. "It seems there is an intemperate dispute below stairs between the cook and a footmen involving knives and a cleaver that I must attend to at once. Amuse yourselves, you two, and I shall return as soon as I can."

"But your ladyship, I must leave myself!" protested Francesca. "That is, I have waited upon your hospitality long enough, and I should return to my own home before nightfall."

"Of course you can stay," said her ladyship impatiently. "I wish you to, Miss Robin, and that should be reason enough. I'll send you home in my own chair later, if that is what worries you. Now pray, keep company with this poor gentleman while I make peace in the kitchen."

"Yes, my lady," murmured Francesca unhappily, dropping a perfunctory curtsey as her ladyship swept from the room.

Behind her Captain Ramsden self-consciously cleared his throat. "Do not feel yourself under any obligation to 'amuse' me, Miss Robin. I came to this house on navy business, not to be entertained in a social manner."

She turned quickly, the light lawn of her skirts swirling around her legs. "Then we are in the same kettle, my lord captain. I, too, came here for business, not for amus.e.m.e.nt. It is only Lady Hamilton who chooses to confuse the two."

"Doesn't she always do so?" Captain Ramsden smiled, a wry sort of smile that Francesca already a.s.sociated with him. "Lady Hamilton is well-known to be a woman incapable of separating her pleasure from business."

"Lady Hamilton possesses the rare ability to find pleasure and delight in everything, my lord captain," said Francesca. She'd liked that smile of his when they'd first met; it had promised the same kind of droll, dry wit with which she herself viewed the world, if only he'd dare set it free. "It is a most pleasing trait, and one that has endeared her to many."

But the captain's expression darkened. "Her ladyship would do better to find her pleasure with her own husband, and not be as concerned with endearing herself to quite so many others."

"If you were referring to Admiral Nelson-"

"I was not," he said curtly. "I'd be a d.a.m.ned fool if I did, wouldn't I?"

She shrugged. " 'Tis not so grave as all that. You would only be commenting upon an arrangement that is already so commonly known as to be unremarkable."

"For you ladies here in Naples, perhaps it is," he said, his shoulders shifting as if balancing the weight of his disapproval. "Here scandal means nothing, with ladies taking lovers as openly as-"

"Not I," she interrupted with blithe honesty. "My heart is my own, and always has been. That is my choice. A true artist cannot give her love away to a man, or risk losing the soul of her talent with it."

He paused, openly skeptical. "As you say, Miss Robin."

"As I do say, and as I believe, whether you do or not." Like every other man, he'd believe what he wished about her; she'd no control over that. "But tell me, per favore. Does my lord captain have a faithful, loving lady wife of his own waiting at home in England?"

"No, Miss Robin," he said. "I most certainly do not."

"No lady wife?" she asked wickedly, the temptation to devilment too much to resist. "Or none who is faithful?"

"No lady wife in England or anywhere else," he said firmly, "faithful, loving, or otherwise."

"Bene, bene." She sighed dramatically. "That is most wise of you, my lord captain. A roving sailor is so very seldom at home to offer the comforts that a wife-"

"Exactly, Miss Robin," said the captain, and there again, where Francesca would never have expected it, came that wry, dry smile. "Just like you, I have chosen to keep my heart to myself. Now this drawing of Lady Hamilton here-is this something you've brought for her to purchase?"

"Oh, no, I drew it myself," she said, still puzzling over his response. She'd been teasing him about being a cuckold. How could he smile over that? "This afternoon. I've portrayed her as Penelope, awaiting the return of the brave Odysseus."

"Penelope?" he repeated, amused in spite of himself. "I'll not say a word to that, not one blessed word. But the drawing is most fine."

"Grazie, my lord," murmured Francesca. The room was filled with the rosy beams of the setting sun, bounced back countless times by the mirrors, and the warmth of the light seemed to warm him, too, burnishing his hair to dull gold, glinting off the polished b.u.t.tons and braid of his uniform, softening the harsh lines the sun and wind had carved into his face. "It's only a sketch, done in haste to capture the pa.s.sing mood of a moment."

"But most handsomely done." He nodded, then to Francesca's dismay he began to look through the other drawings in the portfolio on the table, quickly done chalk or ink pictures of Neapolitan mothers with their children that she'd brought at Lady Hamilton's request. "Are these yours, too?"

"Yes, but they're not meant for showing," she said, hurrying to his side to try to shift the portfolio and the pictures away from him. "Lady Hamilton has a taste for such subjects drawn from life, and so I bring them to oblige her. But they're not finished works, of no interest to a gentleman like yourself."

"But they are," he said softly, putting his hand on the edge of the portfolio to stop her. He had large hands, strong, brown hands more fit for a laborer than a gentleman, dusted on the backs with fine golden hairs and crisscrossed with old scars. "Yet you have no child of your own?"

"No." She leaned forward, trying to reach around him to close the portfolio. As hastily sketched as these drawings were, they seemed somehow too personal, too private to share with a stranger. The tenderness and love she'd captured between the mothers and their children in the market, or sitting on the sunlit steps of San Domenicho Maggiore, or playing on the sand near the water-all revealed too much of her own longings and emotions to be so coldly displayed and perhaps mocked. "Please, my lord, they are not for show or for sale."

"They should be." He turned the sheets, smiling at the next drawing that showed a fat-cheeked little girl gleefully chasing a goose with her chubby arms outstretched, and her mother in turn chasing her. "Surely your own mother must have run after you like this as well, yes?"

"I have no memory of my mother," she said quickly. "She was gone when I was still a babe. Now, please, per favore-"

"My mother died young, too," he said, his voice carefully impa.s.sive as he turned another page. "A great loss."

But her mother hadn't died. One morning she'd simply left Francesca's father and their baby daughter and run off to Marostica with a goldsmith, and she'd never come back. That would have been scandal enough for the righteous Captain Lord Ramdsen, even without the rest of the sorry story: that Francesca's mother had been one of her father's models, and that despite Francesca's birth, they'd never quite bothered to marry.

Oh, yes, she kept her heart to herself, and how many reasons she'd learned for doing so!

Swiftly Francesca ducked beneath his arm and slid the portfolio across the table away from him, shuffling the sheets back inside as she closed the boards together.