Enjoy the first chapter of this romantic novel.
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Chapter One
November 1789
I will never let a man capture my heart.
The poor example of manhood set by Eli Briggs left Nell Tregrain unwavering in her decision. She would remain unmarried for the rest of her life. That determination was firmly implanted in Nell’s mind when she awoke, long before the sun greased the grey sky over the upper reaches of the River Tamar. She’d been dreaming about her dead sister and it was a far from pleasant dream. It troubled her so much that she remained curled up in the warmth of her bunk while muffled voices told her other people were already about on Cotehele Quay.
She stirred only when she heard footsteps on the wooden deck above her. Leaving her father asleep in the opposite bunk, she crept up the creaky ladder in the dim, diffused light of dawn. The seaman, Amos Wilkes, was already awake, busily preparing the Eleanor of Maidstone for its journey downstream.
“Tide’ll be turning at Saltash in the hour, Miss Nell,” he announced and gave her an inquisitive glance; the sort of glance that would have worried her far more had it come from someone else. Doubtless, he saw in her
face some residual evidence of her troublesome dream, but she knew full well that he’d hold his tongue. He was, after all, only an employee.
Nell silently checked the tide for herself then nodded at Amos. “We’ll cast off shortly.”
There was time enough to let her father sleep a little longer before they headed downstream to offload a cargo of empty barrels at Saltash jetty. Once the deck was cleared and they were away again, the tide would carry them speedily on down the Tamar River and out into the choppy waters of Plymouth Sound. After that… she felt a tiny glow of satisfaction… after that, they’d sail along the Cornish coast to Penperran, the harbour village that was her real home, the place she’d missed so much while living in London. Cornwall was the land of her old Celtic ancestors and she yearned to return there.
She stepped onto the quay where other boats were coming to life. Occasional voices echoed in the cold morning air, voices imbued with a familiar West-Country burr. A woman laughed, a mellow sound akin to the way her sister, Hannah, used to display her infectious enjoyment of life.
Nell shivered and folded her arms across her chest.
Poor, dear Hannah. Is it only a week ago you died?
A little more than a week since she and her father had first visited Hannah inside Newgate Gaol? How foolish they must have seemed, wishing God’s mercy upon her when she came to trial. There never was any hope of mercy because the proceedings were led by that notorious judge, Edmund Killiow, the man they knew as the evil spawn of one of Cornwall’s most powerful families. A man as much feared by Londoners as he was by the peasantry in his home county.
Nell wiped at her eyes and jerked her attention back to the present.
Somewhere nearby, an elderly man shouted. He led a heavy horse onto the quay and backed it up to a brewery dray. Another man, older and more noticeably bent, shuffled out from a quayside warehouse, a pipe jutting from his mouth. Cotehele was coming to life.
Nell blinked and shook her head as if emerging from a dream. People were watching her with some suspicion, people who likely didn’t know she was returning to her roots. She wiped again at her damp eyes and hurried back on board the Eleanor of Maidstone.
“I’ll waken my father, Amos,” she called out. “I want us to be on our way as soon as possible. I want to get home to Penperran before the day’s out.”
She was, at last, going home – and relief welled up inside her.
*
The battered old sailing barge rounded a bend in the River Tamar and a terrible smell suddenly hit Jeffrey St Vincent. It was the stench of human degradation drifting down from the hulks moored in the River Lynher, a few hundred yards beyond where the two rivers joined. The rotting remains of the old warships lay stripped of sails and masts, their hulls filled with prisoners destined for transportation to Australia. Those poor souls lived twenty-four hours a day inside the hulks, crammed together like caged animals, trapped in the stench of their own waste.
Jeffrey clasped a hand over his face until the barge had sailed clear of the smell. Not for the first time, it occurred to him that he was lucky not to be incarcerated along with those wretched beings, lucky to be free again after only one year’s imprisonment in the Royal Navy prison at Millbay, near Plymouth.
He blinked as cold spray hit his face. The deck jerked against the river’s choppy flow, so out of keeping with the long, rolling swells he’d encountered at sea. He stretched one arm round to his back and rubbed a bunched fist into his taught lumbar muscles. The scars from his last flogging still chafed against his thick hemp shirt and no amount of massage would ever ease the itchy pain.
He frowned as a coarse voice bellowed from behind. “What’ll you give me for her, gentlemen? Look at her. She’s a fine-looking maid. You’ll never buy one like her at the price.”
Jeffrey ignored the barter, keeping his gaze focussed straight ahead.
Behind him, the odious trade continued. “Did you ever see such a fine young wench as this? And you can have her now for a very small price.” The voice gushed with enthusiasm.
Jeffrey could have taken an interest. He could have turned round to watch, to discover who was being sold, and why. But he didn’t. What was some poor wench to him when he had to live with the knowledge that he’d dishonoured his family name? He was no longer fit to be a Royal Naval officer. While his captain fought a lunatic sea battle off the ice-bound coast of Newfoundland, he’d been clapped in irons on a trumped-up charge of insubordination. In the aftermath of that disastrous voyage, he’d been court-martialled, formally stripped of his rank and incarcerated in the naval prison.
He stood resolutely near the barge’s bow. The vessel carried a dozen or more passengers upstream towards Saltash, his childhood home where the St Vincent name was still a force to be reckoned with. Instead of his lieutenant’s uniform, he now wore a seaman’s slops: sailcloth trousers stained with grease and heavily frayed at the bottoms, and a black serge coat that had seen many better days. His distinctive blond hair was hidden beneath a black woollen cap.
He sighed as, behind him, the unsavoury trading continued.
“Four shillings? Who’ll give me four shillings for the maid? ’Tes not asking too much for a fine wench who’ll warm your feet on a cold night.”
The sail flapped and groaned while the barge tacked against the icy cold wind, dragging its heels on a slowing tide that was about to turn. Jeffrey forced himself to stare ahead at the Cornish shoreline. Dull and lifeless in a light, misty drizzle, Saltash town climbed up the face of what looked like an impossibly steep hill, the houses hanging there precariously. Below, early morning traces of winter sunshine cast hazy shadows all along the waterside where beached fishing boats lay on their keels at ungainly angles. The smell of seaweed drifted back on an off-shore wind.
Jeffrey flinched as the coarse voice became more insistent. “Worth a few shillings to any man, she is. Come along, gentlemen. What about you, sir, you’re a seaman ain’t you?” The speaker paused as if expecting Jeffrey to turn and face him. “Come along, sir. You look like you could afford to buy a fine young maid like this.”
Damnation!
Jeffrey forced himself to breathe slowly, to avoid any sudden angry response. But anger was rippling inside him, bursting to get out. He turned slowly and deliberately to where a lean, sour-faced man in a farm labourer’s filthy smock stood beside a thin girl. She was hunched forward with her hands clasped in front of her. He was immediately struck by her long, black hair and big, sad eyes. Her slender body shivered beneath a thin, grey dress barely reaching below her knees. Her young breasts made little impact beneath the worn cloth.
The labourer grasped the end of a rope tied about her waist. He’d momentarily given up on Jeffrey and he held out his free hand, palm-up, towards two older men. “What about you, gentlemen? Come along, now. Four shill… how about three shillings? You can have her for three shillings. Can’t say better than that, can I?”
The two passengers shook their heads and walked away, disgust written deep in their lined faces.
“You, sir. The naval man.” The labourer directed his attention back to Jeffrey. He swayed uneasily as the boat hit a short wave, then he staggered forward, pulling the girl behind him. As the man came closer, the
stale, pungent stench of drink and sweat fought against the clean sea air and won. He seemed supremely self-assured despite being dwarfed by Jeffrey’s six-foot frame.
“What’s your business?” Jeffrey asked.
“Business? Why, sir, I have here a young wife I can no longer afford. She needs to go to a strong man, someone who’ll not be afraid to beat her when she’s wicked. A naval man like yourself would do very nicely for her. Yes, I’m sure of it, sir. She’ll serve you well, you being a seafarer who’ll know how to treat a maid firmly. And only three shillings.”
“Wife?” Another twinge of pain ran up Jeffrey’s back. He focussed on the girl and gasped. “You’d sell your
wife?”
“Need the money, sir. But she’s a willing wench, I promise you that. Goes at it like a rabbit, sir. Night and day. Like a rabbit, sir. Just needs a bit of feeding to fatten her up.”
The girl stared up at Jeffrey, as if silently pleading for his help. Her gaze held him strangely transfixed while he puzzled at a deeper meaning hidden behind her sad, blue eyes. It was more than just a plea for help,
much deeper, and yet the truth of it eluded him.
Whatever it was, he couldn’t help her. Not here.
“Be off with you!” He waved the man away, deliberately suppressing his bubbling anger. Deep down, he wanted to beat the man or – better still – to pull out his treasured naval sword from his sea bag and carve a slice or two from the labourer’s buttocks. But he couldn’t afford to draw attention to himself, not while he remained so close to Plymouth. Not so soon after his release from the naval prison.
The labourer shrugged and dragged the girl back to where other passengers stood near the rear of the barge. The smell went with him, but the echo of his bartering was still audible.
Jeffrey lurched forward and stared down at the river churning noisily against the barge’s blunt bow. It was nowhere near as majestic as the sight and feel of his last ship, the Dexterity. He allowed himself a brief smile of remembrance, conjuring up an image of the naval warship as it ploughed through high ocean waves at the far ends of the world. The barge was too tame by far, but it was comforting enough to someone who’d loved the sea since before he first signed on as a midshipman, fourteen years ago. He had been twelve then. It seemed a lifetime ago.
Hearing the helmsman’s sudden, aggressive shout, he looked up. The barge was closing in towards the Saltash shore, but something was wrong. A single-mast vessel was tacking dangerously close across their path; the mast and sail leaning back drunkenly against the wind. A strange craft for these waters, what was it?
An English hoy? Surely not.
He’d never before seen such a craft so far from its home waters around the Thames estuary. He homed in on the name, Eleanor of Maidstone.
As the hoy came closer, Jeffrey took an involuntary step backwards and gave the Tamar bargeman a worrying glance. A collision seemed almost certain until, at the last moment, the hoy’s helmsman reacted. Bent with age, and with long white hair streaming out behind him, the man leaned against the tiller and swung his craft away on the opposite tack. As it veered about, Jeffrey spotted a young woman in seaman’s clothes standing in the bow, waving frantically at the Tamar barge. She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, but her words were dragged away on the breeze.
The two boats pulled apart and the brief moment of tension subsided. The collision avoided, the hoy swung round in a wide arc, following the barge in towards Saltash quay. Jeffrey allowed himself a moment to relax before refocusing his attention on the shore.
Another splash of cold spray came over the bow as the Tamar bargeman bellowed out a warning to his passengers and, seconds later, the barge tacked again. The last of the incoming tide died away to nothing as the vessel ran neatly alongside a weed-cluttered jetty.
Jeffrey grabbed his canvas sea bag and jumped ashore, vaguely aware of the other vessel approaching the opposite side of the jetty. Before the rest of the barge’s passengers had begun to disembark, he was hurrying up the steep hill towards Saltash town, and his father’s house.
The town had not changed one jot in his absence. Fore Street, the single, steeply-angled main road through Saltash, was already coming to life. He stopped beside the guildhall and caught his breath while studying the St Vincent house opposite. He owed it to his father to call upon him as a matter of duty. He didn’t expect a warm welcome, but it would be enough to be back in his old home, to sleep in his old bed. Doubtless, his mother would have welcomed him with open arms, but she’d died of cholera five years ago. Drawing a deep breath, he crossed the road and knocked at the door. It opened with the same loud creak he remembered of old, and a familiar figure stood in the opening.
“Why – Mr Jeffrey? You’re back.” The servant girl’s eyes grew large with surprise. She looked older than he remembered, her face more lined, her auburn hair distinctly tinged with grey.
“You look surprised, Lizzy.” He stepped in out of the cold air and was immediately aware of the aroma of pipe smoke: the tang of his father’s favourite tobacco.
“The master didn’t tell us you were coming.” She avoided holding his gaze and chewed at her lower lip, as if she were afraid to comment upon the reason for his long absence.
“He likely didn’t know,” Jeffrey replied. “I sent no word.”
“Yes, sir. Come this way, sir. He’s in his study.”
Jeffrey left his sea bag in the entrance hall while the servant girl escorted him along a dark passageway. The floor echoed hollow to his boots, just as it had done so often when he was a child summoned here to be chastised for so many youthful misdemeanours.
“My father is alone at present?” he asked the girl.
“Yes, sir,” she responded before knocking on the study door and opening it. She curtseyed towards her master and announced, “Your son is here, Sir Edward.” Then she stood back to allow Jeffrey into the
room.
“Good morning, father.” Jeffrey waited until the girl had left the room before continuing. In those few moments, his heart warmed to be in these familiar surroundings once again, but the feeling didn’t last. As the door clunked shut behind him, he detected an air of coldness in the way his father gaped at him, and he hardened himself against a hostile reception.
He coughed and went on, “I’m pleased to see that you are looking well, sir.”
“Why do you come here, boy?” Rear Admiral Sir Edward St Vincent stood at the fireplace, his pipe in one hand and a lighted spill in the other. A tall, austere man, he spoke with a low, harsh voice and dark expression of distaste.
“I came to greet you, father. Would you have it otherwise?” Already, Jeffrey was aware that he’d been wrong not to warn his father of his visit. The old man hadn’t been given time to moderate his strong emotions – he was clearly unable to make himself amendable to his son’s unforeseen arrival.
The rear admiral lit his pipe and drew upon it before replying. “I had word of your impending release a few days ago, but I didn’t expect you to come straight here. I thought you might go somewhere else to lick your wounds, at least until the news of your freedom was forgotten.”
“You’re not pleased to see me, father?”
“My friends thought I would be pleased that you were to be freed. They were wrong, of course.”
“I am saddened to hear of your displeasure.” Jeffrey held himself erect. The cold reception came hard upon him after a year of incarceration, but he was determined to remain calm. “It was never my intent to cause harm to you or anyone in this house.”
Sir Edward glowered at his son. “You defied me, boy. I would have bought you a suitable lawyer, one who would have ensured the truth came out in court. But you defied me. Tried to fight your own defence.”
“As a matter of honour, I wanted to make my own stand, sir.”
“And did you? No! You failed miserably, boy. Stripped of your rank and imprisoned for a year. You’ve brought shame on the St Vincent family name.”
Jeffrey raised a hand in protest. Surely he didn’t deserve this from any member of his own family? Surely his father, of all people, should understand?
He took a step forward, adopting a pleading expression. “But, sir! I was unfairly treated at the court
martial.”
“Unfairly treated? Of course you were unfairly treated. With your pathetic defence, you allowed it to happen. You allowed our family name to be dragged in the gutter.” The old man glowered at his son, his voice turning to a tight hiss. “I will not have you back here, boy. Go and make your own life in whatever way you choose, but do not come back to this house again.” His anger vented, Sir Edward pointedly turned his back on Jeffrey.
Jeffrey blinked. He’d expected annoyance and expressions of hurt from his father, but not this. Not banishment. He summoned up the last of his residual determination to assert, “I am your son, sir. Your heir.”
“No!” Sir Edward kept his gaze averted. His voice cracked with the weight of his emotion. “From now on I have no son. No heir.” And then he hung his head forward as if he was filled with grief.
Jeffrey dropped his voice to little more than a whisper. “You wrong me, father.”
“You wronged yourself, boy! Let me hear no excuses. You shamed me, shamed my family name, and now I want to see no more of you. Thank God your mother is no longer alive to witness the dishonour you have brought upon us.”
Those words were the cruellest of all. Jeffrey opened his mouth to reply, but his throat turned dry. How could his father use his mother against him in such a heartless way? The mother he loved.
He licked at his lips and forced out his final words. “I see. Then… then we shall not meet again.” Jeffrey felt his shoulders slump as he turned on his heels. Maybe he deserved this. Maybe he should have anticipated
it. Maybe the fault was his alone.
Lizzy, the maid, was in the hallway when he walked out from the study. Likely she knew what had taken place in there. He recalled that she had a way of eavesdropping in order to pick up juicy tit-bits of gossip. Within minutes the news would percolate up to the servants’ attic quarters. Within the day, most of Saltash would know that Jeffrey St Vincent had been disowned.
He avoided Lizzy’s gaze as he gathered up his sea bag and left the house where he had grown up. Would his father ever change his mind? Would he one day welcome back his wayward son? He had no idea and that saddened him because he loved the old man, always had. Always would. Feeling heavier in his heart than he had for many a day, he walked quickly away from the town, down the narrow, steep lane leading to the Saltash waterside. For the moment, he could think of nowhere else to go.
The Tamar barge had moved on from the jetty, but the hoy was still there. The same young woman was kneeling on the deck, fussing over the white-haired old man who’d navigated the vessel down-stream. They seemed to be arguing. Jeffrey paused beside a chandler’s shop and their voices drifted across the street.
“We must go on, father. You said we would. You promised! If we leave now, we could be in Penperran this evening.” The young woman wagged a stern finger at him as she spoke.
The old man was calm but firm in his response. “No, Nell. We’ll take one more cargo upstream to Cotehele Quay. We need the money; you know that.”
“But you’re not well,” she protested, a fierce sharpness infusing her voice. “You know that this is too much for you.”
“One more cargo, Nell. Just one. We’ll sail on down the coast to Penperran tomorrow. I promise.”
“Like you promised me before? Oh, father!”
Jeffrey studied the young woman as she stood up and put her hands on her hips. The seaman’s garb hid little of her attractive figure. Once, not so very long ago, he would have openly admired her, engaged her in
conversation, maybe even enticed her into his bed. But that year in gaol had changed him, subdued him and made him acutely aware that he was no longer an attractive proposition for any women. If his own father was willing to disown him, what would any decent woman think? He shrugged and moved on. The argument
between father and daughter was none of his business.
He wandered the grim, waterside streets until his sailor’s eye told him it was nigh on noon, but he still had no idea where he should go. What options were open to a disgraced naval officer? Needing time to think, he left the waterside and walked steadily along the river bank away from Saltash. His future in the Royal Navy had been mapped out long before the idea ever entered his own head. On his eighth birthday, his mother raised the matter of entering his name on the books of the warship, Triumph Royal, under the practice known as false muster. It was a common enough trick for a privileged boy to avoid serving the full six years needed for promotion to lieutenant. But Jeffrey’s father adamantly refused. As commander of the ship, he could have so easily made life easier for his son, but he wouldn’t. Other fathers – men with money to influence an amenable ship’s commander, or men with political power – had engineered false musters for their privileged young sons. But Sir Edward St Vincent was a man of principle. From an early age, he’d instilled into Jeffrey the ideals of honesty and integrity.
“My son will learn his seamanship the hard way, the right way,” Sir Edward had decreed.
His mother had, in time, come to accept her husband’s decision. She was the daughter of a French admiral and had hoped to keep her son away from the privations of the lower decks. But, to her credit, she knew also the importance of Jeffrey getting a good grounding in seamanship. Instead of pursuing the matter of false muster, she spent her energies teaching him to speak French like a true Frenchman.
The six years he spent as a midshipman had been a long, harsh apprenticeship, but Jeffrey was glad he’d served them in full. He was confident he could knot and splice a rope as well as any rigger, could race any seaman to the maintop and could handle a boat as though he’d been born to it. More importantly, he had the respect of the men he commanded. Those six years gave him the edge over boys who’d spent much of their false muster years in the comfort of their homes, enough edge to see him appointed to the rank of lieutenant at his first promotion board.
After five years as a second lieutenant aboard a sixty-four-gun ship of the line, he was appointed first lieutenant aboard his Majesty’s sloop-of-war, Dexterity, a two-mast vessel of two hundred and fifty tons,
carrying sixteen six-pound cannons on her single gun deck. Jeffrey developed a fond affinity with the Dexterity. She was a good ship – no, she wasn’t a ship, she was a vessel. Naval tradition demanded that a ship must have three square-rigged masts. The Dexterity was no more than a brig sloop, but she was a fast vessel and
she carried a good crew. Only the foul behaviour and incompetence of Captain George Butcher, the master and commander, marred Jeffrey’s enjoyment of his duties. Butcher had a poor reputation as both a seaman and a commander, a reputation that had stopped dead his advancement to higher rank. In accordance
with naval practice, he was given the courtesy title of captain while aboard the sloop, but he’d never attained the fully-commissioned rank of post captain and was barred from commanding a rated warship.
Some fellow officers said Butcher was mad. His junior officers looked at the captain’s florid face while he bellowed at the crew for no good reason and they declared that no sane man should sail with him. Privately,
Jeffrey agreed that Butcher was unfit to command, but he continued to give the captain his loyalty… until that fateful voyage to Halifax.
His last voyage as a naval officer.
*
Nell and Amos Wilkes rolled the empty barrels onto Saltash jetty, up-ending them in readiness for the local carrier. Then they began the more difficult task of stowing the new cargo, the load that would put a little extra money in Cornelius Tregrain’s purse. While Amos roped the cargo to the deck, Nell paused to gather her breath and to consider that they might be in sight of Penperran right now – if only she had had her way. How she longed to be back there, amongst the Cornish people she’d grown up with, the people she trusted.
She watched a lone figure walk past the jetty in the direction of Tamar Street, a handsome-looking man with an air of refinement about him. She recalled seeing him alight from a Tamar barge earlier in the day. It was strange that he wore the clothes of a common seaman and yet he had the bearing of an officer. When she and Hannah were younger, they would have admired the man and then exchanged girlish confidences about what they thought of him, and how they might innocently pay attention to him. But those days were now past.
She looked down at her grimy, shapeless clothes and suppressed a snort of self-derision. Dressed as a seaman, no decent man would ever look at her with pleasure, and she planned to keep things that way. She shook her head as the man disappeared from her sight. No – she was determined on it – no handsome man was going to get the better of her. No handsome man was going to govern her life the way Eli Briggs had ruled over Hannah. In the light of her sister’s death, she was quite clear on that score. She would face any sailing perils with a firm resolve because that was the nature of life in a small Cornish community. She would risk taking the Eleanor to sea in bad weather, and she would set sail out into the English Channel to collect contraband when she judged it prudent. But these would be her risks, her decisions. No man would ever make those decisions for her, or impose his will upon her. Not now. And no man would ever make inroads into the sanctity of her soul… or her bed.
Never. It was the only way.
A quick glance told her that the strange man was no longer in sight, no longer a distraction to her earnest intent. She was unmarried, she again reminded herself, and she would stay unmarried for the rest of her life.
To buy a copy without further ado, click on the appropriate BUY FROM AMAZON button above,
Chapter One
November 1789
I will never let a man capture my heart.
The poor example of manhood set by Eli Briggs left Nell Tregrain unwavering in her decision. She would remain unmarried for the rest of her life. That determination was firmly implanted in Nell’s mind when she awoke, long before the sun greased the grey sky over the upper reaches of the River Tamar. She’d been dreaming about her dead sister and it was a far from pleasant dream. It troubled her so much that she remained curled up in the warmth of her bunk while muffled voices told her other people were already about on Cotehele Quay.
She stirred only when she heard footsteps on the wooden deck above her. Leaving her father asleep in the opposite bunk, she crept up the creaky ladder in the dim, diffused light of dawn. The seaman, Amos Wilkes, was already awake, busily preparing the Eleanor of Maidstone for its journey downstream.
“Tide’ll be turning at Saltash in the hour, Miss Nell,” he announced and gave her an inquisitive glance; the sort of glance that would have worried her far more had it come from someone else. Doubtless, he saw in her
face some residual evidence of her troublesome dream, but she knew full well that he’d hold his tongue. He was, after all, only an employee.
Nell silently checked the tide for herself then nodded at Amos. “We’ll cast off shortly.”
There was time enough to let her father sleep a little longer before they headed downstream to offload a cargo of empty barrels at Saltash jetty. Once the deck was cleared and they were away again, the tide would carry them speedily on down the Tamar River and out into the choppy waters of Plymouth Sound. After that… she felt a tiny glow of satisfaction… after that, they’d sail along the Cornish coast to Penperran, the harbour village that was her real home, the place she’d missed so much while living in London. Cornwall was the land of her old Celtic ancestors and she yearned to return there.
She stepped onto the quay where other boats were coming to life. Occasional voices echoed in the cold morning air, voices imbued with a familiar West-Country burr. A woman laughed, a mellow sound akin to the way her sister, Hannah, used to display her infectious enjoyment of life.
Nell shivered and folded her arms across her chest.
Poor, dear Hannah. Is it only a week ago you died?
A little more than a week since she and her father had first visited Hannah inside Newgate Gaol? How foolish they must have seemed, wishing God’s mercy upon her when she came to trial. There never was any hope of mercy because the proceedings were led by that notorious judge, Edmund Killiow, the man they knew as the evil spawn of one of Cornwall’s most powerful families. A man as much feared by Londoners as he was by the peasantry in his home county.
Nell wiped at her eyes and jerked her attention back to the present.
Somewhere nearby, an elderly man shouted. He led a heavy horse onto the quay and backed it up to a brewery dray. Another man, older and more noticeably bent, shuffled out from a quayside warehouse, a pipe jutting from his mouth. Cotehele was coming to life.
Nell blinked and shook her head as if emerging from a dream. People were watching her with some suspicion, people who likely didn’t know she was returning to her roots. She wiped again at her damp eyes and hurried back on board the Eleanor of Maidstone.
“I’ll waken my father, Amos,” she called out. “I want us to be on our way as soon as possible. I want to get home to Penperran before the day’s out.”
She was, at last, going home – and relief welled up inside her.
*
The battered old sailing barge rounded a bend in the River Tamar and a terrible smell suddenly hit Jeffrey St Vincent. It was the stench of human degradation drifting down from the hulks moored in the River Lynher, a few hundred yards beyond where the two rivers joined. The rotting remains of the old warships lay stripped of sails and masts, their hulls filled with prisoners destined for transportation to Australia. Those poor souls lived twenty-four hours a day inside the hulks, crammed together like caged animals, trapped in the stench of their own waste.
Jeffrey clasped a hand over his face until the barge had sailed clear of the smell. Not for the first time, it occurred to him that he was lucky not to be incarcerated along with those wretched beings, lucky to be free again after only one year’s imprisonment in the Royal Navy prison at Millbay, near Plymouth.
He blinked as cold spray hit his face. The deck jerked against the river’s choppy flow, so out of keeping with the long, rolling swells he’d encountered at sea. He stretched one arm round to his back and rubbed a bunched fist into his taught lumbar muscles. The scars from his last flogging still chafed against his thick hemp shirt and no amount of massage would ever ease the itchy pain.
He frowned as a coarse voice bellowed from behind. “What’ll you give me for her, gentlemen? Look at her. She’s a fine-looking maid. You’ll never buy one like her at the price.”
Jeffrey ignored the barter, keeping his gaze focussed straight ahead.
Behind him, the odious trade continued. “Did you ever see such a fine young wench as this? And you can have her now for a very small price.” The voice gushed with enthusiasm.
Jeffrey could have taken an interest. He could have turned round to watch, to discover who was being sold, and why. But he didn’t. What was some poor wench to him when he had to live with the knowledge that he’d dishonoured his family name? He was no longer fit to be a Royal Naval officer. While his captain fought a lunatic sea battle off the ice-bound coast of Newfoundland, he’d been clapped in irons on a trumped-up charge of insubordination. In the aftermath of that disastrous voyage, he’d been court-martialled, formally stripped of his rank and incarcerated in the naval prison.
He stood resolutely near the barge’s bow. The vessel carried a dozen or more passengers upstream towards Saltash, his childhood home where the St Vincent name was still a force to be reckoned with. Instead of his lieutenant’s uniform, he now wore a seaman’s slops: sailcloth trousers stained with grease and heavily frayed at the bottoms, and a black serge coat that had seen many better days. His distinctive blond hair was hidden beneath a black woollen cap.
He sighed as, behind him, the unsavoury trading continued.
“Four shillings? Who’ll give me four shillings for the maid? ’Tes not asking too much for a fine wench who’ll warm your feet on a cold night.”
The sail flapped and groaned while the barge tacked against the icy cold wind, dragging its heels on a slowing tide that was about to turn. Jeffrey forced himself to stare ahead at the Cornish shoreline. Dull and lifeless in a light, misty drizzle, Saltash town climbed up the face of what looked like an impossibly steep hill, the houses hanging there precariously. Below, early morning traces of winter sunshine cast hazy shadows all along the waterside where beached fishing boats lay on their keels at ungainly angles. The smell of seaweed drifted back on an off-shore wind.
Jeffrey flinched as the coarse voice became more insistent. “Worth a few shillings to any man, she is. Come along, gentlemen. What about you, sir, you’re a seaman ain’t you?” The speaker paused as if expecting Jeffrey to turn and face him. “Come along, sir. You look like you could afford to buy a fine young maid like this.”
Damnation!
Jeffrey forced himself to breathe slowly, to avoid any sudden angry response. But anger was rippling inside him, bursting to get out. He turned slowly and deliberately to where a lean, sour-faced man in a farm labourer’s filthy smock stood beside a thin girl. She was hunched forward with her hands clasped in front of her. He was immediately struck by her long, black hair and big, sad eyes. Her slender body shivered beneath a thin, grey dress barely reaching below her knees. Her young breasts made little impact beneath the worn cloth.
The labourer grasped the end of a rope tied about her waist. He’d momentarily given up on Jeffrey and he held out his free hand, palm-up, towards two older men. “What about you, gentlemen? Come along, now. Four shill… how about three shillings? You can have her for three shillings. Can’t say better than that, can I?”
The two passengers shook their heads and walked away, disgust written deep in their lined faces.
“You, sir. The naval man.” The labourer directed his attention back to Jeffrey. He swayed uneasily as the boat hit a short wave, then he staggered forward, pulling the girl behind him. As the man came closer, the
stale, pungent stench of drink and sweat fought against the clean sea air and won. He seemed supremely self-assured despite being dwarfed by Jeffrey’s six-foot frame.
“What’s your business?” Jeffrey asked.
“Business? Why, sir, I have here a young wife I can no longer afford. She needs to go to a strong man, someone who’ll not be afraid to beat her when she’s wicked. A naval man like yourself would do very nicely for her. Yes, I’m sure of it, sir. She’ll serve you well, you being a seafarer who’ll know how to treat a maid firmly. And only three shillings.”
“Wife?” Another twinge of pain ran up Jeffrey’s back. He focussed on the girl and gasped. “You’d sell your
wife?”
“Need the money, sir. But she’s a willing wench, I promise you that. Goes at it like a rabbit, sir. Night and day. Like a rabbit, sir. Just needs a bit of feeding to fatten her up.”
The girl stared up at Jeffrey, as if silently pleading for his help. Her gaze held him strangely transfixed while he puzzled at a deeper meaning hidden behind her sad, blue eyes. It was more than just a plea for help,
much deeper, and yet the truth of it eluded him.
Whatever it was, he couldn’t help her. Not here.
“Be off with you!” He waved the man away, deliberately suppressing his bubbling anger. Deep down, he wanted to beat the man or – better still – to pull out his treasured naval sword from his sea bag and carve a slice or two from the labourer’s buttocks. But he couldn’t afford to draw attention to himself, not while he remained so close to Plymouth. Not so soon after his release from the naval prison.
The labourer shrugged and dragged the girl back to where other passengers stood near the rear of the barge. The smell went with him, but the echo of his bartering was still audible.
Jeffrey lurched forward and stared down at the river churning noisily against the barge’s blunt bow. It was nowhere near as majestic as the sight and feel of his last ship, the Dexterity. He allowed himself a brief smile of remembrance, conjuring up an image of the naval warship as it ploughed through high ocean waves at the far ends of the world. The barge was too tame by far, but it was comforting enough to someone who’d loved the sea since before he first signed on as a midshipman, fourteen years ago. He had been twelve then. It seemed a lifetime ago.
Hearing the helmsman’s sudden, aggressive shout, he looked up. The barge was closing in towards the Saltash shore, but something was wrong. A single-mast vessel was tacking dangerously close across their path; the mast and sail leaning back drunkenly against the wind. A strange craft for these waters, what was it?
An English hoy? Surely not.
He’d never before seen such a craft so far from its home waters around the Thames estuary. He homed in on the name, Eleanor of Maidstone.
As the hoy came closer, Jeffrey took an involuntary step backwards and gave the Tamar bargeman a worrying glance. A collision seemed almost certain until, at the last moment, the hoy’s helmsman reacted. Bent with age, and with long white hair streaming out behind him, the man leaned against the tiller and swung his craft away on the opposite tack. As it veered about, Jeffrey spotted a young woman in seaman’s clothes standing in the bow, waving frantically at the Tamar barge. She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, but her words were dragged away on the breeze.
The two boats pulled apart and the brief moment of tension subsided. The collision avoided, the hoy swung round in a wide arc, following the barge in towards Saltash quay. Jeffrey allowed himself a moment to relax before refocusing his attention on the shore.
Another splash of cold spray came over the bow as the Tamar bargeman bellowed out a warning to his passengers and, seconds later, the barge tacked again. The last of the incoming tide died away to nothing as the vessel ran neatly alongside a weed-cluttered jetty.
Jeffrey grabbed his canvas sea bag and jumped ashore, vaguely aware of the other vessel approaching the opposite side of the jetty. Before the rest of the barge’s passengers had begun to disembark, he was hurrying up the steep hill towards Saltash town, and his father’s house.
The town had not changed one jot in his absence. Fore Street, the single, steeply-angled main road through Saltash, was already coming to life. He stopped beside the guildhall and caught his breath while studying the St Vincent house opposite. He owed it to his father to call upon him as a matter of duty. He didn’t expect a warm welcome, but it would be enough to be back in his old home, to sleep in his old bed. Doubtless, his mother would have welcomed him with open arms, but she’d died of cholera five years ago. Drawing a deep breath, he crossed the road and knocked at the door. It opened with the same loud creak he remembered of old, and a familiar figure stood in the opening.
“Why – Mr Jeffrey? You’re back.” The servant girl’s eyes grew large with surprise. She looked older than he remembered, her face more lined, her auburn hair distinctly tinged with grey.
“You look surprised, Lizzy.” He stepped in out of the cold air and was immediately aware of the aroma of pipe smoke: the tang of his father’s favourite tobacco.
“The master didn’t tell us you were coming.” She avoided holding his gaze and chewed at her lower lip, as if she were afraid to comment upon the reason for his long absence.
“He likely didn’t know,” Jeffrey replied. “I sent no word.”
“Yes, sir. Come this way, sir. He’s in his study.”
Jeffrey left his sea bag in the entrance hall while the servant girl escorted him along a dark passageway. The floor echoed hollow to his boots, just as it had done so often when he was a child summoned here to be chastised for so many youthful misdemeanours.
“My father is alone at present?” he asked the girl.
“Yes, sir,” she responded before knocking on the study door and opening it. She curtseyed towards her master and announced, “Your son is here, Sir Edward.” Then she stood back to allow Jeffrey into the
room.
“Good morning, father.” Jeffrey waited until the girl had left the room before continuing. In those few moments, his heart warmed to be in these familiar surroundings once again, but the feeling didn’t last. As the door clunked shut behind him, he detected an air of coldness in the way his father gaped at him, and he hardened himself against a hostile reception.
He coughed and went on, “I’m pleased to see that you are looking well, sir.”
“Why do you come here, boy?” Rear Admiral Sir Edward St Vincent stood at the fireplace, his pipe in one hand and a lighted spill in the other. A tall, austere man, he spoke with a low, harsh voice and dark expression of distaste.
“I came to greet you, father. Would you have it otherwise?” Already, Jeffrey was aware that he’d been wrong not to warn his father of his visit. The old man hadn’t been given time to moderate his strong emotions – he was clearly unable to make himself amendable to his son’s unforeseen arrival.
The rear admiral lit his pipe and drew upon it before replying. “I had word of your impending release a few days ago, but I didn’t expect you to come straight here. I thought you might go somewhere else to lick your wounds, at least until the news of your freedom was forgotten.”
“You’re not pleased to see me, father?”
“My friends thought I would be pleased that you were to be freed. They were wrong, of course.”
“I am saddened to hear of your displeasure.” Jeffrey held himself erect. The cold reception came hard upon him after a year of incarceration, but he was determined to remain calm. “It was never my intent to cause harm to you or anyone in this house.”
Sir Edward glowered at his son. “You defied me, boy. I would have bought you a suitable lawyer, one who would have ensured the truth came out in court. But you defied me. Tried to fight your own defence.”
“As a matter of honour, I wanted to make my own stand, sir.”
“And did you? No! You failed miserably, boy. Stripped of your rank and imprisoned for a year. You’ve brought shame on the St Vincent family name.”
Jeffrey raised a hand in protest. Surely he didn’t deserve this from any member of his own family? Surely his father, of all people, should understand?
He took a step forward, adopting a pleading expression. “But, sir! I was unfairly treated at the court
martial.”
“Unfairly treated? Of course you were unfairly treated. With your pathetic defence, you allowed it to happen. You allowed our family name to be dragged in the gutter.” The old man glowered at his son, his voice turning to a tight hiss. “I will not have you back here, boy. Go and make your own life in whatever way you choose, but do not come back to this house again.” His anger vented, Sir Edward pointedly turned his back on Jeffrey.
Jeffrey blinked. He’d expected annoyance and expressions of hurt from his father, but not this. Not banishment. He summoned up the last of his residual determination to assert, “I am your son, sir. Your heir.”
“No!” Sir Edward kept his gaze averted. His voice cracked with the weight of his emotion. “From now on I have no son. No heir.” And then he hung his head forward as if he was filled with grief.
Jeffrey dropped his voice to little more than a whisper. “You wrong me, father.”
“You wronged yourself, boy! Let me hear no excuses. You shamed me, shamed my family name, and now I want to see no more of you. Thank God your mother is no longer alive to witness the dishonour you have brought upon us.”
Those words were the cruellest of all. Jeffrey opened his mouth to reply, but his throat turned dry. How could his father use his mother against him in such a heartless way? The mother he loved.
He licked at his lips and forced out his final words. “I see. Then… then we shall not meet again.” Jeffrey felt his shoulders slump as he turned on his heels. Maybe he deserved this. Maybe he should have anticipated
it. Maybe the fault was his alone.
Lizzy, the maid, was in the hallway when he walked out from the study. Likely she knew what had taken place in there. He recalled that she had a way of eavesdropping in order to pick up juicy tit-bits of gossip. Within minutes the news would percolate up to the servants’ attic quarters. Within the day, most of Saltash would know that Jeffrey St Vincent had been disowned.
He avoided Lizzy’s gaze as he gathered up his sea bag and left the house where he had grown up. Would his father ever change his mind? Would he one day welcome back his wayward son? He had no idea and that saddened him because he loved the old man, always had. Always would. Feeling heavier in his heart than he had for many a day, he walked quickly away from the town, down the narrow, steep lane leading to the Saltash waterside. For the moment, he could think of nowhere else to go.
The Tamar barge had moved on from the jetty, but the hoy was still there. The same young woman was kneeling on the deck, fussing over the white-haired old man who’d navigated the vessel down-stream. They seemed to be arguing. Jeffrey paused beside a chandler’s shop and their voices drifted across the street.
“We must go on, father. You said we would. You promised! If we leave now, we could be in Penperran this evening.” The young woman wagged a stern finger at him as she spoke.
The old man was calm but firm in his response. “No, Nell. We’ll take one more cargo upstream to Cotehele Quay. We need the money; you know that.”
“But you’re not well,” she protested, a fierce sharpness infusing her voice. “You know that this is too much for you.”
“One more cargo, Nell. Just one. We’ll sail on down the coast to Penperran tomorrow. I promise.”
“Like you promised me before? Oh, father!”
Jeffrey studied the young woman as she stood up and put her hands on her hips. The seaman’s garb hid little of her attractive figure. Once, not so very long ago, he would have openly admired her, engaged her in
conversation, maybe even enticed her into his bed. But that year in gaol had changed him, subdued him and made him acutely aware that he was no longer an attractive proposition for any women. If his own father was willing to disown him, what would any decent woman think? He shrugged and moved on. The argument
between father and daughter was none of his business.
He wandered the grim, waterside streets until his sailor’s eye told him it was nigh on noon, but he still had no idea where he should go. What options were open to a disgraced naval officer? Needing time to think, he left the waterside and walked steadily along the river bank away from Saltash. His future in the Royal Navy had been mapped out long before the idea ever entered his own head. On his eighth birthday, his mother raised the matter of entering his name on the books of the warship, Triumph Royal, under the practice known as false muster. It was a common enough trick for a privileged boy to avoid serving the full six years needed for promotion to lieutenant. But Jeffrey’s father adamantly refused. As commander of the ship, he could have so easily made life easier for his son, but he wouldn’t. Other fathers – men with money to influence an amenable ship’s commander, or men with political power – had engineered false musters for their privileged young sons. But Sir Edward St Vincent was a man of principle. From an early age, he’d instilled into Jeffrey the ideals of honesty and integrity.
“My son will learn his seamanship the hard way, the right way,” Sir Edward had decreed.
His mother had, in time, come to accept her husband’s decision. She was the daughter of a French admiral and had hoped to keep her son away from the privations of the lower decks. But, to her credit, she knew also the importance of Jeffrey getting a good grounding in seamanship. Instead of pursuing the matter of false muster, she spent her energies teaching him to speak French like a true Frenchman.
The six years he spent as a midshipman had been a long, harsh apprenticeship, but Jeffrey was glad he’d served them in full. He was confident he could knot and splice a rope as well as any rigger, could race any seaman to the maintop and could handle a boat as though he’d been born to it. More importantly, he had the respect of the men he commanded. Those six years gave him the edge over boys who’d spent much of their false muster years in the comfort of their homes, enough edge to see him appointed to the rank of lieutenant at his first promotion board.
After five years as a second lieutenant aboard a sixty-four-gun ship of the line, he was appointed first lieutenant aboard his Majesty’s sloop-of-war, Dexterity, a two-mast vessel of two hundred and fifty tons,
carrying sixteen six-pound cannons on her single gun deck. Jeffrey developed a fond affinity with the Dexterity. She was a good ship – no, she wasn’t a ship, she was a vessel. Naval tradition demanded that a ship must have three square-rigged masts. The Dexterity was no more than a brig sloop, but she was a fast vessel and
she carried a good crew. Only the foul behaviour and incompetence of Captain George Butcher, the master and commander, marred Jeffrey’s enjoyment of his duties. Butcher had a poor reputation as both a seaman and a commander, a reputation that had stopped dead his advancement to higher rank. In accordance
with naval practice, he was given the courtesy title of captain while aboard the sloop, but he’d never attained the fully-commissioned rank of post captain and was barred from commanding a rated warship.
Some fellow officers said Butcher was mad. His junior officers looked at the captain’s florid face while he bellowed at the crew for no good reason and they declared that no sane man should sail with him. Privately,
Jeffrey agreed that Butcher was unfit to command, but he continued to give the captain his loyalty… until that fateful voyage to Halifax.
His last voyage as a naval officer.
*
Nell and Amos Wilkes rolled the empty barrels onto Saltash jetty, up-ending them in readiness for the local carrier. Then they began the more difficult task of stowing the new cargo, the load that would put a little extra money in Cornelius Tregrain’s purse. While Amos roped the cargo to the deck, Nell paused to gather her breath and to consider that they might be in sight of Penperran right now – if only she had had her way. How she longed to be back there, amongst the Cornish people she’d grown up with, the people she trusted.
She watched a lone figure walk past the jetty in the direction of Tamar Street, a handsome-looking man with an air of refinement about him. She recalled seeing him alight from a Tamar barge earlier in the day. It was strange that he wore the clothes of a common seaman and yet he had the bearing of an officer. When she and Hannah were younger, they would have admired the man and then exchanged girlish confidences about what they thought of him, and how they might innocently pay attention to him. But those days were now past.
She looked down at her grimy, shapeless clothes and suppressed a snort of self-derision. Dressed as a seaman, no decent man would ever look at her with pleasure, and she planned to keep things that way. She shook her head as the man disappeared from her sight. No – she was determined on it – no handsome man was going to get the better of her. No handsome man was going to govern her life the way Eli Briggs had ruled over Hannah. In the light of her sister’s death, she was quite clear on that score. She would face any sailing perils with a firm resolve because that was the nature of life in a small Cornish community. She would risk taking the Eleanor to sea in bad weather, and she would set sail out into the English Channel to collect contraband when she judged it prudent. But these would be her risks, her decisions. No man would ever make those decisions for her, or impose his will upon her. Not now. And no man would ever make inroads into the sanctity of her soul… or her bed.
Never. It was the only way.
A quick glance told her that the strange man was no longer in sight, no longer a distraction to her earnest intent. She was unmarried, she again reminded herself, and she would stay unmarried for the rest of her life.
