“Mr. Alexander Sinclair.” Greaves enunciated our guest’s name oddly, straining to pronounce each syllable carefully. “From the Colonies,” he added, in a tone that indicated our guest’s origins caused our aged butler a bellyache.
“United States,” the visitor corrected and bowed stiffly from the waist. Clearly, he wasn’t accustomed to bowing.
We all stared at the young man whose golden curls were tousled and looked as if they hadn’t seen the useful side of a comb in several days. His ill-fitting tailcoat was dusty and hung open, revealing a waistcoat of blue and purple stripes that did not mix well with the brown of his trousers. Not only that, but it appeared to be buttoned incorrectly. He must have borrowed the trousers, or else he’d grown since purchasing them, because they were embarrassingly short. His buckle shoes were so scuffed and worn they looked as if they hailed from a previous decade. One of his stockings had slithered down from its moorings and collected around his ankle.
Madame Cho took in his appearance and sucked disapproving air through her teeth. Jane uttered an audible gasp. Georgie took a deep, steadying breath. On the other hand, I found his disastrous appearance both amusing and interesting. For a moment I forgot about my pounding headache.
Who had we allowed into our midst?
“Welcome, Mr. Sinclair.” Georgie extended her hand to him. “We were told you carry a message for us.”
He took her hand and, rather than bowing elegantly over it, he gave it a firm shake. More and more intriguing, this unruly pup from the Americas. “Yes, miss. I’ve a letter from Lord Wyatt to be delivered to Miss Fitzwilliam. From his description, I take it you are she?”
Her hand flew out of his and up to her distinctive red hair and self-consciously to her cheek covered with equally distinctive freckles. Then she took a deep breath and regained her confidence. “Yes, I am she.”
Mr. Sinclair reached into his coat and produced a sealed letter. “Lord Wyatt said you’d know what to do with it.”
Georgie’s hands shook as she took it and broke the seal. “You must excuse me for a moment. Would you care to be seated, Mr. Sinclair?”
“Thank you kindly, but no. Feels as though I’ve been sitting for a fortnight. A man needs to stretch his legs now and again or the muscles freeze up like a waterwheel in January.” He demonstrated his need to loosen his muscles by shaking out first one long leg and then the other rather vigorously.
Madame Cho hissed again.
I will admit we stared openly at our peculiar guest. It was rude, but none of us looked away. Me, fascinated. Jane appalled that he would mention legs and muscles, and then proceed to shake said legs as if he had fleas. It’s a lucky thing for Mr. Sinclair that Madame Cho didn’t have her bamboo cane in hand, because her natural inclination would’ve been to wallop him for his appalling manners.
Undaunted, Mr. Sinclair continued to regale us with the intimate details of his arduous journey from Paris to England. Much of his tale is not fit to recite in polite company. Although, given his American dialect, I may not have comprehended all of it. It was a bit difficult to decipher his odd accent and phraseology, made all the more challenging because his overly vivid descriptions were frequently interrupted by Jane gasping and Madame Cho hissing like a Madagascar cockroach.
Georgie had excused herself from the room, no doubt so she could apply a developing solution to the invisible ink on Lord Wyatt’s letter. She returned to us, studying the contents of the letter. At last, she handed it over to me, Maya, and Jane. We abandoned our study of the peculiar Mr. Sinclair to read it silently:
May 9, 1814
Dear Miss Fitzwilliam,
I am sending you a gift by way of this gentleman. You will need to apply some effort in order to open it properly.
Meanwhile, I am desirous of knowing how you fare. Are you in good health? How fares our Miss Stranje? Is she as determined as ever to transform you into a proper young lady? Please extend to her my sincerest best wishes in the endeavor. Captain Grey also sends his warmest regards and asks if she would please look in at his cottage now and again, to make sure the servants are diligently tending to their tasks. Our business on the continent has met with a few setbacks as you might imagine with Napoleon sitting on the throne of France.
Yr humble servant,
Lord Wyatt
The real letter, the letter that had been written in invisible ink, now lay exposed between those innocuous lines.
My dearest Georgiana,
This fellow, Mr. Alexander Sinclair, like yourself is something of an inventor and engineer. I discovered he was being held prisoner by the Iron Crown in a house outside of Paris. We took the liberty of slipping him out from under their care and are sending him to you for safekeeping.
He is the nephew of a remarkable engineer and artist, Mr. Robert Fulton, of the Colonies. He assisted Fulton in France on the construction of an extraordinary underwater ship. The French were disappointed, but if the flaws were corrected, we might use an underwater vessel to great advantage against our enemy. Not only that, but Sinclair has ideas to improve upon Fulton’s design of an underwater bomb called a torpedo. Sinclair also carries by memory the plans for Fulton’s warship powered by steam. You will immediately grasp the value of such a ship. I trust you will aid him in his work as he will need to build a prototype. I’m certain that between you and Lady Jane you can harness his faculties and put them to good use.
Although our government originally rejected plans for the warship, with Napoleon back on the throne of France, Lord Castlereagh feels certain there may be a change of mind on the matter. He is desirous of having drawings and a small working model of the warship to present to the council at Whitehall as soon as it can be arranged.
Georgie, my dearest, a word or two of caution: there must be no late-night collaborations. Remember my previous warning about not tempting gentlemen beyond their ability to resist. If poor, unsuspecting Mr. Sinclair should behave toward you in an overly friendly manner, I would have to call him out and beat him senseless. Thus, the world would be robbed of his brilliant mind. Apart from that, I ask that you listen to him with respect and that you and Lady Jane assist him in his work.
Beseech our beloved Miss Stranje to house and keep him from danger. We must not let him fall into our enemies’ hands. I rest easy knowing that at least he is at Stranje House and away from the reach of the Iron Crown, for now.
Yours with deepest affection,
Sebastian
Mr. Sinclair shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Madame Cho folded her arms and narrowed her dark eyes at him, so that I’m sure the poor fellow felt as if he were under guard.
Georgie leaned over our shoulders while Jane, Maya, and I read the letter. When we finished, she frantically whispered, “For now? What do you think he meant by that? Something is wrong. I know it. And Mr. Sinclair isn’t safe here. Not with Daneska back in England.”
Before I could respond to Georgie’s question, Jane sprang up to confront our guest.
“This is impossible.” She waved the letter at him, shaking it as if she could not believe the contents. “What kind of game are you playing at, Mr. Sinclair? You cannot possibly be an engineer. You? Robert Fulton’s assistant?” She looked him up and down, bristling more by the minute. “Impossible. Robert Fulton is one of the finest minds of our”—Jane almost stuttered—“and you … you’re … you’re an American.” She drew out “American” as if it meant he’d been born on the wrong side of the blanket rather than the other side of the ocean.
“Yes, miss. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.” Mr. Sinclair doffed an imaginary hat. “As was my uncle.”
Jane gathered her wits and proceeded more calmly. “That’s not what I meant. I meant to say that I am familiar with Mr. Fulton’s work. I studied the locks he made for the Duke of Bridgewater’s canals. I’ve read all about the steamship he is building in New York. But this underwater vessel … there you have gone too far. You would’ve been a mere child when Mr. Fulton constructed the Nautilus for Napoleon.”
“Yes, miss.” He answered her warily. “I was a lad of twelve when I served my uncle in France.”
“I am not a miss.” Jane corrected him with a surprisingly indignant tone. Although, to be fair, it was the second time he’d addressed her as a commoner. “I am Lady Jane Moore.” She pursed her lips and skimmed the letter again.
“A thousand apologies, my lady. I’m honored, to be sure.” He made a great show of bowing. Too great a show, and I felt sure that wry curve of his lips indicated a bit of covert mockery.
Jane studied the letter as if the answers must still be hidden in the text. “That is preposterous. Why would a man of his intellect bring a twelve-year-old boy to France?”
Mr. Sinclair took a long, slow breath and his easy manner turned as cold as that frozen waterwheel he’d mentioned earlier. “Begging your pardon, my lady, but despite all those fine papers you may have read, you don’t know beans about my uncle. He is the best of men, kind, generous, and he loves his family. He took notice of how I liked tinkering. He and my ma decided I should benefit by serving as his apprentice. And so, I did. Twelve being the accepted age to begin an apprenticeship.”
She glanced up from the letter, blinked, and looked momentarily chastised. That’s something for Jane.
His voice lost some of the stern edge. “I was with Uncle Robert when the Nautilus made her maiden voyage on the Seine in July of 1800. If you read the account, you will know that there were four men inside the Nautilus that day. It ought to have reported three men and a boy. But to be fair, I was tall for my age.”
He added this last remark about his height with a jaunty grin that seemed to completely unsettle our Jane. She pruned up and refused to look at him.
Mr. Sinclair relaxed then and itched absently at his snarled hair. “A leaky tub, that Nautilus. We took her down twenty-five feet. Water pressed against the copper hull, dripping in around the seams, and she creaked so loud I thought she would burst her buttons any second. But we kept her under for seventeen minutes.” He watched Jane for a reaction. When none came, he repeated, “Seventeen minutes.” Then as if Jane might be a little slow-witted he added, “underwater.”
She sniffed and straightened her back gracefully.
“Folks watching along the banks were amazed, I can tell you that. They reckoned we had all drowned until we bobbed up and, pretty as you please, steered back to shore as if we hadn’t just sailed nearly four hundred feet downriver.”
I watched him, this insolent apprentice engineer from America. He wasn’t quite the dunderheaded fool he appeared. There was a spark of mischief in his manner, but he lost interest in Jane when one of our maps caught his attention. Without dismissing himself, he strolled over to our worktable. “Is that … are those the new European borders?”
“No.” Madame Cho snatched up the maps and rolled them. “History lessons. Old maps. Nothing to concern you.”
He looked confused. “But I saw—”
“No. They are old. Not new.” Madame Cho waved him away, gathering up all of our papers and maps. “You go back over there.”
Georgie took him by the arm and guided him over for a look at the tea tray. “Surely you would enjoy some tea to refresh you after your long journey.”
“I … well … yes. If you say so. Thank you, I suppose that might be just the thing.”
She deposited him in a seat and he managed to convince his long gangly legs to cooperate. In the diminutive lady’s chair, his knees stuck up too high and the rumpled stocking was even more apparent than before.
Jane seated herself beside me and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, in an effort, I’m sure, to block out the sight of his hairy leg exposed by the droopy stocking. She grimaced when he tucked a kipper inside a cucumber sandwich and consumed it with puppyish enthusiasm. Then he smeared two heaping spoonfuls of quince jam on a warm bun with a spoonful of curried egg topped off with a slice of Stilton cheese. Jane blinked in disbelief at this concoction.
For someone like Jane, who valued order above all things, whose gowns hung in the wardrobe in graduated colors, whose hair ribbons were meticulously rolled, and who kept neatly penned planting records to account for which type of wheat ought to be planted in what field in order to yield the most abundant harvest, I could see how a man like Mr. Alexander Sinclair might cause her to grind her teeth.
As she was doing now.
I, on the other hand, found him amiable company, refreshingly guileless and yet clever. He reminded me of an otter. Except less tidy.
It wasn’t until we watched him consume half the tray of food Cook had sent down that I remembered none of us had eaten breakfast that morning. Georgie finally helped herself to jam and bread, and Jane selected a delicate bacon and cheese finger sandwich while carefully avoiding eye contact with Mr. Alexander Sinclair.
I found it difficult to concentrate when across the park I was certain Lord Ravencross must be gritting his teeth in severe pain. Real pain. Never mind what the footman had been told to tell me, it was the kind of pain that could steal one’s life away. I stared unseeing at my cup of murky tea, into which Madame Cho had stirred some excessively bitter herbs. I nibbled absently at a biscuit, but it promptly turned to dry cotton wadding in my mouth.
Despite the pounding in my head, I wanted to run back to Ravencross Manor and demand to be admitted. It was foolishness to sit here sipping repugnant tea when he was suffering.
Jane reached over and laid her hand over mine to stop me from shredding my biscuit to crumbs. “I know you are worried, but there would be nothing you could do for him.”
Maybe not, but I could be there. I could annoy him just enough that giving up would not be an option.
Georgie fretted, too, but for other reasons. She turned her plate of bread and jam round and round in her lap. “Mr. Sinclair, would you mind telling us how you left our friends, Lord Wyatt and Captain Grey? Are they well?”
Usually Georgie asks a hundred questions where one will do. Today it was the opposite. I knew what she really wanted to ask, but couldn’t. The yearning in her small query made me wince for her. She wanted to ask so much more. She ached to know if the man she loved was safe. Were Lord Wyatt’s wounds healed? How much danger was he in? Were he and the captain on the run from the Iron Crown? Or were they the ones doing the chasing? Most of all, Georgie wanted the answer to one gut-twisting question: When would Sebastian return home to her?
Our guest finished chewing before responding. “Lord Wyatt said you would ask after him. He instructed me to tell you he is in fine fettle.”
Georgie’s lips pursed for a moment. “Instructed you. Does that mean he is well or not?”
“Yes, miss. Both men are hale and hearty. A daring lad, your Lord Wyatt. I’m under strict orders not to recite the details of our escape from France, but I can tell you this, he and the captain are men to be reckoned with.” Mr. Sinclair stopped speaking abruptly and made short work of a sausage roll.
Georgie blanched. I could well imagine the scenarios she must be conjuring in her imagination. “Tell me frankly, Mr. Sinclair. Is he unharmed or not? No new injuries?”
“Nothing to speak of. A scratch here and there. The man is a first-rate swordsman.” Mr. Sinclair reached for a salted egg, and I wanted to slap his hand for terrifying poor Georgie. I was beginning to think the rude American was as deceptive as Miss Stranje.
“You needn’t worry, Georgie. He has the right of it. Lord Wyatt is an excellent hand with both sword and gun.” I spoke with a firmness meant to settle her fears.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Miss Stranje and Sera in the doorway. I jumped to my feet, nearly toppling my plate to the floor, catching it just in the nick of time. “What news?” I’d risen so suddenly the room began to whirl, so I slumped back into my seat and gripped the arms of my chair.
Miss Stranje looked grim, grimmer than her earlier report warranted.
“What’s happened?” My voice cracked and sounded odd even to my own ears.
She answered me directly, no hedging this time. “Lord Ravencross is doing as well as can be expected.” She looked drained and weary, and she absently rubbed her palms on the side of her dress. “The doctor stitched him up and gave him laudanum. They’ve moved him upstairs to his own rooms, where he seems to be resting more comfortably than he was in Mrs. Evans’s small bed.”
“Seems to be?” I asked.
“We’ll know more by tomorrow morning.” Miss Stranje straightened and gave me a shrewd once-over. “And you should be resting as well.”
I waved her reprimand away. “He isn’t safe. Not in his condition. They might come back. I overheard—”
“Not now.” With a stern look, she held up a hand, forestalling my outburst, and turned to our guest. Our odd Mr. Sinclair had the presence of mind to stand when Miss Stranje and Sera had entered. He stood quietly watching her, alert, reacting to every nuance of her speech precisely the way a curious otter might.
Georgie introduced him. “He arrived with a message from Lord Wyatt.”
“Welcome to Stranje House, Mr. Sinclair.” Miss Stranje extended her hand and, as he had done to Georgie’s, he pumped her hand up and down as if it were the handle of a water spigot.
Jane thrust the letter of introduction at Miss Stranje.
Miss Stranje ignored Jane’s interruption, even though I knew she must have a mad itch to look at that letter. Nor did she let on that she noticed anything objectionable in Mr. Sinclair’s appearance. She treated him with the same respect she would have given a peer of the realm, graciously gesturing for Mr. Sinclair to take a chair. “Please be seated. You mustn’t let me interrupt your tea. You’ve had a long journey I’m sure.”
Only after he took his seat did she accept the letter from Jane, who was fairly frothing at the bit for her to read it.
I clutched the arm of the settee because suddenly the room began to swim before me. The lump on my head must be worse than I thought. But then I glanced at my teacup on the table and remembered the bitter herbs. “You gave me a sleeping draught?”
Madame Cho had been watching me. With a curt nod, she stood. “Come. We must take you to your bed.”
The very last thing I wanted to do was sleep, but what choice did I have? If I didn’t go with her to the dormitorium, I would collapse. Before accepting Cho’s help, I leaned over and whispered sternly in Jane’s ear, applying enough grim warning that she knew better than to refuse, “Wake me at nightfall.”