Page 90 of Dukes Do It Better
Seventy-two hours would pass quickly if he distracted himself.
And it did. The orders arrived, securing his place as a captain in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, serving in abeyance. The uniform would still be his for special Royal Navy events, but Malachi would remain on half pay with no expectation or obligation to command another ship.
As he ran a finger over his last set of orders, a bittersweet smile curved his lips. How he wished he could repay his men for their loyalty.
Setting aside the documents, he wrote a note to his first lieutenant, thanking him for the years of serving together. With damp eyes, he sealed the letter, then penned a second to the coachman in the mews, asking for the travel carriage to be brought around the next morning.
There would be days of travel, but he had the bank book to keep him company. He’d applied himself to decoding it back at the cottage, while waiting on a date for his court-martial. The names and information revealed as he labored over each page with Smith’s key were indeed damning to certain members of His Majesty’s government. Some notations were merely scandalous, others made him question his father’s moral fiber that he’d been involved at all. Spy work was messy business, even when it answered to the cleaner title of diplomatic service.
It was the personal entries that made him pause. Sometimes, Malachi would swear he read the text with his father’s voice in his head. Those excerpts were brief, but enlightening. It had been a surprise to learn the atlas he’d seen in the library hadn’t been George’s. Not initially, at any rate. Father began the marking of it when Malachi enlisted, then George continued tracking his career after their father passed away.
Within the journal, Father followed Malachi’s journeys and spoke openly about his military service. There were recorded anecdotes and highlights from Malachi’s letters home. So far, he’d found two written prayers for gentle seas, a foul-mouthed rant about the Admiralty’s incompetence, and no less than six mentions of both his father’s pride and fear for Malachi’s safety.
In fact, he’d translated an entire passage where Father weighed the benefits and consequences of speaking to the men in charge about keeping Malachi out of the fight with Napoleon.
Outrage and the old bitterness welled immediately from that familiar festering wound. Right there on the page in black and white, his father deliberated and ultimately decided to move forward with a plan to steal not only Malachi’s fortune, but those of his men.
Yet the outrage faded under the other undeniable thing on the page—the worry. Paternal worry, which until very recently had been a purely theoretical idea for him.
It was something to mull over, and he had plenty of time to do exactly that.
Page by page, government secrets revealed themselves, interspersed with personal passages, which allowed glimpses of the man his father had been in private.
He’d thought he knew his sire, but Malachi hadn’t seen much—either because he hadn’t been shown or hadn’t wanted the knowledge.
Father had seen the favoritism Mother had shown between his sons. The frustration and pain rose from the text at times, acting as a balm to old hurts. Someone had not only noticed, but also cared, and it made a surprising difference.
As a child, Malachi had felt invisible. In fact, he remembered a period when he was around Alton’s age, when he’d been convinced he was invisible, and had spent a week experimenting with standing very still in different rooms of the house and eavesdropping on conversations he had no business hearing. Painful to recollect now from an adult’s perspective, especially when he had his own little boy to raise.
Growing up, he’d had a single summer of perfect happiness. Mother had stayed in London, while George, Malachi, and their father explored the Cornish coast from the seaside cottage they’d leased. It had been a whole month of the sea, their father’s undivided attention, and boyhood bliss.
Perhaps his love of the sea had been born that summer. After a time, Malachi had refused to think about the fleeting feeling of home he’d reveled in. It was painful how quickly it expired once they returned to London, so the joy had been buried under the more plentiful memories from his home life.
Or at least, it was buried until he found a journal on the beach last October. Then, the world Emma had created with her words opened up those latent desires all over again.
Within the pages of the bank book, it was clear that not only had Father noticed the favoritism, he hadn’t liked it. A few entries recalled arguing about it with Mother on several occasions. Often after they’d received a letter from Malachi.
The bank book and key occupied his hands and mind for the first two days on the road to Olread Cove. On the third day, he hit a point where he’d rather run to the coast than remain one more minute inside the carriage. No matter how lushly appointed the seats, it was a rolling box on wheels and he was tired of being stuck in it.
They stopped for a brief rest at an inn where the food was good, and where he’d boarded horses for the week, then it was time to resume the journey. With a sigh, he settled back on the seat and picked up the bank book and a pencil.
Two hours later, he narrowed his eyes, then flipped to the previous page and consulted the key in his hand.
“That’s not right. That can’t be right.” The note on which Smith had provided the key had begun to fray around the edges from continued use. Nevertheless, the information didn’t change when Malachi checked and rechecked his work.
Then he backtracked, as verdant landscape passed unnoticed outside the carriage window. Woven into several of the personal passages, a pattern revealed itself. Random capitalized letters and bold text started to make sense when Malachi reread the latest bit he’d translated.
By the fourth day, his eyes burned with exhaustion, and he could hardly believe what he was seeing come together on the pages.
His father had loved him. Truly loved him.
Father had known that by protecting Malachi from the war, he’d stolen the financial gains due a captain in the Royal Navy.
George was the heir, so most of the estate and holdings would go to him. As the younger son of a duke, Malachi hadn’t been left out in the cold by any means when his father died, but the gap between the two inheritances was significant. Made larger by the resentment Malachi carried over the way he’d been forced to watch others earn riches and glory in their careers while he wandered about the Baltic Sea.
If what he’d found in this bank book was correct—and why wouldn’t it be—Father had found another way to see Malachi provided for.
A smile crept over his face. Raising his eyes to heaven, and ignoring the roof in the way, Malachi sent his first genuine laugh to his father in over a decade.
