Page 85 of Miss Dauntless
Matilda did not miss everybody, not yet. She was too consumed with missing Tremont. “Mes amis me manquent.Can you say that?”
Tommie parroted the French exactly, and then Matilda translated each word for him. She wrote the words out and pointed to them as she spoke. Tommie asked how to sayFrance is stupidandVikings are brilliantand a dozen other phrases while the minutes dragged by.
Please come, Matilda thought, sending that silent plea to Tremont.Please tell me that your great, busy mind has found a way for us to be married, despite Harry, despite everything. Please, please…
But by the time she was explaining to Tommie how to sayI call myself Thomas, the motion of the boat had changed, becoming less gentle.
“We’re moving,” Tommie said, his head coming up like a horse who heard the groom pouring oats into a bucket. “We’re sailing on the sea!”
Not quite, but they were underway. Matilda took Tommie up on deck, where other passengers were assembled along the rail, waving farewell to friends onshore and doffing hats in a general gesture of parting.
“Mama, we’re sailing away! The ship is moving!”
“I know, Tommie. I know.”
She searched the crowd on the pier for a particular tall, quietly elegant gentleman and found no one answering to that description, which was to be expected. She’d led Tremont to believe they were sailing later and from a different pier.
“We are sailing away!” Tommie called again, waving to nobody in particular. “I’m a Viking on my longship, and I’m sailing away to France!”
His exclamation provoked a few smiles, and Matilda tried to return them, but she was not a Viking, and she was not on her longship, and Tremont was not going to save her from the wretched burden of living her life as a loving mother and an honorable, decent adult female.
And that hurt, brutally, but the pain was gilded with a little pride.You were wrong, Papa. I have not come to a bad end, nor will I. So there and to blazes with you and your hypocritical judgments of me.
The boat caught the current of the outgoing tide, and the shore receded. Tommie’s teeth were chattering by the time he agreed to return to their stateroom, and Matilda was chilled to the bone. The steward came around to ask if they’d like tea, coffee, brandy, or hot chocolate.
Tommie asked for hot chocolate, while Matilda declined any refreshment. The motion of the ship did not agree with her, and they would not see Dover for hours.
“What in blazing perdition do you mean she’s already departed?” Tremont kept his voice down, though it was a very near thing.
“She and the boy left not an hour ago,” the desk clerk said. “With all their luggage.” He was an older fellow, balding, and skinny. His coat was shiny with age and his gloves less than pristine. “Be you her husband, sir?”
“I am.” Harry spoke up from Tremont’s elbow. “And I am very curious to know where my wife has got off to. Curious enough to summon the authorities if she’s bolted with my son.”
“Shut your lying mouth,” Tremont growled.
“You won’t get anywhere with the likes of him,” Harry said, jerking his chin in the clerk’s direction. “He can’t be bribed, but he can be bullied. I know the type.”
The clerk drew himself up. “If you was a proper husband to the lady, she’d have no reason to bolt, would she?”
“Precisely,” Tremont said, “but I am not her husband, and I am most concerned for her and the child. This fellow”—he jerked a thumb toward Harry—“has no idea where she’s gone. She is not on the manifest for the Portsmouth packet, and her only relative—an auntie—gave us reason to doubt the Portsmouth itinerary in the first place.”
The morning had been busy, starting with a raid on Lambeth Palace and progressing to an invasion of Aunt Portia’s breakfast parlor. Tremont had press-ganged Harry into joining the affray, because he hadn’t time to tarry in Knightsbridge playing skittles with a swindler.
Moreover, Harry deserved to know the result of Tremont’s consultation with Mr. Delancey regarding the niceties of ecclesiastical law pertaining to voidable marriages.
Portia had been unforthcoming in every regard, except that when Tremont asked for an address in Philadelphia where he could send any correspondence for Matilda, Portia had replied that she had no acquaintances in Philadelphia who might be prevailed upon to hold Matilda’s mail.
Philadelphia had been a ruse, which left only the entire rest of the world for Tremont to search.
“What other packets depart from the nearby piers?” he asked.
The clerk sent a dubious glace toward Harry.
“I mean the woman no harm,” Harry muttered. “But she’s leaving England under a serious misapprehension.”
The clerk addressed Tremont. “All manner of packets tie up on this part of the river, from Aberdeen on south and around west to Bristol. Many of them also call at Dover, though some passengers prefer to take the stage overland to Dover.”
Would Matilda subject Tommie to more than seventy miles of stage travel? “And from Dover?”
