Unlikely Spy Catchers (St. Brendan Book 2) Read online

  The

  Unlikely

  Spy Catcher

  Seattle, WA

  Camel Press

  6524 NE 181st St

  Suite 2

  Kenmore WA 98028

  For more information go to: www.camelpress.com

  www.carlakellyauthor.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Design by Dawn Anderson

  The Unlikely Spy Catcher

  Copyright © 2019 by Carla Kelly

  ISBN: 9781603811088 (trade paper)

  ISBN: 9781603817004 (ebook)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To the memory of Robert J. Chandler, Ph.D., historian.

  And Euclid again, of course.

  Books by Carla Kelly

  Fiction

  Daughter of Fortune

  Summer Campaign

  Miss Chartley’s Guided Tour

  Marian’s Christmas Wish

  Mrs. McVinnie’s London Season

  Libby’s London Merchant

  Miss Grimsley’s Oxford Career

  Miss Billings Treads the Boards

  Miss Milton Speaks Her Mind

  Miss Wittier Makes a List

  Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand

  Reforming Lord Ragsdale

  The Lady’s Companion

  With This Ring

  One Good Turn

  The Wedding Journey

  Here’s to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army

  Beau Crusoe

  Marrying the Captain

  The Surgeon’s Lady

  Marrying the Royal Marine

  The Admiral’s Penniless Bride

  Borrowed Light

  Enduring Light

  Coming Home for Christmas: The Holiday Stories

  Regency Christmas Gifts

  Season’s Regency Greetings

  Marriage of Mercy

  My Loving Vigil Keeping

  Double Cross

  Marco and the Devil’s Bargain

  Paloma and the Horse Traders

  Star in the Meadow

  Unlikely Master Genius

  Non-Fiction

  On the Upper Missouri: The Journal of Rudolph Friedrich Kurz (editor)

  Louis Dace Letellier: Adventures on the Upper Missouri (editor)

  Fort Buford: Sentinel at the Confluence

  But love is a durable fire

  In the mind ever burning

  Never sick, never old, never dead

  From itself, never turning.

  Sir Walter Raleigh, “Walsinghame”

  — Preface —

  Late February, 1804

  Prison Hulk HMS Captivity, Portsmouth

  Was it the winter’s cold that brought out painful lumps the damned British called carbuncles on his hands? Was it the night he woke up, terrified, because he dreamed he forgot how to chew? Lately they had been given only watery soups. Was it the crazed prisoner who tried to escape by gnawing on the bulkhead until his bloody mouth filled with splinters? Was it the gibberish language and smells of the rafalés, truly insane, who flitted about the three decks of the HMS Captivity, wearing nothing and squatting wherever they chose?

  It was all that, and it was none of that, Lieutenant Jean Hubert decided. He had discussed the matter a few days ago with signalman Jacques Rien, fellow prisoner who had served with him in the West Indies aboard the sloop-of-war Calais. They had decided to put away discussions of ratatouille and compliant women and determine what made captivity aboard a prison hulk in Portsmouth Harbor unbearable.

  This was scarcely philosophical, but they had to choose topics other than cuisine. Yesterday, two prisoners beat each other to death, arguing whether Languedoc’s potage made with cream and truffles was superior to that found along the Rive Loire. Their jailers had laughed as the men bludgeoned each other into insensibility. No, food was, so to speak, off the table for a while.

  Jean and Jacques Rien came to no consensus. Later that evening, swinging in his hammock and trying to shut out sounds of men coughing, farting, arguing, dying, Jean decided that the worst thing about being a prisoner of the Royal Navy was lack of solitude. Had he possessed any remaining louis d’or, he would have traded it for a quiet corner on the Captivity. Surely there must be one somewhere.

  Officially, solitude meant a few days in the Hole for those who talked back or otherwise irritated their captors. It took little provocation, but not even isolation was quiet. The sound of men weeping in darkness was worse than women in tears. A smart man could cajole a woman, but a man? Hardly ever.

  Jacques Rien had admitted to a growing uncertainty that his wife was still faithful to him. Yolande had not heard from him in years and had no idea he was merely a channel away now, and not in the disease-ridden waters off Saint-Domingue. Jacques fretted that she had found someone else.

  Jean Hubert had no such worries. He had no wife, no parents, one brother in Canada and a sister who had the misfortune to marry a minor aristocrat and now lay rotting in an unmarked grave, her severed head probably between her legs.

  Peace and quiet. Warmth would be nice, but it was optional. Real food would be good, too, but after a while, even a starving man starts to regard meals with some indifference.

  And while he was imagining the impossible, Jean Hubert added one thing more: the ability to open a door and walk outside, needing no one’s permission. That would be freedom.

  — Chapter One —

  London, late February 1804

  Am I a man or a mouse? Able Six asked himself as he glowered at his poorly tied neckcloth. I am a husband, and thank God for that.

  His next glance took in his wife Meridee, who sat on their bed in Grace Croker’s London townhouse. Meri wore that now-familiar serene expression, directed downward at their son Benjamin Belvedere Six, whose eyelids were at half- mast as he nursed.

  Three months should have been long enough for the newness to wear off for Able, considering how nimble his mind, but such had not been the case. There Ben lay, with little fat rolls in abundance, a testimony to good mothering. He was a calm baby with Able’s black curly hair and dark eyes.

  “I hope he is not a genius,” Able had remarked to Meridee not long after his birth, which made her laugh.

  “Even if he is, shall we let him be a baby?” she replied.

  At this moment, Able was hard put to tell whether the mother or the son appeared more content. Now was the moment to test her.

  “Please accompany me to Trinity House,” he said, with no preliminary cajoling. “You’ve filled our laddie to the brim, and he will likely sleep until we return, with Mrs. Perry in charge.”

  “My love, I have not been invited, nor am I ever likely to be.”

  He watched as she gently hoisted Ben to her shoulder, where he produced a resounding burp that startled him and jerked his head up. After one owlish look around, their baby returned to his milk-induced coma, nestling into that most pleasant space between his mother’s neck and shoulder.

 
Moving gracefully, Meri deposited their offspring in his cradle. She stuffed herself back into her shimmy, then scrutinized Able and his neckcloth. She turned him toward the end of the bed, where he obediently sat.

  “Let’s start over.” She bent toward him, keeping her voice low, even though Able was certain not even a pack of baying wolves would have roused Ben, not after that feeding.

  The expert where he was not, Meri smoothed down the untied ends, flicked them here and there, tugged a bit, then stepped back. “You’ll do,” she told him. “And no, I will not trespass on the – what is it you call them?”

  “The Elder Brothers.”

  “Such an odd name. Are they all geriatrics?”

  “I’ll remind you that our boy’s namesake can hardly be called ancient.” He patted the bed and she sat. “Captain Sir Belvedere St. Anthony is but forty.”

  “Forty hard years.” He saw all the sympathy in her eyes.

  “I know. There are times – too many to count – that I loathe and despise Napoleon for what he is doing to us.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “How many years more will we suffer the Corsican Tyrant?”

  “Ten if a minute,” he said, well aware that even he had no idea. “Let us see if Sir John Moore prevails on land. We will continue to do our part at sea.” He smiled. “And at St. Brendan’s, which is what brings us to London, when we would all rather be in Portsmouth.” He nudged her. “Even you, Meri? Ever think you’d come to like that devil-may-care den of iniquity?”

  She gave him her clear-eyed appraisal that he craved because of its honesty. “I decided I can live anyplace where lives the man – well, men now – I adore.” She nudged back. “Even Euclid.”

  When he started to laugh, she put her hand over his mouth. “Hush!”

  “Ben is sleeping the sleep of the well-fed,” he reminded her.

  “I wish I knew why you were asked here.”

  “So do I.”

  “I thought you knew everything.” She nudged his hip.

  “I don’t read minds, Meri.”

  He returned the hip nudge and added a hand on her thigh. “I still don’t read minds, but even the most oblivious husband would understand what you’re up to.”

  “Are you grateful?”

  What to do but kiss her? His brain emptied out as she kissed back, and messed up the neckcloth she had reconstructed from ruin. She took the dratted thing from his neck and pulled out a new one from the bureau drawer.

  “This looks even better,” she declared a few minutes later. “No more kissing.”

  “Not ever? Horrors! I can calculate the number of times we have kissed and done much more, and arrive at a percentage that would make such a threat seem improbable in the extreme.”

  “I have no doubt you can,” she replied. Thank merciful heaven they had been married long enough that such mental nonsense didn’t faze her. “You have likely already done it.”

  “Aye, miss.”

  “Plead all you want, my love, but I wasn’t invited to Trinity House.”

  Able knew he could win. All he had to do was speak the truth.

  “Meridee, I’m fair terrified to go without you,” he said and meant every syllable. “Who am I even to be sitting on a bed in Curzon Street? There are still times when I feel like a workhouse bastard. I don’t belong in London’s most fashionable district.”

  “Neither do I,” she told him, her head against his shoulder now. She touched his face, sighing when he turned his head and kissed her palm.

  “Meri, do you ever feel like a feeding machine?”

  “Yes!” she replied with good humor. “Would I change that? Never.”

  As he stood up, Able tried not to think of his own mother, a Dumfries whore. After she birthed him in an alley, she had cared enough to drag herself to the church steps and leave him there, before she crawled away to die alone like a wounded cat.

  Trying not to think was one of the few things Sailing Master Durable Six couldn’t do. He remembered his mother panting and groaning as she gave birth and suddenly how cold he felt as Scottish rain drenched his naked skin and he cried for the first time.

  Think of something else, he commanded his phenomenal brain.

  In a moment, Meri stood beside him, her hand over his eyes. “No, no,” she whispered. “Don’t.”

  All he needed was Meri close by. He held her to him until the scroll that was his remarkable mind changed to Euclid’s propositions. The feel of his wife’s hand covering his rapidly moving eyes soothed him.

  “Very well, Able, I will come along. Will they throw me out?”

  “They wouldn’t dare. I’ll corner Grace Croker downstairs. You know how she enjoys a challenge. You’ll have a willing accomplice.” He sniffed her milk-damp shimmy. “Find something dry to wear, though.”

  She swatted at him. He laughed and hurried downstairs to the sitting room and found John Mark instead of Grace. Dressed neatly in black, with the St. Brendan the Navigator patch over his heart, John contemplated the globe.

  With emotions decidedly mixed, Able watched him, seeing a lad much like himself when he joined the fleet, although John was eleven to his nine. There was a world at my fingertips, too, he thought. There are still days that I miss service in the fleet.

  Eyes bright, John looked up when Able entered the room.

  “Where away, Mister Mark?” Able asked.

  John pointed to the Mediterranean Sea. “Here, sir, standing the watch.”

  “In time, in time,” Able said. He stood by the globe, his hand on John’s shoulder, marveling at the change one year could make in the life of a lad whose origin had been desperately sad.

  He knew John Mark still woke himself up with nightmares of the Portsmouth workhouse where he had been taken as an infant. More than once, Able was relieved that he knew no one else with his total recall, especially John Mark. When he came to St. Brendan’s, the boy’s workhouse matron had filled in the tragic details.

  The lad’s mother had been a prostitute, like Able’s mother. Rags stuffed in her mouth to silence her screams, she had been dragged aboard a ship, hidden, and passed around from sailor to sailor. Nine months later she had been kicked ashore naked in Plymouth. She gave birth on a freezing dock as her prison-frigate sailed with the tide.

  The ringleaders had been caught and forced to confess. Before she died, her only words had been, “In all that time, couldn’t they have given me back my dress?” Thank God John Mark had no recollection. Better he not know that the monsters had been transferred to other ships, and not hanged. The Navy Board had shrugged at the terrible business. “She was but a whore,” had been recorded in the court document. The baby went to the workhouse, remaining there until the age of ten, when the experiment at St. Brendan the Navigator School began.

  After John’s year in her care, Meri had been firm in her refusal to send him back across the street to St. Brendan’s dormitory. She had argued effectively that John would remain under their comforting roof until the nightmares were gone.

  “Sir, we look fine as five pence, don’t we?” John asked. Despite everything, he was a cheerful child.

  “I declare we do,” Able agreed.

  “Did Mrs. Six fix your neckcloth?”

  “She did. Is it so obvious when she does it, versus when I do it?”

  John Mark grinned and returned his attention to the Mediterranean.

  “Where is Miss Croker?” he asked.

  “Sir, I believe she is reading in the library.”

  He strolled down the hall to the library, and there was Grace Croker, their hostess. The sister of St. Brendan’s headmaster, Thaddeus Croker, Grace had invited herself along because she wanted to give her Mayfair rowhouse an airing. She had begun teaching last spring when Master Rodney Blake, English literatur
e and grammar instructor, had come to a fitting end after a pimping career that might have gone unpunished because of his rank and fortune.

  Wealthy and bored in London, Grace hadn’t been hard to convince and happily came to teach. Possessed of a brain as quick as her brother’s, she had proved essential to St. Brendan’s. Her continued employment, even minus salary, was not a sure thing, but nothing about St. Brendan’s was a sure thing. Perhaps that was why Able had been summoned to Trinity House. Maybe the Admiralty had gotten word of the nearly forgotten, centuries’ old monastery near the docks and wondered what was going on. Trinity House’s various duties were a mystery to most, even Able, except that sometimes its members were called upon by the crown for work of a discreet and silent nature.

  Grace looked up when he came in and closed the book, her finger saving her place.

  “Able, are you and John Mark ready?” He couldn’t overlook her grin. “I can see Meridee did something wonderful to your neckcloth.”

  “As ever.”

  “For a genius, there are times when you are not so smart,” she teased. Theirs was the camaraderie of teachers. At times she exasperated him, but he admired her more. Heaven knows he must exasperate her, too.

  “I have convinced her to come along with John and me, and sit in the gallery, if there is one.”

  “I doubt ladies are allowed.”

  He noticed she had removed her finger from the book. “She took some convincing. I, uh, promised her that you would come along and buttress the argument.”

  “You know I will.” Her expression softened. “You can’t do this without her, can you?”

  “I would never presume to try.”

  — Chapter Two —

  “Will I do?”