“I did.” His friend paused. “Not in those exact words, necessarily. And I should also mention, he’s been asking to speak to the captain.” He added that last part under his breath.
Albion guffawed with laughter, and Nathaniel shot him an annoyed look that instantly quelled the man’s mirth. “What did you say?”
“I said . . . the boy continues to ask when he might speak to the captain. Several times now. He’s said it is a matter of some urgency.”
“I trust you can help the boy with whatever concern he—”
“I assured him of that, Captain,” Hayes interrupted. “He’s growing . . . agitated. Almost yelling and such. He said it was private and that it was for your ears only and that he knows you’d absolutely be willing to speak with him.”
“I’m not.”
“I said as much, too, but . . .” Hayes coughed into his fist. “He insisted I was wrong and asked to speak to you immediately.”
“And taking orders from new deckhands is now something you do?” Nathaniel drawled.
At his side, Albion attempted to stifle a grin.
Hayes’s cheeks flushed. “No. Yes . . . Well, it is just . . .” He cursed. “It is just that he’s not like other deckhands. He issues commands like he’s a captain, but in a polite way . . .”
This time Albion didn’t bother to quell his bellow of laughter.
“And he seems to really think you’d want to talk to him—”
“I don’t,” Nathaniel said over his quartermaster’s interruption. “Tell him to paint it a third time, and if he doesn’t do it right, then a fourth and fifth, and I don’t care if he has to paint the goddamned walls a thousand times over, tell him to get it right. And if there’s something wrong with the paint, then figure out what that is and fix it.”
Hayes swallowed noisily. “Yes, Captain. Of course.” He dropped a bow.
Dealing with green deckhands wasn’t a responsibility he took on. Nathaniel’s focus belonged solely on the mission and the details surrounding the upcoming confrontation with the French. He didn’t have the damned time to go about coddling a lad just finding his sea legs.
“Deal with whatever concern it is he has,” he ordered the quartermaster. Failure to do so wouldn’t properly prepare the boy for the correct order of rank and succession upon the ship.
From the corner of his eye, Nathaniel caught a glimpse of the deckhand Oliver rushing over to Billy, a fellow deckhand scrubbing down the railings.
The boys exchanged a handful of words, and then with his cleaning rag in hand, Billy quit his post and followed after the older, taller deckhand.
Nathaniel’s frown deepened. What in hell is this? Members of his crew leaving their jobs? Nathaniel ran a tight ship and didn’t tolerate men who didn’t follow orders. If a captain let his sailors be lax, then both the mission and the crew were in jeopardy. This was what came from hiring a skeleton crew, and yet his father and the demands he’d made of Nathaniel had left him no other choice. “Where is he?”
“Just below deck. As I said”—the other man looked like he’d downed a mug of seawater—“I had him . . . painting the corridor walls.”
“Albion, man the wheel,” Nathaniel ordered, and his second-in-command’s shoulders sagged with a palpable relief. “Hayes, you come with me.”
Both men spoke. “As you wish, Captain.”
“As I wish,” Nathaniel muttered. “If that were, in fact, the case, I’d be navigating the ship, and whatever damned nonsense going on between my blasted deckhands would be settled by my quartermaster.”
Albion erupted into another round of laughter.
Bright splotches of red filled Hayes’s cheeks, and Nathaniel stalked off. There was no place on either his ship or his mission for things to be amiss. There was even less of a place for it in this particular one, which the duke had marked as Nathaniel’s absolute last if he did not fulfill his obligations and responsibilities as damned ducal heir.
Determined to put an end to whatever games were afoot, Nathaniel headed in search of his suddenly insubordinate deckhands, and to meet the newest one responsible for all his troubles thus far.
They were laughing.
Or mayhap a better word for it would be “sniggering.”
It had begun with two of the deckhands, who’d hurried past when she’d begun her work, only to double back to take in her efforts.
From there, her audience had only grown . . . and also grown bolder in their meanness.
“Gor, methinks ye need some pinks in there, lad,” one of her detractors called over, and Cassia flared her nostrils as his mockery met with more raucous mirth.
Lad.
Lad.
It was all she could do to keep from boxing the little fellow’s ears and pointing out that she likely had five or so years on him.
“You may rest assured, dear sir,” she said, keeping her voice deep and even and her gaze on her strokes. “If I were in possession of a greater selection of paints, then I’d take your suggestion into consideration. As it is, I am working with less than stellar options when it comes to paint, and I’ve been forced to blend together different colors to make new ones.”
She silently tacked that on to the rapidly growing list of things she really needed to speak with Jeremy about when he came ’round. “If your captain ever bothers to visit, I will tell him as much.”
One of the sailors sniggered nastily—in fairness, was there anything less than a snigger that wasn’t nasty? “He’s yer captain, too.” He paused. “That is, as long as yer on this ship.”
“Which isn’t likely for long,” another fellow declared, his pronouncement met with hoots and whistles as the boys all clapped their hands and stomped their feet in a rolling, happy noise.
One of the boys stuck his head over her shoulder, and his warm, tepid breath slapped her cheek. “He’s tossed men overboard for less, and Oi sure think ye’ve enough offenses on yer list where ye’ll find yerself suffering the same fate.”
Despite herself, and despite the fact she personally knew the captain, that she’d played dress-up with his trousers and tricorn hat when she was a girl, the mean boy’s threat sent dread tripping along her spine.
Do not rise to the bait . . .
Do not take it . . .
You have a family full of troublesome children who love nothing more than to get under your last frayed nerve . . . Why, these miserable little buggers had absolutely nothing on the McQuoids.
Sure enough, as she refused to give in to their gibing, the little boy drew back and returned to the still-growing gang of youths mocking her.
Since she’d made her Come Out, she’d gone unnoticed. She’d been invisible to the gentlemen looking for brides. But neither had she been an object of scorn and mockery. When presented with the unkindness of Jeremy’s crew, Cassia rather found herself preferring the former state.
In fairness, she could admit their censure wasn’t completely unwarranted.
It wasn’t her finest work.
She was usually infinitely good at painting.
It was one of the skills Cassia did possess in abundance.
She knew how to paint and draw everything from the wild fields of Scotland to the bowls of fruit faithfully set out every morn at her family’s breakfast table.