Convenient Christmas Brides: The Captain’s Christmas Journey / The Viscount’s Yuletide Betrothal / One Night Under the Mistletoe

Joseph Everard, post captain, Royal Navy, turned around to stare hard at Lieutenant David Newsome’s paltry heap of personal effects on his desk, wishing he could make it go away. It remained there unmovable, another sad testament to the fleet action now called Trafalgar. That one word was enough to convey all the horror, the pounding and the fire, which combined to create the most bittersweet of victories, with the well-nigh inconceivable loss of Vice Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson.

Had anyone been interested, Joe could have explained his reluctance to deliver David’s effects in person. It wasn’t because his second luff had done anything amiss, or behaved in any way unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. True, he was young, but weren’t we all, at some point?

Joe had done this sad duty many times before, whenever possible. He should have been inured to the tears, the sadness and the resentment, even, when a mother, father or wife had stared daggers at him, as if he was the author of their misery, and not Napoleon. Left to his own devices, Joe Everard would happily have served King and country patrolling the seven seas and engaging in no fleet actions whatsoever. He had never required a major, lengthy war to prove his manhood.

They were all puppets in the hands of Napoleon. Now that war had resumed, after the brief Peace of Amiens, Joe saw no shortcut to victory for years.

Something worse explained his reluctance for this distasteful duty, something Lord St Vincent, or as he had been then, Captain John Jervis, had described one night.

They had come off victorious in some fleet action or other—they tended to blur together—and Captain Jervis and his men were moping about in the wardroom. The wounded were tended and quiet, and the pumps in the bowels of the ship had finished their noisy job.

‘Look at us,’ Captain Jervis had remarked to his first lieutenant, an unfortunate fellow who died the following year at Camperdown. ‘There is nothing quite as daunting as the lethargy that victory brings.’

No doubt. Trafalgar, a victory as huge as anyone in the Royal Navy could ask for, dumped a full load of melancholy on Joe Everard’s usually capable shoulders. Why one man should die and another should not was a mystery for the ages, and not a trifling question for a mere post captain who had done his duty, as had every man aboard the HMS Ulysses, a forty-eight-gun frigate. He and his crew of well-trained stalwarts had babied the Ulysses through the storm the next day, limped into Torbay and remained there waiting a final diagnosis from the overworked shipwrights.

He and his officers had travelled from Torbay to Plymouth to sit in the Drake and drink. They talked, played whist and cursed the French until they were silent, spent and remarkably hung over. Joe couldn’t release anyone to return home to wives, but the wives could come to Plymouth.

More power to you, he thought, as he had listened to bedsprings creaking rhythmically and wished he had found the leisure, or perhaps the courage, to marry.

After a week, the verdict was a month to refurbish and repair in the Torquay docks. He released his officers to their homes for three weeks and cautiously gave his crew the glad tidings, wary that some might not return and truth to tell, hardly blaming them if they did not. His sailing master, a widower with children in Canada, had no objection to staying in Torquay for the repairs. Such a kindness gave Captain Joseph Everard no excuse to avoid the condolence visit to Weltby, Kent, where Second Lieutenant Newsome’s parents and one spinster sister resided.

Since England apparently still expected every man to do his duty, Joe sent a note to Augustus Newsome, explaining the reason for his visit and hoping he would not upset the family by returning their son’s belongings in person. He added a postscript stating when he could be expected in Weltby.

He chose to take the mail coach from Plymouth to Weltby, mainly because he enjoyed the sight of ordinary folk going about their business, almost as if the war raging at sea was happening on Mars. He could listen to idle chat and observe people not poised on the edge of danger possessed with that peculiar thin-faced, sharp-featured look that all men at war seemed to wear as a badge of office.

He hadn’t reckoned on the power of Trafalgar. Joe never thought of himself as a forbidding fellow, but truth to tell, an ordinary ride on the mail coach would have been a silent one. Maybe he did look like a man who had no wish to talk. God knows he had frightened a decade’s worth of midshipmen.

But Trafalgar had loosened people’s tongues and heightened their curiosity. If the spirits of the deceased hung around for a while, as Shakespeare claimed they did in Romeo and Juliet, Joe had to imagine Admiral Nelson would have enjoyed the praise heaped on him by England’s ordinary citizens.

Joe thought he might be troubled to talk about the battle recently waged that was still giving him sweating nightmares in December, but he wasn’t. The other wayfarers were genuinely interested in the contest of the British fleet against the combined forces of France and Spain.

They even wanted him to explain his ship’s role, which also surprised him, because the newspapers had sung the praises—well deserved—of Mars, Victory, Agamemnon and Ajax, ships of the line with stunning firepower.

But, no, they had questions about the service of the battle’s four frigates and he was flattered enough to explain the frigates’ role as repeaters on such a roiling scene, with smoke obscuring battle signals. ‘We read the flags and passed on the messages, where we could,’ he said. ‘It meant moving about and coming in close so other ships of war could read Nelson’s flags.’

It sounded simple enough, but the reality was timing movements and darting about to avoid obliteration, which nearly came when the French Achilles’s powder magazine exploded and rained fire on the deck of the much smaller Ulysses. That was when David Newsome died, struck by a flaming mast. Joe paused in his narration and bowed his head, which gave the old lady next to him silent permission to hold his hand, the first such gesture he had felt in years. No one ever touched the captain.

‘It was a battle never to be forgotten,’ he said, when he could speak. ‘Our foe fought valiantly, especially the Spanish, but I do not think Boney will beat us now.’

The old lady still held his hand and Joe didn’t mind. ‘Then hurrah, Captain,’ she said quietly. The other travellers nodded.

When she did release his hand, she looked with sympathy at his face. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.

Joe touched the plaster on his cheek that covered black stitches from a splinter that missed his eye by a quarter-inch. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘My Trafalgar souvenir.’

She rummaged in the bag at her feet and drew out a ceramic jar. ‘Goose grease,’ she said. ‘Rub it in at night. Won’t scar so bad.’ She smiled at him. ‘A handsome fellow like you doesn’t need a reminder of battle, does he?’

He took it with thanks and turned predictably red, grateful none of his officers was there to chuckle at their captain. ‘It’s not as though I could forget, ma’am, but if you say it will prevent scarring, I believe you.’

He wondered if a traveller would comment upon his mail-coach journey, since they seemed to be settling into a certain camaraderie he found endearing. Sure enough, a little boy posed the question, curious why he was in a mail coach. Didn’t the Royal Navy pay better than that?

The child’s embarrassed mother tried to shush her son, but Joe laughed. Since they were all so plain spoken and kind, he felt no distance from them.

‘It’s this way...your name...’

‘Tommy Ledbetter,’ the boy announced. ‘I am five.’

‘Tommy, I like to travel by mail coach,’ he said. ‘I like to sit here and watch people like you going about your business in an England I hardly ever am privileged to see, as I serve on the ocean.’

Tommy looked around. ‘We’re not much,’ he said, which made the vicar sitting next to the boy smile and the old lady chuckle.

‘You’re England,’ Joe said. ‘That’s enough for me.’

Chapter Two (#ud480d6bb-3198-5402-b3a9-7f97dc803e4b)

‘When will the mail coach arrive, Verity?’ Mama asked for the tenth time since luncheon. ‘I hope he does not expect too much from us.’

‘Mama, I am certain he will do what is proper, in such circumstances,’ Verity soothed.

‘Does he have any idea how much we are suffering?’ Mama asked in a voice close to a whine, but not quite.

Verity knew herself to be practical, a trait she had acquired from her father. Still, it was a good question and she knew her mother was in pain from the loss of Davey; they all were.

‘I expect Captain Everard has a considerable idea of suffering, Mama,’ she replied. ‘Quite possibly he does this sad duty often. I imagine it takes a toll on him, too.’

She could tell her mother had never considered this angle of mourning, so consumed had she been with her own loss of a beloved son in October. Perhaps the workings of time on even the most tragic of events would spread its unique balm. Verity could hope, anyway, because she suffered, too.

Verity had suffered another loss not long after Trafalgar, one that ranked low, compared to Davey’s death, but which caused her anxiety of another sort. Barely had they digested the news of his death when Lord Blankenship, the marquis who employed her father as his estate manager, had informed her that her services were no longer required as teacher in the entirely satisfactory school where she had educated tenant children, much to her delight and their gain.

Lord Blankenship, a kind enough fellow, had hurried to assure her that he did not question her abilities. The issue was a personal one. He informed her that an impoverished relative had petitioned him for employment, because the creditors were circling his wounded finances like wolves and all was not well.

‘He claims he can teach and blood is still thicker than water,’ Lord Blankenship said. ‘I had my secretary write this morning that I will employ him in your position, starting after Yuletide. I will give you a small supplement and any sort of reference you could wish, Miss Newsome. I trust you will understand.’

What could she do but assure him she understood? Because he seemed to expect it, she also pasted a pleasant smile on her lips and told him not to worry about her. He left her classroom relieved and justified; she seethed inside, angry because the world was not a fair place for ladies.

Her father had taken her dismissal with remarkable calm; her mother, in agony over Davey’s death, heard her not at all. Mama did question her two weeks later, when Verity stayed home from what would have been a school day. When Verity told her again, Mama patted her hand. ‘You can mourn here with me, Daughter,’ she said. ‘Besides, you do not need to earn your bread. Papa is able to provide, as long as he is alive.’

After then, what? she wanted to ask her parents. Papa earned a modest living that had sufficed, probably because for all of Mama’s flyaway airs, she had a remarkable ability to rein in expenses. The Newsome household probably even resembled the taut ship that Davey, in letters home, said Captain Everard ran.

Now Davey was dead, a promising career gone. In the course of things, he likely would have married and set up his own household, which, he had assured her, would always have room for his only sibling, should she never marry, as seemed the case now.

As she waited for Captain Everard’s arrival on that late December day, Verity chafed on several accounts. The death of her brother had rendered her as sorrowful as her parents, who mourned their son and comforted each other. She mourned her brother feeling much more alone, sorry for his passing above all, but sad that his death had diminished her own future.

The matter seemed dismal beyond belief, but for her parents’ sake, she stifled her emotion; they had enough to worry about. David Newsome, as bright and promising a lad as anyone in Weltby had known, had been consigned to the deep off the coast of Spain, fish food and out of reach. She also stifled her unreasonable anger that Admiral Nelson’s body had been returned to England in a keg of spirits, to be buried in the coming January with high honours in St Paul’s Cathedral. Everyone else was slid off a board into the sea. There was no grave where Mama could plant flowers.

I want what I cannot have, Verity thought, as she went to the sitting room, the better for her to spot a post chaise pull up and deposit a captain with a box of all that remained of David Newsome, Second Lieutenant, late of the HMS Ulysses.

Papa had said they could offer the captain a bed for the night and so they would. Perhaps he could tell them something of Davey at sea, before her dear brother faded from everyone’s memory except the memories of the three people who had loved him best.