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Sir Richard did not take the hand she offered. Wise man. Dance would be careful not to touch her again, after his too-close encounter at the davits. The feel of the surprising soft flair of her back concealed by the voluminous cloak beneath his hands had been enough to wipe the entire contents of his mind momentarily clean.
    God’s balls. This is what he had come to—lurid imaginings about a wide-eyed, buttoned-up spinster.
    Sir Richard was being much more prudent—he was looking at the dangerous girl as if she might harbor the plague. “There must be some mistake. James Burke is a man.”
    “I imagine he is.” Miss Burke kept up her very polite, if very determined smile, and let her empty hand drop. “But my given name is Jane, and I assure you, I am J. E. Burke, and I am a conchologist.”
    “That cannot be.”
    Miss Burke retained her poise and her smile with some effort—a bloom of high color was streaking across her smooth cheeks. “I assure you, sir. I am she. But to save us from going on in this rather unscientific manner perhaps I might offer you proof? I have the letters of our correspondence here, written in your own hand, and the hand of Sir Joseph Banks’s secretary, detailing our agreements and arrangements for the voyage.”
    Miss Burke fished out a packet of letters—the same letters she had brandished at him in her boat. Then, Dance had thought the stiff breeze had been ruffling the papers, but now in the lee of the rail, he could see that it was her hand that was trembling. Indeed her whole body was nearly shaking with some mixture of indignation and … Could it be fright?
    Dance took a surreptitious half step toward her. All it would take was for the tiny spinster to collapse in a fit of vapors upon his deck.
    But somehow Miss Burke the conchologist rallied—she put her hand to her chest to ease her fright, and hid her tremors by raising both her chin, and the letters of correspondence. “Are these not your letters to me, sir?”
    “Yes, but…” Sir Richard was clearly discomposed, and losing sea way. “But I had no idea that you were— I was given to understand that J. E. Burke was the son of Lord Thomas Burke, and the grandson of the Duke of Shafton.”
    “Lord Burke is my grandfather, and His Grace of Shafton my great-grandfather. Both, I am happy to say, enjoy excellent health and correspond with me regularly. And with the Duke of Fenmore, our expedition’s patron.”
    Sir Richard’s anxieties were not in the least allayed by Miss Burke’s strong connection with her illustrious ancestors. “But there must be some mistake.”
    “Not on my part, sir.” Her voice gained strength, with only the tiniest trace of tremor and trepidation. “Or should you like to quiz me, to prove it so? Shall I fetch my pen and paper from my trunks, and draw you the Mollusca aggregating on the bottom of the hull?” At their blank looks she explained. “The barnacles there— Lepas balanoides as classified by Linnaeus in the last century. Which, by the way, I believe may be an incorrect classification, as to my way of observation, the animal shares more characteristics of Crustacea than Mollusca.” Miss Burke tipped up that alabaster chin as if she were knocking back a stiff belt of brandy.
    Would that he could do the same.
    But she was as potent as a belt of brandy just looking at her. Now that she had stolen the wind from Sir Richard’s sails, she stood firm, like the calm eye in the center of a hurricane, this tiny little woman, impervious to the havoc that was emanating from her like waves from a storm.
    Poor Sir Richard was entirely buffeted back, almost into the arms of the three men who had gathered at his back. The assembled naturalists seemed to have been drawn up to the quarterdeck en masse by the dangerous threat of this small woman’s argument. “You believe the great Linnaeus to be incorrect?”
    “Yes.” Miss Burke was undaunted by the man’s obvious alarm. “I have been working