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from creditors.” Mr. Laidlaw stared into his
teacup as though he were reading his neighbor’s destiny. “She came
here to watch the lieutenant buried in Plymouth, and then she was
taken in childbirth. For all I know, she’d like to return to
Northumberland, but that would take money and she has
none.”
    Thomas sipped his tea. “Did the vicar and his
wife think to do right by their son’s widow and child?”
    “ Mary Ann said they never looked
with much favor on her marriage. They hounded him because he
married for love, and not with an eye to finding a lady with enough
inheritance to support them both. I hear that army careers aren’t
cheap.”
    “ Mrs. Poole told me her husband was
convinced he was destined for greatness in the army,” Thomas said.
“His parents won’t help her?”
    “ Can’t now. Both dead,” Laidlaw
said.
    They sat in silence, each aware how seldom does
greatness touch the deserving, but meanness seems to linger
forever.
    Mr. Laidlaw brightened then, and pointed to a
pencil drawing over his mantelpiece. “Mary Ann drew that for me
last Christmas. I told her how much I liked a good piece of beef
and dripping pudding.”
    They laughed together.
    “ She said if she ever got some
watercolors, she would steal in here and touch it up.” His eyes
grew wistful. “I hope she does. That’s as close as this old
body will come to such a feast.”
    “ I beg to differ, Mr. Laidlaw,”
Thomas said, his mind made up. “When Mrs. Poole finishes work
today, I propose to take the three of you to a good restaurant for
just such a meal. Do you think she will agree to my
scheme?”
    “ If I assure her that I won’t get to
go if she doesn’t!” the old fellow declared. “I intend to be most
persuasive.”
    Thomas left it at that, bidding the man good
day and promising to return at six of the clock, when Mary Ann
Poole trudged home from a job where she had to do as Lady Naismith
told her without catching the eye of Sir Edwin. And look forward to
no employment after Christmas Eve, a worse prospect than her
current lot.
    Thomas was a man with a good imagination, but
he could not begin to grasp how frightened she must be right now.
Yet in no way had she indicated her fears. Well certainly not to
you, you simpleton , he berated himself. She probably doesn’t
want to terrify Beth, and it’s none of your
business .
    Acutely aware of the desperation Mary Ann Poole
must be feeling and finding himself powerless to think of a
solution, he spent the next few hours back in Plymouth, closeted
with the headmaster of St. Clement’s School, arguing the merits of
accepting as a student the daughter of an army man dead at
Corunna.
    “ It isn’t done,” the man assured
him. “Females, yes, but she must be the poor child of a Royal Navy
man.”
    “ Could it be done if I donated a
whacking amount of money to St. Clement’s?” he asked bluntly, out
of patience with nitpicky rules.
    “ We will see about it,” the old
priss said quickly, and dismissed him.
    And then what? Suppose he succeeded in getting
Beth enrolled in a far better school than the one in Haven run by
an idiot? He couldn’t kidnap Mrs. Poole and drag her to Plymouth to
do … what with her? He wondered if she would consent to moving
into his house under his sister’s charge, but that idea strangled
itself at birth. Although he planned to be at sea soon, Mary Ann
Poole would probably never consent to such an arrangement out of
pride, or fear that what might have happened to her in Lady
Naismith’s employ might be repeated in his own establishment. He
knew it would not—he was a man of honor—but society would never
countenance such a solution.
    He stewed some more, and then got back in the
post chaise for the little drive to Haven, an unhappy
man.
    “ I am far from bored,” he announced
to the world at large, which happened to be a cat slinking down an
alley. But was worried any better?
     
     

Chapter Six
    A lthough she would not miss
her