“Does she speak Latin?”
“Not that I know of. But neither does your average English exciseman, so I collect we could get away with it. WhereisEugénie?”
At this direct inquiry, Lamentation began to look extremely innocent beneath his cherubic blond curls. “I understand Eugénie and Wall went down to the butcher.”
Archer paused. “Again?That’s thrice in three days. Is it for dinner or—”
He broke off. He’d heard... something... coming from the casks. A sound as of tapping.
Lamentation made a gesture somewhere between a wince and shrug. “I don’t think it’s for dinner, Cap. I think it’s for the puppies.”
Archer felt his teeth click closed, and he forced his jaw open with a creak. “What. Puppies.”
The tapping sound, which had tapered off, started up again as if in response to Archer’s ground-out inquiry. He crouched beside the barrels and shoved his hand into the shadowed gap between the staves and the cool kitchen wall.
He withdrew a small black puppy.
“No,” he grated. As a protest, it lacked vigor, being drowned out by the sound of tiny canine squeaks. “How many times have I said it? No more dogs!”
Another damp black nose emerged from the shadows, and Archer very seriously considered weeping.
On theSwallow, Wall had been the ship’s surgeon. But after he had left in the wake of Archer’s disgrace, Wall had turned his skill from humans to his real passion: veterinary medicine.
At the time, it had seemed a most excellent idea. Archer had proposed a number of strategic moneymaking schemes that involved extracting exorbitant fees from ladies of leisure to attend their beloved pets. In practice, however, Wall had not found the time to travel to London and fleece aristocratic ladies of their coin, because he was too busy providing inexpensive veterinary care to every animal in the surrounding villages.
He and Eugénie—his wife and their crew’s talented forger—had also proven quite competent at rearing orphaned puppies. There was, Archer felt, a veritable epidemic of puppies in Cornwall. Most of them now seemed to be living in his house.
He stuffed the puppy in the pocket of his trousers and reached into the shadowed gap behind the barrels, where his hand promptly encountered a second warm, squirming form, and then a third. BloodyChrist.
“Only three, I think,” Lamentation said brightly.
“Three new ones,” Gerry clarified. “On top of the five we already had.”
Lamentation shot his beloved a hasty glance of betrayal.
Archer stuck the second puppy in his other pocket, where it wriggled and bit his thigh. He carefully extricated the third puppy, at which point he realized that he was out of pockets.
He considered wrapping it about his neck like a stole, and then decided not to, if only because Wall would have an apoplexy if he saw Archer doing any such thing.
“Outside,” he said. “If we’re going to feed and house every orphaned dog in Cornwall, we can at least keep themoutside.”
He was halfway to the rear exit, his right pocket nearly torn off by minuscule needle teeth, when he heard another unfamiliar sound.
Not tapping this time. More of a pounding, really.
At the front door.
“What the devil,” he muttered and reversed course. Were Wall and Eugénie back so soon? And why were theyknocking?
A brief vision of excise officers flashed through his mind, and he thought of the casks of smuggled Rhenish wine currently in plain sight in the Pomeroy House kitchens. He tucked the third puppy under his arm, ran his fingers through his hair, and recalled himself to his position.
He was the steward of Princess Serafina of Monfalcone. His position at Pomeroy House was entirely legal and sanctioned by the royal family. If British officers had descended upon the mansion, he would send them on their way on behalf of House di Sangro.
He tried to remember his few words of Italian and flung open the door.
Before him stood a trio of women. They were young, richly dressed, and apparently mid-argument. The tallest one had her fist upraised as if to continue pounding.
Barring some massive changes in the British military he’d not heard about, Archer felt fairly certain these were not excise officers.
