Page 1 of Miss Wylde and the Wynd

Chapter One

Southampton, England, August 1817

With spyglass in hand, Mr. Damian Wynd faced the unrelenting wind coming off the channel and pushed the hair from his eyes to watch the Annabelle grow larger in the distance. Her sails billowed, and she rode low in the water due to a full hull. The Annabelle would not be the only ship to return from Quebec City filled with the ever-increasing demand for timber, but four more ships would arrive within days. The Annabelle was simply the first to return to their docks located in Southampton, which was preferrable to London where congestion and competition made being one of England’s top import-and-export businesses more difficult than it needed to be.

At any one time, Trade Wynd had ships sailing to and from America, Canada, the Caribbean, Cape Colony, Madeira, Greece, Gibraltar and any country on the Continent with a port.

“Where is that one from?”

Damian glanced down at the six-year-old child, Livia, who had become his shadow of late.

“Where did you come from?”

“The earl told me to keep an eye on you.”

The earl was Sterling Wynd, the Earl of Wyndham, who happened to be Damian’s older brother and Livia’s stepfather. She referred to Sterling as the earl or simply Earl, when addressing him directly. Never Wyndham.

His brother had returned home only a month earlier after being gone for over a year. Sterling had left a bachelor and visited various locations on the Continent to renew trade relations, especially those that had suffered during the war with Napoleon, and to once again increase imports. His next to the last destination had been Wyndview Farm, a vineyard they owned in the Cape Colony on the southern tip of Africa, where he had met his now wife and her daughter, Livia.

Sterling had been successful in restoring those trade relations and once again Trade Wynd ships were only docked long enough to load and unload cargo or make repairs before they set sail again.

“What bounty do we have today?”

“Bounty? We are not pirates,” Damian reminded her as the crew, dock and warehouse workers were carefully, but quickly, setting the ropes, pulleys, tackles and crane to unload the cargo from the Charlotte Rose that had arrived just that morning.

Olivia shrugged. “It would be more fun if you were.”

“Dangerous and illegal you mean.”

The child blew out a heavy sigh. “What did the Charlotte Rose bring in?”

“Marble from Carrara, Italy.”

Her brown eyes lit with excitement. “Is it for Jules?”

Jules was one of Damian’s younger brothers who had started sculpting as a child when their father had given him a broken piece of marble. He had not stopped since, except for when he had gone off to war.

“If any is broken and cannot be sold, it will go to him.” Though, Jules had spent nearly two years working on a statue that nobody had been allowed to see. That marble had been purchased by him and ordered directly from Carrara—the largest block of marble to have ever traveled on a Trade Wynd ship.

“If it is not broken, where will it go?”

“Stonemasons, sculptors.” Damian shrugged.

“And makes you rich.”

“You are turning rather mercenary.”

Livia frowned. Her delicate dark eyebrows drew together over her eyes.

“Greedy,” he clarified because he assumed she did not know the meaning of mercenary. “First bounty and now becoming rich. Do you hope to be a pirate one day?”

“Maybe,” she answered. “Or maybe you will let me captain one of your ships.”

“Women do not captain ships.”

“Anne Bonny did.”

“She was a pirate. Trade Wynd is an established and respected export and import business,” Damon reminded her.