Almost a Lady by Jane Feather

regarded him with head cocked. “G’morning . . . g’morning,” he declared with what Meg would have sworn was a questioning note.
    Cosimo opened one eye. “Surely a man can take a nap on a sunny afternoon, Gus.”
    “G’morning,” the macaw repeated with rather more insistence.
    “He is the most extraordinary bird,” Meg said. “He makes everyone do exactly what he wants.”
    “He has us all well trained,” Cosimo agreed, opening both eyes and hitching himself farther up against the railing. “Pass me the glass, will you?”
    Meg handed him the wineglass. He filled it and drank with a little sigh of pleasure. She remembered something he had said when first they’d met. “This mission of yours,” she said rather musingly. “I understood you to say it was a matter of some urgency . . . so much so that you couldn’t possibly take the time to turn around and take me back to Folkestone.”
    His eyes sharpened a little and he turned to look at her. “Yes, I did,” he agreed. “What of it?”
    “For a man with a sense of such urgency, you seem remarkably untroubled by being becalmed,” she pointed out. “A whole day has been wasted, it seems to me. And if you can’t make harbor tonight, then a whole night too.”
    He smiled again and shrugged lightly. “I’m a sailor, Miss Meg. I know I can do nothing about the wind. It will serve me when it chooses and only then. I await its pleasure with patience.”
    Once again she had the sense of that deep core of the man existing beneath this carefree, amused façade. A stillness ran there with the hardness that she’d already seen. What else? Power and resolution, she was convinced. Cosimo was no idle dilettante sailor.
    “Why do you sail a sloop-of-war?” she asked abruptly. “You don’t belong to the navy.”
    “No,” he agreed. “Not in so many words.”
    “Ah.” Meg sat up fully, curling her legs beneath her. “A denial that’s not a denial. I’ve always found those most interesting.”
    He nodded. “Yes, I can see why.”
    “But you’re not going to say anything else?”
    He shook his head this time. “No.”
    Meg absorbed this, continuing to look at him with interest. Whatever his mission it had something to do with the war. “Did those men-of-war leave Folkestone with you?”
    The gleam in his eye intensified. “So you noticed them?”
    “They were hard to miss.” She turned to look out between the rails and then pulled herself to her feet and scanned the horizon. “They’re not in evidence now.”
    “They too are at the mercy of the same mistress,” he said, standing up with her. “The wind plays no favorites.” He walked across to the helm and picked up a telescope. “Here, take a good look at your surroundings, Miss Meg.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she said tartly as she took the telescope. “It makes me feel like a governess.”
    At that he laughed. “Oh, no, not you, Meg. No governess ever had such ungovernable red hair and such an asp’s tongue.”
    “I wouldn’t know, I never had one,” she said, raising the telescope. “At least not beyond the age of five.”
    “So you attended an establishment . . . a school for young ladies,” Cosimo said.
    Meg lowered the telescope. “Drawing, study of the globe, a little pianoforte, a little Italian, a smattering of French?”
    She shook her head. “No, sir. I didn’t have a governess beyond the age of five and I was never educated in some establishment to be one.”
    Cosimo was puzzled. He knew little about the education of girls, but women of Meg Barratt’s position, or at least what he assumed from her manner was her social position, usually had some kind of formal learning. “You had no education beyond the age of five?”
    “We had tutors,” she said impatiently, scanning the horizon. “Of course we were educated.”
    “We?”
    “My friend, Arabella. We grew up as sisters.” She lowered the telescope and turned slowly to look at him. “I have