Free Seize the Fire by Laura Kinsale

save the fleet?"
    It'd be steep work with this female, clearly. "Please, ma'am," he said with a remote smile. "I didn't actually save the fleet."
    Mrs. Whoever gave a little squealing sigh. "So modest! Oh, but you saved the admiral, and I'm sure anyone would agree it is the same thing. What is that old saying? 'For want of a shoe, a horse was lost; for want of a horse—'et cetera. I'm not perfectly certain of the sequence, but it leads right up to commanders and kings and countries, you know, and if you saved your admiral that is quite splendidly identical to saving England herself. Rushing beneath a falling mast to drag him to safety—did you ever think , Mrs. Plumb! Right here in your drawing room!"
    Sheridan considered explaining that he'd been out of his wits at the time; that he'd meant to push the old imbecile in the other direction and make him into mutton hash. But Mrs. Mental Acuity's intellect was obviously in no case to survive a concerted attack of rational thought, so he refrained.
    Julia looked on with a cool smile while her caller purred and cooed and fluttered. Sheridan stirred sugar into his tea and sank deeper into quiet desperation. Outside the comfortable house by the river it was sleeting rain, which was evidently the new national climate voted in by Parliament, inasmuch as it hadn't let up for a minute since he'd set foot in England. The ice crystals stung the windows and slid down the panes, creating little prison bars of light and shadow.
    He caught Julia's eye once. She must have read something of the rebellion that was growing at the back of his throat, for she began efficiently to dispatch Mrs. God-Knew-Who back out into the rain. When the door had closed on the lady's laced-up rump, Sheridan sprang out of his chair and began to pace.
    Julia walked back across the room and sat down next to the tea tray. "There," she said, "she is gone, is she not? Silly bitch. Sit down, now—I won't let anyone else come in and torment you, I promise."
    He stopped and looked toward her. With bleak relish, he envisioned her stripped and tied to the shrouds, where she could find out the real meaning of that word, the same way he had.
    His mouth tightened. He stared at her a moment and wondered, not for the first time, if she had known of his father's greatest joke—if she had been aware when the old man had called him down from school at the age of ten and told him his childhood dreams were coming true: he was going to Vienna to study his music with the masters—here was the ship, here was the name of the captain who would take him, here were his new clothes and his own trunk and some jolly good fellows who'd look out for him on the trip…
    "Sheridan," she said. "Sit down."
    It was intolerable. Now he must have Julia to pacify him and Julia to pet him and Julia to tell him what to do with every moment of his life.
    "Sheridan," she said again.
    He thought of debtors' prison. And India.
    He sat down.
    "Her Highness will return from her walk quite soon, I'm sure," Julia said, taking up the embroidery from the sewing box.
    Sheridan balled one white-gloved fist inside the other and rested his elbows on his knees. Then he cradled his head in his hands, staring at his boots. "Haven't you got a bottle stashed somewhere about the place?" he asked peevishly.
    "Nerves?" She looked up from her needle. "And thought you were such a lady-killer."
    "Excellent notion. God knows I'd be pleased to kill you, but then you ain't a lady."
    "I can't think what is keeping the princess. I asked her to stay home this morning, but Her Highness must have her constitutional, even in this weather. I'm afraid she will freeze if she walks all the way to Upwell."
    "Her Confounded Highness can walk all the way to Peking, for my money," he snapped, "and I hope she does."
    Julia slid a bit of embroidery floss through her teeth to make a knot. "I must say, you're acting very badly about this. It seems to me you would view it as a golden