Free A Scandal to Remember by Elizabeth Essex

it.”
    “They took the captain’s gig, sir,” Morris explained. “Some watermen found it abandoned at the sally port and towed it back out. And wanted to be paid for the service, besides.”
    Despite being a smaller boat, the gig could hold a lot more than just two men—Dance should feel lucky to find that only two men had absconded. “Get the necessary coins to pay the watermen from the purser.”
    “About Givens, sir.”
    “Yes, Givens.” Dance still had a bone to pick with the man, for though the purser had done his duty in seeing all of the Royal Society’s party suitably settled, the damn man had still not yet produced the muster rolls or the ship’s accounts, despite Dance’s insistence. “And send him to me.” The man had seemed anxious enough to flatter his way into their guests’ good graces, buttering up Sir Richard to no end. But Givens was evidently not that interested in staying in Dance’s good graces.
    Dance scrubbed his hand across his face. He needed a shave. And a pot of coffee. Perhaps even poured over his head.
    “But that’s the problem, sir.” Morris’s voice was full of apology. “It was Givens, sir.”
    The shave would have to wait. As would everything else. “God’s balls.” Dance was on his feet and cursing himself for a fool. He hadn’t curtailed the purser when he might have—and should have—when he had first sensed the man was less than honest. The man must have simply taken the money and gone. “How long has he been gone? Send Mr. Ransome to me this instant. I want this damn ship turned upside down and inside out for those books. Which one is Givens’s cabin?”
    “Don’t know, sir.”
    But Dance had already left Morris and the wardroom behind, opening the doors of the warrant officers’ cabins himself, only to find Ransome tearing open his own door, looking much the worse for wear, shading his eyes from the glare of the dim lantern and stinking of sour beer.
    “Damn your eyes, man.” Was there no one on whom he might count? How in hell was he supposed to keep order and discipline when the men whose duty it was to keep order were drunk or less than honest? “Is there no one on this damned barge who can keep to his feet?”
    “No, sir,” the bosun stammered, scratching one of his mighty paws across his bristly maw as if he might find his answer there. “’E poisoned me.”
    It was not the first time Dance had ever heard one warrant officer accuse another, but he had never thought to hear Ransome, of all men, admit to being a victim of any sort. “The devil you say. Who?”
    “The devil Givens,” the bosun ground out. “He’s absconded, damn ’im—” Ransome choked himself off from saying anything more, but Dance had heard enough. The devil was surely at play along Tenacious ’s decks.
    “He’s had a head start of four hours.” Dance reckoned a man that canny—and clearly the purser had enough brains to take advantage of a drunken, inept captain, put a sleeping powder in the belligerent Ransome’s ale, and make away with any ready monies Tenacious had possessed—had enough smarts not to wait around Portsmouth, drinking away his ill-gotten gains in a local taproom. But there was something—something in Ransome’s frantic manner, a suspicion that nagged at the back of his brain like a Billingsgate fishwife—that made him uneasy about the bosun and the purser. When he had come aboard, he had thought the two were as cozy as a clutch of thieves. “Why would he do such a thing to you?”
    “To get off, on his own, din’t he?”
    Ransome hadn’t said, “without me,” but that was what Dance heard. Or perhaps he just wanted to hear it. Perhaps he just wanted an excuse to dislike the man more than he already did. “You knew him best, Mr. Ransome. If you had any chance of finding him, where do you reckon he’d be?”
    The question—or perhaps the fact that Dance had been the one to ask it—caught the bosun off guard. “Ball and Anch—”