Preface: In Which the Plan is Formulated and an Accomplice is Enlisted
Gillian Mallehy sat at the dining room table, examining the latest letter from her father. She fingered the weather-stained parchment, reading over the lines again:
Arrived at Island’s End two nights ago, and have had heavy rain since. Even summer here is cold and wet. The Progress moves along slowly but well. Expect your brothers home as soon as Winter Festival. Will write more when time permits.
There was no closing save for his scribbled signature. Gil sighed, simultaneously wishing the missive were longer and knowing that her father was a man of few words, unlikely to waste time, ink, or parchment on effusions of familial affection. He and two of Gillian’s brothers, all officers in the army, had been chosen to accompany the new king as he made his ceremonial Progress around the Island, surveying his territory and renewing the oaths of fealty sworn to him by the noblemen who served him.
At least she could count on Roger for a longer letter than this. Her eldest brother, ten years her senior at the age of twenty-nine, understood her desire for descriptions of the far-off places he’d visited with the army. She might even expect some lines from Kylan, two years Roger’s junior, who had recently been selected from the regular infantry for a place in the king’s guard. She had missed them both in the year and a half that the Progress had spent touring the land, but she was heartened by her father’s assurance that they would be home before two years were up.
Gil pushed the letter aside, laying it on a book Nathaniel had left open on the table. Her youngest brothers, Nathaniel and his twin Jacob, were still five years older than she, making her not only the baby of the family but also the only girl, a situation which she had alternately lamented and appreciated.
One thing she knew for sure: it was difficult to grow up in a house with five others, only to have all but one of them leave her behind to attend to their duties at practically the same time. Only Nathaniel, the scholar of the bunch, was left at home poring over his books, working in his bedroom-turned-laboratory. Jacob’s job as a captain in the King’s Navy hadn’t called him to join the Progress, but it kept him away from home nonetheless. She’d heard him remark that some days he felt his ship was more home to him than the place where he grew up, their sturdy two-story house built on the edge of the second-largest military encampment on the Island, just outside the harbor town of Point.
Gillian’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. She wasn’t expecting anyone, but she got up from her seat and made her way from the kitchen through the receiving room to the front door. By the time she opened it, the knocking had grown frantic.
She opened the door and her friend Leah nearly fell into her. “I cannot believe him!” she said, pushing strands of her long blonde hair out of her face.
“Do you want to come in?” Gil asked.
Leah glared at her and stalked into the receiving room, and Gillian followed. Leah took a seat on one of the couches and immediately started squirming, crossing one long leg over the other and jiggling her booted foot back and forth so that it disturbed the hem of her dress. It started Gil worrying--usually, she was the one doing the fidgeting. In fact, it was a trait of hers that Leah complained about.
She took a seat beside Leah and felt the couch wiggle a little. Really not good. “Start from the beginning, Lee,” she said. “Which ‘him’?”
“The viscount,” she spat, lunging up from her seat and beginning to pace in front of Gil. “He comes into the store like he owns the place”--Gil thought it would be very bad to remind her that he did, so she stayed quiet--“and starts talking with me about our finances. About how he’s so sorry for our loss, like I haven’t heard that a million times, and is there anything he could do to help us?” She shuddered. “And then, damn him, he has the nerve to insinuate that there are ways to get around the licensing issues, and that he would be more than happy to sponsor Sam’s claim to Father’s business if given the proper inducements.”
Gil wanted to shudder, too. The Viscount Wainsley, who controlled the lands surrounding Point, was a shrewd and calculating nobleman bent on reclaiming his family’s good name by restoring them to their former fortune, and more than once, he had sought to do this by taking over the largest trading company in Point, owned and run by Leah’s father. After her father’s untimely death, the viscount had become even more persistent. Leah didn’t need to spell it out for Gillian to understand the direction she was going in, but still she said, “What sorts of inducements?”
“He wants me to marry him, Gil!” she said, her tone incredulous.
Gillian had expected this, but was still surprised by the viscount’s audacity. “He told you that?”
“Well, not in so many words,” Leah said, sitting down once again on the couch beside Gil. “But you know how people like him are! They never say anything you could possibly hold them to. So of course I told him to bugger off--not in so many words,” Leah assured Gil, “but he got the idea.” She sighed and leaned back against the couch, closing her eyes. When she spoke again, it was in a voice that seemed somehow small. “I just don’t know what to do,” she said. “Everyone who might sponsor Sam in renewing the business license knows that the viscount doesn’t want anyone to help him…and he has enough power over them that they can’t speak out against him. If I can’t find anyone to renew the license, Wainsley gets the company anyway. If only--”
She cut herself off with a shake of the head, but Gillian could have completed the sentence for her: If only Stephen were here. It was a phrase her friend had uttered a lot in the past months, to Gil’s ears alone. She was the only person in Point to know that Leah Taylor was engaged to sea captain and trader Stephen Kerrick--the same Captain Kerrick who had set off on a trading voyage to the Spice Isles just before Leah’s father’s death, and who would be gone for the next three months at the least. Leah and Stephen had kept their engagement a secret, planning to announce it when he returned from this voyage, rich from the exotic goods he would have traded and worthy of the daughter of the richest trader in Point.
But the plan had gone horribly awry two months ago with Leah’s father’s death. It had been sudden and unanticipated, giving Mr. Taylor no time to find someone to sponsor Leah’s younger brother, Samuel, in running the business. Leah had long lamented that she could not act as Sam’s sponsor, or simply run the business herself--she had been raised to know how--but it was not permissible for women to own business ventures that required licensing by the crown, and Sam had a year to go before reaching his maturity. Leah, Sam, and their mother had been left to search for someone to sponsor Sam and allow them to keep the business in the Taylor family.
Leah needed to find a sponsor for Sam within the next three weeks, or else the business would revert to the crown--to be run by the local representative, in the form of the Viscount Wainsley whom Leah utterly despised. Gil hadn’t had many opportunities to interact with him, but she thought him a rather slimy creature, and her friend’s opinion of him solidified her own.
If only Stephen were here, she found herself thinking, he could fix both of Leah’s problems with Wainsley. He could stand up to the viscount and sponsor Sam, and if he made his engagement to Leah public, she wouldn’t have to suffer Wainsley’s unwanted advances.
Gillian sighed. As much as she hated it on some days, it was a truth of her world that any woman wanting to get something done had better have a man to speak for her. Mr. Taylor was dead, and Stephen was halfway across the world by now. There was no man who could stand up for Leah.
Unless… An idea shifted, nebulous, in Gil’s mind. Leah raised an eyebrow at her, but Gil gestured her to be quiet. After a moment, she smiled, turned to Leah, and said in a triumphant voice, “I have a plan.”
***
Gillian burst into the blacksmith’s shop and slammed the door behind her emphatically, then leaned her back against it to face Darren, who had just looked up from the forge. His first thought was something along the lines of Not again, his second closer to Hopefully this time it’s legal. He made to speak, but Gil held a hand out to silence him before he could so much as open his mouth. “Don’t say anything, just hear me out,” she said. “I’ve got a crazy plan and I need your help, and I don’t care if you want to give it to me or not, you will give it to me, because if you don’t help me with this I’m still going to do it anyway, only it’ll be more dangerous without your assistance. And I know I’m crazy but I don’t care, I’m doing this anyway. So help me or don’t help me, but if it’s my life on the line because you didn’t, and if I die or get injured or thrown in jail or exiled or something, you know you’re going to be sorry.”
Darren looked at her in silence for a moment, taking in her disheveled state--she had obviously come here at a run. Strands of her dark red hair were coming loose from their bun to frame her face, and the light of the forge at which he worked only added spark to her already fiery eyes. She would never understand that it wasn’t necessary for her to make all of these disclaimers before asking him to do something for her, although they were amusing; he would always be there for her, just as he had always been there through all of her schemes and plans, through all of her practical joke attempts to repay her older brothers, through those years when she and Leah had been friends, then not been friends, then been friends again. She had been a constant in his life from the time she was two years old and he was four, and she’d stumbled into his father’s shop trying to hide from one of her brothers. They were around the same age, shared some of the same interests, although she would always tease him for his utter disdain for the kind of “adventures” she was always getting involved in. This wasn’t at all the case, of course. He loved the adventures that they shared together, as long as he was sure that no one was going to get hurt.
Well. As long as she wasn’t going to get hurt, though if he ever told her that, he’d probably be the one in pain. She would hate him forever if she knew how much he worried for her safety.
She didn’t need to try to convince him that her plan was a good one. That was probably a bad thing, because it meant that she talked him into things that were obviously not good ideas, but he didn’t care. He’d follow her anywhere. And someday he hoped that she would be old enough, or smart enough, or just at the right place in her life that she would realize that. And at this point he would not have to tell her, but she, as had happened in so many of their past endeavors, would appear breathless at the door of his house or his workshop or find him on the streets and tell him.
He smiled slowly, and she started to smile back. “So you’ll help me?” she asked.
Darren shook his head, still grinning. “Not so easy, Gil. First you have to tell me what it is you need help with. Especially with at disclaimer like that--I’m curious to know what you’re planning that could be so potentially harmful to your life, but in which I would be able to assist you. Sit down?” He pointed over to his tool bench.
Gil took the invitation and walked away from the door and into the workshop proper. She spread out her skirts of her day dress and settled down onto the bench. Darren set aside the sword metal he had been tempering and sat down on the bench beside Gil. “So, what is it this time?” he asked.
She told him.
When she had finished, he sat there still silent, still staring at her, and very, very worried but at the same time so bemused that it was hard for him not to smile.
“So let me get this straight,” he said. “You,” he pointed a finger at her, “want me,” he poked a finger into his own chest, “to help you learn how to act like a man. You want me to give you lessons in being a man, and then you want me to lend you a few sets of clothes and keep the secret that this mysterious man who’s just become engaged to your best friend is, in fact, you--dressed as a man, of course.”
Gil nodded. “Yeah. That pretty much explains it.” She paused for a second, then added, “And the sooner the better. We’d like to announce our engagement next week.”
Darren shook his head. He had really never heard anything more ridiculous from her. He wanted to disagree with her, but at the same time he knew that he would not be able to convince her to change her mind, and even if he said that he would not help her, she would go through with her plan anyway. And quite likely, going through with it without his help would be the death of her. Possibly going through it with his help would still be the death of her. Cross-dressing wasn’t the sort of thing that would be taken lightly. There was no criminal punishment for simply dressing as the member of the opposite sex, as far as Darren knew, but Gil’s goals went far beyond simple cross-dressing to the assumption of male identity.
And yet when you got down to it, Gil was the closest friend he had. And he’d known before she’d ever asked what his answer would be.
“Okay,” Darren said. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
Go to Chapter 1
Arrived at Island’s End two nights ago, and have had heavy rain since. Even summer here is cold and wet. The Progress moves along slowly but well. Expect your brothers home as soon as Winter Festival. Will write more when time permits.
There was no closing save for his scribbled signature. Gil sighed, simultaneously wishing the missive were longer and knowing that her father was a man of few words, unlikely to waste time, ink, or parchment on effusions of familial affection. He and two of Gillian’s brothers, all officers in the army, had been chosen to accompany the new king as he made his ceremonial Progress around the Island, surveying his territory and renewing the oaths of fealty sworn to him by the noblemen who served him.
At least she could count on Roger for a longer letter than this. Her eldest brother, ten years her senior at the age of twenty-nine, understood her desire for descriptions of the far-off places he’d visited with the army. She might even expect some lines from Kylan, two years Roger’s junior, who had recently been selected from the regular infantry for a place in the king’s guard. She had missed them both in the year and a half that the Progress had spent touring the land, but she was heartened by her father’s assurance that they would be home before two years were up.
Gil pushed the letter aside, laying it on a book Nathaniel had left open on the table. Her youngest brothers, Nathaniel and his twin Jacob, were still five years older than she, making her not only the baby of the family but also the only girl, a situation which she had alternately lamented and appreciated.
One thing she knew for sure: it was difficult to grow up in a house with five others, only to have all but one of them leave her behind to attend to their duties at practically the same time. Only Nathaniel, the scholar of the bunch, was left at home poring over his books, working in his bedroom-turned-laboratory. Jacob’s job as a captain in the King’s Navy hadn’t called him to join the Progress, but it kept him away from home nonetheless. She’d heard him remark that some days he felt his ship was more home to him than the place where he grew up, their sturdy two-story house built on the edge of the second-largest military encampment on the Island, just outside the harbor town of Point.
Gillian’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. She wasn’t expecting anyone, but she got up from her seat and made her way from the kitchen through the receiving room to the front door. By the time she opened it, the knocking had grown frantic.
She opened the door and her friend Leah nearly fell into her. “I cannot believe him!” she said, pushing strands of her long blonde hair out of her face.
“Do you want to come in?” Gil asked.
Leah glared at her and stalked into the receiving room, and Gillian followed. Leah took a seat on one of the couches and immediately started squirming, crossing one long leg over the other and jiggling her booted foot back and forth so that it disturbed the hem of her dress. It started Gil worrying--usually, she was the one doing the fidgeting. In fact, it was a trait of hers that Leah complained about.
She took a seat beside Leah and felt the couch wiggle a little. Really not good. “Start from the beginning, Lee,” she said. “Which ‘him’?”
“The viscount,” she spat, lunging up from her seat and beginning to pace in front of Gil. “He comes into the store like he owns the place”--Gil thought it would be very bad to remind her that he did, so she stayed quiet--“and starts talking with me about our finances. About how he’s so sorry for our loss, like I haven’t heard that a million times, and is there anything he could do to help us?” She shuddered. “And then, damn him, he has the nerve to insinuate that there are ways to get around the licensing issues, and that he would be more than happy to sponsor Sam’s claim to Father’s business if given the proper inducements.”
Gil wanted to shudder, too. The Viscount Wainsley, who controlled the lands surrounding Point, was a shrewd and calculating nobleman bent on reclaiming his family’s good name by restoring them to their former fortune, and more than once, he had sought to do this by taking over the largest trading company in Point, owned and run by Leah’s father. After her father’s untimely death, the viscount had become even more persistent. Leah didn’t need to spell it out for Gillian to understand the direction she was going in, but still she said, “What sorts of inducements?”
“He wants me to marry him, Gil!” she said, her tone incredulous.
Gillian had expected this, but was still surprised by the viscount’s audacity. “He told you that?”
“Well, not in so many words,” Leah said, sitting down once again on the couch beside Gil. “But you know how people like him are! They never say anything you could possibly hold them to. So of course I told him to bugger off--not in so many words,” Leah assured Gil, “but he got the idea.” She sighed and leaned back against the couch, closing her eyes. When she spoke again, it was in a voice that seemed somehow small. “I just don’t know what to do,” she said. “Everyone who might sponsor Sam in renewing the business license knows that the viscount doesn’t want anyone to help him…and he has enough power over them that they can’t speak out against him. If I can’t find anyone to renew the license, Wainsley gets the company anyway. If only--”
She cut herself off with a shake of the head, but Gillian could have completed the sentence for her: If only Stephen were here. It was a phrase her friend had uttered a lot in the past months, to Gil’s ears alone. She was the only person in Point to know that Leah Taylor was engaged to sea captain and trader Stephen Kerrick--the same Captain Kerrick who had set off on a trading voyage to the Spice Isles just before Leah’s father’s death, and who would be gone for the next three months at the least. Leah and Stephen had kept their engagement a secret, planning to announce it when he returned from this voyage, rich from the exotic goods he would have traded and worthy of the daughter of the richest trader in Point.
But the plan had gone horribly awry two months ago with Leah’s father’s death. It had been sudden and unanticipated, giving Mr. Taylor no time to find someone to sponsor Leah’s younger brother, Samuel, in running the business. Leah had long lamented that she could not act as Sam’s sponsor, or simply run the business herself--she had been raised to know how--but it was not permissible for women to own business ventures that required licensing by the crown, and Sam had a year to go before reaching his maturity. Leah, Sam, and their mother had been left to search for someone to sponsor Sam and allow them to keep the business in the Taylor family.
Leah needed to find a sponsor for Sam within the next three weeks, or else the business would revert to the crown--to be run by the local representative, in the form of the Viscount Wainsley whom Leah utterly despised. Gil hadn’t had many opportunities to interact with him, but she thought him a rather slimy creature, and her friend’s opinion of him solidified her own.
If only Stephen were here, she found herself thinking, he could fix both of Leah’s problems with Wainsley. He could stand up to the viscount and sponsor Sam, and if he made his engagement to Leah public, she wouldn’t have to suffer Wainsley’s unwanted advances.
Gillian sighed. As much as she hated it on some days, it was a truth of her world that any woman wanting to get something done had better have a man to speak for her. Mr. Taylor was dead, and Stephen was halfway across the world by now. There was no man who could stand up for Leah.
Unless… An idea shifted, nebulous, in Gil’s mind. Leah raised an eyebrow at her, but Gil gestured her to be quiet. After a moment, she smiled, turned to Leah, and said in a triumphant voice, “I have a plan.”
***
Gillian burst into the blacksmith’s shop and slammed the door behind her emphatically, then leaned her back against it to face Darren, who had just looked up from the forge. His first thought was something along the lines of Not again, his second closer to Hopefully this time it’s legal. He made to speak, but Gil held a hand out to silence him before he could so much as open his mouth. “Don’t say anything, just hear me out,” she said. “I’ve got a crazy plan and I need your help, and I don’t care if you want to give it to me or not, you will give it to me, because if you don’t help me with this I’m still going to do it anyway, only it’ll be more dangerous without your assistance. And I know I’m crazy but I don’t care, I’m doing this anyway. So help me or don’t help me, but if it’s my life on the line because you didn’t, and if I die or get injured or thrown in jail or exiled or something, you know you’re going to be sorry.”
Darren looked at her in silence for a moment, taking in her disheveled state--she had obviously come here at a run. Strands of her dark red hair were coming loose from their bun to frame her face, and the light of the forge at which he worked only added spark to her already fiery eyes. She would never understand that it wasn’t necessary for her to make all of these disclaimers before asking him to do something for her, although they were amusing; he would always be there for her, just as he had always been there through all of her schemes and plans, through all of her practical joke attempts to repay her older brothers, through those years when she and Leah had been friends, then not been friends, then been friends again. She had been a constant in his life from the time she was two years old and he was four, and she’d stumbled into his father’s shop trying to hide from one of her brothers. They were around the same age, shared some of the same interests, although she would always tease him for his utter disdain for the kind of “adventures” she was always getting involved in. This wasn’t at all the case, of course. He loved the adventures that they shared together, as long as he was sure that no one was going to get hurt.
Well. As long as she wasn’t going to get hurt, though if he ever told her that, he’d probably be the one in pain. She would hate him forever if she knew how much he worried for her safety.
She didn’t need to try to convince him that her plan was a good one. That was probably a bad thing, because it meant that she talked him into things that were obviously not good ideas, but he didn’t care. He’d follow her anywhere. And someday he hoped that she would be old enough, or smart enough, or just at the right place in her life that she would realize that. And at this point he would not have to tell her, but she, as had happened in so many of their past endeavors, would appear breathless at the door of his house or his workshop or find him on the streets and tell him.
He smiled slowly, and she started to smile back. “So you’ll help me?” she asked.
Darren shook his head, still grinning. “Not so easy, Gil. First you have to tell me what it is you need help with. Especially with at disclaimer like that--I’m curious to know what you’re planning that could be so potentially harmful to your life, but in which I would be able to assist you. Sit down?” He pointed over to his tool bench.
Gil took the invitation and walked away from the door and into the workshop proper. She spread out her skirts of her day dress and settled down onto the bench. Darren set aside the sword metal he had been tempering and sat down on the bench beside Gil. “So, what is it this time?” he asked.
She told him.
When she had finished, he sat there still silent, still staring at her, and very, very worried but at the same time so bemused that it was hard for him not to smile.
“So let me get this straight,” he said. “You,” he pointed a finger at her, “want me,” he poked a finger into his own chest, “to help you learn how to act like a man. You want me to give you lessons in being a man, and then you want me to lend you a few sets of clothes and keep the secret that this mysterious man who’s just become engaged to your best friend is, in fact, you--dressed as a man, of course.”
Gil nodded. “Yeah. That pretty much explains it.” She paused for a second, then added, “And the sooner the better. We’d like to announce our engagement next week.”
Darren shook his head. He had really never heard anything more ridiculous from her. He wanted to disagree with her, but at the same time he knew that he would not be able to convince her to change her mind, and even if he said that he would not help her, she would go through with her plan anyway. And quite likely, going through with it without his help would be the death of her. Possibly going through it with his help would still be the death of her. Cross-dressing wasn’t the sort of thing that would be taken lightly. There was no criminal punishment for simply dressing as the member of the opposite sex, as far as Darren knew, but Gil’s goals went far beyond simple cross-dressing to the assumption of male identity.
And yet when you got down to it, Gil was the closest friend he had. And he’d known before she’d ever asked what his answer would be.
“Okay,” Darren said. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
Go to Chapter 1