When You Wish Upon a Duke by Charis Michaels

“This open door is an invitation, is it not?” asked mercenary Declan Shaw, standing in the passageway outside the Duke of Northumberland’s cabin.

“ ‘Invitation’ is a stretch,” said the duke, not looking up. He’d been staring at the same page of a Scandinavian atlas for twenty minutes, seeing nothing. “Invitation for what?”

“We’ve not seen you for two days, Your Grace,” said Shaw, stepping inside. “The men want to know what to expect when we make landfall.”

“What to expect . . .” repeated Jason slowly, drawing out the words.

“Not me, mind you,” said Shaw. “My philosophy, as you’ll remember, is ‘Surprise me.’ Especially when it comes to pirates.”

Jason laughed. Declan Shaw was a known planner. Jason tossed the atlas aside.

“Tell the men,” the duke said, “to expect very little ice—the country’s name is misleading—and lichen apparently. Cod at every meal? This is what I’ve been told.”

“Hilarious,” said Shaw. “So tell them you haven’t the slightest notion?”

Jason leaned back and closed his eyes, propping his boots on the desk. “These men were chosen for their ability to improvise. Why the hand-wringing? We are three days out.”

“We are a day and a half out,” corrected Shaw. “And clearly you really don’t know. North, this cannot—”

He was cut off by a sudden knocking. Shaw blocked the door, but the force of the knock and the speed of the rap-rap-rap could mean only one thing. Jason sat up and slid his feet on the floor.

“Excuse me, Your Grace.” Isobel Tinker stood in the corridor behind Declan Shaw.

Jason pushed to his feet. She was dressed in a smart, moss-colored suit, her hair swept neatly into her signature bun. She stood straight and steady, clutching paperwork to her chest.

“I’ll call back,” said Shaw. “If you’ll excuse—”

“You will stay, if you please, sir,” said Isobel, extending her small, gloved hand. “Miss Isobel Tinker,” she said, introducing herself. “I’m—well, I’ve been given the title of ‘cultural attaché’ on this mission. Or so I’m told.”

Shaw had no choice but to take her hand. He affected a confused half bow, shooting Jason a glance that said, Surely you’re joking.

Jason nodded back. Introduce yourself.

“Declan Shaw,” said Shaw. “Leader of His Grace’s, ah—”

“Hired thugs?” provided Isobel.

“Yes,” confirmed Shaw.

“Very good,” said Isobel. “Then of course you should remain. I’ve come to share my knowledge of the port in Stokkseyri. I’ve had previous experience dealing with the locals, so I’ll tell you what I can. This may be helpful as you plan your recovery mission.”

“Plan?” said Shaw, coughing.

Jason shot him a look and said, “Please come in, Miss Tinker. How heartened I am to see you. Are you . . . well?”

Jason plunked a chair beside his desk and Isobel, skirts swishing, settled in. Pushing away detritus with the blunt end of a pencil, she cleared a spot for her notebook on his strewn desk. Jason watched her, unable to conceal a smile. He realized he was staring, looked away, and then turned back. He felt as if someone had opened the door of a very dark cell to the bright light of day.

She’d come. Dressed, alert, potentially healthy. And she appeared ready to work.

He’d not seen her since the kiss and he’d replayed it in his mind a hundred times. She’d left of her own accord, but it felt like she’d been snatched away by demons from her past.

And yet now, here she was.

“I wasn’t certain,” he began, “when we might benefit from your wealth of experience.” He kept his tone light and teasing, but he wanted to snatch up her hand and feel her pulse, test the strength of her grip. She was visibly thinner but no less robust. Her color was good, her eyes bright.

“Nonsense,” she was saying, spreading her paperwork on his desk. “What purpose would I serve as a cultural attaché if not to share my experience?”

Declan Shaw coughed.

Jason shot Shaw a warning look and swiveled to Isobel. “Would you speak more freely if Mr. Shaw were not he—”

“No, I would not,” she said. “Shaw remains. If he goes, so do I.”

“Mr. Shaw, it is,” amended Jason, narrowing his eyes at his friend. He cocked his thumb toward the small stool.

“Now,” began Isobel, fanning out watercolor renderings and unfolding a map. “The port at Stokkseyri is here, and we will, no doubt, approach from the southwest . . .”

She went on from there, talking about currents and the number of harbor warehouses.

Jason tried to listen. He leaned forward in his chair, he nodded, he mimicked the pose of rapt attention. And in fact, he was paying very close attention, but not to her words—not yet. He was taking her in. The pink had returned to her lips. She spoke animatedly, her hands expressive. Tight, smooth wool sheathed her body, curve by curve, in a snug jacket.

“What do you think, Your Grace?” she was asking, pointing to a watercolor painting of a wide river cutting through a barren plateau.

“Ah,” said Jason, scrambling.

“I think you’ve the right idea, miss,” provided Shaw. He gave Jason a look that said, Pathetic.

Jason had spent the last four nights prowling the passageway outside her cabin. He’d interrogated her tight-lipped steward, a man who’d developed a fierce and protective loyalty to her. He’d berated the men in the berth belowdecks for banging the floorboards. He’d sent her notes.

Despite this, there had been no reliable sign that she was well. Or willing to cooperate. Or that she did not hate him.

He’d missed sleep and meals worrying about her. For a time, he’d forgotten about poor Reggie or the cursed dukedom waiting for him in Middlesex. He’d wallowed in something like “regret,” a sentiment in which he rarely indulged, especially not for kissing a pretty girl who absolutely needed to be kissed.

“And that,” she was saying, sketching a wide circle around a blue area on her map, “amounts to all I know about the harbor in Stokkseyri. Which admittedly is not a lot. The comings and goings of ships simply was not a focus when I was there. I spent a great deal more time inland.”

“Very thorough,” praised Jason. He needed to say something.

Isobel stared at him, unimpressed.

“But do you have some plan for what you intend to say when you reach the docks?” she asked. “To the locals? Who is meant to be your contact or resource in Iceland?”

Jason blinked, glancing at Declan Shaw.

Shaw piled on. “Yes, Your Grace. Tell us of your contact or resource in Iceland?”

“Ah,” Jason began, unaccustomed to accounting for his plans, or rather lack thereof. “I have the letter sent to my uncle, asking for ransom money in exchange for the safe return of my cousin.” He riffled through papers on his desk. “I believe it says something about asking for a man in a certain street in Reykjavík called Hans . . . Something or other. It was cruder than most ransom letters I’ve seen, almost comically cloak-and-daggerish, but it made it clear the pirates want money.

“Of course we’ve not sailed to Reykjavík,” Jason conceded. “Honestly, I’d hoped to circumvent any formal meeting with pirates and steal away with the captives without relinquishing a single farthing. The ransom was difficult for my uncle but not impossible. The money sent by the families of the other merchants, however, will bankrupt them. And it’s not as if they could scratch together gold on such short notice. They’ve sent bank notes. Not a pirate’s preferred form of currency, one would assume.”

“Alright,” conceded Isobel slowly. “So you hope to evade the ransom and outwit the pirates. How?”

“Well,” Jason ventured cautiously, “by using whatever lovely intelligence you share with us.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Me? Me? Is that all? You know no one in Iceland and will have no local support?”

Jason drummed two fingers on the desktop, allowing this (apparently) unsettling bit of (also apparently) bad news to sink in.

Shaking her head, Isobel began scribbling a note on a piece of parchment. Jason tried to read it but saw that it was in a different language. He felt a little like an insubordinate pupil who had just been taken to task by a very irritated, very pretty teacher. Unbidden, he felt a pulse of desire.

Isobel continued. “But what will you claim when you sail this not-small brigantine into the very tiny harbor of Stokkseyri and drop anchor? The locals will be curious. You must have some narrative about who you are and why you’ve come. If the pirates have a man in Reykjavík, you can be certain that Stokkseyri is thick with their spies and allies. It’s far closer to the glacier caves.”

“Honestly, I hadn’t planned to offer any excuses at all. When I discern the way the wind blows, so to speak, I’ll either steal away with my cousin and his colleagues in the middle of the night. Or I might simply demand that they are returned. I didn’t set out on this mission with twenty . . .” He looked at Shaw. “How did she describe you?”

“ ‘Hired thugs,’ Your Grace,” provided Shaw.

“Ah yes, I didn’t embark with twenty hired thugs to be marched around by pirates or protocol.”

Isobel shook her head and made more notes. “That will never do. You underestimate Doucette.”

“Doucette?” asked Shaw.

“The pirate band that make Iceland their summer home is led by a Frenchman called Phillipe Doucette,” said Isobel.

“Fine,” said Jason, “we’ll say we’re scientific researchers, come to study the volcanoes or the . . . moss.”

Isobel narrowed her eyes and glanced appraisingly back and forth between Jason and Declan Shaw. “You look nothing like scientists, neither of you—and I’ve seen the others. You look like woodsmen. And before you take a shine to that idea, let me remind you that Iceland is almost entirely devoid of trees.”

“Perhaps we’ll say we lost our way at sea . . .” considered Jason.

“So you mean to portray yourselves as idiots?” Isobel surmised.

Shaw chuckled.

Jason said, “Why don’t we simply suggest that there is some mechanical issue with the brigantine, and that we’ve sought safe harbor to repair it?”

Isobel thought for a moment. “That should work, so long as the captain can name some legitimate issue with the ship, something about which the locals can reliably gossip. You’ll want to order up repairs from the village. Everyone will be curious. Visitors are a rare and precious commodity in Stokkseyri.”

“But should we drop anchor out of view and endeavor to slip into the port unnoticed?” asked Shaw.

“Not if your plan is no plan at all. Even if you knew the location of the captives and meant to steal in and out in a night, complete anonymity would be a challenge. Anything out of the ordinary will be noticed. This part of the island is flat and treeless; there is literally nowhere to hide. You will be seen, that is my opinion. It sounds reasonable to claim damage to the ship, but you must also be able to say where you were going and how you came to limp into Stokkseyri.”

“Fine,” said Jason. “I’ll say I’m writing a book of travel essays, and we were bound for Greenland. How’s that?”

“That should . . . suffice.” She was clearly not impressed.

“If we devise this elaborate fiction and chat up the locals, then I can rely on town gossip to inform what’s become of my cousin.”

Isobel looked at him, tapping her pencil against the back of her hand. “Are you asking me or telling me, Your Grace?”

“Ah . . .” Jason hedged. She was so very stern and irritated and . . . alive. He felt another lick of desire.

She went on. “Am I to believe that you’ve no plan at all, Your Grace? Nothing?”

Jason suppressed a smile. She was so very difficult to impress. He should not value this, but he did. Impressing her became the most important thing on his list of Important Things. After recovering poor Reggie, of course.

He cleared his throat. “The manner in which I’ve always conducted my work, Miss Tinker, tends to be a more gradual, friendly kind of . . . amble. I turn up, I make friends—lucky for me, I’m a likable sort of fellow—and I observe. I scout for weakness and oversight. Unless I’m meant to infiltrate known enemy territory, I prefer a relaxed perusal of the field of play. I take it all in. I seek alliances. You’ll recall this tactic from the first time I encountered you.”

This elicited a satisfying crimson blush from Isobel.

Behind her, Declan Shaw closed his eyes and looked away, biting back a smile.

Jason cleared his throat. “To you, this sounds like ‘not planning.’ To me, the plan is, be nimble. Be efficient. We’ll not be locked into some overstudied, overprovisioned choreography. Not before we’ve even clapped eyes on the place.”

Isobel took up a fresh piece of parchment and made more indecipherable notations. Speaking to the sheet, she said, “Nimble it may be, but a ‘gradual amble’ takes time. By very definition, it’s slow and extended and, honestly, wasteful. Returning to England may be something you dread and wish to postpone, but for me it’s a priority. This is a sentiment I can only guess is shared by your cousin.”

“Fine,” he said, “here’s the plan. Hardly my style—I prefer to make friends rather than enemies—but my plan will be to locate one of the pirates, isolate him—‘abduct him,’ if you will—and interrogate him. Assuming I can get reliable information from this method, we’ll know more within hours.”

“And just where do you plan to locate a pirate?” she asked.

“The pub.”

Isobel harrumphed. “How simple you make it seem.”

“I’ve never been to a port in the world that does not boast at least one establishment where men congregate to drink and gamble. Furthermore, never once has such a place been devoid of pirates. Trust me.”

“Alright,” she said cautiously, “if you manage to turn up a stray pirate, I will pay a call to my old friends. The Vagns.”

“Go on,” Jason said, taking up a piece of paper and pen. Now they were making progress. Old friends were far more useful than captured pirates.

“They are a family I knew during my time in Iceland,” she said unsteadily, “who have a warehouse in the small dockyard at Stokkseyri. Assuming their warm regard for me has endured, this should give us somewhere to begin. I’ll ask them about the news since I’ve gone, especially anything about missing Englishmen. At least one of the brothers should be in the warehouse office. A visit from me will be odd and unexpected, but I will have your story about the brigantine repairs and we’ll invent some addendum about why I happen to be on it.”

“So now you will have an alias,” Jason said.

Isobel looked at him like he suggested they all leap off the deck and fly to Iceland.

“Of course I will have a story. A single woman, traveling alone, cannot turn up with no justification. I can hardly say you bribed me with a building to translate your pirate attack.”

Jason glanced at Shaw, who was slowly shaking his head.

She went on. “As an English lord—in fact, simply because you are a man—you may step off a boat anywhere in the world with no excuses or explanation. You don’t even have to be cordial.”

“I am always cordial.”

“A single woman cannot turn up on foreign shores or even on the doorstep of an old friend without a litany of reasons why her presence is proper and approved and sanctioned and allowed. You know this, Your Grace; you would be a terrible spy if you did not.”

He opened his mouth to reply but she cut him off. “Perhaps what is at issue here is not that a lady requires a backstory, but whether I am a lady.”

“Stop,” he said, sitting up. “Call me a terrible spy if you like, but please do not make assumptions on whether I view you as . . . ladylike. Any oversight about our fabricated biographies can be chalked up to my personal brand of spy craft or to sheer laziness. But it’s nothing more than that, I assure you. Contrary to what you think, I don’t pass my days speculating about whether you—or anyone—is a lady.”

She was silenced by this and shifted in her seat. She glanced at her notes.

“Look, Isobel, of course you must have a backstory,” Jason said, softening. “What would you like?”

“Well,” she began, calm again, “if you pose as a writer, I can be your translator—let us keep close to the truth—and perhaps also I am painting illustrations to match your text? I am never without my watercolors, and I was known to paint even seven years ago. Beyond that, I should be cast as your, oh . . . niece?”

Jason made a choking sound. “Surely you are too old to be my niece.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Or perhaps you are too young to be my uncle. In any event, I must be a relative.”

Behind them, Declan Shaw asked, “May I be allowed to leav—”

“Yes,” barked Jason in the same moment Isobel said, “No.”

“I’ve got it,” said Jason. “I’ll pose as your bodyguard. Shaw here has had a lovely run with this gambit.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

Jason ventured, “Perhaps we should pretend to be married.”

Isobel waved a hand. “That’s overdone, believe me. And it presents all sorts of logistical problems with how we met and why we suit and forced proximity.”

“Sounds worth the effort to me,” mused Jason, thinking of touching her whenever he liked, sharing a room with her.

“It’s not,” she said. “We will be cousins.”

“Cousins,” he repeated, eyeing her. There was nothing cousinly about his regard for Isobel Tinker. He wasn’t certain he could manage the theater of it.

Declan Shaw was rising from his stool. “Honestly, these details are—”

“Stay,” Isobel sang out in the same moment Jason muttered, “Go.”

Shaw slumped on his stool.

“And which local family is this?” Jason asked. “For whom are we now posing as cousins?”

“The patriarch’s name is Sveinn Vagn,” said Isobel. “The boys are Stefen, Gisle, and Sveinn the Younger.”

Jason scribbled his own notes, taking great liberties with the unfamiliar spelling. “What else should I know about them?”

Isobel shrugged. “They’re one of the ruling farm families in Iceland. Their estate is inland, but they warehouse their wool near the port for export to Denmark. They have a long-standing feud with the family that is allied to the pirates.”

Jason looked up. “Oh yes, you mentioned the pirate allies. Another bit of luck if they don’t get on. Perhaps your friends will be motivated to help us.”

“Perhaps, but I would not count on it. The Vagns do not fight with the other family, more like complain about them. And please be warned, they maywell complain about me. I cannot say how they will receive me. Even if they are pleasant—which is by no means a guarantee—they may be disinclined to gush about local gossip. I’ve been away for seven years, and I was here under very strange circumstances. They may look back on my time in Iceland and feel a bit . . . deceived.” She blinked twice and looked down at her notes.

Jason watched her, staring at the bun on the top of her head. Moments ticked by.

Would she offer . . . nothing more? he thought. These people accounted for their only connection in Iceland. Surely there was more to the story. Jason bit his lip in frustration. He tapped the pen against the desktop.

After a moment, he said, “And you knew this family how, Miss Tinker?”

He’d meant to be casual but the words came out hard. Why would she speculate about the reception of a lot of Icelanders? Anyone should be happy to see her—it shouldn’t matter what happened seven years ago or if she was his cousin or translator or Anne Boleyn.

Who were these people and what had they done to her? He’d wanted to know this from the start. Even her uncle, Sir Jeffrey, had been evasive about it.

She was taken in by a respectable family who treated her as a guest, was all the older man said.

“Isobel?” he prompted, but she wouldn’t answer.

She shook her head at the parchment.

The room went very quiet. Shaw shifted on his tiny stool and the wood creaked. A clock ticked on a shelf. Jason dropped his pen and the motion of the ship caused it to roll across the desk. The three of them watched its progress in loaded silence.

Finally, Isobel raised her head. “I knew them as . . . friends,” she said. “Why must you know more than this? You will not even tell us your plan.”

“I thought we established there is no plan,” said Jason. “And it’s useful to know about these people because . . . perhaps I should accompany you to this warehouse. Perhaps several of us should be with you. Perhaps our alias can be more effectively portrayed if I know more. Most of all, I cannot authenticate anything we learn from these brothers if I don’t have a sense of who they are.”

“They are Icelandic farmers,” she insisted.

“Fine, but are they thoughtful? What might cause them to be biased or unreliable? I want to know what we’re sailing into,” he said.

“Now?”

“Sooner rather than later.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she insisted. “It’s not relevant.”

“You’ve just said we must devise alibis and backstories and pretend to repair a fully functional brigantine, just to survive local gossip. Your history with these people may matter a great deal. It is very relevant, I’d say.”

“No,” she disagreed, albeit weakly. She was shaking her head miserably. Jason’s heart began to throb.

“Look,” he said, “I may be casual and appear carefree, but the key to my success has always been information. The more I know about everybody, the more I can either help or hinder whatever happens. It is, at its heart, the essence of being a spy. Knowing.”

Without warning, Isobel shoved from her chair.

Jason and Declan Shaw scrambled to stand.

“I need air,” she said.

“It’s raining,” Jason said.

“I don’t care.”

Without another word, she turned and quit the room.

Jason grimaced at Declan Shaw, took up two coats, and followed.