The Riverboat Mystery (Jenny Starling #3)(7)

Jenny looked at the gleaming white vessel and felt herself smile. She couldn’t have stopped herself from falling in love with the craft even if she’d tried to. It so effortlessly brought back memories of the elegance and élan of days long since perished. She could just imagine Greta Garbo lounging on one of the main salon’s white leather couches with a gold cigarette holder about a foot long in one hand, and swirling a fluted glass of champagne in the other. Clark Gable wouldn’t have given a damn whilst playing poker in the games room, and No?l Coward wouldn’t have looked a whit out of place holding court by the mock fireplace in the salon. It wasn’t very often she got an assignment as glamorous and as different as this one.

She took a long deep breath of pleased anticipation. She could hardly wait for the morning to come. The lure of a short river cruise was beginning to make her feel as excited as a little girl on Christmas Eve.

With her bed-finding mission now satisfactorily accomplished, Jenny made her way tranquilly back to the garden.

Wainscott House, she saw at once, had been built around a large quad. In the middle was a large square lawn, with a sundial in the exact centre, which looked both old and original, and she wondered if it had truly come with the house. This lawn was in turn surrounded by colourful and tightly packed herbaceous borders. The house occupied two sides of the square, and on the opposite sides were two small converted cottages that had once been stables, and a variety of outbuildings.

From one of the large cottage doors, wide enough to have admitted the horses that had once lodged there, a man stepped out and into the sunshine. He wasn’t a tall man, and he wasn’t a young man, and from the way he moved down the path in a curiously circular, rolling gait, Jenny had no difficulty at all in labelling him as an old sea dog. Only sailors walked like that in her experience. Which was considerable. Either that or he was someone who had had way too much grog. This, then, she surmised, could only be the captain.

Jenny left her seat in the shade in order to waylay him. ‘Hello. You must be Captain Lester?’ she asked pleasantly.

The man jerked to a halt, obviously taken aback by the sound of a woman’s voice. Jenny wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t thought that the housekeeper, Mrs Jessop, was the kind of woman to take to crusty old sea-salts, and from what she knew (or rather guessed) of a sailor’s lonely life, they probably preferred to keep themselves to themselves. Not that she supposed that piloting a riverboat was the same thing as taking to the oceans.

Still, one sailor, or so she’d discovered in her early twenties, was very much like another.

‘Aye, that’s right. Tobias Lester, ma’am, at your service.’ Tobias Lester was, she supposed, in his mid-fifties. His hair had once been golden but had now settled into that silver-blond salt-and-pepper shade that could be so appealing on a man. His eyes were the same blue-green of the sea, and looked attractive in a rather round, pleasantly creased face. His skin had the look and consistency of leather — no doubt as the result of years of working outdoors.

‘I’m your cook for the weekend,’ Jenny introduced herself, instantly liking the older man’s warm smile of greeting.

Tobias Lester’s smile widened. ‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am. A sailor’s always glad of a first-rate cook. I joined the merchant navy when I was just eighteen, and reckon I’ve sailed every sea that’s out there. But I can’t say that any of the ships I was on had what you might call a first-class cook — not a priority, see? But with pleasure cruises, well, that’s different, isn’t it? Got to keep people happy. Will this be your first cruise?’

They began to walk in unspoken mutual consent down the path and out towards the river. Jenny took the captain’s assumption that she was, in fact, a ‘first-rate cook’ for granted. But it pleased her nonetheless. What a nice man Captain Lester was.

Jenny nodded. ‘Yes, it is my first time on the water.’ And then, thinking rather uneasily of Bora Bora and typhoons, she added a shade uncertainly, ‘I hope the going won’t be too rough.’

Captain Lester laughed heartily. ‘Good grief, no! The river’s as flat as a millpond. It’d have to be, I reckon — the Swan’s a flat-bottomed boat, you see. She can’t take much rocking about.’

Jenny nodded but didn’t really see at all. What she knew about boats could be written on the back of a pea. And a dried, very shrivelled pea at that.

‘She hasn’t got a V-shaped hull,’ the captain continued, showing remarkable patience at a landlubber’s obvious ignorance. ‘If we hit a wave, she has no real way of riding it out comfortably. That’s why Lucas called her the Stillwater Swan, see? There’s a vast difference between the way river craft are made and ships that have to put out to sea.’

Jenny smiled, much relieved. ‘So it’s a guaranteed smooth ride then, is it?’

The captain laughed his hearty laugh again, his eyes crinkling attractively at the corners. ‘That I can promise you, ma’am. Even if it rains. Which—’ he looked up judiciously into a bright blue sky ‘—it won’t.’

And sailors knew these sorts of things. Or so she’d been led to believe. And, in truth, she was quite prepared to take his word for it.

The captain had an easy-going manner that would enable him, she imagined, to get on well with anyone who crossed his path. But he also had that unmistakable air of competence about him that made you feel you could trust him as well as like him. It came as no surprise then that the socially active Lucas Finch had chosen this experienced and presumably retired seaman for his captain. He looked the part, he wouldn’t embarrass him or his guests with too much social ineptitude, and he so obviously knew what he was doing.