Wizard's Daughter (Sherbrooke Brides 10)

6

"What a lovely thing to say." Rosalind laughed, suddenly uncertain. "But I am nothing compared to Grayson."

"You are different from Grayson, more powerful."

"Oh, well—" She laughed as she reached into her small reticule and scooped out some pennies. He watched her race after the young men. He heard laughter, then the first line of another familiar song, this one faintly Germanic.

When she came skipping back to him, he handed her the rest of her beef pie.

She ate it. "Gerard thanks you for the money."

"They were your pennies."

She shrugged. "Yes, but it is always the gentleman who must pay. It's some sort of ritual, so I suppose you must pay me back."

"You are temporarily short of funds?"

"Actually, those four pennies were the last of my fortune until my allowance next Wednesday. It is difficult, but I must give up a pound of my allowance for the collection plate." She sighed. "It is the right thing, of course, but when one is in London and visits the Pantheon—" She sighed, looking at him beneath her lashes.

He said nothing, his eyes still brooding, resting on the bushes behind her.

"What is wrong, my lord? You look fair to gut-shot. Are you temporarily penniless as well?"

That brought him back. This smiling girl was not a haunt­ing vision of another time with a siren's voice to bring a man to his death—no, at least in this moment, she was a young lady who'd spent all her allowance. "Fair to gut-shot? I don't believe I have ever before heard a young lady say that."

"On the other hand you have been gone from England for many years. What do young ladies in Macau say?"

"The young ladies in Macau are mostly Portuguese, and there isn't an equivalent in Portuguese for 'gut-shot.' But in Patua—that is a local language developed by the Portuguese settlers who came in the sixteenth century—" He paused, leaned down, picked up a skinny branch, and tossed it. Who cared about a language spoken by very few people in a set­tlement on the other side of the world?

r /> "Patua—what a lovely name. Do you speak the lan­guage?"

"One must."

"Say something in Patua to me." "Well, there is a Patua poem a friend of mine turned into a song I've always believed very pretty—"

Nhonha na jinela Co fula mogarim Sua mae tancarera Seu pai canarim.

He shook his head at her. "No, I will not attempt to sing it. You would run away, your hands clapped over your ears."

"Not I. I have great fortitude. Now, I don't have the least idea what you said, but the sounds are nice, like soft music."

"I'll translate it for you:

Young lady in the window

with a jasmine flower

Her mother is a Chinese fisherwoman

Her father is a Portuguese Indian.

"Imagine, you left England when you were only a boy and you went to this place where there are Chinese fisher-women and Portugese Indians—a place so very different from England. Were you treated well there—a foreigner?"

No one had ever asked him that. Slowly, he nodded. "I was fortunate enough to do a good deed for a rich Por­tuguese merchant in Lisbon. He gave me a flattering intro­duction to the governor of Macau, who happened to be his brother-in-law. I was treated well because of him, even though I was English."

"What was your good deed?"

He laughed. "I saved his only daughter from a rather oily young man who was plying her with champagne on a bal­cony under a vastly romantic Lisbon moon. She was foolish, but her father didn't realize it then. She was very angry at me for that rescue, as I recall."