The Unlikely Gun Wharf Rats by Carla Kelly

Author:Carla Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance Historical Fiction. The year is 1808. Davey Ten, a promising Gunwharf Rat, has finished a year of medical school at the renowned University of Edinburgh. It’s been a tough year for Davey. Students and faculty alike have been informed of Davey’s early workhouse years, his questionable parentage, and his lowly status. These bigots have condemned him by silence, which is killing his spirit. All Davey wants is to return to St. Brendan’s.
 Master Able Six finds a solution. Why not send along another Gunwharf Rat to keep him company? Able’s grandmama, a Scot of wealth and influence, arranges for the two Rats to stay at her Edinburgh house, maintained by Esther Teague, a spinster. 
 Fellow Rat Avon March returns to Edinburgh with Davey. Adept at skulking, Avon will provide needed conversation, but also try to learn about the mysterious disappearance of a Royal Marine sergeant and Royal Navy warranted officer, from the hospital’s famed Royal Infirmary.
 Both Rats have two allies: Miss Teague, who has now found people who need her, and Josiah Coffin, physician and Quaker, who has his own struggles with the bigotry around them. 
 And there is the matter of grave robbing…
Publisher: Epicenter Press Inc.
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-two

Where was this assurance coming from? Esther Teague prided herself on knowing herself pretty well. Maybe if she had been bounteous and beautiful, there wouldn’t have been room in her head for intellectual musings. Ladies like her could not afford to be flibbertigibbets. Her looks were passable, but nothing special. Her chest too flat, her purse also too slim. She was cynical enough to know that a well-padded purse encouraged possible suitors to overlook other deficits, but such was not her fate.

She bided her time through dinner, settling for small talk and comments about Edinburgh, and the hope of spring eventually, all the time deeply aware that these Gunwharf Rats had somehow worked their way into her heart.

Perhaps she had been as lonely for company as Davey Ten. There was Avon, who said little but observed much. Even Mrs. Perry, capable and intimidating when it suited her, but too shy to sit at table with them. She wanted to know more about them, which meant they needed to know more about her.

“Gentlemen, we need to talk.”

She sat there calmly, hands folded in her lap, back straight, the perfect lady because she was, above and beyond her spinster state and her own poverty that teetered upon the charity of relatives. With no choice in the matter, she had opened the doors of Aunt Munro’s house on two uniformed young men. Nowhere had Aunt Munro or anyone ordered her to do anything except provide a safe place to live. The young men had each other to talk to, plus Mrs. Perry as a further sounding board.

Esther knew she could easily continue as the person she already was, a competent, reliable old maid who ran a well-ordered house and would do her duty. Nothing more was required of her. As she sat there, watching them exchange glances when she said they needed to talk, Esther examined her own prejudices about the very word “workhouse,” and came up short in her own estimation.

What she had feared – loutish fellows with no manners, sly and sneaky – had never materialized. Davey and Avon were polite and obviously intelligent. In the single week they had been in her home, she watched the insecurities surface. They were wary around food. They somehow guarded their plates when they ate. If a pan dropped in the kitchen, or a carter’s horses made noises on Wilmer Street, they flinched and started, as if ready for flight. She had no idea how much of that was from frightening and haphazard times in the workhouse before St. Brendan’s, or from their experiences in fleet actions and then the deadly struggle needing only one word – Trafalgar. Perhaps all.

Watching them now, she wanted to tell them, “Trust me.” She also realized the corollary: “Trust them, Esther.”

She barely knew where to start. What had they ever been but abandoned? She wondered – and would likely never know -if they could not trust even this Master Six they spoke of. After all, he had

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