Trapped in Their Manor, Twin Dukes Keep Me Captive

Chapter 3:The Captain’s Warning

I swear that I shall never set foot on an ocean-going vessel again for as long as I live, unless I am sailing back to Europe. I loathe the sea—that boundless expanse of horrifying blue, where one might sail for a full month without catching so much as a glimpse of land. The troop ship rolled so violently it turned my stomach inside out; the hold was stifling and overcrowded, filled with sailors whose crude speech curdled my blood. None of these miseries ought ever to have crossed my path, yet aboard this ship I had no escape. More than once, fists banged against my cabin door late at night, their knocks reeking of ill intent. I had always considered myself far from delicate. Back in Ludwigsburg, my mother the Viscountess had once chided me: “My dear, even for a simple holiday you ought to bring at least a dozen attendants to cut a proper figure. Two servants is absurdly few—I cannot fathom how they are meant to tend the carriage and press your lace gowns all at once.” If the Viscountess could see me now, unkempt and filthy aboard this troop transport, the poor woman would surely faint dead away.

The captain of the compartment next to mine was a Dutchman named Brand van Smit. He and his personal retinue carried sidearms and swords, tasked with overseeing the press-ganged recruits and stamping out mutiny before it could ignite. The very first words Captain Brand spoke to me the day we boarded were these: “If you must perish, hold on long enough to reach New Jersey first. A Lieutenant Colonel fetches a handsome price; should you die out here on the open water, we shall receive only a tenth of the sum.” He added, “A decade ago, we would have collected the British gold the moment you stepped aboard, with no care whether you lived or breathed.”

Captain Brand bore the classic features of a Dutchman, his face crisscrossed with deep, terrifying scars left by skirmishes against Native Americans. Even his burliest guards bowed to his authority without protest. He cared little for conversing with me, yet assigned a younger Irishman named O’Leary to tend to my needs.

The ocean crossing stretched on endlessly. For the first several days, violent seasickness kept me bedridden. Then a tempest descended upon us; roaring waves tore the convoy asunder. Sails reinforced with ropes thicker than my arms snapped as easily as autumn leaves. The storm tormented our fleet for two full days and nights. In the wake of that hellish gale, I fell gravely ill, burning with unrelenting fever that blurred my consciousness to nothingness. O’Leary heaped layer upon layer of blankets over me, heavy enough to suffocate, yet I still shivered uncontrollably, rambling in delirium. Half-conscious, I thought I heard Brand roar in furious frustration: “Still breathing? Why will she not just die? Fetch a musket and put a bullet in her! Stop wasting my medicinal herbs on this lost cause!”

This is the end, I thought. I escaped the lecherous old Count’s shotgun only to perish in this godforsaken place. If I had foreseen this fate, I would have eloped with Helena after all. Farewell, my Helena! My fiery little Minchen! My red rose Lena! My exquisite Zinovia, as lovely as a tulip!

Yet divine grace from the house of Edmond must have watched over me. After three days trapped in fevered slumber, I opened my eyes to the dim cabin. The first sight that met me was Captain Brand, standing with his back turned, a candle clutched in one hand, occupied with some secret task. Brand did not notice I had woken. Though we were alone in the cabin, he kept darting furtive glances toward the door as if a thief, then bent back down to mutter and tinker with something. Sensing he was about to turn around, I squeezed my eyes shut and feigned unconsciousness. From the sound of his movements, he stowed several unknown objects in three separate cracks around the room.

Days passed before I regained enough strength to investigate what he had hidden: hard black shells jammed forcefully into the wall fissures, wedged fast and immovable. For all my education and experience, I could not identify what creature they belonged to. Sailors were known to employ obscure rituals to beg the Lord’s protection when beset by storms or sickness at sea. Staring at those dark shells, however, I suspected the captain’s prayers were less for safe passage and more for my swift departure into the Lord’s embrace.

Brand never mentioned his strange deeds. He wore his usual surly scowl whenever he faced me, yet he stopped sneering “Lieutenant Colonel” in a mocking tone and instead asked bluntly, “You must owe a mountain of debt to have been sold off like this, am I right?”

I recounted my absurd, unbelievable ordeal from start to finish, stressing firmly, “My estate yields twenty thousand thalers each year!”

“Tch, spare me the tales,” the captain huffed. “My own forebears were nobility once—I know exactly how young noble ladies such as yourself live. You could inherit two hundred thousand thalers a year and still spend every coin until you owe twice that sum.”

His words struck painfully close to the truth. Come to think of it, I did carry outstanding tabs with a dozen merchants, adding up to roughly twenty thousand thalers in total. Maintaining the air of a polished noblewoman came at a terrible cost. My elegant Berlin landau and my small open-top snail-shaped phaeton, along with two coachmen and three horses to man them, devoured nearly half my manor’s annual revenue. That did not even account for endless necessary luxuries: linen shifts, tailored silk gowns, whalebone stays, embroidered collars, polished pearl buttons, lace trim, fine kid leather slippers, pocket watches, silk parasols, and countless other trivial yet indispensable fineries—all mandatory for any lady of station. That was surely one reason the bandits never bothered to demand ransom from me; they knew I could never produce such a vast sum at short notice.

What stunned me far more was learning the captain descended from aristocracy himself. “I have pored over noble lineages and never seen ‘van Smit’ listed among titled families,” I said. The unspoken question burning on my tongue was this: Could a person of noble blood abandon their station to serve and earn a commission in a foreign army? Such a thing was unthinkable within the Duchy of Württemberg. Every noble’s sole purpose was to curry the Duke’s favour and secure standing within Ludwigsburg’s aristocratic circle. All nobles schemed relentlessly in this invisible arena, pouring forth gold, energy, and endless hours of their lives. Those who succeeded revelled in power and pleasure within Ludwigsburg Palace, showered with the sovereign’s bounty. Those who failed retreated in disgrace to the provinces, branded bumpkins, banished forever from Ludwigsburg’s high society. Securing a military commission directly through one’s noble lineage to claim its accompanying profits was a common ambition among peers, yet abandoning one’s noble status to enlist abroad was unheard of. Rumour claimed such exiles existed only in distant Paris, and whenever the court spoke of them, they wrote the poor souls off as utterly ruined. To put it plainly: A noble lady might simultaneously hold an officer’s rank, yet no common-born officer could ever ascend to nobility.

“My forefather was a distinguished lord, but my father was a second son, barred from bearing the full family title,” the captain said, his tone suddenly grave. “Miss, you are young, and seeing you reminds me of my youngest boy, who died of malaria. Hear the warning of an old man who left Amsterdam at fourteen and has witnessed every manner of human folly. I have met countless young nobles convinced their birthright’s glory will shine eternal. They squander gold recklessly, parading fifteen thoroughbreds and gilded carriages, competing to buy priceless diamonds to woo noble ladies. Everyone adores wealth, and they believe it flows endlessly from manors and merchant coffers. They indulge in wild debauchery each day as if the Last Judgement will dawn tomorrow, until their debts pile into an unshakable mountain and crush them. At that crossroads, they have two choices: swallow their pride and wed the daughter of a miller or a Jewish merchant for a fat dowry to clear their debts, or crumble entirely, surrender all their ancestral lands to moneylenders, flee their homeland, and die a miserable death deep in some foreign forest.”

“I will speak plainly. When I first laid eyes on you, I assumed you were yet another noble brought low by unpaid debts. It seems you have not fallen quite so far—but from the look on your face, you stand at the very start of that same destructive path. In recent years I have watched no fewer than one count and two viscounts lose all standing the moment their promissory notes fell due, forced into exile only to perish far away in the East Indies. You may dismiss my words as alarmist, yet the fact you survived your fever to stand here and speak with me may well be divine providence. Perhaps the Lord sent me to deliver this counsel to you.”

He spoke with crushing solemnity, less as a man offering friendly advice and more as one tasked by God to voice buried grief he could share with no other soul.

O’Leary later confirmed my suspicions. “The captain’s youngest son fled after amassing thirty thousand francs in debt. Word reached us he succumbed to malaria in the East Indies at only twenty-two years of age.”

O’Leary also shared a chilling revelation that sent a shiver down my spine. “When we departed New Jersey, word spread that tensions between the colonies and London hang by a thread. Rumour holds South Carolina and Georgia are plotting open rebellion—the very lands we are bound for.”

“They say another Franquemont girl perished there once, too.”