Текст книги "I Married the Duke "
Автор книги: Katharine Ashe
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The ship that would take her to a prince.
He would not remain at the chateau long. The letter of hire said the royal family would depart for their winter palace on the first of September. If she arrived after that, she must find her own way.
She always sent all her spare funds to Eleanor; she had no money to spend on more travel. And she simply must make an excellent impression. She would prepare the princess for her London season. Then perhaps—if she were very lucky and dreams came true—the prince would come to admire her. It would not be the first time one of her employers had turned his attention toward her, liking the pretty governess a bit too much. Not the first by far.
This time, however, she would welcome it.
She twisted her way through the crowded tavern in the captain’s wake. His back was broad, his stride confident, and men made way for him.
“I beg you to reconsider, Captain,” she called to him as he passed through the door to the street. Her fists balled, squeezing away panic. “I must reach the chateau before the first of September or I will lose my new position.”
He halted. “Why didn’t you book passage on a passenger ferry?”
“I did. I missed my ship.” She chewed the inside of her lip, the only bad habit from childhood that she had not been able to quell. The public coach from London had rattled her bones into a jumbled heap. But anticipating the sea voyage proved so much worse. For two decades her nightmares had been filled with swirling waters, jagged lightning, and walls of flame. She’d been tucked in a corner of the posting inn’s taproom, struggling to control her trembling, when the call for her ship’s departure sounded. She had forced herself to her feet and out the door by sheer desperation to know once and for all who she really was.
Then, in the inn yard, she encountered the children.
“I had a matter of some importance to see to,” she evaded.
Lamplight cast unsteady shadows across the captain’s face. Probably it had been a very handsome face before the scar disfigured it, with a strong jaw shadowed now with whiskers and a single deep green eye lined with thick lashes. His dark hair caressed his collar and tumbled over the strip of cloth tied about his head.
“A matter of more importance than your new position at a chateau?”
He did not believe her.
“If you must know,” she said carefully, “I have three children I must take to their father this evening before I travel to France.”
He looked blankly at her. “Children.”
“Yes.” She turned and gestured to the curb beneath the eave of the tavern. Three little bodies huddled against the wall, their eyes fixed anxiously upon him. “Their father awaits them across the city. While I was attempting to contact him, my ship departed without me,” taking with it her traveling trunk, another trouble she could not think about until she solved her first problem. But the daily cruelties of the foundling home had taught her resourcefulness, and working for spoiled debutantes had taught her endurance. She would succeed.
“I am relieved—” Captain Andrew’s fingers crushed his hat brim, the sinews of his large hand pronounced. “I am relieved to learn that you take pride in your progeny even as you abandon them.”
“You have mistaken it, Captain,” she said above the clatter of a passing cart, making herself speak as calmly as though she were sitting in an elegant home in Grosvenor Square recommending white muslin over blush silk. “They are not my children. I encountered them only in the posting inn yard. Their mother had abandoned them, so I determined to find their father for them.”
The captain turned toward her fully then, his wide shoulders limned in amber from the setting sun that lightened his hair with strands of bronze. In his tousled, intense manner, he was not commonly handsome, but harshly beautiful and strangely mythic. His dark gaze made her feel peculiar inside. Unsolid.
His lips parted but he said nothing, and for a moment he seemed not godly but boylike. Vulnerable.
She tilted her head and made herself smile slightly. “I can see that I have surprised you, Captain. You must reevaluate matters now, naturally. But while you are doing so I do hope you will reconsider the plausibility of me being mother to a twelve-year-old boy.” She paused. “For the sake of my vanity.”
He grinned, an easy tilt of one side of his mouth that rendered a pair of masculine lips devastatingly at the command of a grown man indeed.
“How callous of me.” He crossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the doorpost. “I beg your pardon, madam.”
“Without any sincerity whatsoever, it seems. I pray you, sir, will you take me to Saint-Nazaire?”
The grin slid away, leaving the vibrant scar dipping over his right cheek yet more pronounced. He must have suffered the injury recently. The war had been over for a year and a half, but he bore the erect carriage and authoritative stance of a naval commander.
It wouldn’t matter if he were the head of the Admiralty and his vessel a hundred-gun ship of the line, as long as he carried her swiftly to her destination.
“How did you determine the location of their father’s home?” he said.
“I asked about. I can be persistent when necessary.”
“I am coming to see that.” He pushed away from the doorway and started off along the street. “Come.”
“Come?” She gestured to the children and hurried after him.
He looked down at her as she awkwardly tried to match his long strides, and he halted mid-street. He did not seem to heed the traffic of horses and carts and other pedestrians, but stood perfectly solid before her like he owned the avenue. His eye glimmered unsteadily, a trick of the setting sunlight, she supposed. It was a very odd sight. He seemed at once both in thorough command and yet confused.
He pointed at a building across the street. “Give my name to the man that you find on the other side of that door and tell him that I said he is to escort you to the children’s home and return you to your inn tonight.”
“But– No.” Arabella’s cold hands were pressed into her skirts. “You needn’t. That is to say—”
“He is a good man, in my employ, and you and the children will be considerably safer crossing this town with him than without.” He scowled again. “You will do this, Miss Caulfield, or I will not take you to Saint-Nazaire on my ship.”
Her heart turned about. “You will take me there?” Upon his ship. Upon the sea.
She must.
He scanned her face and shoulders. “To whose home are you traveling, little governess?”
He was no longer teasing. She must be honest. “I am going to Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux. It belongs to an English lord, but the Prince of Sensaire is in residence there and he has hired me to teach his sister before her debut in London society at Christmastime.”
“Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux,” he only said.
“Do you know it, Captain?”
“A bit.” His brow cut downward. “Miss Caulfield . . .”
“Captain?”
“My ship is not a passenger vessel. There will be no other women, no fine dining or other amusements. Aboard it, you will be at my mercy. Mine alone. You do understand that, do you not?”
“I . . .” She hadn’t given it thought after so many people in port recommended him. Naïvely, she had assumed it meant he was a gentleman. But gentlemen had lied to her before.
She had no choice. “I understand.”
“We depart at dawn, with or without you.”
He moved away, and Arabella released a shaking breath. Forcing a bright smile, she pivoted about and beckoned the children to her.
Chapter 2
The Sea
Mr. Miles, the captain’s cabin steward, was a neat little person with a starched cravat, velvet lapels, and high-heeled shoes. When he greeted Arabella as she boarded the Retribution, he peered at her gown as though it were made of sackcloth. “You haven’t any luggage, madam?”
“My traveling trunk departed for Saint-Malo without me. I must purchase new clothing at Saint-Nazaire.” With funds she did not have. After she paid Captain Andrew his fee, she would have one pound three shillings in her pocket, enough to hire a coach to drive her to the chateau. She would arrive wrinkled and filthy, but she would arrive on time.
“The leddy’s a sight for weary eyes, Mr. Miles.” The day was gray and cool, but the smile of the Scotsman who approached was broad, his sea-weathered skin crinkled about his eyes. He bowed. “Gavin Stewart at yer service, Miss Caulfield. Ship’s doctor and sometime chaplain, though o’ the Roman persuasion.”
“Sir?” she said, uncertain of his meaning.
“Father,” Mr. Miles corrected with a pinched nose, turned about on his heel and clip-clopped across the deck, weaving through the dozens of sailors who were preparing the ship for departure.
“Aye, lass. Ma French father had a quarrel with the Presbyterians, ye see, so he raised us Catholic. But I niver mind it, ’cept when there be a bonnie lass aboot.” He winked.
She smiled. “I don’t suppose you typically have women aboard, do you?”
“Niver.”
Her amusement faded. “Never?”
“No’ a one, lass. Ye must have a way with persuasion.” He offered his arm. “Nou, allou me to see ye to yer quarters. ’Tis a sennight’s trip ahead o’ us at least, an’ it’s smelling like rain. Ye’ll want to be comfortably settled afore that.”
“Rain?”
He patted her hand upon his arm. “No’ to worry ye, lass. ’Tis a fine strong vessel.”
Her mother had probably thought the same of the ship upon which she put her three daughters to sail to England.
Arabella walked along the deck, averting her face from the open water beyond the busy port and restraining herself from clamping on Dr. Stewart’s arm like a frightened child. The farther she moved from the gangplank, the more her stomach clenched.
Everyone else aboard seemed at ease and active. A boy leaned against the deck house, whittling a stick. The others all worked at ropes, planking, and sails, most of them laboring at a massive pulleylike device, hauling barrels from the dock to the deck. They chanted a song that matched the rhythm of their footfalls. Weathered like Dr. Stewart and dressed simply, to a one they looked like ruffians, with missing teeth and scruffy whiskers. But they worked diligently as the breeze sheering off the channel snapped at ropes and sails. Each cast her a quick glance and some tugged at cap brims in greeting then returned to their tasks. Only one young man did not; his attention never wavered from the pile of canvas he was stitching with bony hands.
Dr. Stewart guided her down a steep stairway onto a deck lined with enormous cannons: silent waiting warriors. At one end a narrow corridor gave off onto small curtained chambers to either side and one door directly ahead.
Mr. Miles threw open the door. “Captain, your guest,” he said primly.
Captain Andrew sat at a writing desk, his left shoulder to a window, his brow bent to his palm and fingers sunk in his hair. In his other hand was a pen, and upon the desk an ink pot and ledger opened past the first folios. The scents of cheroot smoke and salt mingled with the decidedly masculine furnishings of a dining table, chairs, and a single sitting chair. Beside a mounted sword and a brass mechanism of some sort, only two pictures adorned the walls, one of a ship flying the British flag, the other a charcoal drawing of a boy standing in the corner of a dark chamber.
He turned to look over his shoulder at her. His jaw was darker with whiskers than the night before.
He frowned.
She lifted her chin.
“Ma’am.” He stood, the top of his head brushing the ceiling beam. “Good day,” he said in a perfectly flat tone. He wore a loose-fitting coat with a waistcoat and plain neck cloth, a pistol strapped to a sash across his chest and a sword at his side. His hair was tousled and a scowl lurked at the corner of his very fine mouth.
She walked toward the lion in his den.
“Good day, Captain.” She extended her hand. “Here is the fee I agreed to pay you.”
He looked briefly at the purse dangling from her fingers then at Mr. Miles. The steward came forward and took it.
The captain’s attention fixed on her again. “Welcome aboard, Miss . . .”
“Caulfield.” Her cheeks warmed. Cretin.
“Caulfield,” he murmured. “I see you’ve met Dr. Stewart, whom some of my crewmen believe is also a man of religion.”
“An’ those gadgies in Rome,” the Scot mumbled with a grin.
“I have,” she said, feeling befuddled and like a complete fool for it. She had dined with heiresses, dressed baron’s daughters, and schooled future countesses in comportment. It was idiotic to be tongue-tied in the presence of a rough, crude merchant ship captain, even if the daylight enhanced the wolfish glint in his eye and he looked at her as though he knew her thoughts. “He has offered to make me acquainted with my quarters.”
He gestured toward a door to his right. “Be my guest.”
Mr. Miles darted forward with a clippity-clop and opened the door. The cabin within was narrow and curved on one side along the curve of the ship. A long cot with wooden sides built into the wall, a small ledge, and four clothing pegs were its only furnishings.
“Will it suit you, Miss Caulfield?” the captain said at her shoulder.
“But– Is it your bedchamber?”
“It was.” His smile was slow and his emerald eye danced with deviltry. “Now that you have paid for it, it is yours.” His gaze dipped to her lips.
“But—”
“I told you this is not a passenger ship, Miss Caulfield. Bunks are few aboard, and the mattress in my cabin is the most comfortable of those few. Do you concur, Mr. Miles?” he said without removing his attention from her.
“Entirely, Captain,” the English Napoleon said.
Dr. Stewart chuckled.
They were enjoying this.
“I cannot—” She had been forced to face plenty of indignities as a servant, but this was outrageous. “That is to say, it would not be proper for—”
Captain Andrew lifted his brow.
“I cannot deprive you of sleep, Captain,” she said firmly.
“Dinna fret, lass. He’ll sleep fine and dandy with ye in his bed.”
Dr. Stewart could not mean what she imagined. He was a priest, for heaven’s sake.
The captain slanted him an odd glance.
“Gentlemen,” she said, “if gentlemen you can be called,” she added under her breath, “this is insupportable, and you know it as well as I.”
Captain Andrew laughed softly. It was a wonderful sound—deep and warm and confident and appreciative.
She forced herself to look him in the face. “Captain?”
“I am afraid I’ve nothing else to offer you, little governess, but a hammock on the gun deck with the crew or a straw pallet with the goats and sheep below. Would you prefer one of those?”
“Not precisely.”
“Ye’ll have ma cabin, lass,” Dr. Stewart said, and went toward the door. “The bed’s no’ so soft, an there be no door to lock. But ye’ll have the privacy a leddy needs.”
She released a breath and slipped by the captain to follow.
Dr. Stewart shook his head. “I warned ye she woudna take to it, lad. Some wimmen dinna care to be teased.”
“Seems so,” the captain said quietly.
She glanced back. He was no longer smiling, but watching her with that same intensity he had revealed for a moment on the street the night before, like he knew not only her thoughts, but also her fears.
Like he was a wolf, and she the lamb.
WITHOUT ANY FANFARE of trumpets, the ship drew away from the dock with a sudden sway that left Arabella’s joints loose and her limbs trembling. Dr. Stewart invited her to the main deck to watch their departure. She declined and instead sat on her borrowed cot, clinging to its sides, eyes clamped shut, and thought of her sisters, Ravenna’s bright smile and Eleanor’s arm wrapped about her shoulder. Her heartbeats were frantic. Her palms grew slippery on the wood.
She opened her eyes and reached for the shutter over the window. She folded it open. The sea stretched before her in undulating swells of white and gray.
She slammed the shutter closed.
A miniature bookcase beside the cot and bolted into the wall held several dozen well-worn volumes. She snatched up the closest, opened it, and read.
When Mr. Miles scratched on the curtain with her dinner, her stomach was too tight to accept food.
Eventually, she slept, restlessly, and dreamed of storms. She awoke to the steady drum of rain on the ceiling above her head. Mr. Miles brought her breakfast. She left it untouched.
Her second day at sea proved equally eventless and equally exhausting. Her nerves were raw, her skin clammy, her belly cramped. She needed distraction. Not, however, in the form of a wolfish ship captain, whose deep voice and confident tread she occasionally heard through the wall shared between the cabins.
But she was unaccustomed to inactivity. On her third morning aboard she ventured out of the doctor’s cabin to stretch her legs and seek out a hiding place aboard that would not put her in sight line of either the captain or the water that surrounded them completely now.
A sixty-five-gun merchant ship, however, while considerably larger in volume than the London town houses in which she had worked, posed a challenge when it came to places a woman could stroll or sit unnoticed. After ducking around barrels and lurking behind cannons to avoid the captain, she found an ally. The cabin boy had been following her about on her tour of the ship’s nooks and crannies.
“If you’re wantin’ someplace to set, miss,” he said, “you’ll like Doc’s place. It’s warm and dry, though it rocks somethin’ fierce in a storm, seein’ as it’s in the bow.”
He guided her to the infirmary, dropped to his behind on the floor outside the door and pushed his cap over his brow.
“Won’t you follow me inside like you have followed me everywhere else this morning?”
He shook his head. “No, miss. I’ll catch a wink while you’re in with the doc, if you don’t mind.”
“I do not.” She laughed. “But do tell me your name so that I might wish you pleasant dreams.”
“Joshua, miss.”
“Pleasant dreams, Joshua.”
Dr. Stewart welcomed her and she settled on the extra chair in his infirmary, a book on her lap. She was no scholar like Eleanor, and when they hadn’t turned her stomach, the doctor’s tomes on the treatment of shipboard ailments had nearly put her to sleep. Today, however, she had unearthed quite another sort of book from the captain’s day cabin while Mr. Miles served her breakfast—a peculiar book for such a man to own.
Dr. Stewart had set a vast wooden chest atop the examination table and was drawing forth bottles of powders and liquids, making marks in a ledger, then returning the bottles to the chest.
“Ye canna be comfortable there, lass,” he said. “ ’Tis no place for a leddy to set. Allou me to have the boys set up a canopy for ye atop where the light’s better and ye can take the fresh air.”
The wooden chair was a torture only less noxious than sight of the sea. “It is quite comfortable, in fact.” She turned a page in Debrett’s New Peerage. “I am quite well.”
“Aye, I can see that.” He smiled as he placed a bottle in its rightful nook in the case.
She bent to her book. All of her former employers had a copy, so she had long since memorized every page. She folded it closed in her lap. “What do you have in your medicine chest there?”
“Cures that a man might need at sea.”
“Two bottles have skulls and crossbones on the labels, I noticed.” Suitable for a pirate captain. But now she was being ridiculous. “What need do you have of poisons?”
“Arsenic, taken in wee doses, aids the nerves. Otherwise ’tis for the rats. ’Tis a powerful poison.”
“Best then that you keep a lock on that chest.” She opened her book again. “With a captain such as yours, passengers mustn’t be given any opportunity for mutiny, must they?”
The doctor chuckled. Bottles clinked.
“He intrigues ye, daena he?”
Her head snapped up. “What?”
A sympathetic twinkle lit the Scot’s eyes. “Ye’d no’ be the first, lass.”
“Doc?” A sailor stood at the door, a young man of no more than seventeen, clutching his cap in his hand. He was the sailor who had not looked at her on deck when she arrived, nor since, as he avoided her gaze now. His hair was filthy, his sun-darkened skin draped over knobby cheeks and hands.
“What do ye need, lad?” The doctor went to him.
The youth’s hollow eyes were fixed on the medicine chest.
“Got me a nasty toothache, Doc.” His accent was English—Cornish—the accent that the Reverend Caulfield had drummed out of Arabella after their four years at the orphanage. Young ladies did not speak like peasants, he had scolded. But he was not naturally a harsh man; only her misbehaviors had roused his irritation. Only her. To him, gentle, studious Eleanor could do no wrong. Always off in the stables or woods, Ravenna had rarely ever come under his notice. Only Arabella with her fiery hair and too-pretty face made him fret.
“Can ye gimme somewhat for it?” the young sailor asked the doctor.
“It may have to come out, lad.”
The sailor clutched his cap over his jaw. “Naw, sir. Me mum said as I’d best come home with all me teeth or I’d best not come home at all.”
“Begging yer mither’s pardon, lad, but if it’s paining ye, it may need to come out or it’ll take the whole bone.”
The youth shook his head. With a last quick glance at the medicine chest, he disappeared.
Dr. Stewart shrugged. “Some dinna know what’s best for them.” He cast her a knowing grin. “Both sailor lads an leddy governesses.”
But Arabella had no attention for his teasing. The young sailor did not have a toothache. With the same keen sense of people that made her so good at her work, she knew it of this youth. He wanted something else in Dr. Stewart’s medicine chest. Something he could not simply ask for. He had lied.
THE SHIP GROANED against a swell of the sea, drowning out the rasp of Arabella’s breathing. The mattress was like a board. Lying rigid on it, she felt every sway of the ship, every wave, every tilt. She should have accepted the offer of a hammock. The crewmen slept perfectly well despite the poor weather, while for four nights now she had barely dozed.
She had not returned to the top deck since she boarded the ship, and she had seen the captain only from afar. That was enough. The ocean terrified her and the captain was large, unpredictable, and a little bit dashing, and she needed only the service of his ship, not teasing or intense scrutiny that made her think about him whenever she wasn’t preoccupied by the constant roll and pitch that seemed to bother no one but her.
Instead she should be thinking of the royal family to whom she was traveling. She should be making plans for Princess Jacqueline’s debut in London society. Her mind should be bent on how to win the prince’s attention despite her servile status.
The ship leaned and she clutched the edge of the bunk. Wind howled. The wall creaked like it would snap.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She was exhausted. But this simply must be borne. She was a world away from comfort now. But soon, hopefully, all the canings and scoldings and groping hands and even this heaving ship would be pale memories of a distant past.
Then, she would bring her sisters with her into her fairy-tale life. Eleanor could quit translating texts for the Reverend by the putrid light of tallow candles, and Ravenna could set up her own stable or kennel or even a physician’s practice if she wished. They would be together again.
She missed them. She missed the affection they shared, the secrets and confidences and embraces. She had lived too long among strangers, coming to know women barely younger than her only in order to set them out into the world as brides, then being sent off for another assignment, another debutante, another success.
She feared her turn would never come and that she was chasing moonbeams. A prince would be mad to look twice at a governess. Her journey to Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux would win her nothing but further distance from her family. She would be alone in a foreign world living among people who paid for her skills for the remainder of her life.
And she would never know the truth about who she was.
She turned onto her side, but her skirts tangled in the blanket. With no lock on the cabin door, she was afraid to undress for sleep. Her gown was a shambles. With an upturned nose Mr. Miles had offered to press it for her, but she had nothing else to wear in the meantime. And nothing else to wear to meet a prince. It was hopeless.
No. This was fear and weariness speaking. She would not accept defeat.
Wide-awake, she sat up, banged her head on the top of the bed and groaned.
This was insupportable. She had not survived years of canings then scoldings then gropings only to cower in fear and doubt, not now when she had never been closer to her goal.
She crawled over the wooden side of the bed and for a moment stood still in the cramped space, bracing herself against another sway of the ship. Then she pulled her cloak tight about her and drew aside the curtain door.
All was quiet. The door to the captain’s quarters was closed. In the other direction sailors slumbered in hammocks strung up between the massive cannons in the dark. A single lantern at the closest stairway cast a wavering glow. All smelled of brine, unwashed men, and farm animals from the hold below. But the faintest whiff of rain touched the air.
It had fallen steadily for three days already. Few sailors would be atop now, she suspected. Dr. Stewart had said that no storm threatened. And she needed the activity.
More than that, she needed to be brave.
Holding tight to posts and cannons against the ship’s gentle roll, she stumbled to the stairs and gripped the rail. Raindrops fell onto her hands, but she put one foot on the glistening step, then the next.
She climbed the narrow stair with her heart trapped firmly between her molars, wind grabbing at her hood and skirts.
Water puddled across the top deck and the sky was a thick darkness from which fell a steady, light shower. Rigging clattered in the wind. Far toward the bow lit by two bright lanterns, a pair of sailors huddled. Arabella held onto the stairway railing with both hands and made herself look up at the sails. Only a half dozen of them were unfurled, and they were stretched with wind.
A strange eddy of calm crawled through her.
She released one hand from the rail.
She took a slow, deep breath and felt her feet solid beneath her. The ship rocked. She bent her knees into it.
She could do this.
Her other hand loosened on the rail, then released it.
She did not fly up into the sky and nothing propelled her abruptly from the center of the deck and into the sea. She felt light, giddy, almost weightless. She looked up again and rain pattered on her cheeks.
Pulling in another breath, she moved one foot. Then the other. Then the other. She did not look at the darkness of the water beyond the main rail, only at her feet, at a trio of barrels nearby, at a line stretching from the railing to a sail above, at anything but the sea.
Finally she came to the main railing that ran all the way around the deck. Her fingers curved around it. It was solid and reassuring. She looked into the darkness.
The Atlantic roiled, tossing up whitecaps beneath the starless sky. Only lantern light from either end of the ship lit its surface.
She stared, dizzy and clutching the railing. Twenty-two years ago this ocean had swallowed everyone aboard a ship traveling from the West Indies to England—everyone except three tiny girls. It was a miracle, the Cornish villagers had said. God had saved them.
But God had not seen fit to save their nanny. And their names meant nothing to the villagers, nor to the distant solicitor in London that the village aldermen reluctantly hired to find their father. So, plucked from the horrors of the sea, the three little beneficiaries of a miracle had been deposited in a foundling home where they then learned other sorts of horrors altogether.
The black water churned. Arabella’s hands were ice on the railing.
She must conquer this. She would.
She sucked in air, fresh and tinny. After the closeness of below, it was a little scent of heaven.
Drops pattered on her hood and shoulders. The sleeves of her gown clung damply to her arms. She shivered. But she was standing erect and stable on the deck of a ship. She could not go below yet. Not until the nightmares were truly and thoroughly bested.
She released the rail with one hand and then pulled the other away from safety.
Her breaths came short. Panic washed over her. The deck seemed to spin.
She grabbed the railing.
“It is unwise to drench oneself while at sea, Miss Caulfield,” rumbled the captain’s deep voice at her shoulder. “One might remain drenched for weeks if the sun fails to appear.”
She turned, clutching the railing hard with both hands behind her.
His stance was square, his face dark in the shroud of rain. His height and the breadth of his shoulders garbed in a coat that reached to his calves shaped an austere silhouette in the light from the front of the ship. In the dark he seemed even larger than before, and powerful and dangerous and . . . mythic.
She was ridiculous to think it. He was just a man. But her thoughts were muddled, and he looked so solid and strong.
“I had not considered it,” she said.
“Apparently.” He seemed to watch her. “Did you return the children to their father?”
She stared. “Children?”
“In Plymouth. You do recall that you missed your ship’s departure on account of three urchin children. Do you not?”
“Of course I do.” She only found it remarkable that he did. “Don’t be foolish.”
A crease appeared in his scarred cheek, deepening the shadow across his face. “You have a remarkably agile tongue for one in dire need of assistance, Miss Caulfield.”
“Alas, servitude has not taught me meekness.” The open sea yawned at her back like a hole that would swallow her up if she were to lean outward only the slightest bit. “But when one is teased in the dark by a large man who has previously threatened one, one is foolish to behave as a servant.”
“Did I threaten you?”
“If I remind you of it, will you make good on the threat?”
He smiled slightly.
“Captain Andrew, are all your crewmen men of good character?” The youth’s lie to the doctor in the infirmary bothered her.
In the silvery darkness, his eye glittered. “Would you have cause to expect otherwise, madam?”
