Heart's Safe Passage (20 page)

Fiona set her feet on a path for the bow. She leaped down the quarter ladder and streaked past Phoebe, a blur of black and white fur. Mel shouted and charged after her, slate in hand. She shot past Phoebe, all gangling arms and legs.

Phoebe spun on the heel of her slipper and joined the chase. “The tar,” she shouted.

Her words roused others—men polishing guns or repairing sails—to chase the dog. Fiona dove into the center of a sail, turned two revolutions, then slipped from beneath the sail maker’s reaching hand and continued her quest, docked tail bobbing, lithe body springing—

“No!” Phoebe and Mel shouted together and dove for the dog—too late.

One of Fiona’s leaps sent her flying right into the bucket of tar. The container overturned. Black sludge oozed across the deck. Cursing, Riggs bounded to his feet, grabbed a ratline, and hoisted himself onto the rail.

The dog sat in a puddle of congealing tar, her black eyes huge, her mouth clamped together. She shook as though suffering from a fever.

“Fiona Docherty.” Mel reached for the dog.

Phoebe reached for Mel. “Don’t. You don’t want tar all over you.”

“But it’ll kill her.” Tears sprang into Mel’s eyes.

“Nay, lass, it’ll not be killing her.” Rafe reached them and crouched beside the terrier. “You silly wee beastie.”

The softness of his voice, the gentleness of his hands as he lifted the terrified dog by her front shoulders set an ache deep inside Phoebe. Her own eyes filled with moisture. She blinked hard and turned away. “I’ll go fetch oil or lard from the galley.”

“You gonna drown her in it?” Riggs called down from the shrouds. “That’s what she deserves.”

Slowly, so slowly his movement was barely perceptible, Rafe straightened and looked up at the seaman. His features hardened like tar on a winter’s day. “For that remark, Sam Riggs, you will be getting yourself down here and cleaning this muck off the deck. Now.”

Riggs stared. “I didn’t do it. I was minding my own business and—”

“Derrick? Jordy?” Rafe spoke the words in a normal tone.

The two men had moved up behind him, as no doubt he knew.

“Yes, sir,” Derrick said.

“See that this man cleans up this mess, then confine him below.”

“But I—” Riggs grew paler.

“Yes, sir,” Derrick and Jordy chorused.

The former stepped to the rail in one stride and plucked Riggs off the shrouds as though he weighed no more than Mel.

As Phoebe turned away to fetch oil or lard from the galley, she caught Riggs’s expression from the corner of her eye. It was cold, as cold and hard as ice-coated iron, yet his dark eyes blazed with hatred.

Chilled by that look, Phoebe hurried to the hatchway leading down to the lower deck. She thanked God for the fact that on the lower deck, even though it was low of beam and smelled of men who exerted themselves daily and lived in too-close quarters, the sickness didn’t bother her as it did in the cabins. Quickly she entered the galley. The fragrant steam billowing from the chamber felt like balm on a wound. She paused to inhale it, to take a moment of comfort in the familiar aromas of peppercorns and potatoes, cinnamon and apples.

But the hard walnut shell of apprehension remained knotted in her middle.

She stepped over the coaming and called to the cook, a mere shadow in the steam and smoke of the room that needed better ventilation. “We need oil or lard, whatever you can spare. Fiona’s got herself coated in tar.”

“Silly wee beastie.” The man Phoebe knew only as Cook surged out of the gloom.

Although his tone was just as gentle and affectionate as Rafe’s had been, it didn’t send that ache swirling through Phoebe as had the captain’s words, his tone.

She hugged her middle, willing away fear of Riggs, willing away this ache for Rafe. “Riggs was caulking the deck and Fiona toppled over the tar bucket. Do you have what we need?”

“Aye, that I do.” Cook produced a tub from behind a bar holding the containers on their shelves, and set it in her arms. “Can you manage it, lass, or shall I carry it up?”

“It smells like dinner needs your attention. I’ll manage.” She wanted to take it to Rafe, have an excuse to finally break the impasse between them. “Thank you.”

The wooden tub sagged in her hold. She staggered a bit but hefted it onto one hip and crept back to the hatch, glad the sea lay in relative calm so she and lard didn’t go tumbling across the lower deck like a child’s hoop. Once at the ladder, though, she hesitated, not sure how she would manage the steep steps and lard. If she set it on the tread above her, she could balance it as she climbed. Once on deck, she could simply slide the tub across the planks.

She started up. One, two . . . The decks lay close together, barely more than five and a half feet. Three—

A shout rang overhead. “Sail ho. The Tricoleur.”

A French ship. The enemy to this English vessel.

Feet pounded around her, below her, above her. Phoebe froze on the ladder, not sure if she should continue up or descend.

“Enemy in sight!” men cried. “A fight! A fight!”

Fiona began to bark. A female screamed—Belinda, no doubt. And a man hurtled through the hatch, tripped on the tub of lard. It slammed into Phoebe’s middle. She folded like a fan, wind driven from her lungs. Her arms flailed in the air, grasping at—nothing. No rail. No rope. Her hands clutched space, and she fell.

Her back struck the lower deck, her head something harder. Lights flashed before her eyes. A scream echoed through her head—not hers then. She gritted her teeth against pain in her belly and back and skull. An old blow. Another scream. Another tumble down steps. Blood. So very much blood.

No, not blood. That was then, a different set of steps, a different floor, a different Phoebe. This was lard. Greasy, stinking fat oozing from a split in the tub beside her. A different man crouched over her, one with the kindness of an angel and a soul as empty as a broken glass.

And she loved him. God forgive her. She’d told Dominick and Tabitha she might, but the uncertainty had passed. She knew she’d lost her heart for the second time in her life, and to possibly the second-worst man she could find. Maybe even the worst one. Worse than Gideon Lee.

She doubled over, sobbing.

“Where are you hurt, lass?” Rafe stroked her hair away from her face. “Do you ken if aught is broken? Did you hit your head?”

Though his hand felt steady and warm, tension rang through his voice.

Phoebe held her breath in an attempt to suppress her gasping breaths, the flow of tears, the mourning for losing her heart so unwisely again. Around her, the brig had fallen into the relative quiet of normal activity, the tumult of potential action silenced as though someone had slammed a door. And Rafe hadn’t been the man who ran into her. He had been shorter.

“I must have.” She raised her head and blinked in the brightness of three lanterns held up by a ring of men with concerned faces. “I don’t remember everyone coming.”

“You lost consciousness then.” Rafe cupped her chin in his hand and turned her face toward him. “Jenkins, bring that lantern closer. Yes, there. Shine it into her eyes.”

Phoebe dropped her lids against the brightness.

“Nay, lass, let me look to see if you’re concussed.” He lifted one of her lids with a fingertip.

His face hovered mere inches away. His breath fanned across her lips in a light caress, his gray eyes gazed into her one open eye. She opened the other so she could gaze upon him so close, so concerned, so—

She closed her eyes again. “Why?”

“Your pupils will tell me if you have bruised your brain.” He gave her that tilted corner of his lips that passed as a smile. “Are you seeing one or two of me?”

“One is quite enough, thank you.”

“Aye, I thought as much.”

“But I didn’t mean why look into my eyes. I meant—” She remembered their audience and clenched her teeth.

He slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Are you in pain?”

“Not a great deal. But I don’t know what happened.”

“Watt the clod ran into you,” Jordy announced. “I think he should be cleaning this muck off the deck.”

“’Tis a day for muck on the decks,” Watt grumbled. “But better the grease than the tar. I am sorry, Mrs. Lee.”

“It’s all right. It was an accident.” She started to shake her head, winced, and barely resisted the urge to lay her cheek against Rafe’s shoulder, so broad, so close, so tempting.

She stiffened her spine. “The French ship?”

“Sheered off, the cowards,” someone grumbled. “Saw us and turned tail and ran.”

“And when we didn’t give chase,” added another man, one back in the shadows beyond the circle of lantern light, “who’s the coward?”

Silence. Stillness below deck. The arm around Phoebe grew as taut as a backstay.

“We have ladies and a child aboard,” Rafe said in a quiet, even tone that nonetheless hummed with the tension of a steel wire in the wind. “There will be no fighting. I’ll say naught more about it. Now get to your duties. Cook, I’m afraid we’ll need more lard for the dog. And hot water for Mrs. Lee to no longer resemble a greased pig.”

A ripple of nervous laughter ran through the men as they began to disperse around the lower deck and back up the ladder.

Phoebe glared at Rafe. “You don’t speak to me for a week, then have the audacity to call me a greased pig? If that bite-sized excuse of a dog hadn’t dived into the tar and—”

He brushed his fingers across her lips. “Hush. You’ll be doing yourself an injury. Now then, do you need someone to carry you to your cabin?”

She thought she might. Her knees felt like water.

“I can manage.”

She meant she should manage. She wanted him to carry her too much.

She allowed him to lift her to her feet. Her skirt slapped against her legs, sodden with lard. Her stomach rolled. She must look a fright. If she’d intended to attract the man with her good looks, she had failed.

No, not attract him. She must not. He was more wrong for her than Gideon had been. As she climbed the ladder to sunshine and fresh breezes, she listed the ways to keep her mind off of him close behind her. He came from an enemy country. He was on a deadly mission. He held no faith in God.

She could change all that. She had at least another month before they reached England. Surely in that month God would honor her prayers and bring this man to his knees.

But it hadn’t happened with Gideon.

She shoved that memory aside. Gideon was dead, gone, her mistake paid for and then some.

She paused on the deck, dizzy from her aching head, queasy from the lard, heartsick with memory and knowledge. The sun beat down warm for October in the North Atlantic, so the sailor said. All lay quiet.

A chill ran through Phoebe for no logical reason. Belinda still stitched baby clothes beside the rail. Mel and Watt rubbed oil into Fiona’s hair to remove the tar. Riggs scraped at the spilled tar on the deck, diligent despite his mutinous expression. Others performed their duties of adjusting sails, holding the brig on course, polishing the brass guns ranged along the gunwales. Peaceful for a vessel intended as a machine of war.

A war against one man. A vessel that existed to salve the hatred of another man.

No wonder cold seeped through her. She was more of a fool to love him than to have loved Gideon. If she couldn’t change Rafe . . .

She’d been unable to change Gideon.

She bowed her head in case her despair showed on her face, and plodded aft. A glance back told her she had made a slimy mess on the deck. She paused at the top of the companionway and addressed Rafe without looking at him. “I’m so sorry for the mess. I’ll help clean it.”

“And risk your hands? Now go down, and we’ll have hot water for you in a few minutes.” He strode away, his footfalls firm on the deck planks, and she wished she had a serious injury so he would take care of her.

Odd she knew he would. Seeing to the sick and injured aboard any ship rarely fell to its captain. But Rafe Docherty seemed cut from a different cloth. He saw to everything aboard, from caring for the sick to navigating the vessel to ensuring the captive guests enjoyed every comfort the brig had to offer.

Within minutes of leaving her, he did indeed send down a barrel and men with canisters of hot water so she could wash away the lard. It was seawater that left her skin a little sticky, but better sticky than slippery. She smelled of the jasmine soap she’d purchased on Bermuda, heady and warm compared to Belinda’s sharp tang of lavender.

No one appreciated it other than her. Belinda and Mel, seated on the deck with the latter now reading
Evangeline
, wrinkled their noses. A scrubbed and shorn Fiona sneezed, and Rafe appeared nowhere in sight.

Despite an ache in her skull where she’d landed on the deck, Phoebe climbed to the quarterdeck and leaned against the taffrail behind Jordy once again at the wheel. “How big is this ship?”

“’Tis a brig. We have only two masts.” He leaned toward the compass and turned the wheel a quarter revolution. “A hundred and seventy-five tons. Eighty feet long. Not so big, but big enough to get the job done.”

“What job is that?” Phoebe stared at the Scotsman’s graying hair as though she could see the truth through his skull. “Killing men?”

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “We’re a privateer, no?”

“Were, I think. But how big a brig or any vessel do you need to kill one man?”

“None, lass, but I’ll not be talking of it further. Talking does no good. Only prayer.”

Phoebe wanted to argue with him but guessed it would do no good. So she changed her tack. “Why did he take his family to the Mediterranean during a war?”

“It was during the Peace of Amiens. And Mrs. Docherty, the younger one, she—” Jordy’s gaze strayed past Phoebe’s shoulder. “You’d best leave the quarterdeck, Mrs. Lee. He’s coming back and may not wish to find you here.”

“I’m not afraid of him, Mr. McPherson.”

So why had she let him avoid her? Not fear. On the contrary—she wanted to stay with him, follow him around like Fiona followed Mel. She’d remained aboard the
Davina
instead of leaving when she’d had the opportunity because she wanted to block Rafe from his course, then she acted no differently than she had as a schoolgirl attempting to gain Gideon Lee’s attention by avoiding him, peering at him over the edge of an open fan.