Heart's Safe Passage (28 page)

Phoebe shivered. She’d never seen any man so cold in the face of an emergency. Gideon had been quite the opposite, red-faced and shouting, moving. Always moving, fists—

She jerked herself away from that line of thought and followed Rafe’s gaze to the wall of weapons arranged behind their iron grill. A sword, two rapiers, several cutlasses and daggers, and a brace of pistols provided considerable protective or assaulting power. All of it remained useless with the six of them confined to the great cabin. They needed to get out, get Mel and Belinda below to relative safety, get Rafe, Jordy, and Derrick to where they could lead the men away from their current folly.

Surely Rafe intended to lead them away from the fight.

But presumably, armed guards stood behind the door with panels of teakwood thick enough that one could hear through it only if the interlocutors shouted—thick enough to stop a pistol ball. Likewise, the skylight’s opening was too small for anyone larger than Mel to go through. Perhaps the stern windows? When opened, the gap looked large enough for a man, if he could somehow climb the stern to the quarterdeck without getting himself hacked down or shot the instant his head appeared over the edge of the deck.

But they wouldn’t harm a woman.

Not sure what she would do once on deck, Phoebe opened her mouth to speak. A second blast of gunfire roared toward the brig. This time the
Davina
’s crew fired in response. The brig shuddered and tilted, rolling sideways into the trough of a wave.

“Aye, I taught them weel.” Rafe’s upper lip curled as he spoke into the ensuing silence. “They ken enough to fire on the up roll.”

“But they do not have a leader,” Jordy protested. “They ken how to fire the guns, but there’s no one who can lead them, give proper sailing directions.”

“Watt?” Phoebe glanced at Rafe, wondering why he’d let the man stay free after the last attempt at mutiny. “Can he—”

“A competent leader,” Jordy growled.

Someone was giving sailing orders. The bellowed commands reverberated through the deck, directions to haul lines, to tack to starboard. The brig dipped and swung.

With a curse, Rafe lunged across the cabin. “The wrong maneuver. You fools, that’s the wrong direction.” He flung open a stern window. Frosty air swirled into the cabin, and Belinda staggered to the bunk to draw the quilts more tightly around Mel.

Who looked right at her and smiled.

“She’s awake again,” Belinda cried.

“And like as not ready for eternal sleep with these—” Rafe broke off and drew back into the cabin. He faced Jordy and Derrick, whose grim faces suggested they knew what he was about to tell them. “The Frenchman is trying to sail around us.”

Jordy muttered something and dropped onto a chair. Derrick remained stolid, an immovable mountain in a gale.

“What—what’s so bad about that?” Phoebe had to ask.

“’Tis one of the oldest fighting maneuvers in the history of using guns on vessels.” Rafe spoke to them with his head out of the stern windows again. “Raking is what the maneuver is called. A vessel sails across the bow or stern of another one and fires a broadside. The shot flies down the entire length of the vessel.” He drew his head in again. “Everyone on the deck.” He spoke in an even tone bleak of emotion. “Derrick, get Mel.”

“She can’t be mo—”

Rafe grasped Belinda and dragged her to the deck. Derrick caught up Mel, quilts and all, and flattened them both along the side of the bunk. The crash of exploding gunpowder rumbled like thunder across the water, and Phoebe followed their actions, throwing herself between bunk and window seat, Jordy crowding in beside her seconds before the windows exploded in a hail of splintering glass. The chair where Jordy sat moments earlier turned to kindling in a heartbeat.

Belinda screamed. Phoebe swallowed the cry rising in her throat along with a dose of bitter bile. But others wailed above them, the animal cries of men in agony.

“Lord, no, please.” Phoebe choked on the meaningless prayer.

It was too late. Men had been wounded, possibly killed, men with whom she had probably talked, eaten, strode along the deck.

“I need to be up there. I can help.” She scrambled to her feet.

Jordy caught her arm. “Nay, lass, stay down.”

Something crashed on the upper deck, and the
Davina
listed leeward.

“I must be going out there regardless.” Rafe rose from behind the dining table. Fragments of glass dripped from his clothes and hair, glittering teardrops in the still brilliant sunshine. Glittering like the cold light in his eyes that froze Phoebe’s core. “Derrick, I need your help.”

“Anything, sir, but we don’t want you dead. They’ll need a leader when it’s all over.”

“Not if we’re all prisoners of war.” Rafe glanced at Mel in her cocoon of blankets on the deck. “’Twill kill my lass.”

“They’ll kill you if you appear on deck,” Jordy said. “Could we perhaps shoot off the lock?”

The door had escaped damage in the broadside, but the bulkhead beside it bore a jagged hole that surely led into the adjoining cabin, the one Rafe had been using.

“I don’t think we can shoot off the lock without getting shot ourselves.” Rafe fitted a key into the lock securing the grill over the weapons. “But a shot or two at the panels may distract them into thinking we intend to use the door.”

Eyes fixed on the hole in the bulkhead, Phoebe pointed out, “If the ball does go through and hits a vital organ, it could kill whoever is on the other side.”

“Aye, that it could.” The lock snapped off the protective grillwork, and Rafe stroked one hand along the barrel of a pistol. “’Tis the risk they’ve taken on, thinking locking us in here is enough to stop us.”

“You’d murder your own men?” Phoebe thought she might be sick then and there.

“He gets what he deserves.” Rafe removed the pistols and moved on to the sword. “Derrick, a dagger or cutlass?”

“Both, sir.”

“I’ll take one of the rapiers.” Jordy joined Rafe at the weapons array. “And a dagger. I like those best in hand-to-hand combat.”

The two vessels exchanged more gunfire. Phoebe flinched with each shuddering boom, gagged on the stench of gunpowder blowing through the broken windows.

“We’re all going to die,” Belinda sobbed. “My baby. They’re going to kill my baby.”

“Maybe you can reason with them,” Phoebe suggested. “They might be frightened enough now.”

“Aye, of course a female would suggest talking.” Rafe turned on her. “The time for talking is passed. I tried the talk in Bermuda and this is what’s happened. Jordy, open the stern windows so I don’t cut myself on the glass. Derrick, you can lift me?”

“Yessir, I can.” Derrick’s dark face tensed. “But, sir, they’ll kill you the instant you appear on deck. You know they will.”

“Only if whoever wants me dead is on the quarterdeck.” Rafe gestured to the destroyed windows and ruined chair and bulkhead. “Nine years at this, and never once did I find myself aboard a vessel that got itself raked.”

He stalked over fragments of glass and wood and a broken crate of preserves with red jelly oozing between the slats like blood. He poured black powder into the priming pan as he moved, a practiced action to perform such a delicate operation while walking. “And the two of you will come up right after me. Ready to go?” He pressed the barrel of a pistol to the door beside the lock. “One shot and—”

“Wait.” Phoebe bounded across the cabin and grasped his arm. “You can’t go up there. Whoever wants you dead probably is on the quarterdeck. He’s likely one of the leaders of the mutiny.”

Rafe smiled, but his eyes were cold. “Then he’d better be faster than I am.” He cocked the pistol.

Phoebe grabbed his wrist with both hands. “Rafe, wait. You don’t need to risk your life by going up.”

Another roar sounded from the French vessel, and the
Davina
shuddered.

“I risk everyone’s life by not going up.” He tucked the pistol under his arm, gripped her wrist with his other hand, and tried pulling her hands away with a firm but gentle tug. “Now let go.”

“No, there’s another way.”

“Indeed.” He curled his upper lip. “I suppose you know a great deal about armed combat between two vessels?”

“No, but—” She licked her dry lips. “I—I’ll go out through that hole in the bulkhead and distract the guards here. If I can get the door unlocked, you can come out with Derrick and Jordy.”

“If you can get the door unlocked.” His tone held doubt, but he released her wrist and his face relaxed. “’Tis a big risk on your part.”

“And I need my midwife soon,” Belinda wailed. “Don’t get yourself killed.”

“They’re not going to harm me.” Phoebe spoke with more confidence than she felt.

“The French will not hesitate,” Jordy muttered.

“I’ll have to be on deck for that.”

Where, of course, she fully intended to go. She was a healer, capable of tending wounds or offering a moment of comfort for anyone whose wounds were beyond repair.

“Give me a chance.” She lifted one hand to Rafe’s cheek. “It’s the best chance to keep you alive.”

His eyes burned into hers like silver stars, then he gave one brusque nod. “You have twa minutes.”

Too little time. Yet another booming crash of broadsides from both vessels sent her flying across the cabin and into the ragged hole blown into the bulkhead. Belinda began to weep behind her, and someone murmured soothing words. A soft, gentle voice too high in pitch to belong to any of the men—Mel.

Her heart and hands steady, Phoebe pushed herself through the opening. Her gown tore. Her hair snagged and tumbled from its pins. Near darkness met her, darkness filled with the scents of damp leather and ginger, bergamot and salt spray. Rafe’s scents—heady, disarming, motivating her to climb over a sea chest and reach for the door handle.

She turned it with as little noise as possible, not that anyone would notice with shouts and guns blasting above, and the ominous creak of timbers below. For a heartbeat, the door stuck. If this one was locked too—

She yanked it hard. The door flew open, staggering her back. She gasped, and the guard in the companionway swung around and aimed a pistol at her chest.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“That raking shot blew a hole in the bulkhead.” She groped for the man’s name. “Pearson, I crawled through so I can go help the wounded.”

“I can’t let you.” The pistol didn’t waver. “Orders.”

“From whom?” She smiled and took a step over the coaming, a step closer to the pistol, certain she would cast up her accounts onto the man’s bare feet at any moment. “He couldn’t have meant me. I don’t know anything about weapons. I just know about wounds.” She sidled around so her back nearly rested on the door of the great cabin. “You have wounded companions up there. I hear them calling for help.”

Pitiful, whimpering cries that made her eyes tear and her throat close.

“Please.” She held out her hands, palms up. “I might be able to save them.”

Pearson’s glance flicked from her hands to her face to the open cabin door. “Robbie’s beyond help. That raking shot.”

Phoebe sucked in her breath. She remembered the lad with silvery blond hair and a ready smile.

“I might have saved him.”

“No, ma’am, a six-pound shot took his head off—”

Phoebe doubled over, retching.

Pearson shouted and leaped back. Phoebe followed, still bent over, and rammed her head into his middle. He collided with the ladder and folded, his gun clattering to the deck. Phoebe snatched it up and clipped him behind the ear with the barrel. He slumped sideways, and she spun to twist the key in the lock of the great cabin door.

The door flew open and the three men charged out. Rafe took a moment to lift her aside, and Derrick dumped the unconscious sailor into one of the cabins. Then they were gone up the companionway ladder, Rafe bellowing orders and Derrick and Jordy guarding his back.

Head and stomach reeling, Phoebe began to follow, then turned back to find the medical supplies in the cabin. “Stay on the deck,” she told Belinda.

They would be safer belowdecks, but no safe way to get them there now.

“And cut some cloth into bandages,” Phoebe added.

“But I need my cloth for—”

“Your baby can have a few less diapers to save a man’s life.” Phoebe snatched up the box of medical supplies and slammed the door behind her. For good measure, she locked it and pocketed the key. Then she raced up the companionway into a scene from a nightmare.

A pall of gray smoke lay over men black with gunpowder, crimson with blood. Wet sand marred the normal whiteness of the deck planks, absorbing water from the sponges for cleaning the guns and the life fluid of the wounded, the dying, the dead.

Telling who was whom seemed impossible in the swirling fog of smoke. Bodies lay sprawled between the guns, fetched up against the rails, and beneath an overturned cannon. Red hair shone in a flash of sunlight slicing through the cloud. Phoebe dropped to her knees beside the man, her heart and bile in her throat, her eyes stinging. He couldn’t still be alive, not with the lower half of his body crushed.

But he was. When she touched his hand, his eyelids flickered. His lips twisted into a grimace of a smile, then moved in words. She leaned down and nearly touched her ear to his mouth so she could hear the utterance in a lull between crashing guns. “What I . . . deserve . . . for—for mutiny. Forgive . . .”

“God forgives you. Just ask Him.” She touched his face, the side of his neck, not sure whether or not he heard her or asked for redemption.

Tommy Jones had died.

“Stupid men and their wars,” she shouted.

No one reacted. The shriek of cannonballs overhead drowned out even thought.

In the seemingly silent aftermath, the groans and wails of the wounded rose like tormented souls from the underworld. Keeping her head below the level of the gunwale in the hope a shot wouldn’t separate her brainbox from her body, Phoebe began to crawl from man to man. She knew each of them, if not by name, at least by sight. She’d lived on the same vessel with them for a month. Even if she hadn’t known them, she would have done what she could to help. She brought life into the world, and when necessary, she did what she could to keep it there.