Heart's Safe Passage (30 page)

“You’ve a sharp tongue on you, don’t you, lass?” He kicked open a cabin door—not the great cabin. “This one does not have the wreckage in it. You need a bath before you see Mrs. Chapman or Mel.”

“But I should look in on them.”

“Not looking like you’ve been mortally wounded. You are all over blood and smell like a charnel house.”

“Perfume to you?” She tossed up the last word as he set her on a bunk.

His breath hissed through his teeth.

She cringed and shrank against the bulkhead, her hands raised. “It was a jest. A poor one at that. Please don’t—”

“Shh.” He brushed a fingertip across her lips. “I’ve ne’er harmed a lady in my life.” He turned toward the door. “Not directly, anyhow.” Then he was gone, closing the door behind him with the softest of clicks.

Phoebe drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins. She shivered in the tiny cabin with its porthole no bigger than a man’s head and few furnishings. Throughout Mel’s coma, Phoebe and Belinda had taken turns sleeping in here. It had belonged to Mel. Her books resided on a shelf built into the bulkhead and held in place by a wooden bar.

Mel had come awake as the fighting began. Bloodstained or not, Phoebe needed to see her, make sure Belinda was all right. She must make herself move, not cower in fear of blows that would never come. She must . . . she must . . .

She flung herself off the bunk and grasped the door handle. Nothing happened. She tugged and pushed. The door remained in place. She beat her fists on it. No one responded.

Rafe had locked her in. He’d made her a prisoner in a space not much larger than a dressing room. No, smaller. A coffin.

“No. No!” She heard the rising hysteria in her voice and stuffed a corner of the quilt into her mouth.

Though her voice was silenced, her heart raced, her limbs twitched. Her mind raced over a hundred scenes of locked rooms, her pleas ignored.

Calm. Calm. Calm.
She cried the litany in her head.

The door popped open. Two sailors, who had obviously cleaned up a bit after the fighting, lugged in a bath too small for anything beyond standing in to pour water over oneself, and steaming water. It smelled of the sea and would leave her skin sticky, but she didn’t care. To scrub away the grime of the battle looked like a taste of heaven.

“Cook’s preparing some food, ma’am,” one of the men assured her.

“Thank you.” Phoebe didn’t have room to stand with the two men and the bath in the cabin. “Please don’t lock the door.”

“Captain’s orders, ma’am.” The spokesman departed, and the latch clicked from the outside.

Beyond breaking the door down with the oversized tin washbasin, Phoebe was stranded, confined. The porthole opened, but the air outside proved too cold. Still, the gulp of fresh sea air helped. She would bathe, maybe even contrive to wash her hair free of the smell of powder smoke, and manage Captain Rafe Docherty later.

As she sluiced warm water through her hair a few minutes later, she realized the brig had grown quiet enough for her to hear voices in the adjacent cabin, one light and feminine, the other male. Rafe talking with Belinda or Mel? For a moment, picturing him with his daughter, his joy at her waking up after the great risk he took with the trepanning, Phoebe felt her heart soften toward him. The coil of anger loosened.

Then hammering began close at hand, and voices outside were loud enough for her to hear the words. They were repairing the wrecked stern windows and the hole in the bulkhead, wreckage from the battle—a great risk he had taken with his child and unwilling passenger—and the anger gripped her again. It gripped her so hard she could scarcely breathe. She yanked on fresh clothes and began to pound her fists on the door.

More hammering began elsewhere on the brig. Shouts rose. Metal clanged. No one would hear her, not even next door, unless she shouted.

If she opened her mouth and began to shout, she feared she would never stop. Surely she had lost her reason. She’d seen too much death, too much destruction that day. In earlier days.

“Lord, I can’t go on like this.” She returned to the bunk, huddled against the bulkhead. “Lord, where is my inner peace? Where are You?”

Around her, a cacophony of bangs and thumps and shouts rose. The cabin remained silent, empty of so much as a hint of the presence of the Lord she’d felt even in the bad years of her marriage.

Shivering, she wrapped a quilt around herself and sought Bible verses she knew. She fell asleep reciting the fifty-first chapter of Psalms. “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, Thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of Thy righteousness.”

“I have no bloodguilt” were the first words out of her mouth upon waking. “My heart is pure.”

Gideon’s face flashed before her eyes in the darkened cabin. She shook her head to dislodge the image. Another one appeared, one she had scarcely known, too distorted with rage, with pain, with grief, for her to recall features. Her bloodguilt.

No, no, no, she had done nothing deliberately. She had not willingly gone into battle, into any fight, led anyone into danger. Rafe had spilled blood, not her.

But she knew the truth and must not deny it, there alone in the dark as she had been too many nights over the past four years of her widowhood—and before. The quiet of the brig pressed down around her, each creak and groan of wave-tossed timbers emphasized by the lack of other noises around them—no talk, no laughter.

Only a solitary patter of footfalls striding back and forth. Back and forth.

Phoebe leaped from the bunk and shoved against the door, ready to shout the ship awake if it was still locked. But someone had unlocked the door. It opened so abruptly she stumbled over the coaming and into the companionway. At the top of the ladder, crisp, damp, star-laden air beckoned. She started up, limping as she put her full weight on her ankle. Little pain. Just a wrench. She certainly didn’t need a physician to look at it.

She reached the quarterdeck. Light from the binnacle spilled onto the face of the helmsman. Expecting Jordy for an instant before she remembered his death, she started at the sight of another man, whose name eluded her. On the far side of the quarterdeck, Rafe had ceased pacing. He gripped the weather rail and gazed toward the horizon, his hair whipping around his face, his shoulders hunched beneath his heavy boat cloak as though he were cold.

A flash of tenderness plucked at Phoebe, a wish to take him in from the cold, serve him hot chocolate and bonbons—as though a hardened man like him would ever receive such gentle treatment. If he was cold, if he was in pain either physical or in his heart, he had brought it all upon himself.

But she went to him and touched his arm. “Why don’t you go below, where there’s less wind?”

“I do not dare leave my quarterdeck for more than a few minutes.” He half turned toward her. “The men are calm now, sated with the spoils of victory. But the last time I turned my back on them, they . . . my . . .” Suddenly he unclasped his cloak and flung an edge around her blanket-wrapped shoulders, drawing her close to his side. “I can’t get warm, Phoebe. I was beside the galley fire for a full turn of the hourglass. Aye, a full half of an hour, and I couldn’t get warm. ’Tis a chill deep in my bones.”

“Are you afraid?” She was quite warm beside him, maybe too warm. The temptation to lay her head against his shoulder and find her own peace in closeness ran as deep as the coil of anger now subdued but still present, twitching its tail. She remained upright and poised, as much as a lady could be poised surrounded by a man’s thick woolen cloak, his strong arm, his scent. Her heart raced, and she pressed her hands against his chest, against his short leather jerkin as a further barricade, and let words build a stronger wall. “Do you fear your own men after this happened?”

“Aye, a wee bit. We’re so close to England now, though, I have little doot they’ll stay in line. Especially with the ringleaders”—he cleared his throat—“dead.”

Now the chill crept up Phoebe’s spine, and her fingers curled around a button on the front of his coat. “Dead? All of them?”

“Aye, all of them.” He clipped out the response.

“Your uncle?”

His chest rose and fell. His warm breath fanned her face with the merest hint of a hitch in it. “They put him in with the French prisoners of war. They . . . took any decisions away from me.”

“The prisoners—the prisoners killed your uncle? Did you know they would do that? Did you order your men to put him there?” Her voice rose in pitch on each question. “Hadn’t you seen enough death and destruction for one day, for one lifetime that you willfully—”

He pressed his fingers to her lips. “Hush. Mel sleeps right below us.”

“I’m surprised you care.” Phoebe stepped out of the protective warmth of the cloak and planted one fist on her hip, the other on the rail. “This entire enterprise has risked your daughter’s life, first with her accident meant for you, and then the battle itself.”

“The battle was not my choice.”

“You didn’t try to stop it. You claim you love Mel, but you don’t show it.”

“Phoebe, please. You do not understand.”

“Oh, I understand. I understand that a little girl who adores you nearly died again today because of you. I understand—” He raised his hand again, as though intending to stifle her words, and she slapped it away. “I’ll have my say, Rafael Docherty.” She kept her voice low. “What I saw today is a man who has served you honorably and well, who has followed you through nine years of danger in the hope of protecting you until you come to your senses, and died today doing just that. Yet you stand here and worry about losing control of your ship again like a child who might have his favorite toy taken away, and talk about being cold inside. That’s what happens when you have no conscience, no soul.”

“Is it now?” He sounded calm, matter-of-fact, as though her words had rolled off him like raindrops over oiled cloth. “And you would ken this how?”

Phoebe drew herself upright, her chin a little elevated so she could look into his face, pale in the starlight. “I know this through my faith in God.”

“Is that so? Your faith in God protects you from regretting your actions?”

“I—” Too late, Phoebe saw the trap. If he knew, if he’d heard one word . . .

She took a step backward.

He captured her hand beneath his on the rail, holding her fast. “So you are telling me, you sanctimonious prig, that being a Christian means you feel naught of the remorse for mistakes you’ve made?”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“So you act with impunity?” Though quietly spoken, his words lashed her across the ears like a cat-o’-nine-tails. “No matter what you do?”

“I didn’t say that. I only meant—”

“That your faith in God keeps you warm despite sending your husband to his death and killing another woman’s husband down in Seabourne, Virginia?”

18

Rafe regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. The pain burning through his veins like poison gave him no excuse to lash out at Phoebe. And no words could take them back.

Silence hung between them like the layer of cold seeping beneath his cloak. Beneath his fingers, her hand felt as rigid as the weather rail, so stiff she scarcely seemed to breathe. But she didn’t run from him. At any moment, she would open her mouth and give him the tongue-lashing he deserved.

Encouraged, he brushed his thumb against the satin smoothness of her cheek. “I expect you’re wishing me in Davy Jones’s locker now?”

“What—where?” The merest hint of a quiver began at that single word and reflected in a shudder through her.

“The bottom of the sea.” He grimaced. “With the dead men.”

“Is that—is that where you put them?” Another quiver in her voice, another shiver through her person.

Rafe sighed. “Aye. According to tradition, we had the service at sundown and slipped them over the rail.”

“I would have liked to attend.” Her voice grew stronger, steadier. “You didn’t tell me, and I cared for Jordy too. But you had me locked in my cabin.”

“Aye, for your own good.”

“My own good? What good does it serve to treat me like some kind of prisoner, a criminal, when I’m not—” She broke off on a hiccupping sob. “But you think I am a criminal.”

“I do not ken the details to make that sort of judgment. But your locked door had naught to do with that. It had to do with the men after battle. They can be . . . irresponsible, especially if the drink is involved.”

“I thought you didn’t allow drink on your ship.” Her tone held the hint of a sneer, a challenge, but still that tendency toward shakiness.

“I do not. But the Frenchman was not so inclined, and a few got ahold of it before I could put a stop to them. I didn’t want you bothered, if you ken what I’m saying.”

“Yes, yes, I understand. I suppose I should thank you then. It’s just that being confined like that, in that tiny cabin . . .” She turned her face away. Her hair half tumbled from her topknot. It gleamed like spun silver in the starlight.

Rafe’s fingers flexed, aching to touch those gleaming strands. “Phoebe. Mrs. Lee. Whatever I’m to be calling you, we cannot ignore what I said about you.”

“Do you want me to talk about it?” She turned on him, her hands raised and fisted in front of her, her face ashen. “Do you want all the salacious details of violence and blood and how I really killed three people? The one life I saved—” She stopped as a sob more like a keening wail rose from her throat, and she twisted away from him.

He let her go. She couldn’t get far on a brig with only eighty feet from stem to stern. She could hide below, but he knew her well enough by now to know she wouldn’t.

His cloak secured around him against the brusque night wind, he paced to the binnacle, checked the compass heading, and turned the hourglass. “We’ll be in England again in less than a week if the wind stays in our favor like this, eh, Hamish?”

“Aye, sir.” The young man shifted his position behind the wheel from one foot to the other. “Is the lady a’right, sir?”

“Fighting distresses ladies.” Rafe gave the youth a tight smile. “They like us coming home as conquering heroes, but they do not wish to hear much of the details of how we gained our sil’er. Remember that, lad, and you’ll do fine with the lasses.”