The Road to Ruin

by Bronwyn Stuart

  Emptiness clung to her very being and she couldn’t shake herself free of it. Why did no one want her?

  *

  James stopped only to ask the direction to The Aurora and how long it would take to get there. It was another twenty-five minutes before he got the details from the captain, who was unwilling to cooperate until James vowed not to do Daniella any harm when he found her. He had to swallow what was left of his dignity and explain his nightmares to account for her injuries. Explain that Daniella could look after herself and that it was she who had given him his two blackened eyes. It was no small feat. He still wasn’t sure the captain or even his own mother believed him about any of it but they consented and gave him the information he needed.

  Another twenty minutes passed while horses were haggled over and saddled.

  She already had over an hour’s head start. How long did it take to ready a ship for sail, providing the storm damage had been repaired? Surely she would also need time to convince her father’s crew to leave without their captain?

  Germaine and his mother agreed to stay at the inn and give James the chance to speak with Daniella alone. He’d had to grovel for that, on his knees. Thank God he had little pride left.

  Had he not shown her in his actions how much she meant to him? He’d married her damn it and still she ran. Perhaps her ship and her independence really did mean more than anything else in the entire world and it wasn’t an act? Why couldn’t she just bloody well see what he could offer her?

  James swore a blue streak as he mounted, Hobson on a horse behind. When he found her, he was going to tie her to a chair and make her listen. Make her see he would do anything for her if only she would stay at his side. Surely she would listen then…

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Time seemed to stretch itself out until minutes felt like hours before her beautiful ship came into view. Docked in an inlet big enough for two ships if neither one needed to turn around, in water calm and almost clear.

  It wasn’t her father’s usual place to dock but then Darius had mentioned the ship sustained some damage in the recent storms. She found the humility to be grateful for the pirate’s intervention: without it they’d be headed for the wrong port and James have thought her the worst kind of trickster.

  She hoped her father had already completed the repairs. Once she was on board, they could weigh anchor and leave this wretched land behind.

  Her father would forgive her. He had to. After this, she had no place left to go.

  As they neared the ship, Daniella slowed her horse to a walk. Shock took hold and devastation ate her soul in one mighty gulp.

  She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. A nightmare? Yes. But was it real?

  Of the three towering masts, only one stood. There was no evidence the other two had ever been there. Even from a distance she could tell half the railing was missing. No men worked her deck. No shouts or orders reached her ears over the horse’s hooves thudding on the earth.

  The majestic ship she’d spent her life on was as broken and as silent as a dead man.

  “That’s what you’ve been fighting for?” Patrick asked. His tone didn’t mock or condemn. She wondered if he was as stunned as she was.

  Daniella only nodded. She didn’t have the words to explain to him how beautiful The Aurora had been. How other captains coveted her and a king had once tried to take her.

  Readying herself for more heart-wrenching pain and even more damage, she kicked her heels to the mare’s sides and took off towards the wreck. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad as it looked? Perhaps the masts had been dismantled to allow for the repairs?

  But it was worse. So much worse.

  She wasted no time sprinting up the plank but the side she’d seen from a distance was far better than the other. Darius hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said the captain had limped her there. She wasn’t seaworthy at all. She was barely liveable.

  “Is it possible Amelia isn’t here?” Patrick asked, completely oblivious to her turmoil.

  “It’s possible there isn’t anyone here,” she replied. But her father would never leave the vessel unmanned. Not even in her current state. The Aurora meant more than that to him. It was their home. Their way of life.

  One step towards the stern and a barely muffled scream split the silence. It was long and loud and the pain it carried made Daniella wince and duck. Both she and Patrick drew their daggers at the same time. Daniella would have given almost anything to have a sword in her hand instead of the short unfamiliar blade.

  “Wait,” she told Patrick as he looked for the stairs to go below. “I know this ship better than anybody. I’ll go first.”

  Patrick shook his head and started tiptoeing across the deck. “Not likely, lass,” he whispered to her without a backwards glance.

  He was going to get himself killed.

  Another scream, this time lower in volume but not lacking in intensity. Daniella followed Patrick down the short narrow stairs into a darkened corridor. She waited for him to keep going but he seemed stuck fast.

  “What are you waiting for?” she hissed.

  “I can’t see a goddamned thing,” he hissed back, his frustration palpable.

  Daniella pushed past him. “Follow me.” The pitch black didn’t bother her at all. The next scream did.

  “Amelia?” Patrick bellowed down the passageway.

  “Thank you very much,” Daniella said with a shake of her head. They may as well have announced their arrival with a brass band.

  As men usually did, Patrick ignored her warning, her words, her, and pushed ahead into the dark.

  Daniella went straight for the captain’s cabin. If the women were guests aboard the ship, it would make sense for them to share the largest space. Dagger at the ready, she pushed the door open and then sprang back into the shadow. Not a man seemed to notice her presence. Hurt and anger and pride kicked each other trying to get to the surface. Was she now invisible as well?

  Finally one sailor turned his head but then turned back. He then seemed to come to his senses. “Dani?” he asked, breaking away from the group hovering about the bed.

  “What the hell is going on, Hoste?” Why did seven of her father’s men cram their bulks into the small space leaving the decks unmanned? Leaving her ship completely defenceless?

  Another scream and Daniella fought her way to the bed as the men stepped back almost as one.

  Amelia. The young woman writhed on the bed, her dark honey hair plastered to her forehead with beads of sweat as she forced out one breath after another and then another. Tears slid down her face and onto the pillow as she cried out, her arms around her belly, her knees drawn in protectively.

  Amelia’s eyes, when she managed to focus them on the newcomers, held shame and hopelessness and a fear so great Daniella also took a step away.

  “Help me,” Amelia begged on a broken sob. “Make it stop.”

  As though shot from a cannonball, Patrick exploded into the room, a curse on his tongue and a tension in his stance. When he saw Amelia, nothing else registered.

  She shrank away as he approached the bed, the fear turning wild in her eyes as she appealed to the other men in the room for assistance. Shuffling back on the bed as far as she could until her body was flush with the wall, she once again covered her mountainous stomach with her hands. “Get out,” she said to him, the father of her child.

  “Amelia, you cannot mean that,” he protested as he fell to his knees on the timbers. He reached for her; she tried to back away again.

  “Get him out of here,” she cried as pain once again ripped through her and she doubled over with another scream.

  Daniella gazed around at her family, her father’s sailors, the men she’d known all her life. Not a one made a move. They all looked to her for orders as though she had never left.

  “Hoste, Lion and Woodhead, fetch linens, hot water and brandy. The rest of you get out. You’ll not want to see what happens next.” She’d watched the deliver
y of a baby just the once. She’d wanted to look away, to leave the room, but her father wouldn’t allow it. He’d wanted to her to assist, to hold the poor girl’s hand as she wailed into the night. Daniella had thought he kept her there on purpose, as a warning, such was the torment it had imprinted on her soul. Amelia’s screams bought it all back in an instant. They had to do something. The baby was coming whether she wanted to be there or not.

  “How long ago did the pains start?” she asked as the room slowly cleared. She needed to know how long the woman had been fighting her body and her babe.

  Before Amelia could answer, Farrar, her father’s bosun, stopped in the doorway and indicated Patrick. “He staying or going?”

  “He’s staying,” Daniella said forcefully. “He can see where his actions have led.”

  Jenson, the ship’s cook, also stayed. “I’ve been caring for the girl so far. I can help,” he offered, his serious gaze switching back and forth from Daniella to Amelia. “She’ll have a rough time of it.”

  Patrick stood and turned on the spot, his arms out as if to ward them all off. “You’ll not touch her, none of you. I’m taking her off this ship right now. It’s no place to birth a child.”

  Jenson leaned back against the wall with all the nonchalance of a man who knew the outcome of the argument already. “I have six more men outside that door who would beg to differ.”

  Exactly what she did not need in that moment was a pissing contest. “Stand down. Amelia is not going anywhere.”

  “You told me you would give her to me,” Patrick accused.

  “I told you I would ask her what she wanted. Look at her, Patrick. Do you think you could move her? I’d wager she won’t even let you touch her.”

  “I’ll take that wager,” Amelia muttered from the bed. When three sets of eyes were on her, her spine straightened and a show of defiance lit her features. “I asked him—” she indicated Patrick with a point of her trembling finger “—for help once and he denied me then.”

  “I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since. Why do you think I’m here?”

  Amelia tried to sit up, tried to collect some of her forgotten dignity, but another pain gripped her and she screamed again. Patrick ignored everyone and took her in his arms. She held on to him as though he was the anchor and around them raged a hurricane. Burying her face in his dirty shirt, Amelia sobbed and begged him to take the pain away.

  Jenson moved to the foot of the bed and began to lift her skirts.

  Patrick pulled his dagger and pushed the man away with one hand while he tried to hold on to Amelia with the other. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “We need to know if the baby is coming,” Jenson told him, not budging an inch.

  Daniella moved forwards then too and placed her hand on Patrick’s outstretched arm. “We need to know how long she has laboured. The baby could be in trouble. Amelia is tiring quickly.” Any fool could see it.

  “They are right,” Amelia said with a groan, rolling to her back and letting her knees fall apart. “He is coming. Just get him out, please.”

  Jenson flicked her skirts up with no more preamble, with no more argument. He removed her drawers and Daniella had to just about hold Patrick back. She wondered if he even knew exactly how babies were brought into the world.

  “Be still,” she told him as she also bent to look. Already she could see a small amount of white-blond hair atop a barely crowning head.

  “He is nearly here,” Jenson told them all as he pushed his sleeves up to his elbows.

  Hoste slipped into the room with steaming water and clean linens and then left again. Jenson washed his hands and then bade Daniella to do the same.

  Her hands shook. This was not supposed to happen. Where the bloody hell was the brandy?

  “I’m so sorry,” she told the other woman as she readied the linens. “You should have been at your home dealing with this, with a doctor, with your brother and your mother around you. You should never have ended up here.”

  Amelia shook her head, her hair splayed around her. She opened her mouth to speak but Patrick cut her off. “If anyone is to take the blame for this mess, ’tis me. I should have listened to you when you came to me. I was a coward and a cad and a dunderhead. I should have married you right then in the church down the road from the club. We would right now be with my mother and my sisters and a midwife. Our child would not be born out of wedlock. He would know he was loved from the first instant.”

  Amelia’s cinnamon eyes, eyes the same as James’s in every way, opened wide. She panted, “He has been loved from the first instant. By me.”

  “He is our son, Amelia. I made a mistake, the biggest of my life. I was never worthy of your heart then. I should never have taken advantage of you but I was so taken with your beauty and your kindness and your passion for everything in life. And when you came to me, I was confused and drunk and I made the wrong choice. Not days later I realized and went to find you but you had gone and I thought your brother had found out and done away with you.”

  “Done away with her?” Daniella asked. “You honestly thought he’d killed her?”

  Patrick nodded. “I did at first. The Butcher and all that. It’s why I followed him when he took you.”

  Daniella gasped. “It was you in the garden that night watching the house?”

  Amelia spoke up then. “What? What? My brother…would never…harm me.”

  He turned back to her. “Then why did you disappear so suddenly? Why did you not ask him for help?”

  Yet another pain gripped her and this time instead of screaming, her eyes rolled back and a long low moan rent the air. Her back arched off the bed and her fingers curled to fists. “Please make it stop,” she begged again when her stiffened body softened slightly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Tell James I’m sorry.”

  Daniella took Amelia’s hand in hers and said, “You can tell him yourself when you introduce him to your baby.”

  “He’ll…never forgive…” she managed.

  “Then you don’t know him very well. He kidnapped me to have you back.”

  “You’re…his wife…”

  “We were married this morning. On board a ship in the middle of the ocean. Now you breathe. Right down as far as you can.”

  A thought came to her as the girl obeyed. “Amelia, Patrick will marry you right here, aboard this ship. No disgrace. No shame. Only love.”

  “He doesn’t…love me. Or the…baby.”

  Patrick leaped to his feet and roared, “The hell I don’t!”

  Amelia jumped, her eyelids snapping open as she stared at him. “Just…honour.”

  Patrick held her head up so she could see him. “I do love you. I don’t go about bedding random virgins, Amelia—I made a mistake. You can spend the rest of our lives taking it out of my hide but please, for the love of God, marry me, be my wife, let our child have my name and my lands and my people for his family. You’ll be treasured as a Laird’s lady and our son will have a title and a castle and pride.”

  “You…betrayed me. Can’t…forget.”

  “You don’t have to forget, my love, you only have to say you’ll be mine.”

  Another contraction, so much more severe than any of the others Daniella had witnessed, took hold of Amelia then. Patrick held her down while Jenson barked orders. Daniella did everything she was told to and then took Amelia’s hand in hers. “Take courage. Give your babe a name. Don’t curse him to—to the fringes of life.”

  She’d never allowed herself to think like that at all. Perhaps that was why she yearned for her shipboard family. None of them belonged anywhere else.

  “Please, my love, please say the words before it’s too late,” Patrick implored Amelia.

  The blank look in her light eyes was frightening but then clarity appeared momentarily and she nodded. “I’ll be your wife.”

  “Thank the Lord,” Patrick sighed.

  “Excellent, man and wife, et cetera, et cetera,” Jenson said a
s he readied linens and took away soiled ones stained with the brightest of blood, then gathered his patient up so she was relatively upright, though her head lolled. “Amelia, sweeting, you’re going to have to push as soon as you feel the next big pain. Do you understand? You’re going to have to push as hard as you can.”

  Daniella continued to stare at the blood: there was so much. Surely something was wrong. She shook herself and moved closer to help support the labouring girl.

  “I can’t do it,” Amelia cried, her head thrashing on Jenson’s shoulder. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Jenson’s voice was soothing. “Just listen to your body. The baby grows impatient and wants to meet you. Just push. Now! Hold your breath and push!”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  James had never been so terrified in all his life. The blood-curdling scream from The Aurora wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before, but now it was coming from someone he loved.

  He reined in and slid from the too-small saddle in one unsteady movement. He and Hobson had had to separate just in case they were going in the wrong direction.

  So much time had passed. Anything could have happened.

  He didn’t slow down as he ran on to the ship via the wobbly plank. But then he had to stop. He didn’t know his way around this ship. He didn’t know where Daniella was or who she was with. He had to pause; he had to think.

  “’Ere, ’oo the fuck are you?” a voice rang out from behind him.

  James turned and faced a wiry little man. His fingers flexed and curled. “Where is Daniella?”

  “She’s below.”

  Spying a door, James pushed the man out of the way and took off at a run just as another scream reached him. He was going to kill the man who dared touch her. He would burn the boat to the waterline, as he’d wanted to do all along.

  Before he got too far along the below-decks corridor, he came to a wall of burly sailors. None looked particularly vicious or scary but all were definitely guarding the door at their backs. The room from which the awful sounds were coming.