Heart's Safe Passage

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  In the morning, with no word from the brig and sunlight streaming through her window, she asked the inn maid for a few items to make her morning comfort complete. The girl looked dubious, but she returned in a quarter hour with hot chocolate, bread, jam, and ink, pen, and paper.

  Hot chocolate and food at her elbow, Phoebe dipped the pen in the ink and began to write:

  Dear Tabitha and Dominick . . .

  “Don’t come no nearer.” A youth named Tommy Jones leaned over the gunwale as the cutter bumped against the side of the brig. “No one’s welcome aboard.”

  “I am your captain,” Rafe stated.

  “No more you ain’t.” Darkness hid the lad’s expression, but the sneer rang through his tone. “We got a captain who’ll let us fight.”

  “Or get you killed.” Rafe made himself smile. “But if you want to be foolish enough to trust a man who got cashiered from the Navy for incompetence in sailing orders, at least allow me to collect the women.”

  “Can’t. Hostages.”

  Rafe bit his tongue. He must not allow any of them to guess the rage boiling inside him. Rage and anxiety simmering like a vat of acid. He kept his smile in place, though it pained his face. “’Tis not wise, that notion, Jones. You ken the British Navy does not take kindly to mutiny.”

  “We all hold a share in this brig.” Though the words spoke of defiance, Jones glanced toward the frigate bobbing a hundred yards away.

  And Derrick struck. With a flash of a powerful arm, he sent a coil of rope sailing upward. It caught Jones in the face. He cried out and staggered backward. Before he recovered, Rafe grabbed the chains and clambered aboard. Jones surged forward and fired his pistol. It missed. With a lunge, Rafe grabbed the lad’s wrist and twisted. The pistol sailed empty across the deck. Rafe kept twisting until Jones’s hand rested between his shoulder blades and he was whimpering.

  “Quiet,” Rafe commanded. “I am not hurting you.”

  “You are,” Jones whined.

  “What is afoot here?” Watt called out as a crowd of men bearing lanterns swarmed along the main deck. “Jones, I told you—ah, Captain Rafe, have you come to join Mrs. Chapman and your daughter as our hostages?”

  “Nay, I have come to take my brig back.” Compelling Jones to the deck before him, Rafe glanced from face to face, meeting and holding their gazes, marking the names of those who wouldn’t meet his eyes. He ended with Watt. “Do not do it. I could rightfully have you hanged for this.”

  Watt snorted. “Not if we are at sea.”

  “With Jordy and Derrick and Mrs. Lee left on Bermuda?”

  “Mrs. Lee will do naught for you,” Watt pointed out. “Indeed, she will like as not cheer as we sail away.”

  “Not with her patient aboard.” Rafe released Tommy Jones and took a step toward Watt.

  The older man drew his pistol from his belt. His gray eyes gleamed like honed steel in the flickering light. “Do not force me to shoot you, lad.”

  Rafe nodded. “I will not.” He backed up and leaned his hips against the rail. “Why risk it? I said you could have the brig when we are finished with Brock.”

  “If Brock does not finish us,” Watt grumbled. “You ken as well as I his position is protecting him.”

  “I ken he does not want me alive. Did he persuade you to this action, my old . . . friend?”

  Watt’s body jerked as though he’d been struck.

  Rafe pressed on. “So quickly after I did you such a good turn—when was it, Watt? Fourteen years ago? Thirteen? When the Navy said—”

  With a yell, Watt flung himself at Rafe, one hand fisted, the other brandishing the pistol like a club. Rafe leaped aside, and Watt hit the rail with an “ooph” of pain. His pistol dropped into the harbor with a gentle splash.

  And Derrick yanked Watt into the cutter.

  “Anyone wish to follow?” Rafe asked the motionless crew. “Or would you like to reissue your pledge to me?”

  No one spoke for a full minute and then some. Rafe didn’t know most of them well. Privateer crews came and went. Men grew weary of being at sea, or made enough money to give up the danger. The Royal Navy pressed some of them aboard, and others succumbed to battle or disease. More replaced them, ready to risk their lives for potential wealth. So Rafe stopped trying to know them all well. One couldn’t care about the loss of men he knew little more about than their names and their ability to sail and fire a gun. Consequently, the men didn’t know him either, except by reputation for fairness, justice rather than mercy, his ability to win.

  The silence on deck stretched on. In the cutter, Watt growled as Derrick tied his hands behind his back. Below them, Fiona barked, and neither Mrs. Chapman nor Mel made her quiet down.

  “So why would you be going back on your word?” Rafe broke the silence. “Are none of you men of honor?”

  “We want more money,” a topman named Riggs said.

  Another man stepped forward, as rough-hewn as Riggs was slight. “We’re jaded. There’s nothin’ to do, and the women are distracting.”

  Rafe’s eyebrow twitched upward at the non sequitur. “We’ve seen only one potential prize since we left Virginia. That wouldn’t have taken more than an hour or two to take, so you wouldn’t have much more to do. That’s life aboard any vessel.”

  “But we’d be richer for it,” Riggs persisted.

  “Or dead.” Rafe smiled.

  “We’d have had the cargo to keep us occupied,” someone called from the back of the clustered men.

  “True.” Rafe nodded. “Would you like to go down to the hold and occupy yourself with the current cargo?”

  Someone made a remark about the ladies.

  Rafe clenched his fists. Before he thought what to say, a few of the crew rebuked him.

  “You don’t talk that way about ladies.”

  “Thank you, Farrell.” Rafe nodded to the man. “I’m glad some of you have decency left. Now, about more money.” Rafe set his jaw and fixed his gaze on Riggs. “I’m presuming you all are open to negotiations?”

  “Maybe.” Riggs took a step forward, hands on his hips, narrow chest and pointed chin thrust out. “Depends.”

  “It always does.” Rafe returned to his nonchalant stance and said nothing.

  The men began to shift from foot to foot. Their gazes strayed past him to the sight of St. George’s. With dawn breaking over the eastern horizon, cries of vendors began to drift across the water, and bung boats paddled into the harbor to surround the vessels, bringing goods to sailors left aboard.

  Several boats bumped against the hull of the Davina. Rafe nodded to Derrick in the cutter. He climbed aboard, quick and agile despite his size, and stationed himself behind one of the guns amidships. From his pocket, he took a length of slow match, and from beneath his loose shirt, a bag of grapeshot.

  “What the—stop them!” Riggs shouted and charged toward Derrick. “Men, we gotta stop him.”

  “Why?” Rafe yawned. “The gun can’t turn on you.”

  Riggs halted, and two men bumped into him in their rush. He seemed not to notice. “Maybe not, but he’s up to no good.”

  “Just inspecting the gun.” Rafe strode to the taffrail and glanced down at two bung boats pulling away. “Be off with you. My men are occupied at present.”

  One of the passengers waved to him.

  He waved back, then faced the men again. “Do you want to stop Derrick from doing work you all should be helping with, or continue discussing taking over my brig?”

  “We don’t need to discuss nothin’.” Riggs pushed through the other men, who stepped aside as though he were royalty, and stalked up to Rafe. “We are takin’ over now.”

  “Are you certain that’s what you’re wanting to do? You ken I left Jordy ashore, and Watt is . . . indisposed.” Four of Riggs’s sycophants, Tommy Jones amongst them, slipped down the deck, heading for Derrick, and Rafe tensed, ready for action if necessary. “If you mutiny, Jordy will notify those frigates yonder, and they’ll be after you b
efore the cat can lick her ear.”

  Not that the Davina had a cat, only one frantically yapping dog.

  Riggs laughed. “They won’t do nothin’ to us. We got your daughter and Mrs. Chapman as hostages.”

  “Do you now?” Rafe laughed and turned so he could wave to two of the boats rowing toward shore.

  Mel waved back from one of them, having neatly slipped out of one of the stern windows and into the craft sent to fetch her and Mrs. Chapman.

  Riggs and several others paled. By rights, Rafe could have all of them hanged.

  “Just this once,” he said in a voice barely loud enough to reach the quarterdeck, “I will be merciful. Now remember what you agreed to when you signed on, and get back to your duties—except for you, Tommy Jones and Sam Riggs. Do not you move.”

  11

  Phoebe understood how Rafe had avoided her company during the five days they spent on Bermuda. She couldn’t figure out how he managed it on a vessel the size of the Davina, but he did. She spent every minute she could manage on deck, where fresh air soothed her queasiness. For him to walk past her without even nodding made his avoidance obvious to everyone aboard. Why was more complex. She suspected she’d crossed a line of intimacy during their nighttime conversation over coffee. She couldn’t explain that to anyone, though.

  “What did you do to offend him?” Belinda asked after a week of Rafe striding past without the merest glance in their direction.

  They perched on chairs beneath a canvas awning against the weather rail, enjoying breezes chilled by winter’s approach. Belinda stitched miniscule garments while Phoebe read to her from a copy of Evangeline.

  She closed the volume she found tedious but Belinda loved, and held her place with her finger as she glared at her sister-in-law. “Why do you think I did something to offend him?”

  “He hasn’t spoken to you since we were on Bermuda.” Belinda paused to rethread her needle. “And there was all that nonsense about the men trying to mutiny.”

  “It wasn’t nonsense.” Phoebe glanced across the main deck.

  Sam Riggs and Tommy Jones, apparently the ringleaders of the mutineers, knelt on the deck with a pot of reeking tar and a brush. They appeared to be engaged in the onerous task of caulking the seams of the deck. The previous day, they’d cleaned the slime from the scuppers. Before that, they’d scrubbed the decks from prow to stern. Apparently Rafe’s idea of punishment was not flogging, hanging, or confinement, but the duties necessary and despised by sailors. As he worked, a muscle on the side of Sam Riggs’s jaw bulged further, and his mouth thinned over his pointed chin. Occasionally he lifted his head, shook back his shaggy brown hair, and glared at Rafe, usually his back. Tommy Jones, on the other hand, kept his head down, the end of his queue often dragging in tar or bilge water.

  “That one bears watching,” Phoebe murmured.

  “Which one? Oh, him? Riggs?” Belinda moistened her lips. “He was going to use us for hostages. I think he should be in prison. I think they all should be, including Watt.”

  “I don’t think I’d have kept them aboard either.”

  But Rafe would have his reasons, perhaps keeping friends close and enemies closer. Watt apparently had been part of Rafe’s life like Jordy, except not as loyal, even antagonistic. He maintained his old duties of helmsman and bosun when necessary, but he said nothing to anyone, and his dark gray eyes held a steely edge that sliced through Phoebe whenever she accidentally crossed their path of sight.

  As she did too often, Phoebe allowed her gaze to stray to the brig’s quarterdeck in the hopes that the captain would cross her line of sight. He stood at the binnacle, half turned toward Jordy at the wheel, Mel beside him and Fiona cavorting around their feet. Sunlight gleamed in his garnet hair, and the breeze flirted the ends of the strands against his cheeks. Phoebe’s fingers itched to brush it back, smooth it to its normal satin texture, touch his face.

  She snapped open the book and stared at the page without seeing the printed words. Instead, she saw other words, words written with a broken quill pen and poor quality ink. Words written in her hand and betraying Rafe’s trust.

  For his own good, of course. Of course it was. He must not continue on his mission. It would destroy him in spirit, if not in body too.

  But they were words, words and actions that kept her from going to him and attempting to break down the barrier he had erected since the night she kept talking to him so he wouldn’t do something foolish. She’d sacrificed her own reputation for the sake of his soul. Then she’d unleashed potential wrath upon him in the name of stopping him from becoming a man he himself could never respect—a cold-blooded killer.

  Quite simply, guilt kept them apart. Phoebe’s guilt stemmed from the letter she’d sent to Dominick Cherrett. And Rafe’s? Guilt over bringing her along against her will. Kissing her. Or perhaps simply remorse over telling her too much about his past. Whatever his reason, an invisible wall lay between them no matter where either of them moved about the brig.

  Her gaze strayed to the quarterdeck again. He and Mel faced Phoebe and Belinda now, faced the sun to take the noon bearings, identical sextants in their hands. Light flashed off the glass of the instruments, dazzled Phoebe’s eyes.

  Her heart squeezed, and she looked away.

  “You’re not reading,” Belinda said.

  “No, I’m not.” Phoebe tried making sense of the words again, tried to transfer them from her eyes to her mouth so Belinda could continue to sew baby garments.

  And Phoebe wondered if Dominick would get the letter. Would he or could he act upon it? That Rafe would never forgive her she did not doubt for a moment. If it spared his life, she didn’t care.

  At least she told herself she didn’t care.

  “Phoebe.” Belinda heaved a sigh of exasperation. “You stopped reading in the middle of the sentence.”

  Phoebe closed the book. “I’m sorry. I can’t read in this light.”

  The sextants had been returned to the drawer in the binnacle. Father and daughter bent over a slate, working out the calculations of longitude and latitude, no doubt. Their brows furrowed in identical manners of concentration. Fiona pawed at Mel’s leg.

  Phoebe rose. She needed to stop playing the coward and approach him, make him talk to her. She had thought they were developing a friendship, as much as a man and woman could be friends. At least a comfortable camaraderie. Approaching him should be easier with his daughter beside him. Surely he wouldn’t be rude to her in front of his daughter.

  “Where are you going?” Belinda asked.

  “Aft.” Phoebe set the book on her abandoned chair, ignored Belinda’s protest, and set her feet on a path toward the quarterdeck.

  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.”