Heart's Safe Passage

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  “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.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Rafe clapped him on the shoulder and strolled away as though nothing of the day overset him. In truth, he thought he might have enough of the poison of rage and pain in his veins to tear all eighty feet of the mainmast out with his bare hands.

  “You should have let him kill me, Jordy,” he murmured to the night sky. “You had a soul worth saving.”

  The burning in his blood reached his eyes. He pressed cold fingers to them, forcing back any demonstration of emotion. Weeping like a woman wouldn’t bring Jordy back, nor Watt, nor the others who had laid down their lives in the name of gaining quick wealth and in truth striving for his goal.

  But he could hold the grief inside no longer. It came, tears as scalding as a spring from the bowels of the earth, as salty as the sea that had at last received the penultimate member of his family. All he had left was Mel, and he’d come too close to killing her too. She deserved a better father than he had been to her—sweet, loving, courageous Melvina Docherty.

  To hide his weakness, he slipped behind the cutter and leaned over the rail, far enough for the icy salt spray to wash his face. He gripped the water-sanded wood and breathed deeply to get himself back under control, in command of his emotions and his future. He wasn’t dead. He must go on, make the deaths of value.

  He sensed Phoebe’s presence beside him before he caught a whiff of her jasmine scent still tainted with a hint of lavender. She said nothing. She didn’t touch him. She simply stood beside him, her fingers curled around the edge of the rail.

  “Am I to apologize to you, lass?” he asked at last.

  “For speaking truth?” She shoved a handful of windblown hair out of her face and held it at the nape of her neck as though her fingers were ribbons. “I don’t know how you found out. I thought only a few people knew. I hoped only a few people knew.”

  “’Twas gossip in the taverns and naught more. I had no business bringing it up as though I knew the whole.”

  “Gossip speaks truth this time—to an extent. I—” The Davina slid into the trough of a wave, and she released her hair to grip the rail again. Wild, shimmering locks cascaded over her face and shoulders.

  Rafe gathered it in his hands this time and held it off her face, his thumb and forefinger acting as a hairpin to keep her face clear, a pale oval in the shimmering lights of stars and phosphorescent waves. Words to express how beautiful he found her rose to his lips. He swallowed them back and chose the less pleasant but far more intimate. “You do not need to tell me, but I’d like to ken the whole of it.”

  “I’ve told only two people the whole of it. About my husband, that is. Too many others had to know about the other.”

  Rafe waited, touching only her hair and the nape of her neck. If he told her that hearing of her transgressions might help him forget his own, she might run off again, avoid him like the plague she seemed to think he was.

  She rubbed one hand over her face. “I wish there were someplace warmer and drier.”

  “The lady who wanted to stay on deck in a storm wants to go below on a clear night like this?”

  “I don’t like confinement. My husband—” She pursed her mouth. Her chin quivered.

  “Did he lock you in the rooms?”

  She nodded. “He said I flirted too much at parties, so he told me I couldn’t go to any more. I was seventeen and missed my friends, so I went anyway. After that, he locked me in my dressing room every night.”

  Rafe kept his opinion of such a man to himself. “So your sickness when you were first aboard wasn’t from the sea so much as the close quarters.”

  “I think that’s likely.”

  “I’m so sorry.” He propped one hip against the rail for balance and brushed the fingers of his free hand across her face. Finding moisture too warm to have come from a brief dose of sea spray, he brushed it away and kept his fingers curved around her cheek. “I had no ill intent in it, you ken.”

  “I know that now. But I was nearly angry enough that first night to use the knife on you.”

  “Perhaps you should have. The way the crew was feeling about me, they might have declared you a heroine and done whatever you liked, such as put you ashore.”

  “Jordy and Derrick wouldn’t have let me get away with it. And Watt . . . Rafe, I thought he cared about you.”

  “Aye, weel, so did I until we were locked in the great cabin. But I ne’er thought he was wanting to kill me.” His throat closed and he shook his head. “He was my blood kin, my mither’s much younger brother. He went into the Navy, but he left at age thirty. He lived with us in Edinburgh for a year, then joined a privateer crew.”

  “So that’s how you ended up here?”

  “Aye, he made the suggestion, and I was game for anything in my rage and grief.”

  “But why would he turn on you?”

  “Greed. He could claim to be captain in the event of my death and claim my shares. Who would gainsay him, when half a hundred men would attest that indeed he was the captain?”

  “I can’t understand that kind of greed, to kill one’s own nephew for nothing more than gold?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.” Or admit the rest. “What else did your husband do to you that prompted such a gentle lady to drive him to his death?”

  She let out an unladylike snort. “I’m scarcely gentle. And by choosing to be a midwife, I am not much of a lady now.”

  “You’ll al’ays be a lady, Phoebe Lee.”

  “Don’t flatter me, Rafe.” She stepped out of his reach, leaving his hands cold without her to touch. “As you not so subtly pointed out a bit ago, I’m not
much of a Christian either. I’m a fraud, a hypocrite. I preach about God’s love and forgiveness and accepting it. I talk about God’s peace and healing. And all the while I have so much anger in my heart against my husband and . . . that other man, I wanted to hurt you myself today. Now I can never convince you that your path is wrong and following Christ is right, the only way.” She began to weep in deep, harsh sobs. “I know that’s the truth, but I don’t know how to get there now that I realize I’ve lived a lie all these years.”

  “Ah, Phoebe, my dear.” He stepped forward and gathered her to him.

  She didn’t resist. She laid her head on his chest, and the sobs exploded from her in shuddering bursts that made more of her words incomprehensible. After a few attempts, she gave up trying to speak and cried herself out, sheltered in his arms and warm boat cloak.

  Rafe said nothing either. He remembered the platitudes of the pastor when Rafe had returned home broken in spirit. The man had meant well. Perhaps they had been the right words under most circumstances of loss. But Rafe didn’t believe even God could heal the kind of wounds dealt his soul in the Mediterranean. Phoebe’s confession seemed like more proof that God’s encompassing forgiveness was just not enough sometimes.

  Yet Derrick forgave those who had held him in captivity and sold his wife and children elsewhere. Rafe had seen the man’s back, a crisscross of scars from the lash. Derrick often tried to speak to Rafe about forgiving those who transgressed against him, James Brock in particular. No doubt Derrick would add Watt’s name to the sermons. But Rafe had walked away. He didn’t want to know.

  Now he wished he did so he could give Phoebe advice, grant her words that would set her heart at rest for her past transgressions and those who had hurt her.

  “It was bad, your marriage?” he asked.

  She nodded against him, her weeping growing quieter, more shallow. “I thought I was in love. He was handsome and debonair and everything I was supposed to marry.”

  “Lots of land?”

  “How’d you guess?”