“Gently, Rafe.” Phoebe curled her hand around the spoon beneath his and stopped his battering of the batter. “You’re going to have half of it on the table.”
“So I am.” He began to search the shelves for a pudding bag, remembered he didn’t have the water boiling, and lifted the bucket to fill the giant kettle. “This will take hours to boil. We will need to look in on it to ensure the water doesn’t boil away.” He turned from the stove to find Phoebe motionless, spoon in one hand, gaze still fixed upon him. “Stop your staring at me, Mrs. Lee.”
“I cannot, Captain Docherty. The sight of you being domestic . . .” She released the spoon, closed the distance of the half dozen feet between them, and kissed him.
Though as cool and light as morning mist, the gesture blazed through him, melting, incinerating arguments and pain until it reached his core, where he managed to extinguish the yearning for her.
He set his hands on her shoulders and held her off at arm’s length. “Aye, I wished to be domesticated once. That has been destroyed, and I am not certain I can get it back, no matter how much I—”
“How much you what?” Her words, her eyes, the hands with which she gripped his collar challenged him to finish.
The response burned on his tongue. He shook his head, biting it away. “’Tis unimportant if I do not change my course, and I will not.”
Phoebe’s lips quivered. “Because you still love her?”
“Nay, I do not love her. I have not loved her for over a decade. Not like a husband should. But I cared for the friends we were once.”
“And as the mother of your daughter?”
He flinched. “Aye, that too. Mel has always been a joy despite everything else. But Davina . . .” He started to shrug, started to shake off the talk of his past and direct the conversation to Phoebe. But his shoulders weighed down too much to shrug off the sordid history. “Sometimes I think I despised her at the end. I tried to give her all the time I could between my studies and working with my father, but she complained all the time. No matter what I did for her, I—she—”
“It wasn’t enough?” Phoebe lifted one hand and stroked the hair back from his face, as he’d seen her do to Mel, her touch spindrift light. “I do understand. And no matter how much we accomplish, it never seems like enough for anyone, even God. What I’m trying to tell you, Rafe, is that destroying James Brock won’t be enough. At first I thought becoming a midwife and bringing life into the world would help me forget what happened to my husband. Then I thought giving up my happy life in Seabourne to give my services to the women in the mountains would be enough to help me forget that—that accident. But they haven’t been. You will never forget your pain over your wife until you forgive. And you could destroy your life if someone else doesn’t kill you first.”
“Ah, yes, unless someone stops me first. Someone like Dominick Cherrett and his admiral uncle?”
“Would that be so awful?”
“Do you think having me thrown into Newgate as a pirate will save my soul?”
“Dominick wouldn’t do that to you.”
“But the Navy might. Or did you think they would take kindly to me removing one of their prisoners from the prison hulks? That’ll get me hanged faster than the accusation of piracy. ’Tis treason, you ken.”
“I want to stop you from either action, from either accusation.”
“And leave Mrs. Chapman without her husband?” He gave her a half smile. “Few men live long in those floating coffins.”
“I—well, I—” Her eyes grew round.
“You did not think, no?”
She shook her head, then looked away.
“You had the best of intentions, I have no doot, hinnie. You wanted to rescue me. But that stops me from rescuing George Chapman.”
“If you could do both . . .” She shifted from foot to foot, gazing down as though she needed to see her dainty toes to perform the restless action.
She looked so chagrined he wanted to sweep her close and tell her not to concern herself. Instead, he injected an edge of hardness to his tone. “All good intentions have some kind of consequence, Phoebe. I know the possible consequences of my actions.”
“And don’t care?” Water from the kettle boiled over onto the stove top with a hiss. It may as well have been Phoebe expressing her annoyance with him. “You don’t care if you’re hurting me, hurting Mel, and most of all hurting yourself.”
“Oh, Phoebe, I do care. I do not want to, but I do.” He turned to the table. “And I care about my pudding, you ken. Will you hold the bag, or would you prefer to pour?”
“I’ll hold the bag.”
They said nothing as Phoebe held the pudding bag open and Rafe poured the batter in. He then pulled a needle and thread from his coat pocket and began to sew up the top of the linen, watching Phoebe gape from the corner of his eye.
“Aye, I can sew up more than people. And all the best cooks—”
A shout rang out from above. He raised his head to listen.
“Ice! It’s raining ice!”
“Aye, but I do dislike sailing past the Bay of Biscay. ’Tis always the foul weather here.”
“Is—is ice dangerous?” Phoebe had paled.
Rafe slipped the pudding bag into the boiling water. “Not if we take the right precautions and do not see the enemy.” He turned back to her. “I must go, but thank you for telling me about what happened. I could not bear your hurt and ken I was partly the cause of bringing it back to you.”
“Yet it helped. I feel . . . lighter.”
And so, in a way, did he.
He cupped her face in his hands but refrained from kissing her with great willpower. “Keep your burden light, lass, and do not love me. If Lord Dominick received your letter, I am like as not headed for Newgate and a hangman’s rope.”
“Which would make me—”
“Captain?” Feet clattered on the ladder.
“I must go.” Rafe released her and headed for the door, yet his feet felt too leaden to step over the coaming, leave the cozy realm of domesticity he and Phoebe had shared, a glimpse of a future that would never be.
Riggs, a quieter, most compliant crewman since the battle and Watt’s and Jones’s deaths, reached the galley. “We don’t know how much sail to take in.”
“Aye, I am on my way.”
Afraid if he glanced back to Phoebe he would end up like Lot’s wife, or at the least forget duty and responsibility, he charged up the companionway ladder as though she pursued him with shackles. Icy wind blew into his face, not strong, but crowded with needlelike shards of ice. Sleet would slow them, as it coated sails and lines and made handling the rigging dangerous.
“I want lifelines rigged,” he called to the nearest men. “From hatchways to companionways and from bowsprit to quarterdeck. No one walks on the deck without using one.”
Already the deck grew slick with freezing patches of water. As long as the wind blew, the sails should remain free of enough ice that would set them in danger of collapsing, but if the wind rose, climbing the shrouds to furl the sails for safety could prove treacherous.
“Aloft.” He ran toward the quarterdeck as he issued the orders. “Clew up all but mainsail and spritsail.”
Men leaped to obey. They knew the risks if they did not get the sails in.
On the quarterdeck, Rafe snatched up a spyglass and sought for the Fleur de Nuit, their French prize. It had proved to be a grand sailing vessel and kept on station without a hitch once the mast and rigging had been repaired. From the look of things, either the men had decided to take in sail too, or they mimicked what they saw aboard the Davina. Either way, they took in sail. If a gale blew up, they could be separated. He would lose his prize, nearly half of his men, and the French cargo. All he would have were the French prisoners and nowhere to off-load them to another vessel so he didn’t have to sail to the naval port at Plymouth or Portsmouth and risk being stopped if Lord Dominick had gotten word to his uncle. Rafe wanted to set
in further east in Southampton. They knew him there. Few questions would be asked. He would be mere hours from the prison hulk in the Thames from there.
Southampton, by all his best estimations without sunlight for a noon sighting, lay another five hundred miles northeast. Five hundred miles, two to three days of sailing, until he reached the next step in his plans.
As long as no one from Dominick Cherrett arrived to stop him. The fool woman for writing such a letter. Rafe should not have sent Watt ashore to watch her after he tried to mutiny, but it had gotten him off the brig. Rafe wanted Watt away from the men he wanted to entice. Watt had likely delivered the letter himself, thinking it would destroy Rafe. And perhaps Brock’s henchmen had persuaded Watt to go after Rafe then, persuading him to kill his nephew whenever and however he could.
If only the men hadn’t put Watt in with the prisoners and they hadn’t killed him. Rafe could have questioned him, learned why Watt had grown so murderous. Surely control of the ship wasn’t the only reason.
“I will be asking Brock himself,” Rafe muttered.
And even to his own ears, the declaration lacked much of its venom. His heart didn’t clench quite as tightly with anger as it had for nine years.
Oh, Phoebe, what have you done to me? What’s left if I don’t have Brock to destroy? I will have failed Davina yet again.
A shriek drew Rafe’s attention to the main deck. Phoebe had emerged from the hatchway and promptly landed in a heap on the deck, a patch of ice beneath her. Rafe started aft, then waited. Five men had already reached her, two practically yanking her in half in their endeavor to be the first to help her to her feet. Her trill of laughter rang through the wind and sleet and nearly yanked Rafe’s heart from his chest. Although broad, calloused hands pressed her delicate fingers to the lifeline, a phalanx of men surrounded her on her careful way back to the cabin. Rafe watched her progress, wind blowing his hair into his eyes and stinging his cheeks, then she vanished down the companionway, and he returned to the wheel.
“I’ll take over for a bit.” He nudged the man aside. “You go get warm. There’s coffee in the galley.”
“Thank you, sir.” The man—a youth of no more than nineteen years, in truth—saluted and started to turn away, then swung back. “Sir, I’m awfully sorry about what we did to you and—and Mr. Jordy. No wonder my mama always said that greed is a sin. It sure led to nothing but trouble.”
“Aye, someone al’ays suffers when greed’s involved.” He tried to give the youth with the guileless blue eyes a smile, but failed. “But you’ve got prize money now to take back to that mama.”
“Yes, sir, she’ll appreciate it.” The boy grinned. “After she tans my hide for how I got it.”
Rafe did smile at that. “I had a mither like that myself. Run along now. You are turning blue with the cold.”
The boy saluted again and did just that, leaving Rafe to shiver inside his woolen cloak and coat and linen shirt. He wanted Phoebe tucked beside him. He’d been warm with her close.
But Phoebe had betrayed him to Dominick Cherrett, though nothing was likely to happen. The Navy was too occupied with the French and Americans to fash themselves over one privateer, but she’d divulged his plans to others, and that struck a blow to his soul.
She’d done it to save his soul because she loved him, the misguided, wonderful, infuriating female. At that moment, he wanted his soul to be worth saving. If she came to him and said she wanted him to repent so she could spend her life with him, he might have given in, given up.
But she didn’t appear, and the moment passed. He wasn’t suffering cold and deprivation of comfort in order to sacrifice his plan to destroy the man who had deprived him of his family. God had abandoned him when Rafe needed Him most. He wasn’t about to crawl back without his mission accomplished. The world would be a better place for it.
So why did that declaration sound as empty as words hollered down a well?
He squinted into the rain and wind until Riggs, his left arm in a sling, came to relieve him at the wheel. Then he descended to his cabin for dry clothes. He had to brace himself for seeing Phoebe, but he couldn’t avoid Mel to avoid the other female, so he tapped on the great cabin door.
Mel was alone, sitting up with her Bible on her lap and tears streaming down her face. “I can’t read, Da. I know the letters, but they make no sense to me now.” She gazed up at him with trusting, innocent eyes. “Why can’t I read?”
“’Twas the blow to your head.” He stroked her head, his fingers seeking the indentation in her skull, assessing how well it healed. “A blow to the head can make a body forget his own name.”
“I’d rather forget that than how to read. I—I’m stupid.”
“Oh, lass.” Rafe perched on the edge of the bunk so he could hold her head against his shoulder. “We will teach you to read again. Your brains just got a wee bit scrambled is all.”
“But I want to read now,” she wailed.
An echoing cry rang through the bulkhead.
Rafe snapped his head up, listening. He heard nothing save for the usual shipboard noises and turned his attention back to Mel. “We cannot al’ays have what we want now, lass. You ken that. Sometimes we can have naught that we want.”
Like the revenge that had eluded him for nine years.
“But sometimes we can get things back when we lose them.”
“We never got Mama back.”
“Nay, she’s gone to heaven.”
“Has she?” Mel raised her head and gazed at him with tear-drenched eyes. “Uncle Watt said he did not think Mama believed in God that way.”
“She did at the end. She called on Jesus to save her and begged for His forgiveness. I have told you this.”
“Aye, but it helps to hear it. If it was not too late.”
“It was not.” Rafe picked up the Bible and flipped through the pages. Once he could have found the passage in moments. Now it took him a full five minutes of searching first in the Gospel of John, then to the eighth chapter of Matthew, to the parable of the man hiring workers for his vineyard. “So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.” He glanced up at Mel’s pale but still beautiful face. “I am thinking that means ’tis never too late.”
“Not even for you?” She grinned at him.
“Only if a man accepts the work, bairn.” He kissed her brow. “I’ll make certain you learn to read again, a’right?”
“But who will read to me until then? Mrs. Chapman isn’t well, and Mrs. Lee is never here.” She tilted her head. “She’s always with you, isn’t she?”
“Aye, much of the time.” He rose and backed to the door.
“Don’t you think she’s very pretty?”
“Aye, she’s beautiful.” He laid his hand on the handle. “I will be sending up—”
“She has a tendre for you, you ken.”
“Aye, lass, I ken she does, and I ken ’tis of no use, and I ken ’tis time you had a rest.” He flung open the door to find Phoebe with her fist upraised.
“Are you going to strike me or knock?”
“Knock. I heard you.” She glanced past him. “May I enter? I need a moment.”
“Mel’s awake.”
“That’s all right.”
He stepped aside, and she swept past him, graceful aboard the vessel now.
“What is it?” he asked, closing the door.
“Belinda.” She glanced at Mel, then back to him. “Rafe, we need to get her to land as soon as possible. She’s going to have that baby within the week.”
21
Soon. That was all Rafe had said to her about when they would reach land. Soon, if all went well aboard the brig, if a French naval vessel didn’t stop them, if the British Navy didn’t stop them.
For Phoebe, soon wasn’t good enough. Belinda wasn’t quite at her confinement, but Phoebe had examined enough women in Belinda’s condition to recog
nize the signs. The fact that Belinda didn’t fuss about Phoebe examining her told its own tale—Belinda suspected the nearness of her time too.
“I’m going to die,” she had murmured before falling asleep the night before.
Of course Phoebe responded, “No, you won’t.”
Aboard a vessel somewhere outside the Bay of Biscay or perhaps in the English Channel? Phoebe didn’t know. The worst conditions under which she’d delivered a baby had been aboard the merchantman in St. George’s Harbour. Although cramped, that cabin had been clean and the deck steady.
They did their best to keep the cabins aboard the Davina clean, but they had to use seawater, so all felt sticky or even grainy. And damp. The only time Phoebe had felt warm and dry in the past five weeks had been in the galley.
Walking on the main deck in the early morning after a restless night of little sleep, Phoebe struggled with the pain now bubbling to the surface, the lanced wound releasing its poison and the fragments causing that poison. Rafe the vengeful privateer captain trying to drive her away. Rafe the physician unwittingly beginning the healing. Unwittingly solidifying her love for him.
Not what he wanted to do, but willingly admitting the defeat of believing he could never care for another woman.
“He loves you.” She whispered the words to the edge of dawn breaking along the horizon. “He loves you, but he won’t give up his quest even for you, let alone God.”
He was right to push her away under those circumstances.
“But I want those circumstances to be different, God. I want . . . him.”
Who was she to want, to pray, to think she deserved anything from God? She had hidden behind a shield of self-righteous superiority, condemning Rafe for his actions while harboring anger and bitterness to two men who had damaged her life—Gideon, for making her existence miserable and contributing to the loss of her baby, and the man she’d known only by his surname, Kenyon, for making life in Seabourne so uncomfortable she had fled from her friends.
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