Heart's Safe Passage

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  Now, with Rafe less than seventy feet away on the quarterdeck scanning the horizon, Phoebe examined her heart and wondered if she had written to Dominick for help to save Rafe from himself, or to get even with him for keeping her aboard—being alive and open to her own form of revenge. If that were so, she was more despicable in her action than he was. He made no secret of his intentions or his knowledge that what he did went against God’s will for the lives of His people. She, on the other hand, spoke of peace and love and forgiveness, and plotted to bring him down in the name of saving him.

  “Don’t let Dominick come,” she prayed. “Please.”

  If God chose to let her suffer the consequences of her behavior, she would have to find another way to save Rafe. She would do nearly anything to keep him out of prison, away from James Brock, free to find peace and forgiveness and a future.

  Free to love, even if it wasn’t her.

  She turned from the rail to see that he had lowered the spyglass and watched her instead of the horizon. A smile tugged at her lips. An invisible cord yanked at her heart. As though it were a lifeline stretched taut between her and Rafe, she traversed the main deck and climbed the quarter ladder, then paused at the top while he slipped the spyglass into its holder on the binnacle, said something to the helmsman, and closed the distance between her and himself.

  “You look cold.” He took her hand not holding the rail and chafed it between his, his gaze soft on her face, a sweetheart’s caress with the eyes. “What were you doing down there all alone?”

  “Praying.” She gazed into his eyes and smiled. “For you.”

  “Good. We need all the prayers we can get here in the Bay of Biscay.”

  If she had a ruff like a wolf, it would have risen at that moment. “What do you mean?”

  “Storms, Frenchmen, Americans, English Navy.” He smiled. “Which would you prefer?”

  “None.”

  “Indeed?” He clasped her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “But you sent for their aid, did you not?”

  “And prayed they don’t arrive.”

  His fingers flexed. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want you thrown into prison regardless of what you do.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t want you to do anything you shouldn’t, and I don’t want you in prison either, especially not because I was wrong in the decisions I made. Because I want you free to find your own way back to the Lord. Because Mel needs her father.”

  “Ah, yes, Mel.” He glanced back at the helmsman, who wasn’t even pretending not to listen, then turned back to Phoebe and lifted her hand to the crook of his elbow. “Let us walk.”

  They walked in silence. Icy wind buffeted their faces, the sky clear now but with more clouds on the horizon. The sea swirled away from the hull in waves the color of tarnished pewter rimmed with white froth, not high but low and choppy and empty of any vessel save for them.

  Near the bow, with the men at watch on deck and in the rigging, Rafe paused and scanned the horizon instead of looking at Phoebe. “How would you feel about Mel needing me if I told you that she’s not my daughter?”

  “Not your—” Words eluded Phoebe. She stared at his profile, chiseled and strong enough for a figurehead.

  “Aye, I have been trying to tell you for days now, perhaps weeks, but the time has ne’er been right. ’Tis true, nonetheless. I married Davina to spare her shame.”

  “Her father asked you to.” Things he’d told her came rushing in. “And you loved her.”

  “Aye, I thought I did. I think that died when I learned what she had done. And then she told her father he could compel me to marry her.” His tone was flat, his arm rigid.

  Phoebe hugged his arm close to her side. “If you didn’t, no place for you at the university?”

  “Aye. ’Twas not quite said that way, but we kent what he meant. Everyone would think ’twas I who dishonored her.”

  “But—but, Rafe, she looks so much like you. She could be. That is—”

  “There is a family resemblance? Aye, indeed there is.” He turned to Phoebe then. “Watt McKay was her father.”

  “Rafe.” Phoebe’s hand flew to her lips. “Is that why—”

  “He hated me? Aye. He’d gone off privateering before he knew. We were wed before Watt returned.”

  “I thought he was in the Navy.”

  “He was.” Rafe grimaced. “They court-martialed him for running his sloop aground from sheer incompetence. But he can manage the guns—could manage the guns, so a privateer was happy to have him.”

  Phoebe glanced from bow to stern of the Davina. “This one?”

  Rafe nodded. “When the captain was killed, the crew voted on a new captain. Watt wanted it, but the men were not fools. I was good at the mathematics and learned celestial navigation quickly, so they elected me, and I changed the brig’s name. I was not so quick to learn the fighting, but it has been learn or die, and I have had a powerful reason to live.”

  “With Watt fueling your hatred all the time.” Phoebe’s eyes burned. “And now he’s dead. Haven’t there been enough deaths?”

  “I ken you wish me to say yes, but I cannot.”

  “It won’t bring Davina or your parents back, and the risk to you—”

  “The risk to me, Phoebe, is keeping Brock alive. He tried to kill me on Bermuda. Watt tried to kill me and nearly killed Mel. That Brock was even on Bermuda when I was says someone has betrayed me, and I ken of no other man to do this but Watt.”

  “Yet you protected him for Mel’s sake.” As she spoke the words, Phoebe knew nothing could ever keep her from loving him, and she would do anything to keep him safe until he made his heart right with the Lord. In doing so, maybe she could find the way back herself.

  His hand covering Phoebe’s on his forearm, Rafe headed back toward the quarterdeck. “Mel does not ken the story of her parentage. I will tell her one day, though by law she is my daughter.” He gave Phoebe a smile so gentle and sweet her knees turned to porridge. “Aye, and by my love too. But there were rumors, and she may hear them again one day. I do not want her to have to live with me having killed her true father.”

  Phoebe’s heart felt so full she feared if she began to speak, she would gush forth nonsense words of love and admiration.

  Rafe paused at the top of the companionway ladder. “’Tis too much to ask, I ken, but will you look out for my lass if something happens to me?”

  “Rafe—”

  “If ’tis not too much to ask.”

  “No.” Phoebe shook her head. “It’s not too much. But you can’t go on, for Mel’s sake. Now more than ever she needs you.”

  “Phoebe.” He faced her, holding both her hands, his face bleak. “I have ne’er been enough in all I have done. I was too bookish for Davina to be happy with me. I was not a good enough physician to heal her sickness. I could not save her from the pirates, and I could not keep Watt from hating me enough to keep him alive for Mel. In destroying James Brock, I ken I can succeed and do the world a service.”

  Heart shredding in her chest, Phoebe gazed up at him. “In the man you are beyond the hatred for James Brock, you are enough for Mel and for me.”

  “Aye, perhaps, but ’tis the rub of it, no? I do harbor the hatred.”

  “God can take it from you.”

  “As He has taken yours?”

  Phoebe flinched.

  Rafe touched her cheek. “That was unkind of me. Forgive me?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Forgiving him for all he had done to her was so simple. Why could she not forgive Gideon and the man who had stolen the new life she’d built?

  Because she had never loved Gideon, and the other man was a stranger. Yet forgiving them was no less important.

  “Then we will speak no more on this. Let our last days together be as friends and not opponents.” Without waiting for her assent, he leaped down the ladder, then held up a hand to steady her on her way down.

  On deck, the clatter of feet an
d pewter plates rang out as breakfast was served. Below, the cabins lay quiet with Mel and Belinda resting and Phoebe sitting beside Rafe at the table as he read Robinson Crusoe to Mel. Phoebe etched the scene in her mind, wishing she could draw, and sought for a way to make the domesticity continue. If she couldn’t change Rafe’s heart, if God didn’t change his heart, this would be the last of it. She would say goodbye in a few days, and he would likely go to his ultimate death, preferring to die as a hero to a woman who had never deserved him and had been dead for nine years.

  Another person for Phoebe to forgive.

  I’m not very good at this, Lord, so how can I persuade Rafe of its virtue? she prayed.

  What she was good at was tending to people. Her sailor patients were all doing well. Mel would live. She couldn’t hold a spoon well or read, she remembered nothing about being in the rigging the day she fell, and she complained of headaches and dizziness. But she lived, she was eating, and her color improved with each day.

  Phoebe treasured every minute with Rafe and Mel and even Belinda. Part of her wished they weren’t so close to their destination, but a day, then two, slipped by. They entered the English Channel on the third day, and with only a hundred miles to go to the coast, the cry rang out, “Sail off the starboard quarter.”

  In a heartbeat, Rafe dropped the book onto the table, snatched weapons from the array on the cabin bulkhead, and charged onto the deck, calling out, “Call to stations.”

  The race began, the drill Phoebe had seen a dozen times in the past five weeks. Someone began to beat upon a drum, a rapid, martial cadence. Men swarmed from along the rails on deck and up from below. They pulled canvases off the guns and hauled out barrels of water. Ammunition appeared on deck, but no one lit the slow matches.

  Phoebe followed Rafe up the ladder, then remained frozen, flattening herself against the rail to stay out of the way, her hands locked onto the wood as though she were an off-center figurehead molded into the brig and only an ax would remove her. She knew she needed to get below, gather up Belinda and Mel, and get medical supplies and foodstuffs they could eat without cooking. Her hands refused to unstick from the rail.

  “Phoebe.” Rafe’s voice rang clear and sharp through the frosty air. “Get below.”

  She meant to shake her head, but only her hair, free in the wind, moved.

  “Mrs. Lee.” Rafe again, sharper. Closer. He strode toward her. “Get below. Now. That’s a frigate sailing toward us, and if we can’t tack and outrun it and it’s French, we’re in for an uncomfortable fight.”

  “You want me below.” Her voice emerged barely above a whisper. “I can’t go there.”

  “You have been a’right with me lately. You will do a’right now.” His hands as gentle as his voice now, he grasped her shoulders and turned her from the rail. “I’ll take you down.”

  “Belinda. Mel.”

  “We’ll fetch them.”

  “But if it’s a battle . . .”

  “We run from frigates. With this much warning, we’ll likely manage to get away. We can maneuver in shallower water if we can reach it in time. But it could be close.”

  “And if we don’t get away?” She gazed up at him, trying not to show how badly she was shaking.

  Of course he knew. His face softened, and he drew her against him. “Then we lose and they’ll likely guillotine me.”

  “They wouldn’t dare.” Tears starred her lashes and spilled over.

  “Shh.” He brushed the tears off her cheeks with his fingertips, then tilted up her chin. “But if the worst happens . . .”

  He kissed her, a silent reminder that no matter what the future, he loved her. The knowledge gave her the impetus she needed to break away from him when someone called for clearer direction, then slip aft and gather her charges together. Two sailors appeared to carry Mel and Belinda to the lower deck, dark now with lights and fires out. Mel talked more than she had in the days since she’d regained consciousness, but Belinda sat in silence, a state more unnerving than her histrionics.

  Phoebe huddled between the two, one arm wrapped around Mel’s frail frame and the other around Belinda’s shoulders, not quite as plump as they had been at the beginning of the voyage. Phoebe concentrated on breathing slowly in and out, in and out, while her ears strained to hear the orders given above.

  Those proved to be few, mostly for sailing instructions. More sail, haul to larboard, to starboard, full and by. Voices remained indistinct, the lookout’s reports incomprehensible. Every time Rafe’s voice rose loudly enough to penetrate the deck, Phoebe’s heart leaped. He’d kissed her instead of saying words. He’d helped her forget her fear of the dark confinement below. She’d drawn on his strength. Yet he believed he’d weakened her faith. He had simply shown her the weaknesses in it.

  The ugliness of her bitterness loomed before her like a sea monster, a hideous creature ready to devour her with a truth she didn’t like. A sob racked through her. She gulped it back. She wanted to cry out in protest. She’d been a Christian for years. She’d claimed to be a Christian before she married Gideon. A warning had sounded in her head about marrying a man of whose faith she was uncertain, but she’d ignored it. Phoebe Carter wanted what she wanted, and her parents gave it to her.

  Marriage to Gideon Lee had shaken her faith. She couldn’t understand why God would allow her to be so mistreated, why her life, intended to be perfect—an enchanted existence of being adored, pampered, and protected—had turned into a nightmare. But when her baby died, stillborn in a labor too early after Gideon had shoved her down the steps, Phoebe reached out to the Lord for strength, for another chance at life. When her mother came to tell her Gideon had died, indeed that he had been buried while Phoebe lay delirious with fever and loss of blood, she had turned her heart fully back to the Lord.

  Because Gideon was dead.

  Self-loathing rose in Phoebe’s throat like bile. As a rumble like distant thunder reverberated overhead, Phoebe faced a monster far more frightening than a French man-of-war. The shaky foundation—no, the despicable foundation—upon which she had built her façade of holiness.

  “Dear Jesus, where do I go from here?” She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until her words fell into the otherwise silent brig.

  “Then—then it was a gun?” Belinda whispered. “Phoebe, tell me it was thunder.”

  “I don’t know.” Phoebe assured herself she didn’t know for sure. Just because the day started out bright and sunny didn’t mean a storm hadn’t blown up. The English Channel, someone had told her, tended toward stormy weather.

  “It was a gun.” Mel rested her head on Phoebe’s shoulder and gripped her hand. “But we’re not going to die. I don’t think God would save my life so I would die like this.”

  “My baby,” Belinda moaned. “I can’t have my baby down here and see him fall into French hands.”

  “You won’t.” Phoebe spoke with more conviction than she felt. “And the French aren’t at war with Americans. They—they’ll take care of us.”

  Belinda wrapped her arms around her middle. “But my back hurts. What if it’s my time?”

  “Of course your back hurts,” Phoebe said in a bracing tone. “It’s not comfortable down here. The deck is cold and hard, and the air is foul.”

  “But my back hurts,” Belinda persisted.

  And it could mean her travail had begun.

  Phoebe laid a hand on Belinda’s abdomen. It was distended and firm with a hint of movement from the baby. She detected no contractions, not the merest hint of tightening. Of course, it could begin in the back . . .

  “You’re all r—”

  Another rumble sounded from above. The Davina lurched to larboard. All three women shrieked.

  “We’ve been hit.” Belinda began to sob. “I’m going to die so close to George. Oh, I’ve been so wicked, I’m going to kill our baby.”

  “They’ll cut off Papa’s head,” Mel whimpered. “’Tis what the French do to people like him. He’ll go unde
r that blade and—and he doesn’t believe in God.”

  “Hush, both of you.” Ashamed of herself for coming so close to an actual scream, Phoebe snapped at her companions. “Belinda, Captain Docherty will surrender before he endangers our lives in a futile fight.” She hoped. “And, Melvina, your father does believe in God.”

  “But he doesn’t follow Him. Uncle Jordy and Derrick tried to convince him he should, and so have I, but he doesn’t like God because of what happened to my mither.”

  That was part of the truth. Phoebe didn’t think she should tell Mel the rest, how her father didn’t follow God because Rafe wanted to get revenge on the man who had caused Davina’s death.

  Gideon had chosen not to follow God because he preferred his wild ways, the drinking, the gambling, the women. Phoebe had thought she could change him once they were married. Instead he changed her, turned her into a woman with bitterness buried deep within her, so deep she found striking another man with a poker far too easy, and not regretting her action even easier.

  She should have learned her lesson. Instead, she thought she could accomplish the same thing with Rafe. She thought staying with him instead of getting herself and Belinda to safety would lead Rafe back to the Lord. How vain of her. How arrogant. How sanctimonious. There she sat with an expectant mother about to deliver and a child barely recovered from a trepanning, huddled on the lower deck of an English privateer, being chased by a French frigate half again their size and with three times the men since their own prize crew was aboard the French merchantman, because she thought herself so spiritual she could sway Rafe Docherty from his course. Instead, she’d poured out her anger and bitterness against the male gender and shown him how much of a hypocrite she was.

  “Lord, can You ever forgive me?” She surged to her feet and began to pace, stumbling in the darkness.