by Merry Farmer
In the morning, she was awakened from a cozy sense of contentment by Linus shaking her.
“Natalia,” he murmured, his voice sweet yet firm. “Sweetheart, it’s time to get up.”
Natalia sucked in a breath and stretched as sleep left her a little too fast. “What?” she grumbled, rubbing her eyes. The world around her seemed far too dark for it to be time to get up.
“It’s morning, love,” Linus told her, bending to kiss her cheek several times. “The world awaits us.”
Natalia squirmed and opened her eyes fully, glancing around the dim cabin. She frowned. “How can it be morning? It isn’t even light out yet.”
Linus laughed. She twisted to look at him. He was already fully dressed, and his hair was damp, as though he’d bathed or perhaps gone for a swim. “The sun is just over the horizon,” he said. “We have a hundred things to do today.”
She frowned, settling on her back. “Like what? We’re stranded on an island. All we can do is wait for someone to come find us.”
He shook his head. “If we want to eat, we need to feed the stove and fetch water for tea. I found some eggs and a rasher of bacon. You can cook breakfast while I check on the boat and make certain everything is secure on the island and with the lighthouse.”
Natalia’s frown deepened. “You want me to cook breakfast?”
“Yes, of course.” His fond grin faded. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know how to cook breakfast,” she said. “And it’s far too early. Just past dawn? I don’t generally rise in the morning until after ten o’clock.”
It was his turn to frown. “That won’t do. The world won’t wait for you to sleep in. Normal people rise with the sun and begin the day with work.”
For some reason, his comment hit her all wrong. “Normal people?” she asked.
“Yes.” His smile returned. “Normal, middle-class people. Like we will be when we’re married.”
Natalia eyed him suspiciously. He seemed a little too pleased to call himself a normal, middle-class person. “I will bring money into our marriage, you know,” she said, shifting to sit up and holding the sheets around her chest. “And with your medical innovations and advances, you’ll be famous in no time.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps.”
She was beginning to be sorely irritated by his continual gestures of nonchalance. “Isn’t that what you want?” she asked, studying him with narrowed eyes. “To be a celebrated and renowned physician?”
“Of course,” he answered, standing. “But more than that, I just want to lead an ordinary life.”
The statement was alarming, even though it shouldn’t have been. Natalia hunched her shoulders, trying to make heads or tails of it.
“Come on,” he told her with what might have been either teasing or command. “It’s time to start the day.”
He punctuated his comment by grabbing the corner of the bedclothes and tossing them aside, revealing Natalia in all her naked glory. He met the sight with a rakish lift of his brow, but in spite of how delightful everything they’d shared the night before had been, Natalia was deeply offended by his leering.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said, scrambling out of bed and racing toward the washstand to clean up before dressing. “Don’t you have a hundred things to do?”
“I was just admiring your beauty,” he said, his teasing grin falling flat.
“Well, don’t. I don’t feel very beautiful at the moment, I feel like a drudge.”
She began washing and only realized he hadn’t replied to her statement when the silence between them started to feel heavy. She glanced over her shoulder, and was unsettled to find him frowning at her. As much as she wanted to say something to make the situation better, she couldn't think of a thing. He turned and left the cottage before anything came to mind.
The day went downhill from there. Even though Natalia had her traveling bag with her, it had been left in the lifeboat overnight and all of her changes of clothes were damp with salt water. She dressed yet again in her soiled traveling clothes, feeling horrible and filthy. Linus didn’t seem to notice, but that only added to her irritation. As did his efforts to help her with breakfast.
“That’s not the proper way to break an egg,” he told her, hovering over her shoulder as she attempted to fry a few eggs. “Look, you’ve broken the shell into it.”
“I’m not used to cracking eggs,” she told him through a clenched jaw.
Minutes later, the eggs she had managed to crack were burning in the pan.
“You have the pan too hot,” he told her, switching from crowding her on one side to standing too close on her other side. “And did you season the pan with butter? The eggs will stick if you didn’t.”
“What do you mean by season it?” She glared up at him.
“Have you ever cooked an egg before?” he asked instead of answering.
“No,” she said, coming close to shouting. “I’ve never cooked anything before. We’ve always had a cook to do it.”
“Then let me show you.” He nudged her aside.
“Do it yourself, if you’re so determined to have eggs,” she shouted, stomping to the other side of the cottage.
“This is something you’re going to have to know how to do once we’re married,” Linus told her, clearly losing patience himself.
“We can hire a cook,” she insisted.
“We might not have enough money for it,” he said.
“I will make certain we do,” she growled.
Somehow, breakfast managed to be made, though it tasted like ash in Natalia’s mouth as she ate it. At least she managed to make a decent cup of tea. After breakfast, things didn’t improve.
“We should really do laundry,” Linus said, already beginning to strip the bed.
“What are you doing?” Natalia rushed to stop him in alarm. “You can’t just pull a bed apart like that.”
Linus sent her a flat look. “Considering what we’ve done in these sheets, it would be rude not to wash them. See if you can find a clean set of sheets stored somewhere.”
“Is that an order?” she asked, crossing her arms.
“No,” he said impatiently. “It’s just what needs to be done.”
“Then you do it,” Natalia growled. “I’m going to see if I can spot any ships coming to rescue us.”
She stormed out of the cottage and around the corner to the stairs leading up to the lighthouse, fuming. How could Linus be so heavy-handed? Yes, chores needed to be done, but the world was teeming with servants who were trained to do them and could be hired for the purpose. It was shocking to discover that he expected her to lower herself to do all the things that a common housewife was meant to do.
Several ships were visible on the horizon from the top of the lighthouse, but none of them seemed to be veering off to head toward the island. Natalia fought not to be swallowed by despair that they would never be rescued. She loved Linus and Linus loved her. They were going to be married and live happily together forever, like characters in a story. But now that prospect filled her with dread as much as it filled her with hope.
She stewed for as long as the felt she could get away with before climbing down from the lighthouse and going back into the cottage. Linus had stripped the bed of its sheets and taken all of her salty and sodden clothes out of her bag. He’d also filled the copper tub from the day before with soapy water.
“I’ve gotten things started for you,” he said with a tired frown as soon as she walked through the door, without even a smile or a hello.
“How magnanimous of you,” she grumbled, marching to the tub and rolling up her sleeves.
He sighed with impatience as he watched her drop to her knees and pick up a small cake of soap. “There’s no use in pouting,” he said. “Every wife in England is faced with these same sorts of tasks. You will survive laundry, I can assure you.”
“Every wife in England does not do these tasks,” Natalia argued, plunging her hands int
o the water and scrubbing the soap against the sheet that was already submerged. “Every English wife that I know hires someone to do these things for them.”
“Every aristocratic wife,” Linus agreed.
“And I am an aristocrat,” she fired at him.
“But I am not,” he said with all the hallmarks of a man fighting desperately to keep his temper in check. “And when we are married, you won’t be Lady Natalia any longer, you’ll be Mrs. Townsend.”
Natalia huffed in anger. “That doesn’t mean I’ll be middle-class.”
“Yes, it does,” Linus said, sounding as though his patience were waning.
“Then maybe I don’t want to marry you,” she shot back, throwing the cake of soap into the water and standing. “Maybe I don’t want to give up my position and the life I was born to. I thought you wanted to better yourself, but it seems to me that all you want is to drag me down to the level where you started.”
“And what is wrong with the level where I started?” he asked, raising his voice at last. “The life of a middle-class doctor is respectable enough for most people.”
“It’s not how I was raised.” Natalia planted her hands on her hips and glared at him. “You are so much more intelligent than anyone else I’ve ever met, Linus. You’ve made all the right friends and impressed all the right people. So why are you so determined to stay stuck in the mud of banality?”
“I just want to lead a normal life,” he said, throwing his arms to the side. “I just want to have a wife and a family and a practice I can be proud of.”
“But you don’t have to tear me away from everything I’ve ever known and turn me into someone I’m not to have that,” she argued.
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“It most certainly is,” she said. “And if that’s the way you want things, then I don’t want to marry you. I reject your offer of marriage and any further suit you might make.”
“Fine,” he snapped. “Go on being the sheltered, spoiled, silly miss that you were destined to be.”
Natalia flinched. “Is that what you think of me? That I’m spoiled and silly?”
“You can’t even fry an egg,” he said, throwing his arm out toward the stove.
“I know how to hire someone to fry an egg for me,” she growled. “I know how to check their references and how to manage them. I know how to give employment to people who need it and to maintain the social structure that keeps our society from sinking into chaos.”
“Spoken like a true lady,” he said with a sneer.
“Because I am a lady,” she said, clapping a hand to her chest. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s who I was born to be.”
“Yes, I can see that now,” he said, dripping with derision. “Just as I was born to be a second-rate nobody?” The question deep in his eyes touched something far deeper than the argument they were having, Natalia knew it. She just didn’t know what to do about it.
“You are a rare sort of man who can rise above the conditions of his birth,” she told him. “I thought I loved you for it, for the potential you hold within you. But if you insist on looking down on me because I was born above you, if you insist on making me into something I’m not because you’re too afraid to grow into everything you could be, then I want no part of whatever almost happened between us.”
The pain that lined his face was suddenly too much for her to look at. She twisted away from him and stomped out through the cottage door and down toward the empty dock. Tears stung at her eyes. It felt as though something had broken within her. But she fought against it, fought against the feeling that she was making a terrible mistake by walking away from Linus. She’d made a mistake by walking toward him to begin with. Marrying him would be an utter disaster.
“Natalia!”
She heard her name in a distant shout. At first, she turned back to the cottage, but the call hadn’t come from Linus. She turned back to the sea, raising a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun. Sure enough, a vessel of some sort was steaming toward them. She caught a glint of sunlight off of something metal, probably a spyglass of some sort if whoever was in the boat could see well enough to call her name. Her heart caught in her throat and she raced down to the dock, waving her arms. At last, someone had come along to rescue her and take her home, where she belonged.
Chapter 12
Linus’s whole body ached, but not from the work he’d been doing for the last day. The ache of muscles he hadn’t used in a while was a familiar sort of pain, but the disquiet in his soul was something entirely new and, admittedly, frightening.
He clattered the pans he and Natalia had used to make breakfast in the small washbasin that served as a sink beside the stove, cleaning up what Natalia wouldn’t. Or perhaps couldn’t. As angry as he was, a quiet voice in the back of his mind continued to whisper to him that the life she had been raised to live truly was as different as could be from the life he’d always envisioned for himself.
Although, how difficult could it be for a woman of Natalia’s intellect and ingenuity to learn how to manage a household? She was smarter than half the men he’d gone to medical school with. Cooking and keeping a house were well within her capabilities. He simply didn’t understand why she would reject the notion of creating a happy, settled, cozy home life for the two of them.
And now she was saying that she didn’t want to marry him at all? He could only shake his head at the thought.
Still, as he finished cleaning up after breakfast and then moved on to work on the laundry she’d abandoned, he tried to see things as rationally as he could. He believed that people could change, but he had to admit that change didn’t happen overnight. It was the same with Fergus. He had come so far since the attack that had necessitated him hiring Linus as a personal physician, but that progress had been slow. Fergus would inevitably make more progress, though Linus didn’t think he would ever be the man he was again, but that progress would be slow as well. Natalia’s transformation from coddled daughter of the nobility to proud and strong wife, a woman able to stand on her own two feet, would happen slowly as well.
He finished scrubbing the sheets floating in the washtub and wrung them out clumsily, dripping water all over the floor of the cottage, before carrying them outside to the clothesline he’d spotted strung between the cottage and the lighthouse. He intended to hang the sheets and then go in search of Natalia to see if she was finished with her mood, but he spotted her the second he stepped through the door. She was down by the dock, waving her arms at a small vessel steaming its way toward the island.
“Who is that?” he called out, carrying the sheets on to the clothesline and carelessly hanging them to dry.
Natalia glanced over her shoulder at him, her frown still in place. “We’ll find out soon enough,” she said before turning back to the boat.
Linus finished with the sheets, then walked down to the dock to join her. Natalia stiffened as he reached her side. He peeked sideways at her, glanced out at the approaching steamboat, then back to Natalia, attempting to judge how much time he had to set things right before their rescuers reached them.
“Natalia,” he began in as gentle a voice as he could manage, “I’m sorry that we quarreled.”
She turned to him, eyes wide with indignation. “Is that what you call it?”
The ache in Linus’s gut increased. She was still fuming. “Clearly, we have things that need to be said, things we need to sort through.”
She humphed and crossed her arms, staring out at the sea and the boat.
“I love you,” he said with surprising emotion. “I don’t like the turn things have taken between the two of us.”
She looked back to him with increasing uncertainty. Beneath her indignation, Linus was certain he could see traces of the affection he knew she still had for him.
“Perhaps the problem is that we never discussed what we expect from each other,” he said. “I am beginning to see that we each assumed quite a
bit about the accommodations the other would make in this unusual love affair.”
A faint flush of pink came to her cheeks, and she tilted her head down slightly, as if his words had impacted her.
“We need to talk,” he continued. “Not just superficial talk either. We need to—”
“Natalia Marlowe, I am going to tan your hide for this irresponsible stunt!”
Linus’s attempt at reconciliation was cut short by the voice of none other than Lord Malcolm ringing from the steamboat. Linus’s mouth dropped open, and he stared at the boat, heart sinking, at the figure of Lord Malcolm standing in the prow, glaring at the two of them. Of all the people who would find them and rescue them, he was the last Linus would have wished for.
“Lord Malcolm, what in heaven’s name are you doing here?” Natalia called out to him, reflecting Linus’s thoughts.
Lord Malcolm waited until the steamboat came closer to the dock. It was the sort of vessel that should have been on a river, not the ocean, which made Linus wonder if Lord Malcolm had sought out the fastest boat he could find in the least amount of time, whether it was fit for the job or not. At least the sea was still calm that morning.
“I’ll bring her as close to the dock as I can, but you might have to jump or swim for it,” an unseen voice said on the steamship as they approached.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to get to that island and give my daughter a piece of my mind,” Lord Malcolm growled.
Linus’s brow shot up. It was an open secret in the Marlowe and Campbell families’ circles that Lord Malcolm was, indeed, Natalia’s natural father. The fact that he would say as much aloud meant they were in dire circumstances indeed.
That point seemed proven when Lord Malcolm railed, “I dropped everything and caught a train the moment Lord O’Shea telegraphed from Dublin, telling your mother and I that you’d run off with this scoundrel. You’re just lucky that there are only so many islands along the route from Liverpool to Dublin and that we found you quickly.”
