“Your coloring. Just a bit of olive. Any Roman ancestors?”
She shrugged. “I’m American. They could be from anywhere.”
He shook his head. “If you’re American, they’re likelier to be English, Spanish, Dutch, or … well …”
“What?”
“Natives or … forget it, you’re likely right about having Italian blood.”
“What?” She was just relaxed enough to push the subject.
“All right. African.”
“I don’t have any black in me,” she said, laughing at the idea. “You haven’t seen me dance. My grandmother is English—the rest, I don’t know.”
That was odd, she thought. With all her father had taught her about the distant past, he’d never mentioned his own parents.
“You say it as if I insulted your honor. My best friend, dearer than a brother, happens to be descended from Africans. And likely a white or two somewhere along the way.”
“I did not. I have the dullest, most uninteresting lineage of any person ever born on this continent. If anything, I was insulting myself.”
“Nonetheless, lascivious masters have had their slaves since the beginning of slavery. Is it so unlikely that there are lascivious mistresses as well, giving birth to the children of strapping slave lads and passing them off as planter aristocrats?”
“I know that, but ...”
And then she remembered Nan, speaking of her grandmother coming from an exotic land.
His eyes narrowed through the cigar smoke as he watched her, but he said nothing. He gathered up the remains of their meal back onto the tray Jem had left, set it all outside the cabin, then barred the door. He returned to the table. “Up.”
Marley rose, and he placed his cigar in the ashtray. He drew the chairs away from the windows and opened another window, locking it into an open position, and it was almost as if they were under an open sky.
Then he lifted the contraption Jem had brought in and separated it into two piles of rope. Grasping a loop at one end, he slipped it over a hook in the ceiling, then did the same at the other end.
Marley smiled in pleasure. It was a hammock. Moments later, both were in place, swaying in the slight breeze from the windows and the motion of the ship.
He walked around the cabin blowing out candles, leaving only a couple burning near the bed.
Moonlight poured into the cabin and lent him a dark, almost sinister aura. He walked to her, took the cigar and placed it in the ashtray. He arranged a small table between the hammocks and there he placed their drinks and cigars.
Standing at one of the hammocks, he held out a hand to her. “Care to view the constellations?”
Delight filled her, and he spread the hammock apart for her. “There’s really no graceful way to do this. Just throw a leg up, and then ... well, no, not like—wait.”
He quickly saw it was too tall for her, and he lifted her in his arms. She spread the sides of the hammock apart, relaxing into it. “Okay, I’ve got it now.”
He stepped back—for only a moment.
“Oh!” Her panicked cry came just as her rear end popped through the ropes that had been severed there. She was bent nearly double, stuck, her stockinged feet flailing in the air, her riot of curls bouncing everywhere.
He laughed until he, too, was bent double.
For the most fleeting moment embarrassment stung her, until she imagined what she looked like.
And—even more so—when she noticed the look in his eyes, no mockery at all, simply delight.
She reached for her cigar and puffed it, propping her elbow on her knee as she peered up at the sky. “Ah, yes, I believe I see Orion’s belt.”
Here he roared with laughter.
From the open window came the cry: “Will you two pipe down? Some of us are trying to sleep. I had to eat down here in second class, I won’t be reduced to a groundling at a second-rate play. And you better not be smoking my cigars.”
Raven.
Laughing, Marley set aside the cigar and attempted to leverage her way out of the hammock. “A little help?”
“Hm. This way I would know you won’t wander off.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“I’ll scream rape.” She was unsettled by Raven knowing she was alone with the captain this time of night. Why, she didn’t know. Where else would she go?
“He knows better.” He lifted her clear of the sabotaged hammock. “That rotten lad. I didn’t know he had such mischief in him.”
“Who?”
“Jem. You’ve made an enemy, I’m afraid. He’ll likely apologize tomorrow, he regretted it before he ever left.”
He crossed to the other hammock, testing it, glancing at her. “If you don’t mind sharing …”
She blushed in the pale moonlight. And then she nodded.
He swung into the hammock and reached for a walking stick nearby, anchoring the hammock with it. With his other hand, he grabbed her around the waist and swung her up. “Watch out for the table.”
She squealed and landed face down on him, spread-eagled, in an intimacy that swept them both with excruciating pleasure.
His rakish humor left him as he held her hips in place—presumably to keep her from falling out of the hammock.
“Careful.” His voice was a low command against her throat. “Focus. Moon and stars.”
His hands smoothed over her hips as if in appreciation, but then he easily lifted her, working against her nervous fidgeting, and tucking her to his side.
“Hand me a cigar, darling, and a glass of rum.”
She smiled as she did so, then did the same for herself.
“What?”
She shrugged. “It just seems quite—intimate. All of this.”
“Marley, you have no secrets from me.”
“You don’t know me at all.”
“I know enough. Hush. Exhale. Behold.”
She looked into the sky, realizing that the windows he’d opened included a skylight. The night sky was open to them, the windows placed so the sails didn’t obscure their view.
The moon rose into a cloud as ethereal as gossamer, lighting it into an apricot glow. Presently the clouds passed, leaving only the moon and the stars.
The stick clattered to the floor. “Oh, shall I get that?”
“Just a walking stick. Not to fret.”
“Why does a man as young and virile as you need a walking stick?” She heard, too late, the suggestion in her words.
But he ignored that. “It belonged to someone dear to me.”
“Your father?”
“Oh, no.” He laughed. “My father is equally virile, if not quite so young.”
She smiled. “Oh, a shooting star!”
“A babe sent from heaven.”
She stopped to think before speaking, then, knowing the answer to her unasked question; a sea captain would indeed be superstitious.
“Where does he live?”
“He owns a home in Williamsburg and a tobacco farm with a good deal of land. He also owns properties in England, and an estate in Bermuda—St. George’s.”
“Do you look like him, or your mother?”
“My mother.”
“She must be a beautiful woman.”
He blew smoke rings into the air. Finally he responded, “She was. She died when I was born.”
“I’m so sorry. Did you grow up in Williamsburg?”
“My father suffered a string of terrible losses there that year. He could no longer bear the place. Everywhere he looked, he was reminded. He tried for a time to live on my brother’s plantation, but was no happier there. So he purchased a sloop, hired a crew, learned to sail himself, and loved it. He built the home in Bermuda. He became a new man, as sea-loving a sailor as any salt who ever drew breath.
“He refuses to discuss his life in Williamsburg. What little I know, I learned from servants. And only recently has he taken to visiting the town again. Truth is, he’s there now, waiting for me to arrive and carry hi
m back to Bermuda. But enough of this.” He flicked ash into the ash tray and sipped his rum.
She enjoyed him telling her about his father—but curiosity still nagged at her. “But—what about that walking stick?”
He sighed. “It belonged to the man who taught me how to command my own ship. He, too, is dead.”
“What was his name?”
“He went by the name of Michael. Ah, I suppose it doesn’t matter now. His name was Crispus.”
“Crispus Attucks?”
He went still. “How do you know that name?”
She blew away the smoke, then sipped her rum, content. Truly, how little they still knew of one another, yet.
“You’ve already said you don’t believe me.”
“Then try once more.”
“He was the first man to die for the American Revolution, dying at the Boston Massacre in March of 1770. An escaped slave whose mother was of the Massachusetts tribe. They were known as Natick Praying Indians.
“All things I could have learned from any local Boston newspaper, but I did not. I learned it from my father, who was an American history professor before he died in 1994, then learned it again and again in the classroom.”
“Right. I’d forgotten.” He gently took her glass of rum and drank it down. “Here, put that back on the table. If one of us is going to be a drunken raving lunatic, I have the poorer imagination.”
She giggled at his dismissal of her confession as drunken blather.
“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t smoke much of this, I’m afraid.” She tamped out the cigar in the ashtray and turned carefully, facing him, looking into the sky at another angle. “What’s your name?”
“Hawk.”
“I mean your real name. Your Christian name. I want to say it.”
“Ah, I’d like that, too. But the less you know when we arrive in Boston, the better. Michael gave me that name, and Raven his, to protect us. It has served us well, especially this year.”
“Why this year?”
He sipped his rum, making a thoughtful noise. “It has been a busy year. Well, you should know that, being the time traveler. Lunatic monarch, a crowd of treasonous colonials, Brits with big guns, and all that.”
She cuddled against his throat, brushing her lips against the pulse under his ear.
“Have you ever been in love?”
He laughed. “Have you, sweet Marley?”
Her mouth opened against his throat, and she drew her tongue upward to his ear. “How old are you?”
Suddenly she was so sleepy, she abandoned her kisses and snuggled into his neck, relaxing.
“Twenty nine—I turn thirty next July fourth, if the fates spare me.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her clarity fading away.
“You’re sailing on a doomed ship with a man cursed to die before his thirtieth birthday.”
She didn’t hear him. She only felt him draw her close to his heart, and drop a chaste kiss on her forehead as he stared up into the stars—as if searching for an answer there.
Chapter Eleven
Marley awakened in the captain’s bed with an aching head. In the faint light, she saw Hawk seated at a chair, fastening his shoes. When he noticed she was awake, he rose.
And then she noticed that the warm, easygoing man she’d come to know, to trust, was gone.
“What’s wrong?”
He walked to the daybed and turned back to her as he slapped open the panel concealing the safe. He withdrew the contents and dropped them into the leather seat of a chair.
“Without lying, if you are able, how much did you read?”
Cold dread swept Marley. She sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.
“I saw the papers, but I didn’t look at them.”
“Ah. Kind of you to leave my will alone. And the ledger?”
“I read it all. That you’re a privateer, and quite good at it.”
“You did not see the Letter of Marque?”
“No. I assumed it’s with the Continental Congress since you’re not English.”
He exhaled, pointed anger glimmering in his eyes. “One need not speak the idiom of the King to be a loyalist.”
After a slow moment, she stood, trying to appeal to his reason. “Are you suggesting I’m a loyalist?”
“You have proven it yourself by prying in matters that were none of your concern—after I forbade you.”
“That was not my intention. I was sitting in the daybed reading, like you told me to. I admired the carvings in the wall and touched one—and the panel opened.”
“And how, I ask once again, did you arrive in the water where I found you?”
“I’ve already explained that as best I can. I know it makes no sense.”
“Tell me the truth!”
His rage shook the room, and she dropped to the edge of a chair. He took a step closer. “Now.”
Trembling, she rose, trying to swallow her terror, facing him. Her voice quavered as she spoke—but speak she did.
“My parents were Robert and Cassandra Hastings. They were murdered when I was three. I had two sisters named Rachel and Juliana, and they were taken away. My grandmother is Hannah Hastings. She and I took a pleasure trip, a day cruise, from Florida to the Bahamas. There was a terrible storm and the last I remember is you rescuing me. You know the rest as I know it.”
She swallowed, and he remained silent. When she found the courage to look up at him, he was staring at the ship’s log and papers he’d tossed on the chair.
“I have spoken nothing to you but the truth. If I were you, I wouldn’t believe me, either. But you have no cause to fear me.”
“You are correct in one matter. I do not believe you.” He walked to the door. “Since you cannot be trusted below deck, you will work with the men above. You have an hour to tailor the clothes you wear to better fit you without revealing that you’re a woman. Then you’ll report to Raven. You will replace Jem in his duties and be glad of it. If you were a man, this hour I would have you whipped—or perhaps worse.”
With that, he closed the door behind him.
But, she noticed with delight, not locked. The disappointment she felt at his anger and distrust was softened by this. Exhilaration filled her with the freedom promised in his action.
She nibbled at breakfast, drinking down her stout black coffee. No sugar this time, but it was growing on her. She wondered how a cigar would taste with coffee. Not that she’d ever likely taste another one of Hawk’s.
The memory—was it just last night?—made her face grow warm, with him holding her in his arms as they watched the stars and smoked cigars and drank rum. Not the silly stuff of romance as she’d imagined it, but far more powerful, for a woman like Marley. He had invited her into his world and shared its best with her.
Would this act of imagined treachery end their growing intimacy? She couldn’t see any other option, judging from his anger.
Her borrowed clothing was already tailored as best she knew how, but she tied her hair into a ponytail then wound it into a knot and stuffed the knit cap over it. She emptied the chamber pot into the toilet as she’d seen Hawk do it, then spent the rest of the hour tidying the cabin.
She looked at the cotton stockings she’d borrowed from Hawk. They were already showing dirt, and she hadn’t left the cabin. She brushed them, pulled them up underneath the pants, and unrolled her sleeves down to the wrists. She tightened the collar as much as she could, trying to hide her missing Adam’s apple. Finally, she gave up.
The caffeine in the coffee further energized her, and she grabbed the tray of dirty dishes, heading up the narrow ladder.
If any doubts about the truth of her strange voyage lingered, they vanished as she reached the top step to the main deck. She gasped at the view. The sun was rising into a blue sky studded with white clouds, the air pristine. No land on any horizon. The wind pulled at her cap, and she tugged it back into place.
The men
she saw—everywhere, it seemed—were not actors. They perched in the rigging, trimming sails and studying the horizon. They knelt on the deck, holystoning and sanding the wood with methodic care. The man nearest her, a raw-boned, shirtless fellow wearing a brown scarf tied around his head, sang a lusty shanty as he hammered at a structure, perhaps doing carpentry repair.
He looked up at her just long enough to observe the new boy before he opened his mouth to belt out another verse. Around the edges of his teeth was a line of gray discoloration showing decay. And, as excitement filled her, just for a moment Marley stopped to love her life.
“Watch your step!”
She lost her balance trying to avoid a mop the man nearby was slinging in long, wet strokes on the deck. He jumped back, alarmed, as her tray teetered, as she stumbled, and the men nearby turned to watch her dance a clumsy jig before righting herself.
“Marley! Over here!”
Even as she turned to look for the speaker, Jem arrived. No longer hating her guts, he was cheerful and even ready to be helpful.
“Galley’s below. When you’re on deck, keep your head down and steer clear of the men. You’re liable to get your noggin walloped, if you don’t stay out of the way.”
He led her to the galley, and she found it trickier descending with the tray than coming up. She dreaded serving dinner, and what that might entail.
She heard Cook before she saw him. He muttered in an Irish brogue as if to someone, but they arrived to find him alone in a galley stacked with dishes.
“Why did the crew leave you alone with all this, sir?”
He threw up his hands in disgust. “I sent ’em away. I’d rather do it meself than put up with the likes of them. Get to work.”
“Sir, I have duties to the quartermaster up above now, but the new boy here, Marley, he can help you.”
He clapped her once on the back before vanishing.
Marley looked around at the piles of battered metal plates and tankards. How many men were on this ship, anyhow?
“Don’t just stand there, boy, get going. Them potatoes are waiting for peeling, too.” Then, as she stared: “Argh. You ain’t never been a cabin boy.”
She shook her head.
Immortal (The Trelawneys of Williamsburg Book 2) Page 10
