by Minda Webber
Stopping her fingers from their repetitive drumming, Eve watched her father enter her study like a clipper ship under full sail, then waited for him to fire the opening volley. He had taught her well: Never fire until you see the whites of the skull and crossbones, and never let your enemies or friends see you sweat—not even when deep in the sweltering heat of the tropics.
This afternoon her father was wearing a blue velvet jacket with a blue carnation in his buttonhole. A large blue diamond earring twinkled from his ear. His blue eyes were large, and the corners were webbed with telltale lines of hard loving and living. He carried a cutlass and two pistols, both probably loaded.
Eve smiled as she stood to greet the wayward salt of the sea, scrutinizing him. His bluish-black hair was tied back in a queue, his beard neatly trimmed. He was a handsome man who still appeared to be in his late fifties, though with his werewolf ancestry he was much older.
The old pirate was dressed to the nines this afternoon, as befitted a gentleman, but a gentleman he was not; he was a wily old scalawag who gave no quarter and did not take mutiny lightly. And for the past twelve years, Eve had been the mutineer in his life. Her financial situation was getting desperate, but she'd never ask the Captain for help. He'd never share any of his ill-gotten gains, not without attaching conditions like babies galore and closing the asylum.
He came to a stop before her desk, rolling on bandy legs as if he were still stationed upon the deck of his ship. Glancing about, hands on hips, he grimly shook his head. "As always, I feel like I've blundered into a madhouse!"
Eve narrowed her eyes. So, this was his opening volley? "You have. But then, you're well acquainted with madness, aren't you? If I remember correctly, your first mate thinks he's a dog and is always barking at whales. Do you still have that same boatswain, the one who thinks he's the prince regent, having everyone curtsy to him?"
Squinting and growling, Captain Bluebeard snarled at her. "He's the best boatswain I've ever had, and you know me first mate's a weredog. I suppose ye be putting on airs now ye're all respectable."
Her return shot had drawn blood. Eve hid her smile. "And a fine weredog he is. I've always liked Mr. Collie."
Rolling his eyes, Bluebeard shook his head. "Don't try yer sweet talk now. It won't work," he said, then glanced around the room. "I can't believe me own daughter would choose to close herself up behind these dreary, dank walls. You should be sailing the oceans, with bluebirds of happiness flying high overhead, harboring in crystal-blue lagoons, the cries of gulls and a hearty crew of cutthroats yo-ho-hoing in yer ears."
"More like a bunch of drunken sots yo-ho-hoing about their bottles of rum," Eve retorted, a little stung by her father's scurvy tidings.
"Come now, lass. Ye must miss the sea. It's in yer blood, it is. Ye have a head on your pretty shoulders, lassie. It's past time you started using it, instead of mucking about in people's mad starts. Ye have such a flair with the cutlass, and can navigate a ship near better than meself. Nobody dead or alive can yell, 'Hoist up the mainsail' better than ye. You're wasting away here, Evie! Ye should be surrounded by sea chests filled with booty, the brisk salt breezes blowing through that mane of yours."
Eve frowned fiercely. Bluebeard was using his considerable charm to bedevil her with guilt. "You know, trying to make me feel guilty isn't going to work. It never has. It's true that I love the sea, but I also love my work here." It was so like him to disparage her choices. He wanted her to be a chip off the old block, but she just wanted what she had.
"I've no longing to board a ship and sail away from my problems. I've worked hard for respectability, in both my profession and my personal life," Eve pronounced coolly. "It's what I want, and well you know it. Don't you ever tire of having this same lame discussion year after year?"
Bluebeard shook his head. "I never should have taken your mother to wife. What with her fancy ways and blue-blooded ancestry—gave ye airs it did, and the ill luck of making ye a bit too compassionate for those in need. Yer mother never could refuse anyone or anything in pain. We had more stray cats and dogs on me ship than the ocean has fish." His words were critical but his tone nostalgic.
Eve wanted to roll her eyes. Her father was exaggerating again, something all pirates were notorious for doing when not outright lying. Her father was no better. "Mother had a kind and loving heart," she reprimanded.
"Aye, that she did. But whatever her faults, I loved the woman dearly. She was the best of me and the best of me memories—besides looting."
Eve nodded reluctantly, conceding that the old salt had loved her mother, his sixth wife, as much as he was capable of loving anything that wasn't jewel encrusted or rigged with sails.
"Still, her blue blood did give ye those highfalutin dreams, and of course me own mother didn't help none—filling your foolish head with furball fancies of handsome, honest princes, and virtue as its own reward. Shiver me timbers! Everyone knows thieving provides a better reward, and virtue be for fools with pockets to let."
"There is nothing wrong with honesty or an honest day's work," Eve snapped, a scowl darkening her pretty features.
"Why ever would I want to toil for my supper when I can steal it?" Captain Bluebeard queried in frustration, gesturing with his big hands, flapping like a demented gull run amok. He would never understand women, and he had been married seven times. Scratching his chin, he vowed that someday he would get it right.
He went on: "I didn't mean to make you lose that fierce temper of yours. Although, for being the grand lady ye are… I wonder at the gentility of snapping at yer poor ol' dad."
Eve glared at her father. He only played the be-a-lady guilt-trip card when it suited him. Far be it from him to notice her manners at any other time. "I've worked hard to be a genteel lady, with proper manners and grace—a task, I might add, not easily undertaken, given my formative years of swinging a cutlass and robbing unsuspecting ships."
Shaking his head, Bluebeard stared at his poor misguided daughter, at her rising color and tightening lips. "Such a waste of cutlass training, and of teaching me little lass to fire a cannon," he said, fondly remembering. "What a chucklehead ye be. Once ye could hit the boarding side of a ship. Now I doubt ye could hit the broad side of a barn. Why, I have me doubts that ye could even scamper up the ropes to the crow's nest anymore, could ye? Gone all soft in the body as well as the mind."
"No, Da, I've left my cannon-firing and rope-scuttling days behind me," she replied stiffly. The last thing she wanted him to know was that she climbed ropes at least twice a week in the bell tower, whenever the hunchback Hugo escaped from his room.
"Argh! It does considerable harm to me feelings, seeing me only daughter running a madhouse and conversing with monsters with no more sense than their makers gave them or a goose. It ain't fitting for an heir to the Bluebeard heritage. Me ancestors are probably rolling over in their watery graves. What'll happen to me ships when I die? Who'll sail my Jolly Rogers—all three of them? I should have had me a son. Seven wives, and none of them provided me a lad. Only your mother gave me a child. And what a child! Instead of helping me with the pirating like a good obedient daughter, you're here helping this scurvy lot. This bunch of strangers. These freaks who should all be boiled in oil."
Eve did roll her eyes this time. Oil boiling was one of her father's favorite threats. Here he went again, on one of his usual rampages.
"Makes me wonder if you're not as knocked about in the head as the rest of these swavies ye've got locked up here—or not locked up here, as they should be. Whoever heard of inmates running an asylum? Ye didn't fall from the crow's nest and not tell me, did ye?"
"If I don't help my patients, who will?" Eve retorted. Despite her extreme indignation, her outward appearance remained coldly polite. She would not let her father get her goat with his trollish attitude; she would strive to be a dutiful hostess, in spite of how infuriated he made her, and no matter his nefarious intentions. "Not every inmate needs to be locked up. Rather, they need c
ounseling and understanding and the freedom to move about. Some of them have fears of locks and closed-in places."
"Ye mollycoddle them, Evie. Ye spend too much time with their hysterical fits and starts. Ye need to be free to come and go, to see the Seven Wonders of the World, not sit here wondering about your patients."
She ruefully shook her head. Her father never releneted in his quest to sever her from her patients. "You know how I feel about the insane. Think of Grandmother Ruby. The mind is a terrible thing to waste, and being lost in the dark, never to find the light of sanity, is a loss be-yond tragic—a loss to both humanity and the inhuman."
Unhappily, sanity could be as fragile as a very thin thread of gossamer silk. That line that separated the sane from the insane meant she had to walk like a tightrope to help them. Her patients dearly needed someone to walk it, to share their dark-shadowed worlds with them. Someone needed to help them reveal the things they feared went bump in the night.
"They are like lost children. They need a way home, a route, and someone to help them make the journey," she said.
"If I had me way, all these deranged loons would be walking the plank. Just like me fifth wife, that harpy," Bluebeard muttered.
Eve snorted. "Pirates always loved a good tale, especially a fish-tale. She had heard this story more than once, about Bluebeard's fifth wife, who had met her fate in Davy Jones's locker, where her husband had decided to hide while she and Davy were being unfaithful."
"Thought she could monkey about with me, she did, but I showed her different when I made her walk the plank. Watched her fall to her fate below," Bluebeard reminisced, an odd light in his devilish blue eyes.
Laughter burst from Eve. In spite of her irritation with her father, he did have a wry sense of humor. And he didn't mind directing it back at himself. "How fortunate that she was what she was."
"Unfortunate, to my way of thinking—and what a way to discover her perfidy! There I was, a fine figure of a pirate, standing proudly on board me ship, listening to the slattern's loud splash, waiting for a cry of help from the scurvy female… and what did I hear? Nothing, I tell ye. Instead of pleas for help I heard another splash, and then I saw a green tail batting at the water and her malicious grin. She saluted me; then next thing I know she flips up that saucy green tail of hers and dives below the surface of the sea! I can still hear her laughter ringing in me ears. Gave me old heart a start, it did. Ruined me plans of retribution, sunk beyond reproach. Like I said, she always was a harpy. I just never knew she was a mermaid."
Eve resisted the urge to smile. She knew her father's pride had been hurt, but that he'd also cared enough about the woman to leave her to the sea and her lover, Davy Jones. The old sea dog should have known better in the first place. Mermaids were never happy out of the water, even if it was on the rolling deck of a ship. Their relationship had been fishy from the start.
"Bested by a fishwife," he groused. "I've never lived that down with the crew."
Eve couldn't help but laugh again. It always tickled her funnybone to see her father defeated, because it was a rare occurrence indeed.
"It was skullduggery at its worst," the Captain remarked, shaking his head. His blue diamond earring sparkled in the light from the large beveled window. Then, shrugging his shoulders, he turned his attention back to his mutinous daughter. "Skullduggery, it seems, abounds in all places—on deck of me ship and in this dusty old asylum. The Towers? Towers of raging idiots is what it is. I had hoped for once in your life you might show some appreciation for what is owed your Bluebeard heritage."
Dismayed, Eve straightened her back and thrust her chin forward. "I told you before that this is the way I choose to live my life. I will not be bound by the pirates' code."
The Captain glared at her. "A plank! A plank! My kingdom for a plank. It's mutiny, surely it is, for a daughter to speak so to her doting old da."
Eve smiled coldly. A lesser woman might have given in to her father's constant harassment, but not she. "Yes, it is."
"Argh," he sputtered, his face red. "Blast it to smithereens! I can't believe me own flesh and blood is so cold-blooded, so unfeeling of her poor da's feelings. Ashamed of me, ye are."
Eve's icy smile faltered, and she hurried over and patted his arm. Was he serious? "I'm not ashamed of you, Da, just of what you do to earn your living. I love you, you know, in spite of the fact that you're a rogue of the first order, and a rapscallion to boot."
The Captain patted her back, the redness leaving his thickly bearded face. "Well, then, if I can't get ye to leave this here mausoleum, then at least give me my second wish. Give me grandkids to dandle on my knee and to sail the China Sea with."
Eve raised a brow. Grandchildren were the last item on her agenda, especially with her husband—or rather, without him. She said, "You know that's impossible for the time being."
"You're speaking of your marriage, are ye not? This mysterious marriage ye contrived in Vienna? This havey-cavey marriage that I was not contacted about, to a man I never met and have still seen neither hide nor hair of?"
Nodding warily, she agreed. Her marriage of convenience was convenient indeed. For her. "Adam is very busy. You know full well that I have explained over and over about him. It's a marriage of convenience." Her father was up to something; she could tell. But what was it this time?
"A connivance is more like it. How's it convenient when the man ain't here to bed ye? Why, it ain't natural! Why on earth would ye go and marry some nobody who nobody ever gets to see?"
Eve hid her wince, his comment cutting too close to home. She turned away and nervously began to twist the pearl necklace around her throat. "You of all men shouldn't contest the fact that he's not titled. I don't care if Adam is a nobody. My husband is a paragon among men. I fancy that there is not a male like Adam Griffin in the whole world." And truer words were never spoken.
Bluebeard scowled, repeating with an assurance Eve found quite disturbing, along with a hard glint of determination in his eyes, "He's a nobody. It appears you've married a ghost, a nothing, a will-o'-the-wisp."
"You can't say that. You don't know him. He's really quite something," Eve defended staunchly, trying to quell her misgivings about the Captain's comments. He was giving her no quarter, and she really could have used the two bits. "He's perfect—and perfect for me. The perfect man."
Her father threw back his head and laughed. "You wish. Let me tell ye a secret, lassie. There is no perfect man. It's an invention by bored, silly, love-struck ladies." As he said the last, the laughter faded from his voice and his eyes fixed harshly on Eve's countenance. "Or of lassies who think they are better than they are. Daughters who should be giving up fairy tales before pirate stories."
"Your imagination is as unbridled as your tongue. I haven't the faintest idea what you're speaking of. Would you care for a glass of brandy?" Eve asked, pointing to a decanter atop the china cabinet, hoping the old ploy would work.
It failed, and her father shook his head. "I don't be needing any spirits to deal with a spoiled child."
"Oh, fiddle-faddle and fifteen men on a dead man's chest," Eve grumbled. Why couldn't he just leave her alone?
Undeterred by bribery, Bluebeard pursued his course. "You need a flesh-and-blood man, lass, one who'll love and cherish ye. One who'll stick with ye during shipwrecks as well as windfalls." He fixed his fierce blue gaze upon her. "You're ripe for the bedding, Evie. You're twenty-eight come this March. Don't you think it's time to end this farce of a marriage and find yourself a real man? Why, I know Captain Ben Hook is still interested in you. And he said he'd pay me the dowry price. Though he ain't of the Penzance line like we be, the pirates of the Caribbean are not a bad lot. He wants to take to you wife, bad."
More like bed, Eve thought grimly, but she kept her rebellious thoughts to herself. Captain Ben Silvers—later dubbed Captain Hook—was a tall, thin man with a dark brown eye and a slightly rakish air. He had an eye patch, and a solid gold hook where his right hand u
sed to be. He was also ruthless and cunning. Ever since she'd turned fourteen, Hook had attached himself to her. When she'd become eighteen, he'd begun to try to win her affections, to bind her securely to him. It had taken all Eve's cunning to elude the crafty rat. She had barely escaped his clutches and a seduction attempt, fleeing to Vienna to go to school.
Perhaps she should have told her father about Hook's less than honorable schemes. At the time she had been afraid her father would either challenge Hook to a duel or clap his hands in joy at the idea of her getting married. She'd wanted to risk neither event, so she had remained silent.
"You would tie to me to a pirating marauder whose motto is, Any port in a storm or a calm sea?" she asked.
"He's a lusty man who will fill yer belly with fortune."
Eve grimaced. "You make me sound like some Chinese cookie. Besides, I wouldn't want his fortune. I have never been interested in Captain Ben Hook, and well you know it. That rat-faced moron must be the unluckiest person I know."
"Why, that's blasphemy. Ben Hook is a wily pirate. He's got a hoard tucked away in his treasure chests, and his ship, the Tiger Lily, is fine, fast in the water and has good, strong lines. He's also got wererat blood in him. 'Tis true he's not a full-blood, but at least he's got some shape-shifting ability."
"I was speaking of his unfortunate habit of losing body parts," Eve remarked. And a rat was a rat, as far as she was concerned, even if he didn't turn completely furry during the full moon.
"Why, Evie, Hook's loss could have happened to any ol' sea dog. It's not his fault that ogre took exception to him trying to steal his gold fillings."
"And his eye?" Eve asked, arching a brow.
"A mere accident in Persia. Could have happened to anyone," her father replied lightly, staring up at the ceiling in an expression of pure innocence.
"Yes. I imagine he won't be peeking through keyholes into any harems anymore."
