There were tears standing in Alex’s eyes. “Leave me alone,” he said. “If you have an ounce of pity in your black, bloody soul, leave me alone!”
“I will not,” Duncan vowed. “I will follow you to the grave if that’s what I must do. I will plague you even in death, my friend, but I will never…by God I will never let you rob the world of the gifts only you can give! Never!”
Alex began to weep and then to sob. “Jesus God, Duncan, you don’t know how it is …”
Duncan gripped Alex’s shoulders, to lend him strength, to share the very substance of his soul if that was what it took. “No,” he said. “I don’t know, and I wouldn’t presume to say I did. But you can’t give up and die, Alex. You talk about our new country—well, it must have people like you to survive. For the sake of your countrymen, if for no other reason, you’ve got to get past this. We need you in this fight, and beyond it, too, when the victory is won.”
Alex shuddered with grief. “I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough.”
“You can,” Duncan argued, still holding his friend. “Don’t turn your back on us, Alex. We’ve come so far, we rebels, and fought so many bloody battles. We’re hungry and footsore and, heaven help us, all we want is our liberty, the freedom to choose our own fate! Have you forgotten the dream so easily? Will you abandon us now, when we need you the most?”
“You promised,” Alex wept. “You swore you would help me die, if I decided not to live!”
“And I meant what I said,” Duncan replied softly. He embraced his friend. “But I never promised not to make a case for living. We will go to Queen’s Town, Alex. You can drink and wench and expel your demons. And then we shall go back to the business of winning this war.”
Alex smiled; his face was still wet with tears, and though it was fleeting, it had been a genuine smile. “How can you go a-wenching, when it’s plain you love Phoebe Turlow?”
There are some things one does not try to deny, not to one’s closest friend, anyway. “Alas,” Duncan admitted, “I am smitten and want no other but her. I have retained sufficient wit, however, to make a show of sowing wild oats, and I can still drink, thank God.”
“Very well,” Alex said gravely. “shall accept this challenge, if only to prove to you, once and for all, that you are defending a eunuch. But heed me and heed me well, Duncan—I have not released you from your promise to aid me if my final choice is death.”
Duncan felt a chill of foreboding at Alex’s words, but he was, in many ways, at his best in a crisis, and he spoke in easy tones. “You’ve been such a horse’s ass of late that I may decide to spare you the trouble of choosing and shoot you myself.”
“Then perhaps I shall endeavor to make myself even more obnoxious,” Alex replied with weary humor and stumped past Duncan, on the crutch he’d whittled for himself, to take refuge in the house.
Duncan swore, watching him go, and thus did not hear Phoebe approach from the other side of the veranda. She simply appeared next to him, rested and fresh, her funny hair newly washed and sticking out in places. She wore a frock fashioned of some smooth fabric, and the dusty rose color suited her well, lending a healthy glow to her clear skin and casting a soft reflection upward into her eyes. He caught his breath, for the love he bore this woman, an emotion only recently discovered, went deeper than the very roots of his soul. All that he had told Alex about her was truer than the purest truth, and so were the things he hadn’t yet dared admit, even to himself.
“Phoebe,” he said stupidly.
She smiled, that was all, and he felt himself overtaken by her, possessed, pirated, and plundered, like a ship commandeered by the crew of swifter, better craft. Dazed, he decided that the situation was much more serious than he had guessed, for this was not a passing fancy, like the many liaisons littering his past. No, this was an eternal thing.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, a frown creasing her forehead. “You look pale.”
“I have just come face-to-face with my own future,” Duncan said. “Or the lack of one, which is probably more likely, given my line of work. I need you, Phoebe. Will you be my mistress—share my bed and my table?”
“No,” she answered, without hesitation. There was nothing coy in her expression or her bearing.
He was taken aback, for he was not accustomed to refusals. Furthermore, her responses to his lovemaking had not been those of a reluctant woman. She was, he suspected, as insatiably lusty as he himself, and would want, even crave, the release he could give her.
“Why not?” he managed, after a moment or two of stricken pause.
She smiled, but her splendid blue eyes were solemn. “Because I deserve better. I won’t live with the knowledge that I can be discarded when someone younger and prettier comes along.”
He tried to protest, but Phoebe did not give him a chance.
“Oh, I know better than anybody that a wedding band is no guarantee of lasting devotion,” she went on. “Still, it’s much harder to get a divorce in your time than it was—will be—in mine. Marriage is not taken lightly.”
Duncan saw then that there would be no reasoning with her. She was as obdurate as any of those rabble-rousers up in Boston, though in a sweeter and gentler way, of course. He did not even attempt to explain that marrying him would make her an enemy of the Crown, every bit as guilty of treason and piracy, in the King’s view, as her husband. Nor did he remind her how easily she could become a widow within weeks, days, even hours of her wedding.
“You will deny me your bed unless I take you to wife,” he said slowly. “That is blackmail, Phoebe.”
“No,” she responded, and he caught the scent of lemon on her skin and remembered how brave she had been, swimming away from Jacques Mornault’s ship, how she’d felt, warm and supple and eager, thrashing beneath him, meeting him as an equal on that plane and on every other. “You’ve taught me to want you, Duncan, and I will suffer as much or more than you for my decision. But I have learned to value myself, and I will not be used.”
Duncan considered the lectures he had given Alex, concerning the taking of wives and the fathering of children. And he did love Phoebe, though he could not yet tell her so. He must find the proper words first, or perhaps convey his message in the language of music. “Very well,” he said. “If you want a wedding, you shall have it. This very day.”
Phoebe looked surprised. “Don’t we need a license or something?”
“Papers can be drawn up and witnessed, if you want them,” Duncan allowed. “I am the captain of a ship, you will recall, and I have the authority, even in wartime, to perform a marriage ceremony.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the groom?” she asked.
He laughed, drawing her close and planting a light kiss on her forehead. His heart ached at the contact, however innocent, and there came a painful grinding in his loins. “Yes, and when the service is ended, Phoebe, you shall be my wife in deed and in truth. Alex can serve as my proxy—it might do him good to pretend he’s a bridegroom, with all the delights of the wedding night before him.”
Phoebe’s color was high. “You’re sure this is legal?”
He kissed her, this time lingeringly, on the mouth, and then bent to touch his lips briefly to the swell of flesh above her bodice. She shivered in his arms, and he resisted the temptation to seduce her, to lead her quietly to his bed and tease her until her cries of rapture made the tiles rattle on the roof. “Yes,” he replied at last. “The marriage will be binding, in heaven and on earth, and you’ll have all the papers and rings and baubles you want to prove it. I’ll write my family in Charles Town, and if anything happens to me, you shall have a home with them.”
She stiffened against him. “Nothing is going to ’happen’ to you,” she insisted. “I haven’t come all this way and been through all this trouble, just to lose you. Besides, I don’t think your family would appreciate my politics very much.”
Duncan touched a finger to the tip of her nose. “Phoebe, Phoebe,” he scolded
gruffly, “we must be realistic. There is a war being fought, and I have other enemies besides the British. I could be killed at any time. And I must have the assurance you’ll be safe, with my father and brother looking after you. They won’t agree with your rebel ways, it’s true, but they’ll love you, you may be sure of that.”
Tears glistened in her dense eyelashes. This woman, who could face scoundrels and sharks and natives with spears with such aplomb, wept at the mere suggestion of Duncan’ s death, and her display of emotion touched him more than he dared allow her to see. “Okay, okay,” she said, in that strange bastardized English Duncan had yet to master. “Let’s just handle this one moment at a time, shall we? Tomorrow will take care of itself, and so will all the days after it.”
Duncan cupped his hand on her chin and raised her face for his kiss.
“Think carefully, Phoebe,” he said when it was over. “This is a dangerous thing you are doing, aligning yourself with the likes of me. The penalty for treason is still death.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “The penalty for living is death, Duncan. It’s what you do that really matters, not what you wish or think or fear will happen.”
He smoothed her odd hair. “So be it,” he said. “We will be married before nightfall, and dance while there is music. Go now, and make yourself ready for me, while I tell Alex he’s about to be a bridegroom.”
9
Phoebe went back inside the house in a daze, trailing her hand along the ornate bannister as she climbed the stairs. The whole situation seemed more like an impossible dream than ever before, now that Duncan had proposed. Although she wanted to be his wife, she was afraid—no, terrified—of waking up to find herself in the old life, where the man she loved was no more than words on the tattered, discolored pages of an obscure history book. She might pop back into the twentieth century at any time, like that guy in the TV reruns who was always making “leaps,” with no warning and no chance to say good-bye.
She entered her room, sat down on the chair in front of the vanity table, and stared at her image in the mirror. She could face the British if she had to, and even the pirate Mornault, but leaving Duncan would be an anguish beyond bearing. Especially if he was her husband.
Phoebe sat there in confused silence, one part of her quaking with fear, another bursting to celebrate, for quite a long time. Her trance was broken when someone knocked at the door, and she turned on the vanity seat, expecting Old Woman, or perhaps Duncan, come to say he’d changed his mind about the wedding.
“Yes?” she called, her voice a little shaky.
It was Alex who entered, leaving the door ajar, for the sake of propriety she supposed, and moving with painful slowness into the center of the room.
“You’ll pardon the intrusion, I hope,” he said, his eyes kindly and sad as he pondered her. “I’ve come to make certain this marriage is truly what you want and that you’re not being forced into it.”
“You don’t think much of your friend Duncan,” Phoebe commented. “When I first came here, you believed he’d been keeping me prisoner in the cellars.”
Alex sighed, and Phoebe saw fine beads of sweat glistening on his forehead. He had expended considerable effort to see her. “On the contrary,” he replied, “I know Duncan Rourke to be the finest of men. The fact remains, though, that when he gets an idea into his head, he’s likely to assume any sensible person would agree with it. Even if they’re kicking and screaming in protest. As for the cellar incident, well, he once locked me in one, as a jest, forgot I was there, and went off on a hunt.”
Phoebe smiled. “I suppose he thought you’d keep,” she said, gesturing toward the window seat. “Sit down, Alex.”
He made his difficult way to the bay window, with its fluttering gauze curtains, and sat. After pulling a handkerchief from an inside pocket of his spotless azure blue waistcoat, he dried his face and neck and sighed. “We grew up together, Duncan and I,” he said after a few moments of agitated rest. “I am not as close to my own brother as I am to him.”
Phoebe’s smile had fallen away. “You must have been there, then, when the British captain took the whip to him.”
Alex flinched visibly and went so pale that Phoebe jumped to her feet and fetched him a cup of water from the carafe beside her nap-rumpled bed. “He told you about that, did he?”
“Yes,” she said. “Including the affaire de coeur with Mrs. Sheffield.”
“I was away at school at the time,” Alex said, between sips of water. His color, such as it was, was beginning to return. “My father rode with Mr. Rourke, and with Lucas, when they freed Duncan by force. It was very nearly too late, even then.”
“He said it took a long time to recover.”
“It was a year before he was right,” Alex told her, his eyes haunted, fixed on some distant scene. “Duncan got the pneumonia, the beating had weakened him that much, and he nearly died from that.”
Phoebe was silent, hoping that Alex’s thoughts were following the same track her own had taken. If Duncan had survived a savage beating, and the illness that followed, then Alex should be able to find a way through his present troubles.
“He never really got over it, you know,” Alex reflected. “It’s why he plays that splendid, dreadful music of his.”
Phoebe nodded. “Do you hope to persuade me not to marry Duncan?” she asked. It had crossed her mind that Alex could think her unsuitable for the match—after all, she had appeared out of nowhere, blathering about elevators and other things that were still unknown in the eighteenth century. Too, her short hair must seem bizarre to him, since the women of his time usually didn’t cut their tresses between the cradle and the grave.
Alex shook his head and made at least an attempt at smiling. “No, mistress. He loves you, though he’ll not say so until he’s good and ready, so you must be patient with him. Now I know, at least, that my closest friend will be happy, provided he’s fortunate enough to survive this rebellion of ours.”
“What about you, Alex?” Phoebe asked. “Do you mean to survive, too?”
He rose tremulously to his feet, with the help of his crutch, and it took all Phoebe’s forbearance to keep from rushing to his aid. “We shall see,” he said. “In the meantime, there is to be a wedding, and I am to play at being a bridegroom.” He paused and assessed her fondly. “He’s a lucky fellow indeed, our Duncan. Have patience with him, Phoebe—he’s good to the core of his soul, but sometimes he thinks he ought to seem otherwise. I know him better, perhaps, than any man alive, and I can tell you he’ll be a faithful husband, because honor is second nature to him. Should you betray him, however, Duncan will be the very personification of fury, and though he would not deny you, you’d never again know his trust.”
Phoebe’s heart swelled at Alex’s tribute to her future husband, but it ached, too, because he so plainly believed he could never experience happiness and passion of his own. “You are a splendid man,” she said and meant it. “Someday soon, there will be another wedding—yours—and we’ll all be joyous.”
“Yes,” Alex replied, in that same distracted, beleaguered voice he’d used before. “Or perhaps a funeral, at which I shall expect you to weep.”
Phoebe swallowed tears, knowing that sometimes people who are drowning in despair simply cannot be reached, no matter what. “And what would you expect of Duncan, in such a circumstance?”
“Music, of course. Thunderous, discordant stuff, fit to bring every dead sailor up from his watery grave, with his hands pressed to his ears.” He had reached the doorway, by the same laborious effort he’d exhibited all along, and he turned on the threshold to meet Phoebe’s gaze. “Do you think I don’t know how highly my friend regards me, Phoebe, and what it will do to him if I die? Well, mark you this: I understand full well, and the grief of it, added to my other burden, is nigh unto unbearable.” With that, Alex was gone.
Phoebe was still sitting there, staring at the space he’d left in the doorway, when Old Woman came in, carrying
a dress trimmed in ecru lace draped over one arm. Her face seemed polished with merriment, glowing like fine, dark wood, and she would not countenance sorrow in the bride.
“Good thing we got you a bath and a rest,” Old Woman chattered, laying the gown on the bed and smoothing it with her broad, competent hands. “Won’t be no sleep for you this night, miss, and you’ll smell sweet for your man.”
Phoebe sighed. “Have you ever looked at Alex’s palm?” she asked. “What did you see there?”
“Calluses,” said Old Woman. “You don’t worry about him. He got his own charts to follow.”
Phoebe stood and went to examine the dress. Alex’s visit had put her in a reflective mood, but she was to marry within the next few hours, taking a man she loved for her husband, and she knew better than anyone what joys the night would bring. “Did this belong to that poor woman, too?” she asked, smoothing the creamy satin of the gown. “The one who was shipwrecked?”
“No,” Old Woman replied. “I made it with these black hands, before Mr. Duncan found you wandering in the cellar. This dress, it never belong to nobody but you.”
“More magic,” Phoebe said with a smile.
“It be magic that brought you here,” Old Woman said. “I give you another gift, too, on this happy day. I tell you my name, but you do not say it, you hear? Not ’til the time comes!”
Phoebe was caught up in the spell. After all, if she could travel through time, then certainly Old Woman’s true name could make magic. “Can I tell Duncan?”
“No,” Old Woman said adamantly, scowling a fierce scowl. “You got to promise me you won’t. Not until after.”
“After what?”
“You never mind that. You’ll know when it’s right.”
Phoebe sighed, but her curiosity wouldn’t let her miss this chance. “All right, I promise,” she said.
Old Woman whispered the name in her ear. It was an English word, after all, embodying everything good.
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