Pirates

by Linda Lael Miller

  Duncan had not said a word since takeoff, and he was white as a Bing Crosby Christmas. When the plane touched down and bounced along the runway, engines roaring in reverse thrust, he gave Phoebe a look that would have curdled yogurt. Translation: Don’t ever ask me to do this again.

  She began to wonder how he would react to her surprise. Scratch Space Mountain and Star Tours, she thought with some regret.

  They checked into a room, then caught a cab to a shopping mall, and Phoebe used her ATM card again, this time to replace the cash she’d spent on their airline tickets. Later, she would find a pawnshop in a bad neighborhood and hock one of Duncan’ s gold coins, just to get a feel for their value. In the meantime, the pirate in her life needed a change of clothes—she still had the rumpled contents of the suitcase she’d brought from Seattle—so she outfitted him in jeans, athletic shoes, and a blue cotton shirt.

  “Ummm,” she said, admiring him.

  Duncan, overwhelmed all over again by the mall and the crowds of scantily dressed shoppers, was starting to turn testy. Phoebe took his hand and dragged him out onto the concourse and into the food court, where she purchased double-bacon cheeseburgers, french fries, and milk shakes.

  “This is a distinct improvement,” Duncan said, brightening, “over that swill we had at the hospital.”

  Phoebe smiled. “Don’t get too used to it. Good as this stuff tastes, a steady diet of it would put you in the hospital.”

  Duncan had finished his fries and started in on Phoebe’s. There was color in his face again, and an evil glint in his eyes. “Do you presume, woman,” he said, pretending to ferocity, “to dictate what I will and will not eat?”

  “Of course,” Phoebe answered blithely. “I’m your wife.”

  He sighed. “I suppose that means you won’t buy me another of these”—he turned to consult the sign over the counter at the fastfood franchise—“Belly-busters?”

  “That’s exactly what it means,” Phoebe said. “Do you want to die of clogged arteries before you turn two hundred and fifty?”

  Duncan laughed. “I shall be two hundred and forty-five on my next birthday,” he said, and a woman pushing a stroller between the tables of the food court paused to stare.

  That afternoon, they visited one of Orlando’s major tourist attractions.

  “We did not revere mice in quite the same way, in my time,” Duncan confided behind his hand, as a giant and very cheerful rodent skipped by on two legs. “Nasty little creatures, for the most part.”

  Phoebe elbowed him gently, mindful of his sword wound and general debilitation. “You speak sacrilege,” she warned, with a smile in her eyes. “Come with me, Captain Rourke—there is something I want to show you.”

  Duncan seemed shaken when they came out of the ride—Phoebe’s personal favorite—featuring pirates, skeletons, heaps of treasure, and a convincing battle between ship and shore. “You might have warned me,” he said, a muscle flexing once in his jaw, “that there would be gunplay!”

  Phoebe laughed. “I told you it would be realistic,” she said. “How do you feel about ghosts?”

  He didn’t reply.

  Later that night in their hotel room, when they were both immersed to their necks in the Jacuzzi, Phoebe asked, “Well, Mr. Rourke? What do you think of modern America?”

  Duncan pondered his answer, taking his wineglass from the tiled edge of the tub and sipping from it. “That,” he countered dryly, at considerable length, “was modern America?”

  Phoebe splashed him for being so pompous. Still, she had to concede he had a point. “One facet of it, yes,” she admitted, when his wine had been swamped with bathwater and his hair drenched. She went to him, slipped her arms around his lean, bare waist, and laid her head against his good shoulder. “Tell me what you thought,” she urged. She really wanted to know.

  Duncan hesitated, then allowed his hands to rest on the small of her back. “The pirates were amusing,” he said, and the sorrowful mischief in his eyes was unsettlingly reminiscent of his father, “though I confess I almost threw you to the floor of the boat once or twice, to save you from stray musket balls. The haunted house, however, was nearly my undoing.”

  She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “But you don’t like it here.”

  He paused again. Then he smoothed her hair and said, with touching reluctance, “No, Phoebe. I don’t belong.”

  Phoebe bit her lower lip as tears threatened. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I gave you the impression that the whole place is one big amusement park, and that’s not true. The country you and your friends fought to establish is so much more, Duncan—”

  He quieted her with a brief, light kiss. “I know,” he assured her hoarsely, pulling her close to him. “We’re together, Phoebe. That’s the important thing.”

  She sniffled. “Yes,” she agreed. “But you know what? For all its trials and hardships, I think I like your world better, too. It was more graceful, somehow, and everything seemed more substantial. More real.”

  Duncan curved a finger under her chin and lifted. “But it will be better for you here,” he said. “Better for our baby.”

  Phoebe nodded. They’d watched a PBS special on pregnancy and childbirth earlier in the evening, and Duncan had been captivated. “I’ll see a doctor tomorrow,” she promised, seeing the concern in his eyes, “just to make sure everything’s all right. And then I’ll show you another side of America.”

  “I love you,” he said softly. He had told her before when in the throes of passion, but this was different. A milestone, somehow, a decree that what they shared together was permanent. Even eternal.

  She stared at him in wonder and joy, because, for all Duncan’s tenderness, all his protectiveness and his passion, he had never said those words in quite that way. And she had yearned to hear them, in just that context, the way a desert flower longs for the cool mist of morning.

  “And I love you,” she replied. “In this world or any other.”

  Duncan kissed her again, very deeply and very thoroughly, and then brought her out of the water. They dried each other with soft hotel towels and took their time making love.

  Phoebe saw an obstetrician the next day and came out of the exam room smiling, with a prescription for prenatal vitamins in her hand. The examination had gone well, and the baby’s heartbeat was strong and steady. Duncan was in the waiting room when she emerged, staring in the direction of the sea.

  She saw the forlorn expression on his face before he’d had time to replace it with one of those knee-smiling grins of his.

  “Come along, Mr. Rourke,” Phoebe said tenderly, taking his hand and brushing her lips across his knuckles. “There is something else I want you to see.”

  A little over an hour later, they were on the freeway, in a rented car, headed for Cape Kennedy.

  “It’s time we talked about islands and oceans and supernatural elevators,” Phoebe announced, keeping her eyes on the road.

  Beside her, in the passenger seat, Duncan frowned. “What about the baby? You haven’t told me what the doctor said.”

  “Our child is fine,” she assured him, her throat thick with emotion. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

  They had hamburgers, Duncan’s favorite food, at a fastfood place near the base. Then Phoebe took her eighteenth-century husband through the space museum, explaining moon shots and other modern wonders as best she could.

  On the way back to their motel in Orlando, Phoebe made a few comparisons of her own. There were things she liked about the twentieth century, of course, but she knew she didn’t belong there, any more than Duncan did. Quietly, in the most private part of her heart, she said good-bye to the 1990s.

  “We’re going back,” Phoebe proclaimed.

  “Back?” Duncan echoed. He’d been deep in thought since they’d left the museum. Little wonder. “How?” he asked in a distracted tone.

  “We’ll start by flying—okay, we’ll take a boat—back to Paradise Island. Then we’ll ch
eck into the hotel, there to wait and watch and hope to high heaven that the magic elevator takes us back to 1780.”

  Duncan’s smile was rueful—and sad in a way that hurt Phoebe’s heart. “That would be a miracle,” he said.

  “Maybe it would,” Phoebe agreed, reaching over the gearshift to squeeze his hand. “But it isn’t as if it hasn’t already happened twice. Could be that the third time, as they say, is the charm.”

  He sighed. “Even if it were possible—what about the baby?”

  “What about him? He was conceived in the eighteenth century. Maybe he’s supposed to be born there.”

  Duncan seemed unconvinced, but they sold a pile of gold coins to a shop owner that afternoon, and by evening they were aboard a chartered yacht, speeding toward Paradise island. Standing in the wheelhouse with the skipper, listening to an in-depth lecture on how the instruments worked, Duncan looked truly happy for the first time in days.

  The Eden Hotel was as depressing as before, but Phoebe knew in her heart that returning had been the right thing to do. They settled in, Mr. and Mrs. Duncan Rourke, and spent their days reading and exploring and talking, and their evenings making love. Phoebe was perfectly content and could have gone on living in that aimless way forever, but she sensed a restlessness in Duncan, an impatient longing for the world he knew.

  Phoebe searched high and low for Professor Benning’s book about Duncan’s life, without saying anything to her husband, but she turned up exactly nothing. Probably some tourist had found the little volume and taken it home. Calls to the island library and to a book search service on the mainland were fruitless, and Phoebe reluctantly gave up on finding out how her story, and Duncan’s, would end.

  Perhaps, she reasoned, it was for the best.

  Phoebe’s pregnancy was starting to show, and the proceeds from the coins were running out, when Duncan developed insomnia. She often awakened in the night, with a start, and found him gone, and she was always terrified by the discovery.

  Usually, she found him on one of the terraces, or sitting at the piano in the bar, running his hands tentatively over the keys, as if afraid to unleash the music inside him. On occasion, he walked the beach, and later described the constellations he’d seen in wistful tones, as though the stars he’d looked up at were not the same ones he’d always known.

  Although he loved her, and said so often and eloquently, with words as well as with his body, Phoebe began to fear that she was losing Duncan, that he was slowly slipping away from her. She wanted to cling to him, keep him at her side night and day, but she loved him too much and too well to make herself his jailer.

  And so Phoebe waited and watched the ever-changing temperament of the sea, and beneath her heart, the baby grew.

  Duncan got out of bed slowly, in the depths of that still and sultry night, some three months after their return to the hotel on Paradise Island, taking care not to awaken Phoebe. He’d gotten to know the bartender, an affable black man who called himself Snowball, and sometimes he was still behind the bar when Duncan came downstairs, polishing glasses or wiping tables.

  The television set, an apparatus Duncan had come to despise after an initial and very brief period of fascination, was tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel when he entered the lounge.

  “Duncan, old buddy,” Snowball greeted him, flashing that broad ivory smile. He called everybody “old buddy,” but Duncan didn’t mind because the term made him feel welcome. As much as he loved Phoebe—enough, he sometimes thought, to sacrifice his soul for her—he missed the companionship of like-minded males, like Alex and Beedle and his brother, Lucas. When he let himself consider the fact that they were all long dead, these men who had been his friends, the grief was hard to bear.

  “Hello,” he said, glancing at the clock on the wall behind the bar. Still an hour until closing time, he thought. As usual, the place was empty, except for the two of them.

  “Hey, do me a favor, will you?” Snowball asked. “I got half a case of Grand Marnier down in the cellar, in that little room at the bottom of the stairs. You mind gettin’ it for me, so I don’t get in Dutch for leavin’ before my shift’s over? Soon as I step out of this place, somebody’ll be in here wantin’ a maitai, and the night manager will have my ass.”

  Duncan smiled. He hadn’t learned to speak twentieth-century English, in all its varieties—Snowball called it “lingo”—but he could usually understand it. “Sure,” he said and set out for the cellar without asking for directions. He’d stored wine in that same small chamber in his time, along with contraband rum.

  “Thanks, man,” Snowball said.

  At the top of the cellar stairs, Duncan flipped the light switch—one of the many modern inventions he had come to appreciate—but nothing happened. He hesitated, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, and then he saw a strange, faint glow in the passageway, and heard a bell chime.

  The elevator. For a moment, his heartbeat quickened, but then he remembered: The contraptions were commonplace in the 1990s. Every building of any size had one, including this seedy hotel.

  He went down the steps, opened the door to the storage room, and by the glow of the lingering elevator, found the half case of Grand Marnier Snowball had asked for. Lifting the box, Duncan started back toward the stairs, then stopped, grinning. The elevator was still there, with its doors open, waiting. Why walk?

  Duncan stepped into the cubicle, congratulating himself on his understanding of modern devices, pushed the button for the lobby, and watched as the doors slipped shut. The machine glided upward and stopped, and Duncan stepped out, yawning a little. He’d have a drink, talk with Snowball for a while, and then go back upstairs, to lie beside Phoebe and wait for morning. If his wife awakened in a malleable mood, he would make love to her …

  He had stepped out of the elevator, and heard the doors whisper closed behind him, before he realized what had happened.

  The lobby was no longer a lobby. It was an empty, moonwashed room, littered with broken statuary, shining crystal splinters from the fallen chandelier, and bits of molded plaster from the ceiling.

  Duncan whirled, the crate of brown bottles still in his arms, and found the elevator gone. The wall was smooth and utterly bare, except for a hook and a dangling wire that had once held a painting in place.

  He lowered the liquor to the floor, his heart pounding in his ears, his eyes burning. Then, knowing that he was back in 1780, without Phoebe, he flung himself at the place where the elevator had been and screamed her name.

  Phoebe sat straight up in her bed, wrenched from the depths of a sound sleep as surely as if a fist had grasped her brain and jerked her awake. She was drenched in perspiration, her nightgown clinging to her skin, and the sound of her own name echoed in her ears, like the shriek of a banshee.

  “Duncan?” She fumbled for the switch on the bedside lamp, turned it, and the glow verified what she had already known: Her husband wasn’t there. “Duncan!”

  He was downstairs, she told herself, as the terrible urgency that had awakened her subsided into despair. Or walking on the beach, or reading in the lobby …

  The assurances didn’t help. Phoebe got out of bed, peeled off her cotton nightgown, found one of the sweat suits she’d sent away for instead of maternity clothes, and got dressed, fumbling all the while.

  She kept murmuring Duncan’s name, over and over again, like a crazy woman repeating a litany, but she didn’t care how she sounded, didn’t try to stop herself. Her gut told her what her mind wanted to deny: that something awful and profound had happened.

  Their room was on the second floor, and Phoebe didn’t bother summoning the elevator. She dashed down the stairs, barefooted, hair sticking out all over her head, and raced into the cocktail lounge.

  Snowball was there, and he looked up expectantly when Phoebe slid into the room like a deer on ice. “Phoebe?” he said, narrowing his eyes for a moment.

  “Where’s Duncan?” Phoebe demanded breathlessly. She knew the answer
, even then, but she wasn’t willing to face it yet, wanted to hear somebody deny what she was thinking.

  Snowball rounded the bar, took Phoebe’s arm and ushered her to a chair. “I sent him downstairs for something,” he said. “He must have got to talkin’ to somebody. Here, you sit tight, and I’ll get you a nice glass of milk.”

  Phoebe stood up, then sat down again. She was out of breath, and her knees were trembling so badly that she was afraid she’d fall. She began to cry, softly at first, and then harder, and then in great, hysterical wails.

  Snowball patted Phoebe’s back and murmured that everything would be all right, and she laid her head down on her folded arms and sobbed.

  “You got to stop that,” the bartender said. “It ain’t good for you. You want me to call a doctor before I go and find that damn fool husband of yours?”

  Phoebe raised her head and hiccoughed. “He’s gone,” she said.

  “What you mean, ‘he’s gone’?” Snowball demanded, but he was beginning to sound worried. “I just saw the man a few minutes ago! Why, he’ll probably walk through that door in a second or two. When he does, how you goin’ to explain carryin’ on like this?”

  She pretended to be calm and waited, but Duncan did not return. By dawn, Snowball and the desk clerk and the island police knew what Phoebe had realized at the outset.

  Duncan Rourke had vanished like a memory made of smoke.

  19

  Where the hell have you been?” Alex demanded, whitefaced with annoyance and the residual pain of his knee injury, when he entered the ruins of the study to find Duncan there, pouring a drink. To spare his family and friends as much of the shock as necessary, Duncan had hidden the case of Grand Marnier first, then gone to the bedchamber, there to exchange his twentieth-century garb for breeches, boots, and a loose linen shirt. He’d barely been able to tolerate the place even long enough to change his clothes, knowing that Phoebe was gone, that he might never see her again.

  The mere prospect was all but unbearable; the reality, day upon day, night upon night, would be pure torture.

  “How long was I away?” Duncan countered grimly, calling upon all his inner resources, marshaling his thoughts into a semblance of order. As much as he wanted to give in to despair, he did not have that luxury. There was a war to win, and people depended upon him.