by Jane Feather
It was yet another puzzle. But when he came back to the ship his work here would be done. They would sail back to England with no more hazardous journeys ashore. There’d be all the perils of French shipping to navigate, but Meg had no fears on that score. She firmly believed the privateer could outsail any admiral of the French fleet. Probably of the Royal Navy, not excluding Admiral Nelson. But that article of faith she kept close to her chest.
She leaned her crossed forearms on the rail and gazed out towards the beach and the small shape of the dinghy. The adventure was all but over. It had to be. She had a world to go back to, not to mention consequences to face. She couldn’t begin to imagine how to explain what she’d been doing to her mother, let alone her father. Arabella would help fabricate something, but it was still a daunting prospect. And that would be the end of adventuring. She would be an old maid of thirty, with limited financial prospects, no longer remotely interesting to the social world, even with the patronage of the duchess of St. Jules. If she were a widow, the situation would be brighter. A widow with a decent annuity, even brighter still. But she was just plain Miss Barratt with a sufficient competency to maintain a dignified single life in the country.
Except that she was not that person. How could she possibly settle for such a half-existence? She was a privateer’s mistress. She knew depths of passion unthinkable to most of the women of her world. Arabella being the exception. She felt truly alive as never before. And all that lay ahead was being buried alive in Kent.
She turned away from the rail and went below, suddenly too depressed to enjoy the soft night air.
Cosimo took a path from the beach into the tiny village of St. Aubin. He knew it of old. Before the war he had run a healthy smuggling trade in fine wine from the vineyards of Bordeaux to the beaches of Cornwall, and despite changed circumstances he was still welcomed by the occupants of the Lion d’Or as an old friend.
“Eh, bonsoir, mon capitaine,” the bartender called, opening the tap on a casket of wine and filling a glass. He set it on the counter. “Comment ça va?”
“Bien, merci, Henri, et vous?” Cosimo raised the glass in an appreciative toast.
The old man shrugged an affirmative that was not quite convincing. Then spat into the sawdust at his feet. Cosimo nodded his comprehension, and when the door banged open a few minutes later to admit two members of the gendarmerie, he understood even more as he watched his old friend supply them with the best of his cellar with no hope of payment.
He stayed, however, offering monosyllabic responses to the policemen’s questions, before offering to buy them cognac, signaling to Henri for the best he had. It worked magic as it always did as they began to talk under the influence of the fine spirit. He learned that patrols had been stepped up in the hills, that Napoleon was going to conquer the world . . . something he fervently hoped would prove incorrect . . . and that the port of Bordeaux was now closed to all foreign shipping.
After an hour he threw money on the counter, offered a wave of farewell, and left the tavern, his step just a trifle unsteady. He heard derisive laughter behind him and a contemptuous smile flickered across his mouth.
He reached the Mary Rose without incident a little before midnight. Climbed onto the deck, gave orders that they should take the ship out of sight of land, and went below.
Meg was curled up on the window seat, still reading Mrs. Radcliff’s The Italian. She didn’t think she’d ever taken so long to get through a book, and had a moment of regret for the long line of eager ladies waiting for its return to Mrs. Carson’s lending library. She jumped up as Cosimo came in and Gus announced, “G’day,” swooping from the window seat onto Cosimo’s shoulder.
Meg looked him over carefully. He seemed the same as always. “You’re back,” she said, stating the obvious. “Did everything go well?”
He shook his head as he discarded his cloak. “No,” he said.
“Why? What happened?” Concerned, she came over to him. “Are you hurt, Cosimo?” Alarm edged the question.
He shook his head again. “No . . . no . . . not a scratch. I’m fine.”
Meg stepped back a pace. “So who isn’t?” She watched his expression.
“The courier didn’t appear,” he said flatly. “I can only assume something happened to prevent him.”
Meg frowned. “Will you try again tomorrow?”
“No, I can’t risk it. It’s an absolute rule. If a meeting fails, we don’t try it again.”
“Oh.” That made sense in the strange world that Cosimo inhabited. “What will you do?”
“They’re vital dispatches,” he said.
“Where are they?” Meg asked. “May I see them?”
For answer he unbuttoned his shirt. Tucked snugly beneath his armpit was a tightly folded packet of paper. “Why would you wish to see them?”
And now she felt stupid for her doubts. “No real reason, of course. But what are you going to do with them? Is there someone else who can take them?”
“No.” He unfastened the thin leather strap that held the papers in place and took them out, setting them on the chart table. “We work in exclusive circles. It’s the only way to keep information safe. This circle is now closed.”
“But if they’re vital?” Meg wondered why she was pursuing this when she knew perfectly well that he was going to take the dispatches himself. Wherever their final destination was.
He pursed his lips. “You know what I’m going to say.”
“Yes. Where do they have to go?”
“Toulon.”
Meg’s eyes widened. “But that’s on the Mediterranean. It’s the other side of France. You’ll have to sail around Spain, through the Strait of Gibraltar.”
“Your geography is impeccable, my dear,” he said, regarding her with a smile that was both questioning and rueful. “As it happens, I don’t intend to sail.”
“Go overland?” She tried to envisage the map in her mind. Such a trek across the center of France in the middle of a war, with sensitive dispatches . . . “Sweet heaven,” she murmured.
“Come with me.”
For a moment she was breathless. She looked at him dumbstruck as the prospect of such a journey, such an adventure at the side of the privateer, took shape, the map of France opening up in her mind’s eye. She took a deep, slow breath and asked simply, “How will I get back?”
“The Mary Rose will sail into the Mediterranean to meet us. It will take her perhaps two weeks longer than it will take us.” He kept his voice calmly matter-of-fact, as if what he was suggesting was a simple and perfectly reasonable, logical adaptation to changed circumstances.
“Will I ever get home?” Meg murmured more to herself than to Cosimo. She wasn’t so far lost in the joys of passionate adventuring as to be completely unaware of the very real possibility that such a journey could end in disaster. What would happen if the Mary Rose was lost at sea, sunk by a French vessel, leaving them stranded in the center of a French port on the Mediterranean? What would she do if something happened to Cosimo on the overland journey? There were no guarantees, despite the privateer’s cool confidence.
But did it really matter? She’d already spent a bleak quarter of an hour contemplating what awaited her when she got home. Was there any reason to hurry that future? She had never been averse to taking risks, quite the opposite. Although this was a risk of such magnitude it required at least a few minutes of thought.
Meg decided she’d devoted sufficient time to thinking. “When do we leave?” she asked.
Cosimo’s smile hid his relief. He was only just realizing how worried he’d been about her response. He didn’t doubt her courage, but he still didn’t know her well enough to be certain she would cast aside her own world as completely as he was asking her to. They would get back to England eventually, but he had no idea when. In agreeing to accompany him to Toulon, she was accepting the fact that her life would never be the same again. He was sure that she had come to terms with that in those long few
minutes before she’d agreed, but nevertheless some inconvenient prick of conscience obliged him to be certain.
“Are you quite sure you know what this means?” he asked, taking her hands and drawing her close to him. “We will get back to England eventually, but I can’t promise when.”
“I understand that,” Meg said. “But at the moment I don’t have anything to go back for. I would like to write one more letter, though, just to prepare my family for a long time without any communication from me. I don’t want them to think I’m dead before I am.”
“That can be arranged.” He kissed the corner of her mouth. “You are a delightfully unusual woman, Meg Barratt.”
“As unusual as Ana?” She raised a quizzical eyebrow to show that the question was not really serious.
“In different ways,” he replied. He frowned slightly. “Tell me, Meg, why do you keep bringing Ana up? Does something trouble you about her?”
“As I said before, she interests me,” Meg responded. “I’m assuming you were lovers as well as partners?”
He nodded. “Does that bother you?”
She looked astounded and Cosimo realized what a stupid and somewhat arrogant question it was. Meg’s nature was far above such petty emotions as jealousy.
“Not in the least,” she declared. “How could it?”
“Forgive me, I wasn’t thinking straight,” he said rather dryly. “But you haven’t answered my question.”
Meg pressed her finger into the cleft in her chin, trying to find the right words. “It’s just rather strange . . . it feels peculiar, to be living someone else’s life,” she said slowly. “I look sufficiently like her to be mistaken for her, I wear her clothes, sleep with her lover, go on her adventures . . . her presence is somehow everywhere, and I seem to feel the need to know all about her . . . to compare myself, my actions, my responses.”
Cosimo thought about this. It had never occurred to him that she should have such a complex attitude to a situation that struck him as purely serendipitous. It puzzled him a little, but then he reflected that women saw certain issues in a very different light from men. Even Ana had surprised him sometimes with the complexity of an emotional response. And Meg was much less hardened by life than Ana had been.
But Ana’s life, her secrets, were not his to tell. In fact, he found talking about her intensely painful, knowing what she had been through in the last weeks. “I don’t compare you,” he stated flatly. “Not in any way, shape, or form.”
That was hardly the point, Meg reflected. But perhaps she couldn’t expect him to understand. He was certainly throwing up that wall again. Ana was off limits to any serious discussion.
A knock at the door broke the moment of rather awkward silence. “Y’are wanted on deck, Captain,” Biggins called.
“Right away.” Cosimo released Meg’s hands, putting his own on her shoulders and kissing her again quickly. “I can’t tell you how happy you’ve made me,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you, love.”
She smiled. “I’m not ready to leave you either, Cosimo.”
When he’d gone she went over to the chart table and picked up the little packet of paper. Why were these dispatches so vital? Such a tiny parcel, small enough to be secreted under his arm. And they had to be taken all that hazardous way to Toulon. Reasoning that he’d left them in full view so she was hardly prying, she unfolded the three sheets. They made no sense, just line after line of unconnected letters and numbers.
Encrypted, of course. Her gaze flicked up to the shelf of dictionaries. It might be an interesting exercise to see if she could crack the code. She smoothed out the papers on the table with the flat of her hand and concentrated on the sequence of letters and numbers, looking for connections, regular repetitions, anything that would make some kind of sense. After a few minutes she reached down Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. She turned the pages until she found one with notations in the margin. She read the various entries carefully, glancing at the coded sheets beside the book to see if anything jumped out at her.
She was so absorbed she didn’t hear the door open and was totally unaware of Cosimo’s presence as he stood in the open doorway watching her. Gus landed on the chart table next to Dr. Johnson and she turned with a start. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“So I see.” He closed the door and stepped farther into the cabin. “What are you doing?”
“I was trying to crack the code,” she responded, trying not to sound guilty or apologetic. “You left these dispatches here, so I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”
“Mmm,” he murmured, reaching over her shoulder to take up the pages. “Quite a big assumption, Meg.” He folded them carefully and slipped them into the pocket of his britches, thankful that he’d had the foresight to provide something that could pass as the mythical dispatches. “But it was careless of me to leave them . . . Did you have any luck?” He had to hope that she hadn’t, given that the sequences of letters and numbers were utterly meaningless.
“No,” she said. “I’m hoping you’ll teach me. Since I’m coming with you to deliver them, what harm can it do if I learn how to read them?”
He shook his head. “A great deal of harm if you think about it.” He was looking unusually grave.
Meg frowned. “You trust me to come with you. You trust me to know why you’re making the journey. And that’s as far as it goes? I don’t understand, Cosimo.”
“Then let me explain.” His expression was still grave. “I’d rather hoped not to have to spell this out, but if I must, I must. If anything happens on this mission . . . if you fall into enemy hands, then what you don’t know you can’t reveal. Do you understand now?”
Meg did and her scalp crawled. She looked down at her hands, knitting her fingers together. She felt his hand warm on the back of her neck.
“Changed your mind?” he asked softly.
She raised her head, pressing back against the firm, warm clasp, and his fingers tightened with a reassuring strength. “No,” she said. “Not for a minute.”
He dropped his hand, bent, and kissed her neck. “Now, let’s talk practicalities.”
“Yes, when do we leave?” Meg was aware of relief. She didn’t want to dwell on the dangers; she’d made up her mind and there was no virtue in looking for reasons to change it.
He held up a hand. “First things first. Do you ride?”
She stared at him incredulously. “Cosimo, I was born and bred in the country.”
“I’ll assume that’s an affirmative,” he said. “May I also assume that you ride well?”
“I was four years old when I first joined the hunt,” she told him with a touch of asperity.
“Sweetheart, it may come as a surprise to you, but not every horsewoman is comfortable with more than a gentle trot down the tan at Hyde Park.”
“Well, you’ll be pleased to know that I am.”
He offered a smile of appeasement and held up his hands in surrender. “Enough said. Next question, at the expense of getting my head bitten off. How well do you speak French?”
Meg pondered the question. “My accent’s not wonderful, at least nowhere near as authentic as yours, but I can hold my own in a conversation.”
He nodded. “Then we’ll have to find an identity that would explain a slightly foreign accent.”
“Swiss, perhaps?”
“Even better, Scots,” he said. “The French-Scots connection is still very strong and you could have spent time in France during your childhood with distant French relatives.”
“Wasn’t Mary, Queen of Scots, a redhead?” Meg inquired with a dry smile.
“I believe so, but her cousin Elizabeth certainly was,” he returned.
“Useful discipline, history,” Meg mused, a glimmer of laughter in her green eyes. “Particularly in the world of espionage.”
“Be serious,” he scolded. “We’re not playing games, Meg.”
She felt a prick of annoyance. “I know that. But we’re still safe and sound on
the Mary Rose. What’s happened to your sense of humor?”
“It tends to go absent without leave when I’m planning a mission,” Cosimo stated without apology. “It does return, though.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Meg said, sitting on the window seat and folding her hands in her lap. “Very well, mine too has taken a holiday. So pray continue with the planning, sir.”
There was something about the way she was sitting, the attentive cock of her head, the fixed attention of her gaze, that gave him pause. She was mocking him, still not aware of the seriousness of this. Ana would have been frowning in thought, putting forth objections, ideas, every ounce of her concentrating on the possibly life-saving minutiae of the mission. But Meg was approaching this as a lighthearted venture. Intellectually she knew the dangers, but she’d not yet really experienced them, so how could he expect her to second-guess them? He could lay them out for her in great detail, or he could ease her into them with a little practical experience. She would learn quickly, he was confident of that.
He let himself relax. “It’s near dawn but I’m famished,” he said. “Why don’t you go to bed and I’ll rummage in the galley.”
Meg jumped up, declaring, “I couldn’t possibly sleep. Besides, I’m ravenous too. And we need to discuss this some more. We know I can ride. We have a national identity that will explain my scratchy accent. But I have a host of questions and I need them answered tonight . . . or this morning, rather,” she amended, glancing towards the window, where the night’s darkness was giving way to a soft gray.
“Then let’s go to the galley and see what we can find.”
Meg went ahead of him down the corridor. Belowdecks the ship was asleep, but she was sailing under a full crew on deck. It occurred to Meg that she would miss this when they took to the land. The routines of shipboard life seemed to have seeped into her blood, which she thought now seemed to move with the rhythm of the sea. Her gait had certainly changed with the ever-moving decks beneath her feet. And her eyes had grown accustomed to distant horizons.
