“Oh, a fair few,” he acknowledged. But there was a sort of reserve in his manner now, and no story was immediately forthcoming.
“I was just wondering about the sort of man he is. I really hadn’t bargained on this trip, you see,” she said, averting her gaze, “and to find oneself quite at the mercy of strangers . . .”
“You’ve naught to fear here, miss.”
“Fear?” she echoed, as if the thought had never crossed her mind. “Certainly not. The captain has such a gentlemanly air about him,” she suggested, but the observation earned her only a nod of agreement. “I was wondering, in particular,” she said at last, hoping she would not be punished for her impatience, “what you know of the history between Captain Corrvan and this ship that’s following us, the Justice.”
The friendly light left Mr. Beals’s eyes, as if someone had shuttered a pair of windows. “Why do you ask, miss?”
“Oh, just curious,” she began, but Beals clearly saw through that lie, prompting a more honest reply than she had intended to give. “You see . . .” I’ve been betrayed by one I loved as a brother. And I don’t know when I’ll see my home again . . . “Captain Corrvan accepted an enormous sum of money to deliver some valuable cargo to England.”
To her surprise, Beals nodded. “Aye. He’s promised us all our fair share.”
It was how sailors were usually paid, of course, each man getting a portion of the profits, according to his rank. But somehow she had not expected Captain Corrvan to divide even his ill-gotten gains. Then again, wasn’t there some old proverb about honor among thieves? “By coming aboard after Caesar, I inadvertently played into the hands of the person who paid him. I am the valuable cargo, Mr. Beals.”
His eyebrows shot above the rims of his glasses.
“And there’s a man aboard the Justice who knows it, a man who wishes me nothing but ill. I can’t help but wonder . . .”
“What, miss?” he prompted.
“Whether Captain Corrvan means to deliver me to him,” she finished at last. Gravely, Mr. Beals shook his head. “Is it so impossible to believe that your captain has entered into another bargain, a more lucrative one yet? Might he not intend to make an exchange—my life for a fortune in gold?”
“I won’t believe it of him, leastways.”
“He is always forthcoming to you and the rest of the crew, then?” she pressed. “Has never held back something you ought to have known?” Beals shifted in his chair and she knew she had touched very near an old wound, one that was imperfectly healed. “Some deal in which you ought to have shared, perhaps?”
But money, it seemed, was not the nature of Captain Corrvan’s particular offense. Beals shook his head more sharply this time. “Never, miss. No man on this crew has aught to complain of, an’ they’re all better off than they were.” The more agitated he became, the more his West Country accent broke through. “But it ain’t money what drives him.”
“Oh, of course not,” Tempest scoffed. “It never is.”
“Why, he only ever went after Stratton because his father—”
She leaned forward in order that she might not miss a word of his story, but the movement unfortunately alerted Mr. Beals to his near blunder. “It’s not my story to tell,” he insisted after he had pulled himself back from the brink of telling it. “But I can say this: Cap’n Corrvan would sooner scuttle the Colleen with his own two hands than help out Stratton and his band of pirates. No matter what he was paid.”
His earnestness was surprisingly persuasive. But her curiosity was still unappeased. And whatever the source of the bad blood between Andrew Corrvan and Captain Stratton, she did not relish the prospect of being caught in the middle of their feud.
Mr. Beals had risen from the table and walked closer to the door as he spoke. “Before you go,” she called after him, “you did promise I might visit Caesar. He is well?”
“Like naught was ever wrong wit’ ’im,” the surgeon said with a warmer smile. “I’ll say that you asked after ’im and see what can’t be arranged.”
“And Mr. Beals?” His hand hesitated on the door latch. “Forgive me for asking so many questions,” she said. “I hope I haven’t given offense.”
“Naw,” he said, opening the cabin door. “Perfectly understandable that you’d be curious, under the circumstances. But if you want to know more, you’ll have to ask t’ cap’n direct.”
“Of course,” she agreed, despite having no intention of doing so. She was formulating another plan.
Early the next morning, she ventured out onto the deck once more. A handful of sailors were busy at varied tasks. At the helm stood a weathered-looking man of middle age, his eyes focused on the far horizon. Mr. Bewick, she presumed. Captain Corrvan was nowhere in sight.
Setting out on what she hoped would be mistaken for a morning stroll to take the air, she passed the quartermaster with a nod. Farther along, she met two seamen mending sails under the supervision of the Scottish boatswain.
“Good morning, Mr. Fleming,” she began. “Am I disturbing you?”
One of the other sailors snorted. “That’ll do, Hackett,” Fleming said sharply before stepping away and motioning for Tempest to follow.
“What is it you wanted, Miss Holderin?”
A sudden gust made her borrowed shirt billow away from her skin, and she was suddenly grateful to have been deprived of her muslin dress, which would have revealed a great deal more than the shape of her arms. The wind filled the sails, too—those of them that were up, that is. A goodly number of them remained tightly furled.
“Would we not travel faster with more sails, Mr. Fleming?” she asked, hoping her curiosity would sound innocent. “I thought speed was of the essence.”
It almost felt as if they were not really trying to get away from the Justice. She twisted surreptitiously to glance behind them, but as had been the case before, she could see nothing but water.
“Cap’n’s orders,” Fleming told her.
She might have predicted that would be everyone’s favorite reply, whatever her question.
“Now, then, I’d advise you to return to your quarters, miss,” he continued. “’Tisna wise for you to be out and about.”
Her lips parted in a would-be scold. Under no circumstances did she intend to spend the next weeks locked away like the cargo in the hold. He and the other men were going to have to accustom themselves to her presence.
But Mr. Fleming had already returned to his post.
So someone didn’t want her poking her nose into things, eh? That meant there must be something more than Captain Corrvan’s past to hide. And she was determined to uncover it. Only then could she know whether she dared to trust him at all.
Which was why, a few days later, it came to pass that Timmy Madcombe found her near the seamen’s quarters on a lower deck.
He started as he closed a door behind him. Tempest just caught a glimpse of the room’s interior: rows of berths stacked one above the other, most filled with unidentifiable, snoring heaps. “Can I help you, miss?”
“Why, Timmy.” He had not been her first choice to interrogate, since she doubted the boy had been aboard the ship long enough to know anything useful. But despite his shyness in her presence, he had a reputation among the crew for being something of a chatterbox, and beggars could not be choosers. She flashed a smile and then corrected herself. “Er, Mr. Madcombe, I suppose I’m to say. I’m still not accustomed to these shipboard conventions.”
A frown of uncertainty wrinkled his brow. “As you wish, ma’am—er, miss.”
“I’m glad of a chance to say thank you for the loan of your clothes.”
He glanced at her nervously, blushing to the roots of his hair. “’Tweren’t nothin’, miss.” A pause. “Are you . . . looking for something?”
“Oh, just acquainting myself with the ship. Is that a problem?” Another smile, but this one might have crossed the border into simpering, for it actually drove Timmy backward a step.
�
��No, o’ course not,” he insisted, bumping hard against the wall. “It’s only . . . well, sailors aren’t used to having ladies about, miss. If you choose to wander about, you might hear—or see—something you’d rather not.”
Ah, now she was getting somewhere. She widened her eyes and wished she could summon a blush at will. “Oh my. I didn’t think of that . . . Is there some illicit cargo aboard?” she asked, lowering her voice to a whisper.
“Ill-icit?” He shaped the word uncertainly and at last shook his head when he could not puzzle out its meaning. “Dunno, miss. I just thought you might not like to hear the men swearing and such. They takes care not to do it so much above,” he explained with a jerk of his head to indicate the upper deck, “fearin’ you might be by. But it gets awful rough down here, sometimes.”
“Oh.” She could not keep the disappointment from her voice. “Yes, of course. I thought you meant that Captain Corrvan had undertaken something illegal. You’d know, wouldn’t you, if something weren’t quite right?”
“Miss?”
“I mean, you seem like such an honest young man,” she flattered. “You’d resist, I suppose, if you were asked to do something that was wrong.”
“’Tain’t likely,” he insisted, and she was left to wonder whether it was the illegal activity or the resistance to it he found improbable. “Now if you’ll excuse me, miss. I’m due on watch.”
So it went, for the better part of a week. Deep suspicion of her questions. Half answers given to them, at best. No information about Andrew Corrvan’s past. Only tantalizing glimpses of his present.
One evening her supper tray had been brought by none other than Caesar, who had been put to work alongside Greaves in the galley and showed some promising culinary skills. The boy seemed both well and happy, and he readily confirmed that he owed the captain his life for saving him not from his master’s cruelties, although there had been plenty of those, but from the violence of an angry customer.
Andrew Corrvan was willing to subvert the law, it seemed, but not quite—or at least, not only—in the ways she had at first imagined.
This new revelation about his character was confirmed the next afternoon when she almost stumbled over the carpenter, Mr. Ford, repairing a section of railing, damaged by a barrel of gunpowder that had broken loose of its ropes and almost rolled overboard. Although the air was cool, he was bareheaded and bare-chested and sweating from the exertion of his task.
As soon as he realized she was standing there, he grunted and reached for his shirt, pulling it swiftly over his head. But not before she glimpsed the maze of jagged scars across his back, remnants of a flogging that must nearly have cost him his life.
“Pardon, miss,” he said, but he did not sound apologetic. He could tell that she had seen.
After a moment, he returned to his work, apparently deciding that she didn’t mean to move on. “That must require a great deal of skill,” she said as she watched him.
“A fair bit,” Ford acknowledged without looking up.
“I was . . . wondering when you joined the crew of the Fair Colleen, Mr. Ford.” While she wanted desperately to find someone able to reveal something about Stratton and the Justice, another part of her prayed that his answer would be a recent date, more recent at least than those scars. Neither sailors nor slaves were strangers to the lash, but she found herself hoping that those scars had been gained on land, not at sea. Not under Captain Corrvan’s watch.
“Why do you ask, miss?”
Tempest’s eyes darted around the deck. Prior to coming aboard this ship, uncertainty had been an unfamiliar feeling to her, but it was growing more familiar by the day. “Just—curious, I suppose you could say.”
“Curious?” he echoed.
Tempest hesitated. “Truthfully, I’m trying to learn something about the ship that’s following us. Rumor has it, there’s some history between its captain and ours.”
She expected to be told once again to ask Captain Corrvan, but this time, her question was rewarded only with silence.
“I came aboard two years ago,” he answered at last, fingering the blade of the tool in his hands. “In the Barbados.”
“Is that where you learned to do such fine work?”
“No, miss.” Dusting off his hands, he at last rose and stood before her. “I hail from Charleston. My master”—the word was spat from his lips with such vehemence, she would not have needed to have seen the scars to know what kind of man his master had been; by Ford’s light complexion, she could also guess the relationship between the two had been one of blood, and not just bondage—“had me trained for a carpenter. Loaned me out. Took what I earned. Didn’t seem right, so I ran. Twice. And when he couldn’t persuade me not to do it again, he decided to send me to his plantation in the Barbados and teach me a lesson I wouldn’t forget.”
It would have been kinder, Tempest thought, to have killed him outright. But his master had obviously not been interested in kindness.
“That’s where I met the captain and decided to go to sea instead,” Ford concluded.
“I see.” She remembered something Mr. Beals had told her. “So, you’re a freeman now?”
His eyes narrowed. “If I’m not, it soon won’t matter. Captain says we’re for England, and I’ve been told there are no slaves there.”
“That’s right,” Tempest agreed. Her father had once explained the intricacies of Lord Mansfield’s rulings to her; no man could be a slave on English soil. Realizing Ford had told her much more than he should have, if not precisely what she had asked, she excused herself and returned to the cabin, feeling a stab of something like guilt when she considered that her bid to change the Fair Colleen’s destination might result in changing Mr. Ford’s, and perhaps Caesar’s, lives for the worse.
Over dinner, she paused to take stock of what more than a week’s worth of effort had gained her. She now knew every nook and cranny of the Fair Colleen—or the Colleen, as the men all insisted on calling the ship, as if her fairness were somehow in question. Every port she’d heard named had been a West Indian port, and it sounded as if the transatlantic voyage was a rarity. In general, though, the crew behaved as if they were content. Captain Corrvan seemed to be well-liked by his men. He dined in the galley. Played cards with the ship’s officers. Even volunteered for night watch.
And twice, at least, he had helped a slave escape from his master—an unthinkable crime in Tempest’s world, if not her worldview.
So what did it all add up to? And what did Captain Stratton have to do with any of it?
With every day that passed, home slipped farther away. She needed to decide now whether she was willing to sail on, or whether she meant to find some way to resist. Everything seemed to hinge on the character of the man captaining this vessel. But if Andrew Corrvan’s past actions were to have any influence on her decision, then she was going to have to do whatever it took to find out what she wanted to know about him.
Contrary to everyone’s insistence that only the captain himself could answer her questions, she felt certain one other person on this ship knew the truth. And that man was Mr. Bewick, the taciturn quartermaster of whom the whole crew seemed slightly afraid.
Tempest pushed away from the table and stood. Tonight, it was time to be brave.
Chapter 8
“How’s that new cabin boy workin’ out for you, Cap’n?” With narrowed eyes, Fleming pretended to focus on his hand as he spoke.
Andrew knew instantly he was not being asked about Caesar. “I’m out,” he said, slapping down his cards.
Ford and Beals looked up from their own hands, surprised by the abrupt end to their game.
But Andrew could not listen quietly to another ribald comment on the pleasing effect of Timmy Madcombe’s breeches on Tempest Holderin’s arse.
What kind of fool traipsed about a ship in boys’ clothes, asking treacherous questions?
And what kind of captain allowed it?
The kind of fool, he suppose
d, who wanted answers—and the kind of captain who wondered who might supply them.
“Now, Cap’n,” Fleming began, trying to placate him but unable entirely to wipe the smirk from his freckled face, “I didna mean—”
But Andrew had had enough. The boatswain’s small cabin felt like a cage, and he needed to be free of it at once. “I’ll send Mr. Bewick down to finish my hand,” he said as he pushed away from the table and stood. “Good night, gentlemen.”
“G’night, sir,” the others called after him as he ducked through the doorway and walked along the passageway to the ladder nearest the helm. Before the top of his head had passed through the opening to the upper deck, he could hear voices. If he tilted his head, he could see the quartermaster’s back, and young Madcombe’s narrower frame alongside.
“I wanted to thank you for the part you played in rescuing Caesar from that horrible establishment.” He could only just make out Tempest’s voice above the noises of the ship.
A grunt of acknowledgment from Bewick, not quite audible, but visible by the lift of his shoulders. “Is there somethin’ you require, miss?”
“As a matter of a fact, yes.” A long pause followed. “Answers. Mr. Beals hinted there was bad blood between Captain Corrvan and the captain of the Justice. Is it true?”
Nothing subtle about this one. Well, she’d never get anything out of Bewick.
“You’d have t’ ask the cap’n, miss.”
“A fine idea.” He could hear the indignation in her voice. “If I ever saw him.”
“Night watch,” Timmy explained in uncharacteristically tight-lipped fashion.
Bewick gave the boy a nod of support. It seemed the man was coming around to Andrew’s suggestion that he train Timmy to the helm. Then, “Off t’ bed wit’ you, lad,” the quartermaster ordered gently.
Expecting any moment to be discovered by the boy as he descended, Andrew listened for footsteps and relaxed only when he heard them shuffle away to the stairs in the prow. And then silence. The muscles in his calf began to ache, and he hitched himself higher on the rung, wondering whether she had left, too.
To Tempt an Heiress Page 9
