by Jane Feather
Genevieve opened her eyes when a shadow fell across her, blocking out the sun’s warmth and light. “I was not asleep,” she murmured, stretching luxuriously. “Bewitched, I think.”
“As you appeared.” He dropped to the deck beside her.
“Does my costume now satisfy your notions of decency, monsieur?” she asked, an impish gleam in the tawny eyes.
“Do not make light of a serious matter,” he chided, closing his own eyes with a little sigh of pleasure.
Genevieve, after an instant’s consideration, decided that the admonition was not to be taken seriously. “Will we sail up one of these little rivers into Lake Borgne?”
“No, we are going to sail down to the delta, then come up through Breton Sound,” Dominic informed her.
“But is that not a very long way around?” Genevieve sat up curiously. Any one of the little tributaries of the Mississippi would take them directly into Lake Borgne within a few hours, but to sail down to the Mississippi Delta and then back up the coast through the sound would take much longer.
“Are you so anxious to curtail the voyage?” Dominic asked lazily. “I have not been at sea for so long that I am reluctant to stay only in inland waterways.”
“I do not think that is your only reason.” Genevieve regarded him through narrowed eyes. “The privateer does not waste precious time simply to satisfy a wanderlust.”
Dominic gave a low laugh. “What a perspicacious child you are! No, indeed he does not. I do not wish anyone with eyes to see to realize that Lake Borgne is my destination. We are seen sailing into the Gulf and from there our destination is anyone’s guess. We can beat up the coast, and no one will be any the wiser.”
“Wind’s backing to the east, monsieur,” the helmsman sang out, and Dominic pulled himself to his feet.
“Very well, we’ll wear ship,” he said, strolling over to the wheel.
Genevieve stood up, watching as the men ran to their appointed stations, bringing the frigate round close hauled on the starboard tack. It was a fascinating operation, and she found herself wishing she could take some part in this business of sailing. The huge sails filled, and La Danseuse heeled slightly on the rippling waters of the wide river, her decks aslant so that Genevieve grabbed the rail automatically. There was another bellowed order, and men ran for the rigging, swinging themselves into the shrouds as they climbed, agile as monkeys, to loose the topsail.
Dominic had not said she was confined to the quarterdeck and, indeed, Genevieve could not think of a good reason why she should remain where she was when all the activity was below on the main decks. Down there, among the crew, she might, with careful observation and her ears open, learn something of the sailor’s craft. She climbed back down the ladder, taking up a position against the lower deck rail, gazing up at the men at work in the rigging. It could not be that difficult to climb up there. They all made it seem remarkably easy, at any event. She’d watched men in the shipyard repairing struts and shrouds, perched way above the deck, clinging one-handedly, laughing and singing, as relaxed as if they were in an armchair before the fire.
A lad, not much older than twelve, swung himself onto a small platform at the top of the mizzen mast. It seemed dizzyingly high, but the rigging provided a solid enough ladder. He must have the most magnificent view, Genevieve mused, right out across the land and ahead to the delta and the Gulf. The decision to join him seemed to make itself, and she had kicked off her shoes and jumped for the mizzen shrouds almost without realizing it. Once there, it became very clear that the business was not as easy as it looked. Her feet and fingers seemed to reject the unfamiliar steps as she curled both around the rigging, but Genevieve was not one to give up once she had set her mind to something. Controlling the sick little flutters in the pit of her belly, she climbed steadily, looking down through her feet only once. That once was quite enough. After that, she kept her eyes up, trained on her goal, which did not seem to come much closer as her suddenly frail and unorthodox stepladder swung unkindly in the wind.
Silas saw her first. His jaw dropped as he gazed at the unmistakable, tiny figure swarming up the rigging, the sun shining off the silver hair. “Monsieur?” He touched the arm of his master whose attention was given to the helmsman. Dominic turned, then his gaze followed Silas’s pointing finger.
“Sweet Jesus!” His face paled beneath the suntan. “What the devil will she decide to do next?” He ran to the quarterdeck rail and bellowed up at her. “Genevieve! Come down this instant!”
Genevieve heard the shout but set her teeth grimly. Having got this far, she was not about to deprive herself of success. Besides, the mizzen top was now a lot closer than the deck beneath, and she did not know how much longer her aching fingers would hold purchase on the prickly, cutting ropes of the shrouds.
At the master’s shout, the crew, to a man, turned to stare upward. The sight of the ship’s unusual passenger clambering to the mizzen top was surprising enough, but it was not that that caused their amazed whispers. It was the fact that the figure continued to climb, disregarding monsieur’s order, even when that order was repeated at increased volume. Did she not know the penalty for insubordination?
“Doesn’t seem to hear you, monsieur,” Silas remarked laconically.
“Oh, she hears me all right,” Dominic said through clenched teeth. “And by God, she’ll not suffer from selective deafness a second time! Bring her down!” His knuckles whitened as he clenched the rail; his heart pounded as her foot slipped, and the rigging swayed violently under her convulsive grabbing at the shrouds. One false move, and she would plummet a hundred feet to her death on the deck beneath. It was always possible, of course, that she might consider such a fate preferable to the one he had in store for her when he got his hands on her. Fury fed fear, fear fed fury as he watched Silas’s rapid progress up the rigging, and Genevieve at last reached the mizzen top and the safety of the platform. From the security of that vantage point, she peered down at the circle of upturned faces far below and to Dominic’s white-hot rage, waved cheerfully.
“Didn’t you hear monsieur tell you to go back down?” her fellow occupant of the mizzen top asked with a fearful curiosity.
Genevieve, who was seriously doubting her ability to descend in the manner of her ascent, mumbled something vaguely, and looked around. The view was every bit as stupendous as she had imagined, but whether it was worth the fearful effort of the climb, she was not at all sure; any more than she was sure how she was going to get down again.
The lad peered over. “Here comes Silas,” he observed. “Wonder why. He doesn’t come up here much.”
Silas reached the platform and regarded Genevieve appraisingly. The girl was scared, he decided, which might make their descent somewhat troublesome.
“Monsieur wants you on deck, mademoiselle,” he said briskly.
“I’ll come in a few minutes,” she said, offering a shaky little smile. “I’ve only just got here so I might as well enjoy the view.”
Silas was not fooled by the brave words. “Monsieur wants you now. If I don’t get you down, he’ll come for you himself. You don’t want that to happen.” This last was said with all the confidence of one who knew what he was talking about, and Genevieve felt a prickle of apprehension that had nothing to do with her fear of the climb. “Follow me,” Silas went on. “I’ll guide your feet. Just put them where I direct and don’t look down.”
He moved back down the rigging, leaving enough space for Genevieve. She lowered herself gingerly over the platform, and then froze, clinging in panic to the flimsy rope. “I can’t, Silas.”
The agonized whisper reached him, and he swore under his breath. Reaching up, he grasped her ankle, his hand warm, firm and comforting. “Yes, you can. I’m going to hold your ankle all the way.”
Dominic chewed his lip, guessing at what was causing the delay even though he could hear nothing of what was said. Silas could only be holding her in that manner for one reason. Genevieve wouldn’t be the fir
st to need gentling from that unstable height. Many a young lad on his first voyage had been petrified with panic and vertigo up there, and Silas was using established practice. He probably should have gone for her himself, Dominic thought in angry, frustrated helplessness as he paced the quarterdeck, not taking his eyes off the scene being played out way above him. At last, however, when he was about to spring for the shrouds, Genevieve moved backward, slowly but definitely. Silas climbed down further, holding her ankle so that she came with him. Dominic heaved a sigh of relief and went down to the main deck to wait for them.
Genevieve kept her eyes fixed on the pattern of the rigging in her hands, concentrating only on the feel of the rope and the warm security of the fingers circling her ankle, obeying those fingers blindly as she placed her feet where they directed. Time seemed to stop and there was only this steady, rhythmic progress among the creaking rope and stiff, shivering canvas, a progress that would eventually bring her to solid deck beneath her feet so long as she did not allow her mind to wander.
“Just a few more yards,” she heard Silas say in calm reassurance, then she felt hands around her waist, and she was swung through the air to land solidly on the deck.
Her knees began to shake uncontrollably, and she grabbed the rail as the aftermath of panic slowly receded and she was able to take in her surroundings again. There was total silence, eerie in its absolute quality, and Dominic was standing in that dreadful, motionless way. Then he spoke, his voice quiet and even. “Did you hear me tell you to come down?”
Genevieve swallowed and thought rapidly. Would denial save her skin? Somehow, she thought it would probably do the opposite. There was no way she could not have heard that deep, carrying instruction. “I was almost at the top,” she said, lifting her chin. “I wanted to finish what I had started.”
“I see.” Dominic inclined his head in a pleasant gesture of comprehension. “Then you will not object to repeating the journey, will you?” He smiled with his lips only, and gestured toward the rigging.
The color drained from her face. “Dominic, no … I do not wish to … I ca … cannot.”
“I think you will find that you can,” he said, still in the same pleasant, even tone. “You and I will go up together and look at the view. I’m sure you did not spend sufficient time in the mizzen top to see all that there is to see. We should be able to see the Gulf.”
Her mouth seemed to fill with sawdust, and her palms misted, clammy and cold. Wordlessly, she shook her head, no longer aware of the interested stares of their audience, conscious only of that glinting azure gaze, the coiled tension in the powerful frame standing so close to her that she could almost feel the heat of his skin. And again, she was overpoweringly conscious of impending danger. “Please …” she managed, her voice a mere thread. “I cannot.”
“I will give you a choice,” he said. “Either you climb the rigging again, or I will put you ashore—here.” He looked over her shoulder at the banks of the river and, as if hypnotized by the sense of menace, her head turned to follow his eyes, to look into the swampy, forbidding distance, stretching, green, unwelcoming and seemingly uninhabited by any living thing that moved upright, on two feet. “There is no place on La Danseuse for those who do not know how to obey orders, or who cannot be taught to do so.”
Genevieve knew with absolute, cold certainty that he meant it. He would do exactly as he said, without compunction or scruple, and no one would make a move to help her. This was Monsieur Delacroix’s private kingdom where he ruled supreme, and she had always known what she risked by venturing into that dominion. She glanced up at the mizzen top and unconsciously stiffened her shoulders. What she had done once, she could do again. She turned and swung herself up onto the mizzen shrouds.
Silas nodded thoughtfully. Monsieur had not gone soft, after all, for all that he’d had that strange look in his eye earlier. He was treating the girl like any novice cabin boy. The rule was always the same. Send ’em up again immediately, before they had time to dwell on the first fright, otherwise they’d never be able to go aloft another time, which, in most cases, would be the end of a promising maritime career. Not that the mademoiselle had a promising maritime career ahead of her, he remembered with a sudden, puzzled frown. But then, she’d disobeyed orders, of course. It was an appropriate enough penalty that monsieur had chosen. Anyone else would have found themselves lashed at the gratings.
“I’m right behind you.” Dominic’s voice, as calm as ever, reached Genevieve, and the rigging shook as he leaped for the shrouds. “Go at your own pace. You are not going to fall.”
Just why, when he was forcing her to do this dreadful thing, did he sound so reassuring? Genevieve gritted her teeth, forcing her raw fingers to claw around the rope as her aching legs climbed upward. For two pins, she would kick backward and catch that expressionless, domineering bastard unawares and topple him from his precious rigging to fall among the grinning circle of sailors on the deck beneath. Busily contemplating such a satisfying revenge, Genevieve barely noticed the distance and reached the mizzen top in an amazingly short time.
Dominic swung himself onto the platform behind her. Its previous occupant had descended in the wake of Silas and Genevieve, and they were alone up among the sails and clouds and wheeling seabirds. Genevieve sank down on the planking, catching her breath, examining her reddened palms with a pained grimace.
“Let me see.” Dominic turned her hands up. “I’ll put some salve on them when we go down.”
“Such consideration,” she snapped. “Why should you care? By the time I get down again, there’ll be no skin left. If I get down again,” she added glumly.
Her companion made no response, but merely took a cigar from his shirt pocket, struck a flint and lit the tobacco, narrowing his eyes against the smoke as he walked to the edge of the platform and examined the horizon. He was no longer angry, but neither was he prepared to enter an acrimonious discussion on the punishment he had imposed. It had been both deserved and necessary if she were to understand the realities of life aboard his ship. It had also not done her any harm to push herself beyond the threshold of fear. It was a lesson she might be glad of one day. So he smoked in silence and gazed out at the horizon, and Genevieve fumed in silence, dreading the descent, yet knowing that this time she would manage it without panic; knowing, too, that it would only be in the most extraordinary circumstance that she would again defy the privateer publicly on his own ground.
They made the descent, Dominic first. But he did not guide her feet as Silas had done, although Genevieve knew somehow that had she needed it, he would have done so without hesitation. When they reached the deck, he ordered brusquely, “Go below and take off those britches. Stay there until I come to you.”
He walked off without a second glance, back to the quarterdeck, and a thoroughly exhausted Genevieve went meekly down to the cabin, wondering whether anything could be salvaged of this adventure.
It was an hour later when Dominic, deciding that she had had long enough to contemplate the lessons of the afternoon, went below to join her. He found her, still fully dressed, fast asleep on the bed, her sore hands curled open on the pillow near her head. With that tiny, enigmatic smile that had so disturbed Silas, he went over to the table and poured wine, taking a sip as he turned back to the bed. “Genevieve?”
The straight lashes swept up and she stretched, blinking bemusedly as if uncertain where she was. Then her eyes shot wide open and she sat up. “I fell asleep.”
“That was certainly the impression I had formed,” he responded gravely. “I thought I told you to take off those britches. It is quite clear that you can get up to far too much trouble wearing them.”
“But I like wearing them,” Genevieve said, then bit her lip as his eyes darkened ominously. “I would have taken them off, only I fell asleep.”
Dominic put his glass down and came over to the bed. A flat palm on her shoulder pushed her onto her back. “I am very much afraid, Mademoiselle Genevieve, th
at you are a great deal too accustomed to having your own way. The fact that you simply wish to do something is not sufficient reason for doing it. Particularly in those cases where I do not wish you to do it.” His fingers moved deftly on the buckle of her belt, unfastened it, then undid the buttons at her waist.
“But why should what you wish be more important than what I wish?” Genevieve demanded, incensed at the very clear injustice of his statement. She pushed impatiently at his busy hands.
“Because I am older and stronger than you, and you are on my ship,” he told her, brushing away her hands as if they were irritating mosquitoes.
“I might find the last reason to be worth considering,” said Genevieve, with an assumption of dignity hard to maintain as her nether garments were tugged over her hips. “But the first two are purely incidental.”
“Oh, are they, indeed?” The turquoise eyes narrowed speculatively. “Perhaps I should demonstrate how convincing greater age and strength can be.” A final pull, and her britches were yanked off her feet.
“Oh, what are you doing?” Genevieve tugged at her shirt in a vain attempt to cover her nakedness, feeling suddenly too vulnerable to be having this discussion.
“Merely doing what you had refused to do for yourself,” he said calmly, putting one knee on the bed beside her, taking her wrists in one hand and pushing the shirt up to her waist with the other.
Genevieve squirmed uncomfortably as his eyes raked her body, bared from the waist down. “If you wish to prove that you are stronger than I, you do not need to,” she said, through a suddenly constricted throat.
“No?” he said, a pensive light in the blue eyes. “Perhaps I do not want to prove my greater bodily strength, but the emotional and physical sway one body can hold over another. There are chains that bind more securely than any that man can manufacture, Genevieve.”
Genevieve tensed, feeling a hard knot of resistance in her belly. She did not like lying here, held in bond by his gleaming, speculative eyes and the hand at her wrists. It felt like a game that she did not want to play. But when she turned her head in denial on the pillow, away from the steady, azure gaze, he bent his head and his lips brushed the tender sensitive skin on her neck, just below her ear. A little shiver ran over her, and her bared flesh seemed to come alive. She closed her eyes tight and concentrated her will on resistance and denial. Dominic smiled, but she did not see the smile, hearing only his voice, light and amused.
