Taming Charlotte

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Who knows?” she said, with a lightness of manner that was wholly feigned. “Perhaps I’ll fall in love with that stranger who washed up on the sand this morning. That would be romantic, don’t you think?”

  Patrick spat a curse word, thrust himself away from the railing, and stormed into the house, slamming one of the great double doors behind him.

  Charlotte supposed she should have felt triumph, for she’d obviously gotten Patrick’s goat, but instead she just lowered her face to her hands and breathed deeply until the urge to sob uncontrollably had passed.

  Once she’d recovered her composure, Charlotte stood and began to clear the table, only to be shooed away by a scandalized Mary Catch-much-fish.

  When Patrick left the house minutes later, in the company of a sheepish Mr. Cochran, and with a protesting Jacoba trailing after them, Charlotte refused to give in to her own feelings of apprehension. Instead, she took the opportunity to look in on the patient.

  The sleeping man was waxen, his rest fitful, and he gave a cry of despondency that wrung Charlotte’s heart. She went to the bedside and gently took one of his hands in both her own.

  “Susannah!” he screamed suddenly, bolting upright on the mattress, with its crisp linen sheets. “Dear God, Susannah!”

  Charlotte’s throat tightened in sympathy. “There now,” she said softly, “you’re safe here. Nothing is going to hurt you.”

  The stranger looked at her, frantic, in the grip of a living nightmare. His eyes were a spring green. “She drowned—I tried to save her, I tried so hard—”

  “Shh,” Charlotte said, smoothing sweat-dampened hair back from his forehead. Despite her outward composure, she was filled with visions of the unknown Susannah, crying out for help, sinking beneath the waves of an angry sea before she could be reached. “Of course you did everything you could. Rest now. You need your strength.”

  He did not relax, however, but instead flung his head back on the pillow and gave a harrowing cry of grief. It was worse than a sob, worse than a scream of pain, that sound, for it came from the very depths of his soul.

  Instinct warned Charlotte not to allow the patient to withdraw into his agonies if she could stop him, and she gripped his shoulders hard.

  “Tell me your name!” she ordered.

  Again that haunting moan of despair came.

  “Don’t you dare give up now!” Charlotte yelled, kneeling on the mattress, digging her thumbs into the man’s sparely muscled upper arms. “It’s a bloody miracle that you’re still alive—do you hear me? A miracle! That means you’ve got things to do before you go on to your rest, important things! Damn it, mister, you get back here right now!”

  Amazingly, he stilled, staring up into Charlotte’s face as if he were just returning to himself from some far distant place. “Who are you?” he asked, the words sounding a rusty rasp in his throat.

  She smiled, released him, scrambled off the bed, and smoothed her skirts. “My name is Charlotte Quade Trevarren,” she said.

  “Susannah?” He looked past Charlotte’s shoulder. “Is my wife here?”

  Charlotte shook her head, swallowed, and made herself keep smiling. “I’m sorry.”

  In the next few minutes, Charlotte learned that the visitor’s name was Gideon Rowling. He was an Englishman, and he and his new bride, Susannah, had been sailing to Australia when their ship had been set upon by pirates. Some of the passengers and crew had escaped in lifeboats, the Rowlings among them, but most had been murdered outright. The vessel had been looted and set ablaze.

  The lifeboats had eventually become separated one from another during a storm, and in the end the skiff the Rowlings had shared with an old man and two crewmen had been overturned. The last time Gideon had seen Susannah, she’d been holding out her hand to him, screaming for help.

  When the story was finished, Gideon lapsed into sleep again, no doubt because he found reality unbearable, and Charlotte couldn’t say she blamed him.

  19

  THAT FEVER MUST HAVE BURNED UP YOUR BRAIN,” COCHRAN observed, with his usual dry bluntness, as he stood beside Patrick at the porch railing. Both men were gazing out to sea, and both were yearning for the feel of a deck beneath their feet. “Once in a lifetime—provided the gods and all the fates have agreed to favor him, that is—a man encounters a woman like Charlotte. Yet here you are, ready to drop her off on her papa’s doorstep like a lot of dusty baggage.” The first mate paused, sighed deeply. “If Brigham Quade doesn’t shoot you like a mangy stray for this, he’s not the man I think he is.”

  Patrick gave a sigh of his own. Would no one ever understand that he was being noble, giving up Charlotte and the child this way?

  He had been fooling himself before, thinking he could be happy as a planter, confined to one place all his life; he’d faced that. He needed excitement, experience, even the occasional brawl.

  Plainly his life would consist of one dangerous adventure after another, and he thrived on the fact, could not give it up for a safe, quiet existence. By his reckoning, it followed that a woman and baby could not rightly be expected to live in such a manner.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Cochran,” he said grimly, his eyes still fixed on the horizon, his fingers tightening as he gripped the railing of the veranda, “you would be better off minding your own affairs and leaving me to mind mine.”

  Cochran took a cheroot from his pocket and lit it, and the rich, fruity scent of the smoke encircled them. “You know,” he replied, at his leisure, “I never took you for a fool. Now I’m forced to admit that I was wrong.”

  Patrick was stung, but he wouldn’t let Cochran see that. He gave his friend a wry look and said, “A rare enough occasion—your owning up to a mistake, I mean.”

  Unruffled, Cochran simply smiled, shrugged, and drew deeply on his cheroot. “As if the sky wouldn’t fall if you confessed to a failing or two,” he replied.

  It seemed to Patrick that a change of subject would be advisable just then. He liked Cochran and didn’t want to do battle with him, verbal or otherwise. “What do you make of it, this Rowling character washing ashore?”

  “I’d say it means trouble,” Cochran answered readily, and with a hint of relish. “Not from Rowling, of course—he seems like a good enough sort. I figure Raheem—or some other dung bug just like him—is probably out there somewhere, waiting to hit this island like a squall. God help us all if they’ve learned that the Enchantress is at the bottom of the bay. And there’ve been signs that a big storm is brewing out to sea, too.”

  Patrick felt a stab of grief at the mention of his ship; he mourned her as he would a woman, or a child, or a beloved friend. For the moment, however, he had to think of practical matters; the half dozen cannon salvaged from the Enchantress had to be set up on the high ground behind the house, facing the bay. His wards and the sailors still recovering from the fever must be brought to the main house. Also, plenty of food and water would be required, in case of a siege by either nature or pirates.

  Or both.

  “Damn,” Patrick murmured, but mixed in with the undeniable dread he felt was a sense of excitement. Even the prospect of a challenge made him stronger.

  In the days to come, the last vestiges of Patrick’s illness fell away, for there was no time to languish on the veranda or in a sickbed. More debris from the shipwreck washed ashore, but there were no passengers, dead or alive, in the mix. And Patrick could feel trouble closing in, despite the calm waters of the sea and the soft, fragile blue of the sky.

  A rising wind teased the tops of the palm trees, and Charlotte finally had to give up the idea of sketching, at least for that day. The pages of her drawing book fluttered so that she couldn’t concentrate, and in any case, she had other pressing matters on her mind.

  The mysterious, tragic Gideon Rowling, for one. Although Charlotte felt none of the attraction toward him that Patrick could stir with a glance in her direction or the mere lift of an eyebrow, Mr. Rowling was still a romantic and appealing figure. He slep
t most of the time, and broke Charlotte’s tender heart by crying out repeatedly for his Susannah, and he had the thin, haunted beauty of a starving poet. He was a Christian missionary, as it happened, and he and his wife had intended to devote the remainder of their lives to the task of saving the Aborigines from damnation.

  To Charlotte, it seemed a splendid undertaking, though ambitious.

  Then there was Patrick, who was always in her thoughts, on one shelf or another. Charlotte hoped that the captain loved her—he did not attempt to hide his feelings when, in the warm, fragrant darkness of the tropical nights, he moaned her name and swore by all the saints that she owned his soul—and yet Patrick persisted in being difficult by day. He scowled at Charlotte whenever they encountered each other, which was a rare occurrence because he’d developed an uncanny ability to avoid her. When they did speak, an even more uncommon event, he made it clear that he still intended to relegate both her and the baby to Quade’s Harbor.

  In addition, Patrick’s wards had moved into the main house, along with the few seamen who were still ill enough to be confined. Cannon had been set up on the hilltops, and sailors and natives alike had been busy for several days, boarding up the windows of the house.

  All in all, it was a lot to sort out, even for Charlotte’s agile mind.

  Wandering back into the house, which seemed shadowy and somewhat oppressive now that the windows were covered, she decided to look in on Mr. Rowling. He, unlike Patrick, could always be counted on for civil conversation, though he was still quite melancholy, of course.

  He was seated in the downstairs parlor, listening quietly while Stella, one of Patrick’s wards, played fairylike, oddly sorrowful music at the pianoforte. Charlotte would have retreated, seeing that her friend was not alone, but he smiled in a forlorn way when he saw her, and beckoned.

  She approached, ignoring a scathing look from the pretty, dark-haired Stella, and crouched beside his chair. “Hello,” she said gently.

  He touched her hair, a gesture that, made by nearly any other man on earth, would have been sure to bring Patrick’s wrath down on all their heads. “Charlotte,” he said, his voice gruff and fond. His gaze dropped to her bare toes, which were just visible under the hem of her skirts. He grinned crookedly. “Where are your shoes?”

  “I’m not certain,” she confessed. “I don’t recall exactly where I left them.”

  Mr. Rowling laughed, but the sound was oddly painful to hear.

  Stella ended her musical recital with a crashing chord, rose from the piano stool like a geyser shooting out of the ground, and swept out.

  Charlotte winced. “I’m sorry if I interrupted,” she said.

  Her friend sighed. “The young lady has decided to court me, I think,” he confided, forlorn amusement shining in his eyes. “I don’t imagine there are a great many eligible men on this island.”

  Charlotte looked away for a moment, because his words had brought Patrick’s image surging to the surface of her mind like some magnificent creature rising from the sea.

  “It’s quite soon, isn’t it—for you to be interested in another woman, I mean?”

  He shrugged. “Being interested in a woman is quite another matter from being in love with one,” he said, in grave tones. “I’ll cherish the memory of Susannah until the day we are reunited in heaven, but the great weakness of my character is that I cannot abide loneliness. I have no doubt that I’ll remarry at the first opportunity, and Stella is as likely a candidate as anyone.”

  She rose from her crouching position and took Stella’s seat on the piano stool, idly spinning this way and that, just as she’d done as a child, back home in her father’s parlor. “Men are fickle creatures,” she observed, without rancor.

  “And what prompts that observation, may I ask?” The question was pleasant in tone, and quietly offered.

  Charlotte tried to smile, faltered, and gave up the effort. “It hardly comforts a woman, knowing the man she loves could replace her so easily.”

  “We are talking about the captain now, I think.”

  She lowered her eyes for a moment, but her cheeks felt hot and she knew Mr. Rowling could see her embarrassment. “Yes,” she admitted. “I could be torn to pieces by rabid monkeys and scattered all over the island in bloody bits, and Patrick would probably say, ‘Poor girl, what a pity,’ and then start looking about for someone to take my place.”

  “You underestimate your station in Mr. Trevarren’s heart, I think.”

  “Then you’re quite wrong, Mr. Rowling.”

  “Gideon,” he corrected.

  Charlotte felt tears sting her eyes and ascribed them to her pregnancy and the changes it had wrought in both her body and spirit. “Gideon,” she repeated, getting used to the name. Finally, after some seconds of awkward silence, she forced herself to meet his gaze again. There was something about him, some gentleness in his nature, that invited confidence. “I’m in a terrible fix,” she said, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands and then sniffling once. “I was married to Captain Trevarren, you see, and now I’m not, and there’s a baby.”

  Gideon held out a hand to Charlotte, and she scooted the piano stool closer, on its green crystal rollers, and clasped his fingers. “Go on,” he said.

  She told the whole story, starting with her first meeting with Patrick, long ago and far away, in Seattle. She’d loved Mr. Trevarren from the moment of their original encounter, high in the rigging of the Enchantress, she confessed. She’d become his true wife, in her own heart at least, when Khalif had pronounced them married. Patrick had ended their union—a fresh torrent of tears came when she related how easy it had been for him, just clapping his hands and repeating the phrase “I divorce you” three times—but for Charlotte the ties were far more binding. Now, she confided miserably, Patrick meant to abandon and forget her.

  When Charlotte finished the wretched tale, leaving nothing out except the most intimate details, she saw a new fire in Gideon’s light green eyes. A muscle tightened in his jawline. “By all that’s holy,” he breathed, in a furious undertone, “the man has gall, flouting the very laws of God!”

  Charlotte swallowed, wondering if she’d said too much. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time. “I don’t think he exactly meant to do that—“ she began, but Gideon immediately cut her off.

  “It’s unconscionable,” he declared. “Charlotte, if Patrick Trevarren won’t marry you properly and give you and your child his name, then I will.”

  She felt the color drain from her face. Gideon was a fine man, good and gentle and handsome in the bargain, but wonderful as he was, Charlotte feared she could never grant him the privileges of marriage. Despite her brave words to Patrick earlier, about taking a lover and becoming notorious once he deserted her in Quade’s Harbor, she found the thought of another man touching her abhorrent.

  Gideon half rose from his chair and planted a brotherly kiss on Charlotte’s forehead. Then he drew back and smiled again. “So that’s the way of it, then,” he said quietly. “Send your captain to see me, Charlotte. I’ll put the fear of God into him.”

  Charlotte’s eyes widened. “I wouldn’t want Patrick to be forced into marrying me,” she whispered.

  Gideon patted her hand. “Don’t fret, Charlotte. I don’t think it’s going to be necessary to use force.”

  Charlotte immediately sought Patrick out and found him in his study, going over a series of charts with Mr. Cochran. The wind rattling at the windows and mourning on the roof made an apt accompaniment to his sour expression.

  Can this, Charlotte thought, with amazed resentment, be the same man who held me so tightly last night in our bed, who took such eager solace in my body and invaded my very soul with the tenderness of his words and his touch?

  “What is it, Charlotte?” Patrick asked, his tone testy, his gaze as cold as the fiercest winter. “I have things to do, and not much time.”

  She stood as tall as possible in the great double doorway, her shoulders strai
ght, her chin high. Even barefoot, her hair tumbled from a brief interval outside, Charlotte knew she was the very picture of dignity. It was a knack she had cultivated from early childhood.

  “Gideon—Mr. Rowling—wishes to speak with you.”

  Patrick frowned, perhaps because she’d used the visitor’s Christian name, and let the chart he’d been examining roll back into a cylinder with a whispery sound. “I’ll see him later.”

  “Fine,” Charlotte agreed sunnily, with a slight shrug. She turned to walk away, knowing she’d nettled Patrick, pleased by the fact.

  To her surprise, he stopped her with a single terse demand. “Where are your shoes?”

  First Gideon had wondered why her feet were bare, and now Patrick wanted to know. She looked back at him, somewhat coyly, over one shoulder. “I wouldn’t think of interfering with your important business by answering such a silly question,” she said. And then she walked away.

  She heard him swear and smiled as she proceeded along the hallway leading into the back of the house. The kitchen was in a separate building, and Charlotte had a sudden yen for a handful of Jacoba’s special biscuits. She hummed as she crossed the yard, hardly noticing the wind that made her hair dance and pressed her skirts against her legs.

  *

  Patrick tried not to think about the summons from his guest, the missionary who’d washed up on the beach some days before, but the caressing way Charlotte had said the man’s name echoed in his head. He couldn’t afford to plan the defense of everyone on the island while in a distracted state of mind.

  He finally cursed, muttered an excuse to Cochran, who wore an irritating smile, and went in search of Rowling.

  The man was in the parlor, and Stella and Jayne were both there, fussing over him, pouring his tea, chattering like a couple of tropical birds. Patrick was fond of the pair—they were like the sisters he’d never had—but just then their youthful eagerness to please Rowling annoyed him.

  “Out,” he said, without preamble or explanation.

  Jayne and Stella exchanged pouting glances and then left the room.