Their marriage wasn’t exactly the one of romance novels – not like the ones Laura read, anyway. She smiled at the thought of her cousin. There was only so much books could teach her about the heady passion when a man and a woman come together. Right now, her head would be full of thoughts of being Lady Victoria’s attendant, discussing parties and trousseaux and honeymoons.
She looked around at the weathered walls of the villa, which seemed only half-habitable. Laura would last exactly half a day here. Catallus was far, far from London society. Sophia considered herself a practical woman but twelve years with the Cappleman family had made her used to a luxurious standard of living, Still, she didn’t require coddling, and this place reminded her of the convent where she spent the first ten years of her life – except more spartan.
She walked into the main building itself. The door into the room on the right side of the entrance was boarded over, so she continued past it to the next. This door was ajar. It seemed to be a study. A sizable map hung on the stucco wall, and a large table, simple but well made, dominated the room. There were also two open-shelf bookcases. For seating, there was one high back leather chair in a deep green leather. The only other seating seemed to be a coffer on which sat a group of mismatched cushions.
Apart from a couple of unlit lamps, the only illumination was the afternoon light seeping through a pair of warped timber shutters. The next room was much larger. She could see her trunk in it. That must be the main bedroom. Sophia decided to explore it last. Not that there was much more to see.
Past the bedroom was a kitchen of sorts with an ancient wood-burning stove set into the fireplace. Copper pans hung from a wrought iron rod suspended from the ceiling. In the center of the room stood a table and a couple of homemade chairs. The last piece of furniture in the room was a plain timber dresser.
Through the kitchen doors, Sophia could see another garden – a culinary garden it seemed – that ended at a rock face into which time, nature and water had eroded a channel. The water poured into a large concrete reservoir. She knew the design well. The Romans must have discovered a spring. The water was held here to supply the villa, which would have had fountains and baths in its heyday. She looked around the side of the reservoir to see a copper pipe at the top of the cistern, green with age, which fed down the hill to where she could see an even larger man-made reservoir to supply the rest of the village.
At the eastern side of the garden, laundry fluttered in the breeze on a line with a clothes prop mounted at its center. Behind it, there was another door through which she could hear the sound of Uncle Jonas talking with Alfonso.
“It’s not what you were expecting, is it?”
Kit startled her.
“I wasn’t sure what I was expecting.”
“Something more than a hovel, I’m sure.”
She heard the loathing tone. Did he expect her to agree? Was he goading her?
“What is it you want me to say?”
“Ah, answering a question with a question. I thought that was supposed to be my failing.”
She folded her arms. “So is presuming to know what I’m thinking.”
She moved to step past him, but he stopped her with a hand to her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
It was the first time he had ever apologized to her. She allowed her temper to cool.
“With you here, I’m seeing this place for the first time, and all I see are its faults. It’s not like London; hell, it’s not even like Palermo. There are no luxuries.”
“You’re here.”
He folded her quickly into his embrace and she rested her head on his chest. His long exhalation of relief eddied in her ears.
“You’re better than I deserve. I’m not a perfect man, but I want to be a better one for you.”
Chapter Thirty-One
From his vantage point in the villa, Kit could see a halyard pulled taut, his crew and the villagers hauling the Calliope onto her side, exposing her hull almost to the keel. Afore noon, the tide would be out, and the hard work of scraping off barnacles would begin.
This morning, Sophia told him she and Professor Fenton had decided to survey the headland and make a decision on which area to be explored first.
He shut the study door behind him, pleased to have the place to himself. When he strategized, he preferred quiet. Yet, he had to confess, waking up next to Sophia brought him peace. He had watched her sleep in the pre-dawn light, grateful she had not disparaged Catallus. In fact, she made an effort to make herself at home last night, much to the delight of Lyda.
If it was just this alone, he could be a content man, happy with a simple life with good friends, his business and most of all, a wife who loved him…but the shadow of Kaddouri loomed. He had made too many people – living and dead – too many promises to go back on them. Restless ghosts hid just out of sight of his consciousness, felt but not seen, reminding him their spirits couldn’t settle until their tormentor was dead. He took several deep breaths.
He’d never done this without the aid of opiates. Then, he would work for days and nights, insomnia driving him as much as his desire to destroy the slavers. He would force himself to the brink of collapse, then take laudanum. His body would finally get the rest it was craving while his mind continued to puzzle things out.
It was dangerous. Not only to himself, but also to the people around him. The final straw had been when he pulled a knife on Elias and nearly slit his best friend’s throat. It had taken three men to hold him down while he screamed at his hallucinations.
He needed a rush through his veins to give him the clarity he needed for this task. Without the use of opiates, he didn’t quite know how to get it. He turned his full attention to the length of paper stretched across the desk. He traced a finger down the ink line Jonathan had drawn indicating the shore of the Tunisian coast.
His work was detailed and meticulous; Kit expected nothing less from his navigator. But his counsel was missed also and, with Elias working with Giorgio to perfect the Greek fire and its delivery, it was up to Kit alone to finalize their battle plan.
The thick stone walls of Kaddouri’s casbah at Al-Min were indicated on the map, as were the cottages of the fishing village huddled around its protective walls. From the outside, the citadel looked impregnable, but Kit knew better. Everything had its weakness – so long as you knew where to look. The thick, wooden gates that protected ships in the harbor seemed sturdy enough. It would take a sustained barrage and a full frontal assault to breach them.
He planned to be clever. What he could not go through, he would go around. What he could not go around, he would go under. These walled cities were a living chaos, nothing as orderly and predictable as European castle keeps, but one thing held true – those who held the power were the most protected, and the things they coveted were protected even more so. Wherever Kaddouri’s treasure lay, his heart would be also. That’s where Kit would strike.
All he needed to do was work out how to inflict the most damage in the shortest amount of time. Could it be done in one blow? He doubted it. But if it was to be done, the only way would be to go inside. With what?
Well, they had used submerged bombs successfully before. Such an explosive device could be used equally well on land.
Where to place such a device? That was the thing. The blank space inside Al-Min’s walls was the unknown – and that he had to know.
The only person he could coerce the information out of was Ahmed Sharrouf – and Ahmed was the last man he wanted to trust with his life, let alone with the lives of his crew. He put that part of the puzzle to one side. It was one he could not control. What he could control was getting into Al-Min; that would be the easy part.
The difficult part would be getting back out.
There were two ways. Over the wall and into the water – a plunge of thirty feet by his reckoning – or by swimming under the gates. How far could a man fall safely from a height into water? How far could a man swim under the surface bef
ore his lungs gave out? These he could find the answers to.
*
“This is an absolute find! Look, you can see the remains of the foundations here, and judging by some of the stones in the cottages below, you can see they were made by an expert stone mason’s hand. They would have been brought here originally as ship ballast I think…”
After a while, Sophia stopped paying heed to Uncle Jonas’ monologue and watched Elias and a group of men set a fire in a small quarry below. She heard the fizz of something igniting, then smoke billowed up, acrid and black. From her vantage point, she wasn’t able to tell whether the Greek fire experiment was a success or failure.
“Are you paying attention, dear?”
She shook her head, looked to where Jonas pointed, and started sketching.
She spent her days like this, working alongside her uncle, documenting the villa complex on the headland, looking for evidence that would identify the owners. Kit never joined her during the day. Sometimes, she wouldn’t even see him for the evening meal. Late at night, long after she had gone to bed, while in a half-doze, she would feel Kit climb in beside her and gently caress her cheek, so softly as to not fully rouse her. He was always up before the dawn’s first light, leaving her to wake up alone.
Sophia didn’t know a lot about marriage, but she suspected it involved the couple spending at least some waking hours together.
She shook her head. Sophia couldn’t expect him to spend every moment with her. In fact, she should be grateful to be spending so much time with Jonas. He would be gone soon. But his work did not fill her days. Her uncle tired easily and, by mid-afternoon, he would sleep, leaving Sophia to explore her new home on her own.
By her count, there were fifteen children on the island. Everyone worked here, even the youngest child could be taught to gather eggs and milk goats. The older ones, the boys, she saw mending fishing nets on her arrival, also appeared to be learning carpentry; the girls worked alongside the other women, tending the vineyards and the gardens.
Sophia walked down the path from the house to the largest of the structures, which on first appearance had seemed to be a store. However, there was no door in the opening. Stepping out of the glare and the late morning heat, she looked about inside. There was another opening opposite the one she entered by. That, too, had no door. Around her, the walls did not go all the way up to the roof. That was, in fact, suspended on a dozen thick brick pillars, which let in light and air while the roof and its eaves offered protection from the elements.
Stacked against a far wall, she recognized some of the crates and barrels unloaded from the Calliope. Despite the obvious use as a storeroom, the building had another purpose it seemed. Long benches, stacked three high, stood either side of the door and a small cross placed high on the short wall attested to Elias’ efforts to make this space a chapel of sorts.
She thought of the island’s children again. Yes, they may be safe and protected here, but what happened when they grew older and wanted to build a life on their own? What future would they have without an education? Some of them may want to tell their own stories one day. They couldn’t do it if they could not read or write or do basic arithmetic.
Well, if this place could be a storehouse and a church, there was no reason it couldn’t be a school, too. Sophia imagined Sister Maria smiling down on her. Would Kit allow her to do such a thing?
She turned and looked out over the inlet, protected by basalt rocks from the wilder sea beyond it. The day was hot. There would be a storm tonight. She could already see the clouds gathering on the western horizon. In the bay itself, a dozen people crawled over the exposed hull of the Calliope scraping off barnacles for a fifth straight day.
She decided not to ask for Kit’s permission. She would simply do it.
*
Kit joined his crew and the men from the village scraping the Calliope’s hull. He itched to get back out to sea. They had a month to prepare for the gates of Al-Min to be open. It would be their best shot.
The urge for action thrummed in his veins, almost as insistently as the opium once held him. This mission would be it. At the end, either Kaddouri would be dead, or he would.
Sweat poured off Kit’s sunburned back as he ran the sharp blade across the wood. Revenge would be sweet, and he imagined for a moment that the timber across which he cut was Kaddouri’s throat.
He was once terrified of men like Kaddouri – and not ashamed to admit it. They were sadists who took delight in torturing their victims. Kit remembered when he was just eleven years old and a particular man came into the tavern for the first time… The opiates had not just been for the pain, they were to make such memories go away.
He wiped sweat from his face and looked up to see Sophia outside a cottage, talking to one of the women. He saw her laugh and his heart clenched. He loved her; he knew it with every fiber of his being. He desperately wanted to give himself to her completely, but he held part of himself back. He couldn’t. Not until he had exorcized the demon.
When she lay in his arms at night, he felt at peace, but it was gone by morning, absorbed by the weight of responsibility. Every face on Catallus reminded him of it, every testimonial written in the journals, the haunted faces of those he could not save damned him for not doing more.
That was why this mission was so important.
And yet, with every day that passed, he could see her drifting away from him. Mind you, it was difficult to have a marriage when you were barely in the same room together. The smiles she once gave to him, she now bestowed on other people. Whenever he did see her, she told him she was content enough exploring the ruins on the headland, taking two of the boys with her on her searches and coming back with buckets of, well, he wasn’t sure what. He’d never asked her, it was easier not to intrude. She was asleep when he crawled into bed beside her, if he got to bed at all. So many things raced through his head, and his insomnia became acute.
Kit glanced up the rise once more. She was gone.
He felt a slap on his back and another man took his place on the hull. Kit waded out of the water, grateful for the respite from the sun, and headed towards his villa. He passed the warehouse and allowed himself a small pat on the back for noting Sophia had started a school and was teaching anyone to cared to know French, English, Spanish, even elementary arithmetic, and he loved her even more for it.
Perhaps he was just an idiot, and Elias was right once again. Sophia would break his heart. He should have listened from the beginning and kept his distance.
He closed his eyes and remembered the first time he saw her – bravely facing a cad in her ugly, ill-fitting dress; those mesmerizing brown eyes. He saw even then she yearned for someone to love her and see the woman behind those glasses and her bookish interests. He wanted to be that man. But there was more to loving someone than just playing the gallant.
He realized it now, just as he recognized he was no good at this sort of stuff. Maybe it was a mistake to have tried. Samuel Cappleman obviously had feelings for Sophia, though misguided fool he was. Perhaps Kit should have persuaded him to take her back to England, away from temptation. Out of reach.
The thought hollowed him out. His chest physically ached, and not just from the thoughts that tormented him. He had promised Elias almost a year ago that his days of using laudanum were over, and he had kept his vow. But each day, it became harder.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Mrs. Kit, Mrs. Kit, you must awaken!”
Sophia was jostled violently awake. Lyda stared, her eyes wide with panic. She threw herself out of bed and slipped a simple peasant dress over her nightclothes before she thought to ask the question.
“What’s wrong?”
“Mr. Nash wants you in the storehouse now. It’s Mr. Kit.”
Sophia asked no more questions. She ran. At the storehouse, a dozen men clustered around the entrance. She started to push through and the crowd parted, making way for her.
Kit lay motionless on a table;
a thin blanket covered his lower half. His torso was bare. Without her glasses, she couldn’t tell, but he didn’t seem to be breathing. His lips were blue and his abdomen, usually flat, seemed swollen. She put a hand on his chest and nearly wept when she felt it rise.
“What happened?”
There was no answer.
“Mr. Nash!”
Elias put his arm around her shoulders.
“Sophia, Kit nearly drowned.”
“How did this happen?”
“He wanted to see how long he could hold his breath for underwater.”
“What?”
Elias ignored her interjection. “We got concerned after two minutes but he indicated he was fine, so we left him for another two minutes, then he disappeared into the seagrass—”
“How long?”
“—Marco and I went straight in after him. By the time we found him…”
“How long was he underwater?”
“About seven minutes.”
Sophia slammed her fists on the table. “You nearly killed him! He could have drowned!”
“Seven minutes?” a weak voice asked before dissolving in wet, chest-deep coughs.
Kit was pale, but a more natural color was beginning to emerge.
“I was—” Kit stopped and pulled in a raspy breath before hacking another cough. “I was hoping for five.”
The men around him burst into cheers and laughed. Sophia burst into tears.
She ran, ignoring Elias’ calls to wait and only stopped when she had reached the far side of the headland. Her shaking legs gave out by a fallen Corinthian column. She daren’t close her eyes. When she did, all she could see was Kit lying there as still as a corpse. She wept. Her fright and her anguish poured out onto the grass until she felt like a husk.
She’d nearly lost him, not to the sea nor a battle he had no control over. He’d nearly drowned, and he had done it deliberately. The realization pounded in her chest, nearly making her sick.
Regency Scandals and Scoundrels Collection Page 161
