by Louise Allen
Then the irony of it struck her. Here she was, prinking and posing in front of a mirror, trying to make herself look as unfeminine and unattractive as possible, when all the time she should be on her way to England, to her aunt Amelia the Duchess of Allington, stepmother to the present duke, who was to give her some town bronze before her come-out next Season. They’d have the letter by now, telling them of her father’s death, of her own ill health.
She should be in the luxury of her own cabin on a large merchantman, practising flirting with the officers and worrying that she did not have pretty enough gowns in her luggage.
A proper young lady in this situation should be in a state of collapse, not scrubbing out privies, swaggering about with a knife and sharing a cabin with an attractive, dangerous, good-for-nothing rogue. Depressingly, this proved she was not a proper young lady. On the other hand, if she was, she would still be in the Naismiths’ power. Better to be a skinny tomboy and alive.
Clemence gave the bandana one last tweak and headed for the galley, her stomach rumbling with genuine hunger as it had not done for weeks.
Street was ladling an unpleasant-looking grey slop into four buckets. Clemence wrinkled her nose, hung back and hoped this was not dinner.
‘There, that’ll do for ’em.’ The cook gestured to the two hands who were waiting. ‘They got water?’
‘Enough,’ one of the men said, spitting on the deck close to Clemence’s feet. ‘Waste of space, the lot of them. Not worth nothing.’
‘If the captain says keep ’em, we keep ’em,’ Street said, his voice a warning growl. ‘He’s got his reasons. You check the water and let me know if they’re sickening. I’m not taking a lashing for you if you let any of them die.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ the man grumbled, hefting a couple of buckets and shuffling off, followed by his mate.
‘Mr Street?’ Clemence ventured. ‘I’ve come for my dinner, sir.’ The cook waved a bloodstained hand towards a rather more savoury-looking cauldron of stew. He seemed out of temper, but not with her, so she ventured, ‘Are there prisoners on board?’
‘None of your business, lad.’ He swung round to glower at her. ‘You keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you if you want to keep a whole hide. And don’t go down to the orlop deck, either. You hear?’
‘Yes, Mr Street.’ The orlop deck? Why mention that? It was the very lowest deck, below the waterline where the cables were stowed. There would be no cabins down there, just dark holds with bilge water, rats and darkness; it would never have occurred to her to visit it. The cook went back to wielding his meat cleaver on a leg of pork, so she took bread to sop up the stew, poured some of the thin ale into a tankard and retreated to her refuge on top of the barrels.
The stew was better than she had expected and her appetite sharper, but Clemence spooned the gravy into her mouth absently, her eyes unfocused on the expanse of blue stretching out to the horizon. If there were captives down on the orlop deck, then they would be common seamen, she assumed, otherwise, if they had any value, they would be up in a proper cabin being kept alive with some care.
And if they were seamen, then some of them might be men from Raven Duchess. She stared down at the planking, scrubbed white by constant holystoning, the tar bubbling between the joints in the heat. Somewhere down there below, in foul darkness, could be men in her employ, men who’d been kept prisoner for six months. Men she was responsible for.
‘Then lay in the course you suggest through the channel, Mr Stanier. We’ll take it at first light.’ It was Captain McTiernan, Nathan at his side, Cutler behind them. All three men had their hands clasped behind their backs, just as she had seen her father pacing with his captains. It seemed impossible that pirates would behave in the same everyday way, but the more she saw, the more she realised they were not bogeymen out of a children’s storybook, they were real men operating in the real world. Their work just happened to be evil.
Instinct made her wriggle down amongst the barrels as though she could hide in some crevice, then common sense stopped her. It was not safe to cringe and cower; if McTiernan saw her, he might assume she was spying on him. As they drew level she wiped her crust round the tin plate and drained her tankard with an appearance of nonchalance, despite the fact that her heart was thudding against her ribs.
McTiernan stopped, bracketed by the two men, and looked at her. Clemence stared back, trying, without much difficulty, to look suitably nervous and humble. His eyes were flat, without emotion, staring at her as though she was no more, nor less, than one of the casks. Her eyes shifted to the left. Cutler was more obviously assessing—now she knew what a lamb in the slaughterman’s yard felt like. She shivered and glanced at Nathan, trying to read the message in the deep blue gaze. Warning or reassurance?
McTiernan blinked, slowly, and she half-expected to see an inner eyelid slide back into place like the lizards that scuttled up every wall in Raven’s Hold. Then, without speaking, he turned. Clemence felt the breath whoosh out of her lungs just as there was a shout from above.
Everyone looked up. Something was falling. Wedged between the barrels, Clemence tried to wriggle away, then the tail of her shirt caught, jerking her back. She felt a sharp blow to her head and the world erupted into stars.
Minutes passed, or hours. Her head hurt. She was on her back on the deck and above her she could see the captain, staring upwards towards the mast-tops that seemed to circle dizzyingly with the ship’s motion. Then someone bent over her. Nathan. The sick tension inside her relaxed; it was all right now. He was here.
‘Lie still.’ His hand pressed down on her shoulder and she lay back, closing her eyes. Her head hurt abominably, but the warm touch meant she was safe, she reasoned with what parts of her brain still seemed to be working. Something else, her common sense presumably, jabbed her. Nothing was all right, least of all the way she was feeling about this renegade officer.
‘Is he dead?’ Cutler. If I’m dead, he’ll eat me. The words whispered in her mind; she was beginning to drift in and out of consciousness.
‘No, just stunned. I’ll take him below.’
‘Flog the bastard.’ It was McTiernan, his voice flat calm.
But I haven’t done anything, she wanted to shout. It wasn’t my fault! She shifted, trying to wriggle away, but Nathan’s hand curled round and held her.
‘Steady, Clem. He’s angry with the hand who dropped the fid.’ So that was what it was. Her memory produced the image of a heavy wooden spike. Point down it would have killed her.
‘Because it hit me?’ she murmured. McTiernan was this angry because a cabin boy had been hit on the head?
‘No.’ Her eyes opened as he knelt, slid one arm under her knees, the other under her back. ‘Because it almost hit him.’
Nathan straightened with her in his arms. The world lurched, steadied, to reveal a man on the deck, cowering.
‘Fifty. Now.’ McTiernan turned on his heel and walked away, leaving the man screaming after him.
‘All hands for punishment!’ Cutler roared, making her start and try to burrow against the security of Nathan’s hard chest.
‘I’m taking the lad down,’ he said. ‘You don’t need me for this and he’s no use to me unconscious. I need to check his head.’
Fifty? Fifty lashes? ‘That will kill him,’ Clemence managed to say. Her view, mercifully, was confined to the open neck of Nathan’s shirt, the hollow at the base of his throat, the underside of his jaw. She made herself focus on the satiny texture of the skin, the few freckles, the pucker of a small scar, the way his Adam’s apple moved when he swallowed.
‘Oh, yes, it most certainly will. Close your eyes, lie still, I’ve got you.’
Oh, God. He had got her, oh, yes, indeed. The realisation of her danger thudded through her throbbing headache seconds after Clemence let her head sink gratefully on to his shoulder.
She was closer than she had ever been to Nathan and his hands seemed to be in the places that were most dangerous—th
e curve of her hip, her tightly strapped ribcage. She couldn’t see what had happened to the hem of her long shirt that she had been using to disguise the fact that there were no bulges in her trousers where a boy ought to bulge.
‘I’m all right, you can put me down.’ She was ignored. Of course, Nathan Stanier took no orders from scrubby boys. He would have to set her on her feet when they got to the companionway though, she reasoned, praying he was not intending to undress her to tuck her up in bed.
But it seemed that Nathan had thought out the logistics of descending steep stairs on a pitching ship with his arms full. He swung her round and hung her over his shoulder, one arm tight around the back of her thighs as he climbed down. ‘Sorry if this jars your head, but we’ll be down in a minute.’ And they were and she was back in his arms almost shaking with the jumble of sensations, fears, emotions that were rattling round her poor aching head.
‘There.’ He put her down. Clemence opened her eyes and saw they were in their cabin. This was her bunk, thank goodness. She’d say she wanted to sleep…
But she wasn’t safe, not yet. Nathan knelt in front of her, overwhelmingly big on the confined space, and tipped her forward against his chest so he could part her hair and look at her scalp.
‘Skin isn’t broken, but you’ll have a nasty lump.’ He didn’t seem ready to release her, one hand flat on her back, holding her close, the other running gently through her hair, checking for lumps. Clemence let her forehead rest against his shoulder. Madness. Bliss. ‘All her senses were full of him, his heat, the feel of him, the scent of him, the aura of strength that seemed to flow from him. She could stay like this all day. Safe. She began to drift.
‘Clem?’ Nathan’s voice was puzzled. ‘Why the devil are you trussed up like the Christmas goose?’
‘Cracked ribs,’ she said on a gulp, back in the real world with a vengeance. ‘When my uncle hit me. I, er…fell against a table.’
‘Rubbish. You’d have yelled the place down just now when I slung you over my shoulder if you’d got cracked ribs.’ He slid his hands free and sat back on his heels beside the bunk. Clemence closed her eyes as though that could hide her. She wanted so much to believe he would protect her when he knew her secret, wanted so much, in the midst of this nightmare, to believe there was good in this flawed man. ‘Clem, take your shirt off.’
‘No.’ She opened her eyes and met his, read the questions in them.
‘Why not?’
There was nowhere to go, no lie she could think of, no escape. Eyes locked with his, braced for his reaction, Clemence said, ‘Because I’m a girl.’ And waited.
Silence, then, ‘Well, thank God for that,’ Nathan said.
‘What?’ She sat bolt upright, then clutched her head as the cabin swam around her. ‘What do you mean, thank God?’
Nathan was looking at her with all the usual composure wiped off his face. He seemed a good five years’ younger, grinning with what had to be relief. ‘Because my body was telling me there was a woman around,’ he confessed, running a hand through his hair. ‘I kept finding myself staring at you, but I didn’t know why. The relief of finding that my dissipated way of life hasn’t left me lusting after cabin boys is considerable, believe me. What’s your real name?’
‘Clemence.’ The release of tension on finding that he had not become a slavering monster bent on rapine turned into temper. It was that, or tears. ‘And the relief might be considerable for you, but now I am sharing a cabin with a man who knows I am a woman and whose body is most certainly interested in that fact—a piece of information I could well do without, believe me! Forgive me, but I was much happier when you were simply confused and uncomfortable.’
‘So, you think I am more likely to ravish Clemence than Clem, do you?’ He rocked back on his heels and stood up, hands on hips, looking down at her.
She had made him angry again. Clemence lay down cautiously, too dizzy to stay sitting up. ‘No, I don’t think that. My cousin was going to force me every night until he got me with child and I had to agree to marry him. I may not know you, but I do understand that you don’t treat people like that. But this…’ she waved a hand around the confines of the cabin, the closeness of him, the privy cupboard ‘…this is not very comfortable. Not for a woman alone with a man she doesn’t know.’
You wouldn’t mistreat people you know as individuals, that is, she qualified to herself. Putting a pirate ship in the way of capturing and plundering merchant vessels and killing their crews, that was another matter. You couldn’t tell that sort of thing about people just by looking at them, it seemed.
‘My God.’ He sat down on the nearest chair. ‘No wonder you ran away. Which of them hit you?’
‘My uncle. Why?’
‘For future reference,’ Nathan said grimly. ‘This cousin of yours—he didn’t—’
‘No. I’m too scrawny to interest him at the moment. He was going to fatten me up.’ Nathan’s growl sent a shiver of pleasure down her spine at the thought of Lewis walking into the cabin and coming up against that formidable pair of fists. ‘Are you going to tell anyone about me?’
‘Hell, no! If you were in danger when they thought you a boy, you wouldn’t be safe for one minute if they knew you are a woman.’ He pulled out a chair and sat down out of reach of her, whether for his peace of mind or hers, she couldn’t tell. ‘How old are you?’
‘Nineteen. Twenty in two months’ time.’
Nathan’s eyebrows went up and he raked one long-fingered hand back through his hair again, reducing it to a boyish tangle. Clemence resisted the urge to get up and comb it straight. ‘This gets worse and worse.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? I thought you were fourteen, a child. Now I know you’re not—’ He stopped, frowning. ‘We need to think about the practicalities of this.’
‘There aren’t any, not really.’ Clemence sat up against the hard bulkhead with some caution. ‘There’s the closet, thank goodness, and now you know who I am I can just ask for privacy when I need it.’
‘When are your courses due?’ he asked, in such a matter-of-fact manner that she answered him before she had time to be embarrassed.
‘Three weeks.’ Goodness, she hadn’t thought of that.
‘Good.’ Nathan was pretending to pay careful attention to a knot-hole in the table. ‘You are doing very well with the way you move. I guess you know some young lads?’
‘I used to run wild with them until I was fourteen,’ she confessed. ‘What is that noise?’ There were no live pigs on board, surely?
‘A man screaming,’ Nathan said, getting up and slamming both portholes shut. ‘Try not to listen.’
‘It’s him, isn’t it? The man who dropped the fid.’ Suddenly it was all too much. Somehow she had managed to endure Uncle Joshua’s threats, Cousin Lewis’s plans for her. She had acted with determination and escaped, stolen a horse without a qualm, kept her head when McTiernan and his men had seized her, coped with two days on a pirate ship and now…
Clemence dragged her sleeve across her eyes and sniffed, trying to hold back the tears.
‘Stop it, crying isn’t going to help him,’ Nathan said abruptly.
‘They are killing him by inches, torturing him,’ she retorted. ‘Can’t you do anything?’
‘No.’
She half-turned, hunching her shoulder towards him. Of course he was right, there was nothing to be done. It was just that she expected him to work miracles. Oh, damn! Why had he discovered she was female? It weakened her; she was turning to him for help he couldn’t give and which she shouldn’t expect. The moment she’d decided to escape from Raven’s Hold she had taken her own destiny into her hands, however feeble they might prove to be, and now she was reacting like Miss Clemence Ravenhurst, sheltered young lady.
‘Clem. Clemence.’ She shook her head, fighting to try to regain her composure and her independence. ‘Oh, come here.’ Nathan sat down on the bunk and pulled her rigidly resisting body into his arms. He presse
d her unbruised cheek against his chest, muffling her ear into his shirt, and held his palm to the other side of her head so that all she could hear was his heartbeat, the sound of his breathing and the turmoil of her own thoughts.
‘Clemence,’ he repeated, his voice a rumble in her ear. ‘That’s an unusual name. But I’ve heard it before, not all that long ago, either. Can’t think where, though.’
‘You’ve had a few other things on your mind,’ she suggested, trying to drag her imagination away from what was happening on deck.
Nathan gave a snort of laughter, stirring her hair. ‘Yes, just a few.’ His hold on her tightened, not unpleasantly. He felt very strong. It was a novelty, being held by a man other than Papa. He’d been one for rapid bear-hugs, her father, impetuous lifts so her feet left the floor as he twirled her round. ‘How did you get this thin, Clem? I’d better keep calling you Clem, less risk of a slip.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, her lips touching the soft linen of his coarse white shirt as she spoke. A fraction of an inch away was the heat of his skin; she could almost taste it. ‘I was always slender. When my father died I didn’t feel much like eating; then, when I realised what Uncle Joshua was doing, my appetite vanished all together.’ She shivered and felt Nathan’s hand caress gently down her swollen cheek.
‘They made me eat the night I escaped. Apparently I was so skinny it would be unpleasant for Cousin Lewis to bed with me. He said I was like a boy.’ Nathan stiffened and muttered something, but all she could hear was that low growl again. ‘That’s what gave me the idea. I still had the clothes from when I used to run wild as a child with the local planters’ sons.’
‘How did you get out?’ He was talking to distract her, she thought, grateful for the attempt.
