A Different Sort of Perfect (23 page)

It took hours for her heated cheeks to clear and the
numbness to dissipate. Why hadn't she realized the situation's
appearance before? This magical cruise, with her and the
Topaze
, the captain and crew, all seemingly lost between sea
and sky — it couldn't go on forever. Someday they'd enter a bay or
harbor, slip into a port and drop anchor, and then everyone ashore
would be watching the ship.

And see her.

Clearly, oh so clearly not with a chaperone.

It had all seemed so simple, so very straightforward,
back in Plymouth: let the furniture movers carry her aboard a ship,
and then convince the captain to assist her in finding Phillippe.
But now she knew so much more about ships, the navy, the nautical
life, and her frantic daydreams, her silly musings, took on all the
unreal color they deserved. Captain Fleming had been gracious and
more than patient with her.

But sooner or later, he'd have to put her ashore. And
return to the job he'd been assigned: stopping that French frigate
before it attacked the East Indiamen, including her father's ships,
soon to be her own.

And she'd have to find her way back to Plymouth as
best she could.

Without Phillippe.

Without any husband at all.

Leaving her with Viscount Maynard.

Who seemed worse than ever after—

The face that leapt to her mind wasn't Phillippe's,
with his commanding eyes and modern, curly auburn hair. Actually,
it had been over a year since she'd seen him. No longer could she
even be certain that image, the one she forced to form in her
thoughts, was an accurate representation of him.

The man she yearned to marry had faded like washing
in her memory.

And the hole that knowledge ripped in her heart was
even worse than the thought of the viscount.

No, the face that automatically formed within her
mind's eye was patrician, with a strong chin and chiseled nose,
pale blue eyes with winged brows, smile lines digging grooves about
his mouth, and golden curls growing from their short crop and now
spilling over his frilled shirt's collar.

She'd spent so much time with Captain Fleming, being
his clerk, joining him at table, conversing and laughing with him,
that she'd almost come to think of him as a sort of surrogate
husband, just as the world must be looking at her as his surrogate
wife.

And that was the most humiliating blow of all.

* * * *

Hennessy brought her a sandwich for lunch.

"Beg pardon, my lady, but it's looking like a hard
blow and we're tying everything down. Captain's called for all
hands and the cook." He nodded at the plate before her. "Sorry, but
that's the best I can do for a meal, at least until dinner."

A prickle of unease feathered through the remains of
her numbness. "Really bad, you think?"

"Mortal bad, it looks." He backed from the room. "You
won't be in the way on the poop deck, if'n you wanted to watch."
Hennessy closed the door before she could thank him.

On deck after lunch, and the dark line chasing them
had thickened, darkened, spread into a massive wall across the
northwestern sky, bearing down on them much as the
Flirt
had
done, and at a similar speed. Dark grey with roiling white edges,
shot through with whorls of graveyard green, its walls seemed solid
and impenetrable as those of a castle. In the afternoon the first
jagged fork of lightning leapt across the storm's wall. The hair on
her arms stood upright and quivered.

She leaned onto the quarterdeck railing. "I don't
suppose we can run away from that?" she called to Staunton.

He glanced up from overseeing the sailors frapping
down the cutters and spars on the davits. His eyes were fixed,
intense. Worried. A small shake of his head. "Good and tight,
Brearley. Don't want the boats shaking loose."

The upper yardmen dismantled the t'gallant masts,
lowered them to the deck with an assembly of ropes, and Chandler
swung through the diminishing rigging like one of the more
remarkable great apes, directing their efforts. Mr. Abbot bellowed
orders from the gangway as the most skilled hands arranged rolling
tackles between yards and mast, and Lieutenant Rosslyn checked the
gunners as they double-bowsed the cannons against the ship's sides,
manila cordage creaking with each roll. On the foremast, Captain
Fleming and David Mayne worked a crew stripping off the
tropical-weight sails and bending on a new suit of storm canvas,
thick heavy stuff that blazed white in the stark sunlight. Staunton
helped arrange tarpaulins and battens as coverings over the
hatchways and sent hands aloft with puddening for the yards.

All day they worked, on and on. As the afternoon
progressed into evening, their hands picked up speed, careful
still, but hauling and tying more quickly, more firmly. No one
seemed to glance toward the storm as it loomed nearer; no one
except she, of course, and the numbness again crept into her hands,
up her neck to her face. If only she could help more. But her only
useful contribution lay in keeping out of the way while the crew
worked, and not another question would she ask.

She'd read in Staunton's journal of the ferocious
storms in the Bay of Biscay, thousands of miles to the north,
around Africa's western hump and beyond Spain's peninsula — storms
that could rip the mast off a ship, split a sail, smash a lightning
bolt into anything metal, lay them on their beam end and swamp them
beneath a spilling wave so the ship never righted herself. Ships
went down with all hands in such storms.

If the storms in the South Atlantic rivaled those,
she might not need a husband, after all.

* * * *

Captain Fleming seemed to go out of his way to keep
their dinner conversation light and distant, and perhaps that was
for the best; banalities were more appropriate table talk than
terror, certainly. But as he folded his napkin — she'd long ago set
hers aside — Clara couldn't stop herself from asking,

"In your experience, is this storm very much worse
than others? Is there compelling reason for such caution?" Her
voice wavered on the word
storm
. Embarrassing, but she
wouldn't let herself look away.

His eyes flickered, a concrete, unhappy knowledge
undermining his forced smile. He'd hidden his worry from her, and
with some success. Doubtless the more experienced officers and crew
knew enough to be worried without any cue from the captain. But
this frank, unspoken acknowledgement of their danger hollowed out
her insides and left her undigested spotted dick floating in the
most nauseating manner where her stomach used to be.

"It is large," he admitted, "and powerful. The glass
has been falling all day and while I have seen it lower, I can't
say I've ever seen it much lower." His mouth firmed. "But during
our last cruise,
Topaze
weathered a true hurricane, and the
year before that we chased a French frigate into the Roaring
Forties, where the waves broke higher than our mainmast. It's
possible this storm will be worse than those experiences." One side
of his mouth hiked up, his cheek's groove deepening, and his eyes
laughed at her. "But it's not likely."

Astonishing, how her insides resumed their usual
positions and duties without effort, bringing her dessert to heel
and soothing her qualms, all at his wry, lopsided smile. Clara
smiled back. She'd always appreciated him as a master sailor, of
course, but when precisely had she developed such reliance upon his
abilities?

Captain Fleming threw down his napkin. "However,
clearly this is our last night of peace for a few days—"

"A few
days
?" She could not have heard him
correctly.

"Aye, yes, it's huge for all that and will take a
while to sweep past us or wear itself out. So why don't we take our
coffee up on deck?" He rose and held her chair for her. "Often
before a storm, the crew arrange some entertainments. You won't
want to miss that."

"Entertainments?" Difficult enough imagining men
sewing their own clothes and cleaning their own spaces, despite all
the evidence she'd seen to the contrary. And sometimes it was
difficult to tell when Captain Fleming was making game of her.

He gave her his arm. "I promise you, dancers fit for
Sadler's Wells."

Hennessy's cantankerous mate stood at the aft
ladder's top, holding a silver tray with four china cups of
steaming coffee. He made such a ridiculous figure, the rough-hewn
sailor standing in as footman; but she smiled at him as she took
the first cup and his sickly grimace could be interpreted as a
smile in return, by the optimistic, at least.

"Good evening, Mr. Rosslyn," she said as the
lieutenant accepted a cup. "Good evening, Mr. Chandler."

"Good evening, Lady Clara, and good evening,
captain." Lieutenant Rosslyn's smile was much more sincere.

Chandler swallowed, balancing his cup and saucer
carefully with gleaming knuckles. "Good evening, Lady Clara."

A greeting rough but audible and clear: that surely
counted as progress. She flashed him her best smile.

The storm had taken a massive bite from the sun,
leaving a dark, unreal hole behind, and the sunset, in weird
clouded colors of grey and orange, spread only to the south. In the
north, the clouds were closer, amazingly closer, and where the deck
should have been splashed with the sun's final warm rays, gloom
deepened in their place. Her breath caught in her chest; that solid
castle wall sliced through the day like some horrible omen.

Behind her, what sounded astonishingly like a guitar
strummed.

A guitar? She raised her eyebrows at Captain Fleming.
Without looking at her, his lips curled into a secret smile, and he
glanced at the fo'c'sle.

Leaning against the foremast sat an otherwise useless
waister, cradling a Spanish guitar and ruffling his way down the
strings. A gunner and then a fo'c'sleman lifted German flutes,
joining the waister's tune, and behind them David Mayne scraped a
bow across a fiddle. The crew surrounded them in comfortable
clusters. Wake smacked his palms together, clapped again, and then
they all joined in as Ackers, the captain's coxswain, folded his
arms and began to dance.

His shoulders never moved, his arms bent in front of
his chest, but his lithe feet stamped and flew. Two others joined
him and the simple country dance segued into an impromptu hornpipe
competition, the wonderful music spinning them around each other in
the little clearing of crouched bodies, bare feet slapping the deck
as the sun sank exhausted below the sea. Someone lit lanterns and
in the overlapping lights the game continued, knees lifting, hands
waving, toes flexing and pointing and tucking, none of them willing
to be the first to collapse.

Clara's feet twitched with yearning as faster and
faster they whirled, the flutes improvising above the guitar and
Mayne's cheerful fiddle. Finally the foretopman's feet began to
drag and his mates hauled him protesting from the circle. But
Ackers and the gunner danced on until finally the musicians drew
out one long, final note, as if by some unseen mutual signal, and
lowered their instruments together. The gunner staggered.

"Aye, that's settled it," said a voice from the
lower-deck crowd.

"Aye," said Wake. "Ackers took it there." And he
pounded his palms together. Ackers stood straight, feet tucked
primly into third, as the applause rolled for'ard and aft.

She joined in. With such a round of dancing, he'd
earned the recognition. No matter that she didn't get to dance, as
well.

Oh, she should quit being silly. Who on earth — or,
more appropriately, who aboard the ship would she dance with?
Chandler? Staunton?

She wouldn't even think of another name. She wouldn't
think it and it wouldn't happen.

Another lantern flared to life, and as the fo'c'sle
brightened, a voice began to sing:

"There was a gay young farmer,
Who lived on Salisbury's plain;
He loved a rich knight's daughter dear
And she loved him again.
The knight he was distresséd,
That they should sweethearts be,
So he had the farmer presséd,
And sent him off to sea."

Wake? Indeed that was Wake's voice, no longer as
scratchy and gnarled as the old fo'c'sleman, but filling out the
words of this unknown ballad with a rich true tenor. And as he
dropped the note for the dying fall, a flock of voices rose around
him, joining in the refrain:

"Singing Rule Britannia,"

Clara laughed, ducking her mouth down and behind her
hand; she wouldn't have Wake thinking she laughed at him when it
was the song's impossible combination of lovelorn farmer and
patriotic anthem that she found humorous. Captain Fleming's lips
curled but he joined in the song with Rosslyn and Chandler:

"Britannia rules the waves
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!"

The other voices died away and Wake's again rose,
singing the second verse alone:

"'Twas on the deep Atlantic,
Midst Equinoctial gales,
This young farmer fell overboard
Among the sharks and whales;
He disappeared so quickly,
So headlong down went he,
He went out of sight like a streak of light
To the bottom of the deep blue sea."

Time for the refrain, and Clara hauled in a breath to
join the song. But longing squeezed her heart, closed her throat,
and homesick tears threatened. She'd left England without a
backward glance, without leaving so much as a note for Uncle David
and Aunt Helen to find.

As if she'd abandoned them, when she owed them so
much.

And with that storm bearing down on
Topaze
,
she might never see them again.

The men's voices rose around her. She swallowed the
tears, the emotion, forced her throat to clear, and belted out the
song with her floating village: