A Scandal to Remember (33 page)

He might want to find them and have his men near, but Jane was happier thinking them hundreds of miles away, or better yet, at the bottom of the gray brooding ocean where they belonged, God rot their souls.

But she kept her opinion to herself, as did he while he finished rigging the main sheet on the foot of the boom, and sat at the tiller to put the vessel into the wind.

“So if we don’t know where we are,” she asked, “how do we decide where we are going?”

“I do have some idea of where we are—vaguely. We are in the Southern Pacific. And judging from the air and water temperature, I should reckon we’re somewhere above forty degrees of latitude, but that is only my guess, based on … dead reckoning. On instinct. And years of naval service.”

But Jane couldn’t seem to share his confidence. She didn’t like looking out at the endless gray. She had much rather look at him instead. At the granite-hard line of his jaw. At the implacable surety that he projected from every inch of his taut body. “Seems sensible enough,” she made herself say, though the words stuck in her throat. Mostly because her throat was dry and sore.

She scrubbed her tangled hair off her face, and tried not to think about wanting a drink of the precious water they had diligently collected through the storm. “How long do you think it will take for us to get … anywhere?”

He squinted at the horizon. “A month, to be safe. Take a drink of water.”

Jane felt her heart plummet to her still damp shoes. “I don’t think we have enough water for a whole month. Not unless it rains again.”

“And it will. The air is heavy with moisture. So we will collect more water, and you can take a drink now.” He spoke with that confidence, that surety that she wanted to lean on to keep her shaky hopes propped up.

While she took a few grateful gulps of the life-saving rainwater, he adjusted the sails. “But the consequence of the rain will be that without the sun to take a noon reading for the longitude … I can’t yet make a plan.” He sat, and Jane slid over, so he might have adequate room on the cockpit bench. “And so we sit.”

But there didn’t seem to be much else to say. “But as soon as we have sun you will be able to fix our position?”

“I will. As long as there is sun at noon. And you will do the mathematics just to be sure I get it right. At noon.” He dug a watch out of the pocket of his waistcoat, and held it up to his ear before he opened it to check the mechanism. “And if this watch did not get too waterlogged and can still keep time. It was in my pocket, when we were … in the water.”

“Do you mean while I was drowning?”

He heard the self-pitying despair she could not manage to keep from her voice, and spoke to counter it. “Yes.”

He reached out to take her hand and held it, much as she had done in the wardroom that first time. When his mere presence had given her a comfort and reassurance she could not entirely feel now. “But you did not drown. You are alive. We are alive and together. Don’t despair.”

He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her up next to him as if they were an old married couple—though she had never seen her father do that to her mother. But he meant it as a companionable, comforting gesture, she supposed.

Though she had to admit it was not nearly so comforting as the gesture he had made on the previous afternoon.

Heat swept across her skin and up to her hairline so visibly, that he looked at her with some concern, and put the back of his hand to her forehead. “Are you feverish?”

Yes. That was certainly a much more acceptable explanation than the fact that she seemed to have turned into a trollop who thought of nothing but a man’s touch. “No. I’m fine. I’m just … feeling a little helpless, I suppose, while you do everything. What can I help with?”

“You can recover your strength. You slept a great deal yesterday.”

And there was the heat again, spreading from her face down her neck. “Yes. But I meant something more actively helpful, like scanning the horizon for ships.”

“And there you have it.”

She was saved from the necessity of saying anything more by the arrival of raindrops, mercifully falling to cool her face.

Together, she and Dance rigged one of the rectangular tarpaulins over the bottom of the boom to make a sort of a tent over the well of the cockpit, and set out their canvas buckets to collect more rainwater. But in the process they both got wet, and so to prevent either of them from becoming chilled again, Dance took the precaution of sitting down very close to her in the bottom of the well, and wrapping his arm around her for comfort.

It was strange and nice and unnerving how he managed to do so much without letting go of her. It was a strange dance they did together—a nautical waltz.

But so long as he touched her, or she could lean against him, or feel the heat of his body surrounding her, Jane felt that she would be all right. She would eventually get out of this misadventure she had willed upon herself with her vanity and her pride and her overweaning ambition. She would cling to him and his warmth and pray incessantly to stay alive.

Because the alternatives—death, or worse, Dance’s death—were simply, utterly, entirely unpalatable.

Chapter Twenty

Dance was in hell.

He wanted her so badly his eyes ached from looking at her, but she fell asleep on him again. Literally, the moment Dance settled her head against his chest, she fell asleep, before he could even so much as formulate a plan to kiss her. And despite her saying otherwise, Dance was convinced that she was in fact ill.

Her breathing was strained, and her brow seemed warmer. He’d seen it before—men pulled from the water, saved from drowning, only to have the sea claim them by somehow filling up their lungs with water and drowning them on dry land.

They weren’t on dry land, but he would have given her all of the water they had collected before he took another sip if it would help to flush the salt out of her lungs. So he let her sleep, and collected the rainwater that pattered against the tarpaulin, and when the breeze picked up, he let the wind push them to the northwest.

And tried to think of anything but the fragile girl in his arms. So he thought of his ship, and his men—of Able Simmons with his head bashed in, and Rupert Honeyman herding the midshipmen together in the cutter, proud of his newfound responsibilities, and mindful of where his loyalties lay. And of others less loyal—of openly defiant Ransome, and the silently treacherous Manning.

The serrated gash at the top of his shin began to heal now that the air was warmer, and he could leave off his boots, and move about the small craft barefoot. But his real concern was for Jane. Who coughed and slept, and showed absolutely no interest in a return to their previous intimacy. Indeed, it seemed to him that she took pains to keep her normally straightforward gaze averted from his. And though she showed no aversion to his touch when he brought her to rest against him in the cool of the evenings, neither did she do anything to advance or enhance their closeness.

Or it could have been that she was really sick.

And she knew it. Her lips moved in a constant silent litany of prayer.

And so the nights and days took on an endless repetitive cycle as their little craft sailed onward—they collected water, and he made her drink it. She watched the horizon, and he watched their course. He gathered her to his side every evening, and spent the night trying to think only of the treachery of his crew to keep his mind from the soft fall of her hair against her shoulder, and the sweet curve of her breasts where they pressed against his chest.

Dance lost count of the days. Sunsets were set apart from sunrise because the twilight to the west was streaked with fiery yellows, and the dawns from the east were painted lurid shades of pink and purple. But the one color they never saw was blue. The sky remained an ominous, overcast gray that reflected itself onto the ocean day after brooding day, and made it nigh unto impossible to take the reading of the zenith of the sun. And with the difficulty in fixing the sun, neither could he calculate with any true degree of accuracy if his watch was still keeping time, or if the salt water from his dunking in the wreck had eaten its way into the mechanism.

And so he stayed wide awake each night, and tried to find the stars, and tired not to think too much. About how it was a big wide ocean. About how many days they had been alone on the sea. About how a miscalculation of only a few degrees could keep them from sighting land.

Jane had packed quite a lot into the little pinnace—the pails that kept them in rainwater, and the tins of potted meat, and biscuits and marmalade they rationed carefully—but she had packed no maps or references, and Dance had only his memory of reading Captain Cook’s accounts of his voyage to rely upon in choosing his course.

He tried to tell himself that he had as good a chance as any man of finding what he sought—a speck of dry land—and better than most. But the consequences of missing were enormous. As enormous as the sea itself.

And he was haunted by thoughts of what might have become of the others. Eighty-four men and four naturalists under his command were adrift somewhere else upon the sea, and he was responsible for them even if they had seemingly forsaken him, and left him to go down with Jane in his ship.

And he had seen no other ships or boats, though he had watched the horizon incessantly, and set Jane to doing the same. The waters far to the northeast, off the west coast of South America, were the familiar whaling grounds for Yankee ships out of New England, good sailors and fair-minded, hardworking men. But of those wide-hulled ships, and smoking stacks, he had seen no sign.

Easier to look at Jane. Easier to suspend his thoughts by letting his idle fingers play with her hair. Even windblown, it was soft, and it soothed him to run the silken strands across the backs of his fingers. Just as it quieted his doubts to trace the smooth line of her jaw—so often tipped up in the air, so resolute—and the plush line of her lower lip, now beginning to crack and chap.

When he looked at Jane, his mind could come to rest. Her beauty—that indefinable quality that was a combination of both her person and her personality—gave him a focus, a duty. He would do whatever it would take to keep her alive. He would close his mind to everything but her.

But he could not close his mind to the sound that rolled low across the water. There was a gathering dull roar that did not come from his head. It came from somewhere out there, out on the sea.

Dance stopped, and tried to make his sleep-deprived and thirsty mind concentrate, to test if his imagination was getting the better of his senses. The wind had also picked up at a good clip, whistling past his ears, and the sound of the hull slicing through the water lulled him with its rhythm.

But still, he could not ignore the prod of instinct—that bristling pressure at the nape of his neck, pressing down on him, warning him to pay attention. Dance eased Jane out of his arms, and stood up.

And saw before him in the silver glint of dim moonlight, the shadowy loom of what looked like land—a low, irregular hump of darkness that rose out of the sea with a line of white surf demarking where the water gave way to the sand. It was real. He had not imagined it.

A raw mixture of hope and fear and excitement shot through his veins like uncut rum.

“Jane.” His voice was tight and dry from disuse. “Jane, wake up. I think I’ve found it.”

He had aimed by sheer instinct and dead reckoning at the easternmost of the Pitcairn Islands, knowing that English people—or formerly English people—lived there, and that the Royal Navy made frequent trips to the vicinity. But by the time he realized that the low hump could not be the mountainous Pitcairn, and that the line of white was
not
the pearlescent sand of a beach, but the foaming churn of surf crashing across a low reef that surrounded the island, they were upon it.

Dance flung the tiller over hard to fall off the wind and come about, but the fast little pinnace was already careering over the razor-sharp rocks. The vessel shuddered and splintered beneath their feet as the waves pounded the hull into the reef.

“Fuck all.” As if it weren’t enough for him to have wrecked a Royal Navy frigate, he had just done the same to a blasted boat. Even he might have to start to believe in bad luck.

But the same surge of surf that pushed the pinnace onto the reef carried it over, and into the calmer water of a wide lagoon. Which they now had to cross if they were to reach the low hump of land.

Dance hauled in the main sheet, and readjusted the sail to get them moving through the water again. “Check the floorboards for water,” he instructed Jane, his voice a dry bark. “Tell me how much is coming in.”

Jane dropped to her hands and knees to feel her way in the darkness. “Only a little. But it’s a steady trickle,” she reported, her own voice just as dry and reedy. “There’s a hump in the ceiling boards. I think the keel may have been damaged.”

“We’ll make it.” He was determined. He had brought them this far—he would not falter at the last. “It’s not too far. Another minute,” he assured her. It was harder to tell the distance in the dim moonlight reflecting off the high clouds, but it could not have been more than a mile across the wide stretch of the lagoon. And at least the water was calm and smooth within the reef. Small comfort, but in a leaking boat with a damaged keel, he would take all the comfort he could get.

Dance trimmed the sail again to get as much speed as possible from the wind shifting around the landmass, and stared through the darkness as the low hump of land slowly took shape out of the gloom. It was not one single piece of land, but several small separate islands with one larger one, strung along the ring of the reef.

He altered course, and aimed for the second largest of the isles for no other reason than twelve-odd years of instinct. And because it was closer, and the dim strip of beach seemed slightly wider, and he thought he had seen the wraithlike shadow of a reef shark glide by the side of the pinnace. After everything that Jane had been through, he would do everything he could to spare her that additional terror of sinking into shark-infested waters.