A Scandal to Remember (34 page)

And then the sand was rushing at them as he ran the pinnace hard up onto the beach, where it shuddered to an ungainly stop. He let go of the tiller and the sheet, and for one very long moment, felt for the first time in months the welcome but unaccustomed feeling of stillness. For a full minute nothing, absolutely nothing save the waves at the foot of the beach, moved.

“Are we there?”

Wherever the hell
there
was.

“Yes.” He made himself sound confident. He made himself ignore the rush of fresh worries that rose up like an imaginary fog from the unknown dark of the island before him. He went to Jane where she was crouched in the well, pressing her hand down upon the fractured keel, as if she might, through sheer will, have held the little boat together.

“You can let it go now.” He reached to take her hand, for his own comfort as much as for hers. He felt old and tired—weary from exhaustion and the knowledge that he had both saved and still failed her all at the same time. “We’ve made land.”

“Where are we?”

They were not on Pitcairn. The low atoll he had grounded them on resembled nothing of the descriptions of the island from Admiralty records. “It doesn’t matter,” he lied. “We’ve reached some land, and that is enough for now.”

He gathered her in his arms both so he could give himself the calming assurance of holding her, and to carry her out of the boat.

But his feet were too unsteady—the sand shifted under his feet, and made him feel off balance, and unsure. Dance was forced to set her down in the fine white sand that seemed to suck at his feet, and sap his strength.

And he had to tend to the broken boat. He had to drag it higher up the slight slope of the beach to a spot above the high-tide mark, where it would be safe. Broken or not, it was all they had.

But when he had done so, his strength was gone, sapped by the effort, and by the constant vigilance of staying up for days and nights at a time. It was all he could do to go to her, and find a spot under a tree where he could finally lay himself down to stop the world from spinning around him.

“Dance,” she said, though her voice seemed to come from very far away, high up at the top of the tree.

“Come down here with me,” he said, and tugged her down beside him so he didn’t have to look up. So he could pull her into his arms, snug against his chest, and close his eyes. And finally let the black oblivion of exhaustion overtake him.

*   *   *

Dance awoke to the terrifying feeling that he was alone. Empty and depleted.

Jane was gone.

The clawing pressure building in his chest might have felt like panic, if he allowed it to be. He lurched to his feet, only to find himself unsteady. He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the watery gray sunlight.

The yellowish cast to the western sky that had obscured the sun for days still made him feel uneasy. He’d been at sea for more years than he liked to count, and sailed the Pacific twice before, and he’d never seen the like.

But the truth of the matter was that his unease was not due to the strange weather, but from the fact that Jane Burke, who had clung to him as tenaciously as one of her precious barnacles for uncounted nights, was gone.

She was nowhere nearby. She was not within his sight.

“Jane.” He staggered toward the boat, hoping that she had taken shelter within its familiar confines. But the pinnace was empty. More than empty—items were missing. The line that had been the main sheet, controlling the sail, was gone, as were many of the tightly packed supplies. “Jane!” he bellowed.

That
was
panic, cracking his voice wide open like a boarding ax.

“Dance!”

Dance turned a full circle to see her running—tearing up the beach at him as if a tribe of spinster-scientist-eating cannibals were after her.

No. There were no cannibals. And she was smiling.

She was running easily, as if she hadn’t just spent however many days it had been in a small boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Her feet were bare in the sand. He could see her small toes, and her white, white ankles and shins where she had tied her skirts up to keep them out of the water. Her hair was streaming loose on the breeze.

Everything that had heretofore seemed so buttoned up and battened down was coming gloriously undone. The drawn, coughing girl of the boat was gone, and left this glowing creature in her place.

When she reached him she held out her hand and offered him a handful of shells, as if she were giving him rubies and pearls, or manna from heaven. Or better yet, carpentry tools with which he might fix the broken boat.

He looked again at the contents of her outstretched palm. Shells. But she was beaming at him as if she were ecstatically happy.

Happy. Shipwrecked only God knew where in the middle of the ocean.

“It’s unbelievable.” She was breathless with her joy. “You won’t believe what I found.
Tridacna gigas.
Giant bivalves. Clams as big as a breadbasket.” She spread her arms to indicate the monstrous size. “And more than that. A Venus comb murex,
Murex pecten,
and another murex, I think, but that I’ve never seen before but it’s definitely a gastropod mollusk with a very wide operculum. And this whelk of the
Triton
type that I’ve never seen anywhere but is definitely some sort of
Cabestana.
Oh, Dance. It’s—”

Dance thought her face would split in two with the width of her smile.

And then she hurtled herself into his arms, wrapping her arms around his back, and sighing into his chest. “Oh, Dance. It’s heaven.”

Heaven.

Impossible. At least highly improbable.

Or that is what he would have thought if she had not been in his arms. Because the feeling of her pulled tight against his chest was a thrill of something tight and right that stilled all his worry.

Happiness radiated off her like the warmth of the sun, this girl who had been a pale, clinging shadow in the boat. “There are so many shells right here within this lagoon that have never ever been found or categorized or described. Right here.” She spread her arms again to encompass the whole of the lagoon. “Just waiting for me.”

She looked at him as if he had done it on purpose. As if he had quite purposefully found her this particular speck of palms in the middle of the sea to present to her like a gift. “Thank you. I don’t know how you did it, but thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, because he could say nothing else. Because she was looking at him as if he were the answer to all those fervent prayers she had mouthed through dry, fever-cracked lips. As if this being marooned with a broken boat on little more than an overgrown reef had been exactly what she had asked of her God.

But her lips didn’t look dry now. They were wide and smiling at him.

“Oh, Lord, what am I thinking. You’ll still be as dry as a bone.”

He must have been staring at her like a demented man, because she put a hand to his shirtsleeve, and steered him toward the palm trees lining the edge of the beach.

“I’ve found fresh water. There’s a stream that flows right down onto the beach from the hill beyond into the lagoon. And I managed to open up a coconut by smashing it on a rock. We could not have chosen a better spot.”

As if there had been a plethora of islands to choose from. As if this speck of land in the middle of the ocean had not been the only speck of land in the middle of the damn ocean he had seen. As if she were actually enthusiastic about the prospect of their being quite effectively marooned there until such time as they recovered themselves—and repaired the boat sufficiently to move on.

But she was pressing the canvas pail, heavy with water, into his hands.

It was everything he could do to simply drink, and not deluge himself in the bliss of clean water. He gulped it down, astonished at the fresh taste and soft texture—the almost voluptuous feel of it against his lips, running down his chin and chest where he spilled it in his clumsy thirst. It tasted like a kiss.

And he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to have her back flush against his body so he knew where she was. He wanted her slight weight and her warmth and the surety of knowing that they were in this together.

Because when he had awoken alone, he had felt lost.

With her, he was found.

So he kissed her. He kissed her because they were alive, and because he did not know what else to do. He kissed her lips and her nose and her ear because she was in his arms and happy.

It was nothing like the bittersweet press of her lips in the rain in the boat. This kiss was soft and slippery and sweet. So, so sweet. Like happiness condensed into a drop of sunshine.

Dance’s arms tightened themselves around her supple back, and stole up the sweet curve of her spine to cradle her skull, and hold her still, and fill the void within him with her simple sweetness. He wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her to him, taking her mouth with the same thirst he had for the water. And she was like water, cool and crisp and sweet. She was warm and melting against him like honey in the sun—deliciously, dangerously sticky.

And she didn’t seem to care that his clothes were stiff with salt, and that he had the dark growth of a two-week beard rasping against the soft skin of her cheek. She smiled even as she kissed. Her eyes were open, and looking at him, cataloguing his scowls and bristles like the spiny protrusions on one of her shells, and he wanted nothing more than to lay himself down before her, and let her examine him from stem to stern, masthead to jib. But she had other ideas.

She blushed and laughed and pushed him away, and straightened her salt-stained skirts. “Drink.”

He did, if only because his brain couldn’t seem to think of anything else to do when he could not be kissing her.

She caught up his hand, leading him down the beach toward the tip of their small island. “Come see. Come see what I’ve found, and what I’ve done.”

“What have you found?”

“Fresh water first of all, but not here. There.” She pointed across the lagoon toward the largest of the green group of islands. “I found that the tide varies by a total of about three feet, so that when it is lowest, as it was this morning, it is possible to walk down the sandy edge of the reef to the larger island. Which is where I found the water. The spring comes out of the side of the hill and flows into the lagoon—there.” She pointed to a low spot on the larger island. “And there are trees that bear fruits besides coconuts. I have a book on edible fruits in with my things in the boat. But I couldn’t carry it all out, though I did take a few things back to set up there, as that side of the island seems to be protected from the prevailing winds. But I rather thought I ought to at least consult with your first, to see if you agreed.”

She looked up at him in full expectation that he would agree, as if he would be quite stupid and wrong not to do so.

“Yes. But…” He tried to make his brain function at at least half the speed of hers. All that time he had slept like a dead man, she—this girl he had thought fragile and helpless—had worked and explored and fended for herself. She had done all of the things he ought to have done. “I’ll have to have a look round, and see if it’s safe.”

“Safe from what?” She laughed at his ridiculous attempt to salvage his pride. She shaded her face with her hand to look back over the island. “I am quite sure that if native islanders lived here, they would have seen us long before we saw them. And I haven’t smelled any other cooking fires.”

Other? He had always admired her spine, but now he had to stop to take stock of her intelligence. And sniff the breeze. He caught a whiff of cooking fire.

Devil take her. Was there nothing she could not do?

Dance cast about for something—anything—he could do. He looked toward the larger island across the lagoon—which did have a higher elevation from which he could watch for passing ships. “I could put a signal fire on that promontory.”

“Certainly,” she agreed. “Very good idea.” She gave him that sunny, pleased smile. “But we won’t need that for quite some time.”

Dance could feel his scowl etching itself into his face, slowly building like clouds before a summer thunderstorm. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that we are fine as we are for a very long while at least. We have water and fruit and a very great number of fishes and crustaceans to choose from in the lagoon. It is as perfect for my purposes as I could hope for.”

“Perfect?” She was mad. There was something in the water that had turned her brain, like the lotus blossoms that waylaid travelers in the old Greek myths.

“Yes. The only thing lacking from the ideal is the presence of the good ship
Tenacious
sitting at anchor outside the reef. But this is better,” she insisted, “for if
Tenacious
were anchored outside the reef, you would be there, and I would be here alone.” She gave him the gift of that wondrously pleased smile. “I like this so much better.”

“You are
happy
that we have washed up here?”

She corrected him, with a laugh. “I am
elated
to be here. Look around you—we are in paradise. There are more than sufficient murexes alone in this lagoon to keep me occupied drawing for months without wandering any farther afield. Which I can’t wait to do.”

“Months?” The word turned his gut as tight as a purser’s fist. What in the hell was he supposed to do for months while she collected enough information to take the Royal Society by storm? He would run mad without a ship, or any useful employment for his time.

But her smile was so wide and glorious it nearly blinded him with its brilliance. “Months!” Her joyously open grin was transformative—everything about her that had ever seemed severe and restricted broke loose the moment she smiled like that. As if she had been drowning, and was finally taking a full breath of air.

But she had almost drowned. And she was breathing fully now. It was almost a miracle. Or maybe it was the soft island air.

“But I think it best we wait for the low tide again tomorrow to move all of our things over to that island. In the meantime, while you were having a much-needed sleep—you let me sleep, but I know you haven’t slept in days and days—I’ve got us a bit of supper.”