Laura Kinsale

S
tanding amid a bedraggled group of nearly naked Indians, Lady Tess Collier was aware she didn’t look much like a lady. She didn’t need the peculiar glances of the genteel European residents of Pará to tell her that after a six-month odyssey down the Amazon she presented a most unprepossessing figure. Skirt torn and heavy with water and sand from landing the pirogues on the beach; hair unkempt and trailing down from the knot at her neck; fingernails blunted or broken by the efforts of unloading her precious collection of plants and animals—no, she didn’t look much like the only daughter of the Earl of Morrow.

She pushed back a loose strand of ebony hair and generously informed the Indians that the jungle monsters with holes for faces were no longer in pursuit, and now that the boats had been unloaded, the men could return home in perfect safety. The relief on their faces was sadly comical. They had escorted the white woman out of Barra do Río Negro in order to save themselves from the supernatural beasts that she had said would surely descend upon them if they hadn’t. All the way down the river, they had cast worried looks over their shoulders.

At her words of dismissal, they wandered off, looking as lost and disconsolate in the unfamiliar urban surroundings as she felt herself. Six months. Six months and a thousand miles downriver, and she still had not completely accepted her father’s death. He had succumbed to yellow fever on New Year’s Day, in a village upstream from Barra. January 1, 1863—ten years to the day since he had packed up his motherless eleven-year-old daughter and left his rich estate in West Sussex to wander the world as a natural scientist.

“Go home,” he had told her, lying sweating and faint in an Indian’s hut. She had not cried. She had smiled at him as he slipped away, and told him not to worry for her. She buried him in the shallow soil of the jungle, beneath the towering trees he had loved, with only herself and a Portuguese priest and one naked little Negro boy to mourn his passing. Go home, his soundless voice had whispered under the silent trees. Go home.

An ill-tempered squawk sounded at her ear as she stood musing in the sandy street. Tess turned a little, speaking soothingly to the tiny, bright-plumed parrot perched on her shoulder. The small bird looked at her with a bleak, suspicious eye, and then began to pull at her dark hair with its yellow beak. She leaned away with a smile. “You aren’t having second thoughts about coming home with me, are you, Isidora?”

Isidora regarded Tess solemnly. Tess had tried to free the friendly parrot before leaving Barra, but when the door of the bird’s woven cage had been opened, all Isidora had done was hop onto Tess’s shoulder and settle comfortably. With no more coercion than a ready supply of nuts, the parrot had accompanied Tess down the river, and showed every intention of following her all the way to England. Tess had grumbled aloud at the bird’s unabashed begging, but she was secretly glad to
have even so small a friend along. The thought of returning to her old home filled her with far more trepidation than this journey alone on the Amazon. Natives and mosquitoes and river flood were troubles she understood. It was the life of a wealthy English heiress that was the mystery.

Go home. How simple that sounded, and how frightening. It had been as if her father had suddenly realized, on his sickbed, just how alone and unprotected his only surviving daughter would be without him. Through all those years of adventure, he had never seemed to worry about her future, and with the faith of a child, Tess had not either. She had let herself believe that their traveling life could continue indefinitely, that her father would be with her forever.

She lifted her chin. No use to dwell on that now. It was nearly two miles from the beach to the country house of Abraham Taylor, the British consul in Pará. She knew from what her father had told her of the papers she was to deliver to his old Eton friend that Mr. Taylor was to be the trustee of her estate. It was a comforting thought, one of the few in a sea of discomforting ones. In the lengthening shadows of late afternoon, she stumbled across rough stone paving and through the deep sandy stretches of unpaved road, lifting her bedraggled skirt and perspiring in the wet heat.

As she left the main city, a wild tangle of vegetation closed around her. Brilliant green-and-blue-striped lizards stood high on four legs and scampered out of her path with their tails held like spikes in the air. She walked up the quiet lane, followed by sleepy birdcalls and the flutter of a spectacular metallic-blue butterfly which she identified automatically as the genus
Morphos.
When the Taylors’ weathered gate appeared, she trudged up the steps onto the wide veranda of the rambling
rosinha.

A Negro maid answered the knocker. Tess followed the woman into a central hall, where the evening air was touched with a welcome coolness, fragrant with foliage smells. A vampire bat fluttered high in the shadowed timbers of the roof—out early, as it was not quite twilight. The large rooms of the stuccoed home were still well-lit by the orange and gold shafts of sunset that poured through the tall windows and doors. Tess was escorted through the bare hall into a sparsely furnished parlor, where a slender, gray-haired woman sat reading to her husband.

Mrs. Taylor laid aside her Bible, rising from her seat with a surprised cry. Mr. Taylor started forward, a smile on his stalwart, generously whiskered face, while his wife stretched out both hands. “Lady Tess—thank the Lord!” she cried. “We’ve been so worried; we heard nothing for so long! Your dress—what’s happened? Where’s your father?”

Tess took a deep breath and walked to Mrs. Taylor, steadying the older woman’s trembling hands in her own young and supple fingers. “Papa is gone, Mrs. Taylor,” she said gently. “The fever took him.”

Mrs. Taylor’s face changed. Tess felt the shaking in her hands increase and pressed them. “Please, ma’am, sit down,” she urged. “I’m sorry—it was cruel, not to prepare you, but there was no way to send word.”

Mrs. Taylor sank into her chair. Tess knelt beside her and looked up through the blur that swam suddenly in her own eyes. To give this news to her father’s oldest and truest friends somehow made it fully real. She would never again see her father, never again hear his beloved voice describing some botanical wonder he had found. The demands of the journey had obscured the magnitude of that loss; while she had fought her way through adversity, she had felt him always at her shoul
der. Now, when she had reached her goal, her lower lip began to quiver.

“When?” Mr. Taylor asked quietly.

Tess strove to keep her voice steady. “New Year’s Day. Upriver from Barra.”

“New Year’s Day—” his wife said weakly. “So long—”

“You’ve been alone since then?” Mr. Taylor interrupted. His tone was harsh, but Tess recognized the pain beneath. She could see him counting days and miles, and all the dangers on the river.

She nodded slowly. “It—took a long time to come back.”

He made a rough sound and turned away. Mrs. Taylor laid her trembling hands on Tess’s hair. “Oh, my poor love!” she whispered.

“I’m all right,” Tess mumbled through the rising lump in her throat. She brushed absently at Isidora, who was determined to destroy what little was left of Tess’s chignon.

“You are—” Mr. Taylor stopped, and then said, “I believe you are the bravest young woman I have ever met, Lady Tess.”

“Oh, no,” she said faintly. “I’m not brave at all.”

Mrs. Taylor stroked Tess’s hair, ignoring Isidora’s rasping complaint. “Never mind. You’re safe now, safe with us.”

“But I can’t stay.” Tess looked up. “I have to go to England—I promised him.”

Mrs. Taylor touched Tess’s cheek with fingers that shook softly, the effect of the wasting disease that was slowly consuming the older woman. “Don’t you want to go home now?”

“No.” Tess bit her lip. “I don’t.”

“But darling, why not?”

“B-because—” To her horror, Tess heard her voice break childishly. She tried to stop herself, but all the tension and weariness and grief of the past six months welled up into a sudden, violent sob. “Because,” she cried miserably, burying her face in Mrs. Taylor’s skirt, “all those English people—they’ll expect me to be a lady! They’ll laugh at me, and think badly of Papa for bringing me up, and I’m—It’s so stupid, I know, I’m such a coward…” She stood up, and dashed the tears angrily away. “Oh, blast—I
won’t
cry! But he made me promise I would
marry!
” Her voice rose unhappily as she spread her hands to take in her ruined skirt and disheveled hair and the parrot that had hopped brazenly to the top of her head. “Oh, look at me, Mrs. Taylor—what gentleman will want a yahoo like
me
for a wife?”

Chapter 1

I
n the warm December downpour, Gryphon Meridon rubbed rain off his aristocratic nose with a gesture that spoke less of aristocracy than of common disgust. If he neglected to slam the flimsy door of the Santa María de Belém do Gran Pará customhouse behind him, it was more from a fear that the rotting barrier would fall off its hinges in his hand than from any gentler sensibilities. He doffed a shapeless and dripping hat and shook his head, flinging sparkling droplets from a wild cut of curls that were tarnished to a wet bronze and plastered to his forehead.

With the aid of a liberal dose of Mexican silver, he’d just finished registering his ship in port—the
Arcanum,
out of Liverpool, owned and commanded by Captain G. Frost. No matter that each of those facts was a bald-faced lie, as long as they agreed with the papers. Captain Frost he was to the world at the moment, and the name passed off his tongue as if it were completely his own.

He avoided a yawning puddle at the foot of the steps, straddling it in one easy stride that took him into the waterlogged, unpaved street. His ship was not even vis
ible through the misting rain, though she was docked at the end of the wharf just in front of him. He swore morosely, hoping his chief mate was coping with the new crew. Grady would be doing his tyrannical best to keep the unfamiliar men working, but they were a damned sorry lot.

“Normal” was not a term Gryf or anyone else would have applied to
Arcanum
’s typical operations; but the ship’s current situation was certainly far from her standard. Well above it, most would say, but Gryf wasn’t so sure of that. True, they were running with a full crew of twenty-three this time, instead of the usual ten that included Gryf himself and Grady, but the jailbait that made up the difference had turned out to be worse than nothing.

It was all, of course, for Her Delicate Highness, Lady Terese Collier. In the space of two months, Gryf had found his clipper transformed from a hired blockade-runner into a vessel that resembled nothing so much as an elegant floating nursery.

Up until this quixotic mission, he had been reasonably happy working for the eccentric Earl of Morrow. The earl’s charter had been a lucky break for Gryf. Instead of the
Arcanum,
Morrow could have hired one of the needle-fast steamers that were being specially built to run the Yankee gauntlet; he probably would have, except what the earl had in mind amounted to mercy calls. He wasn’t interested in quadrupled profits. He simply wanted to
give
the cargo away, to make sure his Rebel friends didn’t starve behind the line. There weren’t many takers for a deal like that, when there was real money to be made at the same degree of risk.

But that particular enterprise was over now. Gryf had made his appointed port in Nassau, looking for further instructions, hungry for more work even though the
blockade was beginning to tighten dangerously. In the back of his mind had been the hope that the earl might even keep him on after the war. It would have been the answer to half a lifetime of prayer, to find a permanent charter. A miracle, to know where their next mouthful would come from. At twenty-five, Gryf had forgotten what that kind of security felt like—could not even imagine it anymore, so that he was not really disappointed, he told himself, that it hadn’t worked out.

The earl’s Nassau agent had offered Gryf one last job. No, that was perhaps too gentle a term. He had
insisted.
A letter had arrived from Brazil—the earl was dead; the earl’s daughter wanted to go home. The agent had looked over the
Arcanum
and pronounced her a perfectly satisfactory conveyance, with a few improvements. Gryf had been willing, until he heard the going rate, and who was getting the bill for the “improvements.”

So they’d simply blackmailed him. It was easy enough: a known blockade-runner, a discreet word to the Yanks, and he was nothing but floating cinders. Lord Morrow had paid fair and not threatened. He had been a gentleman. His solicitors and agents were another matter.

As was his daughter.

Gryf hunched deeper into his oilskins. He was uneasy, out of his depth in this new scenario, with a crew that seemed ludicrously huge and useless and a ship he hardly recognized himself, with all the new decoration. They would put Lady Collier in the captain’s cabin, a thought which made Gryf ache inside, with an old and barely perceptible pain. It was stupid, that pain, and pointless. The
Arcanum
had been fast and new and sailed under her true name once, years ago, before pirates had lured her into ambush and left her a floating hulk mainly filled
with dead. On that fatal voyage the captain’s cabin had been given up to Gryf’s mother and father, and his two pretty sisters. In Gryf’s mind it would always be theirs. Just as the
Arcanum
or
Aurora
or
Antiope
would always be the
Arcturus
to him. He slept forward with Grady, away from those ghosts, and kept his charts on the mess table.

Stupid, too, how that name still could pull at his heart, make it swell a little in foolish pride.
Arcturus.
He kicked at a puddle in self-disgust. Sentimental tripe. His weakness, his damnable softness, was that he needed something to love and all he had left were Grady and the ship. What he would be now, without his old friend and the
Arcturus,
Gryf could not imagine. And he never intended to find out.

He quickened his pace, thinking of wet baggage and reduced profits and what they might look for next, after this delivery was complete. No one legitimate would trust him with a charter in an undermanned, outdated clipper of questionable registry, so he either bought his own cargo or took the occasional smuggling job, spinning in a never-ending circle, making enough to pay for cargo, wearing the ship down delivering it, and then pouring all the pathetic profits down the greedy maw of maintenance, so that the ship was at least seaworthy enough to let him scrounge again for a cargo stake to start the cycle over.

He’d hoped the blockade work would end all that. It should have, until the agent had ordered the overhaul and extra crew, and Gryf had seen his precious savings vanish like a morning mist. Worse than that, he was getting a reputation, which meant time for another name change, because the last thing he needed was a reputation in the kind of places where he already had one under older aliases. He was small fry, unimportant and
unnoticed, and he wanted to stay that way. Too much time, too many names and faked papers and unpaid debts stood between him and that distant afternoon adrift in the Indian Ocean, when a scared and weeping boy had stood by and watched his dying uncle, the last of his own blood kin, sign a thin scrawl to the paper that made twelve-year-old Gryphon Meridon into captain, owner, and most of crew of the
Arcturus.
Too many years of running and skimping and scraping by with whatever cargoes, legitimate or illegal, that he could find to carry. He was not a criminal by nature—he was not even very good at it—but the demands of his ship had no end. He did not know how else to live.

Grady materialized out of the mists in front of Gryf, the gray-streaked hair and red beard unmistakable even through the soup. “Cap’n!” The mate’s voice was gritty with more than usual emphasis, as if the dismay which widened his milky-blue eyes had found a way down his throat to choke him. “Cap’n, we’ve done bought us some trouble dear!”

A familiar twist went through Gryf’s stomach, a surge of the constant and ingrained anxiety that had colored all his adult life. “What?” he demanded. If there was trouble…if there was trouble…His mind went blank and then raced, panning a whole unpleasant vista of possibilities. “What in the name of God is it?”

Grady flung out his free hand, waving toward the forecastle, which was barely visible through the haze. “Up over, Cap’n,” he ground out. “Divil take her, I be stymied.”

Gryf followed the gesture, seeing nothing on deck but a green tangle that looked to be a few square yards lifted right out of the jungle itself, and an oilskinned crew member tugging ineffectually at one of the larger plants.

He relaxed a degree, not identifying any immediate threat. “They told us to expect that, Grady,” he said, puzzled by his chief mate’s agitation. “Those are the earl’s specimens. Just secure them in the hold amidships the best you can.”

Grady set his feet and turned to Gryf with a look that was mutinous. “
You
do ’er, then, by God. I’m right busy.” He nodded vigorously, shoring up his rebellion. “I done told you, Cap’n, what I thinks about this trip. Plain folly, ’tis. I said that. You see to the bloomin’ plants.”

Grady’s captain looked after his friend in bafflement, feeling decidedly at a loss as the older man stalked away. Chewing on his lower lip, Gryf looked up again toward the ship. The same crewman, or another—they were unrecognizable in the ubiquitous oilskins—was still doggedly rearranging plants. Gryf considered a moment, came up with no particular explanation for Grady’s behavior, and started for the plank.

“You there,” he hailed the persistent crewman as he gained the deck. “Forget those plants. You’ll be needed on dockside to dolly the baggage.”

The man remained bent over a specimen, ignoring Gryf’s orders. Gryf hesitated, swearing under his breath, cursing himself as much as the seaman for his own ineffectiveness. He was a captain, yes, but captain of a crew of ten, running an embarrassingly democratic ship.

This new crew intimidated Gryf. Once, he had accidentally let slip a “please,” and gotten such a queer look in return that he’d added “sir” in confusion, and then realized the ridiculousness of it himself: the captain calling the steward “sir.” He felt hot blood go to his face at the humiliating memory, and snapped “You!” at the recalcitrant seaman, using the impetus of irritation to carry him across the deck in three strides. His hand
came down roughly on the bent crewman’s shoulder, and he whirled the man around to face him.

In the moment of action, he already regretted it. The flash of anger, directed toward himself, would not see him through a confrontation. He searched madly for the righteous bullying indignation of authority, failed to summon it, and glanced down at his captive with a chagrin that metamorphosed rapidly into shock.

His seaman was a woman.

The suspended second of discovery passed like infinity; Gryf stood paralyzed, open to a thousand minute details that came too fast to catalogue. She was tall for a woman, but not nearly as tall as he was, with dark hair and ivory skin, high cheekbones, a delicate chin, and eyes of blue-green or gray or some color too complex to comprehend, their brilliance outlined with a bold thick fringe of sooty lashes.

He felt his mouth go slack, his hand dropped, and the details came together in a thunderclap. She was beautiful. Unquestionably, painfully, soul-searingly beautiful, even in a set of baggy, bedraggled foul-weather gear. He blinked and felt his heart contract as it did when the official questions got too sharp and suspicious. The rush of blood should have saved him: in that state of mental panic he could usually summon his best and smoothest lies. Instead, his dockside eloquence vanished. All he could find to say was “Um.”

Her dark eyebrows arched, managing offense and amusement at the same time. She looked up at him with an absolute lack of fear or modesty. Gryf had a sudden suspicion, a horrible vision of possibilities that solidified into numb certainty. He bit his tongue and tasted blood before he had his voice under control. “Lady Collier?” he ventured, a hoarse whisper of dismay, while he hoped with a forlorn and futile hope that he might be wrong.

She nodded, with a smile that went through him like light through clear water. He smiled back, the reflex of total desperation. A long moment of painful silence dragged past before Gryf said, “Oh.”

“And you are…?”

For an agonized split second, Gryf forgot the name he was using. But the survival habit of years was strong; he focused on a point near her right ear that was a degree less hypnotic than a head-on gaze into those level, sea-colored eyes, and made his tongue form words. “Gryphon Frost.”

He had the feeling that he should bow, or offer to kiss her hand; the bald statement of his name seemed too abrupt.

“Of course,” she said calmly. “The captain.”

Her voice was smooth and melodic, as lovely as her face. Gryf observed a damp black curl that peeked out from behind her delicate earlobe, and wondered if he would ever again in his life see anything as beautiful. He felt the idiotic smile creep back onto his face, remembered how he had laid a threatening hand on her, and wished himself decently buried under eighty tons of ballast.

“Forgive me,” he blundered. “I thought you were…I mistook you for one of my crew.”

She laughed then, showing small white teeth, and touched her hand to the floppy brim of her hat. “I can’t imagine why!”

Gryf wished he could think of some further expression of contrition, something more appropriate to his degree of mortification: throwing himself off the poop deck and drowning might suit. He remembered his own hat, pulled it quickly off his head, and stood there with rain running down his face. “Lady Collier—”

“Put your hat back on,” she cried. “Or you’ll certainly catch a fever!”

He obeyed her. The gesture of common sense gave him courage. It was conceivable that she was human, in spite of being an heiress. “Lady Collier, surely you don’t need to concern yourself with stowage, especially on a day like this. We’ll have the plants below shortly.”

This was not quite true; the plants were last on his list of priorities. Foodstores came first, along with finishing out his cargo with a small purchase of india rubber that he’d managed on his own. Jerome Gould, the earl’s Nassau agent, had loaded the ship with smuggled Southern cotton in the islands, infinitely pleased in the notion that he’d badgered Gryf into going past the safe draft limit again. Gryf had neglected to tell the man that in the process of the new outfitting and paint job, he had arranged to have the load lines placed five inches lower on the hull than the original marks. There was room for another twenty tons of cargo without danger.

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