Laura Kinsale (5 page)

Her lips curled upward. She could see the captain’s mouth twitch in an effort to control an answering smile. He was not laughing at her, she realized; he was laughing at himself. “Not thousands,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady.

“Hundreds?” he asked hopefully.

“Maybe fifty. And not all as cleanly as you hit that one.”

He looked pleased, whether at the compliment or at her sudden return of good humor she could not tell. “Then you’ll mount mine?”

“Of course I will,” she said shyly. “I’m rather good at it, you know.”

His smile warmed her. “Oh, yes,” he agreed, so softly that she barely heard. “I know.”

The smooth black hull of
Arcanum-Arcturus
rose above Gryf, a solid shadow cast on the night itself. He secured the dinghy with a practiced ease and swung himself up the boarding ladder, tossing his coat and hat ahead across the rail before he dropped lightly onto the deck.

The night was still, a heavy silence broken only by the hollow sound of his boots and the occasional slap of an errant wave. He’d given all the new crew shore leave, half-hoping that a few of the worst would jump ship; only four of his own crew stayed on board at a relaxed watch, playing cards in the forecastle deckhouse. The windows cast a golden friendly glow, but Gryf turned away toward the stem and the darkness, wanting nothing of camaraderie tonight.

Grady was sitting on the poop deck, near the wheel, as Gryf had known he would be. Gryf threw himself down on a bench, without comment, stretched his long legs out before him, and rested his head against the deckhouse.

A vast melancholy filled him, a weight that started somewhere behind his throat and spread outward. It had begun on the Taylors’ veranda with the sound of a feminine voice, and now it drugged him like a subtle poison, so that he wanted to move, and could not; wanted to speak and found himself dumb. He simply sat, with his eyes closed, and listened to the collection of tiny creaks and moans that made up the soul of his ship.

“Fine evenin’,” Grady said at last.

Gryf let out a long breath. He opened his eyes and looked at the stars without answering.

At length, Grady hazarded, “Maybe it ain’t, then.”

“Maybe not.”

“I tol’ ye not to go.”

“So you did.”

Silence fell again. Gryf roused himself, sat up a little straighter, shifting his gaze from the sky to the occasional flicker of lights onshore.

“They treat ye proper, Cap’n?”

The question was slightly belligerent, an invitation: if Gryf wanted to bare his wounded pride, Grady was there to salve it with suitably derogatory remarks about the gentry. It was loyalty, and a way of gathering Gryf back into the fold, reaffirming his place among the outcasts of the world who had to stick together.

“They were very kind,” he said, hearing the weariness in his own voice.

Grady harumphed, knowing his young captain as no other human being did. “Yer hurtin’ for their ways, ain’t you?”

Gryf stood suddenly and walked to the rail, ran his hands along the wood that was varnished to a new and silken polish. She’s beautiful, he thought, and in his mind the ship was a living thing, a lovely image wound around and tangled with the memory of a satin-smooth cheek under a lock of hair as dark as midnight. He grasped the rough hemp of a shroud, feeling the taut vibration beneath his fingers, the life that ran like a heartbeat from the deck rigging to the lofty tip of the mizzenmast a hundred feet above. He rubbed his cheek against the twisted hemp, taking comfort in the scratchy reality of it. She was his. She was his, and he thought in that moment that he would have sold himself into Hell to keep her.

“It’ll do yer no good to envy,” Grady warned, not without a rough kindness that blunted the edge of his words.

“Envy.” Gryf gave a morose chuckle. “Is that all this is?”

“Less ye fancy yer in love.”

Do I fancy that? Gryf asked himself. The question was answered by a flush of misery that seemed to well up from his toes and settle around his heart like lead. He thought of blue-green eyes, brimming with feisty tears. He thought of the heart-deep fear that had seized him when the snake materialized from the shadows so near her. His shot had not been lucky; it had been aimed with the precision of pure terror. One chance. One chance to shoot four inches past her beautiful, frightened face into near-darkness. He remembered how she turned to him, how she let him hold her. He had not been able to do more than stand and feel the press of her slender form, the silken brush of raven-black hair against his jaw. Every other capacity had deserted him, every thought but the will to hold her safe and alive in his arms forever.

The space of silence was not lost on Grady. Absence of words was proof enough.

“Who is she then, Cap’n?”

Gryf leaned against the shroud, letting the hemp rake a harsh path across his cheek with the movement. He stared at the black water below, half-hypnotized by the restless rise and fall of silvered swells. “Lady Collier,” he whispered, and knew as he said it that the admission might as well have been a death sentence, for all the happiness it would bring him.

Grady sighed resignedly. “I be feared o’that.” There was a faint click of flint as he lit his pipe. “Ye know she ain’t for the likes o’ thee.”

Gryf’s jaw tightened. “That’s not true, Grady.” The shroud bit into his palm. “You know that isn’t true.”

“Ah, Gryphon, what else be there to say? Ye be cryin’
that yer a markee, that yer oughter be rich, when there be none to listen to ye but me an’ this old ship.”

But I am, Gryf thought desperately. His Lordship Gryphon Arthur Meridon, the Sixth Marquess of Ashland.

I actually outrank her.

It seemed the final irony, the punchline of some colossal joke played on him years ago. If the world had run on its usual course, he might have been one of the prospective bridegrooms, sizing up Lady Collier for her fortune and breeding, instead of bleeding himself weak on the very thought of her.

The bleak humor of it restored his equilibrium a little, made him see the difference between reality and dream. He turned back to Grady. “You’ll never guess what they want me to do.”

“Sell ’em your ship,” Grady speculated, in the same tone of voice he might have used to say, “Sell them your firstborn son.”

Gryf smiled grimly and left the rail to sit down again. “Taylor wants me to stay in England to keep the riffraff from Lady Collier’s doorstep, until she finds a husband to take over.”

“I don’ fathom that,” Grady snorted. “Does he think yer a bloomin’ butler?”

“He’s afraid she’ll fall for a fortune hunter. He wants me to protect her, to root out the skeletons in every prospective suitor’s cupboard.” Gryf shook his head and laughed sadly. “He seems to think I know something about dark secrets and the people who have them.”

“The man’s a demmed lunatic!”

Gryf shrugged. “One who offers to pay rather well for his lunacy.”

“Yer not thinkin’ of it?” Grady asked in dismay.

“Have you looked at the books lately? By the time we make London and pay off this mob of good-for-nothing half-wits that Gould saddled us with, we’ll be distinctly short of the ready. Even with that measly load of rubber. Which Taylor knows about, by the by.”

“Does he now?” The words were a growl. “It’s that sneakin’ second mate what tol’ him then. Him and Gould was thick as thieves in Nassau.”

Gryf sighed glumly at this mention of the most troublesome of a sullen lot. “Did you have any problems with him on the docks today?”

“Aye, we did. I warrant more’s to come, for ’ee been’t too happy with lockin’ up below.”

“He’s down there now?”

“He is. Eatin’ up all our stores and doin’ nothing for it.”

“Was that necessary, to lock him up?”

Grady made a sound of long-suffering patience. “Sure, an’ it was. Ye don’ treat that kind man-like. Ye do ’em like an animal, an’ then they get the sense of it.”

Gryf took the short lecture to the heart. Grady always knew these things. Shipboard discipline, chain of command; for all that Gryf had captained a ship for thirteen years, he had not really had to face them, because his own crew was small and loyal and chose to respect his judgment without question. And that, too, could be laid at Grady’s door.

“Hang ye, Gryphon,” Grady added good-naturedly, calling Gryf by his first name as the older man did when he meant to make a point. “You know no more of men than you do of wemminfolk.”

“I suppose not.”

“’Tain’t be thought of as a failin’, though. It’s a strength in you, that after all the world’s done to ye, losin’ yer family and yer home when you be nought but
a boy, you ain’t turned hard. It’s why yer own crew stays. You keep on that way, an’ let ol’ Grady lock up them what needs lockin’.”

Gryf could not help but smile. “You have a bargain there.”

“Same follows for wemminfolk.”

“Does it? I won’t be having much fun, if you handle women for me, too.”

“Pah! You shoulda done what I tol’ yer to do tonight, ’stead of eating fancy food with a silver spoon. There be nice girls, safe and clean, over at that Hulia’s. I checked ’em for you.”

Gryf laughed aloud at this evidence of solicitude. “That was a rough job, I imagine.”

“Gryphon,” Grady said seriously. “Ye laugh, but I warrant it’s the itch that makes yer look to Lady Collier.”

All the amusement went out of Gryf like water from a broken vase. “Grady,” he said tautly, “don’t.”

Perhaps because Gryf had never really disputed his old friend before, had never questioned the value of advice from the man who had been as good as a father, Grady missed the warning. “’Tain’t but sense,” he said doggedly. “Yev been too long. ’Fore two days out, you’ll be after yer lady like a ruttin’ goat, and eatin’ yer heart out for it.”

Gryf was up and two strides toward Grady before he controlled the surge of violence that shot through him. He froze, within arm’s reach of the black shape that was his chief mate and his friend. When Gryf found his voice it was low, and savage in its softness. “You will not speak of her that way.”

Grady held his ground, his only sign of startlement a certain wary stillness. “I be speakin’ o’
thee,
” he said, equally softly. “Sir.”

Gryf took a deep breath. A sense of trapped frustration swelled inside him, a silent howl of pent-up fury. His jaw clenched, and his fists poised to smash at shadows. He said no more to Grady, not trusting his own voice to speak, but spun around and headed below, where he could be alone with his personal madness.

He found his way down by feel, stumbling once on the ladder because he was angry and careless. He groped for a lamp and tinderbox, managed to get a light, and took it with him to the first officer’s cabin, where he locked it into a gimballed wall bracket. Slamming the door behind him with an ill-tempered crash, he sat down on the bunk and pulled off his boots.

Halfway through unbuttoning his shirt he realized he had left his coat and the silly hat on deck. That discovery was deflating, reminding him as it did of the trepidation with which he had dressed for the evening, the stupid worry over whether he had tied his neckcloth properly and whether the coat fit. It was an all new uniform, another clever idea of Gould’s, because Gryf had owned nothing acceptable to wear before a lady even on board ship.

He dismissed the finery as unimportant, in the mood to let it rot all night in the tropical dew. Barefoot and shirtless, he poured himself a measure of Nassau rum and stretched out on the bunk, propping his shoulders on the bulkhead and balancing his drink on one knee.

The brief rage had all drained out of him, leaving nothing but a fatigue that seemed infinite, a weariness down to his bones. His life stretched before and behind him like a desolate plain, promising nothing, offering nothing of remembered happiness. He lived from day to day, one hour to the next, not thinking. He had the ship; he and Grady kept her going. It had been enough, till now, to make him want to see another sunrise.

But as he lay there in the cabin which had been his own thirteen years before, the ghosts of buried memory came back to him. In the silence of the night, he could almost hear their voices: his father and his uncle, talking quietly together in the saloon over a late smoke, discussing his grandfather’s health, the bad spring weather at Ashland, things that might have worried a young Gryf, if he had known the meaning of worry then.

He had not. His grandfather’s illness, the reason Uncle Alex had fetched them all from Calcutta, had been only another adult concern to Gryf. He’d never met his grandfather, the Fifth Marquess of Ashland. The only way that the impending death had touched Gryf was with the news that his Uncle Alexander, Viscount Lyndley, would not go to sea anymore when he became marquess. It had been implicit in the low, earnest tones: Gryf’s father urging his elder brother to marry, to settle down.

Gryf had seethed at that, the taming of his adolescent idol, his dashing Uncle Alex. He’d envisioned marriage as a sort of execution by smothering in petticoats, the same yards of flounced material that his mother and older sister wore. To think that his uncle would even consider giving up the
Arcturus,
give up the glorious life of the sea, for something as dull and muddy as ten thousand acres in Hampshire and an income of a hundred thousand pounds a year was outrageous.

Gryf, in his boyish fantasies, had planned to offer his own services as captain of the
Arcturus,
should his uncle succumb to those satanic wiles. To that end, he had made it a point to befriend the second mate, questioning till a lesser man would have thrown him overboard, but Grady had been as patient then as he was now. Gryf had even been allowed to climb to the top of the foremast, over the protests of his mother, so that he
had been one of the first to see the smoke from the burning ship.

It was the single clear memory Gryf had of that day. Standing with Grady, holding on for dear life with the amplified surge and sway of the ship, Gryf had felt himself as close to heaven as a mortal could come. The sea had been a bright blue featureless plain, the wind a living force. Off to the north, he had seen the sails of the navy brig that came in tandem with
Arcturus,
a twenty-gun man-of-war commanded by Captain Nathaniel Eliot.