The Companion (13 page)

“You misjudge me,” she reproached. He turned a speculating gaze on her. To escape it, she looked around his tidy cabin, and saw a pile of books. “You are reading novels, sir?”

He cleared his throat, also eager for escape. “I find Mr. Fielding’s vision of England most comforting. The legation had something by a Miss Austen, though no one had apparently read it. A sympathetic denizen, Colonel Ware, said I might take it. I find her view of society most acute, in spite of its domestic tendencies. I . . . I wonder, have you read it? It is quite new.”

Beth smiled at this torrent of exculpatory remarks. “I am reading
Sense and Sensibility
even as we speak. And I agree with your analysis. It is an acute, and most satisfying, even humorous book I . . . I quite identify with the practical sister. But I had quite figured you for philosophers, or perhaps poetry.”

He grimaced. “You are severe with me. You no doubt think me a devotee of Mr. Byron?”

“No,” she said slowly. “Lord Byron has a certain freedom about his lines, of course, and an activity which would suit you. But you would not like his assumption of the romantic hero. You might even consider it coy. No, I think you like your tales of courage and adventure with less self-consciousness. Upon the whole I would have said you might be reading the classic Greeks.
The Iliad
perhaps?”

His eyes widened slightly. He picked up a volume that was hidden under the pillow of his cot.
The Iliad
. “You quite amaze me, Miss Rochewell, or unnerve me. I cannot yet say which.”

“Then we are even, Mr. Rufford.” She hesitated. She had revealed her fear.

A step sounded in the common room outside. She was in a single man’s cabin. If the ship knew it, as they seemed to know everything, her reputation would not be worth a shilling. She was not in North Africa now but on a British merchantman that subscribed to stolid British values. “You need your rest. I only wished to know that you were quite recovered.” But the nature of that recovery was still so strange that she flushed again. She turned to go.

“Perhaps a game of chess, at sunset?”

She did not look over her shoulder. “Perhaps.” She pushed out into the corridor, smiling. She would like another game of chess.

Seven

Ian’s eyes closed over his book and he sank into a dreamless sleep, commanded by his body. No bells or sailors’ shouts could rouse him. He had spent the previous night deep in unconsciousness, too. When he woke, he felt the sun sinking below the horizon, although its light did not penetrate his cabin. Would he always know the position of the sun now?

As consciousness took full hold, the hunger woke within him, a gnawing at his gut. He sat bolt upright. He had fed not four days ago! He had counted on two weeks of respite from his need, that he might reach a port of call to quench it. The healing must have weakened him. He bit his lip. The hunger was manageable now. But for how long? How long until they made landfall?

He jumped from his cot, straightened his coat and his cravat, and strode out onto the deck. The girl was there, just ducking into the stern cabin. He must make sure somehow that she kept his secret. Best to reassure her that he was not a monster, lie though that might be. He must engage her in the most innocuous way to ensure her continued sanguine reaction to his nature.

But that was for later. He glanced around. The guardian sloop and no fewer than seven sails from the convoy were
visible in the choppy sea around them. The Captain paced the quarterdeck. He might not take kindly to the fact that Ian led the defense last night when the Captain wanted to surrender. No matter. He had an urgent need for information. Collaring one of the youngsters, he asked the lad to give his respects and might he approach for a word?

The Captain nodded. Ian ran up the stairs. “Captain, do we make progress?”

“We jury-rigged a main topmast and shipped a bowsprit. The barky is making six knots.”

“What is our next landfall?”

“Port Mahon if the winds will carry us there.”

“Is there a doubt?”

“Aye. The glass is dropping.” A bank of green-black clouds scudded to the larboard. “Can’t get into Port Mahon with the wind in the southwest. The harbor entrance is uncommon narrow. Could blow for days or weeks, the ship beating up, never making no progress. The sloop might decide to leave those that must dock there under protection of the battery, and make for Gibraltar with the rest of us.”

Ian’s disappointment must have shown in his face.

“Sailors is slave to the weather, sir, and nothing to be done.” Captain Tindly cleared his throat. “I have written a dispatch outlining the . . . astonishing role you played in saving the ship and its cargo from the pirates. I’ll send a copy, writ out fair, to the Captain of the sloop and to the Company. I have no doubt they will reward you handsomely.”

Ian turned from scanning the blackening horizon to the Captain. “I need no reward,” he said shortly. “How long to Gibraltar if the wind won’t let us in to Port Mahon?”

“No knowing,” the Captain began, then glancing to Ian, “if weather plays fair, four days.”

Four days. He hoped to God he could last four days.

Beth pored over the maps she had spread across her writing desk. They showed the eastern Sahara, with small marks for oases and several Xs where ruins of some sixth-century
tombs had been found. But there was no mark for the finest ruin she knew was somewhere in that desert. The lost city had not been found. The old Imam in Tunis would have told her for certain where it lay, she was sure. Then her father died and everything changed. The ancient texts might hold a clue, though she had been over them a thousand times.

She carefully unrolled a scroll whose papyrus was crumbling. These scrolls were her most precious possessions. In some ways, she’d been preparing to analyze them for years, studying hieroglyphics with the French scholar Champollion as he decoded the stone found twenty years ago by French soldiers in Rashīd (called Rosetta in English), learning Coptic, Demotic, Greek. The gold that once outlined each capital was mostly rubbed away. She could just discern the author’s name. Hamarabi. She pressed the scroll out flat on the little desk and scanned the figures until she found the passage she wanted.

“And in the desert,”
she translated to herself, moving her lips silently,
“there is a great evil, born of the sky, laid in the earth, sustained by the blood of men. It is manifest in the Temple of Waiting that is carved into the city of Kivala, poison to man’s soul as well as to his body. For he who mingles his blood with the blood of the Powerful One shall eat that power at the cost of his soul. He will banish death and age and slashes.”
Was that right? No.
“Death and age, nor wounds nor blood, will not worry him.”
That was better.
“Yet his needs will become unclean.”

The words made her shudder every time she read them. She skipped ahead.
“And when the moon shall touch the tallest peaks of the spine of the earth, then shall its light reveal the city living in the rock six thumbs from the most north peak, waiting for the return of the ones who abandoned their brother. By the half solstice shall the city be known and only righteous men shall enter, at the peril of their souls.”

What a strange mixture of Hebrew syntax, like
righteous men
, and the phrases of the Koran, like
spine of the earth
, all written in a language far older than either. It was as if the text was the basis of the other religions, either that or a later
text that used ecumenical language to obscure its origin. Yet this passage was the closest to a direction for Kivala she had found.

She sat up and sighed. What chance did she now have to follow her father’s dream? She was for England and a staid propriety that stifled women. She was reading the texts to take her mind off Mr. Rufford. She knew that. She tried to think about him as her father would have. The explanation for his healing must lie in some advanced form of coagulation, adhesion taken to extremes. If only she knew more about medicine! But her experience was limited to splinting and stitching simple wounds—superfluous where Mr. Rufford was concerned. What could have happened to him that he was given the ability to heal wounds other men would die of? It was not something he was born with, for he spoke of an infection, passed by blood.

Her gaze descended to the passage once again. “He who mingles his blood . . . nor wounds . . . will not worry him. . . .”

She sucked in a breath sharply.

Was this passage talking about Mr. Rufford and his strange ability to heal himself being passed through blood? Or was she putting an explanation upon the text because it comforted her to have things tied neatly in a package?

She gazed up out of the hatch window. It was nearly sunset. She had an engagement to play chess with a mystery. She would not tell him about her discovery of a text that seemed to mention his condition, not until she knew more about him.

Three days. It had been three days since they had vanquished the pirates, and in those three days they had been delayed, then denied a call at Port Mahon by the vagaries of the wind, and finally, most cursed of all, the winds had almost died out altogether. They made two knots at best, keeping to the pace of the slowest tub in the convoy. Ian paced in the stern cabin as the great sweep of curved windows went purple and the clouds gave back the pink glow of the sun.

The Captain now said he had no idea how long until they
made Gibraltar. Ian’s fate was controlled by the weather, and no one could tell how long the sullen, breezeless state would last.

Ian could not last much longer. His mouth was dry in some strange manner that neither water nor wine could wet. His thirst boiled up from his veins and made him irritable and distracted. But it did not stop his hearing, now preternaturally acute, which could detect the throb of blood in hearts around him. He
must
not feed on the ship, where the results would be obvious.

Where was she? She knew he waited for her every evening at this time right here. He had begun to enjoy her company. He had to admit that. He liked the fact that she seemed to enjoy his company in return without any of the missish airs he had known in England. He threw himself into the elbow chair at the great table and pushed the pieces of the chessboard about fiercely. Did she keep him waiting just to show her power over him? No chess partner was worth that.

The door opened and she swung lightly in, sucking on her finger. “Forgive me,” she said, removing her finger from her mouth, her large hazel eyes luminous in the light of the lamp swinging over the table. “I had some scrolls out, and the time got away from me. See?” she asked, holding out the finger. “One snapped at me and gave me a nasty paper cut.”

Ian did not have to examine the finger. He could smell the fulsome scent, almost sweet, but ripe, too. He could almost taste the copper tang, the thick richness on his tongue. His agitation swung up a notch, like sound of the ship’s rigging in a rising wind. He hardly spared a glance for the welling drop upon her finger but rose, whipped out his handkerchief, and tossed it on the table. He turned away, saying in a gruff voice he hardly recognized, “You had better bind it up before you bleed on your frock. You’re good at bandaging.”

She glanced to him. “Are you all right, sir?” she asked, her voice constrained.

“Perfectly,” he lied. “Only somewhat put out. I must have caught the seaman’s disease of punctuality. I am a very impatient waiter.” Then he realized how uncivil that
was and simply sat again. He cleared his throat. “Black or white?”

“Oh, black, I think.” She bound up her paper cut. The white linen grew a red flower.

“You always choose black. I thought women wanted white.”

“And how many women have you played chess with?”

He grabbed for breath and shook his head. “You are the first. Except for . . . well, except for a girl I knew in London, and then I always let her win.”

“Why?” She moved a pawn out. “Why did you let her win?”

“I . . . I wanted something else from her than winning a game of chess.” He knocked over his knight as he brought it out, and righted it.

“Then why didn’t she call you on it? It’s quite easy to see when someone is letting you win, I find.” Her bishop swooped out diagonally.

He spoke without thinking as he brought out a pawn to protect the knight. “She was too busy being coy, I suppose. She, too, wanted more than winning. Or maybe she liked winning very well and wanted to win on every scale, no matter how small. Women do, you know.”

“I like winning,” Miss Rochewell said emphatically. “But not if you are going to play in so scattered a fashion. It hardly does me credit.” Her own knight came out.

“Don’t think I will let you win.” He took a pawn with his knight.

“I think nothing of the kind,” she said, taking his knight. “But something has you in a bother. Will you tell me about it?”

“Oh, it’s all this idling about. I had hoped to be in Gibraltar by now.” He moved as if by rote another pawn. At this rate he
would
lose.

“I see. And you think perhaps that by failing to shave and setting your neck cloth all ahoo, as the sailors say, you might push the ship along faster?”

His hand darted to his chin and rubbed it. He
had
forgotten to shave. He took a breath. He must look a sight. She was certainly
looking at him strangely. “Forgive me,” he mumbled.

“At least you remembered your scent. Cinnamon and what? I cannot place it.”

Ian felt the world drop away. “I smell like cinnamon and ambergris?”

“That’s it,” she returned. “Not overwhelming. Certainly not unpleasant. Shouldn’t you?”

He sagged. “Yes. I should.” Another way he was like
her
. He had never noticed because you couldn’t smell your own scent. The hunger raking his flesh seemed ever more sinister.

She sat back in her chair, uninterested in the board. “Perhaps your thoughts need some distraction. You spend many hours alone. Shall I tell you about my own problem?”