Days of Gold (17 page)

She laughed so loud that everyone on deck looked at them.

“And what will you do in America?” Angus asked, changing the subject.

“I hear that a hundred people will be at the dock waiting to meet us. We’ll have to go to the courthouse to register, but after that we’re on our own. We can take job offers from those people on the dock. Or...” She gave him a suggestive look. “Or marriage proposals. I may marry one of those American men. I hear they’re a rough bunch, but maybe I can find myself a strong, sturdy man and we can make a life together.” She turned back toward him and lowered her voice. “What I want is my own home. That’s something I’ve never had. I cried for weeks after the baby was born dead. For all that it cost me everything I had, I loved the wee thing.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Angus asked.

“No reason, but I’m good at judging character, and there’s something not right about you.” She looked him up and down. “Clothes, wife... something doesn’t match. I saw it that first day. That you’ll talk to someone like me says a lot. I think maybe you and I are more alike than it looks from those clothes of yours.” She glanced down
at him, at his big legs in the tight trousers and the shirt that clung to his chest in the wind. “I don’t think you’re like her.”

One of the sailors had come on deck with a squeeze-box and had begun playing a reel.

“Come on!” Tabitha said. “Dance with me.”

“I don’t think I—” Angus began, but then he shrugged. Why not? He walked to the middle of the deck. A sailor added a flute to the music, and the next thing he knew, he was dancing with one woman after another. All but one of the women were from Scotland and they knew all the dances that so reminded him of home.

One of the sailors joined them and soon they were whirling about the deck in a frenzy of action. Angus was so glad to have some exercise that he grabbed a woman about the waist and lifted her high in the air. There was another woman, older, and she was quite wide below the waist.

“You won’t be able to lift me,” she shouted over the music and clapping of the people watching.

Angus grabbed her and lifted her as though she were a girl. “Marry me! Marry me!” the woman shouted, making everyone laugh.

Angus’s shirt was open to his waist and he was drenched with sweat, but he kept on dancing so fast and furiously that he didn’t notice when Edilean came on deck. She stayed in the shadows, out of the limelight, watching Angus dancing with the women and enjoying himself.

But Tabitha saw her and moved past the crowd to stand near her.

Edilean looked at the woman and had to resist the urge to move her skirt aside so it wouldn’t touch her. She knew, just by looking at her, what kind of woman she was: She was the type men liked but women hated.

“If I had a man like that in my bed, I’d never leave it,” Tabitha said in a suggestive way.

“Perhaps never getting out of bed is why you don’t have a man like him,” Edilean said over her shoulder.

The woman laughed so loud that Angus turned to her, and when he saw Edilean, the smile left his face.

When Tabitha saw Angus’s expression, she laughed harder. As she left to go back to the group, she swished her long skirt and turned back to Edilean. “Be careful another woman don’t take him from you. And my name’s Tabitha,” she said, then turned and ran back to the dance. When Angus grabbed her about the waist, her eyes were on Edilean.

Edilean looked away and went back down to their cabin.

Hours later Angus returned to the cabin. Edilean was there with one of the dresses across her lap, and she was sewing. “Feel better?” she asked.

“Much,” he answered, smiling. He was sweaty and his shirt was open so his muscular chest was showing and his black hair was in slick curls about his face.

Edilean had to look away or the beauty of him would weaken her resolve. “Good,” she said as she put down her needle. “I have something to ask of you. As you’ve repeatedly told me, you owe me nothing while I owe you everything, but I ask that during this voyage you not humiliate me.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“I know,” she said. “That one prisoner’s quite pretty and she likes you. You have every right to pursue her.”

“I wasn’t ‘pursuing’ her,” he said. “I was dancing with
all
the women.”

“Yes, of course you were. Again, I apologize for what I’ve done
to your life. You were right when you said that if you’d never met me you would still be at home and blindingly happy.”

He wiped his sweaty face with a towel from the bowl and pitcher at the far end of the room. “Lass,” he said, “when a man’s angry he says things he doesn’t wholly mean. Sitting here day after day with nothing to do but struggle with words in a book nearly drives me to madness.”

“Yes, you made that clear.” She picked up the dress again. “As I said, I apologize for what I did to your life. I know I have forever destroyed your chance for happiness.”

“Nay, lass, you haven’t.”

Edilean threw down the dress on the table. “Would you please stop talking to me as though I’m a child! You may see me that way, but I can assure you that other men don’t. I’m trying to apologize to you. I wish with all my heart that I’d thought to tell the captain that you and I were brother and sister, but I didn’t. So now we’re stuck together until the end of this long, dreadful voyage. I made a mistake when I thought to repay you for all you’ve done for me by teaching you to read. Fool that I am, I assumed you wanted to be something different than what you are. I was wrong. You consider yourself perfect as you are and want no change.”

“I don’t think that’s quite true,” Angus said. “Perhaps learning to read would be good for me. In fact...” With a smile, he went to the book she’d been using for a text. She’d found stationery, quills and ink, plus a few novels in the bottom of the smaller trunk, and she’d been using them to show him how to form his letters. He knew numbers and could add and subtract in his head, but he wasn’t used to writing them down. “I think I’m ready for another lesson now,” Angus said. “The exercise did me much good.”

Edilean gave him a little smile. “I’m so glad it did.”

He took the seat across from her and picked up his quill, dipped it in the ink, and wrote his name. It took him several minutes, but he did it. “There. What do you think of that?”

Edilean didn’t look up from her sewing. “Mr. McTern, I am no longer going to be your teacher or your dresser. You can do whatever you want and I won’t interfere.”

“I see,” Angus said as he put the paper down. “It’s that woman, Tabitha, isn’t it? But you shouldn’t be so hard on her. She’s had a bad time in life. She told me her story, and it’s truly awful. She’s been treated unfairly by both people and the law.”

“Poor thing,” Edilean said coldly.

“I think you should have some Christian charity toward her. She’s not had the gentle life you’ve had.”

“My life gentle? Yes, Mr. McTern, you’re right. My life has been so easy. My mother died at my birth and I was raised by my father. But as he was an officer in the army, I saw him so rarely that I spent my life in boarding schools. One time my father came to visit me and he didn’t know which one of the girls was his daughter. He died when I was twelve and I was suddenly without home or family. In school I had to pretend to like girls I despised just so I’d have a place to spend Christmas. Then, when I was seventeen, I was taken from school by an uncle who cared only for the gold my father left me. Since then, I’ve done everything to save myself from having a future as bad as my past.”

“I didn’t mean—” Angus began, but she put her hand up.

“Unfortunately,
you
have been involved in my life in these last weeks, but that was never my intention. The first time I asked
you
for help, you not only turned me down but you also laughed at me, so I knew to ask nothing more of you.”

“I apologize for that. I didn’t mean—”

“Didn’t mean?” she asked, her voice rising. “You’ve caused me
a great deal of misery that you didn’t mean to do, haven’t you, Mr. McTern?”

“I have,” he said, his jaw stiff as he stared at her.

“But, ultimately, you did save me. Because of your diligence I didn’t sleep all day then find out James had sailed off with my dowry. There’s not enough in the world that I could do for you or give you that could thank you for that. That I have any future is the result of your care and concern for me.”

“Lass, I—”

“I have a name!” she half shouted.

Angus sat up straighter. “Would it be Miss Talbot or Mrs. Harcourt?”

“Mrs.,” she said, then gave a sigh as her anger left her. “I really am sorry for all this. You’re right that I’ve been bossing you around. What was it you said? That I was treating you like a trained monkey? That I was trying to make you into what I hoped James was?”

Angus took a while to answer. “Yes,” he said at last, “I said those things in a moment when I was so homesick I couldna think of anything else. But it was just a matter of bad temper and it meant nothing.”

“It meant everything to me,” she said. “Every word you said was true. Mr. McTern, I will make a vow to you that I will never again interfere in your life. You can wear what you want, talk any way you want to, dance with whomever you want. All I ask is that you do not humiliate me on this voyage. Everyone thinks we’re married, so I beg that you not... not carry your lust for the prisoners to the point where people look at me with pity. So far in my life, I’ve avoided that particular embarrassment, and I’d like to continue to do so. Do we have an agreement?”

Angus was sitting ramrod straight in his chair, blinking at her. He felt bad for having yelled at her that morning. But he wondered
why she wasn’t like other women who fought back in a way that ended with Angus putting his arms around her and comforting her. Right now he wanted to go to her and hold her, tease her until she was smiling again, but the way she was looking at him made him unable to even make a joke.

“Do we have an agreement?” she repeated.

Before Angus could reply, there was a knock on the door.

Edilean got up to answer it, but she paused at the closed door. “May I please have your answer?”

“Aye, I agree to not embarrass you,” he said.

She opened the door, and one of the women prisoners was standing there. It was the heavy woman Angus had flung about in the dance just an hour before. “This is Margaret,” Edilean said, “but then I think you’ve met.”

“Aye, we have,” Margaret said, grinning and showing missing teeth. “I think he agreed to marry me.” Quickly, she turned to Edilean. “Beggin’ your pardon, miss.”

“That’s fine,” Edilean said. “My... I mean, Mr. Harcourt is his own man. He does what he wants when he wants and I don’t interfere in his life. Would you excuse me for a minute?” She left the cabin.

“Bloody hell,” Margaret said as she sat down at the table across from Angus. “What did you do to her? Was it the way you were makin’ eyes at Tabitha?”

Angus stared at the woman. He knew it wasn’t right for him to feel this way, but he didn’t like her familiarity with him. Nor did he like the way she’d just plopped down on the chair as though she owned the place. As he felt this, he told himself he was being ridiculous. He and the woman were equals, and he wasn’t a snob. He was... “Why are you here?” he asked.

“She didn’t tell you? She asked the captain if one of us women
could sew. She’s promised me money if I’ll fix her dresses for her.” She looked at him. “I woulda thought a woman would tell her husband about somethin’ like that. Askin’ a criminal into her nice cabin and all.” She looked about the room. “This is as nice as a house. You could live here. Where we are stinks worse than some jails I been in.”

Angus couldn’t help it as his temper rose. Yes, Edilean
should
have talked to him about hiring some woman who’d done heaven only knew what to get herself banished from her homeland. It was not a wise thing to do. If the cabin weren’t so full of valuables he’d go after Edilean and tell her what he thought of her hiring this woman.

“Margaret,” he said finally, “my wife isn’t feeling her best right now. Perhaps you should come back later. We’ll call you.” As he said it, he went to the door and opened it, but Edilean entered the room.

She went to the trunk to get out the dresses that needed to be almost totally remade.

“Cold enough in here to freeze snow,” Margaret said, her eyes on Angus.

“Excuse me?” Edilean said while giving the woman a look that told her to keep her opinions to herself.

“Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am,” Margaret said with a little curtsy. “Now what was it you wanted me to do?”