Heart's Safe Passage (31 page)

“Aye, sir.”

Rafe clapped him on the shoulder and strolled away as though nothing of the day overset him. In truth, he thought he might have enough of the poison of rage and pain in his veins to tear all eighty feet of the mainmast out with his bare hands.

“You should have let him kill me, Jordy,” he murmured to the night sky. “You had a soul worth saving.”

The burning in his blood reached his eyes. He pressed cold fingers to them, forcing back any demonstration of emotion. Weeping like a woman wouldn’t bring Jordy back, nor Watt, nor the others who had laid down their lives in the name of gaining quick wealth and in truth striving for his goal.

But he could hold the grief inside no longer. It came, tears as scalding as a spring from the bowels of the earth, as salty as the sea that had at last received the penultimate member of his family. All he had left was Mel, and he’d come too close to killing her too. She deserved a better father than he had been to her—sweet, loving, courageous Melvina Docherty.

To hide his weakness, he slipped behind the cutter and leaned over the rail, far enough for the icy salt spray to wash his face. He gripped the water-sanded wood and breathed deeply to get himself back under control, in command of his emotions and his future. He wasn’t dead. He must go on, make the deaths of value.

He sensed Phoebe’s presence beside him before he caught a whiff of her jasmine scent still tainted with a hint of lavender. She said nothing. She didn’t touch him. She simply stood beside him, her fingers curled around the edge of the rail.

“Am I to apologize to you, lass?” he asked at last.

“For speaking truth?” She shoved a handful of windblown hair out of her face and held it at the nape of her neck as though her fingers were ribbons. “I don’t know how you found out. I thought only a few people knew. I hoped only a few people knew.”

“’Twas gossip in the taverns and naught more. I had no business bringing it up as though I knew the whole.”

“Gossip speaks truth this time—to an extent. I—” The
Davina
slid into the trough of a wave, and she released her hair to grip the rail again. Wild, shimmering locks cascaded over her face and shoulders.

Rafe gathered it in his hands this time and held it off her face, his thumb and forefinger acting as a hairpin to keep her face clear, a pale oval in the shimmering lights of stars and phosphorescent waves. Words to express how beautiful he found her rose to his lips. He swallowed them back and chose the less pleasant but far more intimate. “You do not need to tell me, but I’d like to ken the whole of it.”

“I’ve told only two people the whole of it. About my husband, that is. Too many others had to know about the other.”

Rafe waited, touching only her hair and the nape of her neck. If he told her that hearing of her transgressions might help him forget his own, she might run off again, avoid him like the plague she seemed to think he was.

She rubbed one hand over her face. “I wish there were someplace warmer and drier.”

“The lady who wanted to stay on deck in a storm wants to go below on a clear night like this?”

“I don’t like confinement. My husband—” She pursed her mouth. Her chin quivered.

“Did he lock you in the rooms?”

She nodded. “He said I flirted too much at parties, so he told me I couldn’t go to any more. I was seventeen and missed my friends, so I went anyway. After that, he locked me in my dressing room every night.”

Rafe kept his opinion of such a man to himself. “So your sickness when you were first aboard wasn’t from the sea so much as the close quarters.”

“I think that’s likely.”

“I’m so sorry.” He propped one hip against the rail for balance and brushed the fingers of his free hand across her face. Finding moisture too warm to have come from a brief dose of sea spray, he brushed it away and kept his fingers curved around her cheek. “I had no ill intent in it, you ken.”

“I know that now. But I was nearly angry enough that first night to use the knife on you.”

“Perhaps you should have. The way the crew was feeling about me, they might have declared you a heroine and done whatever you liked, such as put you ashore.”

“Jordy and Derrick wouldn’t have let me get away with it. And Watt . . . Rafe, I thought he cared about you.”

“Aye, weel, so did I until we were locked in the great cabin. But I ne’er thought he was wanting to kill me.” His throat closed and he shook his head. “He was my blood kin, my mither’s much younger brother. He went into the Navy, but he left at age thirty. He lived with us in Edinburgh for a year, then joined a privateer crew.”

“So that’s how you ended up here?”

“Aye, he made the suggestion, and I was game for anything in my rage and grief.”

“But why would he turn on you?”

“Greed. He could claim to be captain in the event of my death and claim my shares. Who would gainsay him, when half a hundred men would attest that indeed he was the captain?”

“I can’t understand that kind of greed, to kill one’s own nephew for nothing more than gold?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.” Or admit the rest. “What else did your husband do to you that prompted such a gentle lady to drive him to his death?”

She let out an unladylike snort. “I’m scarcely gentle. And by choosing to be a midwife, I am not much of a lady now.”

“You’ll al’ays be a lady, Phoebe Lee.”

“Don’t flatter me, Rafe.” She stepped out of his reach, leaving his hands cold without her to touch. “As you not so subtly pointed out a bit ago, I’m not much of a Christian either. I’m a fraud, a hypocrite. I preach about God’s love and forgiveness and accepting it. I talk about God’s peace and healing. And all the while I have so much anger in my heart against my husband and . . . that other man, I wanted to hurt you myself today. Now I can never convince you that your path is wrong and following Christ is right, the only way.” She began to weep in deep, harsh sobs. “I know that’s the truth, but I don’t know how to get there now that I realize I’ve lived a lie all these years.”

“Ah, Phoebe, my dear.” He stepped forward and gathered her to him.

She didn’t resist. She laid her head on his chest, and the sobs exploded from her in shuddering bursts that made more of her words incomprehensible. After a few attempts, she gave up trying to speak and cried herself out, sheltered in his arms and warm boat cloak.

Rafe said nothing either. He remembered the platitudes of the pastor when Rafe had returned home broken in spirit. The man had meant well. Perhaps they had been the right words under most circumstances of loss. But Rafe didn’t believe even God could heal the kind of wounds dealt his soul in the Mediterranean. Phoebe’s confession seemed like more proof that God’s encompassing forgiveness was just not enough sometimes.

Yet Derrick forgave those who had held him in captivity and sold his wife and children elsewhere. Rafe had seen the man’s back, a crisscross of scars from the lash. Derrick often tried to speak to Rafe about forgiving those who transgressed against him, James Brock in particular. No doubt Derrick would add Watt’s name to the sermons. But Rafe had walked away. He didn’t want to know.

Now he wished he did so he could give Phoebe advice, grant her words that would set her heart at rest for her past transgressions and those who had hurt her.

“It was bad, your marriage?” he asked.

She nodded against him, her weeping growing quieter, more shallow. “I thought I was in love. He was handsome and debonair and everything I was supposed to marry.”

“Lots of land?”

“How’d you guess?”

“Things are not so different in America than England as you all would like to think, not when it comes to advantageous marriages.”

“Did you make an advantageous marriage?” Her voice held an edge.

Rafe’s lips twitched up at the corners. “Nay, Davina had only a passable dowry.”

“But she was beautiful.”

“Oh, aye, that she was. Like her daughter.”

“Mel looks like you.”

“Aye, she has some of my family’s better traits, I’m glad to say. But I did not marry for land. I did not want it. I had my trade to support me and the house in Edinburgh. Davina was town-bred too, so we never hankered for the open spaces.”

“Until you went to sea.”

“Some things about a man can change.” He stroked her tumbled fall of hair. “Did you take land to your marriage?”

“Four hundred acres of prime grazing land in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Gideon wanted horses. More horses. He wanted that grazing land, and I wanted him. I always got what I wanted.” She fell silent.

Rafe tucked his hand beneath her chin and tilted her head back. “You do not need to answer me on this, Phoebe, but did your husband beat you?”

She blinked. “How did you know?”

“The way you cringe sometimes. I knew someone had. The mon’s lucky he’s already dead.”

“Rafe, you mustn’t.”

“Mustn’t what? Despise a man who will harm a female? Watt—” He cleared his throat. “You need not talk anymore if you do not wish to.”

“Or is it that you do not wish to listen anymore?”

“I will listen as long as you talk, but you’re shivering even in my cloak, and the dawn is breaking over the horizon.”

She twisted around and stared at the sky, where a line of pale pink curved between inky sea and gray-blue sky. “Let’s go to the galley. I can make coffee.”

“You can make the coffee?” Rafe didn’t bother to disguise his surprise. “I ne’er knew a lady who could boil the water, let alone cook anything useful.”

“Humph. I made myself learn after I was married. I thought if I got away—” She freed herself from his hold and headed across the deck to the ladder leading down to the galley.

Rafe followed her. In another turn of the glass, men would stir, change the watch, and the closeness of their dialogue would end. And he didn’t want it to end. He didn’t realize how much he’d missed private talks in the middle of the night until Phoebe came along.

He didn’t realize how much he’d missed a woman’s company until Phoebe came along.

In the darkness below deck, they entered the galley. While Phoebe prepared the coffee, Rafe stirred the ashes in the stove until the embers banked deep beneath them flickered to life. He shoved sticks of wood into the stove, noting he needed to send a man into the hold to bring up more kindling. Heat began to radiate into the galley. He took a spill from the fire and lit one of the overhead lanterns swinging from a deck beam.

Phoebe set the pot for the coffee atop the stove. “I didn’t realize I was so cold until I felt the fire.”

“Aye, it can be that way.” The galley offered no chairs, but a number of barrels of flour and oats provided seats. He patted one to indicate Phoebe should make herself comfortable.

She perched on a barrel of fine flour used to bake the occasional plum duff as a treat for the men, and glanced toward the dark recesses of the lower deck. “Won’t we wake the men if we talk?”

“Not likely. A brig is too noisy all the time for anyone to be a light sleeper.” Seated on a barrel of oatmeal, he took her hand and turned his back on the men sleeping a dozen yards away. “Do you have aught else to say?”

She gave him a half smile. “Yes, much more, if you’re not to believe you have a common murderess aboard.”

“Weel, not so common.”

Her eyes widened for a moment, then a faint flush tinged her pale cheeks. “Are you teasing me, sir?”

“Perhaps a wee bit. I did not want you so sad. Fair breaks my heart to see a female weep.”

She peeked up at him through her lashes. “It’s good to know you have a heart.”

Rafe stared at her for a moment, and something did indeed break inside him, but not his heart—a bit of the hardness around it fell away and lodged as a lump in his throat. He swallowed against it. “You cannot think so ill of me if you can flirt with me.”

“Was I?” Her hands flew to her now bright cheeks. “I shouldn’t. I can’t. I think the coffee is ready.” She leaped to her feet.

He drew her down beside him again. “’Tis not ready, lass. You can scarce smell it, so ’tis a poor excuse for running away.”

“I don’t—” She sighed. “I suppose I do. I was running away from Gideon, my husband, when I fell down the steps and—and—” She slid to the very lip of the barrel, her hands gripping the rim on either side of her as though she intended to launch herself upward and outward.

“Go ahead, lass, run from me like you have everything else,” Rafe said softly. “But you’ll still have to live with your own heart and conscience.”

She whirled toward him so fast her hair flew out like a banner. “You talk to me about running and conscience? You? You?” Her voice, though quiet, rose a note on each
you
. “You’ve been running from your conscience for nine years.”

“Nay, lass, you have that incorrect. I am not running from anything. I’m running toward something.”

“Murder.”

“Justice.”

They locked gazes, held, while the coffee began to boil and hiss over onto the top of the stove, the combination of rich aroma and acrid scorching stinging to the nose. Her eyes took on the glow of stained glass with sunlight behind it, and Rafe braced himself for a poisoned dart of a word. But she bowed her head, hiding her face behind the shimmering curtain of her hair.

“The coffee’s finished.” Rafe rose to retrieve two pewter tankards from hooks and fill them with the hot liquid, black and strong in the dim light. He moved with slow deliberateness to give her time to gain her composure.

Or slip out of the galley without him watching her or barring her way.

He heard no movement behind him. Beyond the galley, a few men stirred. In moments, the cook would appear and want to know why someone, captain or not, had invaded his kitchen. Rafe and Phoebe would have no more privacy, and he still didn’t know what had truly happened with the man in Seabourne. Then again, Phoebe didn’t know the entire truth about him either.

19

Belinda wasn’t doing well. Phoebe saw that the instant she walked into the great cabin two days after the battle, proud of herself for balancing a tray of coffee and porridge she’d managed to help the cook prepare. Proud of herself for how she’d evaded talking further with Rafe without running away. And now he was the one gone, having rowed over to the French vessel shortly after she walked out on their conversation in the galley, to ensure all was well aboard the prize. She had wanted to go with him. Because of her cowardice, too much lay unsaid between them. But besides the impropriety of her joining him, she needed to tend to her patient.