Heart's Safe Passage (35 page)

“Aye, but it helps to hear it. If it was not too late.”

“It was not.” Rafe picked up the Bible and flipped through the pages. Once he could have found the passage in moments. Now it took him a full five minutes of searching first in the Gospel of John, then to the eighth chapter of Matthew, to the parable of the man hiring workers for his vineyard. “So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.” He glanced up at Mel’s pale but still beautiful face. “I am thinking that means ’tis never too late.”

“Not even for you?” She grinned at him.

“Only if a man accepts the work, bairn.” He kissed her brow. “I’ll make certain you learn to read again, a’right?”

“But who will read to me until then? Mrs. Chapman isn’t well, and Mrs. Lee is never here.” She tilted her head. “She’s always with you, isn’t she?”

“Aye, much of the time.” He rose and backed to the door.

“Don’t you think she’s very pretty?”

“Aye, she’s beautiful.” He laid his hand on the handle. “I will be sending up—”

“She has a
tendre
for you, you ken.”

“Aye, lass, I ken she does, and I ken ’tis of no use, and I ken ’tis time you had a rest.” He flung open the door to find Phoebe with her fist upraised.

“Are you going to strike me or knock?”

“Knock. I heard you.” She glanced past him. “May I enter? I need a moment.”

“Mel’s awake.”

“That’s all right.”

He stepped aside, and she swept past him, graceful aboard the vessel now.

“What is it?” he asked, closing the door.

“Belinda.” She glanced at Mel, then back to him. “Rafe, we need to get her to land as soon as possible. She’s going to have that baby within the week.”

21

Soon. That was all Rafe had said to her about when they would reach land. Soon, if all went well aboard the brig, if a French naval vessel didn’t stop them, if the British Navy didn’t stop them.

For Phoebe, soon wasn’t good enough. Belinda wasn’t quite at her confinement, but Phoebe had examined enough women in Belinda’s condition to recognize the signs. The fact that Belinda didn’t fuss about Phoebe examining her told its own tale—Belinda suspected the nearness of her time too.

“I’m going to die,” she had murmured before falling asleep the night before.

Of course Phoebe responded, “No, you won’t.”

Aboard a vessel somewhere outside the Bay of Biscay or perhaps in the English Channel? Phoebe didn’t know. The worst conditions under which she’d delivered a baby had been aboard the merchantman in St. George’s Harbour. Although cramped, that cabin had been clean and the deck steady.

They did their best to keep the cabins aboard the
Davina
clean, but they had to use seawater, so all felt sticky or even grainy. And damp. The only time Phoebe had felt warm and dry in the past five weeks had been in the galley.

Walking on the main deck in the early morning after a restless night of little sleep, Phoebe struggled with the pain now bubbling to the surface, the lanced wound releasing its poison and the fragments causing that poison. Rafe the vengeful privateer captain trying to drive her away. Rafe the physician unwittingly beginning the healing. Unwittingly solidifying her love for him.

Not what he wanted to do, but willingly admitting the defeat of believing he could never care for another woman.

“He loves you.” She whispered the words to the edge of dawn breaking along the horizon. “He loves you, but he won’t give up his quest even for you, let alone God.”

He was right to push her away under those circumstances.

“But I want those circumstances to be different, God. I want . . . him.”

Who was she to want, to pray, to think she deserved anything from God? She had hidden behind a shield of self-righteous superiority, condemning Rafe for his actions while harboring anger and bitterness to two men who had damaged her life—Gideon, for making her existence miserable and contributing to the loss of her baby, and the man she’d known only by his surname, Kenyon, for making life in Seabourne so uncomfortable she had fled from her friends.

Now, with Rafe less than seventy feet away on the quarterdeck scanning the horizon, Phoebe examined her heart and wondered if she had written to Dominick for help to save Rafe from himself, or to get even with him for keeping her aboard—being alive and open to her own form of revenge. If that were so, she was more despicable in her action than he was. He made no secret of his intentions or his knowledge that what he did went against God’s will for the lives of His people. She, on the other hand, spoke of peace and love and forgiveness, and plotted to bring him down in the name of saving him.

“Don’t let Dominick come,” she prayed. “Please.”

If God chose to let her suffer the consequences of her behavior, she would have to find another way to save Rafe. She would do nearly anything to keep him out of prison, away from James Brock, free to find peace and forgiveness and a future.

Free to love, even if it wasn’t her.

She turned from the rail to see that he had lowered the spyglass and watched her instead of the horizon. A smile tugged at her lips. An invisible cord yanked at her heart. As though it were a lifeline stretched taut between her and Rafe, she traversed the main deck and climbed the quarter ladder, then paused at the top while he slipped the spyglass into its holder on the binnacle, said something to the helmsman, and closed the distance between her and himself.

“You look cold.” He took her hand not holding the rail and chafed it between his, his gaze soft on her face, a sweetheart’s caress with the eyes. “What were you doing down there all alone?”

“Praying.” She gazed into his eyes and smiled. “For you.”

“Good. We need all the prayers we can get here in the Bay of Biscay.”

If she had a ruff like a wolf, it would have risen at that moment. “What do you mean?”

“Storms, Frenchmen, Americans, English Navy.” He smiled. “Which would you prefer?”

“None.”

“Indeed?” He clasped her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “But you sent for their aid, did you not?”

“And prayed they don’t arrive.”

His fingers flexed. “Why?”

“Because I don’t want you thrown into prison regardless of what you do.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t want you to do anything you shouldn’t, and I don’t want you in prison either, especially not because I was wrong in the decisions I made. Because I want you free to find your own way back to the Lord. Because Mel needs her father.”

“Ah, yes, Mel.” He glanced back at the helmsman, who wasn’t even pretending not to listen, then turned back to Phoebe and lifted her hand to the crook of his elbow. “Let us walk.”

They walked in silence. Icy wind buffeted their faces, the sky clear now but with more clouds on the horizon. The sea swirled away from the hull in waves the color of tarnished pewter rimmed with white froth, not high but low and choppy and empty of any vessel save for them.

Near the bow, with the men at watch on deck and in the rigging, Rafe paused and scanned the horizon instead of looking at Phoebe. “How would you feel about Mel needing me if I told you that she’s not my daughter?”

“Not your—” Words eluded Phoebe. She stared at his profile, chiseled and strong enough for a figurehead.

“Aye, I have been trying to tell you for days now, perhaps weeks, but the time has ne’er been right. ’Tis true, nonetheless. I married Davina to spare her shame.”

“Her father asked you to.” Things he’d told her came rushing in. “And you loved her.”

“Aye, I thought I did. I think that died when I learned what she had done. And then she told her father he could compel me to marry her.” His tone was flat, his arm rigid.

Phoebe hugged his arm close to her side. “If you didn’t, no place for you at the university?”

“Aye. ’Twas not quite said that way, but we kent what he meant. Everyone would think ’twas I who dishonored her.”

“But—but, Rafe, she looks so much like you. She could be. That is—”

“There is a family resemblance? Aye, indeed there is.” He turned to Phoebe then. “Watt McKay was her father.”

“Rafe.” Phoebe’s hand flew to her lips. “Is that why—”

“He hated me? Aye. He’d gone off privateering before he knew. We were wed before Watt returned.”

“I thought he was in the Navy.”

“He was.” Rafe grimaced. “They court-martialed him for running his sloop aground from sheer incompetence. But he can manage the guns—could manage the guns, so a privateer was happy to have him.”

Phoebe glanced from bow to stern of the
Davina
. “This one?”

Rafe nodded. “When the captain was killed, the crew voted on a new captain. Watt wanted it, but the men were not fools. I was good at the mathematics and learned celestial navigation quickly, so they elected me, and I changed the brig’s name. I was not so quick to learn the fighting, but it has been learn or die, and I have had a powerful reason to live.”

“With Watt fueling your hatred all the time.” Phoebe’s eyes burned. “And now he’s dead. Haven’t there been enough deaths?”

“I ken you wish me to say yes, but I cannot.”

“It won’t bring Davina or your parents back, and the risk to you—”

“The risk to me, Phoebe, is keeping Brock alive. He tried to kill me on Bermuda. Watt tried to kill me and nearly killed Mel. That Brock was even on Bermuda when I was says someone has betrayed me, and I ken of no other man to do this but Watt.”

“Yet you protected him for Mel’s sake.” As she spoke the words, Phoebe knew nothing could ever keep her from loving him, and she would do anything to keep him safe until he made his heart right with the Lord. In doing so, maybe she could find the way back herself.

His hand covering Phoebe’s on his forearm, Rafe headed back toward the quarterdeck. “Mel does not ken the story of her parentage. I will tell her one day, though by law she is my daughter.” He gave Phoebe a smile so gentle and sweet her knees turned to porridge. “Aye, and by my love too. But there were rumors, and she may hear them again one day. I do not want her to have to live with me having killed her true father.”

Phoebe’s heart felt so full she feared if she began to speak, she would gush forth nonsense words of love and admiration.

Rafe paused at the top of the companionway ladder. “’Tis too much to ask, I ken, but will you look out for my lass if something happens to me?”

“Rafe—”

“If ’tis not too much to ask.”

“No.” Phoebe shook her head. “It’s not too much. But you can’t go on, for Mel’s sake. Now more than ever she needs you.”

“Phoebe.” He faced her, holding both her hands, his face bleak. “I have ne’er been enough in all I have done. I was too bookish for Davina to be happy with me. I was not a good enough physician to heal her sickness. I could not save her from the pirates, and I could not keep Watt from hating me enough to keep him alive for Mel. In destroying James Brock, I ken I can succeed and do the world a service.”

Heart shredding in her chest, Phoebe gazed up at him. “In the man you are beyond the hatred for James Brock, you are enough for Mel and for me.”

“Aye, perhaps, but ’tis the rub of it, no? I do harbor the hatred.”

“God can take it from you.”

“As He has taken yours?”

Phoebe flinched.

Rafe touched her cheek. “That was unkind of me. Forgive me?”

“Yes, of course.”

Forgiving him for all he had done to her was so simple. Why could she not forgive Gideon and the man who had stolen the new life she’d built?

Because she had never loved Gideon, and the other man was a stranger. Yet forgiving them was no less important.

“Then we will speak no more on this. Let our last days together be as friends and not opponents.” Without waiting for her assent, he leaped down the ladder, then held up a hand to steady her on her way down.

On deck, the clatter of feet and pewter plates rang out as breakfast was served. Below, the cabins lay quiet with Mel and Belinda resting and Phoebe sitting beside Rafe at the table as he read
Robinson Crusoe
to Mel. Phoebe etched the scene in her mind, wishing she could draw, and sought for a way to make the domesticity continue. If she couldn’t change Rafe’s heart, if God didn’t change his heart, this would be the last of it. She would say goodbye in a few days, and he would likely go to his ultimate death, preferring to die as a hero to a woman who had never deserved him and had been dead for nine years.

Another person for Phoebe to forgive.

I’m not very good at this, Lord, so how can I persuade Rafe of its virtue?
she prayed.

What she was good at was tending to people. Her sailor patients were all doing well. Mel would live. She couldn’t hold a spoon well or read, she remembered nothing about being in the rigging the day she fell, and she complained of headaches and dizziness. But she lived, she was eating, and her color improved with each day.

Phoebe treasured every minute with Rafe and Mel and even Belinda. Part of her wished they weren’t so close to their destination, but a day, then two, slipped by. They entered the English Channel on the third day, and with only a hundred miles to go to the coast, the cry rang out, “Sail off the starboard quarter.”

In a heartbeat, Rafe dropped the book onto the table, snatched weapons from the array on the cabin bulkhead, and charged onto the deck, calling out, “Call to stations.”

The race began, the drill Phoebe had seen a dozen times in the past five weeks. Someone began to beat upon a drum, a rapid, martial cadence. Men swarmed from along the rails on deck and up from below. They pulled canvases off the guns and hauled out barrels of water. Ammunition appeared on deck, but no one lit the slow matches.

Phoebe followed Rafe up the ladder, then remained frozen, flattening herself against the rail to stay out of the way, her hands locked onto the wood as though she were an off-center figurehead molded into the brig and only an ax would remove her. She knew she needed to get below, gather up Belinda and Mel, and get medical supplies and foodstuffs they could eat without cooking. Her hands refused to unstick from the rail.