Island Flame (35 page)

Jon started to unbutton his shirt as Petersham filled the tub. His eyes never left Martha. Color rushed into the woman’s cheeks as she realized that he would have no inhibitions about doing just exactly as he had threatened. Cathy saw her consternation, and pushed her gently toward the foot of the bunk.

“It’s all right, Martha,” she said softly. “You can go. He won’t do me any harm.”

Jon did not contradict her statement, and continued undressing lazily. Martha scrambled from the bunk as he freed his shirt from the waistband of his pants. Then she turned back to Cathy.

“Shut your eyes, lovey,” the woman said fiercely. “It isn’t right, your seeing him like that.”

Jon’s lips lifted in a humorless smile. He shrugged free of the shirt, throwing it casually to the floor.

“He is my husband, Martha,” Cathy said quietly. Martha’s mouth widened in a soundless “Oh!” and she clapped her hand to it as Jon began to unbutton his breeches. He gave every indication that he was prepared to strip to the skin regardless of who was watching.

“It’s all right, Martha,” Cathy repeated rather wearily, and, with one last horrified glance at Jon, Martha scuttled from the cabin. Petersham, finished with his task,
followed Martha without another glance at Cathy. Cathy stared after him, perplexed, and then her eyes swung back to Jon. He was stepping rather stiffly from his breeches.

The thick black hair that covered his body was dull now and matted. Cathy caught her breath at the sight of bones showing through the swarthy flesh. Before he had been a lean, finely honed animal with smooth, powerful muscles. Now he looked like the survivor of a famine. The only thing about him that was unchanged was his manhood, standing tautly away from the surrounding black bush. Its burgeoning fullness looked obscene amidst all that wasted flesh. Cathy averted her eyes hastily.

“A little late for maidenly modesty, isn’t it, wife?” Jon commented sardonically. The way he said the last word made it an unspeakable insult. Cathy flinched from the hatred that still licked like flames through his voice.

“Don’t call me that!” she protested sharply, automatically. Jon leaped toward her, snarling, and Cathy cowered back against the pillows. His hands closed over her shoulders, tightening cruelly on the fragile bones. Cathy gasped with pain and fear. Jon’s lips parted in a feral smile and he dragged her up so that her face was level with his.

“Do you know how close you came to being strangled, last night?” he asked almost conversationally, his face not more than three inches from hers. The crazed glitter had returned to his eyes. Cathy shook her head fearfully. Anything to placate him.

“Very close. In fact, if not for my child, you wouldn’t be alive today. So don’t try telling me what to do. I might decide that the child isn’t worth enduring your bitchy ways.”

His hands dropped away from her as if she had suddenly
become distasteful to him. Cathy slumped back down in the bed, her eyes following his every move, her breath coming fast and shallow. He turned his back to move stiffly toward the steaming bath, and Cathy gave a little shocked cry of horror.

“Your back!” she breathed. “What happened to it?”

Jon swung around, the glow in his eyes so bright that Cathy felt scorched by its intensity.

“Don’t pretend with me, slut,” he growled. “I find I’m extremely short of patience where you’re concerned. It wouldn’t take much to persuade me to show you just how excruciating a whipping can be.”

Cathy stared at him. He looked mad, and yet spoke with the confidence that his attitude was justified. Petersham, too, had treated her with scathing contempt. Conjecture crystallized into fact: they were both blaming her for something of which she had no knowledge.

“Jon, I realize you’re angry with me,” she said softly, her eyes never leaving the blazing gray ones. She was going to add, “Won’t you tell me why?” when he interrupted with an enraged bellow.

“Angry? Angry! You bitch, I could cheerfully cut you up for bait with a dull knife, and I may do it yet if you don’t keep your goddamned mouth shut!”

His fists were clenched as if he were having great trouble restraining himself from hitting her. Cathy recoiled from the taut menace in his face. When she remained silent he gradually relaxed, and, turning away, crossed to the tub. He stepped into it, sliding down into the steaming water gingerly. A grimace of pain crossed his features as the hot water touched his raw back. From the bed Cathy could still see the suppurating sores. It looked like
he’d been beaten not once, but many times. Where had he been, she wondered feverishly. What had happened to him?

“Jon, won’t you tell me what happened?” she ventured after some minutes. His head snapped around, and he fixed his burning eyes on her. The bristly black beard made him look like a fearsome stranger.

“You have a very soft voice,” he drawled in reply. “Soft and twining. It almost persuaded me that you were like that too. But you taught me better, didn’t you, wife? You taught me that beneath that distracting exterior beats a heart of pure flint, and a selfish, grasping mind. Do you think you can play the same trick on me twice? I warn you now, don’t try. Killing you would give me more pleasure than anything in my life, and if you tempt me I may not be able to deny myself even until the child is born.”

Cathy gaped at him, feeling sick with shock. There was no mistaking the venom in his tone. Hatred stared implacably from his eyes. She started to protest her total bewilderment, then thought better of it. Plainly he was determined to despise her. Besides, there was no way she could properly defend herself until she knew of what she stood accused. But if she couldn’t tell her innocence in words, she could express it in deed. Swinging her legs over the side of the bunk, she struggled laboriously to her feet. Her swollen belly surged against the clinging pink nightdress and her plaits swung rhythmically against her breast as she moved toward him. Jon watched her warily, his eyes veiled. His gaze moved first to her delicately etched features then traveled as if drawn by a magnet to her surging middle.

“God!” he muttered, closing his eyes as if he could no
longer bear the sight of her. Cathy flushed, thinking that he must find her pregnancy repulsive, but she refused to be deterred. She walked forward steadily until her thighs just touched the cool porcelain rim of the tub. Jon’s mouth set grimly, but he still refused to open his eyes. Cathy stared doggedly down at his overlong black hair.

Jon opened his eyes at last, glaring ominously up at her.

“What do you think you’re doing, bitch?” he grated.

Cathy’s eyes sparkled at the expletive, but she bit her tongue and said nothing as she bent to scoop the soap and cloth from the water. Her fingers just brushed his chest, and his hands flew up to capture hers, tightening cruelly around her wrists.

“I asked you what you think you’re doing?” he snarled, his eyes snapping at her like a wild beast’s.

“Your hair needs washing,” Cathy said coolly, masking her apprehension beneath a surface calm. She was gambling all on the notion that he wouldn’t hurt her, at least not as long as she carried his child. If she were wrong, the consequences could be disastrous. But if she were right— Well, her touch had been the key that freed his softer emotions once. Perhaps it would be again.

“Are you proposing to wash it for me?” he asked, his voice very soft as he jeered at her. “You really think you can touch me with those little white hands and erase everything you’ve done, don’t you? Well, wife, it won’t work, so you may as well not bother. I’ve found out about you the hard way, and I’m not likely to forget.”

“I don’t want you to forget, Jon,” she said in a calm voice, freeing her hands from his grasp. She wet the rag
and squeezed it over his black head. The water trickled down to his scalp, and he didn’t move away. Cathy repeated the manuever, then bent and scooped more water in her cupped hands, wetting his hair thoroughly. When he still didn’t protest, she soaped the thick strands, letting her fingers run deeply through them. His hair and scalp were thick with grime; Cathy should have felt repulsed but she didn’t. Her fingers massaged his scalp, softly working out the dirt. Jon tensed at first under her ministration, then at last began to relax.

“Hell, why not?” she heard him mutter, more to himself than her. “I’ve got your measure now, bitch, and you won’t find me so easily taken in a second time.”

Wisely, Cathy continued as if he hadn’t spoken. After a while she took up the bucket of hot water that Petersham had left and tipped its contents in a steady stream over Jon’s head. The grimy soap rinsed away, and Jon swivelled around to look at her. Whatever words he had planned to utter froze on his lips as his eyes narrowed ferociously on the large wooden bucket that was still half full of water and that she still held in her hands.

“Put that down!” he roared, his teeth snapping together furiously.

Cathy was so startled that she lost her grip on the bucket. It fell with a crash to the floor, cascading water all over her nightdress. She was wet to the waist. Her eyes were huge as she stared at him incomprehendingly, one hand clasping her throat. Jon surged to his feet, cursing fiendishly, stepping from the tub and snatching up the towel to rub himself dry. All the while he rained oaths on her while she cowered dumbly away from him. What had she done to make him so angry this time? She couldn’t
understand it, and her blue eyes mutely pleaded with him to explain. Jon met those eyes, his own growing savage.

“So you think to seduce me again, bitch?” he ground out. “You think to make me solicitous of your condition, is that it? Are you perhaps hoping to be spared the punishment that awaits you after the child is born? I’ll see you in hell first! Thinking of it, planning it—it was the only thing that kept me alive, and you’re not going to weasel your way out of it. Your insidious little ways are wasted on me!”

While Cathy still struggled to make sense of his words, he threw on clean clothes and stormed out. The door banged behind him, and she was left staring blankly at the wall. The horrifying truth crashed over her head like a tidal wave. No matter how violent his rejection of her, or how fierce his hatred, her love for him remained unchanged.

Jon didn’t return to the cabin at all that day. Martha came in and bullied her into bed, and Petersham stiffly carried in their midday meal. But Jon didn’t come. Cathy brushed aside Martha’s care of her impatiently, and felt like screaming when Petersham turned a deaf ear to her questions. If she were going to be able to understand what motivated Jon’s savage resentment, she must know what had happened to him, and why he blamed her. Besides Jon himself, who would undoubtedly meet her questions with furious invective, Petersham was the only one she could turn to.

Darkness fell at last, and the ship gradually quieted. Cathy waited with nervous expectation for Jon to retire to bed. It must have been around midnight when she at last faced the truth: he wasn’t coming. He must really
despise her if he couldn’t even bear to stay in the same cabin with her, she thought forlornly. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she disconsolately blew out the bedside candle and settled down in the bunk. She felt lost and alone beneath the covers. Sobs tore from her throat, and, mindful of Martha’s contentedly snoring form tucked up in a pallet at the side of the bunk, she muffled the sounds in her pillow. Come tomorrow, she comforted herself, she would get some answers to her questions. If not from Jon, or Petersham, then from the crew. Someone would tell her, she felt sure.

The weather defeated her. She rose the next morning to find that it was snowing, not in drifting fat flakes but in a driving curtain of white. From the window she could see icicles forming on the wooden overhang. The sea was gray and choppy, and if it had been possible to see the sky Cathy knew it would look the same. Common sense, and a lack of warm clothes, kept both her and Martha glued to the small area around the coal stove. Any questions she had would have to be saved for whoever entered the cabin first.

Petersham arrived after a while bearing the midday meal. Cathy answered his curt knock, and instead of taking the tray from his hands she caught his arm and pulled him inside the cabin. Then she shut the door, leaning against it so that he would have to push her out of the way to get back outside. Knowing Petersham, she realized that his innate respect for a woman in a delicate condition would stop him from resorting to actual physical force. Unless he, as well as Jon, had suffered a severe sea change.

Petersham set the tray down on the table, and then, with great dignity approached the door. Cathy crossed her arms over her chest, leaning against it, smiling at him
determinedly. With the thick quilt around her shoulders and her hair hanging in braids down her back, she looked like an Indian squaw. Petersham paused some two feet away, uncertain of what to do.

“If you’ll excuse me, ma’am,” he said stiffly, not quite meeting her eyes. His face was rigid with disapproval.

“I want to know what happened to Jon, Petersham,” Cathy said softly. “And I’m not moving until you tell me.”

“You’ll have to ask the Captain that, ma’am.” Petersham’s tone was very formal, his eyes as they met hers hard with dislike. “It’s not my place to discuss his personal business.”

Cathy tried a different tack. “Petersham, I am his wife. I have a right to know what’s wrong with him.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the Captain, so far as I know, Mistress Hale.” The emphasis on the title was scathing. Cathy’s temper, exacerbated by first Jon’s and now Petersham’s unreasonable antagonism, went up in flames. Her blue eyes snapped, and her mouth contorted furiously. She came away from the door, advancing on Petersham. The man backed before her, not knowing what else to do. Martha sprang up and ran to Cathy’s side, clutching at her arm.

“Miss Cathy, you must remember the baby!” the woman cautioned, her voice shrill with alarm. Cathy saw the flicker in Petersham’s eyes as they went from her face to her belly, and suddenly knew the way to get him to tell her what she wanted to know.

“Oh, Martha!” she gasped, clasping her middle and bending almost double. Martha’s face went white, and Petersham mirrored her concern. Cathy moaned, and Martha turned furiously on the valet.