JoAnn Wendt (8 page)

Irritably, the captain jabbed a finger at Flavia and went on in broken English.

“Thy name iss not—iss not—”

He jabbed a finger at her.

“Rochambeau,” she shouted above the wind. “Flavia Rochambeau.”

The captain’s disbelieving laugh was half snort, half bellow. Flavia’s stomach knotted in helpless anger. Her eyes dropped to the deck she’d been forced to scrub in the freezing cold only yesterday.

While she clung stubbornly to her name, she no longer claimed to be a duchess. Almost a month in the bondslave hold had taught her that. Her fellow passengers had leaped upon her title as a pack of dogs leap after a rabbit.

They tormented her. They taunted, jeered. The children had made up singing games, with her the butt of their joke. And she’d gathered the unwanted attention of men who tried to touch her breasts whenever she forced her way through the crowded hold to the vile slop bucket that served as the only privy, behind a curtain of tattered sail.

But the women, excepting Mab Collins, were cruelest of all. Their jibes were tipped in the poison of jealousy. They jeered at her dainty ways, mocked her speech. They roared with laughter when she shrieked upon finding lice crawling in her own hair. During deck scrubbing, one of them always contrived to spill a bucket of cold seawater on her, soaking her to the skin.

The meanness had gone unchecked until Obadiah Collins put an end to it. Exploding in righteous indignation, that gentle giant made it known he would tolerate no further baiting of Flavia. Each night she thanked God for Obadiah’s presence. No person, male or female, was foolish enough to risk the big man’s wrath.

“Thy name iss—”

Flavia jerked herself to alertness. The captain thumbed through his log, his irritation increasing with each page he was forced to search. At last he stabbed a long yellow fingernail at an entry.

“Hah! Jane Brown!” he read victoriously. “Come
Schilaack
September the thirteen.” He glared up at her, his bearded mouth twisting in contempt. “Come
Schilaack
drunk.”

Flavia’s mouth flew open in protest. Then she shut it tiredly. What was the use? The Collinses had told her she was “Jane Brown” from the first. They even remembered her solicitous “cousin” who’d brought her aboard. And she’d wakened in rude clothes reeking of rum.

A dry hysterical sob forced its way up through her despair.

“I
am
Flavia Rochambeau!” she cried out.

But the captain wasn’t listening. He’d already dismissed her and was dealing with two brothers who argued hotly about the possessions of a third brother. The man had died of consumption just an hour before in a bunk near the one in which Flavia and the entire Collins family were crammed.

She turned away, sickened for herself and sickened at the avarice exploding behind her. While the brothers railed, the captain thundered, cursing the untimely death. He could not collect passage if a bondman died before the ship passed the halfway point in the journey. Had the young man lingered, the captain could have tacked the indenture on to that of the young man’s widow.

Sick, despairing, wishing
hers
was the body being passed out of the humanity-packed, fetid hold, she pushed her way through the throng. Her ears were deaf to the insults that trailed after her.

“Ay there, Duchess. Crawl over to me hammock t’night ‘n’ I’ll give ye somethin’ from the duke!”

“Blimey, Duchess! Where’s yer diamond and rooooby tiara? Lost it in the privy bucket, has ye?”

“God! Ain’t so proud now ‘at she’s dirty as the rest o’ we!”

There was a crevice, a little “hidey” place as the children called it, between the starboard railing and a dozen water barrels that were strapped between cabin wall and railing. Only a child or a slender adult could slip in. Flavia made for the haven and squeezed into it. Alone, she clutched the railing and rested her burning face on her hands.

She felt defeated. Empty. The ship rolled under her. Whitecaps smashed at the hull, sending spits of foam flying. The spits sizzled on her hands for an instant, then melted away. She was too tired to think. Too tired to live.

Am I dead to everyone who loved me? Does only my husband know I’m alive? Oh, why haven’t I the courage to end it! The sea beckons . . .

But she had neither the courage to die nor the energy to live. And prayer had deserted her weeks ago. There were only two thoughts, burning like candles, that kept her spirit from being totally extinguished.

Garth.

Baby Robert.

In the past week she finally had come to terms with the fact that she would never see either of them again. But as long as she lived, she could send them her love with every breath she drew. Perhaps her fervent love thoughts could find their way across time and distance, blessing her beloved two.

She knew she must never seek them out. The duke must never suspect what Garth had been to her. He must never suspect Garth had sired Robert. For if he did, she knew he would kill them both.

She swallowed hard. Her heart ached. God, how it ached. Leaning back upon the gurgling water barrel, she raised her face heavenward and sought solace in the winter sky. Clouds galloped overhead like gray mares running free and unfettered. Cold raindrops spat down. She drew one last long breath of sweet air before turning toward the foul hold.

“Let someone give my son the love I cannot give,” she whispered passionately. “Let someone give Garth—”

No, no. It was all too much.

Numb and beaten, Jane Brown turned and descended into the squalid darkness.

* * * *

Garth McNeil shucked boots and stockings and scrambled up the fore-rigging in the moonlight. There’d been an odd humming sound from the after-shrouds. A frayed rope? He had to find out. He was a careful sailor and tolerated no sloppy sailing or worn, weakening equipment.

Hanging on in the wind with the
Caroline
bounding under him, he found nothing amiss in the after-shrouds or the futtock shrouds. He climbed up into the fore-topmast rigging, checking the foot ropes and the lower fore-topsail braces. All was well. He continued to climb up into the bright moonlight, up to the fore-topgallant mast. There he hung on in the wind and looked out at the sea. The sea was painted with moonlight, and the night was as light and bright as day.

At sea a month now, McNeil had fallen to taking the night watch from eleven bells to three bells. It was a lonely watch and counterproductive to his efforts to forget Flavia. Still he persisted in the watch, perversely torturing himself in the quiet hours by thinking of her. At the end of the watch, he would go to Annette’s cabin. These days he went there with intense urgency. It wasn’t the urgency for simple animal release. It was the urgency to forget.

But on Annette’s side, McNeil knew she interpreted his passion as increasing affection. She reveled in it. Annette was blooming like a girl in first love. McNeil knew he should set her straight in the matter, but he made no effort to do so. He wasn’t thinking of Annette. His head was full of Flavia.

The
Caroline
leaped into a deep trough between waves, throwing him against the rigging. He shook his head to clear it, then called up to the man aloft and exchanged a few words.

He scrambled down the rigging, jumped to the deck and pulled on stockings and boots. He began his usual night prowl of the sleeping ship, listening for any change in the hum of the rigging, alert to any discordant creaking of wood spars or ship’s hull. He took a lantern and went down into the cargo hold, checking for any sign of shifting among the lashed-down crates. All was as it should be.

His prowl completed, he returned to the moonlit deck, checked the Jacob’s ladders at bow and stern, then had a few words with Harrington at the wheel. The ritual finished, he treated himself to a smoke.

He’d not smoked half the cigar before his unwilling mind ran back to Flavia. He ached. Normally cynical about women and what they had to offer, McNeil was at a loss to explain his feelings for Flavia and why he should grieve so sorely. The cynic in him said that real love—if there was such a thing as
real
love—came gradually, if ever; “instant” love was merely lust masquerading in fine clothes. But the man within him denied it. What he’d felt for Flavia had been love. That love had been born full-grown the moment he’d opened that tavern door on the quay and looked into those vulnerable eyes. He knew it now.

He was confused by all of it. Why had sweet Flavia played the harlot that first night on the quay? Why?

Seeking answers, he’d questioned the duke’s young footman during the voyage, and by now the lad must think him mad. When the lad said things about Flavia that were unbearable, Garth tongue-lashed him into scared silence. Eager to toady to the ship’s master, the boy spouted gossip willy-nilly. Garth found it hard to sort truth from lie.

Only one thing stood out in a certain light. The duke had chosen Flavia as wife because Flavia’s mother had been a prodigious child-bearer. The duke expected Flavia to reproduce as her mother had done. He demanded heirs. An odd, unformed thought stirred in him like a hazy dream, then faded as a brass bell sounded.

Three chiming strokes rang out in the wind and echoed out over the moonlit sea. There was the tramp of feet, the usual shouts of instruction as the watch changed. He surrendered his watch to Jenkins, exchanged a few words and turned to go. But he didn’t go. He stood in the stern of the ship, watching the foamy churning wake. An odd thing about churning wake. Stare at it long enough and it conjures up pictures. A girl’s white skin, a dewy cheek damp from running through fog...

A light step sounded behind him on the deck. He turned. Annette’s blue silk wrapper shimmered in the moonlight as wind ruffled it. Her dark hair was unbound and feathering in the wind. She smiled.

“Come to bed, Garth.”

He slung his dead cigar into the sea and strode toward her. She came into his arms, and he was jolted by the warmth of her body. He’d not known he was so cold.

He sought her mouth. He kissed her with fierce, bruising urgency.

Chapter 6

“Jane?”

Flavia woke instantly, the way she’d always done at Tewksbury when Robert was fretful with teething and the mother in her would not permit deep sleep. She shifted up on one elbow, careful not to wake the Collins babes, who snuggled warmly against her, one at each side. She rubbed her tired eyes.

“Yes, Mab? What’s wrong?
He’s not worse?”

In the dim light of the hold’s single sputtering lantern, she sensed rather than saw the young woman’s shoulders slump forward in despair.

“Jane, he be raving. He be all the time tryin’ to git up.”

“I’ll help.”

Flavia eased her weary body from the bunk. She covered the sleeping children, pulling the dirty wool blanket up to their thin chins. She shook out her creased and wrinkled serge skirts. Like everyone else, she slept clothed. At least now she had her own bunk. Bunks had become available as the arduous voyage took its toll among the indentured.

Scurvy and ague plagued the ship. It hit the big strong men hardest. And the growing children, of course. One raw potato and half an onion a week did not suffice in containing the sickness, and the captain had done nothing to ease their plight. Greedy, eager to pass the halfway point and realize full profit from bondslave contracts, the Dutchman drove his ship hard. He set his course due west across open wintry seas rather than follow the longer course that trailed the African coast and the Caribbean, where the
Schilaack
might put in for fresh water, oranges, lemons, green vegetables. The result of the Dutchman’s avarice was drinking water gone brackish in the barrel, sea biscuit crawling with worm, salt pork gone putrid and lives lost.

Flavia was outraged at the man’s inhumanity. A dozen times a day she vowed to see him punished, and a dozen times a day she came face to face with the reality of her own impotence. She was no longer duchess of Tewksbury. She was a bondslave. She hadn’t the power to order punishment of a gnat.

Groping through the bunks of the snoring, Flavia made her way to the Collins bunk. That everyone should sleep unperturbed while Obadiah Collins fought for his life did not surprise her. Each family had its share of misery, and in the past weeks she herself had helped sew many an infant or small child into a pillowcase before the stricken parents consigned the small bundle to the dark cruel sea. And the latest outbreak was raging now—dysentery.

Obadiah lay burning with fever. Tossing and heaving about the bunk in his delirium, the big man kept casting off the cool wet cloths Mab placed on his brow and chest.

“Mother, be we halfway?” he demanded, not waiting for an answer but raving on, repeating the question over and over.

In the flickering light, Flavia met Mab’s terror-filled but determined eyes. Flavia and Mab had made a pact. Obadiah was not to know the halfway point had been passed two days before.

Mab took a deep breath of the foul sickly air.

“Course we ain’t halfway, y’big dummox! Now bey’ silent and git well, hear?”

Mab’s roughness was sham. Flavia knew Mab was straining to behave normally so as not to raise Obadiah’s anxiety. For a few minutes it worked. The big man’s hands ceased their delirious fidgeting. His breathing seemed to ease. But Flavia was alarmed. With such fever, he should be oozing sweat. Obadiah, however, lay hot and dry as a desert baked in noon sun. Each breath he drew was echoed by a watery whistle-like sound from his lungs.

To hide her mounting fear, Flavia plunged into helping Mab.

“Mother?”

Obadiah knocked away the cup Flavia was holding to his parched lips. He reared up, searching for Mab’s face and not finding it, although his wife hovered only inches above his head.

“Mother? Be we halfway?” Mab choked off a cry. Shaking, she jammed the knuckles of her fist into her mouth and bit them until they bled.

Flavia struggled with the man, urging him to lie down. He seemed unaware of her. Blindly, Obadiah continued to seek his wife.

“Y’been a good wife, Mother. I’ll not have y’ saddled w’ servin’ my indenture. If I’m to go, I’ll go now—before—before—” Burning with fever, he lost his train of thought. He sank back on the hot pillow. “Before—before—the spring violets does poke up theys bonny heads b’hind the barn—”