Judith Ivory (32 page)

The wind coming off the Channel whipped at everything. Immediately, as they had arrived at the docks, it had taken down a long strand of Christina’s hair. Now, it alternately blew this wisp, and others, arbitrarily straight back or directly into her face. She had given up trying to keep it out of her eyes—both hands were required to manage her cloak.

Many people stood around her in similar fashion, holding down wayward, billowing clothing, trying to combat the chill in the air. Passengers on the dock fidgeted; they stomped, milled, huddled together as they waited for the ship to allow boarding. While longshoremen worked pulleys or paraded by, carrying crates of cargo, like slow and endless trails of ants.

For over three hours, belongings and cargo had been hauled into the belly of the ship. It rode low in the water; as laden as Christina. She closed her eyes and let out a long breath. The baby felt, this morning, like a ton of carpenters’ nails, assorted boxes, this end up. She was tired of standing, tired of carrying her own load on her own feet. Why didn’t they board? Why didn’t they go?

The man at her elbow was as anxious to leave as she, Christina knew, though in a different sense. Whereas Christina viewed the coming day as a nerve-racking, depressing ordeal, Adrien entered his next adventure as if it were a song. It was a relief to him to at last be able to go and confront Edward Claybourne directly.

The gangplank at last cleared. A sailor waved. And Christina, along with everyone else, began to converge on the small ship. Behind her, she felt the pressure of a masculine hand drop against her spine. Adrien. Possessive to the last. She had been unreasonably cross with him all morning. Every charming gesture, meant to reassure, somehow had just irritated her more.

A pretty young woman pushed by them on the gangplank, then apologized shyly. Christina could tell, by the blush and lowered eyes, that the girl had received one of Adrien’s more devastating smiles.

This didn’t add to her good humor. Christina glared over her shoulder.

Adrien made an innocent face.

Christina threw an accusing glance at the young woman. The girl was no longer in a rush but was moving with them. She was doing a remarkably poor job of concealing her girlish interest in the man at Christina’s back.

Realizing where she looked, Adrien made a face. “Did I accidentally smile? Sorry, I was only being polite.” He continued as they came onto the deck of the ship, “Honestly, Christina, I don’t know whether to applaud or hide under this onslaught of sudden jealousy.” This was not the first time he’d been censured this morning for looking at other women.

He found himself a place at the ship’s railing. There he leaned, looked down into the chopping waves, pulling his coat collar up. It was clearly a tactic to try and ignore the girl next to him. But Christina couldn’t help
but scowl at her. The little idiot kept sliding looks from beneath her fluttering lashes.

After a minute, Adrien risked a glance at Christina. She shot back a black glare at him.

“Well, damn it! I can’t help the way she looks at me!”

“You encourage it,” Christina hissed as she herself turned to look into the water. “Your damned smile—”

“Is a gift from my parents! When something pleases me, that’s the way my face looks. Jesus.” He turned around, putting his back—elbows against the rail—to Christina.

“Well, I wish someone would rearrange it for you.”

Her voice lost some of its petulance. She began to feel foolish. It was her fault, not his, she thought. She’d been short-tempered all morning. Uncomfortable, impatient, nasty: Frightened.

She was about to tender an apology, when Adrien suddenly grew alert. She turned and followed his gaze—somewhere on the docks. But she could see nothing of interest. Then a sudden shriek from the young woman beside them started a chain of events that left Christina speechless.

The girl had squealed, as if someone had pinched her. When Christina looked, she was confounded to see Adrien smiling at the woman again. Only this time, the girl looked distressed, uncertain whether to return the smile or not.

Noise came from the dock. It began to draw everyone’s attention. A half-dozen National Guardsmen, armed with guns with long bayonets, were running, shoving their way up the gangplank. Christina turned to Adrien, alarmed, her mouth half-open in warning. Then her jaw dropped completely. The guardsmen literally had to pull her husband from the young girl beside them. He had been kissing her! He had her wedged
against the ship’s rail in an incredibly loving embrace!

The baffled young woman who had received this kiss sputtered angrily in English. The guardsmen issued orders; terse, guttural French. Adrien, in a mixture of the two languages, began to explain.

One guard pointed his gleaming bayonet toward the poor girl. “That must be the woman.” Christina had never seen a bayonet up close. Polished steel. With a razor’s edge, a sharp point. How lethal it looked. “You.” He gestured to one of his companions. “Take her. And you”—pointing the dagger’s end at Adrien now—“are under arrest in the name of the Republic of France.”

They grabbed the young girl’s arms. She leaned her weight backward in resistance. She clamored: A gross error was being made. They tugged at her, not understanding her English. A battle ensued.

Adrien joined in with vigorous denials, neither the girl nor he willing to go along peacefully. Both swore, in French and English, that they didn’t know each other. Coarse laughter erupted. One armed man poked the tip of his bayonet into the belly of Adrien’s wool coat. “You were certainly well-acquainted a few moments ago.” The other men joined in. While the other passengers—in respectful homage to the cruel reputation of these nationalized police—slowly pulled back from the scene. Someone, the captain of the ship, she realized, took hold of Christina’s arm, and pulled her with them, joining her to the retreating crowd; separating her from Adrien.

Meanwhile, the innocent girl began to cry uncontrollably. As she was pulled forward, the more insistently Adrien and the woman protested, the more crudely the men implied a lie. Then they escalated their fun. A guard pushed. Adrien pushed back. Voices grew louder. Adrien’s French grew coarser. And the butt of a gun, coming from nowhere, slammed into his belly.

He doubled over for a moment. Everyone grew quiet.
Slowly, in the eerie silence, Adrien straightened up. There was fury on his face. “I was only trying to tell you—”

With a harsh laugh, his assailant plunged the gun butt into his belly once more.

“Son of a bitch.” The phrase hissed out along with Adrien’s breath. And, head down, he charged into them.

His shoulders took three of the six men. Guns clattered. Profanity oofed out. Two of the guards were knocked backward and together, toppling over some kegs. The third one fell close enough for Adrien to knee him in the face. The man’s nose spurted blood. Then, a second, more organized clattering: The three remaining bayonets leveled. A fourth came up. A retrieved fifth. They pointed, like spokes in a wheel, with Adrien at their hub. He stood bent, eye-level with them.

A new kind of silence. Nasty. Menacing. The guardsman with the bloody nose rose, his face lit with anger. And retribution. He turned his head sideways and spit blood, then without further notice his weapon flashed up. Adrien jerked sideways, narrowly avoiding a malicious stab at his eye. But it caught his cheek. The blade sliced him from temple to chin.

Christina grabbed the railing. She put her hand to her mouth. Adrien’s cheek lay open to the bone. Blood poured down his face and neck, running into the collar of his coat. He looked unsteady as he was shoved into formation.

It didn’t seem real. The stomp of boots on the planks of the ship. The guards. The woman—stunned speechless by the sudden violence. With Adrien in their midst, marching, stumbling away.

As they started down the gangplank, Christina fought an urge to undo everything her husband had just arranged at the cost of his cheek. There she stood, left safely on the ship, while he and another woman
were being carted away. She wanted to yell for them to let him go, to scream that she belonged beside him, or to simply scream his name over and over. Then, as the baby twisted violently inside her, her mind fixed on another alternative.

She let out a long, agonizing scream, and grabbed her swollen belly. Heads whirled to a new diversion. Christina fell to her knees. “Ah! The baby!” she called.

Two women rushed forward. Then another diversion quickly took everyone’s attention.

Adrien had shoved the woman in front of him into two of the guards, then folded himself over and smashed backward into the men behind. In an instant, he was over the edge of the gangplank and into the icy January water of the Channel.

Diversion gave way to pandemonium. The guards in quick succession cocked their hammers and fired into the water. One round. Two. Then, whether by design or accident, a shot discharged into the crowd. The shot went wild. But the passengers and crew of the boat scattered, running, screaming; berserk at the threat. People on the docks scattered, riotous.

It took fifteen minutes for the six irate guards to organize themselves through the panic and commotion. One went ashore with the wild and fretful woman prisoner. Two paced the dock, guarding against the escaped man rising from the water in that direction. While the other three came back onto the ship, stalking its edges over the rail, waiting for their lost prisoner to resurface.

But he didn’t. Adrien had disappeared completely, after the first crazy seconds of his escape.

The ship pulled out. The captain agreed to send the three guardsmen back to shore in a small boat after they were half an hour out. The plan was to separate Adrien from the ship, to look for a swimmer trying to follow it. And meanwhile, they would search the ship
from stem to stern to see if he had managed to get back on it somehow. If he wasn’t on ship or on shore after half an hour, he would be presumed dead. No one could survive the Channel water this time of year for very long.

Christina had been taken to the captain’s cabin. She lay there, in his berth, trying to decide how long was enough of this feigned labor. She was impatient to be up. Everyone had been so kind to her, she was feeling strange and uncomfortable about her ruse. She was eager to put it behind her.

But not that eager. The guardsmen were still on the boat.

She heaved up awkwardly. It was impossible in such narrow quarters, and with such a large belly, to rise straight up from the bed. As she struggled up, one of the women who had come to her aid peered in at the cabin door.

“Just checking on you, dear. How are you feeling?”

“All right. The pains have stopped—”

“Well, they could start again if you don’t rest, you know. If I were you, I’d keep myself in bed until it was the proper time for that babe.”

Christina couldn’t explain. There was no reason to be concerned for the baby. But the relief she had felt at seeing Adrien escape was gradually turning into anxiety. She didn’t want to cause suspicion, but she wanted to get to the deck. “I’m all right, now,” she reaffirmed. “I just need some fresh air.”

The woman came all the way into the cabin. “Looking for the babe’s father, you are,” she accused gently. “Don’t look so shocked. I saw you come on board with him. Everyone did. No one would have let him get away with what he did to that girl if you hadn’t been so rounded.” The woman paused. “He must love you very much to try such a thing. If they would slice him
up for telling the truth, God preserve him if they caught him in such a large fraud.”

“He loves to win,” Christina snapped much too quickly.

The woman laughed at her response. It was a warm, friendly laugh. “Don’t we all. Well, go then. Look out for the papa of your babe. The guards have just been put onto the small boat.” Then more seriously, “They never saw him, you know. I don’t mean to be unkind, but you may be looking for someone who is not there.”

Christina had walked the full circumference of the ship more than twice. She pulled her cloak around more snugly and resumed a similarly circular monologue she had been having with herself. Adrien was the most resourceful person she knew. He was safe. He was fine. He’d turn up, right there on the boat, at any moment. She must have really believed this, for she kept staring out to sea.

The boat with the French guard disappeared in the distance. The small ship sailed on. Faster than any swimmer could have gone. Christina’s cheeks began to sting, the cold whipping against their wetness. When had she begun to cry? She didn’t know. But tears were running down her otherwise stoic face. He’d swum back to France, she was telling herself, in a very stealthy manner—

“You’re not going to make me chase you halfway around the boat again, are you? I’m going to freeze to death if I can’t go inside somewhere.”

She turned. And there he stood. Soaking wet, minus his boots and heavy coat. But alive.

She ran into his arms, clasping him, laughing, crying. He was freezing cold and salty wet. But she hugged him and squeezed him over and over just to know he was there.

“Where have you been?” she was saying. “You need a doctor!” She touched the gash down the side of his face. It had stopped bleeding, perhaps from the extreme cold. He was ice. “We have to get you warm.”

He smiled, despite the cold, the wound, his lack of dry clothes on a winter day. “I’m much warmer already.” He tried to pull her back up against him.

But instead, she tugged at him. “You come with me.”

She led him back to the captain’s cabin, not knowing what the captain would think of her extending his hospitality. But there was no other place to take him. There was a small stove in the cabin. There were blankets. Perhaps she could even requisition some of the captain’s clothes.

Adrien sneezed as they came in. A shiver ran over him. His body twitched from it. He seemed to have to consciously make himself relax. He sat on the berth, lifting her little bundle of clothes there. “These are the captain’s quarters, aren’t they?” Then another chill hit, running through him so severely it made his teeth chatter.