Mariah's Prize (7 page)

“I can’t deny that there’s been talk.

My own mother, for one. ” She tried to smile.

“But I have the eighty-two men in the Revenge’s company to speak in my defense, and their women with them.”

In silent agreement they turned from the marketplace to the smaller streets that led to the water, where they would walk alone. Twilight had deepened into night, the shadows black between the locked warehouses. With a skittering of gravel two cats chased across their path, and from a tavern’s summer kitchen rose the smell of frying bacon.

Mariah looked at the stars overhead, seeking and finding the North Star. “Two nights from now, Captain Sparhawk, and that will be your guiding light,” she said softly.

“I’ll pray you come back safe.” “Pray I come back with a string of prizes behind me, or none of this will matter.”

She wanted to say that he could come back a pauper and it still wouldn’t matter to her. She wanted to say that and a hundred other things before he left, before she lost her courage.

But the two men who lunged at them from the shadows wouldn’t let her.

“Gabriel!” she screamed as the shorter man grabbed her by the waist and pulled her tight against his chest. Before she could scream again he stuffed a dirty rag into her mouth, and when her hands flew up to pull it away he grabbed them by the wrists, wrenching them behind her waist.

Struggling with pain and fear, she tried to twist around to see Gabriel and the second man. In that fraction of a second she saw two figures rolling over and over in the street, the glint of moonlight on the long blade of a sailor’s knife, before her face was thrust against a rough brick wall. His breath sour on the back of her neck, the man trapped her beneath his body as he dug his hand into her pocket, groping for the few coins she carried there.

Twelve shillings, she thought wildly. She and Gabriel would be killed for twelve shillings and her household keys. The man grunted with satisfaction as he stuffed the coins into his pocket, then slid his hand up the front of her bodice. She shuddered and tried to struggle free as his fingers thrust into her neckline beneath her shift to grope the bare skin of her breast.

She heard Gabriel swear behind her. The man who held her was suddenly gone, torn away so abruptly that she staggered backward from the wall.

She heard him grunt again, this time with surprise and pain, and then the scraping of his pewter buttons as his body struck the paving stones.

“Are you unharmed, poppet?” demanded Gabriel as he gathered her into his arms.

She was shaking, but he made her feel safe. She closed her eyes, listening to the rapid beat of his heart beneath her ear.

“Jesus, Mariah, if they hurt you” — “Nay, I’m fine.” He had called her Mariah. When he thought she’d been hurt, he’d called her by her name instead of Miss West, and though she told herself she was a fool, it comforted her even more than his arms around her shoulders. She forced herself to stand away from him, modestly tugging her bodice back in place. Her smile was as shaky as her legs.

“I swear to it, Gabriel. I’m fine.”

In the moonlight he searched her face, his untied hair flopping disheveled around his face. Gently he touched his fingers to the bruise already swelling along her cheek from where she’d struck the bricks, and she winced.

“That’s not fine.”

“It’s well enough.” She’d forgotten what it was like to stand this near to him, or maybe she’d only tried to forget. She took a deep breath that was more a shuddering sigh.

“Are they gone now?”

“Nay, but they won’t bother us.” Hoping that she wasn’t going to faint without his support, Gabriel returned to the still bodies of the two men in the street. Roughly he rolled the first one over onto his back, and Mariah gasped at the dark splotch of blood that covered the man’s chest. His lifeless hand fell open and his knife clattered to the street.

“Clumsy fool,” said Gabriel, shrugging.

“Falling on his own knife like that.”

Uneasily Mariah looked from the dead man to Gabriel. For the first time she noticed the bloodstains on his shirt, blood that had clearly not come from any wounds of his own. Though her own experience with knives and fighting was nonexistent, she doubted the man had been quite as clumsy as Gabriel wanted her to believe.

Gabriel saw the skepticism mingled with the uncertainty in her eyes.

“Mind why you hired me. Miss West,” he said harshly,

angry with himself.

“There’s only a scrap of paper from the governor between me being praised as a patriotic man and me being hung for a pirate. You didn’t want an angel, and you didn’t get one. Be thankful for what you got instead, else we’d both be lying dead instead of them.”

“They’re dead?”

“Can’t be much more dead, by my lights.”

Mariah stared at the two bodies. She tried to think of it the way he did, that they’d have killed her if they’d had the chance, but she couldn’t. The comfort she’d found from Gabriel seemed to fade away, and the summer night seemed suddenly chilly.

“We should go find the watch.” She rubbed her hands along the goose bumps on her bare forearms.

“We’ll have to tell them what happened.” “What, and miss our sailing on account of swearing this and that before a magistrate? Nay, we’ll just let the watchman find the pair of ‘em on his own, and mark it down that they killed one another.”

Gabriel squatted down beside the second body and turned the man’s slack jaw up toward the moonlight. Gabriel frowned, striving to place the face in memories of the past. How long had it been? Five, six years, since he’d last crossed. paths—and swords—with Deveaux and his men?

He bent closer, lifting the crudely carved bone crucifix that hung from a thong around the man’s neck. Enough to mark him as a Papist, no Newport man, but not enough to satisfy Gabriel. With’both hands he tore the man’s shirt open, ignoring the blood that still seeped from the jagged knife wound.

“Gabriel?” Mariah couldn’t keep the quaver from her voice. She didn’t know what he was doing, but she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know, either.

“If you don’t want to meet with a watchman”

“Hush, lass, I’m just” -He stopped abmptly when he saw the neat black fleur-delis tattooed over the man’s still heart, the brand Deveaux demanded from all his men. Only two weeks had passed since he’d learned of the new war, only two weeks since he’d decided to go back to sea to fight again. Yet already Deveaux knew, and now, in turn, so did he. Slowly he stood, wiping the blood from his fingers onto his handkerchief.

“Gabriel?” In the moonlight it was impossible for Marian to read his expression.

“Captain Sparhawk?”

He had almost forgotten her. She looked pathetically small there in the dark street, small and vulnerable. Being her savior didn’t sit comfortably with him. That wasn’t what he wanted from her. He told himself he was accustomed to women who knew how to take care of themselves, trying to overlook how he’d been the one who’d put her at risk in the first place. Fleetingly he regretted the plans he’d put in motion, then angrily thrust his guilt aside.

She smiled uncertainly, and he felt something twist deep inside. Hell, when would he be able to look at her and stop thinking of Catherine?

“Come along,” he said gruffly, holding his hand out to her.

“It’s high time I saw you home.”

Furiously Mariah swept the ashes from the kitchen fireplace, soot swirling around her skirts. No matter how many times she’d explained to Jenny how to lay a proper cooking fire, her sister still put far too much wood on the flames too soon, and after last night’s effort they were all fortunate the house hadn’t burned along with the chicken, charred black on the outside and bloody raw within. Here it was the day before the Revenge sailed, with a thousand little things left for her to do, yet first she must clean up the mess that Jenny had made.

She glanced around at the whitewashed walls, smudged black from the smoke, and shook her head. She’d sent Jenny to fetch water to scrub them down, but knowing her sister’s doleful housewifery, by now Jenny had likely fallen into the well.

“Miss West?”

The broom in her hands, Mariah turned, brushing her hair from her forehead and unconsciously streaking her face with soot. Her eyes widened when she saw the beautifully dressed woman waiting at the open kitchen door.

“Oh, Madame Lambert, forgive me for not hearing you!” she began, anxiously wiping her hands on her apron. The mantua maker had always made her uncomfortable, looking down her long nose at Mariah as the dark, difficult sister, the one who cared more about what ribbons cost than how they looked. She’d rather face a dozen angry tradesmen than one Madame Lambert.

“I thought our accounts had been settled.”

“They have. Miss West, and I thank you for your patronage.” She dipped her white-powdered, head graciously and smiled, the first real smile Mariah could remember receiving from her. She stepped into the kitchen, lifting her chintz skirts clear of ashes. She clapped her hands in their black net mitts, and one of her seamstresses followed, a bundle wrapped in muslin draped gingerly across her outstretched arms.

“We’ve come, you see, with a gift to deliver.”

She took the bundle from her assistant and with a flourish swept away the muslin. Mariah caught her breath, for in the woman’s arms was the most beautiful gown she’d ever seen, the pale pink silk, brocaded with a pattern of darker pink carnations, shimmering against the sooty walls. Below the deep, square neckline the stomacher was embroidered with more carnations to match, and attached to each of the elbow-length pleated cuffs were deep openwork flounces of linen so fine as to be nearly transparent.

“Oh, madame, what perfection!” With a thump Jenny let the bucketful of water drop onto the stone doorstep and rushed inside, her eyes bright with covetous appreciation for the gown.

“Oh, I can’t wait for Elisha to see me in this!”

With a hiss Madame Lambert lifted the silk out of the reach of Jenny’s wet hands.

“No, no. Miss West, this color would be wrong for you.

Quite wrong. But that is of no matter, for the gown is for your sister, not for you. “

Mariah shook her head.

“You’re mistaken. I would never have ordered such a gown.” “That is what the gentleman said, too. The silk, the fashion—his choices for you, and wise ones, too. He has an eye for beauty, that one.” Madame Lambert plucked at one of the sleeves, her smile smug. “It is a gift. Miss West, a gift to you from Captain Sparhawk. The letter. Amity.”

With a tiny bob of a curtsey, the seamstress handed the folded sheet to Mariah. Carefully Mariah slid her finger beneath the wax seal, wishing she did not have to read the message before the others.

My Brave Mariah, Surely you will wish yr. Captain well before he sails in yr. Name against France. Dine with me this Night at my home, & tho’ yr. Beauty like Lilies needs no Gilding, accept this my poor Gift & wear it to Honor me.

Yr. Devot’d Capt.

G.

S.

“It’s from your captain, isn’t it, Mariah?” asked Jenny, stretching as she tried to read over Mariah’s shoulder.

“He’s the only gentleman in Newport who’d do such a grand thing for a lady. Oh, ” Riah, to think you’ve caught his eye! “

“I can’t accept it.” Mariah stared at the bold, elegant handwriting.

He thought she was brave, and he thought she was beautiful, and again he’d called her Mariah. His brave Mariah. Likely he meant nothing by it, of course, only conventional gallantry. But after last night, she was painfully aware of how dangerous his life was going to be, and she wanted to believe that gallantry. Tonight might well be the last chance she’d have to be with him alone.

“If you’ll but have us fit the gown. Miss West,” coaxed Madame Lambert, stroking the silk with the side of her hand, “then you shall realize how wise the captain’s choice is. Though of course every stitch was made with you alone in mind. Miss West. Such a lovely gown for a lady like yourself!”

But lovely or not, Mariah knew a gown like this was a wildly inappropriate gift for any gentleman to give to a lady he respected, too personal and costly, equally as inappropriate as his invitation.

Her reputation had survived one visit to Crescent Hill, but now this supper, at his bidding-No, Madame Lambert would see to it that all of Newport knew.

She gazed longingly at the gown. She’d never had anything half as fine, and he’d been right, the color would suit her. But if she accepted it. “No,” she said with’a firmness that surprised herself.

“I told him before I couldn’t dine with him at his house, and I can’t keep the gown. You must take it away, madame.”

The older woman shook her head so sharply that a fine dusting of white powder fell from her hair to the dark lute string shoulders of her pelisse. “No, Miss West, the gown is yours, and I cannot take it back without risking Captain

Sparhawk’s anger,” she said firmly. She motioned for Amity to lay the muslin wrapper on the kitchen table and then very carefully spread the gown on top of it.

“Good day, ladies.”

Mariah stared at the gown on the table.

“I can’t keep it, and I can’t go to his house for supper,” she said wretchedly.

“I told him when he’d asked me before that I couldn’t. To do so would be madness.”

“To do so would be heaven, ” Riah! ” declared Jenny.

“All along you’ve sworn there’s nothing between you and Captain Sparhawk save boring counting house matters. If that’s true, then why are you so frightened of him?”

“I’m not frightened of him!”

“Then you’re frightened of yourself, and that’s worse.” She smiled indulgently, delighted for once to know more than Mariah. “What harm could come of it? All you do is work, ” Riah. Even when you were with Daniel O’Bieme, the pair of you were as serious as old sticks. “

“That’s not fair. Jenny,” said Mariah resentfully.

“Well, it’s true enough, and I’ll wager that Captain Sparhawk wouldn’t be an old stick with any lady. If you don’t wish to go to his house—and even I’ll grant that that might be seen as passing bold—then meet him elsewhere for supper, the way you said. He is sailing our ship, ” Riah. He wouldn’t dare dishonor you. Though he might call you a blind ninny for walking into walls. I vow you look like you’ve been brawling in a tavern. “