Pirates (34 page)

Beedle waved to the crewmen of the
Northumberland
, and one sporting fellow waved back. “Duncan will have my hide for saying it, but I don’t care,” he said, without looking
at her. “I’m glad you were close at hand today, Mistress Rourke. Your husband had need of you, though only God knows whether he’ll ever admit it or not.”

“Thank you,” Phoebe replied. “I expect, when Mr. Rourke recovers, he’ll lecture me until I’m ready to cover my ears with both hands and jump overboard. He was not, to put it plainly, pleased to find me on board the
Francesca
, today of all days.” She paused, truly aware, for the first time since the action had begun, of her own weariness. “Now, I must go and sit with my husband,” she said.

“He’d prefer it, I think, if you’d lie down,” Beedle said kindly. “I’ll find you a place to rest and come for you straightaway if the captain needs you.”

She thought, as she did every day, every hour, every minute, of their child. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll rest. Thank you again, Mr. Beedle.”

The plain man blushed and offered his arm.

Phillippa and Margaret, Old Woman and all the servants were waiting on the beach with muskets and whatever other weapons they’d been able to find, as the
Northumberland
sailed ponderously into port. When the vessel was near enough that they could recognize Phoebe and Lucas and Beedle at the rail, they lowered their guns and simply waited.

Phoebe came ashore in the one remaining lifeboat, escorted by Lucas and the elderly surgeon, Dr. Evan Mars, who had been on his way to England to stand trial on charges of treason. He had been in the pay of General Washington himself, until his capture.

Slumped between Phoebe and the doctor, rummy with fever, was Duncan.

Margaret Rourke did not wait for the rowboat to reach the shore; she waded out to meet it. “Where is John?” she asked, her gaze moving from her firstborn son to her second, and lingering on the latter even as she addressed the former. “Tell me, Lucas.”

“Father is dead,” Lucas said quietly. Phoebe’s heart went out to him, and to Margaret, whose face showed that she had
known the truth before she had asked. “It was his heart.”

Margaret gripped the side of the boat, standing waistdeep in the surf, her dress floating gauzily around her. She stared at Duncan for a long time, then turned her gaze on Phoebe. “Will he recover?”

“I don’t know,” Phoebe replied in all honesty, wishing again, as they all made their way toward the house, Lucas and the surgeon all but carrying Duncan between them, that she’d read the end of that damnable biography before she left the twentieth century.

Duncan was taken to the master bedroom, where Phoebe and Old Woman stripped him down and bathed his scalding flesh in cool water. He was in a waking stupor and wholly uncooperative during the process, writhing and twisting about, singing snatches of bawdy songs, calling out orders to a phantom crew.

“Let me get Simone to help,” Old Woman said, watching Phoebe. “You look near to collapsing yourself.”

“Simone is back?” Phoebe asked, surprised and somehow troubled by the news. “When did this happen?”

“She showed up two nights ago. Said she came down from Queen’s Town. Now, you don’t bother Old Woman with no more questions. You just go and put your feet up.”

Phoebe didn’t want to be too far from Duncan, but she
had
been under a considerable strain lately, and she was tired. Too, the news of Simone’s return had upset her, in some vague, indefinable way. She laid protective hands over her stomach. “Something is wrong,” she mused.

“A whole lot is wrong,” Old Woman amplified. Then she covered Duncan tenderly with a linen sheet and crossed to the doorway. “Mr. Alex, he ready to put a gun to his head. Miss Phillippa, she so torn up about her papa being gone, I don’t know how we’ll put her back together. Mr. Lucas and Mistress Margaret, well, they just brokenhearted. It’s a sad place, this house.”

“Yes,” Phoebe agreed, but she was still thinking about Simone and wondering why she had returned to Paradise Island.

*   *   *

The next day, Duncan’s fever was down, and his fits of delirium gave way to a profound, healing sleep. The day after that, John Rourke was buried on a hilltop overlooking the sea, with a clergyman, one of the prisoners from the
Northumberland
, to perform the ceremony. Like Dr. Mars, Lucas, and the others, the Reverend Franks had been a prisoner. Franks was accused of preaching sedition and readily confessed his guilt.

Phoebe attended the funeral, and so did Duncan, although he could barely stand. The
Northumberland
was taken out onto the open sea, though still within plain view of the mourners on the island, there to be set ablaze with torches. She made a fitting tribute, Phoebe thought as she stood watching the ship burn, for John Rourke, the gentle Viking. Those who had sailed the craft on her brief and final voyage were returning to shore in small boats.

Alex was the first to turn away and hobbled slowly down the hill on his crutch, brushing off the help Beedle attempted to lend with a motion of his hand. Phoebe glanced up at Duncan’s face, just then, and saw that he was not looking at the magnificent fire, or pondering his father’s fresh grave. He was watching Alex.

“Will you join us?” Duncan asked of Lucas, later that night, when he and Beedle and several other members of the crew had gathered in his study. Alex was notably absent.

Lucas sighed. His face was shadowed with grief, but he was sturdy of mind and bone and spirit, and he was mending in spite of himself. “Join you?” he echoed. “But you have no ship, Brother. Of course, you might have refitted the
Northumberland
for your own use, if you hadn’t been so eager to provide a spectacle for us all.”

Duncan took a sip from the snifter of brandy he’d poured for himself, taking care to avoid Phoebe’s gaze. He was completely aware of her, nonetheless, standing near the fireplace, watching him with her arms folded and that devious little mind of hers spinning like the blades of a windmill. “That cumbersome old tub? It would be easier to maneuver
a whale’s carcass. Besides, the British would have known her at a glance for one of their own.” He took another swallow of brandy, making sure Phoebe knew he’d enjoyed it. “It’s true that we’re in want of a ship, and we’ll have one.”

“How?” Lucas asked with pointed reason, raising both eyebrows. Duncan had forgotten how irritating his elder brother could be when he got bogged down in details.

“Well, hell,” Duncan said, exasperated, “we’ll steal one. Did you think I was going to row into the harbor at Charles Town and put in an order for a fleet clipper, specially designed for piracy and high treason?”

Lucas got to his feet. “I won’t be a party to thievery.”

Duncan uttered a long-suffering sigh. “Sit down,” he replied. “And leave the moralizing to our good and subversive friend, the Reverend Franks.” He paused to give that man a nod of polite acknowledgment. “What is your decision, Lucas?”

The elder Rourke son shoved the fingers of one hand through his dark hair. “Good God, Duncan, we buried our father not six hours past, and you’re talking of stealing ships!”

“I will do my mourning privately,” Duncan said, in a moderate voice that contained, nevertheless, a warning. “The war, I fear, will go right on as if nothing had happened. I intend to fight until we fall or they do. Now, Lucas—on which side shall you stand?”

Lucas hesitated. For a beat too long.

Duncan leaned forward in his chair, setting the brandy aside with a thump. “Can it be?” he breathed. “Can you really be so thick, Lucas, as to hold to your Tory beliefs after they took your land, threw you aboard a prison ship without a trial, and killed your father?”

Lucas was breathing deeply, rapidly. He’d gone pale, and his flesh glistened with sweat, but Duncan knew his brother well—despite the outward signs of it, Lucas was not afraid. He was angry. “Those things were unfair,” he bit out, meeting Duncan’s gaze squarely. “But they are to be expected,
when one member of the family is a wanted man, seeking to overthrow a just government!”

“
A just government?
” Duncan rasped. “You think it is
just
to arrest an old man for the sins of his son? God, Lucas, if you truly believe that sanctimonious rot, then I fear for us all.”

“Damn you,” Lucas cried, on his feet again. “Who shall I blame for the death of my father—the King, for wanting to enforce his laws? Or you, Duncan, for breaking them with such dedication?”

A charged silence settled over the room, smothering all but the smallest sounds.

In the end, it was Margaret Rourke who spoke next, from the doorway of the study.

“You will both hold your tongues,” she said. She was slender and fragile in her widow’s weeds, her flawless skin white with grief and the strain of bearing it with dignity. “Duncan, you claim to love liberty, but adventure is your true mistress, and you would risk anything for it, including the freedom you profess to cherish. You might indeed have become a pirate if you hadn’t had a cause to take up. And you, Lucas, have said a thing many men would be loath to forgive, even in a beloved brother.”

Lucas’s broad shoulders slumped a little, as though his mother had struck him. Duncan was doing his share of squirming as well, but inwardly, and he hid it well.

“Do you think,” Duncan persisted evenly, his gaze fixed, scalding, on his brother, “that Father died because of me?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas answered. Then, without looking at anyone else, including Duncan, he strode out of the room.

There was no more talk of stealing ships that night.

Phillippa was huddled on the end of a stone bench, in an isolated corner of the garden, weeping softly. Alex watched, from a little distance, wanting to console her, not knowing how. Loathing himself for his helplessness.

She must have heard something or sensed his presence, for even though he kept to the shadows, she raised her head, sniffled, and said his name.

He came toward her, his gait graceless and slow, as always, because of the crutch and the small, slippery stones and broken shells that made up the garden walk. The effort to remain upright, and not humiliate himself by collapsing at her feet, raised perspiration on his upper lip.

“Sit with me for a little while?” It was a plea, not a command. She patted the bench.

Alex made no move toward her. “Your father was a good man,” he said. It was the best he could manage, under the circumstances. The world was a black place to him, treacherous and unjust, fraught with ugliness and pain. In point of fact, he envied John Rourke for escaping it.

Phillippa sniffled, her face aglow with moonlight. Even with her eyes red-rimmed and her nose swollen from crying, she was painfully pretty, a lily blooming in a landscape of waste and rubble. “Yes,” she said softly. “Like you.”

Alex flinched inwardly, as if she’d pierced him with a lance. “No,” he argued brokenly. “John was nothing like me. What will you do now, Phillippa?”

“Do?” She widened her gray eyes, and he saw that the thick, dark lashes surrounding them were spiky with tears. “I’ll cry a great deal, I should think, for some time. I’ll always miss Father, and I expect it will hurt when I think of him, at least for a while. But of course I shall go on. That, after all, is what he would want.”

Several awkward moments passed before Alex was able to speak. Here was a mere girl, delicate and fragile, and yet she had more courage than he’d ever possessed, even in his best days. He felt a bittersweet yearning whenever he saw Phillippa, or merely thought of her, but in point of fact he wasn’t fit to speak her name.

He stood in the darkness, his hand trembling where he grasped that cursed crutch. He had fallen in love with Phillippa, during some unguarded moment after her arrival on Paradise Island, and he knew that she cared for him as well. The idea of taking Phillippa to wife, of lying with her every night, consumed him, filled him with an unholy desire.

But he was a cripple. To wed such a woman would be a
travesty on his part; she deserved a man who could protect her, provide for her, teach her pleasure …

“Alex?” Phillippa said gently. “I love you.”

He turned his back on her, turned his back on all hope of finding his way again. And he told himself it was for her sake.

She caught up to him before he’d gained the French doors leading in from that part of the garden and slipped her arms around his waist from behind. In another woman, the act would have been brazen, but it was not so with Phillippa. The gesture was one of sweet innocence, even though the reaction it stirred in him was downright contemptible.

“Why are you afraid?” she asked, resting her cheek against his spine and holding him fast. “I know that you love me.”

He did not have the heart, or the willpower, to break out of her embrace. He felt consoled, truly and deeply, for the first time since that musket ball had shattered his knee. His withered soul drank of her kindness and was soothed, temporarily at least. “Yes,” he admitted at length, his voice broken and gruff. “Yes, Phillippa, I love you. Too much to doom you to a lifetime of sorrow and pity.”

She moved, standing in front of him now, but still holding him fast in her arms. If he had ever doubted his ability to respond to a woman, and of course he had, he could no longer do so. The evidence of his desire was embarrassingly prominent.

“Sorrow and pity?” Phillippa echoed. “All the sorrow is yours, Alex Maxwell, and so is the pity. You’re the only one around here who feels sorry for you—the rest of us just want to shake you until your teeth rattle.”

He let the crutch clatter to the ground and gripped both her shoulders, hard. “Listen to me,” he seethed, too angry now, too frustrated, to think of propriety or of a young girl’s sensibilities. “I am a freak. If we married, and I took you to my bed—” Alex realized what he was saying and abruptly stopped speaking.

There was an unsettling twinkle in Phillippa’s eyes. “Do you think I don’t know what men and women do together?”
she asked. “I grew up on a plantation, Alex. We raised horses and cattle, sheep and pigs.”