Pirates (39 page)

Duncan smiled. He hadn’t learned to speak twentieth-century English, in all its varieties—Snowball called it “lingo”—but he could usually understand it. “Sure,” he said and set out for the cellar without asking for directions. He’d stored wine in that same small chamber in his time, along with contraband rum.

“Thanks, man,” Snowball said.

At the top of the cellar stairs, Duncan flipped the light switch—one of the many modern inventions he had come to appreciate—but nothing happened. He hesitated, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, and then he saw a strange, faint glow in the passageway, and heard a bell chime.

The elevator. For a moment, his heartbeat quickened, but then he remembered: The contraptions were commonplace in the 1990s. Every building of any size had one, including this seedy hotel.

He went down the steps, opened the door to the storage room, and by the glow of the lingering elevator, found the half case of Grand Marnier Snowball had asked for. Lifting the box, Duncan started back toward the stairs, then stopped, grinning. The elevator was still there, with its doors open, waiting. Why walk?

Duncan stepped into the cubicle, congratulating himself on his understanding of modern devices, pushed the button for the lobby, and watched as the doors slipped shut. The machine glided upward and stopped, and Duncan stepped out, yawning a little. He’d have a drink, talk with Snowball
for a while, and then go back upstairs, to lie beside Phoebe and wait for morning. If his wife awakened in a malleable mood, he would make love to her …

He had stepped out of the elevator, and heard the doors whisper closed behind him, before he realized what had happened.

The lobby was no longer a lobby. It was an empty, moonwashed room, littered with broken statuary, shining crystal splinters from the fallen chandelier, and bits of molded plaster from the ceiling.

Duncan whirled, the crate of brown bottles still in his arms, and found the elevator gone. The wall was smooth and utterly bare, except for a hook and a dangling wire that had once held a painting in place.

He lowered the liquor to the floor, his heart pounding in his ears, his eyes burning. Then, knowing that he was back in 1780, without Phoebe, he flung himself at the place where the elevator had been and screamed her name.

Phoebe sat straight up in her bed, wrenched from the depths of a sound sleep as surely as if a fist had grasped her brain and jerked her awake. She was drenched in perspiration, her nightgown clinging to her skin, and the sound of her own name echoed in her ears, like the shriek of a banshee.

“Duncan?” She fumbled for the switch on the bedside lamp, turned it, and the glow verified what she had already known: Her husband wasn’t there. “Duncan!”

He was downstairs, she told herself, as the terrible urgency that had awakened her subsided into despair. Or walking on the beach, or reading in the lobby …

The assurances didn’t help. Phoebe got out of bed, peeled off her cotton nightgown, found one of the sweat suits she’d sent away for instead of maternity clothes, and got dressed, fumbling all the while.

She kept murmuring Duncan’s name, over and over again, like a crazy woman repeating a litany, but she didn’t care how she sounded, didn’t try to stop herself. Her gut told her
what her mind wanted to deny: that something awful and profound had happened.

Their room was on the second floor, and Phoebe didn’t bother summoning the elevator. She dashed down the stairs, barefooted, hair sticking out all over her head, and raced into the cocktail lounge.

Snowball was there, and he looked up expectantly when Phoebe slid into the room like a deer on ice. “Phoebe?” he said, narrowing his eyes for a moment.

“Where’s Duncan?” Phoebe demanded breathlessly. She knew the answer, even then, but she wasn’t willing to face it yet, wanted to hear somebody deny what she was thinking.

Snowball rounded the bar, took Phoebe’s arm and ushered her to a chair. “I sent him downstairs for something,” he said. “He must have got to talkin’ to somebody. Here, you sit tight, and I’ll get you a nice glass of milk.”

Phoebe stood up, then sat down again. She was out of breath, and her knees were trembling so badly that she was afraid she’d fall. She began to cry, softly at first, and then harder, and then in great, hysterical wails.

Snowball patted Phoebe’s back and murmured that everything would be all right, and she laid her head down on her folded arms and sobbed.

“You got to stop that,” the bartender said. “It ain’t good for you. You want me to call a doctor before I go and find that damn fool husband of yours?”

Phoebe raised her head and hiccoughed. “He’s gone,” she said.

“What you mean, ‘he’s gone’?” Snowball demanded, but he was beginning to sound worried. “I just saw the man a few minutes ago! Why, he’ll probably walk through that door in a second or two. When he does, how you goin’ to explain carryin’ on like this?”

She pretended to be calm and waited, but Duncan did not return. By dawn, Snowball and the desk clerk and the island police knew what Phoebe had realized at the outset.

Duncan Rourke had vanished like a memory made of smoke.

W
here the hell have you been?” Alex demanded, whitefaced with annoyance and the residual pain of his knee injury, when he entered the ruins of the study to find Duncan there, pouring a drink. To spare his family and friends as much of the shock as necessary, Duncan had hidden the case of Grand Marnier first, then gone to the bedchamber, there to exchange his twentieth-century garb for breeches, boots, and a loose linen shirt. He’d barely been able to tolerate the place even long enough to change his clothes, knowing that Phoebe was gone, that he might never see her again.

The mere prospect was all but unbearable; the reality, day upon day, night upon night, would be pure torture.

“How long was I away?” Duncan countered grimly, calling upon all his inner resources, marshaling his thoughts into a semblance of order. As much as he wanted to give in to despair, he did not have that luxury. There was a war to win, and people depended upon him.

He took in the restored Alex while he awaited an answer. His friend sported no crutch, figurative or otherwise, though he had a pronounced limp. A pistol stuck into his belt, as of
old, and his hair was brushed and tied back in a remarkably tidy fashion. His skin was sun-browned.

The question took Alex visibly aback, as it should have done. “Good Lord,” he said finally, “I’d have thought you’d know that. It’s been weeks since you vanished into thin air, like some bloody ghost! Lucas and I have been over every inch of the island, searching for any sign of either you or Phoebe. What the
devil
has been going on in this place?”

Duncan felt hollow and raw on the inside, and bruised on the outside. Being dragged down a rocky road behind a horse would surely have hurt less than being parted from his wife this way. And he did not look forward to telling the tale.

He took a fiery sip of brandy and collapsed into the chair behind his desk before replying. “You’d better get yourself a drink, my friend, and take a seat. It is a long and tangled story, full of twists and turns.”

Alex stared at Duncan in curious irritation while taking his advice. When he had a cup in his hand and had planted himself on a hassock, he lifted an eyebrow and muttered, “Well, get on with it.”

Duncan did not expect to be believed. Nonetheless, he began with the night of Phoebe’s arrival—Alex himself had been present for that event, so there was a chance that he might accept at least some of the account, incredible as it was—and then described more recent experiences. Starting with his own elevator journey to the future.

Doggedly, Duncan related the important things and had to keep clearing his throat when he described the circumstances of his final separation from Phoebe. By that point, he did not care whether Alex believed him or not.

“Great Scot,” Alex marveled when it had ended, and Duncan sat, broken, his head resting in one hand and his cup empty. “Mice as big as men? Carriages with no need for horses to draw them? Rocket ships capable of reaching the moon? Why, five minutes in the place would drive a normal man mad, from the sounds of it!”

Duncan sighed and then gave his friend a level look. “So you think me mad?”

“I would think any other man mad, who told such a tale,” Alex allowed. “Since I know you to be damnably sane, I can only assume you are telling the truth.” His brows drew together in a deep frown as he considered further ramifications of the situation. “If such a thing can happen, we can claim to understand little or nothing of the world and its ways.” He paused and gazed earnestly at Duncan for a long time before asking, “How will you carry on, without Phoebe?”

“I don’t know,” Duncan replied. He yearned for more brandy, indeed, for enough to render himself insensible, but that was a comfort reserved for other men, who had the leisure for truly exquisite suffering. He scanned the room with an expression of wry accusation, noticing the damaged walls and ceilings. His desk and chair were practically the only things still standing. “What have you and Lucas and the others been doing while I was away?”

Alex’s neck turned crimson and he averted his eyes for a moment, indicating to Duncan that his friend had been occupied with some private matter. Phillippa, for instance. It was at once amazing and heartening, the change in Alex, though Duncan was too distracted to really appreciate the true scope of this resurrection.

“I’ve married your sister, for one thing,” Alex said, meeting Duncan’s eyes.

Duncan knew his smile was wan, perhaps even grim, but his pleasure in the news was genuine. “Congratulations,” he said. “If I’d known the baggage could work so miraculous a transformation as this, I’d have brought her to Paradise long ago.”

Alex’s flush deepened and then slowly subsided. Apparently, all was well with the bride and groom, even though the outside world stood in shambles around them. It was a thought Duncan did not care to pursue too far.

“We have not been idle,” Alex hurried to add. “Lucas and Beedle and the rest of us, I mean. We’ve—er—appropriated Mornault’s ship. She’s a fine craft, and only wanted cleaning up, really. Lucas has seen to getting her fitted out and ready to serve our purposes.”

“Mornault and the others?” Duncan asked. “What have you done with them? Especially, the girl, Simone?”

Alex stood, limped over to the desk and refilled his glass. “Mornault and his men are still in the stockade,” he said, and a faint hesitation, a note of reluctance, made Duncan brace himself for the rest of the story. “The girl is dead,” he finished.

Duncan felt his stomach roll. “Dead?”

“We couldn’t put her in with Mornault and that lot, of course,” Alex said, and his bleak tone indicated that he was recalling, all too vividly, the details of Simone’s death. “She came here, and slept in her old room, and was given her usual tasks to do. She got a length of rope from somewhere and hanged herself from one of the rafters in the washroom. It was Phillippa who found her.”

Simone—beautiful, troubled Simone, dead at such a young age. The knowledge burned itself into Duncan’s being like a spattering of acid. “My God,” he said and was silent for a while, absorbing and assimilating this fresh sorrow, making it part of him, like so many others before it. “And my mother?” he asked, at length. “How fares that dear and formidable woman?”

“Mistress Rourke is as well as can be expected,” Alex replied, “considering the events of recent weeks. She misses your father, and like the rest of us, she’s been very worried about your and Phoebe’s disappearance. How are you going to explain this to them?”

Duncan sighed. Telling Alex what had happened was one thing, but describing elevators and what he knew of the mysteries of time to the others was more of a challenge than Duncan felt ready to undertake. “One day,” he replied, after some consideration, “I shall, of course, have to tell them the truth. In the meantime, I will simply refuse to say anything. I expect your cooperation in this, Alex.”

Alex looked skeptical—which was nothing, of course, in comparison to the way his family and his officers would react to so outlandish a tale. “I don’t think they’ll accept it,” he said. “However, their relief that you have returned,
albeit without your lovely wife, will probably occupy them for a time. What do you want to do now?”

“Die,” Duncan answered, facing a lifetime without Phoebe. God’s blood, but the years ahead looked insufferably dull, as well as lonely beyond his ability to bear. “I don’t suppose Fate will be quite so merciful, though.”

“Probably not,” Alex agreed. “Come—it is time for Lazarus to emerge, trailing his burial clothes, from the tomb. You must show yourself, Duncan, put an end to your share of the distress that’s been plaguing this household, and tell the rest of us what to do next.”

Duncan nodded, dreading the prospect, and hauled himself out of the chair and onto his feet. He spread his hands and made an attempt at a grin.

“Behold,” he said, “as your unlikely Lazarus steps, bedazzled and blinking, into the light.”

Phoebe’s hysteria eventually subsided, leaving a waking stupor in its place. A week passed, and then another, and no trace of Duncan was found anywhere on the island. This did not surprise her, of course, since she knew precisely what had happened to him. She stayed on Paradise Island, living in the same room she and Duncan had shared, waiting and thinking and, often, crying. Sometimes, she sat in the cocktail lounge and talked to Snowball, but that didn’t change the fact that she was alone again, except for her unborn baby. He wasn’t much company yet, of course.

One rainy afternoon, when her money was running low and her mood was even lower, Phoebe stumbled across her copy of Duncan’s biography, lying on a metal table on the screened veranda. Her heart hammered when she recognized the familiar cloth cover.

It was as though the volume had assembled itself out of nothing.

Now, here it was, before her. The end of the story, the answers to the questions she had wondered about. Had Duncan lived a long life, or been caught and hanged by the British? Had her visit to the past altered history, and would
those changes, if any, be reflected in the musty pages of that slim and tattered book?