Seize the Fire (12 page)

He didn't duck through after her. It wasn't possible, unless she climbed up into the single berth to give him room. He waited outside, holding back a smile at her expression of dismay.

She turned around once in the tiny space, a forlorn figure in the drooping hat and ragged jersey. "It's very small."

"It has a porthole," he said optimistically. "Think of the view."

She eyed the grimy, tarnish-green opening in the hull without enthusiasm. "Is your cabin close by?"

He broke the news to her smartly. Stepping forward, he grasped her at the waist and with a suppressed grunt lifted her onto the cot. She was a nice, tempting weight, all muffled in wool. He thought of exploring the shapeless mass to find the figure beneath it, but he didn't. Standing nose to nose with her in the narrow space, he had only to reach behind him to close the door. "My cabin's here."

"Here! It can't be here."

"Why not?"

She looked at him as if he were ready for Bedlam. "I can't stay in here with you," she said in a scandalized voice. "There's nowhere for you to sleep but—" She stopped, and dropped her face from view.

To the top of her hat, he said, "It's only for a night, until we reach Ramsgate. I'm afraid a princess who's slipped her cable must take what comes along."

She clenched her hands, kneading her fingers. "Oh, if only I could have said goodbye to Fish!"

Her voice was quivering. He knew of two ways to deal with weeping women, of which Her Highness was bound to become a prime specimen at any moment. It was too damned cramped to have a proper go at loving her, so in preparation for leaving he took a step backward and ran into the door.

"Did you write the letter?" he asked.

She nodded and snuffled, reaching beneath her jersey and pulling out a packet. The feminine curves of her figure suddenly took shape as the woolen garment sank back into place. She held out the bulky package without looking up.

Sheridan broke it open. She hadn't sealed it any too securely—it was a wonder she hadn't been leaving a trail of rubies and emeralds and gold from here to Wisbeach. He had the urge to shake her till her teeth rattled.

Discarding the idea as undiplomatic at this early stage in their acquaintance, he pulled the letter free. He laid the packet back in her lap, as if he had no more than passing interest in the tangle of pearl earrings, sapphire tiaras, diamond-studded chokers and jeweled rings that lay winking at him from their bed of paper and burlap.

"We sail with the tide," he said. "Before midnight. I'll have to dispatch this letter immediately."

She nodded, hidden by the hat.

"Don't leave the cabin," he ordered.

She hesitated, and then nodded again.

He narrowed his eyes, considering that moment of hesitation. "I know what you're thinking," he said. "You don't go looking for Fish. You don't go on deck. You don't open the door." He took hold of her chin and jerked it up. "Not even if the damned ship's sinking. Do you mark me?"

She looked satisfyingly startled. He pressed his fingers into her cheeks, drawing a little whimper and a quick nod.

"All right," he said. "See that you behave, or I'll burn your royal backside for you."

She cast down her eyes. "I only wanted to say goodbye."

"Well," he said, "feel free. Get up right now and walk back to The Greenland and say it. He's probably still there, hanging around and crying in his beer over going along with your harebrained schemes." He glared into her wide green eyes. "And then come on back, Your Noble Highness. Because you'll find you won't have to share this cabin after all."

Her lip trembled. She stared at him, all misery and sparkle, her dirty, round face still marked by the red imprint of his fingers. He had a moment of queer and terrible weakness, an urge to draw her into his arms and hold her tight against him.

"Christ!" he said, drawing back abruptly. He put his shoulder to the door. "Do what you please, ma'am."

He shut the door behind him with an ill-tempered thump. When he reached the posting station onshore, he was still in a foul mood. Instead of entering, he banged into the tavern next door and slumped in a seat, thinking of what he would do if he went back and found her gone.

The possibility heightened the peculiar hollow feeling in him. He realized that he'd stormed out so fast he'd left the jewels with her—reason enough to feel sick and empty, he thought furiously. And he dared not even post the letters, not while she might turn up tomorrow morning safe in her bedroom at home. That sad old fool Fish Stovall would take her back in a minute—he probably
was
waiting, hoping she'd change her mind, the sentimental dotard. He'd been superb at his task, following Sheridan's instructions to the letter, but there'd been a damned odd note in his voice at the climax of their little scene in the public house.

So let her go
, he thought sullenly. If she was too homesick to leave the bleeding county, she'd be nothing but trouble every step of the way. He should have known she'd go into a funk on him. Wanted to say goodbye, for God's sake. Wretched female; he couldn't bear that kind of maudlin nonsense. And from a princess who intended to start a civil war in her own country, forsooth.

He examined the seal on her letter to the pope. The light steam from a mulled ale was enough to slip it open intact. A quick perusal assured him of the emotional contents, quite specific and satisfactory in their description of Prince Claude Nicolas as a villain of satanic proportions. He resealed it and leaned on the table, considering his own letters, still concealed inside his coat, one to Palmerston and one to the evil Prince Claude. He chewed on his knuckle until it bled.

A pox on her for fouling his plans already. The missives were calculated risks: Sheridan had written them to keep all his options open as long as possible—an old habit and a tactic that had served him well over the years. He'd developed stalling into a fine art during the length of his career.

But there was no point in committing himself until his princess had made up her muddled little mind. He kept the letters in his coat and got roundly drunk, having nothing else to do but spend the last of the money he'd gained by selling the gold chain off her diamond necklace. The rest had gone to pay for passage as far as Ramsgate and to buy the princess from the crimp—a necessary subterfuge to defeat Julia's initial pursuit. The diamond itself was in Mustafa's care, heading toward their rendezvous at Ramsgate by whatever convoluted oriental means of progress Mustafa could contrive.

The thought failed to lift Sheridan's spirits. It was growing dark. He found himself reluctant to return to the ship, and put it off until he realized foggily that he was running out of tide and money. If she went home and he missed his paid passage to Ramsgate, he was well and truly stranded.

The streets were empty as he made his way toward the quay, his pace only a little unsteady. The watch aboard
John Campbell
was preparing to warp the ship down the river on the turning tide. He clambered aboard, feeling drunkenly at home, hearing the soft voices and the creak of rigging in the night, clear and carrying on the water.

He stood by the rail, looking back along the river to the town. The reflections swayed and wavered on the surface. He rubbed his cold cheeks, taking a sobering draft of winter air. Below him, the peace was broken by the muffled notes of a mouth organ, clearly in the hands of a rank amateur of no talent whatsoever. The sour sound died away, and then took up again, mangling a tune that Sheridan finally decided was meant to be "My Lady Greensleeves."

He went below and paused outside his cabin. From behind the door came the pathetically halting bleat of the mouth organ. It didn't deserve to be called music.

He opened the door.

The sound stopped. He waited in the entry a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dark.

"I didn't think you were coming back," she whispered.

Sheridan leaned against the bulkhead. He couldn't see her, only a deeper blackness in the direction of the bunk. "You'll have to get up," he said.

He heard her move. She worked herself off the cot and into the little standing space. Sheridan shoved past her, squeezing onto the bunk. On his knees, he felt along the bulkhead at the foot of the cot until he found the familiar net of a hammock and secured both ends in the darkness above her berth.

He edged himself into the hammock carefully—no easy task in that small space, with the netting slung as it was so close to the deck above. He settled in. The hammock gave under his weight until he had four inches of clearance above his head. He made a mental note to remember that in the morning and pulled a blanket around him.

"All right. You can lie down again." he told her.

At the exploratory touch of her hand, he started, sending the hammock swinging in the confined space. She felt along his arm, outlining the shape and curve of the net. "Oh," she said. "A hammock."

"Hmm."

"Will you be quite comfortable?"

"Oh, quite," he said with heavy irony.

He heard her move into the berth below him. She bumped him and apologized at least seven times. Finally, she settled down. The creak of the deck and the gurgle of water filled the silence. Sheridan crossed his arms and swung gently.

In the berth below, Olympia lay with her shoulders propped against the hard bulkhead. She chewed her finger and stared into the shapeless dark above her. "Sir Sheridan?"

He grunted.

"I didn't go back to see Fish, you know."

He made another uninterested sound

.

She fumbled in the dark at her blankets. "Fish gave me his harmonica. Do you mind if I play it for a little while?"

"Oh, God."

"Just for a few minutes. I'm trying to learn how. Do you mind?"

He moved above her, malting the bulkhead creak. "My ears are plugged. Yowl away."

She propped herself up on her elbows and blew into the instrument. The notes came out quivering and flat, nothing like the sweet, mournful songs that Fish had played to her on rainy days before his fire. But it made her feel closer to him. She tried to find the first note of her favorite melody, attempting to keep the sound soft, working up and down the scale, never hitting anything that sounded remotely right, or even pleasant. She shifted in frustration and tried again, finally locating an off-key set of positions that made a sad parody of Fish's flowing notes. She worked on those, over and over, trying to perfect them.

"Give me the damned thing," Sir Sheridan said. His arm brushed her roughly as he groped downward in the dark.

Olympia withheld the instrument. "Never mind. I won't play anymore."

"Give it to me," he said.

It was a tone she was learning to recognize. Reluctantly, she allowed him to lift the harmonica out of her hand.

He made several sharp, huffing noises, as if he were forcing air through cupped fingers. Out of the blackness above her came a slow rill of notes—up the scale, down again. Olympia stiffened, about to tell him to leave Fish's gift alone and give it back.

Until he began to play.

The soft, sweet melody of "Greensleeves" started simply. It seemed to curl around the cabin and then fill it, embellished by runs and cascades that surpassed anything Fish had ever coaxed from the tiny instrument. Olympia listened in wonder, storing up through the darkness. The music seemed unreal, so unexpected was it in its mastery of the familiar tune, so sure and certain in its variations, like an easy conversation between intimate friends.

He came to an end of "Greensleeves" and began another melody, one she'd never heard before. It had a rhythm that made her want to pat the blanket in time, and hum along with the gliding wail of the notes. He played on without pausing, old tunes sometimes, but oftener there were unfamiliar ones, strange in composition, atonal but lovely, pouring out a plaintive beauty into the winter night.

The haunting songs seemed to come out of nowhere. She could not see him, yet she knew he was there—the hero who'd saved his admiral and his ship, the captain who'd kissed her and caressed her throat with white gloves, the man who'd found music where she'd made nothing but donkey's braying. And it was his own kind of music—uncanny in its combinations and rhythms, compelling and hard to predict.

As she listened to him, she knew that magic was beyond her. She could never learn to play like this. She could not draw such strange, fluid splendor from a piece of metal and reed. Not with years of trying. And what was more, she didn't want to.

She wanted only to listen to him play.

She wanted to listen forever.

They left Ramsgate on the Post Office packet bound for Madeira and Gibraltar. After a fortnight in his company, Olympia stood in awe of the convoluted turn of Captain Sir Sheridan's mind—she could scarcely recognize herself in the chubby adolescent boy she played, far less believe anyone else would, or could possibly trace them through the series of false names and shabby lodgings on the Ramsgate strand.

But they had finally emerged from this threadbare chrysalis as an affluent, widely traveled gentleman and his invalid sister, bound for a sojourn in more salubrious climes. Representing one of those oddities picked up in the rambles of the true world traveler, Mustafa had rejoined them from out of nowhere, to go along as valet, cook, servant and all-around slave, leaving nothing for the maid Sir Sheridan had hired to do but dress Olympia. Which was just as well, she thought, because the girl was a singularly inferior lady's maid, having a marked tendency to sleep through the night and day both.

Olympia had no intention of complaining about such a trivial detail, however. She sat on deck, in a chair wedged snugly between a mast and a coil of rope, her only company an elderly consumptive lady in the next chair. Sir Sheridan had hung about asking solicitous questions while Mustafa tucked a blanket around her, and then they'd both disappeared with frustrating alacrity—as they'd done yesterday and the day before—to attend to obscure male business of their own.

Olympia sat gazing out at the sea, excited and restless and disappointed in the smooth course of events. Of all the things she had expected from her great adventure, boredom was not one of them. She'd spent most of the last two weeks staring at the various tattered curtains and chipped washbasins and grimy windows in one cheap set of rooms after another, not allowed to go out in public, not allowed to speak to anyone and not seeing much at all of her gallant protector, who'd spent the days outfitting and the nights elsewhere.