The Last Killiney (27 page)

He took the tray to Ravenna, and although she lay sylphlike and beautiful amongst the blankets, Paul didn’t say a word. He set down the food. Smoothing back her hair, touching a kiss to her lovely widow’s peak, these pleasures were strictly forbidden, he decided, at least until he’d come to terms with this tremendous need he felt inside.

Instead, not daring to meet her eyes, he merely backed away. “I’ll leave you to yourself, then,” he said to her quietly.

He knew well enough what he had to do.

Chapter Eighteen

Then I’ll be yours
. That’s what he’d said, hadn’t he?

Ravenna wondered all during their coach ride to meet Vancouver at Falmouth Bay. Where she’d expected Paul to kiss her, to put his arm around her and trade affectionate glances the way a boyfriend would, instead she met with nothing; nothing save his usual, amiable charm.

And there were hours and hours of that. Muddy roads and plenty of sheep made certain their journey to Cornwall was slow. Paul chattered convivially to while away the time, but for Ravenna, this was a torture made all the more unbearable by that grin he flashed, so disarming and suggestive, as he asked her about island living and getting paid to swim under boats.

Of course, he said nothing about the night before.

By the time they arrived at Falmouth, she’d given up worrying about it. It was dark, still trying to rain. She couldn’t see
Discovery
where it rocked at anchor, only pieces of it illuminated by lanterns on deck, but she was excited just the same as she followed James aboard ship, below decks. Down a dark and narrow ladder, through one chamber and then another, at last they emerged in the lamplight of the ship’s great cabin. There, squinting in the brightness from behind James’s shoulder, Ravenna strained to see a short, bald and most eloquent man.

Eloquent because, at the sight of her, the man lifted himself from his chair with unimaginable poise. Ravenna wondered who he was, this gentleman who firmly took her hand and with all respect kissed it, but as his hooded eyes met hers, she realized he seemed completely familiarized with her presence—and yet he, too, stared.

“You do not know me,” he said quietly.

“No,” she agreed.

All the men in the room had fallen silent.

“Well, doubtless there will be much to learn in the months to come,” he said, glancing around at their submissive faces, “for all of us. Forgive me, my lady. I am George Vancouver, captain of this ship. I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”

In her wildest historical fantasies, she’d never pictured Vancouver like this. The man who had charted hundreds of miles of wilderness coast, who’d named great mountains and numberless harbors, the captain who had literally put the Pacific Northwest on the map, was all of about five-foot-two.

He was also bald. Ravenna was later to learn he shaved his head, that he usually wore a wig, but meeting his deadly serious eye, she didn’t know these things. All she knew was that he looked nothing like the portrait she’d been shown as a child.

Vancouver beckoned them to sit at the table with the other men, and as they fell to discussing the finer points of fate and destiny, Ravenna began to fade with exhaustion. She’d been awake nearly twenty hours since leaving the inn the night before, and now Vancouver’s cabin seemed a hallucination, a flashback to her youth when his name had been a family legacy. How many times as a young girl had she tried to picture this cabin around her? How often had she wished to have been a part of this moment?

She was still reeling from lack of sleep when she went out on deck a few hours later. The weak, predawn light didn’t allow her to see much of the casting off, so she contented herself with the sounds of it. Orders were given for the fore and top sails to be unfurled. Officers passed commands between themselves in a procession of echoes. The topmen with laughter scrambled aloft, and when the gunshot sound of canvas catching the wind made Ravenna jump, she knew at last the voyage had begun.

Soon the morning strengthened into a pearly haze, and Ravenna could just make out the accompanying ship,
Chatham
, following dutifully in their wake. Swaying on the rain-slicked deck, she was spellbound by the sight of their consort sailing against the whitening sky so that she hardly noticed when someone came up behind her and whispered quietly in her ear.

“How I do so love a man in uniform.”

Spinning around, she was greeted by a smirk.

“Christian?” she gasped. “How did you…Who let you…”

As her eyes searched the deck, hunting through the sailors, hoping for a glimpse of James or Paul, Christian appeared completely unconcerned. “Who are you looking for, Beloved? Your commander, perhaps? To issue the orders for our return to port?”

“I don’t know how you got on board,” she said, “but when Vancouver finds out, he
will
turn the ship around.”

“I’m sorry, Beloved, but he won’t.”

“Stop calling me that! You have no business being here. You know I don’t want to see you anymore, that James will kill you if you so much as—”

“Then he’ll face the Admiralty, won’t he?”

Ravenna frowned, but Christian only seemed to relish her dismay. “Allow me to properly inform you of my position aboard this vessel,” he said, and with a flourish of his hand, he smiled broadly. “You see, I’ve been appointed assistant to Mr. Menzies, this complement’s naturalist, and as such I represent the interests of the Royal Society and its president.”

“The Royal Society put you on this ship?”

“As you’ll recall, Mr. Banks and I share a certain history as well as a number of unsavory, disreputable acquaintances whose identities, due to my limitless generosity, shall remain nameless.”

“You mean you blackmailed him,” Ravenna muttered.

“All perfectly legal, I assure you.” Regarding her with almost a sneer of sorts, he nodded toward the companion ladder. “Vancouver knows I’m here, Beloved. And neither he nor your mongrel brother can do the slightest thing about it.”

“Christian, doesn’t it matter to you that I don’t want to see you? That I’m engaged to Killiney? Why do you go on chasing me?”

“Why?” Taking a step closer, he touched her arm. “Because I love you, of course. Because I must be where you are.”

Those slate-colored eyes welled up with honesty, filling her thoughts with another place, another man gazing at her just the same. Pure and untainted by ambition or desire, that voice contained the future David as surely as Ravenna lived and breathed, and still he was talking. “Now you must own that from experience, you know the manner of my courtship could best any suitor
you
might fancy, even more so the likes of these bestial sailors. Will it be so hard to endure my affections? For between the Paddy and I, you’ll suffer nothing so much as the result of our rivalry.”

She found herself shaking her head, just staring at this apparition of David.

“And of course,” he continued, “you know what the question will be. Who will win? Who will cultivate your fond endearments, your acquiescence and consenting passion? Who will survive the voyage to claim you in the end?”

With the word
survive
, the spell was broken. Paul could die on this voyage. Christian was right, whatever his motivation for suggesting as much, and in the light of his unsuspecting comment, she worried for the first time she’d made the wrong decision in insisting Paul go.

“Nobody’s claiming me,” she said in a low voice. “I’m not a possession, and if I were…” She pulled her arm out from under his grasp in a blatant move to assert herself, “If I were a possession, I’d be Killiney’s, wouldn’t I?”

And feeling secure in her ability to deal with him, knowing she’d have to for the length of the voyage, she left Christian standing there. She went below decks, fervently hoping David’s history had been wrong.

* * *

Months of endless sea followed that first day on board
Discovery
. Whether it was Tenerife in the Canary Islands or the vastness of the sky over the wide Atlantic, the days passed in a blind succession of toiling and boredom, of sweat and slaving and then sitting around for hours on end, waiting for the wind to fill their sails.

Nothing much happened among the officers or crew in those first few weeks. Nothing much happened for Ravenna, either.

Paul was put to work with the other sailors. Viscount or not, it didn’t matter—he was still a seaman in Vancouver’s eyes, and soon he was reefing, dousing and furling sails, bending to the capstan bars in helping to weigh and cat the anchor, even swaying down the topgallant mast for repairs.

Ravenna had no idea what any of this meant. Outboard motors she understood, but sailing ships were a different story. She only knew that when night finally came, when Paul climbed into his hammock and passed out from the sheer exhaustion of straining at halliards and braces, it wasn’t Ravenna’s hammock he climbed into. Vancouver had set aside a small cabin for James and Paul to share, and it was there that Paul retreated when nighttime came.

Thus she never saw him, save at mealtimes. Then, too, he was so worn from his duties that he scarcely made any sense when he spoke. April, May and June all passed that way, with hardly a conversation between them, only a brush of his hand when they sat down to table, or a wink in the lamplight, haggard and weak.

In July, just as she was getting used to this life, the long hours of boredom, the pitching deck, the way Paul had become a full-fledged sailor and now spent all of his time in the rigging above decks, in July she saw the coast of South Africa for the first time. That was a big deal, so exciting were her days of floor scrubbing and galley cleaning. Thrilling, too, were the fresh provisions ferried aboard at Cape Town, but such were the limits of good times aboard
Discovery
. Mending sails, picking oakum for caulking, keeping a careful log of the ships’ progress along the African coast, these were Ravenna’s more normal pursuits. If she spent time with Paul, it was always on deck in full view of the sailors and Vancouver’s oddly puritanical eye.

Before Ravenna knew it, it was September. Six months had passed. They skirted the tiny island of St. Paul, and sighting land at the southwestern tip of Australia toward the end of the month, she was reminded of James’s name for the place: New Holland, the English called it. The men went out to survey this coastline, as Captain Cook had left it uncharted, and for a month the progress of the two ships was slow. Several hundred miles of Australian beach had to be meticulously explored. Captain Cook had to be outdone.

With the ships standing close inshore, at last Paul got a break from his duties. There wasn’t much for him to do while the boat crews were away, so after months of watching him work like a dog, Ravenna was finally allowed to spend time in his company.

By day—if it rained—they huddled together under a scrap of canvas and just as he’d done at the opera, Paul whispered in her ear this gossip or that about those unlucky enough to wander by.

“Now there’s Dillon,” he’d say, leaning close against her shoulder. “Dillon’s such a royal person. He fancies himself the best-hung lad on the ship, did you know that? The others were rowing with me in the sail room about it, but I think if he really believes as much, then why burst his bubble?”

She always blushed when he said things like that. He never noticed. He’d turn his attention to some other unsuspecting sailor, and then Ravenna would glance down at Paul’s lap, at the folds of fabric bunched there, wondering, gauging, going mad with curiosity.

When the weather was good, she was put to work on drawings of the coast while Paul told her these ship’s secrets. With his stories ranging from size to spitting to imaginary love affairs between Sarah and Corporal Simpson, Ravenna scolded Paul more than once for being silly.

“Couldn’t we talk about us?” she asked. “I mean, we don’t have much time left to talk. Couldn’t we spend it learning more about each other?”

Paul’s eyes became solemn. His hand rose and settled at the back of her neck, and as he gazed at her, biting his lip, she felt his thumb moving ever so slightly in a minute caress.

“What would you like t’know?” Sober voice, soft as rose petals. Ravenna sat completely still beneath his touch and she couldn’t think of one single question to ask him.

In those weeks they spent on the Australian coast, he played the piano for her every night, and to a lesser extent, for the crew. Vancouver had allowed the small instrument for the benefit of his sailors’ mental health, although it was Ravenna who gained the most from Paul’s playing. Conjuring the saddest melodies from the darkness of the great cabin, he’d play for her until Vancouver’s voice came softly from his bunk, “That’s enough now, my lord.” Some nights, before the captain’s order, Ravenna would fall asleep where she lay on the piano, reveling in the feeling of Chopin and Mendelssohn. Always, whatever talking was going on amongst the men fell silent as Paul began his concerts. Always, when Vancouver ordered sleep, the cry went up for more.

Paul played without printed music and without a lamp, and in the blackness of the gently rocking cabin, Ravenna felt drunk when she slipped down off the top of the instrument and lowered herself to the bench beside him. He never kissed her. They didn’t once share a word of affection, but the two of them knew what they felt in that music. They shared it completely, and she found love enough in that and in the grip of his fingers as he handed her into her cabin and closed the door behind her.

Soon these musical evenings ended. By late October a strong wind had come up, forcing the ships to be on their way. When they reached New Zealand, there was far too much work for Paul to even think of playing the piano. At Dusky Bay he made his contribution to the expedition in the form of a hunting trip accompanied by James, Master’s Mate Manby, and a lot of guns.

Where she’d never worried about Paul before, now she was a wreck. They were away from the ship for three days, during which time the decks were alive with whispers about the fearsome reputation of the Maori, the native people of New Zealand.