The Last Killiney (38 page)

Ravenna looked around uselessly, feeling Christian’s hand at her wrist begin to soften. “I have no choice, do I?”

“Say you love me.”

“Christian, I
don’t
love you.”

“You do understand the death rate for infants in this day and age? It’s appalling. Anything that might aid a child in his first few years is essential, be it the best care, the most nutritious food, let alone a house to live in—”

“All right, I love you.” It hurt even to imagine the words. She would have thought to hear them, heaven would shine from his manipulative eyes. As it was, he regarded her placidly.

“That’s precisely what you’ll say to James,” he instructed. “Your performance will rival your mother’s best, or I’ll make a holiday of destroying your brother’s reputation.”

And giving her one last warning glance, he released her. Ravenna didn’t run or even turn away when he steadied himself against the table’s edge and reached for his coat on the floor behind him. She merely stared at him, her thoughts drowning with worry and hopelessness. She knew James would never believe her. Even when she’d spoken to Christian, she’d not been fond of him, only David of her distant memory and James knew this.

Yet as she watched Christian slip his hand into the pocket of his coat, it occurred to her—Christian might force her to
make love
. To keep her baby safe, to keep James and Sarah protected from destitution and disease, she might have to. She couldn’t even think of it, let alone do it.

Then Christian’s hand came out of that pocket with a flash of silver. Ravenna’s heart stilled to a faint tremble at the sight of what he held so disrespectfully in his grasp.

It was Paul’s watch. It ticked within the silence of the cedar walls and Ravenna thought her heart would burst.

“Where did you get that,” she whispered, barely able to breathe, to move or even think for looking at the polished silver.

“What? This?” Christian frowned. “Did James not say he’d be returning within a quarter hour?”

“
Where did you get that!”
The dirt floor soaked up the echo of her demand and Christian shrank from her, lifting his hands.

“The savage!” he said. “I got it from the savage who shared my imprisonment. Calm yourself, it’s only a watch.”

“Where is he now?”

Christian hesitated, staring at her as if she’d gone mad, but she didn’t care about how she looked. “Where is the Indian, Christian,
please!
That watch belonged to Paul—you have to tell me, I have to find him!”

He glanced at her darkly before looking down on the watch, opening it and casually noting the time. Then, raising his half-masted eyes to hers, he showed no sympathy, no sensitivity to her feelings whatsoever when he said, “He’s dead, if you must know. They shot that savage three days ago for thievery, and I suppose I must tell you that yes, he did murder your precious Paddy.”

Ravenna felt her legs slipping out from under her, felt the whole world tilt as that grief she’d held back came crashing down to claim her, and still Christian went on. “Until now, I didn’t understand exactly the base of whose skull the filthy creature had driven his iron blade into. It’s funny, but he described quite fondly how he’d committed the act with his elaborately carved weapon, and yet he said nothing at all about the victim. Oh, but he did mention a river. I could only assume he’d killed another savage like himself, since a gentleman such as Lord Killiney would certainly not have been—”

His voice was a meaningless whine as Ravenna put her face in her hands. Mashing her palms into her eyes, writhing with wave after wave of misery, still she saw nothing but the image he’d described—Paul’s face, scruffy and unshaven, forced down to the boulders of the riverbed while an iron blade pierced his skull, making his russet-colored hair run red.

With the picture burned into her imagination, she bent down in sobs to the floor. She was oblivious to Christian’s hands caressing her, to his manufactured sympathy.
God, don’t let him have suffered
, she thought,
don’t let him have been afraid
.

When finally she came to her senses, it was only because she realized James would be arriving at any moment. Sternly, she told herself,
I must think of my son’s life, I must do as Christian asks or all will be lost
.

So pushing aside the hideous images and brushing the streaks from beneath her eyes, she crawled to Christian’s side to put one last question to him before James’s arrival. “Please,” she asked, “can I have the watch?” She reached out but didn’t quite touch that object she’d last seen in Paul’s living hand.

Christian pulled it back compulsively. “I think not,” he said. “You’ll only be reminded of him with each moment’s passing and such would hardly be good for you, let alone our marriage.” Holding the silver disk to the sunlight, his consumptive features seemed to glow with wickedness. “But for me, what a keepsake! To see the moments spent with you, Beloved, in the movement of his very watch—I’ll be spending his time, so to speak…and he can do nothing about it.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

So Christian got what he’d wanted all his life: marriage to his cousin, the money accompanying this arrangement, and best of all, the opportunity to threaten and get back at James without him ever even knowing it.

It was difficult to keep James from learning what had happened. When she asked him to save Christian from the prison, his first impression was nearly correct, that she’d been tricked. Since she’d never been any good at lying, it took some doing to convince him that really, she’d not expected it, but the sight of Christian, alive and breathing and asking to come home with them, had affected her at the deepest level. After all, he’d been dead. To have him now miraculously returned, safe and enlightened by his experience, was—

“A bad omen,” James said. He stood on the beach at Nootka with his hands at his hips, his brown fingers tapping at the hilt of Paul’s sword. For a long moment in the failing light, he did nothing but bite the corner of his lip as he considered her question: Could Christian make the passage home with them?

In the end, he had to say yes. After all, Ravenna wasn’t wandering off in fits of depression anymore. She was asking, yes, even begging to bring Christian along on the voyage. She had to know he was safe, she said. She couldn’t leave him on that coast and in the months ahead, wonder, Did he die of malnutrition in that Spanish prison because she had left him?

“So blame me,” James insisted.

But then there was this other matter, this information Christian now possessed which James wanted, and wanted badly.

You see, Christian had been captured by Indians. He hadn’t really deserted
Discovery
at all, but fallen prey to a series of mishaps that had eventually led to his being taken to a village and, of all things, enslaved. His story gave a considerable amount of detail about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, and these details could beef up James’s paper for the Royal Society.

All James had to do was put up with his cousin for a few months. That and actually talk to him.

So their voyage home consisted of hours and hours spent cooped up in a cabin the size of a pantry while Christian recalled everything he could about his adventures. It had started with the hunting trip, he explained. Paul and Ravenna had gone off to the island, and knowing what they’d do with their privacy, Christian had followed in a fit of jealousy. For five days he and his cohorts had spied on them, dodging Paul’s hunting attempts while scaring away the deer. They’d watched Ravenna dig clams, dive for crabs, had even made bird calls from the bluff above her head.

Most amusing of all, they’d seen every move the pair had made in their attempts at lovemaking.
Every move
. Remembering the pictures he’d taken from the tent, Ravenna didn’t doubt Christian’s word.

When finally the lovers had returned to the ship, Christian and his buddies had intended to do the same. Yet on their way back, something had happened. The same storm that had ruined Ravenna’s watercolor pictures had sneaked up on Christian, and all the rowing in the world hadn’t saved him from being swept out into the strait. He and his friends had been lost for weeks, rowing along the desolate coast, searching for the ship, so that by the time the Indians had picked them up in a thirty-foot canoe, Christian had been delighted to be enslaved so long as slavery included food.

Taken to the Indians’ summer village, he’d soon found himself digging clams with the women. He’d done it gladly, he explained, because within the first week of his Indian captivity, his two friends had been murdered. A neighboring chief had come to call, arriving at the village in a huge canoe, and the hapless sailors had been marched right down to the beach where, in a grand display of wealth and ceremony, they’d been clubbed to death.

Christian described the beatings in detail. He explained how his friends, having fallen to the sand, had been placed under the neighboring chief’s canoe. They’d acted as rollers in the beaching process, enabling the great man to keep his feet dry.

But washed in a curling ribbon of blood, his crucifix dragging over the rocks, it wasn’t lifeless Mr. Bailey or Mr. Browne that Ravenna saw in her mind’s eye.

Of course it was Paul.

Not able to bear it anymore, Ravenna broke from the cabin then. Right in the middle of Christian’s description, she threw back the door and raced above decks to breathe the cold air of the Oregon coast, to whisper Paul’s name and steel herself madly against the stories she knew she’d hear yet again in the weeks to come.

Barely two days passed before Christian told another, this time the victim being a native man brought from some far flung village as a prize of war. A slave like Christian, this man’s death had been part of a similar ceremony. There’d been a feast at the occasion. Abalone, sea urchins and hundreds of fish had been eaten from wooden, animal-shaped bowls while the Indians had danced in frightening masks and long, flowing mantles of sea-otter fur.

These details James scribbled down furiously as Christian explained how the slave had been led before the Indian chiefs and shoved to his knees, his face forced down to the cedar bark soil. A dagger had been brought out, an iron dagger with a carved, painted haft. The slave’s tangle of hair had been brushed aside in readiness for the kill, and instantly Ravenna saw Paul’s shortened locks, saw the pine needles caught in his blondish brows. The slave in Christian’s story had struggled, and so did Paul when they forced down his head and raised the iron dagger high, drove it into the slave’s neck—right into the base of his Indian skull.

And then she knew.

Christian’s detailed description of the knife, the way Paul’s face had been shoved to the ground, the death of the Indian who’d given up the watch…all these things were blatant lies.

Paul was still alive
.

She must have made a sound when she realized it, for James turned sharply. Under his gaze she tried not to cry. Christian had warned her what would happen if James should start asking questions about the watch, but as her mind raced with the possibilities invoked by Christian’s lie, Sarah interrupted everything.

“So you’re sayin’ this happened, m’lord?” she asked. “Right before your very eyes, they murdered the savage?”

Christian sighed. “Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“Yes, but is it true, m’lord, that’s what I’m askin’.”

Christian scowled at her, and still James kept his gaze on Ravenna. Hope and pain mixed behind her eyes, surely James saw it, for she was burgeoning with wild and desperate thoughts even as Christian lifted his hand, pointed to himself. “You accuse me?” he asked Sarah with innocence. “As emaciated as I am, and scarred for life, I might add, you charge me with fabricating my enslavement by Indians?”

“Plagiarism’s more the word I’d use,” Sarah replied.

“Given the quality of your education—”

“You don’t think I know the meanin’ o’ the word, do you, m’lord?” In disgust, Sarah shook her head. “Plagiarism an’ lyin’ are near the same, but the way I see it, the first takes less imagination.”

Christian laughed nervously. “How can you say that? I’ve told you my gruesome tale as a favor, as a contribution of information toward
his
ridiculous aspirations in the name of friendship, and you have the audacity to suggest I’m lying?”

“I’m not suggestin’, m’lord, I’m tellin’ you. It was your own skull those savages run through like a highwayman’s head on a pike, least that’s the way m’lady put it down in her book near on two years ago, isn’t that right, m’lady? An’ now he’s quotin’ your words as if he lived ’em when it was your dream, m’lady, an’ only a dream at that.”

James raised his hand against her for silence. “Desist,” he said gently, but his gaze never left Ravenna’s brooding. “What is it?” he asked her. “What do you see?”

Ravenna couldn’t speak. She was certain if she did, there’d be one set of words to leave her mouth:
Turn the ship around
.

In the silence that followed, James pushed his chair from the dinette table, bent down to kneel at Ravenna’s side.
Oh, God, Paul’s back there
, she thought madly,
he’s alive and I’ve left him
.

Taking her balled up fist in his hand, James waited patiently, but still she resisted the urge to cry out. She closed her lips tight. She forced herself to look straight into the worry of James’s expression until she thought she’d explode from fury and hope, while beside her, she heard Christian’s clothes rustling and his disgusted little sigh when he rummaged through his coat.

Suddenly an object was tossed on the table.

“That is what disturbs her,” Christian said.

Shining like a dull moon against the scratched oak, Paul’s watch moved, slipped with the pitch and roll of the ship.

Seeing it, James’s brow furrowed. The muscles in his cheek tensed; a dangerous cast came over his countenance, and as he glanced at Ravenna, he let go her hand.