Rondo Allegro (38 page)

She knew what she could do. “The grit, should you want it
removed? This I can do, a simple task.”

“Thank you.” His voice was soft. He made an effort that she
could see, and added, “I confess I couldn’t bear the notion of Perkins mauling
me about anymore. A good man. But accustomed to the vigor of a polishing
cloth.”

She smiled in assent. So he wished to talk? “A wounded man is
not a silver teapot.” And won a brief smile, no more than a quirk of his dry,
cracked lips, but she felt it a victory more strong than any battle. That
brought a new thought, one that ought to please him, after all his efforts,
surely? “Little Mr. Corcoran says that the battle is won. Is this true? The
sea, it is filled with burning and ruined ships.”

“We are better off than most,” he said, his eyes still
closed. “Did you follow our movements?”

“I did not,” she said, returning from giving the order for
water to the sentry outside. “I could only feel, and hear, but saw nothing
until the wounded were bringing in.”

“Do you wish to hear?”

“If you have the strength to tell me, I listen,” she
replied.

His eyes opened, and met her gaze. “We remained untouched
until we were ordered in, to
Victory
’s
aid. She was fairly clawed by the time we neared, and then we could not come at
her for the smoke. We took shot, aimed in the smoke—I suspect that is when I gained
this splinter wound, but I noticed it not as poor Robert Leuven was cut down.
We followed
Neptune
until a pair of
French frigates came at us, intending to drive us off. That is probably when a
French marksman put this ball in my leg.”

He stirred under the bed clothes, and his eyes drifted shut
for a moment. Then, “It was warm work, very warm, smoke as thick as fog. We
aimed by the fire of their broadside, the only thing visible, and fought both
sides of the ship until
Achilles
exploded. Perhaps that is when my head was cut by the debris raining down. We
hauled wind after the French, but there was no chasing them in those airs. After
that, our task was to rescue those in the water, enemy and friend alike.”

A quiet knock, and the water and the cloth appeared. She set
the jug between her feet, and wetted the cloth. Then she stood with water
dripping down her fingers into her sleeves, for she had put on her second best
winter traveling gown, as sturdy as the one she had ruined.

His eyes opened slowly. Once again his pupils were enormous,
the effect of laudanum on a sorely tried body. Sorrow flitted through her and
away at her remembered motions: only instead of her dear father, his beloved
features wasted from fever, here was this much younger man. There was no puffy
flesh, but the clean, strong bones of his jaw, the fine ridges of his cheeks.
His high, smooth brow, the curve of his temples over his eyes. His eyes, their
expression so cool, remote, so alert, sometimes crinkling from laughter
inwardly held, and now, barely open, so that only a reflected gleam shone
beneath the long lashes.

He lay there in his shirt, the front opened, his free hand
loose. The bed clothes had been pulled to his waist. She began with his hands,
working up over his wrists above the shirt frill.

“I beg pardon,” he murmured. “For my state of filth.”

“Cleanliness,” she said, “how is it to be expected, given
today’s events?”

“And yet here you are.” His eyelids crinkled in a smile.
“How did you manage that?”

“When the last of the wounded left, me and Parrette creeped
into the hold like mice, with our buckets of water, while the ship’s people
must do more duties.”

“We have come off relatively lightly,” he said.

She finished with his hands, wrung the cloth out extra hard,
and began to brush it over the top of his head, getting rid of sticky grit
everywhere but the bandage.

“Thank you,” he said, low-voiced. “You cannot conceive how
well that feels.”

“Oh, on contrary,” she said, laughing a little. “I know it,
much.” Her nose wrinkled. “Prodigiously well!”

“Sayers tells me you and Mrs. Duflot labored the entire time
in the orlop. I thank you for that.”

She smiled ruefully. “But it is expected of the women, this
I find aboard the flagship. I only did my part.”

“Those other women chose to follow someone aboard,” he said,
and tried to lift himself on his elbow, but the pitch of the ship, the bed, and
the effect of laudanum defeated him. “Confound it! I should have spoken to you
before,” he said in an urgent tone. “You were taken, I am very much afraid
against your will. I find I still do not entirely comprehend whether you were a
guest or a prisoner of the Spanish.”

“I think,” she said, “I was both.”

“You will have to explain that, but at your leisure. More
important, what was your intention, had you not been brought aboard us?”

This was treading into dangerous territory. Anna wished she
did not have to converse in English, which still took so much effort. Mindful
of her promise to Parrette, Anna said only, “I had not thought so far ahead.”

That much was the truth. She was reluctant to utter lies,
and so, to skirt the danger, she laid her finger over his lips. “Do not speak!
This ship, how it rolls. I must take ver-ry great care that I do not poke out
your eye, and that marine without the door, he must shoot me for mutiny.”

He shook with silent laughter, and closed his eyes with such
readiness that she knew her labors were appreciated, and not politely endured.
She smoothed the cloth over his hair until it lay damp, and tousled, but clean,
upon the pillow.

She could see how good it felt in the way he held his head
steady, or turned it for her, and in the deepening of his breathing. She found
that she was enjoying it as well, and took her time, dipping and wringing the
cloth, then smoothing it again over every plane and curve of his face, tender
over the fine skin of his eyes, a stronger motion curving with the back of his
neck, and down, following the jut of his collarbones.

She drew the cloth over the visible flesh inside his shirt,
along the sling; with a sudden movement, he grunted, shrugged, and the sling
came loose. Anna lifted it over his head and set it on the checkered deck covering,
next to the jug.

Then she worked very carefully, avoiding the bandages, and
at last lifted the cloth to wring it out once again.

He lay very still, his clean hair lying on his brow, his
chest beneath the loosened shirt rising and falling slowly. With a tentative
finger she brushed the hair off his forehead. It was soft as silk.

The sway of the ship, the cot pressing against her hips, the
sough of wind in the rigging, the wash of water down the side, the scent of his
skin, each sense sharpened, closing around her protectively. She glanced down at
his lashes so still on his cheeks, the shape of his face, his mouth, so stern
when he stood on his quarterdeck, so entrancing when he smiled broadly enough
to cause those little shadows to wink in his lean cheeks. His lips, so severe,
and yet so soft to the touch.

Heady with exhaustion, she gave in to impulse and leaned
over the edge of the swinging bed to touch her lips to his, light as the brush
of a feather.

Warmth flared through her, as bright as starlight. His eyes
opened, and his steady gaze blended with hers: she made herself look away, to
busy her hands without having purpose.

A toss of the ship, the slosh of the bucket, recalled her to
the cloth still gripped in her hands. “The water is monstrous dirty,” she said,
a little breathless. “Shall I send for more?”

“I’m an idiot,” he whispered. She looked startled, and he
could not prevent a laugh, though it was entirely against himself. He had been
a captain too long. No one had dared to speak to him, king aboard his wooden
castle, no one to tell him he was a fool to superimpose one woman’s perfidy
over them all.

Anna had come into his life through no merit of his own, and
she was nothing like Emily Elstead. That was all he knew, which was entirely
his fault; when he thought about how nearly he had come to throwing away this
chance, whether by a French cannon ball or by his own pig-headedness, he
reached and caught her wrist as if to never let her go.

She stilled, balanced against the cot: it swayed, and she swayed
with it. He looked up at her smiling eyes, the tender arch of her lips, the
stray curl hanging neglected by one pretty ear, the sweet curve of the neck of
her gown below the little hollow of her throat, and he pulled, not insistently,
but with question in the lightness of his grip, the pucker of his brow.

She understood the question, and looked about her with her
own pucker of question. It might be considered foolish to crawl into the cot,
next to a wounded man, but if she could comfort him, who was to gainsay? In the
eyes of God and of man they were one. She had never felt like a wife—she was
not certain even now what a wife might feel like—but the question, the future,
everything else could wait.

Practiced now, she hitched her hip over the edge of the cot,
and curved her knee. A slight wince, a grin as he shifted, and they swung
together in the cot, the bedclothes rumpled between them. He pulled her close
with his good arm, and she carefully fitted herself so that she would not press
against the damaged one, and turned her face to his.

Their lips met, and met again. Comfort flared into sweet,
ardent insistence; unnoticed, the washcloth fell to one side, his bandage to
the other, and then, at length, the bedclothes thumped softly to the deck.

They laughed breathlessly as each made adjustment, question
conducted through touch, caress, and then answer in their truly becoming one.

After a time, he laughed huskily, and sighed into her neck,
“Ah, Emily.”

His breathing deepened into sleep.

Emily?

She glanced at that sleeping face, wondering if this man she
had married—the man who had become her husband now in every way—even knew her
name. Or was Emily someone else?

She swung there, listening to his breathing as she tried to
sort her emotions. Affront, regret, bemusement, she recognized, and underneath
them laughter. That steadied her. How little they knew one another, after all;
the captain was full of laudanum, wounded, desperately tired. Though now she
believed she had a right to them, this was no time for questions. He needed his
rest—as the cot swung more deeply, she recollected the warnings about weather.

Storm. Thirst. One by one the demands of life crowded in,
and so she waited until the swing returned and flipped herself smoothly out of
the cot. A quick glance back showed the captain still asleep.

She straightened her clothing, picked up the counterpane,
shook it out, draped it over him and tucked it down securely. Then she
retrieved the washcloth, picked up the bucket, and let herself out of his
after-cabin.

She found her own cabin had been restored, Parrette busy
folding things into her trunk. She looked up sharply, her gaze traveling over
Anna, who blushed hotly.

Parrette smiled, bringing her chin down in a decided nod of
approval. Parrette knew very well what had happened, and her nod expressed her
sense of the right of it.

But all she said was, “Set that bucket down. Here is hot
water waiting in that basin. I thought you might want a wash. This hot water
might be all we get before the weather worsens. I will bring your meal on my
return.”

“Worsens?”

“They say a storm is coming.”

“I thought we were already in the midst of it,” Anna stated
as she leaned both hands against the bulkhead. It felt as if the floor slanted
to the pitch of a roof.

Parrette had lifted the bucket of dirty water so it would
not slosh. As soon as the pitch eased, she left. Anna busied herself with the basin
of hot water. She decided against changing into nightclothes. The coming
storm—her own questions—nothing seemed sure, so she put her gown back on,
brushing out the wrinkles with her hands.

Parrette reappeared with supper. Anna found she could
scarcely eat it. Her eyelids burned with exhaustion, her entire body throbbed.
When she could not lift the spoon again, she climbed into her cot, and was not
aware of falling asleep.

o0o

Two bells in the middle watch, or one o’clock in the
morning, Henry Duncannon woke abruptly to find Mr. d’Ivry at his bedside,
candlelight flaring wildly over his drenched form in its hooded
tarpaulin-jacket.

He was instantly aware of something wrong before the
master’s mate spoke: there was a high, dangerous note to the wind in the
rigging, and the groan of the timbers indicated high seas.

“Sir, Mr. Sayers’ duty, but the Spanish barky we’re towing is
all a-hoo. He thinks it might be sinking.”

Pain lanced through the captain’s body, but beneath it was a
layer of well-being, of a note of happiness so unfamiliar he could not
immediately define it. “I shall be on deck in a moment. Send Perkins to me.”

“I’m here, sir, I’m here, a-waitin’ with the last of the
water, and these here clothes,” Perkins said as the midshipman darted out. “And
a pot of tea. It’s in me bosom, right and tight.”

While the steward was talking, the captain eased himself out
of the bunk to the deck. The wound in his thigh where the nearly-spent ball had
been dug out burned as if a hot coal had been put there, and white shards of
pain lanced through his head and shoulder.

The water felt cool on his flesh, waking him thoroughly,
which brought to the front of his mind brief sensory memories and images—gentle
hands, of ardent kisses—of his wife pressed against him. It had happened. He
had not intended it to happen, he would have said he had not wanted it to
happen, but he smiled at the memory of muffled laughter at her inexpert but
eager accommodation as the cot swayed and jiggled and danced, and the intensity
of matched desire. He laughed under his breath as he buttoned the shanks on the
thick coat the steward held out.