Captain of My Heart (3 page)

Enclosed by woods and a haphazard fence, Miss
Mira Ashton’s School of Fine Horsemanship was nothing more than a
field that smelled of clover and wet grasses and the fresh pungency
of newly churned mud. It had rained the night before, and now
moisture dripped from the many oaks, maples, and pines,
pitter-pattering down through branches and shimmering leaves that
quivered beneath the extra weight. Drip, drip, pitter, patter, on
and on until all the woods surrounding the field were alive with
the soft sounds of falling rain. Yet the sky above the treetops was
cloudless and pale, and sunlight stabbed through the branches,
glowing pink and gold through the mists and sending vivid rainbow
colors twinkling off the bent grasses like stardust on a fairy’s
crown.

It promised to be another scorcher of a
day.

Sounds broke the tranquility of the new
morning: the steady beat of a horse’s trot; the snap of a whip
licking the air; the snort of a dappled colt whose chiseled head
and short back spoke of desert blood and whose color was so pure a
gray as to appear almost blue; and from the slight figure in the
middle of the field, around whom that colt trotted in a doughnut of
deepening mud, an exuberant voice belting out the tune of “Yankee
Doodle.”

“Fath’r and I went down to camp, along with
Captain Good-ing! And there we saw the men and boys, as thick as
hasty pud-ding!”

A quarter mile away, Ephraim Ashton,
shipbuilder, sat down to breakfast and the
Essex Gazette,
a
pot of strong black coffee at his right elbow, a basket of hot
buttered corn muffins at his left, and a jug of New England rum
before him, blissfully unaware that his daughter stood ankle-deep
in mud with her head thrown back, her chest puffed up, and her
voice belting out a song with all the lusty fervor she might’ve
lent her favorite fo’c’sle chanty:

“Yankee Doodle keep it up! Yankee Doodle,
dan-dy—”

Rigel flicked an ear but knew better than to
slow his stride.

“Mind the music and the step, and with the
girls be han-dy!”

But then, there were a lot of things Father
was unaware of; he didn’t know about Rescue Effort Number
Thirty-One, he didn’t know that she was going to ride Rigel for the
first time tomorrow, and he didn’t know that she had a bet going
with her brother, Matt, that she could sneak aboard Matt’s
privateer,
Proud Mistress,
at least two more times before
Father caught her at it and flew off into one of his rages. No,
Father would be reaching for one of those muffins just about—Mira
squinted up to look at the sun’s angle—
now,
dipping it in
maple syrup, and shoving the whole sticky mess into his mouth as he
thumbed to the newspaper’s Marine News section, where he would
scrutinize each and every word until he found mention of an Ashton
ship. He might get a smudge of syrup on the top right corner of the
page—but not on the Marine News section. Heaven forbid. And it
would take him exactly one third of the hour he allotted to the
paper to study that section, snowy brows curling out over his nose
like fishhooks and throwing shadows across the page, and his fist
slapping the table with a good hard wallop when he found what he
was looking for. And then he would hoot and holler, and heaven help
the neighbors if they were still abed, for they’d be asleep no
longer.

“And there we see a thousand men, as rich as
Squire Da-vid, and what they wasted ev’ry day, I wish it could be
sa-ved! Yankee Doodle, keep it up, Yankee Doodle dan-dy
. .
.
” She sucked in a great gulp of air and shouted to the
treetops, “Mind the music and the step, and with the girls be
han-dy!”

Hers—like her father’s, her brother Matt’s,
and Newburyport’s itself—was red-hot rebel’s blood. Yet Mira’s
patriotism didn’t end with a mere song, nor the limitations of her
sex, though she’d shunned English tea, donned native homespun, and
worn her dark hair in thirteen braids, one to represent each
colony, as the other women had. As she was a sea captain’s daughter
who’d come into the world some one hundred forty leagues east of
Newfoundland in the middle of a raging gale, with a pitching,
yawing ship her cradle and a piece of sailcloth her first blanket,
the role she took in the defense of liberty was a bit more . . .
active. But it was damned hard to man a cannon—and win a wager—if
Matt kept sneaking off on
Proud Mistress
without her, which
was the only reason she was standing here in the muddy field this
morning and not beside him on the brig’s stout decks.

“And there we see a whopping gun, as big as a
log of ma-ple, mounted on a little cart, a load for father’s
cattle! Yankee Doodle, keep it up . . .”

She bawled out the rest of the verse, then
hummed the next one through her nose, pacing the song to Rigel’s
hoofbeats and plotting, as she’d been doing all morning, the best
way to sneak the latest cat—Rescue Effort Number Thirty-One until
further named—into the house without Father’s knowledge.

She could hide him in the stable and wait
till Father left for his shipyards, which he would do at precisely
one o’clock. She could smuggle him in through the back door. Or she
could simply put him in the front hall and hope he mingled well
enough with the other Rescue Efforts that Father wouldn’t notice
him.

But whatever she did, she’d have to be
careful, because Father was in one of his moods this morning, and
with good cause.

The client—not just another client, but
the
client, whose drafts for a fine new schooner would’ve
pulled the Ashton Shipyards out of their slump and made Ephraim’s
name famous—had never shown up last night. And it was no wonder he
hadn’t shown up, because the gallant captain of the American
privateer
Annabel,
who’d outfoxed a British frigate at the
mouth of the river last night, had been swept overboard during the
ensuing sea fight and was, by all reliable accounts, presumed
dead.

That captain was the client.

So much for all their efforts to make a
favorable impression on this naval architect whom only Matt had
met, several months ago off Portsmouth. But these drafts of his had
so impressed her brother that Ephraim, stopping to listen to him
for once, had finally posted a letter to this unknown captain and
invited him to Newburyport in the hopes of snaring his
business.

The preparations they’d gone through to make
sure they got it! Abigail had cooked up a supper that could’ve fed
the entire town. The rugs had been beaten, the table rubbed with
beeswax, the silver polished till it shone. Mira had even donned a
gown and put her hair up under a little lace mobcap, managing to
look demure and ladylike enough to please even Father, who’d been
just coming up from the cellar with several bottles of his finest
Madeira when he’d spotted her uncharacteristic appearance and
almost dropped them on his toe.

But it had all been for naught. Just like
Matt’s dire warnings to mind her behavior, now dancing through her
head like singsong verses from a nursery rhyme, shaping themselves
to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” and filling the morning with
sound:

“
Don’t race El Nath down High Street, the
client mi-ight see you! Stay at home and mind yourself, and please
try to be go-od!”
Laughing, she threw her head back, let the
sun splash across her face, and belted out,
“Mira Ashton, you’re
a brat! Mira, you’re naught but trou-ble! All boldness and all
brazenness, and don’t feed Luff beneath the table!”

Hmm. That last phrase didn’t quite fit within
the confines of the tune; she’d have to work on it a bit, then bawl
it out on the fo’c’sle the next time Matt took
Proud
Mistress
to sea. Nice and loud, loud enough to send the company
into a fit of guffaws and Matt into teeth-gritting anger. She could
already envision him going as red as his hair, his spectacles
steaming up, his lips thinning out the way they always did when he
was particularly annoyed about something. . . .

Her laughter, fresh as the sea wind that
drove across the marshlands and dunes of nearby Plum Island, soared
up to the hazy blue sky above, for the rest of his silly warnings
didn’t have a prayer of fitting within the confines of “Yankee
Doodle.”

No climbing Mistress’s masts just to prove
you can do it faster than anyone else!

Watch your language, and don’t show up at
the supper table wearing those trousers and smelling like
horses!

And for God’s sake, please find a place to
hide that cat you snuck home off the docks! When Father finds out,
he’s going to have a damned fit!

Well, it wasn’t as though she
kept
all
of the Rescue Efforts. She
did
place them in good homes
after getting them back on their feet. So what if the number was up
to thirty? It was a cumulative count, anyhow; there were actually
only nine cats presently living at, in, and around the Ephraim
Ashton household.

Well, ten. She’d forgotten Rescue Effort
Number Thirty-One, a scruffy ball of orange fur watching her from
atop a fence post and wondering, no doubt, just how she intended to
get him into the house and past Ephraim without all hell breaking
loose. She’d planned it for yesterday; having this esteemed Captain
Merrick around would certainly have diverted Father’s attention
long enough for her to get the cat in and placed safely among the
others roaming the house.

She sighed and squinted up at the sun, just
beginning to burn through the haze. Right about now, Father’d be
reaching for his third muffin and hollering for his second pot of
coffee, laced with a generous dose of rum to “wake him up.” And any
time now, she predicted with that strange intuition that binds
sibling to sibling, Matt would come home with another brave deed
under his belt to make the ladies sigh, the young boys idolize him,
and the other privateers go green with envy. His name would make
the
Essex Gazette,
of course; Ephraim would have something
more to brag about when he met with his cronies down at Davenport’s
Wolfe Tavern on Saturday night; and perhaps he’d cool off about the
loss of the client whose business he’d been so eager to land, a
client whose loss had not been because of
her
this time. . .
.

Just then she heard the distant, dull thump
of a cannon down in the harbor as a ship was welcomed in from the
ocean and into the Merrimack River. The report was followed by a
steady succession of twelve more—thirteen in all, one for each
colony. It was a jubilant salute, repeated by every vessel in the
harbor and the great field battery guarding Newburyport at the tip
of Plum Island. Finally the reverberations faded, leaving in its
wake only the distant screams of gulls and wild cheering from the
wharves and shipyards lining the riverfront.

Matt was back, all right.

She pictured him standing tall and proud on
Mistress’s
quarterdeck as the brig glided past the smoking
field battery and up the river, his spectacles hazed with dried
spray, his coattails flapping in the wind, his red hair whipping
about his freckled face as he considered which woman to choose from
among the throng waiting to pounce on him at the wharf. It would
probably take about an hour for him to drop anchor, make that
decision, claw through that throng, and find his way up High Street
and back to the house in time for breakfast.

Mira would be waiting for him, of course—but
the greeting she planned for him would not be as sweet as the one
he’d get down on the wharf.

She continued working the horse. A mosquito
bit through her trousers, and she reached down, slapped her leg,
swore in a way that would’ve made Father proud had she been his son
and not his daughter, and wiped the sweat from her brow with the
back of her sleeve. Then she heard a commotion coming from the
house. Was Matt home?
Already?

Mira could hear Luff’s insane barking,
mingling with the frightened whinny of a horse. Above it all came
the sound of male voices raised in greeting, or, as one of them was
Father’s, more likely battle.

Already.

By the time Mira had cooled Rigel down and
led him back to the stable, the argument was loud enough to be
heard clear across the street, across the town, and across the
river in Salisbury. Entering the house, she traced its progress as
it moved at what sounded like dizzying speed, from the upstairs,
the hall, the parlor, the dining room; Matt shouting at the top of
his lungs; Father bellowing ferociously; Matt again, his voice
suddenly muffled as he no doubt shoved one of Abigail’s muffins
down his craw. Counting the seconds, Mira waited for the hollering
to fade toward the back of the house before tearing the front door
open. With Number Thirty-One tucked in the crook of her arm, she
kicked off her muddy boots and darted across the thick carpet.

“I’m telling you, Father, he’s
not
a
Brit! How many blasted times do I have to repeat myself? He’s not a
Brit!
Not a Brit!”
Something crashed violently against a
wall. “For Christ’s sake, he was wearing an American privateer’s
coat!”

The argument was approaching the parlor now,
fading behind wainscoted walls, rounding entranceways, and bouncing
off high ceilings as Mira listened with amused curiosity.

“That don’t make him American!” Ephraim
bawled.

“What about the missing client, huh? What
about the
drafts?”

“
What
drafts? I ain’t seen no bloody
drafts!”

“That’s because they were destroyed by
seawater, damn you!”

Father’s gale-force roar made the walls
shake. “Don’t gimme any of yer lip, Matt! I know a damned
Englishman when I see one! Ye come to me with some cockamamie story
about this captain surviving a sea fight with that British frigate,
and then a night alone on the open ocean? Whaddye take me fer, a
damned idiot? That rascal upstairs ain’t my client! Why, I’ll bet
ye my eyeteeth he’s a British deserter off that same bleedin’
frigate!
Christ!
Now, get him outta here, damn you! Cart him
down to Davenport’s tavern, let them take care of him! I want no
part of him, ye hear?”