Laura Kinsale (19 page)

She felt his reaction, a slight tensing of his arm around her waist, and wished she could take back the words. He let go of her, as she had known he would. “Can you go back to sleep now?” His disembodied voice was gruff.

She wanted to say no. Her arm and shoulder felt cool where his touch had been. “Gryf—” she ventured. “I’m sorry. About the money, I mean.”

He stood up, a sudden movement. She could just see his outline, in the faint light from the porthole.

“I know it upset you,” she added. “I couldn’t help myself—I was so afraid you would make me go back.”

He was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was oddly husky. “I wouldn’t make you go back, Tess.”

“Oh—” Her own voice trembled, a little upward break of emotion. “I’ve been such a fool—if only you could forgive me for—”

“Don’t.” He cut across her tumbled regrets. “Tess, I—give me time. Please. I’m not ready for this yet.”

She sniffed miserably. “I’m sorry.”

“Go to sleep,” he said, and she heard him move toward the door.

“Gryf?” His leaving seemed an unbearable loss. “Do you really have to go?”

He made a strange sound, a strained, unhappy chuckle. “Oh, yes. I have to. Sleep, now…just go to sleep. Stephen’s far away. He can’t hurt you anymore.” He opened the door and stepped outside, not answering her muffled good-night. It sounded to him like a child’s, forlorn and small. He shut the door, and then leaned on it, his teeth clenched, his hands strained into painful fists to keep him from flinging the door back and gathering her into his arms again. The cool wood was smooth, like her skin. He pressed his forehead against it,
hard,
to remind himself of who he was, and who she was. He tried to dredge up the barricading anger, the precious insulation of hate, and failed utterly. It was gone, all gone, washed away by the tremulous little voice and the way her fingers closed on his arm. By the way she had not corrected him when he had spoken Stephen’s name—the source of nightmares, the memory that made her awaken screaming. The man she fled from, to the other side of the earth.

Gryf took a shuddering breath. God, why hadn’t he spared her that? How had he managed to fail so completely to protect her? Send her back to Eliot…he could not. Never. But the alternative was torture: to see her, to hear her, to know that she belonged to a man of Eliot’s stamp and Gryf had no right to touch her.

With a vast and terrible effort, he forced his hands to relax. His fingers slid slowly down the varnished door. He checked to make sure it was latched, and padded up the ladder.

T
he island was at first no more than a cluster of clouds rising out of the sea, a deeper blue on the azure horizon. As the ship neared, the shadow below the clouds took on substance: olive and moss, hills and valleys, a tangible reality beneath the drifting bank of white. They were finally approaching Tahiti. Gryf stood at the helm and blessed the sight with heartfelt fervor.

Tess was on the quarterdeck, leaning over the rail beside Sydney as the ship rounded Point Venus and stood in toward the entrance to the harbor at Papeete. The day was fair, a crystal hue, and the light wind carried snatches of her voice to Gryf as she pointed excitedly to familiar landmarks. She had abandoned petticoats after they had entered the warm Pacific; her skirt billowed and swung in the breeze, now plastered against her, outlining the curve of her hips, now floating away in a tantalizing puff that threatened to reveal much more. She was barefoot, and his heated imagination made him certain that along with the petticoats she had discarded every other undergarment, leaving nothing on but the thin blue poplin skirt and light cotton blouse.

The idea made his hands sweat. He took a firmer grip
on the helm, tried to take one on himself, too, before he ran aground with fourteen miles of sea room between Tahiti and Moorea. For five months he had been like this, having lost his illusions and become, as Grady had once predicted, a rutting goat: lusting after another man’s wife until he had given up all hope of ever feeling stable or sane again. He moved in a kind of mad suspension, dreaming every moment of taking her, of feeling that soft warmth beneath him, of her mouth, her hair…while his body went through the rote motions of work and command. Years of practice made functioning possible, though he was certain that every man of his old crew knew that the captain was half out of his mind. It was in the way they looked at him, and the way they carefully did not look at Tess.

If he could just get away from her, he had thought—but no, one hundred sixty feet of waterline might as well have been a ten by ten prison cell, for all he could try to avoid her. And then, after that night in her cabin at the equator, she had begun to seek him out, feeling safe to do so, he supposed, because he had promised not to send her back.

There was no sign of mistreatment about her. She seemed the same on the surface: a little quieter, a little older than the shy, saucy beauty she had been. If anything, in his eyes she had grown more lovely, because in that bleak time after Grady’s death Gryf had managed to convince himself that her face and figure had faults, that she was not special or unique, and in seeing her again all those hopeful disparagements had been shamed into pale extinction by reality.

But it haunted him, what Eliot might have done. She showed no sign, but she suffered nightmares, and Gryf’s hunger for her was tangled with misery and guilt and another, stronger emotion whose nature frightened him.
It went deeper than desire, right to the center of his being. He knew he could not survive another loss like the ones that had come before. So he covered that feeling, crushed it down, buried it in hot, animal frustration, which was an agony he thought that he might live through, if he did not have to live through it too long.

Several of the islanders’ canoes had put out through the break in the reef, their single sails fluttering a gay welcome as they made for the
Arcanum.
Amid much cheerful hallooing a pilot came on board for the short trip through the pass, and Gryf was not really surprised when Tess took up an enthusiastic exchange of greetings with the dusky Tahitians still in the canoes. As far as he could tell, she conversed with them in the island tongue, and whatever she had to say caused a high level of excitement. The man who had come on board, a huge, herculean sort with the countenance of a pleased puppy dog, gave her a bear hug before he made his way to Gryf and took the helm with a friendly grin.

Gryf had enough pride in his ship to forget Tess for the moment and concentrate on getting the
Arcanum
through the reef and to anchor smartly. The pilot spoke a little English, at least to the extent of nautical terminology, and like all the Kanaka sailors Gryf had ever encountered, knew his way around a ship. He and Gryf fell into easy rapport, and under the islander’s direction the clipper rolled through the channel and into the quieter waters of the bay. The crew were all at work, readying the chain, hauling in the topsails; at Gryf’s order, letting go the anchor. As soon as she was well at rest, Mahzu sent all hands aloft to furl the topsails. Gryf went forward to watch the operation with a critical eye. The
Arcanum
was not the only vessel in Papeete’s harbor, and Gryf wanted the furl of her sails to equal or better those of her numerous rivals. That much he owed
his ship, that she was as neat and seamanlike as any other, even if her paint was not as fresh.

It was the Tahitian pilot’s shout that made Gryf look aft. Tess and Mr. Sydney had left the rail and were strolling toward the companionway, Tess chattering animatedly. She stopped and turned at the sharp cry, as Gryf had, and a split second after, a deafening, metallic clang reverberated across the deck. Both Tess and Sydney jumped reflexively and looked around, but Gryf did not wait for them to discover what he had already seen. He was running aft, up onto the quarterdeck, half-blind with rage. “
Stark!
” he bellowed, his voice almost cracking under the force of his emotion. “Lay below, you bloody son of a bitch!”

Stark came down from the mizzen top like a landlubber, using the ratlines as a ladder instead of sliding down a stay. He was talking, fast, a running denial that cut off short as he hit the deck and Gryf seized him by the collar. It was all Gryf could do in his fury to keep himself from strangling the man; instead, he dragged Stark to the spot where Tess had been about to step; the spot where the wickedly sharp point of a marlinespike dropped from sixty feet above was buried three inches deep in the decking.

“Do you see that?” Gryf snarled. “Do you see that, you murdering bastard?” Stark stammered into blaming his shipmate on the yard, and Gryf backhanded him hard, sending him stumbling against the companionway hatch. “Do you think I’m a fool? Don’t you give me your damn excuses—” Stark came upright and raised a hand, as if to strike back, and Gryf hit him again, a blow to the jaw that took Stark down for good. It was an effort for Gryf to stop at that.

He stood back, breathing hard, and tensed when Stark lurched to his feet again. But the man only wiped
the blood from his swelling lip and muttered, glancing around at the crew that had gathered in a threatening circle, “It was an accident.”

“Bring up your chest, Stark,” Gryf snapped. “And clear off. I’ve had the use of your questionable services long enough.”

From the deck a few feet away, Tess concealed her relief at the order. The incident had happened so quickly that she hardly thought of her own safety, but the way Gryf had exploded into violence left her more shaken than the sight of the spike buried point-down in the deck. Never had she seen him like that—the unexpectedness of it was frightening, and yet underneath her shock was another response, one that she was ashamed to admit even to herself. It was gratification: simple, selfish satisfaction to see him so affected by her peril, and to see the steward, whose very presence inexplicably made her skin creep, turned off without ceremony.

She did not speak of it, for Gryf’s face was hard and closed when he glanced at her as the crew broke up. Knowing it was traditional among sailors for the victim to make light of any close brush with disaster, she simply took Mr. Sydney’s arm and continued on her way below, where she busied herself with last-minute preparations to disembark.

For weeks, Gryf had cherished the idea of losing himself in the waterfront grogshops of Papeete. He wanted release: he wanted noise and liquor and dance-hall women, and he wouldn’t have turned down a serious brawl. What he got instead was a formal dinner, followed by a fancy-dress ball.

He stood in the midst of the crowd, a resurrection of Mr. Everett: waistcoated, white-tied, and desperate. He had tried to decline the invitation, but the notorious
hospitality of the island routed his best efforts. It would have required a will of iron—or a broken leg—to defeat the combined pleas of Tess and her friend Mahina Fraser. He wished now he had arranged for just such a disabling accident. Anything would have been less painful than the prolonged purgatory of this occasion.

The party bore little resemblance to any London affair. Its setting was Montcalm, a spacious Jamaican-style mansion at the head of the Atimaono Valley, a fitting residence for one William Stewart, the latest darling of French-Tahitian society. The locals seemed under the impression that Stewart was high ton; Gryf knew better, though he saw no need to say so. Having been introduced, he and Stewart duly pretended they had never laid eyes on one another before, although Gryf remembered the handsome, black-bearded adventurer well enough from a year spent in his pay running contraband spirits out of Australia. How Stewart had managed to transform himself from small-time smuggler into wealthy owner of Terre Eugenie, the newest and largest plantation in Tahiti, was a mystery Gryf felt no inclination at all to solve. Knowing Stewart, he thought it might not stand up to close scrutiny under the law.

Stewart’s ball was a colorful amalgam of Tahitian gaiety and French pomp, with a dash of British hauteur and American energy to spice the mix. Not to be out-done by the European wives in their shoulderless gowns and crinolines, the Tahitian ladies added fresh flowers to the continental fashions: flowers in crowns on their coiled black hair, flowers behind their ears, flowers draped around their slim necks to set off amber skin. Tess, too, wore a tiara of pearl-white tuberose, and a hibiscus behind one ear. Her hair, as dark as any Tahitian’s, seemed as rich as ebony set against her creamy skin and the poppy-red gown which dipped to a deep V
from her bared shoulders, revealing pale cleavage between crimson bands of gathered net. It was the dress of a full-grown woman, no debutante. It reminded him—it fairly shouted at him—that she was married, and so entitled to be insanely provocative.

As her escort, he was obliged to dance with her. He barely made it through the ordeal. The fragrance of tuberose was like strong wine; it blurred his senses, obscured his balance, led him on to reckless flights of imagination—that she was his, that he could kiss the inviting curve of her lips, the tender nape of her neck; that he could slip his hands beneath the red flower and the scarlet gown and bring her hair cascading down over her naked breasts. The music stopped, and for a moment he could not even speak. She smiled up at him, all innocence and pleasure, so that he had to look intently at the fat wife of a French official before he could make his tongue form the simple thanks that was required.

He led her off the dance floor, and left her with her friend, young Mrs. Fraser. The two of them fell immediately into a giggling conversation in Tahitian. Mrs. Fraser spared him a sly, doe-eyed glance, and introduced him to another young native socialite, who proceeded, in a gentle, determined fashion, to bully him out onto the veranda and make overtures which he could not have bettered on the waterfront.

She was very pretty, this Mamua, modestly dressed in what appeared to be a long-sleeved pink nightgown. He did not think she was above sixteen. She spoke French and told him ribald jokes, the punchlines delivered with such a smiling ingenuity that he could not help but laugh. But he did not want her, a discovery which unnerved him. He danced with her and ate with her; he even kissed her, when she made it clear that he had no
other choice. He thought perhaps he really had lost control of his reason. Five months at sea—five months of constant frustration, and then landfall in this most legendary of romantic isles…and he did not want what he was so graciously and blatantly offered.

He told himself it was her age. He told himself it was her innocence. He told himself it was her lack of it. When he had exhausted all possible excuses, he told himself he was indeed crazy, and had been since he had first seen a pair of amused blue-green eyes beneath a dripping sou’wester.

The owner of those eyes appeared to be enjoying herself immensely at the moment. Tess was more animated than he had ever seen her at a ball. Her face was flushed and sparkling; she danced nearly every dance, and she smiled dazzlingly at the British naval captain who guided her most often onto the floor. She took no notice of Gryf after that initial dance, though he could not keep his eyes from the flash of her scarlet grown as she sailed about the dance floor.

Mamua caught him watching, and gave him a reassuring pat. “Come with me,” she said. “You make yourself ill over her.”

On this observation, delivered with the utmost authority by a Tahitian schoolgirl, Gryf decided it was high time he did leave. Tess and Mr. Sydney were to be guests of the Frasers for the length of their stay in Tahiti, so Gryf had no obligation to escort her home. He doubted she would even notice he was gone.

He let Mamua lead him out the front door, exchanging a nod of mutual neutrality with William Stewart. Stewart had Madame de la Roncière, the
commissaire
’s
wife,
firmly on his arm. It was clearly not the time for friendly reminiscence.

Gryf turned his mind to Mamua. He was determined
to discover some polite way to coax this precocious
vahine
back into the nursery where she belonged. After that, he planned to find the nearest cliff, and cast himself off to the sharks.

Over the epauletted shoulder of Captain Bush, Tess had a hard time keeping track of Gryf, but she noticed when that nubile little cousin of Mahina’s coaxed him out onto the shadowy privacy of the veranda. Tess also saw them dancing; and watched the Tahitian girl with him at the refreshment table, offering him bits of pineapple and cake from her graceful brown fingers. When they began to drift toward the door, Tess’s determined vitality faltered in spite of her best efforts.