Lord Of The Sea (30 page)

Chapter 32

She stayed with him the rest of the morning, watching over him as he slept, restlessly, fitfully, the tears running down his face even in sleep until he woke, screaming in terror about drowning before his panicked green stare found her own and the gentle, soothing, motions of her hand on his shoulders, the back of his head as she folded him to her heart, finally managed to calm his frantic shaking.

Sir Graham came in a short time later and found his brother-in-law sitting up in bed and staring vacantly out the stern windows, Rhiannon in a chair beside him and holding his hand.

“Connor,” he said.

Connor blinked, and slowly turned his head to look at the admiral.

Or rather, through him.

“I trust that Rhiannon told you.”

It was a moment before Connor answered. “She did.”

“I need to know about this ship. The one you attacked.”

 “Nothing to tell,” Connor said dully. “She won, we lost.”

“You made a stupid decision.”

“Aye, I did.”

“And you attacked that convoy and cut out numerous ships from it, too, didn’t you?”

Connor was back to staring without seeing out the stern windows. “Yes.”

“I’m taking you back to Barbados as my prisoner of war. You’ll be exchanged in due course, just like any other American.”

Connor said nothing, only continued to gaze dully out the window.

“I didn’t want to do this, you know, but you forced my hand.”

Rhiannon had heard enough. “Sir Graham, have you no pity?”

“Pity?
Pity?!
After his recklessness and stupidity cost him not only his own ship, but the lives of his mother and father?” Now, Sir Graham’s eyes were strangely moist and he turned angrily away, unwilling to allow this show of emotion. “They weren’t my parents, but I loved them just the same. And Brendan Merrick was one of the finest men that God ever created. A man who
was my friend
.”

“I think, Sir Graham, that Connor is suffering enough,” Rhiannon said coldly. “Ask him what you will about what happened, but I won’t let you stand there and hurt him, and make him feel any worse than he already does just to assuage your own pain.”

The admiral’s blue eyes hardened. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Do you realize how hard this is going to be, to have to tell my
wife
? What do you think she’s going to do when she learns that her own brother was responsible for the death of her parents?!”

“
Stop it!
And if Maeve had a dream that sent you out looking for us, don’t you think she probably already knows what happened? You are cruel and unfeeling to stand there as you are and say the things you do! And while you might condemn my husband for his recklessness,
I
see it as a blessing and a gift. A
gift
! Because what is a flaw in one person’s eyes is something to admire in another’s, and some day, maybe you’ll appreciate the gifts that God gave my husband instead of condemning him for them!”

There was a knock on the door.

“What is it?” roared the admiral.

A Royal Marine poked his head in. “Liam Doherty to see you, sir. And the Ashton brothers.”

“Good. Maybe between the four of you, I’ll finally get a true picture of what the hell happened out there.”

Between the three of you
, Rhiannon thought, still holding Connor’s hand. He had not said a word throughout Sir Graham’s tirade, only lying there with his eyes staring unseeingly out the great windows, and Rhiannon wondered if he’d even heard anything the admiral had said.

“Hey, Con,” said Nathan, coming up to the bed while Toby stood mutely behind him. “Glad to see you awake. You had us all worried.”

Connor heard his cousin’s words as if from a long distance away. They skated over him like the breeze off the ocean, passing him by, meaning little, if anything. He couldn’t think of anything to say. The constant buzzing in his blood that kept him ever-moving, the ceaseless racing of his thoughts, had dulled to a nothingness that he couldn’t access. But through it, he was aware of an awkwardness in his cousin’s demeanor, a resentment, even, and Connor was sensitive enough that that didn’t escape him. He turned dull eyes from his idle perusal of the stern windows and looked at his cousin and there, in Nathan’s steady brown eyes, he saw his suspicions confirmed.

You blame me, too. I know you do.
His gaze shifted to Toby, and the boy who had idolized him, who had thought he walked on water, looked away, unable to meet his eyes.
You both do.

He could not blame them.

And Liam Doherty, who was like an uncle to him . . . his father’s best and beloved friend, as faithful and true a friend as one could ever have wished—

Liam would not even look at him. Instead, he walked over to the stern windows and stood there gazing out over the sea behind them.

You too, then.

He shut his eyes and thought about what it would be like to be dead, and found himself yearning for it. Longing for it. Wishing he could trade places with his father. Anything to escape this awful, unrelenting pain.

“So you encountered this so-called merchant ship north of Puerto Rico,” Sir Graham was saying. “Flying minimal canvas, poorly handled, from a distance, unarmed. What was her tonnage? What flag was she flying?’

Nathan’s quiet voice. Liam’s. Connor shut his eyes again and let his mind ride its inevitable, self-directed course, taking him far away, as it had once done so many times in a long-ago schoolroom as his teacher had tried to make him understand that no, the letter P was not made like that, and it faced this way and not that, and that it was hard to believe he was the son of the famous Captain Brendan Merrick when he was so stupid he couldn’t even tell the difference between this letter and that letter . . . .

Connor’s head drooped on the pillow and he dozed, content only with the gentle, loving stroke of his wife’s hand against his arm. He heard, in bits and pieces, the admiral sharply questioning the actions that had led up to the attack . . . Nathan’s responses about the course they’d been on . . . Toby filling in details as he remembered them . . . Liam Doherty still standing by the window. Once, when Connor dragged open his eyes, he saw his father’s old friend raise his hand and surreptitiously pass a knuckle beneath his eye before taking out a handkerchief and quietly raising it to his turned-away face.

After that, Connor let his unreinable, untrainable mind take him where it would, and as the voices around him faded into a low, pleasant drone and then the bliss of nothingness, he found escape in sleep that was, this time, deep, dark, and dreamless.

And Rhiannon, still sitting by his bedside and holding his hand, never left him.

*     *     *

They dropped anchor in Carlisle Bay a day and a half later where Connor, finally able to stand shakily on his feet, was hustled out of the great cabin by two Royal Marines and brought topside.

He had not eaten a thing since he’d woken, and had only accepted a few sips of water. Nothing more.

Rhiannon was indignant.

“You don’t have to make a spectacle of him,” she said savagely, as Sir Graham directed his men to take her husband to the local gaol. “There’s no reason he can’t stay here aboard your flagship. Or with his brother on
Sandpiper
. You’re doing this just to be cruel!”

“I’m doing this because if I don’t, my wife is likely to murder him in cold blood,” the admiral snapped, and when Maeve came aboard, eyes blazing, her beautiful hair falling down over her knuckles as she collapsed, crying, on her husband’s quarterdeck at being told the news, Rhiannon understood. Crazed with grief, Maeve howled out her anguish to the sky, and then, as her brother was being led off the ship, she snatched up a cutlass and charged him.

Sir Graham had anticipated it and easily caught her.

“You stupid, unthinking, selfish, murdering
bastard
!” she screamed after her brother. “
How could you?!
”

Connor stiffened, but was made to keep walking, and Rhiannon ran to be beside him.

“Where he goes, I go,” she said firmly, taking his hand.

Sir Graham just shrugged. There was Kieran, standing on the deck of the sloop that his father had designed and built for him, his eyes huge and haunted.

“He went and did it just as I told you all along that he would!” Maeve was screaming in her hysteria. “Never listened to anyone but himself, always thought he knew more than everybody else, had to go and show off in front of everyone, didn’t he? And now he’s lost
Kestrel
! He’s gone and killed
Dadaí
, and Mother, too!”

Connor, still very weak, tripped over a ring bolt on the big ship’s deck and fell to one knee. There he remained, bent over and defeated, his head lowered, his thick, tousled curls, still encrusted with blood, hanging dejectedly around his face.

His shoulders were quietly shaking.

Rhiannon went up to him and laid a hand on his back. A body couldn’t take much more.

And suddenly she knew what she must do.

There was one sibling that looked to have inherited their father’s thoughtful sensitivity and cooler head, and he was the one whose solemn, wide-set amber eyes were gazing quietly out at them from across the water.

It was unthinkable for Connor to be held prisoner in the Falconer household, not with his sister almost insane with grief. Liam Doherty, Nathan and Toby Ashton, Sir Graham, Maeve, all of them . . . their resentment toward him was palpable. They had rejected him. Every last one of them.

And there was no way in hell that Rhiannon was going to allow Sir Graham to throw her husband in a Bajan gaol.

She marched up to the admiral.

“Let him remain with his brother aboard his sloop,” she demanded. “It’s not like he’s going to go anywhere. Or, can.”

In the end the admiral capitulated, a dull and lifeless Connor was sent to stay aboard
Sandpiper
with Kieran, and
Sandpiper
was ordered to stay right where she was anchored in Carlisle Bay until Sir Graham Falconer decided what the hell he was going to do.

Chapter 33

Three days later, Ned began to complain that his muscles ached. He stopped eating, said he was tired, and pleaded to go to bed early, much to the surprise of his father and numb, hollow-eyed mother.

By the time he wandered, hot, shaking, and sweaty, into his parents’ bedroom in the wee hours of the morning, Sir Graham knew that the same fever that his mother-in-law had contracted had now fallen on his one and only son.

And he felt everything inside of him still.

Sir Graham Falconer had been in fierce, bloody battles and was about the finest that England could offer when it came to raw, unquenchable, sheer, pig-headed courage. But when his little boy came staggering into his bedroom in the middle of the night, crying that he didn’t feel well and his brow hot with sweat beneath his father’s hand, the admiral knew a fear such as he’d never known before.

Outside, the wind gusted once, twice, shaking the coconut palms and whistling a bit as it pushed through their stiff and shaky leaves, and Sir Graham knew that dirty weather was on its way.

Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not the next day.

But coming.

“Papa . . . I don’t feel well,” little Ned said weakly, and the blood went cold in his father’s veins.

*     *     *

At sunrise, that same ominous wind was pulling at
Sandpiper
’s pennant some seventy feet above her deck and Kieran, studying it, looked to the east and then up at the sky above.

Clouds. Sheep’s wool, they were. High, meticulously patterned tufts of thin white cotton, all arranged as though by a giant hand, hundreds of them piling into each other and stretching from high overhead to the distant horizon. He was a mariner. He knew what those clouds meant. When the sky looked like sheep’s wool, it foretold an incoming storm.

The wind moved uneasily through the rigging.

Or something worse.

Kieran looked down at the sea and wondered if, on the other side of the island that faced the open Atlantic, the swells were already building in from the west. Time, perhaps, to think about seeking deeper water. Or to lash the sloop nine ways from sideways at the pier and hope that whatever monstrous work of nature was on its way might spare them.

He wished his father were here. He would advise him what to do.

Kieran’s solemn amber eyes darkened a shade, and he turned and walked aft. Tragedy, it seemed, was never content to wrap its dire net over a few chosen, unlucky few, but instead took great delight in rippling out and making the lives of as many people as it could, unbearably miserable.

He did not have the hot nature of his sister and brother. They had grown up tempestuous, irrepressible, difficult, with Connor getting in constant trouble for brawling, disrespect and making trouble, and Maeve running away from home when she was just sixteen. They had visited more than their share of worry and heartache on their beleaguered parents.

But Kieran was of a more thoughtful, measured nature. When Maeve and Connor had been fist-fighting, he had been sitting out in the stable reading Shakespeare and composing, clandestinely and in terror of being found out, a love sonnet to a girl down in Market Square who probably didn’t even know he existed. He’d hidden it beneath the hay when his mother had come looking for him and then, fearful of it being discovered, he’d torn it into bits and thrown it to the wind.

Maeve—fiery, beautiful, and a force of nature in herself, would never forgive Connor for what he had done. Nathan and Toby would be quicker to come around, and then there was poor Liam Doherty, suffering, perhaps, more than any of them . . . the old Irishman couldn’t bear to even look at Connor, but Kieran knew that it had nothing to do with resentment over his older brother’s decision and what had come of it.

It was because it was impossible to behold Connor without seeing a younger image of their father.

Poor Liam. Poor Sir Graham, who had to manage their wild and willful sister.

But most of all, Kieran’s heart went out to Connor.

He looked up at the pennant once more, and then let his gaze move forward to the sloop’s long, upswept head-rig pointing far out over the water. There, lying prone on his belly along the jib-boom was his older brother, framed against the sheep’s wool clouds beyond.

He had been out there all night.

Kieran stood there watching the motionless figure for a long time.

Then, his eyes troubled, he went below.

*     *     *

Connor, lying far out and above the water, his cheek pressed against the sun-warmed spar and his arms hanging down on either side, was unaware of his brother’s presence.

He didn’t have the strength to move. He, who had spent his life dealing with restless energy, didn’t have the will to move, either. Food didn’t appeal to him, though Rhiannon, bless her sweet heart, had tried to get him to eat some turtle soup last night. He had taken a mouthful or two then wordlessly pushed the bowl aside, got up from the table and had come out here, far away from everyone and everything, to be alone with his agony.

Beneath him the sea had picked up a bit of chop, and the wind made a brief, gusting howl through the rigging far above deck.

Connor noted these facts with a part of his brain that no longer seemed to belong to him. Was it possible for a body to be dead inside, dead all over, really, with only one’s mind still functioning? Or was it that his mind was dead, and his body was the one thing that still had any feeling? He could no longer tell the difference. He felt numb. Detached from himself. As though he were being dragged through time and space in a body that belonged to a stranger.

Something warm tickled his cheek, and he realized he was weeping.

Please, God, give me relief from this
pain.

His neck was stiff, and he turned his head toward the east, laying his other cheek, now stubbled with several day’s growth, against the spar. There, far off, the horizon was a riotous collage of red and crimson, the blushing, fiery light just touching a bank of distant clouds. He could feel the weather changing. He didn’t need a barometer to know that far to the east, a storm was coming in.

He could feel it in his bones.

And he didn’t care.

He shut his eyes, seeing the blood-red light against the back of his eyelids, trying to shut his mind to what his sister had screamed, what Nathan’s and Toby’s and Sir Graham’s eyes had said, what his own heart knew:

You killed them.

The tears leaked from his eyes.

You’re an old man, a fake, and worst of all, you’re a damned coward.

His flat, haunted gaze fell on the place where
Kestrel
had been anchored, and he shut his eyes, unable to look at the empty place on the water. Dear God, was there no place to get away from this gnawing guilt, this anguish and self-loathing that made every breath he took one that he wished would be his last? Unable to stand it any longer, he pushed himself up and, swaying weakly for want of food, made his way back along the jib-boom, the bowsprit, and back to the sloop’s decks.

Do it now. Do it now, before anyone else is up, and make the pain finally stop.

His mouth grim, he strode to the shrouds, hooked a hand through the tarred rope, and began to climb. High. Higher. So high that at last he was in the crosstrees where the mast ended and the topmast began, and there, ignoring the dizziness in his head, the nausea in his belly, and the trembling weakness in his body, he thought about leaping from the rigging.

Not to dive.

But to die.

*     *     *

Rhiannon awoke with a start.

Something wasn’t right. Her eyes flew open in the darkness, and she immediately realized she was in the bunk in the main cabin of Kieran Merrick’s little sloop.

Connor needs you.

She sat up, looking for him in the heavy gloom. She was alone. Fear gnawed at the base of her spine. She found the old pantaloons that Toby had lent her, yanked them on under her night shift, grabbed Connor’s sleeveless waistcoat and hurriedly left the cabin.

Topside, the fresh, heady saltiness of the night air still lay over everything, though dawn had broken in a riotous display of color and cloud to the east. Waves lapped against the sloop’s hull. Rhiannon, concerned, looked around, but the deck was deserted. And yet, with that part of herself that was so intimately connected to her husband, that had woken her in his absence and told her that he needed her, that made her increasingly fearful for reasons she did not yet understand, Rhiannon knew that he was here.

A strange sound was coming from aloft.

Weeping. The kind of raw, anguished sobbing that comes from a soul that has been ripped asunder in grief, horrible to bear and even more horrible to behold.

Rhiannon felt her own eyes well up with tears. She would give up everything she had in this world, if only it would relieve his suffering.

She walked to the base of the mast and looked up. There, silhouetted against the slowly-lightening sky high, high above, she could see her husband’s form, his dangling feet. His forehead rested against the mast, and he appeared oblivious to her presence.

“Connor.”

The weeping abruptly ceased.

“Connor, please come down. I’m . . . frightened for you.”

“Go away, Rhiannon,” he said brokenly. “There is nothing you or anyone can do for me.”

Rhiannon had seen her husband aloft in the rigging as often as she’d seen him swaggering across a deck. She had seen him take absurd risks with his life and his safety, she had seen him do things that would have had most men quaking in terror. But never, never, had she been as afraid for him as she was at this moment.

You need to go to him.

Now.

Her mouth went suddenly dry and her palms broke out in a hot, clammy sweat as she contemplated what she was about to do.

Best
not
to contemplate it.

If she contemplated it, she might not do it.

And if she didn’t do it, she did not want to think of what Connor was up there contemplating, himself.

She walked to the larboard side and there, swallowed hard and took a deep, steadying breath. The shrouds, that tarred, crosshatched network of roping that supported the mast on either side of the ship, pinnacled upward and inward like an ever narrowing ladder, finally ending at the crosstrees so high above. She had seen the crew climb them to go aloft. If they could do it, then surely, so could she.

I am young. I am strong.

She put a hand on the ropes, climbed gingerly up on a nearby gun, and then put a foot on the rail as she prepared her ascent. Her body was quaking with terror.

I can do this. I
will
do this. And I will do it, Connor, because I love you.

She took her foot off the rail, gripped the rough, hard, roping, and slowly began to climb.

Don’t look down. Put your head up and look at your knuckles in front of you and just keep moving. You have to do this. He needs you like he’s never needed anyone before. Climb, Rhiannon. Just climb.

Because Rhiannon knew that if he chose to give up, it really wouldn’t matter whether she fell to her own death. Life, she knew with a sudden, gripping certainty, was not worth living without him. This man who had taught her that fear was not necessarily a bad thing, that life was too short not to leap, shouting with joy, out into space, that life was meant to be
lived
.

In her mind she saw him grinning, as he had done so often in happier times.
Go ahead, Rhiannon. Live a little.

She kept climbing, fiercely determined, trembling hands pulling her upward, flattening herself against the roping as the shrouds narrowed and the deck grew smaller and smaller beneath her.

You taught me how to live, Connor. You taught me how to live, and I’m
not
going to let you die.

She could feel the slow rock of the ship all the more up here, the sway of the mast itself in these hard, taut ratlines that supported it. Nausea swam in her stomach and she fought against a sudden feeling of hysteria. Of fear so paralyzing she was afraid she was going to faint. Her hands were now shaking, sweating, and numb. Terror clenched her belly, and she took several deep gulps, forcing herself to continue on, her fear coming in tiny little whimpers from the back of her throat.

Courage, he’d once told her, wasn’t about doing things you weren’t afraid to do, no matter how terrifying anyone else found them. Courage was doing the things you
were
terrified to do, no matter how un-terrifying anyone else found them.

The whimpering in the back of her throat began to sound like an animal caught in a trap, and Rhiannon bit savagely down on her lip and continued moving ever upward. The shrouds had narrowed considerably now, making her all the more aware of the nothingness of space all around her, the distance between herself and the deck so far below, the very tenuous, perilous, aloneness of her position as she realized the height she had attained.

But every terrifying step brought her closer to her husband.

To any hope of saving him.

The whimpering in the back of her throat stopped, and wrapping both hands firmly around the rough roping, her knuckles white as bone, she looked up. There he was, just a few feet above, his bare foot dangling several inches from her eyes.

“Connor.”

He did not respond, and remained unmoving with his forehead leaning against the topmast. She did not know if he was asleep, or so far gone in grief that the world had ceased to matter to him. Her paralyzing fear as she’d ascended the mast was nothing compared to the stark terror she felt now as she realized there was nothing keeping him from tumbling to his death.

“Connor!”

This time he raised his head, though the movement seemed to cost him all of his strength, and he looked dully down at her.

“Connor, you have to come down. Please.”

“There is nothing for me to come down for, Rhiannon.” His eyes were huge wells of pain behind a forced, unhappy smile. “Y’know, I’ve always been told that hell was a place we go after we die, but now . . . now I know that that was all a lie. Hell is right here. Right now.”