Pirates (15 page)

He sat down on the sand near the fire, started to pull his wet shirt off over his head, and then stopped.

Phoebe was about to remark that he needn’t be shy, since she’d already seen him naked, but the truth was, she hadn’t. Their first intimate encounter had taken place in total darkness, and Duncan had been wearing all his clothes in the second. “What are you hiding?” she asked, as the crabs
rattled against each other like bones in their pitiful prison. “A tattoo that says ’Mom,’ or ’Born to Lose’?”

Duncan stared at her, so genuinely mystified that Phoebe laughed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m still adjusting to life in this dimension.” She sighed, looking at his sodden clothes. “All the same, if you sit around in those clammy duds, you’re going to catch a world-class cold.”

He looked exasperated. “What?”

“You’ll be sick,” Phoebe translated patiently.

“I’ve been sick before,” he said, peering into the bucket of steaming water and then getting up to find more driftwood to add to the fire. Phoebe hoped the crabs would be reincarnated, poor things, as something inedible.

“Will it hurt them?” she asked. “When you drop them in the water?”

“Who?” Duncan inquired.

“The crabs,” Phoebe answered, flushed. Fine thing if
she
was the one coming down with something, after lecturing Duncan the way she had.

He sighed. “No,” he said. “They are very primitive creatures.”

“Suppose some giant came along, and plucked us right out of the sand, and dropped us into boiling water. While we might appear primitive to him, we would certainly feel pain.”

“Very well,” Duncan retorted, annoyed, “let’s just give up eating anything besides berries and roots, shall we?” Phoebe was just opening her mouth to deliver a discourse on twentieth-century vegetarianism when he cut her off. “Ah,” he went on, with an expression of crazed revelation, “but then, for all we know, plants have feelings, too. Leaving us with no choice but to starve.”

“I give up,” Phoebe said.

“It’s about time,” Duncan replied.

The water in the bucket came to a tentative, somewhat grudging boil eventually, and he dropped the crabs into it, first one and then the other. To Phoebe’s enormous relief, they both gave up the ghost without delay, and made no
pathetic, futile efforts to heave themselves out of the pot.

Duncan’s teeth were chattering by the time he fished his dinner out of the bubbling, frothy water with a stick. Phoebe flinched as he popped off a claw and cracked it between two small stones, but the aroma of the succulent crabmeat made her stomach rumble.

He had spread some large, smooth leaves on the ground, and these served as a platter. Shivering, his lips turning a faint shade of blue, he ate.

Phoebe munched her berries and wished she’d never brought up the whole vegetarian question in the first place. She loved both chicken and fish, and enjoyed the occasional filet mignon—or had, when she’d lived in the modern world. It was just the idea of dropping living things into a boiling kettle that had upset her, but she couldn’t very well ask for some of the crabmeat after making such a fuss.

Following an interval of triumphant silence, Duncan cracked several claws, placed them on a leaf, and offered them to Phoebe. “Here,” he said. “Swallow this, if you can force it past that lump of pride in your throat.”

Phoebe accepted the food and ate swiftly and with very little grace. The meal was delicious.

“I still think you should take off your shirt,” she said when they’d been sitting in a peaceful silence for a while, listening to the rain. “I won’t look, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

Duncan’s color, by then, was approaching lavender. Glaring at Phoebe, he untied the laces and wrenched the shirt off over his head. His chest was worthy of Michelangelo’s “David,” though thickly furred with dark hair, and she couldn’t imagine why he’d want to hide. When she took the garment, however, and walked over to hang it with her own things, she saw his back.

Fine white scars marked his flesh from his neck to the base of his spine, and Phoebe marveled that she hadn’t felt them the night before, when she’d touched and stroked him in passion. But of course her senses had been occupied elsewhere.

He sat rigid in the firelight and the misty gloom of the storm, allowing her to look at him. Enduring it.

“What happened?” she asked in even tones, moving back to her place by the fire and kneeling in the sand, her hands resting on the velvet of the cloak where it covered her thighs.

“I was whipped,” he said, gazing defiantly into her eyes.

Gall rushed into the back of Phoebe’s throat at the thought, but she swallowed hard and would not look away from him because she knew he was trying to stare her down. “God, Duncan, even I could guess that. What I was really asking is, why? Who did such a thing to you?”

He tossed the last of the crab shells into the fire and watched the flames lick them. Phoebe had won the staring match, but she felt no triumph.

“Tell me,” she urged quietly. “There is no harpsichord here, no instrument to absorb your fury and turn it into music.”

“Isn’t this codependent behavior?” he asked.

Damn his memory
, Phoebe thought. “No,” she said. “I can’t change what happened, and I can’t make up for it, either. But I can listen, and you might feel a little better for telling the tale.”

Duncan was silent for so long that Phoebe thought he had chosen to keep his own counsel, but finally, still staring into the fire, he began to talk.

“I was fifteen,” he said. “I lived outside Charles Town, with my family—my father raises cotton on a plantation there. It was a good life, though I was expected to work from the time I could lift a hoe. There were books, and a few paintings, and we had tutors. My mother played the harp and the pianoforte, and she gave me lessons …

“But I’ve gotten off course. I was big for my age, and randy in the bargain. During one of Father’s frequent trips to town, on which I accompanied him, I made the acquaintance of a woman—a girl, really—named Francesca Sheffield. She had just been shipped over from England—she’d been married by proxy, and her husband, a British captain,
was my father’s age. Francesca was beautiful, and miserably homesick, and the captain was impatient with her.

“We became friends, she and I, because we liked the same music and the same books, and, eventually, we were lovers.”

Phoebe waited silently, taking note that Duncan had named his ship for this woman, envisioning the tale as he told it—the handsome young planter, the pretty Francesca, exiled from the only world she knew to what must have seemed a wilderness, at the mercy of a man who could not understand her …

“When Sheffield found out—Charles Town is a small place, and there are few secrets—I was accused of … forcing my attentions on Francesca, and I was promptly arrested. My father went to the captain with the figurative olive branch in his hand—he knew the truth of the matter, and though he had been furious with me from the moment he found out about my involvement with the lovely Mistress Sheffield, he couldn’t stand by and see me charged with such a crime.”

He fell silent, stirring the fire with a stick, and Phoebe noticed, to her everlasting surprise, that it was getting dark.

“Didn’t Francesca defend you?” she asked after a long time.

“Oh, yes. And Sheffield beat her with his riding crop, according to Bessie, who was their cook at the time, and locked her in her room to contemplate the wages of sin. I was dragged before a magistrate—an intimate friend of the captain’s, as luck would have it—and no amount of pleading or reasoning on my father’s part—or hers—could alter the course of events. I was bound to a pole outside the town—specially erected for the purpose—and whipped. When I passed out from the pain, Sheffield ordered a dousing with cold water and delivered more lashes. He would probably have killed me if my desperate sire, my brother, and some of their friends hadn’t interceded.”

Phoebe waited a few moments before speaking, dealing with another spate of nausea. The whole scene glowed vividly in her mind, even though it had happened when the man
before her was still a boy. Then she asked, “Why didn’t they put a stop to it sooner?”

“Sheffield was a captain in His Majesty’s army,” Duncan said. “As such, he had the authority of the magistrate behind him, with a handful of soldiers to make sure the sentence was carried out. My father and brother and the others could have been hanged for what they did—riding into the center of the fray with muskets and swords and demanding that I be set free—but they took that chance.”

Tears burned in Phoebe’s eyes and ached in her throat. “What happened then?”

“Lucas, my elder brother, cut me loose—I was half-conscious and something less than clean, as you can imagine—and I was hoisted onto my father’s horse. He held me against his chest, and we went home.” Duncan’s voice was far away. “I recall that he wept.”

“And your mother?”

“She was hysterical—here was her baby boy, streaked with blood from his head to his feet. But she was soon in charge of her emotions, and of every living soul within a ten-mile radius of the plantation as well. I recovered, in time, and poor Francesca was sent back to England, in genteel disgrace. The captain, as I understand it, has been promoted to major and fights courageously for King and country.”

The storm, instead of slackening off, was picking up speed, bending the treetops high above their heads, howling in the twilight like a multitude of ghosts seeking the shelter of their graves.

“You went on living there—in Charles Town—after what he’d done to you?”

“Until my political opinions set father against son and brother against brother, yes. It was my alliance with the Continental Army that made me a prodigal, not the incident with Captain Sheffield.”

To call that an “incident” was an understatement of unsettling magnitude. “You mean your father and brother are Tories?” Phoebe asked, unable to hide her surprise.

“To the marrow of their bones,” Duncan said without
rancor. “My mother had a chapel built, my sister tells me, when I took my share of the inheritance our grandmother left for Lucas, Phillippa, and me, and went off to fit out a ship. She prayed every day—probably still does—that I would see the error of my ways and give up treason and piracy to raise cotton. Or at least help put down this awful rebellion.”

“Oh, Duncan,” Phoebe murmured, overwhelmed by what such a separation must have meant, to him and to his family. “Do they hate you, Lucas and your father?”

“No,” he said, in a strange voice, his face hidden now, in shadow. “It might be better for them if they did, though. Loyal as they are—and I don’t blame them, for there are good and sincere men on both sides of this war, as well as bastards—my activities must make them suspect to the British. I regret nothing, except the pain they’ve endured on my account.”

There was nothing more to say, not then. Phoebe moved close to Duncan and took him inside the soft expanse of her cloak, and they lay together by the fire through the long night, but they did not make love.

By morning, the squall had passed, and the seas were placid again, turquoise under a cloudless sky. Duncan and Phoebe breakfasted on berries and coconut, plucked their still-slightly-damp clothes from the bushes, and got dressed. Then Phoebe climbed stoically back into the canoe, sitting on her cloak again, and Duncan pushed the little craft off the beach and into the tide.

At midafternoon, Duncan spotted a ship in the distance—it was nothing but a speck to Phoebe, who wouldn’t have noticed it at all if he hadn’t pointed it out—and they went ashore again, into a sheltered cove. Here, flowers grew in riotous colors and gaudy abundance, and Phoebe made a fragrant pink and white wreath of orchidlike blossoms to wear in her hair.

Duncan was distracted, watching the ship, lest it draw nearer to the island.

“Is this when we start shouting, ’The British are coming, the British are coming’?” Phoebe asked. She was scared
stupid, but flippancy helped a little, made the whole thing seem more like a game and less like a life-and-death situation.

“No,” he said, without a shade of humor in his voice, without even glancing her way. “We’ll keep our mouths shut and hope to high heaven they haven’t seen us.”

Phoebe peered at the thing bobbing on the horizon. “I don’t see how they could,” she said.

“Through the spyglass?” he suggested bitingly.

“Oh,” said Phoebe. Then, after a pause, “Who are they, anyway, if they’re not English?”

“That’s a pirate ship,” Duncan said. He’d already hidden the canoe, and they were watching the water from a copse of spooky trees dangling moss from their branches, but he still looked worried. “Given the way my luck’s been running lately, I’d say it’s Mornault’s, and they were probably watching us before we even knew they were there.”

Phoebe swallowed. Her experience with such things was limited to watching one road-show production of
The Pirates of Penzance
, a ride at Disneyland, and a couple of romance novels. She hoped to maintain the status quo.

“Well, at least this time you can’t blame me,” she said with tremulous cheer.

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you,” Duncan answered archly.

Phoebe dropped the whole subject and waited, biting her lower lip and squinting at the distant ship. She couldn’t tell whether it was moving away or coming closer, and she wasn’t about to ask Duncan.

At long last, the ship vanished into a dazzling veil of sunshine.

“It’s gone,” Phoebe said straightening her wreath, which had dropped down over one eye. “Now we can stop worrying.”

“Thank you,” Duncan replied, “but I think I’ll continue for a while. He might be taking her around to the other side of the island, hoping to surprise us from behind.”

“Even your luck couldn’t be that bad,” Phoebe said. She was tired, she needed a bath, she had a headache, and aspirin
wouldn’t be discovered for at least a hundred years. She was in no condition to deal with pirates.

“Don’t lay any wagers,” said Duncan, taking her arm and pulling her deeper into the foliage, where things chattered and chirped and fluttered on all sides and overhead.