Thief of Hearts (9 page)

"Wot're all these cross buggers niled t' the trees?" wondered Billy, pointing out the window as the heavy, lumbering
carosse de diligence
bumped and rattled over the rutted road. They'd crossed the Maritime Alps into Italy that morning; now they were moving through a dim and lonely wood, where it seemed the lowering trees were squeezing the carriage in a dark, gloomy vice. Their progress was slow, monotonous; the unending tedium had everyone on edge, even Billy.

When no one else answered his question, Brodie drawled matter-of-factly, "They mark the places where travelers like us got robbed and murdered by highwaymen." Three heads swiveled toward him, then quickly looked away. Anna made a soft, scornful noise and went back to staring out the window. "It's true," he insisted. "It says so right here in this book you gave me."

She nodded grimly, ruing that impulsive gesture. All day Mr. Brodie had been entertaining them with choice phrases translated from Italian that he'd gleaned from the guidebook she'd thrown at him last night. Phrases like "Oh, Lordy, my position has been struck by lightning," and "Alas, we are beset upon by wolves; some fine fellow do please dispel the noisy brutes."

"And have you found an appropriate deterrent to highwaymen in your phrase book, Mr. Brodie?" she asked coldly.

"Yes, ma'am. Two, in fact.
Chiami un vigile
, which means—"

"'Call a policeman.' That'll be a big help. Already I feel safer." She hated sarcasm; the man just seemed to drag it out of her. "And the second?"

"
Ecco, questa'sì che è bella
."

She frowned, puzzled.

"Wot's that?" asked Billy.

"That, Bill, is what they call an idiomatic expression."

"Wot's it mean?"

"It means 'Hullo, this is a rum go.'"

Brodie, Billy, and even Aiden chortled with merriment while Anna stared at them crossly. Mr. Brodie's sense of humor was lost on her. "If it's not putting you out in any way, perhaps you might turn your attention for a few minutes to something besides clever Italian sayings."

Brodie closed his guidebook and smiled across at her as she began to rummage around in the corner of her seat. Presently she brought out a flat, heavy-looking, wicker-covered object about sixteen inches square. It proved to be a writing case, a wondrous thing, a portable marvel, with velvet-covered receptacles for paper, pens, a tiny ink bottle, wafers, sealing wax, envelopes, and postage stamps. The neatness, the finicky efficiency of it almost made him laugh: it was so exactly the sort of contraption she would own.

She looked up and sent him a quelling glance, as if reading his mind. "I thought we would begin very simply," she opened, not meaning to sound patronizing but unconsciously adopting the tone of a rather stern schoolmistress, "and sketch the primary buildings and structures of the Liverpool division of Jourdaine Shipbuilding. I like to think we've a model shipyard; once you understand the rudiments of our operation, you should have a rough but sound grasp of shipbuilding in general, for we build everything from clippers to cargo steamers."

"Which do you like better?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Clippers or steamers. Which do you like better?"

She thought for a moment. "I have no actual preference. Each has its use, steam for reliability, sail for economy. As for speed, they're roughly equal now, but that will change as propellor and engine technology improve. There will always be resistance to steam, but that comes from people who possess more nostalgia than practicality."

"Oh, aye, and we couldn't have that."

She smiled minimally. "Ah, I perceive you're one of the die-hards, Mr. Brodie. Let me guess. You talk of 'leaving the sea and going into steam,' and you call coal 'bought wind.' You deplore the end of the sailing era because that's when men were men and ships were ships, and now it's nothing but noisy engines and ship's firemen and great propellors spoiling a good four-master's sailing qualities." He said nothing, and she raised her eyebrows. "Well?" Fleetingly she wondered why she wanted to provoke him.

She'd succeeded, if the bunching of the muscles in his jaw was any indication. But his voice betrayed nothing but friendly disagreement. "Well, now, there's a bit of truth in what you say, Mrs.
Balfour
. A man who signs away for voyage after voyage in sailing ships gets to like the life, if only because he knows no other. But when he quits sail and goes into steam, all he's really trading is one filthy, cramped forecastle for another. Instead of eating the slops from the galley of his undermanned windjammer, he gets to eat the slops that come out of the galley of his undermanned steamer. The voyages are shorter, the pitiful pay's a bit more regular, and there's less shanghaiing. And a steamer has a boiler room where he can dry his clothes every once in a while. But that's about it, Mrs.
Balfour
. He's still got the same drink-crazed captain, the same number of senseless floggings, the same mad, bucko mates who would slit his throat over a chicken bone." He leaned forward. "To my mind, ma'am, it's mostly romantic ladies and gentlemen who talk about the glories of life at sea, the same ones who order their meals in bed whenever the ship rolls two degrees."

Anna's lips tightened. Obviously he thought she was one of those who idealized a seaman's life, and it was galling to admit he was partly right. She knew a great deal about ships but very little about the lot of the men who sailed them, and it was a lapse in her education she'd never even considered, much less lamented, until this moment. Brodie was watching her with a bland look, eye-brows raised in what she suspected was a parody of her own expression a moment ago. It annoyed her.

"How old were you when you first went to sea, Mr. Brodie?"

"Fourteen."

"And you're what, now, twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?"

Brodie smiled thinly. She knew exactly how old he was. The question revealed how hard it was for her even now to acknowledge that he was any blood kin to her precious Nicholas. "Twenty-eight, ma'am."

"Twenty-eight. Fourteen years at sea. And yet Aiden tells me you'd only just received your chief mate's certificate before you were… arrested." She said the last word with great delicacy, as if it were slightly foreign, slightly vulgar. "That's a bit unusual, isn't it? I believe the average length of time it takes an able seaman to become even a
master
on, for example, a thousand-ton merchantship is more on the order of seven years. Why did it take you so long, I wonder?" From the corner of her eye she saw Aiden shift restlessly beside her. No doubt he thought she was baiting Mr. Brodie. But she didn't care. Among other things, she was sick of the tone of his voice when he called her "Mrs.
Balfour
."

The sly innocence of her tone piqued Brodie's temper. "Well, now, a fine lady like yourself probably doesn't know that there's two ways for a man to reach the poop on most vessels. One's through the hawsepipe and the other's through the stern windows."

It was irritating to admit she hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about, especially since she knew he was using his idiotic sailor's jargon on purpose to baffle her. "You've made your point," she said stonily. "Would you mind translating that now?"

He smiled. "The poop's the officers' quarters. A man—"

"I know that."

He made her a little mock-congratulatory bow from his seat. "A man with a rich, influential family reaches it through the stern windows; without it, we say he squeezes into it through the hawsepipe. A hawsepipe."

"I know what a hawsepipe is, too," she snapped. "How very interesting. I confess I'm struck most by the
convenience
of the excuse. But never mind, let's begin our lesson. I sense we have a very long way to go."

Brodie sat back, expressionless. It was a convenient excuse, but he'd have taken a dozen lashes before admitting it to Mrs.
Balfour
. A truer reason for the slowness of his professional progress was that until a few years ago he hadn't given a damn whether he had a command of his own or not. He'd been a raw, swaggering sailor given to brawling and defying orders, then suffering the inevitable punishment afterward with arrogance and noisy bravado. He was older now, and not as angry. Time had sobered him a trifle. Getting his mate's certificate had seemed like a beginning, the start of his real life.

Then someone killed Mary, and everything went to hell.

He could see that Anna was enjoying herself now. Her sketch of Jourdaine's shipyards had gotten away from her; she had to add another sheet of paper to the first to make room for the rest of the docks. She was explaining what was what in her incredibly refined, upper-class accent; but her voice was so musical, so sweet, really, he found himself not minding. He glanced over at O'Dunne; the lawyer returned a cool stare. Billy Flowers had rested his head against the side of the coach and gone to sleep. Anna was pointing at something and explaining it to him. He squinted and bent forward awkwardly, pretending he couldn't see from so far away. "Should we switch?" he asked O'Dunne, all innocence.

"Oh. Certainly." The lawyer got up and the two men changed places, Brodie's chain rattling as he flopped down beside Anna with a satisfied sigh.

She reared away as if she smelled a two-day mackerel, her back poker-straight, shoulders rigid. That riled him. He clasped his hands and leaned over the writing case, studying the diagram intently, making sure the side of his thigh brushed hers. He heard her draw a startled breath and felt her go even stiffer. "What's this?" he asked, pointing, rattling. She had to shift toward him to see. He turned his head at that moment, and the tips of their noses touched. She went that pretty apricot color he was growing fond of, and he sat back, smiling.

The lesson progressed. Anna began to lose some of her tension after a while, although Mr. Brodie's constant and, she suspected, deliberate nearness kept her from relaxing completely. It grew warm in the carriage, and she had a bad moment when, with some difficulty, he unbuttoned the full sleeves of his linen shirt and rolled them up to his elbows. The sight of so much muscular forearm and reddish-brown hair had the peculiar effect of temporarily emptying her mind. She didn't think she'd ever seen Nicholas's bare arms in all the years she'd known him. No, she was sure of it; she'd have remembered. "A gentleman doesn't roll up his sleeves in the presence of a lady," she almost admonished Brodie. But that was for another lesson; she didn't want to overload him with new information on his first day.

"You say Jourdaine builds everything," he said after she'd described the facility with which they forged their own iron to make stems and stern frames. "Will it continue to, or do you think you'll specialize in one kind of ship someday?"

It was an interesting question; Mr. Brodie had no idea how interesting. Not quite understanding the motives for her own candor, she confided her dream. "It was my hope that we would begin to concentrate on a new line of passenger ships, an intercontinental fleet of luxury liners that would sail between Europe and America. And sail them ourselves instead of selling them on contract to an independent shipping line. Now that's not likely to happen."

"Why not?"

She regarded him gravely. "Because Nicholas is dead. And because Stephen is only interested in building warships."
We can't lose
, she recalled her cousin insisting, for there was always a war somewhere, whether England was fighting it or not. His cynicism repelled her, but her father saw his point. Business was business. Without Nicholas to support her, she foresaw Jourdaine going in exactly the direction Stephen wanted it to.

"But the company is still your father's, isn't it?" asked Brodie.

"Yes."

"And when he's gone it'll be yours, won't it?"

"Yes."

"Then I don't understand. Why can't you build what you want?"

Anna laughed softly. "Mr. Brodie, your naiveté is charming, if a bit breathtaking. The answer, in a word, is because I'm a woman."

"So?"

It wasn't naiveté, she decided, it was stupidity. She shook her head impatiently, dismissing the subject, and began to explain the difference between knees, breasthooks, and crutches in longitudinal framing.

The afternoon lengthened, grew warmer. O'Dunne fell asleep with his chin on his chest. Billy Flowers snored delicately. In the middle of a dissertation on wave troughs and their impact on keel design, Anna caught Brodie in a yawn. She laid down her pen.

"Perhaps that's enough for today," she announced magnanimously.

"Oh, don't stop on my account. This is fascinating."

She suspected he was being facetious. "Where were you born, Mr. Brodie?" she asked abruptly, surprising both of them.

"Didn't Nick tell you that?"

"I'm asking you."

"What did
he
say?"

She didn't answer, merely waited.

Brodie sat back and crossed his long legs. "I'll tell you, but only on one condition. That you don't call me a liar afterward."

Anna flushed. "I apologize for that. I—"

"Apology accepted." He smiled; she didn't smile back. He was beginning to wonder if she had any sense of humor at all. "I was born in my father's house in the Vale of Clwydd, in Denbighshire. I lived there for six years, and then my mother and my brother and I moved to Llanuwchllyn, near Llyn Tegid and the Dyfrdwy. That's the River Dee to you."

"Wales," she said, just to be sure.

"Aye, Wales," he confirmed, laughing.

Not Ireland, then. She believed him. It meant Nicholas had lied. "Are your parents living?" she asked faintly.

"My mother's dead."

"Father?"

"Not dead. As far as I know." Or care, he added to himself.

Anna had so many questions, she didn't know where to begin. But to ask them would be to admit Nicholas had lied about
everything
, and she wasn't ready for that. "You and Nicholas, you… did grow up together, I suppose?" she asked without much hope.

"Aye, until we were fourteen. Then we took different paths, you might say."

His tone held bitterness, she noted. "And yet you both followed the sea. Or ships, at any rate."