Sarah, shaking with anger, spun around to face Nicholas. ‘You—’ The warning glint in his eyes stopped the words on her tongue. He was playing Lockhart at his own game, she realised. Cold, hard calculations about money would have an effect where pleas about humane behaviour would fall on deaf ears.
‘He may be bleeding to death while you argue,’ she said and pushed her way back through the knot of men in the doorway and into the cabin. ‘Millie, can you find me some clean linen?’ She wanted to hug the white-faced girl, but perhaps giving her something practical to do would help.
‘Make room, damn you.’ Nicholas was beside her, shouldering past the sailors. ‘The valise in my cabin, girl. There are neck cloths in the bottom.’
He straightened up and confronted Lockhart, apparently unconcerned about the weapon in the man’s hand. ‘Lockhart, get your men out so we can work on him. Leave both cabins open so we have access to our baggage. Put a man at either end of this passageway with a pistol apiece and draw chalk lines on the floor that we may not cross—whatever it takes to make you feel secure. I have no patience for this.’
The captain snarled some orders, the dazed sailor was dragged away and the cabin emptied.
Nicholas looked out of the door, a rapid survey up and down the passageway. ‘They have left the other cabin open and, yes, he has stationed a man at either end.’ As he spoke there was a loud splash and a yell and he stepped over Pendell’s body to look out of the porthole. ‘He’s thrown that sailor overboard, the devil.’
‘Almost lost him some money, didn’t he?’ Millie said, her voice flat. ‘I’ve come across rum coves like him before. Ruthless. He won’t give anyone a second chance.’ She knelt beside Sarah and helped her roll the young valet on to his back. He was without his coat or waistcoat, which was helpful, and they managed to pull his shirt off over his head without rousing him. ‘Got him through the shoulder and he banged his head on the way down. I don’t reckon it’s too bad if we can stop the bleeding.’
‘You have seen a great number of knife wounds, have you?’ the Duke enquired, turning from the window.
It was meant to be sarcastic, Sarah knew, but Millie merely nodded. ‘Aye, a fair few. This isn’t deep.’
She had also suffered many unwelcome encounters with men as she was growing up near Covent Garden, Sarah was certain, but that did not mean it was any easier for her to deal with this time. ‘Well done for fighting the man off,’ she said as she wound another length of muslin around to keep a folded neck cloth tightly in place. ‘Pendell would be better off on the lower bunk. I think the bleeding has stopped, and he is starting to stir.’
They removed his shoes and stockings, Millie pulled off his breeches without turning a hair and, with the Duke lifting his shoulders and Millie and Sarah supporting his legs, they managed to get the young man on to the bed. He opened one eye, groaned and tried to sit up.
‘Stay flat,’ the Duke said.
‘Millie—’
‘I’m all right, James. Here, help me sit him up,’ Millie ordered.
Sarah bit her lip to control the smile at the Duke’s expression. To give him his due, he did support his valet while Millie slid a rolled-up coat behind him and then passed him water in a cracked beaker.
‘You have been given something to drink out of,’ she remarked.
‘That sailor was holding it when he came in. Had gin in it, I reckon,’ Millie said. ‘He’d drunk it all, though,’ she added regretfully.
The laugh did escape Sarah that time and she received a wintry stare for it from those blue, blue eyes.
He really is a very good-looking man, if only he was not so intolerably top-lofty. Does he ever smile? I wonder. Or would that be beneath his dignity?
‘Now they have opened both cabins to us I shall remain in here,’ he announced. ‘Pendell requires some attention.’
‘They won’t believe that you’re a real duke if you do that,’ Millie observed. She was tucking in the thin blanket around the wounded man’s legs.
‘Here, who took my breeches off?’ Pendell demanded, recovering enough to discover he was clad in only his drawers.
‘I did,’ Millie said. ‘Nothing special to see, is there?’
He subsided, blushing, and Nicholas turned to Sarah, eyebrows raised. ‘I believe I may indeed be superfluous.’
‘Very likely,’ she agreed, causing him to narrow his eyes at her. ‘If you can decide which of your bags James needs, I will take mine through to the other cabin. Millie, is there anything else that you require? Did they give you food?’
‘Yes, ma’am. Your Grace, I should say.’ The maid dimpled a wicked smile at her. ‘I can take care of James here.’
‘I am not at all easy in my mind about what that young woman means by take care,’ Nicholas said when they regained what Sarah was startled to find herself thinking of as “their” cabin.
‘Nothing you need worry about. She likes to tease and I have no doubt they will enjoy a flirtation when he is feeling more himself, if they haven’t begun one already, but I doubt very much that his morals will be corrupted.’
‘How did you come to employ such a girl?’ He had finished arranging his baggage and resumed his seat on the end of the bunk.
‘You mean someone as cheerful, honest and hardworking as Millie Greene? It was just my good fortune, I suppose.’
‘I mean someone who appears to have grown up in a back slum, judging by what I have heard of her language and her prowess with a blunt instrument.’
‘I fear, Your Grace, that we may fall out if you persist in insulting my maid. She was born into a harsh world, through no fault of her own, and has bettered herself through hard work. I was brought up in a very comfortable gentry home and find myself classed as a servant by such as you, and therefore beneath your notice. Again, through no fault of my own. You occupy the highest position in the land beneath the royal family—and that through no effort of your own.’
She swung her feet up on to the bunk and wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘I think for the comfort of us all, just now, it would be as well to pay as little attention to rank as may be and concentrate on the character of those who hold us prisoner.’
Nick bit back the stinging set-down that was on the tip of his tongue, as much for the realisation that he could not possibly top the one he had just received as any restraint about speaking harshly to a lady. Insolent chit! But he had to admit that Sarah had intelligence and wit and also, grudgingly, that he probably deserved her rebuke.
He inclined his head in acknowledgment, too irritated to reply, although which of them he was most annoyed with would be hard to say. It was difficult to recall the last time anyone had actually reproved him: it was not something that happened to dukes, but now he had to swallow the realisation that this woman considered him to be a complete coxcomb.
Annoyance improved her looks, he thought. The colour was up in her cheeks and her eyes sparkled. Pursing her mouth—probably to contain further cutting observations on his character—made the full lower lip pout. He stood up abruptly to lean one shoulder against the bulkhead and stare out of the window. Becoming aroused by his fellow captive was thoroughly inconvenient.
When he glanced back at her she had closed her eyes and it occurred to him that she must be exhausted. However intelligent and strong-willed Sarah Parrish might be, a night at sea followed by witnessing a double murder, being threatened with ravishment at the hands of a piratical crew and then finding herself forced into intimacy with a strange man was enough to exhaust anyone.
‘If you wish to sleep, and it would make you more comfortable, I can retire to the upper bunk,’ he offered.
‘Thank you.’ Sarah opened her eyes and smiled at him and something caught in his throat, strangling whatever cool response he was prepared to make to her reply, whatever it was. ‘But I could not sleep now. I was simply trying to think if there is anything to be done to make Pendell more comfortable and I have just remembered that I have some bascilicum powder which will be useful when we redress his wound.’ She lapsed into thoughtful silence again.
It seemed to Nick that she was a very restful companion when she was not putting him firmly in what she considered to be his place. His experience of women, although extensive, had not included any who did expect his attention, or require it, or who hung on his every word. Sarah Parrish, who was not his servant and who, quite clearly, felt absolutely no desire to cast lures in his direction, was rather soothing.
‘I have a travelling chess set if you would care to play?’
‘You would have to teach me, I fear.’ She sat up straighter. ‘Do you have cards? I can play piquet.’
‘I appear to have fallen in with what one might term a beau trap,’ Nicholas remarked after half a dozen hands had been played.
‘And what might one of those be?’ Sarah made a note of her gains. They were playing for imaginary shilling points and she was feeling rather smug.
‘A card sharp who lies in wait for innocent country gentlemen.’
‘I am no such thing and you are not an innocent countryman, either. I know precisely why I am ahead at the moment—you thought I would be a poor player and were not concentrating on your game. Now, admit it!’
Nicholas held up a hand in a gesture of surrender. ‘You have the right of it. Be assured I am concentrating now.’
‘No, do not deal another hand. I must go and see how Millie and Pendell are and then, I think, it is time for luncheon. If you are to put your mind to my defeat later, then I shall need all the sustenance I can find,’ she said with a laugh and tossed down her hand.
The afternoon passed slowly after their meagre ration of food was eaten. Pendell protested that he was as fine as five pence and only needed a night’s rest to be back on his feet—Millie rolled her eyes at this—but he did appear to be recovering well, so there was nothing to be done there.
‘The benefits of youth,’ Nick remarked when he and Sarah resumed their card game.
‘And you so ancient,’ she said abstractedly, her attention seemingly fixed on her hand. ‘Oh, you have dealt me the most impossible cards!’
‘I am twenty-nine, Miss Parrish,’ he retorted, then saw her pursed lips and realised he had been drawn into a defensive answer and that it amused her. ‘And how old are you, might I ask?’
‘Four and twenty. It is a good thing that our captors have not thought that through. If I was betrothed to another man and wished to marry you instead, then I am quite old enough to have broken my engagement and married where I choose—and there goes the justification for our dashing elopement.’
‘Your fortune is tied up until you are thirty or marry with the consent of your trustees,’ Nick said.
‘Is my fortune so very large? Oh, dear, perhaps that is your motive for carrying me off. I am quite cast down. The disillusion! I have fallen for the wiles of a fortune hunter.’
A snort of laughter escaped Nick. Then he looked again at the cards and swallowed an oath.
‘My trick, I think,’ Sarah said.
‘You were deliberately distracting me.’
‘It worked, didn’t it?’ She looked up at him through her lashes. ‘And you laughed.’
‘It did and I can assure you that my motives in eloping with you were anything but mercenary.’
That earned him a dubious look, but he focused on the cards in his hand and they played on.
It was disconcerting to realise that, beneath the general tension of their situation and his determination to get them all out with whole skins and to see Lockhart and his crew in the hands of the law, there was a growing awareness of Sarah Parrish and the need to protect her. Not as a young woman for whom any gentleman was bound by chivalry to shield, but as someone for whom he had a liking. It was an unsettling sensation.
He had sisters, but they were married and independent of his care. Women, in Nicholas’s experience, were divided into a series of groups, none of which involved actual liking. There had been Grandmama, a remote, aloof figure from his childhood, and his mother. He had been informed that, of course, he loved them and that they loved him. Looking back, he could not detect any real evidence of this. His memory was of soft hands, rustling silks, sweet perfumes and a sensation of being on display during the hour before Mama had gone to change for dinner every evening.
Then there were the servants. Nanny, but she was a distant, blurred memory now, pensioned off when he was deemed, at the age of seven, to require a tutor. The others had treated the youthful Lord Nicholas with rigid, distant respect and he, in turn, understood that a gentleman treats his staff with dignity and consideration.
His father had instructed him in what his relationships should be with the women who entered his adolescent life, as he had done with his brother, Frederick, before him. Firstly, there were married ladies and their daughters, who must be treated with carefully formalised respect—and a degree of wary self-preservation, because the second son of a duke was a very significant catch on the Marriage Mart.
And then there were the members of the muslin company. For a man in his position there was no need to risk association with the lower, or even the middle, ranks of that flock of birds of paradise. Only the highest fliers, the loveliest, most sophisticated companions would do for him.
‘One at a time, my boy,’ his father had counselled. ‘Gets too complicated else. Treat them well, pay them off when they start to cling or they begin to bore you. Be generous.’
By the time Nicholas turned twenty-one he had learned to move through the upper ranks of society with ease and to negotiate his relationships with equal confidence. Some of his many friends had sisters, with whom they were on good terms, and some had wives with whom they appeared to share a depth of understanding and friendship that surprised Nicholas with his memories of his own parents. But he had never observed a lady with whom he could imagine sharing confidences, or jokes or deeper thoughts. Even when he had fallen in love, blindly and disastrously, he could not recall this strange companionable feeling.
Sarah Parrish was not awed by his rank, cowed by his aloofness or intimidated by his set-downs. She had surprised laughter from him and aroused admiration for her courage and her common sense. He would, naturally, have done his utmost to protect any woman in distress, but he doubted he would have experienced this nagging worry that his utmost might not be good enough.
‘If your employer cuts up rough at your belated arrival on her doorstep I will, naturally, ensure that the situation is made clear to her,’ he said abruptly.
‘I am not certain that being told that I have been captured by pirates and have spent days and nights in the company of a gentleman, however elevated his rank, is going to reassure a respectable widow.’
‘In that case I will request my sister, the Countess of Wellingfield, to provide you with impeccable references.’
‘That is very kind of you,’ Sarah said warmly. ‘Oh! My trick, I believe.’
It also appeared, he thought before fixing his attention back on the game, that it had not occurred to Miss Parrish that flirting or casting out lures might be a way out of her predicament when they finally escaped from captivity.
Yes, refreshing was definitely the word for his temporary bride.
Sarah had thought the day’s experiences would banish all hopes of sleep, but when it grew dark and the lanterns were lit and they had eaten the third portion of their rations, she found it hard to keep her eyes open.
Pendell was resting comfortably with no sign of fever and Millie said firmly that she was quite comfortable where she was and that it was safest for Miss Parrish to stay with the Duke and maintain the appearance of their marriage. She returned to her own cabin, feeling somewhat awkward at the prospect.
It was not that she feared the Duke would take advantage. He had not so much as touched her, let alone made any warm remark, but she did not look forward to the prospect of sleeping in her gown, nor of trying to change into her nightgown.
But when she did enter the cabin she found that one of the old sheets from the upper bunk had been hung over the side so that her own bed was screened, and that Nicholas was already under the blankets in the top bunk, his back turned to her.
With a smile she closed the door, took off her gown, splashed the remains of the water jug on to as much skin as she dared bare, and then got behind the screening blanket to take off the rest of her clothes and pull on her nightgown.
There was something very comforting about the all-enveloping softness of good, plain flannel, she decided as she made herself as comfortable as possible on the thin, lumpy mattress.
‘Goodnight,’ she whispered, not expecting a reply.
‘Goodnight.’
The motion of the boat moving slowly through the water was soothing and so, surprisingly, was the sound of deep, regular breathing from above her. Sarah slipped into sleep.
When she woke only flickering candlelight held the dark at bay. She was terrified and strong hands were gripping her. She opened her mouth to scream and a palm was slapped across it.
‘Be quiet,’ ordered a voice that was somehow familiar.