Camilla scrambled to her feet. “I, um, should move this crate so we can get all the cargo organized. You know, if you do this ahead of time, you will save yourself even a quarter hour each stop. That adds up, you know. And if you had a cook aboard, you all would have no need to go on shore for so long to find meals—”
“Shh.” He laid a finger across her lips. “If I made my boat go as fast as you’re talking, my boiler would blow.”
She thought something inside her would explode if she didn’t get away from him, or perhaps fling herself against him and hold on tight. She didn’t know which she wanted. She feared the latter. She remained motionless save for her hands twisting together the edges of her cloak.
“Let’s go for a walk.” He held out his hand to her. “There’s nothing more to do aboard here except to wait, and that can drive a body mad.”
Perhaps that was what was wrong with her. She liked moving, riding when she still owned a horse, walking after that, even digging in the garden when they had to let the gardeners go.
She took his hand. This time, he did not tuck her fingers into the crook of his elbow, but laced his fingers with hers as though he were courting her. And perhaps he was in his untutored way. He had given her that kiss she couldn’t take as playful, such as when a mother kissed the bruise of a child. The deepening of the green of his eyes when he looked at her afterward told her he wasn’t feeling in the least playful.
They passed through the town this time and entered a wooded area with more leaves on the ground than on the trees. The carpet of vegetation silenced their footfalls. With most of the birds having flown south and the wind calm, quiet surrounded them—the kind of place where she expected God’s voice could be heard.
Suddenly the trees parted and the land sloped down to a natural inlet at the mouth of a stream. “The Dutch who settled here called these streams ‘kills.’ I don’t know why. But someday I want to build a house here. It’s close enough to town to hear the boats coming in, but far enough away to give a body peace.”
“Peace indeed.” Below them, the river slipped past in an endless pewter ribbon touched with the gold of sunlight. “It’s fascinating how the water flows down to the sea, but we build machines to help us go against that current.”
He grinned. “That’s how I’ve lived my life—going against the current of what is expected of me. I was supposed to raise horses with the family, but I don’t really like horses much, not enough to make them my life. But the river!” He turned to her, his face alight. “Have you ever been certain you know what your life’s purpose is?”
“I did not have to. It was mapped out for me before I was born. And now—” Her heart yawned empty to experience the kind of joy he showed.
“I was eleven years old when Robert Fulton made his first voyage up the Hudson in a steamboat. I stood on the shore and watched him go against the current at four miles an hour. It was a miracle, and I wanted to be a part of it. Steam is the future.” He shook his head and some of the light died. “I want to have a place to come home to, though.”
If he lost his boat, he also lost his home.
Heart aching for him, Camilla sought for words to comfort him.
The rumble of an engine and shug, shug, shug of a paddle wheel closed her need for speech. A steamboat was chugging down the river, drawing them back to town and the harbor.
That boat didn’t have the right size paddle to spare. Camilla and Black returned to town with Billy and other crewmen to find some dinner. They were finishing what was becoming a ubiquitous apple pie when another boat docked. They had a paddle with which they could part. “We can install this in the morning and be on our way,” Black promised.
“How long?” Camilla asked.
“About seventeen more hours. Now get some rest.”
She wrapped up in two quilts to keep warm, but sat at the table, her Bible open and unread before her, the lamp lending light, if not warmth. She kept thinking how they could save time. One more stop. They could unload cargo quickly now that she had moved that to the front, but the men going ashore for food was another matter. If they had something edible onboard, they wouldn’t need to go ashore. How difficult could it be to add flavor to the stew and to not cook the vegetables all at once with the meat so they became nothing but tasteless gray mush? Surely the captain would be willing to spare a few spices from his cargo.
She was about to go ask him when he knocked on the door. “I saw your light and thought you might like to come sit by the stove and have some hot cider.”
“I would.” Her heart leaped and skipped and acted altogether foolishly at the sight of him standing in the doorway, a warning she should stay put.
She rose and followed him to the cargo deck, where the stove used for cooking radiated heat to the half-dozen men who gathered around it. They were telling stories of the river and travel. One man had been up the Mississippi. Another had nearly died when the boiler of his boat exploded. Camilla listened with fascination, with awe, with the knowledge they probably exaggerated a bit for her benefit. She laughed and applauded, and felt right at home. When one by one the men decided to find beds for the night, Camilla rose slowly from her crate chair, thinking her empty cabin would feel lonely.
She bade everyone good night and started for the steps.
“Miss Renfrew.” Captain Black caught up with her. “May I show you something?”
Of course he could.
She said nothing, simply stepped aside so he could precede her up the steps to the pilothouse.
“Just this” was all he said.
He didn’t need to say more. The town was dark. The boats were dark. Moonlight blazed cold and bright in the sky, turning the river to a rippling silver ribbon and the frost on the trees to shimmering jewels.
She caught her breath and hugged herself against outward cold and inward warmth. “I see why you love the river.”
“Unfortunately, cold means our work will come to an end for the winter.”
She glanced up at him. “What do you do then?”
“I go to a boardinghouse somewhere. I’ve thought about going down to the southern states where a body can work all year, but I don’t know those rivers as well, so I couldn’t pilot.”
“Taking orders is difficult after you are used to giving them.” She rubbed her arms.
He slipped his arm around her shoulders and tucked her head against his chest. “Better?”
“Much.” Warmth stole through her. The town and boats and river lay in such stillness she heard his heart, beating as hard as her own.
“Miss Renfrew . . . ? Camilla?”
“Yes?” Startled at the use of her Christian name, she glanced up.
And he kissed her. She was twenty-five and had never been kissed. This meeting of lips tasting of cider and cinnamon was worth every year of waiting. No wine-soaked roué who had dragged her onto terraces during balls could hold a candle to this man, no matter how large their fortunes or elevated their titles. She leaned against him, she buried her fingers in his unkempt thick hair. She returned his kiss until she couldn’t breathe.
Then she drew away only long enough to inhale a lungful of frosty air before burying her face against his chest again.
“Camilla.” He murmured her name. He stroked her hair. “I was thinking. I can winter in Albany, if you stay. I’m sure you can find work there. Court you proper. We probably don’t know each other well enough for me to have just kissed you, but I’ve wanted to since I met you, and the short time just didn’t seem to matter.”
“Not to me either.”
The specter of Frederick Conover and his threats rose between her and Nathaniel, and she drew away. “I promised Joanna I would go with her to Michigan.”
He kept his arm around her. “And if she didn’t wait?”
“I will find a way to follow.”
Anything to make finding her too difficult for Conover to bother collecting the money he thought she owed him—or worse.
She felt rather than heard his sigh. “And I have no right to suggest I’ll find a way to make you stay, if I have nothing to offer you in the way of a future. I should let you go now. I should send you back to your cabin and tell you to stay away from me until we land.”
Instead of all those things, he kissed her again. Then he released her. “Now go. It’ll be an early morning.”
He didn’t walk her even as far as the cabin deck. She made her way down with her hand to her lips, cherishing the sensation of their lips clinging together. Her legs felt boneless, her insides the consistency of an overbaked apple, and her heart sang, stuttered to a halt, raised its voice again.
By the time she crawled onto her bunk, the heart singing had ceased beneath the weight of what she was keeping from Nathaniel. He would forget about courting her if he knew the burden from which she fled. She would tell him once they reached Albany. Except what if Joanna hadn’t waited and Camilla couldn’t find a way to follow? She would need work and she was good at so little, just organizing.
The following morning, watching the men rearrange her carefully arranged cargo for no obvious reason, as Nathaniel worked on the paddle wheel, an idea struck Camilla’s head. As soon as the captain returned to the pilothouse, she ran up to talk to him, needing to get his attention while the boilers fired up and the engine got enough steam to drive the great wheel.
“Natha—Captain?” She was breathless as she reached the wheelhouse.
He turned and smiled at her. “Did you sleep well?”
“I, um—” She blinked to break the spell of his green eyes gazing at her with enough warmth to turn the blustery autumn day into deep summer. “I think so.”
“Good. We should be underway soon, provided those repairs hold.”
“That is wonderful.”
“You’ll only be two days late. Considering how much downriver traffic there is, we might even get a mooring near the city.”
“That would be even better.”
Suddenly, he reached out and clasped her hands. “Once we’re underway and I’m sure those buckets will hold, I’ll turn the wheel over to Billy so we can talk some more.”
“I thought I’d try to make the stew today so we don’t have to stop so long in that town.”
“Poughkeepsie?”
She nodded.
“If it tastes halfway decent, I’ll consider you a miracle worker. Now I’ve got to get to work. You can sit here, but it’s much warmer down by the boilers.”
She sat in the cold and damp of the open pilothouse, watching his unhurried movements, listening to him talk with Billy, wondering how she would tell him she was, in essence, a woman with a price on her head. And as she sat on the hard bench bolted to the floor of the wheelhouse, an idea took root in her mind. But she couldn’t share that with Nathaniel either.
At noon, she descended to the cargo deck and tiny galley in time to stop a crewman from dumping potatoes, carrots, and some kind of gourd into the pot along with chunks of dried beef. “Do you have any salt or peppercorns?”
She didn’t know how to cook, but she knew how well-prepared food tasted. Perhaps going backward from how she knew something should look or taste would prove useful.
Shortly after she began to add salt and ground peppercorns and taste the results, Nathaniel joined her. With the crewmen nearby, they said little and looked at one another a great deal. When his gaze dropped to her lips, her cheeks heated from more than the stove, and a thrill ran up her spine.
A thrill followed by an ache, an emptiness, an understanding of a future having known at least the beginning of love and cast away because she had trusted an untrustworthy brother. She could only savor the moment—if that was fair to Captain Black.
Cold despite the heat of the stove, she wrapped her arms across her front and began to pace through the stacks of barrels and crates on the cargo deck. The motion didn’t help her think.
The passageways were too narrow for Nathaniel to fall into step beside her. Instead, he circumvented a stack and met her face-to-face in one of the narrow corridors. “What’s troubling you, sweetheart?”
The endearment brought tears to her eyes. “I am fretting about what is ahead for me. How long can I hold on to this gossamer thread of faith?”
“The faith of a mustard seed moves mountains, remember?” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“You’re worrying too.” She touched his cheek, felt the rasp of a day’s growth of whiskers.
He took her hand in his and kissed her fingers. “I am, and for two reasons now. I’m not sure how I’ll manage if I lose both the boat and you.”
Tell him. Tell him. Tell him.
“Captain—?”
“You kissed me back, Camilla. I think you can call me Nathaniel.”
“We English never use first names. At least not in my—” She laughed with an edge to it. “My social rank indeed. Yes, I think I can call you Nathaniel, especially—”
The great bell began to clang. Nathaniel dropped a kiss onto her lips, then bolted for the pilothouse.
Camilla followed at a more sedate pace, considered hiding out in her cabin so she didn’t have to tell him the truth, see the rejection in his beautiful eyes. The sight of lights on shore marked their arrival in Poughkeepsie, so she hid out on the cargo deck instead, organizing what crew were available to haul the crates meant for the town closer to the gangway. A pity they didn’t have a handcart. It would make moving heavy boxes so much easier and safer. The cargo moved, she retreated to the galley to taste her stew. To her surprise, it was rather flavorful. The carrots and potatoes were still too hard, but by the time the men unloaded and loaded, those would surely be soft.
“Tell the men to eat here,” she said to Nathaniel when the Marianne was moored. “It will save time.”
“You’re amazing” was all he said.
She wasn’t certain he would comply, but once the cargo was unloaded and a load of wood hauled aboard, the men all followed, one bearing a pile of fresh bread and a crock of butter.
The men ate in shifts, as they were needed on boilers and in the engine room. Nathaniel didn’t appear at all. He was busy taking the boat back into the river. Camilla was wondering how he would manage to eat, when Billy strode into the galley, his face grim.
“Nate wants to see you.”
“Can’t you take the wheel so he can come down to eat?” She reached for a bowl anyway.
Billy shook his head. “No, he’s not interested in food, just seeing you.”
Her belly aquiver, Camilla climbed to the pilothouse, where Nathaniel stood in the open darkness, his right hand gripping the pin of the wheel.
“Is your hand healing well?” she greeted him.
“It’s doing all right.” He pulled one of the overhead handles, and the boat increased speed. “Sit down, Camilla, I need to ask you something.”
The quivering turning to nausea, Camilla chose to stand beside him at the wheel. “What is it?”
“Lancaster tried to cause us trouble in Poughkeepsie.” He kept his gaze focused on the river ahead. “We weren’t supposed to have fuel available, but it took us so long to get the paddle fixed, more fuel had been brought in.”
“That is fortunate.”
And had nothing to do with her.
“And while I was hearing about the wood,” Nathaniel continued as though she hadn’t spoken, “I learned something else.”
Camilla pressed her hands to her middle. “What is that?”
“It seems a man named Frederick Conover is looking for you. Something about you being a thief?”