NEW YORK CITY
OCTOBER 24, 1825
“Wait. Wait.” Camilla Renfrew raced down Barclay Street, waving her umbrella at the lone figure at the dockside of the last steamboat moored along that section of the East River. “Please, do not leave.”
The man who had been pointed out to her as Captain Nathaniel Black glanced toward her and said something inaudible above the chugging of the boat’s engine, the patter of the rain against Camilla’s umbrella, and the clatter of her hard leather soles on the wooden planks of the wharf. She did not need to hear what he said. His turned back and feet heading up the gangway, his dark hair lifting like mourning kerchiefs waving farewell in the icy wind blowing off the Atlantic, spoke a trumpet blast of a message—he would not wait for her. Emphasizing his rejection, a bell clanged from the upper deck.
Camilla kept running toward the solitary boat and broad, indifferent back. “Oh, no, please, just another moment.” Heedlessly sacrificing her last bonnet to the rain, she collapsed her umbrella and tucked it under her arm so she could gather up her skirt with one hand and run unimpeded by layers of fabric.
She hit the edge of the dock just as the gangway began to rise.
A bell clanged, and the paddle wheel began a languid shug, shug, shug.
She glanced at the growing gap between wharf and gangway, took a deep breath, and leaped onto the latter.
The gangway rocked beneath her, swaying like a tree branch in a gale. Men shouted. Two left the tarpaulin they were tying over some barrels and surged toward her. Captain Black motioned them back with a gesture so forceful he may as well have shoved them, and charged toward Camilla. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Coming . . . aboard.” Running, sliding, gasping for breath, she closed the distance between herself and the captain.
The boat heeled beneath the onslaught of an incoming wave, and Camilla landed on the planks at his feet. She gripped his arm. Beneath her gloved fingers, his arm stiffened to something akin to an iron railing.
She glanced up at its owner and could not move. Eyes the pale green of spring grass back home in Gloucestershire pierced into hers like ivory knitting needles. For all their sharpness, those were young eyes. He could not be more than two or three years beyond her own twenty-five.
“What,” he asked in a frosty tone, “possessed you to do something so dangerous? If you’d fallen into the river, the current would have pushed you right into the wheel.”
Camilla gulped. Her stomach churned like the paddle wheel towering at the stern of the boat. Even in the gloom of the rain-soaked afternoon, the blades flashed in lethal grace. If she had gotten caught, those paddles would have pounded her like a piece of hide in the hands of a tanner.
She clutched Black’s arm more tightly, though her fingers slipped on his wet leather coat, and swallowed three times before she managed to speak. “I insist.”
In response, Black extricated his arm from her grasping fingers and stepped away from her. His face turned stony, emphasizing every chiseled angle. “I can’t help you.”
Behind him, the now mostly idle crew watched with expressions varying from dismay to amusement.
Their curiosity lent Camilla some courage to press her suit. “But you must help me.” She firmed her chin to keep it from quivering, and her voice emerged so sharply she feared she sounded shrewish. “All the other boats have left, and I must reach Albany before October twenty-sixth.”
“You’re not the only one.” He turned half away. “This is not a passenger boat. There’ll be more of those tomorrow.”
“But I cannot—”
She could not stay in the city another night. She could not tell him that, however. Of everything else she had lost over the past six months, no one could remove her pride.
She hefted her reticule. The beaded and embroidered velvet bag hung limp with its sad complement of some English and American pennies and a five-dollar gold piece she doubted would last her another day in the city.
Her chin quivered despite her efforts. “Please.”
“As soon as we can get turned back, I’ll put you ashore again.” He walked away from her, past a black tower belching smoke and radiating blessed heat, and up a stairway.
Camilla followed. “You do not understand, sir. It is vital I reach Albany immediately.”
He paused at the top of the steps. “And it is vital I’m not delayed any longer.” He strode along the upper deck to another set of steps leading to a structure that did not appear to provide much shelter from the rain beyond a roof and boards no more than a yard high on three sides.
Camilla cast a longing look at the row of cabins toward the stern and followed the man. Beneath the roof, a man stood to one side of a wheel as tall as his shoulder, a good five and a half feet. With one hand, he gripped a pin protruding from the side of the wheel, and with the other, he reached up to pull one of several rings dangling from the ceiling. With a screech of gears from the machinery below, the boat ceased backing. Another pull on the rope, and the vessel lurched forward.
Camilla lost her balance and dropped her valise to catch hold of the wooden side.
“Sit down before you fall down.” Black gestured to a bench bolted to the floor, then turned back to the pilot. “How’s visibility?”
“All right if this don’t turn into fog.” The man pulled another lever, and a long, deep whistle blasted low and harsh.
The vessel swung into the stream, the flagpole at the center of the bow pointing the way. Camilla dropped onto the bench and hugged her arms across her middle. She gritted her teeth to keep them from chattering. Heat radiated through the floor of the wheelhouse, but not enough to combat the blast of wet wind funneling through the open front of the structure.
She glanced at the captain, pleading with her eyes for him to reconsider taking her upriver. He did not even glance her way. He and his crewman kept their faces turned toward the bow of the boat and the river beyond, an endless stretch of churning dark water with wharves and warehouses and growing cities along its banks, sailing ships and steamboats and ferries traversing its surface. Bells and whistles sounded in an endless chorus, and smoke from hundreds of boilers fogged the air.
Her heart ached for the clean, crisp air of the Cotswolds, and the home she would never see again because it belonged to someone else.
She swallowed. “How long until you can turn back?” Her voice emerged with the social lightness she had been trained to use in company. With these two hulking men in front of her, her tone sounded weak, barely above the river cacophony.
“With this traffic and rain, ten minutes, maybe twenty,” came the captain’s laconic response.
“I could perhaps perform some task to make myself useful on the journey.”
“Can you cook?” the pilot asked.
Camilla grimaced. “Ladies are not taught to cook.”
Black snorted.
The crewman glanced at her with disgust, though he sported a missing eyetooth and scarred lip above it. “You’re English, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. I just arrived here two days ago. I was to meet a friend here in New York, but my voyage was delayed. My friend has already gone on upriver.” She spoke quickly to get everything out before she lost the men’s attention, what of it she garnered anyway. “And if I do not reach Albany before the canal opens, she and her husband will head west without me.”
And she would be destitute in a strange land.
“I . . . must not be left behind,” she finished rather lamely.
“Other boats will be leaving early tomorrow morning,” Black said.
Camilla shook her head. “Nothing can possibly travel that far that swiftly.”
The two men gave her amused glances.
“Any riverboat captain with half a paddle wheel can get to Albany in a day or a little more,” Black said.
“It is the little more that concerns me.” Camilla stared down at her reticule.
If only she had not spent every last farthing on running, hiding, sailing across the Atlantic.
Another chill racked her body. “Please.” She gulped and fixed her gaze on Captain Black, a broad back that looked about as movable as the shaft of wood holding the giant wheel in place. “The harbor master said you were reliable and trustworthy, which does not seem to be the situation with most . . . riverboat men.”
Not a good choice of words. She was so unpracticed at begging for help she forgot to keep her opinions to herself.
Neither man responded. They spoke to one another about depths and directions, the best way to skirt an oncoming vessel, and something about the cargo and hot coffee. She preferred tea, but hot coffee sounded heavenly.
She ran her tongue over her dry lips and tried one more time. “Why do you have cabins if you do not take passengers?”
“The boat came with them.”
“What if I simply take a portion of deck rather than a cabin. It would be a rather small portion.”
“Let me explain this, Miss—”
“Ren—”
“I don’t care to know your name.” He held up one hand for emphasis before reaching for one of the ropes hanging from the roof and giving it a tug. “I am not going to have a solitary female unprotected on my boat.”
“I crossed the Atlantic unprotected and was perfectly all right.”
Black did not respond. He appeared to concentrate on his ropes and the wheel and the river traffic.
She tucked her chin into the collar of her cloak and hugged her arms across her middle. “Why are you so opposed to having one passenger for the next day?”
The man shrugged.
“Captain Black, that is scarcely—”
The thud of boots on the steps stopped her from lecturing him like a schoolmistress. The crewman appeared with tin cups and a dented pot from whose spout coffee-scented steam spewed. “This should warm us, Nathaniel.”
“Serve her ladyship first,” Black said.
“I am not titled. I am merely the daughter of—” Camilla closed her eyes and her mouth. Her cheeks grew warm for the first time in days, as she realized the man was insulting her, not paying her a courtesy. “I would appreciate some coffee, thank you.”
“Anything for a pretty girl.” The crewman set pot and cups on the bench beside Camilla and poured hers. “It ain’t a lady’s drink the way we make it, but it’s hot.”
Hot and thick as oil. She drank the coffee. It tasted like sludge and smelled like burned stockings, but in its heat lay comfort. In the wheelhouse lay a few moments’ respite from the tumult of the city.
She glanced ahead and saw another wharf growing closer, another unfamiliar place in this strange land where nothing seemed to matter but money. She had departed from her boardinghouse to find her friend, her new employer, and returned to discover the landlady had rented out the room.
“Couldn’t be sure you was coming back,” had been the explanation.
Camilla gripped the tankard so hard she feared she would crush the thick tin. She set the cup on the bench and tucked her hands inside her cloak before they grew cold again.
“You drank that?” Black glanced from where he was once again allowing the crewman to pilot the boat, to Camilla huddled like an old woman in the London stews. “You must be stronger than you look.”
“It was hot. I was cold.”
The boat deck rose, fell, heeled to port beneath her feet. The coffee burned her stomach and up to her throat. A lump formed in its wake, and she could scarcely breathe.
Black glanced her way again. “We dock at Washington Street. I believe there’s a woman there who rents rooms to respectable females.”
“I fear I do not look particularly respectable.”
The captain swept his gaze from her drooping hat, to her wrinkled black dress, to her muddy half boots. He shook his head, ruffling his thick, dark, and overly long hair. “You don’t.”
Nor was she now, the sister of a disgraced and deceased peer.
Lord, you said you would provide all our needs.
Except he hadn’t been doing that for her of late.
“Signal the engine room for less speed, Billy.” Black’s baritone voice rumbled through the wheelhouse in counterpoint to the engine. “We’ll be docking—” He broke off and muttered something that sounded rude.
Camilla followed his gaze and murmured a prayer of thanks. God had listened to her pleas. He had sent another boat. As long as it was headed upriver also and not on its way home, as long as it had enough room for her, as long as she had enough money to pay for passage . . .
She hugged herself, then crossed the wheelhouse to the steps. She need not lower herself to begging and pleading with this indifferent captain. Another boat waited at the dock as though summoned just for her.
She tossed Captain Nathaniel Black a triumphant smile. “Apparently I need not beg you to keep me aboard.”
“No,” he said through gritted teeth, “you don’t.” Then he turned to his crewman. “Let’s take her out again. I’m not getting anywhere near Riley Lancaster.”