The Marianne underway once more, placing as much distance as possible between his boat and that of the man bent on destroying all Nathaniel had worked for since the age of fourteen, he returned his attention to the English lady. She stood at the wheelhouse steps, her valise clutched in one hand and a ridiculously beaded and stitched-up bag swinging from her other wrist. She looked soaked to the skin, bedraggled and waiflike, engendering sympathy he didn’t want to feel. Her poor excuse for a hat drooped on one side and her golden-brown hair curled out of its pins to frame a face too sharp for beauty, yet compelling enough to draw more of his attention than he should give her.
This female, especially, had already proven herself troublesome, leaping aboard like some kind of acrobat. If she had fallen into the river . . .
A shudder ran through Nathaniel. “Not all the elements on the river are trustworthy, Miss—” He compressed his lips to stop himself from asking her what her name was.
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Renfrew. I am a Renfrew of Gloucestershire.”
Of course. Nothing plain and simple like Miss Smith or Jones from Nowhere would match her demeanor. Against his will, he wondered what her Christian name might be. Theodosia or Zabrina perhaps?
“Miss Renfrew,” he tried again, “I’m taking you to Albany. Never you mind why.”
“Thank you.” She set down her valise and raised a hand to her hat. “Do I warrant a cabin?”
Nathaniel sighed. “You warrant a cabin. The last one on the left. It won’t be warm, but it’s dry.”
If she didn’t look so pathetic beneath the sodden hat, he wouldn’t feel so compelled to take care of her. He might find something else to do with her, like put her ashore in Brooklyn Heights, a far better place for a solitary female than Manhattan.
“Thank you.” She brushed the edge of her cloak across her rain-wet face. “I need to see if I can salvage my hat.”
“It looks beyond salvaging to me.”
“I must try.” That luxurious lower lip might have quivered. “It is my only hat.”
He must have been mistaken about that moment of weakness with the lower lip. One as full and soft as her mouth would always appear to tremble with sadness, with joy, with an invitation to be kissed.
He snapped his eyes over her head, observing Riley Lancaster’s boat heading into the river right after them, a bad sign. A very bad sign.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” He started to walk away from her, then the part his mother had raised to be a gentleman sent him to lift her valise. “I’ll take this down for you first.” He led the way down the pilothouse steps to the cabin deck. “You’ll be right in front of the paddle wheel.”
Right in front of the paddle wheel? Her tip-tilted nose wrinkled.
Nathaniel nodded. “Yes, and above the engine.”
“Is that not rather loud?”
“Yes, it is, and it’s also the safest cabin.”
She stared up at him. “Safest, how?”
He smiled. “You have a chance at survival if the boilers blow up.”
Her eyes widened and darkened, and this time he did not mistake her trembling lower lip. “Th-that does not happen often, does it?”
“No.” Relenting, he touched the back of her hand. “Not often enough to scare us off of the river. Now get inside where it’s dry, if not warm.” He opened the door to the last cabin. A rush of stale, dank air puffed out, as no one had traveled in there since the eldest and best of Nathaniel’s business partners died two months earlier.
He dropped Miss Renfrew’s case on the floor and swung away. “Stay out of everyone’s way. This needs to be a fast run. I’ll put you on a proper passenger boat as soon as we reach a town with one docked.”
“I was willing to go on that other one if it was going north.” She gave him a quizzical glance from beneath the brim of that pathetic hat.
“I don’t think you’d have been safe coming off of this boat and going onto that one.”
“Enemies, Captain Black?”
“Not by choice.” Wanting no more questions from her, he turned on his heel with the intention of walking away.
“So what is in the other cabins?” she asked.
He didn’t look back.
“That is, what is more valuable than people?”
Almost anything.
Figuring she wouldn’t like that kind of response, he glanced over his shoulder and gave her the truth, not that it was any of her concern. “The first cabin to starboard is mine. Six other ones contain sugar, molasses, other spices like cinnamon and nutmeg and black peppercorns, and other things I prefer to keep out of the elements as much as possible. They bring a far higher profit transporting them upriver than do people.”
“Where does your crew sleep?” she asked.
Nathaniel shrugged. “Wherever they can find space.”
“They do not have quarters?” Her incredulity rang in her voice.
“They have work and the opportunity to make a profit. What more matters?”
Her nostrils pinched as though he smelled bad, though he didn’t think he did. “I am surprised you have left this cabin empty.”
“Be as surprised as you like. It belonged—” He closed his mouth.
She didn’t need to know about Ralph and Marianne Spraig, how they were more parents to him than his own had been.
She looked away. “I apologize. That was inappropriate for me to say.”
It was, and her admission knocked away any irritation her remark might have caused.
“I am not without a care for friends,” he said gently. He tucked his hands into the pockets of his coat. “Make yourself comfortable. Someone will bring you supper.”
She watched him all the way down the passageway between the two rows of cabins. At least he figured she did, as she didn’t close her door until he reached the steps up to the wheelhouse.
“Get her settled in?” Billy asked.
Nathaniel nodded. “As much as she can be.”
“She’s either a brave or stupid little thing.”
“I suspect the latter.”
“Uh-huh, that’s why you kept her aboard.”
Nathaniel glanced aft. “I’ll get rid of her as soon as we’re rid of Lancaster’s shadow. But I see he’s still there.”
“Has been since he spotted us passing the Washington Street wharf.” Billy pulled the line to the whistle, signaling a slower vessel they were passing. “Why wouldn’t you just let her go aboard? Never heard of Lancaster being anything but gentlemanly with females.”
“Do you think he would be fair to a lady he saw coming off of the Marianne?”
Billy’s silence was answer enough. That morning after the meeting of the partnership in the lawyers’ offices, Riley Lancaster had made clear he would stop at nothing to ensure the partnership ended in a month. Nathaniel’s boat would no longer be his boat if the partnership dissolved.
But it wouldn’t. If he had to go without sleep for the next thirty days, he would in order to buy Spraig and Lancaster’s shares.
He should sleep now. Billy could manage the piloting during daylight. With one or two hours of sleep, Nathaniel could manage to steer their way north all night.
He descended to the lower deck and the engine. It sounded a little rougher than he liked, and he wanted to pinpoint the problem so he could fix it at the next stop. He needed to keep a lookout for Lancaster trying to cause trouble on the river once they left the crowded waters around the city. He needed sleep.
He went to his cabin and dropped onto the chair before his desk. The ledgers lay open with their tale of needing more profitable runs than one boat could accomplish. He needed a miracle to save his company, his future, his very reason for existence.
His conscience prickled over caring so much about profits and accumulating money for the future. But he would not be the failure his father and brother called him when he chose to leave home. He would prove them wrong.
Unable to rest, he left his cabin. On the cargo deck, he ate what he could of the tasteless mush the only crewman who dared attempt cooking called stew. Night having fallen, Nathaniel climbed to the wheelhouse. Billy didn’t have the piloting experience to navigate at night.
Nathaniel knew every pull and rope hanging from the pilothouse roof, every bend of the river by heart. He might have only captained his own boat for two years, but he had been on the river for fifteen, a pilot for ten.
As if the Marianne were his. Indeed, he only owned a quarter of the vessel. He had saved and prayed, invested and prayed some more for eight years to come up with enough money to make it and his skill as a pilot, not to mention his ability to make the crankiest of engines run, appealing to investors. He had found them—Spraig, Harriman, and Lancaster—and thought, at last, his days of being nothing but another man’s lackey were at an end. Soon his father and older brother, growing rich and fat selling horses to those bargemen trading through the Erie Canal, could no longer sneer and taunt and mock him for his passion for steam engines and the water. He would be an independent man in a couple more years, able to buy out his partners, able to build a house in Albany and start looking for a wife.
Then Ralph Spraig suffered an apoplexy and died. Now Nathaniel’s dreams looked about to explode like an overheated boiler.
“Lord, you said you would provide all my needs, and maybe this isn’t a need in your eyes, but please provide anyway.” He grimaced at his prayer. It sounded selfish and grasping. “But it really isn’t.”
Mrs. Spraig couldn’t afford for the partnership to dissolve either. Her husband had sunk a great deal of their life savings, the capital on which they needed to live, into the venture. The Marianne had made a comfortable profit for them to live on, but if the partnership dissolved, what the assets brought would not provide for Mrs. Spraig’s future. It would not provide Nathaniel with enough money to invest in another steamboat. He would return to piloting for other men. His thirtieth birthday approached faster than he liked. Before he reached that milestone in a year and a half, he hoped for a home, a family, a wife to greet him with open arms when he finished a run.
An image of Miss Renfrew, her tilted eyes, her tilted nose, her quivering lower lip, danced before his eyes, interfering with his concentration on the watery road before him. He shook his head and another image of the English lady appeared—the lady with her hair tumbling around her face, softening her sharp features, thick, shining locks inviting a man’s hands to lift it from her neck and—
Nathaniel grinned at his own foolishness. He would get the lady to Albany for whatever was so urgent she had risked her life jumping aboard his boat, and then he would forget about her. He didn’t have time for females until Lancaster cooperated and agreed to continue the partnership. And if Lancaster decided to see it dissolved, Nathaniel could forget females until his hair was gray and his hands gnarled with rheumatism from the constant damp aboard a boat.
He sighed. His stomach growled in response. At the same time the pilothouse steps creaked.
Billy strode into the wheelhouse, a paper-wrapped loaf of bread tucked under one arm. “Thought you could use a bite, Nate.”
“Where did you get that?” Nathaniel tried not to snatch the bread from his lifelong friend and stuff it into his mouth.
“Bought it in the city and kept it hid.” Billy opened one end of the parcel and tore off a chunk of the loaf. “A pity that gal you brought can’t cook.”
“I didn’t bring her aboard. She jumped. Remember?”
“How will any of us forget? I think we’re all older for watching her.” Billy handed Nathaniel the loaf so he could pull off his own hunk of bread. “Think Lancaster will try to stop us?”
“He knows if I don’t get to Albany by Wednesday, this run won’t be nearly profitable enough to buy both my and Spraig’s partnership shares.” Though he chewed the bread, he had lost his appetite. “Mind you, making enough of a profit in time for the deadline won’t be impossible, just unlikely.”
“If we could unload and reload cargo more efficiently, we could maybe get another run in every ten days. Right now, we’re taking fifty-two hours between the trip itself and the lading.”
“Hmm.” Nathaniel signaled to the engineer to slow for a bend in the river, then he sounded the bell as a warning to any vessels lurking around the curve.
The clang, clang, clang echoed off the surrounding hills. No other bells or whistles responded. The river rolled on like a black ribbon beneath a thin layer of clouds glowing from a nearly full moon above.
One more run per ten days would give them three more profitable runs between now and the 25th of November when they either had to buy Spraig’s and now Lancaster’s shares to continue the partnership, or see the assets sold at auction and the partnership dissolved.
“Any ideas on how to speed up loading and unloading?” Nathaniel asked.
“I was thinking two gangways, or hire extra crew.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “We’ll never get the dock space for a second gangway and extra crew will be impossible with the canal opening. But let’s keep—” Movement below the wheelhouse stopped him, a shadowy figure too small to be one of the crew. “Miss Renfrew?”
“Yes.” She reached the bottom step to the wheelhouse. “I-I’m sorry. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.” She climbed halfway up the steps. “Is it possible—” She gave out a little cough. “Could I have something hot to drink?”
Had she asked in a manner that suggested a demand, Nathaniel would have given her a flat-out no, even though coffee was always available. But that hesitancy, that nervous cough, slammed into his heart, softening it toward her far more than the vulnerability her tumbled hair had demonstrated.
“Come on up and sit. Billy will fetch you some coffee.”
Billy cast him a glance with eyebrows raised. “Her ladyship might prefer that stash of tea you have in your cabin.”
“I would.” Her hair tied back at the nape of her neck with some kind of bow, she reached the pilothouse, a fragile silhouette against a light on the lower deck. “But I am not a lady. That is, I am only the daughter of a viscount, so am merely Miss Renfrew.” She inclined her head. “That is, I was the daughter of a viscount.”
“We don’t understand the niceties of British titles here.” Nathaniel fought the urge to reach out and draw her forward to stand beside him—only to give her protection and warmth, not because he wanted to touch her, of course.
“But we do understand you prefer tea to coffee,” Billy added.
“Especially to our coffee.” Nathaniel smiled.
Miss Renfrew’s teeth flashed in the near darkness of the pilothouse. “It is rather awful, you surely know.”
“We do, but we drink it anyway.” Billy slipped past her and headed down the steps, calling back, “We have sugar, but no milk. No cows this run.”
Miss Renfrew started. “You carry cows?”
“Quite often, but only when going downriver.” Nathaniel focused more fully on the river. Night travel was too risky to let a female distract him. “Grain and fruit and livestock go downriver, cloth and spices and other manufactured goods go upriver.”
“Is the food always such as we had tonight?” Behind him, fabric rustled, and the scent of lavender drifted over the sting of woodsmoke. “It does not seem like men would be inclined to work for you with those sorts of viands to look forward to.”
“We stop along the route once or twice to deliver goods and get a good meal then.”
“But does that not waste your travel time?” The backboards of the pilothouse, raised to block out light from below, rattled as though she had seated herself on the bench and leaned back.
Suddenly wishing he could sit too and rest his back against something, preferably something more comfortable than the sliding wood partition, Nathaniel admitted she was right. “It probably wastes an hour every time we stop, rounding the men up and all,” he added.
“If you had a cook, they would not leave the vessel at all.”
“It’s occurred to me.” He stared into the night, concentrating on the water, the sky, the direction the prow was pointing, anything but the musical lilt of the woman’s voice behind him.
He could not even think of a female until he owned this boat free and clear. So much he yearned for a home to return to, a woman at his side aboard and on land, every moment around an attractive lady reminded him of what he could not have if he did indeed fail.
She stirred on the bench. “Forgive me if I overstep. I am simply anxious to reach my destination.”
“What’s for you in Albany, Miss Renfrew?” he asked softly.
“Work.” She laughed, a light tinkling trill that managed to still not sound amused. “My ancestor signed the Magna Carta, and I am having to become a housekeeper for the daughter of a cit, who married an American adventurer.”
“Most of us work, Miss Renfrew. There’s no shame in it.” Nathaniel hesitated a moment, then asked, “What is a cit?”
“A city merchant, a member of the middle class.”
The softness he’d felt toward her froze in place at her offhand condescension toward those who didn’t inherit their money. “And beneath your royal highness, except her money is good when it comes your way.”
At the top of the pilothouse steps, Billy caught his breath. On the bench, Miss Renfrew said nothing. She didn’t even move.
“I have some tea for you, Miss Renfrew,” Billy announced. “You didn’t say if you wanted sugar, but I put some in it anyway.”
“That is quite all right, thank you.” She spoke as though addressing an underling.
Or maybe she was simply overly gracious and he wasn’t used to it.
“Shall I, um, leave?” Billy asked.
“I could use an extra pair of eyes,” Nathaniel said. “We’re getting into the Highlands and may encounter fog between the mountains.”
“How far have we come?” Miss Renfrew asked.
Nathaniel drew a watch from his coat pocket and squinted to see the time in the faint light. “About forty miles. We made good time when we had daylight. It’s midnight now, so we’re going slower.”
“Midnight. We have traveled eight hours then?” A hint of excitement had come into her voice. “Then we should have no difficulty reaching Albany, if we can continue going this quickly.”
“No, we shouldn’t,” Nathaniel said.
“If we don’t stop too long in West Point,” Billy added.
The back boards rattled in their frame, as though Miss Renfrew jumped. “Stop? In the middle of the night?”
“We have an order of fine china for someone at the academy.” Nathaniel calculated who to send to ensure the china was located before landing. “They take delivery when we get to their destination. Sometimes that’s in the middle of the night.”
“And if we’re in the Lord’s good graces,” Billy said, “the inn will still be open enough to provide us with some edible food.”
“But . . . but that sounds like a terrible delay.” Again, panic, uncertainty, vulnerability tinged her tone.
A number of responses ran through Nathaniel’s mind, none of them particularly polite. So he said nothing and concentrated on watching for the lights of West Point and the wharf. The town glowed with a soft radiance against the mist over the river, and the wharf did lie nearly empty. Nathaniel pulled the signal to slow the boat, nuzzled the prow against the dock, and hit the pedal at his feet to signal stop in the engine room. The paddle wheel slowed, then ceased altogether. The engine quieted to a gentle rumble, and steam hissed from the boilers like a sigh of relief.
“I should return to my cabin.” Miss Renfrew had risen. She headed for the steps to the cabin deck.
A little guilty over his churlish behavior, Nathaniel caught hold of her hand. “I’ll bring you back something better to eat than that stew, if you like.”
“Yes, I—” She glanced down to where that silly bag had hung earlier. “I have some money in my reticule in the cabin. Shall I fetch it? I, um, still owe you for my passage.”
The hesitation, the uncertainty in that single “um,” was curious, interspersed with her hauteur the rest of the time. A hesitation over money.
“Exactly how much money do you have in your purse?” A rude question, but he wanted to know.
For a heartbeat, her shoulders drooped, and she looked away. “I have enough for passage, if that concerns you.”
“Passage is two dollars. Food, whether you eat only aboard here or in towns along the way, is extra, though, of course, the food aboard is cheaper, and someone is likely to charge me with robbery for asking for even a penny for a bowl of that.”
She gave him a half smile for his attempt at humor. “Distasteful as it is, I had better eat aboard.”
“If my conscience will let you do that.”
If he was generous with one of the Lord’s lost and vulnerable creatures, surely the Lord would be generous with him.
“I’ll walk you down,” he said, and offered her his arm.
Her hand was small, tucked into the crook of his elbow. Small and cold. The iciness of her fingers seeped through his coat and shirtsleeves. If he knew her just a bit better, he would have covered her fingers with his other hand, warmed them—
He brought his thoughts up short and halted at the head of the cabin passage. “I will see you soon. Perhaps an hour or so.”
“I will pay you for my passage then.” She inclined her head, then spun and glided down the passageway, her hair flowing down her back in ripples and waves like a wind-ruffled river, a temptation.
He left the deck and descended to the cargo bay. Billy was shouting at two crewmen about the crates of china. The men stared at him with identical vacant gazes.
Billy bellowed. “If you don’t find the right crates in five minutes, you can’t go ashore to eat a decent meal.”
“Maybe we could remember better if we had a decent meal,” one of the men muttered.
“And maybe you can stay ashore.” Nathaniel entered the cargo deck ahead of the engine. “Find the china. Billy and I will see it gets delivered so you can go eat straight off.”
Grumbling, but complying with this compromise, the men located the correct crates in two minutes. The four of them lugged the boxes onto the wharf, and the crewmen vanished into the sleepy, but not entirely asleep, town.
“We need a wagon.” Billy glowered at a crate.
More time wasted. They woke a liveryman and acquired a wagon in which to deliver the crates. At the officer’s home, they waited awhile to wake a servant, who had to wake his employer to authorize the delivery and the payment. An hour had passed before they reached the inn, but the landlord, used to their odd hours, provided them with thick, savory soup, nearly fresh bread rolls, and fresher apple pie. By the time they finished eating and collected a basket for Miss Renfrew, nearly two hours had passed and another steamboat had docked beside theirs.
Riley Lancaster had found them again.