Though thy slumber may be deep,
Yet thy spirit shall not sleep…
LORD BYRON, MANFRED: ACT I
For long hours he tossed and turned, his body aching, shivering with a chill so deep in his bones he believed he was sailing on the godforsaken North Atlantic, and that he’d never know warmth again.
Somewhere near, he heard the chirp of birds, the distinctive rustle of wind through the shaggy-headed palms, and the unmistakable bliss of children’s laughter.
And then something teased his nose, a pleasant memory of a sweet-smelling woman with long and wild honey-colored hair and eyes that sparkled like the rarest of emeralds.
Comforting hands spread over his chest, his stomach, pulling back the bed coverings before deft fingers loosened the buttons on his trousers, spreading a heat through his loins that he had not the strength to enjoy. Opening his eyes, he saw Kate hovering above him like a celestial spirit encircled in gold.
“I didn’t mean to wake you, Mr. Farrell. I just want to make you more comfortable. Please. Go back to sleep.”
He managed to smile, lifting a weak, almost useless hand to her cheek. So soft. So smooth. “Lie down with me, Katie. ’Tis cold I am. So very cold.”
Gentle laughter rang through his ears. She stepped back, letting his hand fall heavily to his chest.
“I’d rather run you through with your cutlass,” she stated flatly, tugging not too gently on the ends of his trousers. “Now, go back to sleep.”
Ah, but the fire in her words soothed his pain and warmed his soul. He would sleep peacefully knowing she was near.
But the peace he sought would not come so easily.
“Please, Morgan, please. Don’t let him hurt me.”
He jerked at the chains, twisting and turning, but the bonds at his arms and legs were far too strong, and he could not get to the frightened little girl running from Thomas Low.
“She is mine,” Low hissed. “Your efforts to keep her from me have been in vain. I always win, Mr. Farrell. Always.”
He wanted to strangle the bastard, wanted to feel the shudder of his last dying breath, but he could not escape. “I’ll see you dead,” Morgan shouted.
“Not today, Mr. Farrell. Not today.”
Melody had scrambled to the top of the railing around the quarterdeck, linking her arms through the rigging. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Help me, Morgan,” she cried. “Please.”
The chains cut into his wrists. Blood welled up from the shredded skin, but that pain was nothing compared to the ache in his heart for the sister he could not help, for his parents, who’d been sent to their watery grave just moments before.
Low stood at arm’s length from his sister, hands clasped behind his back. “Come down, child,” he coaxed. “I will not harm you.”
Morgan saw the quiver in Melody’s lips as she looked to him for help. “Dear God,” he prayed silently. “I know not what to do. Give me guidance. Please.”
“Morgan!” she screamed.
Low moved closer, teasing Melody with his advances.
“Jump.” Morgan shouted. He hated the sound of his words, hated himself for what he was asking of his sister, but there was no other choice. “Jump,” he cried. “Please.”
“But I’m afraid.”
“Say your prayers,” he whispered, swallowing down a lump of fear. “Say your prayers—and jump.”
Melody looked at him one last time, trust and faith mixed with terror in her sweet childish face.
“I love you, Melody. I love you.”
She smiled faintly. Then she disappeared over the side.
“I love you,” he whispered, and as if his little sister had heard his words, a soft hand touched his cheek.
“Melody?” he asked, but she did not answer, and even in his sleep, he knew she never would. She was gone—forever. Unconsciously he reached for the cross he’d taken from her lifeless body, for his mother’s ring that he’d retrieved from Thomas Low.
He grasped the delicate piece made of rubies and gold, but the heavy wedding band did not fill his hand.
His eyes flew open. Kate sat beside him.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.”
“What have you done with my possessions?”
She raised an eyebrow at his abruptness. “For your information, I have washed your clothes, I have locked away that blasted arsenal you carry around, and I’ve spent nearly two days taking care of your worthless hide.”
He didn’t care about anything she’d done for him. All he could think of was his mother’s wedding band.
“Where’s my ring?”
“You weren’t wearing one.”
“It was around my neck.”
“Well, it’s not there now, and if you don’t stop yelling at me, the only thing you’ll have around your neck are my hands.”
If not for her anger, for the redness rising in her cheeks, he might have continued to bellow, might have gone on questioning her until doomsday. Losing his mother’s ring was something he could not abide, but being rude to a woman did not set well, either.
“I do believe you would strangle me, madam.”
“I would,” she stated, pacing across the room, then back again to the side of the bed. “Of course, killing you would be a pretty stupid thing to do after I’ve nursed you back to health.”
“Aye. ’Twould have been smarter to let me die on your lawn.”
“I should have thought of that earlier,” she said, a smile softening the anger in her face. “I made you some chicken soup. Can you sit up?”
He’d found the strength to get upset about the loss of his mother’s ring, but in spite of his efforts to lift his shoulders and arms, he hadn’t the energy to rise from the bed.
Kate sighed, something he was learning was as commonplace as her quick-tempered passion and her seemingly unwilling generosity.
She unfolded the stiff arms that she’d clasped over her chest, leaned over, and slipped a hand beneath his head. He savored the softness of her breasts against his cheek, the sweetness of her perfume, and the steady beat of her heart as she propped him up with extra pillows. A man could easily leave the sea behind if he were to have a comfort like this woman in his home.
Sitting beside him, she lifted a bowl from the bedside table. “I suppose you don’t have the strength to feed yourself, either?”
He answered her with a smile, and gave a silent prayer of thanks when she placed the warm spoon against his lips and let the salty brew slide over his tongue and down his throat. Again and again she ladled the soup into his mouth, the only sustenance he’d had in God knows how many days.
“Who is Melody?” she asked cautiously, her eyes intent on the spoon and his mouth.
“My sister, God rest her soul. Why do you ask?”
“You called her name while you slept. I thought she might have been your wife.”
“I have no wife, no children that I know of, nor do I have any other family. I have only you now. And Casey.”
Those words made her look up. “You’re taking a lot for granted, aren’t you?”
“I have told you…I have nowhere else to go.”
“You can’t stay here forever.”
“Rest assured, madam, that that is not my desire. I have but to regain my strength, and men I shall try to find my way back home.”
“And where is that?”
“I have told you already.”
Pushing up from the bed, she set the bowl back on the table and moved about the room, opening a window to let in the slightest of breezes that rustled the lacy white curtains. She stared out at the gathering clouds. “I thought it might be best if you stayed in bed the rest of the day, and maybe tried coming downstairs this evening.”
“I believe you do not wish to acknowledge where I have come from.”
She turned, shaking her head. “You make a pretty convincing pirate, Mr. Farrell, but I don’t believe you traveled through time.”
A more stubborn wench he’d never met. ’Twould be difficult to make her believe.
Walking slowly across the room, she lifted the tray from the bedside table. “The bathroom’s over there,” she said, pointing to the door across the room. “If you have the strength later, you might want to take a shower, or soak in the tub.”
“Have you a servant to carry the hot water?”
She laughed cynically. “The pipes carry the hot water, Mr. Farrell. In case you’ve forgotten, you just turn a knob and water flows right out of the tap.”
An ingenious idea, he decided. One he longed to investigate. Knowledge of such things would benefit him well when he returned to his own time.
“And what of my other bodily needs?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Figure it out on your own, Mr. Farrell. I’m in no mood to humor you.”
Kate crept into Joe’s office, the place where she’d slept the first few months after his death. She’d felt closer to him there. At times she’d imagined him sitting at his desk, polishing a pistol, a sword, or one of his other special “finds.” In the past six months, she hadn’t seen him there at all. She no longer smelled his aftershave, no longer heard the sound of his footstep on the hardwood floor, or the stories he’d so often told Casey.
Joe was gone.
If time travel truly were possible, she’d go back and.…She laughed to herself. Time travel wasn’t possible, and she couldn’t change history.
Going to the bookshelves, she pulled down a few of Joe’s favorite volumes on pirates. She carried them to the desk and sat, flipping one open to the index. Running her finger down the alphabetical listing, she stopped next to the name Black Heart. She started to thumb to the proper place, then hesitated, turning one more page until she found the F’s. Falcon, Fame, Fancy, Farquhar, Farrell. Her hands began to shake as she turned back one page and compared the numbers with those under Black Heart.
Identical. Every one the same.
She flipped to page 43. There were no pictures, but she read the text.
The early life of Morgan Farrell, more often called Black Heart, is as mysterious as his disappearance in 1702. Some say he had been a gentleman from Kent, England, a scholar, and a man admired by women, but the truth was never known. His life as a pirate was no less puzzling. Reputed to be a bloodthirsty beast of imposing stature, he terrorized the American Colonies and the shipping trades throughout the West Indies. Other stories abound concerning his gentleness with children, and more than one thankful wench and starving family were heard to praise his generosity.
Kate flipped back to the index, having learned nothing she didn’t already know, except that the names Morgan Farrell and Black Heart were synonymous. What she hoped to see was a picture.
She tried page 81 and page 115, and finally, on page 147, she found it. The work was rough and dark, the colors faded, but Kate could easily see a scar sweeping down the right side of the man’s face, and a patch over his eye. The lips were too thin, the nose too straight, and the jaw a little too weak to resemble the man lying in her extra bedroom. Still, the hair in the painting was the darkest of browns, and it rippled over the man’s shoulders, stopping halfway down his chest—so much like Morgan Farrell’s hair, which she’d nervously touched and admired. Rings hung from both ears—just like the earrings Morgan Farrell wore, and tucked under a wide leather belt were a pistol, a dagger, and a sword with a jeweled hilt.
Kate twisted around in the oak swivel chair and looked at the weapons she’d locked away in Joe’s display cabinet. The cutlass Morgan had given her, the one he’d said was worth a fortune, looked identical to the one in the painting.
Not for the first time since Morgan Farrell entered her life, her heart thundered in her chest. The man in the next room being the same man who had lived three hundred years ago seemed too impossible to believe, yet the proof she should trust was in the book before her.
She read the caption beneath the painting.
Artist Josiah Lansdown sailed with the infamous Black Heart for only one year, serving as his cabin boy until the pirate established him with a wealthy family in England. At the insistence of Black Heart, the boy was tutored in the arts. This painting, one of only six completed before his untimely death at the age of twenty-one, was accomplished from memory, and inscribed “Black Heart—generous benefactor; beloved friend.”
Could the man she’d nursed and the man in the picture be one and the same?
No, it was impossible. He was delusional. He’d been injured, he wasn’t thinking straight. He couldn’t have traveled through time.
Maybe he was interested in pirates, just as Joe had been. Maybe he was a collector of pirate memorabilia and owned Black Heart’s sword. Maybe he knew the history of Black Heart and liked acting out the part. Maybe there was some resemblance between him and the man in the picture, but she found it difficult to imagine the man in the next room as a generous benefactor, or even a beloved friend.
Yet she remembered well the tear sliding down his cheek while he slept, the way he’d lovingly called out his sister’s name, the way he’d reached for the cross at his neck, and the ring that had disappeared. Men without heart, without compassion, wouldn’t do those things.
Sliding open the desk drawer, she removed the velvet box where she’d put the emerald ring she’d found on the island—the ring that might belong to Morgan Farrell. It was the most beautiful ring she’d ever seen, and she wanted very much to call it her own.
As she slipped it on her barren wedding ring finger, the odd feeling that it belonged there overcame her. She held up her hand, wiggling her fingers, and watched the way the sun’s rays glinted off the diamonds and emerald, splashing a kaleidoscope of light about the room.
She sighed, feeling a moment of guilt for not having asked Morgan more about the ring he’d lost. If he brought it up again, she’d try to find out if this one really belonged to him. Until then, she might as well hang onto it for safekeeping.
She dropped the ring back into the box and closed it away in the desk drawer.
Taking one more look at the picture of Black Heart the pirate, she shook her head. She didn’t want to believe he could be the same man who’d mysteriously appeared in her life any more than she wanted to believe the emerald ring belonged to him, but the coincidences were startling—and too darn confounding.
Quietly closing the door to Joe’s office behind her, she walked down the hall, taking a moment to peek over the landing to see Aunt Evalena playing contentedly with the day care children she herself should have been watching yesterday and today. What would she do without that woman? Evie was always there when Kate needed her. Of course, she’d been dishing out a fair amount of guidance about the “man upstairs.”
“What more could you possibly ask for, Katharine? He’s a rather delightful looking man, he’s helpless at the moment, and if you just bat your eyes a few times, I’m sure he’ll fall right into your arms.”
That was the last thing she wanted. Although, for the first time since Joe’s death, she hadn’t felt lonely.
She laughed to herself. Morgan Farrell had long hair, rings in his ears, a scar on his face, and those horrendous scars on his back. He wasn’t the kind of man she could be interested in—if she ever wanted to be interested in a man.
Down the hall she heard Casey’s giggles. She’d told her to stay downstairs, told her in no uncertain terms that she was not to go anywhere near Morgan Farrell unless an adult was around, but her words had apparently fallen on deaf ears.
Kate stopped outside the bedroom, and listened to Casey and her pirate.
“Do you have telephones where you come from?” Casey asked.
“’Tis not a word I’m familiar with.”
“Well, this is a telephone,” Casey said, and Kate could easily picture Casey showing Mr. Farrell the phone that sat on the nightstand, lifting the receiver and punching the buttons. “Here, I’ll call Aunt Evie.”
“The woman is downstairs. Would it not be simpler to go into the hallway and call down to her?”
“Well, yeah, but I’m not really calling her. I’m calling her phone. In her house across the street.”
“And what is the reason for doing that?”
Kate could hear the exasperation in Casey’s voice. “So you can hear what a ringing phone sounds like.”
There was silence then, and a moment later, Casey said, “Here, listen.”
Kate peeked around the door and watched Mr. Farrell’s brow furrow into a frown as Casey held the phone to his ear. “If your aunt was in her home across the street, she would pick up an object like this and talk into it?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you could speak with her?”
“Yeah, I do it all the time.”
“’Tis a marvelous machine, Casey.”
“Definitely better than the toilet I showed you. Yuck!” Casey wrinkled her nose and picked up the picture book of Treasure Island that Joe had given her on her fourth birthday.
“Can I tell you some more of the story now?”
“Aye.”
Before Casey began, she plumped the pillow behind Mr. Farrell’s head; then, climbing to the foot of the bed, she sat down cross-legged and began to mesmerize her listener.
“The old sea-dog was an awful man who did nothing but sit around the Admiral Benbow Inn drinking rum. Poor Jim Hawkins. It was his job to serve the captain his food, to help him up and down the stairs when he was too drunk to walk on his own. Most of the time, though, the old sea-dog just sat at the table telling stories, and running his finger up and down the big ugly cut on the side of his face.” Casey leaned forward and studied her pirate’s face. “Robert Louis Stevenson didn’t say what the cut looked like, but I figure it was just like yours.”
“Many a pirate had scars,” he told her, lightly drawing a finger over the curving one on his cheek. “Some were visible to everyone, but most were hidden deep inside,” he said, putting a hand over his heart.
“Do you have scars there?” Casey asked. Kate saw the deep sadness on his face, the same look of sorrow she’d seen when he’d mentioned his sister Melody.
“Aye,” he said softly, allowing a smile to return to his face. “But let us not talk of wounds that can’t be healed. Tell me more of this Treasure Island.”
“Well,” Casey said, flipping to a page in the book she knew by heart, and continuing the story in her own words. “The old sea-dog wasn’t a pretty sight, and he was awfully mean. People were scared of him because he yelled all the time, and because he talked about pirates and treasure, and about one-legged men who would run you through without blinking an eye. But Jim Hawkins wasn’t scared.”
Kate had been so intent on watching Casey while she’d told her tale that she hadn’t noticed Mr. Farrell’s eyes closing, until Casey crawled toward him and prodded his arm with tiny fingers. “Are you awake, Mr. Farrell?”
His eyes opened. “Aye.”
He smiled warmly, and that odd gentleness that didn’t seem to match his outward appearance melted a little more of the animosity Kate felt toward him.
“You look like an old sea-dog,” Casey said, “but I’m not afraid of you.”
“I thank you, Mistress Casey,” he said, gently running a hand over her curls before it dropped weakly to his side.
“My Mommy’s afraid of you. My Aunt Evie says that Mommy’s scared of all men.”
“And why is that?”
“Because she’s afraid of falling in love again. Aunt Evie says that’s absolute nonsense. Do you think it’s nonsense?”
Morgan Farrell tilted his head, looking directly at Kate, as if he’d known she’d been standing there all along. He didn’t smile. He didn’t frown. He just stared, and his gaze burned through her, warming her insides, making her tingle like an intoxicating drink of hot mulled wine.
He grasped the cross resting on his chest, and faced Casey again. “I do not believe it’s nonsense. ’Tis painful to lose someone you love, far worse than having your face carved with a knife.”
Casey leaned forward and innocently ran her finger lightly down his scar. “Did it hurt a lot?”
“Aye, Casey,” he said, and Kate knew he was thinking of his sister, not the injury to his face.
“’Twas the greatest pain I’ve ever known.”