The lantern swinging from the deck beam shed a yellow glow over Phoebe’s face, emphasizing its sudden pallor. Her knuckles gleamed white through the fine skin on her hands gripping the edge of the worktable.
And Rafe decided he should cut out his tongue before he said anything so cruel to anyone ever again. Regardless of his reasons for the unkindness, Phoebe had suffered enough. She didn’t need to suffer by his hand—or tongue—also.
“I’m sorry.” The words, so rarely falling from his lips, nearly choked him. “I had no right to say such a thing.”
“No, you didn’t.” Gravel had gotten blended with the honeyed cream of her voice. Her eyes grew dull, like moss gone too long without water. “You talk as though I—as though I—I killed him on purpose.”
“Some of the tavern talk implied as much. After your husband and all.”
“And you believed the talk?” Phoebe pushed herself to her feet.
Rafe opened his mouth to accuse her of running away again, but wasn’t that his intent, to keep her away from him, to make her hate him rather than . . .
He could scarcely countenance the notion that she loved him. She knew he was a reprobate, a man on a violent mission. She knew his past for the most part, and she knew what he intended in the future. She’d seen him in battle. Yet she looked at him with a tenderness that created a churning custard of his heart, and he had to be rid of her, for her sake. He would only hurt her.
For his sake, he wanted to stop her from walking away from him, hold her close, find a minister to marry them—
He snapped his thoughts closed on that notion and stared at Phoebe hovering in the doorway. “You are not going to stay and tell me the truth? Or am I to presume that the rumors, for once, are not false?”
She sank her teeth into her lower lip so hard Rafe expected blood to well forth. For a moment, her spine appeared stiff enough to crack at a touch. Then she collapsed. Her posture slumped, her head bowed. “Rumor is partly right.” She spoke in a murmur barely audible over the crash of waves against the hull.
The sailor’s corner of Rafe’s mind, which he’d developed over the past nine years, realized the sea had grown rougher, indicating they drew near to the Bay of Biscay, an area fraught with storms and French vessels attempting to break the British blockade. There would be too many of them from the Navy and more gun power than his little brig could manage. He needed to be on his quarterdeck in the event of danger, especially now that Jordy and Watt were no longer around, and Derrick had gone to sail the prize into Portsmouth to sell to the Admiralty. But right now, Phoebe was more important. She had been more important for too long now, a dangerous distraction he could not resist.
He glanced at her dejected posture, thought about her last words, and reached out to take her hands. “You do not need to tell me, Phoebe. ’Twas cruel of me to mention a word of it after all you’ve found yourself saying about your husband.”
Which had been his intent, to turn her from him, but he could not. And that spelled trouble.
She pulled her hands free, giving him hope that perhaps he had succeeded in sending her off, then she simply swallowed some coffee, set the cup on the table, and folded her hands in her lap. “It was an accident. That is—” She stared past his shoulder. Her face was pale with two spots of red high on her cheekbones. “He’d—he’d beaten his wife so badly she went into travail two months early. It was my second lying-in on my own. Tabitha was too near her own to go out. The woman survived, but the baby . . . it was too soon. Too small. It never breathed.” Tears starred her lashes, and he rested one hand on her shoulder, whether to comfort her or stop her he didn’t know.
She continued in a high, tight voice. “It was a son after three daughters, and the man was angry. He blamed me. He blamed Tabitha for not coming herself. He blamed his wife for being weak.” Her voice rose. “She had a broken arm because of him, and he blamed her.”
“Shh.” Rafe kneaded the tension from her shoulder. “You ken ’twas not your fault.”
“I know.” She bowed her head. “I went home. And he followed me. He stormed into the house and up the steps. He was shouting.” A shudder ran through her. “All I could think was to stop him from reaching Tabitha and Dominick. So I picked up a poker and caught him in the middle with it. He folded up and fell. He broke his neck. He shouldn’t have. But he did.”
“It was an accident, Phoebe.”
“I know. Everyone said that. Everyone who mattered anyway.” She sighed. “But others knew about my husband and decided I am a dangerous female to be around. So I fled back to Loudoun County and tried to start over. I thought I had. I thought I’d forgiven him and Gideon and myself. But when there was that fight and you and Jordy and Derrick ran into it like everyone else, it was like watching Gideon and that husband, and I realized I’m not the loving Christian I’m supposed to be. I want to save your soul, but now I see mine for the tarnished vessel it is.”
“But isn’t that the point of Christianity? Jesus forgives those who repent?”
“You’re preaching salvation to me?” She glanced up at him, her eyes alight with amusement. “You who want nothing to do with God?”
“Nay, lass, He wants naught to do with me. I have not repented.”
“If you did—”
“Have you then?”
“I thought I had. But there must be more bitterness inside me than I knew.” She swallowed as though trying to clear her palate of the taste. “I’m so uncertain now. For four years I’ve been sure Gideon was behind me, but then there was this man, and now this . . .” She shook her head.
“Sometimes when a mon is shot, the ball carries cloth and other debris into the wound. I can remove the lead and what I think is all the cloth, and the wound may even seem to heal. But then days or even weeks later, the mon has trouble, a fever, pain—” He stopped before getting too gruesome. “I must open the wound site again and find what is the source of the infection. ’Tis more often than not a bit of cloth or wood, a fragment of lead left behind. Once ’tis gone, the wound can heal. I think—” He gazed at Phoebe’s beautiful face with a warmth deep inside him, the glowing coals of wonder. “Perhaps God has used me to lance your wounds so they can truly heal.”
“Maybe He has.” She pursed her lips and half closed her eyes, pensive, calm. Then suddenly she smiled up at him. “And you, Rafe, how can we cleanse your wounds?”
“You do not wish to talk of that.” He turned to the table and began to pour molasses into the bowl. “The weather has been cold enough we still have an egg or two for this, but there’s no milk, so I use molasses to make it moist enough.”
Phoebe was staring at him. “How do you know such a thing? I mean, how to make a pudding?”
“I didn’t start out as captain of a ship. I was a lowly crewman, one of the lowliest, since I knew little about sailing. But that dried biscuit that gets weevils in it disgusted me. The captain then made some jest about me being too fancy for plain sailor fare, so I must be wanting pudding and I could make it for the crew.” A chuckle rose in his chest. “So I bribed the cook to teach me how and did it. Now ’tis a tradition for me to make it once in every voyage. Will you fetch me the raisins?”
She rose and drew the tin of raisins from its shelf. “I didn’t think you would go to sea when you knew nothing about sailing.”
Rafe began to beat the batter. “I was willing to do anything to catch James Brock.” He smiled at her. “I still am.”
“I know.” She slapped the tin onto the table with more force than necessary. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Phoebe?” Rafe began to stir raisins into the batter. “I wish you weren’t here. I never intended for you to come along. Indeed, I would rather you had not. I did not want a lass who despises men to be aboard my brig.”
“I don’t despise all men.”
Selfishly, he wanted her to.
“Only those who’ve hurt me.” Her lip quivered.
“Did I not hurt you by bringing you with us?”
“No, not by bringing me. I had to help Belinda in the end. But the rest . . . You will hurt me, Rafe, if you continue on your current course.”
“Then do not love me, Phoebe. I warned you straightaway what I am like, what I’m doing. I have no room for a lady or God in my life, telling me ’tis wrong to go after Brock. I cannot live with the knowledge that he is free, while Davina and my parents are dead. I hear her screaming in the night, and I ken I have to go after him.”
“Would Davina and your parents want you going against the Lord?” The gravel had gone from her voice. Soft as it was, though, she may as well have boxed his ears.
He sighed. “Phoebe, nay, my parents would not approve. But Davina . . .” He braced himself. “Davina was the most beautiful, the most soft-spoken lass I ever met, but her heart was not with the Lord until the end. When she called on Jesus to save her, the pirates slit her throat.”
Shock registered on Phoebe’s face. “I didn’t know. I just assumed—I mean, you married her and you said you followed the Lord then.”
“Aye, weel, you make a number of mistakes when you are that young.”
“Quite young for a man heading to university.”
“Her father had a great deal of influence over who was accepted.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You married her to get into university?”
“Nay, not as that sounds. I loved her since I kent what the word love meant.” He took the last roll of dough and slid it onto its pan. “But she—”
His head filled with the memory of Davina weeping, still pretty in her tears, fragrant with roses and as soft as thistledown in his arms as he tried to comfort her, his childhood friend with a broken heart.
“She loved someone else.” There, he’d said it. For the first time in thirteen years, he admitted that Davina had not married him for love. “She loved someone who did not want a wife, just the adulation.”
Phoebe’s eyes widened, her lips parted. She said nothing. And he loved her in that moment. She offered him no words of sympathy, no foolish declarations that a silly girl of eighteen had loved the wrong man but had surely come to love him—all the nonsense he had heard from his minister at home, from Jordy, from Davina herself.
“I was her dearest friend,” he continued, unable to stop, like a lanced boil releasing its poison. “But I was too much of a lad to her. Even in the end, she said if I had learned to fight instead of learning medicine, I could have saved her.”
“So you learned to fight.” She stretched flour-daubed hands out to him. His mother had done that when he was a child running in with some hurt needing tended.
He didn’t feel as though Phoebe were his mother. She should be a mother—mother to many children. His children, in a softer, kinder world, where God still cared. Yet hadn’t he just suggested that God cared about Phoebe, cared enough to want her wounds cleansed and healed? If that were true, perhaps his own—
But what did he have without a future based on destroying James Brock?
Phoebe stood beside him for the moment, watching him crack the last two eggs acquired on Bermuda into the batter, then toss in a handful of dried citron and begin to stir. She watched him with a softness, an intense, loving gaze he had seen on other women’s faces directed at other men. If Phoebe, a mere human female, could still care after all his attempts to push her away, perhaps God would love him one day, when he let go of his need to destroy Brock. Destroy him and end his life of safety, because three people had died with brutality and a child had lost her mother. Destroy—
“Gently, Rafe.” Phoebe curled her hand around the spoon beneath his and stopped his battering of the batter. “You’re going to have half of it on the table.”
“So I am.” He began to search the shelves for a pudding bag, remembered he didn’t have the water boiling, and lifted the bucket to fill the giant kettle. “This will take hours to boil. We will need to look in on it to ensure the water doesn’t boil away.” He turned from the stove to find Phoebe motionless, spoon in one hand, gaze still fixed upon him. “Stop your staring at me, Mrs. Lee.”
“I cannot, Captain Docherty. The sight of you being domestic . . .” She released the spoon, closed the distance of the half dozen feet between them, and kissed him.
Though as cool and light as morning mist, the gesture blazed through him, melting, incinerating arguments and pain until it reached his core, where he managed to extinguish the yearning for her.
He set his hands on her shoulders and held her off at arm’s length. “Aye, I wished to be domesticated once. That has been destroyed, and I am not certain I can get it back, no matter how much I—”
“How much you what?” Her words, her eyes, the hands with which she gripped his collar challenged him to finish.
The response burned on his tongue. He shook his head, biting it away. “’Tis unimportant if I do not change my course, and I will not.”
Phoebe’s lips quivered. “Because you still love her?”
“Nay, I do not love her. I have not loved her for over a decade. Not like a husband should. But I cared for the friends we were once.”
“And as the mother of your daughter?”
He flinched. “Aye, that too. Mel has always been a joy despite everything else. But Davina . . .” He started to shrug, started to shake off the talk of his past and direct the conversation to Phoebe. But his shoulders weighed down too much to shrug off the sordid history. “Sometimes I think I despised her at the end. I tried to give her all the time I could between my studies and working with my father, but she complained all the time. No matter what I did for her, I—she—”
“It wasn’t enough?” Phoebe lifted one hand and stroked the hair back from his face, as he’d seen her do to Mel, her touch spindrift light. “I do understand. And no matter how much we accomplish, it never seems like enough for anyone, even God. What I’m trying to tell you, Rafe, is that destroying James Brock won’t be enough. At first I thought becoming a midwife and bringing life into the world would help me forget what happened to my husband. Then I thought giving up my happy life in Seabourne to give my services to the women in the mountains would be enough to help me forget that—that accident. But they haven’t been. You will never forget your pain over your wife until you forgive. And you could destroy your life if someone else doesn’t kill you first.”
“Ah, yes, unless someone stops me first. Someone like Dominick Cherrett and his admiral uncle?”
“Would that be so awful?”
“Do you think having me thrown into Newgate as a pirate will save my soul?”
“Dominick wouldn’t do that to you.”
“But the Navy might. Or did you think they would take kindly to me removing one of their prisoners from the prison hulks? That’ll get me hanged faster than the accusation of piracy. ’Tis treason, you ken.”
“I want to stop you from either action, from either accusation.”
“And leave Mrs. Chapman without her husband?” He gave her a half smile. “Few men live long in those floating coffins.”
“I—well, I—” Her eyes grew round.
“You did not think, no?”
She shook her head, then looked away.
“You had the best of intentions, I have no doot, hinnie. You wanted to rescue me. But that stops me from rescuing George Chapman.”
“If you could do both . . .” She shifted from foot to foot, gazing down as though she needed to see her dainty toes to perform the restless action.
She looked so chagrined he wanted to sweep her close and tell her not to concern herself. Instead, he injected an edge of hardness to his tone. “All good intentions have some kind of consequence, Phoebe. I know the possible consequences of my actions.”
“And don’t care?” Water from the kettle boiled over onto the stove top with a hiss. It may as well have been Phoebe expressing her annoyance with him. “You don’t care if you’re hurting me, hurting Mel, and most of all hurting yourself.”
“Oh, Phoebe, I do care. I do not want to, but I do.” He turned to the table. “And I care about my pudding, you ken. Will you hold the bag, or would you prefer to pour?”
“I’ll hold the bag.”
They said nothing as Phoebe held the pudding bag open and Rafe poured the batter in. He then pulled a needle and thread from his coat pocket and began to sew up the top of the linen, watching Phoebe gape from the corner of his eye.
“Aye, I can sew up more than people. And all the best cooks—”
A shout rang out from above. He raised his head to listen.
“Ice! It’s raining ice!”
“Aye, but I do dislike sailing past the Bay of Biscay. ’Tis always the foul weather here.”
“Is—is ice dangerous?” Phoebe had paled.
Rafe slipped the pudding bag into the boiling water. “Not if we take the right precautions and do not see the enemy.” He turned back to her. “I must go, but thank you for telling me about what happened. I could not bear your hurt and ken I was partly the cause of bringing it back to you.”
“Yet it helped. I feel . . . lighter.”
And so, in a way, did he.
He cupped her face in his hands but refrained from kissing her with great willpower. “Keep your burden light, lass, and do not love me. If Lord Dominick received your letter, I am like as not headed for Newgate and a hangman’s rope.”
“Which would make me—”
“Captain?” Feet clattered on the ladder.
“I must go.” Rafe released her and headed for the door, yet his feet felt too leaden to step over the coaming, leave the cozy realm of domesticity he and Phoebe had shared, a glimpse of a future that would never be.
Riggs, a quieter, most compliant crewman since the battle and Watt’s and Jones’s deaths, reached the galley. “We don’t know how much sail to take in.”
“Aye, I am on my way.”
Afraid if he glanced back to Phoebe he would end up like Lot’s wife, or at the least forget duty and responsibility, he charged up the companionway ladder as though she pursued him with shackles. Icy wind blew into his face, not strong, but crowded with needlelike shards of ice. Sleet would slow them, as it coated sails and lines and made handling the rigging dangerous.
“I want lifelines rigged,” he called to the nearest men. “From hatchways to companionways and from bowsprit to quarterdeck. No one walks on the deck without using one.”
Already the deck grew slick with freezing patches of water. As long as the wind blew, the sails should remain free of enough ice that would set them in danger of collapsing, but if the wind rose, climbing the shrouds to furl the sails for safety could prove treacherous.
“Aloft.” He ran toward the quarterdeck as he issued the orders. “Clew up all but mainsail and spritsail.”
Men leaped to obey. They knew the risks if they did not get the sails in.
On the quarterdeck, Rafe snatched up a spyglass and sought for the Fleur de Nuit, their French prize. It had proved to be a grand sailing vessel and kept on station without a hitch once the mast and rigging had been repaired. From the look of things, either the men had decided to take in sail too, or they mimicked what they saw aboard the Davina. Either way, they took in sail. If a gale blew up, they could be separated. He would lose his prize, nearly half of his men, and the French cargo. All he would have were the French prisoners and nowhere to off-load them to another vessel so he didn’t have to sail to the naval port at Plymouth or Portsmouth and risk being stopped if Lord Dominick had gotten word to his uncle. Rafe wanted to set in further east in Southampton. They knew him there. Few questions would be asked. He would be mere hours from the prison hulk in the Thames from there.
Southampton, by all his best estimations without sunlight for a noon sighting, lay another five hundred miles northeast. Five hundred miles, two to three days of sailing, until he reached the next step in his plans.
As long as no one from Dominick Cherrett arrived to stop him. The fool woman for writing such a letter. Rafe should not have sent Watt ashore to watch her after he tried to mutiny, but it had gotten him off the brig. Rafe wanted Watt away from the men he wanted to entice. Watt had likely delivered the letter himself, thinking it would destroy Rafe. And perhaps Brock’s henchmen had persuaded Watt to go after Rafe then, persuading him to kill his nephew whenever and however he could.
If only the men hadn’t put Watt in with the prisoners and they hadn’t killed him. Rafe could have questioned him, learned why Watt had grown so murderous. Surely control of the ship wasn’t the only reason.
“I will be asking Brock himself,” Rafe muttered.
And even to his own ears, the declaration lacked much of its venom. His heart didn’t clench quite as tightly with anger as it had for nine years.
Oh, Phoebe, what have you done to me? What’s left if I don’t have Brock to destroy? I will have failed Davina yet again.
A shriek drew Rafe’s attention to the main deck. Phoebe had emerged from the hatchway and promptly landed in a heap on the deck, a patch of ice beneath her. Rafe started aft, then waited. Five men had already reached her, two practically yanking her in half in their endeavor to be the first to help her to her feet. Her trill of laughter rang through the wind and sleet and nearly yanked Rafe’s heart from his chest. Although broad, calloused hands pressed her delicate fingers to the lifeline, a phalanx of men surrounded her on her careful way back to the cabin. Rafe watched her progress, wind blowing his hair into his eyes and stinging his cheeks, then she vanished down the companionway, and he returned to the wheel.
“I’ll take over for a bit.” He nudged the man aside. “You go get warm. There’s coffee in the galley.”
“Thank you, sir.” The man—a youth of no more than nineteen years, in truth—saluted and started to turn away, then swung back. “Sir, I’m awfully sorry about what we did to you and—and Mr. Jordy. No wonder my mama always said that greed is a sin. It sure led to nothing but trouble.”
“Aye, someone al’ays suffers when greed’s involved.” He tried to give the youth with the guileless blue eyes a smile, but failed. “But you’ve got prize money now to take back to that mama.”
“Yes, sir, she’ll appreciate it.” The boy grinned. “After she tans my hide for how I got it.”
Rafe did smile at that. “I had a mither like that myself. Run along now. You are turning blue with the cold.”
The boy saluted again and did just that, leaving Rafe to shiver inside his woolen cloak and coat and linen shirt. He wanted Phoebe tucked beside him. He’d been warm with her close.
But Phoebe had betrayed him to Dominick Cherrett, though nothing was likely to happen. The Navy was too occupied with the French and Americans to fash themselves over one privateer, but she’d divulged his plans to others, and that struck a blow to his soul.
She’d done it to save his soul because she loved him, the misguided, wonderful, infuriating female. At that moment, he wanted his soul to be worth saving. If she came to him and said she wanted him to repent so she could spend her life with him, he might have given in, given up.
But she didn’t appear, and the moment passed. He wasn’t suffering cold and deprivation of comfort in order to sacrifice his plan to destroy the man who had deprived him of his family. God had abandoned him when Rafe needed Him most. He wasn’t about to crawl back without his mission accomplished. The world would be a better place for it.
So why did that declaration sound as empty as words hollered down a well?
He squinted into the rain and wind until Riggs, his left arm in a sling, came to relieve him at the wheel. Then he descended to his cabin for dry clothes. He had to brace himself for seeing Phoebe, but he couldn’t avoid Mel to avoid the other female, so he tapped on the great cabin door.
Mel was alone, sitting up with her Bible on her lap and tears streaming down her face. “I can’t read, Da. I know the letters, but they make no sense to me now.” She gazed up at him with trusting, innocent eyes. “Why can’t I read?”
“’Twas the blow to your head.” He stroked her head, his fingers seeking the indentation in her skull, assessing how well it healed. “A blow to the head can make a body forget his own name.”
“I’d rather forget that than how to read. I—I’m stupid.”
“Oh, lass.” Rafe perched on the edge of the bunk so he could hold her head against his shoulder. “We will teach you to read again. Your brains just got a wee bit scrambled is all.”
“But I want to read now,” she wailed.
An echoing cry rang through the bulkhead.
Rafe snapped his head up, listening. He heard nothing save for the usual shipboard noises and turned his attention back to Mel. “We cannot al’ays have what we want now, lass. You ken that. Sometimes we can have naught that we want.”
Like the revenge that had eluded him for nine years.
“But sometimes we can get things back when we lose them.”
“We never got Mama back.”
“Nay, she’s gone to heaven.”
“Has she?” Mel raised her head and gazed at him with tear-drenched eyes. “Uncle Watt said he did not think Mama believed in God that way.”
“She did at the end. She called on Jesus to save her and begged for His forgiveness. I have told you this.”
“Aye, but it helps to hear it. If it was not too late.”
“It was not.” Rafe picked up the Bible and flipped through the pages. Once he could have found the passage in moments. Now it took him a full five minutes of searching first in the Gospel of John, then to the eighth chapter of Matthew, to the parable of the man hiring workers for his vineyard. “So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.” He glanced up at Mel’s pale but still beautiful face. “I am thinking that means ’tis never too late.”
“Not even for you?” She grinned at him.
“Only if a man accepts the work, bairn.” He kissed her brow. “I’ll make certain you learn to read again, a’right?”
“But who will read to me until then? Mrs. Chapman isn’t well, and Mrs. Lee is never here.” She tilted her head. “She’s always with you, isn’t she?”
“Aye, much of the time.” He rose and backed to the door.
“Don’t you think she’s very pretty?”
“Aye, she’s beautiful.” He laid his hand on the handle. “I will be sending up—”
“She has a tendre for you, you ken.”
“Aye, lass, I ken she does, and I ken ’tis of no use, and I ken ’tis time you had a rest.” He flung open the door to find Phoebe with her fist upraised.
“Are you going to strike me or knock?”
“Knock. I heard you.” She glanced past him. “May I enter? I need a moment.”
“Mel’s awake.”
“That’s all right.”
He stepped aside, and she swept past him, graceful aboard the vessel now.
“What is it?” he asked, closing the door.
“Belinda.” She glanced at Mel, then back to him. “Rafe, we need to get her to land as soon as possible. She’s going to have that baby within the week.”