Chapter Twelve

When four people knew the truth, was a secret still a secret?

Adriana contemplated this quandary as she stood in the cabin with the captain, Drake, and a bloody Welshman, discussing how to guarantee Gwynn’s silence. Gwynn sprawled on the floor, curled in on his own ribs, still bleeding from what appeared to be a broken nose, watching her, Drake, and the captain with rolling, half-wild eyes.

“Tonight, Sayer walked in here and collapsed,” the captain began, relating the story they would all stick to. “His nose broke as he hit the floor.”

“So our little mouse,” Drake continued, “raced over to see what happened to her friend. She—” Drake closed his eyes and composed himself “—He noticed that Sayer was feverish and his face spotted.”

“Smallpox,” Roarke said. “So Sayer must go directly to isolation and stay there until the sickness passes.”

“Smallpox won’t work,” Adriana said. “Make it the ague or something.”

“Smallpox,” Drake said, “strikes more terror.”

“But Gwynn doesn’t have any spots.” She breathed out a frustrated sigh. “I’ve had smallpox. I know it doesn’t look like this. The men will know, too.”

“Not everyone has had the disease,” the captain added. “I haven’t.”

“And even if they have,” Drake interjected, “the disease is fierce enough that no man wants to test the idea that he can’t get it again.”

Roarke nodded. “It’s a sure way to isolate him.”

“Smallpox or not,” she said, “they’ll be suspicious. They’ll try to see him from afar, to whisper to him.”

Roarke sidled a glance to Drake. “Is the surgeon with the crew or with us?”

“With us. In an uprising, the surgeon will be the first to die just for the botched amputation he did on old Jean-Claude.”

“Then tell him to set up an isolation area where the men can’t get to this Welshman. And he has to guard Sayer personally, for the sake of the whole crew.”

She insisted, “It will never work.”

Roarke’s face tightened. “It has to work, at least until we see land.”

Drake headed toward the door. “I’ll tell the surgeon to prepare the area.”

“I’ll announce it to the crew.” Roarke pushed away from the desk and reached for his burgundy velvet coat. “Once they hear that he has smallpox, they’ll clear a wide path for him. Nobody will be close enough to see the difference.”

Drake said, “When I return, the mouse and I will carry him—”

“Me? He weighs a ton!”

“You and I have had smallpox. The captain hasn’t. I’ll bear the weight, you just have to pick up his feet.”

“Adriana.”

Roarke’s voice was a calm rumble, and she felt the vibrations down to her toes. She braced herself to meet his all-too-knowing eyes.

“This is very dangerous,” he said. “You need to be convincing.”

“I’m very good at pulling the wool over sailors’ eyes.”

As Roarke predicted, the sailors kept their distance when she and Drake carried Gwynn out of Roarke’s cabin. Sayer kept his silence, as well, probably due to the keen edge of Drake’s dagger against his spine. While they brought Gwynn to the far end of the orlop deck, she heard the sailors’ voices filtering down from the deck above. Oddly, many of their comments were directed at her. They kept telling her to buck up and be strong, as if the captain had made an unwilling peg boy out of her.

Not yet, she thought with a quiver. Not yet.

The bells had rung for the last dog watch by the time she got back to the cabin. Roarke was waiting for her behind the desk, a dark silhouette in the waning daylight.

He looked up at her with troubled eyes. “You’re in terrible danger, petite.”

Petite.

Like she was small, precious.

Like she was loved.

She shook the foolish, foolish thought out of her head. “I’ve always been in danger. Sayer’s stupid but he’s not a fool.”

“I wasn’t talking about him, Adriana.”

He spoke her name and it was like music, somehow. Maybe it was the English accent, maybe it was the way his voice rumbled, but the sound of her true name on his lips was enough to make her knees go soft.

“You,” she said, “haven’t done anything that I haven’t wanted.”

He made a sound like he was sucking air between his teeth, and that’s how she knew she’d surprised him. She’d been a boy too long to start pretending she was some ninny nursery-raised virgin or a fan-wielding flirt.

“Your honesty,” he said, “is…unsettling.”

“Would you have me lie?”

“To protect yourself? Yes.”

“Why would I protect myself from something I want?”

She’d wanted him in an instinctive, deep-seated, purely feminine way that she could no longer deny. She knew he wanted her, too—he’d been at sea without relief for months, of course he reacted swiftly—but it was more than that. When they’d lain on that bed together, they’d been so absorbed that they hadn’t even heard Gwynn open the door.

“Adriana.” His voice was strangled, frustrated. “I thought you understood the drawbacks of being a woman.”

“The drawbacks, yes.” She raised her hands to her hips. “As for the benefits, I’m still learning.”

“It’s always women who pay for such pleasure, petite.”

He straightened up and found interest in the darkness in the corners of the room. He ran a hand through his hair. She could practically hear his thoughts running amok. Then, suddenly he seized one of the charts curled to one side and, removing the weights from the chart beneath, smoothed the new chart across the desk.

He said, “I’ve made an adjustment in our latitude.”

“I noticed.” But the scratching on his map wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. “We’ve veered northerly.”

“We’re not very far from the coast of the Americas.”

Through her mind passed a flood of stories about impenetrable forests, roaming beasts, brutal winters, and red-skinned savages. From what she’d heard of that vast place, it was untamed and brutal, destroying any colonist who dared to settle.

“If the winds hold,” he continued, “we should be at Charles Town any day.”

“Charles Town,” she repeated, as the word settled. “But Charles Town is an English settlement.”

“As usual, you are remarkably well-informed.”

Her heart skipped a beat. She glanced down at the chart, at his finger tracing the furrowed edge of land toward a spot at the edge of a river marked with an X.

“We’re sailing on a French privateer,” she said. “It’d be madness to approach Charles Town.”

“My ship is fast. We’ll veer wide around the city.”

“Roarke.”

His head shot up. She realized, in her distraction, that she’d called him by the name she’d found on his letter. With one look at his face, any doubts she’d nurtured that the letter she’d read was addressed to this man vanished.

He said, “How—”

“I was looking for a rag.” She felt a rush of shame. “I found letters wrapped in a red ribbon.”

“You read them.”

A statement, not an accusation.

“Just one.” She pulled on her own fingers in agitation. “A letter from your mother, concerning Adam.”

She knew his brother Adam was dead. She’d parsed together the stories she’d heard from the sailors with what she’d learned from the letter and what Roarke had told her outside Roscoff. She didn’t know the details, but a girl didn’t have to be lettered to assume that Captain Samuel Leighton was somehow behind his brother’s death.

“Forget my name, Adriana.”

She shook her head. She would never forget that name, any more than she could forget this beautiful man standing across the desk, trying his best to pretend they hadn’t almost made love on the bed she could see out of the corner of her eye.

For that name was the name of the true man, the kind one, the honorable one who existed behind the mask of Captain Wolfe.

“Forget that name,” he repeated, his eyes going flat.

“Why would—”

“I would have you curse Captain Wolfe for what I’m about to do—not the man whose name you discovered.”

For what I’m about to do.

A terrible weakness stole over her.

“As soon as we get within rowing distance of the Americas,” he said, “I’m sending you off alone.”

***

Roarke turned his back to her. He could not bear to see the shock, terror, and betrayal in those soft brown eyes.

We all wear disguises, he thought, as he fixed his gaze unseeing out the wide stern windows of his cabin as the day’s light waned. The danger comes when you wear a disguise for too long, and you become the very demon whose sins you’d once hoped to shed.

“Jamaica,” she said, sometime later, when the silence became too much to bear. “If you’re going to maroon me, do it in Jamaica.”

He flinched at the word maroon. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to be responsible for her virtue. He didn’t want to spend every waking moment thinking of her while the taste of her skin lingered on his tongue. But most of all, he didn’t want to be a captain who maroons people, as Captain Samuel Leighton had marooned him and his beaten, broken brother on the coast of Madagascar.

“Jamaica,” he said tightly, “is too far away.”

“There are other islands.”

“Any island in the Caribbean is infested with pirates.”

“Heaven forbid.”

He tightened his jaw at her flippancy. “If I leave you among pirates, you’ll sign up for another ship and continue this farce until it’s too late.”

Her silence confirmed his suspicions. She knew no other way to survive, so of course she’d do the easiest thing possible. Images of her fate flashed through his mind—dirty, grunting men limned by torchlight groping her small white body sprawled naked on a deck.

Bile grew hot in his belly.

She said, “Tell me where I’m going, then.”

A hot breath rushed out of him. This would be a hundred times easier if she were willing. He’d spent the last week charting the latitude of their voyage and estimating the longitude. He probed his memory for what he knew about the colonies that populated the American coast. Several cities from New York to Charles Town were bustling, thriving English seaports. They’d be difficult to approach in this French privateer without risking notice by any English warships that might be in the area. But there were other settlements, smaller towns with settlers desperate for men and women to join and help build their communities.

He turned around to lean over the desk again. “I intend to release you—”

“—abandon me, you mean—”

“—save you,” he interrupted. “From yourself, if necessary.”

He mustered the courage to look at her. She stood cock-hipped. She had her boy face on, immobile, steady of gaze, her little nostrils flaring. But it was too late, he saw the girl underneath the mask. He knew the softness of that cheek, the curve of her breast now crushed under linen bindings. The hollow of his palm felt warm, as if he still held the throbbing heat of her sex in his hand.

He dragged his attention back to the map. “The Santee River pours into the sea right here.” He tapped a coastal area. “Upstream is a French Huguenot settlement called Jamestown.”

“French?”

“Yes.” He forced confidence in his voice though he wasn’t sure if the settlement was still in existence. Settlements grew, struggled, and disappeared on a regular basis in this wilderness. “The English proprietors of this land are desperate to get it settled, and they’re not particular about nationality. They’ve accepted several shiploads of French Protestants into their colony.”

“But I’m Catholic.”

“Hide it,” he said. “You’re very good at that.”

He heard her footfall as she came around the desk. He fixed his attention on the map while the lines blurred in his sight. A perfumed creature in satin couldn’t exude as strong of an attraction as this slip of a woman, now pressing her small, strong body against his side.

“Don’t maroon me.” She stretched her hand over his. “Don’t leave me there to die.”

Each word a dagger in his heart. Memories tormented him, of him and Adam scouring the shore, seeking fresh water, scrambling for food, wilting under the fierceness of the Madagascar sun.

“You’ll have supplies,” he said. “Food, water, a tarp for shelter—”

“In Jamaica, I could find work in the port. As a cordier or—”

“Don’t lie.”

His fears threatened to choke him. She still didn’t understand that she couldn’t masquerade as a boy any longer. Her secret was contained, but not for long. She needed to face her fate as a woman, and that’s what troubled him the most. He now understood that the choices for women were few and well-defined. She would have to marry, or she would have to bargain her wares in one of the seaports that dotted the coast.

The thought of another man touching her made his ears buzz and his vision haze over, so much so that he didn’t notice the pounding of footsteps on the deck above until Drake rapped on his door.

Roarke barked, “Enter.”

Drake tumbled in, a smile splitting his face. “No worries now, Captain.” Drake waved to the east. “Land-ho!”

Relief loosened his limbs. His longitude measure had been off, they’d reached the coast sooner than he expected.

He said to Drake, “How far?”

“If the wind keeps,” Drake said, “then we’ll be within rowing distance by sunset.”

“Good.” He tapped the desk, thinking. “Tell the men we need to restore our fresh water supplies. Set the sails to landward and make them prepare the barrels.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

“Drake,” Adriana said, “one more thing.”

Drake raised a brow as if amused that a pip of a girl would make a demand.

“When you return,” she said, “make sure to knock first.”