Heart's Safe Passage

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  The guards wanted their lives preserved or respected the word they’d been given with the gold they’d received to let the prisoners escape. They hadn’t pursued any longer than necessary to save their necks from court-martial.

  A grim smile touched Rafe’s mouth. It might be the first fight he’d won without bloodshed and against the English—and he was supposed to be on their side, not the Americans’. Calmness flowed through him even before he caught sight of his brig riding at anchor with but one light showing. He didn’t need to keep fighting.

  The boats bumped the side of the brig. Instantly a line of men appeared. “Who goes there?”

  “’Tis I and the men,” Rafe responded.

  He waited to board until the last prisoner and crewman climbed or had been hauled aboard. Then he drew himself up the line and took a knife from his boot to cut the mooring lines. The rowboats drifted away.

  Rafe faced the men, his own upright and hardy, the prisoners stooped, ragged, pale, with lank greasy hair hanging in their faces, obscuring their identities. “George Chapman?”

  “Here.” He shuffled forward on bare feet, his torn breeches showing legs like gnarled sticks. “I know you’ve done this because you want something from me, but I still thank you on behalf of all of us.”

  “Amen,” the others murmured.

  “If we’d’ve swum, we’d likely have ended up stuck in the mud,” Chapman continued.

  “We saw it happen often enough,” another man said. “The men would get stuck and drown when the tide came in. The guards would leave ’em there to remind us what could happen.”

  Rafe cringed inwardly with disgust. He couldn’t blame the behavior on the English. Plenty of Scots served in the British Navy and Army. They were supposed to be civilized. How could they be so barbaric?

  How could he be so barbaric?

  He fixed his gaze on Chapman. “After the men find you some soup and hot tea and warmer clothing, have them bring you to my cabin.” He addressed all of the Americans. “You are not prisoners unless you show any hostility toward my men or try to take the ship. You will be losing a fight, I am thinking.”

  Uneasy laughter rippled across the deck.

  “Ver’ good. Riggs, you serve these men. The rest of you, up anchor and set sail.” He turned and strode aft to his cabin.

  It still smelled of a combination of lavender and jasmine, remnants of Belinda’s and Phoebe’s presence. Now, however, ribbons and thread, bits of fabric, and tiny feminine shoes no longer littered table and seats. The cabin was spotlessly neat and clean, save for his cloak, his dress cloak, draped over a chair as though its temporary owner would retrieve it at any moment.

  Unable to resist, Rafe picked it up and raised it to his face. It smelled like jasmine, like Phoebe. He imagined her warmth, her soft hair blowing against his cheek, the salt of tears and seawater on her lips. His heart ached worse than any wound he’d ever received, as empty of Phoebe as the cloak.

  “Oh, Lord, I’m a fool to love her.” He tried to thrust the cloak from him. The end caught on the chair back and wrapped around his arm. His fingers lingered for a moment on the soft wool as though it was her smooth cheek. “Where is my sense of victory at being so close to the end?”

  He didn’t need to ask how it had died. He knew—in a pair of moss-green eyes shining like sunlight behind stained glass. In a voice like honeyed cream. In a lady so sincere in her belief in God she understood when and how her faith was weak. She didn’t reject God for her pain, she mourned her lack of faith and how it might have damaged Rafe. He had pressed his advantage against her to push her away, to weaken her faith further so she would stop pricking his long-dormant conscience. But she admitted to her failures as a woman of God and wanted Rafe to forgive her. And all the while she never stopped loving him. She loved him as no one ever had.

  And he was willing to toss it away for the sake of a woman who would never know. And even if she did, Davina hadn’t asked for vengeance. She had asked for mercy. She had asked for forgiveness and mercy, yet he had spent nine years determined to give neither.

  “But surely my sins are too great, Lord. I’ve taken lives. I’ve cost others their lives. I’ve rejected You. Surely it’s too late.”

  He disentangled the cloak from the chair and wrapped the warm wool around his shoulders. Phoebe’s scent enfolded him like loving arms. Her voice glided through his head, echoed in the recesses of his brain by the minister at the kirk of his childhood. God wanted a broken and contrite heart. It was never too late, as long as he still lived.

  “Lord,” he murmured as the deck tilted and the Davina got under way, “my heart is surely broken. The fully contrite may take a wee bit of time, but Phoebe says You will help me if I ask.” Feeling the flush of embarrassment creeping up his face, he continued, “I am asking for that help.”

  And at that moment, someone knocked on the door. “George Chapman,” an American voice called.

  Rafe strode to the door and pulled it open. “Come in. You look a wee bit better, but do you not want some supper?”

  “It can wait.” Chapman, a man with a broad-shouldered frame and too little flesh on his bones at present, stepped over the coaming. “I want to know about my wife first. How is she?”

  “She has likely delivered her bairn by now.” Lord willing she wasn’t dead. “Her sister-in-law was with her.”

  Chapman’s blue eyes widened. “Phoebe came along?”

  “Aye, that she did. Why does it surprise you?” Rafe stepped back so Chapman could come fully into the cabin. Realizing he still wore the cloak, he started to remove it, then changed his mind. He liked holding this memory of Phoebe close. “Do sit down. You look ready to fall over.”

  “I am.” Chapman strode over to the table and dropped onto a chair. “Is she all right? Belinda, I mean?” He slumped forward, his elbows on the table, then straightened, sniffing. “Lavender. She was here.”

  “Aye, I let her have this cabin until my daughter was injured.” Rafe joined Chapman at the table.

  “Your . . . daughter? You had your daughter aboard?”

  “Not by choice, so do not give me the lecture Ph—Mrs. Lee did.”

  “I . . . see.”

  “Nay, you do not, but ’tis of no importance. We have business to settle, do we not?”

  “Yes, we do, but I want to make certain Belinda is well first. In fact, I need Belinda well to help you.” Chapman met Rafe’s gaze, his own eyes red-rimmed but still clear in their sky color. “You see, Belinda is the one who knows where Brock hides out, not me.”

  Rafe sat motionless, feeling like one of those hot-air balloons without its fire—deflated, an empty sack upon the ground. He should be outraged with the Chapmans. He’d had his answer all along. He hadn’t needed to alienate himself on British shores by freeing six American prisoners. He could have simply gotten the information from Belinda.

  But he simply responded, “’Tis no matter who has the information, mon. I am not going to go after him after all.”

  “You’re . . . not?” Chapman stared. “Then why all this?” He waved his hand around.

  “’Tis a recent revelation. Or perhaps I should say a recent rep—”

  The roar of a gun shattered the night.

  Rafe sprang to his feet and charged up the ladder to the deck. He didn’t need anyone to tell him what was afoot. Bearing down on his starboard bow was a ship of the line, ablaze like a ship on a nighttime parade.

  “But we’re English,” one of his crew cried. “Can’t they see we’re English?”

  Rafe looked at the naval vessel, recalled Phoebe’s admission of her letter sent from Bermuda, and sighed in resignation. “Aye, they ken we are British. Signal our surrender and prepare the boat to take me across.”

  “They’re already preparing one,” someone reported.

  And so they were. Rafe strode to the side to meet the envoys from the seventy-four. “Bring more lanterns.”

  By the yellow glow, he could see they ha
d sent two marines, two lieutenants, and a midshipman. Grinning, the lieutenants made the midshipman go up first, though the marines, broad and stolid, followed closely behind the youth.

  “Are you Captain Rafael Docherty?”

  “Am I Captain Rafael Docherty, sir,” Rafe corrected him. “Aye, I am.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” The boy blushed. “Will you come with us, sir?”

  Rafe’s men and the Americans grew silent and still.

  “Am I being arrested?” Rafe asked, suddenly feeling like laughing at the irony.

  “I don’t know, sir.” The midshipman glanced at the two marines behind him. “We were just told to make you come with us.”

  “Make me, eh? Then I have no choice?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then I call that an arrest.” Rafe glared at the marines. “I give you my parole if you will let my brig go without trouble.”

  He felt the men arrayed behind him draw in a collective breath and hold it. He held his own. Chapman needed to get to his wife, and Phoebe needed to know where he was.

  The older of the lieutenants clambered through the entry port and stepped forward. “I’m the first lieutenant, sir. I can safely say that our interest is with you, not your brig or your men.”

  Or six American escapees.

  “Thank you.” Rafe removed a dirk from his belt and handed it to the lieutenant hilt first. “You have my word I will go without a fight and not try to escape.”

  At least until his men were safely away.

  He had to escape, had to get back to Phoebe and tell her, if nothing else, that God had finally begun to remove the anger from his heart. But he wanted to tell her more. So much more, if she would listen.

  And if the Navy didn’t see fit to hang him for piracy or treason, or both. He didn’t fear that. He didn’t welcome the prospect, but his heart remained steady, his spirit calm. For the first time in his life, he didn’t fear death.

  “I must give my crew instructions,” he told the marine. “They will not assault you or your party.”

  Not with thirty-seven guns glaring at them over a mere cable of water.

  He turned to the men. “You will find instructions in my cabin.”

  Chapman would know to sail them back to Guernsey. The crew would believe him.

  He descended the rope to the gig and settled on one of the thwarts. The officers joined him, and the coxswain gave the oarsmen instructions. Six men made short work of the distance. In moments, for the first time in his misadventures as a privateer, Rafe found himself aboard a man-of-war. Acres of deck and throngs of men stretched out before him. This vessel could have taken his own small craft aboard and barely dropped on the waterline. He scrutinized the faces he passed. He read no hostility, no contempt, mostly simple curiosity.

  But the men meant little. He had to reckon with whomever resided over the great cabin.

  That too could have housed most of his crew in comfort. Brass lanterns swung from deck beams high enough Rafe could stand upright. The dining table seated twelve and didn’t have to serve as the chart table too, and the sleeping cabin was separate.

  Despite the capacious chamber, only one man was present. He lounged on the cushioned bench below the stern lights but rose at Rafe’s entrance with the two marines and another redcoat at the door. “The three of you may go.” He spoke with the precise, clipped tones of an aristocrat. He also wore a plain, dark blue wool coat and fawn knee breeches instead of an officer’s uniform, and Rafe experienced the stirrings of uneasiness in his middle.

  The door clicked behind him. The gentleman sauntered forward, tall and elegantly built, with dark hair lying on his shoulders like some seventeenth-century cavalier. He smiled and held out his hand. “Good evening, Captain Docherty. Am I correct in presuming I need not introduce myself?”

  “Nay.” Rafe shook the proffered hand, probably a good sign. “I ken who you are, Lord Dominick.”

  25

  Phoebe had never left a woman in labor to the hands of someone else. She had sent an inn servant to find an island midwife. After the woman arrived—a storklike woman somewhere over sixty with a long neck and long fingers, the latter impeccably clean—Phoebe had kissed Belinda on the cheek and run for the harbor.

  Though it wasn’t possible, she thought she heard Belinda’s cries all the way to the water. No need for such histrionics. All should be normal now. The baby had turned.

  Phoebe was the one who had been stifling her own hysterics since Belinda’s announcement that she had known all along where to find James Brock.

  “He isn’t a diplomat,” Belinda had explained. “He lives in France and funds American privateers to harry the English. Certain men in the government like his money helping to support the war, so we let him sail under a diplomatic flag.”

  “Tell me where he is,” Phoebe commanded, her hands behind her back so she didn’t shake the baby out of Belinda. “Where?”

  Belinda had told her. Phoebe took action, and the next day she found herself in Dieppe, a bustling port city in Brittany on the coast of France, Derrick beside her like a quiet mountain of bone, sinew, and muscle.

  “Captain Rafe is goin’ ta kill me,” Derrick said not for the first time as they paused at a baker’s stall. They bought loaves of hot, crusty bread, then stopped at another booth for strong, milky coffee. “Me sailing his lady to France like this. It’s too dangerous.”

  They had arrived in a sailboat that felt no larger than a canoe, with a strip of canvas instead of paddles, and it tossed about on the channel waves. Phoebe determined to learn to swim before she set foot on anything smaller than a brig.

  Which would make leaving France difficult. If she could leave France. The day and a half the arrangements and journey took left her too much time to think about the folly of what she was doing. Brock had shown no compunction over having his henchmen go after her too, because she was with Rafe. What would stop him from killing her there in Dieppe?

  The answer was simple—nothing. From what Belinda told her and what they had learned thus far in the French city, Brock was a powerful man everyone feared and no one wanted to say much about.

  The fact that he would learn she was a fellow American, a woman from one powerful family and related through her marriage to another, might give him pause before he tried to strike out at her again.

  Might. But she had left letters with Mel. One for Rafe, one for Tabitha and Dominick, and one for the governor of Virginia telling them where she had gone, with whom she intended to meet, and what to do if she did not return. At least, the letters to the Cherretts and Governor Randolph said that. The letter to Rafe said to let the true diplomats manage James Brock. It was out of his hands. She begged him to use his hands to heal, not harm.

  She doubted Brock would harm her. Perhaps confine her until he got away again, but if he did, she would have served her purpose in seeking him out—keeping him out of Rafe’s sphere.

  So, to find James Brock in Dieppe before Rafe did. A difficulty, since Phoebe spoke too little French to matter. Her schoolgirl attempts at the language left the listeners shaking their heads and laughing at what she was certain they were calling an American bumpkin, or some French equivalent. Derrick wouldn’t tell her.

  Derrick spoke West Indian French, oddly accented to these Bretons but comprehensible. He asked questions of shopkeepers and servants passing through the street, urchins living on the streets, and sailors. Whether due to his size or his kind, gentle smile, most of the people talked to Derrick. None of them laid claim to having more than a passing knowledge of an American living in Dieppe, until nightfall.

  Phoebe thought her feet would fall off and stay behind from sheer exhaustion. She was cold and wet from a light rain, yet she stubbornly refused to stay in an inn and wait.

  “I don’t sit still well,” she admitted.

  “You like to manage things yourself, I’m thinking.” Derrick patted her shoulder, then snatched his hand back. “I do apologize, Mrs. Lee.�
��

  “Don’t.” Phoebe took his hand in both of hers. “I know that could get you into trouble with other ladies, but not with me. I appreciate your care and kindness.”

  “I appreciate all you did for the captain.”

  “I didn’t do enough, but if we can find Brock . . .” Phoebe turned away and huddled inside one of Belinda’s shawls that smelled only faintly of lavender now. She wished she hadn’t left Rafe’s cloak behind. It always made her feel protected, safe. Oddly close to him.

  Her heart ached for him, for herself, for them.

  “Do you know yet what you’re going to do once you find Brock?” Derrick paused beside a vendor selling a spicy-smelling fish stew. “Let’s have some supper and talk on that a bit.”

  She ate the savory stew along with more crusty bread and fresh cider, though she would have declared she wasn’t hungry if Derrick had asked her. He probably knew that, so he hadn’t asked.

  Food gone, they continued along the wharves of the port, busy despite the English blockade. Plenty of small fishing boats and other craft slipped in and out, as she and Derrick had.

  “About Mr. Brock, if we find him, what do we do with him?” Derrick asked.

  “It’s not a very good plan.” Phoebe paused to gaze over the choppy water of the harbor, slate-gray beneath a sky only a shade lighter. “I inherited a great deal of money when my father died. By the terms of my marriage contract, it came back to me upon my husband’s death since we had no children. I’ve spent little of it. So I’m going to offer it to Brock to buy up his shares in the privateers if he’ll disappear.”

  Derrick leaned against a half-stone, half-wood structure that looked old enough to have been built by the ancient Celts, and crossed his massive arms over his chest. “What will you do if he says no?”

  “The same thing I’ll do if he says yes—we’ll take him to England to have a little voyage on one of those prison ships to Australia.” She smiled.

  “And what makes you think that’ll stop Captain Rafe from going after him?”