by Jane Jackson
But when he had stilled the fractious horse and glanced up, seeing her properly had stopped his breath. As he looked into those magnificent emerald eyes his heart had turned over. He had watched her gaze widen and swift colour warm her cheeks as she caught her breath. Immediately looking away, his heart racing as it had not done since his capture, he had cursed himself for a fool. Was he not in enough danger? He sensed – knew – the attraction was mutual, profound. And hopeless. The best thing, the only thing, was to ignore it, forget it, and pretend it had never happened.
Keeping his gaze lowered, he had knuckled his forehead in time-honoured fashion, then bent to gather up the dropped canvas. But, as she kicked her mount on, he had not been able to resist lifting his head to watch her go.
Now, as he walked, he searched his memory for every tiny detail, recalling the light dusting of freckles across her nose and the golden tint beneath her rosy blush. Few women of his acquaintance would be so careless of their complexion. But then, few women he knew could have handled the big thoroughbred with such gentle expertise. The beast must have stood a good 18 hands. So how tall was she?
As for the rest of her features, he seemed to remember a neat, straight nose, a generous mouth too wide for classical beauty, and a firm, resolute chin. Slashing in frustration at a stand of nettles, he hurled the stick away. Why torment himself? As Lord Roland Stratton he could have asked friends to arrange an introduction, for she was obviously a gentleman’s daughter, but as Gabriel Ennis, his inferior station in life put her far beyond his reach.
The boatyard was below him. Knowing he would provoke at best curiosity, at worst suspicion, were he to arrive from the beach, he remained on the path and followed it to the village, as he had done the other night.
Approaching the big wooden gates, now open and fastened back, he caught the sound of voices just inside. ‘… Only food? You sure?’
‘That’s what I heard. Don’t make no sense, do it? Who’d break into an inn and not help hisself to a drink?’
‘A bleddy fool, that’s who. More hair than brains. Lest he’s a Methodist, of course. Right, come on, pick ’n up.’
The realisation that the two men were discussing him broke Gabriel’s stride, but only for an instant. He had, in every sense, come too far to turn back. Also, it was more than likely they had heard his footsteps. Though the arrival of a stranger in this small backwater was bound to arouse interest, there was nothing to connect him directly to the theft. It was to be hoped the villagers would find it impossible to conceive of a thief bold enough, or stupid enough, to return in broad daylight and ask for a job.
Subtly altering his appearance by lowering his head and hunching his shoulders, he walked through the gate. The two men he had heard talking were heading away, one each end of a long wooden ladder, toward the slip on which a framework of props and wooden scaffolding surrounded the hull of a newly built ship. Slowing his step, Gabriel peered about him, signalling his uncertainty.
‘Looking for someone?’ The suspicious shout was accompanied by a sudden loud hiss.
Glancing round, he saw clouds of steam billowing from the open doorway of a squat stone building with a slate roof and a wide doorway. Made of weathered vertical planks, the door was mounted on two wheels that ran along an iron rail parallel to the front wall. The steam evaporated to reveal a thickset man wearing a filthy leather apron that covered him from chin to ankles. In the background, Gabriel saw glowing coals on the forge hearth. An anvil and a large water butt stood on the beaten earth floor, and metal of varying lengths, shapes, and sizes was propped against the walls or lay in small, rusting piles. The sleeves of the blacksmith’s shirt were rolled up, exposing brawny forearms, and in one huge fist he held a long-handled pair of tongs that gripped a still-steaming bar of metal.
Softly Gabriel cleared his damaged throat before calling out, ‘Foreman?’
The blacksmith stared hard at him for a moment, then gestured with the bar to a similar building opposite.
With a nod, Gabriel crossed to it, and knocked on the open door.
‘Yo!’ The voice was gruff and preoccupied. Ducking his head, Gabriel paused in the doorway.
‘Come in if you’re coming. I can’t see a bleddy thing with you blocking the light.’
Gabriel stepped inside. The small room contained a big table, a battered cupboard, and a scarred wooden armchair on whose seat was a crushed cushion of faded pattern and indeterminate colour. The table was strewn with half-models of ships, each mounted on a flat piece of wood a few inches larger; two broken blocks, an assortment of copper bolts, a sail-maker’s metal palm, a fid for splicing rope, and some pieces of wood. Several leather-bound ledgers were stacked untidily on the cupboard’s top.
A year ago he would have been surprised at the lack of paper, for there were no drawings or plans, but he was wiser now. The navy might use drawings, but small shipyards worked from three-dimensional half-hulls that showed the desired length, width, depth, and sheer. These were then scaled up; the lines of the model drawn out full size on the lofting floor, after which wooden templates were made of the principal timbers such as frames and stem and stern pieces.
Standing behind the table, scratching his scalp through the wiry grey frizz that surrounded his head like a halo, the foreman looked up, gave a slight start, and muttered, ‘God a’mighty.’ Planting his knuckles on the table, he stuck out a pugnacious chin. ‘Well? What do you want?’
Aware that short men found his size both intimidating and a challenge, Gabriel did not approach the cluttered table, remaining instead at the back of the small room. ‘A job.’ Wincing inwardly at the hoarse growl that was all he could manage, he saw that beneath the bushy brows the foreman’s pale-blue eyes were as sharp as a gutting knife as they swept over him from his coarse linen shirt, battered leather waistcoat, and stained breeches to his topboots. The foreman’s gaze lingered a fraction too long; as it flicked up once more, Gabriel recognised suspicion and waited for the question. To his surprise, it didn’t come, but the foreman’s voice was terse.
‘Wassamatter with your voice? Got a sore throat?’
Gabriel’s lips twitched. He gave a brief, ironic nod as he leant forward and turned down the top of the bandage just enough to reveal the edge of the horrific wound.
‘Bleddy ’ell.’ The foreman grimaced. ‘How did you get that?’
‘Prisoner,’ Gabriel rasped. ‘In France. Stole the boots when I escaped.’
‘Ah.’ The foreman nodded, ‘I was wond’ring about they. Not from round here, are you? How haven’t you gone home?’
Gabriel was ready for this. ‘Can’t. Press gang.’ The cracked sounds emerging from his throat sounded more painful than they now felt. It occurred to him then that the limitations imposed on his speech were an asset rather than a liability. For, though he was Cornish-born, he had none of the working men’s rolling burr.
The foreman’s eyes rounded. ‘They’d take you again?’
‘They’d try.’
‘Got a name?’
‘Ennis. Gabriel Ennis.’
The foreman sniffed. ‘What’s your trade?’
Mentally crossing his fingers, Gabriel rasped, ‘I’m a carpenter.’ He dare not say shipwright. For though that was the work he had been doing in the French yards, in England he would have been exempted from the press by the need for new ships and trained men to build them. ‘I worked on a big estate.’
The foreman scrabbled about in the clutter, picked up a broken block and two other pieces of wood, and tossed them, one after the other, at Gabriel, whose swift reflexes, honed by months surviving in an enemy country, enabled him to catch them easily.
It was a test. Glancing at each piece as he felt the grain and assessed the colour, Gabriel felt his tension ease. ‘The block is ash. This is oak, a split treenail.’ He pronounced it “trennal”, as the foreman would have done. ‘The broken spar is pine.’
The foreman sniffed again. ‘When can you start?’
‘N
ow.’
‘You got somewhere to stay?’
Gabriel nodded.
‘You heard what happened last night? The thieving?’
Gabriel nodded again.
‘What you got to say about it?’
Recognising the foreman’s suspicions, Gabriel held his gaze. ‘I’d guess whoever did it was starving. A man in work has no need to steal.’
‘I don’t suppose you got a farthing to your name, you just back from France and all.’ He frowned at Gabriel, who met the piercing eyes and waited, saying nothing. ‘So you give me a good day’s work, and I’ll pay you tonight instead of the end of the week. We got good shops in the village. Willy Bowden’ll see you right. He’s the grocer. Mrs Mitchell run the bakehouse since her Cyrus passed away last year. Tell them Tom Ferris sent you.’
Gabriel knuckled his forehead. ‘Much obliged.’ Those two words didn’t even begin to express his relief and gratitude. But to say more risked compromising his identity and therefore his safety.
Tom glared at him. ‘I won’t have no trouble.’
‘You’ll get none from me.’
After a long moment and another hard stare, Tom nodded abruptly. ‘C’mon then, can’t hang around here burning daylight.’ With a sniff and a jerk of his head to indicate Gabriel should follow, the foreman set off across the yard to a long wooden shed with double doors at each end currently hooked back to admit maximum light.
Bent over trestles and wooden cradles, two shipwrights assisted by two young apprentices were shaping spars amid a thick carpet of golden sawdust and pale shavings. As he inhaled the sweet, resinous scent of pine, Gabriel recalled the Swiss forests, and fought a rush of memories both pleasant and painful.
Maintaining his slightly stooped, self-effacing posture, he quickly scanned the big shed. Each man’s tool bag sat on the heavy bench that ran the length of one wall. Other tools – saws, adzes, and chisels – were slotted in a wooden rack above the bench. On the opposite side of the airy shed were stacked different types, shapes, and sizes of wood. The stacks were lower than Gabriel expected. Much would have gone into the hull shored up on the slipway. Presumably there was another store from which they drew seasoned wood.
‘Here, you two, I got another carpenter. Name of –’ He turned to Gabriel. ‘Got a head like a sieve, I have. What did you say you was called again?’
Another test? ‘Ennis. Gabriel Ennis.’
At the hoarse rasp the two men exchanged a glance before eyeing him uncertainly.
Tom addressed them in a confiding tone. ‘In prison in France, he was. They near enough cut his throat, poor bugger, that’s how he can’t speak proper.’ He turned to Gabriel. ‘Show ’em what they done to you.’
Reluctant, but aware it would aid his acceptance, which was no doubt what the shrewd foreman intended, Gabriel leant forward and pulled down the edge of the bandage, swiftly replacing it as both men grimaced and studied him with new respect.
Tom continued, ‘He got back here, but he can’t go home ’cos the press gang will have him again.’ He turned to Gabriel. ‘This here’s Walter Keverne, he’ll tell you what to do. This is Tansey, and his boy, Billy. And that there beanpole is Joseph. All right?’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Walter said. ‘What about the wood, then? You seen mister?’
‘No. But Miss Melissa come down this morning. I told she ’tis urgent.’
‘So long as she remember to tell her father.’
‘She will.’
Melissa. Gabriel cleared his throat. ‘Any logs not cut?’
Walter nodded, sucking his teeth. ‘A few. Stacked out the back they are. But since Charlie near hacked his leg off, there haven’t been no one to go down the pit. Billy’s willing, but he can’t do it by his self. And with the packet to finish, none of we got time.’
Knowing it was an unpopular task, and hoping the welts on his back would stand the stretching, Gabriel shrugged. ‘I’ll do it.’
Tansey grinned, showing a mouthful of blackened teeth. ‘Now I call that handsome. Come just the right time you have.’
‘You want it quarter sawn?’ Gabriel asked.
Exchanging a slow grin of relief, Tom and Walter both nodded.
‘I’ll need help,’ Gabriel reminded.
‘I’ll go,’ Billy volunteered. Stocky like his father, he had muscular arms and powerful shoulders. ‘All right, father?’
Tansey shrugged. ‘All right with you, Walter?’
‘Get on, the both of you. What are you waiting for? God knows we do need it.’
Surprised, Gabriel indicated the reduced stacks of wood. ‘That’s all?’
Walter and Tansey nodded, Walter adding, ‘Never seen ’un in this state, not in all the years I been here.’
‘The wood, or mister?’ Tansey muttered darkly.
‘All right, all right,’ Tom broke in. ‘I don’t want to hear no more of that. What if it had been your Billy?’ He turned to Gabriel. ‘Mister’s eldest boy got hisself killed last year. A lieutenant in the navy, he was.’
‘Mister?’ Gabriel repeated.
‘Mr Tregonning. Own the yard, he do. Got another boy out by Jamaica or some such place.’
‘No word from he for months neither,’ Walter added, shaking his head.
‘I know what I think,’ Tansey muttered darkly.
‘Yes, well, you keep it to yourself,’ Tom snapped. ‘Family got enough trouble. They don’t want you making it worse.’
‘’Tisn’t only they who’ll have trouble if we don’t get more wood,’ Tansey grumbled.
Wondering if Mr Tregonning was the owner of the woodland above the yard, Gabriel kept silent.
‘You said your piece, now shut your yap,’ Tom snapped. ‘C’mon, move yourselves. Time’s wasting.’
Gabriel followed Billy, hoping the youth wouldn’t ply him with questions. In fact, he hardly spoke at all. But he worked. By late morning they had hauled a two foot thick and eight foot long log from the pile, stripped off the bark with small axes, marked the main divisions, and made the first cut.
When the others stopped for their dinner, Gabriel sent Billy to join them, saying he wasn’t hungry and would wedge the log ready for the second cut. But within ten minutes Billy was back, a stone jar dangling from one large fist. His young face fiery, he thrust a thick wedge of meat and potato pie at Gabriel.
‘Walter sent it. Said his missus always give him too much. Fat as a pup he’d be if he ate it all hisself.’
Wiping his hands on the sweat-soaked and sawdust-sprinkled shirt he preferred to retain rather than excite curiosity by exposing the welts that striped his back, Gabriel took the pie, touched by the boy’s thoughtfulness and tact. ‘Much obliged.’
Billy gazed into the distance while Gabriel ate, then thrust the jar toward him. ‘Here, ’tis good ale. Falmouth brewed.’
Raising the jar to his lips, Gabriel drank deeply. The bitter beer, cool and delicious, quenched his thirst and gave him new strength. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he returned the jar. ‘Know anyone who might lend me a boat?’ Watching Billy’s face reflect tumbling thoughts, he added, ‘For fishing, Billy. Nothing more.’
Blushing, Billy shrugged. ‘I never thought you was one o’ the gentlemen.’
‘Too risky. I’ll pay for the loan with half my catch.’
Billy thought. ‘Jack got a boat. But he don’t go out much now. Want me to ask him, do you?’
‘Thanks.’ Gabriel started back toward the saw pit.
It was mid-afternoon when, for the second time in two days, Melissa walked with the doctor to his horse. She waited until they were out of earshot of the house to ask the question, dreading his answer.
‘How … How ill is my father?’
Dr Wherry stopped, raising his eyes to hers. His expression was sombre, his gaze compassionate. ‘I think your brother should come home as soon as possible.’
Catching her lip, she nodded, not trusting herself to speak, understanding all his response implied. G
eorge was in the navy, and there was a war on. But George was also her father’s heir and would be the new head of the family, responsible for her mother and herself. It was clear the doctor did not expect her father to recover. She forced the words past the lump in her throat.
‘How long …?’
The doctor moved his shoulders. ‘It’s difficult to say. His strong constitution, active lifestyle, and moderate habits must count in his favour. But I’m afraid the toll of the last 12 months …’ He shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry, my dear.’
Melissa returned to the house to find Sarah waiting for her.
‘Please, miss. These was left on the dining room table.’
‘Thank you.’ Taking the folded letters, Melissa started toward her father’s study.
‘Beggin’ your pardon, miss, but if you don’t mind me asking, we was all wondering, how’s master going on?’
Melissa swallowed the aching tightness in her throat. ‘Not good, Sarah.’
The maid’s eyes brimmed. ‘I’m some sorry, miss.’
‘Thank you. Could you bring me some tea? I’ll be in the study.’
Sitting in her father’s high-backed leather chair, she gazed out of the window. The sun shone from an azure sky dotted with puffs of cloud. Swifts dipped and swooped after insects. The garden was fragrant with roses and in the farm meadows the last of the clover would have been cut. Soon it would be the turn of the grass. Tall and lush, it would make good hay. The breeze made it ripple like water. Down in the yard, the new packet-ship was well on its way to completion. Once the masts had been stepped, the internal fitting could begin. Nothing had changed yet everything was different. And the suppliers had not been paid.
She had not yet told her mother of her father’s collapse. The fever had reached its height at midday and in her delirium Emma had cried out for both her sons. Then, without warning, a drenching sweat had beaded her face and trickled down her temples and neck, soaking her hair, the pillow, her nightgown, and the sheets. Greatly relieved, Melissa and Addey had moved her to the couch. And while Addey bathed her mistress, crooning softly as if Emma Tregonning were still the child she had once nursed, Melissa aided Sarah in stripping and changing the bed. Her mother was sleeping peacefully now, aided by one of Dr Wherry’s draughts. She would need all her strength to bear this latest blow. All the more reason for delaying as long as possible.