A Different Sort of Perfect

by Vivian Roycroft

  Leaving her behind, mortified.

  Numbness crept up her hands to her wrists, up her neck to her cheeks. She couldn't look away from the pinrail, where the heavy belaying pins creaked beneath the rigging's lines. Was that what it looked like? As if she'd married Captain Fleming and sailed as his wife? The certainty grew in her like some morbid worm. Of course that was what it looked like. She'd hardly be the gunner's daughter, would she?

  Captain Fleming shook his head and turned. But his pleased smile faded as he stared at her. "Lamble's rather like Staunton in some ways. It's more than likely he said that merely to stick a needle in your side."

  "He succeeded." Topaze was picking up speed again with the interloper tearing ahead, but the beautiful day seemed ruined. The massive line of clouds loomed behind as if chasing them across the South Atlantic, and Topaze's brilliant tropical sails flashed blinding white against their grey and darkening wall. Clara gathered her crochet kit and went below.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It took hours for her heated cheeks to clear and the numbness to dissipate. Why hadn't she realized the situation's appearance before? This magical cruise, with her and the Topaze, the captain and crew, all seemingly lost between sea and sky — it couldn't go on forever. Someday they'd enter a bay or harbor, slip into a port and drop anchor, and then everyone ashore would be watching the ship.

  And see her.

  Clearly, oh so clearly not with a chaperone.

  It had all seemed so simple, so very straightforward, back in Plymouth: let the furniture movers carry her aboard a ship, and then convince the captain to assist her in finding Phillippe. But now she knew so much more about ships, the navy, the nautical life, and her frantic daydreams, her silly musings, took on all the unreal color they deserved. Captain Fleming had been gracious and more than patient with her.

  But sooner or later, he'd have to put her ashore. And return to the job he'd been assigned: stopping that French frigate before it attacked the East Indiamen, including her father's ships, soon to be her own.

  And she'd have to find her way back to Plymouth as best she could.

  Without Phillippe.

  Without any husband at all.

  Leaving her with Viscount Maynard.

  Who seemed worse than ever after—

  The face that leapt to her mind wasn't Phillippe's, with his commanding eyes and modern, curly auburn hair. Actually, it had been over a year since she'd seen him. No longer could she even be certain that image, the one she forced to form in her thoughts, was an accurate representation of him.

  The man she yearned to marry had faded like washing in her memory.

  And the hole that knowledge ripped in her heart was even worse than the thought of the viscount.

  No, the face that automatically formed within her mind's eye was patrician, with a strong chin and chiseled nose, pale blue eyes with winged brows, smile lines digging grooves about his mouth, and golden curls growing from their short crop and now spilling over his frilled shirt's collar.

  She'd spent so much time with Captain Fleming, being his clerk, joining him at table, conversing and laughing with him, that she'd almost come to think of him as a sort of surrogate husband, just as the world must be looking at her as his surrogate wife.

  And that was the most humiliating blow of all.

  * * * *

  Hennessy brought her a sandwich for lunch.

  "Beg pardon, my lady, but it's looking like a hard blow and we're tying everything down. Captain's called for all hands and the cook." He nodded at the plate before her. "Sorry, but that's the best I can do for a meal, at least until dinner."

  A prickle of unease feathered through the remains of her numbness. "Really bad, you think?"

  "Mortal bad, it looks." He backed from the room. "You won't be in the way on the poop deck, if'n you wanted to watch." Hennessy closed the door before she could thank him.

  On deck after lunch, and the dark line chasing them had thickened, darkened, spread into a massive wall across the northwestern sky, bearing down on them much as the Flirt had done, and at a similar speed. Dark grey with roiling white edges, shot through with whorls of graveyard green, its walls seemed solid and impenetrable as those of a castle. In the afternoon the first jagged fork of lightning leapt across the storm's wall. The hair on her arms stood upright and quivered.

  She leaned onto the quarterdeck railing. "I don't suppose we can run away from that?" she called to Staunton.

  He glanced up from overseeing the sailors frapping down the cutters and spars on the davits. His eyes were fixed, intense. Worried. A small shake of his head. "Good and tight, Brearley. Don't want the boats shaking loose."

  The upper yardmen dismantled the t'gallant masts, lowered them to the deck with an assembly of ropes, and Chandler swung through the diminishing rigging like one of the more remarkable great apes, directing their efforts. Mr. Abbot bellowed orders from the gangway as the most skilled hands arranged rolling tackles between yards and mast, and Lieutenant Rosslyn checked the gunners as they double-bowsed the cannons against the ship's sides, manila cordage creaking with each roll. On the foremast, Captain Fleming and David Mayne worked a crew stripping off the tropical-weight sails and bending on a new suit of storm canvas, thick heavy stuff that blazed white in the stark sunlight. Staunton helped arrange tarpaulins and battens as coverings over the hatchways and sent hands aloft with puddening for the yards.

  All day they worked, on and on. As the afternoon progressed into evening, their hands picked up speed, careful still, but hauling and tying more quickly, more firmly. No one seemed to glance toward the storm as it loomed nearer; no one except she, of course, and the numbness again crept into her hands, up her neck to her face. If only she could help more. But her only useful contribution lay in keeping out of the way while the crew worked, and not another question would she ask.

  She'd read in Staunton's journal of the ferocious storms in the Bay of Biscay, thousands of miles to the north, around Africa's western hump and beyond Spain's peninsula — storms that could rip the mast off a ship, split a sail, smash a lightning bolt into anything metal, lay them on their beam end and swamp them beneath a spilling wave so the ship never righted herself. Ships went down with all hands in such storms.

  If the storms in the South Atlantic rivaled those, she might not need a husband, after all.

  * * * *

  Captain Fleming seemed to go out of his way to keep their dinner conversation light and distant, and perhaps that was for the best; banalities were more appropriate table talk than terror, certainly. But as he folded his napkin — she'd long ago set hers aside — Clara couldn't stop herself from asking,

  "In your experience, is this storm very much worse than others? Is there compelling reason for such caution?" Her voice wavered on the word storm. Embarrassing, but she wouldn't let herself look away.

  His eyes flickered, a concrete, unhappy knowledge undermining his forced smile. He'd hidden his worry from her, and with some success. Doubtless the more experienced officers and crew knew enough to be worried without any cue from the captain. But this frank, unspoken acknowledgement of their danger hollowed out her insides and left her undigested spotted dick floating in the most nauseating manner where her stomach used to be.

  "It is large," he admitted, "and powerful. The glass has been falling all day and while I have seen it lower, I can't say I've ever seen it much lower." His mouth firmed. "But during our last cruise, Topaze weathered a true hurricane, and the year before that we chased a French frigate into the Roaring Forties, where the waves broke higher than our mainmast. It's possible this storm will be worse than those experiences." One side of his mouth hiked up, his cheek's groove deepening, and his eyes laughed at her. "But it's not likely."

  Astonishing, how her insides resumed their usual positions and duties without effort, bringing her dessert to heel and soothing her qualms, all at his wry, lopsided smile. Clara smiled back. She'd always appreciated him as a master sailor,
of course, but when precisely had she developed such reliance upon his abilities?

  Captain Fleming threw down his napkin. "However, clearly this is our last night of peace for a few days—"

  "A few days?" She could not have heard him correctly.

  "Aye, yes, it's huge for all that and will take a while to sweep past us or wear itself out. So why don't we take our coffee up on deck?" He rose and held her chair for her. "Often before a storm, the crew arrange some entertainments. You won't want to miss that."

  "Entertainments?" Difficult enough imagining men sewing their own clothes and cleaning their own spaces, despite all the evidence she'd seen to the contrary. And sometimes it was difficult to tell when Captain Fleming was making game of her.

  He gave her his arm. "I promise you, dancers fit for Sadler's Wells."

  Hennessy's cantankerous mate stood at the aft ladder's top, holding a silver tray with four china cups of steaming coffee. He made such a ridiculous figure, the rough-hewn sailor standing in as footman; but she smiled at him as she took the first cup and his sickly grimace could be interpreted as a smile in return, by the optimistic, at least.

  "Good evening, Mr. Rosslyn," she said as the lieutenant accepted a cup. "Good evening, Mr. Chandler."

  "Good evening, Lady Clara, and good evening, captain." Lieutenant Rosslyn's smile was much more sincere.

  Chandler swallowed, balancing his cup and saucer carefully with gleaming knuckles. "Good evening, Lady Clara."

  A greeting rough but audible and clear: that surely counted as progress. She flashed him her best smile.

  The storm had taken a massive bite from the sun, leaving a dark, unreal hole behind, and the sunset, in weird clouded colors of grey and orange, spread only to the south. In the north, the clouds were closer, amazingly closer, and where the deck should have been splashed with the sun's final warm rays, gloom deepened in their place. Her breath caught in her chest; that solid castle wall sliced through the day like some horrible omen.

  Behind her, what sounded astonishingly like a guitar strummed.

  A guitar? She raised her eyebrows at Captain Fleming. Without looking at her, his lips curled into a secret smile, and he glanced at the fo'c'sle.

  Leaning against the foremast sat an otherwise useless waister, cradling a Spanish guitar and ruffling his way down the strings. A gunner and then a fo'c'sleman lifted German flutes, joining the waister's tune, and behind them David Mayne scraped a bow across a fiddle. The crew surrounded them in comfortable clusters. Wake smacked his palms together, clapped again, and then they all joined in as Ackers, the captain's coxswain, folded his arms and began to dance.

  His shoulders never moved, his arms bent in front of his chest, but his lithe feet stamped and flew. Two others joined him and the simple country dance segued into an impromptu hornpipe competition, the wonderful music spinning them around each other in the little clearing of crouched bodies, bare feet slapping the deck as the sun sank exhausted below the sea. Someone lit lanterns and in the overlapping lights the game continued, knees lifting, hands waving, toes flexing and pointing and tucking, none of them willing to be the first to collapse.

  Clara's feet twitched with yearning as faster and faster they whirled, the flutes improvising above the guitar and Mayne's cheerful fiddle. Finally the foretopman's feet began to drag and his mates hauled him protesting from the circle. But Ackers and the gunner danced on until finally the musicians drew out one long, final note, as if by some unseen mutual signal, and lowered their instruments together. The gunner staggered.

  "Aye, that's settled it," said a voice from the lower-deck crowd.

  "Aye," said Wake. "Ackers took it there." And he pounded his palms together. Ackers stood straight, feet tucked primly into third, as the applause rolled for'ard and aft.

  She joined in. With such a round of dancing, he'd earned the recognition. No matter that she didn't get to dance, as well.

  Oh, she should quit being silly. Who on earth — or, more appropriately, who aboard the ship would she dance with? Chandler? Staunton?

  She wouldn't even think of another name. She wouldn't think it and it wouldn't happen.

  Another lantern flared to life, and as the fo'c'sle brightened, a voice began to sing:

  "There was a gay young farmer,

  Who lived on Salisbury's plain;

  He loved a rich knight's daughter dear

  And she loved him again.

  The knight he was distresséd,

  That they should sweethearts be,

  So he had the farmer presséd,

  And sent him off to sea."

  Wake? Indeed that was Wake's voice, no longer as scratchy and gnarled as the old fo'c'sleman, but filling out the words of this unknown ballad with a rich true tenor. And as he dropped the note for the dying fall, a flock of voices rose around him, joining in the refrain:

  "Singing Rule Britannia,"

  Clara laughed, ducking her mouth down and behind her hand; she wouldn't have Wake thinking she laughed at him when it was the song's impossible combination of lovelorn farmer and patriotic anthem that she found humorous. Captain Fleming's lips curled but he joined in the song with Rosslyn and Chandler:

  "Britannia rules the waves

  Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!"

  The other voices died away and Wake's again rose, singing the second verse alone:

  "'Twas on the deep Atlantic,

  Midst Equinoctial gales,

  This young farmer fell overboard

  Among the sharks and whales;

  He disappeared so quickly,

  So headlong down went he,

  He went out of sight like a streak of light

  To the bottom of the deep blue sea."

  Time for the refrain, and Clara hauled in a breath to join the song. But longing squeezed her heart, closed her throat, and homesick tears threatened. She'd left England without a backward glance, without leaving so much as a note for Uncle David and Aunt Helen to find.

  As if she'd abandoned them, when she owed them so much.

  And with that storm bearing down on Topaze, she might never see them again.

  The men's voices rose around her. She swallowed the tears, the emotion, forced her throat to clear, and belted out the song with her floating village:

  "Singing Rule Britannia,

  Britannia rules the waves

  Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!"

  A few of the hands swung toward her, jaws slacking in surprise, and one of the sea lawyers scowled. But many other sailors smiled as they sang, faces glowing beneath the wavering lanterns. Most of them, in fact. And Wake leaned over, muttered something to the musicians, something that caused Mayne to flash a huge grin. The waister nodded, once, twice, three times, and they broke together into "Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself."

  It was impossible to resist that call. She could stand still no longer; she must dance, if she wanted to live; and before she took the first step, Captain Fleming slipped his hand into hers and swung her onto the poop deck.

  So much for not thinking of that name.

  It would be lovely if there were other couples to join them. But the music bounded across the deck and there was no time for wishes. They would call this country dance between themselves alone. She advanced then retired before him, ducked beneath his upraised arm, twirled, repeated — returning them to their home places, the fiddle's surprising grace notes and the cheerful trills from the flutes sweeping them along.

  He reached across, took her hand, and they circled hands across without needing to signal the change, reversed, repeated. Her heart pounded in rhythm as the sailors clapped and stamped, the railing, mizzenmast, starboard railing, and looming black cloud wall flying past in a dizzying whirl, the deck sloping and swooshing as they capered. It felt as if they'd danced together all their lives, knew each other's favorite patterns — even figures-of-eight and "Mad Robin" around other, invisible couples, never missing a step even when Topaze jerked benea
th them in the most ungainly manner.

  It was the ship's wonderful movement creating the perfect ballroom, of course. She'd known how fabulous dancing aboard would be, from her first step onto Topaze's deck all those weeks ago, and of course it helped that Captain Fleming showed the same comfort with the ship's rolling, that he didn't stumble nor lose his balance nor hang onto his partner nor grab the rigging for support. At some point he'd lost his scraper and his golden curls flew around his shoulders. His eyes never left her, bold, challenging, and his smile flashed in the lantern light.

  Mayne's fiddle rose on the penultimate note, then the musicians drew out the last. Disappointment sank into her with the curtsey. She could dance all night. Really.

  Lieutenant Rosslyn murmured something, his voice appreciative, but his words were drowned by the crew's wholehearted applause and cheers, rolling aft from the fo'c'sle. Captain Fleming rose from his bow, still staring at her across their imaginary line, his smile dying. In the stern lanterns' light his flushed cheeks glowed and his eyes seemed without color, hard and hot as they flashed back the flames.

  The crew's roar surrounded them, enveloped them, and yet it was something apart from them, as if on another ship entirely. It seemed that only the two of them, she and Captain Fleming, inhabited Topaze, and as the applause died away and the frigate's sounds resumed — the rushing of the water, creaking timbers, the rising wind harping through the rigging — the fog of aloneness deepened, until all she could see were the little flames reflected in his pale eyes.

  She should have realized before that such a flame burned beneath his cool and elegant façade. All those hours they'd spent together over the table, over conversation, over books, and she'd never sensed those hidden depths. A polished captain, an athlete in the rigging, a gentleman on deck, a fine dancer, and now a man of passion and contained fire — such a complicated man on so many levels. Would she ever truly understand all of his facets? Perhaps Phillippe, so otherwise perfect, was shallow in comparison; but how would she know?