He would not be the first ship’s captain who couldn’t swim.
“Where do you want him?” he asked Beth, as calmly as if they were finding space to stow a sea chest. “He’s French. I don’t expect Philip will find him good company.”
“I want him gane,” she said. “But if that’s nae an option, then…the library. Ye hae a few books in French, and Latin and Greek. Surely there’s something tae entertain him.”
“Can you do that thing?” he asked. “Something so he stays there?”
That thing.
Tonight was the Harvest Moon, and there was the extra protection spell to put blinders on the wild strawberries and now she had to cordon another ghost in the house. A ghost who’d attached himself to the Captain, who’d had to prove to himself that he still had the Midas touch.
There was more to it, she knew, but it would all have to wait. She needed help getting the Frenchman in the library; not knowing French, she required the Captain’s translations and his presence, since the ghost was now attached to him.
The Captain went in and the shade behind him, and Beth sealed the ghost of Édouard Dubois in the library. She had the Captain step out of the room, and when Édouard could not follow, she pulled an atlas and a few more books that a dead French sea captain might like and opened them. He was already turning pages when they went to the music room to explain the situation to Philip.
“So ye dinnae hae tae repeat yerself,” she said, “tell me, where Philip can hear, how it’s come tae this?”
Ian rubbed his jaw, furred with nearly two weeks’ growth of beard. “If you don’t like it, I’ll shave.”
Beth rolled her eyes. “Nae that,” she said crisply. “The ghost. And the money.”
“Ah. Well.” He cleared his throat and got serious. “I found a way around yer gris. Ian O’Manion couldn’t gamble, so I went back one more incarnation to Jean Delacorte. Now, before ye say aught else, I didn’t get greedy. I asked God for one big night, enough to tide us over, and I swore I’d leave it there. Then I went back to me old haunts and took up where I’d left off.”
He still couldn’t believe how easy it had been, as if the nightmare of his arrest on Tortola and a botched prison break had never happened.
“The first go-round showed me I was on the right track. The purse was small, but it came back to the ship with me.”
When the waxing moon had risen in the star-swept sky, he’d realized that no amount of money could buy a cure for the emptiness he felt, yearning for his Red Beth, missing her and Sophie and their unborn pagan-papist baby. He had wondered if he shouldn’t have brought the fiddle, at least, and had gone below deck, thinking that a shot of whiskey might dull the ache. But when he returned to the captain’s cabin he was using, he saw that he wasn’t alone.
“When I came back in, Édouard was dripping in the corner. I hadn’t seen him since I won his ship. I never heard what happened to him.”
When Ian had taken the Deirdre on the turn of a card, the ship was a stake, just another one of many he’d collected during an extended streak of good fortune that ended dramatically on Tortola. For the man who’d lost her, though, the Deirdre had been everything. With no future that he could see, and nothing left to live for, Édouard Dubois had ended his life but not his existence.
And now he’d attached himself to Ian.
“He looked like he’d drowned. I didn’t know the circumstances. He’s a quiet one, the Frenchie. But the next night, the card table has a different crowd, and one of the toffs had seen the Deirdre and starts talking about Édouard and how one night he’d thrown himself off his brother’s boat that’s out in the harbor.”
Beth looked beyond the wall, and pressed work-stained fingers to her lips. “No guid will come of this,” she whispered, shaking her head. “He shouldnae be here. There’s a darkness tha’ follows in his wake. I warned ye before ye left. Now we’ve got tae find a way tae clear him, tae help him move on, before it gets here. I just pray it’s nae too late.”
That she felt it, still, was disturbing. Beth was so seldom wrong.
“I’m sorry, Red.” Ian glanced at Philip, who seemed more interested in the fiddle that Christiana had found in the attic and insisted on having repaired. “I was in a pinch and we’re on the clock, so to speak. I want to make it legal while it still looks like you have a choice. My lawyer sees no problem, now that I’ve the funds. One big win,” he said. “I stopped, like I promised. I only wanted enough to clear my name and save The Oaks and let us be a family. Is that so wrong?”
No. She couldn’t say that it was. He wanted their future to start sooner rather than later, and he’d resorted to what he knew to make it happen.
Stubborn man. Beautiful, haunted, stubborn man.
She kissed his cheek, and pressed her face into his beard, surprised to find it so soft. It didn’t prick, like stubble at day’s end, and she wondered how it would feel when he loved her like a Frenchman.
The Captain pulled her onto her toes and kissed her like the starving man he was. “I want to take you upstairs but I can’t,” he whispered hoarsely, his word laced with frustration and regret. “I need to see what I’ve missed. It looked like Israel was taking a wagon of ears to the crib.”
“They started picking last week. We’ve a load of apples going out, and most of the garden’s cleared now. Ye’ll need tae see Dylan Marshall. Sean’s been giving them fits. Patrick’s above the tack room, and Sean is in the barn. And,” she said, “Zephyr cannae wait tae win.”
The Captain smiled. “Good. The money will tide us for present, but I’m counting on the stallion to make our future. I promised God I’d be a gentleman farmer. I’ll make you a farmer’s wife yet.”
Before leaving to tour his property and get brought up to date, he gave Beth the bag of the winnings he’d withheld from his bank deposit and asked if she’d hide half of it in her cache at the cottage.
Beth did as he asked. She put part in a hat box that she left on their bed and took the rest in a gathering basket to the orchard cottage, where she hid it under the floor boards. While she was at it, she put the poppet with her bundle of ritual tools that she would come back for later tonight.
Replacing the rug, she went to the hives and spoke with the bees. She informed them of the Captain’s return and told them that Édouard’s ghost was in the library. Then she went into the woods to find Herne.
The oak trees were already twittering. News traveled as fast as the wind. There was an air of anticipation, of expectancy. All of nature was feeling the fullness of the moon, but the energy was strangely erratic, rather than smooth, and increasingly uncomfortable. The restiveness might be an echo of all of the harvest activity in the gardens and orchard and fields. Or it might be a reaction to whatever followed the Deirdre.
She found Herne in his favorite haunt, a beautiful spring-fed glen. It was losing its charm as the trees prepared for the approach of the autumnal equinox; the leaves were already fading. It had been dry, which pleased the Protestant farmers to no end, as it had allowed them to get a good start on the harvest, but if Israel and George continued to pray away the rain, the leaves would fall before turning. Instead of a carpet of brilliant autumn colors, the forest floor would be covered in dull shades of yellow and green and brown.
Herne stayed hidden, of course, sensitive to her frail human nature. One of the first things she planned to do when she died was see what Herne looked like. The nature spirit, hearing her thoughts, seemed at once flattered and disturbed, so she changed the subject and told him what she came here to say. She spoke of the Captain’s return and the arrival of the Frenchman’s ghost and the sense of evil somehow attached to the Deirdre. When she did her full moon ritual tonight, she would weave spells for extra protection, but not knowing the nature of the threat, she wasn’t sure if it would be enough.
She asked for Herne to help her.
And she asked him to let the Captain come back into her circle.
“Nae taenight,” s
he told him. There was too much work to do, with the wild strawberry twins and the dripping French ghost and the threat she still felt somewhere beyond the horizon. But Mabon was only three more days, the day of the race, and she wanted to celebrate the bounty of the harvest with the father of her child. “For the equinox.”
Herne remained silent, saying nothing, thinking nothing—nothing that he would let her hear, anyway.
“Please?” She wished he would be reasonable. She wished that he would see her side of things.
“Please?” she asked again. The Captain and she were mated, with a baby on the way. Surely that counted for something.
Beth heard the stamp of a hoof and the kick of leaves; a gust of wind rattled sharp in the oaks.
No.
She wondered if he saw something that she did not, but she knew it would do no good to ask. Whether forest spirit or nature elemental or ancient archetype, Herne was as stubborn as the Captain.
Ian didn’t know what to expect when he came home. He’d been worried about bringing back the boxing bag that he had Jason hang in the barn. He knew that Beth wouldn’t be too thrilled with the Frenchie, but he’d hoped that his winnings would make up for it, just a bit. Bartholomew Atwood II, Esquire, had nearly cummed himself when he’d dropped a full purse on the attorney’s desk and told him, if he’d expedite the name clearing, Barry would see another one that size.
The mess at the stables was as bad as Beth intimated. Surly Sean was acting like a petulant man-child, and no one could stand to be near him. Sean needed a knot jerked in his tail, and Ian decided that the duty fell to him.
He had Sean meet him in the barn. By the time the lad got there, Ian had stripped everything above the waist and had wrapped his knuckles and was pummeling Herne in effigy. It was something he needed, and something Sean needed to see, and as he worked out his frustrations on the boxing bag, he told Sean a story, the story of his life.
When he was young, Ian wanted to be a pugilist. It was his dream, his passion. Everyone said he had the gift. But he was an only son, and he was expected to apprentice with his father and take over the family business. The only reason his father let him learn was the practical application of learning to dodge and sharpening reflexes. When his father found his younger brother, Ian’s uncle, dead on a stall floor from a horse kick, he’d buckled and let Ian train, hoping it would help him avoid a hoof’s killing blow to the chest or the head.
Much as he liked horses, he couldn’t see himself being a farrier for the rest of his life, so he packed a bag, grabbed his fiddle. and jumped on a ship. He made it as far as France, where he met a girl whom he wanted to marry—and likely would have if they’d stayed in Brittany. But he missed Ireland. He wanted to make a home with her there. He had taken his milk maid over the channel, with every expectation of creating a future together, until a British press gang had ended that dream.
Sean had never seen his stripes of service. He’d never seen where he’d been shot, or the dozen other scars from wounds that could have killed him.
He’d never seen him box.
Ian beat the hell out of Herne and talked about how a man can’t always control what happens to him. He can only control what he does about it.
He knew Sean wanted to be a jockey. It wasn’t his fault he’d outgrown his dream, but it wasn’t Patrick’s fault, either. Patrick had the size and the talent, the heart and the mind and the drive to succeed. Ian planned to nurture that in the boy—the same as he would have done for Sean, if the situation were different. He hoped that Sean would think on what he said. Things were going to change. They must all pull together. And if Sean didn’t do his part, then Ian would have to do something about it.
Sean knew what he meant.
Ian could have left it there, but he knew how important it was to have hopes and dreams. He remarked on Sean’s strength, but he knew that winning fights required discipline and strategy, keeping the fire in your heart and a cool head. If Sean wanted to train, he’d train him. If he could learn the sport and the discipline that went with it, if he did as well as Ian knew he could, they might be able to enter some contests and win some extra coin.
Ian wrapped Sean’s knuckles and showed him some basics and left him to pummel Herne in effigy.
He went in the front door of the house he’d won on the turn of a card and nodded to Édouard, thumbing atlas pages in the library, and to Philip, listening to the fiddle in the music room, then he went upstairs and found a hatbox of money on his bed. While he waited on Beth to come back, he bathed away the stench of boxing in a barn and washed his hair but he did not shave, because he remembered how she’d felt his beard and wanted her to see what she’d been missing.
Beth preferred to go to her circles fasting, but now that she was with child, she ate a light supper with the Captain. In her head and her heart, she was already working, and when his mind would have pulled hers in another direction, she had to tell him no.
She couldn’t explain it. She wanted him to trust that she knew what she was about. Tonight when she went into the woods, she needed to be focused. She must see that everything was done right, and sealed tight, and then, then she would come home and let him take her to bed.
Ian visited the library and pulled a few more books for Édouard, then went to the music room and picked up the fiddle. After tuning the strings and rosining the bow, he played the songs that had given him solace when his youthful dreams were shattered and he wondered what there was left to live for.
He was still playing when Beth came in from drawing down the moon. Marveling at the starlight in her hair, he followed it up the stairs and watched as she undressed. When he saw that she was fine, that Herne had not hurt her and their pagan-papist baby was still nestled snug in her womb, he shed his clothes until they were both naked as druids, and he laid her on the altar of his conscience, and he loved her like the Irishman he was, even when he kissed her like a Frenchman.
Chapter Eighteen
The Captain had missed her, that much was clear.
He made love to her three times and said if she liked the beard, he’d wear it again this winter. She promised him that she would certainly think about it.
Later, she smiled, remembering how it felt.
He shaved it come morning, when the rooster had long crowed, while Philip sang downstairs and Édouard considered maps and she lay wondering if the wild strawberries had been tamed. After breakfast, she collected Harmon and Harmony and took them to the orchard. Their mean mother spied on Beth as the twins scavenged apples to put in their little baskets and chased butterflies amidst the knobbly piles and made dandelion wishes when they thought no one was looking, acting like any other five-year-olds in the world.
Lucy’s wild strawberries had been tamed. They were normal.
It was the most bittersweet, and saddest, thing that Beth had ever seen.
That night, the Captain took her upstairs and showed her again how much he missed her. After, as he held her to his heart, the Captain felt her sorrow. She didn’t mean to spoil the moment; only one other time in her life had a man felt her emotions so easily and so keenly. But the Captain had handled Sean with such wisdom, she didn’t hesitate to tell him what had happened with Lucy and the twins, and how the previous night she’d worked a protection spell to blind them to the fairies. When he heard the why of it, how they’d been so punished, he grew quiet, his clean-shaven jaw clenching and his beautiful green glass eyes darkening with storm clouds. Lucy Knowles might be a fine cook and make good-as-sex cherry pie but she’d best watch how she treated her children or she’d have the Captain to deal with.
He petted the top of her curls and squeezed her shoulder. “Anything else?”
Beth smiled and kissed the brown pebbled nipple closest to her before covering it with her palm.
“Sean was the main thing I couldnae handle. And what I worked for the twins should serve.” She tilted her head and bit her bottom lip and let her mind’s eye sweep the entire plantation,
from Herne’s glen, to the oak grove where she cast circles, to the stables and fields and pastures and pens, holding sheep that gave wool and goats that grazed the grass and the milch cows that yielded butter and cream and the fattened hogs that in two more months would be hanging in the smokehouse. She skimmed servants’ row before coming back to bed.
“Now that ye hae some coin,” she said, drawing patterns in his chest hair, “ye might consider adding some privies around aboot. I dinnae think those here were built tae accommodate the numbers ye hae using them.”
Ian laughed. “Damned if I hadn’t the same thought when the Deirdre’s crew came ashore.”
His shallow-draft schooner was gone again, but she’d be back, and fairly often, having contracted some local work around the bay. The Chesapeake was a vast system, and colonists further inland needed goods and services too, the same as the people and politicians and merchants in Maryland and Delaware and Virginia. Thanks to the connections of Bartholomew Atwood II, Esquire, Ian had gone from being just another gentleman farmer to one with his own transport service. His first customer was the man who’d taken most of his coins at the card table, but when it came time to hire a ship, he remembered that Ian had lost with grace and aplomb and good humor. Barry had set about getting the bonds and insurance and what else he’d need to cover losses from acts of God and man.
With pirates and privateers roaming the waters full up and down the American coastline, having seen what could happen, fast as lightning, to a ship once seized, Ian had done what he could to protect himself. More than one person had been hauled into court for losses in a pirate raid, people seeking restitution for stolen or damaged goods or servants or shipments of coin. He was in good shape right now and he intended to keep it that way.
“Privies.” He pushed her wild red curls back from her pretty face and traced the curve of her ear with his middle finger. “Anything else?”
Ride the Wind: Touch the Wind Book Two Page 15