by Fiona Monroe
"It is not nothing!" Elspeth screamed. "And whose business is it if not mine, brother? I'm the one who would have been married to him, except that it would have been no true marriage—oh God, I would have been nothing but his mistress!"
"You are hardly in a position to be overly fastidious on that score, Elspeth," said James coldly.
"You are despicable!" Elspeth screwed the letter into a ball and flung it full into James face.
It hit him squarely but ineffectually on the forehead, and fell into the empty soup bowl.
"That is what you have married, Lady Atholl!" she cried. "A filthy heartless hypocrite who tried to ship his own sister overseas into a bigamous union with a stranger just because he thought I would embarrass you! Well! You are welcome to him. I wish you every joy. And I will shame you no more!"
She knew even as she was shouting into the shocked, sweet face of Lady Atholl that Arabella deserved none of her anger. It was none of her doing. She had known nothing about any of it. James had certainly told her a creatively edited version of events, flattering to his own part in them; representing her voyage to marry Mr Crowther as an entirely voluntary undertaking, excluding any mention of the scandalous behaviour which had preceded it.
She didn't care. In her ire, she hoped that James's deluded bride retrieved the crumpled letter from the soup bowl, read it and realised what kind of man he really was. She hoped that the blameless girl spent the night sobbing in her own bedroom, while James paced alone in his into the night, bitterly regretting his own infamy, ruing the wreckage of his matrimonial happiness.
She wanted everyone to be as unhappy as herself.
Her fury sustained her as she found the largest travelling-bag left in her closet—her best one had gone with her on her voyage, and she had left it behind on the Heron to sustain the not-quite-fiction that she had been carried off the ship by pirates—and started to fill it with a few essentials. She got a dark thrill from scooping up every trinket and bauble from her drawers full of jewels and stuffing them right at the bottom of the bag, under a change of petticoat. She had no idea how much they were all worth, but she would need something to sell.
The Captain had left the letter there for her to find. That was the only conclusion possible. It could not have found its way by accident into the binding of volume one of The Curse of Blackthorne Abbey. He must have discovered it amongst Captain Cardrew's possessions, and sent it to her as a warning; perhaps so that if James tried to resurrect the scheme to marry her to Crowther, she would have an unanswerable reason to object and refuse. He had given her the key to her freedom, from that unwanted fate at any rate.
Had he meant it as a parting gift? Perhaps he had, but the thought behind it meant everything. He had not turned her away without a word or gesture after all. Her anger towards James receding to a red blur in the back of her mind, as fierce hope and even fiercer determination bloomed in her breast.
It was scarcely past ten o'clock by the time all her preparations were complete, but there was nothing she could do until much later. She needed the house to be asleep, and besides, even in June there would not be two hours of full daylight left tonight. It was hard to sit quietly on her bed, with her bag packed at her feet, and hold herself still, but it was not hard to stay awake. Her mind and heart were too full for sleep.
As she expected, someone knocked on her outer door at about the time dinner would be over. She ignored it. She had locked the door, and though she heard the handle rattle, and a muffled call that might have been James's voice, all was soon silent again. James had no doubt decided to leave her to sulk overnight, and reprimand her for her outburst in the morning.
Presently, she heard the quiet footfalls and creaks and thumps that were the servants shutting up the house for the night and going to bed themselves. At last the household seemed quiet, but still Elspeth waited.
A little after three in the morning, a grey light began to make the outlines of the fireplace clearly visible. She pulled open the curtains fully and saw the first pearly glow of approaching sunrise in the sky over the east woods. Below, a single bird began its reedy, piping call.
Elspeth picked up her bag.
She had meant to slip down the east wing back stairs, which led almost directly to the stable yard, but when she got to the head of the corridor she hesitated. A pain that she could not ignore was pulling at her chest, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears at the very thought of leaving Dunwoodie forever without looking upon her father one last time.
Whether or not he knew her, whether he had even realised that she had gone and come back again, she could not go without saying goodbye.
She crept along the upper passage, passing perilously near James's own apartments, until she came to the great sombre King Charles Suite which had been her father's for the past six decades at least. The shutters in the bedchamber were all closed, so despite the incipient dawn the room was still as dark as night. The gloom was lifted only by the glow of embers in the fireplace—which accounted for how unpleasantly hot and airless the atmosphere was—and a single candle burning low on the nightstand.
A fat woman in a coarse apron was sprawled in a chair by the fireside, head flung back, cap half over her eyes, snoring like a hog.
Elspeth tip-toed past her, though she did not look as if she were likely to wake easily, and approached her father's bed a little fearfully.
His appearance had not changed while she had been at sea, though it was a renewed shock to see how skull-like and wasted his once-proud features were. She could hear the rise and fall of his breath, whistling slightly, though he lay so still.
"Papa," she whispered, and found his hand. The skin felt like dry tissue paper. "It's me, it's your little Elspeth. I was sent away, but I've come back. And now I must go away again, and I won't be coming back. I just want to say before I go that I love you. I wish I could have been a better daughter, but I've always loved you. And I know you always loved me, even—even after Mother died." She swallowed. She didn't think she had spoken of her mother to her father ever since.
She leaned over to place a parting kiss on his bony forehead, and gasped as his fingers closed around hers. Slowly, his eyelids fluttered opened. His once brilliant blue eyes gazed into hers, and then he said in a faint but unwavering voice, "Elspeth. My extra little angel."
A gasp that was half a sob caught in her throat and she pressed her father's fingers against her cheek.
He was still looking at her, but he saw her no longer. He would never see anything again.
"You must sail at first light, for God's sake, Roddie. Hang the Venezuelans, if you can't round them up in time."
"It's easy to see that you've never sailed a ship in your life, brother," said Roderick, as they loaded the last of the supplies into the store. "I cannot be in ten places at once, doing twenty different things."
Duncan had taken it upon himself to purchase provisions for the return voyage the afternoon before; Roderick had returned in the hired carriage to find his brother supervising the loading of salted fish, sides of Aberdeenshire beef, cured pork legs and even punnets of ripe red raspberries, nestling in straw. They would dine sumptuously on their way back across the Atlantic; it was only doubtful that they would get through it all before the meat began to turn. Roderick would have been amused by his brother's energy and thoroughness, had the parting from Elspeth not cast him into what felt like an insurmountable melancholy.
He had done what was without question the right thing; he could have done nothing else. If ever there was a case where a man had to give up a woman for her own good, this was it. Had he not understood this before, it was borne in upon him in full force when he saw with his own eyes the stately grandeur of Dunwoodie House. He was the scion of an ancient line of clan chiefs, and had grown up in a small, remote Highland castle; but she was the daughter of one of the highest peers in the land, and belonged to a home that was little short of a palace.
Despite the way she had looked at him during
their last painful scene alone together, she could not truly wish it to be otherwise. Duncan's wild suggestion that he take her away was nothing more than a dangerous fantasy, and he was very glad now that his anger with her had stopped him sharing it with her. With her warm impetuous nature, she might have seized on the idea eagerly.
But he was not glad that anger was the last emotion that had passed between then, even though he had deliberately fed upon that anger to maintain a facade of coolness towards her all the way to her home. It had been necessary to put a distance between them, even to let her think that he was indifferent. Knowing that it had been for her own certain good, did not make him feel any less cruel.
The sky was already lightening when the first of his hired sailors staggered back from whatever drinking dens and whorehouses they had managed to find in Presbyterian Aberdeen. Again displaying boundless energy and initiative, and a fearlessness that would have stood him in good stead as a comrade on the high seas, Duncan had gone in search of the men and ordered them back to the ship. They were not happy about it, but they had obeyed the young landlubber with his authoritative manner and, Roderick suspected, his liberal purse. Duncan had made light of the money he had laid out overall in his determination to get Roderick's ship stocked and crewed in time to sail with the sunrise.
"I've just been relieved of the expense of my sister," he said, "so I shall be quite a few hundred pounds' worth of hats and gowns to the good this year. Besides, this is your money, Roddie, if everyone had their own."
And he had used the same argument when he handed Roderick a chest containing a thousand golden guineas, gleaming and freshly minted from the new Royal Mint far away on London's Tower Hill.
"Pretty, aren't they?" Duncan said, holding one up to admire and then biting it. "Not Spanish doubloons, but hurrah for the Gold Standard."
"I do not need to take such a large sum from you. Lord Atholl gave me a gift of two hundred pounds in gratitude for returning his sister safely." It had not seemed wise to refuse the offer, made as it had been by a flustered Lord Atholl in a few minutes' private conference in his study, out of earshot of his smiling, watchful wife. The Earl had asked a few tentative but pertinent questions about Lady Elspeth's behaviour on the voyage, and Roderick had managed to answer with deflecting blandness.
He wished his final sight of her had not been her tears.
"Quite right too. Twice the sum would scarcely compensate for the trouble of transporting our sister," said Duncan. "Take the gold, Roddie, and make merry with it. I wish to God you would consider starting over in the New World. If you go back to piracy, they'll catch you before long."
Roderick said nothing to this. The brief vision of he and Elspeth holding hands together on a beach in a pristine land had held its charm only because she had been standing by his side.
Duncan looked at his pocket watch. "Hell and damnation. I wish I could stay to see you safely afloat, but Lochlannan will be filling to the rafters with Clan Buccleuch and if I don't make it back in time for the ceilidh, someone is bound to wonder where I've been. Fortunately I've cultivated a reputation for unreliability and caprice, but even I should probably show up for my only sister's wedding feast. And there's a girl I need to apologise to, dammit."
"Oh?"
"'Oh' nothing. She's promised herself to a penniless student, so obviously I can't compete with that."
There was a brittleness underlying his careless tone which told Roderick that this girl mattered to his brother, betrothed to another though she was, and probably quite a lot. But it was not his place to press him further, though it ought to have been. Duncan's concerns ought to have been an intimate part of his life, his prospects and happiness of overriding importance. Instead, he had but a glimpse of his brother's adult existence, and after today would certainly never see him again.
In the silvery dawn at the water's edge, they embraced one last time and parted without words. Duncan mounted his horse in a single energetic swing and set off at an immediate trot. The animal's hooves rang out against the cobbles in the stillness of daybreak, metal on stone. Roderick watched until his brother had disappeared from sight along the harbour-front, then turned back to the gangplank with a heart that felt heavier than the cursed gold in his cabin.
He lined up the motley band of Venezuelans, who were looking particularly rough and unwholesome after their night in the fleshpots of Aberdeen, and gave them orders to prepare to weigh anchor as soon as possible. They were evidently not happy about yet another curtailed shore leave, but this time at least the ship was well-provisioned and the sailors had coin in their pockets. They set about their work with no great enthusiasm but without complaint, and within the hour there was nothing left to do but haul up the anchor and set the sails to the wind.
Nothing, except to answer the question posed by Ramirez, the sullen-eyed navigator. "What is our course, Captain?"
It was a reasonable question, and Roderick did not have a ready answer. All his shaky Spanish seemed to have deserted him. He looked at the silver-grey shorefront of Aberdeen, gleaming now in the brilliant fresh sunshine of a new summer morning, and out at the expanse of the North Sea; so often, in his memory, dull and heaving, but now shimmering pale blue to the horizon. Back to Venezuela, he supposed, bleakly. He ought to make some attempt to find Washington and his men, and divide the spoils with them as he had promised.
Except that the gold in the chest in his cabin was not spoils. It was part—if a small part—of his own rightful inheritance. He owed none of it to the men who had deserted him.
"Captain?"
Roderick was drawing breath to return a definitive answer, when a kind of commotion on shore arrested his attention. There were yells, and distant curses, and once again the distinctive ringing clop of thundering horseshoes on stone.
It was later in the morning now, and the harbour was crowded with fishermen and other workers. From the Heron's distant mooring, he could not very well see what was going on. But an icy dread cut through him like a chill Arctic wind, for it was a disturbance, and a disturbance could not be good.
Could Duncan have betrayed him after all? The fear of that was worse, he realised, far worse than the prospect of arrest itself.
"Go now," he said curtly, then realised he had spoken in English. "Weigh anchor!" he called, in Spanish. "With all haste! Quickly!"
Whether or not his Spanish was perfectly expressed, the men understood his urgency well enough. They swarmed into action, unfurling the sails and hauling the chain until the dripping anchor reached the cathead. With a gentle lurch, the ship began to move.
Roderick let out a breath.
And then he saw what had caused the distant disturbance on the dock, as the pounding of hoofbeats carried even over the groans of the ship's stretching timbers and the excited screaming of gulls. A huge grey hunter was galloping along the quay, barely held in check by a slight figure riding sidesaddle. A woman, bare-headed, long golden hair streaming behind her.
For a terrifying moment, it looked as if the horse was going to launch itself off the side of the wharf. But the girl reigned it in, with more skill than strength, and leapt from the saddle.
He had known it was her from the first glimpse.
"Captain!" Elspeth cried.
She had handed the reigns of the horse to a startled dock worker. The animal reared and snorted, lathered in sweat. Elspeth ran to the edge of the quay, but the boarding planks had been drawn back and the ship was pulling gently but inexorably into the harbour basin.
"Captain!" she called again. "I want to come with you!"
"Elspeth—" He was almost at a loss for words. Fury and joy, exasperation and exultation all surged within him. "For the love of God, go home!"
"I left James a letter! I've told him what happened between us! It is too late now—I cannot go home!"
"Ease the sheets!" Roderick shouted at the sailors.
They looked confused, and he realised he had no idea how to express the command in a la
nguage they understood. Then two of the men sprang forward to release extra sails; they thought that he was shouting at them to make their departure more rapid.
Roderick jumped into the water. As his ship drifted ever quicker towards the mouth of the harbour and the open sea, he swam in all his clothes through the knife-cold water towards the girl who was crying and laughing and holding out her arms to him on the shore.
Chapter Twenty
It was thanks to Stirling alone that he did not end up losing a second ship, and stranded in a land where there was a price on his head. Stirling, ever loyal and practical, managed to make the Venezuelans understand to becalm the ship just beyond the mouth of the harbour, arranged for a boat to be lowered and rowed back to fetch them both.
Even in his waterlogged clothes, Elspeth would not be restrained from wrapping herself around him as they lay together in the boat. Roderick gave up and, shivering, held her close until she was near as soaked as he, running his fingers through her unbound hair, taking sweet kisses from her eager mouth.
When he locked the door of the great cabin on them both, while the sailors called to each other and the ship groaned and heaved around them as it sailed into the safety of the great open sea, he threw off his sodden outer garments and wrapped all the towels he could find around her. His shirt and trousers still stuck to his skin, but he could not strip them off in Elspeth's presence.
Not yet. Not until they had a few things clear.
"Elspeth," he said with an effort. "You should have stayed at home."
She stood before him, suddenly serious, hanging her beautiful head. "Did you want me to?"
"Of course I didn't want you to! That doesn't change the fact that it was in your own best interests."
"No it wasn't." She lifted her eyes. "I love you. My own best interests are to be with you."