Duncan’s color, by then, was approaching lavender. Glaring at Phoebe, he untied the laces and wrenched the shirt off over his head. His chest was worthy of Michelangelo’s “David,” though thickly furred with dark hair, and she couldn’t imagine why he’d want to hide. When she took the garment, however, and walked over to hang it with her own things, she saw his back.
Fine white scars marked his flesh from his neck to the base of his spine, and Phoebe marveled that she hadn’t felt them the night before, when she’d touched and stroked him in passion. But of course her senses had been occupied elsewhere.
He sat rigid in the firelight and the misty gloom of the storm, allowing her to look at him. Enduring it.
“What happened?” she asked in even tones, moving back to her place by the fire and kneeling in the sand, her hands resting on the velvet of the cloak where it covered her thighs.
“I was whipped,” he said, gazing defiantly into her eyes.
Gall rushed into the back of Phoebe’s throat at the thought, but she swallowed hard and would not look away from him because she knew he was trying to stare her down. “God, Duncan, even I could guess that. What I was really asking is, why? Who did such a thing to you?”
He tossed the last of the crab shells into the fire and watched the flames lick them. Phoebe had won the staring match, but she felt no triumph.
“Tell me,” she urged quietly. “There is no harpsichord here, no instrument to absorb your fury and turn it into music.”
“Isn’t this codependent behavior?” he asked.
Damn his memory, Phoebe thought. “No,” she said. “I can’t change what happened, and I can’t make up for it, either. But I can listen, and you might feel a little better for telling the tale.”
Duncan was silent for so long that Phoebe thought he had chosen to keep his own counsel, but finally, still staring into the fire, he began to talk.
“I was fifteen,” he said. “I lived outside Charles Town, with my family—my father raises cotton on a plantation there. It was a good life, though I was expected to work from the time I could lift a hoe. There were books, and a few paintings, and we had tutors. My mother played the harp and the pianoforte, and she gave me lessons …
“But I’ve gotten off course. I was big for my age, and randy in the bargain. During one of Father’s frequent trips to town, on which I accompanied him, I made the acquaintance of a woman—a girl, really—named Francesca Sheffield. She had just been shipped over from England—she’d been married by proxy, and her husband, a British captain, was my father’s age. Francesca was beautiful, and miserably homesick, and the captain was impatient with her.
“We became friends, she and I, because we liked the same music and the same books, and, eventually, we were lovers.”
Phoebe waited silently, taking note that Duncan had named his ship for this woman, envisioning the tale as he told it—the handsome young planter, the pretty Francesca, exiled from the only world she knew to what must have seemed a wilderness, at the mercy of a man who could not understand her …
“When Sheffield found out—Charles Town is a small place, and there are few secrets—I was accused of … forcing my attentions on Francesca, and I was promptly arrested. My father went to the captain with the figurative olive branch in his hand—he knew the truth of the matter, and though he had been furious with me from the moment he found out about my involvement with the lovely Mistress Sheffield, he couldn’t stand by and see me charged with such a crime.”
He fell silent, stirring the fire with a stick, and Phoebe noticed, to her everlasting surprise, that it was getting dark.
“Didn’t Francesca defend you?” she asked after a long time.
“Oh, yes. And Sheffield beat her with his riding crop, according to Bessie, who was their cook at the time, and locked her in her room to contemplate the wages of sin. I was dragged before a magistrate—an intimate friend of the captain’s, as luck would have it—and no amount of pleading or reasoning on my father’s part—or hers—could alter the course of events. I was bound to a pole outside the town—specially erected for the purpose—and whipped. When I passed out from the pain, Sheffield ordered a dousing with cold water and delivered more lashes. He would probably have killed me if my desperate sire, my brother, and some of their friends hadn’t interceded.”
Phoebe waited a few moments before speaking, dealing with another spate of nausea. The whole scene glowed vividly in her mind, even though it had happened when the man before her was still a boy. Then she asked, “Why didn’t they put a stop to it sooner?”
“Sheffield was a captain in His Majesty’s army,” Duncan said. “As such, he had the authority of the magistrate behind him, with a handful of soldiers to make sure the sentence was carried out. My father and brother and the others could have been hanged for what they did—riding into the center of the fray with muskets and swords and demanding that I be set free—but they took that chance.”
Tears burned in Phoebe’s eyes and ached in her throat. “What happened then?”
“Lucas, my elder brother, cut me loose—I was half-conscious and something less than clean, as you can imagine—and I was hoisted onto my father’s horse. He held me against his chest, and we went home.” Duncan’s voice was far away. “I recall that he wept.”
“And your mother?”
“She was hysterical—here was her baby boy, streaked with blood from his head to his feet. But she was soon in charge of her emotions, and of every living soul within a ten-mile radius of the plantation as well. I recovered, in time, and poor Francesca was sent back to England, in genteel disgrace. The captain, as I understand it, has been promoted to major and fights courageously for King and country.”
The storm, instead of slackening off, was picking up speed, bending the treetops high above their heads, howling in the twilight like a multitude of ghosts seeking the shelter of their graves.
“You went on living there—in Charles Town—after what he’d done to you?”
“Until my political opinions set father against son and brother against brother, yes. It was my alliance with the Continental Army that made me a prodigal, not the incident with Captain Sheffield.”
To call that an “incident” was an understatement of unsettling magnitude. “You mean your father and brother are Tories?” Phoebe asked, unable to hide her surprise.
“To the marrow of their bones,” Duncan said without rancor. “My mother had a chapel built, my sister tells me, when I took my share of the inheritance our grandmother left for Lucas, Phillippa, and me, and went off to fit out a ship. She prayed every day—probably still does—that I would see the error of my ways and give up treason and piracy to raise cotton. Or at least help put down this awful rebellion.”
“Oh, Duncan,” Phoebe murmured, overwhelmed by what such a separation must have meant, to him and to his family. “Do they hate you, Lucas and your father?”
“No,” he said, in a strange voice, his face hidden now, in shadow. “It might be better for them if they did, though. Loyal as they are—and I don’t blame them, for there are good and sincere men on both sides of this war, as well as bastards—my activities must make them suspect to the British. I regret nothing, except the pain they’ve endured on my account.”
There was nothing more to say, not then. Phoebe moved close to Duncan and took him inside the soft expanse of her cloak, and they lay together by the fire through the long night, but they did not make love.
By morning, the squall had passed, and the seas were placid again, turquoise under a cloudless sky. Duncan and Phoebe breakfasted on berries and coconut, plucked their still-slightly-damp clothes from the bushes, and got dressed. Then Phoebe climbed stoically back into the canoe, sitting on her cloak again, and Duncan pushed the little craft off the beach and into the tide.
At midafternoon, Duncan spotted a ship in the distance—it was nothing but a speck to Phoebe, who wouldn’t have noticed it at all if he hadn’t pointed it out—and they went a
shore again, into a sheltered cove. Here, flowers grew in riotous colors and gaudy abundance, and Phoebe made a fragrant pink and white wreath of orchidlike blossoms to wear in her hair.
Duncan was distracted, watching the ship, lest it draw nearer to the island.
“Is this when we start shouting, ’The British are coming, the British are coming’?” Phoebe asked. She was scared stupid, but flippancy helped a little, made the whole thing seem more like a game and less like a life-and-death situation.
“No,” he said, without a shade of humor in his voice, without even glancing her way. “We’ll keep our mouths shut and hope to high heaven they haven’t seen us.”
Phoebe peered at the thing bobbing on the horizon. “I don’t see how they could,” she said.
“Through the spyglass?” he suggested bitingly.
“Oh,” said Phoebe. Then, after a pause, “Who are they, anyway, if they’re not English?”
“That’s a pirate ship,” Duncan said. He’d already hidden the canoe, and they were watching the water from a copse of spooky trees dangling moss from their branches, but he still looked worried. “Given the way my luck’s been running lately, I’d say it’s Mornault’s, and they were probably watching us before we even knew they were there.”
Phoebe swallowed. Her experience with such things was limited to watching one road-show production of The Pirates of Penzance, a ride at Disneyland, and a couple of romance novels. She hoped to maintain the status quo.
“Well, at least this time you can’t blame me,” she said with tremulous cheer.
“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you,” Duncan answered archly.
Phoebe dropped the whole subject and waited, biting her lower lip and squinting at the distant ship. She couldn’t tell whether it was moving away or coming closer, and she wasn’t about to ask Duncan.
At long last, the ship vanished into a dazzling veil of sunshine.
“It’s gone,” Phoebe said straightening her wreath, which had dropped down over one eye. “Now we can stop worrying.”
“Thank you,” Duncan replied, “but I think I’ll continue for a while. He might be taking her around to the other side of the island, hoping to surprise us from behind.”
“Even your luck couldn’t be that bad,” Phoebe said. She was tired, she needed a bath, she had a headache, and aspirin wouldn’t be discovered for at least a hundred years. She was in no condition to deal with pirates.
“Don’t lay any wagers,” said Duncan, taking her arm and pulling her deeper into the foliage, where things chattered and chirped and fluttered on all sides and overhead.
Phoebe scrambled to keep up, holding onto her flower garland with her free hand. “What could this guy possibly have against you that would make him go to all that trouble?” she asked with breathless reason.
“I might have stolen his cargo once or twice,” Duncan answered, without slowing down. “And there was that time off the Ivory Coast, when I burned his ship down to the waterline.”
“Oh, shit,” Phoebe said with conviction.
“Exactly,” Duncan replied.
He left her beside a spring, in the center of the island, with instructions to wait there and be quiet until he returned. He offered no explanation for this desertion except to say he wanted to look around.
Everything should have been all right.
Everything would have been, if Phoebe hadn’t screamed.
And she only did that because of the monkey, which dropped down out of a tree to land screeching in her lap.
The British didn’t come, and neither did the pirates, because they were still too far away. But a crowd of natives slipped out of the jungle—a dozen of them, tattooed and scarred, wearing loincloths and carrying spears. They stared at Phoebe, who had just shooed the monkey away, pointing at her clothes, which must have seemed odd to them, and her crown of flowers.
Phoebe’s heart pounded. She was thinking of the crabs she and Duncan had for dinner the night before, and of cannibals and giant bubbling cauldrons and divine retribution. If God’s eye was on the sparrow, she thought hysterically, perhaps He kept track of crustaceans, too.
“Duncan,” she sang, in a puny tone he could not possibly have heard. It was all she had breath for. “Oh, Duncan!”
One of the natives dropped to his knees, supporting his spear with strong brown fingers. Another followed his lead, and then another, until they were all kneeling.
They began to chant. “Doon-can, Doon-can …”
“Oh, my God,” Phoebe whispered, covering her mouth.
They rose, as one, with a certain primitive grace, still chanting, and encircled her. A scream surged into Phoebe’s throat and died there, too feeble to get past her lips. Then, like actors in a bad movie—if only this was a movie, bad or otherwise—they lifted Phoebe onto their shoulders like a football coach who has just led an underdog team to victory.
“Duncan!” she screamed.
“Doon-can, Doon-can,” sang her escorts, bearing her through the jungle and never missing a step.
They took her to a circle of huts in the middle of a clearing and set her on a large rock, which she hoped was not a sacrificial altar. The men had obviously decided she was some kind of goddess, but the women, who wore little more than their male counterparts, were plainly less charmed. They walked around and around the stone, poking at Phoebe with their fingers and sneering. The masculine contingent took umbrage at such disrespect, and a heated altercation ensued, raising dust and making birds squawk in the trees.
Phoebe tried to sneak away during the argument, which involved much shouting and making of gestures, but she was spotted and tenderly returned to her throne in the heart of the war zone.
The women finally subsided, in sullen defeat, and the men circled Phoebe until she was dizzy enough to fall off the rock in a faint. No doubt they were pondering how best to worship such a strange deity. They touched her short hair, and peered into her eyes, and might even have examined her breasts if she hadn’t folded her arms and summoned up a makeshift incantation.
It was only a line from an old Beatles song—the first thing that came to her mind—but she said it with authority, and it must have sounded dire, for her little flock drew back a little way and henceforth kept their hands to themselves.
Phoebe held them at a distance with a glare, which was more and more difficult to sustain as the day wore on. She had to go to the bathroom, and it didn’t look like Duncan was going to rescue her, and who knew what these people did to their goddesses—burned them at the stake? Dropped them into live volcanoes? Previous deities, if there had been any, were conspicuously absent, and historically, the field had always had a high mortality rate.
At sunset, the natives built up the fire and tried to feed Phoebe what looked and smelled like the digestive tract of a good-sized animal, and she fended them off by reciting every word of Elton John’s last album in a stern voice. There was no telling how long that trick would work, however. Sooner or later, the plot was bound to thicken.
It was sooner, as it happened. There was a great rustling of foliage, and Phoebe’s heart soared. Duncan had come, at last, to save her. She would polish his boots for a year for this and make a real effort to stop talking in twentieth-century lingo just to irritate him …
There was a great hubbub and snatching up of spears within the village, and Phoebe held her breath. Duncan was only one man, after all, and clever as he was, he couldn’t hope to prevail against so many people with that antique pistol of his.
Then a man stepped out of the trees, and Phoebe almost screamed a warning, but a grim realization stopped her. This was not Duncan; this was an ugly, long-haired pirate, with a complexion like cornmeal and part of his nose missing. He wore high boots and a striped shirt and one gold earring, and Phoebe would have appreciated how well he suited the part if she hadn’t been so busy sliding to the ground in a swoon.
She awakened all too soon, to find the man talking to the natives in their
own tongue. He was surrounded by other pirates now, all of whom had bad teeth, if they had any at all, and were surely disappointments to their mothers. There was an exchange of money—Phoebe wondered, in her lightheaded state, what a good goddess was going for these days—and then she was carried off through the jungle.
She considered struggling, decided it would be futile if not outright stupid, and tried to think of an escape plan. Nothing came to mind, but the effort kept her from panicking, at least until she’d been taken on board a stinking ship and tossed into the hold like so much ballast.
By then, Phoebe was sure Duncan hadn’t rescued her because he was already dead, or being held in some other part of the ship.
No. She brought her frantic, runaway thoughts under shaky control. The fact was, she didn’t know where Duncan was, or what had happened to him. Something almost certainly had, and it was unlikely that that something was good. Only one thing was absolutely clear: If she was going to be any help to him, she’d have to help herself first.
8
Phoebe sat in the darkness, feeling like Jonah in the belly of the whale, but without the happy prospect of being barfed up on some distant shore in three days, safe and sound. She huddled, almost in a fetal position, with her knees drawn up under her chin and her arms tightly clasped around her shins, taking slow, shallow breaths, like a creature lapsing into hibernation. She concentrated on the measured thud-thud-thud of her heartbeat, to keep herself from thinking of what would happen when Mornault’s inevitable summons came.
A scrabbling sound at the door interrupted her meditation, and she raised her forehead from her knees, mutely terrified, her skin clammy with sweat. There was a creaking of hinges, followed by a muttered imprecation. The portal was flooded with light, and then blocked again by the figure of a giant.
“For God’s sake,” hissed a familiar voice, “don’t scream.”
Duncan.
Phoebe could hardly believe it; indeed, she thought she must be hallucinating. All the same, she scrambled awkwardly to her feet and staggered toward him, tripping over crates and coiled rope, and an involuntary mewling sound flowed tremulously from her throat.
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