André frowned. “In the cabin with her?”
“Mayhap. But if not, and we batter down the door, she will be in such a rage that she’ll never tell us!”
André thought a moment. “Perhaps I can serve you. Can the ship hold for another half an hour or so?” Fresnel nodded. “Then leave me alone with her. I think I can soon find out where she has hidden everything.”
“Why should you succeed where we have not?”
André laughed ruefully. “Because she is not overly fond of me.” He waited until the two men had mounted the companionway to the roundhouse, then stood very close to Copain’s door. “Gosse,” he said softly, “it is I—André. Can you hear me?” There was a shrieked oath from within, and a loud bang (he thought she might have kicked the door) on the inside of the paneling. “Good!” he said placidly. “Now listen to me, you sour-tempered little savage. Do you think, because you crash about in there and scream foul curses, that I fear you? I am not your father or Gunner to tremble at your childish furies! I shall stand here outside your door—all the night, if need be—and tell you that you are a little whelp who cannot even behave in a civilized manner, nor speak save with curses, nor—” and here he racked his brain to think of insults that would enrage her without causing unnecessary pain when she were sober again “—nor play a worthy game of trictrac, nor—” He stopped, hearing a gentle squeak as she cautiously pulled back the bolt. He braced himself, anticipating the assault. As the door flew open he instinctively ducked and heard the sound of crashing glass behind him. In a moment the passageway was filled with the pungent smell of liquor. Before she could slam the door again he pushed against it with all his might sending her flying backwards onto Copain’s bunk. While she lay there gasping, he closed the door and surveyed the cabin. It was in chaos. All of Copain’s books lay torn in shreds and scattered about the room, a small tobacco box had been smashed against one wall, and half a dozen clay pipes seemed to have been stamped to powder on the floor. A bottle of ink had been tossed against the bulkhead, and still oozed its black stain down the wall.
Delphine staggered up from the bunk, her eyes glowing with fury, yet slightly unfocused. It was clear she was very drunk. “Stinking bilge rat!” she shrieked, and began to throw things at him, her hands clutching at boxes and tankards within her reach.
He warded them off as best he could and advanced on her, fighting back his anger, remembering that Copain had always been able to control her behavior with quiet calm. “Gosse,” he said, “you must return the charts and compass. ’Tis foolish to carry on so.”
“Devil take you for a scurvy whore’s son! Go away and leave me alone!”
“Why are you doing this? When the ship could sink?”
“Let them all die,” she cried, “every whoring one of them! Always tormenting him—sending him aloft to his death—let the ship go to the bottom, with every lousy knave aboard!”
“And would you kill yourself too?” he snapped, feeling his impatience growing in spite of himself. “I cannot believe that! Give me the compass. The charts.”
She glared at him. “Sniveling cowards! They shall have their charts when I am ready to give them! Go away!”
He took a step closer, frowning down at her. “I shall not leave until I have them.”
She stamped her foot. “You shall go now! And empty-handed! With a present from me to see you on your way!” She drew back her hand and slapped him across the face, snapping his head back with the force of the blow. She made a fist and went to strike him again, but he caught at her arm and spun her around, grabbing her shoulders from behind. She tore one arm free and reached for the knife in her belt, swinging it over her shoulder toward him; he saw it coming and released her, jumping back at the last moment from the murderous swipe of the blade. His hand shot out and closed around her wrist, squeezing the delicate bones until she cried out and dropped the weapon. Her hand still imprisoned by his steely grip, she tried to kick him, and cursed as he sidestepped and dodged her heavy shoe. Suddenly she darted toward him and clamped her teeth around the hand that held hers. She could taste blood in her mouth as he yelled and leaped back, his eyes burning in fury.
“Damned savage!” he swore, and raised his hand to strike her down. He caught himself at the last moment, and took a deep gasping breath, forcing his anger to drain away. He watched her as she stood, swaying slightly, her amber eyes glowing with the challenge. He raised his bleeding hand to his mouth, staring at her beneath beetled brows as he sucked the blood from his wound, afraid to speak until he had mastered his emotions again. “And still Copain is as dead as he was this morning,” he murmured at last.
Gosse the brat vanished in an instant. Her face contorted in sudden pain and she crumpled to the floor, all the fury gone. She huddled there, clutching her arms tightly, as great racking sobs shook her body. André knelt by her and picked her up in gentle arms, crossing to the bunk and sitting down, Delphine cradled in his lap. His own anger forgotten, he held her and rocked her as she moaned and sobbed, feeling a tenderness for the poor child he had not thought himself capable of. At last, with a long shuddering sigh, she quieted. Still holding her, André crossed the passageway to her cabin and laid her on her bunk, smoothing back the damp hair from her forehead and stroking her tear-ravaged face until her eyes began to close sleepily.
“Gosse,” he said quietly, “where are the charts?”
She sighed, her voice soft and little-girl sweet. “I put—Copain’s sea chest—under his bunk.” She sighed again, closed her eyes and slept.
Blowing out the lantern, André tiptoed from her cabin and returned to Copain’s room. He retrieved the compass and the rest from the sea chest; about to quit the cabin, he stopped, struck by something rather curious. Every book of Copain’s had been ripped to shreds—except one. On the table one book lay intact, opened to a page. Coming closer, he saw that someone had taken a pen to the page and enclosed two lines from a verse, circling around and around until the lines, hemmed in by their black wall, seemed to leap off the page:
Pass on, say I, and seek your fate,
Nor trouble my repose. I sleep.
Chapter Five
In the morning she was miserably ill. Staggering onto the deck, her hand across her eyes to shield them from the bright sun, she leaned over the railing to vomit into the sea. André tried to tease her gently, reminding her of his own seasickness, hoping to ease the pain that turned her golden eyes black and despairing. But she snarled at him and cursed him foully, as though she were humiliated that he should have been a witness to her frailty. That day and the next she spent hours in the crow’s nest, driving Michel away when he tried to intrude on her solitude; for weeks afterwards she moved about the ship like a wraith, until it near broke André’s heart to see her lively spirit brought so low.
But gradually she began to return to her own self, laughing with the crew, lashing Gunner with her tongue until the warm-hearted giant crept away, red faced. And one day when André was on deck—a brisk breeze blowing—and the cook had given Gosse a bucket of watery, rancid oatmeal to heave over the side, she stood deliberately upwind of him as she tossed the foul mess, and André was splattered from head to toe. He roared his outrage and went to rap her ear, but she made a face and scrambled into the rigging, daring him to follow. He considered it for a minute, then changed his mind. In this wind he’d probably be blown into the sea. He stormed to his cabin, more furious with himself than with her. This was the second time he’d nearly struck her. Damn the imp! How had she managed to rouse such passion within him, strip away his civility and sense of chivalry, strike at the rough core of him?
At supper that night, when she lost her temper at some trifling thing that he said, and had to be restrained by Fresnel from hurling her plate of stew at the bulkhead, André determinedly ignored her, biting his tongue against the angry words that choked him, swallowing the urge to shake her until her teeth rattled in her head. Perhaps it was her way of dealing with the loss of Copain
—to throw herself more fiercely into her deviltry. And truly her pranks and tantrums seemed to have less exuberance in them, more unreasoning fury hovering just below the surface, as though she were taking revenge on him—on the world—for the death of Copain. And sometimes, when he caught her staring at him with a look that was dark and brooding and unfathomable, he wondered if it was something more, something that went beyond Copain.
The weather turned surprisingly hot, the May sun baking Olympie’s brine-soaked timbers. The stench of the bilge was worse than usual. André found that even the Great Cabin was stuffy, the air tinged by the fetid water below. There came a night when he could no longer stay within, tossing on his straw pallet; if he could not sleep, he could at least breathe! It was a beautiful night. The moon had set and the stars twinkled brightly in the heavens, glittering pinpoints in the vastness of sea and sky. He went to the forecastle in the bow of the ship, mounting the ladder to stand beneath the great running lantern that hung from the foremast and creaked rhythmically in the soft air. The sound was punctuated by the gentle splashing of the waves and the faint squeak of taut ropes and lines.
André leaned against the mast and breathed deeply, tasting the beauty of the night. The air was sweet with spring, stirring vague but familiar longings within him, yet salt tanged and filled with the promise of adventure and the unknown. There was a sudden sound behind him. Peering closely in the gloom, he saw Gosse perched on a coil of rope.
He laughed warmly. “It would seem I was not the only one who found the night enticing.”
She rose from her seat and moved past him to stand at the rail, her eyes turned to the heavens. “Did you know that there are pictures in the sky? Copain used to show me. See? There!” Her pointing finger drew the shapes in the air. “The crow sipping from the cup of wine that has spilled at his feet. And there is a lion—do you see? Below the bear—those stars are his tail!” Her voice was filled with childish wonder and delight. “When we sail in the Southern Hemisphere, near Tierra del Fuego where the storms are so fierce, the stars are all different. But when the stars appear—mon Dieu!—they are so close—as though God himself is near!” Her voice caught halfway between a sob and thrilling sigh. “Why should that be, do you suppose? We are no nearer to heaven there, and yet—”
“You love the sea,” he said quietly, moved by the passion in her voice.
“Yes! Oh yes! In the winter, when the foam is frosty on the green waves, and the sky is gray—and the summer—Oh!” she burst out impatiently. “If my unschooled tongue could only say what my heart feels. Copain would chide me for spending too little time with books.” She sighed and stared into the night. “I shall have my own vessel someday,” she said at last, “and the sea shall belong to me—”
“And you would be content thus forever?”
“Yes! No—I know not!” she cried in anguish. “When we harbor in a strange port, with strange people, new sights, I want to see, taste, have—Ah Dieu!” She threw her arms wide in the night air, clenching her fists as though she were grasping all of life and fiercely drawing it down to her breast. She turned to André, her eyes shining, yearning, in the light of the lantern. “But on a night like this—” Her voice was suddenly soft and wistful. “I think I would be content if the voyage went on forever, and nothing changed. Why should that be so?”
Dear Mother of God, he thought, turning away so she might not see the look of pain on his face. How could such sweet innocence still exist in a world that was—to him—cold and barren, old and tired? He laughed unsteadily. “You are so young, child. I can no longer remember when life held such joy, such promise—”
“Curse your gizzard!” she cried out. “I am not so young! I am eighteen!”
A heavy sigh. “I can scarce recall when I was eighteen.”
“My mother was dead at eighteen—and I a babe of two.” She thrust out a belligerent chin. “How old was your—Marielle?”
“Nineteen when I married her.”
“Yet you call me child!”
He laughed softly. “It was a long time ago. I did not feel so old, and so, mayhap, she did not seem so young! And then—you say you are not a child, yet you behave like one. What are you? Child or woman?”
“I am what I am!” she exploded. “I am Gosse! And content to be as I am!”
“But how long can you pretend to be what you are not, nor ever will be? For all your false show and bluff manner.”
“Which is—?” The voice was heavy with scorn.
“A lad.”
“Damn you!” She raised her fists to pummel his chest, but he grasped them firmly in his two hands, pulling her close to him so she was suddenly aware of how he towered over her, of how the width of his shoulders blocked the stars from her view.
“No, Gosse,” he said gently, as though he were chiding a child, “the time will come when you must be a woman, willy-nilly. However much you rage against it.”
Copain would have said the same, she thought, feeling herself defenseless. Damn the man! What a fool she’d been to open her heart and soul to him—doubly the fool to tremble so at his nearness. “Blasted whore’s son!” she swore, shaking free of his grasp. “Not all women must have chestnut hair and helpless eyes and priggish manners!”
He fell back a step—hands clenched at his sides—as though she had struck him. When he spoke at last his voice was cold and hard, the words hissing through tight-held jaws. “Foul-tongued viper,” he growled, then steadied himself with a deep breath. “For me, Marielle will always be the perfect jewel, the mirror against whom all others must be held. Had you but one particle of her womanliness—” He swung about on his heel and strode away.
She started to call after him, then clasped one hand over her mouth and turned away in anguish. For was it not so, what he had named her? Foul-tongued viper. And the only words she had thought to hurl at his retreating back had been ugly curses. Ugly and unwomanly.
May was drawing to a close. Under a fair breeze and a clear sky Olympie neared the coast of France. Fresnel reckoned that they would make Dieppe in three or four days, thanks be to God. It had been a good voyage, save for the loss of Copain: enough food and water, minimal damage to the ship from the storms, the cargo still safe and dry below. Until they reached the Channel, there was very little work to be done; most of the crew was on deck playing cards or dice, or washing and patching their clothes to be ready to go ashore.
André spent the morning writing to Georges de Mersenne; he could post the letter at Dieppe to be carried back to America on the first westward vessel. He had put aside his leather jerkin, for the day was warm; now he unbuttoned the top of his shirt and rolled the voluminous sleeves above the elbows for added comfort. He yawned and stretched contentedly, then closed his writing case and stood up. It was too fine a day to stay in his cabin; he descended to the main deck—half anticipating, half dreading some new deviltry from Gosse.
He was greeted by the sound of steel clashing against steel. Gosse, her bright yellow hair caught by a twist of red bandanna around her forehead, was brandishing a slender rapier, leaping and thrusting at Fresnel while he, a long dagger held in his uncrippled left hand, fended off her attacks with some difficulty.
“Good!” he cried. “Remember what I taught you, Delphine. On the passado you must thrust at the same time you advance. At the same time! Good!”
André leaned against the railing, nodding his head in admiration. Damn, she was good! A little crude perhaps, the movements needing a certain refining, but better than half the young gallants he’d seen at Pluvinel’s Academy. Fresnel had obviously taught her well. It was a pleasure to watch her skill as the blade flashed in her hand, the supple wrist original and inventive in its response to Fresnel’s varied feints and parries. At last she stopped and grinned at André, her eyes shining, breast heaving with the exertion.
“Well?” she challenged. “What think you?”
“Your stoccado is superb. Each thrust is sure and accurate. But can you defend? W
hat of your parades? Your volts? Can you parry? Leap to avoid a thrust?”
“Of course!” she snapped. “Sink me, but the man is a fool!”
“I am to blame,” interjected Fresnel quickly. “I taught her all the defensive positions: prime, seconde, tierce, quarte—and variations besides. But with this lame arm,” he rubbed his crippled right limb, “she no longer is able to practice the skills.”
“Can you fence, monsieur?” she sneered at André.
“I have had my share of bouts,” he said mildly, refusing to be drawn into a show of anger.
“Then perhaps you will show me your defense! If I give you the opportunity to attack, you will see mine!”
“I would not speak so boldly, if I were you,” he said, sending Michel to his cabin to fetch his sword and gauntlet. “I have the experience of years, if nothing else. And combat. Whereas a sapling like yourself can scarce have had many occasions to run a man through!” He smiled good-naturedly, trying to defuse her temper before it should build.
“But I shall let my thoughts dwell on it!” she hissed.
“Come, come, Gosse,” he said, slipping on the gauntlet Michel had brought and pulling his rapier from its leather shoulder sling. “Let us fence as friends, for the joy of the sport.” He made a pass in the air with his sword, enjoying the unfamiliar heft of the blade. “I have not held a rapier for more than a year; I fear me I am soft! I shall need your indulgence, not your enmity. Come.” He urged her forward with a movement of his hand. “Have at me.”
While Michel watched in rapt attention, his eyes never leaving her, and Fresnel smiled his approval, Gosse launched her attack, darting forward to thrust at André. He parried the blow neatly and without too much effort; despite her skill he had, after all, been fencing for longer than the child had years. He let her take the offensive for awhile, murmuring an occasional. “Bon!” or “Well done!” when she was particularly adroit. And when he caught her blade in a parry and returned it with an unexpected thrust, he was delighted to see her respond instantly with a finely executed volt, leaping neatly to one side while she deflected his rapier point. He attacked again. Again she parried, turning her defense into a smooth passado that caught him by surprise for a moment so he was forced to back away. As they fenced, he was pleased to discover that her skills were sharp enough to challenge him. But after ten minutes or so, during which she grew more intense, clenching her teeth in concentration, her faults were becoming obvious.
Delphine Page 6