She rolled to her side, but he caught her ankles, immediately turning her back on her stomach. She twisted to look over her shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing yet, but I’m going to do something about your feet. Be still.”
“My feet? With what?” He was unscrewing the lid from what looked to be a most unsavory concoction. The smell of it, not unlike the odor of horse liniment, rose in the air.
“There’s a man on board who studied the rudiments of healing for six whole months under a famous surgeon in Edinburgh. The men in the forecastle call him doc. He retaliates by tending their wounds from time to time. Since he doesn’t kill any more of them than his medical colleagues on shore, he has a certain reputation. This salve is his.”
Elene winced a little as the ointment touched the sole of one foot. She expected a tremendous stinging, but instead there was soothing warmth. Though she was still, Ryan closed his hand around her ankle, holding it firmly apart from her other foot. The pungent smell drifted around her, strong enough to overcome even the scent of her perfume. Her neck was becoming stiff. She faced forward once more, supporting herself on her elbows. Her tone skeptical, she said, “Are you sure this doc didn’t study in a stable?”
“He would be grossly insulted. But I expect the muscles and hides of horses and people are much the same when they’re sore.”
He went down on one knee as he spoke. His view of her body, Elene realized in some discomfort, must be completely unimpeded. She did not move a muscle; there was no point in calling attention to her position. With a fine pretense at composure, she said, “I take back what I said. That really does feel better, thank you.”
“Doc will be pleased.”
His voice was soft, too soft, and the massaging pressure of his thumbs on the lacerated skin of her feet was hypnotic, addictive. “It … it must be late. I wonder where Devota is?”
“Having a well-earned rest, I would imagine. Besides, she has too much tact to come to you this early.”
“Knowing you would be here, I suppose you mean?”
“She’s an intelligent woman.” He switched his ministrations to her other foot.
“I … wonder if the others are up.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he answered shortly. “They are strangers.”
“You don’t like them being on your ship, do you?”
“We don’t have time to coddle passengers.”
“You could have left them behind.”
“Short of throwing them overboard one at a time, I don’t know how. Oh, I see. That’s what you expected of me. Such notoriety as I must have gained. Gambier doesn’t like it, either.”
“Durant? You spoke to him.” She shifted to look over her shoulder at him once more.
“It would be more accurate to say he spoke to me. He sought me out last night to demand an explanation of just why and how I happened to turn up with his bride-to-be.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth.”
“What!”
“Up to a point. I saw no reason to satisfy what seemed to be his chief concern.”
“Which was?” she asked in some foreboding.
“Whether you are still a virgin.”
She jerked upward, trying to push herself up to a sitting position, but he prevented it by clasping an ankle in each hand. “Let me go,” she demanded.
“Not until you tell me why you’re so upset.”
“Why should I be upset? I positively dote on the idea of the two of you standing around discussing my virginity. What could be more flattering.”
“I wasn’t discussing it, Gambier was.”
“Well, thank you, I’m sure. Would you care to tell me what kind of agreement was struck between you as to my favors after this manly conversation, or am I to guess at it from the fact that I found you in my bed this morning?” She kicked at him in annoyance at being held, but the movement was ineffective and he still would not release her.
He came erect in a smooth, powerful movement, and an instant later his weight was upon the length of her body, his pelvis pressing into the firm curves of her hips, his arms braced on either side like the bars of a prison. Against her ear, he said, “There was no agreement. Would you rather it was Durant here with you now?”
“Get off,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Answer my question.”
His position was a mistake; Ryan acknowledged it in grim control as he felt her movements under him as she tried to throw him off and the stirring in his loins in response. He would not relent until he had his answer, however. Its importance was too great.
“I told you how I felt about my arranged marriage. How can you ask such a thing? Or do you want to know for your own vanity?”
He rolled from her at once, sprawling beside her on the bunk. “Vanity?” he repeated in tones of disgust.
“What else could it be?”
What else indeed? He stared at her lying there with her hair spread around her, half concealing, half revealing the gleam of her shoulders and breasts, and lying in a shining swag in the indentation of her waist. He gazed at the pure clear light of her gray eyes, smelled the fragrance that was a part of her, and was struck by such intense yearning that he felt physically ill. His very heart hurt.
Deliberately he said, “I’m of no mind to give you up just because some precious sugar planter with a prior claim saved his skin by crawling aboard my ship. On the other hand, earlier last night you showed a great regard for respectability and I wouldn’t want to be the cause of you missing the opportunity now that your bridegroom has returned from the grave.”
“I understand,” she said, the light in her eyes as cold and dangerous as a northern lake in a storm. “That’s why you installed me in your cabin and spent the night with me, to make certain that Durant knows he would be getting soiled goods. Without you having to stoop to discuss it, of course.”
“Oh, no,” he said in quiet certitude, “I did that because I couldn’t bear to have it any other way. Because I knew that morning was coming, and I wanted to be here, to see you naked in the sunlight.”
She drew in her breath in surprise and sudden raw pain, as if she had received a mortal wound. She would not let it show. With a lift of her chin, she said, “Now that you have?”
“Now if Durant wants you, he will have to take you from me by force.”
“It seems to me that choice should be mine.”
“I rather thought you had made it.”
“Just because I don’t choose to be collected by Durant like some misplaced parcel doesn’t mean I care to depend on you. You made it plain that would not be wise.” Elene sat up, flipping her hair to one side and drawing her arms across her breasts.
“Foolish of me.”
“What does that mean?” she asked in suspicion.
“Nothing. Are you always this waspish before breakfast?”
His face was closed in, polite but totally unrevealing. There would be nothing more to be gained from questioning him. It was just as well. She was not sure she wanted to know more, why she was not sure.
They had missed breakfast. Ryan opened a door and shouted for the cabin boy, ordering coffee brought to them, but it was so near the noon meal that they decided to wait for anything more substantial. When the coffee came, Ryan drank his quickly, then threw on his clothes and left the cabin. He must have stopped to speak to Devota, for a few minutes later the woman arrived to help Elene dress.
When at last Elene stood gowned in the gold-green trimmed cotton poplin, with slippers on her feet and her hair neatly styled in a coronet of braids, she felt presentable for the first time in days, and also more herself. She was not given to conceit, but she hated to think of how bedraggled she must have looked the night before with her gown town and soiled and wrinkled past saving, her slippers ragged and filthy, her hair straggling down her back in a tangled mass, and the dark shadows of exhaustion under her eyes. Perhaps she could redeem herself, in part at least, by he
r neatness today. She would not forget that it was the actress Hermine to whom she owed the opportunity.
She had been afraid that Ryan meant to leave her to make her way to the common room alone. She was perfectly capable of doing it, but after his maneuver with the cabin, effectively displaying their relationship to all and sundry, she saw no reason why she should have to face the others without support.
She need not have worried. Ryan appeared with the ringing of the bell that announced midday and the changing of the watch. He surveyed her with grave attention, then shook his head.
“I liked your costume this morning better,” he said.
“But I didn’t have—” she began, then stopped in annoyed comprehension.
“Exactly,” he murmured, taking her arm and drawing it through his, admiring the color that had replaced the paleness of her face. “Shall we go?”
Once more, the others were waiting for them. The gentlemen came to their feet as Elene and Ryan entered, the ladies stared unabashedly. A young woman, the thin daughter of the planter, gave a nervous giggle. Durant, lounging against the wall, looked at them both, his eyes glittering and black with rage. It was the actor Morven Ghent who spoke, however, stepping forward with a glass of amber liquid in his hand and a flush on his broodingly handsome face.
“How honored we are,” he said in sonorous tones more than a little flattened by drink. “What felicity is ours. This repast before us cannot but be improved in flavor by the company of our host, the privateer Bayard, and his beautiful blonde paramour!”
7
“MORVEN,” HERMINE CRIED, “for pity’s sake, mind your manners.”
He looked at her, still holding his histrionic pose, his grin rueful. “Did I speak out of turn? Should I apologize?”
“At once!”
“My termagant speaks and I must obey, or be punished in various ways uncomfortable to my self-esteem.” He turned to Ryan and bowed with the utmost grace. “I beseech that you and your lady will overlook the lapse. Or failing such magnanimity, if it please you, I will await your seconds with all due humility.”
Ryan eyed the man without favor. “If you want to please me, Morven, you will save the play-acting for the stage.”
“Spoilsport,” the actor said. “The ladies were expecting to see our blood spilled on the floor before them. Will you deny them that small pleasure?”
“It pains me, it really does, but I don’t want to hear the caterwauling you would make if I so much as nicked your arm, not to mention the death soliloquies you would inflict on us.”
“What can you mean? I’m the bravest of fellows.”
“You’re a great humbug, like all actors.”
Morven heaved a melancholy sigh. “You may be right, but how can we be sure if you won’t indulge me?”
“Oh, I’ll do that quickly enough,” Ryan said softly, “the next time you malign the lady.”
The actor’s expressive brows arched high. “So that’s the way it is? I am forewarned.” He turned to Elene. “I am also contrite. In all truth, I am.”
It was plain from their banter that the two men knew each other. It was also clear that Morven Ghent was right, that more than one of the ladies present were disappointed there was not to be a duel between the two men. For an instant, Elene had been ready to do the actor an injury herself, but that was before she had seen the devilish glint in his green eyes. As for his taunt, she supposed it was an attitude she must learn to accept.
Morven Ghent was outrageously handsome in a dark and poetic style. His hair had the darkness of ebony and was as fine as a woman’s, his features were classically pure, his form elegant. His only fault was that he was well aware of how he looked, and enjoyed the effect it produced immensely.
She extended her hand. “M’sieur Ghent, I presume?”
“At your service, fair lady. I trust you are as recovered from your ordeal as you appear? I think all ladies should wish for such peril if it’s going to leave them as lovely as you.”
Florid compliments were the fashion in some circles, Elene knew, a meaningless courtesy. Still, they made pleasant hearing. “You are too generous.”
A plump matron sitting just beside them spoke with judicious candor even as the actor made his denials. “M’sieur Ghent has been doing his utmost to keep up the spirits of all the ladies with compliments, so kind when we are not at our best. The truth is, chère, you look rather worn. Come and tell us about your ordeal.”
Morven Ghent moved to one side. “Permit me to present Madame Françoise Tusard, the wife of a member of the officialdom of the island we are leaving behind us, though his position escapes me.”
“He is, or was, assistant to the commissioner,” the lady said, her large and rather splotchy face pink with irritation at the slighting reference. Her eyes were muddy blue and protuberant, her nose broad with a bulbous tip, her mouth small and tight and her thin hair turning gray unattractively. Her gown of black-dotted cherry muslin over an opaque chemise was somewhat the worse for wear, but still in the height of fashion. On her hands were soiled silk gloves the same cherry color as her gown, as if to maintain appearances even in the midst of chaos.
“Madame,” Elene said in polite acknowledgment.
“This gentleman behind me is my husband, M’sieur Claude Tusard,” the assistant commissioner’s wife said, indicating a rotund and mustachioed man in rumpled breeches, coat and waistcoat, and a shirt whose high collar would have made turning his head difficult if it had not been so wilted. The gentleman gave Elene an appraising stare and a bow. Before she could do more than curtsy in return, his wife went on, “Do come sit down and tell us everything.”
“No, no,” Morven said, “you must not monopolize the lady.”
Madame Tusard seemed to swell. “That, I take it, is your privilege?”
“How can you suggest it with our host so near? Are you anxious to see the color of my blood after all? It’s simply that there are others here whom she, and also Bayard, have yet to meet.”
It appeared to Elene that she was witnessing one of those small struggles for dominance which take place any time a group of people are brought together. Morven Ghent had a natural tendency to assume center stage regardless of the occasion, while Madame Tusard appeared to be a woman of a managing nature who was used to relying on her husband’s position to increase her status. For the moment, however, the official’s wife was outmaneuvered.
Elene, with Morven at one elbow and Ryan at the other, was dutifully introduced. First there was the third member of the acting troupe, a young woman from Martinique who called herself Josephine Jocelyn and affected the rather torrid airs of Napoleon’s wife from whom she had obviously taken a part of her stage name. Twisting a dark curl as she lounged in her chair, she fluttered her lashes and pouted full lips in Ryan’s direction while ignoring Elene. “They call me Josie,” she said to him. “I don’t mind if you do the same.”
The next girl, Flora Mazent, could not have been more different. She was so shy she could hardly keep her head up and her sallow, blue-veined skin took on a raspberry flush as she found herself the center of attention. Her lashes and brows were so fine as to be nearly nonexistent, and her figure rail-like and flat-chested. She spoke her greeting in a breathless voice, with only the briefest of glances from rather close-set hazel eyes.
“Speak up, Flora,” her father, standing nearby, told her, but his words had a tired sound, as if he knew they would do no good.
M’sieur Mazent was a widower it seemed, a stout man in gray, with thinning hair, the same hazel eyes as his daughter, and a habit of standing with one hand pressed to his abdomen. He had been a planter, but, like Elene and her father, had been burned out. He had holdings in Louisiana also, he said, so had not been ruined completely.
“Now that is done,” Madame Tusard said at the first pause, “perhaps we can eat. I see the food has arrived, and here is the captain to join us.”
There were eleven of them to sit down to the meal, six men
and five women taking their places at three tables. There was no particular order to the arrangement. Ryan and Elene were with Morven Ghent and Hermine. The ship’s captain was seated with Josephine, along with M’sieur Mazent and his daughter Flora, while Durant was left with M’sieur and Madame Tusard. So close together were the tables in the small salon, however, that there was no difficulty in talking back and forth.
The fare was simple, a hearty seafood stew, or gumbo, rich with shrimp and sausage and served over rice. Their needs were tended by a steward who ladled the gumbo from a pot he carried by its bail, then returned with a bottle of wine and a stack of small crusty loaves of bread for each table. The man did not tarry, but went away and left them to it.
Elene wondered where Devota was eating. Applying to Ryan for the information, she was told her maid was dining with the Mazent girl’s maid in a small room off the kitchen. Durant’s mistress, Serephine, was also not present. It was doubtful the woman would care to eat with the servants, yet it was certain Madame Tusard would object strenuously if Durant’s kept octoroon tried to take the vacant chair at her table. Such close quarters made for problems in these relationships where the woman was of neither one world nor the other. It was probable that Serephine was eating alone in whatever space had been found for her.
Not everyone was fortunate enough to have a cabin such as the one Elene shared with Ryan. Devota had told her that the other women were crowded into two rooms, while the men were bedded down with the crew. Captain Jean had gone to great lengths to prevent Madame Tusard from learning of the commodious cabin enjoyed by the ship’s owner. He had been afraid she would try to commandeer it for herself and her husband.
The conversation at Ryan’s table was lively. Hermine kept it going with quips and sallies. Her sense of the ridiculous was acute and she spared no one, especially herself. So unceremonious was she with Morven that it soon became apparent there was something more between them than an affection for the theater. Regardless, Morven did not hesitate to pay Elene the most extravagant court, with winks and languishing sighs, whenever Ryan’s attention was directed elsewhere.
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