To Tempt an Heiress

by Susanna Craig

  “Aye. But he takes the villain with him.”

  When the dog’s next circuit carried him past the door, he stopped and began to bark, a high-pitched sound of distress that brought Andrew to his feet, breaking the quiet intimacy of the moment. “What is it, Cal?”

  The barking stopped just long enough that he could hear the bell begin to ring on the deck. Not the signal to change the watch, but an alarm, jangling harshly, as if a frantic hand jerked the rope. Suddenly he knew what the commotion signified. He had seen this sort of behavior from the dog before, and he could not quite believe he had misunderstood its meaning now.

  It seemed Bewick was right. A woman on board ship posed a dangerous distraction.

  “What is it? An attack?” Tempest cried, jumping from her chair only to drop to her knees and wrap her arms around the panting dog.

  “No,” said Andrew. “A storm.”

  Chapter 9

  Once Andrew had slipped into his oilskins and left, Tempest set about the small tasks he had assigned her, hoping it would make her feel better to be doing something.

  Make sure everything that can move is secured.

  She straightened the desk, placed the heavy brass instrument in a drawer, restored the battered old volume of Shakespeare to its spot on the shelf, then slid the doors of the bookcase closed and turned the tiny key in the lock. A place for everything and everything in its place. Even the chairs fitted into cleverly designed grooves underneath the table, she discovered. Too soon, all was as snug and tight and sound as it could be, and she had no further distraction from her restlessness.

  Keep Caliban calm.

  By far the harder job, since the dog had been desperate to follow Andrew onto the deck and alternated between scratching and whining at the cabin door and cowering awkwardly in the little cage of chairs’ legs beneath the table. Eventually she persuaded him to join her in bed, pulling his ratty woolen blanket off the floor and smoothing it over the crisp linens, then patting it repeatedly to coax him up to lie, panting and anxious, beside her. Every gust of wind, every pitch of the ship, made them both stiffen and jerk with alarm.

  And remember, stay put.

  In truth, she had no desire to do otherwise. No stranger to the strength and unpredictability of tropical storms—on land, if not at sea—she knew worse, far worse, was yet to come. A glance at the rain-spattered window revealed nothing but night’s blackness. Still, she could feel that the sea was rising. By morning light, the Colleen would be tossed like a cork on the ocean. If morning ever came.

  She tried very hard not to think of Harper’s Hill. Would this storm also touch them?

  Was Omeah even now slipping into that trancelike state she inhabited when storm clouds appeared on the far horizon? Edward had speculated that she had survived a storm at sea on her voyage from Africa, but no one would ever know the truth, for Omeah, like most slaves, never spoke of that horrible passage.

  Would strong winds damage the mill further, or delay its repair so that the harvest was suspended or people were endangered?

  Would Edward regret having sent her into the unknown?

  Finding her imagination worse company than her present fears, she sat up and looked around, disturbing the dog, who whimpered piteously and burrowed closer. Surely there was something else she could be doing. But Andrew had given her only one other order.

  Don’t fret about the kiss, lass.

  And she stood far less chance of obeying that command than all the rest.

  Without conscious thought, she pressed the fingertips of one hand to her lips, as if she expected still to feel the heat of Andrew’s mouth on hers. A misstep, he had called it. She rather thought madness a more fitting word. But oh, what sweet madness it had been! How different from Edward’s fumbling attempt, when she had been just fifteen and he old enough to know better.

  Shortly thereafter, when her father had grown ill and died, and the marriage proposals had begun, she had made the vow never to wed. She would live independently for the sake of all those who were dependent upon her. She had sworn she did not need a man.

  How lowering to discover she might still want one.

  And to want such a one as him!

  Prince Hamlet, indeed. She felt quite certain Shakespeare had not intended the play as a statement in support of revenge. No—the story was a tragedy, meant to demonstrate the futility of such behavior. Not that she lacked sympathy for Andrew’s plight. She had spoken the truth when she had told him she understood the powerful pull of a father’s dream on a child’s destiny.

  But if it was not unthinkable to want to avenge his father’s death, certainly it was irresponsible to risk others’ lives in the process. She was surprised by the loyalty his crew had shown him, under the circumstances. Why on earth did they not resist his plan? But maybe they had reasons not to. A man like Ford, for instance, would hardly be served by rebelling. It would only put him in another sort of peril. Perhaps she had been asking the wrong questions all along. Perhaps it was not what their captain had to hide, but the sailors’ own pasts that shaped their decisions. Who could know what bound all of them to their service aboard the Colleen?

  Perhaps they were inspired to risk their lives by his willingness to risk his own. It looked an awful lot like daring, even if there was a certain recklessness at its core.

  And she could hardly fault them for falling under his spell. After all, on what foundation was her own attraction to him built? Not trust, certainly—he had been hired to kidnap her! Later he had argued that she must continue the journey to keep Lord Nathaniel on the hunt, when really, his own interests had been equally served by taking her across the sea. Could he have known from the first that having her aboard his ship would prove the surest way for him to lure his enemy out of hiding at last? No, too many pieces would have had to fall into place for it to have been a clear plan. Still, he seemed glad enough to reap the benefits.

  It was not reasonable, the fascination she felt for this dark, dangerous man with a mysterious past and an even more uncertain future. Nor was it proper. Miss Wollstonecraft had many hard words for the human weakness of lust. Tempest knew a rational creature ought not to succumb to her animal nature.

  But she had never quite mastered the art of behaving with perfect rationality. To say nothing of perfect propriety.

  Could she satisfy the desire she felt without surrendering her dream? She had accepted that forgoing marriage would entail certain sacrifices ... children, companionship. She had never worried about giving up passion, for that was pure emotion and something to be avoided. Physical curiosity, however, could be satisfied without involving her heart at all, could it not?

  Her eyes darted around the small, ever-darkening room. Andrew’s cabin. Andrew’s things. Andrew’s bed. Six weeks at sea without a chaperone in sight. She had courted scandal by coming aboard this ship. She was already ruined—at least, in the eyes of the world. And she had never cared much for what the world thought, anyway.

  She was more than willing to live her life alone, if that was what duty required.

  But would it be so wrong to have the memory of one night of pleasure with a scoundrel to keep her warm in the years to come?

  If they survived to have one night together, that was. The Colleen heaved and Caliban groaned and shifted against her, having fallen at last into a restless sleep. Tempest doubted she would be so lucky. The storm raging outside would make sleep impossible.

  To say nothing of the one roiling within.

  * * *

  Sailors were a notoriously godless lot. So Andrew knew things were bad when he found Hackett kneeling on the aft deck, his hands uplifted in prayer.

  The darkness was thick, almost palpable, as Andrew struggled against the wind to make his way to the helm, where Bewick stood with his pipe still clenched between his teeth, although the rain had long since put it out.

  “Where did you last see the Justice?” Andrew asked. The last thing he wanted was to come up against another ship
under these conditions. If the storm didn’t take them, a shipwreck surely would, and all Edward Cary’s money would not buy back the Colleen from the murky depths of the Atlantic.

  “A league or so off t’starboard and makin’ way.”

  “Before the storm came up, or after?”

  Bewick looked thoughtful. “Weather changed so fast, it’s hard t’say. Before, if I had t’ guess.”

  So Stratton had slipped past them, presumably with the idea of turning back to challenge them head-to-head. And he was out there now, in the blackness of a rough sea, much closer than Andrew would have liked. It was not the report he had hoped to hear.

  He laid a hand on the wheel. “Get some rest. I’ll need you, come daybreak.” As wild as the wind already seemed, he knew the storm would only strengthen with the rising sun.

  Bewick looked for a moment as if he intended to protest, then nodded and took his leave.

  Through the night Andrew battled against an enemy he could not see, not to keep the Colleen on course, for there was nothing to chart by. Simply to keep her afloat. And his whole body screamed with the effort.

  When dawn began to lighten the sky, he found himself longing for darkness again. Better not to see those waves that rose like mountains and threatened to tumble over them. Better not to see the panic on the faces of his crew. In ten years, he had known nothing to equal the power of this storm.

  Although he was not a superstitious man, it was difficult not to wonder whether he had brought this on them all. He had bid his crew risk their lives for a justice—and a Justice—that might never be served. Perhaps this was the end of their journey. What sort of man went to sea with a woman whose very name invoked storm and shipwreck?

  The sort, apparently, who also took comfort in the knowledge that if the Colleen went down, at least he would die with Tempest’s kiss on his lips.

  With practiced eyes Andrew studied the seam between sea and sky, which was neither blue, nor gray, nor green, but somehow all three at once—the ineffable color Thomas Holderin had seen in his daughter’s eyes and yet had seen fit to name.

  Oh, he was cursed, all right. He would be surrounded by that stormy shade until his final hours. He would never be able to forget those eyes—or the woman to whom they belonged.

  * * *

  After three days—or thereabouts, for in this mix of dark mornings and swirling nights, who could say how many days had passed?—Tempest was ready to join Caliban in clawing at the door, desperate for news, fresh air, and fresh water . . . and not necessarily in that order.

  With every window shut tight, the cabin had grown stale with a mixture of odors, both human and canine, scents she would rather not untangle. She was not hungry, at least. The pitching sea had taken care of that. Her body felt heavy with the strange sort of exhaustion that came from lack of sleep and enforced inactivity. When the gray view of a ragged sea grew too much, she drew the curtains and tried not to wonder whether she and the dog were the lone survivors of this terrible storm, tossed about in an abandoned ship on the vast, inhospitable ocean.

  And then on the fourth day, in the afternoon—or so she called it, anyway, for the sky was yellow—a sort of lull fell over the sea. Kneeling on the bench to peek between the drapes, she studied the rise and fall of water that only a week ago she would have called rough, but now felt eerily calm. Was the storm relenting at last? Or had it merely paused to draw its breath before whipping itself into a frenzy once again?

  She glanced over her shoulder at the cabin door. The unlocked cabin door.

  Remember, stay put.

  But he would never even know she had defied him. Just a breath of fresh air. Just a glimpse of another human soul.

  Fearing that Caliban would make a break for it when the door was opened, but incapable of denying the dog a momentary reprieve from the confines of the cabin, she rummaged everywhere for something that could be used as a leash. When she could find nothing like rope, not even twine, she settled on one of Andrew’s cravats and tied one end of the length of linen around the dog’s neck, wrapped the other around her wrist, and prayed that the fabric was sturdy.

  “We stop at the top of the stairs, Caliban. Do you hear me?” The dog wagged his tail in acknowledgment, if not necessarily agreement, then looked expectantly at the door. Tempest’s fingers lingered over the latch. What would she find on its other side?

  From the bottom of the open stairwell, she could see nothing of the deck. Still, she paused and looked up at the sky, welcoming the wash of rain over her face, swallowing its sweetness with the gusto of a parched man wandering in the desert.

  Caliban was content to lick the water from the bottom stair for a moment, and then tugged mightily to be allowed to ascend. With a sturdy grip on his makeshift leash, and a sturdier one on the railing, Tempest followed him up the few steps.

  Only a step or two into the climb, she could see that the deck was not empty . . . of people, at any rate. But everything that had not been anchored, and even some things that had, were gone, swept overboard by the waves that still buffeted the ship, clawing their way up its sides and spilling their salty froth over the planking. The section of damaged railing Ford had been attempting to repair had entirely disappeared.

  A handful of sailors, so soaked as to be indistinguishable from one another, were working to capture the rope of a sail that had broken loose. Andrew was at the helm, she thought—at least, she felt certain the man muffled in oilcloth and holding the wheel wasn’t the shorter Mr. Bewick.

  As she watched, the rope jerked free of the hands of the half-dozen men trying to secure it and whipped across the deck like a snake about to strike, catching on the main mast and snapping back again, throwing off at last a tenacious straggler, the one man who had been unwilling or unable to release his grip on the rope. The man slid across the water-slick wood, scrabbling for purchase and finding none.

  And she realized, as she looked on, that it was not a man. It was a boy.

  Timmy Madcombe’s mouth was open in a shriek of panic, but the wind and the waves swallowed the sound. As he sped toward the jagged gap in the ship’s railing, Tempest dropped Caliban’s leash and clasped her hands over her mouth. There was nothing now between the boy and the sea but a few yards of empty deck.

  Afterward, she could not be certain who reached Timmy first, Andrew or his dog. Both sank iron grips into his clothing and around his limbs, Caliban lowering his body and digging his claws into the soft, wet wood, Andrew holding on for dear life to a remaining fragment of the rail. All three hung suspended, fighting the greedy, grasping fingers of the sea in a desperate tug-of-war over the boy’s life.

  The Colleen lurched, knocking Tempest to her knees, and when she looked up again, a wash of foam was retreating over the edge of the ship. Hands gripped the captain’s ankle, the last link in a chain of men that had suddenly sprung into being, extending from the mast to the disaster, while Andrew’s hands now grasped Caliban’s improvised leash. Although she searched frantically, squinting through the rain, Timmy was nowhere to be seen. The powerful Atlantic had won the struggle and claimed its prize: a boy’s life.

  The ship pitched back, slinging the captain and his dog away from the railing and back toward the mast, where they collided with the others in a gasping heap. Andrew hugged the dog to him and buried his face in the wet, gray fur, his hands still tangled in the now-ragged linen leash. He glanced down at the strip of fabric, then looked up sharply, as if some realization had suddenly struck him.

  Scanning the deck, his eyes stopped when they found Tempest, who still knelt at the top of the small flight of stairs, her hands over her mouth, her cheeks wet with salt water that had not all come from the sea. When he saw her there, his face contorted in a mask of anguish as much as anger, and he shouted at her—words that were lost, thankfully, to the elements. But she knew their import. With a jerk, she struggled to her feet and darted back into the cabin, the surge of bile in her throat unable to make its way past her heart, which fel
t as if it had been lodged there permanently.

  She stayed in the cabin, alone, for the next day—or was it two?—until the storm really had died down and the ship rocked more smoothly and the sun rose once again over the gray waters of the Atlantic. Though the brightness seemed a betrayal, anathema to her grief, she opened the windows to let in the sweet air and was just wondering how she might reach the skylight when she heard the door latch rattle.

  As she turned toward the door, it swung open to admit Caliban, who sprayed the cabin’s interior with a vigorous shake of his damp fur. Andrew stood dripping on the threshold.

  She hurried to him because she could not do otherwise. “Is everything—everyone—everyone else all right?” she asked, stumbling over a question that required more courage than she had anticipated. His cheeks were gaunt and pale beneath his dark beard, and heavy lines of fatigue etched his face. “Are you all right?”

  “Aye,” he said as he staggered past her toward the bedroom, stripping off his sodden suit of oilcloth as he went, and collapsed onto his bed. His next words were muffled by the pillow, but she had no doubt of what he had said.

  “The Justice went down in the storm.”

  Chapter 10

  Tempest awoke stiff and sore, surprised to find she had slept at all. Fear stabbed through her at the sight of the darkening sky. Nightfall, she told herself, pushing down her rising panic. Not another storm. Stretching, she rose from the padded bench beneath the window and then chanced a peek into the other room. Andrew’s oilcloth suit lay in a puddle on the floor and he lay in a similarly damp heap on the bed, sprawled facedown, showing no sign of having moved for hours.

  Wagging a finger at Caliban, who would have pushed past her and gone to wake him, she pulled the door closed with silent caution and in a few steps emerged onto the empty deck. A steady breeze, still tropically warm but without the oppressive weight of the storm, ruffled her short curls as she drew greedy lungfuls of its fresh goodness. The sun was just dipping below the horizon, and already she could see stars winking in the sky above. Like a ghost ship awaiting its haunted crew, the ship sat still, its sails tightly furled, its decks swept clean by the storm. The sudden isolation was more than a little frightening, like finding oneself a sole survivor on a deserted island. Caliban’s snuffling exploration of every abandoned nook and cranny, broken only by stops to relieve himself on the masts, called to mind the heart-wrenching description of Robinson Crusoe cast away with only a dog for company.