A Certain Latitude

by Janet Mullany

  Clarissa Onslowe, raising her eyebrows at the sight of her polluted sheets, wondering, and then realizing. Yes. Excited by the thought of a man frigging himself while she slept, inflamed by her nearness. She’d think of him with his hand on his cock, small efficient tugs; that’s all it would take now, thinking of him thinking of her—yes. Oh, God, yes. The devil with any sounds, too late now—oh Christ—

  “Oh, Christ!” He let out a yelp of pure fear, spunk shooting from his cock, as something with small tickly claws ran over his feet.

  “What’s wrong?” There was a loud crack from below, her head probably, as she sat up. “Ouch!”

  “A mouse, a damned mouse, something!” He leaped stark naked from the berth. “Right over my foot…oh, Christ.”

  “You’re frightened of mice?” Damn her, she was laughing.

  “No. Yes. I was surprised, that’s all.” He was out of breath for several reasons.

  “It was probably much more frightened of you.”

  “Of course, since I wasn’t frightened of it.” His breathing steadied. Even in the darkness there was probably light enough for her to see his cock, now at half mast, still oozing seed, and the thought embarrassed him. “I beg your pardon. I woke you up.”

  “No matter. I’ll ask the sailors if they’ll lend us one of their cats tomorrow. That should take care of it.” She yawned and turned over. “Go to sleep, Allen.”

  Allen? She’d used his Christian name, without his permission, as though they were equals, and he was taken aback by her impertinence. On the other hand she hadn’t been surreptitiously frigging herself and then shrieking with fear at a mouse.

  All too conscious that once again he’d made a fool of himself Allen slumped back into his berth. He landed straight onto the wet patch he’d made, covered himself up, and fell asleep.

  Damn him. As though the ship wasn’t bad enough in keeping her awake, tipping her around in her berth and bumping her against the raised edge, while all the while timbers creaked and groaned, and waves slapped and crashed. Allen Pendale was not a restful presence. Mrs. Blight had been a noisy sleeper, grunting and snoring, but he was worse, thumping around—well, he was a large man, of course, and she didn’t realize how disturbing it was to lie in the lower berth beneath someone—then jumping out and shrieking, and now he was…surely not. She listened. Another wet snuffle, an intake of breath.

  Allen Pendale, weeping?

  She slid from her berth and stood. He lay on his back, broad enough to be wedged into his berth, although it surely couldn’t be very comfortable. It was light enough now for her to see the tears that ran down his face. One hand lay loosely curled on the pillow next to his head.

  “Allen. Mr. Pendale. Wake up.”

  He gasped and mumbled something.

  “Allen!” This time she shook his shoulder.

  “What the devil?” He came awake then, staring at her dumbfounded, and wiped his hand over his face. “Sorry. Bad dream. Didn’t…” He wiped his face on the sheet, somewhat to her annoyance, and groped for her hand. “On a ship.”

  “Yes, you’re on the Daphne. On a ship.”

  “No, the dream.” He stared at her. “Why am I always such a fool with you, Clarissa?”

  She’d wondered about that, too. She was pretty much a fool with him, too, but she hoped she hid it better. Or was that just another instance of her cowardice? Didn’t it take a certain courage to admit anything—interest, desire, love—to someone, not knowing whether your feelings were returned? Or was it merely stupidity, for God knew she had been stupid once. She snatched back her other hand which, like an independent being, had crept forward to smooth the tumble of hair from Allen’s brow.

  His fingers loosened and slid from hers, his eyes closed, and he fell back asleep.

  Clarissa glanced around the cabin, then pulled her stays on, grateful that they were side-lacing and she didn’t have to ask for anyone else’s help. She could only imagine Allen Pendale’s reaction—or could she? Was he was spying on her? No, his back was turned to her and he appeared to be asleep. Naturally, as soon as she abandoned the idea of sleep herself, he became as quiet as a lamb. There was a different movement to the ship now, a deeper swing and rock, and it was colder. Sleet rattled against the small window, followed by the splash of a wave against the glass.

  She drew on her much-darned silk stockings, regretting now that she had thrown away her workaday wool ones, her back turned to Pendale in case some powerful male instinct alerted him to what she was doing. She would have liked to wash, but it was too rough. She imagined water slopping all over the cabin, even if she or Peter, the ship’s boy, managed to get it down the stairs. Finally dressed, shoes, gloves and cloak on, she tapped on the Blights’ door and was greeted with silence. Cautiously she opened the door and peered inside. They were both asleep, but the necessary bucket had overturned and spilled onto the floor. Wrinkling her nose, she decided to seek out Peter, closed the door and climbed up the stairs in darkness—the hatch was closed. With some difficulty she threw it open, and was met with a spray of freezing salt water.

  She clambered out, slammed the hatch shut, and stepped into another world, gray and fierce. A wave broke onto the steep slope of the deck, the water draining off as the ship righted.

  “Best to stay below, today, ma’am,” Mr. Johnson bawled at her above the wind, apparently recovered from his seasickness. “Peter will be below in a while, so tell him what you need.”

  “Thank you,” she shouted back.

  “Mind yourself, ma’am!” He grasped her hand and closed it around a rope. “Hold on tight, and keep out of the way, if you please.”

  Water broke over her feet, soaking and chilling them, but she didn’t care, exhilarated by the danger, the wild elements. She skidded and stumbled to the galley where Lardy Jack, face red from heat and steam, controlled wildly swinging pots over the fire.

  “Good morning, miss. A bit of weather, today, but we’re making good speed.”

  “Indeed, yes. How are the chickens?”

  “Two washed overboard, the rest probably not laying for the moment. I’ll send Peter down with breakfast, ma’am. You shouldn’t be out in this.”

  “I’m most grateful. Make sure he brings the mop, if you please.”

  “You’re not sick, are you miss? We have bets on you and Mr. Pendale.”

  “Not yet.” She grinned back at him. “I trust you won’t lose any money on my account. Can you give me an ember for the lantern?”

  “Surely, miss.” He deftly shoveled hot coals into a small pot and handed it to her. “Careful, now.”

  She would have liked to stay on deck to watch the waves crest and break but, with the amount of activity going on, knew she would only be in the way. She timed her entry into the hatch when there was little water on deck, slamming it closed behind her. Below it felt relatively quiet and warm, away from the roar of wind and sails. She blew on the embers and watched the red heat and glow, warming her hands on the pot.

  She lit the lantern while Allen slept on. Oh, yes, she and Mr. Pendale were going to be on very intimate terms, one way or the other, if this weather held.

  Allen awoke to the vision of Clarissa Onslowe undressing. She sat on his box, one ankle resting on a knee as she peeled off a wet stocking. She wrinkled her nose, smiled, and wriggled her reddened toes to warm them. She smelled of salt, clean and wild, and her face was flushed.

  “Here.” He spoke before he realized the implications of what he was doing, spying on her while she undressed. “Borrow some stockings—there’s a clean pair inside my box.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  It was strange to see a woman he didn’t know poking around among his clothes, books, and papers.

  She gave a small cry of triumph and waved a book at him. “A novel!”

  “You may borrow it, ma’am.”

  He would have liked to watch her put on the dry stockings, but he was having trouble enough with yet another erection, cramming it inside
his breeches, rearranging his shirt so hopefully it wouldn’t show, while flat on his back. Time to take a piss—he wondered how she’d managed, but of course a cloaked woman could do a lot under skirts and petticoats with no one the wiser.

  He really should stop thinking about what lay beneath her skirts.

  “I expect you…I believe Peter is with the Blights. I should…” With great tact she left the cabin as he swung himself down from the berth, as usual bashing his head on a beam.

  “If we were gypsies we’d be married now,” he said as she returned. Presumably she had fastened the stockings outside the door.

  “I beg your pardon?” She gave him a frosty glare.

  He swung himself onto his bed—her bed—and propped one hand under his head. “It’s how gypsies marry. They both piss into the same pot, or so I was told once.” The erotic charge of it had not escaped him and he wondered if he was turning into some sort of pervert. At the same time, the intimacy of marriage, as something other than a series of legal arrangements, for the first time seemed strangely attractive.

  “How delightful,” she muttered, digging into her own box of possessions. She drew out a long length of pale fabric and sat, searching for, and finding, a needle and thread in its folds. She looked up. “Do you have nothing better to do than lie there and stare at me?”

  Miss Onslowe was not in a mood to charm anyone today.

  “Apparently not. I should go and see about some breakfast, if Lardy Jack can cook anything at all in this.”

  “I already have.” She stabbed her needle into the fabric. “Peter will bring us something. Mr. Johnson said we should stay below.”

  “The devil with that.” He swung himself down, annoyed by her bad temper. Maybe she was getting seasick. He hoped not. He didn’t want to see her wretched and undignified, like the sufferers in the next cabin.

  He squeezed by her to put on his boots, noticing that she sat with one hand on her stomach, her face creased. “Clarissa, are you sick?” he barked, looking around for a receptacle for her to puke into.

  “No, I am not, thank you, Mr. Pendale. The crew, by the way, have bets on us, so you’d best go show your face.”

  When he returned, soaked and chilled, and awed by the force of wind and water, he found the reason for her bad temper. She straightened up, her face flushing red with embarrassment, cloths dangling from her hand—rags that held an unmistakable pale brown stain despite their bleached-out state.

  “It’s my woman’s condition,” she said, and he realized she was close to tears. “And I can’t find the rest of my pins, and…”

  “Let me look.” He knelt at her side and poked through her possessions, as she had done his. He found her pins, fastened to a scrap of paper, by pricking himself on them, buried among petticoats or some such. She certainly owned very little—a few pairs of stockings, silk but much darned, neatly folded garments of linen and cotton, a small box that might contain jewelry, a hairbrush and toothbrush, a pair of half-boots, a straw bonnet. That was all; no letters or papers, nothing that hinted of family or friends.

  He handed the pins to her and left the cabin, bracing himself in the narrow space at the bottom of the stairs.

  Poor girl. Far from home, stuck with a boor of a fellow whom she’d let get under her skirts and would far sooner ignore, and now having to deal with female matters with no privacy at all.

  Wait, he chided himself, this was not some pathetic waif of a woman. This was Clarissa Onslowe, the woman who had used him and would almost certainly sell herself to the highest bidder.

  He tapped on the Blights’ door, and asked cheerily about their health.

  He was answered by heartfelt groans.

  A spray of cold water and light from above, accompanied by the scent of bacon, revealed Peter coming down the stairs, agile as a monkey, a large bundle tucked under one arm. “Bacon and cheese, sir, and bread, and a cask of cider and a flask of his lordship’s wine.”

  Allen thanked him and tapped on the cabin door. Clarissa was sitting sewing, head bent.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been very kind.”

  “It’s a damnable situation,” he said. “As you said, we must make the best of it.” He paused, while concentrating very hard on opening the cask of cider with the minimum of spillage, and pouring some into the two cups Lardy Jack had provided. It was remarkable how difficult everything was when liquids wanted to move in unexpected ways and you didn’t seem to have enough hands—something he’d discovered earlier aiming, with only a fair amount of success, into the chamber-pot.

  He handed a cup to her. She drank but refused food.

  He was worried, now. She was getting seasick, he was sure of it. She didn’t look well, pale and with dark shadows under her eyes.

  “Would you like to lie down?” He asked her. “If you’re getting sick, it might help.”

  She shook her head. “As I told you before, I’m not seasick.”

  “Good. I put a guinea on you in the stakes with the crew.”

  “You—” to his relief she laughed. “I am flung about in all directions when I lie down. I have barely slept and my back hurts.”

  Of course. She was so slender, whereas he filled his shelf—he really couldn’t dignify it by calling it a bed—and could wedge himself in.

  He stood and grabbed her quilt, folding it. “Lie down, Miss Onslowe. I’ll put this beside you to keep you in place.”

  “But you’ll be cold…” Despite her words she lay down with a sigh.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll use my cloak when it’s dried out.” He knelt by her. “Turn over. I’ll rub your back.”

  She made a sound as though about to protest, but shifted, and let him put his thumbs on her lower back, where he kneaded and rubbed. A former mistress, who suffered greatly at such times, had shown him what to do.

  She was lithe and taut beneath his hands, at first resisting—he could feel how she tensed, mistrusting—but then relaxed, her breathing deep and slow, as she fell into sleep.

  He covered her up, tucking the covers around her, and knelt watching her sleep, her hair spilling over the pillow. Her lips were slightly parted as though awaiting a lover’s kiss.

  CHAPTER 5

  Three days of rough weather followed—not rough enough for the hatches to be battened down, trapping them below, a possibility Clarissa dreaded—but bad enough for them to want to stay dry and relatively warm in the cabin. It was as though her courses dictated the weather, and she understood why sailors traditionally were wary of women aboard ships. Occasionally, she or Allen ventured onto the deck, to return shivering and drenched, or visited the unhappy Blights. Finally, in desperation, she dosed them with brandy and laudanum from Mrs. Blight’s medicine box and hoped she did not kill them.

  She found, after the initial embarrassments of sharing such a small space, that she was surprisingly comfortable in Allen Pendale’s presence. They spoke occasionally, and learned to tell the time of day from the changing light and the clang of the ship’s bells. Allen’s watch had stopped some time ago, either suffering from some sort of mechanical seasickness or a dousing with seawater.

  Allen produced a bottle of lime juice and insisted she take some, even though it made her mouth pucker. It was, as he pointed out, better than losing her teeth.

  She didn’t know when they started to use each other’s Christian names; not often—there was little need for names in a small world where they were the only human inhabitants. She still smiled when she thought of Allen, stark naked, with a musky, salty scent about him, panicked over a mouse. And that particular scent, she realized, was semen. It excited her to think of his surreptitious pleasure. How did he look, had he wanted her to know what he did, or was he ashamed and frantic?

  She stopped bleeding; the weather calmed.

  “Clarissa?” Allen’s fingers brushed her arm. “Are you awake?”

  “Mmm.” She caught his fingers in the dark, thick and strong, slightly rough.

&nbs
p; “Shall we take a turn on deck?”

  They both began the usual awkward scramble of getting dressed in the dark in the small space. She stood to lace her stays and found that, now, she could sway with the motion of the ship for the most part, as the sailors did, keeping her balance. She pulled her gown over her head and bumped into Allen as he descended from his berth, a brief, clumsy slide, his breath, sweet with cider, warm against her face, the rasp of his cheek on hers.

  If either of them had turned their face a fraction, they would have kissed. She would have liked that very much and imagined his lips on hers—not the wet, open-mouthed, carnal greed of their first encounter, but a gentle greeting between strangers who had grown to like each other. She did like him, she realized, for his practicality and kindness, the grace with which he accepted their forced intimacy. He had rubbed her back that first day of her courses as gently as another woman might, soothing her into sleep as she released a few tears of humiliation into her pillow.

  “Ready?” His voice interrupted her thoughts.

  “My gloves…” She patted her bed.

  “Try your cloak pocket.”

  Like an old married couple, or brother and sister—neither comparison sat comfortably with her. She eased her cloak onto her shoulders and found her gloves. She bumped into Allen again as he moved to open the door for her, and she looked up to see a square of lighter black studded with pinpricks of light—the night sky. The hatch was open, which meant calmer weather and no chance of heavy seas crashing onto the deck.

  The air was freezing, the twinkle of the stars brilliant against the night sky. Behind them, a slight lightening and a pinkish tinge to the sky at the horizon indicated that sunrise was not far off.

  “It’s like a miracle,” he said softly into her ear.

  Miss Onslowe, Clarissa, you’re a miracle. Unsettled by the vivid memory of his hand up her skirts, she moved away and took a deep breath of cold, fresh air.

  “It smells so clean,” she said.

  He laughed. “Probably because I smell so bad.”