Captain Of My Heart

by Danelle Harmon

  It wasn’t into anything.

  ###

  The mutual frustration and helplessness they both felt as Brendan faded before their eyes, and Mira’s spirit died with him, only strengthened the growing bond between Matt and Eveleen, for it brought them together out of necessity, as well as need.

  On a day when Eveleen sat spooning clam chowder into Matt as the two of them lamented the situation, Eveleen finally decided she’d had enough of Mira’s self-pity and despair. Her friend had pulled her out of the misery that had been hers since Crichton had left her a cripple; now it was time to do the same for her. Eveleen waited just long enough for Matt to finish his supper, carried the bowl back to the kitchen, where, oddly, she was able to pass by a plate of Abigail’s sugared almonds without taking any, and marched back up the imposing mahogany staircase and into Brendan’s room.

  And there was Mira, still glued to the chair, head bent, Brendan’s hand clenched in her own, and the Essex Gazette spread across her lap. Her voice was muffled through her thick hair, and her words were strained, hoarse, and ragged.

  Eveleen frowned.

  Sunlight slanted through the window, backlighting Mira’s rumpled muslin gown; her hair fell down over her eyes and across the page from which she was reading. Doggedly she put the newspaper down, shoved the hair over her shoulder, and never relinquishing her hold on Brendan’s hand, continued on, forcing a cheery note to her voice that, combined with the choking brokenness of it, was absolutely pitiful to hear.

  “‘Yesterday—’” Sniff. “‘— the privateering sloop Yankee Lady defeated the British brig-of-war Worcester in a brief but intense exchange in the waters of Nantucket Sound, where the enemy hauled down his colors to the sloop after losing his main topmast.’” Sniff. She passed a knuckle under her eye, shoved her hair back again, and turned the page. “‘By the intelligence of well-placed informants, we learn of a plan by the British to fortify Penobscot Bay—’ Penobscot, Brendan, that’s in Maine! ‘—and establish a haven for loyalists who’ve been driven from their homes. It is feared that the Enemy may construct a fort here, and talk abounds as to the best way to drive them out before they do. . . .’” She paused, for that was not good news, and she’d given the order herself that nothing but good news must reach Brendan, whether he appeared to hear it or not. Hastily she flipped to the front page. “And here, Brendan, listen to this—‘Spain has now allied itself with France, who’s agreeing to help her recover the Bay of Honduras, Florida, Minorca, and Gibraltar from the Brits in return for military and naval aid.’ Spain is in the war! Now, that’s good news, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t move.

  She wiped another tear away, drying her fingers against skirts that were already damp. Another tear trickled down her cheek. Another.

  The skirt grew damper.

  “And here, something about General Washington. And wait! Look at this, Brendan.” The page was dog-eared and worn, for Ephraim had had the newspaper first. “This is about you! It says, and I quote, ‘And the people of Newburyport continue to pray for the brave and gallant Captain Brendan Merrick, who was treated most shamefully at our hands before setting out to rescue Captain Matthew Ashton from the hideous brutalities of Captain Crichton of His Majesty’s Royal Navy.’” She paused, the tears filling her eyes, her nose, her throat, and making it impossible to read the blurry print. With a sob, she set the paper across her lap and buried her face in her wet hands.

  And then she jerked her head up and viciously clawed the hair out of her eyes. “Dammit, Brendan, did you hear me? I said they’ve forgiven you.”

  He didn’t move.

  Heartache swelled her chest, threatening to burst it. “Forgiven you! What more do you want? Patrick Tracy and Mr. Johnson were here this morning, and Michael Dalton’s penning a letter to General Washington commending you, telling him all you did—” She gulped back the tears, her voice catching on sobs. “N-next thing you know, the general will be b-b-begging you to lend Kestrel to the Continental navy—” Sniff. “Next thing you know, he’ll—” Sob. “—be asking you t-to give up privateering and join the n-navy instead.” Sniff. Sob. Sniff. “N-next thing you know, they’ll be making you a c-commodore. A . . . f-flag captain.”

  Bursting into tears, she hurled the newspaper to the floor and buried her face in her hands. She didn’t know if the American navy had flag captains or not—but she did know that Brendan would never be one.

  And that he’d never be a commodore.

  And that he’d never be a privateer again, either, for he wasn’t going to be doing any more sailing. Not today. Not tomorrow.

  Maybe not ever.

  In the open doorway, Eveleen, regal in pink and gold silk, set her jaw and put her hands on her hips as Mira’s voice, barely discernible through fingers, tears, and hair, shattered the quiet of the room.

  “Oh, Brendan . . . you never cared what Newburyport thought, you only cared what I thought. If I’d believed in you from the very start, maybe you’d still have set out to rescue Matt, but at least you’d have done so knowing that I’d forgiven you. That I loved you. But no, I was too busy wallowing in my own grief, looking for someone to blame Matt’s death on, never realizing that you carried more hurt and pain than any of us because you had to bear our condemnation, our accusations, our hatred.” Her voice broke and her anguished sobs drowned out the chirps of baby sparrows just outside the open window. “Oh, Brendan . . . I know you love Matt as a brother! I know you’re not a coward, not a traitor, not a . . . not a Brit!” She raised a red and puffy face, clawed the tears from her cheeks, and screamed, “You’re a goddamned . . . Irishman! You’re an American! You’re a cussed, bloody, stupid, gallant fool!”

  Angrily she flung his hand back across his chest, her muffled sobs wracking her body and making her chair creak as she rocked miserably back and forth, her head in her hands. “Stupid, bloody fool! You’ve had your revenge on us, now, wake up, damn you . . . Damn, damn, damn. . . .

  Huddled there with her arms wrapped around her knees, she missed it: the twitch of his finger; the shift in the rhythm of his breathing; the slight roll of his eyes beneath lax lids.

  And Eveleen, standing in the doorway. “Really, Mira. You disappoint me.”

  Mira raised her head, glared at her, and let her face fall back to her wet palms again. “Go away.”

  “He needs your fighting spirit right now. Not your self-pity.”

  “Get out!”

  Eveleen was not intimidated. With regal grace she swept into the room, shoved the window open as wide as it would go, and pulled up a chair, where she faced Mira from across the bed. Their gazes clashed; calm gold against angry green. Serenity against rage.

  Faith against despair.

  “Well?” Mira shouted, swiping at falling tears and glaring at the other woman over Brendan’s blanketed chest. “You came here to say something, so say it and then leave me alone!”

  Eveleen looked thoughtfully down at her brother’s still face and adjusted her gown, which kept sliding down her shoulder. She frowned and, forgoing hauteur, finally yanked it back up and said something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like a curse before facing Mira with an apologetic smile. Mira did not smile back.

  “When I first met you,” Eveleen began quietly, “I admired you because you had everything I didn’t, everything I wanted—and yet you never struck me as a selfish person. But lately I’ve begun to wonder otherwise.”

  Mira’s eyes hardened, and she clenched her fists at the sides of her chair.

  Dauntlessly Eveleen continued, “What gives you the right to sit here and hate yourself for what my brother made the choice to do?” Reaching out, she brushed her fingers against Brendan’s pale and sunken cheek. “Do you honestly think he could have let what Crichton did to Matthew go unavenged? What Crichton did to me?” She thrust her maimed hand toward Mira for emphasis. “This has been going on for four years, Mira. Four years. And it isn’t finished yet. Oh, no, not by any means. When my bro
ther recovers, he’ll go back out there and he won’t stop until he finds Crichton and puts an end to his cruelties.”

  Mira sniffed back angry sobs. “Your brother isn’t going anywhere, Eveleen, except to a plot behind St. Paul’s Church!”

  “I beg to differ, Mira. And so does John Keefe, and Fergus McDermott, and even Liam Doherty—”

  “Liam Doherty!” Mira leapt to her feet, slamming her tiny fist into the wall so hard that outside, the sparrows stopped chirping. “What the bloody hell does he know? And Fergus waving crystals around like a sachet of perfume every time he comes here. He and Liam and the rest of those bloody Irishmen are making me sick! ‘He’ll be just fine, Mira; you wait and see,’” she mimicked. “None of you can face reality! None of you see him wasting away before your eyes as I do! Or maybe you don’t bloody well care! Damn you, damn all of you, he’s dying, Eveleen!”

  Shoulders shaking with the force of her tears, she turned her damp face to the wall and beat against it with tiny palms, making a pastel drawing of a brigantine tremble on its hook. The artist’s signature mirrored the one affixed to Kestrel’s drafts, framed and hanging in a place of honor in Ephraim’s library.

  Brendan’s.

  “Dying, Eveleen,” she sobbed, brokenly. “Dying. . . .”

  Eveleen shrugged and picked up her brother’s hand. “I’ve seen him worse,” she said.

  Mira whirled. “Any worse and he’d be dead. Dead!”

  “Mira, there are a few things you don’t know about my brother. You see, he’s always tended to be rather . . . accident prone. He’s also cursed with our mother’s Irish luck. I say cursed, because there have been times he’s wished himself dead, times he should’ve been dead—but no.” She leaned across the bed, lifted the blanket, and gently drew it back from Brendan’s chest. “Come here, please.”

  Sniffling, her face pale and angry and wet, Mira did.

  “See this scar?” Eveleen indicated the circle of toughened white skin. “Brendan got it the first time he and Crichton came to blows. I know Liam told you about what Crichton did to me, but I’ll bet neither he nor Brendan told you about what Crichton did to my brother.” Eveleen looked up, her eyes level, her voice hard. “Crichton shot him in the back when he was trying to save an innocent man—Dalby, incidentally—from the lash.”

  Mira stared at her.

  The silence hung heavily in the room.

  Outside the window, the baby sparrows shrilled as their parents returned with food.

  “The ball passed through his body and out through his chest, right here.” Eveleen ran her thumb over the circular ridge of scar tissue. “It should have killed him—but it didn’t. Another shot hit him here, driving him over the rail and into the sea. That one should’ve killed him, but it didn’t.” She gently drew the coverlet up, her eyes filled with the pain of remembrance. “But I’ll tell you what almost did.”

  Mira sniffled and wiped a tear from her eye.

  “Julia,” Eveleen said quietly.

  “Julia?”

  Eveleen gazed out the window, her eyes distant. “She was the daughter of an American army officer in Boston. She was also the one who found Brendan washed up in the surf there after he fell overboard from Halcyon. A pretty young thing, with dark hair like yours and violet eyes that looked deceptively innocent. Like you, she cared for my brother and nursed him back to health in her father’s own house. The Americans used to come and go; it was somewhat of a gathering spot, and Brendan heard enough of their political opinions, saw enough of their suffering, that eventually he came to believe he’d been fighting for the wrong side, the wrong cause—especially after he learned that his own navy had declared him a deserter and a traitor. Crichton, you see, made up a story that he’d incited a mutiny aboard Halcyon and, supported by his officers, that story was widely accepted.” She squeezed his limp hand. “Of course, my brother always was something of a rebel. Our mother’s Irish blood, Da used to say. ...”

  The door swung open and shut in the breeze, and Rescue Effort Number Twenty pattered in, glanced around, and jumped up on the bed. Purring loudly, he rubbed himself against Eveleen’s wrist and finally nestled against Brendan’s blanketed ankle.

  “In any case, to make a long story short, Brendan fell in love with Julia, and he fell hard. They were going to get married, and all the time, my brother was entertaining this idea of designing a schooner to combine the best of American craftsmanship and British standards of perfection. He was a gifted naval architect, you know. But it never occurred to him that his precious Julia couldn’t have cared less about his dreams, would only see the ship as something to take his attention away from her . . . something to compete with. He thought she’d love it as much as he did. He thought she’d be proud of him, as he intended it to be a privateer in the service of his newly adopted country. But no. He didn’t see that Julia was nothing but a spoiled, selfish little brat. Love is blind, they say. Julia wasn’t about to share him with the sea, a navy, and certainly not a ship, no matter how lovely it would be, no matter how heralded, no matter how much General Washington himself praised its design. . . .

  “Well, one day Brendan came back from an appointment with the general and found a note from Julia, propped up against the drafts. Choose the ship or choose me, the note said. But Julia never gave him a choice. She left him, and ended up marrying some army major not three months later.” Eveleen ran her thumb over the back of her brother’s lax hand, and looked up. “She broke his heart, Mira.”

  The silence in the room grew oppressive. Mira felt like something was standing on her chest and squeezing her heart up through her throat. Quietly she said, “So that is why he was always running from me.”

  “Yes. That is why.” Eveleen gazed down into her brother’s face. “You see, Mira, Brendan has been in love with you, I think, from the moment he first met you. He came to me in Portsmouth and told me about this girl he’d met who’d run him down on a horse and went around dressed in breeches. And when I met you, and saw you pounding the pudding out of that scruffy hooligan down on the docks—and the admiration in my brother’s eyes as you were doing it—I knew in my heart it was true. That he loved you. And while he loved you, at first I hated you—not only because you were thin and pretty when I wasn’t, but because I saw you as another Julia. I love my brother, too, Mira. And I didn’t want his heart to be broken again.”

  Eveleen was the image of serenity as the sunshine streamed in through the window and gilded her pale hair. “You’ve always wondered why I didn’t tell Brendan who Mr. Starr really was, haven’t you? Well, it had nothing to do with your promise to get Matthew interested in me, because honestly, I had no faith that would ever really happen. No, I had a very different reason for keeping your secret. That very first time you defied your father and stole aboard Kestrel, I realized you were night and day from Julia. I saw that you loved the sea and loved ships, as much as Brendan did. That he could have with you what he’d tried so hard to have with Julia. Love. Happiness. Someone to share his passions with. And so I held my tongue. You see, Mira, when Brendan loves a woman, be it a person or a ship—” She smiled and folded his loose fingers in her own. “—he does so with every bit of his heart. Every bit of his Irish heart, Liam would say. And he loves you.”

  Silence. Eveleen squeezed her brother’s hand a final time, and gently placed it over the scar on his chest. She looked at Mira and smiled. “He’s not going to die, Mira, because you’re going to tell him how much you love him. Somehow, some way, he’ll hear you. He’ll know. And death itself won’t be able to hold him once he realizes that you’re here waiting for him.”

  She rose, yanked up the loose shoulder of her gown a final time, and turned toward the door.

  “Eveleen, wait! We have to talk!”

  But the other woman was eager to get back to her own patient.

  “Eveleen, please! I want to know more! About Crichton. About Julia. About Brendan! I’ll even have Abigail bring up a pot of tea and some of tho
se cookies she baked earlier—”

  But Eveleen was shaking her head, smiling. As she paused in the doorway, wrinkles fell from the silk at her waist—wrinkles that hadn’t been there when Mira had last seen her in the dress. “Know something, Mira?”

  “Eveleen!”

  “Between you and me, I’m glad Brendan’s here with you and not aboard that schooner.” She winked, never looking as much like her brother as she did in that moment. And then, from behind the side of her hand: “I hate ships as much as Julia did.”

  ###

  Brit.

  Damned Irishman!

  She was shouting at him, swearing at him, her voice ringing through his head, fading in and out on giant, rolling combers of sound—

  Bloody, stupid, gallant fool!

  That hurt.

  “Faith, lassie,” he said, but she didn’t seem to hear him, only going on with that awful yelling.

  His back hurt. His chest hurt. His head hurt.

  He hurt.

  And Eveleen . . . Was that her voice? What was she doing on Kestrel? She hated ships. He was on Kestrel, wasn’t he? Yet that sounded like Ephraim’s big Willard clock, and heaven help him if they’d dragged that aboard his schooner. And why was the ship rocking so? He hadn’t designed her to wallow like a tub. Didn’t remember the bunk being so soft. Didn’t think birds chirped out in the middle of the ocean. He was in a bunk, wasn’t he? Or had they dragged a bed into his cabin? But that didn’t explain the sparrows. They were sparrows, weren’t they? Sparrow hawks? Kestrels? Good heavens—