Part 30 (1/2)

Bracing his back against the mainmast, Edward stared up into a sky that was as dull and gray as old pewter, and bitterly cursed the fate that had settled such a sky over his head this morning. Oh, he'd sailed long enough to know that the only certainty at sea was uncertainty, but it still sat very hard with him that the Antelope would have come this far under the fairest of skies and with the sweetest of winds to fill her sails, only to fall into foul weather so close to England.

He couldn't recall a time he'd been more eager to reach his destination. True, in London he must face whatever waited for him at the Admiralty, with enough grim possibilities to fill any sane officer's head with foreboding and dread.

But in London he also meant to take the best suite of rooms at the one of the fas.h.i.+onable new hotels that were replacing taverns and inns, and disappear into those rooms with Francesca for at least a month. He'd already spent a good deal of time dreaming and planning the details, how he would offer her everything she could possibly desire to make up for the discomforts of these last weeks: the most delicious meals and wines, the softest, most luxurious featherbed with the finest linens, a bath beside the fire filled decadently with steaming water brought up from the kitchen.

And, most of all, he'd offer her himself and his love, freely and openly, a husband to his wife, without any restraints or restrictions or a single st.i.tch of clothing between them, Francesca naked in his bed, exactly like the plump, willing nymph she'd sketched for him. No wonder the paper was growing worn, he'd looked at it so many times, and no wonder, too, he'd felt like he'd been hard in his breeches since Palermo.

”Looks like we'll be in for a nasty blow, sir,” said the beardless mids.h.i.+pman beside him with unwonted cheerfulness. ”Lieutenant Pettigrew, sir, he says it's coming from the North Sea straight down the Channel for our throats. Lieutenant says, sir, that we could be bottled up here for days.”

Edward regarded the boy with the icy reserve of a senior captain, barely containing the impulse to throttle him on the spot. The puppy's only excuse was his callow youth. Otherwise he'd have more sympathy for a man near cross-eyed from l.u.s.t for his wife, and more sense than to tell the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d they'd be days longer in the Channel before he could be frolicking on a featherbed.

But as unsympathetic as the mids.h.i.+pman had been, his prophecy was right. The first rain began to fall from that pewter sky before noon. By evening, the rain was driving down upon them in sheets, the waves whipped to a frothy chop. By what should have been dawn if the sun could have peeked through the clouds, the wind was howling and shrieking like a banshee through the rigging, flailing and shredding the few sheets of canvas Pettigrew had tried to leave in place. The waves toyed with the Antelope like a cat with a mouse, tossing the sloop up high in the air one minutes, only to slap her down with sickening force the next.

Like every other able-bodied man on board, Edward and Peart took their turns at the pumps; with so much water driving into the hold, there was no standing on ceremony, not even for senior captains or their manservants. The muscles in Edward's arms and shoulders ached from the unaccustomed labor, made worse by the chilly, sodden weight of constantly wet clothes.

”A nasty blow, that is all,” he told Francesca, borrowing both the mids.h.i.+pman's phrase and his cheerfulness. ”In January, they're all too common here south of the Channel.”

”Not to me, they're not, Edward.” Wide-eyed with fear, she'd braced herself against the pitching waves in the corner of their bunk, wrapped in shawls and the coverlet with her feet tucked up under her petticoats. By staying on the bunk she'd kept clear of the seawater that had flooded down past the hatches and through the companionway, and now sloshed back and forth across the deck as if in the bottom of a basin instead of their cabin. The timbers creaked and groaned with the stress of the waves, and the lantern swung back and forth wildly, casting exaggerated shadows that were even more disorienting.

”The storm when we sailed from Naples was worse,” he said. ”You weren't frightened then.”

”I'm not frightened now,” she countered crossly. ”I'm terrified, and with every good reason, too.”

He grinned. ”If you are still feeling clever enough to make jests like that, then you are not terrified.”

”And if you show so little sympathy toward me, Captain Ramsden, then you are most barbarously cruel and unfeeling.” She stuck her tongue out at him, pulling the shawls higher around her shoulders. ”The Antelope seems no more than a walnut sh.e.l.l, the way she's being tossed about. Santo cialo, just like that! The Centaur was so much larger and safer that I didn't feel the waves, not in the least.”

”You didn't feel them because you were so busy tending to all those bedraggled Neapolitan counts and countesses,” he countered. ”Here you've nothing to do but listen to the timbers creak and imagine the worst.”

She sighed despondently. ”Mi dispiace e mi scusi, e non me ne importante.”

He looked at her, questioning. She didn't use nearly as much Italian as she once had, and his had grown even more rusty as a result.

She sighed again. ”I am sorry and I beg your forgiveness,” she repeated in English, ”and-and I don't give a d.a.m.n if you grant it to me or not.”

”Oh, la.s.s.” He leaned across the bunk to reach her, not caring how much he dripped on the sheets. She was very dear to him, his Francesca, even so bundled and huddled in wool that it was hard to tell her elbow from her knee. Her face was woefully forlorn, her nose red from the cold and, he suspected, more than a few lonely tears. ”I'm sorry I've had to leave you here so much by yourself.”

She sniffed. ”You're not supposed to say you're sorry anymore, Edward. Besides, you have to help the crew. They'll need you. I'd much rather have you as captain than that wretched, ugly, old Mr. Pettigrew.”

”I'll be sure to give him your fondest regards,” teased Edward, but at once he turned more solemn when he saw her eyes growing red around the edges. ”Don't be frightened, Francesca. I know that's easier for me to say than for you to believe, but I can guarantee that once we're in London, you'll forget every bit of this.”

”You promise, do you?” Her wobbly attempt at a smile showed how unconvinced she was, and when she abruptly shoved aside her wooly coc.o.o.n and threw herself into his arms, he had all the proof he needed. ”Oh, Edward, I do not want to drown!”

”No one ever does, sweetheart,” he said, holding her close and stroking her hair to comfort her. ”You be brave, and remember how much I care for you, and we'll weather this storm together, just like everything else.”

But by the end of the day he wasn't nearly as sure. With an ominous crack that shuddered down to the bottom of the hold, the top of the mainmast broke off late in the afternoon, smas.h.i.+ng the s.h.i.+p's boat and dragging the starboard rail with it in a tangle of snarled lines and splintered spars. Worse still happened that evening, when the pins holding the rudder gave way, snapped like twigs by a wave that caught them broadside.

Now they truly were at the storm's mercy, left to wallow without even a pretense of steering themselves. They were s.h.i.+pping more water by the hour, no matter how the exhausted men labored at the pump, and the sloop was sitting visibly lower in the waves. Their only boat had been dashed to sticks, and no one survived more than a few minutes in the icy grasp of a winter sea. Unless the waves miraculously calmed, they would be swamped by dawn, and sink. It was as brutally simple as that.

Unable to take any bearings in the storm and dark, they had no way of guessing whether they were nearer to breaking up on the rocks of the Spanish coast or running aground in English shallows, or even tumbled out into the endless, inhospitable reaches of the Atlantic.