Читать книгу Regency High Society Vol 4: The Sparhawk Bride / The Rogue's Seduction / Sparhawk's Angel / The Proper Wife - Miranda Jarrett - Страница 22

Damn you, Geary,” sputtered Hay. “You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man, would you?”

Michel shrugged. “I’m French. You’re English. Can you be sure what I’ll do, eh? And you have a knife, don’t you? If my gun’s but a bluff, mon ami, then you can use your blade on me. Not even an English court would find you guilty.”

He watched and waited as Hay decided. Sacristi, the mate’s bland English face was so open he could read the fool’s thoughts as if they were written on his forehead. He himself had played this game so many times that it held neither risk nor excitement for him any longer. Spaniards could still surprise him on occasion, but Englishmen like this one, quivering before him, always backed down because they cared too much for their own skins.

Mordieu, but he was tired, and his head throbbed and burned like the crater of Montagne Pelée, the old volcano beyond St-Pierre. It was taking every last bit of his concentration to hold the pistol steady. Hay must be hesitating because of Jerusa. Not even an Anglais wished to be thought a coward with a woman watching.

But to Michel’s surprise, she wasn’t watching. Instead she’d pressed herself as flat as she could against the bulkhead, as if she hoped she’d somehow squeeze through the cracks to another, happier place. Her face was pale and her eyes were closed, and Michel frowned with concern, wondering if she, too, was ill. Then he remembered the alley in Seabrook, and what in his fury he’d done to her there. Poor Rusa, no wonder she was terrified! Remorse swept over him as he saw she was trembling, and he longed to be able to tell her this would not end that way.

But his own hands were beginning to shake, too, and his shirt was plastered to his chest with sweat. That way, this way: he didn’t care which ending Hay chose, as long as he did it soon.

And to Michel’s relief, the Englishman did. “Very well, Geary, have it your way,” he said abruptly, his face red enough to be on the verge of apoplexy. “I’ve a vessel to command. I can’t tarry here until you come to your senses.”

“A wise decision,” said Michel blandly. He waved the pistol’s barrel from Hay toward Jerusa, and contemptuously he noted how that slight gesture was enough to make the mate’s eyes grow round and owlish. “Now your regrets to the lady, s’il vous plaît.”

Hay sighed with irritation as he turned to bow curtly in Jerusa’s direction. “Forgive me, ma’am, if I have offered any insult to you or your person,” he said. He glared back over his shoulder at Michel. “Does that satisfy you, Geary? Or must I bend my knee and kiss the chit’s hem?”

Michel clicked his tongue, scolding. “You can begin by not calling her a ‘chit’ or any of your other charming little endearments again in my hearing. ‘Mrs. Geary’ will be sufficient.” He leaned back against the pillows and lifted the pistol’s barrel to tap it gently once, twice across his lips. “If I hear otherwise, you will answer to me. And next time, Mr. Hay, I shall not be as understanding. Bonjour, monsieur.”

His eyes had already begun to close as the Englishman slammed the cabin’s door. He felt the gun slide from his fingers onto his chest, and though he vaguely thought he should stop it, he didn’t seem able to make his hand cooperate. He didn’t seem able to do much at all except slip further into the heat and the darkness that were drawing him down, pulling him under like velvet waves, so warm and soft and black….

“Michel?” asked Jerusa anxiously. “Michel, love, are you all right? Can you look at me, Michel? Please? It’s Jerusa, and I want to know if you’re all right.”

But if he heard her he made no sign that he did. His skin burned with fever, and he’d gone limp as a doll made of old rags. This wasn’t right, she thought frantically. How could he have been so lucid—and so menacing—only minutes before, and now be unconscious?

“Oh, please, Michel, can you hear me at all?” She brushed her fingertips across his brow, smoothing aside his hair. His forehead was dry and hot, too hot. Belatedly she thought of the water pitcher she’d thrown at Hay and knew she’d have to go back to the galley for more.

With a sigh she looked down at the pistol on the coverlet, where it had slipped from Michel’s fingers. Lord, he’d left it cocked, and with a little grimace she picked the gun up and latched the flintlock before she cradled it in the crook of her arm. She didn’t want to take the thing with her at all, but she didn’t trust the mate to keep his word, especially not with Michel ill, and with one last look at Michel, she headed back toward the galley.

The boy Israel had finished peeling the potatoes and had moved on to a wooden trencher filled with onions. With tears streaming from his eyes, he barely looked up when Jerusa returned.

“Cook’s no better, ma’am,” he said, flicking off the onion’s thick yellow skin. “Nor is th’ cap’n, they say.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” murmured Jerusa as she refilled the pitcher she’d retrieved rattling around the mainmast between the decks. “I hope they’ll all feel better soon.”

Israel tossed the peeled onion into a battered iron kettle. “Either they will or they won’t, ma’am,” he said philosophically. “Hopes an’ wishes got nothin’ to do wit’ it.”

Unhappily Jerusa thought of Michel. “But surely our prayers will help.”

“If’n you say so, ma’am.” He glanced up at the tin lantern that hung from the beam overhead. The motion of the ship had increased, and the lantern was swinging back and forth so that their shadows danced first large, then tiny, along the bulkhead. “No cookin’ tonight, anyways, ma’am. I warrant th’ order will come down most any minute t’ douse th’ cook fires. We’re in for a blow, no mistake.”

No mistake, indeed, thought Jerusa uneasily as she made her way, stumbling aft to the cabin. She could hear how the wind had changed from the higher-pitched sound that shrieked through the rigging above her, and beneath her feet the deck seemed to have a new life of its own, plunging up one moment and then down the next with such unpredictable violence that before she reached the cabin she nearly spilled this second pitcher full of water, too.

In the bunk Michel hadn’t moved at all. She dipped a handkerchief into the water and wiped it across his face, and then, feeling greatly daring, she lifted back the coverlet and his shirt to draw the damp cloth across his chest and arms. He was still warm, far too warm, but there was nothing else she could do for him now, and with a sigh she rinsed the cloth one last time and laid it across his forehead. She tucked the coverlet firmly around him and beneath the mattress, hoping to keep him from rolling into the high sides of the bunk.

The deck lurched again at yet another new angle, slamming Jerusa into the bulkhead. She had thought she’d found her sea legs by now, but she wasn’t prepared for this, and, rubbing her elbow where she’d hit the latch, she decided the deck itself would be the safest place. She sat beside the bunk with her head level with Michel’s, her feet braced against his trunk, her back against the bulkhead and the pistol resting in her lap, and prepared to ride out the storm and his fever both.

She didn’t know which frightened her more. As the minutes stretched into hours, the depth of Michel’s illness terrified her. Only rarely did he shift or stir, and though she tried to cool his fever as best she could, it seemed to her that his skin only grew warmer to the touch. She could feel him slipping further and further away from her, and there wasn’t a blessed thing she could do to draw him back. She knew from her brothers’ stories that illnesses here in the Caribbean were different from those at home. Here the heat made wounds turn putrid in an hour’s time, and a single fever could kill the three hundred men of a frigate’s crew in a week.

But Michel wasn’t going to die, she told herself fiercely. He’d only eaten some fish that had turned in the sun. Surely even in the Caribbean people didn’t die from such a thing. Besides, they were less than a day from Bridgetown, and there, if he still were ill, she’d find all manner of physicians and surgeons.

Gently she traced the line of his jaw with one finger, feeling the bristles of his beard. He was a strong man, a man too proud to die like this without a fight. Any minute now his fever would break, he would roll over and smile and call her his dear Rusa, and he would be fine.

He would be fine. Right as rain.

“I love you, Michel,” she whispered sadly. “Whatever else happens, I want you to know that. I love you.”

But her words were lost in the earsplitting crack that came from the deck, like a tree splintered by lightning. The mainmast, thought Jerusa with horror, for the sound had come from midships. As wild as the brig’s movements had been before this, her motion took on a new unevenness without the largest sail and mast to steady her.

Over the roar of the wind she could hear the faint voices of the crew, shouting orders to one another, and she could picture the men working frantically against the storm to free the Swan of the wreckage of her broken mast. She’d heard stories enough of what damage that wreckage could do, trailing over the side of a ship and pulling her sideways into the deep trough of a wave until she broached to and capsized.

She was straining her ears so hard to hear the storm that she hadn’t noticed when Michel had begun to mutter, his head tossing uneasily against the pillow. Eagerly she put her ear near his lips, but all he said was fragmented and jumbled, and in French, as well. And her name: dear Lord, had she really heard it? Again he murmured it, this time clear enough for her to know she hadn’t dreamed it. Maybe somehow he knew she was here, knew she was trying to help him.

Oh, Michel, how much I love you!

Grinning foolishly with no one to see her, she tugged him up higher onto the pillow and trickled water between his lips. The fever still held him in its grip, but to her, even the garbled words were so much better than the awful stillness.

More shouts, more wind, the ringing thump of axes as the lines were hacked away. But the shouts seemed closer now, and she could hear heavy footsteps racing up and down the companionway beyond their cabin. Somehow the waves seemed louder over the creaks and groans of the ship’s timbers. Was she imagining it, or was the brig riding lower in the water now, far enough down that only the pine bulkheads and the oak timbers behind them separated her from the sea itself?

Someone ran directly past their door. Sweet Almighty, she had to know what was happening! Bracing herself in the doorway, she pulled the door open and gazed down the narrow passage to the steps. Seawater splashed over her feet and skirts, and she realized the whole deck was awash. The lantern that usually lit the passage was gone, but an eerie, otherworldly light filtered down the steps, bathing the figure of the man coming toward her now with a strange glow that she realized must be dawn.

“Please, can you tell me what is happening?” she shouted at the man. “No one has told us anything!”

The seaman shook his head with exhaustion as he peered at her. “Cap’n’s dead, ma’am,” he shouted back hoarsely to her. “Dead from th’ sickness. We’ve lost th’ mainmast whole an’ half th’ mizzen with it, an’ we’re takin’ water something awful. We’re workin’ every man at the pumps, ma’am. Every man.”

Before she could ask more, he staggered off, bound for the pumps himself. Her terror mounting by the second, Jerusa forced the door closed again and went to crouch beside Michel. She had thought he was improved, but Captain Barker had died. But not Michel; please, God, not Michel, too! She threaded her fingers through his as much to comfort herself as him, and was rewarded by him turning his face toward hers, the merest hint of a smile on his lips.

She listened to the sounds of the storm, her fingers tight around Michel’s. The night before her father or any of her brothers sailed, Mama had always made a ritual of saying special prayers for them at the supper table before grace, and the unspoken belief in the family was that that alone was the reason none of the Sparhawk men had ever been lost at sea. But what if she were the one who was drowned instead, if she were the one who never returned home, whose grave in the churchyard was empty beneath the headstone?

Accustomed as she’d become to the shrieking of the wind and sea, she still jumped and gasped when she heard the pounding on the cabin door.

“Open up, Mrs. Geary! It’s me, George Hay!” shouted the mate, his voice ragged from struggling to make his orders heard over the wind. “Open up now!”

She seized the pistol from where she’d left it on the bunk and stood close to the door. Storm or no, she wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. “What is it you want, Mr. Hay?”

“Damnation, woman, I want to talk to you!” he roared. “Now will you open the door, or must I break the bloody thing down?”

She took a deep breath and opened the door, and immediately Hay lunged for her. But this time she darted backward, away from him. With her legs spread wide against the ship’s pitching and her back against the bunk for support, she held the pistol level with both hands and aimed it squarely at his chest.

“For God’s sake, put that down!” he ordered. “Haven’t we trouble enough without you waving a gun in my face?”

She raised her chin, shouting herself. “You tell me, Mr. Hay.”

Hay raised his hand toward her, but she shook her head vehemently and held her aim. His hat was gone, his clothes as wet as if he’d worn them swimming, his hair without its ribbon hanging lankly to his shoulders. He swore, wearily wiping his face with the soaked sleeve of his coat, and if he hadn’t threatened her earlier she would have pitied him.

“You’re coming with us, Jerusa Sparhawk. In the boat, with me. Now.”

Still she shook her head, refusing to believe him.

“Look, the Swan’s going down,” he explained heavily. “There’s nothing we can do to save her. We’ve ordered the boats, and we’re shoving off, and you’re coming with me.”

“No!” Wildly she glanced over her shoulder at Michel. “I’m not going anywhere with you, especially not without Michel!”

“For God’s sake, woman, if he’s not dead now, he will be soon. Barker went hours ago. You’ll die yourself if you stay here.”

“I don’t care!” cried Jerusa. “I’m not leaving Michel!”

“You bloody little fool,” growled Hay. “I’m not going to leave a fortune like you behind to go to the fishes.”

He reached to take the gun away from her and instead she jabbed the barrel against his chest.

“Once before, Mr. Hay, you had to guess whether this gun was loaded and primed or not,” she said, her raised voice almost giddy. “You can guess again if it pleases you, or you can leave again. But remember that either way I have nothing to lose.”

He stared down at the gun, then at her, before he backed away. “Then damn you to hell, Miss Sparhawk. You and the Frenchman both!”

This time he didn’t bother to slam the door when he left, and Jerusa had to put all her weight behind her shoulder to force it closed against the wind and spray that were sweeping down the passage.

“Rusa, chère.”

Jerusa whipped around. Michel was sitting up in the bunk, watching her.

She ran to him, the pistol swinging clumsily in her hand as she threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Michel, you’re alive! Thank God you didn’t die, and, oh, Michel, how much I love you!”

“Then put down the pistol before you kill me.” He smiled weakly as she pulled away to drop the gun onto the bed. “Now, what is happening, ma mie? What did Hay want now?”

“He wanted me to come with him in the boat,” she explained breathlessly. “He said the Swan is sinking, and he wanted me to leave you behind and go with him.”

His smile vanished, his face drawn and serious as he listened to the groans of the dying ship. “Then go to him now, ma bien-aimée. Hurry, before it’s too late.” Briefly he lifted her fingers to his lips before he returned his hand to her, gently pushing her away. “I would not have you die because of me. Au revoir, ma mie.”

“No, Michel, I won’t do it!” she cried, her eyes filling. “He couldn’t make me leave without you, and neither can you. Why do you think I had your gun?”

He stared at her with disbelief. “You threatened him?”

She grinned through her tears. “I did the same thing you did. If he’d challenged me and the pistol hadn’t fired, I suppose he could have hauled me off with him the way he wished, but otherwise—well, he didn’t choose to trust me, either.”

“Oh, Rusa.” His smile was tight, and if she hadn’t known better she would have thought that he, too, was close to tears. “Perhaps we truly do deserve each other.”

“Then maybe there’s a place in that boat for us both.” Now that he was back with her, the storm seemed less frightening. If he wasn’t ready to die, then she wasn’t, either, and together they would find a way to safety. “Do you think you can walk?”

“As well as anyone can on board a sinking ship, chère.” He shoved back the coverlet and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk. With Jerusa’s help he was able to reach the steps, and by the time they had fought their way against the wind to the deck itself, by will alone he was supporting her as much as she was him as they huddled in the companionway, shielding themselves from the full force of the wind.

As much as Jerusa had guessed at the havoc the storm had caused during the long afternoon and night, she still was unprepared for the sight of the wreck that the Swan had become. The shattered stump was all that remained of the mainmast, and along with the mast itself and all the sails and lines, the starboard rail had also gone over the side. The brig had settled low into the water and the waves broke and washed freely across her now, sweeping everything else away and leaving the deck oddly empty.

Empty of lines and rope, buckets and hatch covers, and empty, too, of any other people except for them. The davits that lowered the boats to the water were empty, also, and with a desperate disappointment, Jerusa realized that George Hay had kept his word and abandoned her and Michel to die together aboard the sinking brig.

But Michel was pointing in the other direction, over the bow. Through the blowing rain and spray Jerusa could just make out a long, shadowy shape on the horizon, land that seemed to be creeping closer every second. No, they were racing toward it, decided Jerusa, and abruptly they stopped. With an impact that tossed them both back down the steps, the Swan was hurled against an outcrop of rocks so large that it was almost an island, and then stayed there, her hull wedged awkwardly between the two largest rocks.

“Hurry, Rusa,” shouted Michel urgently as they climbed back to the deck. “There’s no guessing how long she’ll hold.”

Hand in hand they ran across the deck, now strangely still beneath their feet, forward to the bow. The island Michel had first spotted remained a tantalizing distance across the water, though exactly how far—a hundred yards, two hundred?— Jerusa couldn’t guess. He drew her to the very edge of the deck, where the rail had been before it had been washed away. Below them the bow hung free over open water, beyond the rocks that trapped the hull.

Michel cupped his hand around Jerusa’s ear so she could hear him. “If we stay on board the Swan, she’ll only break up around us, ma chérie. But if we can reach the island, we’ll have a chance of it.”

His eyes were bright with excitement, his whole body so alive with the challenge of what lay before them that she couldn’t believe she’d feared he would die. Not Michel, she thought with boundless happiness, not today.

“I love you, Michel Géricault!” she shouted, as much for the world to hear as for him.

He grinned back at her, his hand tight around hers and the wild daring in his eyes that she’d come to know as his. “And I love you, Jerusa Sparhawk!” he shouted back. “Now jump!” And with a wild, joyous whoop, she did.