A Different Sort of Perfect (30 page)

She slid her hand free and wrapped it back around the
book. "Captain Levasseur." Her voice wavered. She hauled in a deep
breath and tried again. "I am surprised to see you, as well. I hope
I find you—" No, they met on a battlefield; well-wishes did not
comprise a suitable conversational gambit. There had to be
something she could say without giving offense to either side, but
what that topic might be, she had no idea.

Either side.
Well, that was the point, wasn't
it? They were at war. There were two sides, her beloved on one, her
village on the other. Even the gossipy mutters had fallen still and
silent; a voice raised on the
Flirt
seemed obscenely
loud.

Where did she stand? No one knew. Least of all her.
And unlike the gunpowder soot, this question of her belonging
wouldn't come out in the wash.

"
Capitaine…?
" Captain Fleming's voice. He must
have stepped closer; his breath, his masculine heat, all but burned
the back of her neck. If she didn't move, his flame would leap to
her and set her afire. But her feet had taken root in the deck. Her
sluggish mind refused to provide her any words at all. Invisible
walls pressed around her, closer and closer, until she wanted to
flee below decks to escape them all.

"Levasseur," Phillippe said, half-bowing from the
waist. His mannerisms were polite, but his eyes darkened and the
skin over his cheekbones seemed taut and brittle.

A horrid foreboding drove the walls so tightly around
her, she couldn't breathe for the pressure on her breast. The two
men had hated each other on sight, had grown to hate each other
even before then. The battle overflowed its banks and swamped them
all, drowning the captains' patriotic fervor in now purely personal
enmity. She'd no idea if she could swim in such torrid waters. And
she stood between them, certainly physically. But also…
symbolically?

For the first time, she wished she'd never left
Plymouth.

"I will have your sword." Captain Fleming's words
hammered her, cold verbal nails delivered word by word, despite his
blazing heat. Or was that merely the sun? Whatever it was, it was
much worse than she'd feared.

An ugly shade of brick rose from Phillippe's collar,
clashing with its orange hue and sweeping across his taut, sculpted
cheeks. His humiliation was finally too much to bear and she yanked
her attention away. Beside her, a chunk had been torn from the
capstan, raw aged wood showing against the brown paint; odd that
she hadn't noticed it earlier, when she'd been elated over their
victory. Atop the leather covering sat a forgotten hairpin. It
might as well have been a mile away, for all the power she had to
pick up the silly thing.

Metal clicked and clattered. Phillippe extended his
arm, casting a foreshortened shadow across the deckboards. Another
shadow, one from behind her, met it halfway and then jerked back.
Phillippe straightened, the tautness and redness over his
cheekbones spreading to his broad, creamy forehead.

The shadow behind her moved away. Footsteps crossed
the deck, descended the starboard quarterdeck ladder, and dwindled
away for'ard, taking the worst of the tension with them. Clara
hauled in a deep breath and glanced up.

The smile had returned to Mr. Abbot's face. He
gestured toward the port ladder. "Captain Levasseur, this way, if
you please."

Phillippe's lips curved in a savagely polite smile.
"Le capitaine, s'il vous plaît."

"Indeed, Captain?" Mr. Abbot gestured again, less
politely.

Phillippe's jaw withdrew into his stand-up collar
like an insulted turtle. He disentangled her hand from the book and
inkhorn, bowing over it without raising his eyes to hers, then
released her and turned to follow.

But the remaining tension didn't accompany him below.
It stayed huddled on the quarterdeck, inhabiting the six clear feet
that surrounded her, an empty space no one seemed anxious to fill.
A lump grew in Clara's throat.

For the first time since she'd come aboard
Topaze
, she was truly alone.

He knew. The entire outrageous situation had been
defined by her rigid shoulders and frozen, expressionless mask.
Without asking, Fleming knew.

"A foot of water in the well, sir," said the
carpenter. "No shot holes below the waterline."

"Very good." His thoughts ranged over his ship's
condition, but a quivering corner of himself could not forget what
he'd just seen. "Our masts?"

"All sound, sir, although I won't answer for the
mizzen topmast. It lost a fair bit around the middle to one of them
French cannonballs and it could go during the next blow."

"Let it be for now. Our first order of business is
seeing to the
Flirt
. Captain Lamble will need to fish a
mizzenmast and perhaps a main topmast. Ask him if he needs
assistance and if he does, take a boat."

The carpenter saluted and hurried aft. Fleming
returned to the bosun's list of cut rigging. But the growling
undercurrent of his thoughts would not be halted.

When Lady Clara had spotted the French captain her
walls of propriety had slammed down, thrusting everyone from her
emotional sphere and locking them out. It was as if she'd turned
her flesh into a cold marble statue of herself and set that statue
on a pedestal within a glass case, unreachable and distant. In that
moment, he'd known.

The French captain, Levasseur, was her quarry, the
beast her seahunt had in view.

But it's not right.

A little voice spoke from somewhere deep and hidden
within Fleming's soul. Different from the tactical instincts that
guided him in his war against the sea and enemy ships, this little
voice didn't sound like any part of his soul he'd ever listened to
before. But its clamorous insistence could not be ignored.

It's not right.

Whatever her faults — and even her closest friends
had to admit she had a few — whatever her faults, Lady Clara was an
honorable creature, honest, punctilious, proper. Captain
Levasseur's behavior during his battle with the
Flirt
proved
he didn't share her sentiments. He'd shown himself to have no honor
whatsoever. They could not possibly make an amicable couple. They
didn't belong together and never could.

He's not right.

Across the water, Lamble waved cheerfully from the
Flirt
's wrecked quarterdeck. Acknowledgement or even
gratitude underlay the gesture, and Fleming noticed his carpenter
aboard the jolly boat, en route to the battered brig. Even if
Lamble's own carpenter wasn't injured or worse, an extra set of
trained hands wouldn't be turned away. Fleming waved back and found
the surgeon waiting at his elbow. "What's the butcher's bill?"

Dr. Eckhart seemed tired but buoyant, as if lifted
from within. The hair he normally kept combed across his shining
dome had fallen to his shirt collar and it stuck there with a
black, hardened crust. "Nine dead, a baker's dozen injured, mostly
splinter wounds and only one of those serious. Mr. Chandler's arm's
broken, and that's the lot."

If the circumstances were otherwise, Fleming would
have heaved a sigh of relief; the battle could have ended very
differently. But there was no room in him now for such an emotion.
"Then once you've seen to them, ascertain if the
Flirt
's or
Armide
's surgeons need a hand. The
Flirt
's crew lay
down upon the deck and sheltered during the worst of
Armide
's bombardment, but they'll doubtless have casualties,
and we shan't hold the French crew responsible for the dishonorable
behavior of their officers."

Dr. Eckhart's expression turned haughty, as if he
didn't agree with Fleming's assessment. But he saluted and vanished
among the swirling sailors on the fo'c'sle.

If he, Fleming, had Lady Clara's delicate sense of
honor, he'd remind her that a captain could perform a binding
marriage ceremony while aboard his ship. He could marry them and
give her her heart's desire, the prize she'd sought so
desperately.

But he's not right for her.

At first he thought his imagination had conjured her
from his thoughts. But no, she stood at his elbow, book and inkhorn
ready, pen in hand. She'd washed away the worst of the gunpowder
soot and tidied her hair. If she'd been crying, he could see no
trace.

Why should he assume she'd been crying? She'd found
the man she'd hunted. She demonstrated her good breeding by not
dancing a delighted hornpipe amidst their repair efforts.

"Orders, Captain Fleming?" Her voice was level and
controlled. Too controlled.

A band tightened around his chest and fast as that,
anger surged through him. She should have been crying. She should
have hung her head with shame that such a man had ever caught her
attention, much less her heart. She shouldn't have the nerve to
approach him at all.

Of course, that was hardly fair. Fleming hauled in a
deep breath and battened down the anger. "Copy out your notes and
then update the log. I'll sign it as soon as we're underway."

She nodded. The rigidity in her neck and shoulders
made her movements jerky, a puppet with poorly managed strings.
"We'll be going on to the Cape, then?"

"There's no point now. Captain Lamble threw his
dispatches overboard when he was attacked and our mission's
accomplished, the
Armide
stopped before she reached the
Indian Ocean. We'll head for home."

Another nod, somewhat less jerky. So the thought of
going home relieved some of her tension. She thought she couldn't
marry Captain Levasseur until they reached shore, and so the news
of an early return heartened her. The band around his chest
tightened further and an ugly mist blurred his sight.

She started to turn away. Before she finished the
movement, he blurted out, "He's it, isn't he?"

She froze.

"He's the French officer you sought. That murdering,
dishonorable—"

"Must we discuss this now?" She didn't turn back
around. All color drained from her face, leaving her white as
death. Her tension returned, redoubled. The barest tremor rippled
through her. She looked both hunted and haunted.

He'd known without asking. But he'd asked anyway,
although he also knew that once spoken, there were no secrets on a
frigate, and his indiscreet words would travel through
Topaze
like a jungle drumbeat. He'd humiliated her at the
least. And her mien made it clear she was well aware of how
despicable her lover's behavior had been.

Fleming shifted, uneasy. She seemed ready to faint
and he'd contributed to her distress. And really, why should he
interest himself with her affairs at all? She wasn't his concern,
not really a member of his crew. Not his responsibility.

That inner voice spoke again.
But she should
be.

The world canted around him, as if
Topaze
heeled to a gust, as the deeper meaning of those words penetrated.
He grabbed a halyard and held on. "No, of course not. I beg your
pardon, Lady Clara."

She vanished, fleeing down the gangway as if chased
by a bear. In the jibboom rigging, Jeremiah Wake worked steadily
away, never glancing back, giving no sign he'd heard the
conversation. But the disapproving scowl, just visible beyond his
waist-length queue, made it clear he had.

The nerve of that man.

Beyond the bank of stern windows in the great cabin,
Armide
rocked, gentle as a cradle. Sailors swarmed over her
hull and through her rigging like a horde of ants, knotting and
splicing, replacing her shot-away main topmast spar, hammering away
at her battered stern. A glint of yellow caught Clara's eye and she
looked again. David Mayne unraveled the end of a line above the
spanker boom. Those were their sailors at work over there; the
French crew would be below decks, locked in the hold, their own
grape-loaded cannons aimed at them, as Staunton's journal had
described after the Spanish snow-brig's capture last cruise. And
there was Mr. Abbot, stepping from
Armide
's mizzenmast
rigging, grabbing a backstay, and shooting down two hundred feet in
seconds, as unconcerned as Uncle David descending the stairs at
home.

But her thoughts were elsewhere.

Impertinent. Prying. Forward and shameless.

How dare he speak of her private business on the open
deck, where anyone could — and presumably
did
hear? As
captain, he'd the right to issue orders, but none whatsoever to
question her regarding her personal affairs. No more than Chandler,
who hopefully would not draw conclusions from the captain's
behavior toward a lady. And why was she so furious with him, when
Phillippe's transgression was so much worse, so much more
devastating? Captain Fleming described himself as her friend, and
she couldn't ignore the way her heart warmed in her chest at the
remembrance. But Phillippe…

The light from the windows fell across her book, the
facing page half-covered with her neatest handwriting. She'd
reached the narrative point where she'd set aside her prescribed
duties and grabbed the rammer, and it seemed she'd set her memory
beneath the aft hatchway ladder, as well, for after that moment
she'd no clear conception of the chain of events. The world had
narrowed to
Biting Bruiser
's smoking muzzle, the clumsy
rammer, the French gunners beyond
Armide
's ripped-open hull.
She'd helped keep the gun firing; nothing else had penetrated her
concentration.

She'd helped defeat
Armide
. She'd assisted the
gun crews, and they'd done their best to kill the enemy.

To kill Phillippe.

That thought bothered her. But not as much as she'd
expected. If she hadn't helped, it was more than possible the
French gun crews would have killed her. He hadn't known it at the
time, but Phillippe had ordered his gunners to try to kill her, as
well as Chandler, Staunton, Mr. Abbot, Mayne, Jeremiah Wake.