Aching for Always (24 page)

Her dark, handsome husband left, and the mapmaker missed him deeply, but in the years that followed she worked on her maps and raised her princess-daughter until she was as beautiful as the mapmaker herself. She taught her daughter to make maps, too, maps as beautiful as the ones she herself made.

—The Tale of the Beautiful Mapmaker

T
HE
N
ORTH
A
TLANTIC
, T
HREE
H
UNDRED
M
ILES OFF
THE
C
OAST OF
S
COTLAND
, 1706

Joss heard the thump of a melon in the dark, and winced in pain as her skin tore against wet, cold rock. Hugh's arms fell limply away from her sides, and he began to buckle.

She grabbed him, but could only manage to ease his slide to the ground. Her heart was pounding, and she didn't know where she was or what they'd gone through. The ringing in her ears was deafening, and in the inky black beyond the immediate darkness around them she saw stars falling—no, they were sparks—and was stunned to hear the roar of ocean beyond.

They weren't in the alley. They weren't in Pittsburgh.

She stumbled over him awkwardly, trying to arrange herself so she could get ahold of his arms and drag him with her.

When she got through the narrow opening into the open air, icicles of spray beat at her relentlessly and the wind howled. She grabbed him and pulled him free of the opening. He made no noise, which terrified her. With his head and shoulders clear of the passage, she could examine his face in the flickering light of the sparks. Blood ran from his forehead into his ears and neck, and a far more alarming patch of crimson covered his chest.

“Hugh,” she said, shaking him. “Hugh.”

She ran her hands over his chest and shoulder. She couldn't see a wound in the dark and didn't know how he'd been hurt. Another shower of sparks illuminated the ugly dark hole. His skin was clammy, and her fingers went to his neck for a pulse. She felt nothing.

“Hugh!”

He made a low, almost inaudible grunt, and a rush of relief washed over her.

“I think you were shot. What happened?”

He mumbled something, but the wind's roar obliterated it. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, Joss could see they were on a rock over the sea. She pulled off the coat Hugh had given her and laid it over him.

The next instant a wave smacked her to the rock. The salt stung her nose. She was terrified of water. Choking, she struggled to her knees and crawled back to Hugh, who was snorting. She was soaked now and freezing, but she found the coat and brought the heavy wool across his
chest. The water had cleared the blood from his face, but new rivulets snaked their way across his wet skin.

“Ship,” he said hoarsely, and groaned again.

“What?”

“Ship. Do you see one?”

She stumbled to her feet. There was nothing but black beyond the dying sparks. She shouted, “Hello!” but her voice was lost in the wind. “Hello!” she shouted again, but received no response. She had the oddest flash of déjà vu, but it was gone as quickly as it had come.

“No ship,” she said. “Where are we?” But his eyes were closed again, and her heart jumped into her throat. “Hugh? Hugh!”

His lids flickered open, then closed. “The other side. Try the other side.”

She was afraid to leave him, afraid he'd be swept away by a wave. How had they gone from an alley in Pittsburgh to a rock in the sea? Her mind raced through a dozen options, but none of them made sense.

She spotted a metal spike near the base of the cave they'd emerged from. It had a circle at the top, almost like a large iron needle. She pulled it. It held. What its use was, she did not know, but it didn't matter. It would serve her purpose.

She reached for his belt.

After she'd loosened it and pulled it free, she threaded it through the opening in the spike and tightly around his ankle. As an anchor against the waves, it wouldn't hold forever and probably ought to have been used around his chest instead, but it would do for a moment.

By “the other side,” she assumed he meant the other
side of the peaked cave that loomed over the small patch of rock on which they were situated.

She made her way across the vibrating rock. On her fourth step the same weird buzz she'd felt in the alley hit her, and the crazy slide show of images began again: Hugh falling, Fiona in her mile-high stilettos, Di with the baby seat on her arm and Rogan—no, not Rogan. It was a man the size and shape of her fiancé, but he wore a stocking cap and gazed at her from the end of the alley.

“Stop it,” Hugh croaked.

She jumped. “What?”

“Keep moving. We need the ship. Try the other side.”

She flattened herself against the cave's sloping side and used her foot to feel the way forward. When a wall of water sprayed upward, she jerked and nearly lost her hold. The back edge of the cave was directly over the water. The sight of it terrified her. She could not convince her feet to move. She clung to the freezing rock and felt like crying.

Then she thought of Hugh, and the blood on his shirt. He needed help—help she couldn't give.

With Herculean effort, she turned her head so that she was looking out to sea.

She tried to ignore the waves crashing at her feet and the noise of the wind, and scanned the place where the dark haze met light, which she assumed was the horizon. She heard something above the roar. Was it Hugh? Was he calling out for her? She strained to catch the sound, but whatever it was disappeared.

A flash of white appeared on the water, then disappeared. She tried to keep her eyes on the spot. Was it a ship? It appeared again, paired with another.

“Here!” she yelled. “Here!”

The patches grew larger. It was coming closer. It was a ship!

“We're here!” she screamed, but there was no return call. And the sails, though still moving, had stopped growing larger. The ship had turned. She could see the masts clearly now, though she couldn't imagine how a masted ship stayed upright on these waves. She was going to lose them.

“Here!”

What could she do? She had no matches, no wood—no way to build a fire. If she only had a lighter. Then it struck her.

She shoved her hand in her pocket, hoping the water hadn't shorted them out.

She pulled out her phone and Rogan's. She tried his first. It was dead. She threw it out to sea.

Please, please, please.

She pressed the button on hers. A light flickered and went out. She tried again. Nothing. She tried again. It turned on!

She moved the slider carefully with her thumb and delicately paged through her apps to find what she was looking for: a flashlight. She flicked it on, picked strobe and held it out to sea.

The light blinked its quick, urgent glow. “Help!” she cried. “We're here!”

She braced herself against the rock and waved the phone. She knew it was small, but maybe if she made broad strokes with her arm . . .

“Ahoy!” came a distant voice.

“Ahoy!” she shouted. “Ahoy!”

“Stay there! We're coming.”

She edged back, an inch at a time, and when she had the rock firm under her feet again, she ran to Hugh. “They're coming!” she cried.

He didn't move.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
 

Joss had insisted Hugh be transported first, and now she stood shivering in the cold, despite the blanket around her shoulders, watching the sailors attach his litter to the rigged pulley line. Cold and dizzy, she was dreading her own moment of transport and unnerved by the trousers and tailcoats the officers wore. She was deeply concerned about Hugh.

“Will he be all right?”

A lieutenant named Roark, a portly man with closely cut red hair who had followed the first sailor over to the island, gave her a steely look and said in an English accent very much like Hugh's, “I shouldn't worry too much. The ship's surgeon is a fine one. Trained in Paris.” Despite Roark's words, however, there was a look of concern on his face.

“Where are we, exactly?” she asked.

It seemed a simple enough question—and far simpler than the next she would ask—but it was as if a veil had dropped over the lieutenant's ruddy face.

“The North Atlantic, m'um.”

She was at sea, hundreds of miles from Pittsburgh. It was more than hard to fathom; it was impossible. “And w-when?”

He paused. “November eleventh.”

“In what year?”

He shouted to the men who were unintentionally rocking Hugh's litter as they adjusted the pulley. “Damn you! 'Tis not a crate of cabbages you're transporting there, for the love of Hades.” Then he gave her a careful look. “For that I'm afraid you'll have to wait to ask the captain.”

The year's a secret? What was this?

“Then would you mind,” she said, “telling me where I could find him.”

Did she detect a smile on his face? “That, too, will have to wait. Come, let us get you safely lodged in your quarters.”

There was an undercurrent in the words “safely lodged” that made her distinctly uneasy.

“I have a phone, you know,” she said, indignant, and held it up.

Which was a mistake, for Roark lifted it from her hand. “That, I'm afraid, will have to be confiscated.” He slipped it into his pocket.

While she alternately fumed and shivered, the rigged litter delivered Hugh to the ship and returned, not as a litter, but as a seat fashioned out of woven ropes. Still irritated, she refused Roark's offer of a hand as she threaded her legs into it. Closing her eyes, she tried to beat back her growing panic. If she let it, the fear would paralyze her. She gasped as the seat lifted into the air, swinging wildly in the wind. She wished Hugh was there to reas
sure her, then kicked herself for worrying about herself when she should have been worrying about him.

She could hear the waves breaking beneath her like the snapping jaws of alligators, and she closed her eyes and began to cry.

When she opened them again, she was over decking. An able-bodied seaman lifted her free, and she was handed into the custody of two men with guns.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE
 

Then one day the mapmaker fell ill, and she knew she was going to die.

“I have no money to leave you,” she said to her princess-daughter, “but you do not need to worry. Men will come from far away to court you. But you must save yourself for the knight who will share with you all he possesses—and I do not mean gold. I mean his help and his heart. For that is the man that will put everything to right. Beware all others.”

—The Tale of the Beautiful Mapmaker

At dawn, Roark tapped on her door and announced himself. She had been brought stew, bread and beer, and been given a set of sailor's togs and a small hanging cot on which to sleep, but she had not been allowed to leave her tiny room. The ship hadn't moved since she'd boarded, which is to say, the ship hadn't made forward progress, for it pitched and rolled on the water like an out-of-control roller coaster at an amusement park. The only unusual sounds she'd heard had been several bloodcurdling cries that she hoped had been Hugh's, as it might mean he wasn't dead.

Throughout the night, she had turned over various
scenarios that might explain their appearance in this remote place, though nothing had emerged from this exercise except a throbbing headache and the sickening sense that whatever mess she found herself in now was both serious and irreversible.

Needless to say, she had not eaten or slept, and as she went to the door, she had to struggle to keep from tripping over the rolled-up ends of her borrowed pants.

“I wonder why you'd bother knocking,” she said, “since you hold the key.”

Roark ignored this. “You sent for me?”

“No, I sent for the captain.”

“The captain is otherwise engaged. How can I help?”