Burning Up (33 page)

Blimey.
The bed was
tiny
. Long enough to accommodate the captain’s height, but almost as narrow as her bed in Fool’s Cove. Certainly not wide enough for two people to lie side by side, especially if one had shoulders as broad as Mad Machen’s. Even hanging off the edge would be impossible; a wooden rail guarded the side to keep the pitching boat from flinging the sleeper to the floor.

What in the blue blazes did he expect to do—lie on top of her all night?

Her stomach rolled. Perhaps that was exactly what he expected to do.

So she would reason with him when he returned. She wouldn’t antagonize him, but lay out a rational alternative. With a blanket on the floor, she could sleep in the small space between the end of the bed and the chest of drawers. She wouldn’t mind; she’d spent nights in worse places.

Ivy waited. When Duckie returned, she asked him for an extra blanket and made her spot on the floor. Eventually the sun dropped to the horizon, painting the cabin in orange light and purple shadows. Duckie brought her dinner on heavy plates: a thick fish stew swimming with carrots, leeks, and potatoes and sopped up with crusty rolls; melon slices bursting with juice; and a lemon tart made with French sugar. He didn’t set a place for Mad Machen, who was “leading Meg on a grand chase.” As she wasn’t thrown about the room by a shark ramming the ship, or trying to cut her way out of its belly, the captain must have been doing a fine job of it.

When Mad Machen finally came, she was sitting in a chair by the windows, watching the stars appear against the coal black heavens—a view she never tired of, and that she’d never seen over London’s hazy skies. The moon, sometimes, as a dull red glow through the smoke. Never the stars.

The captain’s gaze found her in the darkened room. She couldn’t see his expression, only the gleam of his eyes. After a long moment, he strode to the berth and slid aside the curtain. Her makeshift pallet made him pause.

Ivy filled the silence. “If I sleep on the—”

“No.” He swept the blanket up and called for Duckie. Wearing only a nightshirt, the cabin boy came through the door an instant later. Mad Machen tossed the blanket to him. “If the nights are too cold, she can have it back.”

“Yes, sir.” Duckie left the cabin as quickly as he’d come.

With the flick of a spark lighter, Mad Machen lit the gas lamp on the bureau. In the dim glow, he looked toward Ivy. “You won’t be cold.”

Clamping her lips tight, Ivy faced the windows again.
Rational
, she reminded herself. He made it difficult.

And he’d stolen her view. Now that the lamp lit the cabin, his reflection appeared in the glass, instead. He stood at the bureau with his back to the windows, filling the washbowl with water. She glanced away when he removed his jacket, but looked again when she heard his shirt come off.

She’d spent years training at the Blacksmith’s smithy, learning to build machines that ranged from tiny clockworks to enormous steam-powered locomotives. But before the Blacksmith had let her touch a single prosthetic, she’d had to study anatomy. For two years, she’d watched people wearing tight clothes and loose, observed the nude models brought in by the Blacksmith—and during quiet sessions at night, opening the drowned corpses brought in by the body collectors along the Thames—until she understood how every muscle, tendon, and joint within a human body affected balance and movement.

With sharply delineated muscle that moved smoothly beneath his tanned skin, Mad Machen had a form well worth studying.

Stripped down to his breeches, he washed his face, then wetted a cloth and wiped down the back of his neck, his chest, his underarms. He glanced around once, as if checking to see that she still faced the window. After a brief hesitation, he moved to a bootjack. Bracing his foot, he pulled off his left boot—but when his right came off, she turned in the armchair for a better look, frowning.

His breeches extended to midcalf, so she couldn’t see his knee, but the mechanical leg looked to be a standard skeletal prosthetic, made of nickel-plated steel with basic movement at the joints . . . and a badly configured ankle.

“You have a load-bearing pneumatic where your Achilles tube should be.” She stood and crossed the room. Crouching next to him, she fingered the wide cylinder above his heel. “Look at this. Shoddy work—”

She paused suddenly, looked up; he was staring down at her, his expression unreadable. “It’s not by your ship’s blacksmith, is it?”

“No.”

His gruff response released the tension that had sprung through her. In London, there could be no excuse for work like this, but on a ship, there could be any number of reasons—a lack of equipment being the most likely. She didn’t want to endanger a blacksmith’s position over circumstances he couldn’t avoid.

“Alright. Look here. Your Achilles tube is for balance and stability—it doesn’t handle much weight, but prevents your foot apparatus from flopping around like a fish. But this . . .” She tapped her finger against the cylinder, shaking her head. “It’s harder to compress, which limits the range of motion. You probably don’t take note of it except for on an incline or stairs, or when you want to walk quickly—but then it’s stiff. Yes?”

“Yes.”

His voice had deepened, but Ivy didn’t glance up to gauge his expression. She lifted the leg of his breeches and examined the knee. Rudimentary, but fine. Her fingers itched to build a more advanced joint, but fixing what he had would have to serve.

“If you show me to your smithy, I’ll adjust the cylinder’s valve so that it compresses under minimal weight. It won’t be perfect, but you’ll have a smoother stride until the pneumatic can be replaced.”

“Not tonight.”

Ivy closed her eyes as his answer sank through her. Pushing to her feet, she walked back to the window.

He might have sighed, but she wasn’t certain. The creaking of the ship and the clank of his foot as he moved toward her covered the sound. He stopped by the table and glanced down at her plates. She’d eaten from all of them but one.

His brows lifted. “You don’t like lemon tarts?”

She didn’t know; she hadn’t tried one. “Duckie said the sugar came from the Antilles.”

Two hundred years before, the Horde had used cheap imported sugars and teas to infect almost everyone in Britain with their nanoagents. Ivy didn’t know anyone raised under Horde rule who sweetened their food with anything but honey.

Sitting back against the table, he paused with his hand over the tart. “May I?”

“Yes,” she said, grateful that unlike some descendents of the merchants and aristocrats who’d fled when the Horde had advanced across Europe—and who still considered themselves Englishmen, though they’d never stepped foot on British soil until after the Iron Duke blew up the Horde’s tower—Mad Machen didn’t try to convince her that she had nothing to fear from sugar imported from the New World.

Of course she didn’t; she was already infected. She didn’t reject sugar out of paranoia, but pride. Apparently, he understood that.

He ate quietly. She watched his reflection and hope began to rise in her chest. The downward cast of his shoulders told her that fatigue sat heavily on him. If exhausted, surely he wouldn’t want to force her into his bed.

That hope died when her gaze slid down to his loins. She couldn’t mistake the bulge that had formed behind the flap of his breeches. Though tired, he was obviously imagining what came next.

He finished the tart and straightened. “It grows late, Ivy. Let’s go to bed.”

Her teeth clenched. If he tried to force her, she would kill him. And if Ivy killed him, she wouldn’t make it off this ship. Desperate, she cast around her mind for something—
anything
—that might appeal to him. She only had one thing. Unfortunately, she had very little of it.

She stood, digging into the pouch tied at the waist of her trousers and withdrawing a thin denier. She held the money out to him.

He frowned at the coin. “What is this for?”

“I’ll sleep in your bed tonight. This is to sleep unmolested.”

His gaze flew to her face. His dark brows drew together, and shadows moved over his expression. Ivy’s hand didn’t shake; the rest of her did.

After an endless moment, his fingers closed over hers. He took the coin. “Get into the bed.”

She went quickly, before he could change his mind. Her knees sank into the thick mattress and she stretched out on her side, her back hard against the cold bulkhead. His uneven tread carried him to the bureau, where he snuffed the lamp, and she followed the sound of his steps to the bed. He rolled in beside her, a solid block of heat that almost flattened her against the side of the ship. His hands found her waist.

Ivy tried to shrink back and couldn’t. “You agreed you wouldn’t—”

“Crush you? Hold still.” His rough voice brooked no argument. He hauled her against him, her head cradled by his shoulder, her leg over his thighs. “And relax.”

Her laugh burst out, tinged with hysteria. He truly must be insane.

But as the minutes passed, the tension did ease from her body. Despite everything, she was comfortable—and warm.
So warm.

Not that she wanted to become accustomed to this. “How long will we be sailing?”

He didn’t answer for a long moment, and by the heaviness in his reply, she realized he’d almost been asleep. “Fifteen days.”

She stared into the dark.
Fifteen.
And she had only eight coins.

Seven now.

Mad Machen stirred again. “And twenty days more for the return journey. We’ll be sailing against the wind.”

Five weeks altogether—and only coins enough for one.

Smoking hell.

FOUR

A
s always, Eben woke to the first of eight bells signaling the end of the middle watch. Four o’clock. On the deck above, the crew changed shifts, and the muffled thud of their footsteps told him the transition was smooth, with only one hand running late to his post. He listened to
Vesuvius
, to her familiar creaks and groans. The wind had picked up during the night, deepening each roll of the sea.

When the next bell rang in half an hour, Duckie would bring his coffee and breakfast, expecting to find Eben up and dressed. In two bells, Barker and Simms, the navigator, would meet with him to plot their course. Meg had pushed them far enough northwest that rounding the top of the British isle and sailing down the west coast might take them to Wales faster than turning back and sailing for the channel.

But Eben wasn’t in a hurry.

Ivy had softened against him in sleep, her head pillowed on his chest and her fingers loosely curled beneath her chin. Her leg crossed over his groin. He hoped to God she didn’t wake up. Holding her so close hardened his morning erection into an aching, solid length. If Ivy felt his arousal, Eben had no doubt she’d scramble away, certain he was bent on raping her.

The night before, he’d seen her terror as she’d offered the coin. It’d been all he could do not to haul her against him and prove that he wouldn’t take her by force.

But this route was better. When she’d approached him with the denier, Eben had been planning to coax a kiss from her—and two years ago, a single touch of her lips had almost stolen his control. If he’d lost his head again, she wouldn’t be sleeping soundly now, but lying tense and quivering beside him.

He’d already waited two years. So he could wait for a kiss—and hope that she soon exhausted her supply of coins.

I
vy had a vague memory of stirring awake in the dark, Mad Machen a shadow looming over the bed, softly telling her to sleep longer. She must have. When she fully opened her eyes, the sun was streaming into the cabin from the east.

Hot water filled the ewer on the bureau. She washed and quickly changed her clothes behind the closed curtain. A bell rang somewhere above, seven times. Men were up and about; she could hear footsteps and voices through the decks, a good-natured shout and a burst of male laughter.

She’d seen a number of the crew yesterday. They looked like a rough lot, and a few had a smell strong enough that dipping them in the ocean could have killed any megalodon in a thirty mile radius, but none had appeared starved or abused. They certainly hadn’t looked like the four men whose prosthetics she’d rebuilt in Fool’s Cove.

Perhaps she hadn’t seen all of his men, though—or Mad Machen treated the captives he forced into labor differently than his regular crew.

A soft tap at the door was followed by Duckie’s voice. She called him in, and marveled when she saw the meal he carried: black coffee, a bowl of porridge, honey and cream, round soda biscuits, and a thick slice of ham crowded a large tray. Though Mad Machen had been to sea these many years, he apparently still ate as if he lived in Manhattan City. No one in England made breakfasts such as this. The only item that Ivy consumed regularly was the coffee, made cheap and plentiful by the Liberé farmers in the southern American continent.

Perhaps everyone in the New World ate like this—and so would she, quite happily. But despite the growling of her stomach, she tried not to appear too eager. She’d had ham before. Twice.

Half an hour later, with her belly pleasantly full and the coffee mug warming her hands, she left the cabin. A short, low-ceilinged passageway led her from beneath the quarterdeck. Blinking, she emerged into the sun. Faint spray misted her face, and each breath drew in cold, clean air.

“And there she is.” Barker’s voice came from above her. Ivy glanced up, saw him leaning forward with his elbows against the balustrade, smiling down at her. “Had a bit of a lie-in, Miss Blacksmith?”

Her cheeks heated. She could imagine why Barker thought she’d sleep late. “No. I built an autogyro from the clock and the cannons in the captain’s room, which I plan to fly off the ship tonight,” she told the quartermaster. “What have you accomplished today, sir?”

Barker’s smile vanished. He glanced quickly at Mad Machen, who stood beside him with feet braced and his arms folded over his wide chest, looking as if he owned everything he observed—including Ivy.