For Her Love (20 page)

Her breath caught in her throat.

“It will be all right,” he coaxed. “I won’t move. I won’t touch you in any way. Kiss me for as long as you like, then we’ll go to sleep.”

She moved closer to him. It felt odd to be above him, the one in control, but ‘twas a little exhilarating, as well. The tingling sensation at the juncture of her thighs grew more insistent.

She lowered her mouth to his, following his instructions, moving her lips softly against him. He parted his lips slightly, and with the tip of her tongue, she traced the swell of the lower one before delving inside. He tasted of rum and nutmeg from the bumboo he had imbibed at supper. His tongue moved with hers, executing an intricate dance, but never venturing into her mouth, and he made no attempt to touch her in any other way. To her surprise, she was reluctant to stop. She tilted her head and pressed their lips together harder, thrusting her tongue deeply into the moist cavity of his mouth, suddenly hungry for more. Her hands found their way to his expansive chest, moving curiously over soft cotton and hard flesh.

He groaned softly, the sound vibrating within her mouth, and she pulled abruptly away. “Good night,” she whispered, then pulled back the covers and slid between them.

It took a moment before Giles could move. He was so hard it hurt, and though he wanted very much to stay and share her warmth, he knew that he needed a few moments of privacy or he’d never be able to bear the contact of the sheets against him.

“I’ll be right back,” he told her.

“You’re all right?”

“Fine. I just remembered something down in the office.”

“Come back soon?”

He sat up, sucking his breath between his teeth. “Shouldn’t take more than five seconds.” Then he stumbled down the stairs toward blessed relief.

If Matu had known what had just taken place, Grace thought, she would have given Grace one of her typical, light-handed smacks on the side of the head. Grace did it to herself in Matu’s place. Why had she stopped? He was liking it.
She
was liking it. Then he had moaned, and suddenly she had feared that it would go too far. But they were married. There
was
no too far! Now, the heat of the moment was cooling, and it was taking her nerve with it.

She wished Matu had been able to come with them. She would have known just what to say. Grace fixed her eyes on the flame flickering in the lamp. Where was Matu now? Was she sleeping on the dirt floor of one of the huts? Would her father keep his promise? There were so many uncertainties.

Like how much longer could she expect her husband to wait?

The morning was off to a lousy start. He’d arrived at the dock just at dawn, only to learn that Geoff had already left. Next, he inquired after any captains who had lately been to Tortuga to see what news they brought. Beauchamp was well known. If there were some trouble involving him, ‘twould be common knowledge. Though he found no fewer than four such captains, all reported essentially the same thing: Beauchamp had been off the island for over a month, presumably prowling the Spanish Main. If there had been trouble, it was a well-kept secret. Soon Giles realized that there was nothing for it. He would simply have to journey to Tortuga himself. He wasn’t about to allow his best friend to sail into a situation that was “getting hotter” without being there to guard his back.

In the course of arranging for the trip, he managed to gain a shipment of sugar to take with him, and he felt a little better at the thought that he would at least manage to pay for the trip with the proceeds.

Thus, Giles spent the day rounding up his crew and preparing for a voyage he’d no desire to make. He had never cared for unknown elements of danger, having always preferred to know what it was he faced so he might plan a sound strategy to deal with it. Most of all, he wondered why Beauchamp had called upon him. Granted, they both had plundered Spanish ships, but for two different countries. They hardly knew one another. Lord, would he and Geoff never be entirely free of the old days?

In a general cloud of brooding irritability, he arrived at the dock to oversee the loading of the sugar, only to be informed that his first mate had discovered a sizable leak in the hold.

“What happened?” Giles demanded.

“The planking there’s no good,” his carpenter explained. “‘Tis rotted away.”

“We careened her last week,” Giles snapped, referring to the process of tilting a ship onto its side to clean off barnacles and inspect for other damage. “How could we have missed it?”

“You’ll have to ask Freddie Robbins that. He was assigned to that section.”

It took fifteen minutes to track down the responsible crewmember, by which time Giles had begun a slow burn. If there was one thing he could not abide, ‘twas delays due to incompetence. And in this particular venture, time might well be of the essence.

He found Freddie sulking below decks. For a moment, he considered simply firing him on the spot, but the sailor was young, perhaps seventeen, and Giles took pity on him. “You cannot shirk your responsibilities, lad,” he admonished. “You’ll never make a good sailor if you cannot perform basic duties conscientiously.”

The young man stared at him with blank, blue eyes.
Not merely shiftless
, Giles thought,
but dull, as well
. “Conscientiously. You know, attentively, carefully.”

“I did my job, Cap’n. Not my fault the wood rotted. ‘Tis the water, you know.”

Why had he hired this fellow? “Aye, Freddie, ‘tis the water. Water rots wood. It does it all the time. That’s why we have to stay on top of it. What if this had rotted through while we were at sea? Our very lives depend upon every man’s diligence.” Another blank stare. “Watchfulness.”

“But we found it.”

“The first mate found it. He found it after
you
had been appointed to clean off that section. Finding and reporting problems in an area where you’ve been assigned is
your
responsibility. Now get down below and man the pump. We’ll empty her out and careen her again so the carpenter can do
his
job properly.”

Giles rounded up the better part of the crew, pulling them from less urgent tasks of routine maintenance and setting them about securing the goods that were waiting on the dock to be loaded. To his infinite frustration, he found Freddie back up on deck, tapping one of the Negro sailors on the shoulder.

“Quashee,” Freddie said, “Cap’n wants the bilge pumped. Go on down and give an ‘and. I’ll finish splicing that rope.”

Giles strode briskly across the deck. “I told you to do that, Freddie.”

“Don’t matter ‘oo does it, Cap’n. Quashee there don’t mind.”

“His name is Jawara,” Giles snapped. “And I didn’t order
him
to do it, I ordered
you
. You missed the damage; you can bloody well do the work to help fix it.”

Freddie gave him a sullen glare. “Them Blacks is better suited to ‘ard labor, and what’s the difference what I call ‘im? ‘E’s the only African on deck, and there’s no Englishman anywhere answers to Quashee.”

Giles had always called each man on his ship by name, but he had never thought much of it when white crewmembers referred to every Black as ‘Quashee.’ It was a common African name and was often used to address Blacks of all walks of life in the Caribbean. For the first time, it occurred to Giles that just such generalizations were the foundation upon which slavery was built. It reduced individual men to indistinct members of a servant caste. It stripped them of the fundamental dignity of having their own names.

“Jawara,” Giles corrected through his teeth. “And I’ll tell you this now: you’ll obey my orders, or I’ll put you off this ship. I don’t give a damn if I have to set you on a desert island; I’ll not have my men weaseling out of their duties. As for who must perform hard labor, that would be every man on board. If you’re too delicate, mister, best you find other employment.”

Freddie grumbled, but he made his way below and got to work. Giles checked on him and the repairs, went over their supplies one last time, then dispatched a message to Faith that he was leaving on the morrow. Granted, he had promised Geoff he would look after her, but doubtless he’d left her a guard or two, and Giles hoped to return in less than a fortnight. That reminded him that he’d his own wife’s safety to see to. He chose a man for the job, excusing him of his duties on the ship and telling him to report to Grace at the office on the morrow, where he would stay until Giles returned.

The sun was nearly gone ere the ship was again sea-worthy. He stayed and saw to it that she was back in the water without any further problems. It had been a long, exhausting day, and as if the leak and the confrontation hadn’t been enough, it began to drizzle as he walked home.

*

Giles had sent a message that, while he hadn’t sailed, neither would he be home until dark, so Grace went downstairs to the office, hoping to occupy the hours. It took a bit of self-conscious digging through Geoff’s half of the double desk, but she discovered several stacks of unrecorded receipts and unfiled records. She sat at her husband’s place, carefully calculating monies received and bills paid. Once the amounts were noted in the correct ledgers, she filed the records in the set of shallow boxes she’d found stacked on a bookshelf. As the day waned, a light rain began to fall, and the light faded.

She had just lit a lamp and begun to worry about her husband when he walked through the office door looking damp and very testy. When he saw her, he frowned in confusion. “What have we here?”

“You said that you had some need of help with your accounts. I do not doubt it, now that I’ve seen how far behind you were, but I think I have you nearly caught up.”

He closed the door quietly behind him. “I did say that, didn’t I? I meant later, when I might show you what to do.”

“I found everything I needed on Geoff’s desk.”

The corner of his eye ticked almost imperceptibly. “Geoff has his own filing system, as it were. I know his desk is a shambles really, but there
is
a method to it. A mystifying one, but some rhyme and reason, nonetheless.”

“Aye. ‘Twas not overly complicated. Is there a problem?”

He already had his hands full contending with his partner’s accounting. No amount of counsel had convinced Geoff that his system was too haphazard. How would Giles ever set their records to right if she had jumbled what little organization there was? He closed his eyes, breathing deeply.
One, two, three…
he thought silently.

“Are you counting?” she huffed.

His eyes flew open, gray and somber, like the weather. “What?”

“You count, do you not? You start to feel your temper boil, and you count in your head. What? To ten?”

“It keeps me from saying things I’ll regret.”

She rose from her seat and glowered at him. “And what were you about to say?”

“Nothing.”

“Ha!”

“I just wish that you had waited. There’s a structure to all of this.” He looked at the desk, his mouth a grim line.

Grace marched over to the bookshelf and pulled off the stack of boxes. Then she stomped back over and set them hard atop the desk. “This,” she began, resting her hand on the first box, “is for
Destiny
. It contains shipment records such as inventories and settlements paid to customers, placed chronologically. Receipts for settlement are filed on top of the inventories they correlate with. The next box contains expenses exclusive to Geoff’s ship—supplies ordered, repairs made. You’ll see that I’ve added a bill for canvas and another for a recent purchase of lumber. The amounts are also recorded in this ledger.” She laid her finger on the spine of a leather bound register in a stack of books where she had been sitting.

She set
Destiny’s
records aside and continued. “The next two boxes appear to have been designated for
Reliance
, since one contained her bill of sale and the other had but the inventory of my father’s cargo. You did say that you had only just purchased her. I found the receipt from my father for the money you paid him on Geoff’s desk with other records pertinent to your ship. They have all been recorded and filed.

“That big box over there,” now she pointed to one on the bottom shelf, “is for documents that relate to your overall expenditures—ink and parchment, pay for sailors, and the like. I noticed that you really haven’t two separate, permanent crews. You simply hire sailors ere you leave on each voyage, but many sail with you over and over again. I saw a number of names repeated from one voyage to the next. Incidentally, you have missed a payment to Basil Hale’s widow, and there needs be three more such payments ere you have made good on her pension. I found the agreement tucked under a map on Geoff’s desk and scoured your books for the records.”

“She hasn’t received payment this month?”

“Nay, she has not. I will need access to funds while you are gone if you wish me to continue running the office in your place.” She regarded him through narrowed eyes. “That is, unless you feel I have bungled the job hopelessly.”

Giles cleared his throat sheepishly. “I wasn’t aware that we were behind on Mistress Hale’s pension. I’d been sailing for your father and then courting you. Geoff is usually adequate at handling accounts, but he has been known to lose track if there’s no actual invoice.”

“So I noticed.”

Giles opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“I believe you were going to say ‘thank you.’ No need to stop and count. You won’t regret it.”

“Actually, I wasn’t sure which to say first, thank you or I’m sorry.”

“I’m not partial. Any order will be fine.”

“‘Tis just that, after the apartment, knowing what you consider to be organized…”

“This is business, Giles, not trinkets and finery. I am well aware that without careful record keeping, your company is sunk—if you’ll pardon the pun. I told you, I helped my father quite frequently. I’ve a decent brain for business.”

“I see that now, but you can scarcely fault my mistrust of your father’s training. If you’ll forgive my bluntness, your father does his accounting drunk.”