For Her Love (23 page)

If she spoke the words that quivered in her mouth like living things, she would forever undo the scant equilibrium that had kept her from falling long ago. Matu’s sacrifice would have been for naught.

“Tell me,” Faith urged. “Let it out. I can see that it torments you.”

Unwilling to leap, unable to retreat, she walked the cliff’s edge. “I learned that I am a bastard. My father’s wife was barren, or—what was that other word?” She searched her memory for the biting phrase that her father had used that night. “Frigid. I don’t even know what it means. I only know that he went to—to another woman. A kind of woman no one respects. A kind of woman whose daughter would never marry a fine sea captain. He rutted with her to make me, like an animal.”

“He told you that?”

“His wife did.”

“Oh Grace.” Faith eyes shimmered with tears. “Words are so utterly inadequate.”

The sympathetic grief was Grace’s undoing. Her defenses crumbled, and her anger no longer had enough force to sustain her bravado. Softly she confessed, “So much happened that night. ‘Tis all mixed up together, the defilement, losing my place within my family, knowing that my nurse, whom I loved, suffered because of me. She was the keeper of the secret; that’s why father silenced her. There was no part of me or my life left unsullied. How can I take what Giles has offered when I am so unworthy?”

“Unworthy? What have you done? You did not hurt your nurse. That deed is upon your father’s head. And what does it matter who your mother was or by what act you were created? Geoff’s mother was a prostitute, too.” When Grace opened her mouth to protest, Faith held up her hand to stop her. “That had nothing to do with you. You are here, Grace, and that fact alone makes you worthy. You have lived your life bestowing compassion upon others when you’d had little enough of it yourself. By that, whatever sins you have taken upon yourself are redeemed. If you cannot think yourself deserving enough, then think of Giles. I wish that you could hear him speak of you. He admires you so, and certainly not for your fine parents!” The last two words dripped with sarcasm.

“But…”

“There are no buts. Your mother could have been a murderess, she could have been the lowest woman on earth, and it would mean nothing to him, for it would change nothing about you. As for what you suffered at your uncle’s hands, Giles has some idea of the nature of what happened. He does not think you any less virtuous or pure. All he wants is to heal you, to love you as God meant you to be loved. “

“I’ve tried to let him,” Grace protested. “I just can’t.”

Faith sat down at the table and motioned Grace to the seat across from her. “‘Tis not just the physical coupling. He wants your happiness. He wants you to care for him as he cares for you.”

“I do care for him!” Grace protested as she sank into the chair. “You’re right, he is a good man, and I have seen that in him from the start. I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to let him…let him…”

“The mechanics are similar, I admit,” Faith replied, “but love-making and rape are not the same.”

Grace sat. “I told you. I was not raped.”

“Think you that it mattered to a ten-year-old? You were ravaged. What cared you whether it was with his sex or his hand?”

Grace stared at Faith across the table, feeling as though a window had somehow opened inside of her soul. Something musty and stale filtered out, even as something fresh and clean replaced it. How easily this woman dismissed the notion that she had not been truly hurt, merely because she had not been breached. In a single sentence, Faith had acknowledged what everyone else had ignored, and for some reason, that acknowledgement seemed to rob the incident of some of its terrible power.

Grace’s throat tightened with emotion. “It was never—never spoken of,” she choked. “It was a shameful thing to be swept under the rug and forgotten.” Her eyes fell on the bed, where Faith’s son had dug several wooden sailors out of the satchel to man his ship, and she envied him the simplicity of his life.

“But not by you,” Faith said. “You remember. You remember the shame and the fear. You remember every word he said, do you not?”

Grace squeezed her wet eyes shut and nodded.

“You cannot forget his words, but you can know them for what they are. They are lies, Grace, bitter, sick, perverted lies.”

“I’m not ignorant,” Grace protested. “I am well aware that to make a baby the man
must
violate the woman.”

“There, you see, that is part of the problem. Even the words you use, ‘violate’ and ‘rut,’ are frightening and base. To begin with, he does not violate her. He enters her, but she is made for him. I cannot believe that Giles made no attempt to please you, to make you ready for him.”

Grace rose and went to the hearth, where she busily struck flint to steel. This was not a conversation that she could have looking into the other woman’s face. “Would you like some tea?”

With a sigh of resignation, Faith said, “If you’d rather not talk about it, we won’t.”

“When I saw you with your husband,” Grace admitted reluctantly, her eyes fixed upon her task, “and saw how you were with him, so contented and unafraid. I—I wanted to ask you about it, but…well, you just don’t ask about things like that.”

“Well,” Faith said defiantly, “today we will take tea and speak on all of the things that men brag of to each other over ale and rum. We women are too prone to silence.”

“Silence makes a thing seem shameful,” Grace remarked.

“So it does, but there is no shame. ‘Tis quite natural.” Despite her bold façade, Faith smoothed her skirts self-consciously then folded her hands primly in her lap. “Now, I assume that Giles has touched you? In—intimate places?”

Grace nodded.

“But surely he didn’t hurt you.”

“Nay. It did not hurt.”

“This touching, it is meant to—to stir you—to make your body prepare itself for him. You see, your womb naturally produces something to ease the way. In spite of what you were told, beyond the first time, pain is not an inherent part of joining.”

“The first time? The breaking? The breaking that can only be done once.”

“Aye, but again, the word you use to describe it is too harsh. There is a barrier that must be broken, but the pain is brief and the pleasure overrides it.”

Her face in flames, Grace recalled the dampness that had sprung at the touch of his hand. He had ignited something, just as now a spark flew from the flint to the char in the fireplace. “But eventually he must seek his own pleasure,” she argued, “else there is no seed. My uncle said that the woman must be made to hurt.”

“Your uncle is a liar, and that is probably the best that may be said of him. A real man is aroused by his wife’s desire. Her release as important as his.”

“Her release?”

“It is…” Faith searched for the word, “a
completion
that he brings you to.”

Grace gave a perplexed frown. “I do not think that that has happened between us.”

Faith laughed softly. “You’d know it if it had. Mayhap if you understood about that… Oh, I cannot believe that I am about to say this!”

The char had caught the tinder, and Grace added more fuel, blowing gently on it before turning to cast an expectant look at Faith.

Faith cleared her throat. “I had been told that this was a frightful sin, of course, that even the urge to do it was a sure sign that God had not chosen you for salvation. But Geoff showed me how. He helped me to see that it is no sin, for it eases a woman’s loneliness when she cannot accompany her husband to sea. It helps her to be a faithful wife. Mayhap it could help to ease your fear.”

“What?” Grace demanded, frustrated by her own mortifying ignorance. Surely Faith was not implying that she should…should…

Faith fanned her hand in front of her furiously red face. “Well, if you, um, touch yourself, like Giles touches you, you’ll feel it begin to happen. Then just—just follow where it leads and you’ll see what I mean.
That
is what a man seeks from his lover. Not pain.”

Grace coaxed the little fire she had started, carefully mulling Faith’s words over in her mind. Touch herself?
There?
But it had been good at first, when Giles had done it, before the shutter had blown open and the past had swallowed her up. “You’re sure ‘tis not a sin?”

Faith smiled sheepishly. “I hope not. If I cannot go to Boston with Geoff, he will be gone two months or more.”

The two rosy-cheeked women glanced sideways at one another then looked away. “I am sorry I spoke so harshly to you,” Grace apologized.

With a little shrug, Faith replied, “I know how hard this must have been for you, but with all my heart, I believe that you and Giles can work this through.”

Grace held her breath. Did she dare to hope?

The coast of Cayonne, the only port in Tortuga deep enough to accommodate a ship the size of
Reliance
, was all too familiar to Giles. It had been a frequent haunt in another life. The island itself was made of hills of solid rock. But the unyielding earth had not deterred hearty trees from dominating the land, stretching out their roots above ground, so it was densely forested. Giles knew that wild boar roamed those woods, sustenance for true buccaneers.
Boucanier
was a French word meaning hunters of wild pigs. Buccaneers on Tortuga alternated hunting boars and selling their salted meat with sailing on pirate ships along the Spanish Main.

The French word had, in its bastardized form, sneaked into the English language through criminal alliances. Tortuga had switched hands violently between the Spanish and the French several times throughout the century, but with the help of the English, the French had finally prevailed. Spain claimed official ownership of the island, but its governor, D’Ogeron, was a French citizen employed by the king of France. Privateers and pirates from both England and France were Tortuga’s main defense against Spain, and D’Ogeron welcomed them all with open arms.

With England’s flag flapping briskly on her mast,
Reliance
sailed smoothly into the harbor, only a few ships away from
Destiny
. Through a combination of speech and signs, Jawara had the other Africans working in perfect order so that Giles hardly had to watch them handle the sails, much less give them any direction. He smiled, pleased with his crewmen’s initiative. Turning his attention to the harbor, he saw Geoff and his crew making sure the ship was ready to set sail. He shouted to him, but the breeze carried away the sound, so he had to wait until they docked and he could actually board Geoff’s ship.

“Giles!” Geoff greeted him from the top of the gangplank, obviously surprised. “What brings you here? Where are Faith and Grace?”

Climbing quickly, Giles replied, “At home. I left one of my men with Grace, and I spoke with your man when I saw Faith before I left. All’s well. With Faith that is. What I want to know is what brought you here.”

“I told you,” Geoff protested, “a sugar shipment.”

“Not so,” Giles countered. He pulled the letter from his jacket and handed it to Geoff.

“Damn me!” Geoff muttered, reading it. “‘Tis a mystery to me, Giles.” He handed Giles another letter, written on the same parchment, in the same, spidery hand. “This came a few days after you returned from Welbourne, engaged to Grace.”

Dear Captain Courtney,

I find myself in a rather tight bind here in Tortuga. I’ve need of sanctuary, preferably on a merchant vessel, something above suspicion. I beseech you, as one of your brethren of the sea, to grant me aid. Come quickly.

En Fraternité,

Capitaine Henri Beauchamp

“Why did you not show me this?” Giles asked, after he read it.

“You were getting married. Besides,
Destiny
fit the description he gave. ‘Tis a merchant vessel. Although why he asked us for help, instead of someone French, I’ve no idea.”

“Why does he need help at all?”

“Well, that’s the damnedest thing. I’ve asked all over, but no one knows anything. I cannot find Beauchamp, and everyone I’ve asked says he’s not been around in a month or more.”

“And as you said, Geoff, why us?” He looked at the letter again. “Why
me
? You’d think he would have written this to you, if either of us. You were the captain back when we frequented Tortuga.”

“I thought that might be exactly why he chose you. He wanted someone above suspicion, and I was a bit more notorious.”

Giles scratched his head and studied the bustling port. It was less developed than Port Royal. Wares went directly from one ship to another. This was a place where stolen wealth was quickly redistributed, not openly sold in a major center of Caribbean trade. The crowd consisted predominately of men. Governor D’Ogeron had imported over a hundred French prostitutes, but they had been for the citizens of Tortuga to marry. As he had hoped, the marriages had helped to settle down the rowdy men who lived there. They had set up traditional housekeeping inland, away from the sailors who made temporary use of the island for commercial reasons.

For a situation that was “getting hotter,” it seemed unlikely that no one in the busy port knew anything of it.

“Does it not strike you odd that there are no scribe’s initials on either of these?” Giles asked. “Beauchamp cannot write. Nor is his English this good. And I still cannot fathom why he did not contact another Frenchman.”

“He could have a literate Englishman on board. ‘Tis not unheard of. Mayhap one of our old men.”

“Mayhap,” Giles conceded, “but the whole thing smells off. What possessed you to come without me?”

“As I said, you were to be newly wed. You’d no need of this just then. But I could hardly leave a fellow privateer in the lurch. A near stranger saved my life once. Anyway, whatever ‘twas about, ‘tis a moot point now. We were about to leave,” Geoff said.

“I’ll not be long after,” Giles replied. “I picked up a shipment of sugar and some rum. Once I sell it, I’ll be on my way.”

They parted, and Giles was able to locate a local merchant who would take his shipment. When he returned to the ship, he was surprised to see his first mate in conversation with a stranger. The man looked to be in his late forties, dressed in French clothes, a
justacorps
made of indigo silk with breeches that matched the jacket. Under it, he wore a lace cravat and an elaborately embroidered gold vest. Even more lace spilled from the wide cuffs of the
justacorps
. Dark hair fell smoothly down his back, and there was something about his face that struck Giles as familiar in some way.