The Companion (12 page)

She pushed him away. He lay there on the carpets, strangely weak. He could barely lift his head. The scent of cinnamon and ambergris made him want to gag. She told him to go, and he had to crawl to the flap of the tent. He looked back to see her rearranging her garment into some sort of order. Then hands took him and tied his rope to a post driven into the sand just outside the door of the tent. He lay there, sand clinging to his sweating body until he was dried by the warm sirocco. He fingered the place where she had pierced his throat and suckled. There were two round, raised wounds. The memory of the other slaves, covered in those round marks, made him wail inside. Now that it was over, the full horror of what had happened overwhelmed him. She could make him do anything. He would service her like her own private stud. He was no stronger than the others had been. There was no escape. The memory of the red eyes tormented him. She was not human. And he was wholly in her power, at least until he went mad, like the Frenchman, or died of his wounds. He prayed for an early death, without hope that his prayers would be answered
.

Ian shut his eyes as despair washed over him. It lurked in him still, ready to submerge him under its dark waves. Pray as he might, death was denied him now. He could heal a broken neck. The burns from going naked into the sun had left no trace. If he had needed any more proof of his invincibility, tonight had certainly provided it. His only recourse was to put as much distance between him and the desert as he could and try to forget the monster he had escaped. He could only hope to resist becoming a monster, too. He would not think of her. He would not let her poison who he was with her foul practices, her despicable . . . And yet had he escaped? Was he not fouled as surely, as insidiously, as if he still knelt in chains at her side?

Ian swallowed, tried to breathe, and huddled into his bloody quilts. He squeezed his stinging eyes shut. If he could not pray for death, at least he might pray for sleep. Who would answer prayers from such as he? What God would allow this to happen to one of his creatures?

Beth woke from uneasy sleep before dawn, raised from her dreams of red eyes by the noise of sailors holystoning the deck and singing some chantey. At first she wondered
whether she had dreamed the whole battle with the pirates and the confrontation with a man who might not be quite human as she knew it. She raised her hand. There was the nail she had broken grabbing up the capstan bar. The black dress hanging on the door was stiff with dried blood.

It was real. A kiss she had asked for, pirates attacking, furious battle, Mr. Rufford’s extraordinary feats of heroism, the awful price he paid in wounds, frantic fear for his life, the shock of his healing, and her strange acceptance of his unnatural qualities.
Had
she accepted them? Why? She gave a shudder as she remembered the red glow that had suffused his eyes.

Now, as she lay in her cot, the sensations of last night poured over her. What stood out was an overwhelming sensation of the . . . maleness of him. As she lay in her gently swinging cot, remembering the feel of his lips on hers and the silk of his skin against her fingers made her breath hiss in the back of her throat. She thought herself immune to the naked male body, yet his had an intrinsically different effect on her from the many natives she had seen. It made her flush even in memory. Her eyes swam and she seemed to drift away to a place where she could remember perfectly the hip bone beneath his flesh, the hollow of his belly dusted with an arrow of light brown hair that pointed to his sex. His nipples had been soft over the swell of pectorals. His neck was a pillar of strength with that pulse beating in the most vulnerable hollow of his throat. The muscles in arms and shoulders had been heavy. He was not lean or rangy like so many men. Then his face—handsome, surely, but very particular in its character. His waving hair, thick and soft as a girl’s, only made him seem more intensely masculine.

The heat that suffused her seemed to gather in her loins, producing a strangely satisfying throb. Was it her mother’s Egyptian blood in her veins that pulsed inside her? Her mother had bequeathed to her the heat of the desert. That blood was not something she was proud of, but perhaps she could not avoid its effects. All she knew now was that she wanted to find out more about Ian Rufford and that he called to her in some
elemental way that her blood understood, if she did not.

He would not be on deck. It was daylight. But, after last night, could she not use her concern as an excuse to look in on him?

That got her up and dressed in a fresh black kerseymere dress. Two bells struck on deck. It was only seven in the morning. She could not go calling this early.

Beth went out on a deck just drying from its morning scrub. The blood from the night was washed away. The wind was fresh. The ship bore a cloud of sail in the pale, clear light. Carpenters mounted a new main topgallant spar and men mended canvas ripped by shot. Several sailors touched their forelocks with a knuckle or smiled and nodded. She smiled in return. They must be feeling the general gladness at escape that filled her breast. A young boy heaved the log, let the knots run past his fingers. A grizzled man beside him held a glass with pouring sand close to his face. “Hold!” he called.

“Four and one fathom,” the boy piped.

In the distance she could see another ship. Her heart skipped. A pirate? She looked up to the quarterdeck. The Captain was not there, but Mr. Rait, the first mate, stood just behind the master at the wheel. He noticed her and came forward, tripping lightly down the ladder.

“The convoy, miss,” he reassured her. He pointed behind her.

She turned to see two more ships, sporting hardly any canvas. “What a relief.” Then she saw the twelve long canvas sacks lying just under the rail. “Oh, dear.”

“The butcher’s bill was steep,” Mr. Rait said gravely. “And there will be some additions. We’ll bury them in the forenoon watch.”

“Shouldn’t we take them home for burial?”

“Carrying of dead men is the worst luck a ship can have, miss.” Then seeing her look, he continued. “At least it was quick and in battle. We have a fear of drowning. That’s why so few sailors learn to swim. Better to go fast than slow if we go overboard.”

She nodded. “It seems a hard life, only sleeping four hours at a time, and all the work they have, with only salt pork and biscuit to eat.”

“Not as bad as being poor at home, miss.” He smiled. “Mostly there is salt beef, too, and the ship has banyan days, with peas or beans, and we catch fish and turtles. Sometimes the flying fish and the squids fairly throw themselves on board by the hundreds. Nothing like fried flying fish for breakfast. And of course, there’s the grog.”

He seemed kindly and forthcoming this morning. Still, she could not ask him why he chose such a life, where pleasures still seemed few in spite of all he said and pirates could descend at any moment and create a “butcher’s bill.”

Mr. Rait cleared his throat. “The hands and the officers have expressed the greatest admiration for your courage and your . . . your invention last night during the boarding, miss. You showed the way, slinging that lantern like you did.”

Beth blushed in confusion. So that was the reason for the smiles and nods. The sailors were doing so even now, around the deck, as they listened to the conversation. “Your other passenger was of far more aid than I.”

Mr. Rait’s features darkened. “None of us quite knows what to make of that, miss.”

She raised her brows. “As far as I can tell, he ‘saved your bacon,’ as they say.”

“But the manner of it . . .” Mr. Rait grew pensive. “I mean, he lifted a whole mainmast spar, not just a tops’l spar or a studs’l boom. And the punishment he took shouldering them guns . . . the wounds . . .”

“Men do extraordinary things under pressure,” she said smoothly. “I got the impression that Mr. Rufford was most anxious to avoid being captured by pirates. Do you think he has had some experience with that before?”

Mr. Rait nodded slowly. All hands around listened to the exchange. “What he said, about not being made slave . . .”

“The scars on his wrists,” Beth added. “Surely you remarked them.”

“No. I hadn’t.” But that gave him something to think
about. “I hope he was not too much wounded. Dr. Granger never saw him.”

“I checked in on him,” she said. “Just to see how he did. He was a bit knocked about, but the blood belonged to our attackers.”

“I can sure believe that,” the young man said fervently. “I ain’t never seen anything like the way he got after them.” He gestured to Redding, just coming out from the galley. “Mr. Redding, hop along and get Miss Rochewell a spot of early toast and coffee.”

Beth drank her coffee strong and black from a tin cup on the deck, rather than from the Captain’s china in the stern cabin, and munched on a slice of buttered toast. No sustenance had been so welcome in some time. Had she been unable to taste since her father’s death? The pain struck home and she put it away for another time. It was the first time she had been able to do that. The hands all gave her room with nary a complaint that she was in the way. One fierce-looking fellow with a long braid and a ring in his ear gestured to a canvas bag and invited her to sit “comfortable-like on the cheese of wads.” When she ventured to ask him what that was, he explained seriously and slowly, as though she were deaf or simple, that the wads they used for stuffing powder and shot in their guns came in round bags that looked like a wheel of cheese.

The watch had changed and the morning watch was two bells in, which made it nine o’clock, when she felt it might be respectable to inquire after her fellow passenger. She was on her way to Mr. Rufford’s cabin door when she remembered with extreme guilt that she had another fellow passenger who should demand the courtesy of a call.

“Mrs. Pargutter!” she called, knocking on that lady’s door.

“Come in!” a weak voice called.

“How do you this morning, ma’am?”

Mrs. Pargutter was in her dressing gown and cap, sitting in her cot with a lace handkerchief pressed to her mouth. “Why did I leave Tripoli?” she wailed. “Pirates! And being stuffed down in the bowels of the ship when I am so very
ill—what would have happened had they captured us? My virtue soiled, relegated to rule over the Sultan’s harem, a slave to his insatiable physical needs . . .”

Beth blushed to think of her own fears. At least she had not aspired to preeminence. “I think we should have been ransomed for gold,” she said in a damping tone.

“I shall not take a step outside this cabin for the rest of the voyage, no matter how many pirates attack. Do you know that dreadful place below smelled like tar?”

“I’m sure it did,” Beth soothed. Then, not proud of her cowardice, she added, “Should I just send Jenny to you?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Pargutter sighed gratefully. “And do ask her to bring my tatting. She had more room in her cabin for some of my things than I had in mine, you know.”

“Of course,” Beth murmured, privately thinking that Jenny would be named a saint at any moment if ever she would turn Papist.

When Jenny was summoned and Beth’s excuses made, she again turned toward Mr. Rufford’s silent cabin. Her heartbeat fluttered. “Mr. Rufford?” she called softly, knocking. Would he be asleep, in line with his peculiar habits?

“Come in, Miss Rochewell.”

The deep voice never failed to thrill her. Was she more enamored of him now she knew he held even more secrets than she had suspected? She opened the cabin door.

He was sitting, his cravat neatly tied, his coat of blue superfine smooth across his shoulders, his buff breeches tight across his thighs, his boots gleaming, in front of his basin, putting up his shaving gear. His sandy curls were tied back neatly once more in a black ribbon. His face was smooth and slightly pink with shaving. It was as though last night had never been. But in the mirror she saw painful emotion in his eyes that startled her. A shaving cut showed on his cleft chin. As he mustered himself and turned to her, it disappeared. Her stomach sank. The phenomenon was even more disconcerting in the daytime, though here the room was lit by a lamp since the tiny window was covered with a black cloth. A bullet lay on his dressing table. It must have come from
his back. She tried to imagine his body simply thrusting it out as he healed.

Nerves twanged inside her. The enormity of his strangeness came thumping back. She had accepted his explanation of an infection of his blood with complete naïveté. What if he was some kind of monster? She had been misled by her body’s response to him. It had all started with the kiss she asked for. What had she been thinking? She had not considered . . . What could she say to excuse her presence here? In the end, words came without her permission. “I’m afraid I ruined the edge of your razor by cutting off your clothing. I am sorry, sir.”

The pain in his eyes seeped away. He sighed, not quite in amusement. “I have never heard a prettier apology, or a more unusual one.”

Beth felt her color rise. It was an idiotic thing to have said.

“I should not have ruined your apology by calling you to account,” he murmured. “I am grateful for your most practical attitude.”

She had to say something about having asked him for a kiss. “I owe you another apology, I’m afraid. You must think me forward, with . . . with my strange request yesterday.”

He seemed at a loss, and then his face softened in recognition. “Another practical approach to your problem. I did not object, you will recall.”

She turned the subject, flushing. “The hands are most thankful for your prowess in battle.”

He lifted his brows, his gaze penetrating now.

At least she had done him a service. If he was worried that the men would hold his efforts on the ship’s behalf against him, she could allay those fears. “I told them men were capable of great feats when in the throes of fear or battle.”

“So cowardice is now widely regarded to have induced my strength?”

Beth shrugged. “Better that . . .”

“I suppose I should be thankful you did not go shrieking to Captain Tindly.”