Jennifer Horseman (21 page)

Garrett tried to read the effect of his words, but choosing silence again, she hid from him beneath lowered lashes. His mind caught the image and held it: like a star-haloed light, those lashes closing as he kissed them, tasting the tears he never saw as he slowly filled her—

He got up abruptly, retrieving tht tea tray and bringing it back to set it where she sat. He poured two cups, lacing each with a good deal of sugar before swinging down into the easy chair and lifting his booted feet onto the serving table. The movements were so disarmingly casual that she kept looking up uncertainly, unable to guess his intent.

"So what book caught your interest?"

It required a long moment to realize he would condescend to profess interest in the book she read. She held the book up for his inspection.

"Descartes? The Meditations? Ah ... well," he said, hoping he might engage her with his help. "You must have found it more than a bit difficult?"

As soon as the words were out, he saw he had insulted her. Unbelievably, he had insulted her. A smile tugged at the comers of his mouth when he watched the subsequent prick of her pride, a slight tilt of her head. Other than his sister Jane, he had never known a woman who read with any regularity, yet alone one who read the philosophers.

"I suppose most people find his philosophy difficult the first time they read him."

"Well, I'm impressed. You've read him before?"

"He's my favorite." Before she could think better of it, her passion rose in a whispered rush of words. "Reading him, especially the Meditations, replenishes my faith. Like a sun shining on the eyes, his thought has Aristotle's own clarity and brilliance, but his philosophy, I think, goes so much deeper. It's not so dry or so perfectly obvious once explained. Rather, Descartes gives one a poetic revelation of the sacred—"

The changed expression on his face immediately stopped her. He waited for a moment, confused. "Is it my shock that stopped you?"

She nodded, her nervousness keeping her still, while strangely, her renewed distress caused the creatures to rally around her. Vespa jumped on her lap, Polly flew to Garrett's shoulder, while Tbnali watched in sudden interest again.

"Forgive me, Juliet. It's just that to hear you voice my own opinion on such a subject—" Garrett stopped, the creatures' sensitivity triggering his own. "That's not it, is it, love? It's that your uncle encountered the unnatural lift of your mind and, and what? Is that when he forbid you the use of his library?"

There was no sign of distress upon confronting the subject except for the quickness of her small breaths as she nodded with her eyes downcast. "Yes, he looked just . . . just like you now."

"Were you discussing something with him?"

"No," she shook her head. "I don't even think he knew I read from his library for many years. He overheard me discussing a book the reverend had given me, a hateful book by a man named Malthus—"

"On population control?"

"You've read it?"

"Aye, when it was first printed. A most unsettling book, if any one line in it were true. Why would a reverend give a young lady that book to read?"

"He caught me ... as I was returning from a visit to the poorhouse in Bristol at a time when I was quite desperate. I only risked it once when my uncle was away for a whole week in London. I suppose my motive was selfish; I had a ... need to see people worse off than myself ... so I could know, see that if they could survive, then so ... could I—" She banished the thought with a small wave of her hand. "I brought a basket of food for the children there. Comforting them, playing with them that day, was such an unexpected joy to me. And it made me see that I had something to live for, I mean past waiting for the day when ... I, I could be free."

"The reverend caught me on the way home. I was terrified he would tell my uncle, but no, he never did. He just gave me that book, hoping, I suppose, to discourage any more visits. He believed what Malthus postulated: that soon too many people would fill the world, that famines and plagues, war and disease, were God's means of eliminating humankind, and worst of all, that helping others only exacerbates the problem. I was arguing the very premise with the reverend when I turned to see my uncle in the doorway—" She shook her head, emotion shimmering in her eyes. "He had never heard me speak freely and, and he was . . . quite shocked—"

That strange, sad light came to her eyes and Garrett thought she must be remembering the horror of her punishment. He wanted to banish it, take away the night, but he was helpless, late in saving her by many years, a fact he regretted with a futile viciousness he tried now to control. "Juliet," he leaned forward to take her hand, "it's over now—"

She shot startled eyes up to him, her expression neatly conveying her incredulity upon hearing those words. "What's over now? My beatings? So you say ... how strange, though! I feel no different. I fell trapped and helpless and held against my will in a place where what I want and what I feel does not matter—"

"Enough," Garrett quickly rose to say, no longer trusting himself and willing to leave because of it. "I see little point in reiterating what's already been said. You have been hurt enough for one lifetime and as long as your desires can hurt you, I will keep you from him."

He shut the door behind himself, stopping when he heard the book hit it. Her temper was indeed alarming, alarming in the sheer amount and force of desire it elicited, his desire to tame it. Aye, but a good sign nonetheless, even if she only expressed it behind closed doors. Like a clean fresh wind in the sails, anger was a necessary element on the long journey it would take for her to heal, and the toss of that book meant she was discovering she was safe again. . . .

The last long arms of the sun slanted across the deck where Garrett stood. The great ship appeared vast, powerful, black against the endless blue desert of ocean. The darkening blue of the waters reminded him of her eyes darkening with passion, the uncharacteristically trite poetry of the thought telling him just how much she had captured of him. He found himself torn between laughing and cursing. A frustrated mixture of both sounded just as Leif came to stand by his side at the rail.

As close friends do, Garrett soon found himself recounting the scene he had just quit, how he had found her hiding the book in fear he would object, how this affected him, and then his five-minute success in drawing her out. "I was shocked when I heard her thoughts on that book. Juliet is only ten and seven—"

"Aye, I overheard something about that," Leif interrupted as he remembered something. "I was first to come across her and her young lad, and the devil if I did not hear him thankin' her for writing a treatise on your own Descartes. Her treatise, aye, but one the slovenly bastard presented at the university as his own." "Surely you jest?"

"Nay, as the boy himself said, he has no mind for scholarly studies or ideas. But Garrett, I heard him say the paper she wrote won a place in the library."

"The library?" Shock drew Garrett's brows together, and seeing it made Leif laugh.

"Why is it men are always so shocked when a woman works with her mind."

"That's not fair, Leif. I'd be shocked if she were a lad of seventeen. As if her beauty alone were not enough of an indictment—"

"It never was enough for you, I've seen that a hundred times." Leif watched the emotion cross Garrett's face. "So what happened?"

"My shock reminded her of another man, how it happened that he came to forbid her the use of his library, and as she was telling me this—" He shook his head and looked away. "Leif, I am in trouble. I want her so badly-"

The gentle wind flapped the great sails overhead, small waves licked the side of the ship and from the main deck a sad song played on the oboe, all becoming the backdrop for Leifs solemn statement: "She has come at last, manifesting from the dream. Juliet is her form on earth." Garrett said nothing for a long time, having wondered about this himself. "All I saw of her in my dream was her hair, a long braid of burnt red hair falling over the rock where she lay, and I think ... I can't believe I didn't recognize it from the start. I didn't want to recognize her—there it is, a damning fact."

"Ah, God's teeth, Garrett, you were crazed. You wouldn't have recognized your own image, yet alone a vision from a dream." He paused for a moment before whispering, "Garrett, why don't you just put her under a spell?"

Now Garrett chuckled, "Ah, Leif, if only life were so simple. I thought of it that first night, but even then, I couldn't do that to her. Let me rephrase that: I won't do that to her." Yet a grin remained, a revelation of how much he might like to."

"And why not?"

"For any number of reasons. First, it would only last a day or two—"

"And what a pleasant day or two."

Save for the humor in his eyes, Garrett ignored this. "Jesus, she'd be utterly confused, not understanding at all what was happening to her. I'd wager she'd think she was dreaming or mad or both. Second, Leif, mesmerized or no, it would be against her will, and I don't want to do that to her again."

Leif knew Garrett, though, knew Garrett made the world go his way. By force or magic, his will became reality. Garrett's expression told him he was contemplating not the measure but the result of it. "Garrett," he laughed, "it's like you say, you're the one caught in a spell."

"Aye," he too laughed. "The inadvertent, irresistible spell of a young lady with the beauty of an angel, eyes made of poetry and rich, sable-colored hair that drops to her knees . . ."

" Tis his grief," Leif said after the door closed behind Garrett.

Juliet looked away, affected by it. After the unpleasant scene over books Garrett's grief overcame him tonight, as it had twice before. The sadness became manifest as they ate, changing the light in his eyes as he stared at her hand, his mind filling, she knew, with images of her uncle and his cruelty, traveling then to his younger brother's fate. He excused himself and left Leif and her alone, returning to his telescope where he found solace in tiny pinpoints of infinity lighting the night sky.

Juliet touched her plate, pushing it away.

"Aye, 'tis sad for those of us left on earth," Leif sighed. "Not a day passes when I didn't long for Megan, to hear her voice or touch her face. And it's been nearly ten years now."

Leifs love still shone ten years after his wife's death.

"What was she like? Your Megan?"

"What was she like? Ah, well, she was a highland lass, as bonny and wild as the flowers that grow there. ... I fell in love the moment I saw her riding with her father. ... A McClelland, she was, the forsworn enemies of the Campbells for a century. Our marriage was arranged by our parents."

"Like a truce?"

"Aye, a truce. Though the reality was the McClellands needed our ships and we badly wanted their land. A good arrangement for all except Megan herself. Poor Megan, she was raised to hate me and hate me she did "

A fine yarn spinner, Leif shared an amusing history of how he finally captured Megan's unwilling heart. "An honest-to-God taming of the shrew, only if Megan was here she would be tellin' you 'twas I who needed the tamin'."

He talked for some time more and she listened, fascinated but confused. The more he talked, the more confused she became. How did this man with such soft sentiments—love, affection, humor, a man who could peer into a soul and see a life—become a pirate, a cutthroat, a man associated with Garrett?

Leif fell silent, lost to his own memories until he looked up to realize he was the object of her study.

"What's on your mind? You look like a question is spinnin' round there."

"I ... we will be reaching Sardinia on the morrow?"

"Aye."

Sardinia was an English port in the Mediterranean, she knew. "There will be English ships there?" Leif tried to guess where this was going. "Aye." "Well, how is it a pirate ship will be welcome?" "They will not sight us. What are you gettin' at, lass?" "I ... I'm just trying to make sense of this. I don't understand how Garrett gets away with everything—" "You aren't alone there, but I wager you'll be wonderin' . . . what? If our ship will get caught or if you'll get a chance to — " He stopped, seeing fear change her face. "Ah, lass, you couldn't be thinkin' of trying to leave us or some such nonsense, now could you?" He shook his head, "Well, get the notion out of your head right now."

"I can't ... I can't." She rose and presented her back to hide her emotions. "What if someone kept you separated from Megan, what would you do? How would you feel?"

"A different story, lass, as you well know."

"Why is it different? I love him ... I-"

"You think you do. Just as Megan thought she hated me. Just as Mary, my youngest daughter, thought she loved this scoundrel, a man who courted her with flowers and pretty poems but whose lust was only for her inheritance and my properties. There he was every night, gamblin' monies he did not have and fallin' down drunk in one of Dublin's houses, a louse all round. My oldest too: Catherine was only ten and four when I caught her sneaking out in the dark dead of night to elope with this peasant lad, a boy eking a miserable livin' out o' the township. Lord, that one could nary feed himself yet alone the children he'd get her with. Women do not have a mind for the choices of that kind; their heads are ruled by the heart. Like you, lass. The only reason you think you love that boy is because he—as pitiful as he was—he was all the comfort you had in those long days of terror."

"That's not true!"

"Ah," Leif stood up to leave, "you will come to see it, lass."

That's just not true, she kept telling herself over and over again long after Leif left her alone. 'Tis just not true. She loved Tomas and always would, and that love had nothing to do with her . . . long days of terror. Nothing. She loved Tomas for the very reasons they condemned him: for his gentleness and kindness and tenderness.

She had to write that letter tonight.

Much later Garrett returned, stepping inside the light of quarters only to find Juliet sitting at his desk struggling to write that letter again. This time he did not trust himself to say anything beyond a short unacknowledged greeting. The soft light of the lantern shone over her. Loose wisps of hair framed her pale face, where shadows and light played. He noticed everything: the quickness of her breaths his presence brought her, the darker-colored brows over her lowered lashes as she, too, tried to pretend he wasn't there. An effort that made small creases of concentration on her brow.