Laura Kinsale (2 page)

Tess herself was oblivious to the proper loading order of ship’s stores, and she had no intention of being put off again on the subject of the plants. She had dealt with stubborn ship’s officers before. Whatever it took, coaxing or ordering or throwing an unladylike tantrum, she was ready to do battle for her specimens.

Captain Frost was obviously still embarrassed by the perfectly natural mistake of taking her for a crewman; he kept glancing down and up and anywhere but at her. His diffidence gave Tess ample opportunity for observation. He looked exactly as a blockade-runner should, she decided, with his sou’wester tilted at a rakish angle above strong, well-formed features, and his face clean-shaven and deeply tanned. No softness, except in his smoky-gray eyes, where an unexpected youthfulness contrasted with the hard lines etched around his mouth. Tess found herself warming to him, even as she ruthlessly prepared to take advantage of his discomfort. She
raised her chin and smiled persuasively. “But Captain, the specimens will be on deck.”

“Not for long,” he vowed. “I promise you, ma’am, we’ll have those plants out of the rain within the hour.”

“You will do nothing of the sort,” she retorted, changing tactics smoothly. “I want the pots lashed securely just aft of the forecastle deck. Your mate wouldn’t do it, so I was trying to get on myself, but I can’t seem to manage the larger ones.”

Gryf looked down at his premier passenger in consternation, and found that Grady’s rebellion suddenly made sense. “You were trying to move them yourself?”

“Since your crew didn’t seem inclined to help. Something about the plants being a hazard on deck, which is nonsense. If we put them here, just between the anchor deck and the windlass, they won’t be in the way at all.”

The idea that Lady Collier would even know port from starboard, much less recognize the windlass, made Gryf’s eyebrows go up in dubious surprise. He absently wiped a rivulet of rainwater from his cheek. “I’m sure Grady meant that the plants themselves wouldn’t be safe here,” he temporized. “The hold—”

“—will be too dark,” she finished for him. “Captain, several of these specimens have already traveled halfway around the globe on deck. I’m certain they will be fine.”

He took a breath. “On a steamer, I’m sure they were. But the
Arcanum
is a clipper under full sail, ma—uh, Your Ladyship. We’ll have water across the bow if we get into heavy weather.”

“If the weather threatens, then we’ll move them below, of course. But my father and I sailed from New Guinea to San Francisco on an American clipper, and even in foul weather, there was never any problem with salt water this far forward. That’s one reason why I would like to have the specimens here.”

Gryf glanced away, unable to look into her lovely face and argue deck sheer and freeboard heights and the difference between his Aberdeen-built ship and a Yankee design. Driving into rising seas, there would be plenty of salt water on the foredeck; enough to wash a man overboard, and certainly enough to damage the plants. But the answer was simple enough. Let the plants stay where they were for now. He’d have them moved after the
Arcanum
was under way.

“As you wish,” he said at last. “I’ll see that they’re secured on deck.”

He was rewarded for his surrender with a smile so bright it made him blink.

“Thank you. You’re very reasonable, Captain Frost. I shall take myself out of your way, then—I know you won’t fail me. And you had my note? The Taylors would like you to dine with us this evening.”

All Gryf could manage was an awkward nod. There was a pressure building inside of him, a knot of hopeless yearning that he wanted to hide and was afraid he could not. He bowed to her, followed her to the rail, was turned down with a laugh when he offered to escort her home. She left him standing on the deck like an adoring puppy told to stay. He had that kind of worship on his face; he knew it, because when Grady came on board a moment later there was a disapproving scowl in the older man’s glance.

It made no difference. Gryf watched her walk away, determined and graceful in her ill-fitting oilskins, and nothing in his life but his ship and his dreams had ever made him ache that way before.

T
he small group that gathered for dinner on the Taylors’ veranda was not exactly the cream of English society, but Tess was nervous all the same. It wasn’t the Taylors who made her ill at ease. It wasn’t the Campbells, either, for the Methodist missionary couple who were to accompany her back on the ship as chaperones were a delightful pair, with their dour Scots’ expressions and absurd wit. It was, Tess thought resentfully, entirely Captain Frost’s fault.

She had dressed so carefully, in a white linen gown sashed with pale gray to indicate half-mourning. With an excited anticipation that she saw now as childish, she had intended to elicit that same look of stunned admiration from everyone that she had seen on Captain Frost’s face that morning. It was a new and heady sensation, to put a gentleman ill at ease with her mere presence. Captain Frost didn’t actually count as a gentleman, of course, but he was the best she could do at the moment. She and the maid had worked for three hours to smooth her hair into a glossy, blue-black roll just like in the old issue of the
Illustrated London News
that she had discovered behind a dictionary in Mr. Taylor’s
study. When she walked into the parlor before dinner to greet their guests, she had felt quite regally self-assured, ready to impress them all with her polish.

Unfortunately, it was Captain Frost who had done the impressing. The shipboard figure in wet and well-worn oil skins was transformed; a tall, golden-haired stranger stood in his place and kissed her hand with a touch so brief and reserved she hardly felt it. He was extraordinarily handsome—far more so than Tess had realized initially. Well-tailored clothes emphasized his patrician features; in place of foul-weather gear there was a fine white cravat and gold tie pin, a spotless blue coat, and an aura of severe elegance that was as intimidating to Tess as it was unexpected. She looked up as he released her hand, hoping to find the appreciation she had seen in his eyes that morning, but he turned away without meeting her shy smile, and afterwards never once looked directly at her.

Tess sat now at the table across from him, slowly sipping her pumpkin soup and trying not to glance up too often. In the wavering candlelight his face was beautiful and remote: a golden, gloomy Lucifer after the Fall. She wished she were someone else. Someone graceful and pretty and full of teasing gossip, like the daughter of the new bank director just arrived in Pará. Someone who knew all the news of England, the scandals and the politics, and could tell them with such droll lightness that everyone would laugh. Perhaps then Captain Frost would not sit so impossibly silent and detached. Perhaps then Tess would make him smile, and look at her, and…

And what?

Tess sighed over her soup. She did not care; she
refused
to care what Captain Frost thought of her. If he was bored to tears, as he gave every appearance of being
in his wordless preoccupation with his meal, it was nothing to her. He was a blockade-runner, for pity’s sake, not the Prince of Wales.

It occurred to her that she would probably be meeting the Prince of Wales before the next year was out. Her father had said something about it, rambling on about balls and drums and being presented at one of the Queen’s Drawing Rooms. The thought was appalling. If she had so little success in pleasing a blockade-runner, whatever would royalty think? Obviously, she had been wrong that morning when she had thought that Captain Frost admired her—he had just been surprised, that was all—surprised and probably offended by the appearance of a mannerless girl who took the liberty of prowling the docks in a man’s foul-weather gear.

A renewed surge of resentment flowed through her. What right did he have to be offended? Captain Frost was hardly a scion of respectability himself, considering his occupation. If she hadn’t gone to the dock when she’d heard his ship had arrived, his crew would have stowed her plants in the hold! She would have to go back again tomorrow, to make sure they took care of the live animals properly—no doubt the elegant Captain Frost was so ignorant of the poor creatures’ needs that he would put the baby sloth in a cage with a boa constrictor.

The cheerful conversation between the Taylors and the Campbells lagged while the soup bowls were cleared and a large platter of fish offered round. Tess stared at the table in front of her, folding and refolding a corner of her napkin restlessly. After a moment, she stole another look toward Captain Frost, and her heart gave a quick squeeze of alarm as she realized he was watching her.

It was not an obvious perusal, only a fortuitous tilt of
his head, so that he might have been watching the Negro footman serve Mrs. Campbell’s fish. But he seemed instead to be fascinated by the cut of Tess’s gown, for he stared at her bodice with a hooded, dreamy expression, not even aware that she had looked up.

She felt her face warm, certain that he saw some flaw in her outfitting. His gaze traveled upward with painful leisure, so that she was sure he must be finding fault with her white lace collar and the styling of her hair. It must be years out of date, she thought miserably. That magazine was so old…and the banker’s daughter doesn’t dress her hair like this at all.

Shamed, Tess bowed her head. But the suspense was too much; she raised her lashes surreptitiously to see what he was judging next. His ash-gray eyes met hers in a direct encounter, and in the instant of contact there was communication, an intensity revealed beneath those half-closed lids that shocked her. His look held hidden wildness, and more: for a moment there was romance and adventure and a kind of madness there, a frustration, held in check and then banished by the flick of his gilded lashes as he looked away.

It was startling—and rather frightening—as if she had narrowly escaped the claws of a tiger and saw the beast still, transformed to a house cat and curled near the fire. The vague unease that had plagued her seemed to crystallize into something solid: a queer, pleasant tightening at the base of her throat, an awareness of the pressing softness of her shift across her breasts. For the first time in her life, she had a strong sense of herself as
female,
and of Captain Frost as…something else.

As soon as the feeling took shape in her mind, she knew that it was wrong. Sinful. Tess was fully informed on sex and reproduction; she had seen and studied
things that she knew were unmentionable, which would have made most young ladies of her own class swoon. She had approached the subject with the rationality her father had taught her, maintaining a disengaged, clinical interest, compiling facts which were part of the study of nature.

But here, in the shuttered glance of a silent man, was mystery. Here was something dangerous and dark: a torrent she could drown in. She felt her immortal soul hang in the balance and flung herself back from the cliff, looking down at her poached fish as if it were the gateway into Hell itself.

A heartbeat more, and the feeling passed. The fish was only fish again, and a good deal safer to contemplate than the face across the table from her. What Captain Frost had thought of the instant of encounter she could not tell; she was afraid to look at him again. Mrs. Campbell said something to him, but it might as well have been the gabble of a goose for all Tess understood it. The only thing she comprehended was the sound of the captain’s answer: not the words, but the rhythm and the timbre of his voice, the reserve that lay like a thin shield over deeper things.

Tess drew that same cloak over her own feelings, though it seemed in her case pathetically transparent. She sat through the meal subdued, the food like dust in her mouth. Dim appetites moved in her that had nothing to do with hunger. She saw the captain’s hand rest against his wine goblet and wished to touch him; saw the tousle of sun-colored curls and wished to smooth them. She wanted to be held, to press her cheek against his coat and feel the living warmth beneath. And with each temptation, she became more of a stranger to herself, someone new and mystifying within her own skin.

It was a relief when Mrs. Taylor stood up from the
table. A relief, and a new frustration, for the men stayed on the veranda with their port as the ladies went inside. Tess was angry at her own disappointment—and angry at herself for joining the ladies in urging the men not to tarry long. She had other things to think of, she reminded herself firmly. Important things. Arrangements had to be made to catalogue all her father’s specimens when they arrived in England; Mr. Darwin would want to see some of the orchids, and there were several of her father’s monographs that might, with a little editing, be presented at a meeting of the Linnean Society if Tess could find a member who would read them. There were a hundred things she had to consider, all of them more interesting than a blockade-running sea captain.

Sitting in the drawing room, she tried to keep her mind on those interesting things, but whenever the sound of male laughter drifted to her through the open windows, she found herself glancing toward the door. Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Campbell remained deep in a conversation about the price of Irish butter, a subject to which Tess had nothing to add, and which hardly seemed to warrant the amount of time they were spending on it.

She stared morosely at the needle and undarned stocking in her lap. This is how it will be when I’m married, she thought. Waiting on men and talking of butter. Or worse, talking of fashion and scandal and money, like the banker’s daughter.

Such a future loomed utterly bleak before Tess. From her aborted attempts at friendship with the newly arrived young lady, Tess had already found out that amusing stories about the vagaries of trying to trap live monkeys were anathema. Similar tales of encounters with elusive snakes and lizards had elicited shrieks of alarm instead of laughter, and a tentative mention of the
beauties of Brazilian forests had brought nothing but a look of polite boredom. Tess had given up in despair after one visit, and she had not received an invitation to further the acquaintance.

She dropped the stocking in her lap and interlaced her fingers, gripping them tightly. How she wished to go back to Tahiti, instead of to England. She’d had a friend there, a real friend: Mahina, with her dark and laughing eyes and adventurous spirit. The two of them had climbed green-swathed mountains right up into the mists; they had swum in the lagoons, and sailed to their own special small island to camp and play and giggle over nonsense, living on the fish they caught until their supply of fresh water ran out and they had to return to Papeete.

The carefree, girlish Tess of those days seemed far away now. It had been five years since she had left Tahiti—harder years than her idyllic time in the islands, but still full of excitement and challenge. As she matured, she had absorbed her father’s fascination with the natural world. She had learned from him, and under his encouraging guidance had developed habits of logical thought and discipline. Gradually, she had taken over the practical portion of their journeys: the supplies and logistics, things that her father had managed with impatience and not always very well. Under Tess’s supervision, they had not necessarily traveled in great comfort, but they had seldom run short of salt or sugar or glass jars to preserve their collections.

Footsteps sounded on the veranda. Tess looked up, realized that she had done so, and quickly looked down again. She tried to cover the sudden quickening of her heartbeat with several deliberate stabs at her stocking until she realized that she had not threaded the needle.

No gentlemen appeared at the door. Mrs. Taylor and
Mrs. Campbell chatted on. Between anticipation that the men were coming in and disappointment that they seemed only to be moving to another spot on the porch, Tess found it hard to keep her hands still. She twisted the stocking, wondering what she might say to Captain Frost when he did come inside. Then she pressed her lips together in exasperation, asking herself what earthly difference it made. Her mind bounced back and forth between fretting over the captain and scorning herself for doing so, until she threw down the stocking with a violent motion of self-disgust.

The other two women looked up at her in surprise. Reddening, Tess cast about and seized on the first excuse for her action that she could find. She picked up the large Bible from the table next to her chair and asked brightly, “Shall I read to you?”

Mrs. Taylor smiled. “I’m sorry, love—we old women have been maundering on, haven’t we? Please do. Mrs. Campbell, would you suggest a passage?”

Mrs. Campbell obligingly did so. Tess turned up the oil lamp on the table to supplement the pale yellow light from the gas lamp that hissed softly overhead. She found the recommended place, took a deep breath to gather her scattered wits, and began to read.

Outside, Gryf stood on the veranda near the open window. He tensed a little at the first sound of Lady Collier’s clear voice, and then relaxed as it began to play over biblical passages like the sweet tones of a flute. He was faintly dizzy, from the dinner wine and the port and the soft, heady perfume that seemed to him to have lingered since she had left the table. The conversation of the two other men was an annoying undertone; he wished they would be quiet, so that he could listen to her.

His mother had done that when he was a child, read
the Bible of an evening, after dinner, and he had sat on the veranda of their bungalow in Calcutta and listened. It had always made him feel secure, feel that life was at rights and unchangeable…the small safe world of a boy, seeing the future as nothing but endless days and hours of delight.

His real future had come all too quickly: one day he had been a child, well-loved, and the next he’d been alone and terrified. Gryf’s family had never made it home to England on his Uncle Alexander’s proud new ship, betrayed instead by their own decency. A burning vessel, a plea for help—they had all been false, cunning lures into a pirate trap. Only Gryf had lived, and Grady, who was the second officer, and Gryf’s uncle, for a little while.

Gryf rotated the glass of port in his fingers and took a sip, letting the nightmarish memory slide away as he concentrated on the soothing voice from inside. It touched a chord in him, a lonely echo in the emptiness, so that he hurt for things he could not have. He should be taking his leave, he knew, going back to where he belonged, but he could not bring himself to break the spell that wove its siren arms around him.