Taming Charlotte (35 page)

After that, there was no way of telling who had their way with whom.

Charlotte was breakfasting alone on the veranda the following morning when Cochran came hurrying up the walk, a look of intent concern on his face.

“Good morning, Mrs. Trevarren,” the first mate said. Although he sounded distracted and a little rushed, she was pleased that
someone
was still willing to recognize her bond with Patrick. “Is the captain up and about?”

Charlotte had risen from her chair and stood gripping the porch railing now. Over Mr. Cochran’s right shoulder she could see several natives just emerging from the thick foliage to the east of the house. They were carrying an inert, half-naked man.

“Captain Trevarren decided to breakfast in his—our room this morning,” she said. She was already making her way down the steps. “What’s happened? Has that poor man been drowned?”

Mr. Cochran shook his head. “No, ma’am, and more’s the miracle. Two fishermen found him on the sand this morning. He’s been in and out of his proper mind.” The first mate paused, hat in hand, and cleared his throat. “We wouldn’t have brought him here, Mrs. Trevarren, but he’s in such poor shape that I didn’t figure it would be wise to put him in the cottage with the others. He’s surely too weak to stave off infection.”

Charlotte nodded, lifting the pretty skirts of her pink lawn dress so that she could hurry across the grounds to greet the approaching party.

Mr. Cochran went inside the house.

Charlotte studied the unconscious man who had washed ashore like so much driftwood, her heart twisting with sympathy. He was unlike Patrick in every way, with his delicate build and pale brown hair, but something about him touched her all the same.

Jacoba arrived before the group had reached the front
veranda, sputtering and fretting like a mother hen who’s just found a chick far afield of the coop.

On orders from the housekeeper, translated by a wide-eyed Mary Catch-much-fish into their own language, the fishermen laid the stranger out carefully in a downstairs bedroom. He’d lost one boot, and the few shreds of his brown trousers that had not been torn away were sodden. He began to shiver violently as Mary and Jacoba stripped him, as though the ruined clothing had offered him some warmth and protection.

“Be easy in your spirit, traveler,” Jacoba told him, in a soothing voice Charlotte had not heard before. “You’re among friends now and we’ll take care of you.” She looked at a hand-wringing Mary with her single eye. “Fetch warm water and towels and some of that rum I keep for the Christmas cakes.”

Charlotte drew nearer the bed when Mary bustled out. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Before Jacoba could answer, Patrick’s voice sounded from the doorway, as low and ominous as approaching thunder.

“You can leave this room immediately,” he commanded coldly.

Charlotte glared at her erstwhile husband. “I have experience as a nurse,” she reminded him.

Patrick came to the foot of the bed and looked down at the poor shipwreck victim with dispassionate curiosity. His words, however, were plainly directed at Charlotte. “Jacoba was tending the sick and injured before you graduated from diapers to drawers. She doesn’t need your help.”

Jacoba looked from the captain to Charlotte and smiled. Charlotte was infuriated at first, but then she recognized the older woman’s expression as one of knowing amusement, not triumph.

“I will not have you in here yammering and getting underfoot, Patrick Trevarren,” the Scotswoman said. “Facts be that I’d rather the both of you got out of my way so I can work on this poor devil proper-like. Why, look at him. What parts of him isn’t blue is gray, like a corpse.”

If it hadn’t been for the gravity of the situation, Charlotte
would have laughed at the look on Patrick’s face. Clearly he wasn’t used to being dismissed like a troublesome child, and Charlotte wanted to ask how he liked getting back some of his own.

She didn’t quite dare. It was one thing to disobey Patrick and quite another to go against Jacoba’s alarming authority. The older woman was an unknown quantity, and Charlotte wanted her friendship.

She swept out in a rustle of skirts, her chin held high, and was followed, at a much slower rate, by Patrick.

The captain had been most friendly during the night, but he had returned to his surly and recalcitrant mood upon awakening that morning, which was why Charlotte had taken her breakfast in solitude.

She returned to the veranda, sat down, and poured lukewarm tea into the china cup she had left behind in the excitement.

Patrick joined her, to her secret pleasure, not taking a chair at the white iron table but instead leaning back against the porch railing, his arms folded.

Charlotte hoped her trembling didn’t show as she lifted the cup to her lips and took a ladylike sip.

“What do you make of this?” Patrick asked, almost grudgingly, when she failed to initiate a conversation.

She raised her eyebrows, as if puzzled about his meaning, though she knew full well, of course, that he was referring to the man being tended with such fierce efficiency inside the house.

Patrick seemed annoyed. “There can be no doubt that there’s been a shipwreck.”

Charlotte sat back in her chair, dabbed at her lips with a linen napkin, and reached for another of the light, sugary biscuits Jacoba had baked that morning. “Perhaps,” she agreed, after stretching the silence as long as she dared. “But perhaps our visitor was captured by pirates and thrown overboard for some reason.”

“You have a wild imagination,” Patrick accused, clearly irritated.

Charlotte took her time in eating the biscuit, then
shrugged one shoulder and replied, “I won’t deny that. But it isn’t as though recent events haven’t given me cause to expect the unexpected.”

Patrick narrowed his eyes at her. He looked different, with his shorter hair and his somewhat gaunt features, but Charlotte realized in that moment, with a searing jolt, that she would love him forever and ever. The knowledge comforted her but, at the same time, filled her with an elemental and fathomless fear.

His words came as an even greater shock than her insight had. “You know, of course, that you and my child will never lack for any luxury, even though I may be a world away from you?”

She averted her eyes, unwilling to let him see the pain he’d caused her.
Damn him,
she thought brokenly.
Is he so dense that he can’t guess the truth—that I’d rather go hungry at his side than live in luxury on another continent?

“My father is a wealthy man,” she said, wanting to wound Patrick, wanting to attack him bodily, but forcing herself to speak in a quiet, ladylike tone. “Neither the child nor I will want or accept so much as a bent penny from you, Patrick Trevarren. Once you leave us, you’ll do better to stay gone.”

A difficult silence followed, during which Charlotte’s heart seemed to tremble, crack, and then break into two badly bruised pieces. Finally she made herself look up at this man she loved so thoroughly, so desperately, and so hopelessly.

“Who knows?” she said, with a lightness of manner that was wholly feigned. “Perhaps I’ll fall in love with that stranger who washed up on the sand this morning. That would be romantic, don’t you think?”

Patrick spat a curse word, thrust himself away from the railing, and stormed into the house, slamming one of the great double doors behind him.

Charlotte supposed she should have felt triumph, for she’d obviously gotten Patrick’s goat, but instead she just lowered her face to her hands and breathed deeply until the urge to sob uncontrollably had passed.

Once she’d recovered her composure, Charlotte stood and
began to clear the table, only to be shooed away by a scandalized Mary Catch-much-fish.

When Patrick left the house minutes later, in the company of a sheepish Mr. Cochran, and with a protesting Jacoba trailing after them, Charlotte refused to give in to her own feelings of apprehension. Instead, she took the opportunity to look in on the patient.

The sleeping man was waxen, his rest fitful, and he gave a cry of despondency that wrung Charlotte’s heart. She went to the bedside and gently took one of his hands in both her own.

“Susannah!” he screamed suddenly, bolting upright on the mattress, with its crisp linen sheets. “Dear God,
Susannah!”

Charlotte’s throat tightened in sympathy. “There now,” she said softly, “you’re safe here. Nothing is going to hurt you.”

The stranger looked at her, frantic, in the grip of a living nightmare. His eyes were a spring green. “She drowned—I tried to save her, I tried so hard—”

“Shh,” Charlotte said, smoothing sweat-dampened hair back from his forehead. Despite her outward composure, she was filled with visions of the unknown Susannah, crying out for help, sinking beneath the waves of an angry sea before she could be reached. “Of course you did everything you could. Rest now. You need your strength.”

He did not relax, however, but instead flung his head back on the pillow and gave a harrowing cry of grief. It was worse than a sob, worse than a scream of pain, that sound, for it came from the very depths of his soul.

Instinct warned Charlotte not to allow the patient to withdraw into his agonies if she could stop him, and she gripped his shoulders hard.

“Tell me your name!” she ordered.

Again that haunting moan of despair came.

“Don’t you dare give up now!” Charlotte yelled, kneeling on the mattress, digging her thumbs into the man’s sparely muscled upper arms. “It’s a bloody miracle that you’re still alive—do you hear me? A miracle! That means you’ve got
things to do before you go on to your rest, important things! Damn it, mister, you
get back here right now!”

Amazingly, he stilled, staring up into Charlotte’s face as if he were just returning to himself from some far distant place. “Who are you?” he asked, the words sounding a rusty rasp in his throat.

She smiled, released him, scrambled off the bed, and smoothed her skirts. “My name is Charlotte Quade Trevarren,” she said.

“Susannah?” He looked past Charlotte’s shoulder. “Is my wife here?”

Charlotte shook her head, swallowed, and made herself keep smiling. “I’m sorry.”

In the next few minutes, Charlotte learned that the visitor’s name was Gideon Rowling. He was an Englishman, and he and his new bride, Susannah, had been sailing to Australia when their ship had been set upon by pirates. Some of the passengers and crew had escaped in lifeboats, the Rowlings among them, but most had been murdered outright. The vessel had been looted and set ablaze.

The lifeboats had eventually become separated one from another during a storm, and in the end the skiff the Rowlings had shared with an old man and two crewmen had been overturned. The last time Gideon had seen Susannah, she’d been holding out her hand to him, screaming for help.

When the story was finished, Gideon lapsed into sleep again, no doubt because he found reality unbearable, and Charlotte couldn’t say she blamed him.

T
HAT FEVER MUST HAVE BURNED UP YOUR BRAIN,” COCHRAN
observed, with his usual dry bluntness, as he stood beside Patrick at the porch railing. Both men were gazing out to sea, and both were yearning for the feel of a deck beneath their feet. “Once in a lifetime—provided the gods and all the fates have agreed to favor him, that is—a man encounters a woman like Charlotte. Yet here you are, ready to drop her off on her papa’s doorstep like a lot of dusty baggage.” The first mate paused, sighed deeply. “If Brigham Quade doesn’t shoot you like a mangy stray for this, he’s not the man I think he is.”

Patrick gave a sigh of his own. Would no one ever understand that he was being
noble,
giving up Charlotte and the child this way?

He had been fooling himself before, thinking he could be happy as a planter, confined to one place all his life; he’d faced that. He needed excitement, experience, even the occasional brawl.

Plainly his life would consist of one dangerous adventure after another, and he thrived on the fact, could not give it up for a safe, quiet existence. By his reckoning, it followed that
a woman and baby could not rightly be expected to live in such a manner.

“Perhaps, Mr. Cochran,” he said grimly, his eyes still fixed on the horizon, his fingers tightening as he gripped the railing of the veranda, “you would be better off minding your own affairs and leaving me to mind mine.”

Cochran took a cheroot from his pocket and lit it, and the rich, fruity scent of the smoke encircled them. “You know,” he replied, at his leisure, “I never took you for a fool. Now I’m forced to admit that I was wrong.”

Patrick was stung, but he wouldn’t let Cochran see that. He gave his friend a wry look and said, “A rare enough occasion—your owning up to a mistake, I mean.”

Unruffled, Cochran simply smiled, shrugged, and drew deeply on his cheroot. “As if the sky wouldn’t fall if
you
confessed to a failing or two,” he replied.

It seemed to Patrick that a change of subject would be advisable just then. He liked Cochran and didn’t want to do battle with him, verbal or otherwise. “What do you make of it, this Rowling character washing ashore?”