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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

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BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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The Frenchman sighed like an indulging parent. “It seems you already have,
petit général
.”
Judith had suspected the possibility of warmth behind the man’s cynical smile. Her American countryman made it flower.
Judith watched Fayette’s large-boned form bend, then gently lift Washington, as if he were a child who had fallen asleep by the hearth. She caught sight of the cruel track of a scar that coursed up the sailmender’s right leg and disappeared under the white duck of his trousers. His right foot was twisted inward, useless. Judith lifted the cloak’s hood
over her hair, her shocked eyes. He couldn’t walk. Washington was crippled. How could that be?
“Coming?” Fayette called in an indifferent tone, but daring her with his eyes.
Judith rose and followed the men.
The poop deck was virtually deserted. Judith watched Fayette nod curtly to a single red-coated marine guard. Between the lanterns stood the compact Mr. Carney. He gave Fayette a casual, palms-in salute, then smiled at Judith.
“Ah, and don’t the three of ye look like a regular, strolling-of-a-Sabbath-afternoon family up here?” he exclaimed, pulling off his neckerchief and dusting a place for them on the signal-flag locker. Word had already traveled up two decks that she’d met young Washington, their ship’s ghost, Judith realized.
“Have they come tonight, Mr. Carney?” Washington asked as Fayette placed him beside Judith.
“Feast your eyes over the side, lad. We’ve got our sign of a smooth voyage to America now, all right.” The grizzled man turned to Judith. “That should quiet the few who are still grousing about a female aboard, Miss Mer—”
“Judith, Friend Carney,” she reminded him.
“Judith.” He nodded solemnly.
All their attention was soon absorbed by the sleek, moon illuminated bodies leaping and splashing behind the
Standard.
“Spinners!” Washington cried out.
“Aye, lad, your favorite.”
“What are they?” Judith asked, catching the ties of her cloak as she looked over the side. “Sharks?”
“Nay,” Washington exhaled a more playful version of Fayette’s disgusted snort. “Dolphins! Not fish, but breathers, like us, Judith. They click and whistle and sing like the whales.”
“They are whales,” Fayette said in his haughtiest tone. “Group?” he demanded.
“Cetaceans,” Washington said happily, not taking his eyes from the flashing streaks.
“Family?”
“Delphinidae.”
“Species?” Fayette persisted. Behind him, the old sheet-anchor man gave Judith a helpless shrug.
“Well?” Fayette demanded.
“Delphinus delphis,”
Washington answered effortlessly, still watching
the moon-drenched surface of the Atlantic. “‘Spinners.’ too, because they sometimes spin on their side when they leap. Oh, look at that one, Judith—she’s doing it to greet you!”
Judith sighted the dolphin he’d meant the instant the smaller calf at the animal’s side imitated the same acrobatic movement. Delighted, Judith let out a skittering burst of laughter.
“A greeting dance, is it?” Fayette demanded. “You read the dolphins’ minds now, do you?”
“And what if I do?” his pupil challenged. “Someday I will swim with them perhaps, yes?”
“
Mais oui,
soon after I throw you overboard, you pompous—”
Suddenly, Fayette’s body stiffened with the sound of the shrill whistle. Judith turned to see the marine guard click his heels and salute.
“Merde,”
she heard the Frenchman growl low in his throat before she felt the sudden warm press at her back. Her cloak flared behind her. But there was no wind. She tried to turn, but Fayette took her arm fiercely. His voice was low, calm, desperate. “Please, Judith.” She looked up into his startling green eyes. “Please,” he said again, as she felt another hand’s fingers press the small of her back. She was hiding Washington there, against her nightgown, she realized.
Carney joined Fayette and together they blocked her from the blur of red and white that was the approaching captain. Both men lifted their hands in formal salute.
“Frenchman!” Captain Willis shouted. “Where is he?”
“Who, Captain?”
“That face! I’ve sent three servants to scour the ledge around my windows! There! He’s there, behind—” He pushed the men’s shoulders apart to discover her. “Miss Mercer,” he stammered. Judith stared at the captain of the HMF
Standard
in shock. He was hatless, and his nightshirt was yanked into misbuttoned trousers. He resembled a wild man, despite the jacket of his suit of office drawn hastily across his broad shoulders. Worse was the intemperate look he now struggled to control within his small eyes.
“Friend Willis.” Judith forced herself to smile.
Carney stepped forward. “Mr. Lafayette and me, we were just bringing Miss Mercer up for a look at the dolphins, Captain,” he said affably. “Sign of luck for the rest of our crossing! Could it be them you seen from your cabin’s windows, sir?”
“Dolphins?” Captain Willis said, enraged. “I know the difference between dolphins and—”
“And what, sir?” Fayette asked, a predatory gleam in his eyes.
The captain met Fayette’s look with unmasked hatred.
Judith felt Washington’s fingers press her back in silent appeal. She found her voice.
“Friend Willis,” she called, “I did not know the difference between these wondrous creatures and sharks, imagine! My companions have been explaining them to me. Friend Carney says—”
The captain moved closer. “Miss Mercer. Divine, chattering Miss Mercer.” Judith smelled spirits and degeneration. “Perhaps you’d enjoy a closer look at our splashing camp followers? I understand you and your father are well versed in botany. Does your scientific inquiry extend to animals as well? Shall I call for my pistol and personally shoot a specimen for your further inspection?”
Washington’s hold was compounded by his burning face at her back. Judith felt more than heard his low growl.
“Miss Mercer had just expressed her wish for me to bring some ginger root to her father, Captain,” Fayette said evenly.
“Oh? Attending dear Papa with our French turncoat, are we?” The captain stumbled back. “A pity. Another time, perhaps?”
“No,” Judith said. “No other time. I honor the wondrous sight of the dolphins living.”
He waved his hands spasmodically in the air. “As you wish,” he said in a high, almost giddy voice. “Everything aboard must be as you wish—the Admiralty has commanded it!”
He danced back on his toes, bumping into the approaching soldier. He turned on the man viciously. “Who in hell are you?” he demanded.
“Sergeant Meany of the Marine Guard, sir.”
“Damn you stinking foot soldiers! Where’s Mitchell? Where in hell’s my first lieutenant?”
“Here, Captain.”
Lieutenant Mitchell appeared, as if from the air itself. He had a heavy, ermine-collared dressing gown over his arm. “Captain, it’s a cold watch, sir, and I thought you’d be needing—”
“Just so, just so.” The captain gathered what was left of his dignity and stumbled away on his second-in-command’s arm.
“It’s a good thing the war’s over,” Judith heard the marine guard mutter in disgust, “I’d be hard put to follow that one’s command.”
He walked back to his post as Carney and Fayette freed Washington from the cover of her cloak. Without his warmth against her back, Judith shivered. She saw Fayette’s gnarled fingers sweep through the man’s hair before he pressed Washington’s head to his chest in a quick, wrestling embrace.
“
Mon dieu,
those dolphins will be the death of you!” he said gruffly, pushing him away again.
“Nay, Fayette. They are life-giving, like this lady,” Washington said.
Fayette yanked the young man into his arms. “Below. Now. Carney, bring her,” he ordered abruptly, then finally looked at Judith. She watched him force his agitated breathing to calmness. “Would you wait for my return before you retire to your quarters?” he asked quietly.
“I will.”
“Thank you.”
 
 
O
nce Carney left her back on the forecastle, Judith sat. None of the
Standard
’s crew approached, though she could hear their whispers swarm around her. She watched a cloud obscure the moon.
“You have made an indelible impression on my young friend, Quakeress.”
Judith lifted her head. The Frenchman’s cynical smile had returned. “No less than he has on me.”
“Yes. He told me of your shared African slaves. He will intercede, and so help you find your peace.”
“Intercede?”
“The Light, Judith Mercer. Is that not what you seek in each of your fellows?”
“It is.”
“Are you troubled by the darkness of their skins? Is there no holy light in Africans?”
“What does thou know of our Society’s philosophy?”
“Enough to admire your threat to corrupt social order, and your Pennsylvania Experiment, based on Reason.”
“Reason?”
“Yes. Voltaire says—”
“Thou has read thy Voltaire, thy Rousseau, perhaps, Fayette. They bent Quaker philosophy to shape their own ends. Read our George Fox or William Penn. The Pennsylvania Experiment was based on personal enlightenment, not Reason.”
“Is this true? Will you leave me only with what I despise, gentle lady? Your Society’s retreat from government, and your intolerance?”
“Intolerance?” The sweet tenor of her voice would not give her passion away, Judith decided. She buried her fisted hands in the folds of her skirts. “We are a society based on tolerance.”
“That is the shame of it. To be so tolerant of all others while subjecting your own community to so many precepts of speech, dress, behavior. This is disappointing in a people who started with such revolutionary zeal.”
“Perhaps we should lop heads off, or overrun Europe with armies, instead of plodding so uneventfully toward the Light?”
His eyes boldly swept her trembling shoulders and hidden fists. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “This will be the best Atlantic crossing of my life, I think, Judith Mercer. We shall have a grand adventure, the three of us!”
Judith felt the anger melting from her heart like spring snow. “Fayette,” she summoned. “That young sailor—he is the reason a French prisoner-of-war changed his allegiance and now serves aboard the
Standard
.”
He turned away. His voice, when it finally came, was a hollow whisper. “What else could I do? He was a child, ten years ago. No one came for him. He had only me. So when the time for my release approached, I signed on.”
“It was difficult,” she whispered, touching his arm.
“Not so difficult.”
“Can he not walk at all?”
He faced her, his cynical smile returning. “The surgeon wanted his leg. Perhaps it would have been best. It still pains him. But phantom limbs do, too, I’m told. If only I had known more about healing than killing then. The bandages, you see, they were too loosely placed and—” He swept his hand across his mouth abruptly. “No, he cannot walk at all.”
“Why wasn’t he discharged, sent home? He’s an American. He—”
“He was discharged—D.D.”
“What does that mean?”
“Discharged, dead.”
There was no mirth now in the Frenchman’s sharp green eyes. But when the shiver rode up Judith’s arms, a measure of kindness, part of the kindness that hovered between him and Washington, broke through.
“Who is he, Fayette?” she whispered.
“That, my dear lady, is the puzzle locked inside him. Our puzzle, perhaps, now.”
 
 
“H
e tried to make me swear, Papa,” Judith exclaimed as she brought Eli Mercer his ginger tea that morning. “Swear not to tell any officer, or the master of the watch, or the purser, or anchor’s mate—a vast list of persons who know nothing of the young man’s existence. To them, as well as to Captain Willis, Washington is a rumor, a haunt. For ten years he’s been hidden on this vast vessel, imagine!”
“Extraordinary.”
“Only select members of the officers and crew trusted by Fayette know Washington to be real. When he said that thou and I must be sworn into their society, I told him that we Friends do not take oaths. My agreement would have to suffice.”
“Did he accept this?”
“Not without a stream of French words, which I feel he was using to spare my ears of their English translation.”
Eli Mercer rested his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. He appeared to be searching his breast pocket. No, Judith realized as she heard the sputtering sound of her father’s laughter, he was not searching for anything at all.
BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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