15. The Ship
THE SHIP
Rose had been to the docks before. Dozens of times, in fact.
As the carriage turned onto Commercial Dock Road, the old smells reached her first. River mud. Tar. Wet timber. Fish.
Men who had worked too long beneath the sun.
She had come here as a girl because desperate people went where there were crowds. Where coins might be dropped, errands might be paid for, and scraps might be found near tavern doors after dark.
She remembered the hunger most clearly.
That, and the way men looked at a girl alone near the river.
Rose smoothed her hands over her lap and exhaled a slow, even breath.
She was not that girl now.
The carriage rolled on, passing warehouses, countinghouses, ropewalks, and yards crowded with timber. Men, stripped to shirtsleeves, moved everywhere, shouting to one another over the dull knock of hammers.
Then she saw the ships.
Not gliding proudly along the river, but lifted and exposed in dry dock, their great hulls braced like wounded beasts.
Beside her, before she even glanced over, she felt Lord Reginald change.
A different energy moved through him now. His shoulders eased, but his eyes brightened. His gaze went from one dock to another, taking everything in. But he was not merely looking.
He was understanding.
“How was your ship damaged?” she asked.
His attention came back to her, but not all of it. Part of him remained outside.
“A storm,” he said. “Last spring, a few weeks before I returned to London. We made what repairs we could and believed they would hold. But it was only ever a temporary solution.”
“That must have been a dangerous storm.” Rose knew absolutely nothing about sailing.
“It was. We had warning enough to reef the sails, but not enough to outrun it.”
“Reef?”
“Shorten them.” His mouth curved slightly, as though he had forgotten she would not know the word. “Too much sail in a high wind can tear a ship apart.”
“Is that what happened?”
“We lost two sails. The foretopmast stay parted during the night, and the topmast sprang. The starboard bow took a pounding as well. Several seams opened.”
Rose turned from the window to face him. “But you reached London.”
“We did. Even replaced the stay, strengthened the mast, and recaulked the seams.” Reginald shook his head.
“But when we took her downriver for a sea trial this summer, we hit a patch of bad weather and the bow began taking water. Some of the frames beneath the planking had shifted. The repairs would never have held through another crossing.”
So that was where he had gone.
And the Phantom Gale was why he had returned.
“We turned back,” he said. “She’s been in dry dock ever since.”
“Were you afraid?”
He appeared surprised by the question.
Then he shook his head. “Not then.”
That seemed impossible to her. How could he not have been? “I don’t believe you,” she said.
“I really wasn’t.” He chuckled, as though he struggled to believe it himself, but in the next moment, he’d sobered up again. “When there’s trouble like that, there’s no time for it.”
That answer should not have made sense, but somehow it did.
His gaze shifted back to the yards, but his voice became quieter. More certain.
“Kept her nose where it needed to be. Took down what canvas we could. Had the pumps manned.” His jaw tightened slightly. “Had one man go overboard when a line snapped.”
Rose’s fingers curled in her lap.
“Did he drown?”
“No.”
The single word came quickly. Firmly.
“We threw him a grating and a line,” Reginald said. “He couldn’t get to it.”
“Then how–?”
“I went in after him.”
She stared at him. “Into the sea?”
“That’s where he was.” He smiled at that, as though he were speaking of stepping into a puddle rather than hurling himself into a storm-black ocean.
“Nothing worth fretting over. Sam had a line on me. After that, it was only a matter of reaching Barnes before the current took him under. He was half-drowned by the time we hauled him back, and furious with me afterward because the rope cracked two of his ribs.”
Rose could not seem to look away from him.
“And you?” she asked.
Reginald’s brows drew together. “What of me?”
“Were you hurt?”
His mouth shifted. “I swallowed enough seawater to put me off soup for a week.”
Rose stared.
Then, despite herself, she laughed. Not because it was amusing, but because he had made it impossible to do anything else.
Reginald looked faintly pleased by that.
The carriage jolted over a rut but kept moving. Lining the road, an endless line of masts rose thick as a forest, some bare, some rigged, some half-dismantled.
“But you were afraid,” she guessed. “After.”
He met her eyes and nodded. “When the men were counted. When I saw the damage by daylight and understood how close we’d come.”
He let out a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“A captain may be afraid afterward,” he said. “Not during.”
There it was again.
A certainty that was different from his brother’s ducal authority. This had not come to him through birth or title.
It had been earned.
“The body survives first. The fear comes once the danger is gone.” The words escaped her lips even as Rose stared out the window.
“You’ve weathered a few storms yourself.”
Rose blinked. Losing her grandmother had been a storm. Living in the workhouse. And then, on the streets…
For one uneasy moment, she thought he expected an answer.
Then the carriage slowed and rolled to a halt.
Lord Reginald turned toward his window. “There she is.”
Something changed in his face. Pride, certainly. But there was affection too.
Rose leaned forward and followed his gaze.
There, held high in dry dock with her wounded bow exposed and men swarming about her like ants, was The Phantom Gale.
For a moment, Rose forgot the heat.
The ship looked enormous out of the water. Larger, somehow, than she’d imagined it would look floating free.
Reginald stepped down first, and when he turned and reached for her, there was something almost boyish in the way he offered his hand. As though he could hardly wait to share this part of himself.
Rose didn’t hesitate placing her fingers in his.
“Steady now,” he said as her slippers touched the ground.
It had been warm in the carriage, but this heat, rising from the wood and tar, struck much harder than it had in Mayfair. There was a slight breeze, faint with a breath of salt, but even that lacked any coolness when it hit her skin.
Reginald seemed unaffected by it.
“The damage is along the starboard bow,” he said, nodding toward the ship. He didn’t release her hand and Rose didn’t pull away. “There, where the copper has been stripped. They will have to replace more planking than I hoped.”
Rose looked where he pointed.
She saw wood. Men. Tools. Rope. A great many things that meant nothing to her.
But she noticed the ease in his voice again, none of the careful restraint she’d noticed at The Domus. As he spoke of his ship, and how he’d shore her up again, he was simply a man with a problem—a problem he knew how to fix.
Rose tried to listen.
She truly did.
But as he spoke of seams and spars and copper sheathing, her gaze drifted upward to the masts. To the sky beyond.
What would it be like, she wondered, to stand aboard when the ship was not pinned and stranded like this, but… moving? To watch London disappear. To sail toward places she had only ever heard named by men who wanted to sound impressive.
Foreign lands.
Open water.
No careful little rooms. No appointment books. No familiar corridors where she knew every sound and shadow.
A shiver moved through her and she wasn’t sure if it was excitement or fear.
Reginald looked down at her. “I’m boring you.”
“No.” Rose withdrew her hand at last, surprised that he’d still been holding it. “Only… imagining what it’s like to be a passenger.”
There was an unusual light in his eyes, but before he could answer, a voice called from near the gangway.
“Reg!”
Sam Dyer approached with his hat pushed back and his sleeves rolled to the forearms. He moved easily along the dock, utterly unphased by the noise and confusion.
When his gaze landed on Rose, recognition sparked at once.
“Miss Darling.” He dipped his head, not quite a bow, though there was respect in it. “Didn’t expect to see you down this way.”
“That makes two of us, Mr. Dyer,” she said.
“‘Tis my lucky day then.” His grin flashed. “I’ve been meaning to thank you. Your house has been right hospitable to the men.”
Reginald went still beside her and his first mate either didn’t notice or was pretending not to.
“Huxley says they’re mindin’ themselves right well enough,” he went on. “Could be the rules. Could be Boris standing about with those ham fists of his. Either way, fewer brawls. Less trouble so I’ll not complain.”
Rose felt a small, unexpected pleasure.
“I am glad they’ve been made to feel comfortable.”
“Oh, comfortable is one word for it.” Sam’s eyes danced.
“Enough, Sam,” Reginald said.
Sam looked at him, then back at Rose, his grin deepening.
“Aye. Enough.” He gestured toward the ship. “Yardmaster’s waiting on you. Says he needs you to sign off before removing the next section.”
Reginald’s attention sharpened at once, and the irritation vanished.
“Show me,” he said.
Sam led the way, and Reginald followed, his stride lengthening as they crossed the yard.
Rose just managed to keep up.
She watched as Reginald examined the opened bow. He listened to the yardmaster, asked questions she did not understand, then crouched to run his hand along a damaged plank. His fingers came away dark with old tar and dust.
No one called him ‘my lord’. But they hovered about him, respectful and attentive all the same, waiting on his decision.
“Take the rest of it off,” he said at last.
The yardmaster grimaced. “It’ll add a week. You’d be lookin’ at the first of September if we’re lucky.”
“We’ll lose a lot more than time if she takes water halfway down the Channel.”
Rose looked up at the ship once again, taking in the scraped-up hull and the broken mast… September first. One day after Lord Reginald promised to make his decision.
That the two dates nearly coincided didn’t feel like a coincidence.
Reginald straightened. “Recaulk from here to here. I want the copper sound before she goes back in.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Captain.
The word fit him better than lord.
Rose folded her hands before her and studied him.
Lord Reginald had spent most of his adult life at sea. It was the life he’d chosen. And now he was stuck on land, trapped by both the damage left by that storm and the obligation his brother had placed on him.
So he’d never truly meant to consider saving The Domus.
He’d only agreed to thirty days because he was stranded in London anyway.
Devious man.
Rose watched him for another moment, then cast her gaze beyond the ship, toward the city waiting behind them.
London was full of things to see and do. Shops. Parks. Bridges. Tea rooms. Book sellers. Ordinary corners of life that had nothing to do with The Domus at all.
If she wished for him to stay, first, she needed to show him that London was more than a place to escape.
It was alive. Exciting. Worth staying for.
Then, perhaps, she could persuade him to save The Domus.
Reginald turned then, as though he had felt her watching. And when their eyes met, the heat, the hammering, and the river stink all seemed to fade.
His gaze dropped to her mouth.
Only briefly.
Then returned to her eyes.
Rose’s pulse answered.
Yes, she thought. There was more than one way to make a man reconsider where he belonged.