Chapter 12
Chapter
By the time McGann enters the cabin several hours later, again holding two glasses and a bottle of wine, Catherine’s temper has cooled. She’ll try to make peace with him. He was only trying to help, even if he went about it in the most arse-headed manner possible.
She can see that with some distance. He doesn’t know this crew. He said so himself. And they will be a lot less likely to act on any wayward impulses if they think her married to their captain. Marriage is how society keeps women safe.
Except that isn’t true, is it?
It wasn’t for her mother. Nor for many other women she knows. Marriage only locked them into unsafe situations they couldn’t escape from until they died. Or their spouse did.
Drat it all.
Everywhere she turns is a locked door, physically or metaphorically, and she’s tired of them. It’s not that she doesn’t know Andrew McGann meant well. Of course she knows that.
It’s sweet the way he wants to protect her. But given the choice of protection and safety over freedom… right now, she chooses freedom.
However, she can be more thoughtful in how she approaches that conversation with him. He surprised her earlier, and she didn’t have time to think. But she does now. She can learn to think before she speaks and not after.
“Good evening, Captain,” she says.
“Your ladyship.”
He sits heavily at the table while the cabin boy lays down their dinner and scurries away quickly.
“Why did you do that?” she asks, her brows beginning to furrow. “Call me your ladyship?”
Thoughtful, she reminds herself. Be thoughtful.
“It is your title, is it not?”
“It is. But you only call me lass. Or Menace.”
Which isn’t exactly true. He called her Catherine when he discovered her aboard the ship yesterday. And he called her by her title exactly once before; six months ago, right before everything went pear-shaped.
She watches him, waiting, but he says nothing else. Just sucks air in between his teeth and begins to eat his food. She hates it, the way he won’t even so much as look at her while he’s doing it.
“Your supper will get cold,” he says after a while when she hasn’t started eating. “And there won’t be any sending it back to the kitchen either.”
She takes a deep breath. She’s hurt him, and that’s why he’s acting this way. She thinks of Violet again and wonders how often she’s gone around unintentionally hurting people.
“I really am sorry,” she says, “for earlier. I just don’t want to pretend about anything any longer. Can you understand that?”
He only grunts in reply.
“That was an apology,” she adds.
“Aye. I know what it was.”
She frowns. “I take it you don’t accept?”
He only grunts at her again.
“I really do not care to fight with you.”
“It seems to me,” he replies, “that you want to fight with everybody. With your father. With that solicitor. With Chester. With the ruffian in the street. With Violet, if she knew half of what you keep from her. With your fiancé, the poor bloke. Do you ever do anything but swing your money and station about, bludgeoning people with it?”
All she can do is stare at him. That was… well, it was… mean.
Even if it’s partially true. Because it’s partially true.
She presses her fingernails into her palms to stop the rush of hot, wet tears she can feel trying to breach her eyelids.
“I suppose that is true,” she says quietly, failing to stop those tears after all. “In part. I had my reasons, but—” she shakes her head and doesn’t finish that sentence.
It doesn’t matter what comes after that “but” or what her reasons might have been for any of her actions. What she says instead is, “I didn’t know that’s how you feel about me. I knew you were angry but not that you… that you loathe me.”
But it seems so obvious now that she’s said it out loud. He never wanted her the way she wanted him. The man despises her. He possibly hates her. And he’s only ever suffered her company for payment.
Good heavens, what a fool she’s been. Coming here, forcing herself aboard his ship and into his company.
She stands, wanting to escape, but she has nowhere to go. They’re stuck here together, and he hates her. A humiliating turn of events and one that’s all her fault.
“I’ll just—” She turns and starts for the door.
“Wait,” he says, and when she doesn’t, he stands and strides to her. “Wait, lass.”
“No. I won’t saddle you with my company any longer.”
But whatever dignity she’s been trying to muster is ruined by the tears that are still falling down her face.
“Please,” he says again, more quietly, and holds his hand out to her. “I wasn’t fair to you.”
“Weren’t you?”
“Sit, Menace. And let me tell you a story. I owe you one.”
She shakes her head no, but she doesn’t move, either, so he begins to talk.
“When I first knew who you were,” he says, after they both re-seat themselves at the small table, “is when that bloke had a knife to your throat.”
“That isn’t when we met,” she interrupts, quietly.
“I know it.”
He takes a sip of wine and steals a glance at her. The tears have stopped, thank Elphame. He’d rather punch himself in the face than look at tears he’s caused streaming down her cheeks again.
He clears his throat and continues. “We met that day in the park when I gave Violet my card and invited her to start a medical clinic at my sister’s tavern. But that isn’t when I knew you. I knew you the night you asked me to teach you to fight.”
He glances at her, but she sits still at the table, stone-faced, so he keeps talking. “It was the night of the storm, and you, it seems, had just left the solicitor’s office.”
She nods. “Lightning frightened the horses.”
“Aye. It was so hot that day, the storm hanging heavy over town. It felt more like Jamaica than London.”
“Have you been to Jamaica?” she asks. “Is that why you have all the books?”
He squelches his smile. There’s the inquisitive woman he knows. He’d been worried she wouldn’t show that part of herself to him again after what he’d said to her.
But she’s always been brave. Braver than him, because he can’t bring himself to tell her about Jamaica. He will have to one day, he’s beginning to realize.
But not today.
Not yet.
“I have been, but not for long enough. Those books are for a different reason. They’re to help me…
understand. But that’s a different story.
In this story,” he goes on, “it’s hot. And bloody humid.
Nowhere, my sister’s tavern, is a crush.
It’s one of the few places in London where a Scot can still be a Scot, so everyone gathers there.
To wear their forbidden tartans and hear a bit of piping.
Drink the finest whisky available and speak in Gaelic to whomever is drunk enough to listen.
“I understand it,” he says, “the urge to have even one place like that where a man can speak his tongue and wear his plaid. It means everything.”
“And women too, I presume?”
“Aye. Lasses too. And on that night, it felt like every Scottish lad and lass in London was there.
It was too hot and there were too many people, so I took myself outside.
I remember looking up at the sky. It was early to be that dark.
Heavy clouds were rolling in fast, and I could feel the wet air pressing in on me.
“I knew a storm was coming, but there was something else too, something more than the weather that was crawling its way up my spine. Something was brewing in those dirty, twisty streets. I just didn’t know what it was yet.
“And then there was the lightning and the thunder and the crash of a carriage as it careened past and, Elphame help me, I should have taken myself back to my rooms as I’d planned.
Crawford and I had had a long day, trying to find our funding, and I had no business doing anything but going home so we could try afresh tomorrow. ”
“Why did you turn back?”
He stares at her big, blue eyes across the table. She’s leaning forward, and he exhales a little more, because the awful things he’s said to her don’t seem to have caused too much damage. And because she’s still here, with him, in this cabin.
Outside, the sun casts its light through the window—that particular peachy color of sunset over water. He loves that color, that light, and the way it makes everything seem to glow.
“I turned back because I heard you,” he says. “You screamed after the carriage crashed. And then there was all that noise: horses whinnying, a lad yelling, more screams.
“It was chaos, as it should be after a carriage accident. But the chaos was followed by silence, and I knew that wasn’t right.
It was the silence that made me run, sweat soaking me straight through.
It felt like forever until I could get to you, turning corner after corner, back the way I’d just come. ”
“You said you turned back because you heard me,” she says, “but you didn’t know it was me.”
He only shrugs. “Didn’t I? Not then, I suppose.
Not until I saw you. But fate’s a wily mistress, and she was pushing me forward, toward you, whether I knew it or not.
The rain had just started, and I was out of breath and soaked through, and I turned one more muddy corner, and there you were, on the ground.
“Janet was kneeling beside you, helping you up. And I felt only relief for a moment that you were alright.”
“But how could you tell it was me?” Catherine asks.
“I was on the ground and it was raining and I was wearing a bonnet that, as I recall, was so wet and drooping that I could barely see anything at all beyond its brim. There was no way for you to have known. We’d only met that one time before in the park. ”
“I’d know your face anywhere, lass. In profile or covered in mud or behind a stupid, wet hat. I’ll always know you.”
He’d all but memorized that face of hers.
She blinks at him as she did last night when he told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.