Chapter 12 #2
“And I knew Janet, too,” he adds quickly, trying to recover himself. “She’s a Scot, and every Scot in town makes their way to Nowhere sooner or later.”
Catherine only nods at that, so he carries on. “And then I saw that boy in the corner, holding the horses, looking into the shadows for whoever was about to come out of them. And I felt that jolt run up my spine again. He was waiting on someone or something. Something I knew would hurt you.
“And then the vermin crawled out of the dark. One to Janet and one to you. Janet was closer, and the bloke had his back to me, so it was an easy enough blow to the head, but your fellow—”
“Don’t call him that.”
“Aye. Your bit of scum with the knife to your throat was making threats, and you…” He pauses to watch the peachy-golden sunlight stream across her face. “You said—” Even now, six months later, he can barely believe her moxie.
“I said, ‘I wouldn’t come any closer, if I were you.’”
He chuckles. “Aye. Like the queen herself. Head held high, spine straight. Fists raised in a pair of gloves that cost more than my rented rooms for the month. And I saw, in that moment, who you were, Menace.”
She looks at him then, eyes narrowed. “And who is that? A spoiled earl’s daughter who bludgeons everyone around her with her money and her station?”
“Aye, sometimes.” He shakes his head. “But you’re more than that too.
You’re the eye of the storm. The center where all the power is concentrated.
One step in the wrong direction is chaos to be certain, but that’s not you.
That’s just life. And life has collateral damage.
You deal with it the way any powerful person might, and you shouldn’t be sorry for it. ”
He holds her stare. “I’m the one who ought to be sorry, for all those things I said to you earlier. It was not well done of me. You shouldn’t be anything other than what you are.”
She’s still listening, but he wants her to start talking. To fill this small room with her energy and her warmth and her smile, so he asks her a question.
“You never told me why you held your fists up,” he says. “Were you going to fight the bastard? Plant a facer even though he held a knife to you?”
She smiles at him, and he hopes it’s in forgiveness.
It’s too beautiful a smile to be for anything else.
He wants to still the picture she makes; preserve it like the dried flowers Esmee sometimes keeps.
As if he could hold that light and her smile and this moment in his hands and keep them forever.
“I’d been studying boxing,” she replies. “But it wasn’t the same in the situation as when I’d read about it.”
“It never is, no.” And then, “Why in hell were you studying boxing, Menace? Fighting shouldn’t be for the likes of you.” She’s still an earl’s daughter, even though she’s currently barefoot and wearing trousers aboard his ship.
“The likes of me,” she repeats and smiles again, but it’s the dim one now. The one that’s sad around the edges, not the one that makes his heart swell in his chest.
“It’s for the likes of me if no one is going to do it for me.” She waves that statement away with her fingertips as soon as she says it, like she does with things she doesn’t want to discuss.
But he’s already heard her words and felt the way they make his heart squeeze in his chest.
Nobody to fight for her? Jesus wept!
He wants to insert his boot right into that former fiancé’s arsehole. That bloody fool should have fought for her. If not her father, that cad at least.
“I’d seen enough of the women Violet treats to know it was important to defend myself if I ever needed to,” she goes on. “And as it turns out, I was correct. I’d just had a man hold a knife to my throat, after all.”
He knows what she’s doing, steering the conversation away from this thing she wishes she hadn’t said, and he lets her do it. There are a great many things he doesn’t want to discuss either, top amongst them Jamaica.
So, he keeps his fool mouth shut for once and asks instead, “And if I’d not been there, you’d have turned and swung?”
“I don’t know. You were there, so it didn’t arise.”
He thanks Elphame that he had been there, and not for the first time. He can’t imagine what might have happened had he not been.
“And I realized that day,” she says, “that there had been too many near misses. Too many escapes by luck or fate or what have you. And I didn’t want to know what might have happened had my luck run out.
Had you not been in Covent Garden or my cousin had not turned out to be generous.
I wasn’t prepared for it. And so I asked you to teach me to fight because I wanted to be able to protect myself if I needed to. And, as you know, you refused.”
“I didn’t refuse for long.”
“No. That’s true. You didn’t.” She looks up at him. “What made you change your mind? I never asked you.”
He debates for a moment whether he should tell her. But then he does anyway. “How you said please,” he says. “I’d have given you anything you wanted, the way you said please.”
“Captain McGann?” she asks after a long silence.
“Aye?”
“Why are you so angry at me?”
She looks him right in the eyes as she asks, leaving all the earlier coquetry behind, but he only shakes his head. He isn’t ready yet. There’s too much bound up in him: his mother, his father, Jamaica, Scotland, India.
Who he is and what he’s done and how one thing influences the other. How can he explain it to her if he doesn’t fully understand it himself?
So, he grasps her hand instead. “I hope you can forgive me for what I said to you. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right, and, damn it all, I apologize.
Please let me keep you safe aboard this ship.
Those men out there may be harmless, but I could not live with myself if it turned out they weren’t.
And the only way I know to do that is to make you Mrs. McGann. ”
She looks at him for a long moment before she gives a brisk nod of her head. “I’ll do it,” she says. “I’ll play the part of your wife. But only until we reach Boston.”