Chapter 23
Chapter
Catherine falls back asleep, her body sated and boneless, with McGann’s arms wrapped around her. She’s enveloped in his warmth and his safety and his smell. That hint of floral, whatever it is. She turns over and buries her face in his chest, breathing him in.
When she awakes again, it’s to his voice murmuring, “Good morning,” in a way that’s low and sleepy and sets her insides aflame once more. She wants to wake every morning like this, with her limbs wrapped around him and her face cradled in the curve of his neck.
It stuns her for a moment as her mind clears the sleep away, to realize how close she’s come to living a life without these feelings of warmth and desire and satisfaction.
Had she married Pembrooke, she thinks with a jolt that nearly sends her tumbling out of bed, she would never have known desire at all. She would have never known him.
Good heavens.
But she didn’t marry Pembrooke, she reminds herself, which soothes her; lets her melt into his body once again and relax.
She’s Eve with her apple, Pandora with her box, and the cat with its cream all at once; let in on some cosmic secret and finding it delicious. She brushes her thumb across his nipple just to hear him groan.
“Menace,” he mutters, but his arms tighten around her all the same. “What are you doing?”
She lifts her head from where she’s buried it in his neck. “Exploring.” She grins at him. “Would you like me to stop?”
“Nay,” he says and groans again as she begins to kiss his neck. “Nay, but I’ve got to—”
“Captain!” The knock on the door is insistent and loud, cutting through his words. “Captain! It’s an emergency!”
“Aye!” he calls roughly. “I heard ye the first time!”
She feels the loss of him when he pulls away from her and struggles back into his shirt and trousers, a chill where his heat had just been.
“You’ll be the death of me, lass,” he whispers before he presses his forehead against hers and kisses her. “Promise me you’ll stay put?”
“Andrew,” she begins but is cut off by the shout, “Sail ho! Off the port bow! Bearing down fast!”
“Bloody hell!”
And then the door slams behind him and she’s all alone.
She rises, listening to the sounds on the deck above her. Boots thumping. Men yelling. Some dratted whistle blowing and blowing. She doesn’t know what it indicates, but she knows it isn’t good. Worse possibly than the fires from the rushing cadence of footsteps.
What could it—oh!
She’d read that book on naval warfare while she’d been stuck in this room. Before she’d known how marvelous it could be to be stuck in this room.
She knows what that whistle means. It means piracy.
She dresses quickly, re-binding her breasts and slipping on her new, mostly leather shoes. She feels her head where her bandages are. Her skull is still tender and bruised but it’s better. And she’ll be more careful this time.
She pats the pocket that still holds the key.
Whatever is happening outside of this room, she’ll protect herself and Andrew McGann however she can.
She isn’t certain, of course, that it’s the key they’re after, but she has her suspicions: the navigation errors to draw McGann away while the fires were laid; the knock on her head and her removal from their cabin so it could be searched; her nose and throat irritated by the fires she must have been near before she was dumped in the hold.
And most of all, the way McGann’s skin had gone gray when she’d mentioned the key.
And—
She glances around the space. It’s off. She’d had a vague notion of something amiss yesterday when she noticed the Robert Burns book of poetry she’d been reading had been moved from where she’d left it on the nightstand.
McGann could have easily put it back, but somehow she doesn’t think he has.
She looks around again and, now that her face isn’t pressed into his chest, really examines the space.
The bookshelves don’t seem quite right. Nor does his desktop. Both give her the feeling they’ve been shuffled around slightly. The thought of it sends a spasm of worry up her spine. The cabin—their shared space—has been invaded by someone else. She knows it; she can feel it.
She goes to the desk first and opens the drawers, one after the other.
As she suspected, the neat stacks of McGann’s belongings have been rifled through.
The edges are sloppy and misaligned, completely unlike the precision she encountered the first time she opened those drawers searching for a needle and thread.
Then she turns her attention to the bookshelf.
There, the even rows of books are almost as she left them, except that the spines are no longer perfectly aligned.
And the volume of Robert Burns’ poetry she was reading before has been reshelved in the wrong place.
Not on the top shelf where she’d retrieved it from, where McGann keeps his novels and poetry. And his secret keys.
No, the Burns volume is now on the bottom row with the books on naval warfare and tactics. As if someone tried to reset the room to rights quickly and not paid attention to where things properly went.
She knows then that her suspicions are right. Someone has been here, and they’ve been snooping. McGann would reshelve his books in the proper place by habit alone. Just as he would treat his desk drawers the way he’s always treated them, as neat and precise as one of Violet’s surgical stitches.
She desperately wants to go see what’s happening on the rest of the ship. To tell Andrew what she’s realized. But, drat it all, he asked her to stay put.
She wavers, undecided. She wants to do as he’s asked, although, her mind rationalizes, she never actually answered him. He asked her to be here when he got back but she never had the chance to say yes.
But, no. That’s a technicality and she doesn’t want to live by technicalities. She wants to live by truths. She wants to be thoughtful and careful.
I’ll stay, she decides, although her entire being resists the idea of sitting in this room while heaven knows what’s happening on the decks above.
But I can peek…
She makes her way to the door and opens it just a crack. She hears men up the passageway, yelling. So she opens the door a hair more. Just enough to hear what’s happening.
What in the bloody hell is going on?
McGann tears himself away from Catherine and follows Rogers to the main deck.
The whistle to announce a strange sail on the horizon shrieks in his ears, while under his feet, The Elphame begins to lose speed.
His ship has the combined power of sail and steam—she shouldn’t be slowing.
Not unless… he looks at the black double-masted schooner skipping over the waves toward them.
Unless…
He barely has time to articulate the thought when The Elphame’s engine falters.
Unless we’ve been sabotaged.
He orders Rogers to the boiler room, the phrase dead in the water echoing through his mind as the schooner closes in on them.
“Lay aloft! Loose the sails!” he orders, but with the loss of their engines, they’re hardly moving at all. By the time the sails can be hoisted, that schooner will already be on them. They’re listless. Floating. At the mercy of whatever and whomever that black ship is carrying toward them.
Catherine closes the door to the captain’s cabin when she sees Rogers rushing down the passageway toward the ladder that leads to the boiler room. She opens it again as soon as he’s past.
“What have you done?” she hears Rogers demand of someone. And the voice that answers him turns the blood in her veins to ice. It’s the same voice that lured her out of the room right before she was knocked on the head; the same deep Gaelic accent that she’d once assumed to be McGann’s.
She’ll never make that mistake again, and she wonders how she could have ever been so foolish.
But she hadn’t known there was another Scot on board.
Every other member of the crew she’d spoken with was English, most of them with an accent so deeply inflected by the Kentish dialect she could hardly understand them.
And when that other voice had called to her—was it only three days ago?—she hadn’t yet become attuned to every inflection of Andrew’s speech. But she is now; she could pick Andrew McGann out of a dark room by the tenor of his sigh alone. Or heaven help her, his groan.
The Scot she hears now is someone else; someone who tried to hurt her. And when she hears a loud strike and Rogers roar in pain, she knows that whoever he is, he just hurt the first mate too.
No, she thinks, slipping out of the cabin before she can change her mind. Before she can be stayed by McGann’s request for her to remain where she is and her own desire to be more thoughtful, more careful.
What good is thoughtfulness when someone has hurt her? And Rogers. And when—she’s quite certain—they are going to try and hurt Andrew next. She isn’t about to let that happen.
Thoughtfulness can go to hell, she thinks, when action is required. The key is knowing which time is which.
This, she decides, is a time for action.
She creeps down the passageway and to the ladder she saw Rogers take below deck just a few minutes ago.
It doesn’t descend to the hold but to a small, narrow passageway with a door at the end that sits slightly ajar.
She moves silently and swiftly in the dark, cramped corridor.
Her small size and new leather slippers both boons to her effort to keep quiet.
When she gets close to the door, she presses herself up against the bulkhead and edges closer, trying to stay out of sight.
She can feel damp heat escaping from the space as she pauses outside the doorframe, sweating.
It’s too hot; something is wrong. She sidles closer as steam fills up the tiny room.
She can hardly breathe or see, but she can just make out the figure of James, the English helmsman that McGann demoted, before his face is obscured.
He’s dragging something. She squints to better see what as sweat pours off her skin in buckets and her lungs fight to expand in the thick, damp air.
Is that Rogers?
She wipes the sweat from her eyes but it doesn’t help her vision.
The steam is still pouring out of the pipes.
She’s no engineer, but she is relatively certain this is not how steam pipes are meant to work.
And she knows that if she doesn’t move quickly, she won’t be able to see anything at all.
This air is worse than the thickest pea-soupers that occasionally black out London and wreak havoc, causing people to fall into the Thames or be hit by passing carriages.
She squints again and steps inside the boiler room as quietly as she can. Inside, the steam is even worse, her vision totally obscured. She jams her foot into something and tries to squelch the resulting, “Ow!” from leaving her mouth.
“Who’s there?” James yells.
Drat it all.
He’s heard her, and she can feel, rather than see, the man moving. She stills, holding her breath and trying to become one of those Roman marbles she’s always comparing Andrew to.
She isn’t even sure what she expected to do here. She certainly can’t fight James. Andrew taught her that weight moves weight, and she doesn’t have enough of it to win against a man James’s size.
But she can be smarter and swifter and—no.
Be reasonable. She can’t do anything but get out of this dratted space the same way she got into it.
She edges back toward the door she came through, cursing the way her movements seem to echo throughout the room.
It doesn’t seem possible through the hissing steam, but she sounds as loud as a horse’s gallop to herself.
And then James’s face is right in front of her, looming. He’s found her, and there’s nowhere she can go.
“What are you doing here?” he snarls. “Mrs. McGann, is it?” The sarcasm in his voice is unmistakable.
“I heard noises,” she says, her voice more uneven than she wants it to be. “And I… came to see what the issue was.”
“Is that right?” He lets out a short, derisive laugh. “I am aware that bastard has no wife, you know.” He edges even closer to her. “What does that make you then? His mistress? His doxie?”
He licks his cracked lips and the sight of them with his swollen tongue makes her shudder. She knows the signs of undernourishment from Violet’s clinic, but their cause makes them no more repulsive as he leers at her.
She looks around wildly. He’s too close, the sourness of his breath and the yellow scum of his teeth making her stomach roil.
Think, she commands herself. Breathe and think.
How did he know where she was? He heard her movements certainly, but he’d pinpointed her place in the room exactly. She looks down and sees the steam has risen, just a bit. Enough to show her feet.
Alright. Her heart is beating wildly. A small mistake. But I can be smarter from now on.
Her eyes scan the deck and find Rogers’s prone body. She hops behind him now, hoping that his form will shield her movements.
“You can’t hide from me, dove,” he says. “I’ll find you.” She hears rather than sees him lick his lips again. “Maybe I’ll take you with me. The bastard won’t be in need of you much longer, not where he’s going.”
“And where is that?” she asks, but then quickly realizes her mistake when he begins to laugh at her. Her words gave away her location.
She snaps her mouth shut, but it’s too late. He’s already lunging for her.