Chapter 44
Chapter
The second day aboard the ship brings more of the same. Catherine rises and takes tea and toast with Mrs. Haverfield for breakfast, before the older woman goes to explore the decks with Samson.
Catherine stays in the room, unable to summon the vigor to do anything else.
Some hours later, a steward brings her lunch on a tray, which she nibbles her way through.
She doesn’t taste it, but eats just enough to keep her stomach settled and her head free of pain before she calls for the tray to be removed.
With nothing left to do with herself, she sits. She has books to read, but she doesn’t open them. Elizabeth has packed her an embroidery kit, but she doesn’t touch it.
She doesn’t do anything at all until Mrs. Haverfield appears back in their rooms some hours later. “You ought to come above deck,” she says in an urgent tone. “Something is afoot.”
“What kind of something?” Catherine asks, not moving from her place on the bed.
“It is unclear to me exactly what is happening.” The woman pauses and the little dog barks. “But it seems as if we may be boarded by passengers from another vessel.”
Catherine only shakes her head. “I doubt it,” she says. “There’s a whistle for an unidentified strange sail and another for piracy. They haven’t—”
The sound of the whistle blowing cuts her off.
“You’d better come,” Mrs. Haverfield says again. “The captain has ordered it.”
“Yes, alright,” Catherine replies. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
Mrs. Haverfield, having done her duty by relaying the information, leaves in a hurry, but Catherine remains on the bed.
The irony isn’t lost on her—how she’d been so intent on ignoring Andrew’s request to stay in their rooms before, and now she is the opposite.
Now all she wants to do is sit on this bed and wait.
Whatever happens next is of little interest to her.
For heaven’s sake, she thinks. She really must be bereft of her senses if she can’t even muster up some enthusiasm for pirates.
McGann stands on the quarterdeck with the captain of The Eagle.
“You can stop blowing the bloody piracy whistle now,” he says to the man. “This is not a hostile takeover.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” The captain gives the signal for the piercing sound of the whistle to stop.
“Where are the passengers?”
“Assembled in the dining room as you requested, Your Grace.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re most welcome, Your Grace.”
Bloody hell.
Just call me McGann, he wants to say, but can’t. He bought this ship as a duke and boarded it as a duke, and now he is going to have to find Catherine as a duke.
Where is she?
He wades through the dining room, walking stick in hand, looking for her. He’d given explicit instructions the moment he stepped aboard that the passengers were all to gather in the dining room.
But Catherine is not among them. Of course she didn’t listen, the wee bloody menace. And no one he’s asked has seen nor heard of her.
He’s about to give up and ask the captain for the manifests when he runs into Mrs. Haverfield and Samson.
“No,” the woman says, cradling her dog in her arms. “I’ve not met a Lady Catherine West. If you’d asked about a Miss Catherine Hope, now, that would be a different story. My berth-mate is Catherine Hope.”
She scratches the dog behind the ears. “Isn’t that a paradox? That gloomy young woman with a surname like Hope.”
His heart rises a little in his chest. Hope was the false name Rogers gave her in Jamaica. It has to be her.
Although… gloomy?
His mind rebels at the idea of Catherine as gloomy. She is giddiness and sunshine and joy.
But she had been gloomy at the Yule Ball. She’d been nothing but gloom that night, like a ghost instead of the flesh-and-blood woman he loves.
And the coincidence of another Catherine Hope being aboard is improbable.
“May I ask your room number, Mrs. Haverfield?”
“You certainly may not,” she says.”
“Number 413,” the captain says behind him. “Your Grace.”
“Are you decent, lass?” McGann calls through the closed door once he locates the cabin. He raps on it heavily several times and waits, but she doesn’t open it.
“Catherine?” he calls. “You are in there, are you not?”
No answer.
“Menace!” He knows he’s yelling, but he doesn’t care. “I will break the bloody thing down if I have to!”
Catherine swings the door open and glares at him. “What are you doing here?”
Bloody fucking hell in a handbasket, does this woman get under his skin.
She makes him lose his temper and yell in empty hallways and threaten to break down doors. But she also makes his heart swell at the sight of her face, breaking the vice that’s been clamping it down since the Yule Ball.
“Can I come inside?” he asks. “Or do you want to have this conversation here in the passageway?”
She steps back and lets him in the berth. “You’ll need to have a care,” she says. “Now that you’re the duke.”
“A care for what?” he asks as he limps his way in, leaning heavily on his cane.
“For your reputation, Your Grace.”
He snorts, though one look at her face tells him she means it. “Stuff that nonsense, Catherine.”
“It’s not nonsense. Andrew.”
That’s better than your grace, at least.
“It is, lass, and you know it. Please tell me that isn’t why you ran away from me. Hell, Menace, you didn’t even tell me where you were going!”
She opens her mouth, but he goes right on speaking.
“And do not even for a moment say to me that you didn’t think I’d miss you. Because that’s a damnable lie and we both know it.”
“I haven’t lied to you.”
He takes a halting step toward her. “Tell me why you ran.”
“Andrew,” she says and then shakes her head.
“You’re not just Andrew. You can’t be and you must know that.
You’re a duke now. You have responsibilities and a dream.
You’ve a chance now to be who you were always meant to be and I will not be the thousand-pound anchor around your neck. Don’t ask it of me.”
He only scoffs. “You ran because of your reputation? Or Elphame help me, Menace, because of mine? I’m not a bloody debutante.”
“Do not mock me. And do not insult me. You must be nothing less than sterling now and you know it.”
“I don’t know a goddamned thing except that you made this decision without consulting me. Did you not think to ask what I might want?”
He fixes his eyes on her big, blue ones. Eyes he’s beginning to see enliven with a good fight. She loves a brawl, his Menace does. So if that’s what it takes to strip the gray sheen that’s dulled her, that’s what he’ll give her.
“Bloody hell, lass,” he says. “I never took you for a dimwit.”
Catherine glares at him, feeling all the frustration and fury that she’s squashed down the last few days surge back up within her.
“I beg your pardon?” she says. “Did you call me a dimwit?”
“Aye, I did.”
He takes another limping step toward her, his emerald eyes flashing. “You’re a dimwit if you think your bloody reputation holds the least little bit of importance to me. I’m a duke now. I could give a fuck all what anybody thinks. And neither should you.”
She takes a step forward too, pressing her finger into his chest. “You’re a stubborn, blustery, temperamental fool if you think you can storm onto this ship and tell me what I ought to do or not do.
The Eagle isn’t under your command. You’ve no rights here at all.
Less than a week and already the title has gone to your head. ”
He catches her hand and holds it, pressing it to his heart. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he says.
She ignores the surge of joy that floods her at the feel of his calloused grip, as if a dam has broken. “I’m not wrong,” she says, stoppering all that emotion to better hold fast against its tide.
“Nay. You’re not. I’m definitely a temperamental, blustery fool. For you, Catherine, and only for you. But you’re wrong about The Eagle. She is under my command. I bought her.”
“I beg your pardon?” She pulls away. “Why would you do that, Andrew?”
“Why do you think, lass?” He moves closer again and reaches a single hand up to cup her jaw. “And why are you crying?”
She steps away from him. Not because she wants to but because she has to. “Andrew, don’t you see? No romantic gesture in the world—and I do appreciate the purchasing of a ship as a grand romantic gesture—will give you what you want. I cannot be what you need. I won’t be.”
He looks, for the first time since he’s barged onto this ship and into her room, unsure of himself. Abashed, even. “What do you mean? You’re everything I need.”
“No,” she shakes her head. “I was, I think, when you were Andrew. But that’s not who you are anymore.
Now you’re the Duke of Barclay and the entire world has changed.
” She pauses. “I’d love to change it back but I can’t.
I won’t be Lady Catherine West ever again.
I will not live my life in a cage. And I will not let you throw away your future because of my reputation.
I know you don’t understand what I mean, but it is true nonetheless. ”
He sits on the bed with a heavy thump and a grimace.
“I understand it,” he says. “Not all of it, but more now. I felt it yesterday at the Ball—the pressure to succumb to who they want you to be. The way it really is different, how they think about you and look at you and treat you, when you’re a title and not a man. ”
“Yes,” she says, and ignores the tears making their way down her face.
“Now imagine it if you weren’t a duke. If you were me, and those expectations made up the entirety of your life.
And your only choices were to accept them or live in freefall with no net to catch you, ever.
I choose freefall. But I won’t take you down with me. ”
“Sit,” he says, and pats the bed next to him.
She does, even though she thinks she probably shouldn’t.