Chapter 26
He did not come right back. Ruby waited all night—waited in the captain’s cabin with Alice at her side, her heart shivering with dread as she tried to imagine where he could be.
He hadn’t run. She could not believe that he had abandoned them all—that he had told her to wait and then meant never to return.
He’d stood on the deck with his legs spread and taken Lamentation’s words like a cannon blast to the ribs.
He’d looked stricken, his face gone blue-pale in the moonlight, his jaw clenched tight.
He had made no excuses. And he had not told her where he meant to go.
It was well past dawn when someone knocked.
Ruby was across the tiny cabin in an instant. She pulled open the door, her heart in her throat—but it wasn’t Malcolm in the companionway. It was Eugénie.
Ruby’s lips parted in surprise. Eugénie wore an immense oilcloth jacket draped over her slight body, and her slim brown hand on the door was scarcely visible beneath the garment’s heavy sleeve.
“Is he . . .” The words faltered, and Ruby moistened her lips and tried again. “He’s not back? The captain?”
“He’s not back. He sent a message. He wants me to fetch you. Both of you.”
“He—what? Fetch us where?”
The corner of Eugénie’s mouth curved down, a small anxious crimp. “Come,” she said. “Put your wrappers on. It’s going to be wet.”
They listened. She and Alice scrambled into pelisses, and Eugénie led them up the hatch to the deck and then into the dinghy. Gerry helped lower the little rowboat into the water, and then Eugénie, her face set, pointed them toward the harbor.
“You won’t tell us?” Ruby ventured finally. “Where we’re going?”
Eugénie’s slender arms flexed in a steady rhythm as she rowed.
“I’m not sure I fully know. The captain—he—” She broke off and leveled a gaze at Ruby.
The oars feathered in the air, then dipped back into the water.
“There’s something he wants to do before we venture back to London.
Some assurance he feels he must make. And you . . .”
Ruby clutched her hands together in her lap. She was damp from sea spray, and in her haste, she’d forgotten her gloves. Her fingers were cold. “What about me?”
“You mean to bring him there?” Eugénie asked. “To London? To your father—your world?”
Ruby did not quite know what to say. “I think it is our best choice, yes. You don’t have to worry about Malcolm. I won’t let my father hurt him.”
Eugénie’s mouth was still tipped down, a crooked, unhappy arc. “It is not your father that concerns me. It seems to me that you are the greater risk.”
“I?” Ruby leaned back in the dinghy, as shocked as if the other woman had reached out and slapped her face. “Why would I—I would never—”
Eugénie did not let her finish. “I was the wife of a pirate once,” she said.
“Before Wall. I thought the ship would be our great, grand adventure, and I wanted more of . . . everything. More than the life I had led up until then. I was so hungry for the world that I was sick with it.” She shook her head.
Her mouth was grim, and her eyes were fixed on the sea beyond Ruby’s shoulder.
“I was wrong. All of it was a fantasy. I knew nothing about life aboard ship, about maggots and sailcloth and the catgut thread I’d use to sew up bullet holes. ”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
Eugénie’s voice was low. Her eyes came to settle on Ruby’s face.
“That’s what this summer has been for you.
A fantasy, snatched out of time. But what happens when you bring the captain to your house, to your father?
What happens when you try to fit him into your world, and you find out that he does not belong? ”
“Malcolm belongs wherever he wants to be,” Ruby snapped. If that was by her side, then she would have him, and gladly. “There is no place I would forebear to take him. Nothing he does not deserve. He’s all heart. He would tear himself to pieces for any one of you, and I—”
She halted, her voice fracturing.
Deliberately, Alice laid her hand over Ruby’s. Alice’s fingers too felt like ice, but her grip was firm. “Ruby. Dearest. What if your father disapproves?”
“Let him, then.” Ruby jerked up her chin. “I don’t care what he thinks any longer.”
Alice regarded her for a long moment before she spoke. “Do you mean that? You would defy your father—for the captain?”
Ruby hesitated. She looked at Alice’s wide cerulean eyes, Eugénie’s steady hands on the oars. The words had leapt from her lips without deliberation, and yet . . .
Yes, she realized. She meant it.
She remembered her father’s devastation after her mother’s death.
He had loved his wife—in her heart, Ruby believed that he cared for her and Cassandra as well.
But when Ruby had not performed the role he’d expected of her, his affection had been a weak thing.
He had neither the patience nor the desire to accept the daughter he had, rather than the one he wished for.
And Ruby was no longer willing to settle for a love like that.
Love, she had learned, wasn’t a cage. It was a key.
Alice spoke again, very softly. “I know how hard it is, dearest. To want so very much to make the people you love happy.”
Ruby turned her hand to grasp Alice’s fingers back.
It was true. She had wanted to make her father happy, for so long, for so many agonizing years.
She had tried and tried—had dressed Cass up like a little doll because their father wished it, smiled at him across the breakfast table in Rome because she knew he’d smile back.
They had traveled together to Venice and Athens and the Levant, and she’d taken his notes and read his books, and sometimes she didn’t even know if she cared at all about classical art except for the fact that it was something they could talk about together.
But not anymore. She had been rearranged this summer. And she thought it had been for the better.
“I would defy the whole world for Malcolm,” she said finally. “My father will be the easy part.”
They were almost to the wharf now. Ruby watched the vibrant quilt of ships and sails come into focus. The seabirds’ cries made a noisy tangle in her ears, almost as loud as the throb of her pulse.
Eugénie angled them carefully toward the low docks, and there was a long silence before she spoke again. “Did you know he grows the flowers at the house? The captain, I mean. Planted the bulbs himself when we first came. Thins them in the spring.”
Ruby thought of the barrels of flowers on the side of the house facing over the sea: the irises, the alliums. The delphiniums. “I suspected as much.”
“He’s not all flash and dazzle,” Eugénie said, “no matter what he might want you to think. He’s the staying kind.”
“I know.” When Ruby closed her eyes, she could picture his hands in the soil: the slow patient work of bulbs and seasons. The house with all the dogs. Four hammocks in a line. His long-beloved crew, and all that steadfast loyalty. “I know him.”
“Good,” Eugénie said quietly. “I wanted to be certain before I brought you all this way.”
The sun was fully up now, and it beat hot on Ruby’s unbound hair as Eugénie tied them off at the docks. Ruby’s wrapper was still damp from sea spray, her hem four inches wet, and she and Alice followed Eugénie all the way up the street and into the cool shade of a half-ruined church.
“This is it,” Eugénie said. “He’s inside.”
Ruby blinked. “He’s—what?”
Eugénie yanked open the heavy door and nudged Ruby and Alice through. “He’s inside. He’ll explain.” She gave Ruby a small, rueful smile. “He’ll try to explain. He may require some sorting out.”
Carefully, Eugénie closed the door between them.
The dusty air was cool on Ruby’s face as she peered into the tumbledown nave. Her eyes were slow to adjust to the dim interior. Little bars of sunlight spilled through the cracked entablature, and everything else was dark and quiet.
And then, suddenly, he was there, emerging into a shaft of golden light like a desperate, disheveled prince.
“Ruby.” His voice sounded rough; his face was shadowed with whiskers and lack of sleep. “I thought you weren’t coming. I thought—bloody Christ, what took you so long? It’s been—” He glanced at the window behind him as if for confirmation of the time.
A bass voice at the front of the church, emanating from a sun-splashed set of crimson robes, interrupted. “If you mean for me to marry you in the House of God, my son, I suggest you recall the sanctity of His name.”
Ruby’s lips parted. No sound emerged.
At her side, Alice’s eyes went very wide. She swallowed hard. And then she waved them off and headed for the nave. “I’ll handle this part. You two . . .” She waved her hand again. “Talk. Quickly.”
“Shit,” Malcolm said. And then, “Sorry. So sorry. Let me just—” He grabbed Ruby’s arm, towed her into a shadowed corner, and dropped his voice. “Shit.”
Ruby thought her ears might be ringing. Perhaps she’d gone deaf. “Malcolm,” she hissed, “what’s going on? Who is that man?”
“That’s the Bishop of Winchester.”
Her lips parted. “What?”
“Oh God.” Malcolm pushed her hair back from her face, cupping her cheek, brushing her mouth with his thumb.
“God,” he said again, lower. “Ruby. I don’t—I can’t—I wanted to do this all differently.
I had a whole scheme—I was going to go to the Archbishop of Canterbury after we rescued the princess.
I sold the deed to the Delphinium before we even left St. Petroc’s so I could afford the special license—”
“You what?”
“Because you can marry anywhere with a special license—I thought maybe—at Pomeroy House—after we returned I could . . .” He trailed off.
His palm was against her neck, and his thumb seemed to search out the thundering beat of her pulse.
“But after what Lamentation said on the deck, I realized I couldn’t wait any longer.
Only—Jesus, Ruby, did you know you have to wait seven days for a bishop’s license?
And it must be in the parish where you reside?
I spent three times the cost of a special license bribing this fellow to falsify the register. ”
“I don’t—Malcolm, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
His eyes were hot sapphires in the shards of sunlight. “What if—God. Ruby. I keep thinking—what if you’re with child? What if I bloody well died on this journey and left you alone? What if”—his voice cracked—“I got thrown back in jail, and you didn’t even have the protection of my name?”
“Malcolm—”
“Marry me,” he said. “Now. Today. This minute.”
From this proximity, she could see the dark sweep of his lashes, the tiny shadows they cast along the cut-glass precision of his cheekbones. She could see the individual motes of dust in the air between them, floating in impossible refutation of gravity’s pull.
He wanted to marry her? He had sold the Delphinium—for her?
She felt as if she were somewhere near the ceiling, nothing beneath her feet but empty space. “I don’t—understand,” she said jerkily.
“I wanted to wait,” he said hoarsely. “I wanted to prove to you that I could be”—he gestured, a wide, familiar arc that took in the dilapidated church and the usurious bishop and a parish register spotted with falsehoods—“better. But it turns out I’m exactly the same as I’ve always been.”
Somehow, from inside his coat, he produced a pair of rings—plain gold, unadorned.
Worth, perhaps, the price of his own Delphinium.
“I know it isn’t much,” he said. “But I will give you everything I have. Everything I am. I will never let you go.”
She reached out and closed her fingers over his, clasping the rings between their hands. She felt the press of his callused palm, the small endless circles hard against her skin.
“Yes,” she said.
He looked less relieved than she might have expected. More terrified. Rather as though she’d stabbed him between the ribs and his lifeblood was slowly trickling out onto the stone floor.
“Are you certain?” he rasped. His face was growing whiter and whiter, and if he fainted, she was going to have the very devil of a time holding him up. “Because the bishop is right behind us, and if you come to your senses later on today, it’s going to be awfully hard to undo, and I—”
“Yes,” she said. “Malcolm. Yes.”
He leaned very slowly toward her, until his forehead pressed against hers. “Oh God,” he said. “Ruby. I hope like hell you don’t regret it.”
“I heard that,” rumbled the Bishop of Winchester. “Mr. Archer, you have raised me from my bed at the devil’s own hour, and I grow both hungry and impatient. Are you planning to make this woman your wife, or aren’t you?”
Malcolm dragged himself back to his full height. He smiled at her—the ghosts of his dimples flashing—and towed her unsteadily up the aisle to where the bishop and Alice waited.
Tamsin’s absence was an ache in Ruby’s chest. But Alice’s lips curved up, gentle and reassuring, and, hesitantly, Ruby let herself smile back.
And as she pledged herself to Malcolm Archer—as he slid the too-big gold ring past her knuckle—Ruby thought of what Alice had asked her in the dinghy. Would she defy her father for Malcolm’s sake?
Yes. To do so flew in the face of all the choices of her life before this, and yet she had done it.
When he found out, the earl was going to be furious.
His elder daughter, married in haste to a disgraced naval captain—a smuggler—a confidence artist. It was nothing like what he would have chosen for her, nor even what, in her lonely childhood dreams, she had imagined for herself.
It seemed possible that, when he discovered the truth, her father would never see her again.
And still, knowing that, she had made her choice. She had chosen Malcolm.
The bishop spoke the words of their joining in a sonorous voice, and as he did, she looked up into Malcolm’s pale, set face. She thought of the Delphinium—scarred and lopsided and slow and precious. Her ring slipped against his where he gripped her hand.
If there was a cost to this decision, she would pay it. With her own heart’s blood, she would pay—as he had.