Chapter Five #2
“Afraid I might have said something delicious around her?” she quipped, chuckling at the man’s bluster as a dockhand passed them with a curious expression darting over them. “Why, Mr. Chance, you are a gentleman. What on earth are you doing here, if not to seek me out?”
“I’m not here to see you!” The gentleman scoffed.
“Oh? Oh.” Precisely why the remark should deflate her so utterly, Phylis was not sure, but it did.
It was mortifying, in fact, to discover that the man whom you had teased was now under your blackmailing power had returned to what you considered your natural habitat…only to discover it was nothing to do with you.
She rallied swiftly, however, and shot back, “Come to look at the ships? Why on earth would you…?” Understanding dawned, and as Phylis glared up at the man, he had the good grace to swallow and look abashed. “You are serious, then? About immigrating?”
Yes, she had teased him about blackmail regarding the issue, but really, it made absolutely no sense. The man had everything—everything!
He was a man, to start with, giving him all the freedom Phylis knew ladies did not have on land.
He was nobility—oh, he might not have a title today, but the man would be a viscount eventually.
He must have money; Phylis had seen cufflinks like that in Le Havre, carved from the most splendid ivory and inlaid with gold.
They were not cheap, and they were the third set she’d seen the scuttlebutt wear.
It was maddening.
“I don’t understand,” Phylis found herself saying, quite illogically. Why on earth would the man wish to explain it to her?
Mr. Chance drew himself up as smartly as he could evidently manage. “What I do, or don’t do, is no concern of yours, Mrs. Seaton!”
Phylis forced down a smile.
Mrs. Seaton, indeed. Well, it was a trick that most women at sea played. It was always safer to be a misses than a miss.
Be a miss, and not only did people take you less seriously or wonder why you were unchaperoned—assuming they didn’t peg you for a worker to begin with—but there was also always some rogue who liked the thought of deflowering an innocent.
Be a misses, and the assumption was that you were allowed to be wandering around on your own, and that you were also spoiled goods who could have a man about the place to defend you.
Though she knew that also made some gentlemen—especially younger gentlemen—more eager to get the woman in bed, since there was no risk of being expected to marry her.
But she didn’t often run into gentlemen, so to speak, and men of the working class reacted a bit differently.
Many a time, she had been saved from an unpleasant situation by looking out for her ‘husband’ to return to the table.
“It may not be my direct concern, I’ll give you that,” she said lightly. “But as your blackmailer—”
“Yes, you never did say what you wished to extort from me,” Mr. Chance retorted, his color still high, but his gaze sharp. “If I didn’t know any better, Captain Seaton, I would say you were a pirate!”
The words rang out across the docks, loud and persistent. Heads turned, muttering began, and Phylis was forced to touch the dratted man again.
His mouth gaped at the sight of her hand around his wrist. “Whoa there!”
“You cannot just go bandying about that word as though you mean it!” hissed Phylis furiously as she dragged the man away from the muttering crowds and away from her ship.
The last thing she needed was for the dockhands to start associating the Dreamer with the term ‘pirate’…
He tugged back and gasped at the realization that he could not so easily free himself as she squeezed harder. “Unhand me, you villain!”
Phylis rolled her eyes. “Dear God, have you ever met a criminal in your life or have you just seen them prance about a stage?”
She released the idiot behind a trio of barrels that nicely shielded them from the rest of the people working on the docks, and glared up at the man who stumbled back and seemed intent on infuriating her.
In all ways.
Mr. Chance rubbed his wrist. “You hurt me!”
“Good. Perhaps next time, you’ll remember not to slander a woman in her place of work.”
His eyes sharpened, and a look of something that could have been remorse overcame him. “I-I did not think.”
“That,” Phylis said dryly, “is obvious. What the hell do you think you’re doing, Chance? Immigrating—leaving behind a life that half the world would kill for?”
She had not intended such emotion to pour through her voice, but there it was. The man was an idiot, yes, and a reckless idiot, to boot. But he would be worse than an idiot if he actually walked away from the sort of life no one could dream of.
“I am going to immigrate,” Mr. Chance said stoutly.
Phylis rolled her eyes. “What, because your life is so terrible?”
A seagull soared overhead as the man said, “Well, it’s not—I did not say it was terrible…”
“Most people who immigrate have nothing, you understand? They leave nothing behind and so they risk nothing,” Phylis pointed out, and she could not help but jab the man in the chest as she did so.
“Ouch!”
It was impossible not to roll her eyes again. Had the man never faced hardship of any kind? Had he not…oh, fenced? Or boxed? What was it that lazy, privileged gentlemen of the noble classes got up to, anyway?
As far as Phylis could make out, they meandered through other people’s worlds and kissed like the devil…
Mr. Chance sighed. “You wouldn’t understand.”
There was such pain in his voice that Phylis found herself, much against her better judgment, stepping closer. “You might be surprised.”
“Oh, really?” Yes, there were bitterness there as Mr. Chance laughed cynically. “You are the master—well, the mistress of your own fate. You make your own decisions, Captain Seaton, you decide where you go and how you live your life. You quite literally captain your own destiny.”
Phylis blinked. “Well…yes. Of course.”
She could remember no different. This was her life, and it was a hard one, with none of the comforts that a life on land might have offered her.
But it gave far more than it ever risked.
“Well, I have the opposite kind of life,” Mr. Chance continued, and there was no longer bitterness in his tones but frustration—deep set, and long lasting.
“My family—oh, they love me so much, they want to dictate every movement I make! My future has been laid out for me like—like a railway, no deviation off the line at all. They’re cloying, they’re—they’re clinging to me like—”
“You’re telling me,” Phylis said slowly, hardly able to believe what she was hearing, “that you want to immigrate…because your family loves you too much.”
Mr. Chance laughed bitterly. “You’ve completely misunderstood me. Everyone does.”
The words would have been petulant from the mouth of another, but from this man…from this man, they merely sounded weary. As though he had lived through something exhausting, and the step he was choosing to take was in fact the last straw.
And Phylis hesitated.
Well, what on earth did she know about the man’s life? For all she knew, some truly awful things had occurred to him, and he was hardly like to expose them here.
She affixed him with a stern expression. “Mr. Chance, what is the most terrible thing that has ever happened to you?”
It was a simple question, though she would not receive a simple answer. “‘Terrible’?”