4. Chapter 4
Chapter four
HMS Resolute waited beyond the muddle of boats and shouting men. Marguerite stopped. Three masts climbed into the pale Brighton sky, crossed and webbed with so much rope that the heavens appeared to have been captured, knotted, and pressed into naval service.
“What are them little windows?” Elsie asked, pointing toward the gunports, open in a row of dark mouths.
“Cannons, Elsie. Those are cannons.”
Elsie gave the frigate a long look, then slid a surreptitious glance toward the hackney coach that had brought them to the docks, as if calculating whether it might still be persuaded to take two women somewhere safer, such as a debtors’ prison.
“Seems like the Sea Wolf ain’t very diplomatic either. ”
Marguerite drew Elsie’s arm closer and pressed it with a reassurance she did not entirely feel. “The war is over. Those cannons will be silent now, I assume. Think of this ship as one very large stepping-stone to Naples.”
It turned out the stepping-stone was more difficult to step onto than she had anticipated.
First, one had to convince a fish-smelling boatman to take them to the ambassador’s frigate.
Then one had to endure four sailors rowing as if ladies requesting passage to Naples were ogle-worthy oddities rather than rational creatures pursuing a reasonable objective.
Lastly, one had to sit still while the aforementioned frigate, which had looked almost manageable from a distance, grew larger with every pull of the oars, rising out of the water like a setting from Judgment Day.
Its black side towered above the water, slick and immense. Gulls shrieked overhead with the nasty pleasure of creatures who had never paid a hotel bill.
The boat bumped alongside.
“Here we are, miss,” said the boatman, pointing to a ladder as if it were the front door.
Marguerite looked up at the narrow insult composed of rope and wet wooden rungs. Hung against the frigate’s side, it swayed with the ship, slapped the hull, and descended toward the boat with the confidence of a thing that had ruined better women than she.
Elsie groaned. “That cannot be how people get in.”
The boatman scratched his jaw. “If they want to embark, it is.”
“Miss,” Elsie whispered, “I don’t think you ought to attempt that.”
Marguerite tightened her glove. “Nonsense. I have negotiated worse.”
She had not, strictly speaking, negotiated worse. But Naples waited beyond that ladder. Warmth waited beyond that ladder. A new life waited beyond that ladder. And if fate had chosen to make her future accessible only by damp rope, then fate would have to tolerate the sight of her ankles.
She gathered her skirts, reached for the side rope, and placed one slipper on the lowest rung. Just then, a wave struck the hull, burst upward, and splashed freezing water over her calves.
“How invigorating,” she said, reconsidering every decision since birth.
Elsie clutched the side of the boat. “Come back down.”
“I have only just begun my ascent.”
“You have gone three rungs.”
“All great enterprises are mocked in their infancy.”
She climbed two more. Her knee knocked the rope once, then twice, and she pretended not to notice.
The ladder shifted under her weight, alive and untrustworthy.
Her shoulders had crept nearly to her ears, and the damp wind had found every gap in her clothing with the curiosity of a badly raised child.
Then she looked down. It was a diplomatic error. The water opened and closed below her, a giant mouth waiting to swallow Naples-bound ladies. Her heart gave one enormous thud and then began hammering at her ribs.
“Miss?” Elsie called.
She shut her eyes tightly. “I am conducting an internal inventory and shall move momentarily.”
Somewhere above, a sailor laughed and called, “There’s a mermaid caught in the ropes!”
Marguerite would have objected to the classification, but speech had become ambitious.
Her arms trembled with the effort of holding still.
Yet, she could not make them release, could not make her foot rise, could not make her body understand that remaining suspended between sea and sky was not a plan.
Well, then, this was where she died. In the Channel, frozen to death.
Just as she was condemning the lack of poetic justice, the ropes jerked. The rung beneath her slippers dipped a fraction, and her stomach dropped as if it had been cut loose. She made a sound she would later vehemently deny.
“Do not look down,” said a voice near her ear.
“I had concluded as much,” she managed.
“Good. Then look at my hand.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My hand. Above yours. Look at that, and nothing else.”
She opened her eyes a slit. Indeed, a hand held on to the rope, a few inches from her face.
“Breathe in,” he said.
Salty air entered her nostrils, and she gasped.
“There,” he said. “Again.”
She knew that voice. Marguerite turned her head as far as she dared. Mon Dieu! The pirate from last night braced against the ladder. His chest rose and fell behind her with a steadiness that seemed indecent under the circumstances.
“Easy, Moon. I had hoped to see you again, but not caught in a fishnet.”
“You,” she said, trembling. “I have no more jewels. And this is my own hair. Please do not throw it into the ocean.”
He laughed, and the sound brushed against her back, while her own ribs still fluttered like something trapped in a chimney.
“Do not laugh, I am about to die,” she said lamely.
His hand tightened on her waist. “No. I’ve got you now, little Moon.”
The words should not have helped. They were absurdly confident, delivered by a criminal on a rope ladder in the middle of the sea.
And yet his hand did not shake. His breath did not hurry.
He was solid as a mutual guarantee, countersigned by all the powers, with penalties so precise that even a Habsburg lawyer could not misplace them.
The warmth of his palm spread through her gown’s damp fabric.
She became aware, against her will, of the line of his arm above hers, the leather of his glove dark with spray, his salt-and-smoke scent.
Wind shoved his loose hair across her face—over her cheek, into her mouth, catching at her lashes.
She flinched, then hated herself for noticing how soft it was.
“Put your right hand one knot higher.”
“I am afraid.”
“I noticed.”
“That was not an invitation to be rude.”
“No. It was an invitation to obey. Right hand,” he said. “Now.”
Her hand moved. The rope rasped beneath her fingers. Her palm burned where the fibers dragged over skin. Her stomach gave a sickening plunge as the ladder shifted, but his body shifted with it, absorbing the motion.
“Good. Left foot. One rung.”
“If I fall—”
“You won’t.”
“If I do—”
“I will catch you.”
“That is an arrogant promise.”
“I am an arrogant man.”
She laughed then, a thin, broken sound. It startled her so badly she nearly lost the breath she had fought to find. He brushed his thumb against her waist, and why such a pirate gesture could have steadied her, she could not tell.
His boot nudged the rope steady beneath them, his knee braced near hers, and the next rung found her foot.
“Again,” he said, and his breath touched the side of her neck, warm against the salt-cold air.
Because his voice left no room for the ocean, she climbed. The top of the ladder appeared with the miraculous suddenness of land after exile. A square opening cut through the frigate’s side, and beyond it waited a strip of pale deck.
“One more,” the pirate said.
“You said that three rungs ago.”
Marguerite placed one shaking slipper on the final rung, then somehow, through a feat of will, terror, and masculine interference, found herself lifted through the entry port and onto the deck of the frigate.
Panting, she clung to the pirate, one hand fisted in his coat, her cheek pressed hard against the gold-fringed epaulet at his shoulder, too shaken to care that the braid scratched her skin.
She should have stepped away. She meant to step away.
Unfortunately, her body had entered into private negotiations with gravity and appeared to have accepted his terms.
Then his head lifted. She followed his gaze.
The marine stared ahead with heroic blindness. The young officer stared at the sky as if seeking divine instruction. Two sailors stared at a coil of rope with the solemn devotion of monks before a saint’s femur.
“Back to your duties,” the pirate barked.
The deck sprang into motion. Sailors moved. The officer swallowed. Marguerite moved away from him at once, smoothing the front of her gown with fingers that still had not agreed to behave. Somewhere below, Elsie was being helped toward the entry port by two sailors.
The pirate turned back to Marguerite. The ghost of amusement returned to his mouth. Without the mask, he was far more dangerous—sun-browned, wind-touched, green-eyed, and so indecently handsome that even her most disciplined thoughts began searching for diplomatic asylum.
“Now, little moon,” he whispered, “the next time I steal something from you, promise you will not try to kill yourself to retrieve it.”
Her spine straightened. “I did not try to kill myself. I attempted to board. Your ladder was inhospitable.”
“My ladder has served men in battle.”
“Then it has never met a lady in wet slippers.”
His lips twitched. Marguerite lifted her chin, recovering dignity by inches and refusing to consider that some of those inches had recently been pressed against him.
“I came to call on the new ambassador,” she said. “Is he in?”
The pirate looked at her strangely. “Yes. He is right here.”
Relief moved through her so swiftly she almost forgave the ladder. “Then, by all means, take me to him.”
Ten minutes later, wrapped in a blanket by the pirate and given a glass of brandy to nurse, Marguerite sat in the ambassador’s cabin.