A few hours since they had taken him? Or a whole day? He had no way of determining any of it. His head ached like the devil.
‘You hail from Scotland?’ He tried to make the question as neutral as he possibly could, tried to get the man talking, for in silence he knew he would learn nothing at all.
‘Edinburgh, and before that Inverness.’
‘I’d always meant to go north, but never did. Many say it to be a very beautiful land.’
‘Aye, that it is. After all this-’ he gestured around him ‘-I mean to go back, to live, ye understand.’
‘If you help me off this ship, I could give you enough money to buy your own land.’
The other frowned. ‘Ye are rich, then?’
‘Very.’
The Scotsman eyed him carefully as if weighing up his options, the pulse in his throat quickening with each and every passing second. The sly look of uncertainty was encouraging.
‘Are you a good judge of men?’ Luc’s question was softly asked.
‘I like to think I am that, aye.’
‘Then if I told you I am an innocent man who has done nothing wrong at all, would you believe me?’
The answer was measured.
‘Any murderer could plead innocence should his life depend on it, but I’ve yet to see a man brought to this ship in the middle of the night who has not walked on the shady side of the law.’
Luc smiled. ‘I would not expect you to do anything more than to look away for five minutes after unlocking these chains.’ He gestured to the manacles at his ankles.
‘I’d be a dead man if I did that.’
‘Throw them overboard after me, then, and say that I jumped in.’
‘Only a fool would attempt to swim while bound.’
‘A fool or a desperate man?’
Silence filled the small cabin.
‘When?’ One small word imbued with so much promise!
Luc answered with a question of his own. ‘Where are we headed?’
‘Down to Lisbon.’
‘Through the Bay of Biscay?’
‘We have already sailed through those waters and have now turned south.’
‘The warmer currents, then, off the coast of Portugal? If I jumped, I’d have a chance.’
‘And my money?’ The thread of greed was welcomed.
‘Will be left at the Bank of England in Thread-needle Street, London, under my name.’
‘Which is?’
‘Clairmont. Lucas Clairmont. You could claim it when you are next back in England and then leave the ship for your hometown.’
‘If ye die during this mad escape, I cannae see much in it for me.’
‘Go to Lord Stephen Hawkhurst and tell him the story.’ Luc pulled his wife’s ring from his finger and placed it on the ground in front of him, the gold solid and weighty in the slanting shaft of light from the porthole. ‘I swear on the grave of my grandmother that he will pay you five hundred pounds for your trouble, no matter what happens to me.’
When a cascade of expletives followed Luc knew that he had him. Still, there was more that he might be able to learn.
‘Who brought me on to this ship?’
‘Three fellows who paid the captain for your passage. There was some talk of a woman who wanted ye gone from England if memory serves me well.’
Closing his eyes against the stare of the other, he tried to focus and re-gather his strength whilst thanking the James River for its lessons in swimming from one wide edge of it to the other.
Not Davenport money, he hoped. Not Lillian regretting her intimacy in the alcove at the Billinghurst ball, a dangerous stranger who would be menacing to her? A few pounds and an easy handover! No, for the very life of him he could not see Lillian ever performing an illegal act no matter what duress she might be under. Her aunt Jean, then? Lord, that made a lot more sense. Perhaps he was on the same ship she had bought a passage on for him, though he knew the paper in his pocket to be gone.
Already the man had brought the key from the table and unlocked the manacles. The chains fell limply around his ankles as he stood, towering over his shorter captor.
‘What usually happens to those you take on the ship under the cover of darkness?’
‘At a rough guess I’d say Lisbon would be the last place they ever saw in this life.’
The choice was made. Luc stripped off his shirt and tied it about his waist. He wished he could have picked up the wooden chair near the table and dashed it to pieces, taking the largest piece as ballast. But he did not dare to, for fear the noise would attract others who would not be as willing to barter.
‘How do I leave the ship?’
‘If you follow me, I will show you, but be quiet mind.’ Lifting the chains, the Scotsman muffled their sound in the folds of his jacket as Luc followed him out into the darkness.
Chapter Thirteen
The tapestry in Lillian’s hands was almost finished, an intricate design of fish and fowl wrought in the tones of grey and cream. The belated completion of half-finished projects such as this had been one of the positive things to come out of her enforced isolation and other embroideries still to be done lay in the basket at her feet.
Two weeks now since she had had any word from Lucas Clairmont. Fourteen days since her life had been changed completely by a man who had never wanted anything more than a dalliance. She hated him for it, and hated too the sheer and utter waste of effort it took to loathe him, a depression of spirit all that was left of wonder. From love to hate in fourteen days, tripped in an instant into a ruin she could barely comprehend.
Tears pooled behind her eyes and she willed them away, the picture before her blurring in sadness, though a commotion at the front door made her stand, voices shouting and the raised anger of her father and cousin. Another voice too, lower, familiar, the sound of a tussle and running feet.
‘Lucas?’ His name was snatched from her lips in a whisper as she ran, through the blue drawing room and into the hall, threads of grey and cream trailing in her wake.
Blood was everywhere, across Luc Clairmont’s nose and eyes swelling shut under the fist of her cousin and his friend and he was not fighting back, the crack of his head as he fell on the marble leaving him dazed upon the floor.
‘What is happening?’ Her voice. Loud in the ensuing silence.
‘He deserved it.’ Patrick’s explanation, the grazes on his fists bleeding anew even as he wiped them against the white linen of his shirt.
Did he? Does he? The question flared in her eyes as she stood between her father and her cousin, the opened door of the house letting in the stares of those servants who worked the gardens and also the wet of the driving western rains. She did not come forwards. She could not, two weeks of anger and hurt unresolved even in his re- appearance and a stiffening distance widening between them.
When he coughed and his amber eyes hardened before sliding away from her own, she knew that she had lost the chance of atonement, the feelings that had been between them withered into the unknown, two strangers brought to this place by circumstances that now seemed almost unbelievable.
She did not understand him, had never known who he was or what he wanted, an outlander who had strode into her life with the one sole purpose of disrupting it. And still was!
Her father’s distress added to her own and with a sob she turned away, the silence left behind her telling. Lucas Clairmont did not call her back or try to stop her, the sound of her running feet against marble the only noise audible save for the frantic beating of her heart.
