Chapter Ten
Cullen returned to the darkened cabin with a pail of water for the morning. The one candle in the lantern on his sea chest had been snuffed. He put down the pail and struck a flint to re-illuminate the gloomy interior.
“I left only a few minutes ago. Could ye not wait until I got back to snuff the light? I might have broken my neck in the dark.”
Willa sat up suddenly, pulling the blanket to her chin. “I thought you might spend some time at whist with the officers.”
“I’m just the surgeon, not a blasted officer. And in case you’ve forgotten, it’s been a long day.” He pulled a small coil of thin rope from his pocket along with two short nails he’d coaxed from the ship’s carpenter. Cullen sank onto a short stool in the corner and tied sturdy loops at both ends of the rope.
“What…what are you going to do with that?” Willa pointed to the piece of line twined around one of his sturdy palms. She jerked the blanket higher, nearly covering her nose.
Cullen said nothing, but pulled off one boot and used the bottom of the heel to pound a nail in each facing bulkhead. He fastened the rope loops to each side and threw a spare blanket over the taut line.
After snuffing out the candle in the lantern a final time, he shucked off his remaining clothes, hanging them from wooden pegs attached to the bulkhead. With a deep sigh, he flopped onto his narrow cot, pounded his pillow a bit, and rolled to his side, praying to God he could fall asleep as fast as possible.
He was at the very edge of slumber when there was a small clearing of throat and a voice so soft in the dark from the other side of the blanket, he nearly missed her words.
“Dr. MacCloud?”
“What?” He knew his retort was overly sharp, but at this point, he didn’t care.
“I just wondered why you put up the blanket.”
Her reply was so low, he wondered if he’d imagined it. “I thought I made myself perfectly clear. I’ve never had to bed an unwilling lass, and I’m not going to start now.”
“I’m ready to do my duty.” Willa’s voice ended on a squeak.
“Yer duty?” Cullen seethed. “And exactly what would yer ‘duty’ entail?”
He fancied he could hear an audible gulp from the other side of the blanket.
“You know…what a man expects from his wife.”
“What I expect is for my wife to come to me because she loves me, because she wants me. I’ll accept nothing less. So, until ye have feelings for me, please do us both the courtesy of staying on yer own side of this wall. He gave the blanket a kick with his bare foot. And if ye care at all, my given name is Cullen MacCloud, not ‘Dr. MacCloud’ when we are in the privacy of this cabin.”
With that, he gave his pillow another vigorous pounding and tried lying on his other side, in the hope of coaxing sleep to return, soon. However, another part of his body refused to stand down from high alert, so he finally gave up, threw on his clothes, and found his way to the top deck to pace until fatigue claimed him again.
Willa fought off tears after the sound of her husband’s pounding footsteps faded. Now what had she done wrong? She was ready to perform her wifely duties. Lots of couples ended up in the same predicament as she and Cullen.
Why was the stubborn Scot she’d married so insistent that she had to care about him? She shivered. He even insisted she should “want” him, whatever that meant. How would he know the difference? She could pretend, but had no idea what it would take to convince him she was in thrall to his charms.
She only wished he would let her endure the whole mess of submission, and soon. By her reckoning and the check marks in her journal, she had only a day or two of relative safety left before the next onset of her menses.
She lay dry-eyed for long minutes, staring at the ship beams above her head, remembering the last time she’d assisted at a birth aboard this ship. The captain’s wife had refused to remain home alone for her confinement.
Melissanda Still had died in a pool of her own blood, her stillborn child in her arms. Dr. Morton had done everything he could to save her, but could not overcome the great destroyer of women, childbirth. Willa, who had gotten to know the young woman quite well, held her hand until the end, when the light faded from her eyes and her grip slackened. Willa was just fourteen.
In the midst of one of his many turns around the deck, Cullen came to a kind of peace about his marriage. If the woman he was bound to never came to love him as he thought she should, who should he blame? If not love, might they one day at least share mutual respect? That would be a good place to start. He had nothing but respect for the former Wills, then Willa, Morton.
Before he met Willa, if anyone had told him he would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a woman in a surgery rent by the screams of a patient amidst blood and broken bones, he would have called the man a fool. And fool was he for assuming Willa would react to their marriage like a normal lass in love. Willa had not led a “normal” life.
When he returned to the cabin, he snuffed the burning candle in the lantern he’d left outside their cabin. He tried to make as little noise as possible, considering his hulking frame, but froze mid-stride to his side of the blanket “wall.” Once his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he could sense the outline of his wife sitting up on her bunk. He said nothing but moved carefully toward her and settled gingerly next to
