My Lord and Spymaster

There her dress was, a heap of slit-up rags on the carpet. “My dress got wet, so you cut it off. You must be a right terror in a thunderstorm.” A prudent woman in her situation wouldn’t embark upon sarcasm.

“You were soaked to the skin and freezing and bleeding at the edges. I couldn’t do anything with a bundle of muddy cloth.” He made stripping her naked sound prosaic as oatmeal. “And you were leaking mud all over my bed. I sopped a gallon of dirty water off you.”

“Mud. That explains it.” Her head pounded like a mill wheel. Every muscle in her body hurt, some of them in inventive ways. She couldn’t remember how she got here. She was naked. There was nothing good about this situation. Nothing.

She was in bed in the captain’s cabin of a good-sized merchant frigate, about a hundred seventy tons. This isn’t a Whitby ship. I’m not safe. The cut of the cabin and the neat brass fittings said it was from a shipyard in Boston. This man, though, he sounded English, not American.

Most of all . . . it was strange inside her head. Felt like somebody’d taken a big ladle and stirred her brain a few times. Nothing was where it should be. When she went asking why she was sitting frog-naked in the captain’s cabin of a merchant frigate, she couldn’t dip up a teaspoon of explanation. I am in a mort of trouble.

Captain Sebastian stood five feet away, looking large and lethal, with a worried frown. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Well, you’d say that, wouldn’t you?

He was young to be captain. Thirty, maybe. He had black hair and a big beak of a nose, and sailor skin, dark and rough, burned by suns that weren’t polite and English. Colorful splotches of blood were drying on his shirt. That would be her blood, probably.

I’ve seen him before.

A memory bobbed up, all in one piece. She was standing against the Captain, so close next to him, they were intimate as a pair of teeth. Fog swirled past. That inky hair was wet, slicked down over his forehead. He slid his fingers along my mouth, tickling. That’s all he did, and I was heat and pleasure and squirming inside like he’d kissed me for an hour.

He knew what he’d done to me. He wanted to do it.

I said, “Five shillings?” and I laughed at him.

The memory tipped sideways and sank like a stone. She had no idea what came next. She groped in the corners of her mind and couldn’t find anything.

His voice rumbled, “You’re worrying. I want you to stop that. I’ll take care of you.”

I don’t want you to take care of me. I want to have my clothes on. She huddled up close and tucked the blanket in tight under her. This is a Greek blanket. We use them for packing the fragile cargo. Papa buys a bale or two on the docks at Valletta, last thing, and we toss them on top of . . .

Then it was gone. The image of the dock at Valletta rippled into pieces and blew away, taking Papa with it. There was something she needed to do for Papa. Something important. She had to . . .

Chaos and spinning pain in her head. Nothing else. She couldn’t think.

She looked down. Her toes peeked out the bottom of the blanket, pink and defenseless and silly-looking. “I don’t remember how I got here.”

“I carried you in after the wagon hit you. Let me get you some light. It’s getting dark early.”

I got hit by a wagon? That’s a fool’s trick. Doesn’t sound like me, somehow. She watched him as he walked across the cabin, taking lanterns with him. It hurt like needles to move her eyes. They hurt when she closed them, too. Sometimes you only have bad choices. Lazarus used to say that to me.

When the Captain passed the squares of the windows, she saw him in outline against the gray outside.

That joggled loose another little moment.

He had his back to me and he was holding a knife. Men came spewing out of the Dark like demons. He put himself between me and those men . . .

“I was out . . . in that.” She looked at the rain and fog outside the window. “With you. And you killed someone.”

“There was a fight.” He set the lanterns on the chart table. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. You can sort everything out when your head doesn’t ache.”

He’s a killer, then. I know too many killers.

He’d protected her, in some shadowy fight in the fog. She was sure of it. Maybe that was why he didn’t scare her as much as he should have. She watched him make fire, sheltering the tinder with his hand. Big hands, he had. He was substantial in general, and being on shipboard made it obvious. A man his size filled up the space, bulkhead to hull, deck to overhead.

He blew on the spark and got the candle lit. All the while he was taking quick glances in her direction. Assessing. Seeing whether she was about to panic or scream or run. She might have, if her head hurt less. Easier to panic when your head didn’t hurt.

He hooked one lantern up over the chart table. It swung when he let it loose. Bright and shadow skittered around the cabin. He walked toward her, holding the other lantern, and he bulged out in his breeches, randy as a stallion.

No.

Fear ran down her like water. For the first time since she’d opened her eyes, she was crawly skinned frightened. Cold with it. Shocked and sick with it.

She darted her eyes away and pretended she didn’t see. Oh, she was looking at the chart table. She was staring at the carpet on the deck. But she didn’t fool him. He pulled up, halfway across the cabin, just stood still, and watched her.

She folded up small, hiding under the blanket.

“Stop that,” he said sharp-like.

Easing the blanket with her, she edged back farther in the bunk. No escape that way. The door was on the other side of the cabin. Past him. No escape there, either.

“Don’t be a idiot.” He looked annoyed.

A flash of memory struck. The Captain yelled, his face distorted with rage and contempt. “Run from me.”

She was in his cabin. No way out. The world got wavery at the edges. I am in so much trouble.

He started toward her, across the cabin, deliberate and slow, like piled-up thunderheads approaching at sea. She jerked the blanket and scuttled backwards on the bed, rucking up the covers till she slammed against the portside hull. Just a startling amount of useless, that was.

He came to the side of the bed. He hung up the lantern on the hook in the overhead and stood there scowling. “Would you calm down? I’m not going to lay a hand on you.”

Her memory was full of dark patches of pain and fighting and trying to run. Anything could have happened to her, and she wouldn’t remember. “Maybe you already have.”

“You think I’d do something like that in front of an eleven-year-old cabin boy, and you cold and limp as a dead mackerel? Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly. I’m sitting here with my dress off, and you’re . . .”

“I’m what? This . . .” he gestured crudely, “doesn’t mean a damn thing. This is because you don’t have any clothes on and you’re female. For God’s sake, I don’t attack women every time I get a cockstand.”

She shook her head. The world went spinning. She was so bloody sick. He could grab her if he wanted to. Just reach out and do it.

“I’m not the kind of sorry bastard who rapes women.” His words would have left marks on stone. It chilled her right to the soles of her feet, that soft voice. “Hell.”

“My father has money. I can pay you . . .”

“If your father had money, you wouldn’t be on Katherine Lane.” That hawklike glare never wavered. Unreadable eyes, he had. “It doesn’t do any good to tell you not to be scared, does it? You’d be a fool if you weren’t scared. What do you want me to do about it?”