CHAPTER SEVEN
After the pig incident, Patience and the girls walked the deck together once a day then returned to their cabins. When they did, the sailors wouldn’t look at them. Even Doc ignored Sophie when she offered to help with the cooking. The Captain merely grunted when Patience tried to speak to him.
One afternoon, a few days later, Patience heard Jasper say that he and the Captain had the night watch, so after the girls were asleep, she went on deck. The Captain could not walk away from her, if it was his duty to be there and she needed to speak with him.
He stood at the wheel, moonlight etching his features to harder angles. The sight of him filled her with a huge sense of regret. What they’d shared was special, yet not enough. There would never be a true friendship between them, or anything else.
Uncertain what she expected with regard to this man, Patience realized she was sorry she would never have it. Then she scoffed at herself for being so fanciful.
All was quiet. A few men worked in the rigging. Jasper kept watch while the Captain stood at the wheel.
“I didn’t think we sailed during the night,” she said as she approached him.
“We don’t usually. But the weather is favorable tonight and I thought it best to make time before the men’s anger gets the best of them.”
“You want to be rid of us.”
“Yes.”
Patience wished she could see his face more clearly and sighed. “I had hoped to make amends, somehow. We’ve had some wonderful times, the girls and the sailors. I wish there might be only happy memories of our voyage.”
“The women will remember the good times, Lady Patience. The men will remember the bad.”
“Why? Do you suppose?”
“Because the men predicted disaster. Remembering it, they’ll believe they were right all along. Everyone likes to be proved right. And from the little time I’ve spent with your girls, I think they are likely to remember the good in most situations.”
Patience had to agree, and nodded, but he didn’t notice because he didn’t care to. Discouraged for so many reasons, she turned to go.
“Wait.”
The word made her heart skip and she turned back to him.
He handed her an object which she stared at with great surprise, attempting to identify it for all of a minute, before she realized it was a lantern, dark and cold. “It went out,” he said. “The draft is strong here. Take it to the lamp-room, will you, and re-light it? Then I won’t have to call one of the men from the rigging.”
Her disappointment bringing an ache to her throat, Patience went to the lamp-room, opposite the forward house, where the men bunked, re-lit the lamp and returned to the main deck.
The sight she saw stopped her dead.
Advancing toward the Knave’s Secret in full sail came a huge, hulking phantom ship, cast in moonlight like a dark, eerie pewter giant with no rigging lights.
If it continued its present course, it would split the Knave in two.
“Jasper! Captain! A ship! Coming down on us. Sail O! Sail O!” Patience shouted, waving the lantern, to catch the eye of someone, anyone, on either ship.
“Hard down your wheel,” Jasper shouted. “Stand by the topsail halyards.”
The Captain spun the wheel.
Suddenly, like her heart, the Phantom fairly leapt from its perch to rise like a conqueror. The sea, green and luminous in moonlight, now gave a glowing, eerie cast to the spectacle. The huge monster, its bowsprit like a lance, hovered over the Knave. Patience was surprised it didn’t tangle or foul the rigging, but, like The Connecticut, it must be farther away than it appeared.
When the looming hulk buried her nose back in the sea, it came so close, the splash made a frightening, thunderous sound while seething, foamy water boiled over the Knave’s decks.
Fear held Patience frozen. As the water roared and covered them, the lamp flew from her hand, and the wave threw her against the wheel box. She sought purchase, grasped a crampon and, held.
When the churning water drained low, she gasped and coughed. Surely she would never breathe again.
But, eventually, she did. On all fours, taking deep, treasured breaths, she raised her head and looked about.
The Captain had been tossed like a rag doll against the hatch. With an ugly gash on his forehead, he lay unmoving, her lamp floating beside him.
“Hard over, sir,” Jasper shouted. “Hard over, sir, I say.”
Patience knew Jasper could not see the abandoned wheel whirling out of control, setting the ship square to impaling itself on the Phantom’s bowsprit, a lance in every sense of the word.
If that spear met its mark, the Knave would splinter and become the conquered, the Phantom the conqueror. And everyone would die.
Her heart pounding in her head, water pulling at her dress, Patience dragged herself to the ship’s wheel, almost as wide as the span of her arms. With every ounce of strength she could gather, she set to forcing it in the opposite direction from whence it had gone minutes before.
She emptied everything from her thoughts but her girls, and from some hidden cavern in her mind came a desperate need to turn the wheel. She pulled and turned for her very life. For everyone’s life.
She wondered momentarily at her strength, could not fathom it, but thanked the heavens, nonetheless, and continued to turn. For they must, at all costs, evade the Phantom.
She couldn’t let the girls die. She loved them all.
As she forced the next spoke downward, she began a litany. “For Sophie,” another spoke, “For Angel.” One hard turn for each of the girls, then for each sailor, Doc, Dublin, Paddy and the rest. When she turned a spoke for the Captain, she sobbed, panic nipping her, but she stayed with the wheel, turning, praying.
How long she should continue, she did not know; she simply knew she must.
Sudden voices pierced her determination. Strong arms attempted to hinder her. “No!” She fought Lucifer’s temptation to relieve the pain in her arms, but— “I can’t stop. I can’t let go. They’ll die.” She sobbed. “Oh, God, they’ll die.”
Lucifer uttered an expletive in the Captain’s voice. “Patience, Patience. It’s all right now. We’re safe. You saved us, Patience. Do you hear me?”
“I have to turn the wheel!” No matter that she’d conjured the sweet-snarly captain, she would not be seduced from her purpose.
“Sweetheart, everything’s fine now. Let go, love.”
She looked up. Her imagined Captain had a bloody gash on his brow, and she knew a surge of pain at the sight. But she wouldn’t let go of the wheel. She couldn’t, or her girls and the sailors would die.
Grant ignored the pain in his throbbing head and slipped his arm around Patience’s waist, holding her tight, aching for her panic, proud as anything of her courage.
Jasper had to pry her hand from the spokes, one finger at a time. “Her fingers are so stiff, Captain, I’m afraid I’ll break one.”
“Be careful then or you will. I’ve seen this kind of hysteria before.” Grant bent to Patience’s ear, to gentle her with his words as if she were a frightened colt, poised to bolt, but when her hand became finally free, she grabbed a different spoke.
Jasper looked at him and sighed.
Grant shook his head. “Try again. The minute that hand’s free, I’ll hold it so you can remove the other.”
Patience held the wheel in a death-grip, but they finally tore her away. “No, they’ll die, my girls, the sailors. I can’t let them die.”
Grant lifted her in his arms. “Hush, love. They’re safe. Jasper is taking the wheel now, see?” He knew she must understand because she calmed in his embrace. “Jasper, get us back on course. Dublin can finish my watch.”
Grant carried Patience toward his cabin, his climb down the hatch, a study in balance. When he tried to lower her into Shane’s bunk, she took such a stranglehold of his neck, he almost choked. She gripped him tight as she had the wheel. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t
seem to see him. Balancing her, he yanked Shane’s blankets free of his bunk, hooked a chair leg with his foot to turn it and sat with her on his lap, Shane’s bedding in a heap nearby.
He kissed her forehead, alarm biting his belly. She could have been washed overboard. He pulled her closer. “My brave little sailor, we need get you out of your wet clothes or you’ll catch your death. Me too. If you were yourself, I’d suggest we get naked together, just to see your cheeks turn pink. But it’s no fun teasing you unless you can fight back. I do so enjoy our little squabbles.”
He pushed the hair from her eyes and pressed her cheek to his chest, stroking her temple “Patience, you were wonderful out there tonight. No sailor could have done a finer job. From the moment you saw that derelict ship and alerted the watch, you were magnificent. I watched you while my head throbbed, my stomach revolted and my arms and legs refused to heed my instructions. You held our lives in your tiny, capable hands and saved us all. Only one in a hundred non-sailors would have thought to flash that light? When you turned us from destruction, I knew you must be the bravest woman ever.”
Patience whimpered and burrowed closer.
Grant stroked her brow worried about this daze she was in.
“I’m not brave,” she said, after a minute, in less than a whisper.
He smiled. “Brave doesn’t mean you’re not afraid. It means that in the face of your fear, you do what you must to come about. And you did precisely that, both tonight and when you arrived in America. And do you know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think the families who placed their daughters in your care, and their faith in you, were very smart.”
Patience shivered and sighed. “But I can’t do it.”
“Do what, love?”
“Find them husbands,” she wailed and looked him in the eye. “I don’t even know the Marquess of Andover.”
He chuckled, certain now that his faith in her was well-placed. “Let’s worry about that later. If you hadn’t saved everyone tonight, you wouldn’t need to know the scoundrel.”
“But I have to do right by my girls, Grant. It’s important. I love them and I gave their parents my word.”
She called him Grant. Pride and humility warred within him. Pride won. He kissed the top of her head. “You’ll do your best to keep your word. If there’s anything I’ve learned, you’re sincere. Even when you’re not certain how, you do the right thing. Now, no more talk. Let’s get you out of these wet clothes. You’re freezing.”
She nodded, but kept her arms tight around his neck and nuzzled her face against his shoulder.
Grant chuckled. “Patience, you have to let go.” He loosened her hold, brought her icy hands to his lips, then he blew warmth over them while massaging them between his own.
“I have blankets. What I’m going to do is stand you up, peel you out of your wet clothes, quick as I can, then wrap you warm and tight. All right?”
He was so frightened by her look of trust, he wanted to fetch Rose. But he couldn’t. He needed to be the one to care for Patience. As much as he knew she needed him to.
When he tried to stand her up, her legs buckled so he sat her down and knelt before her, practically tearing her sodden clothes from her shivering body. In a flash, he held her up and wrapped her in Shane’s blankets like an Egyptian Mummy.
“No,” she squealed, when he tried to place her on his bunk. “Don’t let me go.” She thrust her arms from their confinement and clamped them about his neck, the blanket gaping at her breasts.
He kissed the topmost arc of one, couldn’t help himself, and thought she might have purred. “Patience, I need to change into dry things, too. Let me go for just a minute while I change, then I’ll hold you again.”
Patience allowed him to set her on his bunk, but she seemed forlorn when he let her go, almost to the point of tears.
He groaned and turned his back to her, stripping and pulling on dry trousers fast as he could.
When he turned back, she seemed a bit more relaxed. “Are you any warmer?”
“I’m only warm when you hold me.”
He smiled and poured her a brandy. “Here, sip this.”
She shook her head.
“If you do, I’ll hold you, again.”
She looked suddenly haunted. “Please no.”
“Patience, it’ll warm you.”
“Spirits can make you do terrible things. No one should drink, Grant.”
“It’s like medicine.”
Her fear turned to sadness. “So Papa said.”
A warning sounded in Grant’s head, but this was no time to pursue the questions that resulted. “Brandy is often given to people who have been injured or had a shock. Ask Doc tomorrow, if you don’t believe me, but drink it now. Please.”
Her determination wavered.
“Patience, do you think I would give you anything to hurt you?”
“No,” she whispered.
Her easy answer purled through him the way his name on her lips for the first time had done. “Then drink this, please.”
She nodded once and accepted the glass. Crinkling her nose, she took a sip and handed it back. “Thank you. That was—” She gasped.
“You need more than that,” he said, eyeing the glass.
“It worked.” She fanned her face. “I’m much warmer.”
“Just one more sip?”
She shook her head in adamant refusal.
He lifted her, gloried in the feel of her arms slipping easily around his neck, of her body pressed close, and turned back his blankets. He placed her near the wall, got in beside her and pulled her close.
She put her head on his shoulder and her arm over his chest. “It’s hot in here.”
Damned hot.
Her sigh, as she drifted into sleep, fanned warm air against his cold neck. Her exposed breast, pressing soft against his chest, caused another stir. He smiled in contentment, covered her exposed parts and snuggled close, his own eyes closing.