Chapter One
England, 1811
Jed lay flat on his face, fingers digging into the sand.He’d made it.That was dry land under his hands.Those were the sharp pebbles of the beach digging into his palms, and that was gritty, dry seaweed scraping his cheek.It was the most wonderful sensation in the world.
He had swallowed bucketfuls of seawater, and his lungs burned.His soaking wet, freezing cold shirt was plastered uncomfortably over his arse.But he was still alive, still breathing, and not lying at the bottom of the Bristol Channel.
Gradually, he became aware of a voice shouting nearby.
“Hey!Hey!Are you all right down there?”
Jed groaned and rolled over onto his back.He had come ashore at the top of a sandy beach at high tide.Above him, a low line of grass-covered dunes cast a shadow against the rising sun.High up on the dunes, outlined against the pale, dawn-streaked sky, stood a man.
“Need a hand?”the man shouted.
Jed tried to answer and found himself coughing up seawater instead.
The man came scrambling down the dunes in a rush of sand, and then he was standing over Jed.He had a shock of dark hair under a soft felt cap, and a narrow, angular face, handsome in a way that would have won him admirers among a certain section of theNonsuch’s seamen.
As for Jed, he probably looked like exactly what he was: a wet and bedraggled seaman who’d run from his ship.He struggled into a sitting position.A stiff breeze blew across the beach, and he shivered, teeth rattling like a loose belaying pin.
“Are you all right?”the man asked again.
“What does it look like?”Jed growled, amid coughs.
The man raised an eyebrow.“I beg your pardon.I should have realised you were lying there for the good of your health.Sea bathing, en’t that what they call it?”
Jed let out a surprised bark of a laugh.
The man’s lip twitched.“Give us a minute,” he said, taking off the small haversack he carried and crouching to rummage inside it.Soon, he was holding out a dry woollen blanket.“Take off your shirt.”
“I’ll get your blanket all wet,” Jed said weakly.
The man only shook his head.“Don’t you worry about that.”He proffered the blanket again, more forcefully this time.
“All right.Thank ‘ee.Sorry.”
The blanket was very welcome.Jed had gone over the side of theNonsuchin shirt and trowsers, knowing that shoes and other clothes would be fatal in the water.Now, the brisk sea breeze raised pebbles on his skin.The sand under his bare feet was cold and damp.Somerset sand.A Somerset beach.He was in England, for the first time in five years.It was too good to be true.
The beach stretched out to the south, a long, narrow strip of silver sand lapped by the receding tide.To the north it ended abruptly in a rocky headland, the morning sun glistening on wet sandstone.It was beautiful.
It was also bloody exposed, with nowhere to hide.
Out to sea, the last and slowest members of the convoy were straggling along the horizon—slow and ponderous merchant ships bound for the East Indies.TheNonsuchwas nowhere in sight.She must already be over the horizon, at the convoy’s head.But he could see the single-reefed topsails of theRose, bringing up the rear.
He had jumped from theNonsuch’s afterdeck at the changing of the watch, dropping into the water as silently as he could, clutching an inflated sheep’s bladder to his chest.Even now, the bosun, that vicious whoreson, was probably raising the alarm.But Jed was counting on the fact that the whole convoy—twenty merchant ships and three men-of-war as escorts—was far too consequent to put about only to send a search party ashore for one deserter.
But there were the signal flags that could send “Man Run” from ship to ship and ship to shore.And on theRose’s deck stood the officer of the watch, no doubt a sharp-eyed bastard, with a glass that could be trained on the shore at any moment.Jed’s skin prickled.
He twisted around to squint up at the dunes.TheNonsuchhad been two hours out of Bristol Deep when he jumped, which meant he must have come ashore somewhere in the Somerset Levels.Years ago, in another lifetime, he had driven his carrier’s cart back and forth over that marshy land.He could easily find his way across the Levels and over the moors, and thence to the fishing village he hailed from.Christ, to think he would soon be home!It would be no more than four or five days’ walk, weather permitting.Less, if he could hitch a lift.
But on the road he would be at the mercy of every neighbourhood busybody who crossed his path, eager to report him as a deserting seaman.
He’d left his short seaman’s jacket on board, but in his wide-bottomed trowsers no one could possibly mistake him for a landsman.Wet clothes, bare head, bare feet, seaman’s trowsers and pigtail… He might as well have an anchor tattooed on his forehead.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to have gone.He had prepared for this day for years, and then been rushed into it—but there was no point thinking about that now.
“You’ll have to get away from the shoreline,” the other man said, as though reading his thoughts.“But you won’t get very far in them there clothes you wear.”
