Discomfort did not begin to describe the feelings racing just beneath Willa’s lightly boned stays. In a matter of minutes, she’d gone from being showered with flirtatious regard from the strange Frenchman to suffering a glimpse of the fierce protectiveness of which her stubborn Scot husband was capable. Being the object of two men’s dueling attentions at the same time had almost made her giddy.
Almost. Frankly, she wished mightily to return to just Wills who had shared an easy camaraderie with the men of theArethusa. And speaking of the men of theArethusa, the line today required the usual inspection by her husband and dispensing of packets of powders for mysterious stomach ailments or the inevitable pox.
Willa’s tight, looping script noted each man’s medical condition alongside the date in the ship surgeon’s log for which her husband would be responsible at the end of each year, and on which their income would depend.
A twinge of pride took her by surprise. Her husband already recognized the men by name, having made it his business early on to get to know each and every sailor on the crew. She could not explain how something so simple made her hands tingle every time he accidentally brushed against her.
“Mrs. MacCloud, we seem to have run out of doses of unguents.” He lowered his voice. “For treating the pox. Are there more in the sick bay?”
Willa’s maybe-I-will, maybe-I-won’t daydream of warming to the idea of sharing a bed with her husband ended abruptly. “Of course.”
She gathered in her skirts and hurried below, noting the strange passengers had disappeared. Her husband, the long line of patients, and the forenoon watch were the only ones left on deck. Once she descended into the bowels of theArethusa, and entered the surgery and sick bay area, the lower deck heaved as the ship bucked against her lines. The tide was rising.
Willa moved quickly to the sea chest at the foot of her bunk in their tiny cabin. She opened the lid and pulled out the top tray where she kept packets of various mercury salts, jars of herbal salve, and a monogrammed, silver-backed brush that was all she had left of her mother.
Beneath the tray lay all of the clothes belonging to Wills, neatly folded in case she needed them again on short notice.
Cullen leaned against theArethusa’sseaward rail and breathed in the salt air, along with the other questionable odors of the inevitable death and decay wafting from the Royal Navy’s Portsmouth basin where theArethusaremained snug at her berth. She belonged out there on the ocean, and the sooner they set sail, the better he would feel.
Life ashore waiting for a ship to provision before shoving off on another mission always made him feel a bit off-balance.
From where he stood he could just make out the ship’s gilt-painted name up near the bow. The irony of her namesake hit him squarely. In the Greek myth,Arethusawas a nymph and daughter of the goddess Nereus who protested mightily the sensual attentions of the river god Alpheus. After a long, tempestuous struggle, she’d turned into a stream that merged with the god’s mighty river and ended in a fountain on the isle of Ortygia. Both of them had to transform before they could peacefully coexist.
His mouth curved into a maybe-this-might-work-out smile as he pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat. Soon the ship’s bell would signal the end of the two dog watches. He’d left Willa below writing furiously in the journal she kept, biting at her bottom lip as she scratched out line after line in the soft light of the lantern. Suddenly, he couldn’t remember a time without the stubborn woman at his side. When they worked together, sometimes they completed sentences for each other. When they were treating patients, words were rarely necessary.
When he slipped the watch back into his pocket, he felt the outlined ridge of an oval in an adjoining pocket. In the creeping, cotton-gray dusk of the basin, he pulled out the tiny miniature. He gazed down at soft green eyes, a heart-shaped face, and the always ready, freely given, and only-for-him smile, or so he’d believed as a boy. This miniature had been commissioned by a man who loved her. A man who was like a stubborn puzzle to Cullen, a puzzle with unseen, moving parts.
Cullen sent a silent, prayer-like request to his mother, wondering if she could hear. He’d never needed anything more than he needed to know how to love Willa. And he was terrified he might be too late, he might miss his last chance to get this right.
Willa carefully tucked her journal back into her sea chest and re-stacked the storage trays just as she heard Cullen’s footsteps echoing toward the surgery. In the middle deck tonight, there was a crush of women the men had brought aboard for entertainment. The strains of boisterous fiddle music poured into the cabin, making ignorance of what went on impossible to maintain.
The laughter and soft cries did not bode well for a good night’s sleep in her lonely bunk, shut away from the warm man on the other side of the damned thick blanket hanging between them. She’d always ignored the crew’s below-deck, in-port antics with women before she’d married Cullen, but now she could not ignore the added tension. Before, she’d lived her life as a single young man, curious about the riotous noises but hadn’t cared much about what went on outside the surgery. Every now and then, one of the prostitutes would opportune her while the ship was in port. When she’d decline, they’d call her a “Molly boy.” Now, every laugh, every cry, went straight to the fears and indecision swirling through her mind and settling somewhere in the lower part of her body, making her squirm.
“Willa?” Her husband’s voice floated across the dark inside their cabin. She’d doused her candle and scrambled into her bunk when she’d first heard his approach. Now the sound of her name on his lips inside the tiny space they shared did not so much reach her ears as lap at the tips of her fingers and the very ends of her toes. The sound invaded her body, like waves wearing away the shore.
After a few minutes of agonized indecision, she answered. “Yes, Cullen, I’m still awake. Light a candle if you wish.”
“No need.” He stumbled a bit in his progress to his side of the blanketed “wall.”
Willa pondered her next words while the sounds of Cullen shedding his clothes wafted across the barrier. “She’s a beautiful woman.” She bit her lip and squeezed shut her eyes after the blunt words tumbled out. Her cheeks burned, but her hands were ice cold from the uncertainty and fear coursing through her. “You must have loved her very much.”
The silence from the other side of the blanket stretched out for what seemed an endless abyss of nothingness. Finally, he coughed and cleared his throat. “Yes, Ariadne is a beautiful woman, but she has no soul.” The silence wore on.
On Willa’s side of the wall, her mind scrambled to make sense of his words. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t comprehend your meaning.”
“Let me explain. Ariadne would never think to protect the feelings, let alone the health, of an old, injured man who’s worked his hands into twisted knots feeding this ship. Ariadne would never have lost a night’s sleep saving the life of a draft horse in the midst of a difficult birth. Ariadne would never have stayed upright in the surgery for blood-soaked hours helping me save a man’s life.”
“But…” Willa tried to interrupt her husband’s intense outpouring.
“Please, let me finish.” There was a loud intake of breath on the other side. “That woman shot me and left me for dead four years ago, because once in the midst of battle, I thought she needed protection. But I was merely an obstacle to her mission, and she had to eliminate me.”
“But, surely, there is some logical explanation…”
He cut her off, his voice like gunshots in the dark. “No, there is not, and I warn you, once again, do not cross her. Under no circumstances find yourself alone in her presence. She is ruthless. Human life means nothing to her.”
“I’ve done nothing to invite her ire.” Willa’s temper spiked at her husband’s assumption that she was helpless.
“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong.”
