“Couldn’t I put up a separate hammock somewhere at least?”
“I’m not sure where you’d put it, if we had a spare one. There isn’t any space. Unless you mean in the hold with the rest of the men.”
The idea of sleeping in the hold of the ship alongside ten strange men is even more disconcerting than that of sharing a hammock with Jack. But how in Heaven’s name is she supposed to keep her distance from him if they share sleeping quarters? She was so taken with the idea of going to sea at last, of sailing on a ship across the ocean—“only the Channel” Jack calls it, but it doesn’t signify, because it’s the ocean to her—that she never once considered where she might sleep.
She says, “I’m afraid the sleeping arrangements are wholly unsatisfactory.” She hears how she sounds saying it. Prim and foolish—as if she could fall back on the manners and habits of her upbringing here, aboard a smuggling vessel filled with contraband bound for France.
“Isabel,” Jack says gently. He reaches out and nearly touches her cheek again, and oddly she thinks she might cry if he touched her now, because she wants to share the hammock with him, she wants to be close to him, but she cannot; she should not want it and, above all, she is so desperately weary anything could make her cry. “Go get some sleep. I promise I won’t lay a finger on you.”
This is not what she’s worried about, but she is too tired to explain, so she merely says, “Thank you.” Half stumbling with exhaustion, she makes her way down the ladder and through the door. The room covers the width of the stern but isn’t very deep. Besides the hammock it holds a desk and chair; there isn’t space for anything else. Earlymorning light filters in through a pair of rectangular skylights set at a slant in a raised section of the deck above.
The hammock is wide enough for two, though it will be a tight fit, the canvas framed by wooden slats on either end. The sides consist of separate pieces, about a hand’s breadth in width, giving the whole an impression of a high-sided canvas bed suspended from ropes. Since the rain stopped, her dress has largely dried in the wind. She doesn’t bother to remove it, nor does she take off her shoes; she’s too exhausted. Instead, she drops into the sagging depth of the hammock as if it’s her own feathered, velvet-clad, and canopied bed in Greenwich and sleeps the moment she shuts her eyes.
When she opens them again she’s pressed against George. She feels the warmth of his chest under the side of her face, rising and falling with every breath, and she can hear the beat of his heart, steady and strong. She smells the sea air and sweat on him and knows he has come home to her. A deep, vast happiness surges inside her and she turns her face into his chest, wanting to both laugh and cry as she presses her lips against the cotton of his shirt.
Then she wakes fully and it isn’t George she’s pressed against, but Jack. He stirs underneath her, his right arm shifting until it’s half draped across her, holding her in place.
She reels with the discovery. Lying very still, she waits for her heart to resume its natural pace. The cabin bathes in light. The patch of sky visible through the protective wooden grille covering the glass of the skylight is a light, clear blue with a white sun at its zenith. Slowly, careful not to touch the side of Jack’s stomach that sports the scar from the gunshot wound, she turns around and glances over the edge of the hammock. Jack’s coat hangs over the back of the chair by the desk, together with his neckerchief. How long has she been asleep? She never noticed Jack joining her in the hammock.
The warmth of him against her makes her dizzy with sudden yearning. She wants to wake him and ask him to kiss her. Mad impulse, of course. She cannot; she must not. She’s not really longing for Jack to kiss her, she tells herself. She’s longing for George. She misses himand she misses how he made her feel. He knew how to kiss a girl, and even though their times together were few and far between and the act itself performed with an air of hesitance, she enjoyed being close to him.
She must keep her distance from Jack, despite this absurd situation with the hammock. Besides that, Jack stayed on deck while nearly everyone else slept. He has probably only been asleep for an hour or two at most. All other considerations aside, it would simply be unfair to wake him now.
Carefully, she lifts his arm and hauls herself up on the edge of the hammock. He shifts again, half turning away from her and mumbling something sounding like “I couldn’t,”and then what sounds like a name—Marianne, she thinks. Or something like that. Slowly, slowly she swings her legs over the edge of the hammock, and then her toes touch the deck and she climbs out. Jack stays asleep. She breathes a heavy sigh and is about to turn away from him when she recognizes his shirt. It’s the shirt that got torn when he was shot, the shirt she mended for him.
Something tightens in her chest. Turning away quickly, she wipes her eyes angrily. What should it matter that he chose to wear the shirt? She must master these ridiculous feelings.
She takes out the pins from her hair and repins it as best she can. There is no looking glass in the small cabin. She imagines the result will be somewhat disastrous. Quietly, she steals out of the cabin and climbs the ladder to the main deck. The hatch is open, sunlight pouring down it. The sea is a mass of sapphire, here and there accented with foam, the horizon a thin, nearly invisible line between heaven and earth. There’s not a sail in sight except for the full red mainsail of theRapideas she cuts through the swell.
One hand on the mainmast, she opens her mouth and drinks in the air, her heart soaring even higher than it did when she swam in Frenchman’s Creek with Jack; higher, too, than when she first kissed George. This is where she was meant to be all along.
When she came to Helford, she did not think she would everconsider the Sea Bucca story anything other than superstition. Now she thinks maybe there is a Sea Bucca, and if there is, maybe she is his daughter. What else could explain this sense of abandon, of utter, delirious freedom she feels being at sea?
Her shoulders and back ache worse now than they did before she slept. She tries to stretch and winces. A sound behind her makes her spin on her heels. Jack is coming up the ladder. “I thought I heard you getting up,” he says when he reaches the top, as if it’s perfectly normal they shared a hammock. “Good morning, Isabel.”
He hasn’t bothered with his jacket or neckerchief this morning, wearing only his shirt, a pair of light buckskin breeches, and a one-day stubble along his jaw. Her eyes stray to the top of the shirt, which is partly unlaced. The bit of skin there; she knows how warm it is after waking with her cheek against his chest. The heat of the sun settles into her face. “Good morning, Jack.”
“It’s a fine day for sailing. You haven’t eaten yet, have you?” When she shakes her head, he says, “Will you join me for breakfast? Tom cooks for all of us, but I take my meals in the cabin. I’ve got to check our course, then we can go down.”
—
Jack is sitting on top of a barrel, pulled close to his desk, while she has the chair. Tom brings in bread, toasted cheese, and beans. At the sight of the food, a sickness rises in her stomach, but it’s not from the motion of the ship, it’s because she hasn’t eaten for so long. The bread is still fresh, the beans well cooked, the toasted cheese the best she has ever eaten. She tells Jack so and he laughs and says Tom is a fine cook and everything tastes better after a stormy night spent on deck.
Eating at a table with him feels strangely formal after their picnic on the beach by Frenchman’s Creek, but Jack talks as freely with her as he did before, and soon the knot in her stomach loosens. After Tom clears away the plates, Jack spreads the chart across the desk and shows her their course, where they are now and where the currents and wind will take them. “This is where the blockade is,” he says,indicating the sea off the point of Brittany, near a city called Brest. “It runs down to here, by Quimper, so we’ll take the route north of there and avoid the men-of-war of His Majesty’s Navy, who I’m sure would give us a welcome a little too warm for our liking if they knew our business. Our destination is Roscoff.”
He points at a town on the north coast. It’s only when he says it that it becomes real to her: they are on their way to France. She will set foot in the land of the Revolution, of Bonaparte, of the men who shot and killed George at Trafalgar. She tries to swallow. Jack is looking at her and she manages a whispered “France.”
“What of it?”
“They killed George. The French.”
“Isabel.” He reaches for her hand on the chart and she lets him take it. “War killed George. A war wanted by men in high places.”
“You speak as if you aren’t one of them.”
“I’m a smuggler. How could I be one of them?”
“You own land, do you not? You make your fortune trading, whether it’s outside the law or not. You cannot in all seriousness pretend you’re one of the common men who made the revolution in France.”
