He’s still holding her hand; now he moves it, gently, so her fingers rest on Paris. “It wasn’t common men who made the Revolution. Ideas made it. This, here, is a place of ideas; that’s why the Revolution happened there. Do you believe Voltaire was a common man? Rousseau? Diderot? Montesquieu?”
“No.”
“How are you getting on with La Pérouse?”
“I’ve yet to read half of it, but I shall give it back to you soon.” She hesitates, then says, “If there’s time, would you teach me a little about navigation?”
He smiles. “I’ll be glad to. I’ve tried to teach Will, but he’s got no head for trigonometry. Shall I show you the books?”
“You were serious then, about me helping you with them?”
“What made you think I wasn’t?”
She laughs and he says, “You seem to think I jest about a great many things when I don’t.”
“I expect it’s because some of the things you do are fairly outrageous.”
“Oh, are they? What are these outrageous things?”
Still laughing, she says, “Going to dinner parties pretending you’re not a smuggler, conversing with a man who’d hang you if he knew you were, smuggling contraband from France, involving innocent young widows in your criminal activities.”And sharing hammocks with them,she thinks, but she doesn’t say it. The way he’s smiling at her she suspects he knows exactly what she’s thinking.
“You make me sound a proper villain,” he says, but he’s laughing as he rolls up the chart and gets out his ledger. “If you familiarize yourself with the numbers, you can add to them when we get to France. If you find any discrepancies, please let me know—I’m glad to have a second pair of eyes go over them.”
The rest of the morning she spends learning the value of the contraband Jack smuggles to France and back to England. The nature of the cargo is far more varied than the kegs of spirits she had imagined. Besides many ankers of brandy, Jack and his crew have smuggled everything from raisins, pepper, and aniseed to soap, lace shawls, and shirt pins.
The difference in prices between the two countries is astounding, and she again feels an inkling of understanding for Jack’s enterprise that goes beyond mere profits. She cannot deny there is some merit in a trade that allows even the poor to afford small luxuries such as a piece of soap or a bit of salt. Perhaps breaking the law in order to circumvent the tax could in a strange, roundabout way be considered an act of justice, she thinks. When she tells Jack so, he laughs and says he’s pleased she’s coming around to his way of thinking. “Not on everything,” she says. “Not on the innkeeper.”
His expression darkens. “I don’t expect you to understand, but it’s a case of protecting my crew, if it comes to that.”
“Pray it does not,” she says.
He nods, saying, “We’re of one mind there.”
During the afternoon she spends many happy hours in the sun on deck, watching the water and the men going about their tasks. When Dick Pascoe offers to show her how to climb the mainmast rigging, she tremblingly agrees. The whole of the crew watches her make her slow, laborious way to the top, where she sways high above the water, feeling as if she’d only have to spread her arms to take to the sky.
On the way down, she steps on the hem of her dress twice and nearly slips. Heart pulsing in her throat, she makes her way back to the deck even more slowly, where, the moment her feet touch the wooden planking, the men applaud. She glows with their approval as well as the touch from the sun. Pushing a finger into the skin on the back of her wrist, she watches it grow first white and then rosy-red again. She hasn’t been wearing her gloves. Dick climbs down from the top of the mast in the same amount of time it took her to descend three feet. It’s easy for him, she thinks, eyeing his woolen breeches with a pinprick of envy. He doesn’t have to worry about a gown.
Dick’s bare feet land on the deck with a thud. “The sun burns you quicker at sea,” he says, watching her press down on the skin of her arm again. White, red, white, red. It doesn’t hurt—not yet.
Rolling up his shirtsleeve, Dick pats his forearm. It’s deeply tanned and there are lines on the skin, black lines under the suntan. She peers at them, trying to make out the shape. A bird, she thinks. “Is it a swan?”
“Very good,” Dick says. “The ink has faded some.”
“Why a swan?”
“Eight years ago, I ran into the press gang, which impressed me into His Majesty’s Navy, aboard HMSLeda,a frigate of thirty-eight guns. She was a new ship, but I didn’t much like the captain, nor he me for that matter. After my second encounter with the cat, we called at Gibraltar and I made a run for it. I came home on a fishing boat.”
She shudders at the thought of Dick being flogged with the cat-o’-nine-tails. “You deserted,” she says, thinking of George and what he would have said if he’d known she sailed with deserters.
“I never asked to join the navy. I got the swan as a reminder to avoid the press gang at all cost.”
“HMSLeda,she’s named after Leda and the swan, isn’t she?”
He nods. “One of the hands on theLedatold me the story. The swan is Zeus, the Greek God, and he…took advantage of Leda. Well, you know the tale better than I do, I’m sure. The captain says you’re to help him with the books, so you know arithmetic, too, don’t you? Anyhow, I thought it fitting, the swan. Though it wasn’t the ship’s fault that she had a flogging captain.” He pushes his sleeve up further and shows her another ink drawing on his upper arm. “Have you seen this one?”
It’s a mermaid. No, she thinks, studying the blurred black lines. It’s a merman, with hair streaming and a scaly fishtail. “The Sea Bucca?” she asks.
He grins. “Figures you’d recognize him.”
