“I wish I felt that for Hampshire,” he said. “For Wexford.”
“You do not?”
He shrugged one shoulder, the movement brushing his arm against hers. “The land is fine, as land goes. Productive. The oaks are good for ship-building. The tenants pay or they do not. I have a map. I know the fields. But it feels …” He searched. “Inherited. Not chosen. My father walked those acres with a possessiveness that left no room for anything but obedience. I know I should love Wexford as you love Strathmore. Some days I feel only … responsibility.”
She considered that. “You love the sea,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And the sea cannot belong to anyone.” She tipped her head. “Perhaps you have given your heart where no one can inherit it from you.”
He blinked, as if she had trodden somewhere unexpectedly close to truth.
“Tell me,” she said quietly. “Not about Hampshire. About the places youdidchoose.”
His turn. He picked up his cup and set it down again, fingers restless. “The Galapagos,” he said finally. “Small, harsh islands in a blue too deep to describe. Rocks and reptiles and birds that seem to have forgotten what fear is. We anchored there once for fresh water and I went ashore with a party. I remember thinking it looked like the beginning of the world. Or the end. Black stone, white surf, creatures that looked at us as if we were the strange ones.”
She leaned her head back against the chair, turning to watch him. “Go on.”
“Cape Horn,” he said. “A beast of a place. Waves like hills. Wind that strips you bare. You feel very small there. It is humbling.” A faint smile ghosted across his mouth. “India is the opposite. Crowds. Color everywhere. Spices. Heat that feels like another person in the room. People who look at you and know exactlywhat you represent and precisely how unimportant you are in their own world.”
As he spoke, the stiffness in him eased. His hands moved a little, shaping the memories in the air. Isla found herself watching his mouth, not his words, lulled by the rise and fall of his voice.
“Once,” he said, “we were caught in a squall halfway between Bermuda and the Azores. Lightning struck so close the air smelled of metal. The captain, Rearden, stood on the quarterdeck as if nailed there. His coat was soaked through, his hat had blown off long ago.
He shouted the same three orders for an hour, and we obeyed them, and the ship lived.” He laughed softly under his breath. “After, he went below and was sick as a dog. We never let him forget it.”
“I like Captain Rearden,” Isla murmured. Her eyelids had grown heavy without her permission. The words wove around her like a lullaby she did not want but could not resist. “He sounds …steady.”
“He was,” Edward said. “When he was not emptying his stomach into a bucket.”
She smiled, but her head had tipped forward, Her cheek brushed the cool wood of the table. The candlelight blurred at the edges. She tried to straighten. Her body refused.
“Isla,” Edward said. “You should go up.”
“Mmm.” The table was solid, reassuring. It did not sway like a ship or tilt like a burning roof. “I will. Presently.”
Her hand slackened around the cup. He reached to take it before it toppled. His fingers brushed hers but she barely felt it. The next thing she knew was the sensation of movement. She hung in the strange, weightless space between sleep and waking, aware of being lifted but not quite enough to open her eyes. An arm under her knees, another behind her back. The smell of starch and dust and something warmer. Soap and skin.
“Apologies,” Edward’s voice murmured somewhere above her. “You did not give me leave to carry you this time.”
She made a faint sound that might have been protest, might have been contentment. Her head tipped against his chest of its own accord. He carried her carefully up the stairs, she dimly counted one flight, then another. A door creaked and cool air touched her face. Her body met the softer resistance of a cushion. Fabric rustled. Something light and slightly rough was laid over her.
“If Alistair has left any beds clean, I cannot find them,” his voice went on, lower now. “This will have to do.”
She drifted again.
When she woke, the light was strange.
Moonlight, not candle. It washed the room in pale blue, turning the dust sheets over the furniture into ghostly shapes. She lay on a chaise long enough for two men to sit. Someone had dragged it near the window with a rough, plain dustsheet had been thrown over her like a makeshift blanket. The room smelled faintly of must and old air.
For a moment she did not know where she was. Not Wexford. Not Strathmore. Then the molding on the ceiling the crack shaped like a stag’s antlers tugged a memory. Portman Square. The unused front parlor that had been stripped when Alistair began selling anything that could be turned into coin. She turned her head. Edward slept on the floor.
He sat with his back against the side of the chaise, head tipped awkwardly to one side, hands loose in his lap. His legs were drawn up a little, as if he had meant to rest just for a moment and had been caught by sleep. The open collar of his shirt showed the strong line of his throat. In the moonlight the angles of his face softened. The lines of worry etched there all day seemed less deep.
His head was not a foot from her hand. She lay very still, listening to his breathing. Even. Steady. The same rhythm he had kept at sea, perhaps, when the men around him needed aspine to set their eyes on. Her hand moved before she had quite decided to let it.
Fingers to hair, light and careful. He had left it unbound since the afternoon and it fell a little over his forehead now. She smoothed it back with a touch barely more than a whisper. The strands were softer than she expected. Warm from his skin.
