“You and the lad are to go ashore here, ma’am. Captain’s orders,” a sailor told her.
“Nicky!”Where was Nicky?He’d been here just a moment ago. “Where’s my son?”
“I’m here, Mama. I was just getting the bandbox.” Her seven-year-old son stepped over a coil of rope and hurried to her side.
Callie put a hand on his shoulder. Nicky was the most important thing in her life, the reason she was here in the first place. “This is not where I paid to be brought,” she told the sailor in a voice she hoped sounded firm. “Lulworth is a small town, on a sheltered cove—”
“Right, lads.”
Without warning, Callie found herself seized by two burly seamen.
“What—? How dare you—!” What was happening? Surely they didn’t mean to throw her overboard? Nicky…Terrified, trying desperately to reach Nicky, she fought like a wildcat, kicking, screaming, gasping in terror…
“The boy first,” someone yelled. “She’ll follow tame enough then.”
She twisted frantically in time to see a seaman grab Nicky as if he weighed nothing. He hauled him to the ship’s gunwale, lifted him, and dropped him over the edge.
“Nicky!”
The fight went out of her. She made no struggle as the men slung her, too, over the edge of the ship.Nicky.
She braced herself for the embrace of the sea. Death by drowning—dear God, don’t say she’d brought Nicky this far just to have him die like this…
The sailors let go and she fell. And landed with a thud in a small, violently rocking dinghy. A sailor steadied her.
Nicky sat in the bow, his face pinched, pale, and fearful—but alive.
“Nicky, thank God!” She lurched across the wooden seats toward him.
The small boat rocked perilously.
“Sit down, miss! You’ll have us all in the drink!” The sailor grasped her arm and wrenched her down to sit in the stern.
Furious, terrified, but realizing she had no choice, Callie sat, not taking her eyes off Nicky for a moment. The waves were getting larger and the dinghy pitched and tossed. She could swim a little; Nicky couldn’t.
What was happening to them? She scanned the distant shoreline frantically. Thoughts of white slavers, wreckers, and worse flew through her mind. She knew it had been risky to pay an unknown captain of a shabby boat to take them across the Channel. It would have been riskier, though, to take the regular packet from Calais, for then they would have certainly been found. And returned.
“I demand you put us back aboard the ship this instant!” she stammered, trying desperately to make her voice work. “This is not Lulworth and I—”
There was a shout from above and her bandbox came flying down. The sailor caught it and passed it to Nicky. A moment later her portmanteau was dropped into the man’s arms.
The sight of her possessions insensibly calmed her. Perhaps she and Nicky were not to be murdered for their belongings after all. But where was this place, this dark, unknown shore?
The sailor seized the oars and began to row.
“Where are you taking us?”
“Captain’s orders to put you ashore here, ma’am. Storm’s a-comin’.”
“But there’s safe harbor at Lulworth. It would give shelter from a storm.”
“Preventives in Lulworth Cove, ma’am. Capt’n hates preventives.”
“Preventives?” She was so bewildered she couldn’t think. “But…”
“Orders, ma’am,” he said indifferently and hauled on the oars.
She subsided. There was no point arguing. The sailor wasn’t listening. All his effort was in rowing, and it took all her effort to hold on. The little boat was being tossed on the sea like a cork. She had her portmanteau under her feet. Nicky was wedging the bandbox under his, but they needed both hands to hold them steady.
