Regency High Society Vol 4. Julia Justiss

was dry and hot, too hot. Belatedly she thought of the water pitcher she’d thrown at Hay and knew she’d have to go back to the galley for more.

      With a sigh she looked down at the pistol on the coverlet, where it had slipped from Michel’s fingers. Lord, he’d left it cocked, and with a little grimace she picked the gun up and latched the flintlock before she cradled it in the crook of her arm. She didn’t want to take the thing with her at all, but she didn’t trust the mate to keep his word, especially not with Michel ill, and with one last look at Michel, she headed back toward the galley.

      The boy Israel had finished peeling the potatoes and had moved on to a wooden trencher filled with onions. With tears streaming from his eyes, he barely looked up when Jerusa returned.

      “Cook’s no better, ma’am,” he said, flicking off the onion’s thick yellow skin. “Nor is th’ cap’n, they say.”

      “I’m sorry to hear that,” murmured Jerusa as she refilled the pitcher she’d retrieved rattling around the mainmast between the decks. “I hope they’ll all feel better soon.”

      Israel tossed the peeled onion into a battered iron kettle. “Either they will or they won’t, ma’am,” he said philosophically. “Hopes an’ wishes got nothin’ to do wit’ it.”

      Unhappily Jerusa thought of Michel. “But surely our prayers will help.”

      “If’n you say so, ma’am.” He glanced up at the tin lantern that hung from the beam overhead. The motion of the ship had increased, and the lantern was swinging back and forth so that their shadows danced first large, then tiny, along the bulkhead. “No cookin’ tonight, anyways, ma’am. I warrant th’ order will come down most any minute t’ douse th’ cook fires. We’re in for a blow, no mistake.”

      No mistake, indeed, thought Jerusa uneasily as she made her way, stumbling aft to the cabin. She could hear how the wind had changed from the higher-pitched sound that shrieked through the rigging above her, and beneath her feet the deck seemed to have a new life of its own, plunging up one moment and then down the next with such unpredictable violence that before she reached the cabin she nearly spilled this second pitcher full of water, too.

      In the bunk Michel hadn’t moved at all. She dipped a handkerchief into the water and wiped it across his face, and then, feeling greatly daring, she lifted back the coverlet and his shirt to draw the damp cloth across his chest and arms. He was still warm, far too warm, but there was nothing else she could do for him now, and with a sigh she rinsed the cloth one last time and laid it across his forehead. She tucked the coverlet firmly around him and beneath the mattress, hoping to keep him from rolling into the high sides of the bunk.

      The deck lurched again at yet another new angle, slamming Jerusa into the bulkhead. She had thought she’d found her sea legs by now, but she wasn’t prepared for this, and, rubbing her elbow where she’d hit the latch, she decided the deck itself would be the safest place. She sat beside the bunk with her head level with Michel’s, her feet braced against his trunk, her back against the bulkhead and the pistol resting in her lap, and prepared to ride out the storm and his fever both.

      She didn’t know which frightened her more. As the minutes stretched into hours, the depth of Michel’s illness terrified her. Only rarely did he shift or stir, and though she tried to cool his fever as best she could, it seemed to her that his skin only grew warmer to the touch. She could feel him slipping further and further away from her, and there wasn’t a blessed thing she could do to draw him back. She knew from her brothers’ stories that illnesses here in the Caribbean were different from those at home. Here the heat made wounds turn putrid in an hour’s time, and a single fever could kill the three hundred men of a frigate’s crew in a week.

      But Michel wasn’t going to die, she told herself fiercely. He’d only eaten some fish that had turned in the sun. Surely even in the Caribbean people didn’t die from such a thing. Besides, they were less than a day from Bridgetown, and there, if he still were ill, she’d find all manner of physicians and surgeons.

      Gently she traced the line of his jaw with one finger, feeling the bristles of his beard. He was a strong man, a man too proud to die like this without a fight. Any minute now his fever would break, he would roll over and smile and call her his dear Rusa, and he would be fine.

      He would be fine. Right as rain.

      “I love you, Michel,” she whispered sadly. “Whatever else happens, I want you to know that. I love you.”

      But her words were lost in the earsplitting crack that came from the deck, like a tree splintered by lightning. The mainmast, thought Jerusa with horror, for the sound had come from midships. As wild as the brig’s movements had been before this, her motion took on a new unevenness without the largest sail and mast to steady her.

      Over the roar of the wind she could hear the faint voices of the crew, shouting orders to one another, and she could picture the men working frantically against the storm to free the Swan of the wreckage of her broken mast. She’d heard stories enough of what damage that wreckage could do, trailing over the side of a ship and pulling her sideways into the deep trough of a wave until she broached to and capsized.

      She was straining her ears so hard to hear the storm that she hadn’t noticed when Michel had begun to mutter, his head tossing uneasily against the pillow. Eagerly she put her ear near his lips, but all he said was fragmented and jumbled, and in French, as well. And her name: dear Lord, had she really heard it? Again he murmured it, this time clear enough for her to know she hadn’t dreamed it. Maybe somehow he knew she was here, knew she was trying to help him.

       Oh, Michel, how much I love you!

      Grinning foolishly with no one to see her, she tugged him up higher onto the pillow and trickled water between his lips. The fever still held him in its grip, but to her, even the garbled words were so much better than the awful stillness.

      More shouts, more wind, the ringing thump of axes as the lines were hacked away. But the shouts seemed closer now, and she could hear heavy footsteps racing up and down the companionway beyond their cabin. Somehow the waves seemed louder over the creaks and groans of the ship’s timbers. Was she imagining it, or was the brig riding lower in the water now, far enough down that only the pine bulkheads and the oak timbers behind them separated her from the sea itself?

      Someone ran directly past their door. Sweet Almighty, she had to know what was happening! Bracing herself in the doorway, she pulled the door open and gazed down the narrow passage to the steps. Seawater splashed over her feet and skirts, and she realized the whole deck was awash. The lantern that usually lit the passage was gone, but an eerie, otherworldly light filtered down the steps, bathing the figure of the man coming toward her now with a strange glow that she realized must be dawn.

      “Please, can you tell me what is happening?” she shouted at the man. “No one has told us anything!”

      The seaman shook his head with exhaustion as he peered at her. “Cap’n’s dead, ma’am,” he shouted back hoarsely to her. “Dead from th’ sickness. We’ve lost th’ mainmast whole an’ half th’ mizzen with it, an’ we’re takin’ water something awful. We’re workin’ every man at the pumps, ma’am. Every man.”

      Before she could ask more, he staggered off, bound for the pumps himself. Her terror mounting by the second, Jerusa forced the door closed again and went to crouch beside Michel. She had thought he was improved, but Captain Barker had died. But not Michel; please, God, not Michel, too! She threaded her fingers through his as much to comfort herself as him, and was rewarded by him turning his face toward hers, the merest hint of a smile on his lips.

      She listened to the sounds of the storm, her fingers tight around Michel’s. The night before her father or any of her brothers sailed, Mama had always made a ritual of saying special prayers for them at the supper table before grace, and the unspoken belief in the family was that that alone was the reason none of the Sparhawk men had ever been lost at sea. But what if she were the one who was drowned instead, if she were the one who never returned home, whose grave in the churchyard was empty beneath