Sparhawk's Angel (23 page)

"Y
ou are indeed a lucky man,
mon fr
è
re
," said Michel G
é
ricault as he helped Nick push the little boat from the beach into the water. "At least half of me expected to never see you again in this life."

"I won't ask which half it was," said Nick, hopping over the side as the boat floated free. "And besides, we're not clear yet until we reach the
Angel Lily
."

"A simple enough task," said Michel easily. "The tide's in our favor, and the winds, too. All we must do is look like any other nondescript little boat until we reach the deep water."

"Aye, simple enough if no one's chasing us," said Nick gloomily.

Michel chuckled as he drew a line taut. "You are a pessimist,
mon ami
. We'll be long gone before they find Graham's body. Without him to turn your capture into a vendetta, the interest in finding you will fade, especially since the entire fleet sails back to England within the next week or two. By the winter, when the hurricanes are done and they return, they'll have forgotten you ever existed. And maybe, if this extraordinary luck of yours still holds, the war itself will be through."

Nick looked down at the tiller in his hand, lowering his voice so Rose wouldn't overhear. "Graham's not dead, Michel," he said. "At least he wasn't when we left the garden."

"
Sacrebleu
." Michel's pale eyes turned coolly noncommittal, but the unspoken question hung between them just the same.

And outwardly, Nick didn't flinch. "I know what you're thinking, Michel," he said evenly, "but I don't do things the way you do. I've never yet willfully killed a man who was wounded or unconscious, and I wasn't about to begin tonight."

Michel shrugged again. "As you wish,
mon fr
è
re
," he said lightly. "We each live our own lives, eh?"

But Nick knew precisely what Michel wasn't saying. Because he'd been so damned scrupulous about not dispatching Graham, the three of them were still in danger. Blast and hell, if only Lily hadn't interfered and he'd been able to kill the man fairly!

"Ah,
mademoiselle!"
Michel smiled fondly at Rose as she cautiously made her way aft to join them. "Allow me to congratulate you again on your delivery!"

"If I'd shown a lick of sense, I shouldn't have had to be delivered at all," she said sorrowfully, her shoulders bowing low with guilt. "When I think of all the people who might have suffered on account of my foolishness—"

"Oh, love, hush," scolded Nick gently. "I won't hear it, mind? Now come sit with me, and no more of anyone's foolishness."

With a sigh she came to sit between Nick's legs while Michel moved forward in the boat to trim the sails. Shyly she curled closer against Nick's chest, relishing the feeling of being safe with him as he slipped his arm around her shoulders.

"You can babble on all you wish, Rosie, about who has suffered what for whom," he continued, guiding the little boat between two warships like the towering walls of a canyon. "But this night you risked your life to save mine, and no one,
no one
, has ever done that for me before."

She smiled happily. "How could I not do it, Nick? I love you so much I can't imagine my life without you in it. Of course I'd do all I could to keep you safe."

Suddenly her smile changed, and she drew her brows together, thinking. "What you said then, about Lily helping us. Did you truly mean that?"

He sighed, unsure of how best to answer. "So you do think I'm daft?"

"I didn't say that, Nick," she said slowly. "It's only that once you said you could sense her with us, and that sometimes you even saw her. Well, tonight when Lord Eliot was holding me, I felt Lily was somehow there. Maybe it was just because I was so frightened, but she truly seemed to be in the garden watching over us. And then when you said she'd made the cat jump and the flowerpot fall, it seemed so exactly like something that Lily would do that I almost wept."

She tried to smile and ended up wrinkling her nose instead. "Now I ask you, who's the daft one?"

"I'd say we've made a pair of it, Rosie," said Nick philosophically. "No one else would have us."

"I suppose not." Lightly she ran her fingers along his arm. "Not that I shall complain. I rather like it this way. Being so thoroughly besotted with you as I am only makes the arrangement that much better."

"Aye, it does at that." He cleared his throat, remembering all the vows and promises he'd made to her in his mind during the time they'd been apart. It should be easy enough to speak them now, but damnation, he didn't know where to begin, and he cleared his throat again.

She sat upright to look at him. "Have you caught a chill?" she asked, faintly accusing. "You're quite
rumbly to lie against. When we're back in the
Angel Lily
, I'll make you hot tea with sugarcane."

"You'll have to make coffee instead. Good Yankees don't drink tea any longer on account of the tariffs your people inflicted on mine."

"Very well, then," she said promptly. "I shall make hot coffee with sugarcane, as hot as blazes, if you can bear it, and I shall make you drink every last, blessed drop."

The image of her trying to make him drink hot coffee in his cabin made him
smile, especially since he was picturing her once again in her mother's
necklaces and little else, sitting poised on his knee with a silver teaspoon
held daintily in her fingers as she coaxed him to open his mouth just a little
wider, please, only a little more
…

He was so blissfully enthralled with his dreaming that he didn't hear the first cannon from the encampment on the hill they'd left behind, or the second one that answered it. What he did hear was Michel swearing, in both French and in English as he struggled to bring the little boat around on a fresh tack, and belatedly Nick leaned against the tiller.

"
Mordieu
, Nickerson, it's past time for that," shouted Michel. "Haven't you eyes in your head?"

And at last Nick saw the harbor washed in the cool, lemony light of first dawn, the shallow hill of Pigeon Island bright on one side and still in darkness on the other, the gulls wheeling and mewing overhead as they fought over the trash cast overboard by the fleet. And at last, too, he saw the final frigate they had to pass before they would leave the harbor for clear water, a small frigate with only thirty guns, yet impressive enough with all fifteen here on the port side run out, and marine sharpshooters ranged along the rail and in the tops, and dear God in Heaven, every one of those guns and muskets was aimed at
them
.

"
Mordieu
, we were almost clear," said Michel, his face wooden as he stared at the long line of guns. Blindly he fumbled inside his shirt for a locket on a chain and opened it to a miniature of Jerusa, rubbing his thumb around and around the polished gold frame. "If they'd meant to take us as prisoners, they would have lowered a boat by now.
Sacristi
et J
é
sus
."

"Then they're going to kill us instead," whispered Rose. "Because of Lord Eliot, because of
me
, those men are going to kill us."

Nick stared at the frigate, unwilling and unable to believe what his eyes told him was true. They were nearly even with the larger ship, and at this range the gunners would not miss. Before they could sail clear on this tack, to Gideon and the
Angel Lily
, they'd be dead. It was as horrifyingly certain as that. There was no chance of going over the side to swim for safety, not in waters this transparently blue, not at dawn, and not with Rose with her heavy skirts and bandaged arm. They were going to be slaughtered where they sat, their little sailboat smashed to pieces and them with it.

So this, then, was how it would end for Rose and him, he thought furiously, end before it had really begun. He stared at the rows of guns, cursing the fate that had brought his life to this end, while his soul turned heavy as lead at the heartbreaking unfairness of it.

Unsteadily Rose climbed to her feet. "If I must die, I won't go weeping and wailing," she said, though her voice quavered with tears. "Here, Nick, stand with me, so I'll be sure to die at your side. Bravely and gallantly, Nick, oh, please, the way I've learned to be with you!"

Standing there in the light of the rising sun, she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, her dark hair streaming around her shoulders in the wind and her silver eyes defiant as she tried to face her destiny.

He loved her, loved her with all his being, and he didn't want her life to end like this. He couldn't let her believe that this was all there was, and gently he pulled her back down and into his arms.

"You've learned to be brave, Rosie, aye," he said, his voice rough with emotion. "But I'd rather you'd have learned more from me than that alone. We've not much time, I know, but I'd ask you instead to think of when this war will be over and done and our two countries are at peace. Think of yourself as my wife, and us living in a pretty little house in Newport, near the water so we can see the ships come and go from our parlor."

She shuddered with a sigh that was halfway to a sob, a sound that tore at his heart. "I would like a yellow house, Nick," she said softly. "A yellow house with white shutters always looks very fine and trim."

"Then yellow it shall be." They were coming closer under the guns, and he turned her face to his chest so she could not see, smoothing her hair gently. "You can have a garden with all the flowers you like, too, since flowers prosper most amazingly well in Newport. Children do, too. I'm only one of six, you know, and look at me."

"I would have liked that very much," she said sadly, her voice muffled by his coat. "We would have made vastly fine, fat babies between us, I believe."

"Aye, we would indeed." Damnation, why the devil didn't the bastards fire? Why didn't they go ahead and end this
now?
"I love you, my own White Rose, sweet little Rosie."

"And I love you, Black Nick Sparhawk," she whispered. "Dear Lord, how I love you!"

Desperate to treasure this last moment with her, his mind was slow to realize what was happening, but after a lifetime at sea his body sensed the change at once. The wind was shifting, gathering and blowing up from nowhere on this cloudless morning to whip the waves higher, high as a midwinter gale as their little boat raced along before it toward the mouth of the bay. Nick let Rose go to grab at the tiller with both hands, struggling to hold the boat steady while Michel wrestled to control the sails.

"Oh, Nick, look, look at the other ships!" cried Rose as she clung to the side. "Oh, my God,
look!"

The same wind that was making them fly across the waves had caught the frigate with too much sail aloft, and she lurched crazily toward the waves, marines and sailors and guns jerked free from their moorings all tumbling and rolling across the slanting decks as the canvas overhead shredded to tattered rags.

But in as much disarray as the frigate was, the rest of the fleet was suffering, too. As far as Nick could see were shattered masts and ships wrenched free of their moorings, and torn sails whipping in the wind like laundry on the line. With their anchor chains broken, seventy-four-gun ships of the line crashed into their sisters, the bowsprits jabbing into one another's rigging as lines and cables snared together into hopeless tangles. No battle could cause so much destruction in so short a time, and no one storm had ever been so costly to so many ships in one place.

Not one storm or battle, thought Nick grimly, but what were they compared to Lily?

"Oh, pish, I know perfectly well what you're thinking," she said mildly as she appeared beside him in the sternsheets on the other side of the tiller from Rose. "It's not nearly as bad as it looks with everything jumbled together like this, and I took care that not a single innocent fellow was injured. That took some doing, I can assure you, but I did it just the same.
You've
been so wondrously saintly, how could I dare be otherwise?"

Mutinously he scowled at her, unwilling to speak before Rose.

"Oh, go ahead and say it, if you wish," said Lily as she patted at her hair.
"Since this will most likely be our last time to converse, neither Rose nor
Michel can hear a word from either of us."

"Well, then, why the devil did you go through all
this
?" He waved his hand back toward the harbor. "Why didn't you end it with Graham in the garden?"

"Because I wanted to see if
you
would," she said, prodding him gently with her folded fan as if to share a humorous jest. "Thank goodness you didn't, or I don't know what I would have done. You were quite surpassing noble over that, and if you had killed Lord Eliot I wasn't quite sure what I would have done. But this way, he's been supremely discredited and shamed for ordering ships to sea in such dreadful weather, especially on a personal matter. He'll be court-martialed for sure, and sent back to Britain in such disgrace I'm certain he'll never find another heiress. I only pray he's not given to
me
to reform next."

Nick looked at her curiously. "So you really are clearing off, then?"

"That's what you've wished from the first time I rescued you, isn't it?" She tipped back her head and laughed. "Oh, my, I never expected calf's eyes and a long face from you!"

He smiled wryly. "It's not as bad as all that, Lily. It's going to be a powerful relief to know my water pitcher will stay where I put it. But you brought me Rosie, and I'll never be able to thank you enough for that."

"No, most likely you won't," she agreed amiably. "But then, you'll recall I did promise you happiness."

"That you did, and I will thank you for not giving up on me before I found it." He smiled, surprised by how much he truly would miss her. Without thinking he reached out to take her hand, only to have his fingers pass through to the side of the boat.

"None of that now, Captain." She glared at him with feigned indignation and slapped his fingers with her fan, a fan as ethereal as the rest of her that nonetheless left his fingers smarting. Then she smiled, her blue eyes growing misty. "Oh, but I shall miss you, too, my dearest, darling Nickerson! I vow I could almost be jealous of my little sister. Just mind you marry her before you start bringing that litter of jolly babies into the world."