Joanna Bourne: My Lord and Spymaster

“No. I . . . Stop asking stupid questions.”

She’d mislaid a couple pieces of her memory. He’d seen that happen once, when his bosun took a fall from the rigging. It had been a day before the man remembered what ship he was on. He never did remember the fall.

“You’re still shivering. Let’s get you dry.” When she didn’t object, he picked up the towel and started unbraiding and untangling, blotting water out of her hair, making every move slow so he wouldn’t scare her.

She was thinking the whole time, frowning. After a while she said, “I don’t remember everything. What happened to me?”

“You fell under a wagon and got hurt.” They’d talk about it tomorrow. That was one of several discussions he had planned.

Done. He put the towel down. Her hair dried up lighter than he’d expected, the color of a new-cut spar. Lovely. A man would keep this woman just for the pleasure of taking her hair down at night.

“I got my brains scrambled up, didn’t I?”

“A little, maybe. Give it an hour or two and you’ll be fine.”

“I don’t—” She stopped abruptly and jerked away from him. She pulled the blanket loose and looked inside. Her eyes came up, accusing. “I’m not wearing any clothes. You got me naked.”

He was scaring her. He dropped the towel and backed away, holding his hands wide and empty.

THE man retreated, trying to look harmless and not succeeding to any extent at all.

He said, “You’re not naked. You’re in a blanket.”

Oh, that was reassuring, that was. She was wearing damp skin and a wooly blanket. She pulled cloth up to her chin and hid behind it. “We must know each other pretty well, whoever you are.”

“My name is Sebastian.”

“Se . . . bast . . . ian.” She tried the syllables out. She was pretty sure this was a complete stranger. A dangerous stranger. She’d known lots of dangerous men, and she could recognize one at a glance. “You’re one of the things I don’t remember, Sebastian. I don’t remember you at all.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Then I should have my clothes on, shouldn’t I?”

He kept his voice soft, talking to her like she was a scared child. “They were wet.”

There her dress was, a heap of slit-up rags on the carpet. “My dress got wet, so you cut it off. You must be a right terror in a thunderstorm.” A prudent woman in her situation wouldn’t embark upon sarcasm.

“You were soaked to the skin and freezing and bleeding at the edges. I couldn’t do anything with a bundle of muddy cloth.” He made stripping her naked sound prosaic as oatmeal. “And you were leaking mud all over my bed. I sopped a gallon of dirty water off you.”

“Mud. That explains it.” Her head pounded like a mill wheel. Every muscle in her body hurt, some of them in inventive ways. She couldn’t remember how she got here. She was naked. There was nothing good about this situation. Nothing.

She was in bed in the captain’s cabin of a good-sized merchant frigate, about a hundred seventy tons. This isn’t a Whitby ship. I’m not safe. The cut of the cabin and the neat brass fittings said it was from a shipyard in Boston. This man, though, he sounded English, not American.

Most of all . . . it was strange inside her head. Felt like somebody’d taken a big ladle and stirred her brain a few times. Nothing was where it should be. When she went asking why she was sitting frog-naked in the captain’s cabin of a merchant frigate, she couldn’t dip up a teaspoon of explanation. I am in a mort of trouble.

Captain Sebastian stood five feet away, looking large and lethal, with a worried frown. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Well, you’d say that, wouldn’t you?

He was young to be captain. Thirty, maybe. He had black hair and a big beak of a nose, and sailor skin, dark and rough, burned by suns that weren’t polite and English. Colorful splotches of blood were drying on his shirt. That would be her blood, probably.

I’ve seen him before.

A memory bobbed up, all in one piece. She was standing against the Captain, so close next to him, they were intimate as a pair of teeth. Fog swirled past. That inky hair was wet, slicked down over his forehead. He slid his fingers along my mouth, tickling. That’s all he did, and I was heat and pleasure and squirming inside like he’d kissed me for an hour.

He knew what he’d done to me. He wanted to do it.

I said, “Five shillings?” and I laughed at him.

The memory tipped sideways and sank like a stone. She had no idea what came next. She groped in the corners of her mind and couldn’t find anything.

His voice rumbled, “You’re worrying. I want you to stop that. I’ll take care of you.”

I don’t want you to take care of me. I want to have my clothes on. She huddled up close and tucked the blanket in tight under her. This is a Greek blanket. We use them for packing the fragile cargo. Papa buys a bale or two on the docks at Valletta, last thing, and we toss them on top of . . .

Then it was gone. The image of the dock at Valletta rippled into pieces and blew away, taking Papa with it. There was something she needed to do for Papa. Something important. She had to . . .

Chaos and spinning pain in her head. Nothing else. She couldn’t think.

She looked down. Her toes peeked out the bottom of the blanket, pink and defenseless and silly-looking. “I don’t remember how I got here.”

“I carried you in after the wagon hit you. Let me get you some light. It’s getting dark early.”

I got hit by a wagon? That’s a fool’s trick. Doesn’t sound like me, somehow. She watched him as he walked across the cabin, taking lanterns with him. It hurt like needles to move her eyes. They hurt when she closed them, too. Sometimes you only have bad choices. Lazarus used to say that to me.

When the Captain passed the squares of the windows, she saw him in outline against the gray outside.

That joggled loose another little moment.

He had his back to me and he was holding a knife. Men came spewing out of the Dark like demons. He put himself between me and those men . . .

“I was out . . . in that.” She looked at the rain and fog outside the window. “With you. And you killed someone.”

“There was a fight.” He set the lanterns on the chart table. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. You can sort everything out when your head doesn’t ache.”

He’s a killer, then. I know too many killers.

He’d protected her, in some shadowy fight in the fog. She was sure of it. Maybe that was why he didn’t scare her as much as he should have. She watched him make fire, sheltering the tinder with his hand. Big hands, he had. He was substantial in general, and being on shipboard made it obvious. A man his size filled up the space, bulkhead to hull, deck to overhead.

He blew on the spark and got the candle lit. All the while he was taking quick glances in her direction. Assessing. Seeing whether she was about to panic or scream or run. She might have, if her head hurt less. Easier to panic when your head didn’t hurt.

He hooked one lantern up over the chart table. It swung when he let it loose. Bright and shadow skittered around the cabin. He walked toward her, holding the other lantern, and he bulged out in his breeches, randy as a stallion.