Louise Allen - The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst

Everyone looked up. Something was falling. Wedged between the barrels, Clemence tried to wriggle away, then the tail of her shirt caught, jerking her back. She felt a sharp blow to her head and the world erupted into stars.

Minutes passed, or hours. Her head hurt. She was on her back on the deck and above her she could see the captain, staring upwards towards the mast-tops that seemed to circle dizzyingly with the ship’s motion. Then someone bent over her. Nathan. The sick tension inside her relaxed; it was all right now. He was here.

‘Lie still.’ His hand pressed down on her shoulder and she lay back, closing her eyes. Her head hurt abominably, but the warm touch meant she was safe, she reasoned with what parts of her brain still seemed to be working. Something else, her common sense presumably, jabbed her. Nothing was all right, least of all the way she was feeling about this renegade officer.

‘Is he dead?’ Cutler. If I’m dead, he’ll eat me. The words whispered in her mind; she was beginning to drift in and out of consciousness.

‘No, just stunned. I’ll take him below.’

‘Flog the bastard.’ It was McTiernan, his voice flat calm.

But I haven’t done anything , she wanted to shout. It wasn’t my fault! She shifted, trying to wriggle away, but Nathan’s hand curled round and held her.

‘Steady, Clem. He’s angry with the hand who dropped the fid.’ So that was what it was. Her memory produced the image of a heavy wooden spike. Point down it would have killed her.

‘Because it hit me?’ she murmured. McTiernan was this angry because a cabin boy had been hit on the head?

‘No.’ Her eyes opened as he knelt, slid one arm under her knees, the other under her back. ‘Because it almost hit him.’

Nathan straightened with her in his arms. The world lurched, steadied, to reveal a man on the deck, cowering.

‘Fifty. Now.’ McTiernan turned on his heel and walked away, leaving the man screaming after him.

‘All hands for punishment!’ Cutler roared, making her start and try to burrow against the security of Nathan’s hard chest.

‘I’m taking the lad down,’ he said. ‘You don’t need me for this and he’s no use to me unconscious. I need to check his head.’

Fifty? Fifty lashes? ‘That will kill him,’ Clemence managed to say. Her view, mercifully, was confined to the open neck of Nathan’s shirt, the hollow at the base of his throat, the underside of his jaw. She made herself focus on the satiny texture of the skin, the few freckles, the pucker of a small scar, the way his Adam’s apple moved when he swallowed.

‘Oh, yes, it most certainly will. Close your eyes, lie still, I’ve got you.’

Oh, God. He had got her, oh, yes, indeed. The realisation of her danger thudded through her throbbing headache seconds after Clemence let her head sink gratefully on to his shoulder.

She was closer than she had ever been to Nathan and his hands seemed to be in the places that were most dangerous—the curve of her hip, her tightly strapped ribcage. She couldn’t see what had happened to the hem of her long shirt that she had been using to disguise the fact that there were no bulges in her trousers where a boy ought to bulge.

‘I’m all right, you can put me down.’ She was ignored. Of course, Nathan Stanier took no orders from scrubby boys. He would have to set her on her feet when they got to the companionway though, she reasoned, praying he was not intending to undress her to tuck her up in bed.

But it seemed that Nathan had thought out the logistics of descending steep stairs on a pitching ship with his arms full. He swung her round and hung her over his shoulder, one arm tight around the back of her thighs as he climbed down. ‘Sorry if this jars your head, but we’ll be down in a minute.’ And they were and she was back in his arms almost shaking with the jumble of sensations, fears, emotions that were rattling round her poor aching head.

‘There.’ He put her down. Clemence opened her eyes and saw they were in their cabin. This was her bunk, thank goodness. She’d say she wanted to sleep…

But she wasn’t safe, not yet. Nathan knelt in front of her, overwhelmingly big on the confined space, and tipped her forward against his chest so he could part her hair and look at her scalp.

‘Skin isn’t broken, but you’ll have a nasty lump.’ He didn’t seem ready to release her, one hand flat on her back, holding her close, the other running gently through her hair, checking for lumps. Clemence let her forehead rest against his shoulder. Madness. Bliss. All her senses were full of him, his heat, the feel of him, the scent of him, the aura of strength that seemed to flow from him. She could stay like this all day. Safe. She began to drift.

‘Clem?’ Nathan’s voice was puzzled. ‘Why the devil are you trussed up like the Christmas goose?’

‘Cracked ribs,’ she said on a gulp, back in the real world with a vengeance. ‘When my uncle hit me. I, er…fell against a table.’

‘Rubbish. You’d have yelled the place down just now when I slung you over my shoulder if you’d got cracked ribs.’ He slid his hands free and sat back on his heels beside the bunk. Clemence closed her eyes as though that could hide her. She wanted so much to believe he would protect her when he knew her secret, wanted so much, in the midst of this nightmare, to believe there was good in this flawed man. ‘Clem, take your shirt off.’

‘No.’ She opened her eyes and met his, read the questions in them.

‘Why not?’

There was nowhere to go, no lie she could think of, no escape. Eyes locked with his, braced for his reaction, Clemence said, ‘Because I’m a girl.’ And waited.

Silence, then, ‘Well, thank God for that,’ Nathan said.

‘What?’ She sat bolt upright, then clutched her head as the cabin swam around her. ‘What do you mean, thank God ?’

Nathan was looking at her with all the usual composure wiped off his face. He seemed a good five years’ younger, grinning with what had to be relief. ‘Because my body was telling me there was a woman around,’ he confessed, running a hand through his hair. ‘I kept finding myself staring at you, but I didn’t know why. The relief of finding that my dissipated way of life hasn’t left me lusting after cabin boys is considerable, believe me. What’s your real name?’

‘Clemence.’ The release of tension on finding that he had not become a slavering monster bent on rapine turned into temper. It was that, or tears. ‘And the relief might be considerable for you, but now I am sharing a cabin with a man who knows I am a woman and whose body is most certainly interested in that fact—a piece of information I could well do without, believe me! Forgive me, but I was much happier when you were simply confused and uncomfortable.’

‘So, you think I am more likely to ravish Clemence than Clem, do you?’ He rocked back on his heels and stood up, hands on hips, looking down at her.

She had made him angry again. Clemence lay down cautiously, too dizzy to stay sitting up. ‘No, I don’t think that. My cousin was going to force me every night until he got me with child and I had to agree to marry him. I may not know you, but I do understand that you don’t treat people like that. But this…’ she waved a hand around the confines of the cabin, the closeness of him, the privy cupboard ‘…this is not very comfortable . Not for a woman alone with a man she doesn’t know.’

You wouldn’t mistreat people you know as individuals, that is , she qualified to herself. Putting a pirate ship in the way of capturing and plundering merchant vessels and killing their crews, that was another matter. You couldn’t tell that sort of thing about people just by looking at them, it seemed.