Julia Justiss - Regency High Society Vol 4

As much as Jerusa had guessed at the havoc the storm had caused during the long afternoon and night, she still was unprepared for the sight of the wreck that the Swan had become. The shattered stump was all that remained of the mainmast, and along with the mast itself and all the sails and lines, the starboard rail had also gone over the side. The brig had settled low into the water and the waves broke and washed freely across her now, sweeping everything else away and leaving the deck oddly empty.

Empty of lines and rope, buckets and hatch covers, and empty, too, of any other people except for them. The davits that lowered the boats to the water were empty, also, and with a desperate disappointment, Jerusa realized that George Hay had kept his word and abandoned her and Michel to die together aboard the sinking brig.

But Michel was pointing in the other direction, over the bow. Through the blowing rain and spray Jerusa could just make out a long, shadowy shape on the horizon, land that seemed to be creeping closer every second. No, they were racing toward it, decided Jerusa, and abruptly they stopped. With an impact that tossed them both back down the steps, the Swan was hurled against an outcrop of rocks so large that it was almost an island, and then stayed there, her hull wedged awkwardly between the two largest rocks.

“Hurry, Rusa,” shouted Michel urgently as they climbed back to the deck. “There’s no guessing how long she’ll hold.”

Hand in hand they ran across the deck, now strangely still beneath their feet, forward to the bow. The island Michel had first spotted remained a tantalizing distance across the water, though exactly how far—a hundred yards, two hundred?— Jerusa couldn’t guess. He drew her to the very edge of the deck, where the rail had been before it had been washed away. Below them the bow hung free over open water, beyond the rocks that trapped the hull.

Michel cupped his hand around Jerusa’s ear so she could hear him. “If we stay on board the Swan, she’ll only break up around us, ma chérie. But if we can reach the island, we’ll have a chance of it.”

His eyes were bright with excitement, his whole body so alive with the challenge of what lay before them that she couldn’t believe she’d feared he would die. Not Michel, she thought with boundless happiness, not today.

“I love you, Michel Géricault!” she shouted, as much for the world to hear as for him.

He grinned back at her, his hand tight around hers and the wild daring in his eyes that she’d come to know as his. “And I love you, Jerusa Sparhawk!” he shouted back. “Now jump!” And with a wild, joyous whoop, she did.

“Jerusa?”

Michel rolled over on the sand, automatically reaching for the pistol at his waist that wasn’t there. But Jerusa wasn’t there, either. All that was left were the prints from her bare feet and the sweeping marks where her skirts had dragged across the sand. But mordieu, where could she have gone? She had been there beside him when they’d finally crawled from the surf, and she’d been curled beneath his arm after they’d collapsed here, high up on the beach where the palms would shelter them.

“Jerusa!” Unsteadily he rose first to his knees, then his feet, using the palm for support as his gaze swept up and down the empty beach. His gun was gone but his knife had somehow remained in its salt-stiffened sheath, and he drew it now, straining his ears for sound. He was light-headed from hunger and swallowing too much seawater and the lingering weakness of the fever, and the last thing he wished to do was to track her down, wherever she’d wandered off to.

Unless she hadn’t wandered off at all. Unless the beach wasn’t as uninhabited as it first had seemed, and while he’d been asleep like some great useless slug, some other man had come along to claim her. Unless…

“Oh, good, Michel, you’re awake!” She came bounding toward him through the tall grass at the edge of the heavier forest, her bedraggled skirts looped up over her long legs and a small bunch of yellow-green bananas, still attached to their stem, tucked under her arm. “Look what I’ve found!”

“You shouldn’t have gone off on your own like that, ma mie,” he cautioned. He might feel like the wrong end of a sailor’s leave, but she certainly didn’t. “You don’t know who or what you might have found.”

“Oh, fah, Michel, don’t be an old woman about it,” she scoffed, shoving her tangled hair back from her face, and she looked so pointedly at the knife in his hand that he finally tucked it back in its sheath. “I’ve told you before I grew up on an island, and I can take care of myself, too.”

He waved one arm through the air, encompassing the long empty beach, the wild, bright green forest and the vast turquoise sea. “This is hardly a proper little island in Narragansett Bay.”

“No, and we’re not proper little islanders, either, are we?” She grinned mischievously. “Have you any notion of where we are?”

He sighed, wishing he felt as cheerful as she did. “Somewhere off Dominica, perhaps, or maybe the Iles de la Petite Terre. Near enough that Mr. Hay and his friends should have kept to the Swan instead of scurrying off in their boats.”

She followed his gaze to where the brig lay wedged between the rocks, held in place as neatly as if she’d been set there for display. In the bright, warm sunlight it was easy to forget yesterday’s storm and how close they’d come to disaster.

“Do you think they reached land?” she asked. “I haven’t seen any sign of them in this cove, have you?”

“No,” said Michel, letting the single word answer both her questions with chilling directness. “Later, as soon as the tide falls, we’ll want to go back aboard. There’s things I’d rather not leave for the wreckers to find.”

“Wreckers?”

“Of course, ma chérie,” he said, surprised by her naïveté. Did she really believe they’d been cast away on some storybook desert island? There had been French, Spanish and English prowling about these waters for the last three hundred years, and Indians before that, and the odds of finding a truly deserted island anywhere in the Caribbean would be slim indeed.

“A prize like that brig won’t go unnoticed for long,” he explained. “And since she was abandoned by her crew, the salvage laws will let her be claimed by whoever wants her. Not that the wreckers will wait for the niceties of the law. I’ll wager that the first boats will be here by noon tomorrow, and then we’ll be on our way to St-Pierre.”

“Oh,” she said so forlornly it was more of a sigh, as she dropped onto the sand, the bananas in her lap. “I didn’t realize we’d be rescued quite so soon.”

Morbleu, she had believed they’d been stranded here for eternity! But as foolish as such an idea was, it did remain a pretty, tantalizing fantasy, and he could understand all too well why she’d wished for it. Waiting in Martinique with bleak certainty would be his mother and, quite likely by now, her father, and what wouldhappen there was now more than he could guess.

But here on this island the world narrowed to the two of them, a world that existed without the grim entanglements of loyalty and honor and revenge. Here none of that mattered. He and Jerusa had survived the storm unharmed and they had each other, and he couldn’t blame her at all for wanting life to stay that uncomplicated. Sacristi, what he’d give to keep it that way, too!