Susan Wiggs - The Hostage

She wondered about her father, and her friends from Miss Boylan’s. And Philip. How close she had come to taking his hand and driving off into the night with him. She kept picturing that black leather hand reaching for her, kept hearing his refined voice, promising to take her to safety.

Instead, here she was with a skin-clad barbarian, being dragged away like a hunting trophy in his smelly boat.

Like Tom Silver, Lightning Jack wore the skins of dead animals and his hair indecently long. Unlike Silver, he wore a pleasant smile. He caught his partner’s eye. “ Alors, mon vieux. We stoke the boilers,” he said and they started climbing down a hatch.

“What about me?” Deborah asked. Her voice rose on a note of hysteria.

The two men looked back at her and Tom Silver narrowed his eyes dangerously. “Don’t you get it, Princess?” he asked in annoyance.

“Get what?”

“You’re a hostage.”

“I guess you got some explaining to do, mon copain, ”

said Lightning Jack.

With desultory motions, Tom checked the pressure gauges on the boilers. His head throbbed where Sinclair had hit him. “I reckon.”

“So talk. Start with the devil’s bastard, Sinclair. I was afraid you might lose him in the confusion of the fire.”

Tom drew on a pair of hide gloves and fed wood to the fire, building up heat as they prepared to get under way. He glanced over his shoulder at Jack.

“I found him,” Tom said. “I found Sinclair.”

“And did you kill him?” Jack’s onyx eyes glittered. The look on his face indicated that he already knew the answer.

Tom finished stoking the boilers. He slammed the steel hatch shut and rotated the dial. Then he turned to face his friend, the man who had raised him.

“No,” Tom repeated, taking off the thick gloves. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Merde.” Jack believed in simple, direct justice. He had been a voyageur in his younger years. His mother was Chippewa, his father French Canadian. He had earned the nickname “Lightning” years ago when he’d been struck by lightning during a spring storm on the lake. The wound had left a permanent jagged patch along the side of his head where only white hair would grow.

Lightning Jack spoke French, English and Chippewa, and he swore now in all three, slipping easily from one tongue to the next.

“Parbleu,” he grumbled. “If you found him, why didn’t you shoot him?”

Tom was too bone-weary to go into detail. And maybe he didn’t know the answer himself. There had been that split second, that brief hesitation, when his resolve to murder Arthur Sinclair had wavered. What had seemed so simple in the planning turned out much different in the execution.

“The city’s on fire,” he said to Jack. “We picked the wrong night to hunt down Arthur Sinclair.”

“You found him. You had him dead to rights. Were you waiting for a formal invitation?”

Tom didn’t reply.

“I should have done the deed myself. I would have slit the devil’s throat from ear to ear, comme ça. ” He traced the motion with a finger. “And what do you bring me in return? His yellow-haired runt of a daughter.”

Tom took a long swig from a stoneware jug of cider, balancing the vessel on his bent elbow. Even the motion of tipping back his head to drink made him dizzy from the goose egg. Deborah, he thought. Deborah the debutante.

“I would take no joy in slitting the throat of such a one as her,” Jack said.

“We’re not going to kill her.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Tom thought about the huge house, filled with paintings and antiques and trophies of a rich man’s toils. “We’re going to get her father’s fortune in ransom.”

“I don’t want his fortune.”

“Because you don’t need it,” Tom pointed out. “But what about the others? They sure as hell could use the ransom money.”

“Hostage. Pah.” Lightning Jack took the jug from Tom and drained it. “What sort of revenge is that?”

“A better sort. I saw the way he lives, Lightning. I figured out what’s important to him.” Tom spoke the words with a new insight—some things were worse than dying. It was a hell of a thing, figuring that out, but seeing Sinclair like a king in his castle had opened his eyes. Tom wasn’t surrendering his need for revenge, just changing his methods.

“Sinclair’s failed mine left folks destitute. His money could bring them some relief.”

“That is not good enough.” Steam drove the pistons, and Lightning Jack raised his voice over the boiling hiss. “Arthur Sinclair must suffer for what he did.”

Tom didn’t answer. Now that the boilers were stoked, he led the way abovedecks to the pilot house. Miss Deborah Beaton Sinclair still stood astern, holding her shaggy dog and watching the fire, her wet clothes dripping. He couldn’t figure out if she had fallen into the lake deliberately or by accident. He had no idea what was going on in her head, and didn’t care to know, but for some reason he kept wondering. She looked small and slight, her dress and hair bedraggled, her delicate features limned by firelight, her face vulnerable and inexpressibly sad.

She reminded him of a broken china doll. It occurred to him that the city was her home, and here she stood watching it burn. Before her eyes, her own father had taken off in a runaway carriage. She had lost all that was familiar to her. He did not want to think of this young woman’s sadness, but he couldn’t help it. She had the sort of fragile, melancholy countenance that evoked things he was not used to feeling. Like sympathy. Protectiveness.

It was stupid, he told himself. She was the spoiled daughter of a man who did not blink at wiping out a whole town. At Arthur Sinclair’s knee, Miss Deborah had probably learned that in the pursuit of profit, there were no rules or restraints.

When she looked up at him, he noticed a smudge of soot on her cheekbone. Her hair had come loose, and there were large black-ringed holes burned in her damp dress. She kept stroking the dog with one small hand, over and over again.

He bent to the windlass at the bow and cranked in the anchor. He raised the dinghy and made it fast astern. Then he gave a whistle. The engines ground, the twin screw propellers churned and the trawler lurched forward.

The motion made Deborah Sinclair stagger back against the rail. “Where are you taking me?”

He didn’t answer.

“What is your intent?” she demanded, sounding loud and testy now. “I demand to know.”

Her shrill tone evaporated his sympathy. Seizing her had been an act of pure impulse. He had not looked ahead to moments like this, had not considered what it would mean to have a female aboard. They did female things. They had female needs. And this was not just any female. This one probably had a maid just to button her shoes for her. A servant to sprinkle sugar in her tea. A footman to open and close the carriage door for her.

“Well?” she asked. “Have you gone deaf or are you simply being rude?”

“Quarters are below,” he said. “Follow me.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”

He gave a snort. “Fine. Spend the night on deck. Makes no difference to me.”

She took two steps back and tilted up her head to look him in the eye. “I don’t plan on staying,” she said.

“Who was the tenderfoot with the horsewhip?” he asked, ignoring her statement.

“That was Philip Widener Ascot IV,” she said. Her voice was flat, her face expressionless. “He is my fiancé.”

Tom mimicked a limp-wristed parody of Ascot wielding the whip. “Charming fellow. You’re a lucky young lady.”

“You may be sure he will remember you from last night, and all the papers will be filled with a description of you.”