mean.” It was a terrible killer, she’d read, particularly virulent among Yankees who had no resistance to the disease. “It’s hard to imagine such a plague on a land so beautiful.”
She kept her gaze on the horizon, enthralled with the view, until her hands trembled with the effort of holding herself aloft. “Captain,” she said suddenly. “Look there—to the northeast.”
He glanced back over his shoulder and studied the sky. The distant clouds had a peculiar bruised quality. A yellowish caste tinged the light coming from that quadrant, and as she held on, Isadora noticed the heaviness of the seas. “There’s a storm coming, isn’t there?” she asked.
“Uh-huh. A squall.”
A shriek swirled up from the deck. “What in the name of heaven are you doing?”
Startled, Isadora lost her hold on the rigging. For a split second she hung weightless, flying free, doomed. Then, with a joint-twisting jolt, she stopped falling. Ryan had reached through the rigging and held her by the wrists, the cords in his neck standing out with the strain.
“I suggest,” he said between his teeth, “that you grab hold of the ropes. Now.”
She obeyed mechanically, her hands quicker than her mind. Another blister, this one on her left hand, burst as she took hold of the rigging.
“Get down from there this instant,” Lily called, her voice strident with fear. “Both of you.”
“Thank you,” Isadora said, staring with gratitude and incredulity at Ryan. “Truly, you saved my life.”
“I don’t appreciate having to save lives,” he grumbled, starting to climb down. “Don’t scare me like that again.”
Something in his voice gave her pause. With an unaccustomed prickle in her throat, she climbed down, groping carefully with each foot and then following it with the opposite hand. Her palms stung, but she didn’t care. The sensation of falling, and then of having Ryan catch her, had been extraordinary. Mere fright didn’t begin to cover it.
“Did you get hurt?” he asked.
“No.” She sent him a tremulous smile. “I’ve never scared anyone before. Not in that way, I mean.”
“Then in what way?”
She fixed her eyes on each successive rung of the rigging and spoke from a place she had always kept private. “I suppose I was quite frightening to the young men who were sent to dance with me at parties.”
He gave a derisive snort. “Then those young men were more yellow than greasy dogs.”
She didn’t want platitudes from him; she didn’t expect sympathy. “They never knew what to say to me, nor I to them, so it was awkward all around. As I said, frightening.” She felt her foot strike the planks of the deck and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Land sakes, child,” Lily scolded fiercely. “What were you thinking? You could have been killed.”
“And would have been if you’d shrieked a mite louder, Mama,” Ryan said.
“I couldn’t help myself. I generally shriek when a disaster is at hand.”
“No harm done.” Isadora felt suddenly as awkward as she had with the reluctant suitors of Boston. High in the rigging, looking across the vast sea at a land of such mystical beauty, she had felt like a different person. Now, with the solid oak deck swaying beneath her feet, she was herself again—ungainly, tongue-tied Isadora. She’d bared too much of herself up there. Ryan knew things she’d never told another soul.
Without daring to look at him, she said, “I’m afraid I’ve got some blisters. I’d best tend to them in the galley.”
She hurried away, but the wind carried Lily’s voice: “I know you weren’t happy with this arrangement, Ryan, but must you try to get rid of her by throwing her overboard?”
Twelve
A capital ship for an ocean trip
Was the Walloping Window Blind—
No gale that blew dismayed her crew
Or troubled the captain’s mind.
The man at the wheel was taught to feel
Contempt for the wildest blow.
And it often appeared, when the weather had cleared,
That he’d been in his bunk below.
—Charles Edward Carryl,
Davy and the Goblin: A Nautical Ballad
The disaster came so swiftly and so completely that there was, Ryan conceded, a certain poetry in its magnificence. He’d felt the ominous heavy air when he and Isadora had been up on the mast. Though he had focused his attention on her to an alarming—and surprising—degree, a detached practical part of him had seen the power of the coming storm.
The untrained eye might have noted the darkish underbellies of the clouds. The optimistic sailor might have heeded the proximity of Rio and thought that perhaps they’d reach safe harbor before the violent squall struck.
Ryan knew better. A wind gall, luminous in its strange halo on the edge of a cloud, promised heavy rains to windward. He’d concealed his reaction from Isadora and his mother, but the moment he’d broken free of them he had convened the watch and sent them rushing about, battening the ship for a storm.
It struck within the hour, a long wall of wind and heavy seas pitching in from the far Atlantic. A swell hit the ship with such force that her timbers reverberated stem to stern, the vibrations driving up into the legs of those on deck. Gale winds plucked at the shrouds like a clumsy musician playing a badly strung fiddle.
Ryan and Izard met in the chart room. The chief mate’s eyes said what his voice would not—Ryan’s beginner’s luck had run out. Here was the storm that would test his true mettle as a skipper.
“We’ll heave to and make her fast,” Ryan said.
Izard didn’t argue. He merely nodded. An open hatchway let in a gust of wind that swept the charts off the slant-topped table. Wordlessly Izard stowed the charts and turned down the lantern.
As the ship plunged into its inevitable roll, Ryan passed Journey in the companionway. “Check on the women,” he said tersely. “Tell them to keep to their quarters.”
Though a chilling dread seized him, he couldn’t deny the tingle and spark of excitement that churned through him as he rushed out to the deck. Acres of foam surrounded the ship.
He shouldn’t like this, but God help him, he did. He desired the sea as he desired a woman’s body. The sea was his mistress, one with the power to heal, nurture, love, torture…or destroy at her caprice. Like a woman, she was dark, mysterious, unpredictable—impossible to skim over the surface; a man had to plunge in and sink deep.
“Heave,” he ordered. “Heave and sink her.”
The men didn’t
