Page 119 of Homeless

His arms tightened around her, just slightly. “No,” he agreed. “Nor would I. Not one day.”

She let herself lean her head back against his shoulder and closed her eyes. The ship lifted and fell under her on the first of the open swell, carrying them both toward England and everything that waited there, and she gave up, for the moment, trying to push the fear all the way down. It would not go all the way down. It never quite did. So she only stood in the circle of his arms with her eyes shut and the salt wind on her face, and let him hold her up, and tried — just for the length of this one swell, and then the next, and then the next — to keep breathing.

They were four days out of Santander, and the Bay had, so far, spared them.

Darcy had braced for the worst of it. Every man he had spoken to in the harbour had shaken his head over the crossing — the Bay of Biscay in a temper was a thing sailors spoke of the way the muleteers spoke of the roads, with a fatalism that assumed the worst and was seldom disappointed. He had boarded the Prudence half expecting to spend the passage with his head in a bucket and Elizabeth green beside him. But it had not come. The wind had held fair and steady out of the south and west, filling the sails and pushing them north and a little east across a long heaving swell that never quite became a storm. The Prudence rode it well, an honest working ship with an honest working master. Darcy would have to write and tell Harcourt, likely to the man's insufferable satisfaction, that he had not steered them wrong. Four days, and no gale. The master reckoned five or six more to soundings if the weather kept its temper, and a day or two beyond that up the Channel to their landing. That put England ten days off, perhaps eight if they were fortunate.

He came below at the end of the second dogwatch, ducking the low beam at the head of the companion that he had cracked his skull on twice the first day.

The cabin they had of the Prudence was small, as all such cabins were, but it was theirs, and dry. A berth was built into the ship's side, wide enough for two if the two were willing — and they were, God knew, more than willing — with a rail along it against the ship's motion and a curtain that could be drawn for a privacy that was more courtesy than fact. A small table clamped to the deck beneath the swinging lamp, its brass gone soft gold in the light. Two chairs, one of them the folding sort. He had bought a sea-chest for the new clothes they had purchased in Santander, and it was stowed beneath the berth. There was a washstand with a basin in a gimballed ring that kept it level while the ship tilted, which he had watched with a kind of stupid fascination the first evening until Elizabeth had laughed at him for it. At the far side stood a stern window, or the ship's equivalent, a small thick square of glass through which the wake unrolled frothing and endless behind them, and beyond which, just now, the last of the light was going out of a bruised and cloud-heaped western sky. It was, he had discovered, a good place to be alive with her, this small, clean, swaying box that required nothing of either of them but to thrive in close quarters together.

She was sitting on the edge of the berth when he came in. She had changed for the night, into the plain wrapper she wore when the day's business was done. She had taken the pins from her hair and was working the brush through it in the lamplight, one long stroke after another, her head tilted, her eyes half on the dark stern window and half on nothing at all. The lamp swung its slow arc, and the light moved over her with it, gold and then shadow and then gold, catching the dark of her hair where the brush drew it out, and the light streaks of auburn the southern sun had burned into it.

She glanced up and smiled at him when he came in, and she went on brushing.

“You were a long while. I had begun to think you meant to sleep on deck and leave me the whole berth, which I should not have minded in the least. There is a great deal more room without you in it.”

“I was talking with the mate.” He shrugged out of his coat and hung it on the peg by the door. The waistcoat followed, then the cravat, for he would have no further need of them tonight. “He has been fifteen years on this run and had a great deal to say about the weather, most of it encouraging, and the rest of it the sort of thing a sailor says to frighten a landsman for his own amusement.” He crossed the small space to her and caught one loose strand of her hair over his finger, letting her tug it away with the brush when she got to that part. “We are making good way. He thinks England inside ten days. Perhaps eight.”

“Eight? Well. That is something.”

“It is.” He stood over her a moment, watching the brush move through her hair, and then he reached down and took the brush gently out of her hand. “Let me.”

She smiled and turned her back to him, then swung her hair over her shoulder for him. “A husband who kisses me scandalously and brushes my hair? I ought to be pinched.”

“I can arrange that later.” He parted her hair with his fingers and worked the brush in through the midst. It did not seem likely that hair as thick and lawless as hers could possibly be tamed by boar bristles and ivory, but he had gamely bought them for her so she might try, if she liked. Truthfully, he rather liked her hair wild and tousled. It had been so the day she walked to Netherfield the morning after a storm to ask after her ailing sister. It had been so when she stood in a smashed room in Tudela and told him she meant to marry him. It had been so every time he threw her into a bed or into straw, or even up against a wall to quench the fire in his blood. He saw no point in her trying to look civilised now, especially when the crimped, roughed look was starting to become the fashion in London.

“Did you talk to that Viscount Bramwell we saw before when you were on deck?” she asked, letting him move her head to the side to reach a snarl on the bottom thicket there.

“I had not the pleasure. He was much occupied with his party, although he did tip his hat at me. Perhaps tomorrow we will catch him above deck.”

“His wife looked agreeable. I assume that was his wife.”

He chuckled and moved her hair to the other side. “I did not enquire. To be quite truthful, I was not aware there were any other women on the ship. I only noticed the one.”

“Cheeky fellow,” she hummed softly. Her eyes had fallen closed, and her breaths had slowed. “You do not have to continue,” she said after a few moments.

“Why would I not? I have no agenda this evening apart from this, and you are clearly enjoying it.”

“I only meant that I would keep you doing it for hours, because I would never tire of it.”

“Then I will do it for hours.” He slipped his fingers through the curliest, darkest hair at the nape of her neck, and brushed it down with one hand while the other held the rest of her hair to the side. “It is a particular delight of mine, as you well know.”

“You seem to have a lot of those.”

“Many delights. One great obsession, and I am not ashamed to own it.” He let his hands fall to her shoulders and pressed a kiss to the side of her neck.

She turned her head, that smile dimpling her cheek as her lashes shaded the direction of her eyes, and she rested her right hand over his left. “Tell me more about your obsession, Mr Darcy.”

He set the brush down on the berth and returned his hand to her shoulder. “Well, she is terribly despotic, when the mood strikes her. But she does possess some kindness. Why, just this morning, when I tried to rise from her bed, she told me I looked hardly fit to be abroad and forced me to rest myself until I could sit up without looking faint.”

She was laughing. “I do not believe ‘faint’ was the word I used, but you were most decidedly not fit to be abroad. I doubt you could have buttoned your trousers.”

“You see? Terribly kind of you.” He was smoothing his hands down her shoulders now, caressing the tips of her elbows and then slowly sliding them back up to the base of her neck. Then, his fingers found the base of her skull and began to stroke her there, where the tension would drain from her shoulders and her head would fall back into his hands, as it always did.

She was not long in turning to pudding. Between the rolls of the sea and the circular strokes of his thumbs, her head lolled between his hands, and he was beginning to think of what he might do next to please her. The wrapper was a wretched invention. Some prude’s idea of proper attire in a lady’s bedroom, no doubt, and he found it entirely worthless in this instance. So, he caught the neckline of it and began, gently, to tug it down the length of her shoulders.

“I wondered how long it would be before you were at that.” She rolled her shoulder to help him push the neckline down, and she must have done something to the fastenings because it suddenly started to fall away more readily.