Page 111 of Go, Rogue

Chapter

44

The second day aboard the ship brings more of the same. Catherine rises and takes tea and toast with Mrs. Haverfield for breakfast, before the older woman goes to explore the decks with Samson.

Catherine stays in the room, unable to summon the vigor to do anything else. Some hours later, a steward brings her lunch on a tray, which she nibbles her way through. She doesn’t taste it, but eats just enough to keep her stomach settled and her head free of pain before she calls for the tray to be removed.

With nothing left to do with herself, she sits. She has books to read, but she doesn’t open them. Elizabeth has packed her an embroidery kit, but she doesn’t touch it.

She doesn’t do anything at all until Mrs. Haverfield appears back in their rooms some hours later. “You ought to come above deck,” she says in an urgent tone. “Something is afoot.”

“What kind of something?” Catherine asks, not moving from her place on the bed.

“It is unclear to me exactly what is happening.” The woman pauses and the little dog barks. “But it seems as if we may be boarded by passengers from another vessel.”

Catherine only shakes her head. “I doubt it,” she says. “There’s a whistle for an unidentified strange sail and another for piracy. They haven’t—”

The sound of the whistle blowing cuts her off.

“You’d better come,” Mrs. Haverfield says again. “The captain has ordered it.”

“Yes, alright,” Catherine replies. “I’ll be there in a moment.”

Mrs. Haverfield, having done her duty by relaying the information, leaves in a hurry, but Catherine remains on the bed. The irony isn’t lost on her—how she’d been so intent on ignoring Andrew’s request to stay in their rooms before, and now she is the opposite. Now all she wants to do is sit on this bed and wait. Whatever happens next is of little interest to her.

For heaven’s sake, she thinks. She really must be bereft of her senses if she can’t even muster up some enthusiasm for pirates.

McGann stands on the quarterdeck with the captain of The Eagle.

“You can stop blowing the bloody piracy whistle now,” he says to the man. “This is not a hostile takeover.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” The captain gives the signal for the piercing sound of the whistle to stop.

“Where are the passengers?”

“Assembled in the dining room as you requested, Your Grace.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re most welcome, Your Grace.”

Bloody hell.

Just call me McGann, he wants to say, but can’t. He bought this ship as a duke and boarded it as a duke, and now he is going to have to find Catherine as a duke.

Where is she?

He wades through the dining room, walking stick in hand, looking for her. He’d given explicit instructions the moment he stepped aboard that the passengers were all to gather in the dining room.

But Catherine is not among them. Of course she didn’t listen, the wee bloody menace. And no one he’s asked has seen nor heard of her.

He’s about to give up and ask the captain for the manifests when he runs into Mrs. Haverfield and Samson.

“No,” the woman says, cradling her dog in her arms. “I’ve not met a Lady Catherine West. If you’d asked about a Miss Catherine Hope, now, that would be a different story. My berth-mate is Catherine Hope.”

She scratches the dog behind the ears. “Isn’t that a paradox? That gloomy young woman with a surname like Hope.”

His heart rises a little in his chest. Hope was the false name Rogers gave her in Jamaica. It has to be her.