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“I had left the tent unfastened, you see,” Mrs. Peagilly recounted. “And the poor thing found a cozy place to curl up and take a snooze away from the elements.”
Poor thing?
Trinity doubted her response would’ve been as sympathetic as Mrs. Peagilly’s.
No indeed.
No matter their size, snakes were unpleasant, scaly, clammy, slithery creatures.
Was slithery a word?
The shudder that rippled over her this time was not from the cold.
Trinity had despised snakes for as long as she could remember. An encounter with a hissing, three-foot grass snake while playing in the garden when she was five had sent her shrieking into the orphanage. It had been months before she entered the garden or walked in the grass again. To this day, she would not venture into grass taller than her ankles.
And yet, here Trinity was headed to Morocco, home to puff adders, horned vipers, cobras, and boas.
Yes, but that did not mean she needed to venture into the nasty creatures’ habitats.
She put a gloved finger to the dimple in her chin. Mayhap she should acquire a pistol, or at the very least, a stout stick—a large, very stout stick.
A mélange of heady expectation and sensible wariness wrestled for dominance as she considered what experiences she might encounter with her new employer.
“We need to move the gangway soon, Cap’n, else we shall miss the tide.”
Trinity half-turned toward the speaker, Thaddaeus Compton.
The second mate—a ruggedly handsome chap in his late thirties or early forties—clasped his hands behind him as he rocked back on his heels.
“It’ll be tricky enough navigating the river with this pea soup fog,” Mr. Compton said.
Scanning his keen gaze over the pier, Captain Breckett puffed out his pewter gray bewhiskered cheeks, then gave a stern nod.
“Wait five more minutes, Mr. Compton. Not a second more.”
“Aye, Cap’n.”
The clip-clop, clip-clop of a horse approaching captured Trinity’s attention. The hackney lurched to a bumpy stop before the Daunting Duchess’s pier.
“At last.” Relief riddled the captain’s two clipped words. “I was not positive he would make it, and sailing without him would’ve put me in a”—he sent Trinity a covert glance— “deuced smelly kettle of fish.”
So they had been waiting for a passenger.
A very tardy and mysterious passenger.
Whomever they were, they must be important, indeed, to cause the captain to tarry until the last minute—the last five minutes—that was.
“I do not know why you waited on the bloody blighter.” Contempt for the inconsiderate passenger permeated Mr. Compton’s tone. He swerved his deep brown-eyed gaze toward Trinity.
“Beg your pardon, Miss Ablethorne.”
“’Tis of no consequence, Mr. Compton.”
Trinity waved away his apology.
He knew as well as she did that she would hear much worse on the voyage. In fact, the captain’s kettle of fish was no doubt for her benefit—to spare her tender sensibilities. The only way for women to avoid crude speech on a ship was to remain in their cabin with cotton stuffed in their ears, and that she had no intention of doing.
Snapping his timepiece shut with a portentous click, Captain Breckett glanced upward at the mainmast, where an agile young man clambered up the stout pole, and then to the foremast, where another sailor in a navy peacoat secured an encased lantern.
