Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [60]
She focused on Raleigh, on the threatening bulk of the sloop. “They have to be anchored. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be staying in the same place.”
“I thought of that. We can sail around them. By the time they up anchor, we’ll be gone.”
“That’s what I was thinking.” She smiled at him. “Maybe I’ve stayed on land for two years, but I still remember a thing or two you taught me.”
“And I’ve learned a thing or two about the English.” Raleigh was grim. “It doesn’t make any sense for them to anchor there in broad daylight.”
“Unless someone is in trouble or they need water?” Tabitha squinted at the masts. “We are nominally at peace with England and can’t deny them emergency care.”
Raleigh cast her a swift glance. “Do you trust them?”
“No. But it’s daylight. They wouldn’t be bold enough to impress men in daylight, not right off our shores anyway.”
“Wouldn’t they just.” In those few words, Raleigh sounded angrier, more bitter, and yet somehow more British than she’d ever heard him.
She shivered in the wind-borne spray. “They’ve got to be stopped,” she ground out. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll find a way.”
“I didn’t hear you.” Raleigh leaned on the wheel, turning the smack two more points to the northeast. “What did you say?”
“Never you mind.” Tabitha returned her attention to the sloop. She saw the upper deck now, the gangway, and tiny figures moving about. Five men stooped behind the stern chaser gun, but it wasn’t run out.
From tales she’d heard from those who’d fought at sea against the British in the revolution, that gun could be run out in seconds. Seconds. But surely they saw she was a female. They wouldn’t fire on a female. They didn’t fire into American boats, only fired across them, threatened them.
Still, she had to force herself to stand straight, her head up, and not huddle on the deck as the Marianne skimmed past the anchored sloop so close to the stern she saw a face in the window. She gasped, blinked, looked again. The face was gone, but she would have testified in court she knew who it was.
16
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Dominick spied the little fishing boat swooping past the stern of the sloop. Two white faces turned his way, blurs against the blue of sky and sea behind them, the man at the wheel, the woman clinging to the taffrail. The wind holding the sloop at anchor, its bow too close in to the cove, lent the smack its wings.
“He’s a good seaman,” Jennings, the sloop’s commander, remarked. “We saw them earlier. They ran like a demon was after them when they saw us.” He slapped his well-padded thigh and laughed, as though he’d made a good jest of it. “They all run like foxes before the hounds.”
“Can you blame them?” Dominick leaned precariously out of the stern windows to get a better look at the smack. Something struck him as familiar, and he wasn’t sure if the sloop’s pitch, which was strong despite the sloop being anchored, or apprehension made him queasy. “We’ve been stealing their men right from under their noses.”
“Their men?” Jennings’s thick, dark brows drew together like a fuzzy caterpillar. “They’re our men hiding out from their rightful duty to the king.”
“Some. And is it worth it to risk war?”
“You, sirrah, are coming close to talking treason.”
Dominick laughed off the very truth of Jennings’s words. “Just keeping myself from being in trouble while here in America.”
“A pity, that.” Jennings cocked his large head to one side. “Never thought I’d see a Cherrett fall so low.”
“Neither did I.” Dominick twirled the glass in his hand without drinking the amber liquid. Spirits would definitely make him ill, if apprehension about the identity of that fishing boat didn’t do so first. “I should have listened to my tutors at Oxford.” He grinned as though making a great jest himself.
“At least you didn’t kill anyone. I’d hate to have to arrest the nephew of a vice admiral.” Jennings lifted the squat decanter from the table. “Another tot?”
“Thank you, no. I should be on my way. My . . . er . . . master will want me home to serve his supper.”
In about three hours. Yet being away