The corner of his mouth twitched again, this time in a half smile. He straightened the backgammon board and stacked the tokens one by one.
I folded my legs and sat across from him. I tried not to stare at the bruises on his arms and face. His knuckles were scraped raw nearly to the bone, and I remembered that hand clutching the photograph, clutching to life. Hard to believe this was the same person.
“Do you remember what happened?” I asked. “The shipwreck?”
His eyes slid to me, only a flash, judging whether or not to trust me. He picked up the dice. “Yes.”
“And your name?” I asked.
“Edward Prince.” He said it slowly, as though he had little information about himself to share and had to ration it carefully.
“I’m Juliet Moreau.”
He nodded slowly. “Yes, I know.” And I remembered he’d asked Montgomery about me.
It was my turn to stare, wondering what he’d thought of me that first day, when he’d been lost in a whirlpool of delusion. He’d said something that none of us had heard. Now he stared at the tokens, just slices from an old mop or broom handle, with the dice waiting in his hand. The tokens were still set wrong, and I instinctively reached out to rearrange them before starting our game. It felt good to put something in order.
“How did you survive?” I asked.
My question caught him off guard, and his hand curled around the dice. He gave a cautious shrug. “The grace of God, I suppose.”
I watched his broken fist working the dice, the twitch of his bruised jaw, the strength in his wiry shoulders. His words came too easily. He’d said what he thought I wanted to hear, not what he was truly thinking.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. He tilted his head, surprised. “Twenty days at sea. No food. No water. No shade. The sole survivor of dozens of passengers. God didn’t save you. You saved yourself. I’d like to know how.”
He studied my placement of the tokens on the board, memorizing it, learning everything over again from scratch. “Montgomery’s first question was about the family I must have lost,” he said. “The grief.” He rolled the dice, a little too hard. His reaction told me I should have had more sympathy, like Montgomery.
I blinked, unsure of myself. I hadn’t meant to be cold. “I’m sorry. Your family … were they with you on the Viola?”
“No,” he said, surprisingly flat. “I was traveling alone. My father’s a general on tour abroad now. The rest of my family is at Chesney Wold—our estate. Probably entertaining dull relatives and glad to be rid of me.”
His tone was so cavalier as he scratched his scar with a jagged nail and studied the board. Something felt a little too forced. There was almost a harsh, layered tone that spoke of pain and anger and made me suspect he wasn’t being entirely honest. “But you said—”
He shrugged. “I thought it strange you were more interested in the details of my survival than the dozens who died on that ship.” He started to move his tokens, and I should have thought about how heartless I must have seemed, but instead all I could focus on was how badly he was playing backgammon.
He slid a token slowly around the points. “Montgomery told me you’re to be reunited with your father. A doctor of some sort,” he said.
“That’s right.”
He picked up the token, running his finger over the rough-hewn wood. “It’s odd, don’t you think, for a wealthy doctor to want to live in such a remote place? It makes one wonder.”
I caught the undercurrent in his voice, and it intrigued me. Whatever he was insinuating wasn’t good, and it was awfully bold to speak it aloud. Maybe there was more to him than a sea-mad castaway who’d never worked a day in his life.
I picked up the dice. “What do you mean?”
“What would make a man give everything up to come out here?”
I shook the dice and spilled them out across the deck. “I could ask you the same thing, Mr. Prince. What made you leave England if all your family is there?”
His jaw twitched again. “You’ve come to find your father. I’ve come to get away from mine.” Once more, that subtle layer of anger laced his voice.
“Why? What did he do?” I moved my tokens like an afterthought.
He paused. “He didn’t do anything. I did.” And then he shook the dice and threw them, abruptly, as if he’d said too much. A three and a six. He started moving the token in the wrong direction.
“Captain Claggan isn’t exactly pleased I’m here,” he added, and the change in subject caught me by surprise. “Did you know he came with that first mate of his, last night after Montgomery was asleep, and dragged me to the rail? He was going to throw me over until I told him I had relatives in Australia who would pay dearly for my safe return.”