My mother’s idea of proper courtship was a measured, chess game–ish affair. The breathless, twisting pursuit had no charms for her because she didn’t see the chase leading to a candlelit room, pleasant flattery, or a cinematic seduction. Her idea of a chase leaned more toward the baying hounds, the pinned animal finally on the ground, its body gripped in the teeth of the captor. And who will marry such a girl, she was thinking. Imagining what was in my mother’s head put those images firmly into my own. I struggled back to the more pleasing images that were in my sister’s mind.
“Some of those dresses I see, and some of that paint on their faces, they deserve what they get,” our father said. Which made me really mad.
“We’ve got to go,” Lilly said, pulling me toward the door before I could collect myself enough to speak. “We’ll come for dinner on Sunday, Mom. We promise.”
I stayed upset, of course, but Lilly whacked me on the rear and said, “It never occurs to Mom or Dad that not all the girls are thinking about a kitchen with linoleum counters. Some of us have other things on our minds.” She rolled her eyes. “Momma and her church ladies, forever lost in the garden of primrose boredom. Daddy and his Neanderthal ideas. I mean, so, so dumb.”
Plunge ahead, I said to myself. Paddle fast.
THE PIRATE LOVER
Pursuit
Five ships in pursuit of one; five swift ships with a combined force of 2,128 pounds of metal against the Cat with her 488. Basil Le Cherche spent an hour at the masthead with one arm coiled around the rigging and the other training his best glass on the approaching ships. He ordered the Cat, with her shallow bottom and experienced crew, into a foggy series of sandbanks and islands close to the coast, treacherous to the hulls of the larger pursuers. There he had a lead thrown every hundred yards to mark depths and he set the crew to build a raft designed to hold lanterns spaced at exactly the intervals of the Cat’s cabin lights. When night was thick about them he used the starless dark to cloak them as they slid past the last in the sweeping line of Henri Le Cherche’s ships. Safely beyond them he ordered the decoy raft dropped over the side. While it was lashed at the Cat’s side they unfurled its sail, lit its lanterns, and cut the whole floating deceit loose while they darkened their own lights and headed briskly into deeper waters. The judge’s forces saw the raft’s carefully placed lanterns and pursued the flimsy little decoy. Before the Cat was an hour away they heard the rending cracks of a mast going overboard—one of the pursuers hitting a shallow bank and coming to a halt that cost them masts, as well, hopefully, as her hull. They heard cannon fire and saw the raft’s twinkling lights vanish one by one as its attackers’ cannon fire reached it.
“We will have enough room and time to vanish for now,” Le Cherche said to Electra.
“And in the morning, when they see they have lost us?”
He answered this in a tone that seemed both resigned and faintly amused. “Earlier today I saw my brother aboard the flagship. He leads the chase himself, an entirely invested opponent. He will chase on.”
Electra stepped closer to Basil Le Cherche—as close as she dared. His calm, his intelligence, his electric physical presence all drew her into his orbit and held her like a planet holds a moon. Now only a palm’s span from him she could feel the heat of his body. The smell of his sweat, the warmth radiating from his chest in the cool night air—these pulled at her in ways she did not choose to question. She sought his eyes, so alert, so keen and cool. What was the other light she saw in those eyes but could not name?
“Mademoiselle, you seem so intent. What is it you see?” he whispered.
His question summoned up its name. “Sadness,” she said. He turned away from her abruptly. Drawn to him, powerfully moved, she stepped close enough to feel the moisture of his breath. “I have placed you in danger by coming aboard this ship. I am sorry, Captain.”
“I do what I please,” he replied, more than allowing her to come so close—in fact, moving just the slightest bit closer to her. “Not what pleases my brother.” She saw the vein below his jaw pulse, rapid and hot, and restrained the hand that began a journey toward that face, toward a caress down that cheek. He took a deep breath and stepped away from her. “You should leave me now, mademoiselle.” And when she did not leave him he said gently, firmly, “A captain’s suggestion on board that captain’s quarterdeck is an order, my dear.” And so she left him.
The next morning’s light showed that, miraculously, Henri Le Cherche had found their trail. Two of his reduced convoy were hull-up on the horizon. “How could he do this? Is the man a warlock? Has he made some pact with the devil?” She stood beside Basil Le Cherche on the quarterdeck, both their eyes trained on their pursuer.
“I believe he has, mademoiselle.” Basil smiled. “But the answer is simpler than that. Henri and I learned the sea together, from little boys in our tiny sailboat on the marshes to men captaining our own yachts and ships,” Basil said to her. “Perhaps more importantly, our instincts were similar even before we learned side by side. They were woven into an almost inviolable single force in that childhood, and now sometimes it seems we sail with each other’s minds. I try to imagine him imagining me. He does the same. Sometimes we cannot escape one another’s minds. Or one another.” He said this last in a thick tone, his hands clenched.
Judge Henri Le Cherche’s flagship approached, three battleships behind him, all headed directly toward the Cat, all fast and heavily armed. Outrun, outmanned, outgunned, Basil Le Cherche knew that his best tricks had been deployed and failed. He waited on his brother’s approach.
Henri Le Cherche ordered the Cat’s white flag raised and named conditions, which were simple: Basil Le Cherche and Electra Gates were to surrender themselves. No one else mattered to the convoy surrounding the Cat with its guns trained on her hull. The Cat’s sailors massed around their captain to argue their case. They could still fight their way free, they insisted. But Basil Le Cherche drew up to his whole height and made his orders clear: they could fight their way free, perhaps, but it would cost them half the lives on board. They were to do as they were told, take their freedom and use it to stay in hiding in and out of the many harbors along this coast. “This is not over,” he told his crew. “Speak to every fishing craft, every soul afloat you meet in the next weeks asking for news of our fate. Have faith in an escape. We will do everything we can to send some message naming a time and place to rendezvous. If in three weeks you hear nothing, you are to sail on without us. Do you understand? If you hear of an escape but have no message from us, search us out—but only as long as you are safe. You will not place the Cat and all your lives at stake beyond that.” Basil Le Cherche’s crew nodded and fell back.
“Do not think that we are lost, Electra Gates. I will move heaven and hell before I let him have you,” Basil whispered in an aside to Electra. “I will find a way to make you free. Have faith in me.” And strangely, against all the evidence of the crowded ships of an enemy bearing down on them, against all the logic she could bring to bear, Electra did.
NEAVE