The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

“It’s not here.”


“Of course it is. I put it here myself.” Dead Lilly jammed her hand between two storage bags and there it was, a run of purple silk and the hard knobs of pearl buttons. They still looked like there was a tiny lightbulb inside each of them; they were still the milky silver blue they’d been when I first touched them in Jordan Marsh’s designer label section in ladies’ on the second floor. Lilly had told me about pearls starting their lives as little bits of irritating sand that refuse to get spit out by their oyster. I thought of that every time I touched those buttons. I looked at the record shards. I looked at the worn stolen book that had been my company all those secret hours.

“What a little firetrap this closet was,” Lilly observed. Thank goodness you never took to smoking. You’d have burned the house down. Remember my handing you your first cigarette?… 1941. We opened our bedroom window.”

True. We’d leaned out the window and blown the smoke away from us so Snyder wouldn’t smell it and rat us out to Daddy. Kents. I’d gotten sick in the bushes in the backyard.

“Lilly, I’m so happy to see you, but you make me very nervous,” I said to my dead sister, who was, improbably, both holding the purple silk blouse and wearing it. “You understand, right? Thank you for visiting but maybe you could just go away now. Mr. Boppit too.”

“Can’t, doll. The conference. The company. Your future. Look at you, missing meetings, ignoring phone calls. Look at your hair, for God’s sake. Nobody knows where you are half the time. He’ll find you. And you’ll be alone.”

I didn’t have to ask her who she meant. “He’ll move on.”

“Oh, sweetie.” Boppit sighed. “He won’t, but you have to. Otherwise your feelings are going to rip you up like a vulture working on roadkill. We’re here to save you from yourself. From him. Help us.”

“Saving me from myself?”

“Stop looking for Ricky. Accept that sometimes you don’t get any kind of justice.”

“Tell me what you are,” I begged the two figures that flanked me now. “Tell me what you want from me.”

“We already did,” Mr. Boppit said.

“I think I’m in trouble,” I said.

“You might be, honey.” Dead Lilly nodded. “I’m afraid you really might be.”





THE PIRATE LOVER


Fire Ship

“It’s time,” Basil announced to his crew, a strangely exhilarated and cheerful crew, considering that their captain and possibly all of them faced eternity in the next few hours. Still, an almost festive excitement reigned. Men had spent the last four watches working with Chips the carpenter to cut out the shapes of pirates, complete with hats and cutlasses. These they nailed along the rail of the xebec. Every deck was caulked with tar, every piece of rigging sluiced with oily slush—the frying remains from a hundred dinners. All the powder that Basil Le Cherche felt they could spare without making themselves entirely defenseless had been carried to the xebec and set amid tarry rags. When it was as much a floating bomb as it could be, he stood on the quarterdeck and addressed them.

“I’ve said only volunteers will serve, and each and every one of you volunteered. I can’t take each man jack with me, and you must accept that.” They knew what was what: this fire ship would be aimed at the heart of the enemy’s ships, set alight, and left to blow Judge Henri Le Cherche and his convoy all the way to the judgment of God. But to get the ship close enough before it was lit and abandoned, a small crew would have to risk their lives. Basil Le Cherche would stake his own life on the plan—he himself would lead the group who steered the fire ship into her final moments on Earth.

Electra had risen up against him again in the privacy of the captain’s quarters, once more demanding to accompany him and once more being denied. She drew his hand to her breast, guided his fingers beneath the rough sailcloth to the silk of her own skin. They kissed, both of them knowing that it was perhaps the last time they would touch each other.

When the evening sun held itself just above the horizon, the Cat and its accompanying handmaiden, the xebec, skimmed out of the hidden inlet where the judge’s convoy had not been able to follow and made a direct assault on Henri Le Cherche’s superior forces. The sun lit them in silhouette, making the xebec’s rails look as if they were lined with men eager to make a boarding-party assault.

“Are they mad?” Henri Le Cherche’s first lieutenant laughed. “They give us every advantage. Such a pity that men with such fighting spirit will all be dead so soon.”

The judge himself watched the approach with initial exhilaration. But Henri Le Cherche had not survived among the thieves and criminals with whom he associated as long as he had without a coward’s feral sense of self-protection and a liar’s feel for a lie. Surrounded by men who readied for hand-to-hand combat with the xebec’s crew, he said nothing but ordered his pinnace to splash down and take him to the ship at the farthest edge of the convoy. “Watch for my signals,” he ordered. “I will command from the rear.”

Onward the attackers came, closing at five knots on a stiffening wind from the west. The Cat’s crew shook their reef and dragged a sail behind them beneath the surface of the water to give the appearance of striving for every bit of speed so the slower xebec could pull ahead and do its work without drawing suspicion. And it did. Basil Le Cherche and his small group lit the slow fuse at the bow, slid into a gig that they lowered over the aft starboard side so the xebec itself hid their retreat from the enemy, and began their mad row back to the Cat.

Waiting. Waiting. The xebec closing fast and then inside the very convoy, close enough so the wooden images nailed to the railing were plain at last and the enemy saw they had been deceived, cries of “Fire ship! Fire ship!” all too late and then a massive explosion—spars, rigging, and body parts spread over three square miles of sea.

The Cat’s crew did not cheer, for though they had succeeded and they had the captain and his small crew back aboard, the terrible loss of life was sobering to them. Only the ship at the very edge of the convoy—the ship now carrying Henri Le Cherche—was intact.

“Captain!” cried an upper yardsman, pointing toward this sole undamaged ship. “She runs!” Indeed, Henri Le Cherche had ordered the ship carrying him to turn and run, leaving her distressed comrades to fend for themselves. Basil Le Cherche ordered his clearest-eyed lookout up to the mainmast yard with a glass. “Do you see Judge Le Cherche aboard her, Bill?” he called.

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