“DID WE HAVE TO MEET here, Purchase?” Alex looked around the inn with a certain degree of disfavor. The small room was dark, hot and smoky, loud with voices and laughter, and thick with the scent of ale and cheap perfume. They were in the backstreets of Holborn and it was clear that the alehouse offered far more refreshment than mere drink. The exceptionally pretty light skirt who had greeted Alex on arrival had seemed disappointed when he had turned down her offer of companionship and had flounced off to find a more congenial and generous patron, muttering that it was not a coffeehouse, in and out with no deposit made. Alex appreciated the wit and ordered and paid for a pint of ale, but he was still disinclined to accept whatever extras were on offer. He did not want a quick tumble with a whore. That would bring no more than relief of the most fundamental kind and possibly a dose of clap into the bargain. He was too jaded to find the prospect even remotely appealing. He wanted Joanna Ware. Joanna, with her lovely lissome body, which admittedly he had not seen but had imagined in rather too much fevered detail. Joanna, whom he distrusted and yet wanted with a lust so intense he burned with it. Joanna, whom he wanted to shake for her willful insistence on traveling to the Arctic herself to fetch little Nina Ware because could she not see how dangerous it was?
But he would thwart that plan easily enough. That was what he was here for tonight.
“You’re in a bad mood,” Owen Purchase said in his rich southern drawl, tipping his chair back and raising his tankard to his lips. “It’s a permanent state with you at the moment, I hear.”
“I suppose Dev told you that.” Alex eased himself onto a bench behind the rough wooden table. “And I suppose he’s here, too, upstairs with some girl?”
Purchase grinned. “What are you now-his father?”
“I feel like it sometimes.” Alex groaned. “I want to drag him out of there, warn him to be careful to avoid the pox—”
Purchase spluttered into his ale. “He’s young, Grant. The young make their own mistakes. They never listen.” He put down the tankard, leaned his elbows on the table and surveyed his colleague with amusement in his bright green eyes. “Neither do their elders, I hear. David Ware?”
“You’ve heard the news, then,” Alex said.
“I’ve heard Ware made you joint guardian to his bastard child along with his widow,” Purchase said. He tilted his head to one side. “And that you’re trying to stop her traveling to Spitsbergen to fetch the girl home.”
“The word is that you were in Queer Street because Cummings and his fellow bankers had refused to sponsor your wild-goose chase to Mexico,” Alex said, “so you plan to allow Lady Joanna to charter your ship for her foolish voyage to Spitsbergen.”
Purchase laughed, his teeth a white flash in his tanned face. “Bad news travels fast. I’ll make that Mexican fortune and prove you wrong yet, Grant.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “In the meantime can I persuade you not to agree to a charter with Lady Joanna?”
Purchase was silent for a moment and then he shook his head slowly. “I am already committed. I signed the papers this afternoon.”
Alex felt a sharp flash of surprise followed by an equally sharp stab of anger. Joanna, it seemed, had wasted no time.
“Damn her,” he said through his teeth. “Ignorance combined with money is a fatal combination.”
Purchase raised his brows. “You are mighty vehement, Grant. Why?”
Alex could feel his temper tightening intolerably as it had done in Lincoln’s Inn Fields when Joanna had made it so plain that she intended to ignore his advice and travel to Spitsbergen.
“The Arctic is no place for a woman,” he said abruptly, trying to control his anger. “You know that, Purchase.”
Purchase shrugged elegantly. “I’ll allow that it is a harsh climate.”
“Harsh!” Alex exploded. “It’s lethal! And this is a woman who cannot live without luxuries! She has no concept of privation or hunger or even of pitiless cold—”
“She’ll soon learn,” Purchase said dispassionately.
“She will soon die.” Alex stopped, shocked by the violence of his feelings, struggling to wrench them back under control.
Owen Purchase was looking at him with an arrested expression on his face. “I didn’t think you liked her, Grant.”
“I don’t,” Alex snapped.
Purchase shrugged again. “If it is not concern for Lady Joanna that prompts your feelings, then what is it? Guilt about your wife?”
Alex felt his stomach drop.
Guilt.
Not to his closest friends had he ever expressed his sense of blame over Amelia’s death, yet the shame stalked him every day. He had been the one who had forced Amelia to travel with him. His was the responsibility for her death.
In the early days his guilt had been all-consuming; it had been a ravenous beast that had almost swallowed him whole, almost destroyed him. Somehow over time he had found a way to live with it, to pacify it, almost to soothe it to sleep. And then Joanna Ware, in her naiveté, had expressed her determination to go to the Arctic and the beast had awoken and its claws were as sharp or sharper than before. All his memories had flooded back to haunt him. Amelia had traveled-and she had died as a result. And somehow, he did not know why or how, did not want to know why, that made him angrier than ever with Joanna.
“You read too much poetry, Purchase,” he said shortly, turning away from confidences, turning away even from his thoughts and the implication of what they meant. “Your imagination gets the better of you.”
Purchase laughed. “If you say so.” He leaned forward. “Lady Joanna paid in full, in cash, in advance.” He made an eloquent gesture. “What can I say? I am an adventurer these days, Grant, and I don’t turn down offers like that. You’ll know that Dev and I are crewing for her. We sail in a week.”
“A week?” Alex exclaimed. “You’ll never be ready in time. Provisioning alone would take you longer than that.”
“Money talks,” Purchase said, “and Lady Joanna’s money is mighty persuasive.”
“It’s madness.” Alex slumped back in his seat, aware of a mixture of exasperation, frustration and a certain very reluctant admiration that Lady Joanna Ware had proved that obstinacy was one of her finest qualities.
“I don’t suppose,” he added, “that your ship is reinforced to withstand the ice either.”
“Sea Witch is no bomb ship,” Purchase allowed. “Her decks aren’t reinforced, but she’s a tough little vessel for all that.”
“Sea Witch,” Alex said. “Are you trying to curse her?”
“I thought it was appropriate,” Purchase said, grinning. “She handles like a woman in a temper.” He laughed. “And she’s all the more challenge for it.”
Alex moved his tankard in slow circles on the tabletop. “You’ll not reconsider the commission?” he asked.
Purchase shook his head. “Sorry, Grant.”
“Then give me passage, too,” Alex said.
“As crew?” Purchase smiled.
“As a guest,” Alex said. “I’ll pay my way.”
“Why?”
“Because I am Nina Ware’s guardian, too, and I feel an obligation to see her safe.”
Purchase’s clear gaze considered him thoughtfully. “Seems Ware chose well when he named you joint guardian, Grant. You may hate him for shackling you, but you will always do your duty.”