“She’s not coming?” Tomaso’s face puckered with sly regret and he clucked his tongue. “My poor fellow, to be scorned! Women, eh, so fickle, so cruel!”
“Not this lady,” said Jeremiah curtly. He slung the canvas bag with his few belongings over his shoulder. “I’m going below.”
“Ah, you English!” called Tomaso, not in the least offended. “Always eager for the next place to sling your hammocks!”
Jeremiah didn’t bother to correct him. Not only did he want no further conversation with the man, but it might also serve him better for now to be believed an Englishman. An Englishman, for all love; Lord, how merrily Caro would laugh at that!
A gaunt little ship’s boy showed him to what passed for a cabin, a dirty closet half below the waterline. Grateful again that he’d spared Caro this, he wearily hung his hammock and soon drifted off to sleep, lulled by the shuffling of the goats on the deck overhead. He slept deeply, only dreaming once, of Caro skipping along beside him in Portsmouth, the old coverlet sliding off her bare shoulders as she reached out to take his hand.
It was dark when Jeremiah woke and, disoriented, he tensed with terror, his hand at once on his knife, until he recalled where he was. The felucca and Tomaso and Naples and Tripoli and Davy and Caro, always Caro. He forced his sleep-thick brain to sort it through, striving to calm himself. At least there’d been no nightmares, no Hamil to haunt him, and he sighed, slipping the knife back into its sheath.
Above him there was a babble of indignant voices he couldn’t hear well enough to understand, among them Tomaso’s apparently trying to intercede. He rolled from the hammock, his mouth dry and his shirt plastered to his chest, and decided to go topside, hoping that the wind off the water might clear his head.
By the smoking light of an oil lantern hooked to the mast, he could just make out Tomaso’s broad silhouette, gesturing alternately to three of the male passengers. Between them was a smaller figure, one of the women, and Jeremiah watched with idle curiosity, wondering what grievous insult one of the men had brought onto the other through the woman.
But perhaps it was the woman herself who’d caused the trouble. To Jeremiah’s amusement, she tossed her head and waved one hand back defiantly at Tomaso. This one was no ordinary, obedient Turkish woman, and Jeremiah almost wished Tomaso would let her speak. He could use the entertainment.
Abruptly Tomaso turned, shaking his head, and then spotted Jeremiah. With a cry of joy he rushed forward, his arms outstretched.
“Capitano Sparhawk, I was just this moment going to send for you! Only you can answer this. Only you can return peace to my little Colomba!’
He spoke briskly in Italian to one of the seamen, who grabbed the woman by the arm and dragged her toward Jeremiah and the circle of the lantern’s full light.
“I told you before, Capitano Sparhawk, that women give men no peace,” declared Tomaso, “and here now is the proof. That signore there says this creature stole from him as he slept, but she swears he lies. She swears it, Capitano, but what is most amazing is that she says too that you will swear on her behalf. Can you believe it, eh? Come here, mia bella cagna!’
Roughly he shoved the woman closer to Jeremiah, and the black shawl she had wrapped over her head and shoulders slipped to one side. Silver gold hair spilled forward like the moon from behind a cloud, and even before she grinned wickedly, Jeremiah knew it was Caro.
Chapter Fourteen
Caro had expected Jeremiah to be surprised, even a bit irritated, to find her on board the felucca with him. She had, after all, disobeyed his orders, and by now she knew him well enough to understand that orders weren’t something he gave lightly. But she hadn’t expected him to be as angry as he was now, staring as coldly at her as if she’d dropped from the sky.
“You might say you’re glad to see me, Jeremiah,” she said, her smile fading. She had so anticipated this moment, and now that it was here, it wasn’t at all what she’d counted on. “I’m vastly glad to see you again, you know.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Tomaso, shaking Caro by the arm. “You would dare to pretend you know this gentleman?”
“She does,” said Jeremiah grimly, “just as I know her. This, Captain Tomaso, is Caroline Moncrief, Countess of Byfield, though she doesn’t look like much of anything right now.”
“I do not believe it, Capitano,” said Tomaso flatly. “This creature a contessa?’
Delighted that her disguise was such a success, Caro’s smile returned. She had done what the dowager countess had advised and taken responsibility for herself, and she was proud of how well she’d done. Remembering how in Portsmouth the secondhand gown and bonnet had hidden her in plain sight, she had literally bought the clothes from the back of a maidservant at the inn.
Not that anyone should guess she was an English countess, not dressed in a rough full-sleeved shift beneath a laced black bodice, two coarse petticoats, thread stockings and worn shoes that tied with dirty pink ribbons. She had tried to pin her hair severely back the way the maidservant had worn hers, but since Caro’s fashionably cropped tendrils had refused to sleek back, she had been careful to cover her hair and shadow her face with the oversize black shawl that, too, had come from the maidservant.
“Captain Sparhawk’s right,” she said to Tomaso. “I am Lady Byfield. Didn’t you receive word that I would be a passenger?”
Hearing the unmistakable upper-class accent in her speech, Tomaso hastily released her arm. “Forgive me, ma donna, I did not know! But how would I, eh? You dress yourself like una domestica, you pay for yourself on the wharf like all the others, you sleep on the deck with them. How would I know otherwise when this ribaldo accuses you of cutting his purse, eh?”
“You wouldn’t, and that was the point.” Free of the heavy shawl, she tossed her hair back in the cool night breeze, unaware of the interest that her pale, loose hair caused among the sailors and other male passengers. “It was a disguise.”
Unsatisfied, Tomaso shook his head and raised his shoulders. “But I do not understand. Why such a disguise, eh? You are a great English lady. Is it some jest, una facezia, that I cannot see?”
“That’s two of us, Tomaso.” Jeremiah took her arm, his grip every bit as rough as the Italian’s had been. “Come along, love. I’m eager for answers.”
She went meekly as he led her down the short companionway to the tiny cabin, and when he released her to bolt the door and light the little lamp hooked to the bulkhead, she stood with her hands folded, waiting patiently. She had nothing to fear, nothing to hide. Her reasons for joining him were the best.
Yet from the look in Jeremiah’s eyes when he turned around to face her, she knew at once he wasn’t going to agree.
“Don’t start, Jeremiah, not until you’ve heard—”
“I’ll start whenever I damned well please, Caro, and nothing you say will change that.” Pointedly he lowered his eyes to her clothing. The tightly laced bodice accentuated the curve of her waist and hips in a way that her more fashionable French chemises never could. “What the hell are you doing here, rigged out like that?”
“Like this?” She lifted the side of her skirt and glanced down at it almost as if she’d forgotten herself what she wore. “That’s quite simple. I wanted to come on board without any extra fuss, so I dressed myself like this to look like the others. I remembered what you said that night in Portsmouth.”
“For God’s sake, Caro, can’t you see the difference?”
“The difference?”