The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Read online

  “He is an animal, and poverty is preferable to allowing him to lay his hands on me.”

  “I would agree,” Le Cherche said mildly.

  The steward interrupted with a knock and entered bearing a tray with little glasses of gin and a plateful of biscuits. “I thought the lady might need some refreshment,” the steward said by way of explaining an entirely invented intrusion whose only goal was to get a better look at the captain’s passenger. Le Cherche let him set the tray before them and fuss with cloth and decanter before he dismissed the man. He poured her some gin, which she held uncertainly.

  “Ah,” he said. “Tea would have been the more expected thing in your world, wouldn’t it? But this is a different world. A pity we had no opportunity to prepare, but we did not expect you.” Electra met his gaze, tipped the glass to her lips, and drank. She coughed. “You will no doubt be served any number of things you didn’t ask for by everyone from the bosun to the bosun’s cat.” He smiled. “They don’t see many beautiful women.”

  “You are a Frenchman, but your crew is English?”

  “For the better part. I find they’re excellent sailors.” He poured the clear liquid into his own cut glass. He drank. “But now that we are alone and since you already seem to have decided to reject my brother’s advances, I can tell you what I know of his proclivities and tastes.”

  “You needn’t. He described them to me himself.”

  “How unwise of him to reveal them to you before he had you securely in hand. He must have been very confident of your malleability. The better strategy would have been to conceal his own nature until you were a wife and had no legal rights.”

  “Your brother described his expectations of me because he does not believe that my acceptance or rejection is relevant. He informed me that my youth makes my mother my legal guardian and she can dispose of me as she will.”

  “And your mother would give you to him?”

  “She would.”

  “So the woman is either dull-witted or venal.”

  Electra held her head a bit more erect, tried to make her expression wooden, but she was not indifferent to his words. They were painful and they were true—or rather, they were painful because they were true.

  “Unfortunate,” he said softly. “So you fled?”

  “I was forced upon the water, sir. I would surely have departed the city by carriage or horse had I not been sure that your brother had the power to keep a watch on all roads.”

  “You are quite right. He dislikes being thwarted and would have spent whatever was required to secure you. Let me answer your questions before they are posed: No, I will not return you to him. And no, if you remain aboard I cannot tell you our destination. Do you still wish to stay? We slip anchor at the next tide.”

  Electra nodded.

  “Strange creature.” He smiled, but not with his eyes. “The twisting currents of fate gave you the mother and circumstances that would draw my brother to you and then send you fleeing to this very vessel. I seem to be a part of your revealed destiny, and I am not a man to do battle with destiny.” He turned away from her. “Trotter!” he called. “Find Miss Gates a berth near the surgeon’s in one of the cabins by the gunroom. Stow her things and see to it that she is fed. Dismissed.”

  Apparently he meant this last command for both Electra and Trotter. She hesitated by the door. “Sir? I am entirely prepared to supply a fee for my passage, though I may need to beg for patience in payments.…”

  “You assume I care about fees, mademoiselle.” He brushed past her on his way out the door. “I do not.”

  So began Electra Gates’s first sea voyage.

  NEAVE

  Mrs. Daniels Decides to Go

  Mrs. Daniels decided to die in the winter of 1943. I was still reading to her once or twice a month. We checked in on “Can This Marriage Be Saved” and revisited favorite scenes in favorite novels. We still read Mrs. Roosevelt’s “My Day,” and returned to The Odyssey every now and then. At this point in our acquaintance Mrs. Daniels and I communicated in the kind of shorthand that I’d only known with Lilly. More and more when tea arrived, she pushed it away. Then one afternoon she mentioned speaking to her husband.

  “Mrs. Daniels, I thought your husbands were dead.”

  “That does not always silence them, particularly if they have something to say.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He suggested it was time to come along.”

  “Ah.” I just nodded. “Which husband was this?”

  “Oh, the first one, of course.”

  “Mrs. Daniels, was this in a dream?”

  She looked me over, considering. “All right,” she said finally. “We’ll call it a dream.”

  “Dream or no dream, you should eat, Mrs. Daniels.”

  “I’m a grown woman, Neave Terhune,” she said kindly. “I’ll do what I want about my own dreams. I had Violette especially bake this crusty pumpernickel you love. And this butter?” She held it up. “Irish butter. The best in the world, though how the Irish do anything so fine as this butter is a mystery to me, given their attraction to self-destructive, pinheaded, backward habits. Have one of those little cucumber things. Those at least are English.”

  I tried to eat the little cucumber things but failed. Violette set a half dozen slices of aromatic bread before me, and for the first time in my life the siren call of toast failed to move me. Mrs. Daniels and I sat across from each other, the table between us piled high with every delicacy I had ever greedily sought in her house. It all sat untouched. In the next weeks Mrs. Daniels actually shrank, physically, but that didn’t diminish her. She just got concentrated.

  “Neave Terhune,” she said on the last day I saw her alive, her voice pure and hard and very small, “I am grateful to you. And I have loved you.”

  I already knew that, and the knowledge cut into me so sharply I didn’t think I could stand it. I said, “Even though I’m a kind of unlovable young woman.”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “Particularly so.”

  I began to cry.

  “Don’t cry,” she said, a terrible kindness in her voice. “All will be well. I’m sure of it.”

  She died just before sunrise. That week a sunny young man improbably identifying himself as her son showed up with a lawyer and went to work selling everything under her roof. He knocked on my door one day to tell me his mother had left me her books.

  “She knows I’m no reader, and most of these are for ladies.” He shrugged. “You know. Novels. Stuff like that.”

  I thanked him. When the boxes of books came into my house courtesy of some chunky young men that her son had hired for the job, I went through them looking for the Forbidden Shelf of Romances. None were there. I had “borrowed” several of them, meaning I’d jammed them into a book bag when Mrs. Daniels left the room for even an instant, but I’d returned them all, all except The Pirate Lover, which I hadn’t ever been able to give up.

  I took The Odyssey and Jane Eyre under my arm and climbed up to my bedroom. There I sat on my bed and looked out into the backyard. In Daddy’s garden the carrots and cabbages were long gone, but I watched a rabbit nose around hopefully until a neighbor’s terrier flushed it into the next yard, the dog howling along behind the poor floppy-eared thing, intent on ripping it apart. It made me cry again, the stupid dog. The rabbit.

  There are people who think that every experience offers you a lesson, but I’m not one of them. Mrs. Daniels died. What are we supposed to gain in the way of comfort or wisdom from that?

  That afternoon, Lilly knew where I was and she had a feeling for what I was feeling. She came and sat next to me. The Pirate Lover lay on the floor by my bed. She picked it up, asked me if I wanted her to read to me. I said yes. She kept on until the moon got high enough to throw shadows that moved when the curtains blew, which was pretty. There was the runaway Electra at the captain’s table in her first hours on board the Cat, skimming rapidly across the black surface of an ocean, sailing awa
y from all that threatened her. Love, courage, generosity of spirit, adventure—all triumphant. Surely this was the truth, somewhere. The awful feelings seeped out of me. When Lilly stood up and stretched and said let’s sneak downstairs and fry up some eggs, I realized I was hungry. So that’s what we did and the day ended all right after all.

  THE PIRATE LOVER

  The Fool’s Game

  Had she found herself on a pirate ship? Electra Gates was led to a cabin that had room in it for no more than a modest cot, over which hung a single lamp. “The surgeon’s mate was the last one to use this cabin and he liked a bunk better than a swinging hammock but I can ship you either one, miss,” Trotter said as he swung the door open and let his lantern shine to the farthest edge of it—five feet away. A rat skittered out of the light and into some hole invisible in the dimness. Electra stepped into the coffinlike space. “Unlucky bloke. Copped it last trip.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Ship’s surgeon. Fool took a swim in shark-infested waters. Just as useless in the sick bay—was afraid of blood—so I’m sorry to say he ain’t much missed. I myself prefer a hammock to a bunk. Most find it an easier berth in the workings of the ship. When at sea, like, if you know what I mean, miss. And it’s drier should water happen, which is frequent.”

  “A swinging hammock, then, would be perfectly lovely, and I thank you.” He turned to leave but she stopped him. “Mr. Trotter, am I aboard a pirate ship?”

  “Oh, miss, never in life! You must not use that word before the crew or captain, for it’s a low word, miss! We’re a letter of marque! The cap’n’s got the letter set careful like in oiled leather in a waterproof tin chest and I’ve seen it myself. We sail at the pleasure of the queen.”

  “You mean king.”

  “No, ma’am. I mean Victoria, our queen. I see the confusion. The cap’n’s got a French name and a French brother, but he’s no friend to either. This is no Frenchie Louis-Philippe ship. He’s his own man, miss, a man with connections on both sides o’ the Channel. We hunt Spanish and Dutch prizes—as do all the French and English afloat at the moment. I should tell you that there’s still a half a glass before the tide and a person who found she wasn’t where she wanted to be could disembark now if she hustled. Should you want to hustle. If you take my meaning.”

  “You don’t want me aboard, Mr. Trotter?”

  Mr. Trotter blushed a deep pink. “Well, some say women aboard are bad luck, like parsons, but I find they lighten the people’s mood. Not that we aren’t a happy barkie, which we are, but they do. Unless they cause fighting. Then they’re no good to man or beast.” He waited for her to absorb this information. “Normally, miss, you’d mess with the midshipmen and keep an eye on the young gentlemen as a person of a more refined nature but as we’re a privateer there’re no young gentlemen so you’re a member of the gunroom mess though the cap’n invites you to dine with him tonight, you being a kind of guest.”

  “I’m very tired.…”

  “A cap’n’s invitation is an order aboard that cap’n’s ship, ma’am. Now, don’t you fret. We’ll accustom you to our ways. I’ll leave this light, but you must remember that fire is the barkie’s worst enemy besides a Spanish man-o’-war and you must never leave it unattended.”

  He withdrew, leaving her in the dim cubicle whose tiny light threw a hundred flickering shadows. She unpacked what she could, dressed in what she hoped would be appropriate for the captain’s table, and sat still, a bit uncertain, waiting to be summoned. She had pulled a new cotton doublet over her shift, sought out and located her rouge and kohl, but looked in vain for a mirror. There was none. How strange it was to prepare oneself for public judgment without the aid of that reflective surface. There were probably no mirrors at all on board. She was in a world where one’s reflection meant very little—a man’s world.

  She heard the sounds usual to departure, but because she was new to them she could not read them. Still, foreign to her or not, they proceeded in the time-honored order: the cable being wound aboard, the anchor being catted and fished, the pinnace being run up to the davits, the halyards in their blocks. She waited on. The entirety of her cell tilted to one side and she braced herself against the walls of her little quarters, feeling the living wood around her vibrate against the pressures of sea and wind—they were moving. Still she waited uncertainly, sitting silently. She heard the turning of the glass called, heard the gunroom members surging through their shared mess and back to their posts, and then finally, finally, a banging on the door and Trotter’s voice, shrewish now and a bit anxious. “Ain’t you ready, miss? You mustn’t be late!”

  When she swung open her door Trotter took her by the hand and pulled her through the ship’s narrow passages toward her appointment, lecturing on when various messes messed, and how to tell the time from the unvarying routines and noises on ship, and how lateness was never, never countenanced on a well-run ship like the Cat. They reached the doorway to the captain’s cabin and he pushed her forward, gently, over the doorway and into the beautiful space with its stern rising up from a steep counter in a wall of glass. Light glanced up off the waves in their wake and into the shining room. A table glowed with silver and crystal. Behind each seat stood a nodding, smiling, clean-shaven man dressed in his best coat in the stifling heat of the close room, waiting for her. Looking at them watch her approach she understood that these eyes would be her only mirror aboard the Cat. She took a deep breath, smiled as warmly as she could, and thanked them all for the kind invitation to their dinner. She was rewarded with unguarded admiration.

  The captain seated her at his right and lifted his first glass to her. “To my special guest, Mademoiselle Gates. A glass of wine with you, my lady.”

  She raised her glass to his and drank. On this ship, her value, her rights, her safety, all rested on the captain’s authority, and she saw that his authority was total. Had Le Cherche hosted this dinner with the particular purpose of establishing a protected status for her?

  “A beautiful Sauterne, Captain,” she said when he filled her glass again.

  “I had five cases brought aboard before we sailed. I served, in youth, in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, and there I came to a deep appreciation of what private means can supply in addition to what the grateful nation provides a man during wartime.”

  “Sailors are not well provided for?”

  “They are if a pound of bread, pounded dry peas, a pound of salt beef that’s made its way around the Horn three times before it hits your tin plate, and a quart of beer satisfies you utterly. War is not about cuisine, however. Or glory,” he added.

  “Not glory, sir?” she asked.

  “One might stumble upon glory. But war is not glorious in and of itself. It is simply the great contest for resources.”

  “Like a crown?” she said, her tone gentle but challenging.

  “Incidentally perhaps,” the purser joined in. “But a crown is merely the key to what matters.”

  “Which is what, sir?”

  “Land. Silver. Wheat. Women.”

  “Women?” Electra smiled thinly, remembering that she was a guest at this table and in this world, but finding it difficult to curb her own tongue. “Surely we are not something that would appear on a purser’s list, sir, like a case of Sauterne or a plot of land to be squabbled over—a mere possession.”

  “I mean no offense, ma’am.” The purser blushed. “I was merely speaking.”

  The captain broke in. “As to squabbles and mere possessions, I could ask you to remember Helen of Troy—a stolen possession who caused quite a squabble. But pardon me. We border on discussing politics, which is not a suitable topic for a captain’s table. Mr. Davies—I believe the bottle stands by you.”

  The mood lightened with each bottle. Deep into the fifth course a somewhat drunken young lieutenant was holding forth with a story that threatened to become inappropriate before a mate kicked him under the table and he changed the course of the narrative, making it virtually incomprehen
sible. Electra glanced at Le Cherche, catching him in a moment when he thought he held no one’s attention. She expected to find an arrogant man among those he considered his inferiors. Instead she saw a man who sat at an enormous silent distance from those around him, a man with a face whose lines and battle scars showed suddenly in stark relief—a sad man. She turned quickly away, and when the little story had ground to an illogical conclusion Le Cherche clothed himself again in good cheer, calling for toasts all around and a good night. Hours later as she lay in her swinging hammock she heard his cello begin to speak through the thin cabin walls, unaccompanied, the loneliest sound she believed she’d ever heard in her life.

  In the days that followed, Electra ventured enough into the life of the ship to come to know its routines, to know her gunroom fellows, and to be invited several times more to the captain’s table.

  “So you are a letter of marque and you hunt the Spanish?” she asked on one evening when they were alone except for the bustling presence of Trotter, who waited upon them.

  “We are and we do. But if you were of any value at all to my brother, we are now the hunted as well as the hunters.”

  “I doubt this. Your brother might have gone to the relatively controllable expense of having local roads watched to stop me as I fled, but he would not set out upon the boundless ocean to find something as insignificant, in the end, as a woman.”

  “Ah.” He smiled. “Remember Helen of Troy.”

  “I recall your example of Helen of Troy, Captain—but I am no Helen of Troy, and your brother is no Menelaus.”

  “You need not be a Menelaus to be made unreasonable under the influence of pride or of a woman. And your looks are not so unfortunate, Mademoiselle. There are all kinds of charms that can give a woman the power to bewitch a man. I have seen but little of you, yet even in that short time I can see that your arsenal has weapons beyond physical beauty.”

  “Weapons? Surely love is not a battle, monsieur.”

  “Not if the players remain cool and reasonable—each understanding that passion is a fool’s game.”