and I’ll deal with him tomorrow with you safely out of the way.’
‘Very well.’ It was sensible, although her fantasy of confronting Uncle Joshua in front of the island’s Council, finger pointing dramatically at the miscreant, was too satisfying to easily give up.
‘Captain Melville has a house in Kingston that we’ve been using as a base. We’ll go there—no one knows that the navy is the tenant.’
‘Spying,’ Clemence murmured, almost asleep. ‘I knew you were a shady character.’
She woke up as Nathan handed her out of the boat to Street, who seemed more than a little put about to have an armful of young woman who sounded like the boy Clem, but who was clad in fine lawns and silk ribbons. Clemence found herself bundled back into Nathan’s arms with unseemly haste.
‘I can walk,’ she protested, wide awake.
‘Quicker like this.’ Nathan strode off, with Street and the dog at his heels, leaving the boat party to row back out to where she assumed the frigate must be anchored. They were in the streets of middling houses in the west end of town, dwellings hanging on to respectability by their fingernails, an area where the shabby-genteel residents kept themselves to themselves.
Nathan turned into a passageway, then into a yard. The back door opened with alacrity and there was Eliza. ‘Oh, Miss Clemence! He’s got you safe. Oh, thank you, sir!’ She flung the door wide and ushered them in. ‘And One-Eye. Who’s a good dog, then?’ She made a fuss of the hound, who leaned panting against her leg before turning to glower at Street, lurking uncomfortably in the doorway. ‘And you, you great lummox—what are you doing here?’
‘Bodyguard,’ he growled.
Nathan set Clemence on her feet. ‘Eliza, you’ll show Miss Clemence to her room.’ He looked at her. ‘You’ll want to sleep.’
‘I couldn’t sleep a wink,’ Clemence said. ‘Not until I find out what has happened. And, Eliza, you should get to bed.’
‘I’ll just show you your room, Miss Clemence,’ the maid began.
‘It is all right, Mr—I mean, Captain Stanier can show me.’ There was a gasp from the maid. ‘Eliza, I’ve been sharing his cabin for nights, it is all right.’
Without waiting she turned and climbed the stairs. After a moment she heard footsteps behind her and smiled. Thank goodness, she had been afraid he was going to treat her like a society lady the moment they were free.
‘The door on the right.’ It was a simple room, but clean and the wide bed with its white mosquito net sat serenely in the middle of an expanse of polished floor.
‘Oh, a real bed. Bliss.’
‘Then sleep.’ Nathan was standing in the doorway, watching her.
‘No. Not until we talk.’ She held out a hand and he came in and took one of the rattan chairs. Clemence curled up in the other, noticing with a pang of anxiety that he stayed sitting upright, not letting his back touch the chair. ‘Tell me who you are and how the men from the hold are.’
‘We’ve lost some of them, but the survivors are, on the whole, all right, although some have fevers and all are badly malnourished. There are eight of your men safe. As for me, I am part of a mission to eradicate pirates in the Caribbean.’ Nathan steepled his fingers and looked as though he were about to present a formal report. ‘We deprived McTiernan of his navigator in a brothel about a week before he took me on; it took a while to spread the rumours about me, enough for him to get interested, but not suspicious.’
‘The Orion is your ship?’ She imagined the elegant, white-sailed frigate, Nathan on the quarterdeck.
‘No, Melville’s. I haven’t a ship at the moment, I was detached for the mission. You can guess the rest—the disabled merchantman was the first intended honey-trap. When that didn’t work, we set up the sand-bar trap with a supposedly secret bullion ship as bait.’
‘How did you communicate?’ Clemence watched him, noticing the cut in his hairline, bruises on his cheek, the edge of a bandage showing beneath one cuff.
‘It was pre-arranged, most of it. Contingency plans for every eventuality we could think of. I knew about the sandbar, I only pretended to find it when we were up on the headland. While you were setting out the food, I was signalling with a mirror.’
‘It all seems very efficient,’ Clemence observed, wondering as she looked at him now, with his austere manner and his spare reporting, how she could ever have thought him a suspicious rogue. ‘I must have been a nuisance. Why didn’t you tell me the truth?’
‘I wanted you to react to things as naturally as possible.’ He shrugged. ‘And instinct told me that the less you knew, the safer you were.’
‘I see. And when I saw you this afternoon?’
‘Yesterday by now, I would guess.’ He glanced at the clock. ‘Yesterday I had been helping salvage what we could of Sea Scorpion, searching for survivors, which was why I looked as I did. I wasn’t chained in the middle of those men, but I was talking to them, trying to sort out the ones it was safe to try and have reprieved. There are some good seamen amongst them.’
‘And when you saw me?’
‘I did not know what was going on, the Governor’s men were armed. I couldn’t risk shooting starting. When Eliza came tumbling out into the yard after you, I got the whole story out of her.’
‘So what was I doing in the hospital?’