‘I suppose so—he did love the sea,’ Clemence mused. ‘Personally I am becoming thoroughly bored with it and this intolerable dawdling progress.’
‘Don’t wish yourself a storm.’ Nathan pushed back his hat and got to his feet. ‘The wind is changing now—can you feel it? We’ll be clear of the Straits soon and into the Atlantic and all its swells and winds. Then we’ll see how bored you are! And cold,’ he added, pausing by the hammock and running the back of his hand fleetingly up her bare arm, sending delicious shivers down her spine. ‘You will disappear under layers of everything you possess.’
‘Forty-two days out,’ Clemence observed, looking up from the diary she was keeping of the journey. ‘Is it always this slow?’
‘No.’ Nathan glanced up from his own notes. ‘We’ve had more contrary winds than I would have expected. Are you warm enough? I fear we will have to move our customary morning journal meeting inside soon.’ From the day after what Clemence always thought of as their truce, they had been meeting in the morning to write their journals. It was companionable, yet entirely proper, and gradually she sensed that both of them had relaxed into friendship. Nathan was careful not to touch her and she resisted any inclination to flirt. It answered very well in daylight, but at night she still ached for him, lying awake listening to the sounds of him moving about in his cabin, trying to imagine what he was doing.
‘Oh, no, I enjoy this.’ Clemence smiled over the top of the warm scarf Midshipman Stills had bashfully offered her when he overheard her commenting on the cold.
‘Three weeks perhaps, sooner with any luck,’ Nathan added, looking up at the mainmast and then down to his notebook. ‘We’re a good two hundred miles off the Newfoundland Banks now.’ Clemence glanced across to see what he was doing and smiled at the sketch of one of the hands clinging on like a monkey that he had achieved with only a few pencil lines.
‘That’s good.’ Her own journal was so scrupulously devoid of any personal remarks or feelings that she could have heard it read at Sunday service from the poop deck without blushing and Nathan appeared as unconcerned about her reading his.
‘Midshipmen are taught to sketch as part of the training.’ He looked across at her, grinned and executed a swift caricature of her bundled up in her scarf and borrowed pea jacket. I wish I could draw, Clemence thought. When we part, I will have nothing tangible to remember him by.
‘What is the first thing you are going to do when you land?’ Nathan asked.
‘Buy warm clothes! And then find out where Aunt Amelia is.’
‘Which one is she? I lose track of your vast clan.’
‘Lord Sebastian and Lady Dereham’s mother. I have been studying the family tree in an effort to learn them all—I just hope I meet them one at a time or I will be quite overwhelmed.’
‘You will cope,’ Nathan said easily, closing his notebook and getting to his feet. ‘I have every confidence that next Season you will be the toast of London society.’
‘Oh, good.’ Clemence sighed inaudibly as he smiled and left her. ‘I cannot wait.’
Chapter Seventeen
‘Land ho!’
‘Eliza! Eliza, wake up!’ Clemence scrambled off the bunk, thrust her feet into her slippers and pulled on her wrapper. ‘Land!’
There was the sound of feet outside as those with cabins on their deck ran to see.
‘It’s the middle of the night,’ Eliza complained sleepily, opening her eyes. ‘Miss Clemence!’ She sat bolt upright. ‘You cannot go out like that—look at you.’
‘Oh, bother it.’ Clemence snatched up a scarf and wrapped it around her neck. ‘It cannot be that cold, close to land; it is early September, after all.’
‘I mean you aren’t decent—’ Eliza’s voice vanished as Clemence ran up the companionway into the early morning light. And there it was, land at long last, low wooded cliffs, rolling hills, the line of grey that seemed to be an endless shingle bar.
She clung to the rail, staring across the grey water to her new home. No scents reached her nostrils, no vivid colours broke the tranquillity of grey and brown and muted green. Would the people be as cool and muted, too?
‘Welcome to England. We are off Weymouth, not so very far from Portsmouth now,’ said Nathan’s voice in her ear. She turned against the rail and found him close, shrugging out of his heavy coat. ‘Here, put this on. You’ll catch your death and you’ll corrupt the innocent midshipmen before their time otherwise.’
Smiling, Clemence did as he said and found herself enclosed in warm, Nathan-scented wool. For a moment it befuddled her half-sleepy senses and she found herself looking up into his face, smiling, her face unguarded, the carefully polite smiles of friendship forgotten. ‘Thank you.’
‘I had made myself ignore what a kissable mouth you have,’ he said, pulling her gently into a secluded corner. ‘But we are nearly there now. What harm can one English kiss do?’
An English kiss, from Nathan, was, if anything, more inflammatory than a Jamaican one, perhaps because of the contrast between the cool air brushing her face and the heat of his body and his mouth. Or perhaps it was the effect of weeks of living so close to him and behaving with utter propriety.
Her lips parted and he took her mouth with the same implacable gentleness that she had learned to expect as she wrapped her arms around his neck and the coat slid unheeded to the deck.
This was the last time he would kiss her, her last chance to fill her senses and her memory with the feel and scent and taste of him before he became unobtainable, the man she would measure all the others against. The one they would never match.
His eyes were dark and hazed as he lifted his mouth from hers and stood looking into her face. ‘It has not gone away, then, that connection when we touch,’ he sa
id, his voice husky.