Free Wicked at Heart by Danelle Harmon Page B

sacrifice that Gwyneth had made.
    Rhiannon alone
knew the tears that Gwyneth had cried behind her closed door the night she had
finally decided to marry the old man.
    And she alone
knew that old Lord Simms had never laid a finger on his wife, who was still as
pure as she was the day she'd married him.
    Now Rhiannon
watched as her sister bent down to her flowers once more, her simple frock
pooling in the dirt around her knees.  Even with her hands stained with earth,
her hair falling down about her neck, Gwyneth still managed to appear regal. 
Lord Simms might not have made a woman out of her, but he had managed to turn a
clever country girl into a lady.  And Gwyneth, who had loved the old man in her
own way, had done him proud.
    The last
blackbird called out a farewell, and the dimming garden was quiet save for the
rhythmic scraping of Gwyneth's spade.  Leaving her sister to her flowers,
Rhiannon quietly went back inside.

 
    Chapter
5
     
    Deep in another
part of the prison hulk Surrey , one that did not receive the morning
sunlight,  fresh breezes off the harbor, or even the cry of gulls, two people
sat together in the foul and wretched gloom.
    Nathan Ashton and
his little brother Toby were Americans whose only mistake had been to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time.  As a lieutenant and midshipman, respectively,
aboard Captain Connor Merrick's Newburyport, Massachusetts-built, forty-four-gun
frigate Merrimack , the two had enjoyed a salty, swashbuckling adventure
at sea until finally falling prey to the British.  Outmanned and outgunned, Merrimack had fought bravely, sinking before the British could take her into their own
navy, but her people had not fared so well.  Given the choice of joining the
Royal Navy or being incarcerated in one of the prison hulks, what remained of
the American crew had patriotically chosen the latter.
    Patriotic, they
had been.  And, naive.
    Now, three
months later, their patriotism was stronger than ever, but naivete had died the
day they'd set foot on the prison hulk.
    And a hellish
three months it had been, too, thirty-year-old Nathan thought, as he sat in
near darkness and, by the light of a cotton wick set in an oyster shell and propped
in fat saved from their rationed meat, worked steadily on the hole he was
boring in the ship's hull.  It was impossible to hear the desperate grinding of
his tiny knife, due to the loud, incessant racket made by the prisoners on the
deck above as they scraped and rubbed it with sand, but then, he had planned it
that way.  Nine inches deep the hole was, but Nathan had just managed to saw
through to the other side, and now a shaft of daylight rewarded him for his
efforts.
    He put his nose
to the coin-size airhole and then motioned for his little brother to do the
same.
    Frail and
suffering badly from malnutrition and cold, Toby scrambled to the hole, put his
face against it, and sucked in huge gulps of the chilly air.  His eyes closed
and tears began to course down his freckled face, pooling in the lower corners
of his cracked spectacles and tracing paths through the grime on his hollow
cheeks.
    "Oh, Nathan,
I've not felt anything this sweet since before the Merrimack went
down."  He pulled back, his brown eyes full of emotion in his gaunt and
sickly face.
    Nathan swallowed
hard.  The youngest of the Ashton brothers and born very late in their mother's
childbearing years, little Toby had never been strong and hearty like the rest
of them.  He had wanted to become a lawyer or physician, and had signed on to
their cousin Connor's ship only because he was a New Englander and their father
had been a patriot in the first war, and he had considered sea service to be
his prescribed duty.  But seafaring life had taken its toll on the
thirteen-year-old, and life aboard this wretched prison ship was wasting him
away to nothing.
    Nathan reached
out and put his hand on Toby's bony shoulder.  "Don't you worry none,
little brother.  We'll get out of