Free JoAnn Wendt by Beyond the Dawn Page B

had been love. That love had been born full-grown the moment he’d opened that tavern door on the quay and looked into those vulnerable eyes. He knew it now.
    He was confused by all of it. Why had sweet Flavia played the harlot that first night on the quay? Why?
    Seeking answers, he’d questioned the duke’s young footman during the voyage, and by now the lad must think him mad. When the lad said things about Flavia that were unbearable, Garth tongue-lashed him into scared silence. Eager to toady to the ship’s master, the boy spouted gossip willy-nilly. Garth found it hard to sort truth from lie.
    Only one thing stood out in a certain light. The duke had chosen Flavia as wife because Flavia’s mother had been a prodigious child-bearer. The duke expected Flavia to reproduce as her mother had done. He demanded heirs. An odd, unformed thought stirred in him like a hazy dream, then faded as a brass bell sounded.
    Three chiming strokes rang out in the wind and echoed out over the moonlit sea. There was the tramp of feet, the usual shouts of instruction as the watch changed. He surrendered his watch to Jenkins, exchanged a few words and turned to go. But he didn’t go. He stood in the stern of the ship, watching the foamy churning wake. An odd thing about churning wake. Stare at it long enough and it conjures up pictures. A girl’s white skin, a dewy cheek damp from running through fog...
    A light step sounded behind him on the deck. He turned. Annette’s blue silk wrapper shimmered in the moonlight as wind ruffled it. Her dark hair was unbound and feathering in the wind. She smiled.
    “Come to bed, Garth.”
    He slung his dead cigar into the sea and strode toward her. She came into his arms, and he was jolted by the warmth of her body. He’d not known he was so cold.
    He sought her mouth. He kissed her with fierce, bruising urgency.
     

Chapter 6
     
    “Jane?”
    Flavia woke instantly, the way she’d always done at Tewksbury when Robert was fretful with teething and the mother in her would not permit deep sleep. She shifted up on one elbow, careful not to wake the Collins babes, who snuggled warmly against her, one at each side. She rubbed her tired eyes.
    “Yes, Mab? What’s wrong?He’s not worse?”
    In the dim light of the hold’s single sputtering lantern, she sensed rather than saw the young woman’s shoulders slump forward in despair.
    “Jane, he be raving. He be all the time tryin’ to git up.”
    “I’ll help.”
    Flavia eased her weary body from the bunk. She covered the sleeping children, pulling the dirty wool blanket up to their thin chins. She shook out her creased and wrinkled serge skirts. Like everyone else, she slept clothed. At least now she had her own bunk. Bunks had become available as the arduous voyage took its toll among the indentured.
    Scurvy and ague plagued the ship. It hit the big strong men hardest. And the growing children, of course. One raw potato and half an onion a week did not suffice in containing the sickness, and the captain had done nothing to ease their plight. Greedy, eager to pass the halfway point and realize full profit from bondslave contracts, the Dutchman drove his ship hard. He set his course due west across open wintry seas rather than follow the longer course that trailed the African coast and the Caribbean, where the Schilaack might put in for fresh water, oranges, lemons, green vegetables. The result of the Dutchman’s avarice was drinking water gone brackish in the barrel, sea biscuit crawling with worm, salt pork gone putrid and lives lost.
    Flavia was outraged at the man’s inhumanity. A dozen times a day she vowed to see him punished, and a dozen times a day she came face to face with the reality of her own impotence. She was no longer duchess of Tewksbury. She was a bondslave. She hadn’t the power to order punishment of a gnat.
    Groping through the bunks of the snoring, Flavia made her way to the Collins bunk. That everyone should sleep unperturbed