Free The Halifax Connection by Marie Jakober

she murmured. “We’ll make it, won’t we?”
    “Last time I checked, love, nobody ever promised us anything. But if I were making wagers, I’d say yes, likely as not we’ll make it.”
    Sylvie smiled. “Likely as not” was fine. “Likely as not” was the best odds they had ever had.

    Unlike the heroines in the storybooks they read, Frances Harris and Sylvie Bowen did not trouble themselves over what they might wear to Captain Foxe’s birthday supper. They owned but a single decent dress apiece. Nonetheless, Fran took her time gettingready, brushing her hair until it shone, wrapping it into an elegant pompadour with nothing more elaborate than a scarf and a pair of street vendor’s combs. She had always been a striking woman; not beautiful, perhaps, not like the splendid creatures in the magazines, with the pale, perfect faces of angels, but nonetheless striking. She had a full, sensual body and dark, alluring eyes. Even the mill town had not robbed her of those gifts; it had merely altered them, wearing away every trace of youth and lightness, laying bare a depth of quiet, worldly intensity.
    She looked especially splendid tonight, and she glided into the captain’s small cabin with astonishing grace. Watching her, Sylvie understood completely why her aunt could always attract men, why she never needed silks or jewels to do it. It was all in the body, in the way a woman moved, the way she listened, the way she laughed. Whatever came of Fran’s magnetic power in the end, whether it gained her something she wanted or something she did not want—or, most often, nothing much at all—it was part of her, as easy and as natural as breath.
    Captain Foxe greeted them with a warm, almost boyish smile. “Miss Harris, Miss Bowen. How good to see you both. Please come in.”
    Foxe was by no means the biggest man Sylvie had ever seen, but he seemed easily the most solid; if he ever collided with a brick wall, she thought, the wall would probably take the worse of it. He was gallant, however, bowing a little and kissing their hands, the way men did in books. Master Schofield, the first mate, did the same, but not with the same obvious delight. He was very young, probably younger than Sylvie herself, and he seemed ill at ease.
    He’s only here because the captain wants him here, to be company for me, and to make it all proper. He’d rather be in the saloon, talking about the war.
    For a while Sylvie almost felt the same way herself. Nathaniel Foxe’s birthday supper got off to a slow, clumsy start. The cabin was small; the steward could scarcely serve them without elbowingsomeone’s face. The table was tiny, and when a lurch of the ship and a slip of the knife combined to send a piece of chicken flying off Sylvie’s plate, it landed splat in the captain’s glass of port.
    That sort of thing happened in the saloon too; it was a hazard of dining on a rocking boat. But here, at this special birthday supper, it was painfully embarrassing, and she blushed scarlet to her toes. He simply stabbed the offending bit of fowl with his fork, smiled, and said, “Drunken chicken. There’s a fine place in Baltimore serves that. I always liked it.” And he popped it into his mouth.
    The man certainly had style.
    Master Schofield did not. He was terribly well bred and terribly shy, a lethal combination from Sylvie’s perspective. Shy herself, she had no idea what to say to him, and he seemed to have no idea what to say to her.
    “Do you have relatives in Nova Scotia?” he asked at one point.
    “No. Aunt Frances has a friend there.”
    “Oh. That’s good.” After a moment of silence he asked, “Is that why you’re going? To see her friends?”
    To see her friends?
It took a few seconds to understand.
God bleeding almighty, he thinks we’re just … travelling.
    “No. We’re going to live there. To work.”
    He looked quickly at his plate. Obviously he came from the sort whose women never had to work; the sort who looked