Free The Halifax Connection by Marie Jakober Page B

with the moon rising almost full. Not surprisingly, Captain Foxe invited Fran to walk with him on the deck.
    “Would you care for a bit of a stroll as well, Miss Sylvie?” Master Schofield asked.
    For the smallest moment she met his gaze, knowing well what she would see there: the careful yet uneasy courtesy of a man trying to be kind, doing what he knew was expected of him.
    “Thank you, Mr. Schofield, but I’m quite tired.”
    He saw her to the cabin she shared with her aunt, where he bid her a gracious good night, lingering a little—not long, but enough to make her wonder if she might have misjudged him. Perhaps he would have liked to stroll with her. Perhaps on a ship, where women were few, and where young, unmarried women were fewer still, perhaps men were easier to please.
    Perhaps.
    Ten years ago she would have walked with him. She would have walked with anyone, anyone who was not abusive or howling drunk or escaped from a madhouse, rather than be alone. Ten years ago she still believed there was someone who might love her. In theory she still believed it. She always smiled and was heartened when Frances said, “For God’s sake, Sylvie, you have the body of a nymph. You’ve hair most women would kill for. Forget the scar. You’re pretty, love. Damn it all, you’re
pretty!”
    They were words to grow strong with in the full light of day, words to hold and carry out into the street, proud-eyed and smiling. But when the night came down, they were only empty words.
    She thought of Frances, arm in arm in the moonlight with Nathaniel Foxe. Frances was forty-three. She had crow’s feet around her eyes, and bits of grey in her hair, and yet the captain was falling in love with her.
    Sylvie understood then, quite suddenly, why she could not have borne to go walking with Master Schofield. She would have cried every time she passed them on the deck. Not out of envy, but out of the simple recognition of her loss. No man had ever looked at her in such a fashion, treasured her company so much, tucked her arm against his side with such protective tenderness. And the odds were high that no man ever would.
    She dug Fran’s mirror from their trunk. She turned her face into the light, drew her loose-hanging hair back behind her ears, and regarded herself. Sometimes she could do it with absolute detachment, as if she were looking at a picture in a book. Sometimes she could not bear to do it at all.
    From just above her left eyebrow a tangle of scars spread down her face, reaching almost to the centre of her cheek; the longest and cruellest of them twisted to the line of her jaw. The tropic sun, darkening her face a little every day, had made the marks a small bit less distinct. Here, in the cabin, the lamplight softened their awfulness.
    Yet here they were nonetheless. She would carry them forever. Even in old age, when she grew tired and forgetful, when even the worst of her memories might fade if they were left alone, the marks would still be here, reminding her.
    You can run, Sylvie Bowen, from everything but this …

    It was very late when Frances returned to the cabin—so late that Sylvie wondered, quietly, if they had retired to the captain’s cabin first. Fran looked extraordinarily happy.
    “Well,” Sylvie said, “I take it you enjoyed yourself?”
    “I did.” Frances sat on her bed and took her shoes off. “He asked if he might call on me, when we’re settled in Halifax.”
    “And you said yes, then, did you?”
    “Oh, certainly. But I warned him that a woman on her own for the whole of her life were likely to be set in her ways. And he said a man who’d been at sea since he were twelve would be much the same. If I weren’t scared of it in him, he said, he weren’t scared of it in me.”
    “I don’t think there’s much that man be scared of.”
    “No.” Bit by bit, Frances began to undress. “He’s such an interesting man. A good man, I think—certainly he’s been good to us. But