Free Pirates by Linda Lael Miller Page B

She wanted Old Woman to know she was suffering and feel guilty for it. “Has horse liniment been invented yet?”
    Silence.
    Phoebe opened her eyes. Simone, not Old Woman, was standing beside the bed, and she was frowning. This time, however, her expression was one of puzzlement, rather than poisonous dislike.
    “Let me see your hand,” she said.
    Phoebe sat up, but made no move to comply with Simone’s request. “I’d appreciate it if you’d knock, next time you stop by,” she remarked.
    Simone reached out and closed strong brown fingersaround Phoebe’s callused ones, bent, and peered into her palm. She murmured something, and tears brimmed in her strange, pale eyes.
    Phoebe pulled free, but not because she was afraid. Instead of fear, she felt sympathy. And the beginnings of friendship. “Short lifeline, huh?”
    Simone covered her mouth with one hand and turned away. She did not leave the room, but instead went to stand gazing out the windows, toward the sea. Phoebe knew without asking that the other woman was watching for Duncan and wondering if he was safe; she wondered, too, and missed him, though she had no right.
    She stood, but did not approach Simone. “He’ll be back,” she said.
    “Yes,” Simone responded after a pause, without turning to face Phoebe. “And you will be here, waiting for him.”
    Phoebe’s heart was soft, had always been so, and it ached just then. Not for herself, but for this woman who was, by tacit agreement, no longer an enemy. “Duncan doesn’t even like me,” she felt compelled to say. “He thinks I’m a spy.” At last, Simone left the windows, and though she kept her distance, she looked Phoebe in the face. “He will take you for a wife,” Simone said, with dignity and pride, but no rancor. “Many children wait to be born. But he’ll come to my bed, too, and I shall give him sons and daughters as well—as many as you.”
    Phoebe was a misplaced person, on a cosmic scale. She had no reason to think she would stay in the eighteenth century, or in her delusion, if that was what it was. She was attracted to Duncan, but she did not love him, and she had no claim on his loyalties. In fact, it seemed he could barely tolerate her.
    The sensible thing to do was leave.
    But for all that, Phoebe was certain of one thing: If she ever married again, no husband of hers, be he Duncan Rourke or anyone else, would ever go to another woman’s bed. She’d had enough of that kind of humiliation and hurt with Jeffrey.
    “No,” she replied with a shake of her head, and thoughshe did not elaborate, it was plain that Simone understood and saw the assertion as a challenge. With a smile and a shrug of one elegant shoulder, Phoebe’s guest left the room.
    In the morning, Phoebe returned to the garden.
    By noon, she was hoping to make a quantum leap back to the future, just so she could escape the hot sun and that wretched hoe, but nothing happened. Weeds grew and flourished before her very eyes, it seemed, and Old Woman assigned her the same task the next day, and the next, and the one after that.
    And Phoebe worked, because anything was better than sitting around, waiting. Wondering what would happen.
    Two full weeks passed, during which Phoebe hoed and watered and weeded and, for purposes of personal entertainment as much as anything else, plotted her escape from Paradise. At night, she waited to be beamed up—
there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home
, she repeated over and over again like a litany—but evidently, the time wizard wasn’t paying attention. She awakened each morning in 1780, and mingled with her disappointment, always, was a touch of relief.
    One day, she was bent double, pulling quack grass out of the turnip patch, when her heart gave a sudden flutter of warning. She rose, holding her bonnet in place with one hand, and saw Duncan standing at the edge of the garden, watching her. A smile crooked the corner of his mouth and flickered in his