“Entirely, Captain,” the English Napoleon said.

Dr. Stewart chuckled.

They were enjoying this.

“I cannot—” She had been forced to face plenty of indignities as a servant, but this was outrageous. “That is to say, it would not be proper for—”

Captain Andrew lifted his brow.

“I cannot deprive you of sleep, Captain,” she said firmly.

“Dinna fret, lass. He’ll sleep fine and dandy with ye in his bed.”

Dr. Stewart could not mean what she imagined. He was a priest, for heaven’s sake.

The captain slanted him an odd glance.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “if gentlemen you can be called,” she added under her breath, “this is insupportable, and you know it as well as I.”

Captain Andrew laughed softly. It was a wonderful sound—deep and warm and confident and appreciative.

She forced herself to look him in the face. “Captain?”

“I am afraid I’ve nothing else to offer you, little governess, but a hammock on the gun deck with the crew or a straw pallet with the goats and sheep below. Would you prefer one of those?”

“Not precisely.”

“Ye’ll have ma cabin, lass,” Dr. Stewart said, and went toward the door. “The bed’s no’ so soft, an there be no door to lock. But ye’ll have the privacy a leddy needs.”

She released a breath and slipped by the captain to follow.

Dr. Stewart shook his head. “I warned ye she woudna take to it, lad. Some wimmen dinna care to be teased.”

“Seems so,” the captain said quietly.

She glanced back. He was no longer smiling, but watching her with that same intensity he had revealed for a moment on the street the night before, like he knew not only her thoughts, but also her fears.

Like he was a wolf, and she the lamb.

WITHOUT ANY FANFARE of trumpets, the ship drew away from the dock with a sudden sway that left Arabella’s joints loose and her limbs trembling. Dr. Stewart invited her to the main deck to watch their departure. She declined and instead sat on her borrowed cot, clinging to its sides, eyes clamped shut, and thought of her sisters, Ravenna’s bright smile and Eleanor’s arm wrapped about her shoulder. Her heartbeats were frantic. Her palms grew slippery on the wood.

She opened her eyes and reached for the shutter over the window. She folded it open. The sea stretched before her in undulating swells of white and gray.

She slammed the shutter closed.

A miniature bookcase beside the cot and bolted into the wall held several dozen well-worn volumes. She snatched up the closest, opened it, and read.

When Mr. Miles scratched on the curtain with her dinner, her stomach was too tight to accept food.

Eventually, she slept, restlessly, and dreamed of storms. She awoke to the steady drum of rain on the ceiling above her head. Mr. Miles brought her breakfast. She left it untouched.

Her second day at sea proved equally eventless and equally exhausting. Her nerves were raw, her skin clammy, her belly cramped. She needed distraction. Not, however, in the form of a wolfish ship captain, whose deep voice and confident tread she occasionally heard through the wall shared between the cabins.

But she was unaccustomed to inactivity. On her third morning aboard she ventured out of the doctor’s cabin to stretch her legs and seek out a hiding place aboard that would not put her in sight line of either the captain or the water that surrounded them completely now.

A sixty-five-gun merchant ship, however, while considerably larger in volume than the London town houses in which she had worked, posed a challenge when it came to places a woman could stroll or sit unnoticed. After ducking around barrels and lurking behind cannons to avoid the captain, she found an ally. The cabin boy had been following her about on her tour of the ship’s nooks and crannies.

“If you’re wantin’ someplace to set, miss,” he said, “you’ll like Doc’s place. It’s warm and dry, though it rocks somethin’ fierce in a storm, seein’ as it’s in the bow.”

He guided her to the infirmary, dropped to his behind on the floor outside the door and pushed his cap over his brow.

“Won’t you follow me inside like you have followed me everywhere else this morning?”

He shook his head. “No, miss. I’ll catch a wink while you’re in with the doc, if you don’t mind.”

“I do not.” She laughed. “But do tell me your name so that I might wish you pleasant dreams.”

“Joshua, miss.”

“Pleasant dreams, Joshua.”

Dr. Stewart welcomed her and she settled on the extra chair in his infirmary, a book on her lap. She was no scholar like Eleanor, and when they hadn’t turned her stomach, the doctor’s tomes on the treatment of shipboard ailments had nearly put her to sleep. Today, however, she had unearthed quite another sort of book from the captain’s day cabin while Mr. Miles served her breakfast—a peculiar book for such a man to own.

Dr. Stewart had set a vast wooden chest atop the examination table and was drawing forth bottles of powders and liquids, making marks in a ledger, then returning the bottles to the chest.

“Ye canna be comfortable there, lass,” he said. “ ’Tis no place for a leddy to set. Allou me to have the boys set up a canopy for ye atop where the light’s better and ye can take the fresh air.”

The wooden chair was a torture only less noxious than sight of the sea. “It is quite comfortable, in fact.” She turned a page in Debrett’s New Peerage. “I am quite well.”

“Aye, I can see that.” He smiled as he placed a bottle in its rightful nook in the case.

She bent to her book. All of her former employers had a copy, so she had long since memorized every page. She folded it closed in her lap. “What do you have in your medicine chest there?”

“Cures that a man might need at sea.”

“Two bottles have skulls and crossbones on the labels, I noticed.” Suitable for a pirate captain. But now she was being ridiculous. “What need do you have of poisons?”

“Arsenic, taken in wee doses, aids the nerves. Otherwise ’tis for the rats. ’Tis a powerful poison.”

“Best then that you keep a lock on that chest.” She opened her book again. “With a captain such as yours, passengers mustn’t be given any opportunity for mutiny, must they?”

The doctor chuckled. Bottles clinked.

“He intrigues ye, daena he?”

Her head snapped up. “What?”

A sympathetic twinkle lit the Scot’s eyes. “Ye’d no’ be the first, lass.”

“Doc?” A sailor stood at the door, a young man of no more than seventeen, clutching his cap in his hand. He was the sailor who had not looked at her on deck when she arrived, nor since, as he avoided her gaze now. His hair was filthy, his sun-darkened skin draped over knobby cheeks and hands.

“What do ye need, lad?” The doctor went to him.

The youth’s hollow eyes were fixed on the medicine chest.

“Got me a nasty toothache, Doc.” His accent was English—Cornish—the accent that the Reverend Caulfield had drummed out of Arabella after their four years at the orphanage. Young ladies did not speak like peasants, he had scolded. But he was not naturally a harsh man; only her misbehaviors had roused his irritation. Only her. To him, gentle, studious Eleanor could do no wrong. Always off in the stables or woods, Ravenna had rarely ever come under his notice. Only Arabella with her fiery hair and too-pretty face made him fret.

“Can ye gimme somewhat for it?” the young sailor asked the doctor.

“It may have to come out, lad.”

The sailor clutched his cap over his jaw. “Naw, sir. Me mum said as I’d best come home with all me teeth or I’d best not come home at all.”

“Begging yer mither’s pardon, lad, but if it’s paining ye, it may need to come out or it’ll take the whole bone.”

The youth shook his head. With a last quick glance at the medicine chest, he disappeared.

Dr. Stewart shrugged. “Some dinna know what’s best for them.” He cast her a knowing grin. “Both sailor lads an leddy governesses.”