A Light For My Love (23 page)

"All right," he agreed. "Let's go see what we
can do."

*~*~*

When China opened the door to the carriage
house apartment, a strong medicinal odor was the first thing Jake
noticed. "Jesus, it smells like my old man's house," he
grumbled.

"Oh, that's pennyroyal tea I'm brewing. I'm
hoping we can get Willie to drink some, but when I tried to give
him quinine for the fever, he thrashed around so much it was
impossible." China put the door key back in her pocket and cast an
anxious glance around the rough-walled apartment.

It had the look and smell of a sickroom: the
low yellow light glowing from the single oil lamp on the table, the
pungent scent of the tea, the air clammy from the steaming kettle,
the rank stuffiness of an unwashed, fevered body. And it was hot in
here; China had apparently built a big fire in the corner stove.
Jake could feel the heat radiating from its cast-iron bulk.

She led the way to the bed, where he saw a
tall young man, writhing and mumbling. Jake couldn't understand the
words, but he detected an accent—British, he thought. He could see
what stirred China's compassion. Willie probably was thirteen or
fourteen and big for his age, but besides that, he had an angel's
face—younger than his years, with the unnatural flush of fever.
He'd flung off his blanket in his tossing, exposing a shirtless,
pale upper torso. He was a scrawny kid with a thin chest that
revealed every bone in his rib cage. Jake had seen lots of young
sailors like him, but all of them had come aboard his ships
voluntarily.

"They drugged him, huh?" Jake asked
pensively.

China nodded. She took the soup kettle from
him and set it on the table with her towels. "At
least . . . at least he got away." She leaned
over, feeling Willie's forehead with the back of her fingers. He
jerked away from her touch and went on moaning. She shook her head,
her expression set in worried lines. "But all those hours in the
rain really did him in. He's still blazing like Hades."

Willie suddenly kicked a bare foot from the
covers and Jake grasped the thin ankle to look at it. On the boy's
bony instep was tattooed a pig. An amulet common to sailors, a pig
placed on the foot or the knee was said to protect the wearer from
drowning. Jake turned the foot for China's inspection.

"Unless he needs a charm against drowning in
the well, he's no runaway farm boy. He's a sailor, and it sounds to
me like he's from Birmingham, or maybe Liverpool."

China gestured impatiently at the glass
standing on the bedside table. It was half full of milky liquid.
"That doesn't matter. I need to get this quinine into him, and I
hope some tea." She perched on the edge of the mattress and picked
up the glass, giving the cloudy contents a stir with the spoon that
stood in it. Murmuring soothing encouragement to the fevered young
seaman, she raised his dark, curly head and tried to tip the glass
to his mouth. But with a spontaneous churning of arms and legs, he
pushed her hand away and uttered a graphic epithet that stunned
China, who, although no stranger to marine profanity, thanks to
Cap, understood only part of what he'd said. Water and quinine
soaked her apron front. She licked at the single drop on her lower
lip and scowled at the remarkably bitter taste.

Jake pushed his sleeves up his forearms and
glowered at Willie. "There won't be any more of that," he said. The
frown over his green eyes was all the more ominous in the low
light.

"Jake," China began sternly, sitting upright,
"don't you hurt him. He doesn't know what he's doing, and he's only
a boy."

"I'm not going to hurt him, but he doesn't
need coddling, either. He needs the quinine. He glanced at China.
He's been trained to follow orders."

"Graham, right? That's his last name?"

"Yes, but—"

He leaned over the bed, his thick hair
falling forward, until his mouth was inches from Willie's ear.
"Graham!" he shouted, startling both the patient and his nurse.

The effect was amazing. Willie bolted upright
in the bed. "Sir!" He sounded almost lucid, but his wide brown eyes
stared sightlessly.

"You can't yell at a sick person like that!"
China whispered furiously. Jake silenced her with a look.

"Graham, I'm Captain Chastaine. Cook here
expects you to take this medicine." China was aware that a ship's
cook often doubled as the ship's doctor, but she raised her brows
at her new title. Jake ignored her. "If you disobey, I'll clap your
miserable, sorry hide in irons and lock you in the hold for the
rest of the voyage. Then you and the rats can fight over the ship's
biscuit and water we'll throw down to you. Is that clear?" His
resonant voice was thunderous; it could carry in a gale.

China would have objected again, but even she
was intimidated by Jake's absolute authority. She hated him in that
moment as he stood next to the bed, a bullying, autocratic
tyrant.

"Aye, sir!"

Jake nodded at her, satisfied. "All right,
Cook. Graham will take his medicine now."

China glared at him venomously but said
nothing. She mixed another dose, then pulled Willie back so that
his head leaned against her shoulder while she poured the quinine
into him. He shuddered at the foul taste, then turned his hot
forehead against her neck.

"Mum," he mumbled in a tired youngster's
voice, " 'ave yer come to take me 'ome?"

China clapped a hand over her mouth,
struggling against the abrupt, gasping sob that climbed into her
throat from her heart. He was so young, with no one to watch out
for him or care for him. She put the empty glass back on the table
and stroked his dark curls. Tears stung at her eyelids, but she
kept her face tipped down so that Jake wouldn't see them. She
cleared her aching throat to gain control of her voice.

"Hush, now, Willie," she crooned quietly.
"Just rest so you can get well. I'm
here . . . I'm right here." For an endless
time, she rocked the big child in her arms, his weight growing
heavy against her as he slipped away into the troubled sleep of a
fever patient. She was barely conscious of Jake, who leaned against
the wall on the other side of the bed with his arms crossed over
his chest, watching her.

Finally, his long shadow fell across her and
Willie as he gently lifted the boy's shoulders from her embrace and
eased him back down to the mattress, tucking the blankets around
him. Then he held his hand out to her. She looked at his open palm
extended to her, at the broad white scar that ran the width of it.
Her gaze traveled from his hand up to his face, and she saw concern
in his well-shaped features. The tyrant was gone, but the strength,
the capable leader, remained.

"Come on," he said. "Let's sit at the
table."

She put her hand in his and his fingers
closed around it. She was exhausted, both physically and
emotionally. That was why she gave in to his warm grip, she told
herself, why she allowed him to pull her to her feet and lead her
to the table.

"Damn, it's like a boiler room in here," he
said, and raised the shade to unlock the window next to the table.
He pushed it open a crack, and a breath of clean, cool air brushed
her cheek, carrying the scent of the ocean.

A blue enamel pot sat on top of the stove.
"Is there any coffee in that cupboard?" he asked, pointing to the
cabinet on the wall.

She nodded dully, and he stood and rummaged
through it, finding a can of Chase and Sanborn and two thick white
crockery cups. He went about the business of making coffee with the
kind of careless estimating that only a man would employ. Filling
the pot at the sink, he dumped coffee into the water without
benefit of spoon or measure. He looked into the pot, then shrugged
and shook a little more in before he put it on the stove.

As she watched him, she saw a man who had
centuries of mariners behind him. Not men who'd been taken against
their will to serve on ships with unknown destinations. No, Jake
Chastaine represented the breed of seafarer who had an
understanding of and with the ocean that no land-bound person could
fully grasp. These were the men who became explorers and merchant
captains, sailing the world on waters they thought of as their
mothers, their lovers, their curses.

Taking the seat opposite her, he crossed his
ankle over his knee while they waited for the coffee to boil.
Beyond the window next to them, the night lay in stillness as the
rest of the world found peace in sleep, or wept in despair, or made
love in the dark silence.

China gazed at Willie again; for the time
being, he rested quietly. She brushed at the strands of hair that,
stirred by the faint breeze from the window, had escaped her braid
and were tickling her face.

"God, what must it be like to be so young and
far from home, lost in a foreign country, with only strangers for
company?" Her voice shook slightly with fatigue and the anguish
hovering just within her control.

Jake glanced at the sleeping boy, then back
at China's drawn, anxious face. She seemed very small and thin,
sagging in the chair, and an unwanted flood of compassion washed
over him. He could think of her as beautiful, tempting, or smart,
even haughty and unapproachable, and be certain that it was only
lust he felt stirring. But when he saw her like this, a tired,
courageous fighter, struggling to save this boy's life, the
feelings she kindled sprang from a different kind of ache: they
came from his heart. And that scared him. Too many years lay
between them, too many responsibilities. He had a different life
now than he'd dreamed of at nineteen, when he'd watched her with
frustration and anger.

Even so, he still wondered why she'd taken on
a job like this. She wasn't trying to impress Dalton Williams, that
was clear to him. Her commitment was genuine, her passion one that
he couldn't understand. What happened on those nights when there
was no one to help her? And who would she turn to after he left
with the
Katherine Kirkland
, on a course for the open sea
and a crew that included boys no older than Willie? Suddenly a
suspicion dawned on him, one that might explain all of this.

"China," he murmured.

She lifted her eyes to his. He reached across
the small table to touch her hand where it rested on the painted
wood, then stopped short, leaving a space of six inches between
them. He drummed his fingers once, in sequence; his words
hesitating at the back of his throat.

"What happened to Ryan?"

She looked at him with a mixture of horror
and pain so acute he wished he could call back the question from
the awkward silence where it hung. But it was out now. Her lips
parted, but no words formed.

"Was he shanghaied out of Astoria?" he
prodded gently.

China stared at her lap and raised a shaking
hand to her forehead. She nodded finally, and he closed the gap
between their hands. She didn't pull away, but swallowing hard, she
said, "Four years ago. I never talk about it, Jake, and I'm not
going to now. Please—" she drew a deep, shuddering breath, as
though gathering strength to continue. "Please don't ask me
anything more about that."

"Okay," he agreed softly. He tightened his
hand around her fingers, then released them. "God, China, I really
am sorry."

That was the answer, he realized. The reason
everyone had acted so oddly that first morning at breakfast when he
asked where Ryan was. The reason Willie Graham's troubles struck so
close to China's heart. The reason for a lot of things. Ryan
Sullivan, her little brother, had been stolen by the crimps. Jake
had assumed he'd run away to sea—some boys did. He did some quick
calculating. If Ryan had been gone for four years, he would have
been . . . Christ, he had only been thirteen years old when they
took him. Somehow, that sounded very young when he applied it to
the boy he'd known, not at all the age of a man. No wonder China
was so upset about Willie.

"So many of them," China said at last. "They
take so many." Her own voice sounded like little more than a
strangled whisper to her ears. She felt tears rising again and, try
though she might, she couldn't completely stop them. She dashed a
hand across her eyes and looked away. "I don't usually fall apart
like this. You'll have to excuse me."

When he didn't answer, she chanced a peek at
him. His face was thoughtful as he considered her over the lamp
flame. "Don't apologize. Sometimes

I think that women's hearts are all that save
the world from going to hell, one boy at a time."

China suspected that he wasn't talking about
Ryan, or even Willie, but her thoughts were interrupted when the
coffeepot began to boil over. She rose to pull it off the heat, but
Jake stood and motioned her back to her chair.

"I'll take care of it," he said and went to
retrieve the heavy white cups.

She was content to let him. She was so
heartsore and worn out, and thinking about Ryan only added to the
strain. But she wasn't sorry she'd told him about her brother.
Maybe it would make a difference to Jake now, make him see the
league in a new light. She watched as he piled the cups, the sugar
bowl, and two spoons into his arms. Then using one of her towels as
protection, he grabbed the handle of the coffeepot. It was a luxury
to have someone else take charge, even for a little while; she'd
had the burden of responsibility for so many years.

He laid out a setting in front of her and
poured the coffee. Lifting the cup to her mouth, she took a careful
taste. It was scalding hot, heavy and black, a wicked brew intended
for long nights.

Its taste must have shown on her face. Jake
gave her a rueful look. "You might want to try it with sugar." Then
he continued in the same quiet tone, "Do you remember that woman
you saw me talking with that day outside the druggist's?
Belinda?"