Beyond Sunrise (28 page)

Chapter Thirty-six

Alex Preston stood on the moonlit crescent of sand before the dead village. The surf beating against the offshore reef filled the air with a distant thundering roar and the scent of the sea. He kept trying not to stare at the wreck of the
Lady Juliana,
its black hulk grounded in white foam. Then he realized he was looking at it again, and jerked his gaze away to where Jack Ryder's daughter sat on the hard-packed sand at the lagoon's edge.

He found he was glad she was still alive. He couldn't have said why it should have mattered to him, but he thought it had something to do with that painstakingly carved slab of granite behind the deserted chapel. And then he realized the girl was returning his regard with a steady stare of her own.

"You're a British naval officer," she said.

Alex cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Yes."

"My father used to be in the navy." Her English surprised him. He supposed she'd picked it up from that old salt Toby Jenkins. But he thought she must have made a special effort to learn this language of her father. And it struck him suddenly as unutterably tragic, that she should have found her father again now, only to be losing him.

Alex let his head fall back, his gaze raking the bluff above the village. He'd managed to alert the
Barracuda
and make it back here with the captain and a dozen seamen in time to see the old jolly boat putting into shore. Alex had expected Captain Granger to order the men to rush the beach at once, but he hadn't. He'd held them back, watching and listening while Jack Ryder and India McKnight set off through the rain forest. Then he'd ordered Alex to secure the men on the beach while Simon Granger himself followed Ryder, with just two able seamen at his back.

The arrangement made Alex uncomfortable. He couldn't get it out of his head that the captain was allowing his past friendship with Jack Ryder to interfere with the performance of his duties. Alex kept thinking about what would happen to his career if Simon Granger let Jack Ryder slip away from them again. What his family would say if Alex let them down. He felt the weight of their expectations, the urgency of his future, weighing heavily upon him. The captain had specifically ordered Alex to stay here on the beach with the men, and yet...

"Nash," said Alex, coming to a painful, heart-thumping decision.

Nash snapped to instant attention. "Yes, sir?"

"Take charge of the men here."

Nash blinked. "Yes, sir."

The path through the rain forest was easy to follow. Alex took it at a dogtrot, not slowing his pace until the trail began to climb steeply, his boots slipping in the damp soil, his hands scrabbling for fistfuls of fern and twisted roots. He kept running over and over in his head what he was going to say to Simon Granger, how he could possibly explain his blatant disregard of a direct order, but he couldn't come up with anything that didn't sound feeble even to his own ears.

At a curve in the trail, Alex hesitated, his breath soughing in and out of his throat, his stomach roiling with a growing awareness of the arrogance of what he was doing and its hideous consequences if he was wrong. Swallowing hard, he stared up at the dark bulk of the point, then back at the distant curve of the bay below. He was within a breath of turning back when an unexplained sound brought his head around, and he saw the outline of a seaman's cap dark against the starlit sky.

"What are you doing here?" Alex demanded, climbing up to where the men, lolling at their ease, suddenly jerked to attention at the sight of him. "Where is Captain Granger?"

"He went on up t' the point, sir," said the younger of the two men, his eyes so wide Alex could see the whites glowing in the dark. "He told us to wait here."

Alex knew an instant of sweet, selfishly-based gratification, followed quickly by a surge of angry indignation. He didn't stop to think about exactly how he intended to keep Simon Granger from helping his old friend. He only knew that the man responsible for that dark, wave-washed wreck beside the passage was not going to leave this island a free man.

Not a second time.

India felt the warm sea breeze flutter a loose lock of hair across her cheek. The gun barrel was cold and hard against her skin, Simon Granger's grip on her upper arm brutal enough that she had to bite her lip to keep from gasping with pain. With pain, and fear, and a deep, abiding sense of foreboding.

"So Toby Jenkins found the ship's log and charts, after all," she heard Granger say. "Who'd have thought it?"

Jack paused in a pool of moonlight just outside the cave's entrance, the oilskin packet gripped in one hand. "Let her go, Simon."

Simon shook his head. "In a moment. As soon as you toss that packet over the cliff."

"No."
India bucked against the Englishman's grip, then went utterly still as the rasp of the revolver's hammer being cocked sounded loud beside her ear. She was trembling all over, her voice cracking as she said, "Don't do it, Jack. Don't."

The gun barrel shifted against India's temple, scoring the skin hard enough that she
couldn't
quite stop herself from sucking in her breath in a quick hiss. "You know I'm not bluffing, Jack," said Simon. "Throw it. Now."

Jack stood motionless, and it seemed to India as if for one suspended instant the wind ceased sighing through the swaying grass and the surf went silent while the world waited with a breath-held intensity. Then his arm moved, his hand opening to fling the oilskin-wrapped package in an arc that carried it over the edge of the precipice and into oblivion. She heard a succession of
soft
thuds as it bounced from rock to rock, a clattering of loose sliding stones. Then all was silent again except for the wind and the distant thunder of the surf.

"But why?" said India, her heart aching as if it were being squeezed by a fist. "Why?"

"Why?" Jack stood with his hands hanging empty at his sides. A strange smile curled his lips. "I suppose because Gladstone never did change his orders, did he, Simon?"

The man holding India said nothing, although she felt his chest lift with a sharp intake of breath.

It was Jack who spoke. "I remember how after I warned him the
Lady Juliana
was cutting too close to the
eastern
isle, Gladstone turned and asked what you thought, if you believed me. And you said no."

"There was no reason to believe you." Granger's fingers were digging into India's arm, the hand holding the pistol to her forehead clenching the handle so tightly it was quivering. "You'd just spent the last hour raging like some kind of a madman, swearing you'd see us all dead."

"But Gladstone did believe me," Jack said softly. "He told you to order the helmsman to cut in close to the western isle. Only, you thought you were right, that I was determined to kill you all. And so you didn't relay the order."

"Gladstone believed you because he didn't know. He didn't know you were planning to come back to this island to live. He didn't know how you felt about the natives we killed, about that girl. He didn't know
you—
what you're capable of. But I knew you, Jack. I knew you."

A quiver of some emotion contorted Jack's face, something India thought might have been an echo of horror, and an old, old guilt. "I won't deny I thought about it. I thought about keeping my mouth shut and letting the
Lady Juliana
rip out her guts on that reef. I thought about it, but in the end I couldn't do it."

"Damn you." A strange, contorted sound slipped from a painful place deep inside Simon Granger's chest. "Damn you all to hell, Jack. How was I to know? How was I to know you'd changed your mind?" The fist pressing the gun to India's temple wavered, as if that awful sound had come from the tearing loose of something inside him, something he'd held in tightly for ten long years.

"So what are you planning to do now, Simon? Kill me?"

Simon's throat bunched as he swallowed hard. "My orders are to take you in to be hanged."

Jack's head lifted, the moonlight limning his cheeks as a ghost of a smile tightened the skin beside his eyes. "And if I tell them what really happened?"

"Tell your tale to the Admiralty, if you wish. No one will believe you."

India pressed her lips together, holding back a useless, angry outburst. Because what he said was true. No one would take the word of a renegade against a British naval captain. A hero. With Gladstone and the helmsman both dead, there was no one left alive to say what had really happened on that awful day ten years ago. No one except Jack, and Simon Granger.

"And Miss McKnight?" Jack's gaze met hers. India stared deep into his dark, intense eyes, and knew what she had to do. "She knows the truth."

The man holding her shrugged, his grip on India's arm slackening. "After what she's done, do you think anyone will believe her? She'll be lucky if she doesn't hang with you."

Bending double at the waist, suddenly, quickly, India jerked her right arm out of Simon Granger's grasp and lunged away from him. The maneuver caught him by surprise. He turned, reaching for her, just as Jack grabbed one of the skulls off a ledge at the cave's entrance and brought it smashing down on the back of Simon's head.

He staggered, his grip on the pistol in his hand tightening as he turned. Jack's foot flashed out. The revolver flew through the air, and the night exploded with noise and fire and the raw smell of sulfur.

Chapter Thirty-seven

A deadly whisper rushed past India's cheek. She heard the clatter of metal striking rock, and the pistol disappeared into the darkness, leaving only drifts of light gray smoke and the smell of burnt gunpowder.

Simon Granger swung to face Jack and caught a boot in the stomach as Jack kicked out a second time. The Englishman went down hard on his back in the rock-strewn grass, the breath leaving his chest in an abrupt
wouff.
For an instant he simply lay there, sucking in air. He was curling up on his elbows when Jack threw himself on him.

Granger's foot came out, catching Jack's fall, his hands grasping folds of Jack's shirt and using Jack's own momentum to send him tumbling in a flip over Simon's head. This time the grunt was from Jack.

Dropping to her hands and knees, India scrambled about in the darkness, her eyes squinting against the night, her hands brushing over rough stones and dried leaves as she searched frantically for the revolver. Then the sound of flesh smacking against stone brought her head up, and she saw that the two men were now grappling with each other on the ground, rolling over and over in the windblown grass, dangerously close to the cliff's edge.

"You sonofabitch," Jack hissed as Granger's big-boned, rangy body pinned him to the ground. "All these years, you let me take the blame for something you did."

"You think you're innocent?" Simon's breath came in a hoarse, wheezing effort, his hands closing around Jack's throat. "You lost sight of where your loyalties belonged, Jack. That's why the
Lady Juliana
ended up on that reef. Because of you."

"No. I tried to save her." Bringing up both hands, he chopped outward at Simon's elbows, breaking Simon's hold and heaving up with a groaning push that flung Simon sideways.

There was a rush of falling stones, bouncing and rattling as the ground gave way beneath the Englishman and he slid backward, his legs and lower torso shooting out into a dark void, his fingers scratching frantically through the grass for a handhold.

"Jesus, Simon." Jack dropped to his stomach at the edge of the precipice, his hand stretched out. "Grab my hand."

Simon's big fingers closed hard around Jack's wrist, his weight dragging Jack forward until Jack's head and shoulders hung over the edge of the bluff.

"Jack!" India screamed, pushing up, running.

"Try to climb back up," Jack said, his other hand wrapping around Simon's, gripping him hard, the toes of his boots digging into the soft earth.

Simon's voice was a tight thread, his feet kicking in space, his fingers showing white where they dug into Jack's wrist. "I can't."

"Yes you can."

"No. I'm going." Something flashed in the Englishman's eyes, something cold and lethal. "I should have died here ten years ago. We both deserved to die... along with all those men."

With a welling of terror, India realized that Simon Granger had quit trying to heave himself up. He was using all of his weight, instead, to drag Jack over the edge with him.

Jack's shoulders heaved, his breath coming in rasping gasps as he strained determinedly, uselessly, to pull his old friend to safety. Loose stones rolled, bouncing into the darkness as Jack slid slowly, inexorably out over the edge.

"You stupid bastard," Jack said, his breath wheezing out through gritted teeth. "Don't do this."

Simon's lips peeled away from his teeth in an eerie rictus of a smile. "Come on, Jack. Come die with me."

A curious sound, like a haunted, mewling cry, escaped from India's lips before she could stop it. She thought about throwing herself on Jack's legs, adding her weight to his, but she knew it wouldn't be enough.

She spun about, stumbling over a half-buried stone as she lurched toward the cave's entrance. In the soft moonlight, a row of skulls gleamed white and ethereal. Her hands closed around the first one and she swung about in a running rush to lob it as hard as she could at Simon Granger's upturned face.

She heard the dull thud of its impact, bone striking bone. Heard Simon's startled grunt, then a long, thin scream as he lost his grip on Jack's wrist and tumbled backward into space.

"Oh my God," India whispered, as the ancient skull clattered and bounced down the cliff face.

Scrambling to his feet, Jack caught her in his arms and swung her about to clutch her to him. She grabbed fistfuls of his shirt, holding him close. Their chests shuddered together, their breath coming hard and fast.

"I thought I'd lost you," she said, rubbing her cheek against his, over and over again. "Oh, God. I thought I'd lost you."

An odd, wistful smile lit his eyes. "I thought you didn't want me."

She shook her head, her throat so tight it hurt. "I never said I didn't want you." Tears welled up in her eyes, turning the moon and the distant white-curled surf and the looming mass of the bluff into indistinct blurs of darkness and light. And then she saw a shadow of movement, and knew she was looking at the outline of a man, silhouetted against the starry sky. "Jack," she said, her voice a low warning.

But he was already turning, his body tensing as a young officer with dark hair and a tightly set face held out a pistol gripped shakily in both hands and said, "Don't move."

Alex Preston had never believed in shades of gray. He believed there was right, and then there was wrong, and the line between the two was as clearly drawn and unmistakable as the line between those who were good and those who were evil.

Now he stood on a moon-bathed bluff at the darkened edge of nowhere, and felt as if the earth were shifting beneath his feet, as if the sea-scented wind were ripping him apart, tearing him open and leaving him bleeding.

He gripped his pistol tighter, his jaw clenching as he concentrated all his being on keeping the barrel from wavering.

"I think you must have been there a while," said the man before him, this man Alex had thought a traitor to his own kind. The personification of evil.

Alex swallowed hard, trying to clear his throat of the obstruction that seemed to have lodged there. And still his voice sounded like a hoarse frog's. "Long enough."

Long enough that he had simply watched the two men fight, because he somehow couldn't figure out which one he should be making a move to help. Long enough that his world had come unstrung, cut loose, adrift.

"Simon Granger would never have dreamt of deliberately wrecking that ship," Alex said, because it seemed an important point to make. "But you did. You thought about it. You said so yourself. You said you almost did it."

"Yes." Jack Ryder stood with his back to the black void of space, India McKnight silent and white-faced at his side. Alex was keeping an eye on her, too. The woman was dangerous—not what a woman should be at all. "I thought about it," Ryder said. "But in the end, I didn't do it."

"But you could have. And if you had been deliberately steering that ship onto the reef, then what Simon Granger did would have saved the lives of hundreds of men."

"But he was wrong. He disobeyed a direct order, and those men died."

Alex felt a slow heat crawl up his body. By leaving the beach and following Captain Granger up here, to the bluff, Alex, too, had disobeyed orders. And he had been more wrong in his thinking than he could ever have imagined might be possible. He'd been wrong, and yet, somehow, he'd ended up doing right, which struck him as both ironic and unjust.

And it occurred to him that while it was true that in trying to save the
Lady Juliana
Simon Granger had been doing what he believed was right, that didn't excuse what he'd done afterward. By refusing to own up to his mistake and letting Jack Ryder bear the burden of his guilt for ten long years, Simon Granger had committed a terrible wrong. A wrong that must have eaten away at some place deep and secret inside of him.

It was India McKnight who spoke, her gaze leveled hard and fierce on Alex's face. "What do you intend to do?"

Alex's chest jerked on a quick, desperate breath. "Our orders are to take Jack Ryder back to London."

He tightened his grip on his pistol, hunkering down in preparation for flying skulls and all manner of other unorthodox and uncivilized deportments. Instead, Jack Ryder let out a long, weary sigh, and said, "All right. But I'll go willingly. There's no need for chains."

"What?"
India McKnight swung to face him, her eyes wide with fear. "You can't. They'll hang you."

Ryder shook his head. "I'm through hiding." Gripping her by the arms, he met her gaze with a fierce intensity that had Alex looking away in some discomfort. "I'm not going to spend the rest of my life watching the horizon. Worrying about what the next tide might be bringing."

"But... they won't believe you." Her voice cracked. "You have no proof."

"He has me," said Alex simply.

Jack Ryder's head swung around, his eyes narrowing as Alex met his gaze. "Simon Granger was a popular man. A hero. It'll ruin your career, being known as the officer responsible for dragging his name through the dirt."

Alex eased the hammer back on his pistol and let it fall to his side. There might be shades of gray, he knew. But not here, and not now. "Maybe," he said, his heart heavy in his chest. "But it's the right thing to do."

Dawn spilled a rich orange glow across the sky, bathing the calm waters of the lagoon with color and touching the jagged volcanic peak above with gold. The surf lapped at Jack's feet, a gentle sloshing that was only an echo of the violent cannonade hitting the fringing outer reef. He turned his head, his eyes narrowing against the growing light as he stared at what was left of the
Lady Juliana.

It was hard now to remember the man he'd been on that day, ten years ago. He could remember the hollow despair of his grief, and the burning depths of his rage, but he couldn't remember the man he had been before his soul had been scoured by that quick succession of linked tragedies. A part of him had died on that reef, he realized, just as a part of Simon Granger had died. It hurt, thinking about Simon, thinking about what the decisions he'd made that day had done to him. Jack kept remembering the way they had been before, and that awful moment on the edge of the bluff when they had both confronted what they had become.

It occurred to him suddenly that he could again see quite clearly, the dark, wave-washed outline of the wreck undistorted by the jagged flashes of light that had almost blinded him last night. At some point his headache had left him, and he hadn't even noticed it. He sucked the fresh sea air deep into his lungs and drew it all in, the boundless horizons and the tangy green scent of the island and the haunting cry of the gull wheeling overhead, its outstretched wings lit by the golden brushstrokes of the rising sun. He felt suddenly, oddly, lighthearted and free. Which was ironic, given that he was about to be taken into custody.

India's hand slipped through the crook of his arm, and he turned to her. Her fine gray eyes were huge, her face held stiff, as if she was trying very hard not to cry. "I'm so afraid, Jack," she said, and because he knew her now, knew her well, he knew how much it cost her to make that admission.

He cradled her face in his palms. "It'll be all right. I'll come back. I promise."

She wrapped her hands around his wrists and gripped him tight. "You can't promise that."

He rubbed his lips against her forehead. "As long as there's life within me, I'll be back. I can promise that."

Tears welled in her eyes. She squeezed them shut and pressed her face to his so that he wouldn't see. "I should be there with you," she said, her voice a torn whisper. She'd said she wanted to come with him, to sail back to England with him. But as the
Barracuda's
acting captain, Alex Preston had balked at the idea of allowing a woman on board.

Jack brought up one hand to touch her hair. "You need to finish your book."

"I don't care about my bloody book." He smiled. "Yes you do."

"I could follow you." She glanced over to where Ulani sat on a tumble of rocks near the base of the bluff, her gaze on the
Barracuda,
riding now at anchor just off the beach, her decks alive with seamen preparing to set sail. "We could both follow you."

He shook his head. "It would take weeks. We could pass each other on the way and never even know it." He let his knuckles trail down the long line of her neck. He couldn't seem to stop touching her, her face, her hair. Couldn't seem to stop himself from asking the one question he probably didn't want to hear the answer to. "And when I come back? Then what? Will you marry me?"

She pressed her fingertips to his lips, stopping him. "Don't ask me that. Not now."

"Why? In case you commit yourself to something you afterward regret?"

"Jack—"

She reached out to him, but he was already swinging away, the sand crunching beneath his boots as he crossed the beach to where his daughter sat a distance apart, her head bent over something she cradled in her lap.

He paused awkwardly beside her, his gaze on the top of her bowed head. He could see the part that showed so white against the dark of her hair, and the delicate, vulnerable arch of her neck. He wanted desperately to touch her. Instead, he curled his hands into fists at his sides, and said, "Do you understand what's happening?"

Her head fell back and she looked up at him, the blue eyes that were so much like his own narrowing. "What do you think? That because I'm half Polynesian, and eleven years old, I'm stupid?"

Jack sighed. He seemed to be saying all the wrong things to the women in his life. "You know I have no choice but to go?"

"Yes."

"You know I'll be back, if I can?" She blinked. "No."

At least she was being honest. He let his gaze drift around the lagoon. In the clear morning light it looked like an emerald, set in ivory. "I suppose I haven't given you much reason to believe me," he said, and the truth of his words was like an ache in his heart. "But I will be back. If they don't hang me."

He brought his gaze to her face, to find her staring at him, her eyes dark and solemn. "You might want to take this," she said, and thrust something out at him.