Royal Renegade (13 page)

"We grew up together in Dorset, as a matter of fact. That's a county on the south coast," he explained, "across from Normandy. John loved to sail even then. I didn't so much, but I liked to explore, and we did plenty of that, once I remembered to duck when the boom came across." With this lighthearted remark, the major smiled, recalling some incident, and Tatiana sighed quietly. Michael was so handsome when he smiled, his mouth quirking up to soften the severe plane of his jaw. She rather liked that he was not profligate with those smiles and saved most of them up for her.

She was glad, however, to learn that he had had at least one other friend, for the image she had of him as a lonely orphan boy was too hurtful to contemplate. And that made her like Captain Dryden even more, that he had brighened Michael's boyhood with his sailboats and his explorations. It was with a little worry, then, that she recalled the captain's remark that they might be blown off course. "Will Captain Dryden's superior discipline him for getting off course because of the storm?"

"Oh, we'll make Southhampton in plenty of time. And if he has a superior, I suppose it is I, although I am certain Dryden wouldn't like to think of me that way. In any event, I shan't flog him, you may be sure."

Tatiana was frankly puzzled. "But you said that you are in the cavalry. How can you be the superior of someone in the navy?"

Now it was Devlyn's turn to look confused. "Dryden's not in the navy. I'm the one who commissioned his ship for this voyage, so I am his employer of sorts. The foreign office is paying his confiscatory fee, of course." He regarded her with a bit of amusement. "Did you think he was a navy captain? No, Your Highness. No navy ship is run so well, I assure you—I've been on many. Dryden is a free trader." When she frowned her incomprehension, he added gently, "A smuggler."

"Oh! Oh, I wish you might have told me that before," she exclaimed, her mouth turning down a bit sulkily. "I would have enjoyed the voyage so much more! Do you think Captain Dryden might also be a pirate?"

There he was, laughing again, as the sloop slammed into a wall of water, the hull groaning in protest. "No, I'm afraid such joy is not to be yours. John draws the line when the cutlasses come out."

She tried to hide her disappointment under a knowing shrug. "Are you quite certain? He could be deceiving you."

"I don't think so. It's not as if he's ever taken any trouble to hide his nefarious activities." He inclined his head to the side ironically. "He's something of a hero to Dorsetshire youth, in fact. Even his parents know he's a smuggler."

"And they disapprove?" Tatiana asked in bewilderment, for smuggling seemed a most enviable profession. "Is Mr. Dryden in the navy then?"

"No. And he's not Mr. Dryden. John's father is Mr. Manning. Dryden is an assumed name."

His eyes narrowed with amusement as she clapped her hands, "Oh, famous! I do love assumed names. I've had two, you know. John Dryden. After the poet, I gather."

"Yes, when we were fifteen, we thought it vastly clever to name a smuggler after a poet. It seems singularly foolish now," he added with a slight frown. "But John wanted a surname beginning with D, you understand, and naming an outlaw after the poet-priest John Donne was too outlandish even for us.'

"Why must it begin with D?"

Michael shrugged and didn't answer this eminently sensible question. "But the name change did no good, after all. Everyone on the south coast of England knows that the extraordinary Captain Dryden is really only the ordinary son of an apothecary."

"Apothecary?" Tatiana echoed, feeling very ignorant.

"A chemist. You must have them at the palace; they make up medicines and poultices and mustard plasters."

Michael laughed again when she wrinkled her nose in distaste, and, pleased, she redoubled her efforts to amuse. "How inutterably dull. No wonder Captain Dryden turned to smuggling. Tell me, has he been arrested? What does he smuggle—brandy? Women?"

"You are the only woman he's smuggled, as far as I know, and he only brings in brandy for his friends, I think. No, in the main, he trades in rare antiquities and art treasures. He takes a double risk, for often the originating country is not happy to see its national heritage sold away. But with Bonaparte confiscating so many treasures and sending them to Paris, Dryden can claim to be preserving free access to culture—and believe me, he does claim exactly that. He's rather a sanctimonious smuggler." In the mellow glow of the oil lamp, Michael's eyes took on a roguish gleam that quite captured her heart. "Dryden's like you, a natural rebel, only he is bourgeois enough to try to rationalize his sins."

He shook his head, and Tatiana unconsciously mimicked his action. For the rascal Dryden and the upright Devlyn seemed the most unlikely of friends. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, Michael was more easily held astray than she had suspected.

Head tilted to the side, Michael smiled abstractedly at some boyhood memory. "John was ever one to invent the most plausible excuses, and often enough he persuaded me into some arrant mischief or other. I remember—" He broke off, a bit shamefaced, then added in mock warning, "I am not so easily gulled any longer, so don't be thinking I am in the least in sympathy with lawlessness now."

"Tell me what crimes you and Captain Dryden committed," Tatiana demanded, leaning her elbows on the tabletop. But a rollicking wave threw her back against the seat cushion, and by the time she had righted herself a cabin boy was standing at attention before them.

Too abashed even to glance at the princess, the boy recited, "Major Devlyn, the captain asked me to fetch you. One man broke his arm fixing the rigging, and the captain said"—he screwed up his face as if the words were too painful to impart—"that he supposed even you could be useful as long as you can manage to stay out of the gulf."

Tatiana bridled at this insult, but Michael took it in good part, and suggesting she go back to her cabin, followed the boy up the stairs.

Left alone, Tatiana instantly rejected any thought of returning to her cabin and the prostrate Buntin. Instead, she lurched over to the seat Michael had just deserted and knelt there. The leather was still warm and pliant from his body, and she almost sensed what it might be like to be in such close contact with him. But such thoughts unnerved her, and she focused her attention on the gale blowing outside the porthole.

The porthole glass was lashed by the sleeting rain, but she could see that in the last hour, the sky had gotten ominously dark, although true sunset was still an hour away. Of course, she could see little of the sky, as the ship pitched up and down between swells. The sea rose like a slate gray wall whenever the ship plunged off the crest of a wave. It was almost like falling off a mountain, Tatiana thought with rising excitement. But her experience was lacking something essential—the keening wind, the driving rain, the totality of the storm.

Without a second thought, she gathered up the cloak she'd dropped on the bench and pulled it tight around her. When she opened the hatch at the top of the stairs, the door ripped from her hand and she was nearly flung back by the force of the gale. But even a blast that tore her hair from its pins did not deter her. Clutching the meager shelter of her cloak, she plunged through the murky torrent to her launch boat. There she would be safe from the wind and out of the view of the sailors, who, she knew instinctively, would not want her on deck.

The scene before her she would not have missed, despite the precariousness of her position above the pitching deck. The sailors, well-trained for this sort of emergency, worked together with admirable coolness, even in the whipping wind and rushing darkness. Michael, she was a bit relieved to note, was apparently acquitting himself well, even now lashing a corner of the foresail more securely to the rigging. She could barely hear the shouted orders of Captain Dryden and his first mate above the crashing, but in those clipped phrases she caught the echo of excitement and danger.

How wondrous it was, to be here amidst the wildness of a storm at night, with a capable crew diminishing the hazard to a merely stimulating level. Here, still across the great channel from the English coast, Tatiana felt entirely released from the bondage that had been imposed on her for so long. Something savage and elemental about the storm freed her spirit, and she lifted the tarpaulin to let the wind roughen her face.

But as she leaned out of her refuge, the young cabin boy sped around the deckhouse and caught sight of her. He skidded to a halt in front of her, and on his face dawned the horror that he would have to be the one to report this to the captain. Tatiana jumped to her feet, ready to leap out and assure him that she would vanish below with only them the wiser. She grasped a spike in each hand to lever herself over the side of the launch. Just then a wave crashed into the ship, and the spikes came free of their bolts. The ropes hitched about the spikes unhitched, and the launch, released from its berth, plummeted over the side.

Chapter Nine

In the north of France

"Don't tell me this is like a summer stroll compared to Russia," Devlyn finally remarked through gritted teeth. "I've never been so chilled through." They were picking their way through the rocks and driftwood on a deserted beach, their course occasionally revealed by a bolt of lightning. The torrent had diminished to a steady downpour, and he was becoming accustomed to the sensation of wet wool plastered to his skin. He stopped to look back at the leaden gulf, more placid now that the wind had died down. The Coronale was nowhere to be seen.

This had been, without a doubt, the most miserable hour of his life: the cabin boy's scream, the instant of despair, the mad plunge into the gulf. Nearly as bad were the drenching waves, the excruciating progress toward the elusive shoreline, the smashing of the launch and his bad knee on the rocks, the interminable rain.

Princess Tatiana, uncharacteristically, remained silent, tripping along beside him in her sodden slippers. She was bedraggled, her red hair hanging in damp tendrils about her face, her cloak mud-spattered with strings of seaweed clinging to the hem. "You look," he said with grim satisfaction, "nothing like a princess."

The glance she shot him was both apologetic and angry, but with a princess's haughty dignity, she kept her lips tightly compressed. "At least you aren't clinging to me, shrieking about the thunder," he allowed. "Thank God for small favors."

"We're still alive," she finally said over the roar of the surf and wind. "That's a rather large favor, I'd say."

In that moment that he had thought her lost, he had vowed never to reprove her if only he could see her green eyes alight once more. But the rain was so chill, he could not help himself—so much for solemn oaths. "If we are still alive, and I'm not convinced we are for this is truly my vision of hell, it is none of your doing. Did you think Captain Dryden needed your help to keep the situation in hand?"

She stopped, absently putting a hand on his arm to balance herself, and removed her slipper. Shaking the ruined shoe until a seashell fell out, she murmured a bit defensively, "I've never seen a storm at sea before. It was very exciting. I couldn't stand to stay below, listening to Buntin moan and pray." She added as they began trudging again, "I should not have been in the launch. I didn't realize that the waves would get so high or that the spikes were designed to give with a tug. But I suppose, if we needed to abandon ship, we wouldn't want to fuss with untying a half-dozen knots, would we? I wish I might have known that, however, before I used the spikes to pull me up. I thought they were handrails."

He waited, and finally, awkwardly, she said, "I'm sorry. I endangered both our lives. And though I'm sure you'll regret it forever, I thank you for saving my life."

Devlyn could tell from her halting speech that she was unaccustomed to apology. A princess, he supposed, had little cause to exercise penitence. He accepted this as the best he was likely to get from her, although he would have preferred that she fling herself at his feet and beg for his mercy. "We won't speak of it again," he said grudgingly. He resolved to hold his tongue about it, except to warn her away from other idiotic behavior, which meant, he supposed, that he would be reminding her of it every hour or so.

So to distract himself from his anger, he mused, "You know, when Dryden and I were boys, we often sailed over to France—farther north, though, near Cherbourg. That was before the war—before this war, at any rate. We were at war then too, I suppose, but it was rather a desultory affair. Now I see how hazardous the voyage must have been, two boys in a little homemade boat, but John was always so confident, I went along without much trepidation. It would take us all day to get here, and we'd hole up in one of the caves along the coast, or sometimes sleep in a barn. And here I am, contemplating another night in a Norman barn." The princess's unusual silence was goading him into even more unusual loquacity, but somehow the sound of his own voice centered him, helping him to ignore the cold and rain. "Of course, if we come upon the local constabulary I will most likely be imprisoned, and you, if you are fortunate, will be sent back to Russia."

She cast him a panicky look, whether in contemplation of his potential fate or hers, he didn't know. With bravado she replied, "We can always pretend to be the Lebovs, as you had planned."

"Soaking wet strangers in a rural coastal area? Directly south of Weymouth? No, even the provincials here know about British spies. I could pass myself off as a smuggler, I suppose, but how I would explain you I don't know." Her guilty, frightened expression made him add, "Dryden will meet us in Cotentin, if he can make it back there. Until then, we will just have to play least in sight. This peninsula is home for about an eighth of the French navy, so we must be cautious. Napoleon planned to launch one of his invasions of England from Cherbourg, you know, and I think he still has his dreams." He looked regretfully at the rutted, muddy path leading up to the road. At least the wet sand hadn't sucked so possessively at his sodden boots.