“Where is the captain now?” she whispered to Tej.
“At the tavern with his men.”
“Are you certain the ship is unguarded?”
Tej shrugged. “He’s a duke. No one would be foolish enough to board this ship.”
Except for them, clearly.
A half hysterical chuckle rose in her throat. She’d questioned Tej thoroughly, but the boy had been adamant that this was the only way if she wanted to leave Indian shores in short order.
“Won’t those men waiting onboard stop us?” she asked as they crept up the footbridge where two deckhands were waiting.
Tej’s pale teeth glimmered in the gloom. “I told them it was all arranged with the duke earlier and that he gave orders to settle you aboard in the meantime. I also learned that they were hired here for the journey so I convinced them to give up their places.”
Sarani worried the corner of her lip. “And they agreed?”
“They’ll live like kings with what you gave me to pay them,” Tej whispered when the two men in question took their trunks.
Sarani winced. If this recalcitrant captain-duke found out that members of his recently added crew had absconded with a better offer, he’d be furious. He would be even more furious to discover his new, unwanted passengers. But Sarani hoped the ship would be long at sea before that happened. In any case, the amount of money she planned to settle upon him would be enough to convince him not to toss them overboard.
She hoped.
Sarani sucked in a breath, the briny waters of the harbor carrying a hint of salt on the wind. It smelled like rain. Though it was two months shy of the start of the monsoon season, if a cyclone was brewing, they would be stuck here for who knew how long and at the mercy of whoever had murdered her father. She shivered. No, this was the only viable alternative.
Then again, this duke might kill her, too, once he discovered the deception.
Sarani swallowed her fear and hiked her skirts. Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.
The two scruffy-looking men led the three of them down into the hold and deposited them in a cabin the size of a closet. A lumpy bed took up one side, a small chest and a chair the other. The lodgings didn’t matter. She and Asha could sleep together, and she hoped Tej would find a space in a hammock with the rest of the crew.
A frisson of doubt assailed her as she thought of the weapons she’d packed in the base of her bag: a brace of pistols, several daggers, a pair of polished sabers, and her precious kukri blades. All deadly, should she need to use them. And she might. Four months on a ship she had no right to be on and whose captain already sounded like an unforgiving sort.
Goodness, am I doing the right thing?
England was an entire world away, and fitting into life there would be a struggle. But she had no choice.
It was either that or die.
Two
“Storm’s in the winds, Cap’n!”
“All the more reason for us to outrun it, Gideon,” Rhystan said to his quartermaster, standing at the helm while navigating their passage out of the harbor. “And save on coal while we can before we can put into port at St. Helena.”
Gideon bellowed an order to hoist the sails.
“Give a hand with the moorings, Abe,” Rhystan shouted to a nearby deckhand, who nodded and shot down the deck. “Raise the masts. Haul braces and sheets!”
“Aye, Cap’n!”
It didn’t take long for the ship to be underway, the push of the incoming storm just enough to give them an extra boost once the sails were raised. Rhystan stayed on deck, keeping a close eye on the dark horizon. It was more difficult leaving port at night, but he didn’t mind sailing in the darkness.
With the winds from the incoming storm at his back, they would make excellent time. And if they lost wind or ran into trouble, he’d drop the screw propellers. The ship was of a unique engineering design—half sail, half coal-fired steam—and the best of both worlds in terms of speed and function.
The glimmering light of dawn had yet to stretch across the sky, giving shape to the storm that chased their heels. Cyclones were rare but worse than a game of hazard. With any luck, the bad weather would blow past them. Squalls and storms were a necessary evil of being on the sea, and while Rhystan’s ship was built to withstand them, cyclones were not pleasant to endure. Not even for the hardiest of sailors. He would prefer not to encounter one this early in the journey.
They’d been out in the Arabian Sea for several hours before he felt the insistent growl of hunger in his belly. Rhystan scrubbed at his sore eyelids. Visiting the dockside tavern last night hadn’t been the brightest idea, but the crew had deserved a round of drinking and female company before the long trip. While he’d enjoyed a few tumblers of whisky, the latter hadn’t been for him, however.
He’d spent one or two of his younger years in the company of enthusiastic spinsters and widows, but since he’d become duke, sating his desire wasn’t worth the risk of wedlock—especially when those women invariably found out who he was and schemed to become the next Duchess of Embry. Now that was a trap he strove to avoid at all cost. Avoiding women altogether seemed to be a smart bet.
Rhystan scanned the horizon. “Right, Gideon, take the wheel. I’ll head down.”
A man of few words and even fewer expressions, his quartermaster grunted in answer. They’d been part of the original ship’s crew together, and when Rhystan had purchased the Belonging from its previous captain to be the first ship in his shipping fleet, Gideon had chosen to stay on. A mountain of a man with part Turkish origins, Gideon kept to himself. He was a competent sailor, an even better fighter, and he was loyal. But beyond being an orphan and living as a deckhand on the high seas, he never spoke of his past.
That made two of them. Until the dukedom had crashed into his lap, Rhystan hadn’t shared much of his past either. Where they came from did not make them who they were. If it did, he would be a sorry excuse for a man.
All over a woman who jilted him.
Rhystan frowned as he strode across the deck. Ever since he’d thought of Joor and Sarani earlier, he’d been unable to strike either of them from his mind. It’d been a lifetime ago. He’d been but a stripling himself in Joor. A third-born, cocksure, nineteen-year-old son of a duke, determined to make a name for himself and forge his own way.
“The army or the clergy,” his father, the duke, had said on his seventeenth birthday. “Choose.”
With the heir and the spare accounted for, Rhystan had chosen the Royal Navy to be contrary. After the navy, he’d joined the British East India Company because he knew his father wouldn’t approve of any son of his dabbling with the working classes. Though tied to the British Crown, it was a trading company—an unscrupulous one as he’d later discovered—and much too pedestrian for a duke’s son, even the bad egg of the family. He’d toed the line of being disowned until his father had practically ceased to acknowledge his existence.