She set her cup down on the table. Met del Rio’s eyes. “My husband carries many scars,” she said, “as all men who have lived a life like his must do. There are some scars that show, and there are many, many more that he keeps hidden, and when you’ve discovered all of those, then you may try to test me on how well I know my husband. But until that day comes, Captain, I have little time for games.” Her tone was calm, but even she could hear the tremor of her righteous anger running underneath the words. “My husband is a private man, as is his right, and I’ll not take his secrets and expose them for the sake of proving something that his word alone should be the proof of. I’ll not do it. He’s a better man than any I have met in all my life, and if you choose to doubt the truth of our attachment you will have to doubt it, Captain, and be done with it, as I am done with answering your questions. He has told you what we are.”
The captain’s dark eyes slowly warmed with admiration. Gently he said, “And now you have told me also. Thank you, Mrs. Symonds.”
* * *
There were no more questions. No more tests.
They did not meet the dreaded Barbary corsairs, but on the second night the winds had changed and so the ship was held there wind-bound for above a week, with little they could do but find new ways to pass the hours and days, though Mary did not mind.
She found she liked this woman she had chosen now to be—this Mary Dundas, who had traveled and seen trouble and been changed by it; who had no longer any need to feign or borrow confidence but only sprinkle water on her own and pull the weeds that had been choking it and watch it grow each day a little more towards the sun. One evening at the captain’s table Mr. Thomson prompted Mary to retell one of her tales of the Chevalier de Vilbray, which she obliged him with, and then she offered, “Shall I tell a new tale? One entirely imaginary?”
And del Rio had thought this a splendid entertainment. “But the hero,” he had said, “must be a pirate hunter.”
“Quite the best of pirate hunters,” Mary had agreed.
“And you must name him…” He’d paused a moment in pretended thought, his dark eyes smiling in his very handsome face.
Mary had played along. “Marcos María del Rio Cuerda?”
“An excellent name,” he had told her, and settled back into his chair with his wine cup in hand while she’d started her story.
So that had been woven then into the pattern of all of their days on the ship, and each evening she’d told a new part of the tale of brave Captain del Rio outwitting corsairs and a Genoese bank and the whole British navy. The captain had greatly enjoyed this, except on the one night she’d tried to end one of his many romantic adventures in tragedy.
“No,” said the captain, “he never would leave the condesa like that. You must make a new ending.”
Mary had found that amusing. “What, just like that?”
“Why not? You are the one who is telling the story, the ending is yours to choose.”
“I choose the sad ending.”
“No one,” the captain had told her, with certainty, “would choose to leave the condesa. She’s very appealing. Now, tell that part over again, but this time let the captain find someone to cure her incurable fever. It will be much better this way.”
She had done as he’d asked.
“But,” she’d said to Hugh later that evening, while she’d played with Frisque in the cabin, “it really was better the first time I told it.”
He hadn’t replied. He’d been sitting at one of the chairs of their small table, with all three candles together before him, head bent above some little nautical instrument he’d found the day before that was not working. She’d looked at the gleam of the brass pieces held in his hands, and the small parts scattered over the top of the table, and she’d asked for interest’s sake, “Would you have chosen to stay with the countess?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She fainted too much.”
“So you like a strong woman, then?”
He had glanced up very briefly, then down again. “Aye.”
And that glance had made Mary feel warm inside.
They had not touched since the night he had kissed her. He’d kept to his side of the cabin, and stepped out when needed to give her the privacy that she required, and behaved in all ways like an honorable man. But there were times she wished…well, she wished…
He’d distracted her thoughts by beginning to fit the brass pieces together again, turning screws with the point of his small knife and assembling the instrument till it was all as it ought to be, tidy and whole in his capable fingers. He’d set it down neatly upon the scarred wood of the table.
She’d said, “I would ask you a question.”
“Now, there’s a surprise.”
“How do you go from that,” she had said, nodding towards the small instrument, “fixing things, making things work, to—”
He’d finished the thought for her. “Killing them?”
“Yes.”
In the light of the candles she’d watched his mouth twist in the ghost of a smile, deep with bitterness. She had expected his words to be bitter as well, but instead she had heard resignation in his level voice as he’d answered her, low, “Step by step.”
She had thought about that. “But surely, if you marked the steps as you made them, you could then turn round and retrace them and find your way back to the place you began,” she had reasoned. “Like taking the road that you left by, and letting it lead you back home.”