The Paper Marriage. Bronwyn Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      For the first time in years he had gone out and gotten howling drunk. Two and a half days later he’d wakened up in a Newport News flophouse with a fistful of busted knuckles and a head the size of New Zealand, both his pockets and his belly turned wrong-side out.

      Dammit, he wanted her back.

      The Black Swan, not Gloria. God knows, any romantic nonsense had been purged from his heart.

      After four years, the broker was still working on getting his ship back. The new owner, a consortium of dry-land sailors, was intent on playing games with him, their latest demand, relayed by the broker, being a five-percent cut of the captain’s share of the profits for five years and a sale price well above the original purchase price.

      He’d been in the process of negotiating for a two-year split and a lower sale price when all hell had broken loose and he’d found himself with a problem no broker could solve.

      Annie.

      With the tip of his big, booted foot, Matt rocked the cradle Peg had fashioned from a rum barrel and padded with goose down. If Bess didn’t soon come through for him, he was going to have to broaden his search. He could hardly take an infant to sea with him.

      If she’d been a boy, he might have considered it, but she wasn’t. All he had to do was look at Bess to see what that kind of a life would do to a girl. Bossy, meddlesome, conniving, his aunt drank like a man and cursed like a man, and got all huffy when a man did the same thing in her presence.

      He sighed and then he swore. He’d done more of both in the short time since he’d become a surrogate father than in all his thirty-one years put together.

      Yeah, Annie needed a woman. And so, unfortunately, did he. The trouble with a small, insular village was that everyone knew everything that went on. Without a decent whorehouse, a man could get into serious trouble, a tragic lesson they’d all learned the hard way.

      Crank, in his Bible-quoting mode, claimed it was better to marry than to burn, but Matt wasn’t about to commit that particular folly. He was old enough that he could wait until he went to the mainland.

      It wasn’t so easy for a younger man. The first time Luther had ridden in for supplies after the shooting he had come back with his jaw dragging. “Hell sakes, Cap’n, all the girls has disappeared.”

      They hadn’t disappeared, they’d been hidden away, forbidden to associate with the men from Powers Point. Considering what had happened, Matt couldn’t much blame any man for trying to protect his womenfolk, but dammit, Annie wasn’t at fault. She’d come into this world an innocent victim. Matt refused to allow her to suffer for the sins of her parents, if he had to give up the sea forever.

      But it might not come to that. Things were gradually beginning to thaw. The first time Crank had ridden in to lay in a supply of tinned milk, one or two of the older women had offered advice about bringing up a baby’s wind in the middle of her dinner, and using lard to clean her tail instead of lye soap.

      Another woman had offered them the loan of one of her milk goats, but for the most part, the men of Powers Point had been left alone with a task not a one of them was equipped to handle.

      “Bess, you’re going to have to help me with this,” Matt muttered to the cold, damp night. Unable to sleep, he stood on a wooded ridge overlooking the Pamlico Sound, watching the moon sink behind a cloud bank. “God knows, you’re not my idea of a nursemaid, but I don’t know where else to turn.” He didn’t consider it praying, but the same heartfelt sentiment was there.

      Watching a shooting star arc across the sky, he wondered how the death of anything in the universe could be so beautiful. So far he’d seen only the ugliness of death. If he’d been of a mystical turn of mind, he might have taken the shooting star for an omen, but Matt was a realist. Always had been. The second generation of Powers men to have been raised at sea, he’d learned from his father, who had learned from his own father, that a fair wind, a sound ship and a good crew were all a man needed to make his own luck.

      Rose watched as Bess Powers poured two cups of tea, then added a dose of medicinal brandy to her own. She’d been invited for the afternoon to discuss her plans for the future, a future that was beginning to look increasingly dismal.

      She stirred sugar into her tea, which was stronger than she liked, but hot and fortifying. “I should have worked harder on my art and music. Mama warned me I’d live to regret it. The trouble is, I have no sense of rhythm, and as for my watercolors—well, the less said, the better. Bess, how can I even teach a girl to walk properly when I’m apt to trip over my own feet?” Extending her limbs, she gazed dolefully down at her long, narrow kid slippers.

      Bess snorted. “Woman your height would look damned silly with feet no bigger than mine.”

      “Who wants a governess who can’t dance, can’t play the piano, can’t paint and—”

      “I heard from Matt again today. Poor boy, he’s in sad shape. That’s the third letter in two weeks.”

      “Did you know that no one will even consider hiring a woman accountant? I’m smart as a whip when it comes to figures.”

      “Didn’t do poor Gussy much good, did it?”

      Rose looked up quickly, a stricken expression on her face. “I’m afraid not,” she admitted. Given a chance, she might have been able to salvage something, but before she could even go through the accounts, it was already far too late.

      “Sorry, child, you didn’t deserve that.”

      Perhaps she did, but this was no time to pile guilt onto a feeling of inadequacy. If she could just keep her head level, her feet on the ground and her spirits high, she would come through this just fine.

      “I interviewed for a companion’s position yesterday. The pay is barely enough to keep a mouse in cheese, and I’d be expected to sleep in an attic room. The ceiling slopes so that I can’t even stand up, but there’s a lovely view of the garden.”

      “Like I said, poor Matt’s in desperate straits.”

      Rose surrendered gracefully. She had gone on and on about her own slender prospects while Bess listened; it was only fair that she return the favor.

      “You remember I told you about my nephew?”

      Rose knew all about Captain Powers, his land-locked crew and his inherited baby. Bess was a gifted storyteller who never missed an opportunity to practice her art. “Can’t he send off to one of the employment agencies? I’m sure they can find someone suitable, there are so many women looking for respectable work.”

      “And some not so respectable, I shouldn’t wonder. Would you take the job if it was offered?”

      As tempting as it might sound, Rose wasn’t about to leap out of the frying pan into the fire. One thing she’d learned was that she was no good at making quick choices. Another was that positions that sounded lovely on paper weren’t always so lovely in fact.

      Besides, while her heart might ache for any motherless infant, she wasn’t at all certain she wanted to get involved with one of Bess’s relatives. “I haven’t given up. Just because the ideal opening hasn’t presented itself yet, that doesn’t mean something won’t turn up tomorrow.”

      “Thought СКАЧАТЬ