The Maiden's Abduction. Juliet Landon

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      The last words merged into the kiss that he had tried, without success, to delay, and Isolde had neither the time nor the will to withhold her co-operation, as she had sworn to do. Even in half-sleep, the nagging voice returned with its doubts, forcing her to declare them. ‘I don’t want to go to Flanders,’ she whispered, settling once more into his arms. It was all she could think of.

      ‘Then go to sleep, maid,’ he murmured.

      ‘Ships do not turn round easily in mid-ocean,’ Silas laughingly told her the next morning. ‘They’re not like horses. They’re not even like rowing boats.’

      Isolde had not seriously thought they were, but daytime resistance was obviously going to be more potent than any other, and he must not be allowed to think for one moment that he was going to get away lightly with this flagrant piracy, for that was what it was.

      Mistress Cecily, recovered enough to sit in a corner of the deck and sip some weak ale, was even less amused by the idea of Flanders than Isolde was, but then, her sense of the absurd was presently at a low ebb, her only real concern being to place her two feet on dry land any time within the next half-hour. Which bit of land was of no immediate consequence as long as it stood still.

      For Isolde’s sake, she tried to take an interest, but this was predictably negative. ‘They’ll not speak our language, love. How shall we make ourselves understood? And what’s your father going to say? And Master Fryde? There’ll be such a to-do. We should never have…urgh!’

      There was one thing guaranteed to halt the miseries of conjecture, albeit a drastic one, but there was something in what she said, even so. What was her father going to say?