Kissing Comfort Page 29

  Comfort’s gaze dropped from Bode’s sly, knowing one to where his thumb passed back and forth across her hand. The gesture was more intimate than she could have imagined. She regretted that Mr. Douglas would return at any moment.

  Bode removed his hand just before the shipmaster stepped into the cabin. Comfort slid hers to her lap and positioned it in the folds of her gown as carefully as a jeweler setting a ruby in a velvet bed.

  The man who followed Mr. Douglas into the room filled the doorway first. He had to duck his head to enter, and Comfort supposed that had he been anything but clean-shaven, he would have had to dip his head even farther. This giant’s skin fairly radiated a blue-black sheen that, by contrast, made the whites of his eyes glow as though lighted from within. For all the strength inherent in his large hands and muscular forearms, he was clearly nervous about making her acquaintance. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and couldn’t quite meet her eye.

  Comfort knew she was at her best when she could make other people feel at ease. It was when she became the very essence of her name. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Henry. I am grateful you would remove yourself from your duties to allow me to thank you.”

  His head bobbed once. “Welcome, Missa DeLong. You very welcome.”

  Comfort was so intrigued by the soft lilt of an accent that what he said to her didn’t immediately register. It was catching the quick exchange of glances between Mr. Douglas and Bode that directed her attention to what was said. “Miss Kennedy,” she corrected him.

  “Ah, yes. Miss Kennedy,” he said, carefully pronouncing her name. “Not Missa DeLong. Forgot.”

  She smiled, but she felt herself flushing. She didn’t dare look away from him. “It’s all right,” she said graciously. “May I ask where you’re from, Mr. Henry? Your accent . . . it’s quite musical, but I can’t make it out.”

  “Tobago.”

  “Oh. You are the first person I’ve ever met from there. And you’re here now. I’m sure there’s a story.”

  “Plenty story, Missa DeLong.” He heard what he said this time and quickly corrected himself. “Sorry. Miss Kennedy. Story is Mista DeLong make me free. Now I cook for him. Now he give me money.” He smiled broadly, without guile. “Maybe he give me more because I please his missa so well.”

  Chuckling, Bode waved him off. “Go on. I don’t know why I thought you wouldn’t seize the opportunity to ask for money. You, Mr. Henry, are as dependable as the tides.”

  Mr. Henry smiled broadly, revealing a gold tooth where his right canine used to be. He nodded at everyone just once before he backed out of the room and closed the door.

  Mr. Douglas held up a second bottle of wine and cocked an eyebrow at Bode. When Bode nodded, he opened it and poured some in each glass.

  Comfort raised her glass but didn’t drink. She rolled the stem between her fingers and watched Bode across the table. “What did Mr. Henry mean when he said you made him free?”

  “I tell him all the time that God made him free, but he’s as persistent along that course as he is in asking for more money.”

  Comfort had no intention of accepting that answer, but before she could prompt Bode, Mr. Douglas helped her out.

  “Mr. Henry was a house slave on a Georgia plantation. The best I’ve been able to get from him is that he was tricked into leaving Tobago for work and good wages in Philadelphia. Or New York. He’s never been clear about where he was supposed to have been going. The men who misled him and a good number of his friends posed as missionaries. They all ended up somewhere in Georgia, probably first coming ashore near Savannah. Mr. DeLong encountered our Mr. Henry during Sherman’s march.”

  Comfort had politely inclined her head to Mr. Douglas while he spoke, but now her attention returned to Bode. She wasn’t used to seeing him looking awkward in his own skin. He was self-conscious and mildly embarrassed, and he clearly wished himself elsewhere. She was charmed.

  “What’s the rest, Bode?”

  He took a swallow of wine. “We made overnight headquarters in a plantation house that the owners fled in advance of our arrival. The slaves were still there. There was no place for them to go. Some were glad to see us. Most were afraid. The ones that didn’t hide helped us. Mr. Henry prepared dinner for the general and his officers that evening, and it fell to me to send the general’s compliments to the cook.”

  He shrugged lightly, a mostly helpless gesture, and shook his head. “I still don’t know what I said to encourage it, but Mr. Henry attached himself to me. When we left the next morning, he came along. The other officers thought it was amusing until I tried to persuade Mr. Henry to stop following, then they were nearly apoplectic that I was going to send away the best cook they’d ever had. Someone, not me, got him to enlist. He was an Army cook until Lee’s surrender, and when I mustered out, he followed me home. I’m not sure he ever had an official discharge, but then not many did at the end.”

  Comfort sipped her wine and regarded him past the crystal curve of her glass. There was still something left unexplained. Bode said that Mr. Henry followed him home, but home, for however briefly, would have been the mansion on Nob Hill. “How is it that he’s working on the Demeter Queen and not in your mother’s kitchen?”

  Bode’s smile was tight and wry. “It seems Alexandra’s abolitionist views hinge on theory, not practice. Not so dissimilar from Leland Stanford’s hypocrisy of publicly denouncing the Chinese immigration when he was governor while employing them by the hundreds to build the Central Pacific. He paid them wages that made them virtual slaves. My mother and Stanford are merely different sides of the same coin.”

  Comfort wished Mr. Douglas were not in the room. She would have asked Bode if his mother’s intolerance for Mr. Henry contributed to Bode’s reasons for not living on Nob Hill.

  Nathan Douglas stroked his beard. “Mr. Henry was allowed to choose the ship he wanted to work on. One of my men had just finished polishing the figurehead. Mr. Henry said she brought his mother to mind. That’s how we got him.”

  Bode and Mr. Douglas finished the second bottle of wine while Comfort allowed her glass to be refilled just once. She didn’t drink most of it, but she wasn’t ready to excuse herself from the conversation. Even when it turned to maritime matters, she hardly cared that she didn’t understand most of it. She was reminded of all the times she sat between Newton and Tucker while they discussed capital, trusts, debt, interest, and amortization. As a child, that conversation quite literally had taken place over her head. When she listened to Bode and Mr. Douglas discussing propeller pitch, bilge pumps, and trailing astern a taffrail log, it was still true, at least in the figurative sense.

  It was only when she saw Mr. Douglas eye his pipe and tobacco tin with something akin to longing that she pleaded exhaustion and asked to be excused. Bode would have accompanied her back to the stateroom, but she insisted that he stay. It wasn’t entirely selfless on her part. She wanted to be by herself while she prepared for bed, and she needed time alone to weigh the benefit to cost ratio of him joining her.

  Comfort was sitting much as she had been earlier when Bode came upon her, wedged in one corner of the window bench with her legs extended in front of her. This time, however, she wore a white cotton shift and sat in a pool of light from an oil lamp while she read. The book lay open in her lap, and she appeared to be making good progress, because it looked as if a quarter of the pages had already been turned.

  She looked up when he didn’t move away from the door once he was inside. He was leaning against it, his hands behind him, not bothered in the least that she caught him out staring. Resisting the urge to fiddle with her hair, she wrinkled her nose at him instead.

  “You brought the captain’s pipe smoke with you,” she said.

  “I’m afraid I did. There’s no way to avoid it short of leaving, and I don’t mind it. My father smoked fat Cuban cigars. Those, I minded.”

  “It’s all right. It’s rather pleasant, a little sweet. I couldn’t have stayed
in the room, though. I’m still finding my sea legs. I hope my departure was not too abrupt and obvious.”

  “No. Not at all.” He pushed away from the door, removed his jacket, and slung it over a chair. “You haven’t mentioned sea legs before. Are you feeling well? Some people take days to accustom themselves to the rolling.”

  “It comes and goes. Mostly it passes quickly.”

  “If you can read, then it passes very quickly. There are passengers who would throw themselves against one of the rails just thinking about it.”

  “Mm.” She was on the point of raising a question, but he started for the washroom and she let it go. He seemed remarkably steady on his feet, so she supposed there hadn’t been a third bottle of wine uncorked in her absence. That was good; she wanted him to have a clear head.

  When Bode emerged, his hair was damp and spiky. He’d removed his vest, collar, and bib. The shirt was open at the throat, and a towel lay around his neck. He held an end in each hand, tugging first one way and then the other.

  “I thought you might be asleep by the time I returned.” He’d been hoping, actually. He was careful not to glance in the direction of the bed. “I suppose we should talk.”

  “It’s why I’m still awake.”

  “Would you like to go first or shall I?”

  “I will. I doubt that anything I’m going to say will surprise you.” She closed the book over her finger. “I don’t think we should share the stateroom any longer. I’m willing to move to another cabin tonight if you like. I’ll pack my trunk again in the morning. It will be no trouble.”

  “You can have the bed,” Bode said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  She hadn’t expected him to acquiesce quite so easily, and she recognized her own contrariness when she was hurt by it. Shaking her head, she pressed on. “No, that’s not good enough. You probably think I don’t trust you, but I don’t trust myself. I’m not confident that you’re far enough away if you’re still in this room. One of us needs to be somewhere else, and since I’ve already proven that I can attach myself to you like a Barbary Coast whore to a sailor with five dollars in his pocket, I think it should be me.”

  It was rare, but not unheard of, for Bode to lose his footing. There had been the stumble during the fight with the Rangers, and later that same evening Comfort had tangled his feet during their waltz. Those recent examples came to mind quickly. There were other occasions, he was certain of it, but none that he could recall when he had been away from shore. He was reliably sure-footed here, always oriented to the wind, his position, and the motion of the ship.

  Except now. Right now he felt as if his sea legs were failing. In his mind, he was lurching for the table. In reality, he only pivoted forty-five degrees and hitched a hip on it.

  “I think you’d better explain that last remark,” he said. He was clutching each end of the towel a little more tightly than before, but his voice carried none of that tension.

  “You were very clear that I wouldn’t allow you to leave me alone.” She put out a hand, staving him off when he would have interrupted. “I know that’s not what you said, but it’s what I heard. And really, comparing me to a limpet and you to a rock flatters you rather more than it does me. I told myself I wouldn’t dwell on it, but I am doing so. So there you have it. I’d like you to arrange for me to be able to sleep somewhere else.”

  Bode nodded slowly. He stopped working the towel back and forth and crossed his arms over his chest instead. “This is really about what Mr. Henry said, isn’t it? He called you Mrs. DeLong.”

  “That’s part of it, but so is the other. I behave differently when I’m around you. Out of character and contrary to the way my uncles raised me. They would be disappointed in me, but no more than I am disappointed in myself.” She set the book aside. “Perhaps if I were Mrs. DeLong . . .” She looked away, embarrassed that she’d said it aloud. It was difficult not to think about it since meeting Mr. Henry.

  “But you are,” Bode said. “It’s why I thought we should talk. Mr. Douglas performed the ceremony as soon as we reached open water.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Comfort was quiet for so long that Bode wasn’t certain she meant to speak at all. When she finally did, he wished the quiet had lasted longer.

  “This changes everything,” she said, preternaturally calm.

  “Yes,” he said. “It does.”

  “You’ll have to leave.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure how I can make it clearer, but let me try again. You must find other accommodations. I’m staying here.”

  “I understood what you said,” Bode told her. “I don’t understand why.”

  “Then perhaps you’re the one who should have been clearer.” She picked up her book, riffled the pages to find her place, and pretended to read. A pretense of reading was all that was possible, because she couldn’t make out a single word for the red haze clouding her vision.

  “Comfort.”

  She ignored him.

  Bode closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. When he opened his eyes again, she hadn’t moved. He wondered if she had breathed. Her concentration was absolute, but it wasn’t on the book. She was committed to ignoring him.

  He dropped his hands to his side, lightly resting them on the table. “Please look at me.” She didn’t, but he saw an almost imperceptible tightening of her fingers on the book and knew she heard him. He didn’t ask her a second time to look at him. He went on as if she had. “Only minutes ago you started to say that if you were Mrs. DeLong . . . How did you mean to finish that sentence? That if you were my wife, things would be different? That you would no longer be disappointed in yourself? That sharing a bed would be right and proper?”

  Bode stretched, reached for his jacket lying over the chair at the head of the table, and dragged it toward him. From an inside pocket, he pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded into thirds. “This is our marriage document. The ceremony was also recorded in the ship’s log. It’s a legal and binding contract between us, but I will destroy it if that’s what you want. I’ll remove the page from the log. I’ll have the witnesses killed.”

  Bode let his offer lie there for a long time, and then, when he was on the verge of speaking again, he decided to let it lie a bit longer. He was rewarded for his patience. Comfort didn’t so much as glance in his direction, but she did speak.

  “How many witnesses?”

  “The entire crew was there.”

  “And you’d have them all killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Henry?”

  “Yes. I might begin with Mr. Henry.”

  “Because he called me Missa DeLong.”

  “That’s right.”

  Comfort closed the book and looked up at him. Her features were gravely set, her dark eyes only luminous when she angled her head and they reflected the light from the lamp. “It wasn’t a new idea, Bode. Mr. Henry merely said it aloud. Can I assume you told everyone not to mention the ceremony?”

  “Yes. This morning, I asked you what you remembered about last night. When I realized you had no recall of anything between leaving the saloon and waking up, I asked Mr. Douglas to tell the men not to say anything.”

  “But you planned to tell me.”

  It would have been hard to mistake her skepticism for anything but what it was. Bode absently turned the marriage paper over his hands. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I already said that. I was going to tell you tonight.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You were hoping I’d be asleep when you returned. You said as much when you came in.”

  Bode couldn’t remember what he’d said, but he had certainly thought it. “If you’d been sleeping, I would have told you in the morning.”

  “Before or after I displayed my limpet-like qualities?”

  “Don’t say that, Comfort.”

  “I didn’t. You did.” She clutch
ed the book hard against her midriff. Bode was eyeing her warily, but she had too much respect for books in general, and Edmond Dantès in particular, to throw it at him. “You are more like your brother than even I suspected.” She saw him flinch and realized she didn’t have to throw the book to hit her target. “That paper you’re holding means nothing, Bode. My engagement to Bram was more real, and it was a sham. At least he had the decency to make the announcement when I was fully conscious. It didn’t seem as if I had any choice except to go along, but I know that’s not true. As unpalatable as it was, I had a choice. You didn’t give me that.” Her short laugh was bitter. “How many men were required to prop me up? Did I speak any vows? Did you?” She held up her left hand and examined it briefly. “There’s no ring. I hadn’t thought it possible for that paper to mean less than nothing, but without a ring, perhaps it does.”

  Bode waited. If she wanted to say more, he would let her. He owed her that. Her hurt was palpable. It came at him in cold, unrelenting waves that he didn’t try to avoid. He let the silence yawn again, until finally, quietly, he said, “There’s a ring.”

  She stared at him blankly. Color receded from her face.

  “You took it off before you went to bed. It’s where you left it. On the shelf above the bed, behind the lamp.” He made no move to get it, and neither did she. “My offer still stands, Comfort.” He held up the document in his hand. “I’ll destroy it. Better yet, I’ll let you destroy it. You can also remove the captain’s log.”

  “And kill the crew? That’s for me to do as well?”

  “If you like.”

  The enormity of it all suddenly overwhelmed her. Comfort thrust the book away and turned her face to the wall. Tears welled. She dashed them with her fingertips, and when that proved inadequate to keep them from spilling over, she used the sleeve of her nightgown to swipe at her cheeks.