Almost a Lady Read Free

and rang it. His head moved through a ray of sunshine that caught copper glints in the auburn locks. His hair was a color that Meg, with her own unashamedly red curls, had always envied for its subtlety.
    She leaned back against the bulkhead and scrutinized him with narrowed eyes. She didn’t feel in the least alarmed, which struck her as a lunatic lack of reaction in the circumstances, but at the moment there was nothing remotely threatening about her companion.
    A rotund man opened the door and came into the cabin. He didn’t so much as glance at the figure in the box-bed. “Yes, Captain?”
    “Bring breakfast, Biggins,” the man said. “And coffee . . . or would you prefer tea, ma’am?” He smiled politely at Meg. His eyes were the washed-out blue of a distant horizon.
    “Coffee, thank you,” she said with an enthusiasm that she couldn’t restrain.
    “G’bye . . . G’bye . . .” the macaw spoke from his perch as Biggins departed.
    “Does he have a large vocabulary?” she asked involuntarily.
    “Large enough,” the captain of the
Mary Rose
replied. A slight frown drew his copper eyebrows together. “I was told you hurt your head. How is it?”
    She touched the bump. “A little sore, but nothing serious. Where are my clothes?”
    “You won’t wish to wear them again. They were ruined by mud and water.” He dismissed the issue of her clothes with a wave and a gesture towards the side of the cabin. “You’ll find plenty of replacements in the cupboard in the port bulkhead.”
    “I see,” Meg said, although she didn’t. “And what I’m wearing now . . . ?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “What
are
you wearing?” He sounded genuinely curious.
    Meg closed her eyes on renewed confusion. Maybe some threads of sense would emerge from this tangled conversation. “A nightgown,” she stated. “A most fashionable and elegant garment from what I’ve seen of it.”
    He nodded without apparent surprise. “You were taken to the sick bay; I daresay the surgeon took care of getting you out of your wet clothes while he was seeing to the wound on your head.”
    Well, that solved one little mystery at least, and a surgeon’s intimate attentions were unimpeachable. The ship suddenly swung sharply to the left. Meg grabbed the sides of the box-bed as a cracking sound came from above her head. Her mysterious host didn’t seem to notice the change in movement.
    “What was that?” Meg demanded.
    “A tack to port,” he informed her, sliding off the table as the door opened and the rotund sailor reappeared with a laden tray followed by a lad of about seven, bearing a jug of coffee.
    Meg stayed where she was as the table was laid. The boy cast her a curious, slightly guilty look before hurrying from the cabin, but Biggins kept his attention entirely on his task. When he’d gone, accompanied by a chorus of farewells from Gus, she cast aside the coverlet and edged herself out of the box. The floor swayed beneath her and she grabbed the back of a chair.
    “You’ll get used to it,” her breakfast companion said calmly. He ran an eye over her as she stood beside the table. “Yes, a very elegant garment,” he observed. “How fortunate that it fits you so well . . . I hope you like eggs and bacon.”
    Get used to it?
Meg stared at him for a second, then decided that food would enable her to take charge of this insane situation. Her bemused weakness was entirely to do with hunger. She said nothing but sat down and attacked the full plate before her.
    Her host offered no conversation until she had wiped her plate with a piece of barley bread and taken her last sip of coffee. Meg set down her cup and thought rather self-consciously that she must have presented a sight of pure greed in the face of her companion’s rather more decorous table manners. But then she’d eaten nothing since a light lunch at noon the previous day. The reminder banished self-consciousness as the image of that carriage with its open