On Stranger Tides Read Free Page B

lavish budget, but I keep thinking about dinner tonight in Kingston. Rare beef, and fresh vegetables, and beer that doesn’t smell like hot pitch.”
    The young woman frowned. “I wish I was permitted meat.”
    Chandagnac shifted his stool a foot or two to the left so that the tall, taut arch of the spanker sail shaded his face from the morning sun. He wanted to be able to see the expressions on the face of this suddenly interesting person. “I’ve noticed that you only seem to eat vegetables;” he said, idly picking up his napkin.
    She nodded. “Nutriments and medicaments—that’s what my physician calls them. He says I have an incipient brain fever as a result of the bad airs at a sort of convent I was going to school at in Scotland. He’s the expert, so I suppose he’s right—though as a matter of fact I felt better, more energetic, before I started following his diet regimen.”
    Chandagnac had snagged up a loop of thread from his napkin and began working on another. “Your physician?” he asked casually, not wanting to say anything to break her cheery mood and change her back into the clumsy, taciturn fellow passenger she’d been during the past month. “Is he the…portly fellow?”
    She laughed. “Poor Leo. Say fat. Say corpulent. Yes, that’s him. Dr. Leo Friend. An awkward man personally, but my father swears there’s no better medical man in the world.”
    Chandagnac looked up from his napkin work. “Have you been avoiding your…medicaments? You seem cheerier today.” Her napkin lay on the table, and he picked it up and began picking at it too.
    â€œWell, yes. Last night I just threw the whole plateful out of my cabin window. I hope that poor sea gull didn’t sample any—it’s nothing but a nasty lot of herbs and weeds Leo grows in abox in his cabin. Then I sneaked across to the galley and had the cook give me some sharp cheese and pickled onions and rum.” She smiled sheepishly. “I was desperate for something with some taste to it.”
    Chandagnac shrugged. “Doesn’t sound bad to me.” He’d drawn three loops of thread out of each of the napkins, puckering the squares of cloth into bell shapes, and now he slipped three fingers of either hand into the loops and made the napkins stand upright and approach each other with a realistic simulation of walking. Then he had one of them bow while the other curtsied, and the two little cloth figures—one of which he’d somehow made to look subtly feminine—danced around the tabletop in complicated whirls and leaps and pirouettes.
    The young woman clapped her hands delightedly, and Chandagnac had the napkins approach her and perform another curtsy and a sweeping Gascon bow before he let them fall from his fingertips.
    â€œThank you, Miss Hurwood,” he said in a master-of-ceremonies voice.
    â€œThank you, Mr. Chandagnac,” she said, “and your energetic napkins, too. But don’t be formal—call me Beth.”
    â€œVery well,” said Chandagnac, “and I’m John.” Already he was regretting the impulse that had prompted him to draw her out—he had no time, nor any real wish, to get involved with a woman again. He thought of dogs he’d seen in city streets, and called to, just to see if they’d wag their tails and come over, and then too often they had been eager to follow him for hours.
    He stood up and gave her a polite smile. “Well,” he said, “I’d better be wandering off now. There are a couple of things I’ve got to be discussing with Captain Chaworth.”
    Actually, now that he thought of it, he might go look for the captain. The
Carmichael
was toiling along smoothly before thewind right now and couldn’t be needing too much supervision, and it would be nice to sit down and have one last beery chat with the captain before disembarking.