The Horsemaster's Daughter Read Free Page B

missing.

    “Dear heaven, Mrs. Calhoun, I’m so sorry,” she said, crossing the room to take the lady’s hands. “I—what did you say his name was?”

    “Ryan. Ryan Michael Calhoun.”

    “What a marvelous coincidence,” Isadora said, hugely pleased to feel a sudden sense of purpose. “You needn’t bother with Mr. Easterbrook at all. I can take you directly to Ryan Calhoun. Tonight, if you wish.”

    “What?”

    “I know exactly where he is, Mrs. Calhoun.”

Two

Now our ship is arrived And anchored in the Sound. We’ll drink a health to the whores That does our ship surround.

    Then into the boat they get And alongside they came. “Waterman, call my husband, For I’m damned if I know his name.”

    —“A Man of War Song” (traditional)

    “W hat did you say your name was, sugar-pie?” Ryan Calhoun asked the woman in his lap. She and the others had arrived in bumboats even before the Silver Swan had moored. The harbor lovelies hadn’t waited for the docking; they did their most brisk business swarming aboard a ship that had dropped anchor after being at sea for months.

    Thus, the Swan had found its berth courtesy of a harried harbor pilot, with a half-dozen bawds accompanying him.

    “Sugar-pie suits me just fine,” she said with a moist-lipped laugh, then fed him a generous gulp of rum from the engraved silver flask he’d bought in Havana.

    He raised no objection when the whore slipped the costly flask into the top of her worsted-silk stocking. Nothing could dampen Ryan’s spirits tonight. Dressed in his favorite lime-green waistcoat—with no shirt underneath—he sat on the high deck of the fastest bark in Boston; his crew reveled wildly as the moon rose over the harbor, and a vast quantity of sweet liquor boiled through his veins. Life for Ryan Calhoun was good indeed.

    “’S’all yours, sugar-pie,” he said agreeably. “’S’all yours.”

    “Aye-aye, skipper,” she said with a giggle.

    He leaned forward so that his face was almost buried in her cleavage. Then he shut his eyes, his gently spinning head echoing the constant motion of the ship at sea, the ship that had been his home for the past nine months. What better life had a man but this? he wondered—a successful voyage, a well-endowed woman encumbered with nothing so inconvenient as a mind of her own, and a bottle of sugary Jamaican rum.

    He breathed deeply of the soft, faintly sweaty flesh. Female musk. There was no more evocative substance the world over. So what if this woman had no name, so what if she was coarse, so what if she stole from him? She possessed the only thing worth having. It would take a better man than Ryan to quibble with Nature herself. Showing unsteady reverence, he kissed one breast, then the other, pressing his mouth into the softness pushed up by an artfully inadequate corset.

    “Ooh, skipper.” Unblushing, she brought one long leg around his midsection. “I came here for more than teasing.”

    He opened his eyes and blinked up into her painted, fleshy face. She had few qualities that properly belonged to a lady but for the shape, the name and that precious essence. He wondered if he was still sober enough to stagger off to his stateroom with her.

    Leaning back in the deck chair, he could see into the gangway leading to the orlop deck. A man and woman in a hammock swayed with a familiar rhythm, the woman’s legs bare to the hams and hanging over the sides of the webbed sling. Another couple slept atop a coil of rope, a bottle cradled between them. Amidships, Chips and Luigi Conti made music with mouth harp and whistle while Journey, the steward, pounded out a rhythm on a skin drum. Dancing couples reeled and laughed, bumping into barrels and crates. Someone had unlatched the hen coop, and a few biddies ran around the deck in hilarious confusion.

    Something distant and sober inside Ryan suddenly came to attention. For once in his misbegotten life, he’d succeeded. And not in a small way,