The Paper Marriage

Crank swore. A ship’s cook by trade, he had better things to do, but like the rest, he valiantly stood his watch.

Could the captain do any less?

Resigned to his fate, Matt poured water from the kettle into a basin, dropped in a bar of lye soap and prepared to do his duty.

Some thirty minutes later, his sleeves and the front of his shirt soaked, he stood back and admired his handiwork. “There now, you’re all squared away, mate. You know, you’re not all that homely with your mouth shut.”

The infant gazed up at him, her large blue eyes slightly unfocused. She was bald as an egg, but at least she had some heft to her now. She’d been little more than skin and bones when he’d inherited her, but these last few weeks, thanks largely to Crank’s efforts, she had begun to flesh out.

“Yeah, you heard me right,” he murmured softly in a voice that none of his men would have recognized. The cords of tension that recently had tightened his shoulders until he could scarce turn his head from east to west were beginning to ease off now that he was getting used to handling something this fragile.

Luther poked his head into the room, his beardless cheeks reddened by the cold northwest wind. He’d been out fishing the net, dressing the catch and salting down those fish not needed for the day’s meals. “Let me clean up first and I’ll stand the next watch. Think she’ll be sleeping by then?”

“More likely she’ll be squalling again.”

Because his grandfather had been one of them, Matt had been guardedly accepted by the villagers when, along with the two youngest and the two eldest members of his crew, he had returned to Powers Point, the land his grandfather had purchased soon after he’d sold his ship and retired. After standing empty for years, most of the buildings had been storm-damaged, a few of them washed clean away, but the main house was still sound. With the help of Peg, his ship’s carpenter, and a few of the local builders, they had brought it up to standard, adding on whatever rooms were deemed necessary.

In Matt’s estimation, it was as fine a place as any man could want, still he counted the days until he could leave. Crank and Peg would stay on as caretakers once he got his ship back. Neither of them was young or nimble enough to return to their old way of life.

The five men had quickly settled into a comfortable routine, fishing, repairing the outbuildings, working with the half-wild horses they’d bought on the mainland and had shipped across the sound—riding into the village for supplies or to meet the mail-boat.

Billy and Luther had quickly made friends, especially among the young women. The first few times they’d ridden south, Matt had cautioned them as a matter of course against drinking, gambling, fighting and fornicating. “A village like this is different from a port city. If either one of you oversteps the boundaries here, we’ll all pay the price.”

“I ain’t heard no complaints, have you, Lute?” Billy had grinned in the infectious way that had made him a favorite of all, male and female, young and old. Remembering what it had been like to be young and full of juice, Matt hadn’t kept too tight a line on them.

Now Billy was lying under six feet of sand.

Not a one of them doubted he’d done what he’d been accused of doing. Luther had as much as admitted he’d suspected what was going on. Evidently, half the village had suspected, but as the woman in question was from away and her much older husband had a reputation for meanness, they had chosen to mind their own affairs.

Hearing the sound of Peg’s hammer as he nailed another rafter in place, Matt slowly shook his head. Using wrack collected along the shore, the old man had insisted on building another room for Annie, as if they didn’t have rooms going unused in the old two-story frame house.

But then, it made as much sense as Luther’s wanting to buy and train a pony for her, and her not even two months old. Crank had even mentioned getting her a puppy.

It amused Matt to watch his crew vie for Annie’s favor. If she preferred one over the other, she didn’t let on. Bess could sort it all out, if she ever showed up. He had lost his temper and called her a meddling old busybody the last time she’d poked her nose into his personal affairs, but sooner or later she’d be back. Out of curiosity, if nothing else. And once she was here, he could concentrate all his efforts on regaining his ship.

His ship…

Looking back, Matt marveled at the depths of stupidity to which an otherwise intelligent man could sink. Four years ago, at the behest of an old friend of his father’s, he’d reluctantly agreed to attend a ball being held to raise funds for the Old Seamen’s Retirement Home.

It was there that he’d met Gloria Timmons, daughter of one of the sponsors. She had stood in the receiving line looking like one of those Christmas-tree angels, all white and gold and sparkling.

A large man, used to towering over all women and most men, Matt had been flat-out terror-stricken when she’d placed her small, soft hand in his, gazed up at him with eyes the color of a summer sky, and fanned her eyelashes. With his free hand he’d tugged at his collar. He’d had to clear his throat several times, and she must’ve felt sorry for him because she’d given him a smile that would melt a cannonball.

Matt could readily hold his own in the company of men, but he was a fish out of water when it came to women. The truth was, he’d never really trusted one, not since his mother had decided she’d rather live ashore than aboard her husband’s ship, even if it meant leaving her eight-year-old son behind with his father.

Not that he hadn’t enjoyed his share of doxies, but respectable women—especially young, beautiful, dainty, respectable women with soft voices, soft faces and soft hands—those were his downfall.

It had all started that night. Matt had never bothered to learn how to dance. With Gloria, he’d scarcely been able to string two words together without stuttering, but somehow she had made him feel like a regular Prince Charming. By the time that first evening was over, he’d been heart-stricken in the worst way.

They’d spent every day together the entire time his ship was in port. Neglecting appointments with custom officers, shipping agents, brokers and consigners, over the course of seven days he had listened to more music, drunk more tea and sat through more dull lectures than any man should have to endure in one lifetime.

He hadn’t uttered a word of complaint. If Gloria had asked him, he would have crawled over a bed of live coals.

The night before he’d sailed she had allowed him to kiss her. Scared stiff he would break her, or at the very least, terrify her by either his size or his tightly leashed passion, he’d been shaking too hard to do the job justice.

“If only you didn’t have to leave,” she’d whispered after that brief hard, dry kiss. “I could never marry a man who would go off and leave me by myself for months at a time. I would simply die of loneliness.”

He hadn’t realized it at the time, but she’d hit him in the one place where he was vulnerable. It had been years since he’d last seen his mother. As an adult, he’d seldom even thought about her. The last time they’d met had been at his father’s funeral where, like the strangers they were, they had made polite conversation. She’d told him she would be marrying again and moving to Chicago; he’d told her he was off to Honduras at week’s end and they’d parted still strangers. Since then she had rarely crossed his mind, but evidently the old scars were still there.

Oh, yeah, he’d been broadsided, all right. By the time he’d left Gloria that last night in port he had promised to finish one last run, then put his ship up for sale and invest the proceeds in her father’s ship-building firm in exchange for a seat on the board of directors.

In the end, he got exactly what he deserved. After delivering a cargo of dyewood, mahogany and bananas to Boston only three days behind schedule, he had contracted with a broker to sell the Black Swan. With his head still in the clouds, he had bought the biggest diamond ring he could find and headed south with marriage on his mind, only to be informed that Miss Timmons was visiting a friend in West Virginia. Five days later, having partially regained his senses, he’d taken a train to Boston, intent on pulling his ship off the market.

He’d been three days too late. She’d just been sold.

So he’d headed south again, determined to make the best of a bad situation. If he could no longer be captain of the finest three-masted schooner afloat, he would be the finest husband, and make a stab at being a damned good director of Timmons Shipbuilding. He was not without business experience, after all.

That was when he’d discovered that the woman who had stolen his heart was too busy reeling in another poor sucker to spare him more than a rueful smile. “But darling, I never actually said I’d marry you, did I? I’m sure I didn’t. I’m having far too much fun to settle down yet, but Daddy’s still saving you that seat on the board as soon as you’ve sold your ship.”

For the first time in years he had gone out and gotten howling drunk. Two and a half days later he’d wakened up in a Newport News flophouse with a fistful of busted knuckles and a head the size of New Zealand, both his pockets and his belly turned wrong-side out.

Dammit, he wanted her back.

The Black Swan, not Gloria. God knows, any romantic nonsense had been purged from his heart.

After four years, the broker was still working on getting his ship back. The new owner, a consortium of dry-land sailors, was intent on playing games with him, their latest demand, relayed by the broker, being a five-percent cut of the captain’s share of the profits for five years and a sale price well above the original purchase price.

He’d been in the process of negotiating for a two-year split and a lower sale price when all hell had broken loose and he’d found himself with a problem no broker could solve.

Annie.

With the tip of his big, booted foot, Matt rocked the cradle Peg had fashioned from a rum barrel and padded with goose down. If Bess didn’t soon come through for him, he was going to have to broaden his search. He could hardly take an infant to sea with him.

If she’d been a boy, he might have considered it, but she wasn’t. All he had to do was look at Bess to see what that kind of a life would do to a girl. Bossy, meddlesome, conniving, his aunt drank like a man and cursed like a man, and got all huffy when a man did the same thing in her presence.

He sighed and then he swore. He’d done more of both in the short time since he’d become a surrogate father than in all his thirty-one years put together.

Yeah, Annie needed a woman. And so, unfortunately, did he. The trouble with a small, insular village was that everyone knew everything that went on. Without a decent whorehouse, a man could get into serious trouble, a tragic lesson they’d all learned the hard way.

Crank, in his Bible-quoting mode, claimed it was better to marry than to burn, but Matt wasn’t about to commit that particular folly. He was old enough that he could wait until he went to the mainland.

It wasn’t so easy for a younger man. The first time Luther had ridden in for supplies after the shooting he had come back with his jaw dragging. “Hell sakes, Cap’n, all the girls has disappeared.”

They hadn’t disappeared, they’d been hidden away, forbidden to associate with the men from Powers Point. Considering what had happened, Matt couldn’t much blame any man for trying to protect his womenfolk, but dammit, Annie wasn’t at fault. She’d come into this world an innocent victim. Matt refused to allow her to suffer for the sins of her parents, if he had to give up the sea forever.

But it might not come to that. Things were gradually beginning to thaw. The first time Crank had ridden in to lay in a supply of tinned milk, one or two of the older women had offered advice about bringing up a baby’s wind in the middle of her dinner, and using lard to clean her tail instead of lye soap.

Another woman had offered them the loan of one of her milk goats, but for the most part, the men of Powers Point had been left alone with a task not a one of them was equipped to handle.