With effortless ease, he pushed the plane along the plank. Curls of wood, matching his blond tresses, spilled onto the floor with each swoop of the tool.
Beatrice, her tea long gone cold, sat at the small café opposite the carpentry shop, transfixed. Despite the cacophony of the early-morning market, she had ears only for the gentle swoop-swoop of the plane and eyes only for the butterflies who settled on his bare back to sip from the beads of sweat that formed on his billowing muscles.
Once she caught his eye as he paused to stretch, sawdust clinging to the hairs on his bare chest. He paused, mid-yawn, and winked, and it was the wink that startled Beatrice and pushed her to pick up the menu to hide her blushing face. He laughed quietly, mopping the sweat from his brow with a red cloth as Beatrice watched him. She longed to be the one to brush the dust from his arms, to feel them around him, to smell the tang of pine and oak and the sweat of honest labor.
“Beatrice, there you are!”
She dropped the menu.
There, in his normal flop-sweat and pudge, stood Sir John Stanford.
“The galley leaves for Jamaica in three hours,” he said stiffly, hat tucked neatly under his arm as if the captain were there watching. “I thought, perhaps, before we left –“
Beatrice’s eyes wandered past him, to the carpenter’s apprentice back to shaving, shaving, shaving the planks that she knew would make a bed.
“—a walk in the garrison yard,” he said. “It may be some time, six months or more, before I return.”
“Oh,” Beatrice said brightly, still looking through him. “Do you think so?”
Sir John looked at Beatrice. So beautiful. So dainty. So . . . rich. A man could not hope to find a more suitable bride. And yet there she is, staring at the carpenter’s apprentice as if he were Adam himself.
He held out his hand to Beatrice and smiled, though the smile did not reach his eyes.
Beatrice took his hand automatically. She still stared past him. As they walked up the busy market street, she could still hear the rhythmic swoop swoop of the plane in the carpenter’s apprentice’s hands.
Sir John frowned. “One moment, dear Beatrice,” he said.
“George! You there, George!”
A young man talking to the daughter of a fruit-seller dropped a banana and looked around. “Ah, Sir John! Depart in three hours we do!”
“Yes,” Sir John said, pulling the youth into a nearby alley. He looked at Beatrice. “Won’t be a moment, my love.”
“We are still short a ship’s carpenter, are we not, George?” Sir John asked, quietly.
“Indeed! Bastian’s still in jail for drunkenness—“ he replied, almost shouting.
Sir John waved a finger in front of his lips. “Discreetly, now, George,” he said. “I know the Captain looks dimly on press-gangs, but to go to sea without a carpenter is folly. Get Burns and Holly to grab the young man at the carpenter’s stall in the market. He’ll do for our voyage.”
George nodded, then glanced back at the fruit stall.
“Go now, George!”
George sighed, but loped off toward the docks.
“I apologize for the delay,” Sir John said to Beatrice as he watched George slowly wander toward the forest of masts. “Much to do in preparation for the voyage.”
“Yes, my love,” she said absently, staring into the marketplace.
She let out a long, low whistle, followed by a blast to rival the best signalers on the Marie Celeste, and a rough burlap bag smelling of rotten potatoes descended quickly over Sir John’s head. Rough hands clasped his arms and a meaty paw clamped over his mouth.
“I have no choice, my dear,” Beatrice said as the hands pulled him into a nearby stable. “Farewell, Sir John.”
“Remember, don’t kill him,” she said coldly to the captors. “Rough him up a bit and put him in the gaol with Bastian. And see that Bastian makes it to his ship on time; he has duties that should not be shirked.”
She grabbed a banana from the fruit-seller and glanced toward the docks, where she saw George still ambling quietly and slowly through the marketplace. She tossed the banana lightly in the air, spinning it, and caught it. “One more to go.”
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