“You won’t tell us?” Ruby ventured finally. “Where we’re going?”
Eugénie’s slender arms flexed in a steady rhythm as she rowed. “I’m not sure I fully know. The captain—he—” She broke off and leveled a gaze at Ruby. The oars feathered in the air, then dipped back into the water. “There’s something he wants to do before we venture back to London. Some assurance he feels he must make. And you...”
Ruby clutched her hands together in her lap. She was damp from sea spray, and in her haste, she’d forgotten her gloves. Her fingers were cold. “What about me?”
“You mean to bring him there?” Eugénie asked. “To London? To your father—your world?”
Ruby did not quite know what to say. “I think it is our best choice, yes. You don’t have to worry about Malcolm. I won’t let my father hurt him.”
Eugénie’s mouth was still tipped down, a crooked, unhappy arc. “It is not your father that concerns me. It seems to me thatyouare the greater risk.”
“I?” Ruby leaned back in the dinghy, as shocked as if the other woman had reached out and slapped her face. “Why would I—I would never—”
Eugénie did not let her finish. “I was the wife of a pirate once,” she said. “Before Wall. I thought the ship would be our great, grand adventure, and I wanted more of... everything. More than the life I had led up until then. I was so hungry for the world that I was sick with it.” She shook her head. Her mouth was grim, and her eyes were fixed on the sea beyond Ruby’s shoulder. “I was wrong. All of it was a fantasy. I knew nothing about life aboard ship, about maggots and sailcloth and the catgut thread I’d use to sew up bullet holes.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
Eugénie’s voice was low. Her eyes came to settle on Ruby’s face. “That’s what this summer has been for you. A fantasy, snatched out of time. But what happens when you bring the captain to your house, to your father? What happens when you try to fit him into your world, and you find out that he does not belong?”
“Malcolm belongs wherever he wants to be,” Ruby snapped. If that was by her side, then she would have him, and gladly. “There is no place I would forebear to take him. Nothing he does not deserve. He’s all heart. He would tear himself to pieces for any one of you, and I—”
She halted, her voice fracturing.
Deliberately, Alice laid her hand over Ruby’s. Alice’s fingers too felt like ice, but her grip was firm. “Ruby. Dearest. What if your father disapproves?”
“Let him, then.” Ruby jerked up her chin. “I don’t care what he thinks any longer.”
Alice regarded her for a long moment before she spoke. “Do you mean that? You would defy your father—for the captain?”
Ruby hesitated. She looked at Alice’s wide cerulean eyes, Eugénie’s steady hands on the oars. The words had leapt from her lips without deliberation, and yet...
Yes, she realized. She meant it.
She remembered her father’s devastation after her mother’s death. He had loved his wife—in her heart, Ruby believed that he cared for her and Cassandra as well. But when Ruby had not performed the role he’d expected of her, his affection had been a weak thing. He had neither the patience nor the desire to accept the daughter he had, rather than the one he wished for. And Ruby was no longer willing to settle for a love like that.
Love, she had learned, wasn’t a cage. It was a key.
Alice spoke again, very softly. “I know how hard it is, dearest. To want so very much to make the people you love happy.”
Ruby turned her hand to grasp Alice’s fingers back.
It was true. Shehadwanted to make her father happy, for so long, for so many agonizing years. She had tried and tried—had dressed Cass up like a little doll because their father wished it, smiled at him across the breakfast table in Rome because she knew he’d smile back. They had traveled together to Venice and Athens and the Levant, and she’d taken his notes and read his books, and sometimes she didn’t even know if she cared at all about classical art except for the fact that it was something they could talk about together.
But not anymore. She had been rearranged this summer. And she thought it had been for the better.
“I would defy the whole world for Malcolm,” she said finally. “My father will be the easy part.”
They were almost to the wharf now. Ruby watched the vibrant quilt of ships and sails come into focus. The seabirds’ cries made a noisy tangle in her ears, almost as loud as the throb of her pulse.
Eugénie angled them carefully toward the low docks, and there was a long silence before she spoke again. “Did you know he grows the flowers at the house? The captain, I mean. Planted the bulbs himself when we first came. Thins them in the spring.”
Ruby thought of the barrels of flowers on the side of the house facing over the sea: the irises, the alliums. The delphiniums. “I suspected as much.”
“He’s not all flash and dazzle,” Eugénie said, “no matter what he might want you to think. He’s the staying kind.”
“I know.” When Ruby closed her eyes, she could picture his hands in the soil: the slow patient work of bulbs and seasons. The house with all the dogs. Four hammocks in a line. His long-beloved crew, and all that steadfast loyalty. “I know him.”
“Good,” Eugénie said quietly. “I wanted to be certain before I brought you all this way.”
