Captain Jack's Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

shook his head. “As you get older, my dear, one thing becomes clear. People don’t really change, generation to generation. The same strengths, the same weaknesses.”
    Kit laughed and kissed his cheek. “Good night, Gran’pa.”
    Spencer patted her hand and left her.
    But once in her room, Kit couldn’t settle down. She let Elmina help her from her gown, then dismissed her; enveloped in a wrapper, she prowled the room. The single candle wavered and she snuffed it. Moonlight streamed in, shedding more than enough light. Thinking of Spencer’s dance, Kit bowed and swayed through the steps of a cotillion. At its end, she sank onto the window seat and stared out over the fields. In the distance, she could hear the swoosh of the waves, two miles away.
    The odd emptiness remained, that peculiar feeling of lack that had settled deep inside her. In an effort to ignore it, she fixed her senses on the ebb and surge of the tide, letting the sounds lull her and lead her toward slumber. She’d almost succumbed when she saw the light.
    A flash of brilliance, it flared in the dark. Then, just as she’d convinced herself she’d imagined it, it came again. There was a ship offshore, signaling to—to whom? On the thought, the muted reflection of an answering flash from beneath the cliffs gleamed on the dark water.
    Kit searched the blackness, separating the darker mass of the cliffs from the background of the Wash. Smugglers were running a cargo on the beach directly west of Cranmer Hall.
    Within minutes, she’d pulled on her breeches and bound her breasts in the cloths she used for support when riding. She pulled a linen shirt over her head and shrugged on her coat without stopping to tie the shirt laces. Stockings and boots followed. She jammed on her hat, remembering to wrap a woollen scarf about her throat to hide the white of her linen. She headed for the door but paused at the last. On impulse, she turned back and crossed to where, above a dresser against the wall, a rapier with an Italianate guard lay in brackets, crossed over its belted scabbard. It was the work of a minute to free both. Seconds later, Kit slipped out of the house and headed for the stables.
    Delia whinnied in welcome, then stood quietly as Kit threw a saddle onto the black back, expertly cinching the girth before leading the mare, not into the yard where the clop of iron-shod hooves would rouse the stablelads, but into the small paddock behind the stables. Swinging into the saddle, she leaned forward, murmuring encouragement to the mare, then set her directly at the fence. Delia cleared it easily.
    The black hooves effortlessly ate the miles. Fifteen minutes later, Kit reined in under cover of the last trees before the cliff’s edge.
    Fitful clouds had found the moon. Her senses straining into the sudden darkness, Kit heard the soft splash of oars, followed by an unmistakable “scrunch.” A boat had beached. In the same instant, a jingle from her left drew her eyes. The moon sailed free, and Kit saw what the smugglers on the beach beneath the cliffs couldn’t see. The Revenue.
    A small troop was picking its way across the grassy headland. For a full minute, Kit watched. The soldiers were armed.
    What crazy impulse prompted her she never knew. Perhaps a vision of fishermen’s children playing under nets on the beach? She’d seen such a sight just that afternoon, while riding past a fishing hamlet. Whatever, she pulled her scarf high, covering nose and chin, and yanked her hat down. Drawing Delia around, she set the mare on a silent course parallel to the shore. There was no pathway where the Revenue were headed. Kit knew every inch of this stretch of coast, the section she most frequently visited on her rides. She left the Revenue behind but didn’t turn Delia to the shore until she was out of their sight. The clouds were unreliable; she couldn’t afford to be seen.
    Once on the beach, she turned the mare’s head for the smugglers, a dark blotch on