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swooning.” Welles shook his head.
    “Now I’ve heard Sam Lindsey’s youngest girl has set her cap for you.” ‘ “Constance? Oh, aye, I suppose she has, like her sisters before her.” Kit tried to remember the girl:
    yellow hair, or maybe it was red. He’d done no more than dance with her twice at a party last summer, and now the gossip already had them linked.
    “A pretty enough little poppet. I’m bringing her the ri bands she begged from London, but if it’s a husband she’s after, she’d best look elsewhere.”
    “Pray her father thinks the same.”
    “Save your warnings, Abraham. I’m always careful with the maids, no matter how they tempt me.
    I’ll be thirty-three years a bachelor come next spring,
    and I know well how to keep my neck from that particular noose.”
    “Truth is, Kit, you’re married already, to Piton-stead and the mills and trading posts and warehouses and whatever else you’ve built. That’s well and good, I warrant, excepting I don’t know how a sawmill’s going to keep you warm on a january night the way a wife can.”
    Kit shrugged.
    “The farm and the rest give me back double what I give to them, which can’t be said of most wives. Hester keeps my house and sets the best table in the colony, and the nieces and nephews my sisters seem so fond of producing are children enough for me.” He couldn’t resist grinning wickedly at the older man.
    “As for warming my bed, the world’s full of loving, lonely widows.”
    Welles snorted.
    “You’re bad as your father was before your mother caught him, sneaking around kitchen doors like some old rogue tomcat!”
    But Kit only half heard him. Now that England had slipped below the horizon, the little group of passengers was beginning to abandon the post by the rail, and the men and women were carefully feeling their way across the rolling deck to the companionway.
    Finally only one woman remained. Although her face was hidden by the hood of her black cloak, Kit knew at once she was different from the others.
    She alone looked westward, her gaze intent not on what she was leaving, but on what lay ahead. Her small figure stood braced against the wind as her cloak and skirts swirled about her legs, and there was something oddly touching about how bravely she turned to meet the unknown. One of the daughters, he guessed. No matter what Abraham had promised, she might be worth seeking out. He liked spirited women, and this one, Kit felt sure from her posture alone, would have spirit to spare.
    She turned her face upward, to the sky, and the wind caught her hood and whipped it back. Now Kit could see her clearly, her cheeks rosy from the wind and her lips slightly parted, and the way her dark hair, shining with copper streaks in the bright sunlight, swirled around her shoulders. He stared at her there at the rail and swore, violently, under his breath. So this was the reason why Abraham had been so anxious to keep him away from the immigrants.
    Immigrants, hell. The woman was a convict.

Chapter Four
    Dianna remained at the rail long after the others had left. She had spent the first three days of the voyage either retching into a bucket or curled miserably on an ancient, wool-stuffed mattress. But this morning, she had finally begun to become accustomed to the ship’s motion, and the wind and spindrift on her face made her feel almost like herself again. She had never been on the open sea before, and she found the wildness of the ocean and sky exhilarating and limitless. For the first time in her life she felt truly free—free of the past and the present, and free of the responsibilities of being Lady Dianna Grey. Lost in her thoughts, she was oblivious to the curious interest of the seamen working around her, and oblivious, too, to the heated words between the captain and the Prosperity’s owner near the wheel. Not until her fingers and nose were numb from the cold did Dianna reluctantly turn away from the ocean and head back down