I Married the Duke Read Online Free PDF Page B

place aboard that would not put her in sight line of either the captain or the water that surrounded them completely now.
    A sixty-five-gun merchant ship, however, while considerably larger in volume than the London town houses in which she had worked, posed a challenge when it came to places a woman could stroll or sit unnoticed. After ducking around barrels and lurking behind cannons to avoid the captain, she found an ally. The cabin boy had been following her about on her tour of the ship’s nooks and crannies.
    “If you’re wantin’ someplace to set, miss,” he said, “you’ll like Doc’s place. It’s warm and dry, though it rocks somethin’ fierce in a storm, seein’ as it’s in the bow.”
    He guided her to the infirmary, dropped to his behind on the floor outside the door and pushed his cap over his brow.
    “Won’t you follow me inside like you have followed me everywhere else this morning?”
    He shook his head. “No, miss. I’ll catch a wink while you’re in with the doc, if you don’t mind.”
    “I do not.” She laughed. “But do tell me your name so that I might wish you pleasant dreams.”
    “Joshua, miss.”
    “Pleasant dreams, Joshua.”
    Dr. Stewart welcomed her and she settled on the extra chair in his infirmary, a book on her lap. She was no scholar like Eleanor, and when they hadn’t turned her stomach, the doctor’s tomes on the treatment of shipboard ailments had nearly put her to sleep. Today, however, she had unearthed quite another sort of book from the captain’s day cabin while Mr. Miles served her breakfast—a peculiar book for such a man to own.
    Dr. Stewart had set a vast wooden chest atop the examination table and was drawing forth bottles of powders and liquids, making marks in a ledger, then returning the bottles to the chest.
    “Ye canna be comfortable there, lass,” he said. “ ’Tis no place for a leddy to set. Allou me to have the boys set up a canopy for ye atop where the light’s better and ye can take the fresh air.”
    The wooden chair was a torture only less noxious than sight of the sea. “It is quite comfortable, in fact.” She turned a page in Debrett’s New Peerage . “I am quite well.”
    “Aye, I can see that.” He smiled as he placed a bottle in its rightful nook in the case.
    She bent to her book. All of her former employers had a copy, so she had long since memorized every page. She folded it closed in her lap. “What do you have in your medicine chest there?”
    “Cures that a man might need at sea.”
    “Two bottles have skulls and crossbones on the labels, I noticed.” Suitable for a pirate captain . But now she was being ridiculous. “What need do you have of poisons?”
    “Arsenic, taken in wee doses, aids the nerves. Otherwise ’tis for the rats. ’Tis a powerful poison.”
    “Best then that you keep a lock on that chest.” She opened her book again. “With a captain such as yours, passengers mustn’t be given any opportunity for mutiny, must they?”
    The doctor chuckled. Bottles clinked.
    “He intrigues ye, daena he?”
    Her head snapped up. “What?”
    A sympathetic twinkle lit the Scot’s eyes. “Ye’d no’ be the first, lass.”
    “Doc?” A sailor stood at the door, a young man of no more than seventeen, clutching his cap in his hand. He was the sailor who had not looked at her on deck when she arrived, nor since, as he avoided her gaze now. His hair was filthy, his sun-darkened skin draped over knobby cheeks and hands.
    “What do ye need, lad?” The doctor went to him.
    The youth’s hollow eyes were fixed on the medicine chest.
    “Got me a nasty toothache, Doc.” His accent was English—Cornish—the accent that the Reverend Caulfield had drummed out of Arabella after their four years at the orphanage. Young ladies did not speak like peasants, he had scolded. But he was not naturally a harsh man; only her misbehaviors had roused his irritation. Only her. To him, gentle, studious Eleanor could do no