Tender Wings of Desire(10)

“Did I wake you?” a soft voice asked from across the room, and it dragged her out of her self-empowering reverie. Harland sat in a chair across the room, watching her with eyes that she could not read at the moment. Was he sad? Happy? She remembered her father making jokes about the mysterious emotions of women, but men simply did not know that they too carried mysteries.

“I thought you’d be long gone by now,” she told him, feeling vaguely silly for saying something such as that. His lips ticked up in a smile as he stood and made his way to her side, tilting her head up and kissing her again.

“I do not think I want to be going anywhere.”

She blushed, pulling the blanket up to cover herself, although he had already seen her in her nightgown. He smiled at her and stroked her cheeks, and Madeline felt those burning, icy butterflies begin to move in her stomach once again.

“You are very kind,” she said, once again cursing herself for her choice of words.

He grinned. “There’s no kindness about it. I just want to be seeing more of you, every day, for the foreseeable future.”

Madeline blushed brightly but turned to meet his gaze. As much as she believed that she was some liberated woman who could take a lover and then leave him without caring, she was happy to hear that this one was going to stay.

Of course, since daylight had broken, Madeline wasn’t sure she would be able to get him past Caoimhe or whether that would even be necessary. She did not want her new roommate to believe she was a woman of loose morals (although, Madeline supposed, she technically was now), so when it was time for Harland to leave, she peeked outside and saw nothing.

“Come on,” she whispered, reaching for his hand. He took it, and she led him out of her bedroom and into the sitting room that she shared with Caoimhe. The rooms were silent—so silent that she could hear the beating of her own nervous heart, and she practically pulled Harland through the rooms and out the door.

As quietly as they could, they descended the stairs and arrived once more in front of the tavern, where she had first seen him waiting for her. In broad daylight, she pulled him close and kissed him as though he were going out to sea again. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close, kissing her deeply. When they parted, he laid a final kiss on her forehead.

“I am going to see you again!” he swore.

“You know where to find me,” she replied.

“Good.” He gave her one last kiss, a quick one this time, and turned to stroll down the docks, whistling a jaunty tune and looking as though the entire world had been laid at his feet. Madeline watched him as he went, feeling like every love song she had ever listened to was real to her now; they were all singing for her. Her heart pounded in a lovely rhythm, and she wished that she could write and tell Victoria that she finally understood her younger sister’s preoccupation with love. Love was splendid, love was magical! Oh, if only Victoria could have the luxury of finding it for herself! It did not need to be with some high-ranking member of the gentry. Love wasn’t supposed to trap a womaninto a life of dully planning parties and wearing beautiful dresses all the time. Love could beanything.

It broke her heart a little to realize that she had to run away from her home and everything she had known to truly understand that—that her family’s love came with so much obligation that she never would have figured this out on her own. She allowed herself the small relief of knowing that, no matter what she was doing now, she was on the path to finding out who she was. She never knew that she could possibly stumble into a life like this. It cheered her.

Once he had disappeared from her line of vision, she turned to walk back up the stairs. It was early enough that she could probably sleep a little longer, and the idea of stretching out in the bed that was hers, earned after a long day’s work, made it feel better than any feather mattress she had ever laid in.

Entering the rooms, she was a little surprised to see Caoimhe standing in the doorway of her own room. The look on her face showed she was a little less than impressed with Madeline’s actions, and for a moment she felt the same kind of embarrassment she had felt when her mother used to catch her doing something wrong. However, that quickly vanished under the weight of her own stubborn conviction.

Madeline held her head high, knowing exactly what she looked like. Clad in a nightgown, her hair all disheveled, she looked freshly kissed, and Caoimhe was not so innocent in this world to believe anything else. Caoimhe crossed her arms over her chest, her dark eyes burning like coals in the middle of her pale face. There was horror there, Madeline noticed, but as far as she could tell there wasn’t any disappointment. She did not know if she could handle the disappointment of her new friend.

“I should have known,” Caoimhe said. “A young woman, a young innocent, comes to this place and immediately takes up with the first rake she sees.”

“That is not what happened,” Madeline said calmly. In fact, she was completely surprised by her own calmness. “I made my own choice, I respect my own choice. It is okay, Caoimhe, I took a lover, I wasn’t taken.”

Caoimhe played nervously with the end of her braid as Madeline went over to the tiny wood stove to put the kettle on for tea. The two women sat in uneasy silence as they waited for the water to boil, but once cups of tea were in their hands, Caoimhe took a deep breath.

“When I first arrived here, there was a man. His name was Freddie, or at least that was the name he gave me.”

Caoimhe’s cheeks reddened as she remembered this man, and Madeline leaned closer to listen to her tale of inevitable woe.

Caoimhe had been 17 when she came over to England, thinking it would be a land of opportunity. In her small town in Ireland, Caoimhe was destined to become a milkmaid or perhaps a farmer’s wife, but she would not have seen anything of the world.

“So I left,” she explained. “And I ended up in London working in a shop. And that was where I met Freddie.”

Freddie had been in the British Merchant Navy, and the moment he laid eyes on Caoimhe, who had been walking to the market one day, he jumped off of a boat that was preparing to shove off, ran to her side, and asked for her name.

From there it seemed like a dream. Freddie had big plans: he was going to earn a good wage from the merchant navy and then he would come back to marry her.

“I am not going to pretend that I am not a simple woman,” Caoimhe said to Madeline, “and that you do not come from somewhere else, somewhere you do not want to talk about, but the rules are different and also the same. We may not have gone a courting too much, we may not have vast declarations, but a plan such as that was almost as formal…”

Due to his position, Freddie was often gone for long stretches at a time, and Caoimhe was faithful to him every time he left.

“Freddie loved making promises,” she said. “He loved to be in love and to love in return, so I honestly should not have been surprised to hear that he was in love with a girl in every single port he docked. By the time I found out, well, it was too late…”

Her cheeks turned red and she looked away from Madeline out of fear that her emotions would become too obvious. Madeline did not need to guess what kind of shame had been brought upon her. Madeline knew it would be rude to ask.

“I am not warning you about this because I think that Harland is a bad man. I think that men like him, those with the sea in their blood, they are different from other men. I just do not want you to feel the same heartache that I did.”

There was a moment then when it seemed as though Caoimhe was waiting for Madeline to finally, truly open up about her past, and yet Madeline stayed silent. It was not that she wanted to withhold this information from one of her only friends, especially now that Harland knew everything, but as she opened her mouth to speak, she simply could not bring herself to tell the tale. Admitting it to Harland had been like letting it go, and she did not want to bring it back up again.

So she said the only thing she could say:

“I’ll be careful.”

It wasn’t as though Caoimhe was disappointed; far from it, she seemed to take comfort in Madeline’s conviction even though they both knew that words were only words and the most important thing she could do was avoid being ruined by the attentions of a man. Neither of them knew for sure, but for now Madeline was more than willing to take the chance.

“Just do not tell Liam,” Caoimhe said, forcing lightheartedness back into her voice. “I believe he’s taken a shine to you.”





CHAPTER NINE




To call their affair passionate was an understatement. Sometimes it seemed as though the two of them had been made to love each other, and they tried to do so at every given opportunity. Their eyes would meet the instant he walked into the tavern, as if they could feel each other. In that instant, a spark would light and quickly grow into a raging inferno deep within them. They were so consumed that it took every ounce of their restraint not to give into the fire right then and there. The flames would continue to rage throughout the night until the fire was too much, and at last they could let it engulf them.

Over the next month, Madeline felt as if she were walking on air. She felt magical in a way, carrying a delightful secret. Whenever he walked into the tavern, she could feel his eyes boring into the back of her neck, making her feel so alive.