The Other Miss Bridgerton (Rokesbys #3)(46)

Or was it the science of sailing? She didn’t know.

Poppy walked on, a few steps ahead of the captain, craning her neck to look up the length of one of the masts. It was amazingly tall, stabbing the night so majestically she almost thought it could pierce the sky.

“This has to be why the Greeks and Romans devised such fanciful tales of the gods,” she murmured. “I can almost imagine the mast breaking through to the heavens.”

She looked over at the captain. He was watching her intently, his every attention on her words, her face. But this time she did not feel self-conscious. She didn’t feel awkward or embarrassed. Or reminded that in games of flirtation, she could not compete with this man.

Instead she felt almost buoyed. Maybe it was the ocean, or the salt breeze on her skin. She should have felt tiny under the vast starry sky, but instead she was invincible.

Jubilant.

More herself than she had ever been.

“Imagine the mast rips a hole in the sky,” she said, waving her hand toward the dark night above. “And then out fall the stars.” She looked back at Captain James. “If I lived in ancient times, with no notion of astronomy or distance, I might have devised such a myth. Surely a god could create a boat so tall that it touches the sky.”

“A clever theory for the birth of the stars,” he mused, “although it does make me wonder how they came to be spread out so evenly.”

Poppy stood beside him, and together they gazed upward. The stars did not make an even pattern, of course, but they were scattered to every corner of the sky.

“I don’t know,” Poppy said thoughtfully. She kept her eyes on the stars, taking in the vastness of it all. Then she bumped him with her elbow. “You’ll have to come up with that part of the story. I can’t do all the work.”

“Or,” he said dryly, “I can sail the ship.”

She could do nothing but grin in return. “Or you can sail the ship.”

He motioned toward the bow, urging her forward, but instead she pressed her palm against the mast and swung around, like a ribbon on a maypole. When she was nearly back to her starting point, she peeked over at him and asked, “Is it made from a single piece of wood?”

“This one is. Actually, all of ours are. But we are not such a large vessel. Many of the navy’s ships have masts constructed from several pieces of wood. Come,” he said, urging her forward. “This is not even our tallest mast.”

“No?” She looked ahead, eyes wide. “No, of course it isn’t. That would have to be one of the center ones.” She skipped forward, but he was faster, and by the time she’d reached the tallest mast, he had to turn around to offer his hand.

“Here,” he said, “come with me. I promised you the stars.”

She laughed, although not because it was funny. Just because she felt joy. “So you did,” she said, and once again, she placed her hand in his. But they’d gone only two steps before she saw yet another interesting object. “Oh, what’s that?”

The captain didn’t even bother to look. “I’ll tell you later.”

Poppy grinned at his impatience and let him pull her forward, past yet another mast (the mizzenmast, he’d told her without breaking his stride). They went up a short set of stairs, and then forward still .

“The view is best up this way,” he told her.

Her face was already tipped to the heavens, even as she stumbled along behind him. “It’s not the same everywhere?”

“It feels best on the beakhead.”

“On the what ?”

“Just come with me,” he said, tugging her hand.

She laughed again, and it felt marvelous . “Why is your ship named after a chicken?”

“Why are you named after a flower?” he countered.

She considered that for a moment. “Touché.”

“The beakhead is the foremost part of the deck,” he explained as he pulled her along. “Slightly lower in elevation. It’s where the men stand when they work the sails of the bowsprit.”

Beakhead? Bowsprit? “Now you’re just making things up,” she teased.

“Life at sea has a language all its own.”

“Let’s see, I’ll call that ”—she didn’t actually point to anything—“a winchknob. And that over there shall be a mucklebump.”

He paused for just long enough to give her an admiring glance. “It’s not a bad name for it.”

As Poppy hadn’t been referring to anything in particular, she had no idea what what he was talking about, but she nevertheless asked, “Which one? The winchknob or the mucklebump?”

“The winchknob, of course,” he said with a perfectly straight face.

She chuckled and let him tug her forward. “You would certainly know better than I.”

“I shall treasure that statement. I’m not likely to hear it again.”

“Certainly not!” But she said it with a grin, her cheeks nearly hurting from the joy of it. “I’m very good at making up words, you know. It runs in my family.”

His brow crinkled with good humor and curiosity. “I can’t even begin to imagine what you mean by that.”

She told him about her brother, about tintons and farfars, and sneaking into Roger’s room to write lines and help him complete his punishment, even though she was the one he’d wronged.