Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy #2)(33)

He was making Sophia nervous. He meant to ask her something, and she was afraid to learn just what.

“Yes?” she prompted.

“The crew … We had it out between ourselves, Miss Turner. There were a bit o’ scuffling, but I came out on top.” He suddenly crouched before her, transforming his silhouette from tree-trunk to boulder in an instant. His craggy face split in a devilish grin. “I get to be first.”

“We drew lots, Miss Turner. It’s my turn next.” Sophia looked up from her drawing board. Quinn stood before her, wringing his tarred sailor’s cap in massive, knob-knuckled hands, wearing an expression more fit for a funeral than a portrait-sitting. “Do take a seat, Mr. Quinn.”

The man lowered his weight onto the crate opposite, bracing his arms on his knees. “What am I to do?”

With her fingernail, Sophia sharpened the stub of charcoal. “You needn’t do anything but sit there.” She gave him a small smile, then quickly looked down again, as it clearly made him uncomfortable. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” She directed her question to the paper as she began to rough in the oval of his face.

He scratched his chin. “Not much to tell. Born in Yorkshire, I was. My father moved us to London when I was a lad. Got pressed into the Navy when I was sixteen, and I’ve not called dry land home since.”

“You don’t have a wife then? No family of your own?” Sophia kept her tone light, stealing furtive glances at Quinn’s hawk’s-beak nose and heavy brow between questions.

“Not as yet, miss.”

“But surely you’ve a sweetheart for Saturdays?”

Quinn gave a rough laugh. “Oh, I’ve one for every day of the week, Miss Turner.”

Sophia stilled her charcoal and lifted an eyebrow. “What a relief to learn that your calendar is full, Mr. Quinn. For I warn you, I shan’t be tempted to stray from Gervais.”

He laughed then, and his posture relaxed. Sophia was relieved, too. In the week since that night, her drunken toast had become just another shipboard joke. Mr. Grayson had returned abovedecks quickly enough to prevent the crew from suspecting an affair. Neither had the men taken Gervais seriously, thank Heaven, and she was coming to understand why. Most of their toasts weren’t based in reality, either. Life at sea was a dangerous business. The men flirted with death on a daily basis, and they laughed off their close calls. But even if they could escape death, they could not escape loneliness. It was an ever-present shadow that they worked to shrug off—through song, drink, embroidered tales. Sophia could wholeheartedly relate to that sentiment. She knew loneliness, all too well. And having a fantasy lover—well, for the first time in her life, it didn’t make her feel isolated. Here, she was just like everyone else.

She set to work on her sketch, keeping Quinn occupied with questions about his childhood, his home, his service in the war. Asking a man to recall his past invariably caused him to look away, as though his memories marched along the horizon. And while Quinn focused on that far-off time, Sophia could study his features openly without making him ill at ease. She noted the small divot between his eyebrows that appeared likely to become a furrow with time. She observed the tar embedded under his fingernails and in the creases of his palms; stains that would likely never wash off. And when he spoke of his nephew, she caught the faintest hint of a smile at the corner of his eyes.

How different it was, to draw people— real people with lives of sweat and labor, each a unique challenge. A far cry from sketching the same old vases of flowers and copies of copies of great masterworks. It gave Sophia a surprising amount of pleasure to simply talk with the men and gain their confidence. When they sat down before her, they trusted her to collect all their weathered features and tiny imperfections and commit them to paper, to assemble them into likenesses for their wives, their sweethearts, themselves. It felt somehow important. When she handed them the completed sketch, she gave them something of value that came from her talent, not from her fortune or her pretty face.

Of course, it also helped pass the time. And it kept Sophia, for those few hours a day, from thinking of him.

He was everywhere on the ship; there was no escaping him. Even if she remained in her cabin most of the day, the skylight was always open, and through it flowed steady streams of sunshine and fresh air and his voice. Mr. Grayson, as she’d learned from the first, was not a quiet man. He spoke often. He spoke loudly. And when he spoke, people listened. Including her.

The coarse shouts of the sailors, their muttered curses… the periodic clanging of the ship’s bell, the scrape of chains across the deck, the creaking of the ship’s wooden joints … All these sounds had blended into a flotsam of sound that now floated beneath Sophia’s consciousness. But never his voice. Mr. Grayson’s baritone rang out over all, assailing her at the most awkward moments.

She would be dressing in her chamber, bared to the waist, lacing her stays with a newly gained efficiency, and Mr. Grayson would choose that particular moment to linger above the cabin and scandalize young Davy Linnet with a ribald joke. It irritated Sophia beyond reason, that he could bring her ni**les to tight peaks without even occupying the same room. Without even knowing he did so.

At least, she prayed he did not know he did so. Sometimes she wondered.

She might have been the sole person Mr. Grayson aroused with a simple laugh or phrase, but she certainly wasn’t the only one he affected. When the crew fell idle on a calm afternoon and the sluggish silence grew thick, those were the times Mr. Grayson chose to sing. As though he’d been waiting for Nature herself to grow still in anticipation of his performance. He’d burst out with a song—some bawdy, coarse sailor’s shanty, sung with all the reverence of a hymn—and by the time he’d reached the end of the first verse, the entire crew would have joined him. The chorus would ring from every mast, and down in the cabin, Sophia would smile despite her best efforts not to.