Then the peace of early morning was shattered by a loud shrilling of whistles as the bosuns woke the watch presently sleeping belowdecks. Feet pounded on the decks, voices bellowed down the companionways, “Tumble up… tumble up!” And the racing feet sounded like roll after roll of thunder as the men scrambled on deck with their rolled hammocks to stow them in the nets along the frigate's sides.

After three days at sea Tamsyn had become accustomed to the noise of this morning ritual. Josefa, however, continued to grumble at being awoken with such violence. Now she sat up, grabbing the wooden sides of her cradle as it swung wildly with her movements.

“Ay de mi,” she sighed as she did every morning, contemplating manoeuvring her ample frame out of the cot and onto the shifting timbers of the cabin floor.

“Buenos dias, Josefa.” Tamsyn sat up, her own slight body barely creating a stir in the supporting ropes.

There was a loud bang at the door, and the man Samuel's voice came through the oak. “Hot water, missus.”

“Gracias, senor.” Josefa shuffled to the door, drawing her shawls modestly around her. She opened it a crack met Samuel's grinning face, seized the copper jug, and dragged it inside. Josefa didn't hold with sea travel and she didn't trust sailors.

Tamsyn was sitting up, hugging her knees, a slight frown drawing her delicate arched eyebrows together. “It's Monday, isn't it, Josefa?”

“So I believe,” Josefa said, pouring water into a bowl.

“The last Monday in April.” A little sinking feeling settled in her belly. Cornichet's ambush had been on March 28. Her monthly bleeding had almost ended; she remembered how she'd sat huddled in his cabin with the rope around her neck ironically thanking heaven for small mercies.

But in that case it should have started again five days ago. She touched her breasts, feeling for telltale soreness. Nothing. It had been a risk, those three glorious encounters. The first occasion there'd been no time in the swirling conflagration of ecstasy to think of consequences. The other times she hadn't wanted to spoil the rhythm and spontaneity to consider practicalities. She'd never had that problem before, but Lord St. Simon was no ordinary lover.

She'd persuaded herself that the time in her cycle was relatively safe. The village women held to the lore that pregnancy tended to coincide with coupling in the middle of the woman's cycle. It sounded a haphazard lore to Tamsyn, but she'd chosen to believe it.

“Damnation!” she muttered under her breath. Grimly, she swung herself out of the box and disappeared into the quarter-gallery opening off the sleeping cabin, in the faint hope that a visit to the privy would reveal what she knew hadn't happened.

It was a forlorn hope, as she'd known it would be, and she returned to the cabin, pulling her nightgown over her head. Maybe it would start today. She wasn't always reliably regular, and five days wasn't that late. She sponged her body vigorously, as if she could bully it into behaving properly, then dressed in the britches and ridding habit that allowed her some freedom of movement without breaking the colonel's sartorial rules.

She could hear Captain Lattimer talking with St. Simon next door, in the captain's day cabin in the stern of the ship. Lattimer had given up his sleeping quarters to the women and had slung two hammocks in his day cabin that he now shared with the colonel. Gabriel had placidly slung his own hammock in the gun room and spent much of his time in the company of the master gunner and Samuel, with whom he'd developed an easy rapport.

The smell of breakfast took Tamsyn into the cabin. It was filled with early sunshine coming from the sweep of handsomely mounted inward-sloping windows in the stern. Cushioned lockers stretched beneath them to provide seating, and the panelled bulwarks were lined with bookshelves. The captain and his passenger were seated at a laden table in the middle of the room. If it weren't for the two guns mounted at either end of the stern windows, it could have been a pleasant breakfast parlor in a country house.

“Good morning, Miss Tamsyn.” Captain Lattimer greeted her arrival with a wave to a chair. He had a tankard of grog in his hand and was addressing a mutton chop and fried eggs.

The colonel looked up from his own breakfast and accorded her a brief nod-a curt acknowledgment suitable for a slight and not very well-liked acquaintance. He pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. “I'll take a turn around the deck. If you'll excuse me.”

Tamsyn frowned. He always found something else to do the moment she appeared. Except at dinner, when they both dined with the captain… and then he barely addressed two words to her. She sat down at the table, and Samuel put a boiled egg in front of her.

“I'll take a tray into your woman now, miss, if'n she's ready.”

“Yes, thank you, Samuel.” Tamsyn gave him a quick smile. Josefa insisted on taking her meals apart in their sleeping quarters. Gabriel took his in the gun room with the warrant officers.

“How soon before we cross the Bay of Biscay, Capitan? She sliced the top off her egg and to his amusement dipped a slice of toast into the yolk.

“This evening, with any luck. How are you in a rough sea, lass?”

“Lord, I don't know,” Tamsyn said, dipping another slice of toast into her egg. “I've never sailed before, but I'm not an invalidish sort of person.”

“No, I should imagine you're not.” Hugo grinned. St. Simon had given him a brief description of the girl's antecedents, but he'd filled in the details for himself with little difficulty. He understood the colonel was escorting her to her mother's family in Cornwall, but he had the sense that there was more to it than that. Colonel St. Simon clearly wasn't happy with his mission, but Hugo was convinced the tension between the colonel and the girl had its roots in something much deeper.

“Well, if we're in for a Biscay widowmaker, you'll discover what kind of a sailor you are,” he said cheerfully, pushing back his chair. “The bay's notoriously rough even without a full-blown storm.”

“I stand warned, Captain.” She smiled and drank her coffee with relish. Pregnancy was supposed to put one off one's food… or at least in the morning. So far, she was as hungry as ever.

The captain left the cabin, returning to his quarterdeck, and Tamsyn finished her own breakfast while Samuel cleared up around her. “Do you know where Gabriel is this morning, Samuel?”

“Watchin' 'is treasure, like as not,” Samuel opined, sweeping crumbs into the palm of his hand. “Doesn't like to let it out of his sight, though it's stowed right and tight in the ‘old.”

“Perhaps he's afraid someone might make off with a ducat or two,” Tamsyn said laughingly, although she knew that was exactly what Gabriel was afraid of.

“Not on this ship, they won't,” Samuel declared, a touch of passion enlivening his customarily stolid countenance. “There's no thieves in Cap'n Lattimer's ship. Every man jack of 'em knows the cap'n turns thieves over to their shipmates, powerful ‘ard on a man is own mates are. Damn sight 'arder than the cap'n.”

Tamsyn had already decided that life before the et on one of His Majesty's men-of-war was about as grim as life could be, so she merely nodded her comprehension, finished her coffee, and went up to the quarterdeck.

She'd learned in her first hour that the starboard side of the quarterdeck was holy ground, the captain's preserve, to be entered only on invitation. Lord St. Simon, however, seemed to have a standing invitation. In the orderly quiet of midmorning at sea, the two men were talking together at the starboard rail; the marine sentry turned the hourglass at the half hour and struck three bells to signal the third half-hour of the watch. A bosun's whistle thrilled, and a trio of midshipmen jumped for the rigging, scrambling up into the shrouds and racing each other along the ratlines to the masthead some hundred feet above.