A Certain Latitude by Janet Mullany Page A

the lantern while Allen slept on. Oh, yes, she and Mr. Pendale were going to be on very intimate terms, one way or the other, if this weather held.
     
    Allen awoke to the vision of Clarissa Onslowe undressing. She sat on his box, one ankle resting on a knee as she peeled off a wet stocking. She wrinkled her nose, smiled, and wriggled her reddened toes to warm them. She smelled of salt, clean and wild, and her face was flushed.
    “Here.” He spoke before he realized the implications of what he was doing, spying on her while she undressed. “Borrow some stockings—there’s a clean pair inside my box.”
    “Oh. Thank you.”
    It was strange to see a woman he didn’t know poking around among his clothes, books, and papers.
    She gave a small cry of triumph and waved a book at him. “A novel!”
    “You may borrow it, ma’am.”
    He would have liked to watch her put on the dry stockings, but he was having trouble enough with yet another erection, cramming it inside his breeches, rearranging his shirt so hopefully it wouldn’t show, while flat on his back. Time to take a piss—he wondered how she’d managed, but of course a cloaked woman could do a lot under skirts and petticoats with no one the wiser.
    He really should stop thinking about what lay beneath her skirts.
    “I expect you…I believe Peter is with the Blights. I should…” With great tact she left the cabin as he swung himself down from the berth, as usual bashing his head on a beam.
    “If we were gypsies we’d be married now,” he said as she returned. Presumably she had fastened the stockings outside the door.
    “I beg your pardon?” She gave him a frosty glare.
    He swung himself onto his bed—her bed—and propped one hand under his head. “It’s how gypsies marry. They both piss into the same pot, or so I was told once.” The erotic charge of it had not escaped him and he wondered if he was turning into some sort of pervert. At the same time, the intimacy of marriage, as something other than a series of legal arrangements, for the first time seemed strangely attractive.
    “How delightful,” she muttered, digging into her own box of possessions. She drew out a long length of pale fabric and sat, searching for, and finding, a needle and thread in its folds. She looked up. “Do you have nothing better to do than lie there and stare at me?”
    Miss Onslowe was not in a mood to charm anyone today.
    “Apparently not. I should go and see about some breakfast, if Lardy Jack can cook anything at all in this.”
    “I already have.” She stabbed her needle into the fabric. “Peter will bring us something. Mr. Johnson said we should stay below.”
    “The devil with that.” He swung himself down, annoyed by her bad temper. Maybe she was getting seasick. He hoped not. He didn’t want to see her wretched and undignified, like the sufferers in the next cabin.
    He squeezed by her to put on his boots, noticing that she sat with one hand on her stomach, her face creased. “Clarissa, are you sick?” he barked, looking around for a receptacle for her to puke into.
    “No, I am not, thank you, Mr. Pendale. The crew, by the way, have bets on us, so you’d best go show your face.”
    When he returned, soaked and chilled, and awed by the force of wind and water, he found the reason for her bad temper. She straightened up, her face flushing red with embarrassment, cloths dangling from her hand—rags that held an unmistakable pale brown stain despite their bleached-out state.
    “It’s my woman’s condition,” she said, and he realized she was close to tears. “And I can’t find the rest of my pins, and…”
    “Let me look.” He knelt at her side and poked through her possessions, as she had done his. He found her pins, fastened to a scrap of paper, by pricking himself on them, buried among petticoats or some such. She certainly owned very little—a few pairs of stockings, silk but much darned, neatly folded garments of linen and cotton, a small