Kate Moore by To Kiss a Thief Page A

saw once again her rumpled muslin. What a pleasure it would be to doff her limp, soiled dress. She had reviled her captor, and he had provided for her comfort. Her last thought that day was that she did not hate him as she should.
    The third morning of her voyage new sounds and rougher motion woke her. It was rain she heard, passing in driving gusts across the roof of the cabin. Where was he, she thought, and immediately reproached herself for not wondering instead how her parents were taking her disappearance. Yet the otherness of her circumstances, the unfamiliarity of everything around her, made her parents seem impossibly remote. She had a vision of them making calls, entertaining guests, sitting in their drawing room, her mother at the pianoforte, her father with a book, as if she had never existed at all.
    For the first time in her odd journey, the hours seemed to drag. She huddled in the berth or paced, while new thoughts distressed her about what would happen when they reached their destination. If she were to recover the stolen papers and escape her captor somewhere in Portugal, how would she find someone trustworthy and willing to undertake the trouble and expense of restoring her to her parents?
    In the unsettling darkness of the storm she could not tell the time and believed the day would never end. When at last a leering sailor brought her evening meal, she found that even the wine could not make her sleepy. She squirmed and stretched upon her bed and thought the same thoughts repeatedly. Only when the storm subsided a bit and the boat resumed its steady rocking did she fall into a restless, dream-disturbed sleep.
    She dreamt a swirling scene of confusion in a great London ballroom where she must perform all the steps in the sets with no partner until at last a partner seemed to come for her. Her mother smiled at her from among the chaperones, but as the other gentlemen made way for her partner, she saw that it was Croisset, and she turned and ran out into the garden. Yet there was no garden, only a noisy street where the mob pushed and shoved so that her feet could not touch the pavement and she was carried forward against her will. The surging crowd stopped at last, and she looked up to see a gallows, and with the strange prescience of a dreamer she knew for whom it stood. Two officers of the law roughly pulled forward her thief. In waistcoat and breeches, he looked as he had in Humphrey’s stable, save that his arms were bound behind him. His eyes seemed to meet hers at once. When they lowered the rope around his throat, Margaret’s own cry woke her.
    She sat up in the dark, gasping, her heart pounding, and willed away the horror of it.
    “Meg,” came his voice, wondrously near, from the floor, she thought. “You were dreaming. You are quite safe for the moment.” She could not get her breath to answer at once. “If not quite safe, at least somewhat safe,” he continued. “The captain assures me his boat has made the crossing in far rougher weather.”
    “You, here?” she managed to say.
    “Have our adventures frightened you?” he asked.
    “No, it was something else entirely,” she replied. She could not tell him she had cried out in fear for his life.
    “Croisset did not frighten you?”
    “Croisset? Yes, but truly, I . . . I was dreaming about the season,” she said. There was some truth in that.
    “You cried out in fear of Lord Leadfeet and Lady Loosetongue? I cannot believe it.” From the gloom below she heard his low laugh.
    “It was my first season,” she said, wondering at herself that she could once again enter into conversation with him so easily. Nevertheless, she rolled onto her side and propped herself on one elbow to talk to him. In the blackness she could see nothing, not even an outline.
    “Of course,” he answered, “had you made your come-out a year ago, I would have . . .” There was a pause in which she found herself listening most intently.
    “Would have?”