Page 37 of The Pirate Lord
He let out a low oath as his body instantly responded. If he didn’t stop thinking about her, he’d go insane. Or have to spend the rest of his life taking cold baths.
“Gideon, you’d best go below and hear what that woman’s teaching in her school,” said a voice behind him.
Gideon turned to find Barnaby standing at the top of the ladder to the quarterdeck, an amused look on his face. There was no need to ask who “that woman” was.
“Nothing she says or does would surprise me.” Gideon turned his back on Barnaby. He wasn’t about to go near Saraagain, not the way he was feeling now. Let Barnaby deal with her today.
“Perhaps not, but that doesn’t mean it’s nothing to worry about. You’ve got more schooling than I have, but isn’tLysistratathe play where the women refuse to have relations with their husbands until the men agree to stop going to war?”
With a groan, Gideon clenched the wheel.Lysistratawas among the many works of literature that his father had forced down his throat once he was old enough to read. “Yes. But don’t try to tell me she’s teaching them that. It’s Greek, for God’s sake. They wouldn’t understand a word, even if she knew it well enough to recite it.”
“She knows it well enough to give them a free translation, I assure you. When I left, she was telling them the story with great enthusiasm.”
Barnaby reached for the helm as Gideon swung away from it with an oath. “I should never have taken her aboard,” he grumbled as he strode for the ladder. “I should have sent her back to England gagged and bound!”
He ignored Barnaby’s answering laugh and headed for the hatch to the hold. He’d put a stop to this now, before she incited the women to mutiny.
As he descended into the darkness, he heard Sara’s animated voice speaking in slow, measured words. He halted on the steps. She was recounting the scene where the herald of Sparta tells the magistrate of Athens how desperate the men are to end the women’s coldness. He couldn’t help but smile. She was reciting the passage without any reference to the many phallic puns in the original. Only Sara could transformLysistrata, the bawdiest of Greek plays, into a chaste tale.
Wiping the smile from his face, he finished descending the steps and turned to find Sara standing at the far end of the hold with her back to him. A group of about thirty womenand children surrounded her, their faces rapt as they listened intently to every word. Despite the cloying tropical heat in the windowless hold, only the children fidgeted, and their mothers hushed them whenever they whispered their complaints.
He scowled. He’d had it right from the beginning—the blasted woman was nothing but trouble. How was it that she held an audience of hot, tired women in the palm of her hand with only a few words? These weren’t the sort of women who were easily led. They’d all seen the nastiest side of the world.
Yet Sara told a tale in that rich, captivating voice of hers, and they believed every word, ready to follow her into all kinds of trouble. Well, he wouldn’t let that happen. Not again. Matters were progressing well, and she wouldn’t spoil it with her continual attempts to foment unrest.
He strode forward, heedless of the murmuring that began among the women when they saw him. Then Sara turned, and her gaze met his. Instantly, a guilty blush spread over her cheeks that told him all he needed to know about her intent.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” he said in steely tones. “Class is over for today. Why don’t you all go up on deck and get a little fresh air?”
When the women looked at Sara, she folded her hands primly in front of her. “You have no right to dismiss my class, Captain Horn. Besides, we aren’t yet finished. I was telling them a story?—”
“I know. You were recountingLysistrata.”
Surprise flickered in her eyes, but then she turned smug and looked down her aristocratic little nose at him. “Yes,Lysistrata,” she said in a sweet voice that didn’t fool him for one minute. “Surely you have no objection to my educating the women on the great works of literature, Captain Horn.”
“None at all.” He set his hands on his hips. “But I question your choice of material. Don’t you think Aristophanes is a bit beyond the abilities of your pupils?”
He took great pleasure in the shock that passed over Sara’s face before she caught herself. Ignoring the rustle of whispers among the women, she stood a little straighter. “As if you know anything about Aristophanes.”
“I don’t have to be an English lord to know literature. I know all the blasted writers you English make so much of. Any one of them would be a better choice for your charges than Aristophanes.”
As she continued to glower at him, he scoured his memory, searching through the hundreds of verse passages his English father had literally pounded into him. “You might have chosen Shakespeare’sThe Taming of the Shrew, for example—‘Fie, fie! Unknit that threatening unkind brow. / And dart not scornful glances from those eyes / To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.”
It had been a long time since he’d recited his father’s favorite passage of Shakespeare, but the words were as fresh as if he’d learned them yesterday. And if anyone knew how to use literature as a weapon, he did. His father had delighted in tormenting him with quotes about unrepentant children.
Sara gaped at him as the other women looked from him to her in confusion. “How … I mean,wherecould you possibly?—”
“Never mind that. The point is, you’re telling them the tale ofLysistratawhen what you should be telling them is, ‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper. / Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee / And for thy maintenance commits his body / To painful labour both by sea and land.”
Her surprise at his knowledge of Shakespeare seemed to vanish as she recognized the passage he was quoting—the scenewhere Katherine accepts Petruchio as her lord and master before all her father’s guests.
Sara’s eyes glittered as she stepped from among the women to approach him. “We are not your wives yet. And Shakespeare also said, ‘Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more / Men were deceivers ever / One foot on sea and one on shore / To one thing constant never.’”
“Ah, yes,Much Ado about Nothing. But even Beatrice changes her tune in the end, doesn’t she? Isn’t it Beatrice who says, ‘Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu! / No glory lives behind the back of such. / And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee, / Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand’?”
“She was tricked into saying that! She was forced to acknowledge him just as surely as you are forcing us!”
“Forcing you?” he shouted. “You don’t know the meaning of force! I swear, if you?—”
