Page 75 of The Pirate Lord
That’s when she realized she’d been punching the bread silly. She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry . . . I . . . my mind was wandering.”
He took the bread from her, rolled it in some lard, then placed it in a bread pan. “Aye, wanderin’ in troublesome places, I’ll wager. What has you in such a dither?”
She cast him a wary glance. “Nothing . . . important.”
He returned to ladling gravy over the meat. “It’s our good captain, ain’t it? He’s been troublin’ you again.”
“Yes . . . well, no. Not the way you think.” When he cast her a searching glance, she turned her back to him and fiddled with the latch to the pantry. “He . . . he’s been the soul of courtesy.”
“And that bothers you?”
“No, of course not. It’s just that . . . I don’t know what to make of it. Sometimes I think he dislikes me very much. Other times . . . he . . .”
Other times, he makes love to me with passion and caring.But she could hardly tell Silas that, could she?
“Depend on it, the man don’t dislike you,” Silas said in a calm voice. “Gideon just finds it hard to trust a woman, any woman. Especially one of your kind.”
There was that horrible phrase again—your kind. She whirled around to face Silas. “Why does he hate ‘my kind’ so? Which one of ‘my kind’ ever hurt him?”
He set down the gravy ladle and stared at her a moment, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “If I tell you what I know, will you keep it to yourself?”
Her curiosity roused, she nodded vigorously.
He gestured to a chair. “You’d best sit down then, lass. It’s a hard tale, and a long one. But if anyone should hear it, it’s you.”
Taking a seat at the scarred table, she folded her hands in front of her and looked at him expectantly.
“His mother,” he said. “That’s who hurt him.”
She looked at him blankly. “I don’t understand.”
“Gideon’s mother was a duke’s daughter. A very wealthy lady from a very powerful English family.”
An awful feeling crept over her. Gideon was English? His mother had been a noblewoman?Gideon’smother?
“You look surprised.” Taking up his pipe, Silas filled it with tobacco from a pouch in his vest pocket. “I s’pose that’s to be expected. Pirates aren’t known for their fine bloodlines.”
“But how? Who?”
Silas stuck a straw in the stove fire, then used it to light his pipe. “I can tell you the how. The who ain’t so clear, least of all to him.” He tossed the straw in the fire and puffed hard on his pipe. “He told me most of the story when he was drunk one night. We’d seized a ship that day, with an old woman on it named Eustacia. Hearin’ her say her name rattled him bad enough to send him to the bottle. Mebbe you noticed as how Gideon don’tdrink much. I think he fears endin’ up like his father. Anyway, that night, he said his mother’s name was Eustacia, or so his father’d said whenhewas drunk.”
“Gideon told me a bit about his father. The man sounded like an awful person.”
“Aye, he was. Gideon hates him. But he hates his mother more. He blames her for leavin’ him to the care of his bastard father.”
“I don’t understand. How does a duke’s daughter meet a man like Gideon’s father? Wasn’t his father American?”
“Nay. His father was as English as you. Apparently, he was Eustacia’s tutor. He must’ve been a charmer, seein’ as how he got her to run off with him.” Silas’s expression grew grim. “But after she bore Gideon, she got tired of the poor life she led with Elias Horn. She asked her family to take her back, and they agreed.” He stared at her from above his pipe. “But they made her leave her son behind.”
Sara gasped aloud. “They didn’t!” When he nodded, she said, “But why?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. Mebbe to hush up the scandal. Mebbe they hoped that if Elias and Gideon wasn’t around, they could keep it all quiet more easy-like. Who knows how an English noble thinks?”
She flinched. She knew he didn’t mean it as a criticism of her, but it demonstrated how suspiciously the entire crew of theSatyrregarded her countrymen. And her class. No doubt their hatred had been nurtured during the American Revolution, which had probably just ended around the time Gideon was born.
But for Gideon, there was more to it even than that. Remembering how bitterly Gideon had spoken of his mother, she felt heartsick. No wonder he hated “her kind.” No wonder he’d been so reluctant to trust her.
Still, his distrust wasn’t quite fair. She would never leave her own child behind, no matter what her family asked of her. She couldn’t understand how Eustacia could have done it.
