"Why won't you talk to me?" Meredith asked in frustration. "Whenever you seem bothered by something, you bottle it up inside. There is nothing wrong with expressing your feelings. It doesn't make you any less a man."
"Nothing is bothering me," he said with a shrug, continuing down the road.
Neither of them spoke again until the waitress had seated them on the deck of the Pirate's Cove, overlooking the tiny harbor. She greeted Meredith warmly and gave Griffin an appreciative glance, then placed a menu in front of them.
Griffin studied the menu intently, then dropped it to the table and sighed. "It is not something I find simple," he replied. "You seem to want to speak of everything, leaving nothing to private contemplation."
"That's not it," Meredith said, picking up the conversation as if there had been no lull at all. "It's just that we've been living together for nearly two weeks and I know very little about you. If we were truly friends, then you would talk to me."
"I could drink a pint of ale right now," Griffin said, looking out across the water.
"You're doing it again," Meredith said.
"It seems I'm not hungry, after all," Griffin said, pushing to his feet.
Meredith rolled her eyes at the waitress's questioning look. Griffin stood next to the table for a moment, waiting for her to get up, but she stubbornly picked up her menu and studied it.
"I'm hungry," she said, "and I'm going to have some lunch. You can join me and we'll talk, or you can find a nice quiet place and spend the rest of your afternoon in brooding solitude."
"All right," he said, sinking into the chair across from her. The waitress hurried over and took their orders before Griffin had another chance to escape, then brought them two mugs of beer and a basket of hush puppies.
Griffin picked up a hush puppy from the paper-lined basket, stared at the deep-fried blob of cornmeal for a long moment, then put it back where he got it. "My wife died of yellow fever," he said bluntly, his gaze fixed on the plastic basket.
His words hit Meredith like a bolt from the blue, causing her heart to skip a beat. "Your-your wife?" Meredith asked, attempting to eliminate the shock from her voice.
"Jane," he said without emotion. "She died four years ago… with our son. There was an outbreak of yellow fever all along the James."
"Did you catch it?"
He laughed, the sound bitter with self-disgust. "I was not there. I was at sea, on my way back from London, captaining the Spirit. I was so pleased with myself. I had a hold full of China tea I'd traded for Virginia tobacco. And I had purchased a cradle with a bit of our profits. When I arrived in Williamsburg, my father was waiting at the dock. He told me Jane had given me a son. Then he told me they had both succumbed to the fever, just three days apart."
"I'm sorry," Meredith said softly. "You must have loved her very much."
He shook his head. "When we married, I barely knew her. But we came to care about each other. She was a good woman. Whenever I would leave for another long voyage, she would smile and kiss me goodbye. She never complained. She gave me a son. I will not soon forget that."
"Life is a very fragile thing where you come from," Meredith said.
His jaw tightened. "Do you know how they fight the fever in my time? They fire cannons and muskets, and people carry bits of tar with them. They soak sponges in camphor and dip handkerchiefs in vinegar. And they put garlic in their shoes. I am not a physician, Merrie, but even I sense this is not right. Yet I have no idea what might prevent this disease."
"You should drain stagnant ponds and dump out every barrel of rainwater. The fever is spread by mosquitoes."
He looked at her in shock. "Mosquitoes?" He considered the notion for a moment, then tipped his head back and sighed. "I find it a great irony that I've come to a time where women and children do not die of the fever, where a prick of a needle can protect a life against a tiny insect and Jane needn't have died." He paused and shook his head. "A great irony."
"There are many diseases which we've found cures for- typhus, smallpox, measles, the plague. But there are others that still baffle medical science. I guess things haven't changed that much."
They sat in silence for a long while. Meredith was startled by the traces of agony that etched his frozen expression. Slowly, she reached out and wove her fingers through his. "Thank you for telling me," she said. "It helps me to understand."
He didn't reply, merely stared out at the harbor, his features frozen. Meredith's heart ached for him, for his dead wife and the baby son he'd never held. For she could see in the depths of his pale eyes that he blamed himself for their deaths. And she could see that the blame was eating away at him.
And in that instant, she knew it was not just his honor standing between them, but his guilt.
The late-afternoon sun beat down on Griffin's bare back as he scraped another layer of paint off the hull of the old shrimp boat. It felt good to labor again, to work so hard the sweat dripped from his forehead and his muscles ached.
He'd been working for nearly a week and he and Merrie had slipped into an easy routine, a routine in which they kept a careful but friendly distance from each other. Still, the attraction between them had not diminished, and though he only visited her bedroom while she slept, he had been hard-pressed to keep from touching her in all the ways he wanted to.
The thought of her body beneath his hands caused a flood of warmth to pool in his lap and he quickly turned back to work, scraping at the paint with renewed vigor.
Early Jackson was below deck, tinkering with the engine, leaving Griffin to his own thoughts. From the time Griffin was a child, he'd been fascinated by boats and ships. He and his father had spent hours together, carving model-ship hulls from wood before they commissioned the Betty. And at one time, Griffin had thought he might prefer the building of ships to the sailing of them.
In his year at William and Mary, he'd studied mathematics to better understand the design of a hull and the efficiency of a sail. Now, as he worked on refurbishing the shrimper, he found a certain satisfaction in bringing a battered old boat back to life.
Perhaps this would not be a bad way to make a living. Surely there were many boats like this one, boats that needed a tender hand and a loving eye. Griffin stood and stretched, examining the morning's work.
If the boat were his, instead of Early's, he would treat her with much more care. He would strip her to the bare wood and sand her until she was smooth as silk. Then he would lay on a perfect coat of white paint. And after every piece of brightwork was varnished and every winch spitshined, he would hand-carve a nameplate for each side of the bow. Griffin smiled to himself. And he'd call her the Merry Girl.
"Hey, sailor. How about some supper?"
Griffin shaded his eyes against the sun and found Merrie watching him from the side of the road, a teasing smile on her face. She was wearing a loose cotton dress in cornflower blue, which left her arms bare, and a pair of sandals that allowed her toes to peek out. He still hadn't gotten used to seeing Merrie's feet and ankles displayed in public, much less her knees, but that didn't prevent him from appreciating the view.
Bracing his shoulder on the boat's cradle, he grinned and waved.
She jogged up to the boat, swinging a basket at her side. "Are you hungry?" she asked.
"Ravenous," he said. He pulled up the cloth that covered the contents of the basket and peered inside. "Did you bring me a soda pop?"
She pulled out a can and flipped the top. "What are you going to do when you go back and you can't have soda pop with every meal?"
He wiped his hands on the ragged, paint-spattered blue jeans that Early had given him, then took a long swallow of the cold pop, nearly draining the can. "Maybe I will just have to stay," he said. "The prospect of life without soda pop is nearly too much to bear."