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direct gaze gave way to a look of near pleading as she stared first at each of her companions and finally at Josiah. “Now shall we proceed to the vessel? We’ve a long voyage ahead, and I’m sure the captain wishes us to be settled aboard posthaste.”
    “Yes, of course,” Isabelle mumbled. “Please release me,” she added in a hoarse whisper.  
    Once again mute, Josiah allowed the beauty to extricate herself from his grasp. He watched in pitiful silence as Isabelle diverted her eyes and settled her cloak around her shoulders in a show of modesty.  
    Off in the distance, a deckhand sounded the quarter hour while a night bird called overhead. A short distance away, the Jude rocked at anchor, its crew oblivious to the distress of their captain. Overhead, Josiah spotted the constellation Orion, the North Star, and finally the Big and Little Dippers.
    He sighed, his temper briefly under control. Peering at the stars tended to do that, albeit temporarily. It always had.
    “Very well then. Shall we, Captain Carter?” the other Gayarre asked. “Please lead the way.”  
    All he’d worked for rode on this transaction; all he’d become stood in the balance. Three women for his very soul. An odd thought, he realized, yet somehow fitting. Once the women were deposited on English soil, he’d be free of them, free to sail as the owner of the Jude .
    He would be a man without a past, a man whose future stretched wide and inviting before him. To accomplish this, he merely had to deliver three women—three well-paying passengers, he corrected—across the ocean.
    A measure of benefits against possible difficulties stood before him, and he weighed each carefully. “Payment has been made for but one of you,” he said. “What say you to this problem?”
    Again, the other sister stepped forward. “Arrangements have been made for our passage, sir,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes, “although I fear you must collect your payment once we reach the shores of England. I’ve made a bank draft in the amount of—”
    “Impossible.” He slashed his hand through the air, waving away her objection. “I require payment in coin.”  
    Slowly the woman reached into the folds of her traveling garment. Josiah, always on guard, captured her wrist before it could disappear into the sturdy fabric. Isabelle gasped while the Dumont woman stared mutely. Only Emilie Gayarre seemed unmoved.
    “I wish to offer payment of another sort,” she said, staring up at him with dark eyes that regarded him with what looked like a mixture of disdain and fear. “May I retrieve it?”
    Josiah nodded and loosened his grip on her bony wrist. Trembling fingers disappeared, then quickly reappeared formed into a tight fist. Without fanfare, she thrust her hand toward him and dropped something hard and cold into his palm.
    A key.
    “What need have I of this?” he demanded.
    Unblinking, she met his gaze. “It opens the door to a house on Burgundy Street. Perhaps someday you will require use of it.”
    Josiah snorted in disgust. “Only gold and silver will pay your passage,” he said.  
    “Done.”
    He gave her a questioning look, and the amount she offered nearly set him to hoping she meant it. “And where do you propose to find this sort of money, Mademoiselle Gayarre?”
    “It is in an account newly opened in the name of my father and given to make a rather costly purchase.” A look passed between the sisters. “A certain Virginia planter made the deposit some months ago.”
    Virginia planter?  
    Josiah’s mind reeled with the possibilities. But any number of planters lived in Virginia. What were the odds that this one, if he even existed, was the same one from whom he’d vowed to someday extract revenge?
    Still, the possibility enticed him. While Isabelle Gayarre’s gold would ransom the Jude , perhaps her sister’s bank account would place the final nail in his father’s coffin.
    Both figuratively and literally.
    “Captain