"She's not dead."
Ruan looked Captain Black calmly in the eye, as he took a deep swig of his pint of ale. They were seated in a dark tavern, near Packet Quays in Falmouth. The Captain had just surmised exactly what had become of The Elizabeth and her crew. All men were accounted for bar one, a new tar that had joined up at Bristol; the missing man was the chief suspect in what Ruan knew to be yet another attempt on his life. Other men had reported seeing him go down to the main hold just minutes before the explosion, and as cotton wasn't liable to blow up on its own, they had deduced that he had been the one to set it alight. Captain Black had been in the middle of outlining how the crew were going about searching for Olive, who they presumed lost at sea, when the Duke had interrupted him.
"She's not dead," he repeated again, though he could see doubt in the other man's dark eyes. "I know you think I'm mad, but I didn't manage to wake up in a cottage, naked as the day I was born through divine intervention. God doesn't like me enough for that. It was Olive, she brought me there."
Ruan was certain of it. He remembered little of the previous night, bar the horrifying moment that the mast had crashed down upon his head, and another hazy recollection of someone stroking his hair. When he had woken up in the fisherman's cottage, embarrassingly nude and disorientated, he had not been able to recollect how he had arrived there. His clothes had been laid out before the hearth to dry, and the fire within had burned merrily, despite the long absence of the fisherman and his wife. There was no way that he had managed to do all that when he had been rendered completely unconscious. It had to have been the work of his wife.
"Beg your pardon, your Grace," Black interjected, his expression troubled, "But if it was Her Grace who dragged you all the way to the shore, then why did she disappear after?"
"Probably because she knew that everyone would assume she had perished," Ruan replied evenly, taking another sip of the slightly warm ale, and grimacing at its bitterness. "She wasn't exactly enamoured at the thought of being my wife - perhaps she simply seized the opportunity that was presented to her."
"She can't have simply decided to disappear," Black laughed nervously, evidently uncomfortable with his employer's brutal honesty. "Perhaps she was in shock? I'll have the men search the beaches and the cliffs, in case she wandered in a daze."
"She wasn't in shock," Ruan sighed in annoyance, and set his now empty glass on the table. "A woman in shock wouldn't have had the mental capacity to take my signet ring on her way out the door."
Black's own face was a perfect picture of shock at this news, his mouth hanging open in a round "O" of surprise.
"You'll catch flies like that," Ruan grunted, and the young man immediately snapped his mouth shut.
"So what you're saying," Black said slowly, as though his mind were still trying to digest what Ruan had told him, "Is that Her Grace, rescued you from drowning and then disappeared. Purposefully."
"That's about the sum of it, yes," Ruan agreed, waving for the tavern-wench to refill his glass. He did not know how to feel about Olive's desertion; yes it pricked at his pride, but another part of him admired her temerity. She was feisty, and brave, two of the exact reasons he had married her. His loins stirred at the memory of the way that she had responded to his kisses; she had been unsure and innocent, but even that had not stopped her from reciprocating his passion. Ruan growled in annoyance, he had nearly had her but had been too gentlemanly to bed her on a ship. Well, that wouldn't happen the next time he saw her. Even if they met in a hay-barn, he would throw her down on the straw and make her his completely --chivalry be damned.
"What's the plan from here, your Grace?"
The young Captain interrupted his thoughts, which had drifted to rather licentious images of Olive, tousled and wanton on a bed of hay.
"Find her," Ruan cleared his throat, and tried to look more controlled than he felt. "Offer a reward for her capture. One thousand pounds. Let it be known at the docks, for she might turn up there looking for passage abroad."
"As you wish," Captain Black inclined his head, though his lips quirked with amusement. "Perhaps though, your Grace, I shall offer the reward for her safe return, and not her capture. It sounds less romantic when you word it that way."
"Romantic?" Ruan arched an eyebrow, "Never heard of the word."
"Well that's obvious enough," Black laughed heartily, and stood to leave, donning his hat. He paused before he left, and gave the Duke a thoughtful look. "It's not all doom and gloom, your Grace."
"And why is that?"
"Well, she could have let you drown..."
Ruan snorted into the fresh ale that had just been set down before him. Captain Black was right; his wife could have left him to drown, and found herself a wealthy widow as a result. It gave him pause for thought; Olive didn't wish him dead, which given his history, was about as romantic as it got.