Joseph pushed himself up so that he was sitting beside her. He had to hunch over to prevent his head from hitting the beam of the bunk above theirs. “Mercy,” he said softly. “Please, say no more. You are not to blame for anything that transpired.”

She was quiet and motionless.

The boat rocked them back and forth. His shoulder brushed against hers, but rather than letting it linger, he forced himself to slide another inch away from her.

“We are forging a friendship, are we not?” he asked, attempting to make sense of their relationship.

“Aye. You’re kind to befriend a woman like me. I do thank ye, sir.”

A woman like me. She understood the disparity in their stations just as much as he did. She’d said it herself last night. “You’re a lord, while I’m a simple poor woman. Who’s ever heard of a friendship betwixt two so different?”

Mercy realized that even friendship was unusual for two people like them, let alone anything beyond that. And she’d never presume more, would never even dream of it.

His response from the previous night came back to taunt him. “Are we so different, really? Perhaps we are more alike than we know.”

Who determined their stations? Why did the world need such stations anyway? Would not the world be a better place if a man simply lived in humility and loved his brother or sister as himself, regardless of one’s birth?

The questions bumped around in Joseph’s mind, like the cargo floating and colliding in the hull’s bilge water following the storm. They were the kind of questions that were noisy during storms but then quieted when the waters grew calm.

He’d wait for the calm, and his troubled thoughts would find a way to right themselves eventually. For now, he’d do best to get up and put distance between himself and Mercy.

“Sleep for now,” he said as he stood and stepped away from the bunk. “I’ll wake you when the hatch is opened.”

She didn’t respond except to lie back onto the bed.

At her easy acquiescence, inwardly he sighed, wishing for a simpler life where relationships didn’t have to be so complicated.

seventeen

The Falklands,” Mercy murmured, unable to take her sights off the meadows with patches of black peat moss and watery bogs, along with the rolling green hills beyond where a herd of cattle roamed freely.

“We be going ashore today too, ain’t we?” Ann asked, squeezing next to Mercy at the side of the ship, where the women crowded together to watch the longboat of passengers being rowed to Port Stanley. Even Sarah had ventured out of the cabin. Though pale and weak from the voyage, she’d gained some tolerance for the sea.

“Aye, they’ll come back for us, that they will,” Mercy assured Ann and the other girls.