The Stowaway

I

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." Eleanor Roosevelt

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I. 

July 1810

Plymouth, England

Lady Glenna wailed as she knelt at the grave of her one true love. She placed a delicate, gloved hand over the epitaph and longed for the days of the past.

Her cries belonged only to the ocean, as the grave looked over her love's true home. Was he out there? Could he hear her? She had been but a day too late. Too late to say farewell. Too late to profess her love for the final time.

To be made so hollow, and yet so full, by his love was something she would gladly endure.

Eliza Banes wiped her eyes as she closed her novel. Oh, what a beautiful tragedy it had been! To fall in love with such a wild man, whose only love was the sea, and to win his heart in return, only to have their love dashed by smallpox. She could not have written it more perfectly herself.

Eliza climbed off of her bed and crossed her bedroom to her own personal book shelves. Her mother did not allow Eliza's books to be kept in the library. She did not like guests to think that they allread smutty romance, as she called them. Eliza placed the book back on the shelf, next to the dozens of others that she owned.

All of Eliza's books had something in common. They all took place somewhere faraway and romantic. She preferred adventure stories, the kind that allowed her imagination to wander far away from where her body physically was. She adored the passionate, wayward romance the characters experienced. Romances between classes, ranks, criminals and innocents. The passion and the emotion were so much better that way. And she liked them to end in tragedy, in heartbreak, and in loss.

There was no better way to feel love then to feel the loss of it, or at least that is what she had come to understand through her books.

Not that Eliza would know.

She hated finishing a book. She hated returning to reality. Life was so much more interesting aboard a pirate ship, or on a deserted island.

Eliza's life was an endless parade of dull. Her parents, God bless them, had been restored to their fortunes, and so were at the height of Plymouth society. That meant dozens of droll parties and dances with the same droll men only after a rich wife to make heirs for him.

Eliza had lost count at how many proposals she had received and rejected. She really made no effort to seek attention. It seemed to follow her wherever she went. Her own mother seemed bemused as Eliza was always so sour at social gatherings. But the lure of money was more enticing than the woman attached to it, so most men could not have cared a bit at what she looked like, or how she behaved.

How she longed for adventure. How she longed for a life more exciting than her own. How she wanted a daring and dashing buccaneer to sweep her away to far off lands.

To be married to one of those horridly boring gentlemen was her destiny, she knew. It was how her books often ended. But she wanted the romance before she accepted the tragedy! She wanted passion and danger and exhilaration.

Eliza crossed her bedroom to the window and sat down at the seat in front of it. Her bedroom was perfectly positioned to overlook the sea. She could see so far into the distance, as though the horizon was never ending. What would it be like to sail toward that horizon? To sail away wherever one wanted, to follow one's spirit without a care for the consequences?