<div class="floatleft">(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c4/a2/eb/c4a2eb3622a5fd5f4149b8e094a22fa3.jpg)</div><strong>Name: </strong>Danae Vine-Lott<br/><strong>Location: </strong>The Charlotte, Danae’s Cabin<br/><strong>Wearing: </strong>White cotton jodhpurs, loose grey muslin riding shirt with collar open and sleeves rolled up, barefoot<br/><strong>Content: </strong>Comfortably numb<br/><strong>Tagging: </strong>Hannah<br/><br/><hr/><br/>Danae's hand slipped from her hipbone to grip the pommel of a phantom rapier.  She detested being disarmed, and her sudden outburst had added to her sense of vulnerability. To lose control of one's emotions was most unseemly, and especially so for a military officer.  Mrs Herrington would have caned her for such lapse in protocol.  The memory clawed through her subconscious, with a frisson of pain and release. Yes, discipline was good - it distinguished civilised humans from the lower animals and savage goblins.  "Apologies, Ladies, I fear the heat has gotten the better of me. If the Captain bids us to retire, so we should. A storm is soon to be upon us. Though I am no mariner, I have walked the cliffside heaths of Mordentshire long enough to know when the salt air brews one up."<br/><br/>To Hannah, she addressed a brief, "Come, then, Lady Rodes-Taving - I have something for you in my cabin."<br/><br/>Belowdeck, she slid through the semi-deserted saloon, and into the lamplit corridor leading to the aft cabins.  The floor was polished wood.  Smell of beeswax and good olive oil burning.  Hannah's presence stilled her nerves. The woman had a fresh, Mordentshire-rose complexion, and demure as she may well have been one of the 'eligible ladies' social convention would have told her to court.  Fate had willed it that the lands and prestige she craved impelled a marriage to Abigail Sexton, but it was a longstanding convention that a soldier on campaign was unbound by the niceties of life in the Home Shire.<br/><br/>She had a brass key and with it, she unlocked the door to her cabin, and let Hannah in. Their transit into her cabin had been wordless.  Inside, her travelling chest was propped up against a wide bed by the porthole, with thin, gauzy cotton sheets laundered, pressed, and starched that morning.  The flowers set in the vase on the writing-desk were already wilting in the heat.<br/><br/>"Please, sit," she motioned for Hannah to make herself at home on the armchair by the writing desk.  Then she went and fetched a ceramic medicine bottle from a monogrammed leather bag she kept under a pile of pressed shirts in her travelling trunk. She poured two spirit-glasses full of maroon, juniper-scented liquid.<br/><br/>"Opium," she said, matter-of-factly, "dissolved in gin.  Drink it one swallow - I fear the recipe made no allowances for taste. With this, sleep should come swiftly."<br/><br/>"To your health," Danae raised her glass, and drank.  The spirit burned her tongue, and the opium swiftly numbed it.  A sensation of warmth, and well-being seized her, and she lay back on her bed, eyes raised to the ornate floral pattern carved into the ceiling.  Something felt amiss in the immediate rush of narcotic-induced bliss.  Had Hannah Rodes-Taving acquiesced in visiting her cabin alone?  What would the fellow members of her Club think?  The thought troubled her.<br/><br/>"Did you come here, Lady Rodes-Taving, because I can give you what you need? A soldier’s quarters are a dangerous place."