by Angel Payne
The declaration was delivered to the Gaverly villa by a passing group of children. The youngsters proclaimed the event as if it were Carnival, a few even dressed up as such. Golden squeezed her arms around herself as she leaned against the porch rail and watched the costumed group go by. Her soul crumbled more with each youthful cry.
What the anguish didn’t tear apart, her deep shame did. She might as well have been watching herself. She’d been a mindless child, believing whatever the adults told her, growing up with blinders of superstition and hatred and never questioning why—until a courageous, patient sea captain gave her the knowledge that she could think otherwise. That she could open her mind to a thing called trust.
Trust?
In what?
A charlatan who passed himself off as a human being?
You relied on someone who never existed, Golden. What does that make your ‘trust’ now?
But another voice fought the barrier of her memory to answer that question. A baritone of gentle thunder, backed by an orchestra playing a new dance called the waltz.
Books and covers, Golden. They’re never what they appear, even when the title seems crystal clear. Promise me you’ll remember that. Promise me you’ll believe.
The first voice burst into jeering laughter. Believe? In what? In the silence he’d given those bastards even after she’d pleaded for one word—one word!—of self-defense from him? In the incriminating sorrow brimming from his eyes as they lashed shackles on, issued final charges at him?
Her hands clenched where they were wrapped against her ribs.
“Bastard,” she rasped.
There. She’d finally said it. But the curse didn’t feel as wonderful as she’d hoped. And it didn’t relieve the pressure still surging through her body, rising to a hot assault of tears as it mingled with the ache behind her eyes.
“Why?” She choked it into the merciless silence the children left behind. “You obstinate ass, why?”
She kicked angrily at the rail. Then again. True to the standard set by the midnight-eyed fraud for whom they stood proxy, their reply was nothing short of unyielding silence.
“Bastard!”
It felt better this time, propelled off her lips by the confusion she could no more control than understand. “You told me you loved me. I believed you. God help me, I still do! But why? Why, damn you?”
Situations and conclusions. Oh, hellion, don’t you remember? One is rarely what the other accuses it of being…
“Stop it! I don’t want to listen anymore! I won’t!”
…even when your eyes tell you otherwise.
“Stop it-stop it-stop it!”
The refrain wouldn’t surrender. The words drove at her until she ran from the veranda and down the hard dirt drive in desperate hope of escape.
The torment only grew louder as she neared the top of the hill. The ocean wind whipped over the rise and beat against her.
Never what they seem…titles just confuse…even when your eyes tell you otherwise.
She moaned in protest but the wind belayed every order, replacing her ultimatums with a petition of soft, soothing warmth, calling to the deepest part of her. The instinct that heeded essence, not substance. The core that heeded spirit, not mind.
The heart that listened to love, not logic.
Even when your mind tells you otherwise…
“This is insanity.”
She whispered it as her arms fell to her sides, limp and drained. A strange, feather-light feeling began to flow through her from the toes up. “In…sanity.” Even the damp dirt of the drive felt remote beneath her bare feet as she backed away from the rise.
“You’re going barmy,” she told herself. “Voices from nowhere, spouting inane rubbish. ‘Though your eyes may tell you otherwise?’ My eyes are fine, blast it.”
Her voice trembled through her body. She spun and hurried back toward the villa. “Silly,” she admonished. “Rubbish. Books and covers. Promises and believing. Bosh!” She ignored the fact that her snort sounded more desperate than scoffing. “’Tis more like…trust without safety! Conviction without proof!”
In other words, hellion…a leap of faith.
She halted in the middle of the drive.
“A leap of…” she whispered.
Faith.
Her skin began to tingle. Her blood began to pound.
“Dear God.” She whirled around and peered over the sea. “Mast!”
She ran back to the ridge.
“You weren’t just spouting philosophy to me on that terrace, were you?”
The air answered unnatural stillness, as if nature itself saw the explosion of her thoughts and stood back for the view.
Golden’s muscles eagerly joined the audience. She couldn’t do anything but breathe as the scenes of last night whirled through her head. She relived Mast’s solemn expression as he danced with her under the stars. Again, she felt the bafflement of trying to determine what was “missing” in some of his glances. Once more, she grasped the tension which had practically been a physical presence between them…and the flashes of outright fear in his eyes as they’d made love in the garden. Lastly, she relived the words from his lips in the moments before he’d poured himself into her.
Love me like it’s the last time.
As if he were already imploring her to take a leap of faith.
To believe with every fiber of her being…
She began to laugh. And cry. If her heart wasn’t locked in her chest, it surely would have taken to the sky. “You crazy scoundrel!” she cried. “Mast Stafford, I love you!”
Footfall on the veranda turned her head back up the drive.
“Golden?” Maya stopped at the top of the stairs. Her head tilted hesitantly. “What the stars you ravin’ about? You all right?”
“I’m wonderful!”
Maya’s eyes, ringed with fatigue from her own sleepless night, darkened beneath her lowered brows. “I’m going to get your Papa.”
“Papa’s not here, which is just as well.” She ran back to join her sister. “Because we’re leaving, too.”
“Golden, I don’t think that’s a good—”
“Hurry,” she ordered, pushing Maya’s wrap at her. “We’ve got a lot to do and not much time to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Save the wrong men from being executed.”
“What?”
“Stop staring and move, Maya! Please! There’s little time left!”
“Wh-Where are we going?”
Golden smiled. “To get help, of course.”
Her sister’s cocoa eyes widened. “You not going to the army—”
“Oh no, sister! We’re going to the Athena!”
Wayland’s features were as cold as the bars between him and Mast. A cockroach made its way up the pole to the left of his friend’s face. The same bug which had just completed a tour of the dank cell the soldiers had thrown him into last night. He supposed it was on its way to Dinky’s confinement a few spaces away. Undoubtedly, his first mate’s snores were more interesting than the silence in which Mast had passed the morning.
He didn’t rise from his mud-encrusted “bed.” He leaned against the damp wall and concentrated on keeping his eyes open. The goal distracted him from the shackle grooves in his wrists and ankles, and the assorted cuts and bruises along the rest of his body.
Overcoming his physical agony was a lark compared to battling the ache in his heart.
“How is she?” he finally asked Wayland.
His friend preceded the answer with a weighted silence. “Distant. Exhausted. Confused.”
Mast crunched his face in a wince. “Is she at the villa?”
“Aye.”
“Alone?”
“Maya’s with her.”
He nodded. “Good. She’s not likely to go off on some half-cocked adventure now.”
“She wasn’t before. You broke her heart, lad. She can barely move.”
Mast looked away.
A malignant silence stretched again.
Finally, the low question came from his friend.
“Well, then. Are you ready to die, Captain Stafford?”
Mast slowly turned his eyes back up to Wayland’s taut angry face.
Then he smiled.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Golden allowed herself to breathe easily again as she and Maya scurried up the gangway and into the early night shadows along the Athena’s decks.
“We made it!” she exclaimed softly.
“I don’t believe it.” Maya stopped to rub her foot.
Golden flashed a scowl. “We couldn’t take a chance on the main road and you know it. There were soldiers all over the place; any one of them could be the Moonstormer.”
“And none of them could be.”
“Nay.” She returned Maya’s irritated tone in equal measure. “Nay, sister. They arrested the wrong men, and they did it for a reason: to take the punishment for the real criminals. Can you tell me, who but the army has enough power to do such a thing?”
Even in the dim light, Golden could denote the skeptical crunch to the Arawak’s features. She stepped into Mast’s spread-footed pose without even thinking. “Masterson Blake Stafford and James O’Dinkham did not commit those crimes,” she declared. “And I’m going to prove it, whether the rest of the world believes me or not.”
Not awaiting nor wanting to hear an answer, she turned and started across the main deck.
She tried not to notice how eerie her footsteps sounded in the strange stillness of the ship. Even the dock was abnormally empty. Nobody wanted to gawk at the famous Athena any more. That made it all the better to mobilize the men. They had less than twenty-four hours to track the real Moonstormer.
Less than twenty-four hours left of Mast’s life if they didn’t.
So much for her vow not to be daunted. Golden sprinted across the deck on the fresh surge of panic that gripped her. “Rico?” she called. “Ramses? Where are all of you?”
She headed to the fo’sicle, straining to hear a familiar voice or laugh. Only the soft creak of the floorboards answered her from the dark space with the empty bunks. The gunnery deck and main hold yielded the same return.
“Is anyone here?” she called, emerging back to the main deck. “Ho, mates! It’s me, the hellion!”
Ropes and canvas obeyed the wind to clap out her only answer.
She looked to Maya. Her sister shrugged. Golden whirled and started to move aft, refusing to surrender to the frustration and defeat that taunted her. She wasn’t going to give up!
Lantern light spilled over the deck ahead. Her throat caught for a second, but she smiled in relief, identifying the stoop-shouldered figure emerging from the galley.
“Ben,” she cried. “I’m so happy to see you.”
Ben’s face snapped up with an alertness denying his wizened appearance. His owl eyes and thin lips formed three circles of surprise. “Milady—”
She hugged the lovable coot who had become such a good friend to her. “At least someone stayed aboard,” she said. “I should have known it would be you.”
“Milady, what be ye doin’ here?”
“And where is everyone else?” she countered instead of answering him.
Ben skirted his eyes from her to the dock. “At the tavern in town. I told ’em to go,” he added. “’Tis been a tryin’ turn o’ events. The lads needed somethin’ to think about other than when the ship’ll be burned—”
“Burned!” Golden pushed aside her curiosity at Ben’s abnormally rapid chatter to absorb the impact of his last word.
“One way or another, aye. If not the army, then likely the townfolk.” He swiveled his head as if the first lethal flames might have sparked already. “So I suppose ye can see why this not be such a good place fer ye anymore.” He grasped her elbow. “Why don’t ye ladies try to put this mess behind ye fer good? Join the others at the tavern. Try to forget—”
“No.” She grabbed Ben’s hands and locked her feet to the deck in emphasis. “Ben, you don’t understand. That’s what I came here for. Believe me, this crisis is all but forgotten—but I’m going to need your help to prove it. I’m going to need everyone’s help.”
“Milady?” The man’s voice wavered. “What the saints ye be sayin’?”
She jabbed up her chin and set her shoulders. “Mast and Dinky aren’t going to be executed. We’re not going to let them do it.”
“We’re what?”
“Think about it! Don’t you think Mast and Dinky’s arrest, not to mention their conviction, happened too swift and easily? As if it were all planned”—she shifted her grasp to his shoulders—“because it was all planned.”
“What!”
“But that’s not the point,” she drove on. “The point is, the true Moonstormer is still free, wandering about on this very night, and we’ve got to find him!”
Ben’s shoulders sagged. His sigh blended much too well with the lonely creaks of the empty ship. “Ye truly believe this?”
“With every instinct in my body and all the conviction in my heart.”
The wind gave the rigging an extra gusty push. The deck angled strongly starboard then moaned its way level again. Ben slowly turned. He locked his stare with hers.
“Ye fell in love with him, didn’t ye?”
Golden struggled for a moment with how to answer that. But she knew the answer was already evident across her face. “Yes,” she said. “But that has nothing to do with it, either.” She clasped his shoulders harder. “Ben, the point is, your captain, a decent and honorable man, is to be shot to death tomorrow morning if we don’t do something about it.”
“Oh, milady,” His voice faltered as his eyes frantically scanned her face. “Milady, I—”
A loud thump caused the three of them to jump. Golden dropped her hands from Ben’s shoulders as her gaze was drawn to the portion of the deck she’d been avoiding tonight, for fear of the bittersweet memories evoked by just looking there.
The hatchway of Mast’s quarters.
Her heart seized as the door pushed open—and a figure emerged from the cabin.
The man’s face was an indiscernible silhouette against the backdrop of shimmering lantern light. But the man’s shoulders, broad and straight, held the unmistakable mien of pride. And the towering masculine height…
“Mast?” she gasped in hope, shakily stepping forward.
The figure turned and raised the lamp.
She choked and froze.
Not Mast.
“My Lady Golden,” came the surprisingly refined greeting from El Culebra’s placid lips. “At long last we have the deleite of meeting again. Ahhh, Ben, you were so right, my friend. She is quite lovely when she’s not covered in grime or cosmetics.”
“Wh-What’s happening?” she stammered. “H-How did you—”
“Oh, dear,” the Spaniard muttered. “Of course, what happened to my manners? Allow me the pleasure of introducing myself. I am Carlos Rudolfo Jose Nanchez, at your service. Or perhaps you’d prefer to address me by my other titles. Ben tells me you are well acquainted with El Culebra already…
“Or maybe the Moonstormer would be more suited to your taste?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Golden cried out in pain and stumbled backward. “How—how could you know—”
Her gaze flew to Ben.
“Milady,” he muttered, wringing his hands. “Milady Golden, I’m so sorry.”
She whirled and ran. She grabbed Maya and pulled her away, filled with the need to escape this Judas she’d once called friend and the beast he was in league with. But iron-gripped hands yanked her to the deck. Maya screamed and was yanked from her. Then all sight and sound were bludgeoned to a halt by the blow at the back of her skull.
She came out of the darkness to peer at dancing firelight. For a long moment, she stared at the flames in numb fascination. Then pain cut in through her head, and the flames became the inferno of hell.
&nb
sp; Consciousness.
A moan clamored for freedom from her throat, but instinct ordered her to gulp it back. An overriding sense of danger permeated her.
Where was she?
She smelled mist and moss. Touched wet and cold. There were echoes of nearby waves. A cave.
Images crisscrossed through her mind. Torchlight played along hedges in a garden. There were jeering soldiers that melted into laughing children. Then darker scenes of a ship at twilight, and another boat being lowered into night shadows…oars slashing through midnight waters…midnight blue…deep-blue eyes, loving her even as they were dragged away to a prison cell…
Mast! They’re going to kill you! Oh God, no!
Her restraint shattered beneath the weight of agony. A cry erupted from her lips; her body lurched frantically, yearning to bash everything in its way.
Her limbs met painful resistance. Not shackle. This confinement trapped her limbs tighter.
She dragged the lead ball of her head upright and forced her eyes open. She looked down to see thick seaman’s ropes lashing her arms against her torso, and again around both her ankles. The ends of the ties there were secured around a heavy boulder for each leg. Next to her feet she recognized the top of Maya’s head, disturbingly immobile, layered with the same damp dirt which covered her.
She gulped.
“Ah, the sea siren awakens at last.”
The greeting was calm as a garden party salutation. It sent a broadsword of dread down Golden’s spine. She sent a slow, intense glare across the fire—into the cold eyes of Carlos Rudolfo Jose Nanchez.
The Spaniard’s lips curled in an expression that could, if a body was demented enough to see it that way, be called a smile.
“Buenos dias,” he said in a nauseatingly pleasant voice.
“You,” she finally summoned enough composure to state.
Nanchez leered a little wider.
“All this time. All these years. You’ve masqueraded as El Culebra and the Moonstormer.”
“No, amada,” he reproved. “I am El Culebra and the Moonstormer.”