Sea of Ruin
Page 29
The admiral himself didn’t tower over anything. He was a head shorter than the shortest man on board. Yet he wore the tallest, highest high-parted periwig I’d ever seen. Perhaps an attempt to make up for his lack of height.
The stiff-lipped little man was around forty years old and did, in fact, carry a cane, which he swung from a loop on his stubby middle finger.
Maybe he was a loving husband, generous commander, and all-around decent fellow, but I disliked him instantly. I didn’t know why. Just a feeling in my gut.
Ashley greeted him with all the required formality, and they launched into a discussion about Dycker’s purpose here. I caught bits and pieces of the conversation over the roar of waves. Evidently, Dycker had been sent from England to Nassau at the earnest request of the colony’s governor to hold a conference on some private matter. That was now concluded, and HMS Ludwig was on course to return home.
When it was Ashley’s turn to explain his whereabouts, he spoke of the forty pirates he’d captured and currently held below. Then he mentioned the Feral Priest he was soon to collect in New Providence before sailing back to England.
The admiral’s gaze wandered toward the sea as if he’d lost interest in Ashley’s plans. As his attention circled back, he went still. His head turned, and his eyes landed directly on me.
Pulling himself away from Ashley without a word, he strode down the line of soldiers and paused before the men who stood in front of me. “What is this?”
The throng of seamen parted, putting me into full view of admiral’s inspection.
“A prisoner, my lord.” Ashley didn’t move from his position or look my way.
“This charmingly small little confection is a prisoner?” The glittering beads of Dycker’s brown eyes danced over me, making my skin prickle with unease. Then he drifted closer, reaching out to touch my hair.
“Mind your fingers, my lord,” Ashley said. “She bites.”
I gritted my teeth. So his lordship was watching. I couldn’t tell, given the way he stared straight ahead as if he couldn’t stand the sight of me.
“She’s Edric Sharp’s daughter.” Ashley’s accent thickened with something akin to pride. “Bennett Sharp.”
“Well done, Lord Cutler. A fine prize, indeed.” Dycker gave me another skin-crawling appraisal. “But why, pray tell, is she not confined in the hold with the others?”
“I wish to deliver her to England alive and in one piece. My hold is crammed with savages. She lasted less than a minute in there before they were upon her.”
“I see. So she’s sleeping where?”
“In my quarters, my lord.” Ashley’s tone hardened, leaden with challenge.
“Good heavens, that is highly irregular.”
“So is the capture of a female pirate.”
“It’s unbeseeming. Intolerable.” Dycker tapped his cane hard against the planks. “The Royal Navy is not running a brothel aboard its ships. If the First Lord of the Admiralty heard of this—”
“He would understand my quandary and appreciate my willingness to be flexible.”
The air stretched with nervous strain. Anxiety rippled from the rank and file of soldiers and quickened my own breaths.
“Just so.” Dycker sniffed. “There is no further need for you to thwart the boundaries of propriety and risk your reputation. The hold in my flagship is empty. I shall transport this prisoner to England in your stead.”
My objection exploded in a plaintive, horrified gasp that quickly turned into an enraged growl. A smirk stole across Dycker’s face.
Ashley’s hand balled and released at his side. “I appreciate the offer, but she is my prisoner. As thus, I intend to deliver her myself and collect the due recognition.”
My heart shriveled. He wanted his promotion. Of course, he did. And perhaps a part of him wanted to keep me close for the duration of the journey so that he could continue to use my body until he handed me over to the headsman. There might have been an even smaller part of him that wished to keep me forever. But in the end, when forced to decide between his career and my life, I knew he wouldn’t choose me.
My thoughts twisted to a dark place, one that painted the aristocratic world in shades of liquid red.
Dycker strolled back to Ashley. “We’re only a day from New Providence. I don’t have the space to confine forty prisoners, but I can hold the woman while you capture your feral pirate. I shall take her off your hands and moor along the eastern coast of Eleuthera, just a few hours from here.” He thrust his chin in a southwesterly direction. “I’ll wait for you there, and upon your return, I shall sail in consort with your ship back to England. There, you can collect your prisoner from my hold and deliver her to the authorities yourself.”
I stopped breathing, my pulse shivering and gaze locked on the man who held my heart and my life in his hands.
His expression showed no creases, no tension, not a twitch of an eyelash as he spoke in a steady, unconcerned voice. “Very good, my lord. I’m most grateful for your assistance.”
“Excellent.” Dycker snapped his fingers at the lieutenants behind him. “Transport her to the flagship. Make haste.” He turned back to Ashley. “How about a drink in your quarters? I shall like to hear the story of how you captured Edric Sharp’s daughter.”
“It would be an honor.” Ashley turned and led the admiral to the companionway.
Everything inside me cried out, begging him to meet my eyes and reassure me that he had a plan, one that wouldn’t end us. Not like this.
But he didn’t. He didn’t look, didn’t try to send me a hint or give me a sign. Nothing.
It hurt. God’s wounds, it hurt far more than I thought it could. This didn’t even feel like a good-bye. I just felt…forgotten.
Fingers curled around my arms and wrenched me toward the stern, where the ladder to the jolly boat waited. Fighting my escorts and the hundreds of other armed men around me would only speed up my execution. I had no choice but to comply.
As I was ushered off HMS Blitz, I twisted my neck, trying to find Ashley among the scattering of soldiers. When I spotted him, it was only his back, where he vanished below deck. He hadn’t glanced back to check on me, hadn’t waited to see me off his ship and out of his life.
As I slid over the gunwale and descended the ladder, I couldn’t feel the rungs beneath my hands. As I was rowed to the flagship, I couldn’t hear the waves over the drubbing of my heart. As I climbed aboard my new prison, I couldn’t see the horizon through the blurry smear of wetness in my eyes.
Priest wouldn’t know to look for me here. This wasn’t the ship he was hunting.
Every plan I’d made to escape lay in ruin.
Because I’d fallen in love with yet another man who would never choose me first.
The desolation was all-consuming, unfathomable, dragging me into the unsearchable depths of the darkest abyss. And that was nothing compared to what was coming.
Little did I know, I’d just been delivered into an infernal hell that would surpass the very limits a human soul could withstand.
I was immediately put under the decks by two of the admiral’s lieutenants, who looked like brothers with their matching stern expressions and white periwigs. They handled me with less care than one would give a goat as they kicked, shoved, and dragged me to the bilge.
I’d expected the rough treatment but not what followed.
A wad of cloth was forced into my mouth. A ring of iron went around my neck, attached to a chain. Shackles were clapped onto my wrists and ankles. My boots came off. Then I was stripped to my skin.
They didn’t bother with the laces on my bodice and stays. Steel blades ripped through the fabric, removing the gown in strips. Thankfully, they left the jade stone on the choker at my throat. Perhaps because they didn’t see it beneath the iron collar.
My stomach plunged to my feet as I stood before them, naked, gagged, and shaking in the suffocating heat of the climate, trapped in the airless belly of the flagship.
Perhaps I could’ve outrun them through the hold, scaled the ladder, climbed through the hatchway, and locked them down here. Then what? I couldn’t sneak through multiple decks undetected. Even if I did make it topside, where would I go? Jumping into the sea was only an option for those who preferred death over life.
Was that a possibility? Would I reach a point where I’d rather die than endure whatever awaited me here?
My trepidation heightened as they escorted me toward a door in the hold behind the mainmast. It opened without a lock, and they pushed me into the pitch-dark space.
I received such a greeting in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life. The loathsome stench surged bile to my throat, and the gag prevented panting through my mouth.
A ruthless boot knocked me down upon the deck, and the very planks themselves reeked of grisly things—excrement, despair, death. I became so unbearably sickened by the smell that I couldn’t focus beyond the violent urge to vomit.
Until they brought a lantern into the compartment.
The glow didn’t stretch all the way into the corner. But the edge of light that did reach… Oh, merciful God, I wished it hadn’t.
Skeletal legs extended from the darkness—bloodied, unmoving, human, female. My stomach twisted painfully as the officer with the lantern turned in that direction and held up the light, illuminating the cargo.
Three nude African women lay on their backs, glassy eyes staring at the deck above. Their emaciated bodies were restrained in the same manner I was, only they didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
The abdomen of one protruded with a small, round bump. The undeniable swell of a babe that would never be born.
A low, unpreventable wail erupted against the rag in my mouth. Tears seared my eyes. Tremors overtook my limbs, and ice-cold fear sat like iron in my stomach.
I knew I was to be transported to England to hang, and if my demise had been no worse than death, I could’ve faced it with some semblance of courage and clarity. But my situation wasn’t that merciful.
As I took in the scars and open wounds that covered the women, the layers of gruesome bruises on their upper thighs, I was forced to acknowledge precisely what would assail me before I crawled out of this hole. If I crawled out.
The soldiers stepped toward the bodies and kicked at the torpid legs. The youngest-looking woman lay in a state of rigor, suggesting she’d died recently. The one beside her had shriveled to a stage of death that was beyond human recognition. The third one…
“Still alive.” The man kicked again, prompting a jerking twitch from the pregnant body that now showed signs of breathing.
Matted black hair hung over her face in clumps, but her eyes were in there, bright and desperate and staring directly at me as she tried to lift an arm to defend herself. I scrambled toward her—awkwardly and ineffectively with my ankles and wrists shackled as they were—and threw myself onto the soldier’s ramming boot. A foolish decision, for the next kick sent me careening into the wall.
I hit so hard that black spots stole my vision. Pain stitched through my skull, and a loud ringing swallowed my hearing. I climbed through the fog, clinging to consciousness. After several attempts to sit up, the agony dissipated, and my eyesight returned. But I was too late.
Across the hold, one of the officers held the pregnant woman’s head in a bucket of water. I screamed against my gag, scrabbling toward her as her arms flailed weakly, uselessly. Then she fell limp.
Dead.
Gone.
She’d suffered only feet away, and I’d been helpless to stop it.
The horror that swamped my senses was unlike any that had come before it. My lungs burned with the frantic gasps of my shallow breathing. My jaw clenched so tightly I couldn’t unlock it, and the pain in my chest and throat tried to black out my awareness.
I knew this level of evil existed. I’d glimpsed it beneath the rutting body of the Marquess of Grisdale. I’d felt it in Jobah’s stories of his months aboard a slave ship. Hell, I’d battled it on the high seas in all forms of demons and monsters.
But to drown a dying, defenseless woman without reason or care? My mind couldn’t process it. My soul couldn’t bear it.
I lay in a state of traumatic shock, staring at their lifeless bodies.
And I was next.
Before I reached England’s shore, I would be defiled in so savage a manner I would likely die in consequence of it. Just like those women before me.
Being unaccustomed to wearing irons, I naturally feared that particular infliction as the officers turned their attentions on me. Could I have twisted my arms free, I would’ve gone for the knives on their hips. But I could not, and besides, I still had the ring around my neck to contend with, which they now secured to a hook on the wall and locked with a screw key.
Then, to my surprise and relief, they left.
The door closed, and the stark absence of light swarmed in around me. Within that terrible gloom lay the miasma of sluggish heat, the creaking of an unfamiliar ship, and the bodies of my cellmates.
The odor of decay had lived long in this grave, inhabiting its walls, arising from the deck, and floating in the atmosphere. It was old death, the aroma of it suffocating the confined swelter, making the air unfit for respiration.
Trapped in this forsaken place, sharing this nightmare with three women I would never know… It was inenarrable. Inexpressible. Every inch of me trembled, rattling the chains as my heart screamed in grief.
The women were in a better place now. Wherever that was, it had to be easier than what they’d endured in this pit. Still, I wished they had lived. I would give anything to have them here so I could tell them we would get through this, overpower our captors, and escape this ship of horrors.
I would’ve believed those words for them. I would’ve vowed to save their lives with every breath in my body.
But it was just me, all alone. I didn’t know how to make brave promises for myself.
Although the officers had left me inviolate, I still feared I would be taken by force and raped to the point of death. They had looked and acted as though they were capable of such brutal cruelty. Not just with Africans, whom the English had no compunction over enslaving and abusing. But also with me. I supposed they valued the life of a pirate the same as a slave and would treat me with equivalent savagery.
In the dark, I contorted my body as such to put my face near my hands and feet so that I could use my fingers to work the gag from my mouth. Then I gave into an overwhelming need to wiggle toward my recently departed companion. When I found her in the desolate blackness, I lay my cheek on her still warm hand in the shackles.
And I cried.
These women had been stolen from a place of innocence and freedom and, in a barbarous and heartless manner, conveyed to a state of horror and slavery. They were lost to their dear parents and relations, and they to them. No one knew they were dead except me and the evil that had caused their suffering.
All I could offer them were my tears, and these could not avail, for there was no hope for them anymore.
I felt little hope for myself.
My abandoned thoughts grew murkier as time fell stagnant in the stifling abyss. Had it been hours? Days, perhaps. I’d felt the flagship heave from its mooring long ago and knew we’d already sailed to the coast of Eleuthera.
As an added torture, I thought about how close I was to Jade. I’d sent Reynolds to Harbour Island, which sat on the northern tip of Eleuthera. If the flagship anchored close to the shore, I could make the swim and walk to there. How long would Reynolds wait for me?
How long had we been waiting here for Ashley’s return?
He was hunting the pirate who hunted him. How would that end? While Ashley stormed the brothel in New Providence looking for Priest
, would Priest sneak aboard HMS Blitz in the harbor? Would he kill Ashley when he learned I’d been imprisoned elsewhere? Or would he die during the confrontation, surrounded by hundreds of Ashley’s soldiers?
That terrified me more than anything.
It had been my choices in life that brought this situation upon me. Not Priest’s. If he died trying to rescue me, the guilt would destroy me. The possibility of any harm coming to him or Ashley hurtled my pulse into hopeless panic.
From the time Ashley had handed me over and thence—in the brutish but fashionable way of the Royal Navy—consigned me to this hole of death, the grief I’d felt then still panted in my heart. Though my tears over his rejection had long since subsided.
I couldn’t blame him for doing his job to the utmost. I couldn’t accuse him of betrayal, either, for he’d never promised me freedom or happiness or even life. How many times had he told me I would stand trial? He’d specifically warned me he would hurt me again.
There had been no trickery or lies on his part. He’d voiced exactly how this would end and followed through on his word.
I hated him for it. Despised him to the depths of my heart. I had no choice. I needed an outlet for my helpless rage, and he was it. The longer I sat in solitary darkness, the more my thoughts suffered for it until one succeeding woe swelled up another and another and another and…
To my horror, the two lieutenants returned.
They forced the rag back into my mouth. A cravat was wrapped around my eyes and head, hindering my eyesight. Then I was conveyed from the foul-smelling hole and into fresher air. They didn’t take me far. Only a few feet beyond the door of my confinement.
Without my sight, I tripped over planks and cables, stumbling in the shackles. My pulse thundered frantically. My breath beat wetly against the gag as fear ruled every step.
I tried to fight, but one of them held me fast by the hands and laid me face down upon a barrel. He secured the restraints on my wrists and ankles to something on the floor, while the other man dumped water onto my back and callously scrubbed me from head to toe.