“Yes,” I replied languidly. I closed my eyes and sighed deeply. “That's what it's supposed to be like.”
He chuckled and nuzzled my cheek. “Yes. That's what it's supposed to be like.” He sighed softly and kissed my cheek. “You never had this with Gideon?”
“No. Never. I don't think he could ever...” I trailed off, realizing how silly I must sound to him.
He kissed my forehead and whispered, “Tell me.”
I closed my eyes and a shiver of remembered pleasure ran through me. “I don't think anyone capable of give or receiving love could ever feel like this,” I said. I opened my eyes and looked at him, locking my gaze with his. “And I know he was incapable of love. He was incapable of even basic human kindness.”
He rose up on his elbow, looking down into my eyes and trailed his fingers down my cheek. “I think you're right,” he said softly. “God, you are beautiful,” he said fiercely. “And intelligent and wickedly clever, and Loreley—” He broke off and held me out at arm's length. “What is your full name?”
“Loreley Phoebe Jones.”
He nodded and sat up. He reached for my hand and drew me up, too. “Loreley Phoebe Jones, I love you.”
I blinked and stared at him, my mouth hanging open just a bit. He raised his brows in question and I closed my mouth. “Your full name?” I asked, though my throat was dry and my voice came out strangled and squeaky.
“Sebastian Michael Andrew Grant MacIsaac.”
“That's quite a name,” I said. He chuckled and shrugged. “All right then. Sebastian Michael Andrew Grant MacIsaac, I... Well, I love you as well.”
We stared at each other, the heaviness of our words hanging in the tiny gulf between us. I smiled hesitantly and reached out to touch his face. He turned his head and nuzzled my hand and placed a kiss against the palm. I took a deep breath and glanced towards the closed flap of the tent. “I should probably get dressed and find my own bed for tonight.”
He nodded and slipped off the cot to sort through our clothing. He came up with the linen bindings and helped me with them. He kept his eyes open and didn't look away awkwardly even once. After we were dressed and I had pulled my hair back into a quick plait, he gathered me into his arms, and held me against him, his cheek resting against the top of my head.
“Good night, Loreley,” he said and kissed my forehead. “Sleep well.”
I reached up and cupped his cheek tenderly before ducking out of his tent. I glanced around and found no one watching, so I carefully and quietly picked my way through the sand to the tent I was sharing with Ben. He was thankfully asleep already as I laid down in my cot.
I didn't sleep a wink that night. I kept replaying the last five minutes in Sebastian's tent. He said he loved me. And I said I loved him as well. I couldn't stop smiling. I was far too excited to fall asleep. Eventually, tired of thrashing back and forth on my cot, I got up and sought out the bonfire. There were a few men snoozing around it, so I settled in and kept watch as best as I could, but honestly, the entirety of the Royal Navy could have landed on that island and I wouldn't have noticed. I was too wrapped up in the lingering feeling of Sebastian's body against mine, the touch of his fingers, the taste of his skin, the sound of my name on his lips.
I loved him. He loved me. I could think of nothing better, nothing more perfect.
XXII
On board the Jezebel
February, 1717
The next day, Sebastian and I tried hard to act as though the night before hadn't happened. We tried to pretend that we weren't in love but I don't know how well we covered the loving glances or the innocent-seeming touches we exchanged while going about our normal duties. Ben definitely knew something was amiss; he looked at us as though we were out of our minds and perhaps we were. Despite their captain's moon-eyed behavior, the crew managed to finish the repairs and careening in record time and we soon had the ship back in the water.
The months after Pooley's death were much the same as those before it. We took three more ships with little or no carnage and made a fat profit from each. Each payout was an even number, a fact I felt was very strange. There were sixty-five men on the ship, including Sebastian and his four officers. The captain and the quartermaster each took two shares, the other four officers a share and a half each, and the rest of the men each received a single share. It would stand to reason that after doing the maths involved in making sure we all got our due, there would be some small coins distributed, ha'pennies or farthings or something.
I cornered Mr. Hamilton one afternoon after payout and questioned his maths. He glowered at me for a moment and then shrugged breezily. “Two shares goes to Herself, plus whatever remainderizers there might be. Repairs, powder, provisions, Mr. Jones. All quite dear.”
Herself must mean the ship. I'd heard Sebastian refer to her as that in the past. Once I'd puzzled through the rest of his strange words, I agreed that it made a certain amount of sense. “And who holds the ship's shares?”
“Why, Captain MacIsaac, of course. He's the only one whose authoritativeness the men won't question.”
That, too, made sense. Still, something about the arrangement made me itchy. I wondered if it would be possible to put the money in a bank in Havana or Trinidad, and then laughed at myself. These were pirates, after all, lawbreakers to a man. I would have better luck trying to teach a fish to ride a horse than I would in trying to legitimize a pirate crew. The current arrangement would have to suffice. Sebastian didn't seem to be misusing the funds so there was no real reason—beside my itchy feeling—to change things.
All thoughts of money and shares flew out of my mind when I heard the man in the crow's nest call out, “Sails to the south! Looks like a Brit warship!”
Hamilton and I stared at each other for a moment. We both knew Sebastian's opinion of the British Royal Navy and we both knew that he was likely to go after this ship. “He'll try to take it,” Hamilton said with a weary sigh. He shook his head regretfully and I nodded in commiseration.
I followed Hamilton up the main hatch to the quarterdeck, and found Ben and Duquesne standing next to the binnacle. Sebastian was at the gunwales, peering into a spyglass that was trained on the ship, whose sails were barely visible on the far horizon. “It be a British ship,” Ben affirmed. “Captain be wanting to take it.”
“What on Earth is he going to do with two ships?” I asked.
Duquesne shrugged, overhearing my question. “Teach and Hornigold have fleets. So does Vane. MacIsaac just wants to play with the big boys.” I rolled my eyes and scoffed quietly. Men.
I turned to Ben and asked, “Can we? Take her, I mean?”
“Probably,” he said hesitantly. “She be a cutter, see? Single mast? She probably only have maybe ten cannon and a just leftenant in command. Probably he be green, too. Easy prize for us.” The worried look in his eyes did not match the confidence in his voice or his words.
“Mr. Duquesne, raise the tricolor,” Sebastian called out.
I turned to look at the ensign staff, where a flag with vertical bands of blue, white, and red was being raised. I whirled back to face Ben, my brows raised in surprise. “What the hell is he doing?” I shouted. “That's the bloody French flag!”
“Mr. Jones, I'll thank you to keep your protestations to yourself,” Sebastian said without looking back at me. Ben merely shrugged and went to our place at the gunwales on the fo'c's'le. I stayed behind for a moment longer, frowning severely at Sebastian's back, wondering if his nationalistic pride was going to get us all killed one day, then joined Ben.
Despite the cutter's smaller size and faster speed, the Jezebel soon caught up with her. The cutter struck her colors and raised the white flag in short order. There was a sigh of relief from the crew; while we would have eagerly engaged in a fight, we all knew the potential for disaster if it came to that. Once the sails on both ships were furled, Sebastian, Hamilton, and a boarding party of thirty men crossed to the cutter, the HMS Vixen, according to the escutcheo
n across her stern. Ben and I stayed at the gunwales, listening to as much of the conversation as possible.
The boarding party rounded up the Vixen's sailors on the weather deck and some six or seven men stood around them in a circle, their pistols pointing into the thick of the crowd. Hamilton drew aside a couple of the Jezebel's crew men and nodded towards the hold, no doubt telling them to sweep it from stem to stern and herd all the British sailors up to the weather deck where they would be watched as well. This was the trickiest part of the entire operation. If there were any sailors hiding in the hold, it would be easy for them to ambush our boarding party and kill them to a man.
A pleasant-looking man with full lips and a noble nose stood at the binnacle, straight and tall and slightly out of place in his snowy white stockings and buff-colored breeches. He held a tricorn under his left arm and his right hand hung next to his sword. He watched Sebastian and Hamilton approach and then bobbed his head in an abbreviated bow. “Où sont vos papiers, se il vous plaît, messieurs?” A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. Sebastian spoke nearly perfect French; did Hamilton, I wondered?
Sebastian dug in a small leather satchel that hung from his belt and handed over a much-worn paper. “Qui dois-je ai le plaisir de me adresser?” he asked the man.
“Leftenant Fitzroy Henry Lee, messieurs. Et vous?”
“Captain Michael Grant,” he said and then nodded to Hamilton. “Et Lieutenant James Hamilton. Je espère nos papiers sont en ordre?” I knew that Grant and Michael were one of Sebastian's many names, and it dawned on me that after the run of English merchant ships we'd taken in the past few months, anyone claiming the name Sebastian MacIsaac would no doubt be arrested or possibly executed on sight. No wonder he was giving a false name.
“Oh,” Lee looked over the paper in his hand, squinting at the seal at the bottom and then nodded. “Parlez-vous anglais? Je crains que mon français ne est pas très bon.”
“Yes, I speak English,” Sebastian answered with a thick Parisian accent. I hid a grin behind my hand. “You raised the white flag? You will surrender your ship to us? Oui?”
“Well, I would, except this seal isn't right,” Lee said, pointing to the red blob of wax at the bottom of the paper Sebastian had given him. “It appears to be the seal of the governor of Dominica, and yet this signature is that of the governor of Martinique.” He looked up at Sebastian and Hamilton and arched a brow. “Can you explain that, gentlemen?”
Sebastian gave a particularly Gallic shrug, drew his sword and ran the hapless lieutenant through at the same time as he drew his pistol and fired into the crowd. My heart seized in my chest and I drew my own weapons, readying myself for the inevitable skirmish. The last time I'd drawn my pistol, I'd killed a man. I could feel a rising tide of bile surging up my throat and cast around for somewhere safe to stand and avoid the fighting.
The rest of the pirates on board the Vixen fired as well, then drew their swords as they waded into the thick of the British sailors. The decks of the Vixen broke out into chaos and Ben loosed a blood-thirsty scream as he jumped from the Jezebel's gunwales clear across the chasm between the two ships to the nets attached to the Vixen's hull and pulled himself up.
The British sailors attempted to cross over to the Jezebel in the same way, but we were ready for them and fought them off with pistol, swords, knives, and when those failed, our bare hands. I could find nowhere to hide and realized that if the British sailors took this ship, they'd kill me on sight. I had to fight to protect myself, to preserve my own life. I climbed up on the gangway and stepped into the middle of the chaos. I swallowed and steeled myself before I fired my pistol blindly down onto the deck of the Vixen. I drew my cutlass then, stabbing and slashing and trying to ignore the fountains of blood that gushed over me when my blade struck true.
I felt something burning then freezing slice through the meat of my left biceps and looked up to see a boy about my age, his face in a rictus of anger as he lunged at me with his saber. The hours of training with Ben came back to me and I parried, throwing his sword far out to the right, leaving his gut unprotected. I kicked him hard in the groin and slashed out at him, leaving a bloody red gash across his chest. He fell to the deck and stayed there. I moved past him and he was instantly out of mind as I focused on my next opponent.
I heard shouting from somewhere behind me and then the thunderous boom of the Jezebel's cannon as they fired, shaking the plank I stood on and ripping gaping holes in the side of the Vixen.
“Get us under way, Mr. Harris!” Sebastian cried out as he caught me around the waist and pulled me off the gangway, back onto the Jezebel's deck. I hadn't even been aware that I was half-way across to the Vixen until that moment. “You're bleeding,” he said with an astonished face.
I looked down at myself and blinked in shock. I said the first thing that came to mind. “Most of it isn't mine.”
Sebastian chuckled and said, “Go wait in your cabin. Ben will be there in a moment.” He gave me a fond smile and then dashed off to wherever he was needed. The guns fired again and I stood for a moment, watching the Vixen as it was slowly swallowed by the sea. All around me stood men with glazed eyes and defeated airs; they were the sailors who had been serving on the Vixen. I wondered what would become of them.
I retreated to my cabin and stripped off my shirt, wadding it up and tossing it onto my bunk. The linen wrappings were soaked through, too, so I peeled those off and threw them next to my shirt. Thankfully, Ben had left water in the pitcher, so I poured it into the ewer and sponged off as much of the blood as I could and then stared at the gash in my arm.
It was a neat cut, probably three inches long, running diagonally down my arm from left to right. It didn't hurt right now, which meant it was very deep. I knew that once it was stitched up and bandaged, it would hurt and with a vengeance, too. I dried off and pulled on a shirt, leaving my breasts unbound since I wouldn't be seeing anyone other than Ben for a while.
As I waited for Ben to enter, I wondered at my attitude towards the death and destruction that we sometimes left in our wake. It used to be a horrifying thing, something that kept me up at night, something that haunted me during the day. But it seemed commonplace to Ben and Sebastian and the other crew. The faces of the men they killed no longer seemed to inhabit their dreams. Would I ever become so accustomed to the senseless loss that the deaths of the sailors—deaths that I caused in some cases—meant so little to me anymore? I prayed that would never happen. I did not relish the killing, but I could see becoming accustomed to it, if only to save my own sanity. I could see becoming hardened like Ben and Sebastian.
I was afraid that some day, my moral compass would no longer point towards true north.
Moments later, Ben did indeed enter the cabin. He took one look at my bunk with its bloody clothing and shook his head. “You be a crazy girl,” he said with a smirk. “Let me see you arm.” I rolled up my sleeve and showed him the cut. “Oh, that a pretty one. You want stitching up?”
“I think so. It'll leave a scar, right?”
“Yes, but it be good. Captain, he be impressed with you,” he said as he dug in the trunk next to his bunk, coming up with a small medical chest. He opened it and took a curved needle and some black silk thread out.
“And what makes you think I want the Captain to think be impressed with me?” I asked, affronted.
“The way you look at him and he look at you. You two be in love. It be plain to me, though hopefully not to no one else.” He threaded the needle and nodded to my bunk. “You want something to bite down on?”
I ignored Ben's statement of the obvious mutual attraction shared by the captain and I in favor of addressing something of greater concern. “What? Why would I want to bite down on something?”
“The stitches, they hurt. Bad.” He gave me a leather strip. “It be okay if you scream. No one judge you.”
I stuffed the leather strip into my mouth and nodded. Ben inserted the needle into my flesh and white-hot agony cour
sed through me. I did scream and cry and moan and whimper. But I did not flinch or try to pull away from him. After I was the proud owner of fifteen neat, black stitches, Ben gave me a bottle of rum, told me to get into my bunk, and drink all of the rum. My arm would stop hurting and I would feel good.
I did as he instructed and drank until I was blind. He was right; my arm stopped hurting and I felt weightless and dreamy as I floated away on a river of rum. My worries about what the future held in store for my soul were pushed aside for a little while and I did nothing more strenuous than raise the bottle to my lips.
XXIII
On board the Jezebel
March, 1717
I had a beastly head-ache the next morning, but at least the pain in my arm had faded to a dull ache. The sun was entirely too bright and the men entirely too loud, so I spent as much time with the charts and maps and log books as possible, hiding in the quiet gloom of Sebastian's cabin. I had become something of a permanent installation in the space and Sebastian had grown so used to my presence that sometimes he forgot I was there.
When I entered the cabin, I heard voices from the captain's bed place. I sat quietly down at the desk and unrolled a chart, half-listening to the discussion. It sounded as though Sebastian was meeting with Duquesne and the new gunner, Weiss, who had come over from the Vixen.
“It's like the flintlocks on our pistols, captain,” Duquesne said. “But for the cannon.”
“Ja, Herr Captain,” Weiss said. I smiled, hearing my mother's native German spoken again. “It will do away with the need for linstocks and will make crews safer. Guns will aim better.”
“Can you retrofit our existing cannon?” Sebastian asked.
“Nein, Herr Captain. They must be new guns, made with new fittings.”
“And how much would this endeavor cost?”
“Seven thousand reales. For each gun,” Duquesne answered.
The Jezebel's Daughter Page 18