by Kevin Sands
“What is that?” Tom said.
An earthquake, I thought.
But it wasn’t an earthquake. I looked past the pirates to the lights of Seaton—and I saw those lights were dancing.
I blinked. Had I gone mad? No, I was certain of it: The lights were dancing. And they were coming closer, rising up and down like—
Torches.
And the sound. It wasn’t thunder. It was . . .
“Horses,” I said.
And the first of them came into view.
I stared as the figures rode down on us. In the lead was a man in furs, all black, a terrifying scowl on his face. He wore a patch over his left eye and a three-fingered glove on his right hand.
Impossible. It was impossible. “It can’t be,” Tom said.
Lord Ashcombe roared as he rode toward us, forty of the King’s Men thundering behind. He dropped his reins, drawing two pearl-handled pistols from his belt. He aimed them and fired, and the pirate in front of me flew backward into the snow.
The pirates broke and ran. Their captain sprinted after them, terror finally etched on his face. They made for the cliff, flowing past us like we weren’t even there.
Lord Ashcombe roared again as he drew his sword, left handed. “For the king!” he howled, and he swung his blade. A fleeing pirate’s head left his shoulders, gathering snow as it bounced away. Lord Ashcombe rode a second man beneath his warhorse’s churning hooves, then chased a third to the ridge. He wheeled to the right, swung a steel-studded boot, and kicked the man over the side.
Lord Ashcombe pointed to the cove with his sword as the King’s Men reined in. “Take no prisoners!” he cried, and forty English soldiers jumped from their mounts and swung over the edge, weapons waving, battle cries echoing into the night.
Lord Ashcombe watched them go, then flicked his reins. His warhorse plodded toward us, head bobbing. The King’s Warden looked down from his mount as we gaped up at him in astonishment.
“Everywhere you go,” he said, “there’s trouble.”
I flushed.
He spotted the blood on the shoulder of my coat, saw Tom leaning on me, limping. “Do you need a surgeon?”
What I really need, I thought, is sleep. Or maybe I already was asleep. This had to be a dream. “Who . . . what . . . how did you find us?”
Lord Ashcombe frowned. “You sent me a letter.”
“Yes, but how did you get all the way here from Oxford?”
“I wasn’t in Oxford.” He explained as we stood there, dumbfounded. “After the storm, a courier brought news that your ship never made it to Dover. Other boats were lost that day, and their wrecks were washing up on shore, so we rode down from Oxford to look for you. We knew the storm blew ships west, so I moved our command to Southampton.
“I’ve had men scouring the coast for a fortnight, but we were looking too close to the port. I never imagined you’d be carried this far. Regardless, when your courier arrived in Southampton, he spotted the King’s Men at the docks, and they brought him to me with your letter. I conscripted Captain Haddock to return to Seaton immediately.”
“But how did you know we were here?” Tom asked.
“The gunfire,” he said. “The innkeeper at the Blue Boar told me you hadn’t yet returned. It was too dark to go searching for you, but when I heard the shots, I knew: Follow the explosions, and you’ll find Christopher Rowe.”
I flushed even deeper as Tom glared at me. “But . . . you came to look for me?” I said.
Lord Ashcombe regarded me sternly. “You did His Majesty a great service in Paris. And we don’t abandon our friends.”
I shrank under his gaze. “Right. Sorry.”
“Now. Your letter was somewhat vague.” He pointed behind him. “Do you mind telling me whose head that is?”
“A Barbary pirate’s,” I said.
He scowled. “Foul beasts. I’ve been pressing His Majesty to deal with them. When the war with the Dutch has ended, we’ll rid our waters of them once and for all.”
Some of the King’s Men began climbing back over the ridge, puffing in their heavy leather armor. One of Lord Ashcombe’s pistols had fallen from his belt; a King’s Man found it and brought it to him.
Lord Ashcombe brushed off the snow. “Did you finish them?”
The soldier shook his head. “Sorry, General. They got away.”
Lord Ashcombe reined his horse over to the edge. I helped Tom hobble over, and we stood beside him.
The Andalus had already cleared the cove. It appeared that as soon as the gunfire had started, the captain had ordered a few of his men to push the ship out to sea. The mainsail unfurled, billowing in the wind, speeding them away from the coast.
Smoke rose from the beach, pistols thundering as the King’s Men emptied their guns at the departing ship. “I could ride to Seaton, General,” the soldier with us said. “Order Captain Haddock to sail after them.”
Lord Ashcombe shook his head. “No use. That yacht will outrun the Manticore.” He cursed. “How I’d love to sink that boat.”
“Actually, my lord—” I began.
Suddenly the sky filled with light. A second later came a massive BOOM—and the Andalus exploded.
Fire ripped it apart from inside the hold, casting flaming timbers off in glowing arcs. The mainmast shot into the sky like a spear, the sail burning on its ropes. It tumbled end over end before splashing down a hundred yards away. We ducked as a beam of wood whistled past, bouncing a fiery path through the snow.
The remains of the Andalus glowed brightly as it sank beneath the waves. Tom and Lord Ashcombe turned to stare at me.
I flushed so deeply I stopped freezing. “I can explain.”
“Perhaps you’d better,” Lord Ashcombe said.
“I found a map,” I said, and I handed him the pirate chart I’d stuffed in my breeches. “It made me realize that even if we rescued these children, the pirates could always lay in somewhere else and kidnap more. I knew we had to stop them for good. I just didn’t know how.
“But then my memories returned, and I recalled how we’d stopped the Cult of the Archangel. I didn’t have any Archangel’s Fire, of course, but I’d seen the pirates’ gunpowder, in the magazine, in their hold.”
“You set a fuse?” Lord Ashcombe said.
I shook my head. “The fuses they had were too short. The ship would have exploded before we’d climbed out of the cove. Instead, I used nitrum flammans. It’s this powder—if you mix it with zincum india, then add some spirit of salt, it makes a flame, all on its own. It’s really something to see. I can show you—”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Uh . . . right. Anyway, like oil of vitriol, spirit of salt dissolves metals. So I took one of the tin cups from the brig and filled it with all the spirit I had. Then I put the cup on top of the nitrum, which I’d dumped inside one of the barrels. I knew it would take several minutes for the spirit to eat through the tin, which gave us time to escape. Then, once the tin was finally eaten through, the spirit of salt would drip down, and . . . well . . .” I motioned to the burning water. “That.”
Tom buried his face in his hands. I couldn’t read Lord Ashcombe’s expression. Finally, he spoke.
“You’re like a cannon,” he said. “In human form.”
Tom moaned. “Oh, please, my lord. Don’t give him any more ideas.”
DECEMBER 25–31, 1665
Nihil autem opertum est, quod non reveletur;
neque absconditum, quod non sciatur.
CHAPTER
52
WITH THE DANGER PASSED, THE pain, the cold, and my exhaustion finally overwhelmed me. I collapsed in the snow. I have only vague memories of what happened next: Tom and me being lifted into saddles by the King’s Men, a bone-rattling gallop back to Seaton, and a blessed blast of warmth at the Blue Boar Inn. I was carried to my room, laid facedown on the bed, then pinned to the mattress by a pair of soldiers.
I was only vaguely aware of why—until a hot lance bur
ned my shoulder. I screamed, then passed out, and by the time I awoke, the King’s Men had removed the bullet and bound the wound tight.
Tom sat next to me, his ankle wrapped snugly. Sally was there, too, pacing, chewing on a fingernail, cradling her own bandaged hand against her chest.
Oh, how I hurt. “Poppy,” I croaked.
“It’s already boiling—” Tom began, and then Sally flung herself onto me and held me close.
“Ow.”
“Sorry,” she said. She let me go, shaking. “But . . . the explosion. When I heard it . . . I thought . . .”
Tom spared me the effort of telling the story. He explained what had happened on the ridge after she left—well, almost everything. He thought it prudent to leave out the part where I’d lied to her so she’d get to safety. I mouthed to him a silent and deeply grateful thanks.
She still wasn’t pleased. She stared at us, first incredulous, then angry. By the end, she was just flummoxed. “You’re both mad.”
“Don’t look at me,” Tom said. “This is all his fault.”
That was so unfair. “I noticed,” I said, “you left out the part with the whole ‘Stop, pirates, this is England’ speech.”
“That was mad? You threw a pistol at them. A pistol!”
“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
We were still arguing when Sally stomped off, shaking her head in disgust.
• • •
Blessedly, the poppy infusion took the edge off the pain. Once it finally began to work, Lord Ashcombe sent everyone out of my room. He listened grimly as I told him all that had happened since I’d washed up on the beach. I fell asleep promptly after that, but Tom and Sally told me that the moment the dawn lightened the sky, a dozen of the King’s Men rode furiously to the Darcy estate, with orders to bring Sir Edmund and Julian in chains.
Lord Ashcombe nearly spat with contempt when I mentioned the man’s name. “I knew he was a fraud,” he said. “I tried to warn His Majesty not to give him a baronetcy.”
“Then how did he get it?”
“The usual way. Money. It costs a great deal to run a kingdom, and we were in particular need of coin when Charles returned to his throne.”
“Sir Edmund said he knew you. He said you discussed cavalry charges.”
Lord Ashcombe snorted. “He talked. I wondered how angry the king would be if I ran my sword through his newest baronet.” He shrugged. “Opportunities missed, I suppose.”
• • •
I awoke to a chorus, singing.
At first, I thought I was still dreaming. It was coming from outside my window. I blinked and sat up, wincing with the pain. Tom lay sleeping on the palliasse, Moppet hanging half off his back as usual, Bridget resting on top of her. Sally, dozing in the chair next to me, woke when I did.
“Careful,” she said, and she rose to check my bandage. The wound underneath was swollen—and agonizing—so she slathered it in honey and set more poppy to boil.
I nodded toward the window. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Christmas,” Sally said.
I’d forgotten completely. Now I heard the songs more clearly: carols, sung by roving bands of merrymakers.
“Joyous Yuletide,” Sally said, and, despite my pain, it really was. At least for a while.
The King’s Men returned that afternoon—alone. Lord Ashcombe came to my room to tell me the news.
“The men found one of the pirates at the Darcy estate,” he said. “His body, anyway. It was riddled with arrows.”
That would have been Julian’s doing. I was heartened that he’d kept his word. “And the Darcys?”
“Dead.”
I went very still. “How?”
“Hanged,” Lord Ashcombe said. “They were strung from the top of their tower. My guess is some of the locals discovered what the Darcys had done, and decided to mete out justice before the courts did.”
I didn’t tell him, but I didn’t think that was true. I remembered Julian’s last words to me.
No, Christopher. I’ll never be redeemed.
I wondered if, in his own sad way, he’d tried. I wondered, and my heart lay heavy.
• • •
The news from the Darcy estate was bleak, but everything else was warmth. Word had spread at first light to the nearby hamlets and farms, ringing in Christmas with the news their children were alive and safe in Seaton. Two by two, the parents stumbled panting through the snow into town, scooping their little ones into their arms, weeping, as what was forever lost was found.
The Dutch children, of course, would have to wait a little longer to see their parents, but they were no less overjoyed to realize they were finally safe. They were promised that they would be returned to their families, too, by—of all people—Lord Ashcombe, who spoke Dutch fluently. I was surprised, until I remembered that he’d stayed for years in the Netherlands with King Charles when His Majesty was still in exile.
“It looks like Álvaro told Darcy the truth,” Lord Ashcombe said after speaking with the children. “The pirates raided the Dutch coast, but when their own ship was sunk, they had to shelter here. Would have been smarter for them if they’d just laid low until the storm blew over.”
Despite the torment the English children had faced, I sent God a prayer of thanks for the pirates’ greed. If they hadn’t tried to fill their brig, these fifteen Dutch little ones would have been lost.
Lord Ashcombe’s fearsome scars notwithstanding, the Dutch children clung to him like he was their father. It was understandable; though the pirates were gone, the children were still strangers in a strange land—and one at war with the Netherlands. Lord Ashcombe reassured them that the war had nothing to do with them, and they had our king’s promise that they’d all get home safely. He spent the lion’s share of his time with Moppet. Now that the pirates were gone, and she was with someone who spoke her language, she wouldn’t stop talking.
“Her name’s Katrijn,” Lord Ashcombe told us. “That’s Dutch for Catherine.”
She spoke animatedly, pointing over and over at Tom. I couldn’t understand most of it, but I heard two words quite clearly. One I already knew: Piraten. The other we’d heard before, but never understood.
“Monmon,” I said. “That’s what she said the first time she saw Tom. What does it mean?”
“It’s not ‘Monmon,’ ” Lord Ashcombe said. “It’s Maanman. It means ‘Moon Man.’ ” He turned to Tom, frowning. “She thinks you’re an angel.”
Tom’s jaw dropped. “I’m a what?”
“She says . . .” He listened as she spoke. “She says you look like an ordinary boy, but you’re really an angel in disguise. She knows this because . . . what?”
He frowned again. She repeated what she’d said, insistent.
“She says she knows this because when you came down from heaven, you plucked the Moon from the sky. And you used it to save them.”
Tom looked at me, confused. I was just as puzzled—until I realized what she meant.
“Your sword,” I said. “The moonstone on your sword. She thinks it’s the real thing.”
Stunned, Tom drew Eternity from her scabbard and pulled the sheath from her hilt. I hadn’t ever seen the King’s Warden startled before. In the darkness outside the pirate’s cove, he hadn’t got a good look at the blade. Now he stared at it in disbelief.
Moppet—Katrijn—came over to Tom. And as he knelt to greet her, I finally saw what the girl had seen that day in the woods. The stone really did look like the Moon. It even glowed with its own inner light. If I’d been five years old, and alone and scared, and this giant came to save me . . . wouldn’t I think Tom was an angel? I half believed it already.
She spoke to him. Lord Ashcombe translated.
“She wants to thank you for saving her. And she thanks your earthly servants, too.”
Tom grinned at me, and I sighed. I’d be hearing this one for a while.
“She says she misses her family,” Lord Ashcombe continue
d, “and she can’t wait to see them again. Do angels have families, too?”
Tom’s smile faded. “Yes.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Every day,” he said.
She looked at him shyly and spoke again.
“She wants to know if she can touch the Moon.”
Wordlessly, Tom balanced the blade on his palms. The moonstone glowed.
Katrijn reached out for the pommel. Ever so lightly, she touched the tip of her finger to the gem. Then she cupped it, gently, in her palm, before pulling away. She looked up at him.
“When you go home to your family, will you put the Moon back in the sky?”
“I will,” Tom said. “And every night, when you look up and see it, you’ll know I’m thinking of you.”
She flung herself at him. She wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and whispered in his ear. “Ik hou van je, Tom.”
He closed his eyes and held her. “I love you, too, Katrijn.”
• • •
With the children rescued, and the pirates defeated, we were finally granted a few days’ rest. Which was good, because, with our injuries, we couldn’t have taken another step. Sally spent so much time caring for me that I almost forgot she had her own injury, nearly as bad as mine.
The wound in her hand swelled. We both took the poppy now for our pain, and we became reliant on Tom to keep our wounds clean, Sally’s especially. If the infection got too great, she’d lose the hand.
She didn’t seem to care about that. I spoke to her sternly. “Believe it or not, the pain is good. It’s a sign that you’ll be able to use the hand, once it gets better. It’ll be a lot of hard work, but I’ll be there. I’ll help you.”
She shrugged. “All right,” she said, and I could tell she didn’t really believe it. But she didn’t fight me, and I thought that maybe, for a moment, I saw a glimmer of hope in her eyes.
Thankfully, my shoulder didn’t get infected too badly. Lord Ashcombe, more than experienced with the wounds of battle, noted the bullet had injured only flesh. “Another inch to the right and you’d have lost the arm.”
I shuddered. “That’s good to know.”