The Pirate's Daughter

by Helen Dickson

  Drum squinted at her sideways. ‘And what makes you think life on the high seas is a playground? Although I suppose the tales Nat filled your head with would have you think so.’

  Drum was right. Cassandra had fallen beneath the spell her father wove. The stories he had regaled her with had been more potent than the strongest wine. But she was neither deceived nor disillusioned by them and had long since decided that the dashing heroes of Nat’s tales were outlaws, careful to keep well ahead of the law.

  ‘Nat’s life was fashioned by his own hands,’ Drum continued. ‘We were alike. Our souls fed on the same spirit of adventure and a desire to succeed in all we set out to do. Nat was a man of fire, who thought nothing of life if it held no challenge—and such consideration he felt for his daughter was a twist of character you would not expect in such a hardened rogue. But I knew him too well to interpret it as weakness.

  ‘Regardless of the risks, he was drawn back to you time and again like a lodestone, and there were times when it almost cost him his life. I loved Nat like a brother, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was a notorious pirate with a well-deserved reputation for villainy.’

  The colour slowly drained from Cassandra’s face. Drum saw it and forged ahead, refusing to spare her, determined to get it out in the open and make her see Nat for what he was. Too much sentimentality was unthinkable.

  ‘You’ve convinced yourself Nat was practically a saint, who could do no wrong. The truth is he was much closer to a devil than a saint, and everyone knows it. You were naïve enough to believe his boast that he would never harm anyone.’

  ‘He was still my father and I loved him,’ Cassandra remarked defensively.

  ‘You loved an illusion, an illusion you created out of the tales he spun because you were innocent and idealistic.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said, fighting to control the wrenching anguish that was strangling her breath in her chest, ‘and blind, gullible and stupid. But I refuse to believe that the man my mother fell in love with was all bad. He was my life, my king, and the sea was his own special realm into which I have always dreamed of being initiated.’

  ‘Love blinds you. There’s much you don’t know about Nat.’

  ‘I know, which is why I want to feel what it is like to experience a little of what he did.’

  ‘And risk capture—even death?’

  ‘Yes. Please, Drum, take me with you.’ Her eyes implored him to comply. ‘I don’t fear the consequence of my actions. I don’t care if I die tonight or tomorrow or in the weeks to come.’

  Drum looked at her, and then away again. ‘That is why I want you to stay here, for the same reason.’

  ‘Cousin John is in the Caribbean at this time on Company business. Meredith is in Kent visiting her grandmother and isn’t due back for ages yet. I’ll leave her a note explaining where I have gone. She’ll be angry, I know, but I’ll be halfway across the Atlantic by the time she returns to Chelsea.’ She dismissed her cousin without a second thought as she concentrated on the reckless, foolhardy plan forming in her mind, which was beginning to take on a positive shape.

  ‘You have it all mapped out, don’t you?’

  When the good side of Drum’s lips turned down in censure, Cassandra’s resolution to stay calm faltered and she fixed him with a fierce stare. ‘I’m not so chicken-livered that I will faint on finding myself the only woman aboard with a shipload of men,’ she said, voicing her impatience. ‘Besides, if they respect Nat as much as you say they did, as his daughter I’ll be safe enough.’

  ‘I expect you would.’ Drum raised a brow in mock reproof. ‘I was considering your sensibilities.’

  ‘Then don’t.’ Drawing a deep breath, she controlled the urge to shake him. ‘I shall go to Barbados—to John, which is where he will be for the next twelve months at least. Oh, Drum—’ she sighed when she saw doubt cloud his eyes ‘—I want to feel the deck of the Dolphin beneath my feet—to feel the pull of the wind in my hair and smell the sea. I want to know how it was when you sailed with Nat. You of all people should be able to understand that.’

  ‘Aye, you’ll know how it was when you feel the deck heaving beneath your feet. Not many people can stand the motion of a ship’s deck. You’ll be sick right enough.’ Despite his exasperation over her stubbornness, Drum was filled with admiration for her courage, but the rigid, unyielding expression on his scarred face as he looked at her revealed none of this.

  Cassandra met his stare, equally resolute. ‘If I am, I’ll get over it. When we reach Barbados the Dolphin is yours to do with as you please.’

  Despite his misgivings, Drum gave a twisted grin and a wicked, twinkling gleam shone in his eyes. ‘I would give a thousand pieces of eight to see your cousin’s reaction when you arrive on Barbados unheralded.’

  Cassandra sensed he was weakening and seized the advantage. ‘Then you agree to take me?’

  He laughed quietly and rubbed his chin, his expression resigned. ‘You have a persuasive tongue—but I don’t like it. I still say a woman has no place at sea. If I do succeed in securing the Dolphin, your presence on board will be a complication. You are an innocent and as such will need vigilant protection. I don’t relish the role of knight-errant being forced on me. God willing we’ll encounter fair weather that will enable me to deliver you to your cousin before too long.’

  As they walked on Drum’s eyes were bright with anticipation as he became infused with Cassandra’s enthusiasm. She was Nat’s daughter all right—tall, graceful and lithe, as slender as a wand and as agile as a faun. There was an arresting quality about her face and an inner vivacious light shone from her eyes, showing a passion for life—fire and ice. Her mind was strong, her manner bold and determined—a legacy of Nat’s.

  ‘There’s one thing we must speak of. Your father amassed great wealth over the years. The authorities have been unable to lay their hands on it. Only myself and the remaining members of the crew know where it is to be located. What is to be done with it?’

  ‘As to that, I want none of it. It can sink to the bottom of the sea or be given to the authorities. Do what you will with it, Drum. It was obtained illegally and by force. I did not condone Nat’s way of life—and I have to confess that oft was the time I wished it had been different.’

  ‘His way of life was set from the day he seized the Dolphin.’

  ‘That I know. Undoubtedly he was a villain—bold and decisive, and he cut a dashing figure—although his daring deeds made him a charming one, and the scale and brilliance of his villainy elevated him to the rank of one of the most notorious pirates that has ever lived.’

  ‘Aye,’ Drum agreed with a touch of sadness. ‘It did that.’

  Tears clouded Cassandra’s eyes, dampening her lashes. ‘He always made me feel ten feet tall, Drum, and I loved him dearly—pirate or not—to my grief and shame. But he never hurt me so I cannot speak ill of him. When I was thirteen years old and my aunt died and he came to see me, the times I spent with him were the happiest of my life.

  ‘Until then, my life under Aunt Miriam’s dominance had been a complete misery, and she never let me forget the stigma of my birth. There was never a day went by when she didn’t remind me I was her dead sister’s bastard child. Everything I did I did out of a sense of obligation, but, on getting to know Nat, everything I did was to please him, out of love. Now, come,’ she said, walking on with a new spring to her step, the crowd behind them at Execution Dock beginning to disperse. ‘What about these recruits? I must return to Chelsea to get some things and instruct the servants, and in the mean time you have much to do.’

  Drum was of a mind to object, to insist on her remaining at Chelsea, and he would undertake the task of finding men who would be willing to take the risk of releasing the Dolphin from her moorings, men who would know how to keep their mouths shut for a price, but he remained silent, knowing the futility of uttering any protestations.

  There was only one man who could tell Cassandra Everson what to do�
�only one man she had wanted to please, who she would ever listen to. But he was hanging from the end of a rope at Execution Dock. It would take an exceptional man—the like of Nathaniel Wylde—to master her, to tame Nat’s illegitimate, wilful daughter. It would have to be a man who loved her, a man who could not be swayed by the false promise of a coercive, dimpled smile.

  Captain Sir Stuart Marston strode away from Execution Dock with a profound feeling of relief that it was done. At last he had seen his foremost enemy suffer the punishment he deserved.

  On the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, Nathaniel Wylde had ignored a Royal pardon to surrender himself and continued taking and plundering ships bound for the West Indies. Initially, having no love of Cromwell’s protectorate in England, he had preyed only on Parliamentary ships, but over the years, as his enthusiasm for piracy flourished and his gains became richer, in his greed and lust for more it had come to matter little what flag a ship sailed under if her cargo was worth the taking.

  It was almost a year ago that Stuart’s elder brother had been on one of the ships bound for Jamaica to visit his uncle who owned a plantation there, when his vessel had come under attack from pirates. In a heavy mist the heavily laden merchant vessel, having sailed wide of the convoy in which it was travelling, had stood little chance of outrunning or outgunning the two pirate ships—fast single-masted sloops with forty guns between them.

  Only a handful of those on board had survived to tell the tale, and Stuart had learned that the captain of the vessel that had led the attack was Nathaniel Wylde, and that after removing the cargo he and his cohorts had left the stricken ship and nearly all those on board to sink to the bottom of the sea. News of this sinking had shocked the Admiralty and public alike in England. Driven by a need to avenge his brother, Stuart had approached the Admiralty and been granted his wish.

  He was issued with a privateering mission allowing him to seek out Captain Nathaniel Wylde with his ship, the Sea Hawk, to arrest and bring him back to London to stand trial for his crimes—an unusual concession, for such licence was usually issued to a Royal Naval vessel, but the ships of the Royal Navy were needed in the long-running fight with the Dutch.

  After drawing Captain Wylde out of his lair in the Gulf of Mexico, Stuart had hounded him across the Atlantic to the coast of West Africa, which had fewer hiding places than the islands of the Caribbean.

  Wylde had put up a fierce fight, but eventually Stuart and the seamen under his command had managed to capture the Dolphin, her captain and half her crew. Along with his ship, Nathaniel Wylde had been brought to England in chains and hanged.

  In possession of a feeling of deep satisfaction that he had avenged himself on Captain Wylde for the death of his brother, Stuart proceeded towards the Pool of London where the Sea Hawk, chartered to a private English mercantile company, was moored.

  He had only one more mission to the West Indies to carry out for the Company before he was to retire from the sea and settle down to a life of ease at Charnwood in Kent, home to his family for generations, where he would satisfy his mother’s desire that he find himself a wife and provide her with grandchildren and an heir.

  Absently his thoughts turned to the tall, slender young woman he had observed from a distance watching the execution of Nathaniel Wylde. There had been an intense look of concentration in her eyes, which had turned to open curiosity when they had met his. Each had briefly assessed the other with an unwavering stare, and the woman’s steady gaze had taken on an iron nerve. It was the measure of a woman confident of her own worth.

  Her eyes had been the only feature exposed, but he recalled the long strand of pale gold hair escaping the confines of her hood. It had drawn his gaze like a moth to a flame, for it was the only bright feature to lighten the dreariness of the day until Nathaniel Wylde had appeared, and his own mane of hair had shone to equal that of the woman’s.

  It was then the truth burst on him—that the young woman he had seen could in all probability have been Wylde’s daughter. At first his brain refused to accept it and he smiled at his foolish, fanciful thoughts, for not by any stretch of the imagination could he visualise a man’s daughter coming to watch her father hang. However, recollecting tales told by mariners that Nathaniel Wylde had a daughter of spirit and great beauty, and that she lived with relatives somewhere in London, perhaps he was not mistaken in his suspicion after all—and with Wylde’s blood in her, she would feel neither distress nor out of place at a hanging.

  The more he thought about it—having observed her as Wylde had mounted the gallows, he had seen her knuckles showing white from the force with which she had gripped the hood of her cloak across her face, and recollected how both she and her companion had gone to great lengths to keep their features concealed as they remained hovering on the edge of the crowd—the more possible, the more probable it became that the woman he had seen was indeed the pirate’s daughter.

  He could have turned back and denounced her companion, who was undoubtedly one of Wylde’s associates, but for some reason unknown to him he hired a hackney to take him to his ship, eager to put the unpleasant episode behind him and slake his thirst and eat his dinner in the warm comfort of his cabin, reluctant to condemn another man to the same gruesome fate as Nathaniel Wylde.

  But the following morning he had grave misgivings and was compelled to examine his failure to turn back and denounce the man when the bosun informed him that, unobserved, the Dolphin had slipped quietly from her moorings in the dark of the night and was last seen heading down river towards the sea—a woman, with pale blonde hair flowing down the length of her back and dressed in breeches, her feet planted firmly apart, standing in the prow of the ship.

  When the tide had receded it was also revealed that Nathaniel Wylde’s body had been cut free of the hangman’s noose at Execution Dock.

  Chapter Two

  After encountering severe storms off the mainland of South America, which severely damaged the Dolphin’s hull and forced her to put in at the first landfall, which happened to be the island of Trinidad, it was with sadness and reluctance that Cassandra, eager to reach Barbados and her cousin Sir John Everson, parted company with the Dolphin.

  The burial they had given her father at sea had been a particularly poignant moment for her. She had watched through a mist of tears as the corpse of the man who had been tied to her by blood had slipped beneath the grey waters. ‘Goodbye, Father,’ she had whispered, and in the soulful wind blowing over the sea came the tempting strains of an answering farewell, strains that filled her heart, a sound heard by her alone.

  And now Cassandra was glad to be moving on, to put the tragic memories of those terrible last days in London behind her. She acquired a passage on a large English merchant vessel, the Spirit of Enterprise, bound for Barbados and Antigua. During the same storms that had battered the Dolphin, the merchantman, which had been travelling in an organised convoy, since lone vessels were in danger of being attacked and plundered by pirates, had been blown severely off course, and the ship’s commander, Captain Tillotson, had put in at Trinidad to take on fresh water.

  Uneasy at Cassandra being the only woman on board the Dolphin, Drum had insisted that his daughter, eighteen-year-old Rosa, accompany her. She was a quiet, comely girl, with dark features like her Portuguese mother. Drum had taken her on board when they had made a lengthy stop at Praia, his home in the Cape Verde Islands.

  In desperate need of provisions, and to carry out urgent repairs to the badly leaking Dolphin, Drum was to go on to one of the neighbouring islands—an island that was a favourite haunt for pirates. Contrary to his misgivings when he had taken Cassandra on board, the sailors had taken to her like seals to the ocean, and the entire crew would mourn her departure.

  Drum bore a deep and abiding love for his daughter; when the moment came to say farewell, he stood still for a moment while Rosa rested her head against him, then he patted her and said gruffly, ‘Be a good girl, Rosa, and do as Cassandra te
lls you.’ Promising dutifully that she would, lifting her arms she put them round her father’s neck and kissed his scarred cheek. He held her tightly for a moment and then stepped back and turned to Cassandra.

  ‘Try not to worry about Rosa, Drum,’ Cassandra said, aware of his concern and touched at how much feeling this hard-bitten pirate possessed for his daughter. ‘Captain Tillotson is to give us his protection until we reach my cousin. I promise to take good care of her, and ensure her safe passage back to Cape Verde. Where will you go, when the Dolphin is repaired?’

  ‘Who knows?’ he said with a roguish, Irish grin. ‘The ship will sail, winged by her oars, and go wherever the wind will take us.’

  If Captain Tillotson thought it strange for an English woman to be travelling with just one female companion so far from home, he was too much of a gentleman to show it. However, the occupants of the Dolphin stirred his curiosity and he suspected they were sea rovers, but the captain, though fearsome to look at with his scarred face, seemed a reasonable enough individual and was clearly concerned that the young lady and her companion be delivered safely to her cousin on Barbados.

  It was with the dawn on a morning in April, almost five months after leaving England, that Cassandra glimpsed the coral island of Barbados, its encircling reefs giving her a degree of security and immunity. It was a large island, hanging like a teardrop one hundred miles east of the Caribbean chain. Well situated in terms of the north-easterly trade winds and ocean currents that enabled the island to receive shipping from Europe, it rose on the horizon wreathed in a golden mist, like a mirage, bewitching, peaceful and powerfully hypnotic, and, the closer they sailed, the air blowing from inland was heavy with a thousand scents.

  The ship anchored in the commodious bay at Bridgetown. The glittering waters were dotted with all manner of craft, from fishing ketches and lighters to huge merchantmen that docked at Barbados frequently. Barbados was successful in its manufacture of sugar, and Bridgetown, bustling to an ageless quick tempo, was the island’s trading centre.