Sweet Vengeance

by St. Michel, Elizabeth

  Abby fidgeted with the lack of privacy. The bindings around her breasts chafed and she scratched at the wool of her greatcoat not daring to remove it. Comfort did not belong to her. No doubt, it proved safer to maintain a barrage of insults. How long before he discovered she was a female?

  From beneath her blankets she watched Thorne in repose, the dreaded American Privateer who struck terror in the hearts of her countrymen and befuddled the King of England. Eight bells, she counted. Midnight. When would he retire for the night? She didn’t have long to wonder. After a few minutes of shuffling through his papers and making brief notations with a tall quill pen, anchored at the top of his desk, Thorne shoved the chair back and moved away from the desk. He glanced in her direction. Abby feigned sleep.

  He began unbuttoning his white silk shirt, revealing a jagged scar near his heart. Heat expanded in her cheeks. Turn away. She lay frozen and mesmerized.

  She had never seen a naked man. Despite growing up in an all-male household, her father and brothers remained the souls of circumspection. The male anatomy touted untoward for a lady. Certainly through the rough talk of sailors, she had learned things that set her ears to burning. But this was Thorne, the man who kissed her so insensibly and for his sin, she ignored the strictures of proper conduct.

  He sat on the bed, the mattress bowing beneath his weight and pulled off his boots and tucked them neatly beneath. He stood up, shirked off his shirt and unbuckled his belt. Long, strong fingers unbuttoned the top of his breeches. Anticipation thickened the air in her lungs. A thick, silky trail of dark hair began just above the navel and slid down into his open breeches. He crossed to his desk and made a quick note then dropped the quill. Retrieving a chart, he unrolled the parchment, making additional measurements. Abby licked her lips. He seemed so tall and immense as he stood menacingly near like a threatening dark avenger.

  He sipped his wine and she imagined tasting that same sweet wine on his lips. In the lantern light, his lean and handsome profile, starkly etched, mushroomed an awareness of a strong, living healthy man that filled every pore of her being.

  She resisted the instinct again of closing her eyes. While contemplating his map, he stirred; a slight ripple of muscle warned of his enormous strength then reached down to his breeches. Abby gulped. Distinctive warmth flooded the area between her legs. He turned down the lantern, casting them in darkness. Abby bit her lip. The chair shook from when he tossed his breeches on it. How long did she hold her breath before she dared to breathe?

  Thorne settled beneath the thick feather tick, adjusting it to his comfort with the bed squeaking beneath his weight. Lying rigidly on her pallet, Abby became even more achingly aware of how hard it was to be in the same proximity of Jacob. For perhaps a half an hour she lay there, willing her heart to slow, and hearing the cabin grow quiet as the man in the bed stopped shifting, and his breathing grew even and regular.

  The night bent over her like a new mother watching her child. She stared out the stern windows, one blurred star; faint glimmering like a bee flooded the loneliness in her soul like a tempest. Memories and emotions struck like a blow. The fate of her family gnawed at her confidence. The fear of not knowing what happened to them ate at her insides. She had to get back to England. Now.

  Weary of navigating in Jacob’s world, she grew more cognizant than ever that she was a duke’s daughter and at great peril. Where was Nicolas? She imagined the horrid conditions he faced on a slaver bound for Brazil. Even if he survived the voyage, toiling in the hot tropical sun laid waste to a man in no time. Who might have wanted to hurt her family? She swallowed against the knot of emotion lodged in her throat.

  Mentally she listed all the transgressions against her. A shriek of anguish tore itself from her lips before she could strangle it. She curled herself into a ball beneath musty blankets and sobbed uncontrollably.

  Thorne awoke. Like a gnat circling his ear came a sniffle, a sob then full blown howling. “Good God, can’t a man get sleep on his own ship?” He whipped off the covers, hitched on his breeches then lit the lantern. “Come here, boy.”

  This was not what he envisioned when he’d vowed to take the boy’s fate into his own hands. Had he gotten himself into a bigger fix, ordering the lad to sleep in his cabin?

  Something about the boy called to him, and to some degree, aroused paternal feelings. In a moment of reflection, he admired the lad’s spirit. The way he stood up to him in the aftermath of battle and how he survived aboard the merchantman. It was widely known how England’s aristocracy resolved their problems, settling on an unsavory sea captain for a mere pittance. The abducted were murdered at sea or sold into slavery, tidily sweeping away any scandals imminent for peers of the realm. Lee’s reputation had even reached his ears.

  Bold as hell, the boy leaned to twelve or thirteen summers, and somewhere beneath the grime, Thorne surmised, a face smooth as a peach. Abe’s sarcastic propensity was a way to cover his fear. In Thorne’s youth, he suffered Abe’s impulsive nature, getting into fights and rebelling against authority. Years of maturity and experience shaped him. With the right hand guiding the youth, he was certain the boy would develop into a strong man, Thorne, the sculptor, Abe, the clay. He was Abe’s protector now.

  Jacob let out a loud breath. Huddled beneath his blankets, the lad cried. “I’ll haul you by your drawers if you don’t come over here.”

  He almost laughed with the boy’s rapid flight off his pallet. Abe slapped his hat on his head and stood with his head down, so pitiable and pathetic it tugged Thorne’s heart. He reached out and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. An acrid odor of rancid bacon grease and fish lingered. “You must brew the filth to match the stink. I should have you keelhauled to clean you up.”

  Abe stiffened and Thorne laughed. “I doubt it would do any good. Tell me lad, what troubles you?”

  Blue eyes, bloodshot from crying, studied Thorne. Was the boy gauging his concern? A gamut of emotions played across his face from disbelief to curiosity. Abe swallowed hard.

  “My mother died months ago. The doctor said she was too old to bear any more children. She died in childbirth. Then my father and brothers were murdered.” Fresh tears left clean tracks through the soot on Abe’s face.

  “I was put on Captain Lee’s ship.” Between sobs Abe enumerated the atrocities he faced aboard the merchantman. “What’s killing me is I have no idea who hated my family to do this. I want justice.”

  “You want justice?” Thorne shook his head, incredulous with the boy’s bluster. “Noble but impossible. Whoever did this to your family had influence. You have no resources and would end up worse if you sought justice against someone powerful. I’ve had those experiences firsthand.”

  There was a war going on. He was fighting against the injustices of England’s tyranny, the same injustices, Abe had suffered. Jacob’s future was nebulous. He couldn’t tear into England and seek vengeance for the boy. He’d do his damnedest to educate and care for him.

  Abe burst out in a fresh torrent of sobs. His voice escalated a high soprano then hiccupped into a lower octave. Jacob produced a handkerchief and the boy blew his nose. “On top of everything, I killed a man.”

  Thorne’s chest tightened. Like a madness, shades of guilt swung through the lad’s brain. The boy’s moral compass impressed him. Despite suffering inhumane treatment and the prospect of death from the Civis’s captain, the lad endured guilt from killing him. Abe squeaked. Thorne had gripped his shoulder so hard he didn’t realize it. He relaxed his fingers.

  “You removed a piece of scum from the face of the earth. If you hadn’t have done it, I would have dispatched the vermin. Most importantly, you saved my life.”

  Abe swiped his face with the back of his hand and nodded, mollified for the time being with Jacob’s words. Talking out his troubles had been a catharsis for the boy.

  Jacob combed his fingers through his hair. “Get some sleep.”

  Abe relaxed a bit, ambled to his pallet. The deep dark
well of sorrow he must come to grips with on his own was a journey Jacob traveled every day. Why didn’t he take off that inferno coat? Jacob frowned. He’d let him have his way. Tomorrow he’d insist on the boy taking a bath. By the time Thorne turned down the lantern, Abe was fast asleep. He took an extra blanket off his bed and covered the boy.

  Jacob settled into his own bed with his hands folded behind his head. His cabin boy could be completely exasperating, yet there was something about him that was likeable. Jacob just had the usual difficulty of defining the later. Remarkable how similar their lives were. Both were orphans. Both lost their mothers from dire circumstances. Both had family that had been murdered. Both wanted justice.

  Chapter 6

  “My mother-in-law told me if she were my husband, she’d give me poison,” said Enos Lee over his shoulder as he tacked a sail above Abby’s head for shade. “I informed her if she was my wife, I’d drink it!”

  Hilarious guffaws rumbled like thunder by more than a few sailors. With her back supported by the mainmast, Abby sat on a rope coil with yards and yards of canvas across her lap, implementing her embroidery skills to repair tears. The work was time consuming but she enjoyed the easy camaraderie of the crew who had genuinely warmed to the young lad she was impersonating. From Simeon, she had gleaned that Thorne had given the crew blistering remarks, resulting in remorse and apologies about the hazing incident. In fact, Ben Lewis and Enos Lee were deferential to the young cabin boy.

  “I’ve seen his mother-in-law,” said Benjamin Lewis, his cheeks ruddier in the wind. She has so many double chins she looks like she is staring at you over a pile of pancakes. Her ability to stuff beef hocks in her cheeks and whistle Billy Boy is legend. Even the devil gets a fright with her meanness. The only difference between her and a vulture is the vulture waits ‘til your dead before it eats your heart out.”

  Enos slapped Edward Martin on the back. “She said she’d dance on my grave, so I’ll be buried at sea if you please. But not too soon, I have that angel of my wife to get back too.”

  “Here, here. I have my own missus’ sweet arms to get back to,” said Abner Bosworth, a lanky man who spoke like a parson flourishing his sermon.

  In a bout of silence the crew fed on each other’s homesickness and their yearning for home in Boston. Abby looped a length of thread through a needle, knotted it and commenced to stitch, pining for her family, too. Opposed to the band of convicted felons aboard the Civis, the Vengeance’s crew was tame. Farmers, shopkeepers, and fishermen turned sailors loyal to an upstart country, brave family men longing for their wives and children, their resolve ceded to a rebellion to make the world right. She admired them. They risked their lives, fortunes and sacred honor for the price of liberty and the contagion of their rebellion grew in her heart. They couldn’t possibly win their war, not against the greatest empire and, certainly, not against the most powerful navy in the world.

  But for now, she understood the fervor of her Uncle Thomas Hansford, her mother’s brother, a patriot and successful businessman who lived there. She had met her uncle only three times when he visited her family in England. He had recanted many tales, painting an exciting picture of life in the burgeoning Colonies.

  Lucky Pascale, the only black crewmember joined their circle. He was an enormously muscled man with a smooth round face, broad flat-nose and dark eyes that discerned everything. He never spoke. “Why do you call him Lucky Pascale?” Her voice dropped, proficiently rough-hewn. The language of a blacksmith? How far had she come? Her mother, if alive, would be mortified.

  Elijah Brown sighed. Another yarn was to be shaped and she sat an eager audience, enchanted with their sea-ditties and outrageous stories.

  “Now that is a very good tale and one I can attest firsthand. We picked him up near the Bahamas. He was adrift for several days, no sustenance, surely starved, lacking water, in the middle of a squall, a water spout bearing down and sharks surrounding him. He made a sorry sight so Captain Thorne ordered sails cut and we brought him aboard. No one aboard speaks Creole but what we can glean, he is an escaped slave. Our friend, Pascale is very lucky.”

  Abby laughed. During the past two weeks, the crew had become her family, regaling the captain’s young cabin boy with more anecdotes than she could possibly dream. It occurred to her she was having an adventure. She had all the freedoms of a boy, climbing the masts, and enjoying the repartee of the sailors. Abby had never had an adventure unless you counted meeting the King on her eighteenth birthday.

  “Why one time−” Freckled and sunburnt from wind and sun, Samuel Parks’ eyes twinkled, not to be outdone. “We had not a breath of wind for a week, and one night a heavy fog came down. Nothing but danger surrounded us. What could we do? We could not see from one side of the ship to the other and shoals lay dangerously close. Then I got an idea. I climbed up the mast, cut-up the fog with a sword and stuffed it in a ditty bag. Cook served up portions of fog with gravy and in two days’ time, we had eaten our way out to clear skies.”

  Abby smoothed a hand over her stitching. What would be their reaction if they learned she was a woman? Of nobility? She shook her head. No longer would they be open with their conversation.

  She stretched then pulled the wool collar of her coat away from her skin to let in a cooling breeze. Beads of perspiration dripped down her neck and back. As they headed into equatorial waters, the weather warmed and in the broiling sun, she dreamed of shedding her coat. She closed her eyes temporarily, appreciating Enos’s small gesture of comfort and the shade the canvas allowed.

  “And then there was Captain Thorne.” Enos waved his arm in a dramatic arc. “We were outgunned and outmanned, a Man-O’-War bearing down on us so fast and so close I could count the teeth in the grins of her sailors. We had only six guns opposed to seventeen. The captain ordered the men to saw spare masts to the length of guns, painted them black, mounted them on buckets and stuck them out portholes. He filled the rigging with men and so overwhelmed the enemy with the dummy guns, they surrendered immediately.” Enos slapped his knee and chortled. “We helped ourselves to their guns and ammunition and sailed away rejoicing.”

  Abby privately scoffed at the exaggerated stories yet she carried a vivid memory of the damages of maritime forces of the Americans. Despite their diminutive strength, they could shake the formidable Royal Navy. They terrorized the English and Irish Channels, picking the bones of their prizes with disdain, her dear Uncle Cornelius nearly ruined.

  Captain Thorne’s exploits were the most notorious. His pursuits of glory, fame and money, gained, she grudgingly acknowledged through intelligence, self-confidence and probably some luck.

  “Bold as brass he sailed the seas, actually flew the Vengeance over six Men-O’-War and captured ten merchantmen while they slept like babes in their berths.” Enos snapped his fingers. “Like a magician, Captain Thorne and the ten merchantmen vanished like ghosts.”

  “More ghost stories, Enos?” Thorne paused momentarily, his hand clasped behind his back. “You’ll have me riding the wings of dragons and changing raindrops into pearls.” Beneath her lashes she watched him climb to the foredeck. Without a doubt, he was a reckless daredevil commanding a collection of half-disciplined human beings ready to obey every order he decreed, his exploits extolled by his crew with all the admiration and respect of a demigod.

  “The captain is merciful. When he discovered he had captured a ship owned by a widow, and it being her only income, he restored all her profit back to her.”

  “What of the prisoners? What happens to them?” Abby blinked. What would be her fate?

  “Like the ones we took from the Civis are chained below, fed well, and will be traded or bartered for money.” Martin spat a fine stream of tobacco juice. “Far better treatment than the redcoats give, our men stuck in freezing dunghills or baked in airless barges to die.”

  A crick grew in Abby’s neck and her legs fell asleep. She rose and moved to stretch the sleepiness from her limbs. The men sang a sea d
itty, one so raucous it would curl the ears of a courtesan, her cheeks warming beyond the heat of the sun.

  She climbed to the stern and stopped five feet from Lucky Pascale, who stood gazing out to sea, the most forlorn creature she had ever seen. She had never seen a black man before let alone converse with one. No one was near. She let her voice drift over the sea and spoke in perfect French. “It must be lonely not able to converse with anyone. Please know that I am your friend and you can talk with me. It will be our secret.”

  He never turned to her. While gazing out to sea, Pascale folded his broad strapping arms, gleaming ebony in the sun and bowed. If he were surprised with her fluency in his language, he did not show it. “I find it refreshing to speak in my tongue,” he said in eloquent French, exotically accented. “I was a manservant for a cruel master. It thrilled him to torture me. He killed my wife and son in the most merciless way. Chained to a tree, I tore at my bonds unable to help them. Their screams still fill my ears. I did not care if I lived or died, but here on this ship,” he glanced to the men over his shoulder, “I have the will to live.”

  Abby pressed a hand to her throat. “I am sorry for your loss. I know what it is to lose loved ones.”

  Pascale smiled and tilted his head knowingly, his wise eyes focused keenly on her. A nervous tremor rattled up her spine. Did he suspect?

  “A boy brings the needle to the thread. He does not put the thread through the needle.”

  Abby gripped the taffrail. “I don’t understand.”

  “Mademoiselle.” He hesitated while Abby’s mouth worked up and down like a beached grouper. He smiled and bowed again. “Please know, Mademoiselle, I am your friend and that your secret is safe with me.”