by Silver, Lily
“God’s tooth--what’s this!” the dirty sailor swore, drawing his crimson hand from between her thighs. “No wonder that spook left you alone. You’re a disgusting mess!” He sidled away from her and stood, wiping his bloody fingers on his yellowed shirt.
Thankful for the first time for something she’d considered a curse, Elizabeth scrambled back into the shadows, away from him. “Who are you? Why have you abducted me?”
“Cap’n Sully’s the name. I could have left you up there to deal with my men.” He cocked his head at her like an old dog. “I’m thinkin’ you ought to be more accommodatin’. Oh, but you’ll warm to me, won’t ye, girl? After you’ve spent some time down here; with the rats.”
*******
The apothecary shop was bustling with activity. Six customers waited for assistance and Barnaby was in a conference with a client for the Midnight Bell. A searing pain in the back of his skull made Kieran O’Flaherty drop the jar in his hand. The sound of shattering glass echoed in his ears as the shop faded from his perceptions.
He was backed into a corner in a dark, dirty place, curled into a tight ball. His knees were instinctively drawn up to protect his abdomen. Someone was trying to kick him to death. The attack waned. The owner of that lethal boot huffed and wheezed in the semi-darkness. Kieran braced himself for another onslaught. None came.
Gazing about, Kieran surmised he was in the bowels of a ship, in a dirty cell lit by a single tinned lantern. He was seized by the hair---it seemed he had handfuls of the stuff—and was roughly dragged from the corner he’d been huddled in. The stench of unwashed flesh assaulted his nostrils as something vile was pushed at his face. He clamped his mouth shut, refusing to cooperate, only to have his head slammed against the bulkhead.
Waves of blinding pain made him too weak to resist any longer.
He must have blacked out. He was alone in the cell, huddled in the corner on moldy straw. He was linked to a young woman, seeing through her eyes, feeling her pain, tasting the bitterness of her fear. He was inside her mind. Fetid water wicked up the material of her thin gown, and the cold seeped through to her very bones. Kieran felt sick and disorientated from the oppressive pain in his skull. Bursts of light flashed in front of his eyes and the taste of dirty pennies was in the back of his throat. He heard the sound of labored breathing as the girl struggled to contain her horror at what had been done to her. There was a furry sensation on the back of his neck. Kieran jerked convulsively, his gut seizing with revulsion. Every nerve along his spine tightened. He reached up to slap it off. Another creature ran across his bare foot. The girl, whose mind he had been linked with, slapped at the vermin and screamed.
She kept right on screaming long after the rats had scurried into the darkness . . .
“Kieran!” Barnaby’s face slowly formed in front of him. “You had another vision.” His mentor clarified, for the benefit of the patrons surrounding them with concern.
“Aye, a vision.” Kieran muttered, feeling sick and exhausted from the experience. The shop was silent. A burly footman offered him a hand. Kieran was pulled up from the floor. He nodded his thanks, limped to the back room and sagged against the wall. He’d never experienced anything like this in all his life. He’d just been inside the mind of a young woman while she was being assaulted.
“Go upstairs, lie down.” Barnaby insisted with the voice that brooked no refusal. “You look like you’ve just escaped the lower regions of hell!”
“I did.” Kieran mumbled. “But that poor girl is still trapped there.”
*******
To the bewildered smuggler crew, the dark, cloaked figure leading the charge over the rail appeared to be a giant black bird swooping down on its prey. Hence, he’d come to be known as The Raven, a bird associated with dark omens and death in ancient myth, a name he made synonymous with death to any who dared cross his path on the Indian Ocean.
He tracked the small fishing vessel along the southwestern coast of Wales since dawn. When they ignored his signal, he fired a warning shot over the prow. The sloop responded by widening the sails in an effort to flee. They could not outrun his schooner, it was lightest, fastest craft of the times. As he was flying the Union Jack, not pirate colors, he took their unwillingness to communicate as a sign they had something to hide.
Through the cover of cannon fire from his larger Merchantman, The Raven maneuvered his schooner alongside the smuggler’s sloop. He didn’t wait for the grappling hooks to be secured as he dropped to the deck and began hacking a wide path through the befuddled crew. A portly man emerged from the hold. Raised, angry red scratches marred one cheek, confirming The Raven’s suspicions; an unwilling female was on board and had attempted to fend off this filthy cur. The man wobbled with inebriated shock as he took in the stream of armed men flooding his vessel. “Who are you?”
The Raven slipped his blade beneath the captain’s ribs, disarming him with the sure promise of disembowelment if he so much as moved. “Did our employer neglect to inform you I was coming? T’was made clear to me, a split by three.”
“Fletcher didn’t say nothin’ bout splitting the cut by three! The deal was him and me.”
“He sent me to make sure you were following orders. Where’s the girl?”
“I follow captain’s orders, always have, since Ireland. A body’d be a fool to cross him. Ruthless prick, even when he was under military orders.”
“Where is she?” The Raven pressed his blade into his victim’s gelatinous paunch.
“In the hold, and there she stays, ‘til that rich cove what owns her delivers the coin!”
The Raven gestured to the opening in the deck. His Indian servant and several men took his cue and disappeared down the hole.
“Sent you to steal her from me, did he!” The captain was fairly frothing at the mouth, furious but unable to lunge without impaling himself on his adversary’s blade.
“Perhaps.” The Raven shrugged. “How much did he offer you to steal the wench?”
The captain remained silent. With one steady pull of his blade The Raven sliced through layers of flesh. Not deep enough to do any real damage, just enough to make his victim bleed; make him panic. He stopped at the throat, holding the captain like a fish on a hook.
“Five hundred pounds.” The captain offered in a hoarse whisper, aware that a careless movement of his Adam’s apple could cause the sword to pierce his windpipe. “Three hundred to be split between the crew and two hundred for me--for services rendered.”
“What services?”
The seaman remained tight-lipped.
The Raven was not going to play this game. He withdrew a pistol from his belt and pulled the trigger. The captain howled and slumped to the deck cradling his shattered foot. “Answer, if you want to keep the rest of your toes.”
“Wanted her ruined—broken and scared when we returned her to her husband—them be his words, mate, not mine. Wanted me to rough her up, make certain there’d not be another heir popping up later on to compete with his son’s claim to the family fortune.”
“Did you? He said you couldn’t do it! Said you were weak, limp, his words, not mine!”
“Oh, I shagged the bitch, make no mistake, scared her real good, just like he wanted. I earned my cut and I ain’t sharing it with the likes of you. Who the hell are you?”
“We have her, sir!” His Indian servant called out as they carried the unconscious woman’s battered form to the waiting vessel.
Dr. Linton approached him as he stood over his prey. “I’ll need to examine her to determine if she’s been damaged by these brutes--”
“Don’t touch her.” The Raven warned, blood pulsing dangerously in his temples at the thought of any man touching his prize.
“She needs tending, my lord, there is a great deal of blood—“
He removed the second pistol from his belt and cocked it. “I said don’t touch her. I’ll kill you if you do. Is that understood, doctor?”
“Yes, sir.” The surgeon b
acked away with raised hands.
The Raven crouched over a dead body. He snatched a scarf from the limp neck and began wiping the blood from his steel. He lifted it and turned it about to inspect the blade under the glare of the noonday sun. The razor edge winked at him. Cold, hard steel; there was nothing like it for settling scores. It could be as precise as a surgeon’s blade; sever tendons, penetrate organs, or remove a man’s most offensive part. A devious smile burst forth from his lips as his eyes moved to the man crouched at the rail.
He pushed the black scarf that hid his face onto his brow and returned to his captive.
“Who are you?” The captain asked a third time in a voice weak from loss of blood. The man squinted against the glare of the sun as he gazed up at the unmasked face of his executioner.
The Raven poked the captain in the throat with the tip of his blade, forcing the swine to look him in the eyes before he killed him. “I’m the rich husband.”
Chapter Seven
Donovan gazed at his bride now safely bundled in his bed. Her head was wreathed in bandages instead of a lace veil. Her eyes were ringed in purple. She had two cracked ribs and her shins were a mass of bruises that pained him to look at. Rat bites marred her hands and feet. He applied a paste of golden seal to them and clean linens to stave off an infection.
The most worrisome injury was the contusion on the back of her head. Five days had passed, yet his sleeping angel refused to wake up. As a physician he knew the longer she remained in this unnatural slumber, the less likely it was she would recover. She might awaken as a beautiful, living doll, incapable of cognizant thought---or she might never awaken at all.
A cough echoed in the small room. He jerked his head up. It was that idiot doctor again. Damn it, if the old fool wasn’t pestering him about bleeding Elizabeth, he nattered on about the need to examine her to determine if she’d been molested by her captors. The dried blood on her inner thighs, coupled with her captor’s confession, seemed quite conclusive in his mind.
“I didn’t mean to startle you, my lord.” Linton moved noiselessly around the bed, reminding him of an alligator gliding silently in the Carolina swamps. The doctor was a thin, nervous man sporting a full head of gray hair, wire spectacles and a neatly groomed goatee. “I’m going to have to insist that we try the bleeding, sir.”
Donovan stood. At six foot and then some, he towered over the doctor. “She’s lost a great deal of blood already, you idiot. The last thing she needs is another man to cause her pain.”
“The pain might bring her about.” Linton argued. “Come now, trained in the Far East as you were, you’re not familiar with modern medical practices. Why, even a medical student understands the benefits of a good bleeding.”
“Put that lancet away, doctor, unless you want me to sink it in your throat.”
Dr. Linton stared blandly up at him, deluded in the belief that a younger physician would give way to age and experience if pressed. So, no one bothered to warn the new ship’s surgeon about crossing him. Apparently no one cared enough about Linton to do so. Few men could comprehend that a consequence of surviving torture was the peeling away of that thin veneer of a civilized gentleman, exposing the primitive beast beneath.
Donovan no longer feared that beast; he learned long ago to embrace it.
Without further warning, he snatched the lancet from his opponent and pressed the sharp point beneath Linton’s jugular. Linton sidled back with alarm and quickly exited the cabin.
“Imbecile.” He muttered, closing the door with a defining thud. He knelt beside the bed, lifted a limp, bandaged hand and pressed it against his cheek. Tears breached the barricade of his tightly closed eyes before he could stop them.
After depositing Elizabeth on his Galleon at the London docks, Donovan journeyed to Lord Greystowe’s estate to confront the cold English lord and inform him that in spite of his callous neglect, his grandchildren would be well provided for from this point on. The meeting didn’t go as he anticipated. The old earl broke into tears at the news that his grandchildren were alive. He’d been out of the country when his daughter died. The note Elizabeth sent to his estate was set aside unopened until his return, a year later. The earl hurried to London only to find the townhouse belonging to his daughter had been sold. He hired investigators to find his grandchildren, but Fletcher had gone aground like fox, taking the children with him. The old Earl was relieved to find they were safe, and demanded Michael be placed in his keeping immediately. Donovan couldn’t refuse the old man. Michael was his heir and would . . .
A soft moan brought him back to the present. He rose and sat on the edge of the bed. “Elizabeth, wake up.” He shook her gently. “Come now, you have to wake up, dearest!”
Those enchanting turquoise pools fluttered open. Elizabeth stared up at his face for a few brief seconds, and then she started screaming.
His valet burst through the door from the outer suite with Dr. Linton following. The invasion of men sent Elizabeth fleeing into the corner. She braced her bandaged hands against the walls and regarded them all with the eyes of a cornered doe.
“You shouldn’t be out of bed, you’re too weak.” He held his hand up to warn the others back. “Come, Lizzie, bed rest is what you need.”
“M-m-my n-name is . . . E-liz-a-beth!” She insisted, in slow, halting speech. “M-mother doesn’t allow anyone t—t--to call me Lizzie. She says its w-what you call a sc-scullery maid.”
“Well, Elizabeth, are you hungry?” He coaxed, relieved that she could speak at all after what she’d come through. “I can have the cook warm some milk and put in a pinch of nutmeg. Or perhaps hot chocolate would be more to your liking?”
“H-h-how is it t-that you have s-such things h-here? W-we’re at s-s-sea.”
Cognitive reasoning. The tightness lessened about his chest a little more. “I’m a wealthy man. We have goats in the hold, chickens, apples, cheeses, hams, all manner of delightful things. I can have the cook prepare you whatever you desire.” He rose and extended his hand to her. “First, let’s get you back into bed, Sweetheart.”
Her eyes scanned his black attire. “H-he sold me, didn’t he? Papa sold me to you!” Moisture welled up in her purple ringed eyes. Pressed into the corner, barefoot, wearing a bed-gown, she gave the heart-wrenching impression of little girl ready to burst into terrified tears.
“No, lass, it wasn’t like that.” With careful movements so as not to startle her, he edged close. She froze. He inclined his head to examine her eyes. Her pupils were unequal, a sign of disorientation. “Don’t you remember me? I bought up all Fletcher’s notes in exchange for your hand in marriage. I’m your husband--”
“No—it isn’t true!” Elizabeth shrieked. She darted from him as if he were the very devil sent to claim her soul. His valet and Dr. Linton blocked the doorway, so she scurried around the bed and crouched in the opposite corner, her breath reduced to quick, short gasps as she cast panicked eyes at the three men hemming her in.
Donovan realized the sooner the other men left, the better his chances were of calming her. “Pearl, bring warmed milk and buttered toast. Dr. Linton, there is no need for you to be lurking about my suite. I’ll summon you if I need you.”
She continued to stare at the open door after the men retreated. The quaking of her limbs continued, but rather than over-breathing Lizzie didn’t appear to be breathing at all.
He rounded the bed and crouched beside her, attempting to put himself at the same level so as not to appear so intimidating to the poor girl. “It’s all right, Elizabeth.” He held out his hand. She didn’t take it. He didn’t expect her to. He was just trying to get her past her terror.
She turned her gaze to him. The fragile look in her eyes burned like acid in his chest. He couldn’t stand the inches between them. He sat down on the floor, stretched out his long legs and gently but firmly pulled her out of the corner and settled her on his lap.
He cupped her bandaged head, guiding the weaving orb to rest against h
is shoulder and continued to talk to her in a reassuring timbre. Elizabeth melted against him, too weak to resist. She was soft and warm in his arms. The thought nibbled at him that he really should put her back in the bed. He was loath to relinquish this sacred moment after days of watching her linger between this world and the next.
Elizabeth shivered, from fear rather than cold, he surmised, but she didn’t fight his careful embrace. “My Sweet Girl.” He whispered, battling the urge to plant fevered kisses across her dear face. “I won’t let anyone harm you. They’d have to come through me to get to you. They’d have to kill me, and I’m not so easy to kill.” He inclined his head to gauge her reaction.
She seemed bewildered. “Y-you rescued me?”
“I did.” He affirmed, offering a tender smile. “You are safe, Elizabeth. I promise.”
She licked her cracked lips as relief softened her tense features. “C-could you t-t-take me home, sir? I-I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name.”
“Yes.” He whispered, stroking the cheek that wasn’t marred by cruel bruises, anxious to banish her tears. Never mind if it was a different home than the one she meant. He just wanted her to feel safe in his keeping. “I’m taking you home, lass.”
Lizzie sighed, weariness evident in the sound. She placed her small, bandaged hand on his chest. Nestling against him, she closed her eyes, content to sleep in his arms. It was a simple gesture, yet priceless, revealing a trust he didn’t deserve. His eyes stung. His throat closed up as he fought the desire to crush her against him in a painful mixture of grief and gratitude that she was alive, warm and safe in his arms.
********
“Don’t argue with me, just drink it.” Captain Jack Rawlings, Donovan’s friend and ally from their pirating days, set the whiskey bottle on the table and shoved the glass in his hand. They were cloistered in Jack’s quarters, in the outer suite where the captain held card games to entertain his officers during the long passages between England and the Caribbean.