Fortune's Whelp (Fortune's Whelp Series Book 1)

by Benerson Little

  “Rogues, rovers, reivers, and renegades, then—you come honestly by a dishonest trade. And your intentions in Ireland?”

  “It’s my turn, Mistress O’Meary—”

  “You may call me Molly if you like, and I may call you Edward?”

  “As you please.”

  “You were telling me of your intentions in Ireland.”

  “No, I was saying that it’s my turn to ask you a question.”

  “‘Questions and commands,’ is it?”

  “And it’s my turn to play commander.”

  “Ask or command, then.”

  “I hear you’re wooed from far and wide.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear. I’m betrothed.”

  “He’s a good man?”

  “He’s rogue and rover, sir, like you.”

  “You must introduce us.”

  “He’s much too far away.”

  “At St. Germain, perhaps?”

  “You should know how foolish it is to blithely suggest a man is a Jacobite or Tory without evidence. Sir William tells me you were once a Jacobite, yet now you serve King William.”

  She did not wait for his reply, but cantered ahead for a few hundred yards, then slowed to a trot. They rode silently together into the countryside for an Irish mile, Edward bumping up and down a bit to his mare’s short strides, Molly sitting comfortably and moving easily with her gelding’s undulations. Edward and his mare often lagged behind. Several times the mare broke into a canter to keep pace with the gelding, who each time took up the canter himself, was restrained by Molly, tossed his head in annoyance, and reached over to nip the mare for trying to take the lead, often missing her shoulder and biting Edward’s boot instead.

  “Damn animal!” swore Edward.

  “You curse much, Captain MacNaughton—I mean Edward.”

  “The curse of being a mariner.”

  “We’re not aboard your ship, sir,” she said, smiling, then gently pulled her horse to the right. “Three more miles is all you need tolerate my occasionally sharp tongue, and only at supper afterward if you’d rather avoid me. You won’t be with us long, and have affairs of business to manage, so Sir William says. Why make this journey, then? Few travel so far for so short a time.”

  “Sir William surely told you: I’m here settle his investment in my privateering adventure.”

  “But this you could do via letters and solicitors. You don’t need to travel yourself.”

  “Don’t you know well that a Scot, a rat, and a Newcastle grindstone—”

  “—travel all the world over,” she laughed. “But you have merely crossed St. George’s Channel, not the world over. As I said, correspondence would suffice. I think you must truly be a messenger bearing important news or questions.”

  Damn this head! I hardly think straight, Edward cursed inwardly. “You’ve caught me out, Molly. In truth, I’m taking the opportunity to visit with Sir William while on another errand, whose nature I can’t disclose.”

  “I see, sir—an intrigue!” she replied in the same tone of friendly conversational disinterest masking interrogation. But Edward dismissed his incipient suspicion, just as he did his sense of being watched, as the mere byproduct of the wine bottle.

  “Nothing so adventurous, merely matters between great gentlemen and lesser noblemen whose affairs they prefer to keep private,” he replied.

  “And doubtless you hope they will invest in your adventure in return for your service?”

  “You’re a quick one, Molly.”

  “Well, if you need my help with your errand, secretive though you are about it, you can call on me. I know everyone around here.”

  “My many thanks, but I’m sure I’ll manage.”

  His mare stumbled slightly, then tried to canter briefly as she caught her balance. Molly’s gelding immediately leaped ahead, thinking it a race, but she quickly restrained him.

  “Easy, girl, easy,” Edward said as he reined his mare up and patted her on the neck.

  “It must be difficult, though, this begging of gentlemen and noblemen,” Molly said more seriously, once both riders were back on course.

  “I don’t beg,” he replied.

  “Truly?”

  “No.”

  “Not even God?”

  “Not even.”

  “A woman, then? Every man begs at least one woman in his life for love, lust, or money.”

  “Not any woman for any reason.”

  “Then it’s a very hard head you have, for I’m sure it’s taken many hard knocks as you’ve made your way alone in the world.”

  Edward laughed. It felt good; he had not laughed so honestly in weeks.

  They passed a man and woman walking on the road. Something about the pair, a hint of their scorn perhaps, drew Edward’s attention, but upon examination they seemed harmless enough, if aloof and surly, and he saw no one else about. The letters he was to deliver were safely on his person, and he doubted anyone here knew of them.

  “The roads are safe this close to town,” Molly said, noticing his sudden military inspection of his surroundings.

  “So the barber told me earlier. Yet you seemed grateful for my armed protection.”

  “Mere flattery, sir. Praising a man’s martial virtues, whether he has any or not, puts him at ease.”

  And off his guard, Edward thought, idly at first, then more seriously.

  “Does this work with all men? And what need do you have to put men at ease if you’re betrothed?” Edward replied too bluntly. His hangover was wearing off and his apprehensions of women and Fortune got the better of him. Immediately he regretted his words.

  “You’ve already heard that men seek me from far and wide. Where did you hear this? From Sir William? I doubt it. On the quays? From the barber? Or from some clacking hens in the market square? Perhaps you’d like to join these would-be suitors?” she said with a thin smile. “If you do, know that you must seek me for my land, for any other maid or spinster in the county can imitate me in the dark. Know that, if you believe the local people, you’ll pursue a wild Irish woman who will have no master and whose promised lover is a rogue. She rides by night with smugglers and rapparees, or so they say. Like the gossips, you’ll wonder why I’m not married in spite of my many greedy suitors. Am I Sir William’s secret mistress, perhaps? Does he—a Whig, an Englishman, a loyal servant of the English church and of the Dutch king in London—find perverse attraction in bedding a papist? They’re all certain, of course, that I’m a fornicatrice, and therefore wonder why I’m never pregnant. Perhaps I know potions, perhaps I’m barren, perhaps I’m used contrary to nature? But these are trifles that do not matter: property is everything. Better a shrew with property as a wife than a saint with none.”

  “And your betrothed?” Edward asked carefully.

  “Is Irish and an outlaw. If I marry him now my estate becomes his, and the English will seize it.”

  “So, like the Irish-hating Elizabeth, you play at being wooed while biding your own time?”

  “Aren’t you the quick one now!”

  In an instant she was off across the countryside at a gallop, and so was Edward’s mare before he had cued her. Molly rode skillfully and aggressively with a loose rein over the troubled ground, using her hands only when necessary to guide the horse or slow him down. She and her mount gained two hundred yards on him and his. Near a copse at the crest of a low hill she slowed to a hand gallop, then a canter, then to a trot and finally a walk. Her gelding was annoyed at having been reined up and showed his displeasure by bucking, snorting, and throwing his head. Molly waited for Edward, walking her horse in small circles. She laughed as he drew near. The bitterness, real or pretend, was gone, but for a hint in the partly hidden hard line of her mouth and jaw.

  “You are no true horseman, sir. You ride with more boldness than skill. But you sit a horse well enough and don’t interfere with her.”

  “Thank you for the compliment.”

  “Sir William’s
manor house is just beyond, as you probably recall,” she said. “I must apologize for my outburst. I know you’re not like the others—the men who court me—because you haven’t asked me why I live with Sir William when I have my own estate. In other words, you haven’t wondered at our relationship.” When Edward replied only with silence, she continued. “Sir William is an old family friend who took me in after I returned from France. My father was dead by then, and Inniskilling dragoons had burned our home. Only rain saved it from entire destruction.”

  Edward stiffened noticeably in the saddle. He had briefly served with the same dragoons during one of the many side adventures in his life.

  “I don’t hold you responsible,” she continued. “Sir William tells me you were with the Inniskilling men only under duress, and by the time they burned our property you were no longer one of them. Again, I apologize for my outburst.”

  Quickly she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, then immediately cantered away, preventing him from returning the salute if even he had thought to do so. She seemed embarrassed, whether for her outburst or the kiss, or both, he could not tell.

  Edward followed, and soon they arrived at Ballydereen.

  “My thanks for your company and protection, Captain MacNaughton,” she said after releasing the wolfhounds to run to the kitchen. She rode away before he could reply.

  Edward shook his head, bewildered. He began to wonder if his philosophy of Fortune’s messengers was flawed, that there was no escaping Fortune after all; or if his hangover had simply left him vulnerable.

  Damned sack!

  He could not fathom whether he had just had an innocent conversation in which he had said a foolish thing or two, or if he had been quite subtly manipulated for reasons he could not identify. The woman who finished the ride did not seem to him the same who had begun it.

  For a minute he sat on his mount alone before the house. Once more he looked around and about, for the impression of being watched had grown stronger rather than weaker as his hangover diminished.

  And for an instant he spotted what he had suspected: a glimpse of a dark rider quickly disappearing into some trees just below the crest of a hill.

  He turned to follow, discarding his brief urge to inform the house first of his intentions, when he heard the unmistakable voice of the grand old gentleman Sir William Waller who hobbled strongly, cane in hand, from the house.

  “Spurs! Damn, you didn’t use your spurs on her, did ye?”

  Chapter 8

  But the Natives of Ireland,

  over and above that publick quarrel of Religion,

  have a private one of Revenge…

  —“An Answer to the Late King James’s Declaration,” 1689

  All afternoon the Irishman shadowed his quarry, in spite of the urgent need to deliver smuggled arms. To date, he had handed over only two of five stores of arms, and he had other pressing tasks as well. Five days had passed since he had come ashore at Oysterhaven, and he must depart as soon as practical for London for service under Barclay. He had no time for accidental discoveries on the road, yet he indulged himself.

  In the past, Michael O’Neal had often tracked travelers on and off the roads, sometimes simply out of the need to line his pockets with someone else’s coin, sometimes as part of his duty, as he called it, to Ireland. Often he carried a coded letter of instruction: whom to rob and when, or, more rarely these days, which house to burn and when, or what messenger needed protection, or what ships were sailing from Cork and Kinsale, and roughly when, and what their cargoes were. Sometimes his task was merely to handle the secret post sent via French smugglers or privateers, making him no more than a common messenger on a dangerous mail route. In the past his instructions had come from his cousin, a papist Irish priest. But with his cousin’s capture—the brutal beating of the man had burned Michael to his soul—the routine had changed. A new spy was to give him instructions. To give him, Michael O’Neal, who hated to be commanded, orders.

  He had almost come to blows with both of them, Molly and the spy.

  “You may not kill the English officer, the ensign who abused your cousin, the one named Ingoldsby,” the spy said.

  And Molly said much the same.

  “It will raise suspicions,” both she and the spy agreed.

  Michael, angry, acquiesced but silently reserved the right to revisit the issue later, on his own terms if necessary.

  “And what of the Scottish buccaneer?” he asked both the spy and Molly.

  “Nor him,” the spy said.

  “Yet surely by now the Scotsman has the letters,” the Irishman had argued. “Hasn’t he already met twice with the viscount and baronet? In my experience, it’s easier to steal letters from the dead than from the living.”

  The reply was patronizing and sent Michael’s temper nearly to a blind fury.

  “You’re a fool, but for your sake and mine I’ll explain this to you one more time. A Jacobite agent in Bristol bungled the attempt to get Lord Deigle’s letters from MacNaughton, even bungled something as simple as preventing him from sailing. But the Scotsman is here now, so we’ll wait until we know for certain he has the replies from the viscount and baronet. Do you follow me so far? Good.”

  Michael ground his teeth, his face empurpled.

  The spy continued. “Both men claim allegiance to King William, yet both once supported our cause, thus both have intelligence of our cause. In particular, before Viscount Brennan claimed to have abandoned King James, he met with the Duke of Berwick, who is gathering support for King James. Both replies are important, but the viscount’s is vital: he knows of plans being laid in St. Germain. He claims that he won’t help us anymore but also that he won’t betray us. Even so, until his reply to Deigle is in our hands, we won’t know whether he’s telling the truth or not. Is this too difficult to follow?”

  “Damn you,” Michael sputtered. “I endure much for you!”

  “And I for you. Remember that this cause is greater than both of us.”

  “And when MacNaughton has their replies?” Michael spat.

  “We’ll rob him on the road if we can, but we’ll let him live. Our cause can’t afford the attention his murder would draw.”

  “And if we miss him on the road?”

  “We’ll have other opportunities, you know this.”

  Michael swallowed his fury and stayed his fists. It was easier for him to obey the spy than it was to obey Molly, for the spy also took orders, therefore Michael was not as much obeying the spy as he was obeying the spy’s superior.

  Molly herself said much the same, likewise ordering him, who had sworn never to be commanded by a woman, not to settle the old score.

  Does she not care that he marooned me once, leaving me to die of thirst or madness?

  She was adamant. “It would draw too much attention to Sir William, thus to me, thus to you, thus to our hopes.”

  He began to disbelieve her excuse for letting other men woo her, that by this her estate might be saved until James was king again, and then they could marry openly. He began to suspect that she planned for multiple contingencies, including the failure of the Jacobite cause. The obvious conclusion was that she might one day abandon him, rather than her estate, should Fortune choose the wrong side.

  Still, for now he had no choice but to obey. She burdened him with love as the price of sex and eventual estate, in return for which he, sometimes petulantly, often angrily, always hating it, must at times do her bidding.

  So today he would pass on vengeance, for it was a luxury, and luxuries must wait until King James ruled again. He glanced at his quarry below, a mounted English officer named Ingoldsby. Among his other sins, the officer had pretended to woo Molly, as did many men from miles around. Or at least he had before he traveled to London, escorting Michael’s cousin for trial.

  The Irishman’s horse snorted and shook his head, as if afflicted by his rider’s mood.

  Too much to do, no time to waste, a king is likely
to die, Michael thought. Yet still he tarried.

  The thought of regicide—his prescient guess that Sir George Barclay would be tasked to kill the Dutch king of England—gave him no pleasure except in the details. He despised Prince William but did not hate him, for the Dutchman was too removed from Irish history. Michael did hate most Englishmen, though, or claimed he did, but had a curious ability to work with them for profit by stealth or violence.

  He trotted his mount for a hundred feet in order to keep his quarry in sight, then settled him back into a slow walk.

  The ensign below was well-mounted on a foreign animal, nimble and of good wind. The Irishman’s own sturdy mount might better handle the forage and weather of Ireland, but whether it could best the Englishman’s in fight or flight was an unknown. To ride him down, this man, this Englishman, this officer, in broad daylight was too dangerous, given the circumstances. Were the officer to escape he would raise the hutesium et clamor, the hue and cry, drawing attention to those who laid in arms and prepared to rise again against the English. Even his death, his killer unknown, would raise the alarm, as would his disappearance. In this Michael had to agree, although he hated to do so, with Molly and the spy.

  And they will be furious, both of them, if I kill the officer!

  Nevertheless, how he wished to gallop down the slope, pistols in hand, and shoot Ingoldsby at close range, the powder and wad singeing his coat, the balls and shot penetrating his organs, the empty pistols then bludgeoning his brains, knocking him from the saddle, to lie in the mud until his head was severed from his shoulders.

  Today this was only a fantasy.

  His quarry below paused at a fork in the road.

  Off to seduce another young woman and abandon her with child? wondered the Irishman, not bothering to consider that this was also often his own way. He laughed quietly to himself. Aye, going farther afield now that you’ve returned from sending my cousin to London to be hanged, after you broke his teeth and head with your boot. Do you know, boy, that some of the English and all of the Irish laugh at how you were passed out aboard the Peregrinator, too drunk to fight the French off Kinsale and cover yourself with glory? Surely you’ve heard the tales, Englishman, so how do you still hold your head up so high?