The Rebel Pirate

by Donna Thorland

  Until Sarah turned fourteen and her mother put a stop to it. Abigail Ward had sailed with Sarah’s father, Abednego, a reformed pirate turned douce merchant, to Barbados and back for all the years of her married life, but she wanted her daughter to have a proper education, to become a fine lady, and marry a fine gentleman.

  The dame school her mother chose educated the wealthiest girls in Salem and Marblehead. It was the first time Sarah had realized that not everyone thought being a pardoned pirate’s daughter was a blessing. She found that socially, she ranked below almost everyone in attendance, except the daughter of a fisherman who owned a small fleet. Her money smelled of fish. Sarah’s smelled of blood.

  Evidently blood smelled nicer.

  When she tried, earnestly, to ape the fine manners of the other girls, they called her Lady Frankland, after Agnes Surriage, the barefoot Marblehead serving girl who had gotten pregnant by a visiting English baronet at fourteen, and was spirited away by him to learn polish and manners—and deliver her child—in Boston. When Sarah failed, at anything, they called her Agnes.

  Sarah hated the dame school and she hated the dame, until Elizabeth Pierce enrolled.

  Elizabeth had a razor wit and she used it to cut people—particularly people who were unkind to Sarah Ward—to size. Their friendship was built on an equal exchange. From Elizabeth, Sarah learned to enjoy novels, needlework, and gossip. From Sarah, Elizabeth learned to navigate the docks of Salem, to cadge oranges and pineapples off the sailors, to wheedle ribald stories out of the tavern bawds.

  From ages fourteen to twenty they were rarely out of each other’s company. They determined together that if they could not captain ships and sail to great adventures themselves, then they could at least marry men who did.

  And no one in Salem had sailed as far or dared as much as Micah Wild. Calvinist-leaning Salem regarded Wild’s success as a divine endorsement. He had taken a small inherited fortune and made it a large self-earned one. Smuggling was the source of his wealth, cunning the source of his success. By the time he was twenty-five he owned seven ships.

  Sarah had a fortune to rival Elizabeth’s, but not an ancient family name, so when Wild entered their circle, she assumed his intent was fixed on her friend. When he cornered her outside the assembly hall between dances and kissed her, his tongue in her mouth and his hands on her body, she was surprised, but also elated. The thrill of desire was new to her, and intoxicating.

  She found she liked his quick wit and the way people gravitated to him in a crowded room. He liked being able to talk hulls and hawsers with a woman. Abednego had never warmed to him, but when Wild sought Red Abed’s permission, he gave it grudgingly, and Sarah embarked on preparations for her marriage.

  Until the Wards lost all their money. And Micah decided to marry Elizabeth instead.

  The two women had spoken only once since then. Sarah still burned with shame at the thought. She’d begged Elizabeth not to marry Micah. A true friend, Sarah argued, would not, could not do such a thing. But Elizabeth argued that the opportunity was too good to pass up, Wild’s fortune and standing too great to refuse. A true friend, Elizabeth had believed, would encourage her to accept him.

  That was when Sarah had lashed out, telling her that Wild was marrying her only for her fortune. She regretted it almost instantly, but there was no taking the words back.

  Sarah knocked upon the door of that imposing brick house with as much dignity as she could muster. When she asked to see Mrs. Wild, the maid hesitated, and Sarah’s heart sank. If Elizabeth refused to see her, if she did not find Sparhawk a carriage, if he was discovered in her home, their neighbors would punish them. And not just with the cool regard the Wards had endured of late.

  The maid left her waiting in the hall, surrounded by the block-printed wallpaper Sarah had chosen herself, the bold geometric in blue and green that complemented the dove gray paneled wainscoting. The floorcloth she had selected was crisply executed in a marbled diamond pattern with a compass star. She wondered if Elizabeth knew that another woman had chosen so much of her home’s decor, if she was reminded every day in her own house that she had been Micah’s second choice.

  Sarah had picked out all the furnishings in the hall when she had been engaged to Micah, and now she felt poor and shabby amidst such elegance. She was relieved when the maid came back and led her not into the grand parlor with its Brussels carpets and damask sofas, but into the smaller sitting room at the back of the house. She did not know whether the choice of rooms was a slight or a sign of consideration, and she resolved not to care. Sparhawk’s life, her family’s safety—these things were more important than her pride.

  The little parlor was dark, the blinds drawn, the chairs covered in cotton ticking for the summer heat. She had prepared herself to greet Elizabeth—to beg for the loan of her carriage—and plastered what she hoped was a look of contrition and conciliation on her face.

  All for naught. The woman waiting in the lolling chair at the tea table was not Elizabeth Pierce Wild, the friend of her girlhood, but a very different lady. Older than both Sarah and Elizabeth by a decade, she was seated with a posture and poise that mimicked the straight backs of the chairs and called to mind the grace of a swan. Her gray sack gown was striped silk damask, the train suitable for a woman of leisure, and at odds with the lady’s active, alert demeanor.

  Sarah had seen her before. Angela Ferrers had appeared in Salem shortly before Micah Wild proposed the Sally’s voyage to Saint Eustatius. Stylish, sophisticated, said to be a widow of means, known to be political, and certainly no friend of government, the woman had quickly become a fixture at the town’s fashionable gatherings.

  An exodus of wealthy and influential Loyalists had followed close on the heels of her arrival, driven by threats, intimidation, and blackmail. The Wards, thankfully, had been spared. At the time Sarah had attributed their good luck to their poor fortunes. Now it occurred to her that the Wards might have been allowed to remain in Salem for another reason: because this woman wanted something from them.

  “Won’t you sit down?” said the lady, gesturing toward the other chair.

  Sarah had to stop herself from treating the invitation as a command. There was cold steel behind the cultivated voice. It rang with the authority of the quarterdeck and carried with the borrowed vibrato of the pulpit sounding board.

  “I am sorry, but I came to see Elizabeth,” said Sarah.

  “Not Micah?”

  The question, if you knew Sarah’s history, as this woman surely did, was more than a little rude. And Sarah did not like the widow’s knowing, arch smile, nor the way her shrewd eyes noted Sarah’s faded jacket, frayed petticoat, and scuffed shoes.

  “Micah Wild jilted me for my best friend, Mrs. Ferrers. What could I possibly want to discuss with him?”

  “The whereabouts,” said that lady, “of one hundred fifty tons of flint ballast, Salem’s fastest schooner, and a fortune in French gold.”

  • • •

  Sarah did not return immediately. Sparhawk knew from Ned that there were no servants, that she did everything herself, from carrying water to lighting fires to cooking, cleaning, and looking after their father. Ned had been oddly cagey about his father, but also decidedly proud. “My father could make Barbados faster than any captain in Salem. He was going to copper the Sally’s bottom. Hard to say what he will do with her now. He says we must hide her until she can be painted and repaired and that she can’t be the Sally anymore. And that we can’t sell our molasses in Salem because of Wild, and we can’t sell it in Boston because of you.”

  Mr. Ward, unfortunately, was right. The crew of the Wasp and, more important, Lieutenant Graves, would recognize the Sally’s colors—she had a lovely yellow stripe, bright, narrow, and very distinctive—and her name. Sparhawk hoped that Graves had not been close enough to get a good look at Sarah Ward before Cheap had felled him. If Sparhawk did not name
her, she should be safe enough.

  The doctor, it turned out, had courted Sarah, but his prospects had been dismissed as too limited. That was when Sarah had a great fortune in tea to bring to a marriage.

  Ned had also spoken—much against Sarah’s wishes, Sparhawk suspected—about the mysterious older brother. “He is overdue,” Ned had said, with obvious concern. “He should have been home before the Sally left. Sarah says we must not worry yet, and Father says nothing at all. Although it was Father who said he must go to London to get it out of his system, and remain there if he could not.”

  Ned did not know what “it” was. Rebel sympathies, Sparhawk suspected. And damned selfish of him too, when his sister needed protecting and his father’s health was failing. But Sparhawk kept that to himself. Ned obviously worshipped his older brother.

  “All the girls always tried to dance with Benji at the assemblies. And he could ride and fence and shoot better than anyone. And he can handle the Sally almost as well as Father. If he had been home, he would have had command of her, not Molineaux, and you never would have caught us.”

  The Ward family, it appeared, held a universally low opinion of the seamanship of anyone to whom they were not directly related.

  The boy had scampered off soon after that, leaving Sparhawk staring up at the canopy and mulling his next move. The beefsteak was beginning to sound like a very good idea. His stomach gurgled, the sound loud enough to echo in the empty room. He watched the sun begin to set through the window—it would have been a pretty chamber when it was carpeted and papered—then decided to venture downstairs.

  The house must have been older than it looked, because it was built to an antique plan with a central chimney. In front was a modern staircase in two flights, handsomely carved with twisted rope molding. The entire structure was one room deep on either side, and some of the fireplaces still sported fashionable paneling—though others had clearly been stripped of even that.

  He arrived on the ground floor to find the parlors chilled and dark, but light and warmth emanated from the far corner of what had once been the dining room, where a narrow batten door led into a service ell.

  And there was music, of a sort: a low baritone rumble that started and stopped, the cadence, if not the tune, familiar; a sea chantey, but not one of the navy’s.

  The song drew him to the door, and when he saw through the crack that the chamber was unoccupied, into a kitchen with another door at the far end, from whence the singing came. There was no fire burning in the cooking hearth, but the room had a borrowed warmth from the chamber beyond. And a familiar air to it, something of his West Indian childhood—his real youth, not the manufactured tale of Shropshire summers that he and McKenzie had concocted—in the faint aroma of lime and molasses and the low-slung Campeche chairs beneath the window.

  As he listened to the song drifting from the room beyond, and fingered the worn velvet of his borrowed coat, a suspicion stole over him, preposterous and at the same time, somehow inevitable.

  He almost missed seeing the heavy-bladed cutlass propped in the corner. Someone had used it recently to bank the fire. It was blackened with soot and dulled by age, but there was no mistaking the tassel that hung from the guard: eight dark red ribbons strung with shark’s teeth.

  The girl’s name was Ward.

  Her father was a captain.

  My father could make Barbados faster than any captain in Salem.

  In a ship with a heavily tattooed crew.

  Among whom was at least one pickpocket who had tutored Sarah Ward.

  Mr. Cheap sailed with the Brethren of the Coast.

  A name rose up out of childhood memory and bedtime stories, a bogeyman to put fear into the hearts of island children raised on soft breezes and sugarcane. A ginger-haired giant with a shark-tooth-tasseled cutlass.

  “Red” Abed. Captain Abednego Ward.

  Sparhawk had fallen into a nest of pirates.

  Five

  Sarah backed toward the door. Coming to Wild’s house had been a mistake. This woman knew about the flint and the French gold, and now she knew that Sarah Ward and the Sally were back. Which put the Sally, the Ward family, and Sparhawk in terrible danger.

  “I’ll call on Elizabeth another time,” Sarah said, feeling for the latch behind her.

  “Very well,” said Angela Ferrers. “I will interview your charming little brother instead.”

  Sarah froze. She did not want Ned anywhere near this dangerous creature in gray silk. Ned could not keep a secret to save his life—or Sparhawk’s. If a Ward was going to match wits with this woman, it was going to be Sarah.

  “How do you know about the gold?” she asked.

  Angela Ferrers gestured once more toward the empty chair at the table. Sarah took it. The young widow nodded with satisfaction and reached for the brown-glazed pot on the table, the kind the Dutch merchants sold, a delicate Chinese piece set in a scalloped gold mount. It had once been Sarah’s, auctioned like so much else to fund the Sally’s voyage.

  Beside it was a plate of ginger cakes, baked, Sarah knew, by Micah’s cook, Mrs. Friary. They had been a favorite treat of Sarah’s in childhood, when Mrs. Friary operated a bakery near the wharf. Knowing how much Sarah enjoyed the little delicacies, Micah had hired the baker to cook for the new house. Sarah’s mouth watered at the thought of tasting one for the first time in years.

  “Information is currency,” said the widow, pouring a steaming ribbon of tea into Sarah’s cup. Evidently the Rebel prohibition did not extend to the households of high Sons of Liberty like Micah. “And currency,” continued Angela Ferrers, “of course, is currency, especially gold. It is welcome in every port of every nation and it is untraceable, melting back into the money supply after it has done its service.” She passed Sarah a cup. The widow’s hands were manicured, and she wore three dainty mourning rings crusted with pearls.

  “The gold,” said Sarah, seeing no point in dissembling now, “was captured by the British yesterday and will be in Boston by now.”

  “And you were on the same ship, yet here you sit. How is that?”

  Angela Ferrers was far too well-informed. “They tried,” she said, “to press my brother. So I took the captain hostage and ordered his men off the Sally. They had already removed the gold. I could not get it back without risking our freedom.”

  “Either you are a very singular young woman,” said Angela Ferrers, placing a sugared brown cake on Sarah’s plate—she could smell the ginger and molasses in it—“or that is the story you and Wild concocted to conceal your theft of the gold.”

  The spicy cake lost all appeal. “Why do you think I stole your gold?”

  “You are penniless.”

  “Being poor is not the same thing as being a criminal.”

  “Please, Miss Ward, your father was a pirate. Criminality, or so it is said, runs in the blood.”

  “I doubt such traits are heritable,” Sarah replied. “Neither of my parents could balance a ledger, yet I have a fine head for numbers.”

  A hint of a smile flashed over Angela Ferrers’ face. “You are more intelligent than I expected, but the fact remains. You are a Loyalist, and Wild’s lover. You had both motive and opportunity to plot such a theft.”

  “One encounter does not make a man a lover. Micah jilted me. And he is an ardent Patriot.”

  “And he was once your devoted fiancé. Until circumstances changed. Your head for numbers should lead you to a logical conclusion there.”

  She had never questioned Micah’s political loyalties, only his romantic allegiances. “You don’t trust him,” she said.

  “I trust Micah Wild to act in his own interest. I am here to discover where those interests lie.”

  “I am not Wild’s lover. Credit me with some pride, at least.”

  “I begin to suspect that you have more than is good for you. What becam
e of the flint?”

  “The British threw that overboard.”

  “That is a pity. Flint is necessary to strike a spark.”

  “You mean it is necessary to start a war.”

  “Do not be fooled by the quiet, Miss Ward. War has already started. Formal declarations tend to come after the fact. King George has said that the colonies must submit or triumph. Your countrymen have given him their answer. They are stealing cannon from their village greens and laying chain across their harbors.”

  “The ports have been at odds with the navy over the press and the customs acts for years. You cannot be certain that this time it will come to war,” said Sarah.

  “It is my policy,” said Angela Ferrers, “to leave very little to chance. Congress is adamant that the colonies will not fire the first shot, but I will make certain that when that shot is fired, the American side of the story reaches London first.”

  “On a fast ship,” said Sarah. “Like the Sally.”

  “There is your talent for figuring again,” said Angela Ferrers.

  “But Micah has ships of his own that might serve.” Sarah considered her former betrothed’s fleet. “There is the Oliver Cromwell, though she may be too slow. Micah had her built with a deep draft and a false bottom for smuggling. My father advised him against sacrificing speed for concealment, and after today I would say he was right. Better not to be boarded at all. The Conant might be a better choice. Why not one of them?”

  “That is the missing variable,” said the elegant widow, refreshing Sarah’s untouched cup of tea. “The Oliver Cromwell and the Conant are curiously absent from Salem Harbor, and not known to be under the command of a Cape Ann skipper. Their whereabouts interest me. I have found that Wild’s business dealings do not add up, but his ambitions are easy arithmetic. The man who carries this story to London will rise high in the estimation of Congress, and they are about to have need of fast ships and bold seamen. America had only three working powder mills during the late war with the French. Today, she has none. She has no foundries to produce cannon. No factories to make muskets. It must all be imported. Before the war for America can be fought on land, the war for matériel must be fought at sea.”