He considered a moment. “Then come with me,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Come with me to Boston. Your father and Mr. Cheap cannot guard you day and night. If you remain here, you will end in Wild’s keeping. I want to help you. I am offering you, in every sense of the word, my protection.”
“Oh.”
“My terms will sound altogether too like Wild’s, but there are, I flatter myself, important differences. I have money to keep you. I could get Ned a place on a good ship, your father perhaps a pension. Lord knows he deserves one. He captured more pirates than the navy did in those days.”
“You forget,” she said. “I took you captive. I will be wanted in Boston for piracy.”
“An American boy will be wanted for piracy. No one on the Wasp saw your face.”
“Your lieutenant may have,” she said.
“But he is a lieutenant, and I am a captain, and I will swear it was not you.”
“And how,” she said carefully, “would this differ from Micah’s offer?”
“Well, for one thing, I am not married. For another, I think you actually like me.” There was his damned charm again. “I would offer you more, if I could, but I cannot.”
“That is what Micah said, the night he told me he was going to marry Elizabeth.”
“Granted, the effect upon you is similar,” he admitted, “but I swear to you that I have better reason in this than Wild. I cannot offer you my name because I was not born ‘Sparhawk’ and I was not christened ‘James.’ I’m an imposter.”
Seven
Sparhawk owed Sarah Ward some measure of the truth. She had risked her family’s safety to bring him here and save his hand, and tried to fight off her former fiancé on her own to save him from discovery. She was staring up at him expectantly, and he knew that if he did not tell her now, she would always regard it as a betrayal.
“James Sparhawk,” he said, “does not exist.”
“The bullion on your coat looked real enough,” she said, a note of challenge in her voice.
“My rank,” he said, “is real. Earned without interest or advantage of birth. But I did not enter the navy a midshipman and rise to captain like other young gentlemen. I was kidnapped from my home as a boy and pressed aboard a ship bound for Bombay as a common sailor.
“My father,” Sparhawk said, choosing his words carefully, “was the second son of a country gentleman, with no great expectations. What property there was would go to his elder brother. The navy seemed a natural choice. His father approved, and he went for a midshipman when he was not much older than Ned is now.
“He met a girl, a parson’s daughter, while he was on leave visiting the West Country and eloped with her against the objections of her family. His father would not give him money, and he could not keep her snug in England on a lieutenant’s pay, so he brought her and their infant son—myself—to Nevis, where his ship called frequently, though not frequently enough to keep him out of other women’s beds. He was young and feckless, and he forgot to send her money as often as he forgot his marriage vows. He never took the trouble to introduce her to society in Nevis, and most of the English there doubted she was really his wife.”
They had called him a bastard, and his mother a whore.
“My father’s visits and his financial support became increasingly irregular, and my mother began taking in mending and washing to make ends meet. For a time, it was enough to keep us. Then his money stopped coming entirely, and the letters started to arrive. My father’s uncle and elder brother had died in quick succession, leaving him the heir to an ancient barony in Cornwall. Scrubby land. Poor for farming but rich in metals, if someone had the capital to mine it. But the estate was drowning in debt. My father needed money, fast, and hoped to acquire it in the time-honored way of his class—by marrying it. Unfortunately, he already had a wife.
“But the union, he decided, had been irregular. A hole-and-corner affair, contracted when they were both too young to be held responsible, never recognized by their families. He presented this view to my mother, who rejected it out of hand, not necessarily for herself—but for me. She was raising me on the little money she scraped together, to be a gentleman.”
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays he had gone to the Jewess for Hebrew and mathematics. Thursdays and Fridays to the English parson for Latin and Greek. An old Spaniard tutored him in destreza, the true art of the sword. A bookish child, small and weak, he varied his route each day, hoping to avoid the island children who threatened and bullied him.
“My father attempted to buy my mother’s silence with his future wife’s money—he already had a candidate in mind, some plantation owner’s daughter whose family were eager to secure a title for her—but my mother would not acquiesce. She even vowed she would write to his intended and reveal him for a bigamist. So he turned to threats. Rumors were rife on the island that my mother accommodated men. For money.”
By then the rumors were true. The first time he had awakened to the sound of the bed ropes creaking, he’d thought his father must be home—an unexpected visit, but welcome. Peering into the darkness, he had seen the shape straining over his mother, distinctly that of another man, thicker and fairer than his darkly handsome father. He’d been stricken with a deep feeling of dread, a sense that something was profoundly wrong, as chilling as if he’d seen a ghost or a monster.
“My father finally condescended to return to Nevis to speak with her. They quarreled. She told him she had already written to his intended, and sent the proof of their marriage lines. We were living in such squalor then that all I could think as I looked at him was how he glittered with gold, how the braid and buttons of his uniform could have fed us for a year.”
His father did not stay in the cottage that night, and in the morning, his mother discovered why. His fiancée and her family were aboard his ship. He was to fete them that night with a grand party, to introduce his betrothed to English society on Nevis. Sparhawk’s mother had sobbed and raged, gut-wrenching grief alternating with helpless anger. Then she had taken his hand and led him down to the docks, and spent one of their precious coins to have them rowed out to his father’s ship.
There were musicians playing prettily as they came alongside, and paper lanterns hung from the rigging. Tropical flowers dripped from the rails, and their heady scents disguised the fug of bilge water, hemp, and tar. His mother had climbed awkwardly up the side, as foreign, he recognized at the time, to that wooden world as the colorful blooms trailing over the side. He had followed, watching in horror as she caught sight of a tall, lithe young woman in green silk and made straight for her. His father intercepted her, and, bellowing in a voice Sparhawk had never heard him use before, he ordered his marines to drag her from the ship. He watched his father turn his back on his mother, and on him, forever.
“A few nights later, five men broke down the door to our cottage. Two of them carried me to the docks. Their instructions were to drown me, but sailors, even the worst of them, are a superstitious and sentimental lot. They pressed me aboard a brig bound for Bombay. Later, I learned that my mother had been taken to the magistrates and imprisoned for debt and prostitution. I was never again to see her alive.
“I was not, as you might imagine, a midshipman, and I learned—at the wrong end of a cat—to obey orders. The captain of that brig was a tyrant with a taste for boys, and I suffered accordingly.”
The details, to the daughter of a seafaring family, would be easy to guess.
“I was two years on that unhappy vessel until the Admiralty replaced our vicious captain just in time to forestall a mutiny.
“I was more fortunate in my next commander. He guessed that my origins were not as they’d been entered in the ship’s muster—I could read Latin, Greek, and French—and he invited me to study with the midshipmen. When I confessed my true identity, he cautioned me not to reveal myself
to anyone else, lest my father learn that I was not dead and send men to finish the job. And in any case I had no proof of who I was, and my status, in the navy and thus in the wider world, was the lowest of the low.
“So we bided our time, and when one of the midshipmen, always sickly, and now consumptive and unlikely to live, was transferred to shore, I accompanied him as a servant. This boy—the real James Sparhawk—had no living family. When he died, the captain helped me to assume the boy’s identity, and I remained ashore to ‘convalesce’ until the crew was changed out. When I returned, not a man but the captain had known me, nor the dead Sparhawk.
“Under my new name, I passed my lieutenant’s exam at fifteen, captained my first prize at sixteen, achieved a command of my own by eighteen. I have worked these past twelve years to assemble the proofs of my true identity, and my father’s crimes. I do not have them all yet, but I will shortly. That is why I requested service in North America. I have tracked to the Massachusetts Bay the cleric who married my parents on Nevis and tutored me as a child. If I can find him, I hope he can be persuaded to swear out a statement validating their marriage and my identity. But from the moment I step forward and declare myself, my life will be in danger—and so would that of any woman I married, who might be carrying an heir to the title and fortune my father was willing to kill to secure.”
Sarah did not doubt a word of his story. Men had done as much and more when great titles and fortunes were at stake. The Annesley case had still been dragging its way through the courts when she was a girl—and James Annesley, the heir to the Earl of Anglesey, who had been kidnapped by his uncle and endured ten years of indentured servitude in America, and nineteen years of litigation in pursuit of justice, had died of natural causes before he could regain his birthright. But not before surviving two attempts on his life.
On the Sally, Sparhawk had shown himself to be brave, but Sarah was stunned, momentarily, by the determination that must have carried him from Bombay to the quarterdeck of his own brig.
“I am tempted by your offer,” she said. “But I cannot leave my father and Ned without a word. And you must go tonight.” Abednego Ward had run his family the way he had run his crews, democratically. Everyone had responsibilities, and everyone had a say.
A smile quirked the corners of Sparhawk’s perfect mouth. “Miss Ward, does that mean that if you could confer with your family, you would consider accepting my offer?”
“Would you really take me with Father and Ned in tow? And possibly Benji, whom you have never met, as well? We are a passel of rogues, and unlikely to advance your naval career.”
Sparhawk laughed. “I will reserve judgment on Benjamin until I have met him, though I am disinclined to like this brother who leaves you to the mercy of men such as Wild. Ned, however, has promise. And your father would make me a sought-after dinner guest in naval circles. There is nary an admiral save perhaps Old One-Foot-in-the-Graves who would not like to pass the port with Red Abed.”
It was not, to conventional thinking, an honorable offer; yet she thought it the most honorable offer she had ever received. Sparhawk was not interested in her money, because she did not have any. He was not lying to her or holding out false hope of marriage, because there was none. He was being completely honest with her. He was offering friendship and physical pleasure and financial support. She had lived too long without all three.
“Then yes,” she said. “If you would welcome my family, I will consider your offer.” She rose on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. The close contact, the way his body tensed and hers hummed, promised future passion. But tonight, with the memory of Micah’s hands on her, she could not contemplate more.
Nor did he press her for it. “Will they take you in at this judge’s house, until your father returns?” he asked.
“The Rideouts are old friends, and despite pressure, loyal to the king. If they have not been driven out of town yet, it is only because the judge is bedridden and too ill to go—and he has nothing but daughters.”
“Who aren’t handy with a pistol,” Sparhawk replied.
“We were at school together. They are obedient, genteel creatures,” Sarah admitted.
“Thank God,” said Sparhawk. “If there were more such as you in Naumkeag, Miss Ward, the sea-lanes would not be safe for the British Navy.”
Together they descended to the hall. She reached for the latch on the door, but before her fingers touched it, Sparhawk pulled her back and motioned for silence. He angled his body to peer out the sidelights, then beckoned her to do the same.
There were men in the street. Dan Ludd. And others. Ranged in front of the house. Cutting off Sparhawk’s escape. Ready, no doubt, to drag him to the common and hang him.
In this, she was determined that Micah Wild should not get his own way.
• • •
Sparhawk had just acquired a mistress.
Sailors tended to collect things on their travels. His bosun kept a small box stuffed with plant seeds from foreign ports, a whole future garden in potentia; his carpenter kept a bag of heathen votives and shrunken heads. Curiosities, both natural and artificial, were difficult for wandering seamen to resist. One of the hands on Sparhawk’s first snow had found a giant clamshell on Fiji and brought it aboard. When his shipmates quizzed him on what he planned to do with it, he said he hadn’t the slightest idea—but he knew that he should regret leaving it behind.
Sparhawk had not expected to find a mistress in the cold waters off Boston Harbor, but Sarah Ward was a natural curiosity herself, and he knew that he should regret leaving her behind.
She barred the front door of the house and led him back up the stairs and into a disused bedroom that looked out over the roof of the service ell. The window was small—the relic of a previous century—and narrow, but it rose with a soft hiss in smooth channels. Sarah climbed out onto the cedar shakes and motioned for him to follow.
It was tricky with his arm in the splint, but he managed. From there she led him over the shingles to another lower roof, this one a shed in a neighboring yard that rubbed close up to the Ward house, and from there she dropped to the ground in someone’s vegetable garden.
He placed his faith in her and followed, landing softly in a bed of cabbages.
“You’ve done this before,” he said.
“Of course,” she whispered. “Benji and I used to sneak out of the house to meet Elizabeth and drink rum in the Sally’s jolly boat when the schooner was in port.”
“Your father,” he replied as quietly, “does not seem like an easy man to sneak past.”
“He wasn’t. When we were old enough that we no longer had to sneak out, we realized that Mr. Cheap used to follow us.”
She was leading Sparhawk through a maze of low wooden fences, narrow alleys, and neat kitchen gardens, negotiating them with the skill of long practice. “Very intrepid of Mr. Cheap,” he remarked.
They picked their way through a dark passage between two long narrow houses, breathing the distinct aroma of molasses and rum. A distillery. Then they reached the mouth of the alley and a broad street, and Sarah peered cautiously out.
She drew back at once. “There are men in the street.”
“They could just be out for a stroll,” said Sparhawk hopefully, edging toward the opening with a hand on his pistol.
They were not just out for a stroll. It was the beginnings of a mob. There were groups at both ends of the street, the town’s main thoroughfare by the looks of it. They were sailors, mechanics, dockside ruffians. Old capstans had been rolled up from the shipyard to serve as barricades, and the toughs congregating around them held torches, buckets, and pillows.
Tar and feathers, no doubt.
One of the sailors carried an ominous coil of rope over his shoulder.
“Is there another way round?” Sparhawk asked.
“No. It is the manse directly o
pposite.”
“Very well,” said Sparhawk. It was a pretty house, gambrel roofed but larger, by far, than the Ward home, surrounded by a painted wooden fence carved with swags and urns, with a brick enclosure and carriage house behind. Built on a high fieldstone foundation, with stout shutters without and within, it would be a veritable fortress.
And impossible to reach without being seen by the mob.
They would have to make a run for it, and pray someone stood by the door at the ready to let them in. Sparhawk cocked his pistol. Sarah nodded, that same flinty expression in her eyes that she had worn on the Sally when she’d taken him prisoner.
He could not think of a man he would rather have at his side than Sarah Ward, who was of course not a man at all. It was the highest form of compliment, in one sense, and in his experience of women, unlikely to be taken as such. He refrained from speaking it.
They ran, Sarah taking the lead and Sparhawk following with his pistol at the ready. They were spotted almost immediately, a pockmarked sailor with a length of wood closing the distance faster than Sparhawk would have liked.
Then they were up the steps and Sarah was hammering on the door. A gust of candle-scented air met them, and they were through with a rush.
The door slammed behind them. After the Wasp and the Sally and the bare Ward house, the Rideout mansion overwhelmed the senses, all polished mahogany and satinwood and glittering ormolu and gilt. There was the distinct aroma of beeswax from the fine tapers, of brandy from the crystal that littered the glassy surface of the long table in the dining room. Continental landscapes hung above the sideboard and fireplace; carved mirrors between the windows; the famed wealth of New England’s codfish aristocracy on proud display.
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