The Rebel Pirate

by Donna Thorland

  “Heart of oak, my girl,” he said, redeeming himself entirely. “Heart of oak.”

  • • •

  Marblehead was not a grand town of wide streets and graceful mansions like Salem. It was a scrappy little fishing village, and its timber frame houses clung to the steep harbor streets like barnacles. There were no copper or slate roofs here. Just weathered cedar shingle, green and mossy with the damp. Salem smelled like hemp and tar and pine and oak and, when the ships were in, tea and spices. Marblehead smelled like cod.

  Abednego Ward had friends in Marblehead. Smugglers, to be sure, old buccaneers, some of them, but honest men after a fashion who would refit and repaint the Sally and swear before God and the magistrates alike that she was not the ship they were looking for; she had never touched Salem Harbor. The Sally would disappear in Marblehead’s forest of masts, just another sleek little schooner in that fast fishing fleet.

  But the Wards, it was decided at a family conference held in the smoky lean-to of an ancient house hard by the water, could not blend in so easily. Not with the Ward hair. And not in such a small, close-knit community. The Sally would be a week at least refitting, and if they stayed with her, Micah Wild would hear of their presence.

  Cape Ann was too dangerous for them. Their only choice was to seek the king’s protection in the Loyalist strongholds where Wild could not touch them: Halifax in the north, or Boston in the south.

  “Boston,” Benji said.

  “The port is closed. No work there,” said Mr. Cheap.

  “I have friends there.”

  “What kind of friends?” asked Mr. Cheap.

  Benji didn’t answer.

  “I vote for Boston as well,” said Sarah, ignoring a pointed look from Benji.

  Abednego asked once again if they were certain the house was burned. His mind kept returning to it.

  “It is gone,” Sarah said.

  Her father looked tired. “It was the last place I saw your mother,” he said. “The last place I heard her voice. The last place I lay with her.”

  There was not enough money for a coach, so they set out in a cart loaded with stockfish. Sarah and Abednego rode on the back and Benji, Ned, and Mr. Cheap walked alongside. Their guinea gold Ward hair was hidden beneath broad-brimmed country hats, Sarah’s bound tightly under an unflattering cap.

  They had gone five miles before she stopped looking over her shoulder for pursuit. By that time, the news was everywhere. Acting military governor General Gage had sent a column of some seven hundred regulars to investigate reports of a Rebel arms cache at Lexington. The local militia had formed up on the green and the British had fired on them, then cut a bloody swath home to Boston, burning farms and bayoneting old men and children in their homes.

  “It is not a false alarm, like the last time,” Sarah said to her brother. “Is it?”

  The last time had been Charlestown in September, when Gage had seized the powder in the storehouse there, and rumors had flown about shots fired and blood spilled. They had proved untrue.

  “I don’t think so,” Benji replied. “There are too many specifics, too many eyewitnesses. Names and places.”

  Sarah observed that everywhere they stopped, Benji asked questions, gathered information, and once they were on the road again, made notes in a journal he kept tucked in his elegant waistcoat.

  The closer they got to Boston, the more armed men they saw: militia units mostly, but also ad hoc bands. These were not the opportunists of the Salem mob, out-of-work sailors and caulkers bent on vandalism. These were farmers and brewers and shopkeepers and even artisans and lawyers who had put down their pens and plows and answered the call to defend their homes from the British as they once had done from the Indians or the French.

  And they were angry. The Wards were stopped repeatedly by militia and asked from whence they came and where they were headed. The farmers and innkeepers who bought salt fish off the cart questioned them sharply as well.

  Benji talked them past every time, dropping names of Patriot leaders and gathering places with knowledgeable authority. By the time they neared the city, Sarah was fairly certain she could guess with whom, if not exactly how, her brother had spent the last three months.

  Boston was almost an island, a one-square-mile peninsula connected to the mainland by a slender isthmus. Normally a ferry ran from Cambridge, but the Rebel militia occupied the college and the riverbank, and now the only way to reach Boston by land was over the narrow causeway known as the neck.

  General Gage, they heard on the road, had made a bargain with the militia. He promised to allow Rebels out of the city with their possessions if the Americans allowed Loyalists in. But everyone entering or exiting must surrender their weapons to the British. Neither Benji nor Mr. Cheap liked the sound of that. And the militia would let no supplies through, so the Wards were forced to leave the fish cart behind and walk the final mile to the gates on Boston Neck. Given the state of Abednego’s joints after two days on the open road, they liked that even less.

  The narrow isthmus was choked with traffic: carts piled high with household furnishings; wagons laden with trunks bound in leather and studded with brass. The yellow chariot in front of them had an upturned tea table tied to its roof, ball and claw feet reaching into the sky like the corpse of a mahogany gryphon. A clutch of green baize bundles were stuffed between the legs, and from one of them peeked the spout of a dragon-headed silver teapot. The early-morning sun burnished the silver to gold, which glittered off the water lapping at the causeway.

  “It’s like the bloody road to Bethlehem,” swore Benji.

  “No need to blaspheme,” said Lucas Cheap.

  “I have heard you call General Gage a Pontius Pilate, Mr. Cheap,” Sarah pointed out.

  “That’s different,” said Mr. Cheap, with the affronted air of a man who has made a solemn study of biblical oaths.

  They reached the guard post just as the sun peaked overhead. The gates, Benji told her, had once been a tumbledown pile of bricks manned by the town watch, but the army had been busy. Now it was a whitewashed fort with guns mounted on the walls and cannon flanking the portal. Sarah could almost taste the cool air beneath the looming arch that offered a narrow slice of longed-for shade. Here was safe harbor at last from the mob in Salem, from Micah Wild, from the surly armed men on the road.

  The ensign who asked them for their pass was young and earnest and apologetic, but he could not let anyone in who did not have one. They might, for all he knew, be Rebel spies, or saboteurs. Sarah asked how they might obtain a pass, and the young man had the good grace to look embarrassed when he said that they must apply to the governor in person, which of course they could not do since they could not enter the city.

  Benji asked to see his commanding officer. This person, a humorless captain from the 47th, took one look at Mr. Cheap and Abednego and ordered the Wards searched.

  “Wolfe’s Own,” muttered Benji. “The heroes of Quebec. Searching Englishmen.”

  Mr. Cheap was relieved of two pistols, three knives, and a collection of evil-looking Chinese brass implements. They took Benji’s sword, which Sarah noted was inlaid with mother of pearl and a diamond. When the sergeant approached Sarah, the captain shook his head and the man refrained.

  Their weapons were impounded and they were refused entry. Only the friends of government were welcome in Boston. Suspected spies, Rebels, and instigators were not.

  Benji looked ready to argue, but Mr. Cheap had been observing the way the unsmiling captain had been eyeing Sarah. He put a hand on Benji’s shoulder and turned the Wards back the way they had come.

  The apologetic young ensign ran to catch up with them at the end of the causeway. Sarah, the ensign told them, out of breath from his sprint, might enter on her own, but—and now he looked around to make sure there was no one to overhear—he did not recommend it. He was delivering the mess
age for his captain, who had taken an interest in her welfare.

  “He must be married, then,” said Ned.

  Sarah kicked him.

  Mr. Cheap smiled his gold-toothed smile, and the ensign nodded and backed away, because the ensign was intelligent and intelligent men did not turn their backs on Mr. Cheap.

  When he was out of earshot, Sarah, who had Mr. Cheap’s sword pistol under her hip roll, Benji’s practical hanger in her petticoats, and Ned’s favorite knife tucked into her pocket, laughed.

  Mr. Cheap sighed. “We need to get Red inside.”

  “Sparhawk would help us,” Sarah said, looking back the way they had come. “He told me to go to the Three Cranes in Charlestown. The landlord there will extend us credit in his name.”

  Cheap nodded. Benji cast her a baleful look, but he shouldered his pack and led the way back down the isthmus, and on to Charlestown.

  • • •

  Sparhawk sat waiting in the wardroom of Admiral Graves’ fifty-gun flagship, the Preston, anchored at Boston’s Long Wharf. The journey from Salem had taken a day and a half and carried him through a hostile countryside furiously preparing for war.

  He had been forced to abandon the carriage the last few miles, as the roads were choked with militia, but wearing Abednego’s old brown coat, he had been able to pass their lines unmolested.

  More than unmolested. The country people had assumed his injury to have been acquired in their cause. A pretty young girl, no more than seventeen, had rushed out of a whitewashed farmhouse as he walked by and given him the handkerchief from around her neck for a sling. Her mother had given him sausages.

  Sparhawk had spent the last twelve years defending the lives and property of Englishmen, but no one had given him sausages for it.

  He had not been a spy in Salem, but here, on the road to Boston, with his uniform folded neatly inside the pack Sarah Ward had given him, talking to the Americans and taking their salt and eating their bread, he most certainly felt like one.

  Every village he passed through offered him hospitality: a glass of cider here, a loaf there, even a chicken from a farmwife who told him that his country was proud of him and bade him look for her man when he got to Cambridge, where the militia were massing.

  The wives and daughters he passed wished him well, told him to fight bravely, clucked over his arm, and pressed handfuls of bullets on him, still warm from their molds. When he stopped between villages and sat down under a tree to eat, he opened a napkin that he had assumed contained a pasty, only to discover a bundle of cartridges. Very well rolled they were too.

  His instinct, when he reached town, had been to report directly to the admiral. If Graves had been a fighting officer like McKenzie, a man of action, that was what James would have done. But Graves was a seagoing bureaucrat, enamored of protocol, and Sparhawk knew that arriving at the Preston in a buccaneer’s coat covered in the dust of the road and smelling of sausages would not aid his cause or lend credence to his story.

  And he would need all the help he could get with Graves, because two years ago in Portsmouth, when Sparhawk had not foreseen a day he might serve under this admiral, he had carried on a dalliance with the man’s pretty, bored young wife.

  Such liaisons had offered physical satisfaction free of emotional entanglement that might divert him from his goal. There would be no such freedom with Sarah Ward. She had engaged him from the start, elicited his curiosity and admiration before his desire, though desire, when it struck him, had been all the more potent for it. While he was on the road to Boston, through a countryside bristling with rebellion, his mind had returned to her over and over. Sometimes he imagined what they might have done on the trundle in the keeping room had Micah Wild not interrupted, but other times he pictured them gathered together—Sarah, Ned, Abednego, even Mr. Cheap—and himself, at the table or beside the fire, listening to the old pirate’s stories. And this surprised and intrigued him.

  He had always thought that a mistress would be an encumbrance, would slow his progress toward proving his identity. He had never considered that a woman might be a partner and an ally in his quest, but then he had never met a woman like Sarah Ward.

  He would find her a house in one of the seafaring neighborhoods of Boston, convenient for him when the Wasp was in port, and where the Wards would feel at home. It would need to be something big enough for Ned and Abednego and Mr. Cheap. The sooner the better, lest Micah Wild make another attempt to force her into his keeping. But first, he must report to Admiral Graves.

  He begged stockings, a shirt, and a neck cloth off the landlady at the Golden Ball. It was not his usual tavern, but he dined there when he was obliged to be in Boston. He washed and shaved and did the best he could with his salt-stained shoes. He also wrote a note to his prize agent instructing him to reimburse the landlady if Sparhawk was unable. With Boston almost surrounded, and the harbor to defend, every officer would be needed, and it was possible Sparhawk might be required to report directly to the Wasp from his meeting with Graves.

  Now he sat on the other side of the bulkhead from the admiral’s great cabin, in his borrowed shirt and stockings, his hair brushed and tied at the back of his neck, observing the messengers who arrived nearly every quarter hour with fresh dispatches.

  Finally he was summoned, the admiral’s secretary ushering him into the pretty paneled cabin with its carved pilasters and long row of windows, the view of Boston Harbor with Castle William, stark on its island, in the distance.

  The admiral, it appeared, had just finished dining. A joint of beef lay half carved on the table, along with the remains of a pie and an untouched dish of bright green peas.

  Sparhawk had passed the market at Faneuil Hall on his way to the Long Wharf and observed the effects of the Rebel siege firsthand. The tables had turned on the British in the blink of an eye. Their blockade had been meant to deprive the rebellious city of commerce and luxury. It had only constricted the flow, not stopped it. Boston Harbor was too riddled with smugglers’ coves and narrow inlets. The whole North American squadron was not equal to the task of patrolling her, let alone the six ships the admiral had on station.

  Not so the land route, which the Rebels now controlled. Fresh produce had disappeared almost overnight. Half the stalls were shuttered. The rest sold only flour and salt meat. The situation was worse among the poor, which included the soldiery, and Sparhawk had seen more than a few deserting regulars on the road. It was impossible to blame the ones with families. Civilians attached to an occupying army would be the first to starve if the siege dragged on. And while the army, unlike the navy, was mostly made up of volunteers, these individuals had not volunteered to fight Englishmen.

  The admiral’s table was not affected because the navy still controlled the harbor and Graves had begun foraging hay, fodder, livestock, and produce off the islands—at the ends of his guns—months ago, from Loyalists and Rebels alike. It had not made him a popular figure in town. Now he was studying a map of the local coastline. The chart lay on the dish-strewn table, pinned down at the corners by the port, the salt, the relish, and the untouched peas.

  Someone had added notes in a fine flowing hand showing the positions of the Rebel batteries from Salem to Providence, as well as the obstructions they had sunk in those harbors, the hulks and chains and chevaux de frise. Boston Harbor was as yet relatively unmarred, only a few batteries dotting Cambridge. As for obstructions, the Rebels needed none. Boston Harbor, a warren of hidden shoals and ever-shifting sandbars, was tricky to enter even at high tide with the best of pilots. It did not help that the best pilots were American.

  “Well,” said Graves, looking Sparhawk up and down, “what do you have to say for yourself, sir?” His eyes settled on the spot where one silver gilt button was conspicuous by its absence. “You look like a vagabond. And where in Hades is your hat?”

  “I am lately come from Salem, sir, where I was t
aken by the smugglers”—not Rebels, he owed Sarah that much—“who abducted me. With the help of Loyalists in that town, I made my escape. My hat, I presume, is still aboard the Wasp.”

  “You lost your ship, sir. On the eve of war, when we have need of every vessel.”

  “But I sent the Rebel gold safe to Boston, with your nephew.” He knew, from the admiral’s secretary, that the Wasp had made Boston Harbor the evening Sparhawk had been captured.

  “The gold,” said Graves, “is none of your affair.”

  “I believe that to be for the prize court to determine,” said Sparhawk.

  “Do you, by God?” said Graves, upsetting the salt as he rose. “Granny Gage has made a shambles of the powder affair at Lexington. Hancock and Adams have escaped. Gage could not even manage to bribe the popinjay smuggler with a title or the impecunious demagogue with a fortune. Now we are besieged by fifteen thousand Rebels, and that man sits idle, unwilling to do his duty and chastise these misled violent people, for fear of offending his American wife. He has four thousand soldiers but will not bestir himself to employ them. If he allows the Rebels to dig in at Charlestown and Roxbury, we will be completely cut off. Everything, firewood, fodder, hay, meat, will have to be supplied by the squadron, and we do not have the ships to do it. And you, sir, dream of Spanish gold and make light of the loss of your brig.”

  “I do not make light of it,” said Sparhawk, trying to rein in his own temper, because he knew that Graves was incapable of doing likewise. “I merely said that the disposition of the gold was for the prize court to determine.”

  “You will see a court-martial before you will see a prize court, sir. Since you gave up command of the Wasp so lightly, I have turned it over to my nephew.”

  It was a blow. Sarah Ward had been right—the Wasp was a lubberly brig—but there were few enough seaworthy ships in the squadron, and none to spare. Unless an American vessel was captured and lawfully bought into the service—unlikely, cash-strapped as Graves was—Sparhawk might sit out the next year on half pay.