“Lady was more in the way of a courtesy, sir. Or what I might call a euphemism. I think she’s a trollop. But a fine, expensive one.”
“Show her in,” said the tea agent.
Hobbs looked to Sparhawk. He did not take orders from landsmen.
“Tell the lady,” Sparhawk said, “that I have been losing to a certain gentleman”—he nodded at the customs inspector—“and as he is now in funds, he may be inclined to engage her if she will wait outside until we have finished our game.”
Hobbs remained half inside the door, and now he abandoned discretion in favor of directness. “I would not have let her aboard, sir, but she said she knew you. That you had sent for her and would pay the boatman. A very dubious-looking character, if you don’t mind my saying. He’s still waiting. I did question the lady, sir, and she described you to a tee.”
The customs inspector laughed. A clever trollop, at least. No doubt she had gotten his description from the landlady at the Three Cranes. Vexed but at last interested, Sparhawk threw down his cards.
“Show her in, then.” It was either a joke played by some fellow officer, or a ploy by an enterprising harlot. He would soon see.
Ansbach’s man disappeared. The game continued another hand. The customs inspector slipped a card up his sleeve, the door opened, and a breeze blew in, carrying with it the scent of ambergris and neroli. An expensive lady indeed. Nothing had stirred his carnal appetite since he had learned about the death of Sarah Ward, but this woman’s perfume was calculated to arouse hunger.
Sparhawk’s back was to the door, but he resisted the urge to turn and look. The tea agent, however, had an excellent view of their visitor. “Don’t be shy, sweetheart,” he coaxed.
Out of the corner of his eye Sparhawk saw the woman stiffen. Finally he turned to look at her. She was wearing a short red cape of watered silk with a wide, pleated hood that shadowed her face but fell open to reveal a tantalizing expanse of full breasts thrust high by expertly molded stays. Her gown was cream chintz trellised with roses and trimmed with box-cut ruching, hitched into a high polonaise that barely covered her calf. The entire effect was reminiscent of a sugared confection with a cherry on top.
She looked, in a word, delicious.
“Come here and show us your face,” crooned the customs inspector, in a tone Sparhawk had never heard him use with his wife. The man patted his lap. The girl hung back. The customs agent leaned across the small room and reached for her.
The Hephaestion rolled with the onslaught of the evening tide. The woman stepped neatly around the table and out of range. It was a difficult maneuver in a tiny, crowded room on a pitching deck—executed with arresting balletic grace.
For an instant, Sparhawk’s heart stopped. The gown might belong to any woman with money and a certain taste. The scent was expensive but hardly rare. The finely turned ankles would not be uncommon out in the country. The dramatic curves beneath the cape could belong to a countess or a courtesan.
But he had met only one woman who could move like that on a swaying ship.
The moment stretched. His mind, out of habit, denied the evidence of his eyes. For so many years he had held out hope that he would see his mother again, had fought a war within himself to deny fantasy and accept reality. A war that had been won before he ever saw his mother’s grave. The impossibility of it had come to him in, of all places, Drury Lane. McKenzie had taken him to the theater to celebrate his promotion to the rank of lieutenant. The play, Steele’s Conscious Lovers, had been amusing enough, if mawkishly sentimental, until the climactic scene when the heroine was reunited with her long-lost parent.
The falseness of it had struck him to the core. He’d vomited in the street afterward, sickened by his own weakness and gullibility. McKenzie had put it down to drink, but it was the spectacle of his most fervent desire turned into popular entertainment that had soured his stomach and made him see the truth: his mother was dead.
Not once since learning of Sarah Ward’s death had he allowed himself to imagine her alive, to imagine such a moment as this.
He put down his cards. “I am afraid I must ask you to leave,” he said.
“If you don’t want her,” the customs inspector said, “I’ll take her.”
“I do not think your wife would appreciate such a guest,” Sparhawk said. “My apologies, but the game is over.”
The merchants looked at each other, muttered something wry about sailors, time, and tide, and got out.
And Sparhawk was alone with Sarah Ward.
Fourteen
Sarah had not seen James Sparhawk for a month. He was more handsome than she remembered. But different. This was not the same man who had talked hulls and hawsers with her father in Salem, who had almost kissed her in an empty parlor and challenged Micah Wild.
This man was every inch the naval officer. His hair was combed and queued, his satin waistcoat smoothly pressed and pin neat, his linen snowy white, his shoes polished and buckles sparkling.
And he was staring at her with dangerous intensity. Instinct told her to defuse it.
“Your wrist has healed,” she said.
“Yes, so it has. Coming here, like this,” he said, his eyes raking her ensemble, “was risky and stupid. What if Hobbs hadn’t shown you directly to the wardroom?”
So much for defusing the tension. “I’m dressed too expensively for an ordinary sailor to proposition,” she said. She had faced down Captain James Sparhawk once before. She could do so again. Of course, she had been holding a pistol at the time.
“You are barely dressed at all. And for that reason—among others—some might not bother with a proposition.”
“I told the captain’s servant that you had sent for me.”
“But I didn’t. What if I hadn’t admitted you?”
“The steward would describe me. Mr. Cheap said that after four weeks’ confinement, you were unlikely to turn down a shapely trollop. It seems he was correct.”
“No, he wasn’t. I was going to give you—her—money to go away.”
“Mr. Cheap suggested that would only happen if you’d found yourself a pretty wench among the crew’s women.” She’d seen them plying their trade between the gun carriages as Hobbs had led her through the main deck, most pleasant but plain, one of them winsome as a Fragonard, bent over a cannon and being tupped silly by a bellowing Yorkshireman. The earthy carnality of the scene had made her pause and flush.
“Mr. Cheap is no doubt an expert on trollops, but I did not engage one,” Sparhawk said, closing the distance between them. “Not even after I was told you were dead.”
The door was already at her back. There was nowhere left to retreat. And suddenly she knew that coming herself had been a mistake, that she should have sent Benji, taken the risk that Sparhawk might not believe a stranger, because she did not have the power to resist this man.
Sparhawk touched her cheek with the hand he had broken saving her brother, trailed his fingers down her throat, between her half-bare breasts, to rest at the top of her stays. His expression was that of a man who had been in an open boat for a week: parched.
“My shade would have been touched by your forbearance,” she said, removing his hand and taking a step to the side. “How is it that I am supposed to have perished?”
He did not pursue her, but his expression told her he was undeterred. “In a fire,” he replied. “When I suspected I might be detained, I sent your father’s pistols and his cutlass—along with money and a letter—north with one of Gage’s actual spies. He went to your house, or what was left of it. I knew he had the right place when he described the hidden stair. That and the chimney were all that remained. There were bodies. I thought you all murdered.”
Dan Ludd and his friends. She had not considered that their bodies might be mistaken for the Wards. Micah, of course, would know better. “I am sorry. I never intende
d you to think me dead. Wild did not want us selling the house to repay his loan, so he sent his creatures to burn it.”
“And your father and Ned?”
“Safe,” she said.
“Thank God. But, Sarah, that was a month ago. Why did you not write to me?”
“I only discovered your direction a few days ago, and by then, what I had to say could not be entrusted to a letter.”
“If you had only waited a few more days, this blasted court-martial would be done with and we might have spoken on dry land. I have always intended to honor the offer I made you in Salem. I bought a house in the North End and put it in your name. There is room for Ned and your father. I am told it is a little old-fashioned but that it gets good light and is very snug.”
She had indulged in a fantasy very like it on the road to Boston: a snug house, her father and Ned with her, Sparhawk a regular visitor. He would share their table and her bed. In Boston no one would know her. She would not be Abednego Ward’s daughter, no better than she ought to be, or Micah Wild’s jilted lover. She would just be Sarah, and he would just be James, the two of them against the world.
It would never happen now.
“I have come to warn you,” she said, the words sticking in her throat, “that your life is in danger. Your court-martial is set to be a farce. Admiral Graves stole the gold from the Sally. And he intends you to swing for it.”
• • •
She had come to him like Cleopatra rolled in a rug, this pirate’s daughter with the dead-shot aim, a heroine out of schoolboy fantasies. Before DeBerniere’s news, he had imagined her in his arms, in his bed, on dry land, a world removed from the dreary confines of Castle William, the martial routine of the Hephaestion, and the petty malice of Admiral Graves.
Her words were difficult to fathom. He felt them sink in at last, like a mast being stepped into place. “Tell me.”
“The admiral wrote to the First Lord asking for money. He did not hear back, but he was certain, given the circumstances, that he would receive funds, so he purchased two new ships for the squadron, and commissioned repairs for the worst vessels in his fleet. And borrowed the French gold to do it. He thought he would be able to pay it back before anyone noticed it was gone.”
“But the Admiralty did not accommodate him,” Sparhawk guessed.
“No. The king has been disappointed with Graves. The First Lord does not want to replace him—that would be admitting he chose the wrong man for the job—but he cannot justify sending the admiral funds, which critics would view as reward for his failures. And it is too great a sum for the admiral to make up out of his own pocket.”
“It is gross theft,” said Sparhawk. “The kind the service does not take lightly. A share of that gold was owed every man on the Wasp. But how, exactly, does this touch on my affairs?”
“Admiral Graves and his nephew claim that the chest you sent to Boston on the Wasp was filled with flint, and that you conspired with the American smugglers to steal the gold and bury it on Cape Ann.”
It was, if you knew the facts, absurd. If you didn’t, it would be all too plausible, a tale worth telling—complete with buried treasure. Boston’s North Shore had been the haunt of pirates for a hundred years, almost every inlet and harbor a supposed hiding place for their loot. Blackbeard’s silver was rumored to be buried somewhere in the Isles of Shoals; the hoard of Quelch in a cave at Marblehead; that of Veal in the Lynn Woods. The American Main was the stuff of pirate legend.
“What of witnesses?’ he asked.
“Your first officer, the admiral’s nephew, naturally. And the marines from the Wasp. Bribed, of course.”
“And these American smugglers? Are they named?” If they were, Sarah and Ned would also be in danger.
“No,” she said. “But we are suspected. A friend of the family found Ned a place as a young gentleman aboard the Preston. The gesture was well meant, but it has proved disastrous. Francis Graves recognized him. I cannot testify to the real events on the Sally, or I will implicate my brother and myself in resisting the press and the kidnapping of a British officer. In piracy. But I can help you escape.”
He was touched. She had been brave just to come warn him. But escape was impossible. “I think you will find the Hephaestion more difficult to carry than the Wasp,” he said gently.
“No doubt. That is why I have enlisted help.”
She was serious. “What kind of help?”
“My brother Benji.”
“The same brother who left you and your family to the tender mercies of Micah Wild?”
“He doesn’t much like what he has heard about you either.”
“Escaping from an armed frigate is no frivolous caper.”
“My brother is not a frivolous man.” The hollow note in her voice told him not to press for details.
“If I flee,” he said, “it will be taken as proof of my guilt.”
“If you don’t, you will hang from the Preston’s yardarm. Your judges have been chosen to deliver the verdict Graves desires. But the admiral is not without vulnerabilities. He has bought ships, cannon, shot, cordage, clews, hawsers, and spars. There are receipts, ledgers, and witnesses who can reveal the admiral’s dealings and the scope of the ‘personal’ funds used in payment. But you cannot prove your innocence from the grave.”
“I won’t be able to prove my innocence at all. I will be a fugitive hunted by the law.”
“Fugitives are notoriously difficult to track in America. The law never caught up with Whalley and Goffe. They died of old age.”
“That was a hundred years ago,” replied Sparhawk. “And the regicides of Charles the First were aided and abetted by a roundhead populace.”
“You will find local sentiment little changed today. The lady who enabled your flight from Salem and her friends have gathered enough evidence to vindicate you. They will see that you reach London with the papers.”
Sparhawk had suspicions of his own as to who that lady might have been. She was not someone who gave her help—or her other favors—for free. “And what do this lady and her friends want in return?” he asked.
“The Sally,” said Sarah Ward, looking him straight in the eye. “For a powder run to Spain. Under the command of my brother. That is the price of their aid. He will land you on the English coast with money and the papers. I can get you off the Hephaestion, but I could not lay hands on the evidence needed to prove your innocence, and I could not get you all the way to England. So I made a bargain with the Rebels. You must decide if you can live with the terms. I have already made my choice.”
If the elegant lady of Salem was in fact the Merry Widow, the agent who sometimes worked for France and sometimes for Spain and always against British interests, Sparhawk had no doubt she could lay hands on the evidence to clear him. And that she would require more than just a run to Spain with the Sally in return.
Sarah Ward was willing to tangle with forces like this for him.
“I wondered,” he said, “after I left Salem, if you felt as I did. Or if you would wake the next morning and decide that our attraction had been a hothouse flower watered by proximity and danger.” He took a step closer. “But you are here, now, when you could have stayed out of it.”
“You saved Ned, and you stood up to Micah,” she replied. “Honor demanded I come.”
“Merely honor?”
“If you were hoping for more, I am sorry. The last time I made such a declaration to a man, I regretted it.”
“But you don’t deny that there is something between us.”
“No, I don’t deny it.”
“Then come back to my cabin with me now.”
• • •
He was so near she had to tilt her head back to look up into his pale blue eyes, and she was struck once more by his beauty—and how very much she wanted him.
“This i
sn’t the time,” she said.
“If anything goes wrong with your plan,” he countered, “it may be all we have.”
“I thought the prospect of hanging was supposed to concentrate the mind.”
“In the navy, they shoot officers. It is pirates and common sailors they hang. But the effect is the same. It concentrates the mind on the advantages of feeling alive.”
He leaned closer, and she felt his pull like a compass needle.
“I can’t go to bed with you.”
“The bed is rather cramped.” He placed a hand lightly on her waist, tugged her closer. “I was intending to bend you over it.”
She flushed, her mind returning to the pretty Fragonard strumpet. She tried to banish the image, to rein in her racing pulse and speeding breath.
“You want to,” he said.
“I want to, but I can’t.”
“I will be careful,” he said. “I will pull out.” And the image that conjured, of Sparhawk rearing back from her, rampant, was almost enough to undo her resolve.
She shook her head to clear it. “It isn’t that.”
“What, then?”
“Please let me go.”
He did. Because he was nothing like Micah Wild. Then he retreated to the other side of the room, because he was enough like her former fiancé that he did not trust himself within reach of her.
“Was it so bad with Wild?” Sparhawk asked, shoulders flush with the paneled wall, his body taut as a bowstring.
“It’s not that either.” Although she might have been better off if it had been awful, if her night with Wild had quelled her ability to feel passion. Then she might not have been so susceptible to Sparhawk. “It is only my pride that Micah misused. I know it can be good.”
He cocked his head. A slow smile spread over his face. “And how, exactly, Miss Ward, do you know that?”
“I am surprised a notorious rake cannot work that out for himself.”
He laughed. “We will take the question as asked and answered, then. But perhaps a rake knows something you don’t. It’s even better if I do it for you. With my hands,” he said, pushing himself away from the wall and prowling toward her, “if time is short, or with my mouth, if we have the leisure to explore each other.”
The Rebel Pirate Page 17