Heart of Steele

by Brad Strickland

  She opened the door an instant later, and I realized she had been waiting in the adjoining room. “Yes, Sir Henry?”

  Morgan gave Captain Hunter a strange, sly smile. “You may show His Excellency in now, my dear,” he told Miss Fairfax.

  She disappeared back into the other room, and I heard her murmuring voice. And then something beyond astonishing happened.

  Don Esteban de Reyes, the Spanish captain who once had vowed to kill Captain Hunter, stepped into the room.

  Deal with the Devil

  “I BELIEVE YOU know everyone here, Your Excellency?” Morgan rumbled in the sudden silence. I have heard about it being so quiet you could hear a pin drop, but I’d never experienced it until that very moment. No one spoke, no one moved. No one even breathed.

  Don Esteban de Reyes, the captain and owner of the dread Spanish pirate hunter ship Concepcíon, stared back at us, the slightest of smiles on his face. He was a short, stocky dark man in a plain black uniform with a single silver starburst on the right breast. The sword at his side was unadorned and serviceable.

  “Pity I went to all the trouble o’ patchin’ the captain up, Davy,” my uncle muttered next to me, “just to have it all to do again.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see both Captain Hunter and Captain Barrel slowly moving their hands toward their swords. Don Esteban casually raised one eyebrow and they both stopped. There was something heavy and methodical about the stocky Don, and both the captains were still recovering from their wounds taken in defense of the Aurora. Yet even if they had been in prime shape, I do not think they could have easily taken Don Esteban. Finally he nodded slightly in acknowledgment of Sir Henry’s question.

  “Yes, Sir Henry, I do know everyone in this room, at least by reputation.”

  “By the Powers, Harry,” Captain Barrel exploded. “Have ye taken leave of your senses? Have ye no idea of who this be?”

  “Of course I know who it is!” Sir Henry roared like a wounded lion. “I make it a habit to know everyone I invite into me own house! And that’s Sir Henry to you, John Barrel, you old reprobate!”

  During this exchange, Captain Hunter was working to overcome his shock. A grim smile finally touched his lips, and he made a curt bow in the direction of the Spaniard, though his hand stayed close to his sword. “A good evening to you, Don Esteban. I had hoped to make your acquaintance one day, though this is sooner than I had expected.”

  “Life is full of little surprises, Captain Hunter.”

  “This is ever so entertaining,” snapped Miss Fairfax with a note of exasperation in her voice. “But I suggest you gentlemen make yourselves comfortable so that Sir Henry can tell you of his plan. I shall see to some wine—assuming my dear uncle has left any!” And with that, she swept from the room, radiating contempt for every man since Adam named the animals.

  “A very formidable young woman,” said Don Esteban, sighing.

  “You, sir, do not know the half of it,” agreed Captain Hunter.

  “Then I suggest you all take your seats,” snapped Sir Henry, gesturing toward the great table in the center of the room and the ornate chairs around it. “Don Esteban and I have been parleying for a reason. Now that you are all here, I want you to share in the talk. I care not for what has gone before or what will come after! Now we have need of one another!”

  “It is not easy to set aside deep differences just for convenience’s sake, Sir Henry,” Don Esteban said in a cold, flat voice, not taking his eyes from Captain Hunter, who coldly nodded back. With a collapsing rumble, Morgan slowly settled into his own great chair.

  “Aye, there is a difference, Your Excellency. I have presented you with ample evidence that it was not Captain Hunter and the Aurora who sacked poor little San Angel. If you were not convinced, you would not be here. The truth of it is, sir, we all have blood enough on our hands to paint this room red. But another man has enough to fill it. So the question is what is more important? Your differences or putting an end to Jack Steele?”

  Once again the room was deadly quiet. Then Captain Hunter took his hand away from his sword, pulled out an ornately carved chair, and sat himself down at Sir Henry Morgan’s table. Don Esteban hesitated but a second longer and then he, too, drew out a chair and sat down.

  “Oh, well, in for a penny, in for a pound,” grumbled my uncle, and he and John Barrel also sat down.

  “Well begun is half done,” Sir Henry said, taking another long, deep breath. “First, let us share a bit of information. I have not spent the last months simply ignoring your advice, Doctor Shea. I have been at work gathering information. The two of you dealt Jack Steele a grand defeat at Tortuga. You smashed the independent Brotherhood of the Coast before they could join up with the Red Queen. But you didn’t put a finish to him!” He settled back into his chair, suddenly looking pale and clammy. “Now I have new word, and I am almost sure I know what he plans to do.”

  “You have all our attention, Sir Henry,” said the dark Spaniard.

  Sir Henry nodded. “Then listen closely, for it covers all of us. Ships are disappearing. Ships are being looted and stripped. The monster is picking up the pieces you two left floating about. Ships and captains and crews. This time it’s no league made up of gentlemen o’ fortune. He’s building his own navy. He’s buying ships that will sail under the command of their very own pirate admiral!”

  A servant had softly entered the room and was quietly placing glasses of deep red wine in front of everyone. He was ignored.

  Sir Henry spread his hands on the table. “If he’d succeeded at Tortuga, Steele would have commanded fifty motley vessels. Instead he will now command a tight fleet of twenty, with the bloody Red Queen herself to lead them on! He means to take territory, Captain Hunter, mark my words. Make himself king o’ Jamaica or some such.”

  “How can a man be so mad and so cunning, all at once?” asked my uncle in a wondering voice.

  “He’s a remarkable villain,” Sir Henry countered. “We know so much about the pirate but so little about the man.” He took a sip of wine and gasped for air. Then roughly he said, “Been lookin’ into that, too. We think he was a merchant from out of Plymouth by the name of Jonathan Steele. Well respected he was, had a wife and a daughter and a good business dealing in soaps and perfumes and such.”

  “Jack Steele was a perfumer?” said John Barrel, amazement in every word.

  “So we think. Then he and his family set out on one of his ships for the Virginia colony. Never made it. She vanished as completely as if she’d never been built. Months later, someone like him took a sloop and massacred everyone who wouldn’t join him, and that was the birth of Jack Steele. Something happened out there on the high seas. Something terrible. I haven’t been able to find out what it was, but it turned an anonymous little merchant into a cold and calculating killing machine.”

  I stood quiet in the shadows, taking in everything Sir Henry was saying. There had been something—no, someone—before the monster who was Jack Steele. And like Sir Henry, I found myself wondering what could have happened to make so startling a change in a man.

  “So life dealt him a rough hand,” growled John Barrel. “Life’s hard, an’ that’s that. But where the devil did Steele get his hands on that ship o’ his? Sixty guns she had to begin with, an’ she’s got a powerful sight more’n that now. Big ’uns, too. But where the devil did he get her, that’s what I wants to know.”

  “Ah, well,” murmured Don Esteban, finally taking a sip of his wine. “I fear that’s our fault.” Everyone turned to stare at him. He sighed. “You will be the first English to hear this tale; it is not one the Royal Court particularly wants spread about.”

  “I can’t wait to hear this,” said my uncle to John Barrel as he eased back into his chair. Captain Barrel nodded his agreement and also settled back.

  Don Esteban sighed again. “There was a commission made to the shipbuilders of Holland to construct a gigantic merchant galleon for the flota.”

  “
Spanish treasure fleet,” said Captain Barrel, nodding wisely at me, though I already knew what the flota was.

  “Yes, Captain Barrel, the great silver fleet that sails once a year for Spain. She was the Sangreal, the Holy Grail, much larger than most of her class and heavily armed. However, she was storm damaged in her first crossing and was sent to Havana Harbor for repairs. It was there, one dark night after the repair work was completed, that she was boarded and her caretaker crew slaughtered, their bodies tossed overboard. Before the garrisons in the great castles guarding the harbor became aware of what had happened, she had set sail and slipped away into the night.”

  “So the notorious Red Queen is just a tricked-up treasure galleon with a bit of meat on her bones?” Captain Hunter frowned even as he said the words.

  “That is nonsense, sir,” snapped a soft voice from the doorway. Miss Fairfax had returned and stood there glaring. “I might remind you, Don Esteban, that I have seen the Red Queen, and she is no more any kind of merchant ship than the Aurora or the Concepcíon.”

  “And I saw her once from a distance,” said Captain Hunter. “It was a short enough glimpse, for she fired on us and all but sank us. But she had not the lines of a galleon.”

  “She has not, Captain Hunter, not any longer. And you are right, my lady. The Red Queen is not any more the Sangreal. She has been changed.”

  “Well, I am profoundly confused,” said my uncle cheerfully, throwing his hands up in the air. “Treasure ship, warship, fish, or fowl … what is she, exactly?”

  Don Esteban gave him a long, dark look. “The great treasure galleon is no more, Doctor Shea. What is in her place is, as you said, neither fish nor fowl. There is nothing like the Red Queen anywhere on the Seven Seas. Captain Steele completely altered her.” The Spaniard turned to Captain Hunter. “Tell me, sir, what do you know of the Red Queen?”

  Captain Hunter frowned. “What everyone knows, I suppose. She’s oversized, she’s bloodred. I saw her only once. She is monstrously large, and strangely fast.”

  “Few have done as you. Few have seen her and lived to tell of it. And fewer still would be believed. Steele took her to one of his hidden bases. Then he ripped her apart and rebuilt her to some plan of his own. He razed the forecastle by one deck and the aftercastle by two. No galleon has ever had lines so low.”

  “Better stability, though” rumbled Morgan. “The curse of the galleons, and I mean no offense, Don Esteban, is that they tower so high that the wind catches ’em. They make shocking leeway.”

  “Not when ballasted with gold and silver,” returned the Spanish captain.

  “How do you know all this, Don Esteban?” asked Captain Hunter.

  For the first time, Don Esteban looked uncomfortable. “We were able to capture one of the men who worked on the transformation. He was … persuaded to provide information.” Don Esteban closed his eyes and began to recite like a schoolboy doing his lessons. “The Red Queen is one hundred and eighty feet long. Her gun decks have been increased from two to three. A year ago, her armament was sixty sixteen-pound cannons. That has changed. Now her lower deck carries twenty-four thirty-two pounders; her middle deck carries thirty-four twenty-four pounders; her upper deck carries sixteen sixteen pounders. There are two nine-pound bow-chasers and four stern chasers of the same size. Her crew is approximately four hundred and twenty-five.”

  The silence that followed this list of statistics was absolute. I stood in my corner with my mouth open just like all the adults seated around the table. Eighty guns. That was as many as a ship of the line could carry.

  “No, no, that is just not possible,” my uncle objected.

  “One hundred and eighty feet?” wondered Captain Hunter. “The Aurora’s but one hundred.”

  “And the Concepcíon is but one forty,” finished Don Esteban.

  “Now do you understand, Captain Hunter?” said Miss Fairfax, hugging herself as she sat in the corner. “The Red Queen isn’t a ship, she’s a monster, a nightmare with sails. And she and the madman who created her are drawing others to her side!”

  “Aye,” breathed John Barrel. “My bonnie Fury would serve her as a longboat, so she would.”

  “You see how it is, gentlemen,” said a strangely shrunken Sir Henry Morgan. “There can be precious little help from the Royal Navy in this case. King James has troubles of his own right now and I think I spill no secrets when I say there are no more than four navy ships in these waters.”

  “Your news would be more interesting if Spain had more ships,” agreed Don Esteban. “I believe the French and the Dutch are in much the same situation. And none of them could stand up against the Red Queen.”

  “So it comes down to this,” Captain Hunter said, staring off into space. “We—the men around this table—must find the Red Queen’s last secret base and destroy it. And her. And Captain Jack Steele.” He turned his stare to Don Esteban. “To do that we must cooperate, all differences forgotten, until that great task is finished. Or the sea of the Caribbees is a pirate lake and Jack Steele is its king forever.”

  Don Esteban closed his eyes and we all held our breath. He had fought beside us once before but his commission, like ours, was to hunt pirates, and he considered us pirates. Every other Spaniard in the New World thought we were the butchers of San Angel. Had Sir Henry’s evidence convinced him of our innocence?

  Finally that slight smile appeared again on the dark Spaniard’s face. “Our course is clear and only fools would try to sail against it. But you must forgive me, Captain Hunter, if I say it is too perilously close to making a deal with the devil himself.”

  Gravely he offered his hand, and just as gravely Captain Hunter shook it.

  And there in the grand study of Sir Henry Morgan’s great plantation house did the English and Spanish pirate hunters once again join forces to fight the greatest pirate of them all.

  Jack Steele and the bloody Red Queen.

  The unlikely Armada

  ON THE SIMMERING first day of August 1688, under the lightest of breezes, the Aurora glided through the waters south of Cayo Hueso, the last island in a long chain curving down from the Spanish territory of Florida. I was finding life aboard the ship strange again, for Sir Henry had delivered to us new recruits, and our crew was one hundred and eighty strong once more. But so many new faces made me feel ill at ease, as if distant relatives had moved into my home, and me not knowing a one of them.

  High, streaky clouds painted themselves across a deep blue sky. Mr. Tate, who was an old hand in these waters, said they were omens of a hurricane out in the Atlantic. One of the new men cursed him and his omens, warning him not even to talk of such storms. “Namin’ bad luck calls it, ye know,” the ill-natured stranger growled. Mr. Tate shrugged it off as a sailor’s superstition.

  We were to sail within sight of the low island until the others joined us. Mercifully both vessels did on the second day, and that meant we could hoist sail and get under way, finding some relief from the heat. In this place the sun that beat straight down at noon turned the pitch in the seams between the deck boards into black, sticky liquid.

  By sunset of the second day of August the Concepcíon and the Fury had come within hailing distance, and all that night we cast our course eastward, to weather the east point of Cuba and then turn southward, ranging past Jamaica and from there down to Yucatan and points south. The next day, both Don Esteban and Captain Barrel came aboard, and we all huddled in the cabin.

  “Tell them what you heard in the tavern, Davy,” Captain Hunter instructed.

  I did so, mentioning the drunken sailor’s mumblings about Bloodhaven. “He said Steele would be there or at San Angel,” I finished.

  “He certainly had been at San Angel,” my uncle put in dryly.

  “Bloodhaven?” muttered Captain Barrel. “Either of ye gents know where it might lie?”

  “It is not on any chart,” Don Esteban declared.

  “I’ve never even heard of it,” added Captain Hunter.

 
; “Aye, there’s the wonder of it all,” Captain Barrel observed. “Devil a pirate I’ve ever seen as runs such a tight-knit crew as Steele’s. They be afeard o’ him, and that’s part of it. But a bigger part is loyalty. The man commands his crew’s loyalty like … like a blessed admiral.”

  “And he slaughters those loyal to him just to trap an enemy,” my uncle said. “We saw what he did to San Angel.”

  “Bloodhaven, now,” Captain Barrel continued, without paying much heed to Uncle Patch’s interruption. “To be sure, I’ve heard of it, but just in a general way, as ye might say. It be somewhere on the Spanish Main, belike. It could lie anywhere between Portobello an’ Cozumel, for that matter. Might be one of the Miskitas, or might lie near Old Providence, both on ’em prime pirate hideaways at one time.”

  “Someone will know,” Captain Hunter assured him. “I’m positive that Steele has a safe haven somewhere. He cannot sail in and out without being spied by someone. We will ask fishermen, traders, anyone we see. Sooner or later we shall find him, mark my words.”

  A day or two later, we caught the tail end of the blow Mr. Tate had foreseen. It was rough weather, with gales of wind and black lashings of rain ripping the sea to gray-white foam that flew away like ghosts. The Aurora plunged and rose and bucked and groaned, even under only a staysail to give us headway. We lost touch with the other two craft. This was the kind of weather that had made me seasick before, and so it did a few of our old hands. More than once I saw a sailor step lively to the rail, lean over, and throw up to leeward, afterward wiping his mouth in a businesslike way and going straight back to work, as if nothing remarkable had happened.

  I found that I was less sick on deck than belowdecks, so I spent much of the storm near the helmsmen, for it took two of them when the weather was rough. Once I recall the poor ship had climbed up a swelling, green, foam-streaked mountain of a wave. We balanced on the crest of it for a moment, with the wind shrieking in the rigging and rain coming horizontal, hitting as hard as musket balls. Then the bow dipped and we plunged down into the trough of the wave in a sickening, rushing dip that was only just short of falling.