He felt the bed dip as his wife, bless her sweet and loving heart, sat down beside him. “Tomorrow’s another day, Kieran.” She took his hand, still stained with his brother’s blood, careful not to touch the raw wounds on his knuckles. “You’re being too hard on yourself. It will be all right.”
“I said things I should never have said to Connor. He’s suffered enough.”
“And you haven’t suffered just as much, if not more?”
Her words dug at the fragile hold he had on his emotions and a fresh wave of pain stung the back of his nose, his eyes. He was going to come apart right in front of her.
“I met your sister-in-law, Rhiannon. She’ll take care of Connor, and I’ll take care of you. We’ll all get through this. It takes time to heal.” He felt her gentle touch, her warm palm against his cheek. “But you and Connor, you’re brothers. This surely isn’t the first fight you’ve ever had.”
Kieran, desperately willing back tears, said nothing.
“Can I get you anything?”
He didn’t dare to speak. Instead, he just shook his head and concentrated on not giving vent to the huge, gulping sobs that threatened to consume him—huge, gulping sobs that, he now realized, he’d held inside from the moment Sir Graham had returned to Barbados with the news of the shipwreck, its survivors, and the tragedy that had changed Kieran’s world forever.
The house. Oh, the house, and its memories….
Raw agony caught in his throat and he clamped his jaws shut, knowing that if he took in air, it would be expelled in a great, unending howl of anguish.
“Kieran?”
His chest shook with the effort of holding it all in. “I… I need to be alone,” he managed, not wanting her to see him in the unmanly act of crying. “Forgive me. Please….”
She squeezed his hand and the bed resumed its shape as she rose. “Of course, my love.” Her words were soft, and he told himself that she understood, that of course she understood because she, after all, had grown up with a brother and knew the pride a man had in himself and his self-control. But he heard the hurt in her voice, try as she did to conceal it, and it clawed at his own guilt until he thought he would shatter into as many pieces as the Delft bowl that had been amongst what little they had left of Kestrel—the ship of their childhood, a part of their family, the fabric that connected them all.
The Delft bowl….
The first wall of emotion bubbled up from his throat. “I love you, Rosalie, but I need to be alone,” he said brokenly, turning over to bury his face in the pillow as the sobs began to erupt from him in great, undulating waves of pain. “Please….”
But Rosalie was already moving toward the door. She understood. The rage he’d shown against Connor, and now the shattering outpouring of grief. It was all part of the process, and sometimes a person needed to be alone to negotiate that.
She went silently downstairs. The parlor was dark and empty; Matthew and Eveleen must have gone to bed, and Liam had not returned from checking on Connor. She sat on the settee where her husband had been placed and put her hands on the blanket on which he’d lain, feeling his pain as keenly as if it were her own as the distant sounds of his sobs, his suffering, his raw and bitter anguish, came to her straining ears.
“My poor, suffering love,” she said quietly and rising, went to stand at the window to look across the road to the big white house where Kieran had grown up. She thought of the destruction the fight had wrought, and she thought of the beautiful Delft bowl, lying in pieces on the floor where they had left it.
And Rosalie knew what she had to do.
Wordlessly, she got up, lit a lantern, and slipped quietly out into the night.
* * *
Matthew had not locked the door, and it yielded easily to her hand.
The entrance hall stood as they had left it. Faint light found its way through the windows, slanting across the rug and up the wall. Off to the right, an open doorway from whence Connor had come; off to the left another doorway and before her, a magnificent, mahogany-paneled staircase leading up into the darkness.
Rosalie found the first jagged shard of the broken Delft bowl on the floor and, making a deep cup of her skirts, gently placed it inside. A few inches away was another piece, its edges raw and wounded as though it, too, had felt the brothers’ anguish and would never heal. Small bits and pieces, shards of white and blue, broken, probably irreparable. But it wouldn’t hurt to try and maybe she and Eveleen, who’d told her she was an artist, could put it back together again.
She gathered as many pieces as she could find, carefully placing each precious one in the bowl she had made of her skirts, and went into the room from which Connor had come.
It appeared to be a library. She stood there for a moment in the silence, looking at this room flooded with transient starlight. A clock on a mantelpiece, still and silent. Another in a corner, also silent, as though time itself had stopped after the family had left for Barbados. A great round table on which a ship’s plans were haphazardly spread, a half-finished glass of wine that Connor must have left when they’d disturbed him. Built-in shelving filled with books, ship models, some miniatures in little easels; half-hulls on the walls. Under the table, a hooked rug on which was faithfully rendered a huge compass rose. A mariner’s room, this. She wondered if this was where the elder Captain Merrick, the Brendan of fact and fable, had spent his time.
And then she turned and saw it.
Saw him.
It was a painting, life-sized, stretching from the top of the wainscoting all the way to the high ceiling. Starlight made it glow an otherworldly silver, and as Rosalie raised her lantern, it found the face of the man who dominated the painting—and her breath caught in her throat.
She stepped closer, transfixed.
A family. The artist had depicted the group of five gathered around the helm of a ship, the buildings of Newburyport and a blue slice of the Merrimack River in the background. The woman was petite with a freckled nose and mischievous green eyes, her hand resting on the shoulder of a young boy standing in front of her whose dark, curling hair was the color of her own; on her right stood a tall, thin girl with dark red hair and sullen gold eyes, poised on the brink of womanhood; on her left, another boy, tall, auburn-haired and grinning, his fingertips resting on one of the ship’s guns. And standing behind and above them all as if sheltering them with his very presence, his warm smile reflecting his pride and good fortune at this beautiful family that God had given him was a man, strikingly handsome, his face both sensitive and strong and full of good humor. Tall and lanky, he leaned casually against the tiller, the long boom of the mainsail angling off over his head, his arms crossed and laughter brimming in his kind, amber-colored eyes. He was dressed in the clothes of the last century, with a blue button-down coat with red lapels and a black tricorn hat under one arm, his thick, tousled hair the color of autumn, his warm smile one that she already knew because it was the same one this man had given her own husband.
“Brendan.” Rosalie felt her own gaze transfixed by the man in the painting, as if he and his family depicted so faithfully, so lovingly, at the helm of what she could only assume was their schooner Kestrel, could reach out across time and space, life and death and speak to her, embrace and include her in the loving warmth that obviously bound this young and happy family. “At last…we meet.”
And then her gaze fell on that hat once more. That black tricorn tucked under his arm that looked so oddly familiar….
No.
It couldn’t be.
Barely able to breathe, she moved closer to the painting—
And heard a noise behind her.
Rosalie whirled around. The thick, sweaty palm, stinking of grime and salt, was over her mouth before she could scream. She was yanked viciously backward and Escobar’s black, ruthless eyes were the last thing she knew before Rocco’s fist collided with her jaw.
The broken pieces of the Delft bowl fell from her skirts and to the floor.
“Let’s go,” Escobar snarled, grinding his boot into the broken shards. He tossed the young woman over his shoulder, beckoned to Rocco, and together they slipped out of the silent house, down the stairs, and to the ship waiting well out in the harbor, leaving the door swinging open behind them.
Chapter 32
The sobs had shaken him to his core, roiling up and out of him, purging his body of the worst of the grief like his stomach once had of the gone-bad fish he’d had at a seedy waterside tavern in Boston. It poured out of him until he couldn’t draw breath. It poured out of him until he fell asleep in exhaustion and woke hours later, curled in a tight ball of agony around himself.
Depleted.
Time had passed. He sensed it rather than knew it, though he could see a faint glow on the eastern horizon, could see the colors of dawn beginning to bloom on the basin of the Merrimack, the first sparkle of diamonds on the water as the sun broke through a distant band of cloud and ushered in a new day.
Kieran groaned in pain. The awful events of the previous night were still with him. The fight with Connor, the shame and humiliation and yet the relief—yes, admit it—of finally giving vent to things that should have been said when he could still have been kind about it, feelings that should have been expressed before they’d been allowed to build into an uncontrollable explosion. Damnation. His face throbbed, his head ached, he was sore in places he didn’t know he owned, but his heart felt…lighter. Exhausted. Purged and empty and sore. Like his stomach had, after that bad fish.
“Rosalie?”
Silence.
Outside, the sparrows were awake, flitting beyond the window, and he heard the morning call of a robin. Gulls. A church bell somewhere, ringing out the early hour.
“Rosalie?” he called again.
Dimly, he remembered how he had sent her away in the throes of his anguish last night and felt a sudden pang of guilt. He hoped she’d understood. She had certainly seemed to at the time, but he felt bad about it nonetheless and now he wanted her with a desperate ache.
She would make everything all right.
She would make him forget how sick he felt over what he’d said and done.
“Rosalie?”
Gingerly, Kieran swung his legs out of bed and put his weight upon them. He was still in the clothes he’d worn last night, tan trousers and a navy blue linen vest, his shirt spattered with blood. His blood. Connor’s blood. He licked dry, cracked lips; the bottom one was twice its normal size and, as he moved painfully to the washstand and looked blearily at his reflection in the looking glass, he was startled to see the splotch of purple blooming just beneath his ear and fading into the dark shadow that a night’s growth of beard had leant him.
He felt—and looked—like shit. A damned pirate. Like the earth looked after a fierce and violent thunderstorm, pounded to a pulp and drowned beneath the deluge but somehow cleansed. Somehow renewed. He wiped a hand over his face, wincing as his knuckles tightened beneath raw, cracked scabs where they’d collided with his brother’s teeth. Nothing that a bath, a shave, a change of clothes and breakfast couldn’t fix, nothing that a few minutes on his knees before the Lord and an hour or two with his wife couldn’t speed on its way to healing. Then, and only then, he’d be ready to face Connor, to apologize as best as he could for what he’d done and said the previous night.
Ready, once more, to face his family home.
He heard sounds from downstairs, smelled eggs and bacon frying. The low voices of conversation, one of them Uncle Matt’s. His cousins Nathan and Toby. He wondered if Aunt Eveleen and the girls, who’d surely be horrified by his appearance, were up.
Ohhh, I don’t want to face them. I don’t want to face anyone just yet, after what I did to my brother.
But there was no sense putting off the inevitable. He couldn’t hide up here forever.
He turned from the looking glass and went to the window to gaze out over the river, seeing the familiar sight of Sandpiper out there in the dawn with her single raked mast silhouetted against the purple, gold and red clouds. The prows of anchored sloops, brigs and schooners were all beginning to swing around to point upriver, facing a tide that was just turning, and as Kieran gazed idly out at the distant coast of Salisbury, his eye was caught by movement.
It was just an old fishing schooner with patched tanbark sails. Not a ship he recognized, certainly not Newburyport-owned or built, but something about the way it was recklessly raising sail without benefit of a pilot to guide it out of the river, something about the flurry of activity on its decks made him frown, step closer to the window, and reach for the spyglass on the nearby highboy.
He put the glass to his eye—and froze. The swarthy crew, the faces that would have haunted his nightmares had he allowed them and there, at the helm, the one man he would never forget.
Escobar.
And in that moment, his wife’s absence hit him with more force than every blow he’d taken from his brother just hours before. He turned from the window and at a dead run, charged downstairs.
“Rosalie!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Rosalie!”
There was no time to lose.
* * *
Rosalie dragged open her eyes, her head swimming. Her jaw ached. Her head hurt. It took her a moment to realize she was in near-darkness, and another to discern that she was aboard a ship.
A ship that stank of fish, wood-rot, tobacco and sweat, salt and moldy canvas and old food. But mostly fish. Groaning, she sat up. She was lying in a hard bunk of some sort, her hands bound behind her back—what?—and suddenly it all came back to her.
The horrible fight between the brothers… Kieran waking up and the floodgates of his grief finally opening…his plea for privacy, her going across the road to retrieve the pieces of the broken bowl, the painting with the charismatic, smiling Brendan whose wise and laughing gaze had seemed to connect with her own—
And Escobar.
Sweat, as cold as the sea she could hear moving just beyond the hull, prickled her spine and soaked the roots of her hair.
Escobar.
Oh, dear God. Why was he here? What did he want? And Kieran…what would he think when he found her gone?
She knew what he’d think.
That I left him because I was hurt by his need for privacy.
Her blood froze and she began to shake.
And he won’t come looking for me because he’ll be full of shame, and he’ll think I need time to lick my own wounds.
The horror of it hit her like a punch to the stomach.
I am on my own.
Above, calls for more speed, the frantic Haul! Haul! Haul! as men yanked and cursed a sail heavenwards, and Rosalie remembered what this pirate had done and what he’d intended to do to her before Kieran had gotten them all out of that cave, and it was only by taking several deep and steadying breaths that she was able to calm her pounding heart.
Shaking, she swung her legs out of the bunk and as her feet hit the filthy decking, she felt something pressing against her thigh….
And remembered.
I still have Connor’s pistol in my garter.
A pistol that was useless as long as her hands were bound.
She moved unsteadily across the small cabin, wishing there were stern windows that would offer her a view of the sea outside; instead, all she had for light was a grimy and cracked deck prism above, filtering a thread of sunshine down into this miserable, reeking space.
A door, half off its hinges, swung open in the gloom. Apparently Escobar felt that knocking her unconscious and binding her wrists were enough to keep her out of trouble.
You don’t know me very well, do you?
More shouts from above, frantic calls to set topsails, and then the words that both froze and cheered Rosalie’s heart:
“The bastard’s coming after us!”
“Good. That’s just what I want him to do.”
And in that moment, Rosalie had no doubt who “he” was, and she knew tha
t if she did not find a way to end this before Kieran caught up to them, her husband would be a dead man before this was all over.
I have to get topside.
I have to get my hands free.
I have to outsmart them all.
The pistol dug into her flesh, reminding her, begging her, to pull it out and use it. She prayed it was loaded. Even if it was, she would have only one shot—and that one shot had to kill Escobar before the rest of the pirate crew was on her.
The gray, filtered light that lit this tiny cabin didn’t show much of use. She wiggled her arms behind her back, trying to loosen her bonds. They were tight, chafing her wrists, and she began to cast about, looking for something to rub them against, anything to saw away at the bonds that held her, to—
The door opened and there was Escobar.
His eyes glowed feverishly above high, protruding cheekbones and sunken cheeks. He looked like a man obsessed. Or possessed.
“You’re awake,” he sneered with obvious satisfaction.
She looked down, hoping that if she appeared defenseless, he’d relax his guard and perhaps even release her. “I don’t feel well.”
“Your comfort means nothing to me. You’re no more to me than a worm on a hook, puta, which is exactly the purpose you’re going to serve. You’re the bait and I’m the hook, and your husband—he is your husband now, isn’t he?—is about to be reeled in.”
She just looked up at him, frowning, making a question mark of her eyebrows. She didn’t dare to speak for fear that her building rage would warn him that she was anything but frightened.
“Yes, that’s right, bitch. I’ve been tracking your husband since you all escaped me back on our island and you know why?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “He’s the only one who knows where my little brother is, and if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to find him.” Escobar moved closer, his fetid breath seeping through rotted teeth and clouding the air as he came around behind her, yanking her up against his body and pushing a hand against her chest. His cruel fingers sought and pinched her nipple, his mouth hovering near her ear. She held her breath against the stench, closing her eyes against the onslaught. “We took this tub south of Boston so we could sneak into Newburyport without rousing suspicion. My own brigantine is lying just off Gloucester, and if I can lead that son-of-a-bitch you married there, we’ll make short work of him until he surrenders both himself and that pretty sloop. Then he’s going to tell me where my brother Pedro is. And if he doesn’t—heh, even if he does—he’s going to watch me stick my cock in you until you’re screaming for mercy. Or for more. Bet you’ve never had one as big as mine.” His lips grazed her neck. “Bet you’re going to like every last inch of it, too.”
Heir To The Sea Page 27