Shadow of the Corsairs

by Elizabeth Ellen Carter

  Suddenly, the world was a little less dark than it was before but, still, this was serious business she was involved with.

  “When are you seeing your brother – Pietro?”

  “I’m seeing him tomorrow night.”

  “When?”

  Although he hadn’t known her long, Jonathan was sure of one thing – she was a terrible liar. Accomplished liars had an answer right off the tip of their tongue. Instead, Morwena said nothing. And it was the “nothing” that told him volumes.

  “Where?”

  Again, the silence. And the withdrawal. She had become reserved again, hiding her expression behind a mask. But he’d seen too much of it to be fooled.

  “I can’t involve anyone else.”

  “Morwena…”

  “We handle family matters within the family in Sicily. This is my problem.”

  The stubborn lift to her chin suggested she considered it the end of the matter. Jonathan wasn’t so easily convinced, but what could he do? He had no claim on this girl. He couldn’t order her like he would do one of the maids at home or chastise her as he would his daughters – no matter how much he wanted to.

  ***

  Morwena watched Jonathan turn way from her and head toward the gangplank of the Terpsichore.

  She had offended him. He was annoyed with her. But what else could she do? Of course she was grateful for the opportunity that he and his friends had given her, but Pietro was her brother and this was her problem.

  She could guess at the type of men of whom Pietro had run afoul. Times had changed, the aristocrats were no longer in charge – none of them could afford to be. Many of them had left their lands for life in the city, leaving their farms and plantations to the overseers. The clans who leased the lands for the aristocrats had become crooked, they cared little about those who lived and worked the land. They extorted money from the farmers, threatening to burn their crops and their homes if they did not pay.

  Was it any wonder that Morwena welcomed the Englishmen who took over their lands and made money making wine and selling it back to their countrymen? At least they were just after making a profit, unlike the gabellotti who would treat the workers like serfs, instead of the free men they were.

  Gossip in the marketplace whispered stories of what happened to those who dared cross the clans.

  If she could simply clear Pietro’s debts, it would be enough for her. He could work for her and their father need never know.

  One lie upon another… how the Blessed Virgin must weep at her deceptions.

  After tonight, with her brother safe, she would confess her sins and do whatever penance the priest gave her.

  She had no choice.

  For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction... strait is the gate and narrow is that which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

  And the only narrow road Morwena could see was the gangplank up to the ship.

  She followed Jonathan’s broad back up to the deck where he held out his hand to aid her over the scuppers and onto the deck. Her hand was small and pale against his much larger one. The color of his skin was a stark contrast to hers.

  Surprisingly, his hands were not callused as she thought a working man’s would be. Furthermore, Jonathan had manners. He made her feel like a lady. More maddeningly, he seemed to know what she was thinking. She would have to reconsider her disbelief in the second sight if he continued to regard her so thoughtfully.

  He seemed in no hurry to relinquish her hand so she kept it over his as she crossed the deck. Surely she didn’t blush but if she did, she could blame it on the sun. Morwena chanced another glance at him.

  And what did it say about her that she was sure she could read his expression so clearly, too? He seemed to suspect that she planned to go to meet Pietro alone.

  Although she had only known him for a scant few days, she instinctively knew she could trust him. She already had reason to trust him. He had come to the aid of a perfect stranger and followed through with his promise. Morwena knew if she asked for his help, he would give it.

  But it wasn’t just family pride that prevented her. If the gabellotti found out about her enterprise, it wouldn’t be too long before threats would be made against her, followed by the suggestion that paid protection would prevent little accidents – like a fire burning down the warehouse.

  No, Morwena liked her new friends too much to involve them with this. Better that they stick to their trading, or smuggling, or whatever else it was that required them to have a warehouse shrouded in secrecy.

  Still, she felt she owed Jonathan something.

  “I promise, I won’t go alone tonight. I’ll find Nico and take him with me,” she said in a low voice.

  Jonathan didn’t say anything. He simply put his other hand over hers and squeezed.

  In the captain’s quarters, Kit had already pulled out a metal chest and was counting out the coins. Beside him, Elias was busily writing something on paper.

  “Once we conclude our business, I suggest an escort to accompany Miss Gambino home,” said Kit. “I’d hate for our quartermaster to be robbed of her fine profit.”

  “Profit? I haven’t even begun to see a profit,” she answered. “No, you just show a little patience, Captain Hardacre, there will be profit aplenty for all of us before too long.”

  Kit laughed and looked to Jonathan. “I like your friend already!”

  Elias looked up from his writing and set the pen down. “I’m happy to escort Miss Morwena home.”

  “No, no, I think Mr. Afua is the man for the job.” The blond-headed man grinned. “I’m sure he won’t mind.”

  Jonathan shifted on his feet but said nothing.

  Elias ignored the captain’s remark and stood, turning two pieces of paper around so she could read them. It was in rudimentary Sicilian but serviceable enough.

  “It’s a contract in duplicate,” Elias said unnecessarily, “outlining the terms we discussed at the warehouse.”

  She read through the documents. “Good enough, but a waste of paper and ink. I am a woman, I cannot sign contracts. That is why Nico was my intermediary.”

  Hardacre stood, picked up a pen and dipped it in the well. He signed his name with an elaborate flourish – larger than the text surrounding it. Large than life, in fact.

  “Consider it the sign of the high regard we hold you in,” he said. “I’d rather have your signature than that of your brother. As far as we’re concerned, it’s you we’re doing business with.”

  Elias took the pen and added his signature beneath Kit’s on each of the papers. Morwena looked at each man in turn. Kit with his blond hair and hazel eyes, the small gold hoop glinting at his ear; next to him Elias, the quiet one, with eyes like honey and a sweet smile to match; and then to Jonathan.

  They were all good looking men, but Kit and Elias were young, not much older than Nico.

  Jonathan was a man with a man's maturity. Morwena fell into his clear, brown eyes, framed by dark lashes. His sharply angled cheekbones drew her eye to his full lips which started to turn up into a smile.

  “At a loss for words, Miss Morwena? That doesn’t seem to be quite like you,” he said. Jonathan leaned forward and signed his name. “Now it’s your turn.”

  She approached the desk, picked up the pen and hesitated a moment.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Elias.

  “No. Everything is right.”

  Morwena shook her head, plunged the pen into the ink well and signed her name.

  Morwena Francesca Gambino

  “We should celebrate,” said Kit. “Music, dancing, wine, and food!”

  The gold hunter pocket watch in Hardacre’s waistcoat chimed twice, breaking the spell.

  “No.” Morwena felt the buoyant atmosphere in the room evaporate. “I have a business to run. We will save our celebrations for when we have turned a profit.”

  “Just as well anyway, since we have no decent wine or food – th
at will be your job to rectify,” Kit answered smoothly. Elias rolled up her copy of the contract and handed it to her along with another piece of paper. “It’s your first assignment. We sail out in three weeks.”

  Morwena glanced over the list – mostly food provisions, ropes, chains, shackles, and cleats, barrels of nails, some navigation maps, a new large tea pot – these were easy to obtain.

  Kit handed over a small, brown leather purse, its weight filling her palm.

  “Your payment for the implements and enough to purchase what we need on the list. Bargain hard and don’t stint on the quality.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Jonathan observed Morwena’s mood change like a sunset. The golden light of her passion for business seemed to illuminate everything – make it brighter, clearer… but as they walked toward the town now, the shadows started to appear and the brightness dimmed.

  She was still no less beautiful, however, just as the setting sun casts the most glorious colors into the sky. One might look on in wonder but feel the tug of sadness that the thing which brought it to life was now disappearing.

  He would love to see that vivaciousness emerge again and be directed at him.

  The thought surprised him and he hesitated a moment. Morwena glanced at him.

  “Did you trip?”

  He shook his head and they continued. “The cobblestones can be sharp if you don’t know where to step,” she offered casually. “I ruined a new pair of slippers when I was much younger. My friend, Cettina, and I were playing at being ballerinas. A hole got punched clean through the sole. My father was so angry.”

  Jonathan smiled and tried to imagine the woman beside him as a girl.

  “Did your father stay mad?”

  “No, he can never stay mad at me for too long. He was always harsher on my brothers instead of me and I’m ashamed to say I could wrap him around my fingers most of the time.”

  “I can completely understand. My daughters were like that.”

  Now it was Morwena who paused. And the light in her eyes dimmed and the shadows between them deepened.

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  The faces of Mellesse, Debre, Belkis, and Hagos appeared before him, and their spirits seemed to rise up where they lodged in his chest, hammering to be let out. A fleeting moment of panic assailed him. If he actually said out loud the words now forming in his mind, then it would be real. His precious wife and daughters, still alive in his memory, would be dead.

  He became vaguely aware of Morwena’s hand on his arm, and another on his back, leading him to a bench. He lowered himself onto it, shocked by how suddenly disarmed and weakened he was.

  “It’s none of my business…” Morwena’s words cooled him like the air high in the mountains of Gondar.

  He shook his head. The face before him had beautiful, brown eyes, delicately shaped, and alabaster skin. He frowned a moment that it was not Mellesse, although there was something about the way Morwena looked at him – thoughtful, concerned – that broke down the door. For the first time, Jonathan said the words aloud.

  “I was married. I had a wife and three beautiful daughters. They are all dead.”

  He watched her face, the ebb and flow of emotions that subtly played across her features. He knew she had noted the past tense of the words. He read conflict in her face; she wanted to know and he suspected that she would not be content with just a surface rendition. She would want to know it all.

  The thought of telling her terrified him.

  Morwena’s eyes fell away from his for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Yes, so was he.

  After a minute, they rose and their journey continued in silence. Jonathan was lost in his own thoughts, only vaguely aware that Morwena was now escorting him and not the other way around. One street, turned into an alley, opened on to a plaza and then narrowed to an alley once more.

  Then she stopped.

  “Stronzino!”

  Jonathan’s command of Sicilian wasn’t strong, but he recognized a pejorative when he heard one. He looked at Morwena and followed her look to a blue-painted door standing ajar. She disengaged his arm and marched toward the ground floor room but was only halfway across when she yelled.

  “Nicoli Thomasso Gambino! Get out here right now!”

  Inwardly, Jonathan winced – he could never imagine Mellesse yelling halfway across their compound like that. He glanced up, half-expecting to see everyone at their balconies wondering where the murder was.

  Instead, he spotted a lone face in an upper window, half-concealed. He met the old woman’s eyes a moment and she disappeared behind a curtain.

  “Don’t yell like a fishwife, Wena!” a man’s disembodied voice shouted back. Nico, he assumed, appeared and slumped in the doorway as though he’d just been roused from sleep, despite the fact it was late afternoon.

  Morwena was now close enough to thump him hard on the shoulder. Then she raised her fist and struck him again. Jonathan hurried forward. For what, he couldn’t really say. The young man bore the blows without retaliation or, in fact, without much reaction at all. But still, if he raised a hand even in self-defense against Morwena…

  “How could you disappear for five days?”

  “Wena,” Nico was pleading, “I was trying to get…”

  Jonathan continued to approach. Nico fell silent.

  “I think we’ve attracted the attention of the neighbors long enough,” said Jonathan. “Let’s continue this conversation inside.”

  He looked at the siblings. The resemblance was unmistakable – the shape of the nose and the cheekbones were the same; as Morwena was attractive, her brother was handsome. But now the young man stared at him, his black brows furrowing until they appeared as one line across his forehead.

  “I want you to meet someone,” said Morwena, pushing her brother’s shoulder to urge him back inside. “A lot has happened while you were hiding from me.”

  “I was not hiding!”

  Morwena shoved harder and Nico retreated. Jonathan saw her look back, checking to see if he still followed.

  “This is Jonathan Afua. He’s my business partner.”

  Jonathan bore Nico’s open-mouthed expression with equanimity.

  The young man swung to his sister. “But I thought I was your… since when…”

  “Stop gibbering, you cabbage, and listen.”

  Nico shot his sister a sour look and dropped sullenly into a chair at a small table.

  “I know Pietro’s back. I know he pressed you for money – and I know you gave it to him,” Morwena continued, her voice low and calm. That seemed to distress the younger man more than facing blows and the blistering fury of his sister’s wrath.

  “He looked so desperate, Wen. I didn’t know what to do. He’s our brother and you can’t turn your back on family, no matter what they’ve done.”

  Morwena sat down opposite him and reached across the table. She took his hand.

  “Pietro came to see me, too.”

  “He came to the shop? Did Papa see him?”

  His questions were silenced by a shake of her head.

  “Papa is spending a few days with Aunt Savarina. He doesn’t know about Pietro.”

  Jonathan leaned against the open doorway, making himself as unobtrusive as possible. He wondered whether he ought to leave and let the Gambino siblings sort out their own problems, when he felt the full weight of Morwena’s attention on him.

  Please stay.

  He felt the words as surely as if she had said them aloud. Jonathan answered with a half-nod.

  Of course he would stay.

  “Pietro climbed through my bedroom window like he used to do when he would sneak away to go gambling. He said he needed thirty ducats.”

  Jonathan watched, fascinated, as Nico paled a moment then flushed bright red, his shock then anger playing out so obviously on his face. “I already gave him ten! That was two months’ rent on the warehouse. I�
�ve tried everything to make the money back, Wen. Oh, what are we going to do?”

  “Calm yourself, Nico, I have the money.”

  Silence fell between brother and sister. Morwena was a voluble woman, but now an unspoken war of words waged between them.

  He broke the silence, his voice low and dangerous. “Morwena – have you brought shame to our family with this man?”

  She frowned a split second, as if wondering what he was talking about, then her expression turned to a scowl of derision “Of course not! Don’t be an idiot, Nico. Mr. Afua is the navigator on one of the English ships we sell to, the Terpsichore. He and the other officers have bought the warehouse and I am managing it for them.”

  Nico shifted in his chair and Jonathan found himself bearing the full weight of the young man’s scrutiny again. He stared right back while he mastered his anger. Unwittingly or not, this young man had insulted him also by suggesting Morwena had prostituted herself to him as a way out of her financial problems – difficulties, he might add, that were not of her making but of her brothers’. The only thing which stopped him from physically correcting the record was the fact that, if it was one of his sisters who told such a tale, he might well have leapt to the same conclusion.

  The battle of stares was swiftly lost by Nico. He looked away, then had the decency to turn shame-faced to his sister and apologize. Morwena accepted with a shrug of her shoulders.

  “Pietro wants me to meet him tomorrow night to give him the money. I want you to come with me.”

  “Of course.”

  Jonathan watched the young woman’s shoulders sag in relief.

  “And promise me something?” she asked. Nico nodded. “I love you, Brother. Do not run away, even though I’m mad at you, and don’t tell anyone about this business.”

  “Si, soru. I agree. Between ourselves.”

  It was well after dark by the time Jonathan returned to the ship. The sound from on deck of a lone man picking out a tune on a guitar in a minor key was something to tug at the heartstrings.

  For someone who had spent all of his life on the land, he was surprised at how comfortable he felt aboard this ship. He supposed the sea satisfied the wanderlust in him, the ability to travel miles and miles in an hour, pushed along by the wind, mastering it, making it take you where you wanted to go.