He stopped at the far western end of the path he had paced into dust and adjusted his round, wire-rimmed spectacles.
He should have been with Morgan this trip. It was the first voyage he'd missed in over two years, and during the last six nights of worrying, he repeatedly vowed he would never do it again. The wound in his thigh would have healed as quickly at sea as it had on land—more quickly, he was sure, for he would have had other things to occupy his mind apart from the petty squabbles and dramas that took place every day in the tiny settlement. Accompanying Wade on his adventures at sea had cured him of any longings to be a farmer or shepherd. In fact, the first dispute someone had brought before him concerning the ownership of a lamb, Roarke had taken out a gun, shot the beast, and had it roasted for dinner.
Dawn had begun to paint a pale, ever-widening line across the eastern horizon and Stuart's soft brown eyes moved slowly over the oyster-colored sea, searching for anything the moonless night might have cloaked in darkness. Tropical heat would soon banish the thin layer of shifting mists that hovered over the valleys and pockets below. The breeze was steady from the west which would mean any approach to the island's harbor would be made from the north. He concentrated his focus there, hoping to see the towering masts and curved white sails of the Chimera.
He saw an arc of lantern light lift and settle on the opposite rim of the extinct volcanic crater that had formed Bounty Key. A second arc appeared to his right, a third on his left as the sentries marked the hour of their watch. Every direction was covered, every approach guarded by sharp eyes. On a signal, there would be thirty men in boats ready to tow the Chimera into the hidden cove. With a single gunshot, he could have the huts emptied and a hundred men manning the island's concealed defences. If need be, he could put his own schooner, the Vigilant, out to sea and conduct a wider search, but he knew that many more days would have to pass before he could justify that. For now, he could only wait.
Roarke debated lighting the pipe to help him wile away a few more minutes. But his tongue was already coated with a bitter fuzz from the countless times he had done so already to no effect. The palms of his hands were clammy. His stomach churned like a small whirlpool, and if something did not happen soon, he might be tempted to shoot more than lambs.
Morgan had insisted he miss this trip in order to be sure the last of the infection had worked its way out of the saber cut on his thigh. Roarke's hand dropped to it now and rubbed at the itchy weal of scar tissue, cursing Wade's assurances that it was to be only a quick run to Antigua and back to fetch the shipment of French guns. British revenue patrols were lighter than usual—or so he claimed. The Portuguese privateers were busy with the revolution in Paraguay. The Spanish were chasing after The Dutchman, a wily old pirate who had sailed brazenly into Barranquilla and captured two ships filled with Peruvian gold. It was to have been a quick trip with little risk and slim chances of a confrontation along the way.
So why was he twenty days overdue?
Roarke's wife, Bettina, had been overdue as well. A full three weeks by her reckoning, and that was another reason Morgan had ordered Roarke to remain behind. Not that he had been much help to his wife when the actual time came to deliver the child. He had suffered every pang and pain. Every choked scream had had an echo in his own throat, and when she had finally collapsed back onto the bed, drenched in sweat and holding the tiny, squalling, blood-covered babe in her arms, Roarke had almost fainted beside her, overcome by pride and happiness. She had given him a son. A healthy, bright-eyed, robust son born on the eve Morgan should have sailed into port.
Roarke looked up suddenly as the low, echoing wail blown through a conch shell quivered across the hollow silence. It was coming from the first-position watch on the leeward side of the Key. A ship had been sighted. Morgan's ship.
Roarke was running before the sound had completely faded, back along the pathway, tearing the scrub and brush aside as he skidded and scrabbled down the quarter-mile descent to the cove. He hit the beach, his arms and legs pumping in a blur, his teeth clenched against the pain in his thigh. He swerved past the iron bell and gave the pulley three hard jerks, then was off again, circling around the seemingly endless curve of the lagoon and up into the gap in the border of palms where the path began. The grade was as steep as the one he had just run down, and his leg was on fire, the injured muscles beginning to cramp and spasm. He was too exhilarated to care. The Chimera had been sighted. Wade was back and...
He heard pounding footsteps ahead of him. The watches stood in pairs, and one of the men was on his way down, nearly colliding with Roarke on the path.
"Hold up there, man; what it is it?" Roarke grabbed for the man's arm.
"It's the Chimera, sir. But she's in trouble. She's listing heavy to port and showing damage in her yards. The flags are up for a tow."
"Damage?" Roarke shook away the images that instantly crowded into his brain and released the man's arm. "Right then, off you go. Muster all the longboats and make ready for any casualties they might have on board. I'll want a full crew standing by to relieve Captain Wade's men."
"Aye, sir! On my way!"
Roarke spurred himself up the steep path. At the top he shouted for the watch and sprinted toward the answering hail.
"There she is, sir," he said, pointing due south, where Roarke had least expected to see her. The sky was still dark behind the Chimera, but the emerging dawn light had caught her sails, making them seem to glow with a ghostly luminescence as she sailed into the daylight. She was indeed limping, seeming to struggle through the water as if she had a heavy drag.
Roarke removed his spectacles and lifted his spyglass to his eye. There were signs of activity on her deck; men with lanterns were moving about preparing cables for the tow. He trained the glass higher up, examining each of the three masts and could see where a spar was missing and sails were jury-rigged. He traced her hull from bowsprit to stern, hesitating over a missing length of deck rail and several fresh pockmarks where shots had glanced off her timbers.
Roarke lowered the glass. He replaced his spectacles on the bridge of his nose, his movements precise and calculated to buy a few moments of thought as he tucked each wire arm just so behind his ears.
"Right. I'll be below, Loftus. Signal when she's within range."
"Aye, sir."
Roarke turned and swiftly retraced the route to the beach. Men were scurrying about carrying torches and setting up lanterns along the jetty. The six biggest longboats were dragged down off the sand and launched. Oars were loaded and slotted into their locks. Ropes, cables, bitts were fitted in beside the men in anticipation of any difficulties the Chimera might have.
Roarke climbed aboard the nearest longboat and grabbed an oar. He heard the conch echo hollowly from the peak of the crater, and nodded for the oarsmen to push off.
Summer's first glimpse of Bounty Key came when they were almost within hailing distance. She had been fast asleep, a pale arm flung across her eyes, when three dull thuds on the hull startled her awake. She jerked upright, her breath held in her lungs, waiting for the inevitable boom and thunder of cannon fire.
But they were not under attack. The thuds were followed by the sound of shouts and laughter, and as she swung her legs out of the berth, Michael had already tumbled out of his hammock and was pressing his nose to the gallery windows to see what he could see. She could tell it was early morning by the angle of the sunlight glancing off the waves and she guessed they had arrived at their destination by the way the Chimera had slowed almost to a drift.
Summer had not seen or heard from Morgan Wade since he had ordered them locked into a stuffy, airless storeroom deep down in the ship's belly. When the terrible barrage of cannon fire had abated, she and Michael had been taken back to the captain's cabin but there again, they had been locked inside by an equally silent and disgruntled Thorny. He would not answer any of her questions. He had simply stared at her as if she had personally invited the British warship to attack.
/> Wade had every right to be angry with her, she conceded. He probably could have made it through the channel and eluded the other ship without exchanging a single shot had he not taken the time to swim out to save Michael and herself. She had been selfish and unthinking to risk Michael's life in a foolhardy attempt to escape. Thorny's only words to them had been a graphic description of what the rip-current would have done to them had they swum into it; both she and Michael would have been sucked onto the jagged reef below and torn apart.
She looked at her brother now, his nose pressed flat to the glass windowpane. He was so determined to present himself as a young adult, she kept forgetting he was only a boy. In that instant she knew she would not fight anymore. She would stop fighting everyone and everything; she would scrub Wade's decks on her hands and knees if he ordered it. She would polish his boots and suffer his insults, even play the role of hostess at his table if that was what it took to get Michael safely home again.
There were more shouts from outside and she reached up over Michael's head to unlatch the window and swing it open. He popped his head out at once, leaning far enough forward that Summer hooked her hand in his belt for fear he might tumble headlong out and into the water.
"I can't see anything," he said, looking back over his shoulder. "But I think we are being towed. I can hear oars and...oh. Look!"
Summer crowded in beside him and stuck her head out the window too. They were indeed coming close to an island, she could see tall jagged cliffs and flying surf where the waves struck the boulders at the base. The spray from the surf mingled with the layer of mist that hugged the cliffs and swirled out behind the Chimera in thinner pinwheels. There was no beach that she could see, no bay to anchor in, no sign of a nestled village or any life at all apart from the straggly brush that grew from the crevices in the rocks.
The Chimera seemed to be heading straight into the cliffs.
They stayed there, hanging out the window, as the huge ship made a slow, easy turn and was towed parallel to the towering rocks. With a startled glance to the right, Summer watched as the land rose up on that side as well, a second wall of rocks and scrub brush that soon cut off the view of the open sea behind them.
They had entered a narrow passageway of some sort, formed by overlapping outcroppings in the cliffs. The sound of the pounding surf was left behind as the Chimera was towed and guided around the sharp elbow and she realized with a grudging smile, that if they could not see the open water anymore, then any ship trying to follow Wade to his home port, would likely not see be able to see the passage and he would seem to simply vanish once behind the protective screen of the island.
"The devil's own luck," she quoted softly.
Michael was grinning ear to ear, but before he could comment, they were both startled by the sound of laughter outside the cabin door. Summer quickly drew the window shut and latched it again, and with only seconds to spare, Michael was back in his hammock and she was sitting primly on the edge of the berth.
The door swung open. It was Morgan Wade and a man she had never seen before. The newcomer was tall and lean with short, sand-colored hair and dark brown eyes that were magnified slightly behind wire-rimmed spectacles. Her surprise at seeing him come into the cabin was matched by his shock at seeing her perched on the side of the berth, and the sentence he had been in the middle of trailed away into a mumble.
Wade did not glance at the berth, did not acknowledge there was anyone else in the cabin.
"I've made up a list of damages, the main one being the hole in the keel. Where the hell did you say Bull went?"
"What? Oh, ah, he's off sounding out those four new carronades you brought back from Tortuga for him."
"Sounding them where? Knowing your esteemed father-in-law, he would not waste good shot to test a gun unless he had a specific target in mind."
Roarke smiled wryly. "There was a rumor of some Jamaican rum on its way up through the Straits."
"Rum? What in blazes do we need with more rum?"
"Lafitte has offered us a premium price on every puncheon we can lay our hands on. Rum and gunpowder are running about even on the black market."
"Why doesn't the bastard just go out and get it himself? I've never known Jean Lafitte to sit back and be content to take deliveries, let alone pay a premium."
"From what I hear, he's, ah, been entertaining a pretty stiff British blockade around New Orleans. He's been drawing heavy fire since opening the route north to us through Cat Island. He figures a little rum in exchange for his generosity is the least we can do, and Bull agrees."
"He does, does he?" Wade unlocked the cabinet behind his desk and withdrew some documents and dispatches along with his journal and logbook. "What else have the two of you been plotting in my absence?"
"Well...ah—" Roarke glanced uncomfortably at the berth, then at the hammock where Michael was sitting up and openly listening to the conversation. "Is there anything you want to tell me?"
Wade looked up. "Oh. The boy is Michael Cambridge, the girl is his governess. We fished them out of the drink off Saint Bart."
"Cambridge?" Roarke's eyebrows lifted in an arch over the spectacles.
"Aye. Sir Lionel's cub. They were on board the Sea Vixen bound for Barbados."
"The Sea Vixen," Roarke murmured. He frowned and a look came into his eyes as if he were mentally leafing through a sheaf of manifests. "British registry. A passenger ship, for pity sakes—what happened?"
"It was none of my doing," Wade said defensively, holding up his hands. "The Vixen was caught in the same storm that threw us against the reef. We just happened to cross paths afterward and found these two floating on some debris."
"The Sea Vixen went down?"
"I saw no wreckage apart from these two, but—" Wade shrugged.
"And you brought them here?" Roarke's eyes widened incredulously.
"I had every intention of letting them off on the Virgins when we passed, but the governess there, she went through my desk like a plague of locusts. I couldn't be sure what she saw and wasn't about to assume she is as naive as she acts."
Stuart Roarke looked at Summer. "I see. What now, then?"
"Now...we repair my ship properly. As soon as Bull gets back, we'll retrieve the cargo from the Sisters and deliver it, along with these—" he held up the packet of dispatches— "to Norfolk. From what you've been telling me, we can't afford to lose a single crate or barrel, and for that we have Thorny to thank. I was all for putting it over the side."
"Lafitte needs all the powder we can lay our hands to. If he is admitting to the blockade being tight, then in reality it must be a stranglehold." Roarke paused then added, "What about the Northgate? How did you leave her?"
"She took bites from all twenty-four guns. I'm only sorry we could only get off one clean round. I would have liked to hole that bitch and make her captain dance from the yards. I sincerely hope to cross paths with him again; he requires a lesson in manners."
"Morgan—"
"He attacked without so much as a warning shot, Roarke." Wade's eyes glittered with anger. "He saw that we were crippled and unable to return fire or even move out of that blasted channel. He raked us without even offering the option to stand to."
"Would you have taken it? Would you have allowed the Royal Navy to board you?"
"Not bloody likely."
"I warrant the captain knew that. And since you've used just about every other trick in the books to catch the revenuers unaware, it may just have crossed his mind that you were only feigning your predicament."
"Nevertheless, it is a debt I will not be forgetting too soon."
"You seem to have chalked up a lot of debts for a trip that was supposed to be so unremarkable."
Wade spread his hands in a gesture of complete innocence. "I could not have predicted the storm. And we have made repairs at Saint Martin before without losing more than a few crates of cargo in trade."
"Your value has gone up," Roarke remarked dryly. "The newe
st dispatches put the price on your head at fifteen thousand pounds."
"Fifteen—!" Wade looked genuinely surprised. "Well fuck me stupid. The French bastard must have known the patch he gave us would buckle in any kind of a current. I hope the Northgate took her frustrations out on whatever ship was sent out to follow us. He knew what we were carrying. There is enough powder in those barrels to—" He stopped, catching the warning frown on Roarke's face. He glanced at Summer and Michael, then raked a hand through the long black waves of his hair. "I must be more exhausted than I thought," he muttered. "I would slay dragons for a hot bath, a hearty meal, and twenty hours sleep."
"Easily arranged," Roarke said with a grin. "For you and your...guests. They both look as though they could use a bit of cleaning up."
Summer flushed and touched a hand self-consciously to the matted tangle of her hair. She had not attempted to brush it since the ill-fated swim, and her shirt and breeches were filthy from sojourn in the storeroom.
"They're lucky they're here at all," Wade said with a grunt. "They tried to swim for it off the Sisters."
Roarke's eyes widened again.
"Aye," Wade nodded. "And if it was my choice, they'd both feel a good deal worse than they do now."
Summer slipped off the berth and went to stand beside Michael, draping a protective arm around his shoulders. "Please, do not take your anger out on Michael. The fault was mine entirely. I made him do it."
Wade crossed his arms over his chest. "Do my ears deceive me, Governess, or was that just an admission of stupidity?"
She flushed deeper. "It was no such thing. Under normal circumstances, we could have swum the distance easily."
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