The Following Sea (The Pirate Wolf series)

by Canham, Marsha

  "Chandler-Ross Shipping has an agent in New Providence."

  "Do you think he might know where your father is?"

  "I don't know. I had hoped it was a place to start the search."

  "And likely to end it before you'd even begun. New Providence is a pesthole, filled with pirates and whores. The bidding for something as sweet and fresh and young as yourself would start the instant you stepped onto the beach. Furthermore, many of these islands are covered in jungle—thick impenetrable jungle with snakes and crocodiles with teeth as long as your fingers, poisonous spiders and leeches that can suck the strength and life right out of your flesh."

  If he expected his description of tropical paradise to make her crumple into a heap, he was disappointed, for she kept her expression blank and her gaze steady on his.

  "What would you suggest I do, Captain Dante? Abandon the search? Return home to the safety of England knowing that my father might be struggling on his own somewhere, possibly hurt, possibly imprisoned or enslaved in chains?”

  “If he is, then you said it best yourself: you can’t save him.”

  “When did I say that?”

  “When I was dragging you off the jolly boat and you were doing your best to drown us both.”

  “I didn’t mean it. And I’m certainly not going to give up just because of a few snakes and leeches. Would you? Would you sail away and abandon your father, or your brother, or any member of your family? Would they abandon you?"

  Gabriel narrowed his eyes. He disliked arguments where he could not actually argue. Having just emerged from a battle where not one member of his family, least of all his sister Juliet, had so much as entertained the notion of abandoning him to his fate, he could understand the emotion driving the girl forward. Feisty as she might be, however, this waifish little chit was no Juliet. She was all bones and big green eyes. It was a struggle for her just to drag around the cocoon of blankets she kept wrapped around her shoulders. How would she fare with a machete, slashing her way through the jungle?

  "No," he admitted finally. "I would not abandon any of my family if I thought they were in trouble. But then I was born and raised in these climes, Mistress Chandler. Battles and bloodshed were daily fare and we were all taught from an early age how to survive if we were shipwrecked on a deserted island with no food or water. These islands were our playground and all three of us grew up sailing these waters, playing cat and mouse with the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Portuguese. We speak several languages other than English so that we know when we are being offered a fair price for our cargo and when we are being told to get the hell out of port before they hand us our ballocks in a bag. No offence, little esquilo, but if you were to find yourself in a Spanish-speaking village, how would you go about asking someone for information?"

  "Me gustaría preguntarle si había oído algo sobre mi padre," she answered calmly. "I would ask if he had heard anything about my father. And kindly do not call me squirrel."

  Gabriel tapped his long fingers on the desk. "Je suppose que vous parlez français aussi?"

  "Oui. Très bien."

  "Dutch?"

  "Een beetje. A little. As I mentioned, I worked in the shipping office for a while, helping with import, export manifests."

  He drummed his fingertips a moment longer. So she was educated and had enough language skills to know how to ask for a map rather than a banana. But asking questions and getting answers from the right people was a whole other matter.

  "Why are you not afraid of me?" he asked with a thoughtful frown.

  Here, at last, was a question that gave the quickness of her tongue pause. "Should I be?"

  "You have come aboard a ship full of surly men who are wary that you might be carrying the plague. You find yourself locked away in a cabin with someone who is not in the best of humor at the moment—" he fanned a hand absently at the injuries to his face—" and who might well resent being infected with whatever pox killed your ship. A man who has just come through a battle that saw his ship sunk, half his crew shredded by cannonfire, and in no mood to compare those losses to that of an absentee, wandering father. I would think it prudent to be a little frightened, yes?"

  She gave her answer some thought before she shook her head. "I was frightened on board the Eliza Jane. I was terrified to think I was completely alone with nothing but death and empty sea around me. For two days I tried to work up the courage to jump into the ocean and simply end the fear, but I was too frightened to even do that. So no, Captain, I am not afraid of you. Curious, perhaps, but not afraid."

  "Curious? About what, pray?"

  "About why you risked the wrath of your crew to bring me on board. About why you put your own health in jeopardy to fetch me out of the boat and bring me here. About what you plan to do with me if we pass through the night with no ill effects."

  "What would you like me to do with you?"

  "Help me. Help me find my father."

  “I have already told you—“

  "You told me these islands were your playground and you know them well. I expect your name and reputation are equally well known, whereas Captain Fitch was a stranger and therefore likely not to have been given any truthful answers on Fox Island, regardless who he asked. But you are... well... one of them. One of the pirate brethren and any questions you might ask would surely win a more honest answer."

  Gabriel shook his head. "My dear Mistress Chandler--"

  "Captain Dante, you asked me why I left Portsmouth to come on this wild goose chase. The truth of it is, I did not leave by choice. I left because I had no choice. Someone tried to kill me. Had I not escaped on the Eliza Jane, the killer would have tried again and very likely succeeded."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Her words hung in the air for a moment, twisting this way and that. While she might not have been expecting him to leap up in chivalrous outrage and tear out fistfuls of his hair, she wasn't expecting him to simply sit there unmoved, his expression unchanged. Was it because he didn't believe her, or because it was commonplace in this part of the world for people to kill one other?

  His chair squeaked as he leaned forward and refilled his goblet. After a moment's thought, he filled a second one and slid it toward her.

  "Someone tried to kill you? That's rather a bold declaration."

  "Nonetheless, true. I was shot. I can show you the scar if you do not believe me."

  Dante's gaze roved down the slender length of her body at the same leisurely speed his thumb followed a bead of wine that dribbled down the outside of his goblet. "In due time, perhaps. Do you know who shot you? Or why?"

  Her nod was supplemented by a whispered, "Yes I know who, and yes, I think I know why. Or at least... I'm fairly certain I know why."

  ~~

  Every room in the house was a shambles. Furniture was broken, the cushions cut and torn apart. Books were pulled off the shelves, the bindings ripped and the pages scattered. Her bedroom had been completely destroyed, feathers laying about like snow from the mattress and pillows. Curtains had been torn from the windows, her writing desk smashed to bits, even the heels had been broken off her shoes. It was not a simple robbery, nor had the intruder taken the trouble to make it look like one. The small box that held her jewels had been upended, the contents thrown on the floor and left there, crushed under heavy boots.

  At first she could think of no reason why anyone would ransack the house top to bottom. But then a feeling came over her, an icy hand that scraped down her spine and pushed her toward the fireplace in her bedchamber. Trembling fingers touched the loose stone cherub. It scraped open, revealing the secret compartment inside, the one she had found as a child and still used to hold her most precious belongings. The letters from her father were there, along with a small brass box containing several dozen wax disks.

  She removed the letters and the box and clutched them to her breast. Her relief in finding them was short-lived, however, for a moment later she became aware of the soft tread of a boot behind her. H
er back was to the door and she did not see him as he came into the room. But she felt him. She felt the quality of the air change, become thicker, blacker somehow. The mad rushing in her ears, the pounding of her heart almost took her to her knees as she heard the distinct snick of a flintlock pistol being cocked into the firing position.

  ~~

  "Mistress Chandler?"

  She looked up and realized that Gabriel Dante was waiting for her to expand on her answer. The question was: how much should she tell him? How much could she trust him?

  The ability to trust or be trusted is in the eyes, always in the eyes. Her father’s words, but they were hardly comforting now. Dante's eyes were rather daunting and completely inscrutable. The color was not quite brown, not quite green, but an unusual blending of both, like tarnished gold. They were always watchful, always alert, belonging to a man who had lived too long with danger to ever completely drop his guard.

  At the same time, they were clear and direct, they did not flick away or cut slyly side to side as if he was calculating the next lie to tell. Moreover, he had risked his life to bring her on board, and he had risked the wrath of a potentially mutinous crew to lock himself away with her in his cabin. He was still a pirate and she could not afford to forget that, regardless how civilized he appeared to be. But if she wanted his help to find her father...?

  "Mistress Chandler? As I said before, we are going to be together for some time. You can either tell me what has you all tied up in knots... or not. The choice is yours. But it has been a very long day and I've not had the luxury of a twelve hour nap."

  Hoping she would not live to regret her decision, Eva reached up and unfastened the chain from around her neck. She let the silver links spill between her fingers and pool in her palm before settling the locket on top and reaching over to offer it to Dante.

  He looked at the locket, then back up into her face.

  "Take it," she said softly. “Open it.”

  The chair protested as he leaned forward and took the locket out of her hand. He tilted it toward the lamplight and turned it over his fingers, noting the scrolled initial, E, that he had seen before. Locating the tiny indent on the side, he flicked the halves apart with a thumbnail. Unsure of what he expected, to see—a tiny painted portrait or a precious curl of hair—he was moderately surprised to see a coin. A Spanish escudo to be precise.

  He started to lift his free hand in a gesture of confusion but then his gaze flew back down and he stared hard at the small silver coin. After a moment, he drew the oil lamp closer and turned the wick brighter, slanting the coin this way and that in the light, inspecting every tiny detail.

  "Where did you get this?"

  "It was in the packet of letters my father sent me,” she said quietly. “It came a year after he sailed on the Gull."

  "Just so? He put the coin into a letter and sent it to you?"

  "Not exactly. It was on the letter, not in it. But I think it was deliberate. He knew I, alone, would find it."

  "Explain."

  Eva moistened her lips. "When I was a little girl, Father would send letters back from wherever his business ventures took him, mostly to France and Italy and the Netherlands. He would seal them with discs of wax and when he discovered that I carefully peeled off the discs and saved them, he started sending them in various colors and shapes, some with fancy designs pressed into the wax. The seals that came on the letters he sent from the Indies were thick and bold. Three peeled off with no trouble; the fourth cracked against the knife as I tried to take it off."

  "The coin was inside?"

  Eva nodded. "At first I thought it was part of the game, for he was always testing me with riddles and hiding messages inside of messages. I broke the other three disks, found three more coins, and thought myself very clever for having found them. There again, he had always sent little trinkets or coins home when he was away, so I thought nothing of it and simply tossed them into a drawer and all but forgot about them."

  Dante was still studying the coin, but when she stopped talking, he glanced up. "What made you think of them again?"

  "As you can imagine, when the one year absence stretched into two, then three without any further word, I kept reading and re-reading his letters. Seeing his handwriting was the closest thing to contact that I had, and it kept me believing that he was still alive. In the last letter he wrote, his words and thoughts seemed to be more scattered. He mentioned the ancient Greek poem Argonautica and Jason's quest for the golden fleece. It was as if he was trying to tell me something but not saying it outright. I tried every trick I could think of, every cipher we had used in the past, even waded through the wretched poem in Latin, no less. Nothing really fell together until I remembered the coins and thought perhaps the clue was there; that the key to his message might be in the coins.”

  Dante held the open locket in his hand with the chain draped over his long, blunt-tipped fingers. He used the point of a jewelled dagger to pry the escudo free and flip it onto the desk. “Go on. What did you find out about them?”

  “The year the coins were minted is clearly stamped: 1586. Beyond that I wasn't sure what all the markings meant."

  “Did you show them to anyone else?”

  She answered with a troubled nod. “I needed help from someone who could access the naval records.”

  "Go on. What were you told about the coins?"

  Eva's eyes showed a spark of eagerness for the first time. "According to the markings and the year it was minted, the escudos were part of a silver shipment placed on board a galleon that was lost at sea. The NSV on the face of the coin identified the ship as the Nuestra Senora de Valencera. It was wrecked in a storm that year on its voyage home to Spain."

  Dante took a slow sip of wine as he studied the flush in Eva's cheeks and the rather remarkable shade of green that her eyes took on when she was excited. It took no special powers of perception to guess that she believed her father had discovered a shipwrecked galleon with a cargo bay full of silver coins.

  The problem, of course, was that everyone thought they were in possession of secret maps showing the location of a sunken galleon, or heard tell of a hiding place where someone had buried chests of gold and silver. If even a hundredth of those maps or rumors were actually true most of the islands in the Carribee would have sunk long ago under the weight of all that buried gold.

  Dante ran his thumb over the surface of the coin and studied it again. The escudo itself looked genuine enough. The silver was pitted from being tossed in the surf and sand and as he identified each marking and stamp, he shared them aloud.

  "It was indeed minted in 1586,” he said slowly. “The P with the shield and cross tells us it was mined in Peru—in Potosi to be precise. The symbol next to it—" he waited until she walked around behind the desk and leaned over his shoulder to see it in the brighter light— "is the mark from the mint in Nombre de Dios, and this tiny nick on the edge is no accident. It was put there by the clerk in charge of counting every coin that left Panama bound for Hispaniola. This little beauty went on quite a trek down from the Andes and through the jungles of Panama before it ended up in the hold of a galleon bound for Spain."

  Her mouth was an inch from his ear, close enough for her breath to tickle his cheek as she spoke. "Then you believe it's real?"

  "Oh, it's real all right. It was part of the last shipment of bullion bound for Seville to finance the armada Phillip was amassing to attack England. But I'll stake my soul it didn't come from the hold of the Nuestra Senora de Valencera."

  "But I was told—"

  "You were told wrong. Deliberately so, I imagine."

  Eva straightened, taking the rush of warm breathiness with her. "I was shown a copy of the records. There was a galleon by that name lost in a storm in 1586."

  "No doubt there was. The storm... the hurricane you refer to took at least twenty ships down that year. I'm familiar with it because it was the same year and the same storm that drove my father's first ship onto a c
oral reef and damn near sank her with all hands. As it was, he and his crew were stranded on an island for six months before he could make repairs. And because he was stranded for those six months, he was not with Sir Francis Drake when Cartagena and Santo Domingo were sacked, two incredible feats unmatched to this day. I say that only to add to the reasons why someone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of ships and shipping legends would have cause to recall the events of that year. And if someone told you it was the Nuestra Senora de Valencera, he most likely had reasons for not telling you the absolute truth."

  "But… why would anyone do such a thing?" she asked softly. "And how can you say with such rich authority that this coin did not come from that particular ship?"

  Gabriel half-turned in the chair, inherently wary of women with sharp little teeth and nails who had just been told they had been deceived.

  "The Spaniards have limited imaginations when christening their ships and most are named after saints or holy prayers, even some noteworthy sinners whose names vary only by a letter or two. However, not all of them are treasure galleons. The Nuestra Senora de Valencera, for instance, was likely an India Guard. An escort ship, if you will. Small, fast, heavily armed as a deterrent for blackguards like myself who might try to nose up too close and cull one of the fat prizes from the fleet. She would have carried soldiers and guns, not gold or silver, but she was certainly not important enough to have coins minted with her name stamped on them."

  She was studying his face, trying to decide if he was being truthful with her or not. It also told him that she was genuinely unaware of the value of what she wore so casually around her neck.

  "There was another ship lost that year. One with the same initials: NSV. Anyone worth their weight in salt water should have known the name without having to 'search' any records. The Nuestro Santisimo Victorio was one of the largest treasure ships ever built. She disappeared in that same storm with all hands and a belly full of cargo reputed to be worth more than the crown jewels of England and Spain combined.