Pirate Wolf Trilogy

by Canham, Marsha

  “I understand you have seen military duty.”

  “I served in the army for nine years.”

  “You must have purchased your commission young.”

  “I was sixteen. I had two older brothers who was more interested in business and family affairs. The army offered a handy escape.”

  “Your brothers?”

  “The eldest, Richard, died almost five years ago. Lawrence was killed in a duel.”

  “Which elevated you to your current status as duke? Yet it would appear you have remained in the king’s service.”

  Varian shrugged. “There were power struggles within the court, it seemed a poor time to show a lack of loyalty when the wolves were circling.”

  “Loyalty is an admirable quality in any man, regardless of the reasons,” Pitt said. “You must have excelled at your post to have found yourself promoted to captain of the royal guard so young.”

  “I excelled in stupidity, if anything. I was handed a note one day warning of a plot to blow up the king when he opened parliament the next day. I charged full bore ahead, searched the cellars, found the culprit, and tore the lit fuse out of the cask with only inches to spare.”

  Dante laughed. “No wonder the king has an aversion to parliament now. Yet I doubt your post was given solely as a reward for plucking a fuse out of a cask of gunpowder. Old Gloriana had a keen eye for young gladiators as well. She could have ten bull-necked wrestlers stand before her and unerringly pick out the one with enough fire in his eye to win the match. Furthermore, anyone who can impress my son with his swordsmanship—you must show me this move he goes on about—does not wear a captain’s uniform only because he is pretty. Nor is he entrusted to sail several thousand leagues to persuade a few dozen pirates to lay down their arms if he has not earned the trust and respect of his peers. Trust, I might add, that seems well placed, for you hold your own council well. I have a thought that you would be a formidable adversary in a game of chess. But enough flattery. Tell me about this king. What is the climate of the country with a Scottish monarch on the throne?”

  “I warrant the people would prefer him over a Spaniard,” Varian said quietly.

  Dante smiled. “And you, sir. What would you prefer?”

  “I would prefer not to be put in the position of having to choose.”

  The piercing silver eyes narrowed. “Either would I. So we’ll leave England to it’s fate, shall we? You can return to London boasting that you met the pirate wolf and with diligent and daunting conviction, persuaded him to keep the peace. I, meanwhile, having been warned of the overwhelming odds against us, and threatened with the consequences of disobeying the king’s edict, will keep my ships in port and let the richest treasure fleet in a decade leave Havana unmolested.”

  Varian felt the knot in his chest grow tighter. Looking into Simon Dante’s eyes was like looking into a world of salt and sea spray, of endless horizons and booming canvas, of smoking cannon and bloodcurdling violence. He could only guess what kind of fortitude, cunning, and intelligence a man needed to survive for thirty years in the middle of the most dangerous waters on earth, but he could say with absolute certainty that neither cowardice nor caution had played any part in shaping his destiny.

  “If there was another choice to be made,” he asked quietly, “what would it be?”

  Dante’s eyes gleamed. “The way I see it, we have but two options. We do nothing, or we attempt to do something. The nothing part is easy, it’s the ‘something’ that cannot be entered into lightly and might require more than some of us are prepared to give.”

  “If you are trying to alarm me,” Varian said, “you are succeeding.”

  “Good. Only a stupid man jumps off a cliff without looking first.”

  Pitt had crossed the room and was gazing up at the map of England. “The logical and practical thing to do is to send you home with all due haste, your grace, armed with as much proof as we can give you against Spain’s duplicity. It would then fall to you to convince the admiralty that Spain has no intentions of keeping the peace. Quite the opposite: It has every intention of mounting another invasion fleet and declaring open war.” He paused and glanced briefly over his shoulder. “Forgive me if I repeat myself, but it helps when I am thinking aloud.” He turned back to the map. “At best, a fast ship in perfect weather with strong north easterly winds would take five weeks to cross the Atlantic. Once it arrived in London, any letters or documentation would have to be studied and interpreted by twenty wise, bewigged councilors who would then have to argue and debate the wisdom of trusting the word of a handful of filibusters who, it would be further argued, might well have written the documents themselves in order to justify their own guerre de course.

  "Depending on your powers of persuasion, your grace, there might be some canny admiral who might... and I say might dispatch a ship to spy along the coast of Spain, but that is highly doubtful—no insult against your integrity intended. I am sure you would argue long and hard and be quite passionate in your convictions. Nonetheless, the royal council chambers are filled with old men. We have a king who has been more engrossed with commissioning a new version the bible than he has the state of his navy and army. He will hesitate and cavil and unless he has more evidence than a few letters from a disgruntled cook in Nombre de Dios, he will pat you on the head and thank you for your observations, then send you out to your country estate to shoot pheasant.

  “Meanwhile, the Havana fleet will sail. It will arrive in Cadiz unmolested, adding roughly forty warships the size of the Santo Domingo and few dozen refitted galleons from the India Guard to their armada. They will then have the winter to prepare, to send flowery messages of harmony and good will to London, and in the spring they will launch a fleet full of the sons and nephews of the noble officers and valiant soldiers who died in the first failed attempt at invasion. They will sail with vengeance in their hearts, bolstered by the knowledge that England will not have a formidable force of privateers to come to her defence this time because we have all been commanded to keep the peace.”

  “You paint a rather bleak picture,” Varian said.

  “Can you find fault with it?”

  In truth, he could not. The king had been flattered and puffed up with self-importance when the Spanish ambassador had begun discussing the possibility of opening the Indies ports to legal trade with England, and, being a Scot, it would require more than thirty barrels of gunpowder positioned under his arse before he would acknowledge the possibility he had been duped.

  “There is another option,” Dante said quietly, dragging Varian’s thoughts away from the royal council chambers. “It would demand a tremendous leap of faith on your part, and would likely result in charges of treason, sedition, and piracy. It would also require ballocks the size of thirty-two pound iron shot.”

  Varian stared into the unwavering silver eyes. The silence in the room was so thick, he could hear the muted hiss of the candles burning on the desk and the distant ringing of a ship’s bell somewhere out in the harbor.

  “You certainly know how to gain a man’s attention, Captain.”

  Dante acknowledged the compliment with a slow grin. “I haven’t even fired my heavy guns yet.”

  He crossed the room and pointed to the map of the West Indies, specifically to a cluster of dots just south of the Baja Mas chain of islands and spine-chillingly close to Hispaniola. “We’re here, on Pigeon Cay. Scattered to the south and the east are more than a score of islands and harbors that serve as home ports for—” he hesitated over the wording a moment— “similar-minded gentlemen of misadventure. As you can imagine, the departure of the plate fleets in the spring and fall draw a certain amount of interest from these gentlemen and on average, we could expect ten, maybe fifteen captains to rendezvous at New Providence. The flota is due to leave Havana within the next four to six weeks. If we act swiftly, we can dispatch our own small fleet of pinnaces to the neighboring islands and ports, and, if we offer the proper incentive, we could eas
ily rouse the interest of thirty, perhaps even forty captains curious enough to hear what you have to say to them at New Providence.”

  “What I have to say?”

  Pitt walked past, clapping Varian on the shoulder. “You are the king’s emissary, are you not? You brought documents stamped with the royal seal offering all privateers amnesty in exchange for keeping the peace, did you not? Well... we shall simply reword those documents to offer them full pardon as well as claim to full shares of the profits for every ship they capture or sink or otherwise deter from reaching Spain.”

  Varian’s jaw went slack.

  “Half of them cannot read anyway,” Dante said, “so all you will have to do is brandish a scroll over their heads that looks official. The other half are noblemen who may have taken a turn down the wrong path at some time, but who are still staunchly loyal to king and country. We’ll have to fetch you some fine ducal clothes and put a curl in your hair, but my daughter assures me you are the very image of a royal envoy when there is silvered lace at your throat and a purple plume in your hat.”

  “But... I have no such decree, nothing that even bears the royal seal.”

  Pitt smiled and tipped an eye at the painted murals. “You will. And it will look authentic enough the king would think he wrote it in his own hand.”

  “More importantly,” Dante added, “you will have us standing behind you. Knowing the Dantes are committed, the captains will believe it and will join the enterprise if only to ensure they get their fair share of the prize. To that end, I can say with all honesty that unleashing thirty privateers on a fleet of treasure ships—especially if they are not burdened with the guilt of altering manifests to match the ten percent share they apportion to the crown—would produce the same results as throwing a handful of gold coins before a crowd of beggars.”

  “Can we not just tell them the truth? That Spain is planning another invasion and England needs their help?”

  “The same England that has threatened to declare them pirates and placed bounties on their heads? The same England that turns a blind eye when one of their ships is captured and the crew is forced to work as slaves in their mines? The same England,” he added quietly, “that let the last fleet of privateers who came to their rescue starve and die by the hundreds from typhus and fever on stinking ships anchored in the Thames? Have you ever been tarred and feathered, your grace?”

  Varian flushed. He had been barely three years of age when Sir Francis Drake rallied England’s seahawks to defend her coast against the last ‘invincible’ armada, but he remembered that many of the stories of tremendous victory had been clouded by the treatment of the crews afterward. They were forced to remain in port for months, unpaid, poorly provisioned, forbidden to go ashore. Hundreds of brave men starved and died of disease and when the crown eventually did pay them for their services, it was not one fifth of what they had been promised. To add insult to injury, the queen blamed Drake for failing to pursue the fleeing Spaniards, and in the end, he fell badly out of favor and was forced to retire in disgrace and near poverty.

  “The name and legend of El Draque still causes grown men to tremble here in the Indies,” Simon remarked dryly. “I thought him a bit of a blowfish, myself, but there is no arguing his successes against the Spanish. Sprinkle his name wisely amongst the rhetoric and you give rise to the spectre of glory and victory again.”

  “Thirty ships against a hundred are still improbable odds, Captain.”

  “Indeed they are. That is why we will have to work swiftly to improve them somewhat.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Spaniards are arrogant and because of their arrogance, they resist change. Not only do they continue to send their treasure fleets back and forth twice a year on a regular schedule, but their point of disembarkation, their route, the method of protecting them has not changed in over a century. Their fighting tactics are predictable as well, for there is only one sure way for vessels that are top-heavy and square-rigged to gain the advantage, and that is to stand off and pound an enemy with their guns, then close and depend on their soldiers to carry the battle. That is why more than half a galleon’s compliment is made up of troops who wouldn’t know a knot of speed from a knot in a rope. For the same reason, their command is split. There is a capitán de mar who oversees the mariners, and a capitán del navio who commands the soldiers and in battle, commands the entire ship. Most of the time, neither one knows anything about the other’s job, thus there is always a certain amount of confusion on board—more so if the two commanders dislike one another and turn the whole thing into a power pissing match. More rum?”

  Varian looked down at his glass, surprised to see it was empty. “Please.”

  After the men replenished their drinks, Dante tipped his head by way of inviting Varian over to the topographical table. He took a taper from the mantel and lit it off one of the candles on the desk, then touched the flame to the multi-tined candelabra mounted on each corner of the table. The candles there were framed by curved sheets of polished metal, which focussed all of the light down onto the tabletop. The effect threw shadows behind the mountain ranges and gave an even more realistic sense of depth to the islands and channels.

  Pitt, meanwhile, had reached under the table and produced a handful of small, carved replicas of galleons. He started placing ships in ports located all around the table, naming them off as he went, setting particularly heavy clusters at the two main ports of Vera Cruz and Nombre de Dios.

  “Some time over the next four weeks, all of these ships will be leaving port—” he pointed across the table— “and making for Havana.”

  Varian watched with interest as Pitt and Dante began moving the carved ships out into the open water of the gulf, aiming them by squadrons in the direction of Havana. At one point he saw another movement out of the corner of his eye and glanced over at the door in time to see Juliet slip inside the room. She did not approach the brightly lit table, but remained back in the shadows and stood with her shoulders leaning against the wall.

  “The Dutch like to hunt here,” Pitt said, placing a ship that had been painted green off the islands marked Little Antilles. A blue ship denoting French privateers was positioned west of the Caribbee Isles and a third ship, painted red, was tucked into the Baja Mas Islands. “The French are determined to take possession of the southern Caribbee, so they concentrate their efforts there, whereas the English favor the Straits of Florida, where the galleons catch the gulf currents and begin their run out to the Atlantic. As long as we all have one common, rich enemy—the Spanish—there is a certain degree of polite civility between the various nationalities. This is not to say that a Dutchman would not blast a Frenchman out of the water if the opportunity presented itself, but as a general rule, we exchange information when it is to our mutual advantage to do so.”

  “For instance, if our brethren to the south and west were to be told about the increased numbers of treasure ships bound for Havana,” Dante said, “they would happily embark on a feeding frenzy of their own. If they are even modestly successful, word of the attacks will spread through the rest of the fleet and rattle the almirante’s composure before his ships even leave port.”

  “The Spanish are predictable in another way.” Pitt was still maneuvering his vessels toward the port of Havana, lining them up in an orderly procession facing north. “They like to place their most formidable warships out in front, scattering galleons of a lesser size and firepower down each flank, then bringing up the rear with more heavy ships. The treasure ships are here,” he pointed, “in the middle. A fleet this size will take at least two days to clear the port. Because of prevailing winds and currents at this time of year, it will become strung out over twenty leagues or more until the rear guard, acting like dogs herding sheep, can bring all the stragglers up into formation. Once the fleet achieves that final formation, they are nearly impregnable which is why, once they are out in the open water of the Atlantic, only a fool with a death wi
sh would attempt an attack. But here—” he touched a long, tapered finger on the port of Havana and traced it along the passage that ran between the eastern coast of Florida and the Baja Mas Islands. “Here, in the Straits, is where they are the most vulnerable, for there are hundreds of low, sandy cays to hide behind. The strongest currents run through this area and few ships of any size are able to put about once they are committed. All an enterprising captain need do is lie in wait until a comely bitch passes by, then come up fast and attack from behind.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “Do I? If I have given you that impression, pray strike it instantly from your mind. The conditions in the Strait are the same for the predator as for the prey, and while I grant you our ships are lighter and faster and have the distinct advantage in maneuverability, they do not turn on a nod. If we miss on the first pass, it could take an hour or more to regain the weather gauge and by then, the element of surprise is gone and the galleon’s guns are primed and waiting.”