“How can you not understand? I have shown you in a thousand ways since we were children that you were mine.”
She recognized the truth of what he said, realized also the protection of her willful blindness. “You — you are my brother.”
“No more am I, nor ever was!” He moved toward her with the springing steel of a swordsman in his step, and the expression rising slowly behind his eyes made the blood congeal in her veins.
“Valcour—” she breathed as she retreated.
“I am Valcour Murat, no brother of yours, no sibling, no safe relative. I am the man who watched you grow, watched you turn from a green girl into a woman ripe for plucking. You allowed another man to rob me of the first sweet fruit, a betrayal for which you must and shall feel the pain of punishment.”
She moistened dry lips. “I told you I could not prevent it. If you had not—”
“Not that again,” he cut viciously through her words. “The first folly was yours, my dear Félicité.” He picked up her wooden-backed hairbrush from the washstand where she had left it without slowing his advance.
“This — this is madness.” She flung a glance at the door, but he had maneuvered so that a quick lunge could cut her off the instant she made any movement toward it. She could scream, but if anyone came would they help, or would they be more likely to hold her spread-eagled while they waited their turn?
“But such a pleasurable insanity. How many times have I thought of this, of laying you across my knees face down, of throwing your skirts above your head, and while you squirm and cry for mercy, bringing the flat of my hand down upon the soft and tender whiteness of your derriére, leaving its imprint there like a brand? Instead of skirts, now you wear breeches to be pushed down around your ankles, but the final results will be the same.”
With abrupt decision, he discarded the hairbrush, tossing it onto the bunk. As Félicité’s attention was diverted by that movement, he swooped, jerking her toward him so that she stumbled and fell across him as he threw himself onto the bunk.
An exultant, uncontrolled laugh burst from his throat. His fingers dug into her, gouging muscles, paralyzing nerves so that she gasped in pain, twisting and turning with all the wretched weakness of a gaffed fish. His hand came down in a stinging, stunning blow upon her backside. As she stiffened, he reached for the buttons that held her breeches.
Above the sound of the blood drumming in her ears and her own difficult gasping for breath as she kicked and struggled, she did not hear the door open. Without warning Ashanti was there carrying a tray from which rose scalding steam.
“Your chocolate, M’sieu, Valcour,” came her quiet voice that held within it the essence of a threat.
Valcour went still, poised under the sudden danger of scalding liquid held inches from his face. Félicité scrambled from his lap, crouching on her knees on the heaving floor. Ashanti swayed slightly with the movement of the ship, the steam from the open tin pot rising in white, wavering eddies. The strain of the moment lengthened with twanging tautness, then Valcour reached for the nearest of the cups beside the pot.
“How very enterprising of you,” he said, snarling vindictiveness in his yellow-brown eyes as he watched the maid. “I won’t forget.”
Ashanti did not make the mistake of attempting an answer. Her movements deft, she poured chocolate into the cup he held, then filled one for Félicité and handed it to her. “There will be no chocolate tomorrow,” she said, her voice prosaic. “They slaughtered the cow this morning. Will you have breakfast now, mam’selle, m’sieu?”
“We — may as well,” Félicité agreed, recovering her aplomb with an effort.
“And then,” Valcour said, watching with malevolent closeness as Ashanti parceled out the last of the chocolate into her own cup, “you can go while we bring our business to a — satisfactory conclusion.”
Again Ashanti did not reply, only sending Valcour a long glance, her face smooth, dispassionate, as she watched him swallow a long draft of his chocolate in his anxiety to have done with it. She proffered a dry biscuit. He took it, bit into it, and drank once more.
Félicité grew slowly aware of an undercurrent of expectancy that had nothing to do with Valcour’s threats. She ate her meal, sipping from her cup. She looked at Ashanti, sedately lifting her own chocolate to her lips. Valcour drained his and flung the cup down with a disdainful flip of his wrist. He glanced at Félicité, then turned his gaze to the maid.
Uneasiness washed over his face. The blood receded from under his skin, leaving it tinged with yellow. Globules of perspiration burst from his pores. He swallowed, then swallowed again. He started up, cracking his skull against the overhead bunk. Swaying, with blood starting from a cut on his brow, he raised a hand to his throat, tearing at his ruffles.
“For the love of God,” he gasped, his wild gaze on Ashanti. “You’ve poisoned me!” He stumbled forward a step, then bolted for the door.
Valcour did not die. For the remainder of the day he hung from the after rail, giving up gall and bile into the sea, or else lay moaning, moistly pale, clutching his belly and muttering curses. The maid refused to help him. There was no antidote, she said with serene contempt.
Nor did the crew seem overly concerned. They eyed him now and then with a certain rude disdain, bawling obscenities at each other with leers and winks, and taking wagers on when they would be able to see his guts. The general consensus was that he would cast up a final accounting by eight bells of the afternoon watch, as night came down to buss the blue water.
Those who thought it was a sure thing lost their money. It was Captain Bonhomme who, with an offering of watered rum, effected the change. Moments after Valcour had drunk it down, he was upon his feet, staggering toward the head of the ship, bent over against the gripping in his bowels. There in that traditional shipboard ocean wide latrine, perched precariously on the braces of the bowsprit where the ship’s plunging into the waves would wash away the excrement, pawing at the forechains and screened by breast-high bulwarks, he stayed for the better part of the night.
The morning dawned red with a heavy swale. The wind had swung around so that they ran free before it with all sails set and straining. Toward noon, a lug topsail, patched and yellowed, split with a crack like lightning. The pirate crew swarmed aloft to take it down and spread another, but when it was done, they stood on the deck, quartering the horizon with their eyes. A sage comment or two was passed about a falling glass, the dread word “hurricane” was whispered from lip to lip, and a dark, wild-eyed Portuguese in a stocking cap was seen to cross himself. A growling reference was made to the Negro wench; it was bad luck, they said, to have a woman of any color aboard. The best thing they could do would be stretch her out upon the deck, and when they were through with her, throw her overboard. There was some mention of Valcour’s name, but as one wag pointed out, that mincing devil was in no shape to use her, or by God’s blood, to object if they did. None seemed ready to act, however.
It seemed best for Ashanti to stay out of sight. Félicité, after she had carried the warning below, was inclined to do the same, though she also took up Valcour’s sword from where he had left it the morning before, since he had not returned to the cabin, preferring to hang a hammock in the captain’s quarters, well out of Ashanti’s reach. Félicité strapped the blade around her, and felt if not better, at least better prepared.
At dusk of the third day out, the wind shifted once more, coming out of the southeast, blowing in an autumn gale. They shortened sail and rigged stormlines, swinging to skip before it. The ship pitched like a wild thing, flinging itself into the night-black maw of the storm. Lightning danced over the dark water with a terrible beauty. Thunder roared like the lions of hell, and the rain came down. It lashed them in wavering, wind-kicked shrouds, pouring across the decks, washing stench and noisome debris from the scuppers. The seas churned, rising to leviathan heights, spilling over the decks to add the tang of salt to the drubbing rain. It beat itself into valleys and
mountains of water topped with foam. The hammering winds sent the scud flying, and seemed likely to bat the ship from the towering crests. League after league they ran with the tempest, holding the outer edge of its fury. Off course, they plunged onward, driven and harried like a mouse before a tiger, praying for clear seas without reef or shoal.
The timbers of the ship groaned and snapped in torment. The single storm lantern in the cabin, turned low, swung in dizzying circles. Félicité and Ashanti were not greatly affected by seasickness, as many were, even the hardened sailors, most likely because of the herb they chewed. Still, they stayed strapped in their bunks. To wander about was to invite broken bones in the pitching dimness as the ship wallowed and dived like a bottle cork in the waves. Through the bulkhead they could hear Valcour groaning, but could not go to him even if he would have accepted their help. Whether the sailors realized Ashanti was responsible for his illness, or whether they were kept too busy by the storm, no more was heard of accosting her. From the strange looks the men had given her before the weather worsened, she thought they half expected the young gentleman sharing Ashanti’s cabin to begin to share the same symptoms. They were admiring, intrigued, and perhaps consoled when she did not.
It occurred to Félicité as she lay staring at the swaying lantern to wonder why, if Ashanti could save her from Valcour, she had not performed the same service against Morgan. The answer was simple. Though she regretted the violence of Félicité’s initiation, the maid had not been dissatisfied with the man who had accomplished it.
The gray light of morning brought no surcease. Vindictive and frustrated, the storm harassed them through the day and into the endless Stygian welter of the third night.
There came a day of heaving seas and close-huddled horizons. They had lost a topmast, were dragging a sheet anchor, and were taking on water in a thousand oozing, pitchless leaks that caused the pumps to be manned around the clock. But they were as jauntily afloat as the bung from a wine barrel. A fire was started in the brick-lined firepit that had been allowed to go out during the rough seas, and all hands gathered around for a hot meal and a tot of rum before setting to work in earnest on tangled cordage, open seams, and sodden sail.
Valcour, it was reported, was able to take a little boiled beef and broth. Nighttime brought a rift in the clouds that permitted pulsing starlight to shimmer down over the water. The captain hurried top-side with his sextant. Taking a reading, he discovered they were not so far off their charted course as might be imagined, thanks to a graciously veering wind, and so they sailed on.
Félicité stood at the railing with her face turned to the warm and humid breeze. In waistcoat and shirtsleeves, she was still a little overheated. There was a trickle of perspiration between her shoulders and around her hairline, but it seemed best to go no further in her accommodation to the weather. She had just finished her turn at the pumps. As soon as she had rested from her exertions, she would be all right.
No one had ordered her to fall in and lend a hand. It had been the sidelong glances of sullen resentment that decided her. As the youth she appeared, fresh-faced, callow, and not above fifteen, little was actually expected of her, and yet it seemed best to appear willing.
“Wind-blown, rose-tinted of cheek, and in a pensive mood. Forgive me, young François, but you are too pretty to be a boy.”
Félicité turned to face Captain Bonhomme. Drawing on a pretense of affront to keep the alarm from her features, she fingered the hilt of Valcour’s sword. “I shall change, I’m sure.”
“Don’t, pray, draw steel against me! I meant no insult, and I am far too gone in fatigue from the last few days to fight you.”
His words were accompanied by a penetrating glance that did nothing to allay her fears. She had caught him watching her more than once since the storm, and could not help wondering if Valcour, still sharing his quarters, had taken the man into his confidence, or else let fall something in delirium. She looked away over the ink-blue water. “I’m sure you are a fine swordsman, M’sieu le Capitaine. Doubtless you could give me pointers if it so pleased you.”
The captain lifted his shoulders with Gallic eloquence. A trace of derision was in his tone as he replied. “There may have been a time. No more.”
“And yet you lead these men.” She nodded over her shoulder at the men sprawled on deck, those not on the watch engaged in sleeping, fishing, splicing rope, or busily scraping at whale’s teeth.
“Shall I tell you how I came to be a buccaneer, in the hope that you will confide the tale of why you are on the Raven clutching at the coattails of Valcour Murat? It is soon done. A younger son without a sou to my name, I became a mousquetaire at court through influence. There I caught the eye of the young wife of an old and rich nobleman. Merrily and often, I put the horns of a cuckold on his forehead, even to the point of making my bastard his heir. He noticed, finally, what was making his wife as happy as a singing cricket. Rather than trounce me in a public admission of his lackluster performance as a husband, something he was by no means certain he could manage, he arranged for a lettre de cachet. As you may know, such pieces of paper carry the authority of the king condemning the person named to be taken on sight and clapped into the darkest depths of the Bastille without hope of trial. I am not a man who craves to be forgotten, nor do I bear any resemblance to a mole. Warned by my mistress, I left Paris ahead of the gendarmes. The West Indies seemed a healthier section of the world. But having made my way here, I found myself cast onto these sandy shores without the means to sustain myself.”
“A most romantic tale,” Félicité commented.
He sent her a swift glance. “Isn’t it? A bit more, and I am done. As a boy, I had spent a number of summers at my father’s chateau on the coast of Normandy, where I went out with the fishing fleet. From those hardy men I learned the art of dead reckoning and something of sailing. I also met a man who had once been a prisoner of the Arabs, and learned the uses of the astrolabe and sextant. It sometimes seems these things are meant to be. I became a pirate.”
Though the story was a bit glib and polished, there was still enough address in the captain’s manner for there to be some chance of it being true. “So you became the leader of a band of escaped felons, deserters from half the navies and armies of Europe, and lately, the men turned off from both now that England, France, and Spain are no longer at war. Regardless, you insist it is not fear that makes these men obey you, but respect for your knowledge of navigation?”
“When any group of men gather, there must be rules to govern their conduct, else they will be forever robbing and killing each other with little hope of making anything of themselves as a coalition, and with less of sleeping safe at night. In the hundred years and more that there have been corsairs in these waters, the rules that govern their acts and actions have become barnacled with tradition. Shall I recite them for you?”
She had nothing else to do, and it was better than standing alone, collecting stares. She gave a nod.
“Très bien. These then are the articles of agreement signed by the men who come aboard the Raven. One, every man has a vote in affairs of the moment, has equal title to the fresh provisions and strong liquor at any time seized, and may use them unless a scarcity makes it necessary for the good of all to vote a retrenchment. Two every man is to be called fairly in turn by list on board of prizes, because they are allowed a suit of clothes over and above their proper share. But if one defraud the company of the value of one dollar in plate, jewels, or money, the punishment is marooning. If robbery takes place between two crewmen, the guilty one shall have his nose and ears slit and be set ashore not on some inhabited place but where he shall surely suffer hardship. Three, no person shall game at cards or dice for money at sea. Four, the lights and candles shall be put out at eight o’clock at night. If any remain inclined for drinking, they shall do so on the open deck. Five, all shall keep their pistols and cutlasses clean and fit for service. Six, no women allowed. If any man be found carrying any of th
e sex to sea disguised, he is to suffer death—”
Félicité flung him a quick look. “Where does that leave Ashanti, my — the Negro maid?”
“For the moment, she is listed as a passenger and, like you, a dependent of Murat. Later, who knows? Of course, she is also not in disguise. Where was I? Ah, yes, article number seven. Desertion of the ship or quitting quarters in battle is to be punished by death or marooning. Eight, no striking another on board ship. Every man’s quarrel shall be ended on share with sword and pistol, one or both. Nine, no man shall talk of breaking up their way of living unless each has shared a thousand pounds of goods. If any man shall lose a limb or become cripple in the common service, he shall have eight hundred dollars out of the public stock, and for lesser hurts proportionally. Number ten, the captain and quartermaster shall receive two shares in a prize; the sailing master, boatswain, and gunner, one share and one half; other officers, one share and one quarter; sailors, one. In these few laws there is a code of honor of sorts, however hard you must look for it.”
“The quartermaster is Valcour, I know, but the Raven has the other officers you mentioned?”
“Most, yes, though I cannot blame you for not being able to pick them out from the others. As quartermaster, Murat is the voice of authority. He alone can order a flogging; according to Mosaic Law, forty lashes less one. And he is the first man to board a captured prize to make the decision of what will be set aside for the company’s use. In theory, the captain should be the military leader of the ship, with absolute power in time of chase or battle, while the sailing master should be in charge of navigation as well as the setting of canvas. In practice, I share my leadership with Valcour while I handle the lesser post as well. Sometime soon the crew may decide I am not worthy of the command and replace me. I shall not repine. The days of the buccaneers are numbered. Every year there are fewer ports, fewer places where we are welcome, more ships of the Spanish guarda de costas to chase us down, and more and better guns on the prizes we seek to capture. I have been lucky; I am still a whole man, if sometimes put on the rack by fevers. I have my sight, and my sanity, and now and then I think I have tried the patience of le bon Dieu long enough, forcing him to protect my miserable hide. It is time to end it.”
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