I knew then what I must do. I sought ye out, lad. I think I must have been half-mad, and may God forgive me, but I hoped to find ye to be the cursed swine I thought ye to be. Then I would somehow have tricked ye into challenging me. I wanted to kill ye, boy, but when I sat across the gaming table from ye and stared into gray eyes so much like the lady of the portrait’s, I could see only hers and I couldn’t destroy her son.
Of course, ye weren’t exactly what I had been expecting. Aye, ye were arrogant enough, but that was in your blood and the way ye’d been raised, so I couldn’t fault ye that. But I could plainly see that your drinking and whoring were getting the better of ye. Ye looked like ye was staring death in the face. I would’ve left ye to your fate, lad, except that I saw something in your eyes.
I saw regret and sadness, and that same, strange expression of longing that had been in your mother’s eyes. ’Tis a mystery still, the cause of that sadness, for she knew it well long before ye brought your share of heartache to her. But ye were her son, and she would have loved ye dearly, and for that reason alone, I took pity on ye that night.
I vowed that I would make a decent man of ye. Either that, or I’d see ye on the bottom of the sea. And truth be known, lad, I had my doubts those first months when your resentment and lack of spirit nearly cost ye your life.
But ye survived. She would have been proud of ye. I never had the honor of meeting the lady of the portrait, but I have loved her as I have loved no other. ’Twas madness, and I fear that it has been my downfall, for I have been content to live with but a dream these many years. Aye, I’ve played the mooncalf, but I’d not change one day of that devotion.
However, there is one thing I would have changed. It has made me little better than a blackguard, and most deserving of your scorn. I took advantage of my knowledge of ye and hid the portrait, never telling ye I owned it. I had convinced myself that I was doing it for your own good, that ye needed to suffer while wondering what had become of the portrait of your mother. I knew ye were desperate to recover the portrait, for I’d been back to that shop, thinking to purchase something else of the Lady Jacqobi’s. The shopkeeper told me ye’d been in, and that ye’d threatened him, but that he could tell ye nothing about me, not even my name. I knew then that ye’d been gambling just to get enough money to buy the portrait.
And so I have unjustly deprived ye of her comforting presence these long years of struggle, and I do now humbly beg your forgiveness. ’Twas wrong of me, lad, but we all have our weaknesses. Your mother has been mine. How many times have I cursed the fates for their cruel mischief-making!
I only wish that…well, that’s not to be now. I wanted ye to know the truth. I also wanted ye to know that I have come to think of ye as the son I never had. I could not have been prouder of my own flesh and blood. That is why I have left to you, Son, my share of the Perdita. She could have no finer a captain. I hope my partners in her will keep ye on as her master, but they’re a sorry lot of greedy merchants and may not be willing to risk their investment with a young captain at the helm. If so, then sell out and get yourself a ship of your own. Ye’ve got the makings of a fine captain, lad, on that I’d stake my reputation. Ye’ve got your share of the many prizes we’ve captured. ’Tis a small fortune ye’ve amassed. I know ye’ve not spent much of it, but for what purpose ye’ve been saving it, I’ve no knowledge. That be your business and not mine. But if I were ye, then I’d be usin’ it to buy that ship, and have it free and clear, with no meddling partners to interfere. Be your own master, lad.
But one last word of advice from a man who has seen too much misfortune caused by anger and pride. Ye’ve become a good man. Ye be a decent man, with the respect of this crew. I cannot be faulting ye for being ruthless, for only the pitiless survives to sail into home port. While on board ship, ye’re duty bound to your crew to keep your ship afloat at all costs. But, lad, your inflexibility and determination, when not in battle, should be tempered with compassion.
I’ve come to fear that ye’re too unforgiving. Ye’ve survived these many years solely to avenge a wrong done ye. I cannot, in all honesty, blame ye for seeking a day of reckoning. I do worry, however, that your desire for vengeance has become an all-consuming fire. Beware, boy. ’Tis too often a sad truth that the price exacted of the person seeking revenge is far greater than the punishment meted out.
I have found that revenge is not so sweet and, indeed, can leave a terrible bitterness. Ye may lose more than ye win, remember that. And one final word of advice from an old sea dog. Don’t sail too close to the wind, or ye just might find yourself caught between the devil and the deep.
Have a care, lad,
Sedgewick Oliver Christopher
When the Perdita docked, and word of the captain’s death reached the privateer’s owners, the late captain had been proven correct about one of his worries. The Perdita found herself under command of another captain. Dante Leighton sold his share and, the money combined with most of his savings, purchased a sleek little two-masted brigantine just in from the colonies. He christened her Sea Dragon, and had the figurehead of a dragon fixed on the stem just beneath her bowsprit.
For her first voyage under her new master she had a well-seasoned crew, for many of the Perdita crew chose to sail with Dante. Cobbs, the bos’n, Norfolk bred, had figured it best to be sailing with a man trained by Captain Christopher. MacDonald, the Scots sailmaker, had helped make a sailor out of Dante and knew no one better to sail with. Trevelawny, the ship’s dour-faced Cornish carpenter, reckoned that Cobbs and MacDonald knew what they were about, and he had signed on with them.
There was one other individual who knew the captain well and was to be found aboard the Sea Dragon; however, he had a hard time finding his sea legs. During his first few months at sea, it seemed as if he never would. Never had there been so green-visaged a man as Houston Kirby, onetime footman at Merdraco, then personal valet to the old marquis himself, and finally house steward for Dante Leighton, the old marquis’s grandson and heir. That his master was captain of a ship, especially one called the Sea Dragon, meant an uncertain future for them both as far as its newest crew member was concerned.
For many years a loyal Houston Kirby had bided his time, fervently hoping that his lordship would tire of playing sailor. Alas, he had not, and Kirby had finally come to the unhappy realization that he would have to go to sea if he were to serve his young master again, a duty entrusted to him by the old marquis.
Kirby and his father and grandfather before him had not served the Leighton family through strife and turmoil to sit idly by while the last of the Leighton line did his damnedest to end up on the bottom of the sea. Remembering the hedonistic young lord that Dante once had been, trepidation had gripped Kirby as he determinedly climbed aboard the Sea Dragon one inhospitable night.
He had seen nothing of his young master for over eight years, and so could be forgiven for not at first recognizing the captain of the Sea Dragon. The bronze-skinned, broad-shouldered man who had courteously greeted him bore little resemblance to the pale, effete young aristocrat. And the gray eyes Kirby thought he remembered so well had become the impersonal, measuring gaze of a stranger. And as he had stood before the man he no longer knew, those gray eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and Kirby had shivered. He’d never seen so cold and calculating a stare. And strangely enough, he had known for a certainty that had he not measured up to Captain Dante Leighton’s unyielding standards, he would have been thrown overboard like so much bilge water being pumped into the sea.
There had been times during the following years, when cannon fire splintered the deck beside him, that Kirby had seriously doubted the wisdom of following his master to sea. He had come close to death too many times not to have wondered whether he and the captain would ever again see the towers of Merdraco.
He had not been at all displeased, therefore, when the Treaty of Paris was signed in ’63, and the hostilities between En
gland and France came to an end. He had been looking forward eagerly to returning to dry land. But only too quickly he discovered that the captain had quite different ideas for their future, and returning to England and a life of leisure on land had not been part of them.
Instead, the billowing sails of the Sea Dragon had caught a freshening offshore breeze while the captain ordered the helmsman to steer a southwesterly course. Soon the verdant, familiar shores of England disappeared over the horizon. A fortnight passed, and the Canary Islands fell astern as the Sea Dragon ran free before the northeast trades, their first landfall, Barbados.
A young Alastair Marlowe, now supercargo aboard the Sea Dragon, sailed with them. He had joined the crew rather abruptly one rainy night in Portsmouth two years earlier, and had Kirby been asked about that night, he would most likely have chuckled in remembrance of the fancy young gentleman being carried aboard by the captain. The unconscious beau’s velvet coat had been muddied beyond repair, and his fine silk stockings torn, and he had been sporting a nasty bruise on his forehead, the painful result of a cudgel swung by one of a press-gang. They had been attempting, and quite successfully until the captain interfered, to kidnap for service aboard one of His Majesty’s ships anyone clad in breeches who had been unfortunate enough to be walking the streets of Portsmouth.
As the younger son of a comfortably well-to-do country gentleman, the estate now in the hands of the firstborn son, Alastair Marlowe’s future had been anything but inspiring. If he had intended to keep his creditors at arm’s length, he would soon have had to become either a clergyman or a soldier, both proper occupations for down-at-heels gentlemen, but neither of which appealed to a young man starved for a bit of adventure and a decent income.
Only the captain of the Sea Dragon knew exactly why he had taken pity on a young gentleman in distress that night in Portsmouth. Generous displays of compassion were uncommon for Dante. But had anyone been so unwise as to question the captain’s offering a town seedling a berth aboard the Sea Dragon, Alastair would soon have silenced his doubts. He had quickly proven himself no stranger to hard work, and indeed had shown such a willingness to learn that many an old hand had halfheartedly grumbled about being made to look bad by comparison.
As the Sea Dragon followed a leisurely course north, her ultimate destination Charles Town, the bewitching West Indian sunsets and balmy breezes cast their spell over the crew, who still remembered only too vividly the gale force winds and crashing seas of the perilous North Atlantic. By the time they had sailed past the dense tropical forests and conical-shaped mountain peaks of Dominica, the Sea Dragon was shorthanded.
Barnaby Clarke, the Sea Dragon’s new quartermaster and a self-styled dandy out of Antigua, joined the crew in Jamaica. Longacres, the new coxswain and an old pirate with no first name and two missing front teeth, came aboard in New Providence. And Seumus Fitzsimmons, the first mate, a glib-tongued Irish colonial with revolutionary rhetoric, introduced himself to the captain in Charles Town.
Once, while lying at anchor in St. Kitts, the captain went ashore, returning a short while later accompanied by Conny Brady, the Sea Dragon’s cabin boy. Rumor had it that the captain had won the lad in a card game, winning him from the captain of a slaver who had treated the boy brutally. Kirby, had he so wished, could have confirmed the story about how the captain, after having witnessed the seven-year-old cabin boy’s unsuccessful attempt to jump ship in the Dutch free port of St. Eustatius, had sworn to rescue the lad from any future beatings, by fair means or foul.
The fact that the slaver had sailed to St. Kitts with the Sea Dragon, almost yardarm to yardarm, did little to dispel the story, especially because the Sea Dragon ought to have been bound for Jamaica. The story, which had spread quickly, as all good gossip does, had enhanced the growing mystique about the captain of the Sea Dragon. Here was a man compassionate enough to rescue a child, but also quite capable of blowing a ship out of the water.
And, of course, there was Jamaica, the ship’s cat, rescued from a weighted-down burlap sack thrown into a rain barrel in some back alley in Port Royal. Dante had been seen carrying the scruffy, flea-bitten tom aboard the Sea Dragon. Five years later, anyone catching sight of a big, sleek-coated tabby prowling the docks or sunning himself on the taffrail of the Sea Dragon would have had good reason to wonder about the chance of fortune that had allowed the smug-looking cat to lose one of his nine lives in order to live out the remaining eight as a cosseted ship’s mascot, a superstitious crew seeing to his every need.
The following years had found the Sea Dragon sailing with the prevailing winds as she smuggled goods between the Indies and the Carolinas. Unloading contraband cargo in coves along the wild shores, she managed to stay just out of reach of His Majesty’s well-armed frigates and sloops, which patrolled the coastline from Falmouth in the north to St. Augustine in the south.
One of her more passionate adversaries had been Captain Sir Morgan Lloyd of HMS Portcullis, an eighteen-gun sloop. But the Sea Dragon had sailed under a lucky star, or had the devil’s own luck, and the Portcullis never had overtaken her or maneuvered close enough even to fire a shot across her bow, much less a raking broadside.
But those were tales of yesterday, and the Sea Dragon and her proud master had come home. The winds of good fortune had filled her sails on what was to be her last voyage. With a cargo of treasure retrieved from a sunken Spanish galleon off the coast of Florida filling her hold, the captain and his crew had returned to their home country, all wealthy men with dreams soon to be fulfilled. And so for now any challenging roars from the dragon were stilled, and in the ensuing lull, there was only the forlorn sound of creaking masts above a deserted deck while the tide lapped gently against the curving hull of a tranquil ship.
The fog, moving like a great jaundiced cloud, drifted away from the floating forest of masts and desolate wharves. It swirled along the narrow, twisting lanes of the City, where pickpockets, footpads, watchmen, and sixpenny harlots went about their business. In the muffled silence the chiming of bells in church spires lost high in the enveloping mists was like the echoing of a thousand bells, and the discordant notes of a hurdy-gurdy man cranking out a tune reverberated like a banshee’s wail. An anonymous fiddler’s song was carried on the seaborne breeze, and like the cajoling voices of street vendors hawking their wares, the source remained unseen.
A swiftly moving carriage appeared suddenly out of the fog, its wheels rattling across the slick cobblestones as it slid into one of the many iron posts guarding the paved footways. The angry curses from ghostly shapes went unheeded while the carriage continued on, the bundled-up coachman whipping his team to an even greater burst of speed despite the danger to life and limb.
“Ye thick-skulled, fatheaded landlubber!” roared a short, bandy-legged man, his raised fist threatening dire consequences should the offending coachman have been foolhardy enough to halt.
“’Ere, stir your stumps! ’Aven’t got t’whole bloody night, I ’aven’t, t’be standin’ ’ere dawdlin’ while ye twiddle your thumbs, square-toes. Some of us ’as important business t’be seein’ to. Can’t all be genteel folk struttin’ around with our noses in t’air, I’m sure.”
Houston Kirby snorted rudely. “The only important business ye be to, spouter, is tryin’ to decide whose pocket to be pickin’ next,” he warned, and since his next utterance was little better than a growl, the malcontent moved along smartly, sparing no backward glance for so rude a fellow.
“Damned impertinence! Dunno what’s happened to the City. ’Course, never did like it overmuch. People in too damned a hurry, and too busy to give a fellow directions, except tellin’ him where to go for darin’ to bother them,” Kirby mumbled, pausing briefly to glance down at the nicely rounded toes of his boots. “Might not be the most fashionable pair in all of London Town, but they ain’t square-toed,” he muttered indignantly. He spat into the gutter that was quickly filling with dirty water.
Hunching his shoulders against the cold drizzle sneaking down the back of his collar, he marched along the slippery footway. The gleaming pewter and brass, crystal and silver handsomely displayed behind the plate glass of an illumined shop window went unnoticed, as did the warm richness of velvet and silk in a linen draper’s, the seductive sparkle of precious gems and gold in a jeweler’s, and the mystifying potions, salves, and cure-alls of an apothecary’s.
The rain was coming down in sheets by the time Kirby had neared the arched entrance to the yard of Hawke’s Bell Inn. The brown cloth of his greatcoat was soaked through and felt twice as heavy as it had when he’d first struggled into it. Besides that, it was far too long and the wet hem flapped around his knees with every step. But despite the growing discomfort of his ill-fitting coat and the awkwardness in finding safe footing on the slippery cobblestones, Kirby continued to hurry along the lane.
Suddenly he made a great leap through the air toward the other side, or at least as far as his short legs could propel him. And just in time too, for out of the darkness clattered a coach-and-six, which rolled through the arch with a splattering of muddy water in all directions.
Had there been anyone within hearing distance, he would have been left in little doubt as to the small man’s opinion of the driver of that coach. With a sigh he glanced down at his gutter-splashed breeches and very sad-looking round-toed boots. Shaking his grizzled head for what the world must surely be coming to, he scurried into the yard. But peace was not to be found there, for stable boys and ostlers were bustling about, harnessing and unharnessing teams of horses and loading and unloading luggage with little regard for the contents, sublimely ignoring anyone questioning the condition of his trunk.
Kirby sighed as he reached the comparative safety and tranquillity of the taproom, which was crowded with shivering patrons newly arrived from Bath or Bristol, or perhaps even from as far north as Edinburgh, Newcastle, or York. The weeklong journey by stage along the Great North Road was considerably easier and quicker than it had once been.
Dark Before the Rising Sun Page 2