In a Pirate's Debt

by Elva Cobb Martin

  She looked into his eyes. “To get away from Sir Roger Poole’s demand that I marry him.”

  “Poole? But how could he wield any kind of power over you in Charles Town?”

  She hated even discussing Poole and abruptly asked, “Where are we headed, Lucas? I have to know.” She kept her voice level and avoided looking at his face. She leaned on the railing a good three feet from him, but still her hands grew damp, her breath short.

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  He sounded harsh, and she glanced back at him. “Oh, and thank you for saving us from that awful pirate, Captain Low.”

  He stepped close and gripped her wrist. “You have no idea what I’ve saved you from, or you’d be a lot more thankful.”

  She tried to remove her arm from his grasp, but his fingers clamped down.

  “Oh, Lucas, I am thankful, but I want to talk to you. To find out where we are headed.” She looked into his eyes. “Please let go of me.”

  He blinked and released her.

  She turned away, hoping he couldn’t hear her heart slamming against her ribs or see the heat climb her neck in the gathering shadows. Just from his touch and one glance into his eyes, she had almost lost control.

  “What do you want to talk about? I am dropping Captain Bart and what’s left of his crew off at Jamaica, and then I had planned to take you and Merle back to Charles Town.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “It seems we’ve done this before.”

  Lucas gazed back out to sea and the golden sun slipping farther toward the horizon, lighting the sky in varying shades of rose and lavender.

  “Yes, but it seems so long ago since your rescue in Jamaica.” She pushed away a wave of sadness that seemed to drag at her mind and her strength. She moved closer to him. “Lucas, what are you going to do with your life? Haven’t you had enough pirating?”

  He turned to her. “Not just yet. I have one more adventure I must attempt. Besides, I assure you I am not a pirate. I am a privateer.” He caressed her face with a look that raised warmth in her cheeks. His smile maddened her.

  So he planned to continue his wild, dangerous way of life. Tears gathered in her eyes. But her hands balled into fists. She stepped up to him and pounded his chest.

  He drew her into his arms so tightly she could not move, then lifted her chin.

  “What? Tears for me?”

  Travay found her strength and pushed away from him. “Lucas Barrett, after I get off this ship, I never want to see you again. Go on and be a pirate, if that’s what you want, and don’t say it’s privateering.” The last words ended in a sob. She turned and rushed down the quarterdeck steps, her silk skirts swishing behind her.

  She pushed open the door to the cabin, where Merle still slept. After putting the bar in place, Travay dropped down onto her bunk. She took a deep breath and battled angry tears and a feeling of helplessness. Fatigue gripped her, and she slipped out of her dress and climbed into the bunk, falling asleep almost at once.

  Something dark and sinister moved into the cabin through the porthole. Travay fought it in her sleep. The blackness settled over her like a cloud until she found it hard to breathe. She moaned. The thing lifted, but suddenly she found herself back on Arundel, her legs pressed close to the horse’s heaving sides. She could feel the wind and raindrops blasting her cheeks, smell the salt air, and hear the breaking of the tide on the cliff wall below. She brought her whip down hard on the filly’s rump, and they sailed over the cliff into gray nothingness.

  Travay screamed.

  Lucas stayed on the quarterdeck after Travay left in anger. He had insisted on taking the night watch, knowing sleep would be hard to come by with Ned’s and Bart’s crews on board. Anything could happen. He was tired to the bone, but thoughts of Travay pounded in his mind. One refrain kept repeating. I love her. I love her, but I must try once more to find out if my mother still lives.

  And there was a difference—a big difference—between a pirate and a privateer. But he had kept his letter of marque, his license to attack ships belonging to England’s enemies, stored on the Blue Heron. Now, both the ship and the letter were at the bottom of the sea.

  A heart-wrenching scream came from below deck. Then another. He bounded off the quarterdeck and all but slid down the hatch steps. Travay or Merle? In three strides, he stood before their cabin entrance.

  “Travay! Merle!” He pounded on the door. Then he heard sobs. Lucas’ blood rushed to his head, and he prepared to knock down the door. Sinbad and Thorpe moved down the passage behind him, shaking the sleep from their heads.

  “Captain Bloodstone, we’re fine.” Merle’s voice called out to him over the sobbing, which began to subside. The door opened, and Merle stood there clutching a brown robe about her shoulders. She inclined her head toward the far bunk.

  Travay sat up in the bed with her head on her bent knees, still sniffling.

  “She just had a nightmare. That’s all.” Merle lit a small lamp.

  Lucas caught his breath. “Are you all right, Travay?”

  “Yes,” was the muffled response. She lifted her head. “It was the cliff again.”

  He gritted his teeth. If he ever got his hands on Roger Poole …

  He approached her bed. She drew the blanket about her shoulders and looked up at him with glistening eyes and wet lashes.

  “I guess it’s not surprising to have nightmares after what you’ve been through today.” He stopped, his heart hammering in his chest. She was beautiful with her red-gold hair tumbling down her back. There was more he wanted to say, but the words stuck in his throat.

  “Of course. That’s just what I told her.” Merle came to stand close to Travay. “I think she’ll be fine now.” The older lady glanced back at the door and saw Sinbad and Thorpe, naked to the waists, their hair tousled. “We are sorry we woke up the ship.”

  “No bother.” The two men echoed each other and turned back up the passage.

  Lucas tore his eyes away from Travay and prepared to follow the two men.

  At the door, Merle came to his side. “Lucas, I know this is not the kind of seaworthy ship to make it to England, but we really would like to visit a relative I have there. Can you help us make it to a ship returning home to England?”

  “Yes, I will do all I can, but our best bet is to find one in the Charles Town port.”

  Lucas avoided any more private conversation with Travay until they docked in Kingston, Jamaica. In the brief stop at the island to set Captain Bart and his men ashore and to take on supplies, Lucas also managed to leave several of Ned Low’s most problematic crew members drunk in the taverns. He preferred to sail with a skeleton crew he could trust.

  Travay and Merle did not ask to leave the ship, to his relief. He could protect them much better on board. Perhaps Travay didn’t want to go ashore and stir up painful memories.

  The next morning, at first tide, they were back at sea and heading north by northwest to Charles Town. He would find the best passenger ship for Travay and her aunt in Charles Town if they still wanted to go to England.

  The second day out, an albatross took up station on the bowsprit, his great wings at rest in silver splendor. A crew member said it was a good sign, but Lucas felt a steel-like thrust in his gut as if the words were in error.

  Around midnight, Lucas awoke with a start, all his senses alert. He pulled on clothing and headed to the quarterdeck where Thorpe stood watch. The night was clear and the wind steady, though chill for the time of year.

  “Any sign of a storm?” Lucas leaned over the railing and scanned the dark horizon.

  “No, but I’m uneasy for some reason.” Thorpe pressed his lips together. “Don’t know why. Sky’s been clear all night. No thunder. Nothing on the horizon.”

  “Do a sounding.”

  Thorpe motioned to a young guard on the lower deck who had been listening.

  “Aye, sir.” He took up a slender rope with a heavy weight attached to one end and cast it over the railing, giving
it time to sink the length of the rope. “No bottom, sir.”

  Still, uneasiness gripped Lucas’ insides. He took up the spyglass and turned it southeast, directly into the wind.

  Then he saw it—a glimmering flash at the horizon, so fast he wanted to discount it. But when he saw it again, he knew it was no illusion. He handed the glass to Thorpe, who turned pale as he looked. “It’s a blow. A big one, Lucas.”

  On the horizon, a slice of light formed a line between the ocean and the sky. Lightning slashed across it. They had only a brief window in which to prepare.

  Lucas leaned over the quarterdeck railing and shouted, “All hands on deck.”

  Thorpe bounded down the steps yelling the same thing.

  As the men clamored from their hammocks, Lucas and Thorpe shouted orders: “Prepare a storm anchor! Lash everything double tight. Rig all sails for storm! Batten down the hatches!”

  Within five minutes, the storm was visible to all hands, a beast that rumbled toward them, blowing wind and fire. Thick darkness denser than midnight soon settled over the ship, broken only by streaks of lightning. Thorpe and Sinbad threw overboard all but the most necessary supplies to lighten the ship.

  Lucas plunged down the hatch and yelled through the door to Travay and Merle’s cabin. “We’re heading into a big tempest! Tie yourselves to the bunks. And pray.”

  He scuttled back up the steps and plowed across the deck toward the ship’s helm, holding on to whatever he could grasp. After lashing himself to the wheel’s pedestal behind the young helmsman, Damon, Lucas reached around him to grip the wheel just below Damon’s clenched hands. It would take both of them to steer through this deadly storm. Lightning split the sky, and the wind drove waves as high as the sails.

  In front of Lucas, Damon shivered so hard his words came out choppy. “Cap’n, w-will w-we s-survive this blow?”

  “Yes.” Lucas ground out between stiff lips. “With God’s help.”

  A sulfurous smell from the lightning, which was much closer now, blanketed them. The helmsman stiffened with fright, and Lucas forced his voice into steely hardness.

  “Focus on the next wave, the next blast of wind, my man.”

  The sheets of rain lashing them hid huge waves seeking to flip the ship over. Both men groaned as they tried to hold the ship against the hurricane force winds.

  The riotous roar of the storm caused Travay, tied to the berth, to quake. The spittle dried in her mouth when the ship shot to the top of colossal crests then dropped into the torturous troughs below.

  When she could get her breath, Merle offered prayer after prayer in the thick darkness filling the cabin. Travay shrieked every time a bolt of lightning cracked and flashed fire across their porthole, lighting the cabin with an unholy luminosity. They could not escape the cold water that sheeted through the small opening and seeped down on them from the deck above, driven through the boards by the blowing rain and the swells lashing the ship. It puddled on the floor and splashed from one side of the cabin to the other as the ship lurched. Soon they were drenched.

  With his hands gripping the wheel from behind the helmsman, Lucas searched through the driving rain and caught glimpses of Thorpe and Sinbad who had ropes tied around their waists and were doing all they could to prevent men from being washed overboard. It didn’t take long to realize that few of their sparse crew had ever been in a blow of this size. Lucas heard the death cries of several of them as the mountains of water pounded across the deck, snapped the ropes around their waists, and dragged them to watery graves.

  God rest their souls.

  Every barrel and rigging not tied or hammered down washed overboard in the first big thrusts of the storm. Thorpe and Sinbad both yelled at the top of their lungs when the mizzen and then the foremast, with sails strapped tight around them, cracked like pistol shots and washed into the sea.

  For many hours, no hint of daylight permeated the thick darkness and the blowing deluge that tossed the ship.

  Lucas, his hands melded to the helmsman’s, fought to steer the ship slightly upwind and nose the sloop into the massive swells, bracing himself against the shuddering wash of water that followed, then wrestling the ship back a notch. These maneuvers took so much effort that the two men groaned with one voice.

  When the mainmast of the ship exploded like a cannon and blew away, Lucas knew the ship would be lost.

  God save us!

  It might have been an hour later, or it might have been a year—Lucas’ exhausted body felt like it was the latter—when a violent lurch of the ship and a cracking sound from the keel alerted him that the ship had struck a coral reef, although he could see nothing for the blanket of darkness that still lay upon them. At the same time, the wheel went slack in their grip, and Lucas knew the rudder had broken.

  “Oh, my God!” The helmsman slumped against Lucas.

  “Do not give up yet, my man!” Lucas had trouble forming the words with the wind and rain pounding his face.

  The ship, with great creaks and shudders, continued to move forward, driven by the sea, until it came to rest on the reef, wedged between coral formations. Lucas held his breath. Would the wanton waves dash what was left of the ship—and them—to pieces on the rocks? In desperation, he cried out to God in his loudest voice the very words that Jesus spoke to a storm. “Peace, be still! In Jesus Christ’s name, peace, be still!”

  Lucas could scarcely breathe. Had the wind snatched his words away? But in the next few seconds, something happened he would never forget.

  The rain, wind, and punishing waves abated. The darkness lifted. The sun came out and glistened across the soaked deck and destroyed mast stumps. The ship’s groaning and crunching sounds reduced to a moderate rocking with the sea. Lucas gasped a deep, relieved breath and forced his stiff fingers to untie the ropes holding him and the helmsman to the wheel’s pedestal. They staggered apart.

  It was a new day. Twenty-four hours had passed since the storm began.

  The helmsman turned to Lucas, his eyes wide and wild. “W-what w-we gonna do now, Cap’n?” The man’s face gained back a little color as he wiped the streaming hair from his face.

  Lucas ached in every part of his body, and thirst burned his throat. He squinted against the bright light and scanned the deck of the destroyed brigantine. Only by a miracle were they not on the ocean floor. He saw Sinbad, Thorpe, and two other crew members—the only ones to survive—untying the ropes that had saved their lives. His heart lifted more when he saw that by some stroke of luck or prayer, one longboat had survived and still hung by a tattered rope. Thank God.

  “We’ll have to abandon ship, Damon. This coral reef must be part of an island. Let’s pray it’s inhabitable.”

  Damon stood up straighter and took a long breath. “I’m jist a-thanking the God of my old mother we ain’t all scattered down in Davy Jones’ locker.”

  Lucas scanned the waters past the reef. Was that a line of green just on the horizon?

  Thorpe and Sinbad stumbled toward the quarterdeck like sleepwalkers, soaked to the skin and bone weary like Lucas and Damon. The four men threw their arms around one another, breathing one word. “Saved.”

  Lucas added, “Thank God.”

  Thorpe handed a precious water skin that had survived the storm to Lucas, and he gulped a large quantity. Then his breath fled his lungs.

  Travay, Merle. Had they survived the terrible pounding and tossing of the ship in the storm? Was the lower deck flooded? He forced his weary legs to move toward the battened-down hatch to the cabins below.

  CHAPTER 17

  Lucas bent and tried to loosen the wooden block over the lower deck opening. It wouldn’t budge. The crew had battened it down well, and now the wood had swollen with water. Curse words came to Lucas’ mind, but he bit them back. The desire to see if Travay and Merle were safe burned through him like thirst had moments before.

  Sinbad came to Lucas’ aid with a piece of an iron railing he had torn from the battered ship’s tackling. In
two minutes, he had the hatch pried open.

  “Travay! Merle!” Lucas slid down the steps. Tremors traveled up his spine when his boots sank into a foot of water at the bottom of the stairs. Was the ship taking on water this fast?

  “We’re fine, Lucas. Exhausted and thirsty, but fine,” Merle responded just as Lucas reached their cabin door. He heard her struggling to lift the bar.

  “It’s swollen with water, Lucas. We can’t lift it.” This time Travay’s voice called out, and Lucas’ heart sang.

  Sinbad, standing just behind his captain, tapped Lucas on the shoulder.

  Lucas smiled, pointed to the hinge, and commanded through the door, “You two move away from the door. Sinbad’s coming through.”

  The large black man moved as far away in the narrow passage as he could, then leaning in with his massive shoulder, he bolted toward the cabin entrance.

  The door flew from its hinges and skidded to the far wall.

  “Oh!” Both women cried out as one. They sank into the water at their feet, their bouffant skirts bobbing and soaking up moisture.

  Lucas strode to Travay, who was trying to control her garment, and lifted her from the storm water. She had a bruise on her forehead and her soaked clothing dragged at her body, but otherwise, she seemed fine. He took a deep breath and helped her gain her footing in the dark seepage. She lifted tired eyes to his, causing his heart to thunder. For a moment, he thought he saw more than gratitude in her face, but then she turned toward Merle.

  “Thank God. Thank God.” Merle uttered her simple thanks as Sinbad helped her to her feet.

  “Where are we, Lucas? We are shipwrecked, aren’t we?” Travay’s lips quivered. Her glorious hair, now escaped from all its pins, hung down her back. Crumpled, wet, and exhausted, she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  His voice softened. “Yes. But the ship is wedged between coral reefs for the moment, which should give us time to abandon it before—”

  “We’ll be cracked up on the rocks.” Hysteria crept into Travay’s voice.