Captain of My Heart (37 page)

He swallowed hard and tried to take her
hand.

“I said,
get away from me!
” She bit
back the hysteria, shrinking away from him with great racking sobs
rising in her chest. “Don’t touch me, you slime-sucking son of a
bitch—”

“Mira.”

She lay rigidly on her back, staring up at
him through the darkness. “Slinking coward, gutless, wretched—”

“
Moyrrra.
“

She clawed the hair out of her eyes, and
sickened by the sight of him, turned her face into the pillow, its
feathery down muffling her sobs. Her shoulders shook, and she drew
her legs up to her chest, as though she could curl herself around
her grief, her very heart, and hold herself together with it. The
tears came, a horrible sound in the stillness of the room, choking
her with their intensity, robbing her of breath.

“
Moyrrra,
please . . . please listen
to me.”

“Where’s my father?” she sobbed, into the
depths of the pillow. “I . . . want my . . . papa.”

Brendan took a deep and bracing breath. And
then he rose, went to the window, and stood gazing out over the
street, the treetops, and toward the river. Ships drove their masts
against a fading sunset sky. The ships of Newburyport. Except that
one of them would never be coming home again.

Outside, a robin called good night to its
mate, the sound lonely and sad in the twilight.

Quietly he said, “Your da is down at Wolfe
Tavern,
Moyrrra,
where he has been for the past three and a
half hours.”

Father. Losing himself in tipple, just as
he’d done when Mama had died.
Oh, God, help me,
she thought,
huddling closer to herself,
oh God, please help me
. . .
It hurts,
God. It hurts so much . . . Please, God, make
the pain go away . . . Make
him
go away. . . .

But he would not, his words coming quietly
from across the room. “Lassie, please . . . before you judge me,
listen to me. I beg of you. Give me a fair trial, at least.”

She sobbed harder into the pillow, gripping
its corners in white-knuckled, fish-cold fists and squeezing it
about her head as though it could muffle the pain and block out his
voice.

He stood by the window, his body silhouetted
against the last of that lonely light. “We had a strategy, your
brother and I,” he began, quietly, not wanting to tell her because
of the pain it would cause, yet desperately needing to, just to
relieve his own grief, his own guilt, unjustified though it might
be. And as he began to speak, he reached into his coat pocket and
drew something out, though Mira, her face buried in the pillow,
never saw what it was.

“It was a strategy we agreed to try upon the
convoy from London.” Swallowing hard, he closed his fingers around
the object in his hand. “I suppose I shall always wonder if maybe
it was all planned. That maybe someone
knew
we would be
there. You see, there were other American privateers waiting to
pluck prizes out of that convoy, too. Yet none of them were
touched. They wanted Matt, and they wanted me.”

She sobbed something into the pillow, her
voice incomprehensible.

“What was that,
mo stóirín?”

“I said, I wish the bloody hell it
had
been you instead of my . . . instead of my . . .
b-brother!”

He turned back to the window. He looked down
at the object in his hand, biting his lip, thankful that she
couldn’t see the pain, the tears in his own eyes. But the lilting,
musical tone of his voice was gone, like an instrument out of tune,
and through her misery, she noticed it, and it broke her heart even
more.

“We found the convoy ten leagues off Sandy
Hook—a huge convoy, Mira, of fat merchantmen and wallowing ships,
ripe for the plucking—and pluck them we did. It was so easy. Too
easy. We’d stand off during the day, and when it grew dark, we’d
take turns. One of us would distract the guard ships, and the other
would dash in and cut out a prize. Because it was dark, they dared
not separate, and the guard ships couldn’t be everywhere at once.
Oh, they tried to escape, but with so many ships and only a few to
protect them, there were many stragglers. . . . We had our pick of
them. It was so easy. . . .”

He leaned his forehead against the sill of
the window. The sunset was just a gray glimmer now. Fading.

“We were fools. Too bold, too cocky, too
confident—and too greedy. We took so many prizes, we barely had
enough men to sail our own ships, let alone fight them. And still
we didn’t stop. It went to our heads, lassie. We grew drunk on it.
And you know that old tradition, about not returning to port until
you have a prize to show for each of your guns. . . . And here
Kestrel
has ten, and
Mistress
had fourteen.” He
didn’t tell her that returning to Newburyport with twenty-four
prizes had been Matt’s determined goal, not his. “It was an insane
thing to attempt, even for a couple of daredevils like us.” He
looked down at the object in his hand, feeling his eyes burning
with unshed tears. “On the third morning, we anchored in the lee of
an island to wait out a squall—”

He swallowed hard, steeling himself against
the horrible memory, while his hands tightened around the fragile
object. “We woke to fog and rain, and a frigate bearing down on us
from around the point. A British frigate, with every sail set and a
bone in her teeth. She caught us unprepared. I know now that she
was waiting for us. Waiting until we didn’t have the men to
properly crew our vessels, having sent them off in groups on our
prizes. Waiting until success blurred our caution. Matt and I
signaled to each other—we’d worked out an elaborate flag code—and
he asked me to use
Kestrel
as a lure, to try to lead the
frigate away from himself and the prizes.”

He saw no need to tell her that the frigate
had been HMS
Viper
and that its captain was a man named
Richard Crichton. Instead, he told her how he’d tried to lead that
frigate away, for he’d been so secure in the knowledge that
Crichton had wanted
him
that he didn’t believe his old enemy
would give Matt a second thought.

But no. It hadn’t happened that way. It was
supposed
to happen that way, but it hadn’t. And as he’d
hauled off to leeward and sent
Kestrel
on a smooth run, her
sails set wing and wing and the American colors streaming saucily
from her gaff like a flag tempting an enraged bull,
Viper
had chased her only long enough to ensure she would be safely out
of the fight and then dashed back toward the solitary brig and her
covey of prizes, quickly overtaking them and brutally opening fire
with every gun. Matt had fought valiantly, with everything he had.
But
Mistress
had been undermanned, with an island at her
back and no room to maneuver. And fast as
Kestrel
was, she
hadn’t been able to tack back to her sister ship in time.

“If only I’d known, lassie.” His voice was
flat and dead and emotionless. She heard him take a great,
tremulous sigh. “If only I’d
known.
And if only Matt had a
gunner like my own Mr. Starr....”

He winced as Mira curled herself up into a
tighter ball and let out one long, keening cry of sheer agony.

“But the frigate had a skilled gunner. Or
maybe just a lucky one.” His hand tightened on the object in his
hands. “His shot hit
Mistress
’s powder magazine, and she
went up like a torch.”

On the bed, Mira sobbed harder, the tears
soaking into the very heart of the pillow, the pit of her soul.
Horrible, wretched cries that showed no mercy, flooded the room
with agony, caused Brendan to turn from the window and take a step
toward her, two—

She raised her head and screamed, “Don’t come
near me! You should’ve
been
there for him! You should’ve
stayed and fought! You bastard!
Don’t you ever come near me
again,
do you hear me? I hate you!
Hate you!”

He stopped.

“I don’t ever want to see you again!
Ever!”
She struck out, blindly, and her hand found something
in the gathering gloom. A blue and white bowl, commemorating the
launch of the fine topsail schooner
Kestrel,
kept on her
bedside table where it would always be near when she woke up in her
lonely bed in the depths of the night, when she opened her eyes in
the morning—

Her hand closed around it and she flung it
with all her strength toward his voice, the piercing, agonized
crash of china against the far wall shattering the stillness.

“Get away from me, you coward!”

She fell back into the pillow, sobbing so
hard she couldn’t catch her breath, feeling as if she were
suffocating in its wet softness, its damp heat, and drowning in the
choking awfulness of her own grief.

“I hate you. . . . God, I hate you. . .
.”

But it was really herself she hated, for if
she hadn’t fallen in love with this—this
Brit,
she would
have been out on
Proud Mistress
and helping her brother.

“
I hate you, hate you, hate you.”

Silently Brendan moved across the darkened
room. The object in his hand, found as he’d combed the beach of the
island that had shuddered to the thunder of
Mistress
’s guns,
and later, her death, was now warm in his hand. He ran his thumb
over it one last time.

He thought of the broken bowl. Shattered,
like
Mistress.
Like Mira’s trust in him, and the love they’d
shared.

Like
Kestrel
’s honor itself.

Quietly he reached out through the darkness
and put the object on the table where that bowl had stood, and left
the room.

There, alone, staring unseeingly up into the
darkness, the metal growing cold once more, sat the spectacles of a
dead privateer.

###

They had no body to bury, but Captain Matthew
Ashton’s memory was laid to rest with full honors just the same, on
a cloudy day with a mournful wind and an oppressive rain that
soaked through cloak and coat alike. Gray sky and gray river, gray
faces and tears that mixed with the rain and went unnoticed. And a
tombstone of granite, on which was painstakingly carved the
likeness of a brig with the figurehead of a woman; a tombstone that
reflected the mood of the sky, of the day, of the people.

It was a sad day for Newburyport.

The American flag flew at half-mast from the
fort at Plum Island, and aboard every vessel in the rain-soaked
harbor. A black coach carried the dead hero’s family to St. Paul’s
Church on High Street, followed by a funeral procession and
mourners of keening women, silent sea captains, weeping children,
and a seventy-man detachment from the Newburyport militia. When the
sad ceremony was all over, the ships in the river fired their guns
in solemn salute to one of their own, lost in the name of Liberty.
Drums rolled, church bells tolled in lonely sorrow. And at the
granite marker, and its reign of unbroken ground, the militiamen
lifted their muskets and fired three volleys as the dead captain’s
sister tossed a single, blooming tulip to the earth and turned away
to sob into her father’s arms.

Apart from the group a lone figure stood,
wearing his best uniform and clasping his tricorne to his heart.
That uniform was dark with rain, and water streamed from his
curling russet hair. He watched the girl in helpless misery, and
when she lifted her face from the comfort of her father’s chest,
their gazes met across the rainy distance.

Brendan swallowed, and took a hopeful step
forward.

The crowd huddled protectively around
her.

And Mira turned her face away.

His heart broke. And as the ceremony ended
and the townspeople looked up and saw him standing there, they
cursed him and turned away as well, leaving him to face alone the
river that had brought him here—and the schooner whose name had
become anathema.

Newburyport’s newest hero.

Named by his Irish mother for a long-dead sea
explorer, the patron saint of sailors.

In grief, the truth is often crushed.

Chapter 23

Being a man who viewed the use of excessive
force as a necessary means of getting information, Captain Richard
Crichton saw no reason not to defy Sir Geoffrey Lloyd’s demands for
temperance and even less reason not to exercise such methods on his
three Yankee prisoners of war.

They were a bedraggled, sorry-looking lot.
With such ill-bred rabble to represent them, he wondered how the
colonies could ever expect to win a war they were stupid enough to
start in the first place. One, a salty old bloke with steady gray
eyes and the honest face of a fisherman, had proved his Yankee
idiocy by spitting in Crichton’s face; now he was getting a taste
of the lash he’d not soon forget. The second prisoner, also picked
up from the wreckage of the privateer
Proud Mistress,
was a
youth named Jake who wasn’t old enough to put a razor to his face.
Even at such a tender age the boy refused to divulge any
information about Captain Merrick, even under Crichton’s most
persuasive
methods, and insisted he didn’t know a thing
about him or the schooner that had been wreaking such havoc upon
British shipping.

And the third—semiconscious, blinded by
shrapnel, and lying slumped against the bulkhead in Crichton’s fine
cabin—was no help at all.

Captain Matthew Ashton.

No help at all,
Crichton thought, with
a cold grin.
Yet.

With controlled savagery, he drew back and
kicked the blind man hard in the ribs. The Yankee captain doubled
up in agony, his face paling beneath a spray of freckles that,
coupled with his unruly shock of red hair and naked, owlish eyes,
made him look boyish and defenseless.