Captain of My Heart (8 page)

He dropped his fork.

“I hope you like Indian pudding!” Gulping,
Brendan looked up. A plump, apple-cheeked little woman bustled
about, clucking like a mother hen and briskly arranging salt and
pepper and a pitcher of cold milk. She smelled like flour and had
bright, birdlike eyes that didn’t miss a trick. “Our dear little
Mira made it herself. She’s quite a cook, isn’t she? Here, help
yourself,” she said, plunking a silver bowl down before him.
“There’s plenty more where that came from!”

That didn’t surprise him. Slowly Brendan
picked up his fork, stared down at his plate—and choked back a tide
of nausea. The woman—Abigail?—was smiling at him, hands steepled
beneath her chin, eyes glowing with pride.

Waiting.

“Go on!” she urged.

There was no way out. Steeling himself,
Brendan cut a piece of the meat and slowly placed it in his mouth.
It was cold, but it was good—and recognizable.

Mutton, all right.

“Isn’t that good? Here, you eat up. You’re
awfully lean. We can’t have our guests leaving the table with no
meat on their bones, now, can we?”

She hovered about, humming and clucking and
tsk-tsk-
ing some more. Brendan took another bite of the
mutton—a very small bite—chewing it as slowly as possible,
prolonging the inevitable, and willing to make it last until
Christmas if he had to despite the ravenous hunger it awakened in
him. If only the woman would leave. He wished it with all his
heart. He prayed
.
Anything, dear Lord, so that he wouldn’t
have to eat that . . . that
pudding.

He was down to one last, pitiful bite of the
meat when his prayers were answered from a most unlikely
source—Ephraim. As the old man began bellowing from a thankfully
distant corner of the house, Abigail, mobcap askew and petticoats
flying, bustled out of the room with an “Oh dear,” and a “Here we
go again,” and he was left—
thank God —
to himself.

He didn’t waste a single precious minute.

Quickly scraping the slimy mass that didn’t
look like any pudding he’d ever seen into a quivering ball, Brendan
shot a quick glance at the door, grabbed his plate, and slid it
beneath the table where the dog waited so expectantly.

Frenzied sniffing. A clang of the plate
against the floor as the dog began to bolt the food. Then,
silence.

The animal backed out from beneath the table
and, throwing Brendan a look of betrayal and disgust, slunk from
the room.

Brendan, frowning, lifted the tablecloth and
peered under the table.

The pudding was uneaten.

Chapter
4

William Davenport had been a Newburyport man
who’d seen General Wolfe die on the Plains of Abraham, and it was
something he never forgot. On his return to Newburyport, he’d
converted his home into a tavern, hung a sign out front on which
was faithfully carved and painted a bust of the famous general, and
swung open his door for business.

In the years since, Wolfe Tavern, at the
corner of State Street and Threadneedle Alley, had become the most
popular spot in town. The long, rectangular building hosted
political, patriotic, and social gatherings, as well as travelers
of all sorts. Here, men gathered to hear the latest news on the
war, engage in spirited debates, or just amuse themselves with a
game of cards. Back in ’65, when the local Sons of Liberty had
terrorized Newburyport, roaming the streets and making the lives of
those in favor of the hated Stamp Act terrible, it had been in
Wolfe Tavern that they’d met. Davenport had died back in ’73, but
the tavern had continued under the capable management of his sons
Anthony and Moses, still offering stout drink and hearty food for
weary traveler and townsman alike.

It would have been safe to assume that it was
the stout drink and not the hearty food—although that was certainly
being consumed with equal ardor—that had drawn
Annabel’s
company after they’d brought the battered sloop into port with the
help of two Newburyport privateers. Now the mortally wounded
Annabel
lay in her bed of riverbank mud, while every man
Jack and officer of her crew—with the exception of her missing
captain—sampled the fine food and drink for which the tavern was
famous.

Miraculously, not a soul had been killed or
injured during the short but scrappy engagement with Crichton’s
frigate. Oh, Dalby complained that his chest hurt when he breathed
in—too much smoke had got into his lungs, he insisted—but aside
from that, and a few scrapes and scratches here and there,
Annabel
’s crew had been lucky.

Dalby sat now with a mug of ale before him
and a plate of beef and potatoes growing cold beneath his nose, his
shipmates, no doubt the rowdiest bunch of tars to put into
unsuspecting Newburyport all week, surrounding him. The tavern was
clean enough, with well-swept, wide-boarded floors scuffed by the
heels of a thousand boots and shoes, a huge fireplace, and
wainscoting painted an unpretentious shade of ocher. The light from
a tin chandelier, set with spitting candles, cut through the
smoke.

His brow furrowing, Dalby scrutinized the
other patrons. Men lounged at sturdy walnut tables drinking foamy
mugs of beer and puffing on long clay pipes. Three tables away, a
group of finely dressed gentlemen, either merchants or, more
likely, shipowners, were engaged in a lively game of backgammon. A
dog lay half asleep at their feet, and a seaman dressed in baggy
trousers, torn shirt, and a threadbare vest sat on a stool sipping
ale and conversing with a disreputable-looking man in buckskins and
a fur hat.

None of
them
looked to be ill . . .
and his own companions had never seemed to enjoy better health. He
eyed them with increasing annoyance. Liam’s laughter was growing
louder with every tankard of cherry rum he downed, and Dalby knew
it would only be a matter of time before he picked up the fiddle
propped against his chair leg and struck up a lively jig. Across
from him sat John Keefe, his flowing silver hair caught in a
leather tie. McDermott had his nose in a book, and Amos Reilly and
George Saunders were guffawing over something Liam had said.

Dalby’s pinched mouth anchored itself in a
frown. He stared down at his plate; it was the only one that had
any food left on it, and his companions were all eyeing it like a
pack of half-starved wolves. If the captain, God rest his soul,
were here, he’d have finished it off. But the captain was gone.
Dalby bit his lip and blinked back tears, wondering if life was
worth living. The captain was gone,
Annabel
was a wreck, and
his beef didn’t taste right. Probably spoiled. As if to affirm that
assumption, his stomach lurched and he had to swallow tightly to
quell a quick flood of nausea.

A hearty whack across the back from Liam
nearly brought the beef straight back up. “God Almighty, Dalby,
ye’re spoilin’ the fun! First time into port in three weeks and
ye’re sittin’ there lookin’ like it’s the end o’ the world. Cheer
up, would ye?”

“My stomach hurts.”

“Yer stomach hurts? Then here, ’ave s’more
ale, ’twill make it feel better.” Liam dumped a flood of it into
Dalby’s half-empty mug. “What’s this? Not drinkin’, either? God
Almighty, what’s the bloody matter with ye, laddie-o?”

Anyone in his right mind would know better
than to ask Dalby what the matter was; it was something they’d all
learned
not
to do. But Liam, in his cups, had grown
careless.

“I told you, I have a stomachache. Probably
from the beef. It’s gone bad, I just know it has. And that ale
tastes suspicious, too. How do I know where it’s been? How do I
know it wasn’t in someone else’s mug before mine? How do I know
that person didn’t have the smallpox, or a fever—”

“What’s that, Dalb?” Reilly yelled. “Don’t
want your supper?”

“Heck, if you don’t want it, slide it over
here and I’ll take it!” Keefe cried.

Reilly leaped up, knocked Keefe’s hand away
as he reached for Dalby’s plate, and grabbed it for himself. Keefe
responded with a hard punch to Reilly’s jaw. Reilly howled and drew
his own arm back to return it, and Liam casually yanked the plate
away before the dispute could get any worse. “Look at ye, fightin’
like a pack o’ curs over a bone.” He curled his brawny arm around
the plate to guard it and plunged his fork into a greasy slab of
beef. Popping it into his mouth, he chewed loudly, washed it down
with rum, and stabbed another chunk. “And over a hunk o’ meat that
Dalby says ’as gone bad. Fer shame, lads! Fer shame!”

“Dalby’d say it’s gone bad if they carved it
off the pig right here in front of him.”

“Pig? You pillock, beef comes off a cow. The
kind with udders.”

“Ye mean like the ones that serving wench
has?”

“You keep your eyes off her, Reilly, you hear
me? I saw her first!”

“The hell with ye, Keefe! I
spoke
for
her first!”

Dalby lunged to his feet, so angry the cords
in his neck began to vibrate. “How dare you all sit here and talk
about food and drink and women when our poor captain is dead and
drowned? How dare you!”

They all stared at him.

“Now, Dalby.” Liam plucked his napkin from
the table, swiped at his jaw, then tossed the cloth back to his
plate. “The cap’n’s goin’ to be just fine. Ye don’t see me
worryin’, now, do ye?”

“Just fine?” Dalby wailed, and made a sudden
grab for his chest. He mustn’t holler like that. It wasn’t good for
the heart. Taking several deep breaths to calm himself, he faced
Liam angrily. “That’s easy for you to say now, but you sure weren’t
so confident about things yesterday, if I remember right! The
captain’s not just
fine,
and you know it! We all saw him get
swept out to sea by the current!”

“Cap’n can swim,” Saunders grunted, reaching
for his mug.

“But it was cold last night!”

“It ain’t cold, it’s summertime.”

“Aye, the seas are still warm.”

“This is not the Indies!” Dalby wailed. “And
what if a shark got him?”

“Ain’t enough fat on the cap’n’s bones.
Shark’ll spit him out.”

“Not enough fat? Hah, not enough meat,
either,” Liam said, stabbing another chunk of beef. “Always told
him to eat more. Too damned thin fer his own good. Course, if he
had some stoutness to him, he wouldn’t’ve tumbled off o’ the ship
in the first place. And if he had some fat under his hide, he
wouldn’t have t’ worry about stayin’ afloat—”

“—or keeping warm, either,” Keefe added,
importantly.

Dalby sat down hard. Oh, how could they sit
here and joke about the captain like that? And Liam—Liam was the
captain’s best friend, and had been ever since Brendan’s father,
the distinguished old Admiral Merrick, had died and his widow had
moved herself and her two children back to her beloved home in
Connemara.

“Ah, ye worry too much fer yer own good,
Dalby.” Liam leaned back and crossed his massive arms behind his
head, making his chair protest beneath his great, muscled bulk.
“See what it’s doin’ to yer stomach? Ye’re makin’ yerself sick o’er
this. Cap’n’s da was English, aye, but he’s got the luck of his
Irish ma to see to him, and it’s never failed him yet.”

Dalby bristled. “The only Irish luck I see
here is yours. With the captain dead and gone,
you’re
in
command now. You tell me who’s the lucky one!”

Fortunately for Dalby, Liam’s temper was not
easily ignited, for Liam was twice as big, thrice as strong—and
half his age. He merely smiled, belched in happy contentment, and
picked up his fiddle. “An’ would ye mind a-tellin’ me just what it
is I’m supposed t’ command, Dalb?”

Dalby’s mouth snapped shut. It would be a
while before
Annabel
was seaworthy again—a long while. And
the magnificent schooner that had been the captain’s dream . . .
her drafts had died with her creator. Dalby turned his face away to
hide the emotion in his eyes.

Liam was an astute man, even with a quart of
ale swimming in his belly. “Here now, Dalb,” he said, laying a big,
square hand across the little sailmaker’s bony arm. “There’s not a
soul on earth who cares for the cap’n more than I do. If I thought
he was dead an’ gone, d’ye think I’d be a-sittin’ here drinkin’
away his memory? God Almighty! Why, I’ll bet ye my share o’ th’
next prize that any minute now, that door yonder’ll swing open and
our Brendan himself’ll come strollin’ in—”

As if on cue, the door
did
swing open
and a tall figure stood silhouetted in the hot sunlight.

“Captain!” Dalby cried, lunging to his
feet.

But it was not their gallant young commander
who stood there, but a stranger with a freckle-dusted face that
looked as if it would stand little, if any, sun, and unruly red
hair curling out from beneath a floppy felt hat. There was no doubt
that he was a seaman; probably an officer if not a captain, judging
by the way he carried himself and rocked back on his heels. His
eyes, magnified by spectacles that gave him an almost scholarly
appearance, swept the crowd, crinkling in a smile as they perused
each of the serving wenches. Yet in true Yankee style, he had no
pretense—his jacket of pilot cloth had seen better days, and a
strip of leather belted a pair of trousers rolled up to display
white hose and scuffed, buckled shoes.

Forgetting his stomach, Dalby squinted
through the smoky air and tried not to stare, for the man looked
awfully familiar.

The newcomer took off his hat, raked a hand
through his wild red locks, and grinned broadly as the serving
wench whom Keefe and Reilly had been arguing over for the better
part of the last hour flung herself into his arms with a squeal of
glee. He caught her, kissed her full on the lips, and set her down,
where she clung to his arm like a barnacle.