Falconer's Quest (9 page)
It was Reginald’s turn to grow ashen. “Who are you, madam?”
“Thank God, oh, thank the Lord.” Her strength dissipated with her ire, such that only the railing kept her from collapsing to the gangway flooring. “I am Amelia Henning.”
“Ma’am, forgive me, but your name—”
“I was the first to bring word of your stepson’s abduction.”
Reginald struggled to shape the words. “You have seen him?”
“I have.” All vestige of strength had evaporated with her anger. “Forgive me, sir. Might I sit? I am feeling quite faint.”
“I have spent four months fighting against an uncaring, unlistening world.” Amelia Henning’s trembling fingers held fragments of the bread and cheese supplied by Soap. “I have been living at the seaman’s mission run by my husband’s church. I have spent days seeking aid from the navy and the government. All to no avail.”
“Samuel told me…That is, Samuel Aldridge, my friend and partner. He informed me that the messenger— who turns out to be you—had simply vanished.”
“It was a mistake. I see that now. But your man insisted upon taking such a measured course. And his constant questions nearly drove me insane.”
Which was how she looked to Falconer’s eye. A woman on the border of insanity. Her movements were jerky. Beneath that ragged hat, her face was blistered with sun and taut with hunger and nerves. Yet through all the disarray, she was an uncommonly attractive woman, in a rather half-starved and desperate fashion. Amelia Henning sipped from her cup, rattling it against the saucer when she set it down, then turned back to the plate of bread and cheese.
“I could not wait. Not for an instant. And Mr. Aldridge insisted upon doing nothing until you arrived from America. You or your trusted man.” But she did not say this in other than a matter-of-fact tone.
Reginald had adopted a pose of utter patience. He nodded in agreement at everything the woman said and spoke to her as he would a woman of position. “I apologize most profusely, madam. But Samuel merely acted as I had requested. We had received so many frustrating reports, you see. One after the other proved false. People who had heard of our son’s disappearance sought to profit from it.”
“Do I seem to you a woman after gain?”
“No, madam. Nothing could be further from the truth I see before me and hear from your lips.”
“Yet your Mr. Aldridge peppered me with his questions and offered no help at all!”
“Again, my sincerest regrets over any distress he might have caused. Won’t you have more cheese?”
“I am rather famished.” She could scarcely lift the fragments of bread to her mouth. She ate a bite, then a crumbled segment of cheese, then took a tiny sip from the cup. Her gaze was never still.
Footsteps rumbled down the outside passage. Harkness and Lieutenant Bivens entered the cabin, then crowded to a halt. “What’s this?”
“Captain Harkness, may I have the pleasure of introducing Amelia Henning. We were just having a most remarkable conversation. Mrs. Henning, would you mind terribly if they joined us?”
“Of course not.” Her voice was both weary and petulant. “Why should I, since I’ve spent the entire day trying to meet him?”
“Of course. Most foolish of me.”
Falconer sensed a sudden chill race up his spine. All of a sudden, the entire situation came into brilliant focus. Eyeing the sun through a telescope could not have been more shocking.
He interrupted the introductions. “Mrs. Henning, may I ask why you did not tell Samuel Aldridge all that you know of this situation?”
The hand rose and fell, a bit of bread, a sliver of cheese. “And you are?”
“My name is John Falconer. I am Reginald Langston’s trusted man. We have known one another for years, and I can assure you, whatever Master Langston says is far more trustworthy than most men’s gold locked in a steel vault.”
“I will testify to that as well,” Captain Harkness said.
Falconer leaned forward in his chair. He could not say why, but he was certain enough to speak his thoughts aloud. “Madam, forgive me for saying this. But I fear you and I suffer from the same malady.”
The hand stopped in midair.
“We have both suffered a grievous loss, is that not true?”
The hand began to tremble more violently.
“I mean something beyond the death of your husband. This Ali Saleem. He took someone dear to you.”
She whispered, “His men attacked the village where I carried on my late husband’s mission.”
Falconer lowered his voice to a murmur. “There is something more, I believe. Something you have kept hidden away. It tears at you, though. I know, Mrs. Henning. I know because I have been there myself.”
A tear coursed down the sun-blistered cheek. “He has my daughter. If she is still…”
Falconer reached across the impossible distance and caught her hand with his own. “We shall pray with you, madam. And if we can, with God’s help we will see the two of you reunited.”
“Amen,” Reginald echoed.
But the words merely drove the woman to straighten her spine. She spoke to Falconer directly. “I am after more than comforting words, sir.”
Falconer felt the bond between them, of loss and the drive to overcome sorrow for another’s sake. He searched the woman’s narrow features and decided. “You wish to come with us to Africa?”
“I insist upon it.” At this she turned and stared meaningfully at the captain, as fierce a challenge as Falconer had ever seen.
Harkness began a rumbled reply, but his protest was never fully formed. Out of the corner of his eye, Falconer saw Reginald Langston abruptly signal to the skipper and then say, “Proof, Mrs. Henning. It is a terrible word, and I am certain it has caused you offense. But we have received so very many false reports, I have no choice but to ask if you have any to offer.”
“Your stepson carries a scar on the inside of his left forearm.”
Reginald’s voice quavered slightly as he asked, “Did Byron happen to mention how he received it?”
“He spoke of climbing out of a dormitory window his last year at Eton.”
“It is he,” Reginald whispered. He sank into the seat next to Falconer. “How did he appear to you?”
“Terrified,” the woman replied curtly. “Exhausted. He was kept in Ali Saleem’s underground dungeon, with no glimmer of daylight and very little air.”
“Did he say anything that I might pass on to his mother?”
A flicker of compassion registered deep in the widow’s shattered gaze. “Only that he was sorry. That he begged her forgiveness. And beseeched God and your good self not to leave him to rot away without light or hope.”
Reginald covered his eyes and spoke no more.
Falconer took over once more. “So Ali Saleem showed you Byron.”
“One of his captains did. I never set eyes upon the pirate prince.” The words came with a force shocking to her hearers. “The captain himself hauled me into the dungeon. He said my daughter would live if I delivered the message. And if you brought gold.”
“This much you told Samuel Aldridge,” Falconer said, speaking low and calm. “This captain, did you catch his—”
“Yes, I told Mr. Aldridge. But I saw what was behind his questions.” Despite Falconer’s soothing strength, her voice rose once more to a frantic pitch. “He was going to take all that I knew and then leave me to wait in England! He would not promise to give me a berth! And I will
not
wait here a thousand leagues from my daughter! Catherine—” her voice broke—“is all I have left in the world! Do you hear me, sirs? I will
not be left behind
!”
They sailed the next morning with the outgoing tide. Captain Harkness made no further objections to Amelia Henning’s presence, and the crew said nothing directly to the officers about it. But Falconer’s years of experience belowdecks aided his interpretation of the mutterings and the scowls he heard and saw. Not all of the sailors were men of faith, and some of those who were still had not fully cast off common seamen’s superstitions. Falconer caught the men’s grim predictions that a woman who was not an official passenger would only bring them all bad luck.
Yet their sailing could not have been finer. The skies remained clear and the wind fair, a steady blow from the east that powered them southward across gently rolling seas. By their second evening on board, they had passed the Channel Islands and entered the deep waters marking the Bay of Biscay.
Captain Harkness and Lieutenant Bivens included Matt in their sailing instructions as they did the middies. They taught about charts and compass bearings, and they let him sight the sun through the sextant. He held the captain’s chronometer when a crewman cast the log along the leeward side to measure the ship’s speed. Falconer watched with pride as Matt counted the knots in the log rope, halting when the clock’s second hand swept through the minute and then correctly reporting the ship’s speed to the captain. Falconer observed how Harkness played stern but fair when Matt mangled the finicky calculations to determine precisely where the ship lay. The boy grew strong, sun-browned, and fit, and though he scarcely ever smiled, he drew pleased grins from the toughest of sailors.
Amelia Henning sat upon a poop-deck chair, one lashed to the railing alongside the water barrels. She carried a book of psalms in her dress pocket and often drew it out. Although she seemed to ignore the crewmen, Falconer was certain she was aware of their hostility. Whenever Reginald or Captain Harkness addressed her, she responded fully. Now that she was shipboard and headed toward the Mediterranean and her captured child, she gave freely of what information she had.
Whenever the men stepped away, the woman stared to the south, peering over the waters at a daughter only she could see.
The person who was able to reach her was Matt. They took to reading a psalm together each morning. The two heads, one red haired and gaunt, the other towheaded and lively of countenance, squinted against the brilliant sun and traded verses. Since Matt had become a favor ite among the seamen, his growing closeness to Amelia Henning gradually erased the sailors’ grumbling more than anything the captain might say.
Falconer was watching the two of them study the Book when Harkness invited him onto the quarterdeck, the captain’s private domain. “What can you tell me of these pirates, Falconer?”
Reginald moved forward at a beckon from the captain. The owner had legal right to any place on the ship, but a happy crew was one where customs were maintained. And an owner could not sail the ship. Reginald Langston was a man who chose his skippers carefully, then was himself careful to treat them as leaders in their own right. He did not enter the captain’s bailiwick unless invited.
When Reginald had joined them, Falconer replied, “I have not fought these particular Barbary louts myself, so everything I know about them is hearsay.”
“Forget that for the moment. I too have heard of them for years. What I want to know is the general cut of a pirate’s jib. You have gone up against pirates, I suppose.”
“On three occasions. Once off the Malacca Strait. Twice in the Indian Ocean.”
Falconer found himself distracted by the sound of Matt’s voice and glanced to the lower deck. Matt stood like he’d been born to the sea, legs well spaced and his body rocking easily to the ship’s motion. He stood beside Amelia Henning’s chair and sang. Falconer recognized the hymn as a favorite of Ada’s. A number of the sailors had turned from their duties to observe the boy and hear a voice as clear as the sea air.
“I am waiting, sir.” But Harkness did not sound impatient.
Falconer turned back to the skipper. “They are brutal fighters and show no quarter. But they lack discipline. They are raiders. They prey on weakness. They fear a stronger foe.”
Harkness gripped the lapel of his greatcoat and tugged. “And this captain the woman mentioned, what is his name?”
“La Rue. Philippe La Rue.”
Reginald asked, “Is that an African name?”
“More likely French.”
Reginald was shocked. “In this day and age a citizen of a civilized country would become a pirate?”
Harkness replied, “I have even heard of Americans among the Caribbean raiders.”
Falconer added, “The French have a division of their army which is open to anyone. Prisoners, deserters, men of any stripe or nation. The foreign legion, it is called. A brutal force, with the harshest discipline on earth. Many who survive it become mercenaries.”
Harkness tugged harder upon his lapel, the act of a fighter impatient for action. “How, pray tell me, would you go about this maneuver?”
“We first must stop in Marseilles,” Falconer explained, glad to be discussing plans. “Make it known who we are and why we are there. An agent for the pirates will contact us.”
“How can you be so sure?” Reginald demanded.
“An agent will seek us out,” Falconer repeated. “And then they will test our mettle.”
“What, you mean attack?”
“Seek to steal our gold. Perhaps seize some of us for ransom.”
Reginald cast an anxious look from one man to the other. “What are we to do?”
“That is simple enough,” Harkness replied, his gaze steady upon Falconer. “We prepare.”
The third evening after leaving Portsmouth, they dined as usual in the captain’s cuddy. Harkness had invited Amelia Henning to join them, but she had politely declined. The officers were well aware of Matt’s presence at the table, and they tempered their discussions about what lay ahead. After a dessert of green English apples and fresh figs, early fruits gathered in the Portsmouth market, a subtle shift in the wind caused Harkness to rise and move to his doorway. He returned a moment later and sat back down in his chair with a nod to Bivens that all was well. But his mind seemed to be elsewhere, such that he said to no one in particular, “Late in yesterday’s night watch, I heard weeping from the lady’s cabin.”
To their surprise, Matt spoke up for the first time during the meal. “She fears for Kitty, sir.”
“Who?”
“Her daughter, Captain Harkness.”
“I thought the lass was named Catherine.”
“She has been known as Kitty since birth, sir. She had a habit of mewing like a newborn cat that charmed everyone who heard her.”
