Heart of Steele (13 page)

“So the notorious
Red Queen
is just a tricked-up treasure galleon with a bit of meat on her bones?” Captain Hunter frowned even as he said the words.

“That is nonsense, sir,” snapped a soft voice from the doorway. Miss Fairfax had returned and stood there glaring. “I might remind you, Don Esteban, that I have seen the
Red Queen,
and she is no more any kind of merchant ship than the
Aurora
or the
Concepcíon.”

“And I saw her once from a distance,” said Captain Hunter. “It was a short enough glimpse, for she fired on us and all but sank us. But she had not the lines of a galleon.”

“She has not, Captain Hunter, not any longer. And you are right, my lady. The
Red Queen
is not any more the
Sangreal.
She has been changed.”

“Well, I am profoundly confused,” said my uncle cheerfully, throwing his hands up in the air. “Treasure ship, warship, fish, or fowl … what is she, exactly?”

Don Esteban gave him a long, dark look. “The great treasure galleon is no more, Doctor Shea. What is in her place is, as you said, neither fish nor fowl. There is nothing like the
Red Queen
anywhere on the
Seven Seas. Captain Steele completely altered her.” The Spaniard turned to Captain Hunter. “Tell me, sir, what do you know of the
Red Queen?”

Captain Hunter frowned. “What everyone knows, I suppose. She’s oversized, she’s bloodred. I saw her only once. She is monstrously large, and strangely fast.”

“Few have done as you. Few have seen her and lived to tell of it. And fewer still would be believed. Steele took her to one of his hidden bases. Then he ripped her apart and rebuilt her to some plan of his own. He razed the forecastle by one deck and the aftercastle by two. No galleon has ever had lines so low.”

“Better stability, though” rumbled Morgan. “The curse of the galleons, and I mean no offense, Don Esteban, is that they tower so high that the wind catches ’em. They make shocking leeway.”

“Not when ballasted with gold and silver,” returned the Spanish captain.

“How do you know all this, Don Esteban?” asked Captain Hunter.

For the first time, Don Esteban looked uncomfortable. “We were able to capture one of the men who
worked on the transformation. He was … persuaded to provide information.” Don Esteban closed his eyes and began to recite like a schoolboy doing his lessons. “The
Red Queen
is one hundred and eighty feet long. Her gun decks have been increased from two to three. A year ago, her armament was sixty sixteen-pound cannons. That has changed. Now her lower deck carries twenty-four thirty-two pounders; her middle deck carries thirty-four twenty-four pounders; her upper deck carries sixteen sixteen pounders. There are two nine-pound bow-chasers and four stern chasers of the same size. Her crew is approximately four hundred and twenty-five.”

The silence that followed this list of statistics was absolute. I stood in my corner with my mouth open just like all the adults seated around the table. Eighty guns. That was as many as a ship of the line could carry.

“No, no, that is just not possible,” my uncle objected.

“One hundred and eighty feet?” wondered Captain Hunter. “The
Aurora
’s but one hundred.”

“And the
Concepcíon
is but one forty,” finished Don Esteban.

“Now do you understand, Captain Hunter?” said Miss Fairfax, hugging herself as she sat in the corner. “The
Red Queen
isn’t a ship, she’s a monster, a nightmare with sails. And she and the madman who created her are drawing others to her side!”

“Aye,” breathed John Barrel. “My bonnie
Fury
would serve her as a longboat, so she would.”

“You see how it is, gentlemen,” said a strangely shrunken Sir Henry Morgan. “There can be precious little help from the Royal Navy in this case. King James has troubles of his own right now and I think I spill no secrets when I say there are no more than four navy ships in these waters.”

“Your news would be more interesting if Spain had more ships,” agreed Don Esteban. “I believe the French and the Dutch are in much the same situation. And none of them could stand up against the
Red Queen.”

“So it comes down to this,” Captain Hunter said, staring off into space. “We—the men around this table—must find the
Red Queen
’s last secret base and destroy it. And her. And Captain Jack Steele.” He turned his stare to Don Esteban. “To do that we must cooperate, all differences forgotten, until that
great task is finished. Or the sea of the Caribbees is a pirate lake and Jack Steele is its king forever.”

Don Esteban closed his eyes and we all held our breath. He had fought beside us once before but his commission, like ours, was to hunt pirates, and he considered us pirates. Every other Spaniard in the New World thought we were the butchers of San Angel. Had Sir Henry’s evidence convinced him of our innocence?

Finally that slight smile appeared again on the dark Spaniard’s face. “Our course is clear and only fools would try to sail against it. But you must forgive me, Captain Hunter, if I say it is too perilously close to making a deal with the devil himself.”

Gravely he offered his hand, and just as gravely Captain Hunter shook it.

And there in the grand study of Sir Henry Morgan’s great plantation house did the English and Spanish pirate hunters once again join forces to fight the greatest pirate of them all.

Jack Steele and the bloody
Red Queen.

The unlikely Armada

ON THE SIMMERING
first day of August 1688, under the lightest of breezes, the
Aurora
glided through the waters south of Cayo Hueso, the last island in a long chain curving down from the Spanish territory of Florida. I was finding life aboard the ship strange again, for Sir Henry had delivered to us new recruits, and our crew was one hundred and eighty strong once more. But so many new faces made me feel ill at ease, as if distant relatives had moved into my home, and me not knowing a one of them.

High, streaky clouds painted themselves across a deep blue sky. Mr. Tate, who was an old hand in
these waters, said they were omens of a hurricane out in the Atlantic. One of the new men cursed him and his omens, warning him not even to talk of such storms. “Namin’ bad luck calls it, ye know,” the ill-natured stranger growled. Mr. Tate shrugged it off as a sailor’s superstition.

We were to sail within sight of the low island until the others joined us. Mercifully both vessels did on the second day, and that meant we could hoist sail and get under way, finding some relief from the heat. In this place the sun that beat straight down at noon turned the pitch in the seams between the deck boards into black, sticky liquid.

By sunset of the second day of August the
Concepcíon
and the
Fury
had come within hailing distance, and all that night we cast our course eastward, to weather the east point of Cuba and then turn southward, ranging past Jamaica and from there down to Yucatan and points south. The next day, both Don Esteban and Captain Barrel came aboard, and we all huddled in the cabin.

“Tell them what you heard in the tavern, Davy,” Captain Hunter instructed.

I did so, mentioning the drunken sailor’s
mumblings about Bloodhaven. “He said Steele would be there or at San Angel,” I finished.

“He certainly had been at San Angel,” my uncle put in dryly.

“Bloodhaven?” muttered Captain Barrel. “Either of ye gents know where it might lie?”

“It is not on any chart,” Don Esteban declared.

“I’ve never even heard of it,” added Captain Hunter.

“Aye, there’s the wonder of it all,” Captain Barrel observed. “Devil a pirate I’ve ever seen as runs such a tight-knit crew as Steele’s. They be afeard o’ him, and that’s part of it. But a bigger part is loyalty. The man commands his crew’s loyalty like … like a blessed admiral.”

“And he slaughters those loyal to him just to trap an enemy,” my uncle said. “We saw what he did to San Angel.”

“Bloodhaven, now,” Captain Barrel continued, without paying much heed to Uncle Patch’s interruption. “To be sure, I’ve heard of it, but just in a general way, as ye might say. It be somewhere on the Spanish Main, belike. It could lie anywhere between Portobello an’ Cozumel, for that matter. Might be
one of the Miskitas, or might lie near Old Providence, both on ’em prime pirate hideaways at one time.”

“Someone will know,” Captain Hunter assured him. “I’m positive that Steele has a safe haven somewhere. He cannot sail in and out without being spied by someone. We will ask fishermen, traders, anyone we see. Sooner or later we shall find him, mark my words.”

A day or two later, we caught the tail end of the blow Mr. Tate had foreseen. It was rough weather, with gales of wind and black lashings of rain ripping the sea to gray-white foam that flew away like ghosts. The
Aurora
plunged and rose and bucked and groaned, even under only a staysail to give us headway. We lost touch with the other two craft. This was the kind of weather that had made me seasick before, and so it did a few of our old hands. More than once I saw a sailor step lively to the rail, lean over, and throw up to leeward, afterward wiping his mouth in a businesslike way and going straight back to work, as if nothing remarkable had happened.

I found that I was less sick on deck than belowdecks, so I spent much of the storm near the helmsmen, for it took two of them when the weather was rough. Once I recall the poor ship had climbed up a swelling, green, foam-streaked mountain of a wave. We balanced on the crest of it for a moment, with the wind shrieking in the rigging and rain coming horizontal, hitting as hard as musket balls. Then the bow dipped and we plunged down into the trough of the wave in a sickening, rushing dip that was only just short of falling.

I held on to something—a backstay, the rail, I do not remember—and watched with sick fascination. As we rushed downward, the waves cut off the wind, and suddenly the howling in the rigging ceased, leaving only the dismal universal roar of the storm. To my horror, the bow of the
Aurora
stabbed into the sea, as if we were heading down to the bottom, and for a moment I was sure we would never rise. One of the men at the whipstaff cried out, “God save us!”

And then with a terrible, creaking groan, the good ship raised her bow again, and a green wall of water came washing straight back along the deck. It
smacked into me chest-high, and I felt my feet sweep from under me. For a moment only my death grip on the backstay and the rail held me aboard, and then the water poured from the scuppers as if we had taken a waterfall aboard us. And then we were climbing one of those monstrous waves again.

By the time the storm had passed, we had much mending to do, but nothing had carried away or broken. With a fresher wind, we found our two consorts. Neither of them was badly damaged, and together the three of us fairly flew to the south.

That was just the beginning of dreary weeks spent coasting along. We met precious few vessels, and none of them had any news to share. Sometimes we threaded our way through a maze of low islands or ghosted along northward within sight of the coast of Central America, praying that no strong wind would spring up to wreck us, for the chief of a sailor’s fears is to be caught on a lee shore, a shore toward which a strong wind is blowing. In such cases, a ship has small hope of surviving, and so does her crew.

We were nearing the territory of Yucatan by the
first of September. That afternoon Mr. Adams and I slaved away at our mathematical studies on deck, for the heat below was stifling. Mr. Adams’s mathematical studies had fairly blossomed. Somehow understanding had taken root within him, and he was now showing me how to work hard problems in trigonometry. Lord knows, it could not have been my uncle’s teaching that made the difference, for he knew as much of the higher mathematics as a flounder does of the Alps. Perhaps it was simply that Mr. Adams had grown desperate, and desperation drove him to great effort.

At any rate, late that night I lay in my hammock, dripping with sweat and vainly trying to sleep. At last I gave up and swung down to the deck. My uncle, in his cot, was snoring away, for he could drop off at any time and in any place. I took a pillow and went up on deck to find a coil of rope where I might curl up in the relative coolness.

It must have been well past midnight when a hurried exchange of voices woke me up. “To the north, see?” someone said. “Better tell the cap’n.”

I sprang up. “What is it?”

One of the new men jumped a foot, swore, and then said, “The loblolly boy? What’re you doin’ above boards?”

“Hush up, Sweeney,” said the other, a man I knew to be Obedience Jackson. “He’s our mascot, like. He brings us good luck.”

By then I had heard what had drawn their attention. It was a low, distant rumble, something like thunder. But it was not thunder, for I had heard the sound often before. Somewhere to the north, a ship was firing its guns.

I sprang to the rigging and clambered up to the maintop, where Olaf Petersen gave me a grunting welcome. “Ye can see there, about three points to larboard. Watch steady.”