Pirate Wolf Trilogy (98 page)

Gabriel moved painfully across the deck and
down the ladderway, ducking through the hatch and following a
companionway into the stern where the captain’s quarters were
located. As on most Spanish ships, the great-cabin was lavishly
decorated in velvets and gilt, with ornately carved furnishings
better suited to a royal brothel than a warship. The
capitans
were mostly figureheads, members of court who were
appointed by the king and not accustomed to suffering the hardships
and discomforts of common seamen. Most surrounded themselves with
rich trappings from home, placing creature comforts well above
practicality.

Directly overhead was a smaller, far less
pretentious cabin assigned to the ship’s sailing
maestro
,
the true commander of a galleon. Gabriel briefly debated abandoning
all the crimson velvet and gold curlicues for simple wood and wool,
but his legs had barely held up coming down the ladderway and he
did not think it prudent to be seen crawling along the companionway
on hands and knees.

Gabriel scanned the luxurious cabin with his
one good eye and grimaced... a painful gesture which sent him
searching hesitantly for a mirror. He spied one, cracked with
battle damage, hanging over a porcelain washstand. He approached it
with no small amount of trepidation, for his captors had applied
both the lash and their fists, beating him savagely for three days
and nights. His back and shoulders were whipped raw and if the
widespread patches of black and blue flesh on his chest, arms,
belly and legs were any indication, his face was likely just as
grotesque.

Jonas often mocked his younger brother's
cavalier good looks saying there was no place for vanity on board a
fighting ship. Bracing himself, Gabriel inched up to the mirror but
the thing that stared back at him was even worse than he expected.
His left eye was purple, swollen to the size of a small coconut,
sealed shut with a crust of dried blood that had leaked from a deep
cut across the eyebrow. His right eye was red with broken blood
vessels, making the tarnished amber iris look inflamed. A second
deep gash along his cheek puffed and distorted the square lines of
his jaw. Lips that could normally make a wench lick her own in
anticipation were split and scabbed. The long thick waves of
chestnut hair were caked with blood and filth, and hung in dirty
strings to his shoulders.

A wave of nausea swept through him. There was
water in the pitcher and he poured some into the basin then took a
square of linen and began to carefully wash away the layers of
dried blood and grime. When he finished, there was not much of an
improvement; he still resembled one of the gargoyles mounted on
cathedral roofs to scare off the demons.

He tossed the cloth aside and looked around.
He could not remember the last time he slept, and every muscle and
sinew in his body was crying out for rest.

The Spaniard's berth was no berth at all but
an actual four-poster bed draped in a crimson canopy. Gabriel
stared at it a moment, then went to the desk instead and began to
sort through the piles of maps, charts, and logbooks that had been
salvaged from the
Valour
.

He was interrupted once by the cabin boy,
Eduardo, who brought in a tray laden with biscuits and cheese and
heaps of cold mutton. There was a pot of broth too, which was
steaming hot and coursed through Dante's battered body with
much-welcomed restorative powers. The Spanish
capitan
had
had good taste in wine and after several goblets, with his belly
full and his aches starting to go numb, Gabriel gave in to the
temptation to rest his head on the desktop for a moment.

At some point he woke and found himself on
the bed under a thickly quilted blanket. The cabin was dark save
for a single glowing lantern that flickered above the desk,
suggesting he had slept through the entire day. Since there were no
sounds of gunfire or thundering footsteps overhead, he surmised
their progress out of the Straits was steady and uneventful. His
eye closed again and he buried his head in the feather bolster,
letting the motion of the ship rock him gently back to sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

Somewhere in the Providence Channel

The ship was dying around her.

The death knell had sounded a week ago when
one of the crewmen had collapsed on deck with a blood-curdling
scream. His body had been soaked in sweat, his skin covered in
ugly, festering pustules, and his eyes glassy from a raging fever.
The men who had slept, eaten, or gamed in his vicinity followed in
horrifyingly swift succession. The surgeon, a drunkard and a fool,
had been among the first to succumb, which had left no one to offer
relief to the sick and dying.

After six weeks at sea, the
Eliza Jane
had dropped anchor in Fox Town, a port on the island of Eluthera.
It was the captain’s grim supposition that the first feverish
crewman had caught the sickness from one of the island whores. He
had ordered the ailing men confined belowdecks, but it was already
too late. The stench of death engulfed the
Eliza Jane
like a
cocoon, bringing even the strongest, stoutest men to their knees.
The last valiant act the captain was able to perform was to raise
the yellow flag on the mainmast, a signal to all passing ships to
steer well clear.

Evangeline Chandler felt her brow twenty
times a day, expecting the worst. Her maid had died in her arms and
since then, she imagined every ache to be the onslaught of the
fever, every roil of her belly to be the beginning of the bloody
flux that would mark the beginning of the end. Captain Fitch had
ordered her to stay in her tiny cabin but that had proved to be a
different kind of hell. There was no porthole, no source of fresh
air. The cabin was five paces by six paces, with a good portion
taken up by a narrow berth and a sea chest containing her meager
belongings. A small commode cupboard and washstand occupied one of
the corners but the boy who had been assigned to empty the pot and
provide her with fresh water had not been seen in two days.

Even worse was the silence. Over the course
of the long voyage from Portsmouth, Eva had become accustomed to
the rapping of hammers, off-key singing, running feet overhead,
shouts to haul in sail or play more on. Day by day those familiar
sounds had diminished, leaving only the groaning of timbers and the
rush of seawater beneath the hull. There were no further knocks on
her door signalling a tray of food had been left outside. There
were no gruff voices in the companionway asking if she was still
alive.

There was no water left in the pitcher and
she’d had nothing to eat for two days. Her reflection, when she
dared to hold up the tiny polished mirror, was shocking. Her
normally clear, sea-green eyes were ringed with shadows, her skin
was sallow, her lips starting to crack from thirst.

Eva looked at the door and listened to the
silence. She was running out of options. She had to leave the
cabin, find water, and see for herself what was happening out
there. She wasn’t sure why the disease had not claimed her; perhaps
there were others wondering the same thing, keeping themselves
hidden away from the lethal vapors.

She did not even know if it was day or
night.

She bit the inside of her lip and reached for
her cloak. There had seemed to be little point in trying to lace
herself into a stomacher each day or to pace the cabin in fancy
brocades, thus she had taken to dressing in the comfort of a simple
white smock. With little else to do to pass the time, her hair was
brushed smooth and fell in a gleaming golden curtain to below the
curve of her bottom.

Donning the cloak, she pulled the hood up to
cover her head and opened the door a crack. The companionway was
dark; the lamp that usually burned outside the captain’s door,
which was opposite her own, was unlit.

After another moment of trembling uncertainty
she returned to the berth and lifted the long-snouted flintlock
pistol that had been her constant companion through the past six
weeks. Despite the Chandler name and the respect that came with it,
she had not been oblivious to the dangers of being a woman
outnumbered two-hundred-to-one on a long sea voyage. Captain Fitch
had guaranteed her safety but he was dead now. The crew had been
suitably deferential for the most part, limiting their lewd
comments to when she was almost out of earshot, but fever and death
made for altered priorities.

With the pistol primed and hidden in the
folds of her cloak, Eva crept out of the cabin and made her way by
wary inches along the narrow companionway to the bottom of the
wooden steps that led up to the open deck. There she paused and
stared up at the patch of sky showing through the hatch. It was not
the crisp blue of morning or the bright heated turquoise of noon.
The sky was a washed-out gray as if the light was fading,
suggesting it was late afternoon... or early evening.

She mounted the steps slowly, unaware she was
holding her breath. She had no idea what to expect to see at the
top, and hoped it would be a normal scene of men bent over sails
with needle and thread, or scrubbing planks with a holystone, or
hanging from the rigging and working the lines.

Perhaps the danger had passed and she had
merely been forgotten, locked away in her tiny cabin.

Pulling the cloak tighter, she stepped over
the coaming and emerged from the shadows onto the open deck. The
sun was, indeed, low in the westerly sky yet it took several blinks
for her eyes to adjust after living so long with yellowish
lamplight.

At first she saw nothing out of the ordinary.
The sails were furled, rolled and tied into fat sausages along each
yardarm overhead. Only the uppermost triangles of canvas, which she
had come to know were used for steerage and not speed, hung open to
catch the wind. The ugly yellow flag still luffed softly on the
mainmast; the miles of naked rigging lines seemed to hang from the
yards like empty cobwebs.

Then she saw the bodies.

The first one was slumped across a capstan,
arms and legs limp, mouth open and crusted with dried vomit.
Another was sprawled near the rail and might have looked as if he
was sleeping but for the sockets of his eyes, which were empty and
black, the flesh around them shredded by rats that seemed immune to
any manner of disease.

Clutching the gun tighter she turned away
from the sickening sight and stepped further out onto the deck.
There were more bodies, dozens of them frozen in a terrible
tableau. She turned quickly on her heel, her cloak dragging over
the timbers, and looked up at the quarterdeck.

There was no one standing at the helm. She
could not recall when she had last heard the ship's bell rung. The
hourglass on the binnacle had not been turned. Moreover, the long
wooden arm of the tiller had been bound in rope and tied to the
rail, something that would cause the ship to sail in a continuous
circle.

"My God," she whispered. "My God."

She made another quick turn and mounted the
steps to the quarterdeck, too stunned to do more than stare at the
rope binding the tiller. Even if she untied it, she had no idea how
to steer or sail a ship.

She whirled and ran to the side, exchanging
the grip she had on the pistol for a new and terrified grip on the
wooden rail. From this elevated view she could see down the length
of the
Eliza Jane,
at the bodies scattered stem to stern,
all of them silent, all of them motionless.

"H-hello? Is anyone there?"

Silence greeted the panicked shout.

"Hello!
Please!
Is someone...
anyone... there!"

She scanned the ocean in a full circle but
there was nothing but open water and sky in all directions.

"Hello!
Hello!
" She gripped the rail
tighter, feeling tears sting into her eyes. "Please, someone
answer! Hello!
Hello!
"

She pushed away from the rail and ran back
down the steps, then along the deck to the bow. Each frantic step
was accompanied by a shout, a cry, a disbelieving plea for someone
to answer. She found the captain slumped over a barrel amidships.
His eyes and cheeks were gone, gnawed by rats and gulls; blackened
streaks of dried blood trailed down onto his chest. When she looked
closer, the trail of blood rippled with a thousand crawling,
gorging flies.

Eva clutched her belly and ran past the
horror to the foredeck.

She could not be the only one left alive on
board the entire ship! It was not possible! It was not believable!
It was madness! Insanity!

Why, of the two hundred souls on board, would
she be the only one spared?

"Father," she whispered. "Dear God...
Father... what do I do now?
What do I do now
?"

She stumbled against the thick oaken arm of
the bowsprit, blinded by tears. She tried to scream but her throat
was too dry. She tried to quell the panic blooming in her chest but
it rose and squeezed around her lungs until her vision turned dark.
She felt herself crumpling and something banged her head, causing a
brief starburst of pain... then nothing but the nightmare she had
already endured a hundred times...

~~

"I want to go with you."

"No. Absolutely not."

"He is my father. If you are sailing to the
Indies to search for him, I want to go with you."

Lawrence Ross looked up from the pile of
papers he was sorting on his desk. "This is not going to be a
pleasurable jaunt for a few days across the Channel. This is going
to be weeks, possibly months of sailing in all manner of weather,
good and bad, in tropical heat, landing on hostile islands covered
in jungles, dealing with pirates and blackguards and men who would
think of you as a delicacy to roast over an open fire... after they
had their fill of using you."