Ransome's Quest (3 page)

She stared at the underside of the deck above, trying to clear the haziness from her brain. Yes. They had made port. Left
Alexandra
and ridden in carriage across those horrible, rutted roads to Tierra Dulce, Julia’s sugar plantation. The low, sprawling white house with the deep porch that wrapped all the way around and the white draperies billowing through the open windows.

The porch. She blinked rapidly. The porch. At night. In the dark. Henry Winchester and…and Ned.

She bolted upright and then flung her torso over the side of the hammock as her stomach heaved.

Why should she be sick? She hadn’t experienced a moment of seasickness on the crossing from England to Jamaica. She climbed out of the hammock, skirt and petticoats hindering her progress until she hoisted them above her knees, and made for the small table with a glass and pitcher.

Wan light from the stern windows sparkled through the glass, revealing a residue of white powder in the bottom of it. She set the glass back on the stand. Last night the pirate had made her drink from the glass, and then everything had gone hazy. But before that…

She buried her face in her hands. Being torn away from Ned. She prayed they had not killed him. She’d heard no gunshot, but as their raid had been one of stealth, they would more likely have used a blade to end Ned’s life.

A sob ripped at her throat, but she forced it to stay contained. She would not give the pirates the satisfaction of seeing her upset. And she must, and would, find a means of escape.

Thirst got the better of her, and she lifted the china pitcher of water and rinsed her mouth before drinking deeply the brackish liquid. She then turned and surveyed the cabin. Obviously the pirate captain’s quarters. Though smaller than Ned’s aboard
Audacious,
which was in turn smaller than William’s aboard
Alexandra,
the room was neatly kept, with serviceable furnishings, whitewashed walls and ceiling, and plain floors. Nothing to exhibit the extravagance or wealth she’d expected to see in a pirate’s private lair.

The desk. Perhaps something there would tell her more about her captor. She crossed to it, rather surprised by the empty work surface. No stacks of the papers or books like the ones resting on William’s or Ned’s worktables. Her fingers itched to open the drawer under the desktop and the small doors and drawers along the high back of it, but Mama had taught her better than that.

Two miniatures hanging above the desk caught her eye. One showed a woman, probably a few years older than Charlotte, with dark hair and angular features. Too plain to be called pretty, but not ugly either. The green backdrop of the second painting contrasted vividly with the reddish-brown hair of a pretty girl and matched her vibrant green eyes.

Mahogany hair and green eyes—just like Julia. Why would a pirate have a portrait of Julia hanging in his cabin? But, she corrected herself, the painting was of a girl no older than thirteen or fourteen. Surely the resemblance to Julia was merely coincidental.

“She was lovely, was she not?”

Charlotte gasped and whirled. A dark-haired man dressed in a blue coat that resembled a commodore’s or admiral’s—complete with prodigious amounts of gold braid about the cuffs, collar, and lapels—stood in the doorway of the cabin.

He tossed a bicorne hat—also similar to a navy officer’s—onto the oblong table in the middle of the cabin, clasped his hands behind his back, and sauntered toward her, his eyes on the portrait.

“What do you want with me?”

“I am sorry for the manner of your coming here, Miss…?” He cocked one eyebrow at her.

“Ransome. Charlotte Ransome. My brother is Commodore William Ransome. He will hunt you down. And when he finds you—”

“When he finds me,” the pirate said, sighing, “I am certain the encounter shall be quite violent and bloody. Is that what you were going to say?”

Charlotte ground her teeth together. The man stood there, serene as a vicar on the Sabbath, acting as if they stood in a drawing room in Liverpool discussing the weather. “What do you want with me?”

“With you? Nothing.” He flicked an invisible speck of dust from the oval frame. “My business is with her.”

“With her?” Charlotte nodded toward the painting. “Is that…?”

“Julia Witherington—or Julia Ransome, as I have lately learned. Empress of the Tierra Dulce sugar empire.”

The strange lilt in his voice when he said Julia’s name sent a chill down Charlotte’s spine. “Yes, she is married. To my brother.”

“The famous Commodore Ransome.” The pirate turned and ambled toward the dining table. “His reputation precedes him.”

Worry riddled Charlotte at the pirate’s lack of worry over the thought of William’s hunting him down and blowing him and his crew out of the water. After Charlotte escaped, naturally.

“You were not part of my plan, little Charlotte Ransome.” He turned, leaned against the edge of the table, and crossed his arms. The coat pulled across his broad chest and muscular shoulders. A lock of dark hair fell over his forehead, softening the way his heavy black brows hooded his eyes. His nose had been aquiline once, but now it sported a bump about halfway down from whence the rest of the appendage angled slightly to his left. A scar stretched across his forehead and down into his left eyebrow. On first sight he could have passed for Spanish, but his accent marked him as an Englishman.

If he weren’t a no-good, dastardly, cowardly, kidnapping pirate, she might consider him handsome.

“Did you kill him?” The question squeezed past her throat unbidden.

“Him?”

“Ned—Captain Cochrane. The man with me on the porch.” She schooled her emotions as best she could, pretending the man standing before her was none other than Kent, her nemesis during her days aboard
Audacious
as a midshipman.

“If he is dead, it is through no work of me or my men. We do not kill for sport, only for defense.”

“Ha!” The mirthless laugh popped out before she could stop it. “Morality from a
pirate
? Someone who spends his life pillaging and thieving and destroying and killing and…and…” Heat flooded her face.

“And?” The pirate stood and stalked toward her, an odd gleam in his dark eyes. “And ravishing young women? Is that what you were going to say?”

Charlotte backed away, right into the edge of the desk. She gripped it hard. “N-no.”

The pirate leaned over her, hands on either side of her atop the desk, trapping her. “Do not try to lie to me, little Charlotte Ransome. You have no talent for it.”

Stays digging into her waist, she bent as far back as she could. “Yes, then. Ravishing.” Not that he would get a chance to ravish her. A fork. A penknife. Anything with a sharp edge or point. Once she had something like that in her possession, she would be able to defend herself against him.

Up close, the pirate’s brown eyes held chips of gold and green. A hint of dark whiskers lay just beneath the skin of his jaw and above his upper lip.

He blinked when someone knocked on the door but didn’t move. “Come!”

“Captain, Lau and Declan are back.”

“Very good. I shall meet with them in the wheelhouse momentarily to hear their report. Dismissed.”

Charlotte wanted to cry out to stop the other man from leaving, but she knew she deluded herself. She was no safer with any man on this ship than with their captain.

Would Ned still want her—even be able to look at her—after the pirates were finished with her?

“What’s this?” The pirate reached up and touched Charlotte’s cheek. “Tears?”

She shook her head, more to dislodge his hand than in denial.

With another sigh he straightened and then handed her a handkerchief. “Calm yourself, Miss Ransome. I have no intention of ravishing you. Nor of allowing anyone else to ravish you. While you are aboard my ship, you are under my protection.”

He crossed to the table and retrieved his hat. “You, however, must stay to this cabin at all times. Though my men know my rules of conduct, a few of them might give in to the temptation of their baser desires should they see you about on deck.”

Charlotte leaned heavily against the desk. The handkerchief in her hand was of the finest lawn, embroidered white-on-white with a Greek-key design around the edge. She frowned at the bit of cloth. Why would a pirate carry something so delicate?

He settled the bicorne on his dark head, points fore-and-aft, the same way the officers of the Royal Navy wore theirs.

“Who are you?”

He touched the fore tip of the hat and then flourished a bow. “I am called El Salvador, and you are aboard my ship,
Vengeance.
Welcome to my home, Miss Ransome.”

E
l Salvador de los Esclavos
. The Savior of the Slaves. He’d adopted the epithet many years ago, when he heard it chanted over and over by the dark-skinned men and women bound in chains on a ship he liberated. His reputation, if not his real name, had preceded him.

El Salvador de los Esclavos
. The pirate who had kidnapped a young woman—and the wrong young woman at that. What would his reputation be now?

Salvador closed the cabin door softly behind himself and joined his five most trusted men on the quarterdeck.

“Who is she, Cap’n?” Declan, his first mate, preferred meetings on the deck rather than in the captain’s cabin. At six-and-a-half feet, he was too tall to be a sailor. But he was one of the finest men Salvador had ever sailed with.

He had to be honest with these five—the men he trusted with his very life. “She is Charlotte Ransome, sister of Commodore William Ransome.”

“Ransome?” Picaro ran his fingers through his ginger curls. The second mate—who’d been known as Simon Donnelley before he turned pirate—had been part of the crew the shortest amount of time, only five years; but his knowledge of the Royal Navy proved time and again to be vital. “Ransome. The man has quite the reputation. He’s never engaged in a battle he didn’t win.”

“Then we must make certain he does not find us, so he cannot engage us in battle.” Salvador crossed his arms.

“He’s going to have a powerful need to get his sister back.” Jean Baptiste, the sailing master, whose tone was as dark as his skin, did not take his hands from the wheel or remove his eyes from the horizon beyond the bow of the frigate.

For the first time in his life—his life as a pirate—Salvador feared he’d done something he might come to regret. “The plan worked. We simply ended up with the wrong woman.”

“Think we can still get the admiral to pay? And if we can get that kind of swag from snatching girls, why haven’t we done it before?” Picaro asked.

“It ain’t what we do.” Declan leaned on the railing that separated the elevated quarterdeck from the waist of the ship and scowled at Salvador. “I’ll say it again. I don’t think it’s right to go around snatching young women from their families. It ain’t what we do.”

“The captain has his reasons for taking this action.” Lau, the boatswain, could always be counted on to defend Salvador, even if in this case his actions might not be worthy of defense.

Salvador raised his hands. “There is no point in further discussion of the merits or disadvantages of taking the girl. It is done. Now I must decide what action comes next.”

“Give her back. Put her in one of the boats with some food and water and set her adrift.” Declan stood, towering over everyone else. “We’re still close enough to land that someone should come upon her before nightfall.”

“Someone?” Salvador cocked his head. “What if that someone happens to be Shaw?”

The first mate’s lips pressed into a tight pucker. “Unless I’m disremembering, Shaw’s the reason we set out on this fool’s errand to begin with. Something about how he’d been bragging he was going to snatch Julia Witherington if ever she came back to Jamaica. And you decided to snatch her first. But now”—Declan raised his left arm and pointed downward, presumably toward Salvador’s cabin below them—“you’ve got the wrong girl, and you’ve dragged Commodore Ransome away from Tierra Dulce, where he could have provided some protection against Shaw for the Witherington woman.”

Salvador’s stomach churned at Declan’s precise explanation of how he’d managed to bungle the whole affair. “Other than casting the girl adrift, which is not going to happen, what do you suggest?”

“Well, we certainly can’t go back for the Witherington woman now. Not with Ransome on our tail.” Declan glared at him.

“We lead them astray and then double back and take the other woman,” Lau suggested. “Plant a few false leads to send Ransome far afield—up to Cuba or over to Hispaniola. Then we come back around and take the Witherington woman now no one’s there to protect her.”

“
Two
Royal Navy ships docked at Kingston, if you will recall.” Picaro kept his voice even and calm. “Ransome could order the second ship to protect the inlet. We would have to go overland, which would take far too long.”

“Captain.” A soft voice edged out the others for Salvador’s attention.

“What is it, Suresh?” Salvador glanced at his steward.

The young, reed-thin East Indian nodded toward the raised skylight behind them.

Salvador turned, and his breath caught in his throat. Charlotte Ransome’s blue eyes widened and then disappeared from the windows at the front of the raised box that provided extra light for his cabin.