Teresa Medeiros (46 page)

Heedless of its sharp edges, she swept the glass aside and scrambled up the ladder. She heaved open the trapdoor only to be engulfed in roiling smoke. She batted at it, coughing to clear her lungs. A pile of crippled sail dangled to her left, extinguished, but still smoldering.

She fanned the smoke from her stinging eyes only to have them fill with tears.

She was too late.

The flag of surrender rippled against the pallid circle of the moon, its grace a stark contrast to the charred destruction surrounding it. It was a measure of his men’s faith in him that even as Gerard prepared to surrender their beloved vessel, not one of them protested.
They stood silently on the battered deck, their heads bowed, but their shoulders unbent.

Lucy passed among them like a pale wraith. She knew she should be embarrassed by her flimsy attire, her tangled hair, the scandalous signs of Gerard’s possession, but she had found among their ranks all the things the Admiral had taken such perverse pleasure in withholding—acceptance without judgment, affection without reproach, a nobility born not of birth or military stature, but of behavior.

She stopped in front of Gerard. Her low voice trembled with emotion. “You can’t do this. Do you hear me? I won’t allow it.”

He stared right through her, as if he’d been struck both blind and deaf by the enormity of his actions. Seeing no help there, Lucy turned to Tarn. His freckled face was stark white.

“You mustn’t let him do this, Tarn. I forbid it!”

The young Irishman gazed at the distant horizon, his hands fumbling with a battered string of rosary beads.

Lucy ran to Pudge. Her heart lurched to discover a fat crack running through the right lens of his spectacles. Somehow that was the worst affront of all. “Please, Pudge. Try to talk to him. Tell him he’s making a terrible mistake.” Pudge only shook his head sadly. “Is this what you ran away for? So that wretched wife of yours could watch you hang at Newgate?”

Dashing her tears away before they could blind her, she turned to Apollo. An ugly gash marred his temple. She clutched at his arm. “Oh, Apollo, dear Apollo, if anyone can stop him, you can! My father won’t bring him to trial. He’ll kill him. Now. Tonight. And he’ll see the rest of you hanged or jailed. Is that what you want? To spend the remainder of your life in chains?” The
former slave stood unmoved by her pleas, his features carved in stark ebony.

A lone man slouched against the quarterdeck rail. Lucy seized upon him with desperate hope, fighting hysteria. “Kevin! He’s your brother! Surely you can make him see reason. Even if we surrender, the Admiral will find a way to silence me. He’s realized that I know about his privateering scheme. I can discredit him. Destroy his precious reputation!” A thread of blood trickled from Kevin’s fair hair. She brushed it from his brow with trembling fingers.

Kevin gently pushed her hand away, his wry, pitying gaze so like his brother’s that it chilled her to the bone.

She pivoted on the deck, turning her beseeching gaze on each man in turn. Once she had stood in that very spot and demanded they betray their captain; now she would entreat them to spare his life. The wind whipped at her hair, tore the tears from her cheeks.

“Don’t you see? He’ll find a way to silence all of you. Why do you think he only brought one ship? Because he didn’t want any bloody witnesses!”

She nearly collapsed with relief when a warm pair of hands closed over her upper arms from behind. At last, someone to help her make their captain see reason! But the voice in her ear
was
Gerard’s, its rich cadences deepened by regret.

“I can’t risk battle with you aboard. At least this way you’ll have a chance. If the Admiral blows us out of the water, you’ll have no chance at all. These men chose this life and, by consequence, this death. Even Digby had a hand in his own fate.” He steered her to port, showing her not out of cruelty, but out of love, the grim, canvas-wrapped bundle lying limp on the fo’c’sle.

Lucy’s knees faltered, but Gerard was there to support her as he had always been.

Grief roughened his grip as he drew her against him, shielding her from the wind. “You’re not like them, Lucy. I dragged you away from your safe, orderly life and carried you aboard this vessel by force. You had no choice.”

Lucy pulled away from the refuge of his grasp to face him. Determination banished her hysteria; her voice was as crisp as a bell ringing across the waves. “I’m choosing now. Don’t do this. I’m not worth it.”

Gerard threw back his head with a despairing laugh. His eyes shone with admiration and another, far more fragile, emotion, that robbed Lucy of her breath. “Oh, God, but you are, angel. You’re positively priceless.”

Hope flared in her heart. She fisted her hands in his shirt and shook him, her voice rising to a shout to combat the wind, the flapping of that terrible flag, and loudest of all, the smug silence from the
Argonaut
. “Then don’t let him win, by God! Fight!
Fight for me!
”

G
ERARD GAZED DOWN AT THE DELICATE, but determined, fists tangled in his shirtfront. It seemed Lucy was no longer content to be the Admiral’s puppet, but was willing to seize all of her hopes and dreams and shake them until they surrendered. She’d finally chosen him over the man she’d spent a lifetime believing to be her father. His enemy had become her enemy.

She’d proven herself willing to beg for him. Willing to fight for him. Willing to die for him. Could he offer her any less?

When he lifted his head, the familiar glint of resolve in his eyes caused a hopeful stir among his men. He called out, “What say you, gentlemen? Are we going to let this bold lady prove us all to be craven cowards?”

A rousing cheer went up from his crew.

“I’d say not, Cap’n,” Tarn yelled, his freckled face split in a wide grin. “If she’s armed, we’re all done for anyway!”

Squealing with joy, Lucy threw her arms around
Gerard’s neck. He spun her around, lifting her clear off her feet.

Pudge whipped off a salute, his broken spectacles only adding to his roguish air. “Shall I withdraw the flag, sir?”

Gerard’s gaze flicked to the rippling symbol of their capitulation. A wicked smile slanted his lips. “Not … just … yet.”

Lucy recoiled in mock horror. “Why, Mr. Claremont, you wouldn’t!”

He leered down at her. “I’m a villain, remember. I don’t fight fair.”

“Neither does he.”

His smile faded at the somber reminder of all they were risking—his ship, these devoted men, that precious, tenuous emotion binding them in common accord. As he brushed his lips against hers, savoring her taste, his men each found a task to occupy their hands, some vital preparation for the battle to come.

His mouth hovered above hers, reluctant to break contact. “You’re to go below and stay there. Don’t come up no matter what you may hear.”

“Is that an order, Captain?”

“Damn right, it is. And I expect to be obeyed.”

Lucy took a step backward and snapped off a salute that would have made Smythe beam with pride. “Aye, aye, sir. I live to please.”

Gerard chuckled, raking an appreciative gaze over her unconventional uniform. “That you do.”

Lucy flew back into his arms for a final embrace. Her lips devoured his as if her kiss alone could infuse him with the strength he needed to face down the Admiral. Gerard rubbed her slender back, absorbing the essence of her right through his bones.

When she drew away to obey his order, his arms had never felt quite so empty.

Lucy made it as far as the lower gundeck, where she found several gunners preparing for battle, and five powder monkeys, most still in their teens, arguing over who should be promoted to gunner now that their master was dead.

A willowy lad, his cheeks cratered with the scars of smallpox, stabbed a bony finger at the other boy’s chest. “I’ll be eighteen next month. The job needs a man, not some pimple-faced boy.”

His companion’s voice cracked with dismay. “You may be older, but I come aboard first. I been with the Cap’n since ’is maiden voyage.”

As the others chimed in, the argument quickly disintegrated into a shouting match with each of them casting aspersions not only on the others’ manhood, but on the marital status and temperaments of their respective mothers, a futile exercise since the majority of them were orphaned at birth.

“Gentlemen!” Lucy’s unladylike bellow startled them into silence. “We haven’t much time. Is this squabbling necessary?”

They gazed at her nervously, knowing the Captain’s woman, though slight in appearance, was a force to be reckoned with.

Lucy softened her voice to the cajoling tones she’d frequently used on Sylvie’s younger brothers when she needed them to fetch her shawl or some lemonade. “I’m sure Mr. Digby would have wanted you to settle this dispute in a reasonable manner.”

They exchanged a baffled glance.
Reason
wasn’t a word they’d associated with the cantankerous “Mr.” Digby.

Lucy sighed. “Very well, then.” She pointed to the only gunner who hadn’t threatened to resort to fisticuffs
to solve the dilemma. “You, sir, are promoted to gunner.”

While his companions muttered in timid protest, the soft-spoken youth scratched his head. “Aye, but that’ll leave us one monkey short. Who’ll carry me shot?”

Eyeing the kegs of gunpowder and the eighteen-pound iron shot stacked like dragon eggs in the womb of the long, narrow gallery, Lucy smiled wanly.

Jeremiah Digby might have treated the world at large with loquacious contempt, but he had showered affection on his beloved cannons. Their ebony barrels gleamed in the checkered moonlight streaming through the gunports as if polished by a lover’s caress. Lucy had learned enough about the subtleties of piracy at Tarn’s feet to know that only in the most dire of circumstances, when all attempts at subterfuge had failed, would the captain actually give the command to fire them.

As she crouched beneath a gunport, watching the
Argonaut
plough through the inky billows in a direct course for their bow in preparation for boarding them, she was hard-pressed to imagine a circumstance more dire. The warship painted a silvery wake against the canvas of night, a shimmering highway to heaven. Or hell.

“Wot the bloody ’ell is ’e waitin’ for?” one of the gunners muttered. “An invitation?”

Lucy might have echoed his sentiments had she been able to squeeze a word past the icy lump of dread in her throat.

Her stomach knotted in kind as the seventy-four-gunner swelled to monstrous proportions, blocking the moonlight, blocking the sky. The gundeck was swallowed
by darkness, its sputtering lanterns casting more shadows than light.

“Do something,” she whispered. “Anything.”

As if to fulfill her reckless wish, the narrow oak gallery listed to port with a grinding creak, sending them all careening across the sand-sprinkled floor. Lucy caught the barrel of a cannon before it could swing around and smack her insensible. Groping for handholds, she staggered back to the starboard gunport, dropping to her knees to compensate for her lost equilibrium.