The Diamond King (32 page)

The tavern was poor indeed with dirt floors, dirty glasses, and rum that would kill most men. It was also mostly empty. The one person inside regarded them with suspicious eyes.

Alex leaned against a rickety bar and let Marco talk for him. Marco, he knew, had never been to Brazil, but he had been born in Portugal to a whore. He’d grown up on the waterfront and was as tough as any man in his crew, and that was saying a great deal.

Alex tried to look indifferent, as if the conversation was of no import to him, and drank the rum. He’d had bloody poor liquor before, but this was about the worst. It burned all the way down his throat and settled in his stomach like molten lava.

He knew Spanish well enough to make out some of the conversation; it was close enough to Portuguese to understand meanings. He pretended otherwise, though. It suited him to act the swell. He wanted to be underestimated.

Tomas was indeed in the town. He had a wife here who was pregnant and he returned often to see her between expeditions into the interior for gold, diamonds, and other precious stones. Only God himself, though, knew when he would attend the bar, and no one was willing to tell them where he lived.

He and Marco sat at what passed as a table in chairs he feared would break under Marco’s hefty weight. One rum became two, and two became three. The sun sank into the west, a ball of fiery red.

God, it was hot. He wished he were on the back of a fine horse on a Highland path, making his way across a glen with tumbling waterfalls. He longed for the heather and nettles and light brown cottages with their dark brown thatch roofs. There everything was muted: the mist, the hills, the skies, even the purple of the flowers.

Here, everything was brilliant. A sun so bright and large you felt you could reach out and touch it, green so startling it was more vivid than a polished emerald, flowers like colors in a kaleidoscope.

The heat sapped strength while the cold of Scotland invigorated him.

By all the saints in heaven, he was homesick. He even missed the smell of peat and the taste of oatcakes.

He knew he would never know any of them again. He could never return to Scotland.

The thought—or maybe the rum—made him morose.

And led to an even more dangerous image of a Scottish lass.

She had the strength of the Highlands in her. The muted beauty. The character tempered by steel. Despite her Campbell heritage, she had the attributes he loved best about his homeland.

Marco kicked him.

He realized he’d been staring down at the bloody rum. Crying in his cups, someone might say.

He looked up.

Two men in white shirts and white trousers were entering the establishment. They paused, looking cautiously around the interior, their gazes fixing on Alex and Marco. Their faces were burned brown with the sun, their eyes predatory, their stances wary. Their features indicated Indian as well as Portuguese blood, and perhaps even some African.

Their eyes were contemptuous as they regarded whom they obviously considered interlopers who did not belong.

They went to the bar. A rumble of a language not quite Portuguese ensued between the bartender and the newcomers. Then one turned toward Alex and came over to him.

“Senhor, I hear you are looking for me.”

Alex understood, though the dialect made it difficult.

“Si. Bon tarde,” he said in an accent he knew gave him away as something other than Portuguese. Still, one look at the man’s eyes and he decided he best not play games. He doubted pretending an ignorance of speech would do him any good.

“Tomas Freres?” he asked.

The man nodded warily.

“I was told,” he said in Spanish, “that you might know of diamonds I can buy.”

“You can buy diamonds in Sao Paulo,” the man said shortly, and turned back to the bar.

“But then I would have to pay taxes and send them to Goa. There is an easier way.”

“Only for thieves,” the man said.

“Aye,” Alex said.

The two men regarded each other steadily for a moment. Marco was silent, watching. So was the second man who had entered just seconds earlier.

Slowly, the first man smiled, a wide smile with a gold tooth glinting. “I think I like you, Senhor... ?”

Alex hesitated, then said, “Malfour.” His true name of Leslie was known only to Burke. He intended to keep it that way.

“So do you like snakes, Senhor Malfour? To reach the ... stones, you will have to move among them.”

“I’ve been around the two-legged kind.”

Another brilliant smile. “Ah, they can be more deadly, perhaps.”

“Their intentions are.”

“And how much
dinheiro
can you offer for my trouble?”

“You have none to offer?”

“Senhor, no. I am but a... how do you English call it... a messenger.” His look became sly. “I can take your
dinheiro
and return....”

Alex smiled. “That is very kind, but I would not like you to encounter the snakes alone.” He paused. “And I am not British.”

Tomas raised an eyebrow in question.

“I once was a Scot, before they stole our homeland.”

“Then you and I have something in common, senhor. My ancestors’ land was also stolen.”

“Are you interested in my proposition?”

“
Sim
, you interest me, senhor.”

“You interest me, too,” Alex said, turning to Marco. “This is my friend, Marco.”

The man merely nodded. “How much will you risk for your prize?”

“Much.”

“I know someone who might help you. But you will have to go inland, and it is risky for someone who does not know our country.” He grinned again. “Of course, you could change your mind and trust me.”

“Would you?” Alex asked.

The
bandeirante
grinned again. “I think I like you. We will leave this afternoon.”

Alex returned to the ship. He and Marco would go with Tomas; Burke would stay in
Vit�ria with half of the money they had. He’d been told the journey would take a minimum of twenty days. Eight days to the meeting with a band of
bandeirantes
on the Jequitinhonha River. Four days there to bargain, eight days back.

The three of them met with Claude.

Alex and Claude pored over a map. “I want you to sail the ship north, away from the shipping lanes. Return in twenty-one days,” Alex said.

“Do you trust him?” Claude asked.

“I trust no one,” Alex admitted wryly. “But if all goes well, we can all leave this ship rich men.”

Claude nodded.

“I want you to watch the children. And Lady Jeanette. No one is to follow us.”

“
Oui
,” Claude said.

“It probably will not be easy,” Alex added with an ironic twist of his lips.

“Little is easy with you,” Claude said.

Alex chuckled at that. “Aye, I think you are right.” He looked at the others. “We will leave a little before dawn. Tomas says it is easier traveling then.”

“Is it safe?”

Alex shrugged. “Burke will stay in Vit�ria with the remainder of the money to buy the diamonds. He will take proper cautions on secreting it, then leave instructions with you, though I trust his abilities to stay alive completely. No one will know he has any funds with him. I will take enough to let them know I am serious. I am not foolish enough to take it all with me. I am hoping their greed will keep me safe.”

He left then, heading to the main deck where he knew he would find Jenna and the children. She was sitting on a stair leading up to the forecastle. Both children were sitting on a step below and she was reading to them from a book.

It was a pretty picture.

He had found her unusually literate and well-read, more so than most women. She would probably be called a bluestocking in England, but he enjoyed the company of a woman who knew more than how to organize a household and was not afraid to show it.

He walked over to them, aware somehow that she was aware of him, even before he approached. He regarded the book’s title. Poetry by Thomas Gray.

Alex knew it, despite the fact that Gray was English. In truth it was his book. He had purchased it in France.

“You like it?” he asked.

“Aye, it is gentle.”

“At times,” he said.

Her large expressive eyes were cautious. And well they might be. He’d been cruel in order to be kind. At least, that was what he had told himself. Perhaps he had been protecting himself.

She looked down at the children. “Will you fetch me a cup of tea?”

Robin and Meg looked from one to the other knowingly, then started for the hatchway, leaving them alone.

“You came to tell me something,” she said.

Her honestly never failed to startle him. He had never thought that a quality of women, but then, he chided himself, it hadn’t been of men, either. Wasn’t he a prime example of that?

“Aye,” he said. “I will be leaving before dawn for the interior. I will be gone for three weeks or so. Claude will sail the ship north, far away from the shipping lanes, and wait.”

“And what do you propose to do about me?”

“Will you stay aboard, look after the children? Make sure they do not come after me?”

“Aye.”

He stared at her, astonished by the simple answer. She had said she might return to France, but he did not think she would like it. She would find Paris as he had; frenetic and superficial, a city of extravagant privilege and extreme poverty.

“And I have been thinking,” she said, confirming what he was thinking. “I think I would like to go to America, to Boston or Philadelphia or Charleston, rather than France. I have been talking to one of the crew members. He said ... people are more free there. Even women.”

Her answer did not surprise him. “I will see you get there.”

She looked away. He felt a loss. He wasn’t sure why. He shouldn’t. He was grateful, aye. She had been unexpectedly helpful. And he would repay her for that help.

She was biting her lip. She had done that at the governor’s house, too, displaying an uncertainty in a woman who could be so surprisingly competent. It was that vulnerability that made her so ...

Irresistible.

He leaned down and his lips brushed her nose now sprinkled lightly with freckles from the sun, then lowered to her lips. They were slightly salty, her face warm. She tasted good, so good that he did not care about the stares that must be directed toward them. His fingers touched her cheeks, then her hair.

He forced himself to draw away. “I had best get some sleep. I probably will not see you in the morning, but you have my thanks. And if either Burke or I are delayed in returning, Claude will have orders to get you to America with money I have set aside for you and the children.”

Her eyes clouded. He wondered whether it was at the thought of his not returning. But that was foolish. He knew she was not a woman to sleep with a man lightly, and yet he understood that a night’s passion could not overcome centuries of distrust and hatred, nor futures destined to follow in different paths. It had been a moment robbed from time, one caused by extraordinary circumstances.

“It should all go to the children. I told you I had means—”

“You will need more to raise them properly.”

Unexpected mischief crept into her eyes. “Properly?”

He felt an odd tug at his heart. Perhaps it was because her own was so strong.

“Aye, and it will no‘ be easy,” he said, lapsing into his Scottish burr.

She looked at him steadily, even as he saw she was trying not to show apprehension. Or something more than apprehension.

“I will be back,” he said.

“Meg will be heartbroken if you are not,” she said with forced cheerfulness. “She plans to marry you one day.”

“I thought she had her heart set on Robin.”

“She’s having problems making up her mind.”

“A decidedly female trait.”

“That’s a decidedly male opinion.”

He grinned at her. He couldn’t remember when last he had done that, when he’d so enjoyed an exchange with a lass. She never backed down.

“You,” he admitted, “are the exception. You are stubbornly set in your actions. And opinions.”

“Aye. I thought you a pirate when I met you, and you are a pirate still.”

“And has your opinion changed about pirates?”

“Aye,” she said softly. “I did not realize pirates cared so much about others.”

He wanted to say nay to that, that he was a fraud and not at all what she thought. But the words did not come this time. He stared at her for a long moment, wondering when she had become important to him, exactly what moment, what second, had brought feeling back into his life.

But hope was gone. Dead. Buried with so many of his clansmen in a place called Culloden Moor. How could anyone who had witnessed that carnage, the brutality, the stark inhumanity to women and children, believe in God, or hope, or dreams? He had been a soldier. He had taken his chances. He would never blame what had happened to him on someone else. But what had happened to hundreds of innocents was something else.

“Thank you for caring for them,” he said, then turned away and went down the hatchway. He
did
need sleep. He certainly needed his wits. And they had a way of deserting him when he was with Lady Jeanette Campbell.

Alex managed several hours of sleep. He woke sometime in the middle of the night, dressed, checked his weapons: pistol, powder, dirk, and a second knife. He had liked Tomas, but he knew a renegade when he met one.

He divided the gold to be used to purchase diamonds. The sale of the ship’s contents in Martinique had given him more than enough to purchase what he wanted. He kept a small portion he could easily carry, and gave the rest to Burke, who would stay at one of the small inns in Vit
�
ria.

Alex bundled a second shirt and second pair of trousers with him, then pulled on his long boots. To the bundle, he added still another knife, and wrapped everything in a rough but warm blanket, then in a poncho, which should protect the contents from water. He’d already learned that there could be violent rain storms as well as dangerous rivers to cross.

He searched his mind to see whether he should include anything else. He knew he was placing a great deal of trust in Claude, and in Jenna. But this was the one opportunity to provide security for those he had taken under his care.