The Pirate Captain (56 page)

“Y’ll give me leave to say, sir, ’tis nothing on yer account. It coulda been that blessed bird over there,” he said, gesturing toward Beatrice roosted in a nearby tree, luminescent in the starlight, “and they’d go hammer and tongs at each other just the same.”

The moon was past its zenith, dipping behind the treetops at the far side of the bay, when she implored Pryce one more time.

Pryce the Amiable disappeared; Pryce the Bullish returned. “If’n he could have been here by now, he woulda.”

Pryce’s failure to argue further she took as a positive. She shied from the nagging image of Nathan lying in the bushes, injured and helpless.

Pryce glanced toward the eastern sky and a low-hanging Venus. “’Twill be light in a bit.”

“Then, we're going?” Her hopes skyrocketed as she lurched to her feet.

“
We’re
goin’.
Yer
stayin,’” he said, rising.

“No, I'm not!” Teeth clenched, her breath came quicker. She tried to hold the fierce pose. Exhaustion and worry weakened her defiance and she wavered. Face crumbling, her chin began to quiver.

“I beg, Pryce. Please. I can’t just wait and wonder. Besides, you need me to show you where I saw him last.”

“Oh, very well. But ye’d best not get hurt! And if ye do, jest keep goin’, becuz we won’t be able to bear ye a hand when the Cap’n goes after ye!”

He had to shout at the finish, because she was already far down the beach.

###

“It’s not a lot,” Pryce said, looking down at the glistening blood, kept wet by the night’s damp. A disquieting number of footprints converged on the churned spot of dirt.

“It’s enough,” Cate countered tartly.

“If’n we’d come sooner, he’d still be gone,” Pryce said with maddening evenness, divining her thoughts once again.

Cate led the small party of Morgansers to Lady Bart’s and where she had last seen Nathan. An internal clock had ticked since she heard him fall. Had he escaped unharmed, he would have met them on the beach. That failing, her best hope was that he was alive and being held. Harte’s “gnat squashed” comment haunted her. It hadn’t been uttered lightly. On the contrary, there had been great intent in those reptilian eyes.

Unbeknownst to her—damn his eyes!—Pryce had dispatched men to check the town, goal, thieves’ hole and garrison. They had returned to the shore with the pink of dawn breaking on their shoulders and empty-handed. It meant Nathan had been taken somewhere else, somewhere that deeds far too heinous to be witnessed could be carried out.

But where?

The garden was heavily trampled. With no clear tracks to follow, there was no way of knowing. Cate tried to take it as an encouraging sign that there was no blood trail, but a thin reassurance it was.

Cate chewed the inside of her mouth. The task of searching each and every one of the plantation’s buildings loomed larger, and the clock was still ticking.

“Hoy, lookit!”

All heads turned to follow Squidge’s point to a nearby tree.

“It’s just Beatrice,” Towers grumbled, waving a dismissive hand.

Beatrice’s head bobbed, markedly agitated. Arching her wings, she squawked, several of the men wincing at her shrillness in the morning’s quiet.

“Cap’n, ahoy!”

They looked to each other, at the parrot, and back.

“Cap’n, ahoy!”

Pryce approached the bird with a narrowed eye. “C’mon, speak up, ya useless pile o’ feathers, or I’ll be a-feedin’ yer carcass to the crows.”

Beatrice rose with a shriek and soared low through the trees, bright against the sky’s pale. Circling back, amid several obscenities, she repeated her cry, and set off. Exchanging puzzled looks, the people shrugged and followed.

The marauding pirates traversed the plantation with shocking ease. Lady Bart’s showed all the signs of having once been a grand place, but it gone to recent ruin. The distant barking of dogs, startled chicken protests, and curious bleats of goats marked their progress, but with no shouts of alarm. Still, with a Commodore and Marines about, extreme caution was required.

Beatrice was their only hope, and a shining one she was. Several times she circled back, seemingly to round them up and hurry them along, repeating her message and coarse remarks. At last, she settled on the rooftree of a squat building. Barrel hoops, wagon wheel rims, anvils, and water vats marked it as the estate’s blacksmith. The Morgansers crouched behind the crumbling stone walls of an abandoned byre. If there any further doubts as to Beatrice’s credibility, the scarlet of two Marines posted at the barn’s double doors was confirmation enough: such security wouldn’t have been necessary if inside was only iron and bellows.

“Smitty woulda been a-workin’ by this time o’ day,” Pryce observed, eyeing the bare wisp of smoke curling from the chimney, a forge yet to be stoked.

“Why the blacksmith?” asked Smalley.

Cate answered before she thought. “Shackles and chains.”

A bitter bile rose. In cold evaluation, the smithy was a wise choice: close enough to the house for convenience, and yet removed enough for privacy.

A low growl emitted from the others.

“Bastard.”

Cate couldn’t disagree with Chin’s assessment.

“Belay, ye bunch o' cod-headed swabs! Wasted hate is wasted energy. Let’s be sure o’ what’s afoot here.” Pryce’s calm was betrayed by his knuckles, white on the hilt of his sword.

So much now made sense. Cate’s suspicions had been correct, but there was little satisfaction to be gleaned. Ambition had its price; someone as advanced in rank as Harte, at his young age, had to be consumed by it. His hunger, however, was not yet sated. Arresting someone as renown as Nathanael Blackthorne still alive would deny him his personal justice. Bringing Nathan in “accidentally dead,” would supply Harte with both his pound of flesh and the prestige of ending the pirate’s reign of terror.

“Now what?” sighed Ogden. The snake tattooed on his head peered down with an equally puzzled look.

At that early hour, neither of the Marines struck an imposing figure: one slumped on a barrel, the other on an overturned bucket. Leaned against the barn, both were asleep, judging by the gaping mouths, oblivious to Beatrice’s boisterous proclamations from overhead.

“Pride o’ the King’s Navy,” Pryce snorted contemptuously. “You stay.” He drilled Cate with one of his most piercing looks. “The rest o’ ye’s watch her, whilst I go see what’s what.”

With a final warning glare, Pryce crept away. He made his way to the back of the barn, his path marked by glimpses of him behind a bush or abandoned cart. Quaking with anxiety, Cate contained herself until he had disappeared around the building. She broke away in a hiss of protest from those left in her wake. Following Pryce’s darting path, she caught him up. He whirled, reaching for his sword, and then gave her a withering glare. She pressed a finger to her lips, smirking at his displeasure.

The back of the building offered no access; no windows or doors, not even a loose board. They separated to investigate further. Cate discovered a crack in the weathered siding and urgently waved Pryce over. He stood while she squatted, and they put an eye to the split. They jerked back at the sight of red coats inside: five, maybe seven Marines, clustered in irregular groups. Judging by their actions, there were more out of their narrow line of sight. Pryce thumped her on the arm and pointed.

It was Nathan. He sat in the straw, slumped against a post. His arms were held high by shackles on his wrists, suspended to a beam overhead. Head lolled between his arms, his body curved in a defensive inward arc, as if expecting another blow, or God knew what else.

Fury shook her and she swore under her breath, Pryce nodding in avid agreement. She vibrated with the urge to tear away the boards, Marines be damned! Pryce’s hand on her shoulder steadied her. A silent argument ensued, a pantomime of gestures and expressions, offering and negating as to what should be done. The only thing they could agree on was to retreat, where they could argue further.

“He’s in there,” Pryce reported grimly upon their return. “Bastards ’ave him strung up like a slaughtered pig.”

“We have to get him out of there.” Cate only uttered what everyone else was thinking. Her hot rush of anger had ebbed, the cold calm of calculation settling in.

The first suggestion was an outright frontal attack; after all they were pirates, and were eager to do what they did best.

“There has to be nigh a dozen o’ them red-bellies in there, plus them what’s posted guard,” Pryce said. “We can take ’em all, well ’n’ good, but one shot and we’ll have the whole mess on us. The Cap’n appears in no condition to show a leg.”

“We need a diversion,” Cate said, more to herself. A few seconds more and she snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it.”

Their lack of confidence was obvious, but with no option at hand, a decoy was necessary.

“Just wait for the cue,” she said, with a sly smile. “I promise, you’ll know it.”

Cate crept away, leaving Pryce to grumble in protest. The men worked their way to the rear of the smithy, while Cate, wrestling with her gown, dodged among the cribs and coops, until she was directly across the yard from the blacksmith’s front doors.

Cate was poised to make her move, but stopped at hearing the rapid approach of hooves and wheels. She dove deeper into the shrubbery and peeked back to see a two-wheeled curate pass, Harte at the reins. The two Marines idling at the door snapped to attention when he pulled up, scurrying to open them for him.

Luck was with her: the doors stood open, the guards attending their commander inside.

Her hair had flung off most of its pins and tumbled free about her shoulders. She ruffled it further, and then slapped herself hard on the cheeks to redden them. Taking a deep breath, she sprung up and raced for the barn. With a siren-like scream, Cate ran, wildly flapping her arms. Skidding up before the doors, she threw her head back and gave another frenzied howl, circling and flailing in apparent hysterics.

From inside came shouts of alarm and running feet. She flew at the first Marine out the door, and screamed, pounding his chest with her fists. She ran to the next, maniacally babbling. Harte appeared, flanked by more Marines. Pitching to a new stridency, now alternating from hysterics to sobbing, she launched at Harte. He touched her arm and she jerked away to run terrorized to the next, clawing at the vermillion fabric as if for protection.

“Dear God, Catherine!” Harte exclaimed. He pulled her to him, and she arched her back to yowl squarely into his ear.

“Stop them!” Cate wailed into Harte’s coat. “Stop them! Don’t let them take me. Not again!”

“Pray, who? I beg of you?”

“Pirates!” she cried in wild-eyed shrillness, and threw a terrified look over her shoulder. “No, no, don’t let them take me. Nooo…!”

While she burrowed against him, the Marines were dispatched inside and in a defensive position around them, as if the pirates might materialize directly. Since there were no tears—she wasn’t that good of an actress—Cate kept her face deep in the crook of Roger’s shoulder as she cried, going louder at the least suggestion that he might move away.

“Commodore,” shouted one of the soldiers, running from the building’s dim. “Commodore, Blackthorne: he’s gone, sir.”

“Noo…! Nooo…!” she screeched, scrabbling frantically at Harte’s coat, the effort made worthwhile by a satisfying ripping sound. “Don’t let him have me, pleeaase! Not again!”

“Don’t just stand there,” Harte cried. “Go get him.”

The hallmark of a good soldier is calm before battle, but nothing in Harte’s training had prepared him for a hysterical woman. Perfect! The longer she could keep him off balance, the better. She thought to throw herself in front of the charging Marines, but Harte’s grasp was too firm. They had said Blackthorne was gone; that would have to be enough.

Roger stiffly patted her shoulder as he held her, with words Cate supposed were meant to be comforting. Murmuring more useless nothings, he guided her to the carriage. He leapt in beside her, a pop of the whip and the horse was off on a high trot. She kept her face hidden. Her performance had opened the floodgates, and she now swung wildly from make-believe hysteria to the real thing. The image of Nathan hanging by his arms was there at every closing of her eyes, and she began to shake with a mix of revulsion and fury at the monster that had put him there; the very one she now clung to. Growling like a rabid dog, she hammered him with her fists, one landing at his jaw, another, his ear.

Roger applied the whip to the horse.

Now at a full gallop, the carriage soon slid to a halt in a spray of gravel at Lady Bart’s doorstep. Harte eased Cate out of the carriage and bustled her into the house. The servants met them in the foyer, the entire house being thrown into an uproar. Leaning heavily on his arm, ostensibly for support, Cate dug her nails into the flesh of his wrist as she was taken upstairs. Lady Bart appeared at the top, clad in a wrapper and a cap, its flounced edge hanging ridiculously low over her nose.

In a confusion of voices, curious faces peeking from behind chamber doors, Cate was ushered down the hall to her room, where she was deposited on the bed. Red-faced at having entered a lady’s chamber, the Commodore quickly exited, leaving Cate to end her performance.

“Oh, you poor dear.” Lady Bart circled the room, clapping her hands to her cheeks. “To think, you were abducted right from our very garden, taken by that insidious, vile, disgusting creature and dragged off like some kind of an…an animal. I don’t know why Diggie refuses to do something about those perfidious, barbaric creatures! We must be rid of such disreputable criminals, right here in our very midst…”

Sally appeared and Lady Bart’s voice faded from Cate’s awareness. After a flash of dismay at Cate’s ruin, the gown a ghost of its former self, she undressed Cate in her confident manner, and snugged a wrapper about her shoulders.

“Here,” Sally said, under Lady Bart’s monologue and pressed a glass into Cate’s hand. “Drink this. It will give you ease.”

It was brandy, and a very good one. Cate’s eyes watered at the first sip touching her throat, raw from screaming. The liquor set off a pleasant glow in her stomach and she began to sag. It had been a very long night. It seemed impossible it had barely been a day since Nathan had set her off for Hopetown.