The Rebel Pirate (31 page)

“Cheap did not, I take it,” said Sparhawk, “guide the
Nancy
to the Long Wharf.”

“No. He took her up one of the little high-tide creeks, where a schooner named the
Sally
was waiting for her. To do these Rebel pirates credit, they did not molest or rob the British crew. They put them off in the ship’s boat and allowed them to remove their personal possessions. But they took all of the powder, and they burned the leaky little brig to the waterline.”

Benjamin Ward had told Sparhawk: he would always put kin and crew before king and country. And evidently, before his own passions as well. Angela Ferrers had demanded a powder run in exchange for the evidence against Admiral Graves, and as Benji had observed, there were nearer sources of powder than Lisbon. He could not count on Trent being able to bribe the Americans to save his sister, and so he had taken it upon himself to acquire a bargaining chip. And in so doing, he had perhaps driven a permanent wedge between himself and Charles Ansbach.

“What will you do now?” asked Sparhawk.

“The Graves family—the admiral and all four of his nephews—has vowed to hunt this Rebel pirate down and hang him, but I am determined to find him first.”

To find him first. And no doubt keep him from harm if he could.

A few hours after Ansbach left, one of the
Preston
’s marines came for Sparhawk and led him to the gangplank without explanation or fanfare. From the top of that ramp James could survey the entire length of the Long Wharf, thrusting almost a mile into the harbor, lined with squat bulky warehouses. Once, ships had lined up along that mighty jetty end to end, an unbroken line of masts and rigging, promising to the sailors who came to Boston to make their fortunes the limitless freedom of the sea.

A few small shops struggled on: caulkers and carpenters employed by the fleet, merchants who were granted precious dispensations to sell the most basic sustenance, rice and flour and oats. There was a barrel maker open for business opposite the
Preston
, his awnings rolled out against the summer sun and his products on proud, if somewhat scanty, display.

His father stood beside a rack of barrels, waiting.

This time, he had come for him.

The day was hot, the air humid, and that was why Sparhawk could not draw breath. The caulkers were busy at their work, their pitch boiling noxious vapors into the air, and that was why his eyes were watering.

“You are free,” said Anthony Trent.

“And Sarah?” James asked with what voice he could find.

Trent nodded reassuringly. “Expected from the castle hourly. Come, let us go home.”

Sparhawk climbed into the carriage, glad of the shadows inside where he could hide the emotion that threatened to overcome him.

“How?”

“Nothing less than blackmail. I procured the receipts for the
Diana
and the admiral’s other purchases from a certain widow of the Rebel persuasion. A formidable and intriguing woman. The documents are damning, as they specify the coin in which the sums were paid. Graves has been given copies of these documents. If you and Sarah were not released, I promised to send the originals to the Admiralty.”

“And what did you give the Rebels in return?” Sparhawk asked.

“Information,” replied his father, “the source of which, I fear, will become obvious within a very short time. Specifically, Billy Howe’s plans for an attack on the Rebel positions at Roxbury. He is poised to make Gentleman Johnny’s ‘elbow room.’

“Billy shared his plans with Clinton, Gage, Burgoyne, the admiral, and me. When it is clear that their attack has been anticipated, I will become a man without a country or a livelihood, which is as much as I deserve. But it is my hope that both will be restored to you through my actions, and to Sarah as well.”

Sparhawk had just gotten his father back. He was not prepared to lose him again. “You won’t just stay here and let them arrest you,” he said.

“No,” said Trent. “After I have seen you and Sarah both free, I will leave with the Reverend Edwards for Cambridge. He has invited me to live with his family in their house near the college until such time as the troubles are settled or I make other arrangements.”

“It is not so very difficult, I understand,” Sparhawk said, thinking of Joseph Warren’s midnight visits, “to slip across the lines. I could come to see you.”

“I would like that. I cannot give you back your mother, or your childhood, or the years that we have lost, but I would give you a future with a woman who is worthy of the man you have become, and try to earn myself a place in it. That is, if you intend to marry Sarah.”

“Of course I do.”

“That is well,” said Trent. “I almost feared, when I saw her house in the North End, that the resemblance you bear to my youthful self might not be
too
pronounced.”

“I did not offer Sarah marriage because I did not know what would happen when I stepped forward and declared myself your son. If you had been the murderer I thought,” he said, hearing the defensiveness in his voice and trying to curb it, “then you might have been a danger to her.” Sparhawk was explaining himself as though an errant child, and this man his father.

Which he was.

“I’m not even sure it would have been legal to marry her under the name James Sparhawk,” he added.

“I suggest you decide on that point quickly, as I have asked the Reverend Edwards to meet us at the house. He is not terribly fastidious in the matter of licenses, fortunately. You will have to beg Abednego’s permission, of course, and I must warn you in advance that you may find it a gruesome business.”

Strange to think his father too had sought such permission.

“Did he offer you rum?” asked Sparhawk, remembering the sulfurous black liquor he had drunk in Abednego Ward’s keeping room in Salem.

“No,” said James’ father.

“Then I think it will be just fine.”

Sparhawk had never seen the spacious home Trent rented on the Common, but it equaled the size and luxury of the house Micah Wild had built for Sarah in Salem, and far exceeded it in opulence. It was a fit place for a wedding, but afterward, he wanted to take her to the snug little house in the North End, or better, to the
Sally
, where he would ask for her ration of grog, and convince her to walk across the deck for him in nothing but her chemise and stays.

Abednego Ward greeted Sparhawk in the hall and shook his hand, congratulating him on his escape from the gallows.

“He was not as near the rope as all that,” chided Trent, who had cause to know how very near he had come, and the cost to set him free.

“It is a fine thing,” said Abednego Ward, “a fine thing, to have a brush with the Almighty. It can change a man’s direction entirely.”

Sparhawk agreed that it could, although he thought he might always have been sailing in the direction of Sarah Ward.

The Reverend Edwards arrived and punch was served, but Sparhawk did not want to drink until Sarah was with them. He sat near the window in the parlor, waiting for the sound of her carriage, and discovered there an embroidery frame with Trent’s coat of arms—no,
his
coat of arms—drawn in pencil and an outline begun in gold-wire thread. He traced its outline, the lines of the familiar griffin and brace of Cornish chough, and recalled the embellished curtains on the
Sally
, how she had confided to him in that antique bed in the North End her desire to sail with him to share the freedom—and discomforts—of the sea as Abigail had with Abednego.

“And there will be no dame schools for my daughters,” she had vowed. But the delicate needlework, the ribbon tucked into the copy of
The Female American or the Adventures of Unca Eliza Whitfield
that sat snug between the sofa cushions, betrayed the pleasure she had discovered in these female accomplishments. The dame
had
broadened her mind, at least in some respects. Once he had a ship again, Sparhawk would broaden her horizons. And the children they created would have both the wonders of education and the freedom of the sea.

The sun dipped in the sky. The warmth of the day dissipated. And still, her carriage did not come.

Trent sent to the wharf for word of the boat he had hired. It had not yet returned from the island.

“Perhaps,” suggested the reverend, “she was taken unawares by the good news and required time to pack.”

Sparhawk did not believe it. He had never known Sarah Ward impractical, or vain of possessions.

“Send direct to the castle,” said Sparhawk.

Trent agreed. An hour passed, and a dark certainty overtook Sparhawk. “Graves has double-crossed us. We should go to the castle ourselves.”

“No,” said Trent. “If the admiral is refusing to free her as agreed, we will not be able to effect her release on our own authority. I will go to Province House and speak to Tommy Gage, and if need be, row him to the castle myself to demand her return. But you should wait here, in the event that she or some news of her makes its way here.”

Sparhawk knew that his father was right; he could not help Sarah by storming the castle like a knight of old. So he sat in the pretty parlor where she had begun to embroider his family’s coat of arms in gold-wire thread and waited for Sarah Ward, her father sitting quiet and subdued, his earlier ebullience gone, on the settee opposite.

The shadows in the room lengthened, the sun set, the servants came to light the tapers, and finally Anthony Trent returned.

“I have been to the castle and back in the company of Thomas Gage. The admiral claims that he sent orders for her release, and the commander at the castle admits to receiving such orders and transmitting them to the guard at the gate. The guard says that she was taken ill and carried to a boat, and he was told that she was in the care of a family friend. The fort major is not to be found, but his wife tells the same story. Sarah’s maid was out walking when all this transpired, and saw nothing. In the end we searched the fort, the outbuildings, and the beaches, and found no trace of her. Sarah Ward is gone.”

The Phillips family was unfailing in its kindness. The guard would not permit Sarah to leave the apartments to see the natural beauty that Major Phillips swore was to be found on the island, so they brought that beauty to her. Mrs. Phillips picked wildflowers and refreshed the bowl in Sarah’s room each day. Her wan, distracted daughter, Rebecca, dried and pressed the discarded blooms, and labeled them in a book in a neat flowing hand.

When Rebecca was searching for pencils one day, Sarah saw an abandoned project lying hidden at the bottom of a drawer: a compass rose made completely out of dried flowers, the points picked out in rich violet and the rings in bold, verdant green. There were three points yet to be completed, and it had clearly been made as a gift, with part of the recipient’s name, Martin, visible in the corner, but when Sarah questioned her about it, Rebecca just smiled her sad, distracted smile and closed the drawer.

Looking out the windows seaward during the long afternoons when Mrs. Phillips and Rebecca walked the beach, Sarah was reminded of her first weeks at the dame school, when she felt imprisoned in the dame’s rambling waterfront house, the sea sparkling within reach but forbidden. She had come to enjoy school, in the end, and cherish Elizabeth Pierce’s friendship, now lost to her, but she had always felt the shackles of the dame’s expectations, and when she became engaged, had thought that Micah Wild would set her free.

While Major Phillips’ wife and daughter were out during the afternoons, he often invited her into his little study and encouraged her to borrow any books she might like—he had a prodigious library, as many as twoscore volumes—and discuss anything she might have read recently. He did not have any novels, but he had several histories, and these she enjoyed. He also had many trays of dried and pinned insects, which she did not.

He was not in the habit of offering her any refreshment during these interludes, and he always seemed vaguely embarrassed, like his wife, by the poorness of his hospitality, but today he surprised Sarah by placing a decanter of brandy on the table between them. She was even more surprised when he rummaged in his secretary and produced two cut glasses.

“My dear,” said Major Phillips, pouring the brandy, “today your ordeal is at an end. You are to be released.”

Her hand trembled. She was not going to hang. She brought her shaking glass to her lips and drank it off to steady herself. Phillips patted her hand.

Then panic overtook her. “And James Sparhawk? Is he to be freed as well?”

Major Phillips refilled her glass. “I believe so.”

“When may I leave?” she asked, and then regretted it. They had been so good to her, and she did not want to appear ungrateful. “That is, your family’s kindness has sustained me, but I long to see my own.”

“Of course. Of course. That is my wish, to see you restored to your family. We will miss you, my wife and I and Rebecca. I believe that your stay with us has done her some good. You will have guessed, I think, that she was disappointed.”

“Yes,” said Sarah. “As was I, once,” she said. But she had not been entombed on a rock. She had possessed the freedom of the sea.
And now she would have James Sparhawk, who was necessary, for her, to life.

“That is what I was given to understand,” said Major Phillips. “It is a fault of fathers, I think, to raise their daughters too protected from the world. Our Rebecca was not prepared to resist the lures of a rogue.”

Sarah had not been protected. She had climbed rigging and picked pockets and cadged oranges, been raised by rogues and adventurers, and she had been taken in by Micah Wild as easily as Sparhawk’s mother had been beguiled away from her country parsonage by Anthony Trent.

“I was commander of the castle in those days,” said Major Phillips. “And Martin was a boat pilot and a frequent guest at our table. He thought Rebecca would have an income, but when I lost my post, there was no possibility of that. I told him as much, and when they ran away together, we knew to expect the worst. It lasted a few weeks, and he left her penniless and in debt in New York. She was preyed upon. By the time we found her, she was much changed.”

“I am so very sorry,” said Sarah, “but I do not believe there was anything you could have said to dissuade her.” Abednego Ward had not been able to talk Sarah out of an alliance with Micah Wild. He had warned her not to go to him that night.

“No,” Major Phillips agreed, recharging her glass once more. “That is why I am anxious to see you returned home safe.”

“There is time, if I hurry, to make the mail boat,” she said. There had been a clock beside the door, but in the shadows of the room she had to squint and could not make out the dial. She rose out of her chair, but too quickly. Relief made her light-headed, and she sat back down.

“My dear, you cannot go back to this Trent,” Major Phillips said, reaching across the table and sliding the brimming glass into her hand. “He has worked to free you and that is well, but you do not owe him what he will expect when you return. And his reputation is such that I have reason to believe he has designs upon you.”

Something was not quite right, but Sarah’s thoughts were muddled. “Trent is a good man,” she said. “He was going to marry me. But Trent is . . . now he will be . . . he will be my father,” she said. “Father-in-law,” she corrected. It was all suddenly very confusing.

The fort major looked concerned. “That is not what I was told,” he said.

She tilted the glass in her hand, stared at the thick sludge on the bottom, tried to puzzle out what it might be. Sniffed it. Cinnamon, but not. A spicy scent that sometimes clung to her father’s sea chest, and Mr. Cheap’s. A captain’s private cargo. As valuable as nutmeg or pepper, gram per gram. Opium.

“You’ve drugged me,” she said, her tongue thick.

“You will take no harm from it,” he promised, his voice a little anxious.

The door opened and Micah Wild stood framed in the light from the hall.

She stood up, grasping the table for support. “That man,” she said, pointing at Wild, “burned my house down.”

“That is the opium talking,” said Micah Wild.

The room swirled around her, the red of the chairs, the black of the clock, the green of the fort major’s coat blurring into streaks.

Then Micah was behind her, grasping her by the waist and keeping her from falling, pulling her back against his chest, and encouraging her to give in to the drug’s pull and sleep.

“No,” she said, but her vision was dimming, and the room was being taken from her by the opium one color at a time until all was gray and blurred.

“I don’t like this,” said Major Phillips.

Her head felt heavy; her limbs would not answer. “Please,” she begged the fort major. “Send for Trent.”

“Trent is a seducer,” said Wild, his voice coming from far away. “He has tired of her and intends to hand her off to his son.”

She clung for one last moment to consciousness, long enough to feel Wild lift her and carry her to the daybed, to feel him stroke her face and tuck a hair behind her ear and say in his honeyed voice, “Everything is going to be all right, Sarah. I’ve come to take you
home
.”

•   •   •

General Gage sent a detachment of his own men to search Castle William for Sarah Ward. He also posted a guard at the Long Wharf to inspect the small boats putting in, but there were far too many little wharves and anchorages in Boston and Charlestown to search them all, and by that time Sparhawk and Trent had already come and gone from the island. They questioned the maid, Mrs. Phillips, her morose daughter, and the guard at the gate. And then they searched the island for Major Phillips.

They found him outside the walls on a secluded stretch of beach, staring out to sea. They did not need to resort to threats or bribes. The man poured forth his tale. He knew he had been deceived when he saw Micah Wild carry the girl to the daybed. His hands on her had been too possessive, too familiar, for a chastely devoted suitor and family friend. Major Phillips had taken money from Wild, as he had taken money from Trent, and he had received his thirty pieces of silver. The incident was a stain on his soul. The pieces could not be given back.

Wild had paid him to drug the girl. He had explained that it was a precaution, that she was highly excitable and liable to do herself an injury if he had to take her away against her will. His tale was one of innocence seduced, a simple seaman’s daughter, promised to a doughty merchant, beguiled away from hearth and home and lawfully betrothed by a worldly rake named Trent.

There was enough of fact, when the fort major quizzed the girl on her family and origins, to burnish the story with the aura of truth. And enough similarity to his daughter’s sad tale that he was predisposed to believe it. Sarah Ward was from Salem, her father had been a mariner, she had been engaged to marry, but had not. She lived under Trent’s roof. Trent had a certain reputation with women, and he had paid for her upkeep at the castle. Her gowns were lavish and costly, the kind a kept woman wore.

Wild told him Trent was about to pass her on to another naval officer. It would be the beginning of a steep, fast slide into degradation. Unless Wild could spirit her away from her seducer before the man got his hooks into her once more.

Sparhawk saw his father’s hand return again and again to the hilt of his sword, felt his own fingers twitch to do the same. But the fort major was a dupe, and his spiritual agony already exceeded any physical chastisement they might mete out. They needed two names from this man and nothing else: that of the ship on which Wild had taken her, and that of its intended port of call.

Sparhawk was not surprised when he learned the first, but taken aback at the second. The ship was the
Roger Conant
, with her four-pounders and her swivel guns and her twoscore hired men. And she was bound for Rebel Salem.

•   •   •

Sarah woke beneath a silk canopy in a soft feather bed. The posts of her bower were polished mahogany carved with swags and urns. The drapes were pale blue figured damask. A quiver of Cupid’s arrows picked out in gold paint adorned the tester.

The dimensions of the room felt strangely familiar, but the mustard yellow walls, flowered carpets, and plump upholstered chairs did not. She could not place where she was, nor how she had come there.

Then she remembered the fort major’s study, the drugged brandy, Micah Wild’s hands upon her. Someone had removed her gown and loosened her stays, and she knew with certainty that Micah had touched her while she slept, could recall through the poppy’s haze the way he had stroked her hair and her face on the daybed in the major’s parlor, then as he held her across his lap in the boat.

Micah Wild had said he was bringing her home, but her home was gone, burned by his longshoreman.

She slid from the high bed and clung to the posts for a moment, her head still thick and fogged from the opium. Her gown lay across a chair, her shoes on the floor beside it. The dressing table and washstand were unfamiliar, but the size and placement of the windows, and when she looked out, the patchwork of rooflines and clapboard colors, told her where Micah had brought her, and whose house this was. She was in Salem, and the house was Micah Wild’s.

The bedrooms had not been completed by the time Micah broke their engagement; they had been only plaster and planks when she saw them, but if she remembered correctly, based on the views, this was the guest bedroom at the back of the house with the prospect of the North River. Another chamber across the hall, where Micah and Elizabeth must sleep, looked out on a similar view. She knew that room had been intended for the master and lady of the house, as it adjoined a small study where Micah had planned to conduct his more private business transactions, to keep ledgers and write receipts for French molasses and Dutch tea and all the other smuggled goods that flowed in and out of Salem.

She took a step forward, and then retreated to the bed. She did not feel well at all. She could still taste the brandy and the dusty dry spice of the opium in her mouth, and felt the tangle of dried saltwater spray in her hair. Micah could not have brought her all the way to Salem in a rowboat. He must have had the
Conant
hidden somewhere in the channels of Boston Harbor.

Even if Sparhawk or Trent discovered that much, they could not reach her here in Rebel Salem. General Gage had tried to send a column of regulars up under Colonel Leslie in February, and they had been driven back by the combined militia and townspeople.

Gage could not even break out of Boston now. The navy was unlikely to go haring off in pursuit of a woman it had only grudgingly released on a charge of piracy. And if Micah Wild was welcome in Salem once more, the
Sally
certainly wasn’t.

Which meant that if she wanted to see Sparhawk and her family again—and stay out of Micah Wild’s bed—she would have to get out of Salem herself.

Shoes and a dress would be material to a successful escape. And sweet cooling water. She drank half the pitcher on the washstand and bathed in the rest, combed and pinned the tangle of her hair, reserving the longest pins in the dressing table for a more important purpose than her coiffure.

It took her longer to pick the lock than it should have. Standing up, she became dizzy; kneeling on the floor, she began to sway. Finally she accomplished her task with her cheek pressed to the grain-painted door and her heart beating wildly from the exertion. She knew sailors who took opium because they enjoyed it, but she could not understand the attraction. Unconsciousness, strange dreams, and nausea held little appeal.

She kept the pin that had vanquished Micah Wild’s brass door lock, and tucked it into the front of her gown. The hall, thankfully, was empty, because there was no way to slip discreetly down that broad curving stair.

The latch on the front door lifted just before she reached it. In a moment, she would surely be discovered. The parlors to the left and right offered no concealment. She darted instead for the opening beneath the stairs and found herself in the service ell, broader and taller than Sarah’s whole house had been, and full, just now, of servants.