Buccaneers Series

by Linda Lee Chaikin

  But Mathias was nearing his seventieth birthday and was not strong, for he hadn’t fully recovered from last year’s attack of island fever, which often racked his body, bringing weeks of sweating and delirium. He was up and about now and carrying on his work in the Singing School, but he certainly had no money to lend her to pay Mr. Pitt.

  Nor did he approve of Jamie, questioning his Christian faith. “His is a restless spirit.”

  She thought of Cousin Lavender.

  Emerald had lived in the Great House until she turned twelve, though her bedchamber had been small and plain compared to Lavender’s. During the season of childhood they had been friendly, sharing the same governess and tutor, although her great-aunt disapproved. Lavender too never let Emerald forget that she was lacking as a Harwick and that their Great-aunt Sophie and Lady Geneva Harwick would never leave her a dowry nor plan for her marriage to a man of title. She was at the Great House out of charity because—after all—despite her shameful birth on Tortuga, she was the offspring of Great-aunt Sophie’s wayward nephew, Karlton.

  But once the truth that Ty and Minette were related to Emerald by marriage became known, Emerald did not even have the good fortune of living in the Great House. She’d been sent away to live in the Manor when Great-uncle Mathias arrived.

  During the last two years the relationship between Emerald and Lavender had taken a change. It began when Lavender became deathly ill with the same island fever that plagued Mathias. Lavender, the darling of the family, became bored in her long months of convalescence and, lacking someone her own age to talk with, insisted that Emerald be called up from the Manor to keep her company.

  Although the family at first balked at the request, it was clear that Lavender would not take no for an answer. Illness and beauty had resulted in her being pampered, and both Great-aunt Sophie and Lady Geneva doted on her. There was little she didn’t receive when she put up a fuss, and Emerald had been sent for.

  In those early days Emerald arrived by way of the kitchen door and was ushered up the grand staircase by the mute governess, who heartily disapproved. Once in Lavender’s bedchamber, Emerald would spend the afternoon hours in her cousin’s company.

  At first they had not been happy hours for Emerald, but as her confidence in the Christian faith grew because of Mathias, she found that she could even begin to feel sympathy for her cousin, which was odd in itself, since Lavender had everything in the world that a young girl with a future title could wish for, and Emerald herself possessed so little.

  Thinking of all this now as she stood weary and hopeless before the window in the lookout house, she did believe that Lavender had a mild affection for her. If she turned to Lavender, would she help her? There was a glimmer of hope that she might, and Emerald decided to visit Foxemoore first thing in the morning.

  With her mind made up to try every possible door of escape, she felt some relief. Then she thought of that nasty buccaneer Captain Foxworth.

  A small shiver touched her skin. Suppose he unmasked her visit aboard his ship to the Harwicks? Impossible, she soothed herself. Captain Foxworth would have no opportunity to bring the matter before them. His reputation as a pirate forbade his being known or received by such a family. And anyway, he didn’t know who she was or where to find her.

  “Perhaps,” she murmured dourly, “there’s some good in his thinking I’m a wench after all. Foxemoore will be the last place he’d ever seek me. He probably thinks my father is the owner of a tavern.” She winced at the thought.

  Then new fears rushed in like a gale. Unless, she decided nervously, Zeddie’s tongue is loosened through torture.

  Who knew what manner of man this buccaneer was? True, he had seemed gallant, even a man of the nobility, when he had rescued her from the unwanted advances of that loathsome Sir Jasper. Had he recognized her in his cabin as the same girl? She didn’t think so, for he would have mentioned it and accused her of following him to his ship.

  No, she’d been disguised as a cabin boy. There was small chance she would ever see him again or had any need to worry about his accusing her to the family.

  She shut her eyes, leaning her head against the pane. Her ability to think was growing dull through lack of sleep. Then suddenly an image flashed across her mind as clearly as though she were standing in his cabin again. The portrait of Lavender on his desk!

  She drew in a breath. Could Lavender possibly know this pirate? No! But what if…

  Her hand clenched the drapery. She had laughed when finding that unlikely portrait, believing the ship to belong to Levasseur. Now the find was no longer amusing.

  What was the name of the earl’s grandson whom Lavender was to marry in England?

  “Baret,” she breathed aloud. “Baret Buckington.”

  But Sir Jasper had called him Captain Foxworth. He couldn’t be the earl’s grandson, she told herself desperately. Could he?

  She thought back to Lavender’s bedchamber. Lavender had a number of paintings of the family from London. Surely she would have one of the earl’s grandson, whom she would marry one day. Yet Emerald could not recall having seen such displayed on her bureau.

  Now there was a second reason to seek a visit with Lavender. She must know if there was any connection between this mysterious Captain Foxworth and Lord Baret Buckington.

  6

  VISCOUNT BARET BUCKINGTON

  The Jamaican moon appeared from behind the racing clouds and scattered a wake of shimmering jewels across the bay of Port Royal. The captain of the Regale left the quarterdeck, his boots ringing on the steps up to the high aftmost deck. He stood at the taffrail, the curved walk over the stern, looking every inch a roguish buccaneer in a white Holland shirt partially opened against his bronzed, muscled chest. He was oblivious to the strong tropical wind blowing his dark hair, shaking the billowing sleeves. He stood as still as a statue with his gaze fixed upon the big guns of Fort Charles looming ominously over the seawall. His dark eyes beneath even blacker lashes narrowed, but it was not the guns that he saw in his memory.

  The captain of the Regale—heir to the title of viscount—was Lord Baret Buckington, recently known among the Brethren of the Coast as Captain Baret Foxworth.

  Gripped in his hand, which wore the family ring of his grandfather Nigel Buckington, earl in London, was the small silver cameo and a cross woven of delicate golden hair. His mouth hardened, his dark eyes becoming warm with righteous anger. The knuckles on his hand turned white.

  He gazed now at the intricately carved frame that held the portrait of the woman, rubbing his thumb over the silver. He had deliberately placed her portrait in that despised silver frame.

  Baret had hired artisans to design the frame from a silver ingot taken from a Spanish treasure ship. So I’ll not forget what arms and feeds the Inquisition army of King Philip of Spain, he thought.

  The silver had been mined in Peru by religious prisoners, men who died from exhaustion and disease. The whips of the Spanish captains serving the powerful family dons were not lax for long. The quota of silver bars brought by the yearly mule train on its long overland route to the treasure fleet at Porto Bello would not wait for the recovery of the depleted health of a slave. When a man died he was merely abandoned and replaced by a new prisoner: European, African, or Carib.

  The Europeans were usually heretics—Protestants from Holland and France. King Philip’s Inquisition army raged in the Netherlands, and many of its prisoners were sold to the colonies on the Main.

  Again Baret touched the silver with its ruthless heritage. The silver was as much the cause behind his leaving Cambridge Divinity School to take to a life of buccaneering as was his present search for his father’s whereabouts. As he stood with the wind blowing against him, he saw himself as a small boy hiding on the wide stairway at Buckington House in London. His grandfather and his father, Viscount Royce Buckington, were in a hot argument that set his boyish heart pounding.

  The earl, wearing a green satin dressing gown embroidered
with gold thread, paced the red carpet in the drawing room. A painting of King Charles I was framed in gold above the hearth. Handsome portraits of the Buckington family, all lords, viscounts, and earls, surrounded the king like a royal entourage.

  “I forbid this lunacy of yours, Royce. What of your reputation as viscount? You’re to inherit the earldom after me. What of His Majesty! Civil war tears England asunder! Cromwell’s Roundheads number in the thousands! If His Majesty’s brother must flee, the Buckington family is sworn to go with him into France and to draw sword to protect him abroad as king in exile! I for one will go with him, and so must you.”

  Royce’s rugged voice sounded with impatience. “Your ways slay me, Father. You bid me die for Charles—to fight my own brothers in England for a cause I question—but it is Spain who is the enemy of England and the Netherlands. Shall I not rather stop the stench of Spain’s Inquisition army? Every Spanish treasure ship I sink will be a fortune lost to King Philip which he would otherwise use to feed his army in the Netherlands.”

  “You’ll not bring Caroline back by throwing away your life to become a common pirate!”

  “Pirate?” his father had repeated scornfully. “Is that what Felix says? Let my brother call me as he will. I vow my ship to become a dread and a terror to the Spanish dons. This is my answer!”

  “Put your sword away.”

  “I shall sink every treasure ship of King Philip that I find in the Caribbean Sea!”

  “Felix is right,” came the earl’s bitter voice. “Before this madness of yours is over you’ll have stained the Buckington name! Look on the wall—what of them?”

  Royce gave a laugh. “Family portraits? There isn’t a saint among the ancestry of scoundrels, my father. As for Felix, I’ve begun to think he’s spying for Spain.”

  “You speak thus of your brother!”

  “Half brother. A foe, just as sure as I stand here!”

  “And my son, even as you! And what of your own son? If you’ll not think of yourself or the Buckington name, what of Baret? You owe him more than a blackened reputation.”

  “I have fair plans for Baret. When he’s of age he’ll be sent to Cambridge as Caroline wished. He’s not to know what happened to her yet. He’s too young.”

  Crouching on the stairway, Baret had listened thoughtfully. Cambridge! Divinity training! While his father took to sea to sink Spanish ships? His small hand formed a fist. Where was his mother?

  His father and grandfather were arguing again. He strained to hear above his pounding heart.

  “One day Baret will know that I loved his mother more dearly than a man may love a woman. That I love her still. He’s to know I have honor, a cause to serve far nobler than civil war in England. I’ll return from the West Indies to see him. I’ll find no shame in my new life as a buccaneer, and I don’t think he will either. When he’s older, he’ll understand the cause.”

  “And if we must flee England with Charles into France?”

  “Then I’ll find you in Paris. I’ll see him again. And when it is safe to be Protestant in France, train him in the words of John Calvin. I’ve also asked Sir Cecil Chaderton to be his tutor. He’s agreed to stay with the boy until it’s safe to return to England.”

  “Royce! How can you throw away your title for a memory?”

  “A memory? Do you call Caroline naught more than a memory? God have mercy! In Holland the Inquisitor questioned her faith until she fainted, but they revived her again on the rack. Oh, yes! They used all their devilish weapons to break her faith—the thumbscrews, the Iron Maiden—do you know what that is?”

  “I have no desire to hear tales of horror—”

  “You will hear! It’s a form-fitting coffin studded with five-inch iron spikes! They slowly crushed her ribs, all the while the Inquisitor kept asking in his soft voice from hades, ‘Where are the other heretics hiding? Where? Speak, child, speak.’”

  “You’ll go mad! Do you think all Spain is a beast? That all the men who carry the cross and wear hooded cowls are Inquisitors?”

  Royce banged his fist against something hard. “Do you think I can ever forget? Then they buried her alive!”

  On the stairway Baret sat white and shaking, clutching his stomach. Dread, dark as a pit, sucked him into its hopelessness. He understood the hellish face of the terror his father had explained. Bending down his dark head on the stair, young Baret convulsed with silent sobs, hot tears splashing over the fist pressed against his mouth.

  Mama, they buried you alive. After they did all those horrible things, they still hated you and covered you with dirt. He could imagine his gentle mother with golden hair, screaming, clawing for air—his mother, who had prayed with him beside his bed, who had comforted him in his fears, who had cared for him when no one else was there.

  Baret suddenly saw the face of the only Spaniard he had ever seen—the ambassador to the court of Whitehall. A man named Bernardo, wearing rich black velvet with a high white ruff around his neck. He envisioned Bernardo, with his V-shaped beard, his cool dark eyes—the friend of Uncle Felix Buckington—staring down at his mother while shovelfuls of dirt buried her alive.

  Bernardo’s once kindly face was forever changed into that of an enemy.

  His mother’s voice echoed in his memory: “Jesus said to forgive your enemies, to pray for those who persecute you.”

  “I can’t,” wept Baret on the stairs amid the shouting of his father and grandfather in the drawing room. “I can’t.”

  The new face of Spain was branded on his heart. His father! Oh, how he loved his brave father!

  “Destroy them, Father,” he choked, clenching his fist. “Destroy Spain!”

  On the Regale, Baret stood gazing at the portrait of his mother while holding the cross woven from her hair. “Destroy Spain,” he murmured to himself.

  “Like your father, you’ll not forget,” came a familiar voice.

  He turned from the taffrail toward Sir Cecil Chaderton. Baret had been friends with the Cambridge scholar since childhood, when Chaderton had reluctantly journeyed with the earl, his family, and other members of England’s nobility into France with the exiled king.

  Although a secret supporter of Cromwell’s Roundheads, and a loyal scholar with a seat at his beloved Corpus Christi College at Cambridge, Chaderton had left England because of his affection for Baret and his father. The man had been Baret’s tutor in New Testament and Greek but also a personal counselor during the years of exile. All that Baret knew of staunch Calvin theology was due to the brilliant scholarship of “Sir Cecil,” as Baret affectionately called him.

  Chaderton claimed a bloodline to that noble Puritan Laurence Chaderton, who, along with Lancelot Andrewes and other Greek and Hebrew scholars had been commissioned by King James I to translate the Authorized Version of the Bible.

  “It does not deserve to be forgotten,” Baret answered him. “Nor will I forget my father.”

  Sir Cecil made no immediate reply, and Baret left him on deck and returned to the Great Cabin, where he placed the small cameo and cross inside the silver box along with other items of intimate value. This time he locked the box and the desk drawer into which he placed it. He doubted that the girl had swum away with anything that would unmask his identity.

  Remembering the incident that had failed to locate Lucca aboard the Santiago, he was reasonably assured that his secret goal as a buccaneer with Henry Morgan remained guarded and that his true identity was unknown. There were few sea rovers he could trust. Nor could he trust members of the family, least of all his father’s half brother, Felix.

  Felix, a member of the High Admiralty Court in London, had secretly been involved in the verdict handed down three years earlier against Baret’s father, declaring Royce a West Indies pirate. With that black mark upon his father’s reputation as Cromwell’s privateer had come the added news of the sinking of his ship off Havana. Felix had brought this dark news to the earl at Buckington House. He produced a legal paper written in the hand o
f the governor-general of Jamaica witnessing to the fact of his father’s escape and arrival at Port Royal. Later, his father had been killed.

  “Killed in a duel on the street of Port Royal.”

  By whom? As yet, Baret had not been able to discover the pirate’s name. He had reason to doubt Felix’s story.

  Now that his father was declared to be dead, Baret had first right to the title of viscount, but the earl was furious with him for having taken to sea as a buccaneer and thought nothing of holding the title in abeyance. Baret’s inheritance of his father’s lands and jewels in England and his shares in the vast Foxemoore sugar plantation in Jamaica were also denied him in the hope that he would return to England chastened and willing to take his position in the family as his grandfather wished.

  He would return. But not yet.

  Baret stood now, hands on hips, and glanced about his ransacked cabin. His eyes narrowed. He thought of the little wench who had sneaked aboard. It would serve her well if he returned to Port Royal and found her—if only to make her correct the disarray in which she had left his cabin!

  Impatiently he snatched up a linen shirt and black trousers that she had pulled from his teakwood trunk. He replaced them.

  He glanced up then, aware of Sir Cecil’s presence in the open door.

  Few of his peers would now recognize the staunch old Puritan who had taught at Cambridge before embarking with Baret in the dangerous pursuit of buccaneering on the Spanish Main. Absent his scholar’s cloak with fur collar and his flat velvet hat, Sir Cecil was now garbed in an elegant Spanish suit of black taffeta trimmed with silver lace designed in Madrid for some wealthy don. Baret had retrieved the suit and matching broad-brimmed hat from the Santiago and with straight face had awarded the outfit to his Cambridge tutor, never believing that the dignified Puritan would wear it.

  Baret’s memory flashed back to a certain wooden desk in France where as a boy he had watched Sir Cecil bent over a sheaf of papers, his pen scratching, occasionally pausing to dip the quill into the inkwell. The man now standing at his cabin door seemed a stranger. His jaw-length gray hair remained neatly paged against a lean hawklike face, once pasty from London’s fog but now toughened and browned by long exposure to the tropical sun. The short, pointed Sir Walter Raleigh beard remained, now lightly oiled.