Across a Moonlit Sea

by Marsha Canham

  “Philip of Spain has been bragging,” he said, stepping aside to give her a full view.

  Beau looked down and for a few moments it was not exactly clear what she was seeing. Ships, certainly. A painted forest of masts and great gilded sterns lying regally at anchor in some unidentifed port.

  Seeing her frown, Dante slid a blunt-ended finger across the bottom of the vellum, drawing her eye to the artist’s signature. The name meant nothing to her, but the date beside it was very specific.

  “This is … April, is it not?” she said hesitantly. “Unless …”

  “No, you haven’t been at sea that long, and neither have I.”

  He moved two of the goblets he was using as weights and let the top painting curl back into a roll. There was another beneath, of more masts, more ships in a much larger harbor, and again she read the script, aloud this time.

  “Maius—May—anno 1587.”

  “The first port I am not familiar with, but this one”— the pewter eyes glanced from Beau to Spence—“is Cadiz.”

  “Cadiz?” Jonas queried. “Why the devil—?”

  “The King is showing off his fleet preparations,” Beau said in awe. “He is showing off his armada.”

  Dante grinned again. “I told you, you were going to have stop doing that: being so clever.”

  “But …” She looked down at the paintings. “How can you be certain these are accurate depictions? How can you be certain it isn’t just braggadocio and wishful thinking?”

  Dante gazed at her a moment, then ran the tip of his finger along the soft auburn wisps of hair that curled against her neck.

  “I know because of these. They’re standing on end. And because of these—” He reached into the crate again and withdrew a thin sheaf of papers. They had been heavily waxed and sealed with the imprint of the King’s ambassador in Veracruz. With fresh wine shimmering in his cup, he pulled a chair under the lamplight and began skimming the pages, translating from the Spanish as he read small excerpts that might interest his audience.

  “‘Like hawks they came out of nowhere, struck, and flew away again in the night, with Satan himself blowing in their wings. We are told the attack was led by the French dog,’” He paused in his reading and scowled. “Dog? When was I demoted from a wolf to a dog? At any rate, ‘… the attack was led by the French dog De Tourville, with some measurable success, which, I regret to inform Your Most Royal Highness, bears a loss to the treasury of some five hundred thousand ducats.’” Dante stopped again. “The thieving rogue. It was no more than four, by God, although he has put the reward for my head up to fifteen thousand ducats. Five thousand more and I’ll be worth as much as your hero, Sir Francis Drake.”

  “Fifteen thousand is tempting enough,” she said wryly. “Believe me.”

  He swallowed a mouthful of wine and lifted the papers again. “Then there is this.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t quite know; it’s in code.”

  “Then how do you know it’s important?”

  “Why else would it be in code?”

  Beau resisted the urge to curse and instead snatched a sheet of paper out of his hand and scanned it quickly. “It looks like perfectly innocent writing to me.”

  “You read Spanish?”

  “I can read charts and currents, and this”—she stabbed a finger at the document—“looks like nothing more ominous than weather reports.”

  “Which is precisely what they are. Weather reports, harvest predictions, wind movements…”

  “How dreadfully foreboding.”

  He took another sip of wine and lounged back in the chair. The black silk of his shirt trapped small puddles of yellow light from overhead and made him look as if he had been gilded. Beau, who could still feel the line his finger had drawn on her neck, tried very hard not to notice how his shirts never quite seemed to be laced to the throat. She failed miserably and found herself staring at the muscular V of his chest with its dark, smooth mat of hair, so lush and thick, it made her want to bury her hands in it.

  “Before we reached Veracruz,” he was saying, “we had occasion to prime our guns on a Spaniard just off Barbados. There were dispatches on board from the King to Diego Flores, the governor of Panama. They were also filled with weather reports and harvest predictions and I did not think too much of it at the time … until Victor Bloodstone”— he spat out the name with, if it was possible, more venom than before—“advised me, through knowledge of his uncle’s dealings with spies and so forth, that Philip of Spain has a penchant for putting all of his important correspondence in code.”

  “Harvests and such?” Jonas guessed, wanting back into the conversation.

  Dante nodded. “I’ve a dozen like this in the papers we took from Veracruz, and there are twice as many more on the San Pedro. I had nothing much to do while we drifted at sea for two weeks, so most of mine are translated. If there is a code there, I have not found it yet. A fresh pair of eyes might help, though, if you had someone on board who could read Spanish and perhaps see something I missed.”

  “Spit,” Beau said.

  Dante’s dark head came around again with a frown. “I fail to see how that would help.”

  “Spit McCutcheon,” she explained on an exasperated sigh. “He reads and writes Spanish. Latin as well. He was a church cleric at one time.”

  “A minister of the Lord?”

  “Try his patience sometime and you will have him spouting psalms.”

  “From the pulpit to a gunport is still an interesting leap for the imagination to take.”

  “So is the one from a French chateau to the deck of a pirate ship.”

  A smile was startled into his eyes, and a moment later it turned into quiet laughter, directed as much at himself as at anything she had said.

  “Touché, mam’selle. Rarely have I been called a pompous goat with such delicious finesse.”

  Spence laughed as well and clapped his hand to his thigh to call for another toast. “Paintings be damned! Spain be damned! Philip an’ all his blatherin’ papists be damned! Come here, the pair o’ ye, an’ take my hand. Captain! Ye already know what I think o ‘yer skill on the seas; there’s naught I could say to add to it, save that I was honored to share a deck with ye today. An’, Beau! I’m not forgettin’ I’ve got the finest damned helmsman a sailor could ever want guidin’ the keel! I’m that proud o’ ye, Isabeau Daria Spence. Proud enough to burst the heart clear out o’ my chest!”

  Beau stared stupidly at her hand as Spence took it and sandwiched it with Dante’s between his own huge paws. She felt a thrill of light-headedness and pride, being praised by the father she loved above all else and toasted by a man who regularily scorned danger and cast his destiny to the wind.

  Her gaze drifted upward to Dante de Tourville. He’d asked her what had brought her to this point in her life, if she had any regrets that she was not sitting by a hearth wearing silk frocks and sipping chocolate out of tiny porcelain cups.

  For the past eight years she had been sipping life and living adventures those safe at home could not even imagine. She’d had salt spray, not rice powder, dusted on her cheeks, and instead of sitting cozy by a fire, she had climbed to the top of the mainmast and gazed out across a moonlit sea, standing close enough to the heavens to reach out and snatch at a handful of stars. Was there anything anywhere half as beautiful as a molten sea at sunrise or half as intoxicating as the smell of a spice-laden breeze off a tropical island? She had swum in the crystal-blue waters off Tortuga, and she had chipped ice off a floe near Greenland. She had made friends with Indians in the New World and enemies with gunners on board Spanish galleons. She had shared the camaraderie and the danger, the excitement as well as the fear.

  And she had been kissed, for whatever reason, by a pirate wolf who would not have passed her a second look had she been sipping chocolate beside the Queen.

  A round of laughter intruded on the magic of the moment and she realized, with an odd sense of detachment,
that Jonas was no longer holding her hand in Dante’s; it was staying there of its own accord. The long, tapered fingers were closed lightly around hers, cradling her in the warmth of his palm, caressing her with an intimacy that sent a fierce rush of heat spiraling through her body. Her breasts blossomed with it, her belly shimmered with it, and her blood raced until the heat became as intoxicating as the wine.

  She was aware Dante’s eyes had not left her face, but she resisted the compelling urge to meet them. The penetrating silver-blue was always dangerous, never more so than now as they challenged her to acknowledge something he already suspected: that she wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be, wasn’t as independent, as sure of herself, as indifferent to the feelings she tried so hard to guard against revealing. He could see that Spence’s praise had set her emotions in a turmoil; was he wondering how deep and how far that turmoil extended?

  Beau withdrew her hand and curled it tightly by her side. Jonas was offering another toast to God knew what and calling for a fresh bottle of wine.

  “No more for me,” she said quickly. “My head is already spinning in circles. I think I will bid you both good-night.”

  Jonas belched, his nose red as paint, and tried to focus on Beau’s face. “Are the watches set an’ armed? We’re twenty feet from an enemy ship an’ we’d not want to be caught with our cods open an’ our pissers hangin’ out.”

  It took a second or two for Beau to redirect her thoughts, to concentrate on something as practical as watches and the safety of the ship and crew, but she was thankful for the cold, hard sense required to form an answer. “Lewis has the deck until midnight, then Hubbard, and Simmonds for the ghost watch, all with full crews.”

  “Aye.” The bald head wobbled slightly on its barrel neck. “Keen eyes on all o’ them. We can sleep sound tonight.”

  She risked another glance at Dante, but he had moved out of the circle of light and had his back turned while he opened another bottle of wine.

  “Good night, Captain Dante.”

  “Dormez-vous bien, Isabeau, et revez du plaisir.”

  Chapter 14

  Sleep well, he had told her, and dream of pleasure. Beau closed the door to her father’s cabin behind her and stood in the gloom of the companionway, hearing the echo of Dante’s parting words in her head. Dream of pleasure?

  An innocent phrase or another subtle mockery?

  A round of male laughter drew her eyes down to the narrow slice of light fanning out from the crack beneath the door and she wondered what they would be dreaming about this night. Probably the pleasure of going to war with Spain.

  While it was true Sir Francis Drake and others had been warning the Queen for many months of a building frenzy in Spanish ports, it was also true—and the dilemma of any sovereign who did not want to venture into a war unless all avenues of negotiation were exhausted—that Elizabeth could not squander the money of her overtaxed subjects to build a navy on rumor and speculation alone. If Dante had found proof of Spain’s intentions, then war was inevitable and the Queen would need all of her loyal merchantmen and privateers to defend England’s shores from invasion. That included the Egret, and the sooner home, the better.

  Beau looked along the corridor to her own door. There was another weak sliver of light spilling out the bottom, and she supposed Billy had transferred the rest of the maps and charts from the Spanish galleon. She needed her own charts for the morning and it was probably best to find them now instead of stumbling about with a thick head at dawn.

  It seemed odd somehow to hesitate on the threshold of her own cabin, to feel like a trespasser when most of the belongings inside were hers. Perhaps it was just the sight of the shirt Dante had cast off earlier, still crumpled in a heap in the corner, or the faint scent of sunshine and leather that lingered behind, that was making her skittish. Even more likely, she could blame the wine and the talk of itching and scratching for making her skin prickle and her throat aware of every breath she took.

  A single candle flickered inside its glass lamp on the chart table. There was brighter moonlight streaming through the slanted windows, and drawn by the thought of a fresh breath of air, she crossed to the gallery door and slipped outside onto the narrow balcony.

  To starboard the looming hull of the San Pedro blocked the horizon. The Egret was anchored off her stern quarter, riding lightly on the gentle swells, kept at a secure distance by the grappling lines. She could hear banging and sawing on the decks above; she could smell pitch and smoke and the metallic scent of spent gunpowder. She would have liked to cross the gallery and have a closer look at the humbled goliath anchored beside them, but to do so she would have to pass the windows on Spence’s side of the ship and unless she ducked down like a thief, they would think she was spying on them.

  She walked instead to the larboard side, where the moon glistened close to the horizon and poured a molten river of rippling silver toward the Egret. An earlier mass of clouds scudded away to the east, glowing blue-white on their underbellies. The brightness of the moon had washed most of the smaller stars out of the sky, but there were enough winking in the darkness to bring Beau’s elbows down on the rail and her chin into the cradle of her hands.

  Would she rather have rigid buckram corsets and wire farthingales? Or crow-faced matrons telling her how to wear her hair or chiding her if a freckle appeared on her nose? Not likely.

  A frown brought her chin up again and she pulled the bunched linen strips off her hand. The palm was still tender, but luckily she’d had enough calluses to absorb the worst of the rope burns. And probably enough wine to dull whatever sensations were left.

  She tossed the bandages overboard and, on a further restless urging, unplaited her hair from the constricting tightness of the braid. Careful not to waken the crease on her temple, she gave her scalp a few good scratches, easing the tension a hundredfold. She stared down at the inky blackness of the water twenty feet below and wished she’d found time earlier for more than just a perfunctory wash to rid herself of the heat and grime of battle. A long, slow, hot bath would be comparable to heaven right now. A hot bath, an oiled rub, and a soft, deep featherbed.

  Beau’s head jerked upright and her eyes popped open. She had a hammock in a sail closet waiting for her. Moving reluctantly away from the rail, she started back for the door.

  She was not quite there when she saw movement inside the cabin and froze. Simon Dante was closing the outer door to the companionway; a heartbeat later he was putting toe to heel and scraping off his boots, kicking them aside with the relish of a man unhappy with restrictions of any kind. The thongs on his shirt were already loose and dangling. In less time than it took for a gasp to leave Beau’s lips, his belt was unfastened and flung to the floor and the black silk shirt was pulled up and over his head.

  Shocked and too stricken to move, she watched him extend his arms wide and give a mighty yawn. He clasped his hands behind his neck and stretched the bulging biceps, then bent his torso from one side to the other, his muscles rippling in the candlelight, his hair falling in waves over each shoulder as he moved. Unlacing his hands, he reached straight up, easily curling them over the top of a ceiling beam. He arched forward, stretching his chest and belly, then back until he was clinging by his fingertips and balancing on his heels.

  The wound on Beau’s temple throbbed once with the sudden rush of blood to her head. Her cheeks were burning, her throat was dry, and she tried frantically to think of a way to escape the gallery without being seen.

  She turned her head ever so slightly, knowing the moonlight was behind her, outlining her silhouette. When she looked back again, he was bending over his sea chest, fishing out a stoppered bottle. He opened it with his teeth and poured some of its contents into his hand; a few seconds later, the strong scent of camphor oil drifted out the door.

  Beau could not have moved if she’d wanted to. She watched him rub a gleaming film of oil into the powerful display of muscles along his arms, massaging it into the squared b
ulk of his shoulders, his neck, into his ribs and chest, and as far around on his back as he could reach. She watched him knead each muscle and work each sinew and by the time he was finished, standing in the light like a burnished war god, Beau’s limbs were weak. Her belly was a moving, liquid mass of heat. Her own skin, she could swear, had shrunk two sizes too small and threatened to burst at the slightest movement.

  A fresh, sharp whiff of camphor restored a measure of her senses. She had to get off the gallery—but how? There was only one door leading inside and even if she could muster the nerve to walk boldly through it, what possible explanation could she give for having waited so long to do it?

  There were more than enough hand and footholds to climb to the upper deck, and it was the mistake she made, lifting her head to locate the first carved groove, that alerted Dante to the dark outline of an intruder on the gallery.

  Beau had the advantage of the candlelight to show her the startled look on his face as he spied her through the diamond grid of the windowpanes. He had the advantage of long legs and quick reflexes to carry him through the door and out onto the narrow gallery before she could put a foot to the rails and reach for the first handhold.

  Strong hands, rough hands, grabbed her around the middle and dragged her back, slamming her hard against the canted hull of the ship.

  “You!” he gasped. “By all that’s holy—what the devil are you doing out here? You could have been killed, sneaking around in the dark like this, you little fool, or have you forgotten there is an enemy ship anchored beside us with several hundred angry men just aching to swim across and slit our throats?”

  Beau looked down and saw the glitter of a knife in his hand. “I … haven’t forgotten. And I wasn’t sneaking. I came to get my charts for the morning and—and then I wanted a breath of air, and—and—it is my cabin, you know. I am not accustomed to having someone else in it, or to asking someone else’s permission to go inside.”