Pirates

by Linda Lael Miller

  Duncan muttered a pithy exclamation, then said, “The articles found in your possession, madam, are hardly commonplace.” His blue eyes pierced her, warmed her in places where their gaze should not have reached.

  He had found her purse, then, and rifled through it. She was annoyed on the one hand and relieved on the other. No two ways about it: To go through a woman’s handbag was an invasion of privacy. Still, her driver’s license, her credit cards, the wallet photos—all were irrefutable proof, if only to Phoebe herself, that she was still firmly rooted in her own identity. The odd restlessness that possessed her now, however, was nothing she wanted to claim as a part of her personality.

  Phoebe drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “I would like my things back, please,” she said.

  “Regrettably,” Duncan retorted immediately, though his expression indicated that he felt no remorse for anything he’d said or done so far, that his authority was unassailable, in this room and far beyond its boundaries, “I cannot grant your request until you’ve answered my questions satisfactorily.”

  The excitement Phoebe felt was not voluntary, nor did it seem to have much of anything to do with finding herself in the wrong century, but she kept her composure. “Then we are both defeated,” she replied, “because you don’t believe a word I say. You’ve already made up your mind about me, so why not just go ahead and hang me for a witch and be done with it?”

  He glared at her, his eyes glinting with the hard shine of gemstones, while their pure, dark blue color, that of summer seas mirroring the sky, presented, in contrast, a sense of softness and great, fiery depths. “Perhaps you are a sorceress,” he said at last, and Phoebe wished she could tell for sure whether he was serious or not. “Mayhap I should send you to the mainland, with your odd belongings and your babbling, and let a magistrate sort the matter out.”

  “You wouldn’t blow your cover that way,” Phoebe challenged, hoping against hope that her guess was right, and he was only bluffing, trying to scare her into confessing a litany of sins he had already ascribed to her. Though he was opinionated, she did not believe Duncan Rourke was superstitious.

  Duncan put his hands on his hips and tilted his head to one side. “Blow my cover?” he drawled. “Damn it all to perdition, woman, what are you talking about?”

  Phoebe sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I keep forgetting that things need to be translated. What I meant was, you won’t send me to the States—er, the colonies—because you don’t want the British to know you’re here.”

  He gave a long, measured, and downright lethal sigh. Then, ignoring Old Woman, he clasped Phoebe’s upper arm in a hard but painless grip and shuffled her across the room and out into the hallway. Before a protest could be raised, Duncan had thrust his unwanted houseguest over another threshold and into a chamber that was plainly his own.

  He dragged her to the desk, a beautifully carved piece that would probably bring a fortune at an antiques auction in a couple of centuries, and pressed her into the matching chair. Her purse was there, and some of its contents, including Phoebe’s pitiful store of cash, were arrayed on the shining surface.

  He thumped the currency, which he’d laid out in a neat fan shape, with one index finger. “Where did you get these notes?” he asked, and this time there was wonder in his voice instead of anger.

  Looking at her belongings and then at Duncan, Phoebe realized, in a moment of blinding revelation, that the impossible had happened.

  To her.

  Somehow, she had indeed found an opening in time, and she had slipped through it.

  “I’m afraid to tell you,” she confessed fretfully at long last.

  Duncan crouched beside her, looking up into her face, gripping the back of her chair with one hand and the edge of the desk with the other. He drew unseen lightning down from the skies, like a human divining rod, and it crackled through Phoebe.

  “Please,” he said.

  Phoebe bit her lower lip and raised her eyes to Old Woman for a moment in silent question, and her guardian nodded slowly.

  “I came from the future,” Phoebe blurted in a rush of words.

  “I don’t understand,” Duncan admitted, brushing her face lightly with the backs of his knuckles, leaving prongs of fire in their wake. At least he hadn’t said, I don’t believe you.

  “Neither do I,” said Phoebe, barely able to keep from crying. “I was minding my business, in my own time, and suddenly the elevator was gone and I was here and there you were…”

  He took one of the bills, a crisp twenty, and held it up. “It say ’The United States of America’ on this paper. What does it mean?”

  “That you won the war,” she told him, speaking impatiently because she was still trying to comprehend that she had slipped through a crack in time and found herself in another century. There was no sense in asking herself how it had happen—that was a mystery she might never solve, through she certainly meant to try. All Phoebe could do for the moment and make the best of them.

  And try make some sense of the things this man made her feel.

  Duncan rose gracefully to his full height, still holding the twenty-dollar bill and gazing at it in quite amazement. “He is a clever man, the printer who made his.” he said, and the wistful note in his voice wrenched at something hidden far back in Phoebe’s heart. “Some Tory trick, without doubt, calculated to mock our efforts to win liberty.”

  “You asked for the truth,” Phoebe pointed out. “And just as I predicted, you think Im lying.”

  “How can I even imagine otherwise?” he asked, meeting her eyes at last. Sadly. “It is a wild tale you tell. And an impossible one in the bargain.”

  “Is it?” Phoebe asked, putting the question to herself as well as to Duncan. She was still trying to deal with matters herself, still speculating, ’wondering, marveling. “We don’t know much about such things, in my century or yours. For all any of us can say for sure, time is merely a state of mind, a matter of perception. Maybe, instead of being sequential, unfolding minute by minute, year by year, century by century, eternity exists as a whole, complete in and of itself.”

  “Gibberish,” Duncan said, but she saw, distracted by the many ramifications of her predicament though she was, that he found her theory intriguing, if not entirely likely.

  “The question is,” Phoebe muttered, running the tip of her index finger over the raised lettering on one of her credit cards, “what do I do now? Can I do back, or is the way closed forever?” She looked, as she spoke, not at Duncan, who had stepped back, but at Old Woman. “If I guessed your name,” she asked, whimsical in her state of polite shock, “and dared to say it out loud, would the magic take me home?”

  Old Woman laid one hand on Phoebe’s shoulder, warm and heavy and reassuring. “You already be home, child. And you got here by a magic all your own. You’re with us because that’s what you wanted in the deepest pan of your heart.”

  Duncan sighed, drew near again, and picked up a small photograph of Eliott, Phoebe’s half brother. “This miniature is remarkable,” he said, a frown of confusion creasing his forehead. “I cannot see the brushstrokes.”

  “That’s because there are none,” Phoebe said, quite gently, considering that she was both irritated and scared. And something else that was harder to define. “This is a photograph—sort of a reflection, captured on paper.”

  Her handsome host looked up, his eyes narrowed in wariness and suspicion and something Phoebe hoped was the beginning of belief. “And when was—will—this be invented?”

  “Sometime in the nineteenth century, I think. There are a great many pictures of the Civil War, which began in 1860, so even though the process was still pretty cumbersome, they’d mastered the fundamentals by then.”

  Duncan looked pale and, again, a muscle flexed at the edge of his jaw. “What Civil War is this?” he asked, in a reasonable but otherwise utterly expressionless tone of voice.

  “You’re not ready to hear about that just yet,” P
hoebe told him. “You’ve got your hands full with the Revolution, and, well, let’s just say that the War Between the States wasn’t one of our country’s finer moments. And then there was Vietnam, but that would really depress you—”

  “Enough,” Duncan interrupted. “Are you telling me that our nation will go to war against itself?”

  Phoebe sighed, wishing, of course, that she hadn’t mentioned that particular period in American history. “Yes,” she said.

  “For what cause?”

  “It was very complicated, but I suppose it had more to do with slavery than anything else.”

  Duncan appeared to be developing a headache of monumental proportions. “Even now,” he mused, “that question makes for bitter division among the staunchest patriots.”

  “If you guys had only outlawed it when you drew up the Declaration of Independence, everyone—especially black people—would have been spared a lot of grief. But it isn’t going to happen: The planters from the southern colonies, among others, will maintain that slavery is necessary to economic survival, and, in the long run, they’ll get their way.”

  Old Woman interceded quietly. “That’s enough of such talk, child,” she said, laying her hands lightly on Phoebe’s cramped shoulders. The tense muscles relaxed with dizzying suddenness, as if some powerful drug had been injected. “Come away with me now. You got to have some sunshine and fresh air if you want to mend yourself proper.”

  Phoebe didn’t protest that she wasn’t in need of mending, because she wasn’t entirely sure, given all that had happened to her since the night before. Besides, she felt a deep and elemental craving for the sea and the sky and the tropical breezes that roared and whispered between the two. She rose slowly, her gaze locked with Duncan’s for a long moment. Then, conquered in some subliminal and utterly delicious way, she lowered her eyes and turned to follow Old Woman out of the room.

  After the women had gone, Duncan gathered up Phoebe’s uncanny possessions, one at a time, and tucked them back into the bag. All except for the likeness she had called a “photograph,” that is—he kept that, gazing into the masculine face and wondering if this was the man Phoebe loved.

  In the deeper regions of his mind, of course, he was considering the evidence he’d seen with his own eyes, touched with his own fingers. He wanted to believe Phoebe’s story, despite the unsettling prediction of a war between the colonies themselves, because it meant the Continental Army would prevail. Despite the terrible odds, the deprivations, betrayals, and disappointments.

  Tucking Phoebe’s bag into a deep drawer in his desk, Duncan turned and resolutely left the room. That night, he and Alex would ride to the opposite side of the island, where a watch was posted, in case the long-awaited signal of a ship’s approach should come from that direction. The vessel in question, christened the India Queen, was rumored to be all but sinking with the weight of its cargo: gunpowder, barrels of the stuff, along with crates of muskets and balls. General George Washington’s militia was in dire need of all the munitions that could be begged, borrowed, or stolen.

  Now, there were plans to be laid. The British ship would, without question, be well defended, her course set for Boston Harbor. The task of intercepting the vessel and confiscating the weaponry required flawless timing, and the slightest mistake might well result in disaster for Duncan and every member of his crew. According to his information, the man at the helm of the India Queen was a seasoned captain, with an understanding of the sea and its ways that seemed imprinted on his spirit like some unseen tattoo. To get the better of such an adversary was not easy.

  Duncan descended the main staircase and left the house by a side door, looking neither to left nor right but straight ahead, lest his gaze fall by accident on Mistress Turlow, who was surely somewhere nearby. He did not wish to be distracted from the business at hand—securing arms for General Washington’s army.

  He walked through the gardens, lushly scented and flamboyant with color, even after the ravages of the recent storm, past Italian statues and marble ponds and elaborately carved stone benches. Van Ruben, the Dutch merchant and planter, had come to this island seeking solitude, but he had brought the beauty of the Old World with him, to savor in private moments.

  Duncan passed through an opening in a hedge taller than he was, and descended a steep, pebble-strewn path snaking down the verdant hillside to the beach. The cove where his ship rode at anchor was down the shore, fairly wreathed by trees and foliage.

  He was pleased to see members of his crew on deck, preparing the vessel for a swift journey. Apparently, he thought, he wasn’t the only one who expected the signal; Alex, as first mate, had already given orders that the Francesca was to be made ready for a voyage.

  Seeing their captain standing on the beach, two of the men lowered a skiff to the water, fully rigged, and one climbed down a rope ladder to take up the oars.

  Duncan waded out into the cove without troubling to remove his boots—they were of sturdy leather, after all, and expected to hold up under hard use. When the small boat drew near enough, he climbed deftly aboard, barely rocking her even though he was a man of considerable size.

  “She’s a fine sight, isn’t she, Captain?” boasted the sailor, whose name was Kelsey, as proudly as if it were his own.

  That sense of pride and personal interest was a trait Duncan valued in a crew member. He smiled, looking up at the Francesca’s sturdy masts and trim sails. “Aye,” he agreed, with affection. “She is that and more.”

  Reaching the ship, where the ladder dangled in wait, Duncan and Kelsey made the skiff fast to her side and then climbed aboard.

  Alex was waiting on deck, hands caught behind his back, ruddy of complexion and bright of eye. He plainly relished the prospect of a mission, just as Duncan did, and there was reason to hope, from his happy countenance, that he’d left his dark mood behind, like a ship outrunning a sea squall.

  “You’re expecting the signal tonight,” Alex said.

  Duncan nodded, taking in the bustle of preparation with a glance. “Aye. And you are in agreement, it would seem.”

  “Yes.” Alex paused and cleared his throat diplomatically, but he couldn’t help grinning. “What of the mysterious Mistress Turlow?” He pretended to search the shore, tilting his head to peer around one of Duncan’s shoulders. “I half expected you to bring her along, poor chit, and hang her from the yardarm for a traitor and a spy.”

  Duncan did not appreciate the reminder; he’d put forth a considerable effort, after all, to set aside all thought of that troublesome personage. He scowled and moved past his friend to descend the steps and proceed along the passageway toward his quarters. His desk was there, with his charts and logbooks and navigational tools. “We have more important matters to discuss,” he said, for Alex was practically on his heels. “The India Queen may well have an escort, given the cargo she carries, and in any case, the British can be counted upon for a respectable flight.”

  Alex sighed, closing the cabin door while Duncan opened the portholes to air and light.

  “We’ve been planning this raid for weeks,” the first mate reminded his captain. “What else is there to say?”

  Duncan took a chart from a cabinet affixed to the wall and unrolled it on the surface of his desk. “Plenty,” he replied. “Should our first strategy fail, we must have another at hand. And still another after that.”

  Alex’s jaw tightened, then relaxed again. He could manage any weapon, from a slingshot to a cannon, with uncanny accuracy, and he was a fine horseman as well as an able sailor and swordsman. There could be no question of his courage, and his skills as a commander were also above reproach. For all of it, he was sometimes hasty, due to an impatient nature, and had been known to take rash and therefore, to Duncan’s way of thinking, foolhardy risks.

  “The British won’t be expecting us while they’re still so far from the coast,” Alex said after a moment’s pause, used, no doubt, to regroup.

  “The British,” Duncan ans
wered, frowning thoughtfully as he studied the chart, measuring distances with his eyes and probabilities with his mind, “are always expecting us. They did not assemble the greatest navy on earth by leaving the security of vital supply ships to chance.” He looked up, at last, and saw that Alex’s neck had reddened, probably with suppressed irritation. “Have you any suggestions,” asked the captain, “or must I labor over the problem alone?”

  Alex had been offered an opportunity to salvage his dignity, and he did not refuse it. He bent over the chart, examining it thoroughly, and then offered an idea …

  *

  The signal came as soon as darkness had settled over the long and tangled chain of islands, a bonfire blazing on a distant shore, and Duncan saw it from the terrace outside his room. The India Queen would be within their grasp, if they sailed with the next tide and the winds were favorable. Once they’d boarded her, and subdued the captain and crew, the vessel would be diverted to a harbor just south of Charles Town, where a band of patriots waited to claim the muskets and gunpowder for use against the King’s men.

  Duncan turned to go back inside the house just as the bells in the small chapel Van Ruben had built for his wife began to toll. He smiled, grimly pleased that the watchman on duty had been paying attention. The crewmen, who had huts and houses of their own all over the island, would converge on the cove where the Francesca bobbed on the rising tide, ready to set sail for the colder waters to the north.

  Candles and oil lamps filled the hall and the foyer with a pleasant glow, and Duncan felt a twinge of sadness because he had to leave. He was, he told himself silently, getting too attached to his comforts. Ten days or a fortnight at sea would be good discipline.

  He had not seen Phoebe, there in the warm shadows of the drawing room doorway, and when she stepped into the light, he was arrested by the surprise of her presence. She was wearing an ill-fitting frock that Old Woman had probably salvaged from the bottom of some trunk, and her strange hair gave her a fey look, like a nymph or a pixie strayed from the musty pages of some ancient folktale. There was a fragility about her, a bereft air, that tugged at Duncan’s heretofore invulnerable heart.