“I know you will.”
“I’ll never leave you. Not in this life, or the next. Never.”
“I know you won’t.” She shut her eyes once more. “Oh, God . . . I’m so cold.”
She didn’t see the tears slipping from his beloved eyes and slowly tracking down his cheeks, didn’t feel his trembling hands or hear the strange, guttural sounds coming from the back of his throat as he tried to choke back sudden, towering sobs that threatened to overwhelm him. But she felt the hard warmth of his body as he carefully climbed up into bed beside her, took her in his arms, and cradled her tenderly to his chest.
There, his tears melded with the trail of perspiration that trickled down her brow.
And above, his son, oblivious to just how critical his mother’s illness was, continued to send the willing little Kestrel closer and closer to her date with destiny.
A date that would be her final one.
* * *
“What do you make of her, Con?”
Toby had joined him, and now the two of them stood well forward at the larboard rail, watching the distant ship.
Connor was aware of the way his young cousin was watching him, hanging on his every word. It was hard not to feel a bit swelled up by such open admiration, hard not to derive confidence from it when that same confidence had been dented by his father’s admonitions only an hour before.
Confidence that made him reckless.
Connor’s fingers were drumming against the hot breech of a nearby gun.
“She’s riding low in the water. Looks like they’re hoisting topsails now, maybe her royals, too.”
“Think they’ve gotten spooked by our presence?”
Connor grinned. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?” He turned to One-Eye, coiling a line nearby. “The wind’s veered a point. Let’s get the stuns’ls on so we can run down on her before she can take advantage of it. She’ll be faster than we are with it abaft the beam, but given how sloppily she’s being handled, I think we’ll have the advantage if we fly the kites.”
“Aye, Captain.”
There was movement behind him. It was Nathan and Rhiannon, who had given the tiller over to Jacques.
“I thought you said we wouldn’t attack,” Nathan said, frowning.
“I’m not attacking. But only a fool would blindly share sea space with a ship whose colors and intent are unknown.”
Rhiannon reached out and touched his arm. “Are you sure we should be doing this?” she asked gently.
Sudden anger lanced through him. “For God’s sake, I’m the damned captain here. Why is everyone questioning my judgment? First my father, and now you two.”
She didn’t back down. “I’m not questioning your judgment, just your actions. Your mother is ill, Connor. Sicker, I think, than your father is either letting on or willing to admit. I’m sure he’d like to just get her home without incident or delay.”
“Hailing that ship and discerning her identity will take all of fifteen minutes, and we’ll all sleep better tonight for my having done it!”
She had found a chink in his armor, but to acknowledge it would be to admit weakness or error, and that was something he could not do. Not with everyone looking at him for guidance and orders.
And not when his father was aboard, the first time they had ever sailed together in wartime, the first chance that he, Connor, would have to show him that he was his son and equal in every way.
One-Eye and several others were climbing the shrouds now, going aloft to set the studding sails that would extend the surface area of Kestrel’s square topsail and make her all the faster with the wind coming off their starboard quarter.
The distant ship, rolling heavily in the seas, was now directly off their larboard bows, the distance between them rapidly decreasing.
“Ease out the main a little more,” Connor snapped, willing more speed from the schooner. “We’ll fire a shot across her bows and get this business concluded before anyone even knows what we’re about.”
Time went by too slow for his liking, and his fingers drummed a faster tattoo on the rail. Finally, high above their heads, the studding sails were on and sheeted home at a speed that had Connor frowning.
“We need more crew, Con,” Nathan said quietly.
“Stow it.”
Connor gave the order to let the schooner fall off a point. Around them, the sound of the hull cutting through the sea changed in pitch as Kestrel began to run hard and fast, chased now, by the long ocean swells and the wind itself.
Ahead, the ship was growing larger as Kestrel eagerly closed the distance on her.
A sudden hush fell over the deck, and feeling it, Connor turned.
There was his father standing a short distance away, his face pale beneath that absurd old hat. He looked confused. Lost.
“Da, what is it? You’re not sick, too, are you?”
“No, lad. I’m not sick. I need to talk to you. It’s about your—”
“Captain!” It was Jacques at the helm. “She’s tacking! Your orders, sir?”
“Look, Da, I can’t talk right now. Can it wait?”
His father looked up and across the rapidly decreasing stretch of water to the merchant ship. She had come about and was now on a beam reach, running almost perpendicular to them, and it occurred to Connor, in that moment, that it was a bit odd that she would be doing that instead of taking advantage of the easterly wind in an attempt to get away.
One-Eye hollered down from above. “Captain, she’s not flying any colors!”
“Two points to sta’b’d,” Connor called tersely to Jacques at the tiller.
“What was that, sir?”
“Two points to sta’b’d! Stay to windward of her, damn you!”
“Shear off, lad,” said Brendan, quietly.
Connor stabbed his fingertips into his temples and shut his eyes as he tried to focus his thoughts and control his temper.
“Don’t worry, Da, I know what I’m doing, I’ve got it all under control.”
Kestrel was all but flying now as the wind sent her closer and closer to the merchantman, a ship thrice her tonnage and still continuing on that strange and intersecting course.
“Connor, I—”
His temper blew. ‘You know what your problem is, Father? You’ve lost the fire in your belly, that’s what! Or maybe you never had it to begin with and all those stories about you were one big, fat lie. There’s a war going on! You built this ship for war, and now you want us to run away and hide! I wish you would just get the hell off my deck and go away, you’re distracting me, I can’t think, damn it, I can’t think!’
“Connor!” Rhiannon gasped, trying to pull him away from his father.
“Well it’s true! Lies, all of them. Lies!”
Brendan just looked at him, his eyes tragic.
Connor, feeling as though his head was going to blow apart, stalked away, hurt, humiliated by his father’s actions, and betrayed by the dawning truth—a truth that he had spent a lifetime believing, a truth that was now coming apart before his very eyes. To think that he’d been raised on stories of his father the legend. To think that all these years, he’d been deceived into thinking his father was someone, something he was not, and he suddenly felt like a fool for having been duped for so long. “It’s true! It was all a lie, wasn’t it? All those stories that Mother and Liam told me, they were nothing but nursery tales, embellished each time in order to make you look like the hero you never were, to make me see you as bigger than you really are, to make a little boy worship you! You’re a sham, Father! You’re an old man, a fake, and worst of all, you’re a damned coward!”
A terrible silence fell over the ship, and even the seas beneath Kestrel herself suddenly seemed to hush.
Clenching his fists, Connor turned to Nathan, hating him for his silently condemning eyes. Hating all of them for the way they were looking at him as though he was the one who had done something terribly, unspeakably wrong here. “Fire a shot across that p
ig’s bow. I’m done wasting time.”
“Aye . . . sir.”
Quietly, Nathan turned to give the order, and a moment later Kestrel’s most forward gun banged out an impudent demand that the other ship heave to. The ball skipped across the water, slicing harmlessly through the crests of blue, blue waves before finally sinking.
The other ship did not heave to.
And in that moment Connor, leaping barefoot up atop the old gun his mother had dubbed Freedom so long ago, saw movement along her steep sides, and to his horror, gun ports, previously closed and their seams blending in against the paintwork, yawning open. One by one by one.
They had found the armed pirate ship.
“Oh, Christ,” he swore, and turned to shout an order for Kestrel to head up and to run like she had never run before.
It was too late.
With an unholy, ear-splitting roar, the other ship’s great broadside flashed orange and a hail of iron came slamming into the little schooner.
* * *
Kestrel never had a chance.
As she obeyed her captain’s frantic command to turn away from the danger, her sails in confusion and her sleek black side coming straight on to the bigger ship as she came about, the hail of iron found her. An eighteen-pound cannonball smashed into one of her two boats, sending an explosion of deadly splinters in all directions and reducing it to kindling wood in its cradle. Others tore into her rigging, sliced through sails and severed her standing rigging, bringing spars, cordage, and the topsail’s yard crashing and bouncing off her deck in a deadly rain of debris. The proud studding sails that had sent her so swiftly down upon her quarry were cut to ribbons. Several of her guns were upended, her captain was hurled twenty feet into one of them, and everywhere there was screams of pain and confusion and the smell of smoke.
“Connor!” Rhiannon screamed, picking herself up from the deck where she had fallen and peering desperately through the smoke. “Connor, where are you?”
She never felt the gash on the back of her hand that spilled blood down her arm and onto her pretty yellow gown. Her ears ringing, her senses dazed, she stumbled across the wreckage on deck. She saw Jacques, groaning and crawling on hands and knees near the untended tiller. One-Eye, desperately trying to get old Liam Doherty out from beneath the jagged, broken spar that had been the topsail yard, now lying in pieces across the deck. Nathan, grabbing an axe and hacking desperately at rigging in a frantic attempt to free the schooner from the tangle of sail, rigging, and spars that hung, swinging, from a few last lines so far above, Toby running to take the tiller as Kestrel lay helpless and vulnerable under the other ship’s guns, and Brendan, bending down beside a man lying draped and face-down across one of the overturned cannon, arms and head hanging, apparently dead.
A man with canvas pantaloons cut off at the knee, bare feet and calves, and a straw hat, spattered with blood, lying upside down on the deck beneath his head.
“Connor!”
Rhiannon was running now, sobbing as she leaped over debris on deck, slipped in blood, and plunged to her knees beside her father-in-law. She grabbed one of her husband’s hands, her thumb feeling for a pulse at the wrist.
“Uncle Brendan!” It was Toby calling from the tiller, his voice rising in fear. “They’re running out their guns again!”
Brendan, blinking and dazed, looked up.
Toby’s voice rose in a scream of terror. “What shall I do?”
Numb with loss, Brendan blinked again, trying to clear the fog in his head. Do? His precious Mira, dying below. Kestrel hit hard, probably fatally. And Connor. Connor, his beloved son—
And then someone touched his arm, and feeling as though he was looking at her from far, far away, as though from the body of another person, he gazed down into the face of his new daughter whose huge green eyes were staring pleadingly up into his own. “I know what you think, but Connor’s not dead,” she said vehemently. “He has a pulse, Brendan. He’s not dead.”
“Not dead?”
Her grip on his arm became desperate, and the pain of awareness began to bite through the blessed numbness, clearing it away, laying the path ahead of him bare. “Don’t give up on us, Brendan! The fate of everyone on this ship is in your hands, and yours alone. They’re all looking to you to save us. Please. Please don’t give up.”
Toby’s shrill voice cut into his thoughts. “Uncle Brendan!”
Brendan saw Liam, limping, making his way toward him, and their gazes met.
And in that moment, Brendan knew what he had to do.
They had too much damage to turn and make a run upwind, as Connor had tried to do in that horrible moment before they’d been hit. And there was no way—no way—the little ship, outgunned, outmanned, and mortally wounded, could win against her towering rival in a sea fight.
But she would have to.
He stood up and seized a speaking trumpet lying nearby. “Put her back on her original course,” he shouted to his young nephew. “Quickly.”
Relief mixed with terror in young Toby’s face, and Brendan felt his beloved schooner loyally answering the rudder as the youth let her fall back off the wind on a course that would now, with the big ship forging ahead of them, take them directly across its wake.
That one decisive move immediately rendered the other ship’s broadside useless—for the time being.
“God almighty, it’s about time ye took control of this situation,” Liam muttered. “What next, Captain, old friend?”
“Run out the starboard broadside. Double-shotted. In less than a minute, we’re going to cross her wake, and it will probably be our one and only chance to rake the hell out of her.”
Liam turned, cupped his hands to his mouth and bawled, “Sta’b’d guns! Load up with grape, double-shotted!”
Kestrel’s small crew immediately ran to carry out Brendan’s order, and it was only then that he finally knelt and, sliding his hands beneath Connor’s arms, gently lifted his unconscious son off the gun and dragged him up into the comparative shelter of the gunwale.
“You should go below, Rhiannon.”
“I can’t leave him.”
Her father-in-law smiled, and she saw respect in his kind, honey-colored eyes. “No, I don’t think you can. Nor would I want you to. But since you insist on staying up here on deck, at least sit down, keep your head down, and say a prayer or two for us all.”
She lowered herself to the deck and put her back up against the gunwale, holding out her arms as Brendan dragged his son up against her and tenderly laid him in her open embrace. Blood ran from a cut in his scalp and trickled down the stubbled line of his jaw, and seeing it, Brendan turned away.
Her voice brought him back to the present.
“Are we going to survive this?
He just looked at her, and she saw something deep and unspoken in his gaze. “Some of us will, lass. But not all.”
“Sta’b’d guns loaded and run out, sir!”
He looked down at Connor, his eyes dark beneath the shadow of the old tricorne that his son had taken such delight in teasing him about. “I must leave you now. Be strong.”
Kestrel, wounded, bravely surged forward, her long bowsprit and jib-boom now sliding past the ornate stern quarter of the other ship as Brendan went to the rail where all could see him.
“Fire!” he shouted, and one by one Kestrel’s guns spoke as they passed astern of the other ship, each one leaping back on its tackles, coughing a plume of smoke and flame and making the deck thunder beneath their feet. In a crashing shower of glass, the big stern windows imploded and screams issued from deep within the enemy ship as Kestrel’s broadside ripped through the big vessel from stern to stem, cutting down everything in its path.
“Just like old times, Brendan,” said Liam beside him.
“Just like old times.”
Except Mira was not here. Mira, who—
He was desperate to go below, to return to her, but again he saw the pleading eyes of his new daughter, felt th
e heavy responsibility that had been thrust upon him, saw the relief and trust in the eyes of everyone around him and knew that he had a duty here, first.
“Nathan.”
His nephew was there, touching his temple in a salute. “Sir?”
“Send someone below to check for damage.” And then: “Who is your best gunner?”
“One-Eye is, sir.”
“Our foe is preparing to wear ship, and we must prevent that from happening at all costs if we want to avoid another broadside. Is your man good enough that he can take out her steering, Nathan?”
“I reckon he is, Uncle Brendan.”
“Put him to work, then. Larboard guns this time. Quickly.”
Off to starboard the enemy ship was beginning to make her slow turn, preparing to bring her full broadside to bear on them once again, preparing to finish what she had started, and Brendan knew he could not let that happen.
Someone was at his elbow. “We took a bad hit below the waterline, sir. Larboard side, just abaft the cathead. She’s taking on water.”
“Get the pumps going.”
“Aye, sir.”
He studied the other ship. She would run them down in no time. There was nothing to do but make a big, sweeping turn to larboard in an elaborate dance to avoid that deadly broadside, to head back up and try for another shot at the stern . . . and the ship’s Achilles heel, her steering.
He laid a hand on the rail. One last dance, lassie, he murmured to the little schooner. I know your wings are broken, that you can no longer dance, but please, love . . . try your best.
“Ready about!” he called.
“Ready about!”
“Load up the larboard guns!”
Kestrel’s long, jaunty jib-boom began to make her sweep around the horizon . . . northwest . . . west . . . southwest . . . south . . . across the wind, more debris falling from above as her great booms went over . . . .
Come on, lassie. Dance. . . .
East. . . .
“Larboard guns all loaded and ready, Captain!”
Kestrel completed her turn, and once more her proud jib-boom took aim on the other ship’s wake.
Lord Of The Sea Page 29
