The Rebel Pirate

by Donna Thorland

  The girl narrowed her eyes and scrunched her nose. It was wildly unbecoming and charming all at once. So charming, he realized too late, that it was a signal. He heard a scuffle behind him. He did not turn to look, because she raised one slender arm and captured his full attention.

  “I have a better idea,” she said, leveling her pistol at his head. “Order your marines off our ship.”

  Two

  Sarah Ward’s heart hammered. She’d heard of James Sparhawk. Coastal gossip accounted him a good seaman and a conscientious enforcer of British policy. Normally, these were qualities she admired. She was no Rebel, and the Wards were no more smugglers than most of Salem’s merchant families, which was to say they dealt in contraband only when it was more profitable than legitimate cargo.

  He could not have Ned.

  “Put the pistol down,” he said, living up to his reputation for being coolheaded, “and we will discuss the boy.”

  “Without the pistol,” she said, “I suspect our conversation would be one-sided.” And it would end with Ned pressed aboard a British ship, never to be seen again, all because they’d agreed to Micah Wild’s scheme. “I won’t let you take my brother. Order your marines back to your ship, and I promise we’ll put you and your lieutenant ashore—unharmed—at the first opportunity.”

  Mr. Cheap, her father’s formidable sailing master, had felled the lieutenant in question with a sack of flint. The Graves boy was curled up on the deck, gasping for breath. She supposed a few bruises—and perhaps a broken rib or two—were to be expected. Lucas Cheap had endured six weeks of sloppy sailing under the command of Micah Wild’s hired captain without a word of complaint, but the prospect of going to jail for the man’s intrigues evidently palled.

  Sparhawk’s marines had fared little better. The Sally’s crew now possessed their muskets. The lobsters looked worried, with reason. A sailor might do anything—even murder—to avoid being pressed. No one, particularly not the British officers of the North American squadron, had forgotten that business on the Rose in ’69, when a group of Yankee sailors had barricaded themselves in the forepeak and harpooned the British lieutenant who hadn’t had the good sense to let them be.

  Sparhawk was at least exhibiting more tact than the unfortunate captain of the Rose. He made no sudden moves, no threatening gestures. Nor did he take his eyes off Sarah Ward.

  “Smuggling is one thing,” he said. “You’ll pay a fine and lose your ship and cargo. Kidnapping officers of the king is quite another. It will get you hanged.”

  “So, I suspect, will the chest of French gold in your cabin,” she said. “No matter that it has nothing to do with me or these men. They’ll still suffer for it. And so will the wives and children who depend on them.”

  “They should have thought of that,” Sparhawk said, “before they signed aboard a smuggler.”

  He could afford to be smug, this tall, glittering captain with his gold braid and gilt buttons. “Your king’s taxes,” she replied, “have made it impossible for them to earn a living any other way.” Her father had tried trading in legal British goods. It had brought him to penury and her to something worse. “These are desperate men, Captain Sparhawk. Even if your crew swarmed over the side and retook the Sally, you and your lieutenant would die.”

  “If I return to Boston without the gold, I’ll like as not face a firing squad. ‘Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.’”

  Candide. Surprising reading for a sailor, but then by all accounts James Sparhawk was no ordinary sailor. In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

  “Then you will understand that I am just tending to my own garden,” she said, answering him in kind.

  His blue eyes widened fractionally. She had surprised him. Of course she had. Sailors’ women did not read Voltaire.

  “My choice,” he said, “would seem to be a bullet now or a bullet later, unless we can reach some agreement about the gold.”

  He was right, of course. Micah Wild’s French gold wasn’t just a fortune—it was enough money to arm most of the smugglers on the coast. And after seven years of crippling tariffs, there was hardly a sloop in New England that didn’t carry illicit goods—or wouldn’t mount a pair of four-pounders and add a dozen rough men to her crew if she could afford it. A British captain who let such a dangerous fortune slip through his fingers would pay a high price.

  The treasure was a bargaining chip, and she would use it to save Ned and the Sally’s crew. What Micah Wild would do to her later, she didn’t care to contemplate.

  “The gold,” she said, taking a deep breath, “may remain aboard the Wasp.”

  “The Wasp is more likely to end up in one of the Dutch free ports than Boston with that chest full of gold—unless she is officered,” Sparhawk countered. “Release Mr. Graves to captain her home.”

  “Mr. Graves,” she said, “makes an excellent hostage. The admiral is reputed to be inordinately fond of him.” He was also reputed to be the boy’s real father, the only plausible explanation for why the admiral still worked so hard to advance the lieutenant’s career. Cruelty was often forgiven at sea. Ineptitude was not.

  “I suspect my prospects will be little improved,” James Sparhawk said dryly, “by allowing the admiral’s nephew to be kidnapped. He might think me careless. Let the gold go to Boston with Mr. Graves. Take me as your hostage, and I give you my word that the Wasp will not pursue you.”

  He didn’t say, No ship will pursue you, nor could he make such a promise. If the Wasp met another navy vessel on her way home to Boston, another captain would not be bound to honor James Sparhawk’s word.

  Their only chance was to run for home, and fast. The Sally should just make it—if the weather held.

  “Agreed,” she said at last.

  Sparhawk nodded, but Lucas Cheap cast her one of his looks—dark as the threatening sky. He had some inkling of what had passed between her and the man who had jilted her, and he could guess the price she would pay for crossing Micah Wild.

  • • •

  The Sally, being a merchant vessel, didn’t have a lockup, so her ruffian of a sailing master confined Sparhawk in the captain’s cabin. This suited Sparhawk, as he wanted another look at the Sally’s papers. Capturing one chest of foreign gold was not enough. There would always be another. If the money wasn’t French or Spanish next time, it would be Dutch. And it would be used to buy powder and shot and the blood of British sailors.

  Sparhawk had not entered the navy willingly, but the service had been mother and father, school and church, to him; the King’s Rules and Admiralty Instructions his Bible, the Articles of War his Book of Common Prayer. He would not see the service become prey to the machinations of foreign powers.

  The French king Louis and his ministers would deny any involvement, of course, leaving the British Navy to round up and hang the American traitors if it wished to put a stop to the flow.

  If he could not bring the Sally home to question her crew, then he needed names—the dead captain’s for a start, the owner’s and investors’ if possible.

  The girl’s.

  He did not like the idea of a noose around her slender neck. The fine gold chain was a far better ornament, and her misguided defense of the boy had reminded him of another woman and another boy a very long time ago.

  He might have been able to disarm her, but the situation in New England was delicate. The blockade, in place for nearly a year, had failed to chastise disobedient Boston, and tensions between Britain and her colonies were running higher than ever. If a pretty young American girl were hurt during a customs search, the rabble-rousers like Adams and Hancock and their counterparts elsewhere would brew a tempest in a teapot—with open war the result.

  But these were no ordinary smugglers. He’d been on deck as the Americans began their
repairs, and while he could not put his finger on any one thing, the Sallys sported an altogether more raffish appearance now that the British were gone. They had rolled up their sleeves to clear the wreckage off the deck and heave the dead captain’s body overboard, and Sparhawk had seen that every man jack of them bore a tattoo—many more than one.

  This was unusual in the merchant marine, where crews were often filled out with one-timers. Only a career sailor opted to go under the needle, to be marked for life as a man who had stood before the mast. There was also a preponderance of that antique fashion, earrings, and Sparhawk was surprised to see more than one diamond bob glinting on the sun.

  Raffish or no, these were the men the Admiralty—and every post captain worth his salt—was worried about. The navy needed these hands to man its warships, and the trouble in America was playing merry hell with the recruiting. If these sailors evaded the press in numbers, if the smugglers of New England began to arm schooners like this one, fast, strong, innovative, the already overtaxed British Navy would be unable to stop them.

  The shallow anchorages of New England were no place for British ships of the line, and the North American station was perilously short on seaworthy small craft, while Yankee schooners were numerous and widely held to be the best in the world. The Sally had been such a sleek and lovely thing, even badly handled, that it had pained him to fire on her. James had coveted a fast vessel like this his whole career—damn her dead captain for a fool.

  Sparhawk had crippled her twice over when he’d splintered the mast and killed her commander. Merchant crews were tiny. The skipper had not been a credit to his calling, but there was no one to replace him. The sailing master’s business, contrary to his title, was not sailing. It was navigation: charts and angles and stars, and this close to home, dead reckoning. He was a capable man with a compass and a sextant, no doubt, but no captain.

  Sparhawk caught the fellow’s name as the crew responded to his orders: Mr. Cheap. A good hand in a fight—Cheap had proved as much leading the Sally against Graves and Sparhawk’s marines. James watched the man dash back and forth across the deck, hauling on lines and splicing cables when he should have been standing still and issuing orders. And every few minutes he stopped what he was doing to lay eyes on the girl.

  He did not look at her with lust, but with concern. Mr. Cheap was desperate to get her and the boy clear of the Wasp. That was why he was crowding on too much sail. The girl they deferentially referred to as Miss Sarah and the boy was Young Master Ned. There was as much tugging of forelocks as on a royal vessel, but to a slip of a girl and a wide-eyed boy.

  This display of deference and loyalty shocked him. He had not attempted to press any of the regular sailors, just the girl—until he discovered her sex—and the boy. Smuggler’s crews usually got off easy with a few weeks in jail and a loss of wages. It was an accepted risk.

  Rebels were another story. The navy had decided to treat Rebel sailors as pirates. They could be tried and hanged for resisting a boarding. The crew of the Sally risked a great deal for these two.

  And while Mr. Cheap might not be fascinated by the girl’s—Sarah’s—body, Sparhawk was. He did not know how he had ever mistaken her for a boy. She was not tall, but she had distinct curves and a slender, defined waist. Like one of those headless Venuses that were all over the Med, she was sculpted along classical lines.

  She was decidedly feminine, yet there was nothing fussy or delicate about her. Sparhawk had entertained ladies aboard his ships—if the men were allowed trollops in port, he saw no reason to deny himself—but the bored wives and merry widows he consorted with, even those married to other captains, didn’t have legs like this girl. She stood as lithe and easy on deck as any of the Sallys, graceful hips and round bottom outlined in canvas trousers, adjusting instinctively to the pitch and roll of the ship.

  Mr. Cheap caught him watching the girl, or more accurately, one specific part of the girl, and that was when the sailing master smiled wide—revealing three carved gold teeth and no goodwill whatsoever—and directed him below.

  “Who are they?” Sparhawk asked as Lucas Cheap thrust him not at all gently down the hatch.

  “Passengers.”

  James felt his way aft through the shadowy main deck, where only scattered light filtered through the hatches, the redoubtable Mr. Cheap a palpable menace behind him. “That girl is no passenger,” James said. Her pistol had never wavered. “She has the sea legs of a Jack Tar.” Neither the wind nor the roll of the ship, nor “feminine” qualms, had disturbed her aim when she drew a bead on him. Nor had she blinked at the gore on deck or the rivulet of the dead captain’s blood that had snaked past the toe of her shoe.

  “This is Naumkeag,” the sailing master said. James knew the Indian name for Salem and her shores. The fishing place. “Our women are bred to the sea.”

  “And to the Manual of Arms, it would seem,” Sparhawk said under his breath.

  He regretted it at once, reminding Cheap of circumstances and testimony that hung over the girl’s head like the Sword of Damocles. Sparhawk had grown too used to his own quarterdeck, but he was not master and commander here.

  Lucas Cheap moved like a snake. He seized James by the collar, swung him around, and slammed him back against the bulkhead. Sparhawk found himself staring into Cheap’s gimlet eyes. Slatted light glimmered off the sailing master’s gruesome gold teeth, and James could feel the man’s heated breath against his face—and the cold sting of a short blade pressed to his ribs.

  “She promised you’d get to shore in one piece,” Cheap said, “and I won’t make a liar out of her. But if you know what’s good for you, you’ll forget all about that girl. Ask anyone on the coast. Or the Lord God himself. They’ll tell you. Lucas Cheap sailed with the Brethren. He makes good ever on his threats.”

  Sparhawk didn’t doubt it. He had spent his childhood—brief though it was—in the West Indies. The buccaneers were greatly reduced since Morgan’s day, but they made up in viciousness for what they lacked in numbers. Lucas Cheap had the cut of such a rogue. “You are devoted to her,” James said.

  “I’ve followed her father to sea, man and boy, these forty years. And his daughter might not have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she is a lady, and on the Sally, she is treated as such.”

  “I did not mean to imply otherwise,” Sparhawk said. “Only to observe that she is remarkably brave.”

  Lucas Cheap released Sparhawk, stepped back, and looked him over. Finally he grunted and said, “A pretty sentiment, Captain. You might even mean it. But she’s not fair game for your sport.”

  Sparhawk’s reputation must have preceded him. The Massachusetts coast, as he was often reminded, was shaped like an ear. It heard everything.

  “Understood. I have no designs on her.” His own personal code would not allow it, no matter how intriguing she might be. “And I meant the boy no harm, Mr. Cheap. I went to sea myself at that age.”

  Lucas Cheap snorted. “With a midshipman’s berth, a sea chest full of warm clothes, and no fear of the cat. As a young gentleman is privileged to do, eh?”

  “As a common sailor,” Sparhawk replied, “with nothing but the clothes on my back.” He risked a great deal saying so. There were only two men in the world who knew how he had been pressed into the navy. One had saved his life. The other had tried to take it from him.

  “Then I’ve no need to tell you what might befall a boy under a bad captain.”

  He knew all too well. When he thought about it, he could still feel Captain Slough’s hand on the back of his neck. “That does not happen on my ship.” He made certain of it.

  Cheap shrugged his powerful shoulders. “It happens enough. That’s why the girl was on board, to look out for the young master on his first voyage and after the family interests. The gold was the hired captain’s private cargo. It had nothing to do with her. When you report to your admi
ral, you’ll leave the girl out of it.”

  “I shall do as duty and honor demand,” he said.

  Lucas Cheap surveyed him with a jaundiced eye. “I’ve served in your navy. There was plenty of duty and precious little honor in it.” He removed an imaginary piece of lint from Sparhawk’s epaulet, fingered one of the silver gilt buttons atop his snowy lapels, then sliced it neatly off. “Something to remember you by, Captain,” Cheap said, and dropped it in his pocket.

  Then he let James into the skipper’s cabin and locked him within.

  If Sparhawk were lucky, they wouldn’t take the ship’s log off him when they put him ashore, but he couldn’t count on that. He must read it and find the names he needed now. He had scarcely cracked the book open—had learned nothing more than her tonnage and registry—when the key turned in the lock and the door opened.

  The girl—Sarah—stood shivering on the threshold. She had changed her clothes, but she was as fascinating in a swallow-tailed calico jacket and rustling silk petticoats as she had been in sailor’s togs. Her eyes fell immediately on the log. “I believe that belongs to the Sally,” she said, holding out her shaking hand.

  “It should have gone over the side before we caught you,” Sparhawk said, hoping to distract her.

  “Captain Molineaux was nothing if not consistent,” she said, her attention still focused on the slim volume in his hand. “He proved unprepared for every eventuality.”

  There had been no opportunity on deck for her to make any expression of outrage or grief over the death of the captain. It had not occurred to Sparhawk until now that the man might have been someone important to her—a lover perhaps.

  An unwelcome thought. Her words now argued otherwise, but he found he needed to know. “Who was he to you?” Sparhawk asked.

  “The captain was hired by one of the Sally’s investors,” she said. “For his politics, and not, more’s the pity, for his skill as a sailor.”