The Rebel Pirate

by Donna Thorland

  Before Sparhawk could take it in, he was surrounded by a flock of females who led him into a large double parlor, cooing and fluttering in a rustling cloud of silk and lace. They called him “dear” and “brave,” and forced him into an ancient and uncomfortable chair. It was hard and oak and straight as a mast, and Sparhawk suspected it had come to the New World on the first boat from England. It had pride of place in an otherwise perfectly classical scheme, and Sparhawk could only presume it was some sort of Puritan heirloom.

  He had not marked Sarah’s faded jacket or frayed hem before, but beside these fashionable creatures in their brightly colored silks, she looked like a ragamuffin. No powder, no paint, no art to the dressing of her honey gold hair. And yet she drew the eye like a sail on the horizon.

  She would be the first woman he noticed in any room.

  The flock settled, and Sparhawk spied a lady standing a little apart: tall, graceful, dressed in a gray sack gown closely molded to a lithe, athletic body. Her calm too singled her out. She was not one of the Rideout sisters. Sarah was watching her warily.

  “The carriage,” said this unusual lady, “is waiting in the enclosure. The judge’s coachman, unfortunately, is inebriated. You will need to sober him.”

  This she had addressed to Sarah. Now she turned a cold, assessing eye on Sparhawk. “I know your face,” she said.

  He rose and bowed. “Captain Sparhawk, madam. At your service.”

  “I think you rather at the king’s service, which is a pity, as I have heard of you, though Sparhawk is not the name that your face brings to mind.”

  Three sharp raps on the door were followed by a demand, in the honeyed voice of Micah Wild, to send the British dog out. There was no need to put the implied threat of fire into words—the torches dancing beneath the casements spoke for themselves.

  The Rideout sisters paled. Sarah’s lip curled. And the singular lady in gray silk raised one plucked eyebrow and said, “I believe it is about time for the captain to leave.”

  • • •

  Judge Rideout rose from his bed and bought them a little time by addressing the mob. Now that he was seventy-two years of age and ailing, his oratory was not the equal of Micah Wild’s, but he had built the smallpox hospital on Winter Island and paid for the inoculations that had saved so many lives—though not Sarah’s mother’s—in ’72. They were bound to hear him out.

  While that worthy man spoke, Sarah poured coffee into the coachman. She had brewed it strong, and when Phippen balked at swallowing the sludge in the bottom of the cup, she threatened to make more.

  He swallowed it.

  The widow and Sparhawk muffled the horses’ hooves with blankets. Then they were out in the walled enclosure behind the house with the widow dictating instructions to the judge’s not-quite-sober man and Sparhawk checking the powder in Abednego Ward’s pistols.

  “I shall send them back to you,” Sparhawk said, “with money for the trip to Boston. Enough to keep you until I return if the Wasp and I are not in port.” Then, suddenly hesitant, he added, “Say you will come.”

  She had not seen him look so vulnerable before, even lying injured and half drowned in her father’s bed on the Sally. She wanted to say yes, without condition or qualification, but she had her family to think of, and could not. So she said, “I shall speak with my family.”

  And then she kissed him. She had to grasp his shoulders and rise on tiptoe to reach him, but when she brushed her lips against his, she realized with a shock that it was the most intimate she had been with this man whose protection she had so blithely accepted.

  He froze and she feared she had misjudged him; that a man who was so used to command would not welcome such forwardness. Her doubt lasted only a moment. Sparhawk slid his good hand around to the small of her back and pulled her close, then deepened the kiss. Fierce desire, long dormant in her, woke.

  She felt a pang of loss when he climbed into the carriage, and a sudden, giddy elation when he stopped on the running board and turned to her. “The Three Cranes in Charlestown is where I stay. The landlord there knows me. I have money banked with him. If I am not in port, he will extend you credit on my account.”

  She nodded.

  “The Three Cranes,” he insisted. “Say it so I know you will remember it.”

  Sea captains, she knew from experience, could be very trying. “I am not one of your midshipmen, to repeat orders and say, ‘Aye, aye, sir.’”

  “I understand that you take orders from no one, but the last time I parted with a woman in dangerous circumstances, I never saw her again.”

  He meant his mother.

  “The Three Cranes,” she said.

  Sparhawk smiled. There was a boyish, hopeful light in his eyes. On impulse, she reached out to stroke his hair. He caught her hand and pressed it to his lips. The coach jerked forward, breaking them apart. With a rueful smile he climbed inside and took a position at the window, resting a pistol on the sill. Phippen struck up in earnest, and the carriage thundered out of the enclosure.

  It was only when Sarah had shut and barred the gate that she realized the widow was no longer in the yard. Nor in the parlor. A sound drew Sarah up the rope-carved staircase and to the open casement, where Angela Ferrers stood looking out, the barrel of a long hunting rifle in her hand. In the moonlight, Sarah noted ink stains on her fingers, and she recalled the printed broadside with its row of black coffins.

  Sparhawk’s carriage emerged from the alley at the end of the street.

  The mob stirred. Those nearest saw and gave chase. A few shots rang out. A man climbed onto the running board.

  Angela Ferrers braced a shoulder in the window frame to the open casement, raised her rifle, sighted, and fired.

  The man gave a cry and fell off. The carriage broke free of pursuit and disappeared around the corner.

  The widow nodded. “And they are away.”

  Sarah watched as the man the widow had shot climbed unsteadily to his feet, grasping his shoulder. Sarah recognized him—a sailor from one of Micah’s regular crews.

  “Thank you,” Sarah said.

  “Don’t thank me, Miss Ward. I didn’t do it for you or your captain. The rumors in the street are true. The British fired on the militia at Lexington. They bayoneted old men and children in their homes. That is the tale printed in the Gazette, and that is the tale that must reach London and be taken up by our supporters in Parliament. The hanging of a British captain in a New England port would tarnish that story. We have been allies tonight because our aims converged. Tomorrow we will be enemies again.”

  “Are politics the determinant of all your actions?” Sarah asked.

  “Is sentiment the determinant of all of yours?”

  “Not sentiment,” Sarah said. “Loyalty.”

  “A scarce commodity indeed,” said the widow. “Spend it wisely, Miss Ward. And if you can spare a little for your country, seek me out. I could make good use of your knowledge of the ships and seamen of Cape Ann.”

  “I’m not free to play politics with you, Mrs. Ferrers. My elder brother is abroad, and my father is no longer young.”

  “Your brother Benjamin has been in Boston these three months. He understands what you do not. Cleaving to the authority of the Crown will not protect your family. It didn’t protect your brother Ned from the press. You did. Those who lie down meekly in a civil war are always the first to be trampled.”

  • • •

  They got the judge back into bed and waited out the riot that ensued, the Rideout sisters clustered on the settee and Sarah and Mrs. Ferrers in the chairs opposite in the pretty gold and green parlor, listening to the tumult outside: the shouting and sounds of destruction as the mob took its frustrations out on the Rideout home.

  Micah’s followers ripped the ground-floor shutters off the windows and hurled rocks through the transom lights. Then, when i
t became evident that the Rideout house was too stoutly constructed to tear down, the rioters began on the fence, hacking the urns from their balusters and pulling the posts out of the ground.

  The violence lasted the better part of an hour, and then ended when there was nothing fragile enough left to break. A little while later, when the street was finally empty, Angela Ferrers took her leave, a muff pistol concealed in the folds of her cloak, and Sarah and the Rideout sisters breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  Sarah herself set out half an hour later—unarmed, and all the more cautious for it—and picked her way home through the evening’s wreckage.

  There were broken bottles littering the gutters, paper wrappers, discarded items of clothing, and here and there a bit of stray vandalism had occurred: a broken shutter on one house, a shattered transom on another, lanterns smashed to cover the actions of the mob in darkness.

  She had spent two days in nearly constant company with James Sparhawk, and the impulse to turn and share her thoughts with him now was ingrained, but of course he was not there. Sarah longed to discuss the enigmatic widow, Micah’s oratory, the antics of the Rideout sisters, with a mind that ran on a parallel course with her own.

  She’d felt a similar sense of loss when Benji left for London, but there had been nothing she could do about that. This was different. There was something Sarah could do about this.

  She could join Sparhawk at the Three Cranes in Charlestown. She could take a lover. Become a mistress. Keep house for a man she desired and who desired her. Matters had to be settled with the Sally and her family first, but for all Mr. Cheap’s surliness and her father’s caginess, they liked Sparhawk. And Ned, of course, already worshipped him.

  The damage to the Ward home was remarkable in its thoroughness. There wasn’t a single intact pane of glass, not even on the third floor. The mob had gone to some effort—Micah’s doing, no doubt. The front door was hanging on one hinge and mud spattered the bare floors inside, along with other less pleasant fluids.

  Sarah did not want her father or Ned coming home to this. It was bad enough that the house had become a shadow of the home they had once enjoyed. She drew a pail of water and began washing the worst of the filth. Lucas would have to help her rehang the door. They could board up the third-floor windows—no one slept up there anyway—and perhaps use oilcloth on the lower floors until they could afford glass.

  No. Without the Sally, they would not be able to afford glass. And the house must be sold to keep the Sally out of Micah’s hands.

  A door creaked open at the back of the house. Her father and Ned had returned. She wished she’d been able to put at least the kitchen to rights before they saw it, but she was heartsick over Sparhawk and wanted nothing more than to see the people she loved best in the world.

  She rushed into the kitchen and stopped dead in the middle of the room.

  It was not her father, and it was not Ned.

  It was Dan Ludd and three other men.

  The first held a bale of straw.

  The second a bundle of rags.

  The third carried a bucket of pitch.

  And in Dan Ludd’s callused hand was a burning brand.

  Eight

  Sarah opened her mouth to scream. Ludd punched her in the stomach—a merciless jab, with no concession for her size or sex. She doubled over in pain, breathless and mute, unable to resist as he dragged her out of the house.

  He did not plan to burn her. That was a relief—until he grasped her wrists and wrenched them behind her back. She tried to call for help. Nothing but spittle and wind came from her mouth.

  It didn’t matter. These were Micah’s men. Her neighbors would not dare to cross them. And she had sent away the one man who would.

  Before she could get her breath back, he tied her hands, gagged her with a wad of cloth and a piece of rope, and bound her feet as well. For a moment she thought she would suffocate. Then her lungs filled painfully with air. He gripped her under the arms and thrust her into the shadows behind the boatshed.

  Ludd reached down to tighten the gag, and his coarse features went suddenly slack. The point of a sword burst through his corded neck, and blood shot down the steel to pool at the tip. He fell atop her, heavy as ballast.

  She looked up into the dawn light and beheld the longed-for face that was a more angular reflection of her own: Benji.

  Her brother touched a finger to his lips. Quiet. Then he dragged the corpse off her and knelt to remove the gag and cut her bonds.

  Three of them—inside, she mouthed.

  He nodded and stood. Blood dripped from his gory blade as he turned toward the house. She watched him pad quietly in stocking feet over the grass and disappear into the open door of the kitchen. Flames already flickered in the parlor windows. The house, she knew, was lost.

  Her brother came out a few minutes later, as silently as he had entered, their father’s model of the Sally, wrapped in Wild’s “Bloody Butchery” broadside, tucked under one arm. He knelt to wipe his rapier on the grass. Then he helped her to stand. There was blood speckling his fawn breeches, and more staining the lace of his shirt cuffs. “I could not find Father’s pistols or his cutlass,” he said.

  For all the polish she had gained in dame school and in the company of Elizabeth Pierce, Sarah was still a pirate’s daughter. She knew bad men. Dan Ludd and his cronies had been worse. Fire, in a neighborhood so crowded, was wanton murder. She could not mourn them.

  “The pistols and cutlass are elsewhere,” she had said. “Safe.” She hoped. Along with Sparhawk.

  And then she flung herself into Benji’s strong arms, bloody though he was. He was her brother, and he was home.

  Together they dragged Dan Ludd into the kitchen. They worked wordlessly and efficiently, their actions a macabre parody of childhood exploits. Ludd’s men had used pitch in the parlor and the dining room, and the dry timbers of the old house were well ablaze, but Benji had closed the kitchen door to slow the spread of the fire, and the service ell, newer and not as flammable, was still untouched. Outside once more, she told him as quickly as she could about Wild and the Sally and Sparhawk.

  By that point she had been up all night, escaped a mob, parted with a man who had revived, however hopelessly, both her native desire and her interest in romantic love, and lost the few possessions she had left. Benji, thankfully, took over from there. He found a boat for them and rigged it, then raised the cry of fire for the sake of their neighbors, and had them away down the river before anyone knew they were gone.

  She asked him when and how he had reached Salem.

  “I came on the Desdemona from London. She was bound for Salem, but she was carrying sailcloth and salt beef, and the navy impounded her—rapacious bastards—and diverted her to Boston.” He did not say he had been in the city for three months, nor what he had been doing there.

  She told him about Sparhawk’s offer, although she did not share the story of the captain’s dangerous past.

  “I can see why you accepted,” said her brother, “and I am sorry you were driven to it, but that’s hardly necessary now. I am home, the Sally is still in our possession, and we can repair our fortunes.”

  “I did not accept out of necessity,” she replied.

  “You may be all grown up, Sarah, but you are still my little sister. Do I really want to know the rest?”

  “No, probably not.”

  “I have heard of this Sparhawk. You deserve better than to be some rake’s amusement.”

  His censure stung. “It was not like that. He behaved with nothing but honor.”

  “An offer of marriage would be honorable. An offer of protection is an insult.”

  “It is the least insulting offer I have received since Micah jilted me.”

  “Wild might have harmed your prospects in Salem, but there is a wider world beyond Naumkeag. When we have money a
gain, no one will care about what happened with Micah.”

  He was wrong about that. People would care. If the Wards became rich again, there would be men willing to overlook Sarah’s folly for the sake of her money, the way Micah had overlooked her humble origins for the sake of her fortune. The idea did not appeal. And Sparhawk had wanted her for herself, and been willing to take on the whole piratical Ward clan to have her.

  “We have a hold of French molasses we cannot sell on the North Shore because of Micah Wild, and we cannot sell in Boston because the Sally is wanted by the navy. Even if you repainted her and ship-rigged her and managed to fool the customs men, we have no funds to buy a new cargo. Even Father could not trade air, Benji.”

  “Father would tell you that there are ventures for which an empty hold is no impediment.”

  So, she suspected, would Angela Ferrers. Sarah said, “So long as I have a say in her, the Sally will carry no more contraband. No more flint, no more foreign gold, and certainly no powder from Saint Stash. We cannot afford to take any more risks.”

  “Any move we make now is a gamble,” Benji replied. “At least smuggling is a gamble we’re good at. And the greater the risk, the greater the reward. Father terrorized the Main and earned a fortune doing it.”

  “You are not Father. And that was a different time,” she said. “Red Abed was lucky not to hang in Port Royal like Calico Jack.”

  Benji shrugged. “Fortes Fortuna adiuvat,” he said. “It is why you fell for Wild. His daring. But Elizabeth was always the better choice for him.”

  Sarah had missed Benji terribly, but no one irritated her quite as much as her brother. “Why? Because her father was only a smuggler, not a freebooter?”

  “No. Because she is an opportunist, just like Wild. And you, dear sister, are not. Elizabeth Pierce will bend to circumstances. She’s a flower that will always grow toward the sun.”

  “And what does that make me?” she asked sourly.