The Rebel Pirate

by Donna Thorland

  It was difficult to keep her guard up against him. They shared an interest in geography and exploration, and he had visited most of the ports that were technically closed to American ships. He brought her to a mapmaker and to a shop that sold instruments of navigation, and he bought Ned a fine sextant, wood with brass fittings. They spoke about hull design and those American innovations the British Navy refused to adopt, the merits of pitch pine spars, and the British obsession with oak.

  Benji came and went from Trent’s house freely, dressed stylishly, and spent most nights out, always returning well after the curfew, often not until dawn. Sarah wrote to the landlady at the Three Cranes twice asking after Sparhawk, but received no reply. Benji’s inquiries, made grudgingly at her insistence, yielded no word of the missing captain. Her brother urged her to forget about him, but she could not.

  At the end of a month, Trent announced that he had gotten Ned a place aboard the Preston, Admiral Graves’ flagship.

  “It is not,” Trent admitted, “an exciting post. The Preston is a floating office. She’s too big to be of any real use in Boston Harbor. But your brother will learn gunnery and navigation and the traditions of the navy; and for the purposes of becoming a midshipman, it will count as time served at sea. Real time. Not ‘false muster,’ with his name entered on a ship he has never even seen from the dock. The practice, shamefully, is widespread, much to the detriment of the service. In any case, Ned will be close to home for the start of his career. I thought that should please you.”

  He told her this in the little Chinese parlor that looked out over the Back Bay.

  “It is very generous of you,” she said, “but Ned is an American, and he does not have the interest to make a career in the navy.”

  “It is true that peacetime promotion relies on patronage. Wartime, however, is another matter. And Ned will have my patronage,” said Trent. “Before you protest, I will say that I have no one else to lavish it on. My son died when he was Ned’s age. I have helped other promising young men, without debauching their sisters. And I like to think it balances somewhat the nepotism of Admiral Graves, whom I must call on tomorrow. Perhaps you and Ned would like to accompany me.”

  It was too generous an offer to refuse. Sarah knew they must accept it, for Ned’s sake. She was coming to believe that Trent’s kindness was genuine, or at least that if he intended to seduce her, he also intended to reward her for it. She wondered if barefoot Agnes Surriage had been similarly maneuvered into accepting the attentions of Harry Frankland, or if she had been the one doing the maneuvering. Had she welcomed his advances, or felt as Sarah did, guilty because she was pining for another man?

  She and Ned did accompany Trent to the admiral’s flagship. Ned, naturally, was much taken with the Preston and the fanfare with which Trent was piped aboard, so different from the democratic workings of an American merchantman. The Preston’s first lieutenant welcomed them all very cordially, and no sooner did her brother express his admiration for the ship than a midshipman quite close to Ned’s age appeared and offered to show him over the whole vessel.

  Sarah and Trent were led to the wardroom. A few minutes later, Trent was called into the admiral’s cabin. He left Sarah in the care of the first lieutenant, who made polite small talk with her about the navy and encouraging remarks on the prospects and training of young gentlemen on a fifty-gun man-of-war.

  Trent had been closeted with the admiral for half an hour when a young man, fair-haired and lightly built, stormed through the wardroom, cursing with great vehemence but little imagination. Sarah’s heart skipped a beat when she recognized him: Lieutenant Graves, from the Wasp.

  The Preston’s first officer rose hastily to intercept him, and Sarah was thankful that his back was turned while she composed herself. Lieutenant Graves had not seen her face on the Sally. She was almost certain of it. But her hair was distinctive, and if he saw Ned, he might connect the two blond children of the Charming Sally with the Wards.

  “You cannot go through,” said the Preston’s first lieutenant to young Graves.

  “You’re a bloody officious toady, Jeffries,” said Lieutenant Graves.

  “There is a lady present,” that officer replied icily.

  Graves cast a contemptuous eye over Sarah Ward. She was ready for it. She smiled her best hen-witted lubberly smile, and attempted to look nothing like a woman who had spent most of her life on ships and among seamen—and nothing like a certain ship’s boy.

  She needn’t have worried. Graves was wholly intent on gaining admission to see his uncle. “I won’t stand for it,” he said. “It is enough to vex any officer who cares at all for his character.”

  “Guarding the livestock on Noddle’s Island is vital to provisioning the city,” said Jeffries.

  “Do I look like a swineherd?” asked Graves.

  “I wouldn’t care to comment,” said Jeffries.

  Before Graves could reply, Ned came flying into the room, vibrating with excitement, full of praise for the lofty heights of the fighting top—where one of the marine sergeants had shown him how to load and aim a musket in a stiff wind—and the staggering spread of canvas possible on a fifty-four.

  Young Graves scowled. He did not like having his tantrum interrupted. Then he took a second look at Ned, furrowed his brow, cursed, and said, “That little brat is a fugitive from the press.”

  Twelve

  Sparhawk counted himself lucky. When the marines had turned him over to the guard at Castle William, the grim island fortress guarding Boston Harbor, he had feared being thrown in one of the cells beneath the thick stone walls. They were airless, windowless storage chambers for powder that a man might survive at the height of summer, but which would almost certainly prove deadly in the winter. Later he learned that such had been the admiral’s orders. But the fort was under the control of the army and the military governor, and General Gage had anticipated Sparhawk’s arrest.

  On Gage’s orders James was not placed under the authority of the castle’s military commander, but in the charge of the fort major, a retired reverend and veteran of Louisbourg, who lived with his family in an apartment within the walls. Major John Phillips was the castle’s former military commander and had been accustomed to an income of two hundred pounds per annum, plus twenty or thirty guineas a year in let-passes for the shipping, and of course bribes.

  The major, it transpired, had been unjustly ejected from his post in ’70, when he was in his sixth decade of life, and could not be expected to find new employment. Such was the ingratitude of the last governor, Hutchinson, that Phillips had been named fort major only after the most strenuous efforts of his friends. That he had been reduced to living on a mere hundred pounds per annum meant that he could not entertain James as befitted a king’s officer, but that he was amenable to allowing the importation of any little luxuries that James might require, or the procuring of them, for a small commission.

  James was given a room in one of the guardhouses in the yard, on a corridor occupied by a customs inspector and an agent for the East India Company tea, along with their families, who had fled Boston and the Rebel mob when the trouble started and still dared not go back for fear of their neighbors. This was another indicator that General Gage’s hold upon the city was fragile indeed.

  Sparhawk’s chamber was sparsely furnished, but the tea agent’s wife lent him linen, and Lady Gage sent him a basket of fresh food and other necessities, with her compliments . . . and no doubt Dr. Warren’s.

  During the day Sparhawk had the freedom of the yard. At night his door was locked—a formality only. Castle Island was an impossible three-mile swim to the mainland through frigid water. Pressed sailors had done as much to escape naval service, but a man would have to be desperate to attempt it.

  And Sparhawk was not desperate—yet. He had known the consequences of refusing Graves’ orders: a trumped-up charge and no doubt an unpleasant court-
martial, the threat of which was meant to bend him to the admiral’s will and induce him to burn Charlestown.

  He would not do it.

  Graves could not prosecute him for failing to obey an unlawful order, but such was the wonder of the King’s Rules and Admiralty Instructions and the Articles of War that just by carrying out his duties as an officer with a modicum of common sense, he was almost certainly guilty of something for which he could be prosecuted.

  Sparhawk’s best hope was that his sin of losing the Sally as a prize would be mitigated by his perspicacity in sending the French gold home to Boston, because there was nothing an Admiralty Court liked better than cold hard cash.

  James had expected word of Sarah Ward from Gage’s spy by the end of the first week, but had still heard nothing at the end of the second. It was possible that DeBerniere had been captured, of course, but Sparhawk expected that in such circumstances he would have heard from General Gage himself.

  Graves could hold him for only so long without a trial. In the meantime, Sparhawk decided on optimism. He undertook to arrange his affairs to make room in his life for Sarah Ward and her family. The tea agent and the customs inspector still conducted business from their refuge, and a boat came every day to ferry their correspondence back and forth to the city. Sparhawk wrote to his man of business instructing him to find a house suitable for a family, with access, but not too close to, the waterfront. He directed that it be furnished and provided with at least a maid and a cook. That, on account of Abednego’s least surprising confidence: She cannot cook worth a damn, my Sarah, but she packs a sea chest tight as an oyster and stitches a sail something pretty. Talks French and Latin too, but that was her mother’s doing.

  And Sparhawk took up the line of inquiry he had come to Massachusetts to pursue, and wrote letters attempting to ascertain the direction of the parson who had married his parents.

  In the middle of Sparhawk’s third week at the castle, without warning, the utterly forgettable DeBerniere appeared in Sparhawk’s room, sitting in the chair by the table and amusing the customs inspector’s children by sketching them and doing a very good impression of the sergeant drilling in the yard downstairs.

  DeBerniere sent the children back to their mother, and Sparhawk spied the oilcloth package laid on his bed. He did not need to ask what it was. Red Abed’s shark-tooth tassel peeked from the folds.

  “You were not able to find them?” Sparhawk asked.

  “I am so very sorry,” said DeBerniere.

  It was warm in the room, but Sparhawk felt suddenly very cold.

  DeBerniere had traveled north up the coast on foot, stopping in all the port towns of Cape Ann. He had discovered the shipyards hard at work refitting American vessels “for defense.” Recruiting for such rebellious enterprises was open in the waterfront taverns, more circumspect in the finer public houses where skippers were looking for skilled men such as doctors and carpenters.

  DeBerniere had found the Ward place easily enough. The central chimney, with its curious hidden stair now exposed to view, was all that was left. Fire had consumed it and two other houses in the neighborhood on the night of the riot.

  Four charred bodies had been discovered the next day.

  DeBerniere described the scene with an artist’s eye for detail, but in his mind Sparhawk did not see the smoking ruin of the Ward house. He saw Sarah standing on the deck of the Sally in that storm, smiling at him; and felt the sense of home and welcome she had kindled in him so briefly.

  For a moment he could not draw breath; then the world came rushing back, and he realized DeBerniere was still speaking.

  “A local feud,” said the spy. “Some kind of long-simmering dispute over a schooner, I was given to understand. The kind of private murder that is so easily cloaked by a civil war. They did not want to talk about it in Salem, or in Marblehead.” He produced two glasses and a bottle of something quite like whisky. “The schooner itself, naturally, has disappeared.”

  Sparhawk disliked whisky but drank it anyway. DeBerniere nodded toward the cutlass laid out on the bed and said, “What was he like? Red Abed?”

  She was remarkable. Loyal and brave and beautiful as a ship under sail. We ran through moonlit gardens and defied an angry mob.

  “I spent an afternoon with him,” Sparhawk said. “He was old and frail, but he had forgotten more about the sea than I shall ever know.”

  And I will mourn his daughter all my days.

  • • •

  Ned, God bless him, put on his most convincing expression of innocent puzzlement, the one he used when the last of the cream had disappeared or when a book was left lying open on its spine or out in the rain. Sarah forced herself to laugh, to smile, to put a hand on Ned’s shoulder, look young Graves in the eye, and say, “Don’t tease him, Lieutenant. He has been threatening to run away and sign aboard a king’s vessel as a common sailor if we do not let him go for a midshipman.”

  “He was the ship’s boy that started all the trouble on the Sally,” insisted young Graves.

  The door to the great cabin opened. A portly, jaundiced, and solemn man who had to be Admiral Samuel Graves emerged, with Trent at his shoulder. “What the devil is going on now, Francis?” the admiral demanded.

  Young Graves could not contain his indignation. “That child should be in irons. He’s a pirate.”

  “Francis,” said the admiral in a warning voice.

  “You must be mistaken,” said Anthony Trent. “Edward is the son of a family friend and has been in school this past year.”

  Ned beamed. Another dubious demigod for his pantheon.

  Young Graves took a second, less certain look at Ned. “Do you know that for a fact?”

  “Have you some reason to doubt my word?” asked Trent, in the same polite, edged tone he had used in the Three Cranes. And Sarah had no doubt that now, as then, he knew that the Wards were liars.

  “Of course he doesn’t,” said the admiral, whose own family was as much trouble. The Graves nephews were in another mess at the moment, with two of them embroiled in feuds with Boston merchants and one of them suspected of an illegal duel with a romantic rival. Graves himself was at odds with General Gage, their wives were not on speaking terms, and the admiral had antagonized more than one of the Loyalist merchants by seizing their cargo for naval use. Samuel Graves could not afford another affair of honor right now; certainly not a quarrel with one of his own officers; especially not a known duelist like Trent.

  “It was an honest mistake, I am certain,” offered Trent.

  Francis Graves was hotheaded but not stupid. He saw his way out, and he took it. “As you say,” he agreed. “A mistake. It was the uncommon hair,” he added. Then he looked at Sarah. “Honey gold,” he said. “The pair of you.”

  His eyes lingered, and she knew he was comparing her size and shape to that of the boy on the Sally.

  Trent made their farewells and guided Sarah and Ned down the gangway.

  When they reached their carriage, he put Ned up top with the coachman and closed the windows despite the heat, so that he and Sarah could be private.

  “Now what was all that with the admiral’s idiot nephew?” he asked.

  There was nothing to be gained by concealing the truth from Trent, who had already embroiled himself in the matter, and Ned was in too much danger.

  “Lieutenant Graves was right,” she said. “He did recognize Ned. He tried to press him earlier this summer. We were homeward bound on my father’s ship when the Wasp overtook us. We were carrying French molasses, flint for ballast, and a chest of foreign gold. I took the captain of the Wasp hostage and traded the gold for our freedom. I am sorry, but Ned cannot serve aboard the Preston. If Lieutenant Graves questioned him closely, he would have the truth out of him.”

  She held her breath, waiting for his reaction.

  Trent leaned forward. “Sarah,” he
said, “are you certain the gold was put aboard the Wasp?”

  Considering that she had just confessed to an act of piracy, it was the last thing she had expected him to ask. “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I carried it.” In answer to his raised brow, she said, “I was dressed as a ship’s boy when we were boarded. Mr. Cheap thought it a wise precaution. Why do you ask?”

  “Because the captain of the Wasp has been arrested and will shortly stand trial. He is accused of colluding with the American smugglers to steal the French gold. That is why Admiral Graves called me here today. He needs three captains willing to serve as judges. The story circulating is that this Sparhawk conspired with the Rebels to send a chest full of flint to Boston, then buried the treasure somewhere on Cape Ann.”

  “That is nonsense,” said Sarah. “Captain Sparhawk was our prisoner. And if my family had stolen a chest of French gold, we would not have come to Boston on a fish cart. The gold was on the Wasp.”

  “I do not doubt it. In the last several months Admiral Graves has made a number of expensive purchases—including a vessel for one of his nephews to command—and carried out extensive repairs to the squadron. It is not unusual for an officer abroad to advance his own funds for such purposes, or if he does not have such sums, to use his own credit, in expectation of reimbursement. But there is always the danger that the Admiralty will disallow the expenses. Especially when there is an indication that they were undertaken less for the good of the service, and more for the advancement of a particular officer’s career. In this case that of Thomas Graves, one of the admiral’s nephews, who has received the Diana. The admiral has boasted that he bought her from a Marblehead merchant and that she is the largest schooner in the service—one hundred twenty tons. She has an unusually deep draft.”

  “She would,” said Sarah, recognizing the characteristics. “She has a false bottom.” In answer to Trent’s questioning glance, she added, “She is not a Marblehead schooner. She is a Salem vessel.” And Sarah knew whom Graves had bought her from.