The Rebel Pirate

by Donna Thorland

  Major Phillips refilled her glass. “I believe so.”

  “When may I leave?” she asked, and then regretted it. They had been so good to her, and she did not want to appear ungrateful. “That is, your family’s kindness has sustained me, but I long to see my own.”

  “Of course. Of course. That is my wish, to see you restored to your family. We will miss you, my wife and I and Rebecca. I believe that your stay with us has done her some good. You will have guessed, I think, that she was disappointed.”

  “Yes,” said Sarah. “As was I, once,” she said. But she had not been entombed on a rock. She had possessed the freedom of the sea. And now she would have James Sparhawk, who was necessary, for her, to life.

  “That is what I was given to understand,” said Major Phillips. “It is a fault of fathers, I think, to raise their daughters too protected from the world. Our Rebecca was not prepared to resist the lures of a rogue.”

  Sarah had not been protected. She had climbed rigging and picked pockets and cadged oranges, been raised by rogues and adventurers, and she had been taken in by Micah Wild as easily as Sparhawk’s mother had been beguiled away from her country parsonage by Anthony Trent.

  “I was commander of the castle in those days,” said Major Phillips. “And Martin was a boat pilot and a frequent guest at our table. He thought Rebecca would have an income, but when I lost my post, there was no possibility of that. I told him as much, and when they ran away together, we knew to expect the worst. It lasted a few weeks, and he left her penniless and in debt in New York. She was preyed upon. By the time we found her, she was much changed.”

  “I am so very sorry,” said Sarah, “but I do not believe there was anything you could have said to dissuade her.” Abednego Ward had not been able to talk Sarah out of an alliance with Micah Wild. He had warned her not to go to him that night.

  “No,” Major Phillips agreed, recharging her glass once more. “That is why I am anxious to see you returned home safe.”

  “There is time, if I hurry, to make the mail boat,” she said. There had been a clock beside the door, but in the shadows of the room she had to squint and could not make out the dial. She rose out of her chair, but too quickly. Relief made her light-headed, and she sat back down.

  “My dear, you cannot go back to this Trent,” Major Phillips said, reaching across the table and sliding the brimming glass into her hand. “He has worked to free you and that is well, but you do not owe him what he will expect when you return. And his reputation is such that I have reason to believe he has designs upon you.”

  Something was not quite right, but Sarah’s thoughts were muddled. “Trent is a good man,” she said. “He was going to marry me. But Trent is . . . now he will be . . . he will be my father,” she said. “Father-in-law,” she corrected. It was all suddenly very confusing.

  The fort major looked concerned. “That is not what I was told,” he said.

  She tilted the glass in her hand, stared at the thick sludge on the bottom, tried to puzzle out what it might be. Sniffed it. Cinnamon, but not. A spicy scent that sometimes clung to her father’s sea chest, and Mr. Cheap’s. A captain’s private cargo. As valuable as nutmeg or pepper, gram per gram. Opium.

  “You’ve drugged me,” she said, her tongue thick.

  “You will take no harm from it,” he promised, his voice a little anxious.

  The door opened and Micah Wild stood framed in the light from the hall.

  She stood up, grasping the table for support. “That man,” she said, pointing at Wild, “burned my house down.”

  “That is the opium talking,” said Micah Wild.

  The room swirled around her, the red of the chairs, the black of the clock, the green of the fort major’s coat blurring into streaks.

  Then Micah was behind her, grasping her by the waist and keeping her from falling, pulling her back against his chest, and encouraging her to give in to the drug’s pull and sleep.

  “No,” she said, but her vision was dimming, and the room was being taken from her by the opium one color at a time until all was gray and blurred.

  “I don’t like this,” said Major Phillips.

  Her head felt heavy; her limbs would not answer. “Please,” she begged the fort major. “Send for Trent.”

  “Trent is a seducer,” said Wild, his voice coming from far away. “He has tired of her and intends to hand her off to his son.”

  She clung for one last moment to consciousness, long enough to feel Wild lift her and carry her to the daybed, to feel him stroke her face and tuck a hair behind her ear and say in his honeyed voice, “Everything is going to be all right, Sarah. I’ve come to take you home.”

  • • •

  General Gage sent a detachment of his own men to search Castle William for Sarah Ward. He also posted a guard at the Long Wharf to inspect the small boats putting in, but there were far too many little wharves and anchorages in Boston and Charlestown to search them all, and by that time Sparhawk and Trent had already come and gone from the island. They questioned the maid, Mrs. Phillips, her morose daughter, and the guard at the gate. And then they searched the island for Major Phillips.

  They found him outside the walls on a secluded stretch of beach, staring out to sea. They did not need to resort to threats or bribes. The man poured forth his tale. He knew he had been deceived when he saw Micah Wild carry the girl to the daybed. His hands on her had been too possessive, too familiar, for a chastely devoted suitor and family friend. Major Phillips had taken money from Wild, as he had taken money from Trent, and he had received his thirty pieces of silver. The incident was a stain on his soul. The pieces could not be given back.

  Wild had paid him to drug the girl. He had explained that it was a precaution, that she was highly excitable and liable to do herself an injury if he had to take her away against her will. His tale was one of innocence seduced, a simple seaman’s daughter, promised to a doughty merchant, beguiled away from hearth and home and lawfully betrothed by a worldly rake named Trent.

  There was enough of fact, when the fort major quizzed the girl on her family and origins, to burnish the story with the aura of truth. And enough similarity to his daughter’s sad tale that he was predisposed to believe it. Sarah Ward was from Salem, her father had been a mariner, she had been engaged to marry, but had not. She lived under Trent’s roof. Trent had a certain reputation with women, and he had paid for her upkeep at the castle. Her gowns were lavish and costly, the kind a kept woman wore.

  Wild told him Trent was about to pass her on to another naval officer. It would be the beginning of a steep, fast slide into degradation. Unless Wild could spirit her away from her seducer before the man got his hooks into her once more.

  Sparhawk saw his father’s hand return again and again to the hilt of his sword, felt his own fingers twitch to do the same. But the fort major was a dupe, and his spiritual agony already exceeded any physical chastisement they might mete out. They needed two names from this man and nothing else: that of the ship on which Wild had taken her, and that of its intended port of call.

  Sparhawk was not surprised when he learned the first, but taken aback at the second. The ship was the Roger Conant, with her four-pounders and her swivel guns and her twoscore hired men. And she was bound for Rebel Salem.

  • • •

  Sarah woke beneath a silk canopy in a soft feather bed. The posts of her bower were polished mahogany carved with swags and urns. The drapes were pale blue figured damask. A quiver of Cupid’s arrows picked out in gold paint adorned the tester.

  The dimensions of the room felt strangely familiar, but the mustard yellow walls, flowered carpets, and plump upholstered chairs did not. She could not place where she was, nor how she had come there.

  Then she remembered the fort major’s study, the drugged brandy, Micah Wild’s hands upon her. Someone had removed her gown and loosened her
stays, and she knew with certainty that Micah had touched her while she slept, could recall through the poppy’s haze the way he had stroked her hair and her face on the daybed in the major’s parlor, then as he held her across his lap in the boat.

  Micah Wild had said he was bringing her home, but her home was gone, burned by his longshoreman.

  She slid from the high bed and clung to the posts for a moment, her head still thick and fogged from the opium. Her gown lay across a chair, her shoes on the floor beside it. The dressing table and washstand were unfamiliar, but the size and placement of the windows, and when she looked out, the patchwork of rooflines and clapboard colors, told her where Micah had brought her, and whose house this was. She was in Salem, and the house was Micah Wild’s.

  The bedrooms had not been completed by the time Micah broke their engagement; they had been only plaster and planks when she saw them, but if she remembered correctly, based on the views, this was the guest bedroom at the back of the house with the prospect of the North River. Another chamber across the hall, where Micah and Elizabeth must sleep, looked out on a similar view. She knew that room had been intended for the master and lady of the house, as it adjoined a small study where Micah had planned to conduct his more private business transactions, to keep ledgers and write receipts for French molasses and Dutch tea and all the other smuggled goods that flowed in and out of Salem.

  She took a step forward, and then retreated to the bed. She did not feel well at all. She could still taste the brandy and the dusty dry spice of the opium in her mouth, and felt the tangle of dried saltwater spray in her hair. Micah could not have brought her all the way to Salem in a rowboat. He must have had the Conant hidden somewhere in the channels of Boston Harbor.

  Even if Sparhawk or Trent discovered that much, they could not reach her here in Rebel Salem. General Gage had tried to send a column of regulars up under Colonel Leslie in February, and they had been driven back by the combined militia and townspeople.

  Gage could not even break out of Boston now. The navy was unlikely to go haring off in pursuit of a woman it had only grudgingly released on a charge of piracy. And if Micah Wild was welcome in Salem once more, the Sally certainly wasn’t.

  Which meant that if she wanted to see Sparhawk and her family again—and stay out of Micah Wild’s bed—she would have to get out of Salem herself.

  Shoes and a dress would be material to a successful escape. And sweet cooling water. She drank half the pitcher on the washstand and bathed in the rest, combed and pinned the tangle of her hair, reserving the longest pins in the dressing table for a more important purpose than her coiffure.

  It took her longer to pick the lock than it should have. Standing up, she became dizzy; kneeling on the floor, she began to sway. Finally she accomplished her task with her cheek pressed to the grain-painted door and her heart beating wildly from the exertion. She knew sailors who took opium because they enjoyed it, but she could not understand the attraction. Unconsciousness, strange dreams, and nausea held little appeal.

  She kept the pin that had vanquished Micah Wild’s brass door lock, and tucked it into the front of her gown. The hall, thankfully, was empty, because there was no way to slip discreetly down that broad curving stair.

  The latch on the front door lifted just before she reached it. In a moment, she would surely be discovered. The parlors to the left and right offered no concealment. She darted instead for the opening beneath the stairs and found herself in the service ell, broader and taller than Sarah’s whole house had been, and full, just now, of servants.

  Their chatter stopped abruptly. There were three maids and two cooks and a burly footman in the mold of the late, loathsome Dan Ludd. He got up from his place at the table, where one of the maids had been feeding him slices of apple, and took a step toward Sarah.

  The room spun. She felt hands reaching for her, then a chair being thrust under her, and she looked up to find an anxious sea of faces peering at her, including that of the cook, a smiling woman Sarah recognized, Mrs. Friary, the best baker in town. Micah had hired her for the new house because Sarah loved her ginger cakes.

  “Get the captain,” Mrs. Friary said to the wide-eyed maid beside her. “Miss Sarah,” she said in the voice one reserved for children and invalids. “Miss Sarah, you’ve been very ill. Captain’s only just brought you home, and you’re not to be out of bed.”

  She was ill, certainly, but only because “the captain” had dosed her with opium. Even seated, she still felt dizzy, and when she attempted to stand, the yellow shutters on the windows, the copper pots over the fire, the iron hooks over the hearth, moved in a kaleidoscope of fragmented colors.

  “Fetch some water,” said Mrs. Friary.

  “The poor thing,” said the wide-eyed maid.

  “Filthy British bastards,” spat the youngest of the footmen.

  Which was peculiar, because these were Micah’s servants, and they seemed to be full of righteous indignation and sympathy for her.

  Sarah heard booted feet running. The sea of faces parted. Micah Wild knelt in front of her, and the look of concern on his handsome face was unfeigned. “I’ll take her from here, Mrs. Friary.”

  “What did you tell these people?” Sarah asked, trying—and failing—to stand.

  He caught her as she slumped into the chair and lifted her into his arms. She was too sick and dizzy to protest.

  “I told them the truth,” he said in his orator’s voice, intended to ring through the house as he carried her out of the kitchen. “That you are a heroine. You were wrongfully imprisoned by the treacherous British in Boston for saving Ned from the press and took ill in their barbarous jail. And I brought you out of there, brought you home.”

  That explained their caring and concern, the kindness they had been too afraid to show her when she had defied Micah Wild and refused to become his mistress.

  “Only the jailer, as it turned out, was treacherous,” she said. “And only because he was deceived and bribed by you.”

  Wild sighed. “The doddering old fool gave you too much opium. I am sorry for that. But Mrs. Friary is making you ginger cakes. And you will recover quickly now that you are home.”

  Home and not home. The house he had built for her, with the furnishings she had picked out, and the cook hired to please her. The familiar voices outside her window, calling down the river, the sound of the water lapping at the reeded banks. The scent of molasses-sweet air from the rum distilleries wafting on the breeze, and beneath it, the salt tang of the sea. It was what she had longed for, shut up in Castle William—what she thought she might never see again.

  Now if her head would only stop spinning, she might be able to take some comfort in these little things at least.

  She had to close her eyes as he bore her up the winding stair to avoid being sick. If she had been capable of even crawling back to her room, she would have preferred that to enduring Micah’s touch. She could not blame his servants for swallowing his lies. People would believe anything he said in that honeyed voice. In Sarah’s experience, if there was a grain of truth in Micah’s words, they were taken as gospel.

  He deposited her gently on the bed in the blue and gold chamber and brought a wet cloth with which to dab her forehead. She swatted him away.

  “Where is Elizabeth?” she asked, remembering that her former friend’s family had called her home in light of Wild’s newly precarious circumstances.

  “Gone back to her family. This time for good. They are having our marriage dissolved.”

  “And how is it you are welcome in Salem once more?”

  He refreshed the cloth and laid it across her forehead, and this time she did not stop him. “I’m not, exactly. Or I wouldn’t be without you. The pamphlet that Benji’s friends printed has made you quite the heroine, defending Ned from the press and such. And now I am your rescuer. Salem’s Committee of Safety allowed the Conan
t to enter the harbor because we carried you.”

  “Why Salem? And don’t tell me because it is my home. You burned my home.”

  Another wave of nausea swept her, and she twisted on the bed. He replaced the cool cloth with a fresh one. “Your house would still be standing if you had been reasonable that night.”

  “And Ned would have been pressed aboard the Wasp if I had been reasonable that day.” She sat up. “But I am not reasonable, and you are not a romantic. Why are we here?”

  Wild laughed. “You may not be reasonable, but you are certainly made of tougher stuff than Elizabeth. You would not have run home to your father over a little double-dealing.”

  She was not so sure he was right about that, but she let it pass.

  “We are here,” he said, “to retrieve my property. It is my hope that the Committee of Safety and the Continental Congress will soon welcome me back into the fold, but I have made provision in case they do not.”

  For a moment she was puzzled; then she understood. “The French gold. The admiral paid you for the Conant and the Cromwell with the French gold. It is still here.”

  And it was the most damning evidence against both Micah Wild and Admiral Graves, if she could lay hands on it.

  “Just so,” he said. “If Salem will not welcome us, then Providence or Newport will. We have enough capital to provision the Conant for a profitable cruise. The Sally’s success in Boston Harbor has ignited a fever for privateering, and the admiral’s latest threats of retaliation have sent the ports scrambling to arm vessels for their defense. Salem cannot fit out ships fast enough.”

  “What success?”

  “You have not heard? Benji took a British supply ship, loaded with powder. Dr. Warren and his Provincial Congress may be willing to overlook my recent defection if I will fly their pine tree flag on the Roger Conant and do the same.”

  “And will you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why this change of heart? The admiral gave you letters of marque to hunt the Sally. The Congress may not.” The Provincial Congress, to judge by the machinations of Angela Ferrers, wanted James Sparhawk. Fast ships and bold seamen. Ones they could be sure of.