To Catch a Flame
Page 32
But he had ever been a warrior, battling the enemies of his country. From the moment he had stepped upon his first pitching deck, he had recognized the vital importance of heeding the chain of command—on his own ship and in a vast kingdom as well.
Rafe's gaze flashed to the Spanish ships, then back to Drake's Revenge, the pride that burned within him warring with his love of his men and his ship. He would no longer hurl them into this foolish cause. It was time to make an end. "Come about!" Rafe shouted, "Rejoin the fleet."
Smoke-darkened faces turned to him with a mixture of shock, disappointment, anger, and relief. Then murmurs worked through the mass of soldiers and sailors crowded together on the deck. "Retreat? Nay! Captain, don't—" The protests welled from the battle-grimed men like the swell of the waves.
"Get this ship back to the fleet!" Rafe roared, the sound of his voice turning the bravest of his men into cowards.
"Sí, Captain."
"Whatever you say, sir."
Rafe wheeled, barking out commands, hacking at the fallen rigging with his saber in an attempt to cut free the fallen mast. Bastion labored beside him, as always Rafe's second pair of hands, almost his second self since that long-ago day when Rafe had saved him from the clutches of a band of English cutthroats.
"C-Captain."
Rafe looked up at the sound of a choked voice and saw the wide, frightened eyes of his cabin boy.
"The ship is taking some water," Enrique stammered. "Lopez says we'd best go about. He swears the leak is not enough to sink her, but there's so much damage—"
"Lopez raised his first sail before your father was born. If he says she can stay afloat, she can stay afloat."
"Sí, sir."
Rafe's gaze swept to where a bone-thin sail maker wrestled with torn, flapping canvas. "Get de Leon to brace that accursed spar before it falls and crushes what firepower we have left," Rafe roared, "and—" Rafe felt timid fingers tap his arm. He wheeled to find Enrique chewing nervously at his pale lips. "What in the name of the devil—"
"Your pardon, Captain, sir, but Lopez... he said to—to tell you a shell hit an arm's breadth from the powder magazine. Told me to assure you that no—no stray spark—"
Bastion's laugh rang out, and for a moment Rafe felt an urge to pummel any man fool enough to jest, yet the sound of Bastion's chuckle seemed to lift the fearful Enrique's flagging spirits.
"Rique, mi querido niño," Bastion said as he swung his arm around the boy's thin shoulders, "if a spark had touched that magazine, the captain would be in no need of assurance, except final absolution. It seems that God hasn't deserted us after all, eh, Rafael?" Rafe saw the wry twist to Bastion's lips. His friend's face was awash with distaste as he peered across the deck.
"But there are times, mi compañero, I wish some of God’s servants would."
The acid humor in Bastion's muttered words made Rafe follow the young nobleman's gaze to where a figure seemed to materialize out of the haze that hung over the deck, robes of the dread Inquisition wreathing his tall figure. Rafe could not stifle the sudden trickle of foreboding that slid down his spine.
"Encina. What the devil is that fool doing out here?" Rafe spat. Loathing mixed with fierce resentment washed through him at the sight of the passenger. He had been forced to give the man berth on his ship, though for some strange reason Encina despised him. Rafe’s jaw clenched as he cast a scathing glare toward the man he knew to be his enemy. "I ordered that bastard to stay in my quarters during the bombardment," Rafe ground out.
"Perhaps the good father is on a mission of mercy," Bastion said with a wicked blandness, "to, shall we say, ease the plight of the dying."
Rafe snorted in disgust. "The only death Encina wants to see is my own, though God alone knows why."
Rafe raised his fingers to the powder-grimed collarbone exposed by his torn doublet and touched the aged scar that bisected a birthmark in the shape of a scimitar. If Encina had been able to open the faded scar with a slash of his ebony gaze, Rafe was certain he would be spilling his lifeblood on the salt-coated deck.
He felt the deck shift beneath him as the ship heeled leeward, its bow easing toward the Spanish galleons clustered on the distant sea, but his eyes stayed locked on the Inquisitor's enigmatic countenance. Encina's stiletto-thin nose carved between the sharp angles of his cheekbones. His carnal lips curled in a mysterious half-smile. All the ugliness in the religious fanaticism infesting Rafe's homeland seemed to lurk beneath that slight curve of the Inquisitor’s lips—the blackest curses, the hideous mysteries, the darkest terrors.
Rafe’s memory filled with the terror-stricken faces of men and women, screaming as the flames of the auto-da-fé ate away sanity, then life itself.
Pain raked Rafe as he remembered the ever-gentle Brother Ambrose, the holy man who had taken in an orphaned boy and then, years later, had died rather than betray a fugitive Jewess to the Inquisition's crucible of death. In that instant Ambrose's beloved countenance blurred into delicate, angelic features drowning in horror.
Rafe's mother...
His gut lurched at the hazy memory, the sense of danger from the Inquisitor sweeping through him even more fiercely than Drake's grave threat. He saw Encina cross himself and turn eyes, glittering with a strange kind of triumph, heavenward. Then the haze of gunpowder closed about the Inquisitor, hiding him once more in a swirl of mist.
Rafe spun again to his task, battling beside a dozen of his men to rid the Lady of her crippled mast. But he had scarce driven his blade through a single length of the stubborn cord when a cry rang out from below the deck that drove all color from the face of every man who heard it.
"Fire!”
Rafe staggered as if a cannonball had slammed into his gut, his gaze struggling to pierce the pall of gunpowder that all but obscured the deck from his view.
Cries of terror erupted from the soldiers, and Rafe's own sailors turned to him, their eyes wide with horror. Fire... that most dreaded of all calamities on the sea. The disaster that would most likely kill them all.
Enrique's ashen face swirled before Rafe's eyes in a whirl of smoke that already carried the sharp tang of burning pitch.
"Go below and get the wounded,” Rafe bellowed. “Then abandon ship, each whole man carrying one who is injured. Manolo, prepare the boats!"
Rafe's eyes swept in an agonized path across the Lady's hull, the one home that had ever really been his, the only place he had truly belonged. His jaw clenched.
Bastion's face was white as he aided Manolo and the terrified cabin boy in settling a groaning soldier into one of the longboats.
"How... how did the blaze start?" the wounded man moaned.
"Cannon fire," Rafe bit out. "Drake's cursed cannons."
"Nay, sir." Rique's voice quavered with fear and confusion.
"What?" Rafe's hands closed on Enrique's spindly arms.
"It was not cannon fire. Could not have been. Lopez said the fire started among the dry stores, below the waterline."
"Below the waterline? How could that be?" Rafe’s stomach twisted. No man should have been near the storage hold. Every lantern and fire had been extinguished long before the Lady had first engaged Drake. Then how...?
A soft splash at the side of the ship startled Rafe. He turned in surprise to where the first of the longboats was being launched. Nay, impossible, Rafe thought. Even in the throes of panic the men could not have launched the craft so swiftly. Yet there was the longboat, cutting cleanly through the swells.
Rafe could see only the outlines of the figures who manned the craft's oars, but the person who stood in the small vessel's prow was illuminated as if by some hell-born flame, his graceful hands folded in prayer, his lean face turned toward the heavens.
Encina.
"Rafe!" Bastion's voice was raspy with smoke. The billowing clouds were searing the lungs of the men as smoke poured from the hatches. "The last boat is ready. We have to abandon ship before she goes down."
The fury that had been b
uilding in Rafe through the endless weeks at sea roiled through him. Frustration and helplessness and the grating necessity of bowing to those less skilled than he. "I'll not consign her to the sea for nothing, Bastion," Rafe said. "Drake will pay the price for the Lady's death and for the death of my men."
"Damn it, Rafe—"
"I'm going to sail her into the Revenge, Bastion, and pray God I reach Drake before the powder magazine explodes."
“You can't mean—" Bastion's mouth hardened, and Rafe could see understanding flit across the young nobleman's face. "So, we take that bastard Drake down with us, eh, compañero?"
"I take Drake down with me. You join the others."
"You can't sail this hulk alone, crippled as she is," Bastion bit out. "We'll finish this together, Rafe, as we started it."
Rafe saw the stubborn set to Bastion's jaw and acknowledged the bitter truth to his words. He couldn't see to maneuver the Lady and steer her toward Drake at the same time. A hot fist seemed to crush his throat. He raised one hand and gripped Bastion's shoulder. Their eyes held for an instant. "Friend." The single, choked word from Rafe's throat brought a reckless smile to Bastion's face.
"You would do well not to spread such ugly rumors, amigo, else—"
"Captain, sir?"
Bastion's words were cut off by a quavering voice, and Rafe wheeled to where the gangly Enrique now stood.
"I—I'd like to stay, too." The boy raised his dark eyes to Rafe, gazing up at him with the worshipful expression Rafe had ever tried to quell. "Manolo and I could man the sails well enough so that you'd have a better chance."
Rafe drove his fingers back through his hair, his mouth twisting in pain. "Rique, this ship is going to be blasted into bits. You can't—"
As if to mock him, the tattered sails flapped in the wind, slowing down the Lady's already waning speed.
"Damn King Philip! Damn me!" Rafe felt a sickness roiling in his chest. "Manolo, Rique, set the topgallant to leeward. Bastion—"
"I'll take the helm. The others will need you on deck." He spun and bolted toward the hatch.
"Bastion!" Rafe called. The man paused and turned. "Ease toward Drake with the greatest of care, so he won’t be alerted that there is fire aboard. We have to dupe him into thinking the Lady is sinking—and lure the greedy bastard close."
Bastion gave a short nod then plunged into the veil of smoke. "Cast off!" Rafe bellowed to the men waiting to lower the last of the longboats. A sick sensation shot through him as his last hope of survival was blotted out. He had courted death a thousand times and had even laughed at it.
But now, as he met the Reaper's stare, he knew it was no longer some rakehell adventure to be embraced with the same heedlessness as a courtesan. Death's face was hideous and haunting, the face of a phantom he’d met in a nightmare twenty-eight years ago.
With an oath Rafe shook himself as the sound of Rique's reedy voice babbling prayers and Manolo's grunting and cursing snapped him back to the present. His eyes stung, and his lungs burned. Heat penetrated the soles of his boots from the inferno blazing below as he yelled directions to Bastion, but Rafe could not banish his mother's face from his memory.
Features, once beautiful, lost in a tangle of honey-colored hair, deep blue eyes fierce with love for him, yet devastated by terror and loss, pleading. It was too late, too late to delve into the desperation in those memory-shrouded eyes, too late to do anything but confront his own mortality. The image of her face hung in the haze as Rafe gripped the gunwale, his eyes straining, his mouth cursing, desperate as the ship inched toward Drake's own... closer... closer.
The English artillery roared, and the sound that had filled him with anger and bitterness moments before now twisted his mouth with a savage joy, because it assured him that Drake was not yet aware of the flames eating through the Lady from within.
"Windward, Bastion, a sword's breadth windward," Rafe directed in a hoarse voice all but lost in the choked coughs of Bastion. "If we can just hold on for a minute more—"
"Captain!"
"Holy Mary!"
Rafe wheeled at the sound of Rique's sob, glimpsing in that instant a burst of flame roaring through the Lady’s pitch-encrusted deck. Rafe's hand flashed up instinctively to cross himself as the world exploded into a thousand shards of pain.
BUY THE BOOK: To Chase the Storm
THE RAIDER SERIES
The Raider's Bride
The Raider's Daughter
To Catch a Flame
To Chase the Storm
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About the Author
Kimberly Cates
When Kimberly Cates was in third grade she informed her teacher that she didn't need to learn multiplication tables. She was going to be a writer when she grew up. Kimberly filled countless spiral notebooks with stories until, at age twenty-five, she received a birthday gift that changed her life: an electric typewriter. Kimberly wrote her first historical romance, sold it to Berkley Jove, and embarked on a thirty-year career as an author. Called “a master of the genre” by Romantic Times, her thirty-three bestselling, award-winning novels are noted for their endearing characters, emotional impact and their ability to transport the reader to the mists and magic of the British Isles.
Kimberly has also penned historical romances as Kimberleigh Caitlin and contemporary romances under the pseudonyms Kimberly Cates and Kim Cates.
Also by Kimberly Cates
ROGUES, RAKEHELLS AND REDEMPTION:
Culloden's Fire Series
Gather the Stars
Angel's Fall
Crown of Dreams
Crown of Mist
Morning Song
Saving Galahad (Coming Soon)
Celtic Rogues Series
Black Falcon's Lady
The Black Falcon's Christmas
Her Magic Touch
Briar Rose
Stealing Heaven
Lily Fair
The Raider Series
The Raider's Bride
The Raider's Daughter
To Catch a Flame
To Chase the Storm
AMERICAN WEST
Only Forever
FUTURE RELEASES:
Restless is the Wind
Contemporary Romance:
Fly Away Home
Historical Fiction:
The Queen’s Dwarf by Ella March Chase
The Virgin Queen’s Daughter by Ella March Chase
T
hree Maids for a Crown, a story of the Grey sisters by Ella March Chase