The Iron Rose

by Marsha Canham

  “Go to hell,” Gabriel snarled. “Go straight to bloody hell.”

  Recalde sighed and nodded to Jorge, who lifted a bucket full of the salted brine used to preserve meat and threw it over Gabriel’s head and body. Some splashed the man hanging next to him, whose back had been slashed by a whip, and he let loose such a scream it set all one hundred and twenty of the Valour’s bound crewmen quivering in the lines.

  Gabriel made no sound. Every muscle, every sinew in his body remained clenched through the inconceivable agony of brine seeping into his open wounds. Just when he thought he might be able to open his eyes and breathe again, he heard the order to put on all sail and felt the Valour leap forward with a response. They were breaking away from the fleet and heading straight for the cays. Moreover, they were not going forth alone. Following in their wake were three of the biggest warships in the fleet, their gunports open, their decks cleared for action.

  “Gabriel,” Juliet whispered. “Dear God, it’s Gabriel … there, in the shrouds.”

  Crisp’s lips moved but the oaths were either too foul to vent or the air in his lungs suddenly too sparse to give them sound.

  They had fired another shot to alert her father and Geoffrey Pitt that more company was imminent, but there had been no quick way to warn them of the fact that one of the four ships was the Valour. Juliet had sent a messenger back in a jolly-boat, but that was before they bristled out to meet the oncoming threat and saw the human shield. Neither the Avenger nor the Dove had come through the channel yet and Juliet had to assume they were still dealing with the first two galleons. There would be prisoners to disarm, perhaps even set ashore under guard, to ensure they would not retake the ships and strike from behind.

  Juliet knew she could not strike out alone against four ships, she simply did not have the firepower. And if the Valour had been taken over by the Spaniards, she would not even have speed as an advantage, for the two ships were well matched and any attempt she made to come in fast would be met with an equally nimble counterattack from her brother’s ship.

  Not that any of that mattered now. As soon as she saw the crew tied to the shrouds, it changed everything. Every scrap of nerve, courage, and bravado sank to her toes and she knew the mind-numbing shock of real fear.

  “What are yer orders, lass?” Crisp asked softly. “The men are lookin’ to ye.”

  “Dear Christ,” she muttered. “If we fight, we’ll be killing Gabriel and every other man in his crew.”

  “They’ll be killed anyway. An’ if we run, the bastards will make straight for the channel. They’ll know the men onshore won’t fire an’ neither will yer father. Then we’ll all be in a fine mess.”

  “Wait,” Varian said. “Look … they’re slowing down, they’re splitting up.”

  The trio watched as the warships took down sail and carved wide swaths through the water to line up in a blockade formation a league offshore. The only ship that continued to move forward was the Valour, and inside half a mile, it too presented a broadside, gliding parallel to the shoreline.

  It was not the most gracefully executed insult, for there were yards aligned wrong and the ship turned far too slowly, something Juliet noted but was helpless for the moment to know how to use to their advantage. All she could think of at the moment was her brother tied helplessly to the shrouds. She wasn’t quite ready to dismiss his life as easily as Crisp, though she understood emotion had no place on the deck of a fighting ship. They had all understood the risks before they left New Providence. They understood the risks each and every time they sailed out of Pigeon Cay.

  She glanced quickly over her shoulder, but there was still no sign of the Avenger. Turning back, she caught Varian’s eye and held it a moment, wondering if he, with his annoying ability to read her thoughts, could read them now.

  “The Spaniards are soldiers,” he said quietly. “They think like soldiers, not like seamen.”

  “What of it?”

  “A parley,” he advised.

  “What?”

  “Ask for a parley. Find out what they want, what they are prepared to do to get it.”

  “I already know what they want,” she snapped. “And I know damned well what they are prepared to do to get it.”

  “Then use it to buy some time. Send me over under a white flag and let me talk to them.”

  “You? Why the devil would I send you?”

  “Because I am the Duke of Harrow. I am the king’s emissary and still have the power to negotiate a truce.”

  “A truce?” She nearly spat the word. “They don’t want a truce, they want blood. Mine and my father’s.”

  “Just so, but they also don’t know if it is just you and your father they have to deal with. Thus far, they have only seen the Iron Rose and the Avenger. For all they know, there could be a dozen more ships lying in wait behind the cays.”

  “You want to try to bluff them?” She looked at him even more aghast, if that was possible. “If they don’t believe you—which they won’t—they will kill you. At the very least, there is no guarantee they won’t tie you up in the shrouds alongside my brother.”

  “I am not that easy to kill. You should know that by now. And if they tie me in the shrouds beside your brother, I will be in excellent company. Lower a boat and show a flag,” he urged gently. “Let them know you want to negotiate. It is what any good general would do, and what any well-trained soldier would expect.”

  Her eyes remained locked to his in an unrelenting grip while a hundred different reasons for denying his request flashed through her mind. One above all set the blood pounding in her temples, not loudly enough, however, to drown out the grim command she gave to Nathan Crisp to ready a jolly-boat and find a white flag.

  “Give me five minutes,” Varian said, glancing over her shoulder at the glowering quartermaster. “And four of your strongest oarsmen so I don’t have time to change my mind.”

  He looked at Juliet one last time, then dashed below to find clothes more suitable for a king’s emissary. The royal blue velvet doublet and breeches he had worn to impress the privateer captains were crushed but wearable, and he was struggling to fasten the starched ruff around his neck when he heard the cabin door open behind him.

  When Juliet saw how badly his fingers were fumbling the task, she took the ruff and the ruby brooch gently out of his hands. “Let me do that before you stab yourself. I would have thought you had acquired some skill in dressing yourself since Beacom’s departure.”

  “Pressed to speed, I am much more adept at undressing, as you well know.”

  She looked up and caught the intense look in the midnight eyes.

  “Just between you and me,” she admitted softly, “I do my shaking afterward. Especially when I have done something truly stupid and realize how lucky I am to have survived.” She smiled softly and touched his cheek with a fingertip. “You won’t do anything truly stupid, will you?”

  He would have answered, but he was distracted by her hands moving around to the nape of his neck, tying a narrow leather strap beneath the starched white ruff. Sheathed in the strap was a knife that slid beneath his doublet and hung against the clammy skin between his shoulder blades. She then knelt down in front of him and unfastened the garter below his knee, shoving his breeches up high enough to allow her to strap a second, needle-thin filleting knife to the inside of his thigh. Another went around his left calf before she adjusted the cuff of his boot. The last, a short double-edged serrated blade, she slid inside the front of his breeches.

  “I doubt there are too many men—even Spaniards—who would search there for a weapon,” she said. “But I would have a care how you sit.”

  After passing a critical eye over his form to see if she could detect any of the knives, she helped him strap on his baldric, giving the polished hilt of his rapier an extra touch for luck.

  “If you can get close to Gabriel—” Her voice faltered and he tucked a forefinger under her chin, tilting her face upward.

  “I
’ll tell him.” He studied her face a long moment, as if committing every pore and eyelash to memory, then kissed her lightly on the mouth and straightened to indicate he was as ready as he was ever going to be.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Isabeau Dante stared at the messenger and asked him to repeat what he had just said.

  “It’s Captain Gabriel’s ship, Cap’n Beau. It’s the Valour. Spaniards are at the helm, coming in fast with three more galleons on her flank.”

  “And Captain Juliet?”

  “She’s standin’ fast, Cap’n, waitin’ on orders.”

  “Oh, dear God.” Beau glanced at the closest of the two smoldering galleons they had herded into the elbow of Spaniard’s Cay. Simon had gone on board the first to dictate the terms of surrender; Pitt was on board the second, several hundred feet away. Neither ship was close enough for a hail to be understood and she called over one of the fastest swimmers, dispatching him over the side with the urgent news. Before he had cut ten clean strokes through the water, Beau had ordered men into the tops and by the time the swimmer reached the hull of the first galleon, the Avenger had shaken out every scrap of canvas she could carry and was underway, heading down toward the southern point of the cay.

  When the Pirate Wolf heard the gasped message from the lips of the soaked crewman, he was livid enough to fire a shot from a handy swivel gun across his wife’s bow. She did not stop and he hailed Geoffrey Pitt with a savage bellow. Within minutes, they were both on board the Dove piling on sail, but were out of position and were forced to make a wide, slow turn, hampered by the lack of wind coming over the crest of Frenchman’s Cay.

  The Spanish captains, their ships reduced to smoking ruins, saw that they were being abandoned and screamed at their officers to find enough sail to hoist into the broken spars and effect an escape. Both ships beat a retreat due east into open water, hoping to put as much distance as they could between them and the ferocious teeth of the Pirate Wolf.

  They would not get very far.

  Isabeau, meanwhile, had rounded the point of Spaniard’s Cay. She took in the scene at a glance, the three warships formed in a threatening line and the Iron Rose drifting almost at a standstill, looking small and vulnerable and as valiant as David must have looked facing Goliath. There was a jolly-boat making its way across the choppy water to the Valour, and even at that distance, the white flag on the stern was clearly visible.

  “An English duke?” Recalde paced a slow circle around Varian St. Clare, the sunlight glinting off the cone-shaped peak of his helmet. “I confess I am intrigued to know why you would be keeping company with such a notorious band of pirates.”

  “It was not by choice, I can assure you,” Varian said. “My own ship was recently waylaid by Dutch privateers, who planned to hold me to ransom. The Dantes apparently paid what they demanded, thinking to rescue a fellow Englishman from the clutches of the cheese-eaters, but I have yet to find a reason to thank them. Especially now,” he added, tugging on a cuff to straighten it, then brushing an annoying fleck of lint off the velvet. “I dislike being forced to do anything at gunpoint, whether the hand holding the gun is English or Spanish.”

  Recalde pursed his lips. “You are saying they forced you to come and parley?”

  “They thought a proposal delivered by me would carry more weight than if it came by way of a filth-encrusted sailor.”

  “Ah. From one gentleman to another?”

  “My dear captain, while you might wear the veneer ably enough”—Varian paused and glanced pointedly at the naked, bleeding men that were bound to the rigging lines—“I see nothing that would lead me to believe you were anything quite so elevated as a gentleman.”

  Recalde, whose head had been tilted to the right while he listened, now tilted it slowly to the left as he studied Varian’s face. “Unfortunately, señor, gentlemen do not retain their manners long in the jungles of Nombre de Dios,” he murmured. “Particularly when one deals with criminals and misfits, one quickly learns that they do not respond to manners, only to a show of strength and a willingness to be completely ruthless. As for this … proposal you bring, while I am amused and flattered by the Dante audacity, I can assure you that nothing less than a complete surrender will suffice.”

  “If that is the case, then it may be perceived that we do indeed have a problem, for the captain of the Iron Rose—”

  “The captain of the Iron Rose will present herself to me within the hour, señor, or she will not only be condemning her brother to death, she will be responsible for the deaths of every man who served on board this ship.”

  “Whereas I have been empowered to tell you that unless you stand down at once, the rest of the Dante fleet”—Varian almost stumbled when he turned and saw sails to the north, coming around the point of Frenchman’s Cay, and sails to the south where the Avenger was now standing off Spaniard’s Cay—“will show no mercy when they raze your ships to the sea.”

  “I believe a situation such as this would be called a draw, would it not?”

  “You may be sure Captain Dante is sincere in her threats.”

  “As am I, señor.” He raised a hand and one of the scarlet-clad soldiers touched a glowing fuse to the touch hole of a swivel gun mounted on the deckrail. “Shall we see who blinks first?”

  Juliet reacted without thinking.

  She had watched the jolly-boat take Varian across to the Valour, had followed the flash of blue velvet as he climbed up the hull and went through the gangway. After that, she had only been able to catch glimpses of royal blue amidst the sea of scarlet tunics and molded leather breastplates.

  Then the round of grapeshot had torn through the wall of crewmen with horrifying results and she knew the negotiations had met a violent end. She did not have time to think. She did not have time to absorb the shock of seeing helpless men blown to pieces. She only had time to react and trust her instincts.

  At less than three hundred yards, it was not possible to build enough speed to cut in swiftly under the Valour’s guns, deliver a broadside, and peel away again without coming under heavy fire herself, but no one, not even Nathan Crisp, balked at the order to do just that. With every scrap of furled canvas suddenly dropping from the yards, the Iron Rose surged forward to close the distance between the two sister ships and, at the last impossible moment, heeled sharply about, presenting her broadside.

  Delivered at point-blank range, every shot smashed into the hull of the Valour with devastating results, the iron balls tearing through the timbers of her outer skin and plowing through open ports, unseating cannon and obliterating the Spanish gunners who manned them. Shots that did not rip an exit through the opposite hull ricocheted around the lower deck, turning it into bloody chaos. The Spanish crews, unused to English gun carriages, fired wild, and while many of the shots tore into the Iron Rose’s sails and rigging, a lucky number went wide.

  Counting off every precious second it was taking the gunners on board the Iron Rose to reload, Juliet could see the Spanish arquebusiers on board the Valour taking to the rails and rigging. Gabriel’s upper battery, she knew, held five swivel guns, but to her ever-increasing outrage, she could see that they were not being mounted on the gunwalls to fire at the crew of the swiftly approaching privateer. They were being fired, one after another, at the men screaming in the shrouds. Before the fifth gun discharged, a streak of blue velvet ran across the deck, his sword flashing, his white neck ruff stark against the tanned face and flying chestnut hair. He was able to clear a path to one of the swivel guns, to cut down the man holding the fuse before it could be lowered to the touch hole, then to slash his way through three more men before he was finally brought down under a crush of red-and-black-clad soldiers.

  Juliet had no time to ponder Varian’s fate as the Iron Rose, moving too fast now to avoid a collision, backed her topsails and slid beam on through the water so that when she rammed the Valour, it was broadside to broadside, the impact causing a huge gout of foaming water to spew up between them
. The gunners had reloaded by then and fired another round of sangrenel and incendiary shot, which blasted straight into the damaged hull, taking out most of the cannon that were left on the lower deck and starting fires wherever the pitch-soaked scraps of flaming canvas settled. Up in the tops, crewmen with muskets started to answer the deadly fire from the Spanish sharpshooters, but they were hampered by the human shield and many died where they stood, unable to make a clear shot.

  Juliet screamed for grappling hooks to lash the two grinding ships together.

  Their first desperate attempt to board was turned back by volleys of gunfire. Juliet had mounted all her falconets on the starboard rails, but the men who were firing them into the opposing tops were being picked off with terrible precision. Until they could clear the yards, the men on the deck of the Iron Rose were exposed and helpless.

  Juliet was pinned against the bulwark on the quarterdeck, already bleeding where a musket ball had nicked her arm. Nathan was crouched beside her trying to reach the helmsman, who was draped over the whipstaff, a red bloom spreading across his back.

  A lone figure appeared in the hatchway below the quarterdeck and, after taking a deep breath to steady himself, ran through the hail of musket balls to seek shelter behind the bulkhead.

  Johnny Boy set his quiver of arrows beside him. Using the lip of the deck as cover, he began firing at the Spanish arquebusiers, shooting them out of the yards with swift and deadly accuracy. He was able to launch his arrows between, over, and under the writhing shield of human flesh, where the uncertain aim of muskets had made it impossible to return the Spaniards’ fire. He loosed one arrow after another until the first quiver was empty, then reached for the second and began making a noticeable gap in the Spaniard’s defenses.