Lovesong

by Valerie Sherwood

  The first night was bad but the next day was worse. Both Captain Santos of the Valeroso and Captain Garcia of the Santiago could see their sister ship of the flota, the Coraje, send them a distress signal. The Coraje had lost her rudder and was turning about wildly in the storm, heeling over in imminent danger of capsizing. But the strong winds were driving them apart, the boats that were put over the side to aid their sister vessel promptly capsized with the loss of their crews and soon the Coraje was nowhere in sight.

  Her loss seemed to draw the two remaining galleons together as if for protection—and night found them drawing too close. There was a great crash, Carolina and Doña Hernanda were thrown from their bunks, there were shouts from the deck—the two ships had collided.

  “Madre de Dios!” gasped Doña Hernanda, clawing her way back to her bunk. “Go see if you can find out what has happened! Are we sinking?”

  Carolina fought her way to the deck and found it a scene of wild confusion. In the blinding rain the two great galleons had struck each other broadside and done some damage. Their rigging had become tangled and was hastily being cut away lest they carry each other to the bottom. She clung to the rail with the rain beating down in her face and watched the Santiago reel away from them—and then a great wave came over the bow and swept her back on a wall of water, back the way she had come into a passageway which, as the wave departed, was now awash.

  The hatches were secured, an order bawled that the women were to keep to their cabin, and Carolina groped her way back, aided in getting her bearings by Doña Hernanda’s plaintive cries.

  “We are not sinking,” Carolina gasped as she almost fell through the cabin door. “At least not yet.” She tossed back her wet hair. “We collided with the Santiago.”

  “With the Santiago—oh, then we are surely lost!”

  “No, no, the rigging was fouled but the ships have been separated now.”

  Doña Hernanda gave a frightened bleat. “We will never see land again,” she wailed. “Oh, I was wrong to make a trip back to Spain even though my brother desired me to meet his new wife! I should have stayed in Cartagena and never ventured upon the ocean!” She gave a scream as the ship heeled over and all the furniture and trunks in the room crashed against the cabin wall. “We will not survive the voyage!”

  And Carolina wondered bleakly where Thomas was tonight—and if he had been cut down from the mast and put in irons. . . . Like as not that was what had happened to him. And if the Santiago was lost he would have not even the slight chance of those who elected to swim—his chains would hold him fast and carry him, down, down to the bottom of the sea.

  At the thought she gave a little moan and Doña Hernanda interpreted that as fear for their fate. “Do not worry, niña!” she cried in a sudden reversal of feeling. “My son is in command. He is a good sailor, he will not let us drown!”

  But good sailor or no, the collision with the Santiago had shaken Captain Santos. He set himself to put some distance between him and his wallowing sister ship, and in so doing lost her altogether.

  So it was with a damaged hull and with part of her rigging missing that the Valeroso fought her way free of the storm at last and found herself alone upon an empty ocean.

  Carolina and Doña Hernanda—bruised and dazed from the ferocity of the storm—came up on deck. They were wobbly and had trouble keeping their footing in the giant swells that were the aftermath of the storm.

  “It is a wonder we did not sink!” cried Doña Hernanda, breathing in great drafts of the clean-washed air. Her high-backed Spanish comb of carved tortoise-shell sat awry in her tumbled hair for she had been too frightened and banged about during the storm to demand that Carolina comb her hair. Carolina too was the worse for wear. Her fair hair, innocent now of pins, had come entirely loose and was cascading down over her shoulders. One of her sleeves had been rent when she had been tumbled along the passageway at the height of the storm, and her gray linen overskirt was ripped where it had snagged on a piece of skidding furniture the night before.

  Neither woman cared at the moment how she looked. They were grateful to be alive. And Carolina, peering around her at decks swept bare of all the gear that had been piled about, then tripping over shattered timbers and trying to avoid cloth from fallen pieces of rigging, echoed Doña Hernanda’s amazement.

  But with the calmer seas, Doña Hernanda had become her regal self again. “Come, niña she told Carolina. “We have had a bad time of it but it is over now. We will have my son send us some hot food and we will both sleep all day. I command it!”

  Carolina felt sympathy for the harassed captain, who looked as if he had not slept in days, as his mother advanced upon him. He made a strangled sound in his throat, gave her a beaten look, and muttered something about “served in their cabin.” But somehow aboard that sodden battered ship, a fire was started and before the women collapsed in their bunks they had both enjoyed bowls of surprisingly delicious steaming soup.

  “It tastes the better because it is the soup of deliverance!” Doña Hernanda laughed and Carolina returned her a wan smile. Out there somewhere was Thomas, God knew where. . . . She asked herself whether the Santiago had survived these seas, and tried not to think what might have been Thomas’s fate. Then, filled with hot soup and exhaustion, she fell asleep on her bunk and—like Doña Hernanda who was snoring musically on the other side of the room—slept for hours.

  But the storm was not to be the last of Captain Santos’ trials aboard the Valeroso. The following night a fog bank drifted in and the Valeroso, still searching for her sister ships, kept her stern lanterns lit and clanged a bell in an effort to find them.

  It was to be his undoing.

  Suddenly in the night there was a shout from the watch and the bleary-eyed captain bounded from his bed and staggered out on deck.

  “’Tis the Santiago!” came an excited cry.

  This was good news indeed for they had feared themselves to be the storm’s only survivors. Captain Santos strained his eyes to see through the enveloping murk and suddenly, too close for comfort, the hull of a tall ship appeared. It was indeed the Santiago and he and the deck watch both shouted a warning as the Santiago hove up alongside, her wooden hull rising up out of the mist to scrape against the side of the Valeroso.

  Captain Santos’ straining eyes had seen no one aboard, and the wild thought had crossed his mind that the Santiago had become a ghost ship, a derelict that had ridden out the storm without a crew, without a captain. But he had not the time to voice his fears.

  Before he could grasp what was happening, from the Santiago grappling irons came flying. And even before the two ships were firmly secured, from the Santiago's apparently vacant decks rose muscular men who had crouched there, waiting for the vessels to touch. Having seemingly materialized out of thin air, they now bounded silently over the rail, cutlasses swinging. The suddenness, the silence with which the whole thing had been accomplished, made the attack seem a hellish, unreal vision to Captain Santos.

  “Pirates!” he shouted hoarsely and wheeled about in a desperate attempt to gain his cabin—and his sword.

  “Buccaneers,” corrected the tall sinewy leader of the first wave as he landed solidly on two feet upon the deck of the Valeroso. His long arm reached out and caught Captain Santos in mid-flight. Seized by the scruff, Santos was swung about. The buccaneer’s smile flashed in his dark face but his voice and his hard gray gaze were deadly. “Ye’d be well advised to strike your colors and surrender your ship on the instant.”

  “Who are you?” asked Captain Santos faintly, swaying back from his formidable adversary as from a vision of Hell.

  “Kells is the name,” was the laconic reply. “Captain Kells. You may have heard of me.”

  Captain Santos shuddered. He had indeed heard of Captain Kells—as who had not? It was a name that resounded throughout the Caribbean. Resounded to Spanish ears like a death knell, tolling.

  “I have women aboard,” he cried hoarsely. “You cannot
expect me to—”

  “Well, they can wait,” said the tall buccaneer mildly. “Meantime I’m taking over your ship. Order your men to put down their arms and surrender peaceably and none will be killed. You have my word on it.” The grim smile deepened. “My word as a buccaneer.”

  Captain Santos swallowed. To be taken—and with his mother aboard! Through his mind in that instant flitted everything he had heard about the formidable buccaneer who faced him. Many were the stories told, and some of them frightening enough—of night attacks and daring raids, of impossible escapes and quick reprisals. But none of those stories had suggested that Captain Kells had ever broken his word to any man. “And the women will not be harmed?” cried Santos.

  “I’ve never harmed a woman—Spanish or any other,” was the cool rejoinder. The buccaneer’s gray gaze raked over Santos. “Can you say the same?” he challenged.

  Captain Santos winced for there had been an English girl once, taken from a ship in mid-ocean. He had kept her in his cabin, tamed her to his hand. Sweating, he wondered if Kells knew about that. Something in those cold eyes told him he did.

  “Make up your mind,” snapped his adversary, “if you don’t want your men’s throats cut!”

  The Spanish captain’s shoulders slumped in defeat. There was nothing for it but to do as he was bid. Numbed by events, he struck his colors and surrendered his ship.

  So swiftly, so silently had the attack taken place that the first thing the two women knew of it was when a ship’s officer knocked on the door of their cabin. He was very pale and he informed them in shaky Spanish that the ship had been taken by buccaneers and their presence was requested on deck.

  Behind Carolina, who had opened the door but a crack, Doña Hernanda started up and grabbed at her heart. “Buccaneers? Did I hear him aright, Christabel? Did he say buccaneers?”

  “He did.” Carolina felt her own pulse begin to race. In any case, she told herself as she dressed hastily, she would be no worse off than as a prisoner of the Spanish who might on a sudden whim send her on to Spain to be tried by the Inquisition. The buccaneers were reputedly gallant toward women. But suppose . . . they were not? A little thrill of fear went through her. She would have preferred not to have to find out first hand!

  “My jewels,” Doña Hernanda was gabbling. “Hand me that case, Christabel.”

  Carolina helped the older woman secrete a variety of rings and chains in her stiff black clothing. “They may search us,” she warned.

  Doña Hernanda blanched. “Oh, surely not that!” she gasped, looking as if she might faint.

  It was Carolina’s opinion that none of Doña Hernanda’s jewels were very fine; she had obviously spent her wealth in other ways—perhaps on the career of the son who must even now be on deck surrendering his sword to the bitterest enemy Spain had in the New World—the buccaneers of Tortuga.

  It was in the end not a Spaniard at all who escorted the two women to the deck but a rakish young buccaneer named Lindstrom. He had not an ounce of fat on his cordlike muscles, had Lindstrom, and he was carelessly dressed in a loose white shirt and leathern breeches. His shoulder-length yellow hair was held back by a wide band of black cloth that gave him almost the appearance of wearing bangs—the headband concealed a deep scar where a musket ball had creased his forehead and he wore it for vanity’s sake, but Carolina was not to know that. His light blue eyes raked over them both and lit up at sight of Carolina. “My captain would like to know your names,” he said in slightly accented English.

  Carolina’s head went up. To give her real name might mean that she would be sent back to Virginia—to marry Ned or some other lad chosen by her mother! She would prefer to take her chances on Tortuga or whatever other buccaneer port they set sail toward.

  “I am Mistress Christabel Willing,” she said firmly. “And this lady is Doña Hernanda, the mother of Captain Santos who commands this ship.” She hesitated. “This ship that has taken us, is she English?”

  That he at least was not English was the clear implication. Lars Lindstrom smiled. It was a very infectious smile. “The ship that has taken you is a buccaneer ship. She bears no nationality. But I have the honor to be Danish. And my captain is Irish. His name is Kells.”

  “Kells?” Doña Hernanda spoke no English but her straining ears had caught the name. “Oh, we are lost! It was Captain Kells who last year sacked Cartagena. We made our escape in a cart with all our plate before the pirates burst through our defenses.” She leant forward, wringing plump hands now completely barren of rings. “Christabel is my personal maid.” Her voice rose to a hysterical squeak. “Do not hurt her, I implore you!”

  She had spoken in Spanish and Lindstrom now responded in his waterfront Spanish. “We will hurt neither of you. Come.”

  Once on deck they found themselves in the midst of a scene of wild activity, carried out in the mist with the aid of torches and lanthorns. Guns and other weapons were being stacked upon the deck and the resentful crew—after all they had just been through a terrible storm and now to find themselves captured without so much as crossing swords with the enemy was really too much—were being herded down below decks, muttering.

  She did not see the buccaneer captain who was doubtless occupied in the captain’s cabin, gathering up the valuable maps and the ship’s manifest.

  Lars Lindstrom grinned as he boosted Carolina over the side onto the other ship that was now lashed firmly to the Valeroso. Even in the mist Carolina’s startled gaze recognized it as the Santiago.

  But that meant Lord Thomas was here! Nearby she saw Captain Santos, who stood unarmed with his arms folded, watching sourly. She turned to him.

  “There was an Englishman tied to the Santiago’s mast for punishment just before you took me aboard,” she cried. “Can you tell me what happened to him?” Captain Santos had been watching his mother approach with some trepidation. Now he favored Carolina with a cold look. “All the prisoners save you were transferred to the Coraje before the storm struck,” he told her. “And we lost the Coraje in the storm—we do not know what has happened to her.”

  He winced as his mother cried reproachfully, “How could you have let this happen to us? You could not have been watching!”

  Disappointment at Captain Santos’ words flooded over Carolina. Her hopes had flared the moment she realized she was stepping onto the Santiago's broad deck—and now to find that Thomas was gone somewhere else, possibly lost . . . !

  “Come along, Doña Hernanda,” she said sadly, knowing that it would do no good at this point for the older woman to heap recriminations on her son. “Watch your step over those ropes.” She steadied Doña Hernanda and added beneath her breath, “It would not do for you to fall—you would jangle!” Doña Hernanda, mindful of her rings and baubles, paused to cast one vengeful glance at her son, who ducked his head and looked away. Then she moved on, treading carefully indeed as she and Carolina followed Lars to a comfortable cabin quite similar to the one they had so recently left.

  “This cabin will be yours to share,” he stated matter-of-factly. “But you must remain in it, you will not have free run of the ship. Captain’s orders.”

  Carolina nodded.

  “What will happen to the Valeroso?” she asked, for she had visions of a magnificent mountain of flames fading away into the ocean mist as the mighty galleon sank beneath the waves—even as the Fair Alice had done on a sunny afternoon.

  Lars Lindstrom shrugged. “We will put a prize crew aboard her and sail her to Tortuga.”

  “I had thought you might—”

  “Sink her? She is too valuable a vessel. Captain Kells may decide to outfit her and send her against the Spanish, just as he will do with the Santiago here.” He patted the cabin wall.

  And then he left them—Doña Hernanda to wring her hands and worry about her son, whom she alternately wept over and denounced as negligent, Carolina to sit wistfully upon the edge of her bunk and ponder the strange ways of fate. She the runaway, captured and now recap
tured, was on her way to a buccaneer stronghold—and still she knew nothing of Thomas’s fate.

  A prize crew was hastily put aboard the Valeroso, and Carolina could feel the Santiago creak and hear her sails catch the breeze with a snap as they pulled away from the other ship. It was very late—near morning, she thought—when there was a discreet knock on her door. She opened the door a crack and found herself looking into the smiling face of Lars Lindstrom.

  “Mistress Willing,” he said, “did I understand you to say that the Spanish lady with you is Captain Santos’ mother?”

  “Yes, that is what Doña Hernanda told me. Is he all right? She is worried about his safety.”

  “He is well enough. Our captain wishes to know how you came to be aboard a Spanish ship, Mistress Willing?”

  “Why, tell him that I had sailed from Yorktown on the Fair Alice bound for London and we were attacked by three Spanish galleons. The other passengers were put aboard the Santiago and later transferred, I was told, to the Coraje. But because Doña Hernanda’s personal maid had been washed overboard, I was transferred to the Valeroso and ordered to take her place.”

  “As her personal maid?”

  “Yes.”

  Did she see a flicker in those blue eyes? She could not be sure. “I will inform Captain Kells of what you have told me,” he said tersely. As she was about to close the door he added, “Keep your door latched. Remember there are men aboard this vessel who have not seen a woman for some time and such a woman as you— never!”

  With this parting complimentary warning, he was gone, leaving Carolina to report to Doña Hernanda in Spanish what had been said.

  A short time later Lars was back. “Captain Kells,” he told her laconically through the door, “will see you now.”

  So they had been summoned to an audience with the buccaneer captain! Some of Doña Hernanda’s alarm was communicated to Carolina as Lars led the way to the great cabin in the stem.