Juliet found the dark eyes waiting for her when she turned. “So much for Johnny Boy thinking you could not read a chart,” she murmured.
“I am just as likely to be a hundred leagues out one way or the other but I do know the constellations that lie over the equator and we are considerably north.”
“Is this supposed to win my trust?”
“Would it help to nudge you closer if I told you I am also aware of the upcoming rendezvous on New Providence Island? If my dates are not as muddled as my thinking, I would estimate the annual meeting of all the privateers should happen some time within the next fortnight.
“Did Gabriel tell you that?”
He shook his head. “I knew before I left London. That was where the Argus was bound.”
“You were just going to sail into a harbor full of privateers? Demand they haul in their guns and follow you back to England like docile lambs?”
“I was empowered to offer some excellent incentives aside from the amnesty and the pardons.”
“Titles? Lands? Estates? Tossing a knighthood at someone who already rules the sea is rather like tossing someone a coin to fetch their trunks, when that someone already has so many chests filled with coins, there is a lack of warehouses to store them.”
He held her gaze a moment then spread his hands with a helpless shrug. “In that case, I have nothing else to offer but the truth. I am not here to spy on your family. I have no intentions of studying stars and charts and landmarks with the intent to reveal the location of this island to anyone, nor do I have any tawdry ulterior motive for—” he leaned forward, kissing her hard enough to suck the breath from her mouth— “doing that. And if my proposal appeared stiff with terror, it is because you are a very terrifying young woman, and because it has confused the bloody hell out of me to see how easily you have managed to twist my entire world... everything I knew up until a few days ago to be solid and real and unchangeable... into something I hardly recognize at all.”
He raked a hand into her hair, but while it remained there and while his eyes continued to search her face, he did not try to kiss her a second time.
Juliet did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved. Nor did she know if she would have kissed him back or pushed him away if he had pulled her into his arms again. It was not even faintly comforting to know that she was not alone in her confusion, for if nothing else, she had assumed... she had known, dammit, that she could rely on his ingrained sense of ducal propriety to keep this thing between them on the lowest possible level of complication.
Next, he would be spewing declarations of love, and she would be expected to know how to respond.
She surged to her feet. “We should go inside. I am famished and my mouth tastes like seawater.”
Varian was slower to rise, slower to clear his face and rearrange it in a less compromising expression. “If I am to meet your father, I would beg the chance to make myself a little more presentable.”
“The clothes you wore yesterday make you look arrogant and self-serving. In truth, you will make a better impression in calfskin and cambric.”
“I bow to your better judgment, madam.”
“Do you indeed? Then brace yourself, sir, for the real judge and jury awaits you inside.”
~~~
Varian had not yet made the acquaintance of either Lucifer or Geoffrey Pitt, though their reputations had certainly preceded them. The Cimaroon was possibly the tallest and broadest man he had ever seen in his life; a huge black mountain of muscle glowering in one corner of the room. His eyes were like two bottomless holes burned into his head, and when he peeled his lips back in a grin, the filed points of his teeth glinted like white daggers.
Pitt was only slightly less intimidating. He was not as tall nor as solidly built as the other men who crowded the great room but the bulk of his muscle, Juliet had warned, was between his ears. He was of a similar age as Simon Dante—mid fifties—but wore less weather lines on his face, and showed no gray in the sun-bleached waves of his hair. His eyes were the color of jade, pale green and intently focussed. A man who thought to tell him a lie was a fool indeed, for although his smile was deceptively friendly, his instincts were as sharp as a blade. Proof of this was in the way his mouth drifted upward into a speculative little smile as he looked from Varian to Juliet, then back to Varian as she finished the introductions.
“You will join us in a glass of brandy?” Simon Dante asked. “Or would you prefer to try our island rum?”
“Brandy, thank you. I’m afraid my stomach has not acquired a keen enough tolerance for your rum.”
Dante was also studying the rumpled hair, the damp clothes, the fresh nick on his temple as he filled a glass and handed it to him. “You look as if you’ve had a rough time of it, lad. What new torment has my daughter been putting you through?”
Happily, Juliet had not yet taken a mouthful of her own wine and when she coughed, it was just air.
“She offered to show me a breathtaking view of your island, and was kind enough to take me up to the summit,” Varian said without missing much of a beat. “I must say, I am in awe, Captain, for you command the horizon as far as one can see in any direction. A pity you do not hold sway over the insects that attacked us on the way up and again on the way down.”
“Vicious little beggars, were they not?” Gabriel agreed raising his glass. “I was forced to use my sword to clear a path for us.”
“You went up the mountain?” Simon looked at his younger son as if such a strenuous activity was not a common day occurrence.
“It was a mood.” He shrugged. “It came upon me unawares. Besides, someone had to chaperone these two. Jolly might have tossed him off the cliffs before we had a chance to hear his pretty speeches from the king.”
Dante glanced pointedly at the bruise beginning to darken on his son’s cheek then turned to Varian and smiled as he raised his glass. “Your continued good health, sir.”
“And yours, Captain.”
They drank, their gazes locked over the rims of the goblets.
“And so you have come to offer the brethren an Act of Grace. All sins and past transgressions pardoned if they will but abide by the terms of the treaty with Spain—have I the fair gist of it?”
“There are a few additional incentives, but yes. That would reduce the three pages of whys and wherefores in the king’s intent to a single sentence.”
“Was this Act signed by the king’s own hand? Or did he have one of his ministers do his dirty work?”
“It was the king himself. I witnessed the signing with mine own eyes. It was signed in the presence of the Spanish Ambassador as well, who then sent a copy to Spain.”
“You have this decree on your person?”
“Unfortunately, no. It was lost with the Argus.”
Jonas snorted from across the room. “Convenient.”
Varian turned and looked into the amber eyes.
“Well it is true. I could say I was travelling with papers to prove I was the Emperor of China, but if they went down with the ship, how would I prove it? For that matter,” Jonas added, “we only have your word that you even are who you say you are.”
“I have no good earthly reason to lie, sir,” Varian said quietly. “And my word is good enough for most men of my acquaintance.”
“Look around you. Do we appear to be like most men of your acquaintance?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake.” Juliet, who had been sitting with a leg draped over the arm of a chair, rose and went to the sideboard to refill her wine. “Why not just fetch a pot of boiling oil and have him pick a stone off the bottom. If his flesh melts off the bone, you will know he is lying, if it remains unblemished, you will know he speaks the truth.”
The only one who responded to her sarcasm was Lucifer, who grinned and nodded as if he approved of the idea.
Simon gently swirled the contents of his goblet. “I am inclined to give our guest the benefit of the doubt—for the moment anyway—unless yo
u have a damned good reason why we should not?”
Jonas snorted. “I don’t trust him. That’s reason enough for me.”
Isabeau came walking through the open door. “If he had brown eyes instead of blue, that would be reason enough for you, Jonas dear, when your belly is full of rum.”
She went directly to the enormous cherrywood desk in the corner of the room and slapped down a sheaf of papers. The topmost ones were curled at the edges; some still had bits of wax stuck to the parchment where the seals had been broken.
She joined Juliet by the sideboard and poured a full measure of wine, draining it before she turned to address her family.
“I have been reading for most of the day,” she announced. “Aside from the manifests of crew and cargo, there were the logs—which I will get to in a moment—and an inordinately thick sheaf of personal letters entrusted to the capitán to carry home to Spain. The Spaniards are effusive, to say the least, and whine at endless length about the food, the bugs, the swamps, the conditions in port, the noise from the garrison barracks, how much they long to be going home, how they miss the warm plains of Seville, the breezes off the Pyrenees, the snow, the olive trees... Pages and pages of tear-blotted script bemoaning their plight to lovers and mistresses and wives and families. I am ready to pull my teeth out to save them grinding together every time I read the salutation, mi amore!” She paused and held out her cup for Juliet to refill. “Then there are the official reports from the commandants, from the gobernador, from the damned lackey in charge of seeing there are enough linens on the tables in the officers mess. And the cook! Dear Christ weeping on the cross, the poor bastard is beside himself for the short supplies of vessie. Three pages he goes on about it. Three damned pages about vessie, written in a hand that looked like it used a chicken foot as a quill! For the blood of God, what is vessie? Is it the name of a girl or something to eat?”
When no one was able to answer, Varian ventured to raise a finger. “If I may, I believe it is the bladder of a pig, used for steaming meats and stews.”
“Can it steam away a pounding head and bleary eyes? If so, I shall demand a crate myself. As it is, I was driven to stab the letter a dozen times to gain relief. You’ll find the shreds there, right beside a second letter from the same poor bastard, bemoaning the fact that although there were over twenty ships in Baranquilla preparing to embark for Havana to join the most glorious armada to set sail in his lifetime, alas he was not destined to be on board one of them.”
“God bless cooks who aspire to greater things,” Gabriel mused aloud.
“Happily for us, he was not always a cook,” Isabeau said. “Apparently his family had wanted him to become a priest, but he preferred to worship at the altar of greed instead and I gather he was banished to Nuevo España by way of punishment. Believe me, I know all of his miseries and complaints, even to the state of his bowels. You must be the Duke of Harrow,” she said brightly, coming forward.
“Comtess,” he said, offering a formal bow. “Your servant.”
“Comtess? Beware of another stabbing, sir, if you address me thus again. You may call me Beau, and I shall call you... ?”
“Varian.” He seemed startled by the instant informality, almost as startled as he was by his own dreadful faux pas in instinctively reaching for her nonexistent hand to kiss. “The honor and the pleasure is, of course, mine.”
She studied his face through narrowed eyes. “I see my daughter has been practising her stitchery again. You have improved, my dear,” she added, smiling over her shoulder. “And thankfully so, for it would have been a shame to mar such a handsome fellow.”
Varian touched his fingertips to the wound on his cheek. Apart from one brief glimpse when Beacom had shaved him yesterday, he had deliberately avoided examining the wound that ran along his hairline. Handsome was not a word he would have applied to what he had seen in that reflected mess of knotted threads and mottled bruises.
“As for the log,” she said, turning to her husband. “It reads like a travel journal. The captain sailed her from Havana to New Leon, in Mexico, then south to Vera Cruz where he took on his cargo of silver coins. From there he continued on down the isthmus to Nombre de Dios, where he agreed to carry crates of spices from the Manilla galleons that were in excess of what the merchant ships could hold. He also acquired Captain Recalde and a hundred troops from the garrison. A week after they left Nombre de Dios, it appears the capitán del navio of the Santo Domingo had an accident—he fell off the forecastle deck in a rain storm and broke his back—at which time Recalde assumed the post. They touched in at Porto Bello, Baranquilla, Cartagena, and Margarite Island. At each stop, they took on cargo and more soldiers who were bound for Havana. At their last stop, after heading due north to Hispaniola, the captain was relieved to find a large number of ships waiting in port—eighteen of them, to be precise. Some of the troops he had taken on earlier, were transferred to these vessels to ease the overcrowding on his decks, which had at one point reached nearly seven hundred men.”
“Seven hundred?” Juliet asked.
“Not including the seamen. So you were even luckier than you realized, m’dear. If you had come across the Santo Domingo a week earlier, you would have been outnumbered six to one instead of just three to one.”
Geoffrey Pitt was frowning. “Eighteen ships at Hispaniola? A normal count would be six or seven.”
“And don’t forget the Dutchman’s report of seeing more ships than usual off Maracaibo,” Gabriel added. “You might want to ask our guest about that, however. He has an intriguing explanation about three fleets overlapping, putting as many as one hundred treasure galleons in Havana waiting to leave for Spain.”
“One hundred galleons? There hasn’t been a fleet that size in—”
“Over twenty years,” Varian said, saving Pitt the trouble.
“I should think closer to thirty,” Isabeau said quietly. “That was the last time they ordered all of their naval ships, and most especially all of their warships home, and no, it was not because of three fleets overlapping. It was in anticipation of launching la Felicissima Invencible—the biggest invasion fleet the world had seen—against England the following spring. Do you read Spanish, Varian?”
“Why... yes, yes I do.”
“Good. Then this should be of special interest to you.” She returned to the sheaf of papers she had left on the desk and raised the topmost sheet. It was a single page of heavy parchment bearing the remains of two wax seals and the florid signature of the governor of New Spain.
“It seems the king has recalled all of his top ranking officials and ordered most of the troops and warships home to Castile. He also indulges in some bragging, stating that they have had great success in lulling the English king into believing they are committed to upholding a lasting peace, and that with the return of the fleet to Spain, they will at last have sufficient men and ships, as well as the financial means to launch another invasion armada in the new year whereupon they will finally avenge the honor of their noble ancestors as well as eradicate the heretic devils from England once and for all, restoring the power and glory of the One True God.” Isabeau came forward and presented the document to Varian. “As I understand it, you have been sent here to convince my husband and the other privateers to keep their ships in port? Are you quite certain that is what you want to do?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Varian was invited to accompany the pirate wolf and Geoffrey Pitt to the chart room. It proved to occupy one of the largest areas on the main floor and was aptly named for the breathtakingly huge reproductions of continents and coastlines painted directly onto two of the sixteen foot high walls. The territories that comprised the Spanish mainland in the new world—the Spanish Main—occupied one full quadrant and included minute details of the coastline that flowed from the tip of Florida around the gulf coast to the New Kingdom of Leon, down to the Yucatan, Panama, and across the northern coast of Tierra Firma from Cartagena to Paria. Painted inside the gr
eat gulf were the islands of the Greater Antilles, the Baja Mas Islands, and the Caribbee Isles. Each known city, port, cay and islet was neatly identified, the sea lanes and passages marked as well as the thin blue latitude line denoting the Tropic of Cancer.
England, the western coast of Europe, and the Mediterranean filled another wall, while the third was filled with shelves of books, racks upon racks of maps, charts, astrological tables. The fourth wall was interrupted by doors leading out to the terrace, but between the two tall banks of doors was an enormous table the size of a dining board on which had been built a three dimensional map of the Spanish Main. It showed islands with any recognizable landmarks, channels, reefs, coastlines, and rivers. Forts were represented by small stone blocks over which flew tiny flags identifying the nation that controlled the island or port. Most were Spanish, but a surprising number of French and Dutch flags showed that inroads were being made, especially in the easterly Caribbee Isles.
At either end of the room were desks, a drawing table, assorted chairs and small reading tables and, as Varian raised disbelieving eyes to the ceiling, suspended overall was a map of the star constellations identical to what one could see if one stood on the roof and gazed heaven-ward.
“My wife’s handiwork,” said Simon Dante, waiting an appropriate amount of time for Varian to absorb the stunning details and close his mouth again. “She was as restless as a piranha through all three of her confinements and I either had to find something for her to do or maroon her on an island somewhere for several months each time.”
“I confess, I am speechless. I have never seen such extraordinarily fine work, not even in churches or cathedrals. The king’s admirals would ransom their souls to have a war room like this.”
Dante smiled to acknowledge the compliment and poured three glasses of rum. The evening meal had been accompanied by an extravagance of wines; a full bodied Rhenish plonk with the soup course, a lusty Madeira with the plates of shrimp and lobster, and a dry, velvety Burgundy with the mutton and beef. French cognac had been served with platters of fruit and cheeses for desert, then sweet cane rum had been enjoyed on the terrace with fat Dutch cigars. Varian’s head should have been reeling, yet it was oddly clear and focussed. Anger undoubtedly played a major role in his sobriety, for he had not only read the document Isabeau Dante had presented with such a cool flourish, but he had studied a dozen others that, taken individually might have added to nothing but rumor and gossip. Taken as a whole they spelled treachery and cunning, deceit and betrayal. His shock, his confusion had barely permitted him to enter into any of the conversations that had swirled around the dining table. He had noticed that Pitt and Simon Dante had exchanged more than a few quiet words between themselves, studying him while they did as if they were trying to gauge his true character. Thus it was with some interest—and wariness—that he accepted their invitation to join them in the chart room.
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