“Pressed to speed, I am much more adept at un-dressing, 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 Valor. 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 upon 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 under way, with Beau at the helm, heading 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 affect 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 staunch 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 Valor, 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 parlay?”
“They thought a proposal delivered by me would carry more weight than if it came via a filth-encrusted sailor.”
“Ah. From one gentleman to another?”
“My dear captain, while you might wear the veneer ably enough,” he 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 actually blinked 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 standoff, 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 deck rail. “Shall we see who blinks first?”
~~~
Juliet reacted without thinking.
She had watched the jolly boat take Varian across to the Valor, had followed the splash 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 Gabriel's 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 Valor’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 Valor 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 Valor 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 gunwales 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 the swivel gun, 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 Valor, 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 cannons that were left on the lower deck and starting fires where ever 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 own 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 tiller, 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 and, using the lip of the deck as cover, 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 Spaniard’s 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 defences.
“Away!” Juliet shouted. “All hands away!”
The men of the Iron Rose needed no prompting. As soon as the muskets were silenced, they were swarming over the rails, their knives in their teeth, their cutlasses and pikes raised to meet the sea of soldiers flowing across the Valor’s deck toward them. They clawed their way over the bloody remains of shattered crewmen, cutting down others who were still alive and screaming to be freed. Those who had their bonds slashed joined the fray with rage in their hearts and eyes, joining the charge against the Spaniards with anything they could grasp to use as weapon, even with bare fists if nothing else was at hand.
Juliet emptied the four pistols she wore in her belts, then flung them aside and fought through the crush of helmeted soldiers with her sword in her right hand, a dagger in her left. Arrows continued to fly overhead and bodies fell screaming from the yards into the melee below. The gunners on board the Iron Rose, fired another raking broadside into the Valor’s belly, sending chunks of planking and hot cinders rising on explosive forks of orange flame. Rigging lines were cut along with the freed crewmen and yards swung loose, hurling more Spaniards off balance. As soon as the Valor’s crewmen were freed from the rigging, the Rose’s bow chasers began firing up into the tops, earning the alternate name they bore with bloody justification: murderers.
Water began to pour through the holes in the Valor’s belly. Smoke and steam choked the passageways and stairwells; seamen who had thought to remain below were forced up on deck, where they were cut down by privateers or shot by their own soldiers in the confusion.
Juliet fought her way to the quarterdeck, where she had seen the greatest concentration of scarlet doublets and steel breastplates. It was also where she had last seen her brother, his body jerking and twisting in outrage against his bonds. He had been shouting encouragement, cheering on the men of the Iron Rose as they attacked his ship, at the same time screaming for someone to cut him loose so he could join the fight. Juliet was almost there when she found herself cornered against the bulkhead below the quarterdeck, fending off attacks from a clutch of Spaniards armed with heavy cutlasses.
Nathan was on her left. He lunged at one of the soldiers to block a thrust, deflecting it with a powerful strike from his own blade. The steel snapped at the hilt but the Spaniard had a dagger in his other hand, which he drove forward and plunged hilt-deep in Nathan’s shoulder. He jerked it back and would have stabbed again but the intent was deflected as a thin slash of steel came out of seeming nowhere and sent the Spaniard’s dagger spinning across the deck, the fist still clenched around the hilt.
“We’re going to have to stop meeting like this, my love,” Varian said, pausing to flash a grin before he moved to stand beside her, fighting shoulder to shoulder, facing their attackers. His face was bloody, his ruff was gone, a sleeve of his doublet was parted at the shoulder, revealing a deep gash in his upper arm. He was bleeding from another cut on his thigh, but it did not seem to hamper his strides as he helped her clear a path to the ladderway.
With her back amply defended, Juliet vaulted up the steps to the quarterdeck. Crewmen from the Rose had swung across on cables and were engaging an enormous giant of a man in one corner, while on the opposite side of the deck, a Spaniard wearing the steel breastplate of an officer fumbled with something at the rail. At first she could not see what he was doing, but then he turned, his hand gripping the long brass monkey tail of a loaded falconet, swivelling the iron barrel around to aim the muzzle into the shrouds where Gabriel was tied.
Juliet saw the spluttering linstock. She saw his mouth draw back in a grin, heard something that sounded like a deep, slow distortion of a curse. She saw the flat black eyes staring out at her from beneath the curved sweep of his helmet and recognized Cristobal Recalde at once. The shock halted her a moment, long enough for him to show her the glowing fuse he was lowering toward the touch hole of the bow chaser.
Juliet heard herself scream. She was aware of her feet carrying her forward, but her steps seemed to drag and her legs were so heavy, it felt as if she was slogging through waist-deep quicksand. Gabriel turned, again so slowly the beads of sweat on his brow looked like droplets of syrup glistening where they fanned through the air. Their gazes met, for just an instant, but it was an instant that lasted eternity, filled with broken images of every smile, every laugh, every childhood prank they had happily suffered at each other’s hands. His battered lips were moving, he was saying something she could not hear, but by then she was reaching out, she was leaping into the air, she was smashing into Recalde’s chest and shoulder just as he touched the hissing fuse to the powder hole.
Juliet seemed to hang there i
n mid-air as the powder sparked and flared. The delay was just long enough for her to know she had knocked Recalde’s hands away from the barrel. She heard the louder boom as the main charge exploded, and she saw the gleaming iron beads of grapeshot bursting out from the flared maw of the gun, but instead of spraying the shrouds where Gabriel was tied, they were now aimed straight at her chest...
~~~
Immediately after the Iron Rose opened fire, all three Spanish galleons put on sail and started forward to join the attack. The first to reach the battling ships was swinging into position to unleash a full broadside when Isabeau brought the Avenger cutting across her path. Gunners on both vessels were ready, but the privateer was lighter, faster, bolder than the Spaniard, and the Avenger’s cannon made short work of the rails and ports on the larboard side, blasting great holes in the decking and unseating whole gun carriages, sending them rearing back on cracked timbers. The Spaniards retaliated by tearing holes in the Avenger’s tops, but she was already trimmed to fighting sail and merely shook off the affront, coming hard about, and firing a hot round straight down the bows, blasting the tall forecastle with a series of broadsides that enveloped both ships in clouds of smoke.
Breaking free of the sulphurous yellow fog, Isabeau ordered more sail and brought the helm about again, closing the circle tighter this time, knowing the greater threat was not from the galleon’s fixed batteries, which were ineffective at less than three hundred yards, but from the scores of marksmen that lined her yards and rails like fire ants and if allowed to get close enough, would slaughter the valiant fighters on board the Iron Rose and the Valor. With Lucifer at the helm, she brought the Avenger in again on a swath of curling blue water, this time sweeping the Spaniard’s upper decks and tops with a barrage of chain and sangrenel.
Pirate Wolf Trilogy Page 67
