A furious Spanish pirate and a foiled conspirator made formidable enemies even if they had not joined forces. Toss the treasure from the Nuestro Santisimo Victorio into the stew pot and Dante wondered if he, himself, was not a little mad.
Stubs’ advice had been sound. Watch and track and wait for reinforcements to arrive. The Avenger, captained by his father, Simon Dante, was the largest and most heavily armed of the Dante fleet. Jonas would row his Tribute by hand if necessary to come to his brother’s rescue. The problem was that both ships had peeled off and sailed for New Providence. That only left his sister’s ship, the Iron Rose, and Geoffrey Pitt’s Christiana at Pigeon Cay, neither of which had left the recent fracas in the Straits undamaged.
No, he could not count on help arriving any time soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The master gunner, James Giddings, and two of the twenty men he had set out with after leaving the Endurance arrived in camp mid-morning. Charged with following the progress of the Muertraigo’s galleons and setting up a system of runners to warn of their approach, Giddings had moved quickly along the coast and was surprised to find Dante’s larger group had arrived first at the Wells. He had left two men at each post, a mile apart. As the galleons passed each position, one man would run ahead to alert the next post, while one remained behind to build the signal fires that would guide the other Dante ships through the bight... should any of them arrive in time.
Giddings was pleased to report the Endurance had safely left the inlet at dusk the previous night with the wind in her sails and further, as a parting gesture Stubs had, to the rousing cheer of the men listening, holed the crippled galleon and sent it to a watery grave. Muertraigo’s remaining two galleons along with the English Cormorant had been well into the bight by then, but not too far that they would not have seen and heard the thunder of the guns.
Rowly grinned. “Good on Stubs. The Spaniard will think we’ve done our worst and are heading for home.”
Dante rubbed a hand across the nape of his neck. “Perhaps. In any case we have a good deal of work to do.” He cast around the camp and frowned. “Where is Chandler?”
“Right beside you,” said a voice, so close on Dante’s shoulder he jumped back and put a hand to his sword hilt. All he could see at first was a cluster of rocks and bush, but then the rock seemed to move and take on the shape of a man.
William Chandler stepped forward, hands on his hips and laughed, a deep-bellied sound that brought most of the crewmen who had been resting by the fire to their feet. He was stripped down to a narrow loincloth and his exposed skin was smeared head to toe with muck.
“You asked what was in the heavy barrels I insisted we bring. Now you know. ‘Tis mud from the caverns, home to the wee creatures that take on the appearance of whatever you stand beside. I was told by the natives that they used it to turn themselves invisible when the Spanish came to raid the island for slaves.”
As soon as Dante’s wits returned, he reached out a hand to touch Chandler’s arm. He studied the slime that came away on his fingers, marvelling at the way the color and hue changed as he moved his hand from rock to leaf. It took a few moments for the little creatures to work their magic, but when they did, it looked as if he had lost the tops of his fingers.
“I’ll be damned.”
“They don’t like cloth unless you piss on it first,” William said with a toothy grin, then brusquely cleared his throat when he saw Eva come up quietly behind Gabriel. “Beg pardon, my dear, but a fact of nature is a fact of nature.”
“I noticed it in the cavern,” she said. “That they faded when I wiped my fingers on my shirt. How long does the effect last?”
“A couple of hours, no more. But ponder the beauty of having half a hundred men lying on the beach and rising up at once looking like living sand. The Spaniards will do more than just piss down their legs. They’ll be afraid to step five paces onto the shore afterward without shooting at it every inch of the way! At night, what’s more, the little creatures glow, as you’ve seen, and for that, we can use their own former crewmates against them.”
He reached behind and picked up one of the skulls he had brought from the macabre wall in the cavern. It was smeared with the mud and blended, for the moment, with the rock it had been sitting on. “In the caves, they glow off the light each other makes, but under starlight or moonlight, they turn white as ghosts. Imagine a score of them set on the rocks or on the beach.”
“Aye,” Rowly muttered. “That would cause a squirt or two.”
Dante’s men, who had been spooked once already, saw the skull and took several steps back en masse with some hurriedly crossing themselves.
“Spaniards,” William guffawed loudly raising the skull in his hand, “who were afraid of what I had under my loincloth.”
His attempt at humor was rewarded by a few nervous chuckles and an arched eyebrow from Eva.
Gabriel was admittedly intrigued. He knew of whole crews who had abandoned a ship after seeing the strange lights known as St. Elmo’s Fire dancing across the yards and masts. Seeing ghostly, disembodied skulls could very well send the fervently religious Spaniards into a panic.
He turned to Rowly and Giddings. “Scout the beach for the best positions to place the men, both the live ones and the, ah, dead ones. I’d give a few fingers and toes to have a couple of stout cannon to mount on the hills, but we’ll have to make do with what we have.”
Another commotion at the edge of camp had him turning in time to see Billy Crab emerging from the forest with the carcass of an enormous wild boar slung across his shoulders and two thirty-pound piglets dangling from his belt.
Rowly looked around at the clutch of crewmen who still had not moved. He waved a hand and spurred them on with a jovial bellow. “Don’t just stand around gawping, lads! Get those fires going! Looks like we’ll be fillin’ our bellies with fresh meat tonight.”
~~
While the boars were skinned, cleaned and spitted over the fire to roast, Gabriel took most of the men down to the beach. They worked hard until dusk, digging out trenches and finding hidey-holes in the rocky slope that were ideal for the ambush.
Giddings, after chewing on Gabriel’s comment about the lack of cannon, came up with a clever, if somewhat archaic alternative. He found pairs of slender, pliable palms and tied ropes to the top. He then fashioned a sling out of a leather pouch and while Dante watched with a skeptical eye, he had men haul back on the makeshift catapult and load rocks into the sling. On his signal, the ropes were released and the rocks were sent hurling out over the ridge to the beach below, kicking up sprays of sand where they landed.
“Why does that make me feel like David flinging stones at Goliath?” Gabriel wondered aloud.
Giddings, a man of few words, only grinned and beckoned Billy Crab forward. The next sling held a hollowed-out coconut shell filled with pebbles and gunpowder. When it was released, and before it struck the ground, Billy drew his crossbow and fired a bolt tipped with a flaming rag. The bolt struck the shell in mid air and the two halves, sealed with mud, broke apart, peppering the beach with fiery little missiles.
Dante looked at the grinning gunner and his new protégé.
“He hasn’t missed a shot yet,” Giddings remarked casually. “I also plan to render the boar fat to use as Greek fire. Burns as hot as pitch or tar. I’ll need to take a few men off the beach to gather and clean out the coconuts.”
“Take as many as you need,” Dante nodded, deciding he was glad Giddings was an ally and not an opponent.
The rest of the long afternoon was spent stripped to the waist and working alongside the men. At one point Gabriel stopped for water and saw Eva sitting with Eduardo and the others who had been set to the task of cracking the coconuts and scraping out the sweet white meat so the shells could be dried. Another time he noticed her walking past carrying a kettle full of melted boar fat, her face shiny with sweat, her hair flying loose about her shoulders. He was about to call to one of the
men to relieve her of the heavy pot, when she lifted one hand off the handle to toss him a smile and a wave.
He watched her until she rejoined the circle of working men, none of whom jumped up to help her, but all of whom approved of the fact the mermaid was willing to work as hard as them.
Another thought occurred as he watched her set the pot on the sand, for he could not remember a cast iron kettle being among the critical items they brought along on the trek across the island. The answer came when he saw William Chandler dragging a timber sled out of the woods, the slats loaded down with supplies. Over the past four years, Dante realized, he must have anticipated the need to squirrel away caches of stores and equipment in various locations along the way between the beach and the wreck of the Victorio.
By nightfall, the men were exhausted and hungry. Chandler had gone foraging again and come back with a sack full of wild onions, roots, mangos, and peppers hot enough to scald lips and tongues for hours after the meal. They were used sparingly to season a broth made from the boiled heads and viscera, and by the time the meat was roasted, the men sat down to a feast that left them happily bloated and covered in grease.
~~
Eva ate until her belly protested. She sat between Gabriel and her father listening to them exchange stories about their privateering adventures, and when Dante excused himself to set up the system of watches and lookouts, Eva remained with her father. They talked quietly together, still trying to catch up on what they missed in each other’s lives for the past four years. Of most interest to Eva was how he had come to lose his eye, but after several attempts to pry the story from him failed, she concluded the memory was either too painful or too gruesome for him to talk about.
When his remaining eye began to droop, she gave him a warm kiss on the cheek and made the excuse that she, herself, was tired. Wide awake, she curled up on a bed of palm fronds and within moments heard him snoring from twenty feet away.
She could see Gabriel from her pallet and was content just to watch him for a while. He and Rowly and Giddings were talking strategy, drawing out plans in the dirt with some broken sticks. Her gaze went from there up to the umbrella of surrounding trees, where she was lulled by the play of reflected firelight on the underside of the swaying palm fronds. Here and there through gaps she could see patches of starlit sky.
Two months, she thought. Two short months ago she would not, in any of her wildest dreams, have envisioned being part of such a scene with a belly full of wild boar, a bed made of leaves and sand, tree branches for a roof, and crew of rough-hewn privateers for company. She would not have imagined wearing breeches and a man’s cambric shirt and feeling utterly comfortable doing so. She would never have believed she would shed her clothes in a forest pond and, naked, seduce a man into joining her there. Most of all, she would not have imagined spending a blissfully shameless night in the arms of a man like Gabriel Dante, easily the most dangerous, most exciting, most enigmatic man she had ever encountered.
And her father! Gracious good God, she hardly recognized him as the perfectly attired, elegantly appointed, respectable man of business he had been in Portsmouth. The wild mane of hair and beard aside, he was solid muscle and strength now. His laugh was robust and heartfelt, not the forced, politely reserved response to something he did not find amusing in the least. He looked to be at home here in this vast tropical wilderness of rock and underground caverns. He had found the Nuestro Santisimo Victorio, for pity’s sake; he had devised canvas bells for storing air underwater, had turned Billy Crab from being the timid son of a baker into someone who could shimmy up palm trees to pluck coconuts or dive forty feet underwater to salvage treasure. Together they had learned how to survive on strength and wits and unimaginable courage, and she did not believe for an instant that either man would be content returning to Portsmouth. William, in particular, would not be able to tolerate the starched ruffs and political intrigues necessary to pander to the crown and hold the king’s favor.
He would never again be content to sit in an office and watch his ships sail away to exotic ports of call.
But the question that had her contemplating the incredible swath of stars was: Would she?
Despite the flies and the heat and dirt that got between her toes regardless how many times she shook it out of her boots… despite the terror of being on board a ship under attack… could she see herself being strapped into whalebone stomachers again, dragging around yards and yards of heavy brocaded skirts, painting her face white, or having her hair rolled on hot irons and tortured into a nest of tight curls? Could she see herself tolerating the pretentiously false attentions of men like Lawrence Ross who bored her to the point of screaming… over the earthy, honest lusts of a man like Gabriel Dante? Could she return to the tepid life she led back in England?
Reginald Bernard, her father’s loyal clerk, was the only one who knew she had survived the fire to board a ship bound for the Indies. But gently bred young women simply did not do such a thing regardless of the reason. Even supposing she could recover from the scandal of letting people believe she had died in the fire, it was unlikely she could convince anyone she had remained an unsoiled virgin after spending time on board the Endurance, locked away in a cabin with one of the most infamous privateers on the Spanish Main.
Her gaze returned to the firepit. Rowly and Giddings were no longer there. Dante sat alone, the rugged lines of his face burnished by the flames. He appeared to be lost in his own thoughts, but after a moment he looked directly at Eva as if he had felt her eyes searching for answers.
If she should be afraid of anything, she should be afraid of him. Not because of who or what he was, but because he was teasing her with the knowledge that there was something more exciting than whalebones and brocade, more exciting than court intrigues and large gloomy castles, more exciting than crowded streets with overflowing gutters. He prized his freedom and lived each minute of each day as if it was to be the last, taking full advantage of any opportunity life threw his way. He had narrowly escaped death a few days before their paths crossed, and again, just the other night when he turned his guns against Muertraigo. If the Spaniard’s ships arrived at Spanish Wells within the next day or two, as they most likely would, he would be facing death again and spitting in its eye. Whether Fate spit back this time or the next was the only unknown, and Dante did not appear to waste precious time or breath worrying about it.
Could she, Evangeline Chandler, distant cousin to the king of England, ever learn to live for just those moments as well?
Would a man like Gabriel Dante even want her to share those moments with him?
He tipped his head and smiled as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. As she watched, he stood and casually scuffed over the markings in the dirt, then walked across the firelit clearing to the path that led into the forest.
Eva knew where he was going. Every drop of blood that was racing through her body wanted her to follow, wanted to sink with him into the misty waters of the pool, wanted to feel him surging strong and potent within her.
It was a moment that would not come again, and knowing this, accepting the consequences—regardless of the consequences—she rose from her bed of palm fronds and followed him into the forest glade.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
The beach was deserted, the wide strip of sand yawned in a lazy crescent with a rocky slope framing the shore and leading up to a higher bluff crowned with graceful palms and tall fir trees. Nothing moving on land save the tiny swirls of sand spun by the breeze. The skeletal remains of a broken hut was at one end of the beach along with evidence of old firepits near the base of the slope where former crews had landed to fill their barrels with fresh water. Stranded lengths of twisted driftwood had collected in a shallow tidal pool, used as perches by a small flock of pelicans. Gulls squatting on the rocks had seen the three tall-masted ships gliding toward the bay and they left their crevices and nests to start screaming a welcome as they circled overhead.
; There were no visible footprints in the sand, no signs that anyone had landed recently for water or any other reason.
Estevan Muertraigo lowered the spyglass and pursed his lips thoughtfully. He had been staring through the glass so long, studying the beach from one end to the other, there was a circular pink imprint around his eye.
“Anything?” he asked.
“The lookouts report nothing, Capitan,” said a senior officer. “Just the flying rats and the pelicans.”
Muertraigo nodded with satisfaction. “Lower away a boat and send a landing party ashore. I want men up on that high point—” he indicated the position with the end of his spyglass—“and for half a mile back along either side of the cliffs overlooking the bight in both directions. I want ample warning if anything moves on land or in the water.”
“Si, Capitan.”
Muertraigo glanced sidelong at Lawrence Ross, who had remained on board the San Mateo, not so much by choice as by no choice whatsoever. The Spaniard had been caught unawares once by a cunning Englishman. He was not about to be double-crossed by this one, especially after discovering that the lovely blonde whore on board the Dante ship was Ross’s former fiancé. Having seen the beauty up close, he could not believe a man would be stupid enough to cast her aside and Muertraigo was now suspicious of every word, every vow of assurance that came from Ross’s lips.
“Tell me again, my friend, how you were to contact William Chandler.”
“I was to land in the bay, build a tall signal fire on the highest point of the bluff, and he would contact me. This leads me to believe his camp cannot be too far away.”
Muertraigo curled his lip and studied the narrow, aristocratic face without any effort to conceal his disdain. “On these islands, the nights are so dark you can see a small flame from many miles away.” His ferret-like eyes flicked to his first officer, Diego Castellano. “Why are you still standing here? Dispatch the landing party at once.”
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