Across a Moonlit Sea (23 page)

“Bah!” he said again, giving the snort less conviction this time. He held out his cup, however, and chided her soundly when she would have filled it only halfway.

“I’ll have to fetch another bottle.”

“Fetch it, then,” he grumbled, “ere a body dies o’ thirst.”

Spit had thoughtfully brought half a dozen on his last visit and Beau took out her knife, about to peel off the wax seal, when she looked up and saw Simon Dante standing in the doorway.

He was just standing there, with several rolled charts tucked under his arm and a large wooden crate balanced in his hands. The shirt he had changed into earlier was black, and with the dark hose, the dark boots, the dark richness of his hair, he had simply blended in with the shadows. Nothing in his expression indicated he had been there long enough to overhear any part of their conversation, but all the same, Beau felt an airless tickle pass across the nape of her neck, like the filament from a spider’s web.

“Come in, come in, come in,” Spence urged, having noticed Dante the same time as Beau. “Fetch up a cup an’ join us.”

“Actually”—Dante grinned and stepped into the brighter circle of light—“it was cups I was bringing you.”

He set the heavy crate on Spence’s desk and started lifting out goblets, all solid gold with jewels encrusted around the stems and bowls. Spence’s eyes bulged when he was handed one embedded with diamonds and sapphires as big as his thumbnail, then another studded with rubies, tourmalines, and topaz.

“I thought, if you were toasting your victory, you should have the proper vessels to do it with.”

Spence beamed and sent his plain silver cup clattering onto the floor. “Daughter, have yer hands frozen on the bottle? Crack it open an’ bring it here. How goes it topside?”

“The lads are putting their backs to it. We should be well fixed by morning.”

“How well fixed?” Spence asked, narrowing his eyes.

“A rough estimate? Sixty thousand. Possibly as much as a fourth more, depending on what the gold and silver will fetch in London.”

Spence’s jaw sagged and he did not seem to notice or care as the bandage on his head dropped down over his eye.

“Sixty thousand … ducats?” Beau asked breathlessly.

Dante held up a goblet and gauged the depth of the fire glinting off the gemstones against the sparks kindling in Beau’s eyes, and handed it to her. “I read ducats off manifests, but I think in terms of good English pounds.”

“Sixty thousand pounds,” Jonas whispered.

“Enough to gild your
Egret
in gold if you want.” Dante laughed.

“Sixty thousand,” Spence muttered. “Why, that would be—roughly—thirty thousand for me, an’ thirty for the rest o’ the crew, including you an’ yers, o’ course,” he added, snapping his head around to Dante, “—for all fought equally hard an’ are equally deservin’ o’ shares.”

Dante raised his goblet to acknowledge the compliment as well as Spence’s generosity. Seeing that the bottle was now indeed frozen in Beau’s hands, Dante lifted it gently away and poured a brimming measure in all of their cups.

“To the Egret,” he said, “and her fearless crew!”

“To the Egret!” Spence roared, spilling as much Madeira down his beard as he did down his throat. “An’ to the good grace an’ common madness o’ Simon Dante, Comte de Tourville, bastard Frenchman, pirate wolf, an’ … have I forgotten aught o’ yer titles, my lord?”

“Admitted heretic and free-rover,” Dante supplied with a smile.

“Oh, aye, aye. Well, we’re all of us heretics in the eyes o’ the foamin’ papists, are we not? An’ though we may rot in hell for our earthly sins, while we’re here, we’ll bloody well enjoy them!”

Beau shared the toast and felt her head take a delicious twirl toward weightlessness.

“Where, by Christ’s tailfeathers, are McCutcheon an’ Pitt an’ that other black devil o’ yours?” Spence demanded. “It was a good part their skill on the guns won us this day, they should be here to share it.”

“Lucifer is standing guard over the Spanish crew—God save them—and McCutcheon could not be dragged from the cargo holds if you wrapped a hundredweight of chain around his ankles. Mister Pitt is, I’m afraid, in love again, so I doubt we’ll see him tonight either.”

“Eh?” Spence sputtered a mouthful of wine down his chin. “Did ye say … in love?”

“The little Spanish duchess is quite a rare beauty, and if there is one thing Pitt cannot resist, it is a
ravissante
dark-haired, blue-eyed young innocent who speaks in waiflike whispers and flutters her lashes like butterfly wings. He was smitten the instant he saw her and I doubt he’ll be much good to either one of us over the next few days.”

“You’re still planning to bring her to England with us?” Beau asked.

“The duchess
and
her little silk pennant. A day after the
San Pedro
makes port, every Spaniard worth his salt will be after us. A hostage against safe passage would not go amiss, here at sea as well as at home.”

“At home? Why would we need a hostage at home?”

“Have you forgotten the prize ship Drake towed into port two years ago? The spider king screamed piracy and demanded the ship be returned and El Draque brought before a Spanish tribunal to answer for his crimes. Coincidentally,
the ship was also carrying a member of the royal family, whose safe return to Seville was all that saved Bess and Sir Francis from a lengthy diplomatic battle. In this case, we not only have your sorry hide to bargain for, but mine as well.”

The wine was fogging Spence’s thinking. “Yours?”

“Veracruz,” Beau supplied dryly. “And Victor Bloodstone. Do you think, Captain Dante, a youthling duchess and a few Spanish documents will placate the Queen when you declare Walsingham’s nephew a thief and run him through? Think you Bloodstone has not already paid her handsomely from his profits and told his uncle all there was to tell about what you found in the documents at Veracruz?”

Dante’s eyes narrowed. “I can assure you the Queen will claim the first bloody thrust once she is apprised of how he came to sail so gloriously up the River Thames, his holds bulging with
my
silver and gold. She abhors treachery in her Court almost as much as she abhors the thought of marriage and having to share her crown with a man.

“As for Walsingham, he takes pride in his web of spies and puts great store in the accuracy of the information he receives from his hundreds of little moles. No doubt Victor
has
already dazzled his uncle and the Queen both, by reporting the contents of the letters we took from Veracruz, but since I was the only one with any skill in translating, he would only have been able to base his reports on what I shared with him.”

“Which was not the complete truth,” she surmised with grudging admiration.

“‘It is the nature of every man to err, but only the fool who perseveres in error,’” he quoted. “Cicero, I believe. At any rate, I made an error once in trusting someone completely and paid for my mistake dearly.”

Beau saw the muscle shiver in his cheek again and she recalled what Spence had said about his wife.

“But what if it isn’t enough?” she asked quietly. “What if a duchess and a few documents are not enough to convince the Queen that the death you plan for Bloodstone is not simply a vengeful, cold-blooded murder?”

“If it isn’t, I suppose I shall have to pray the executioner’s blade is sharp when it kisses my neck, for I plan to kill the bastard anyway.”

Beau found herself staring into eyes that were as cold as ice and she felt a shiver down her spine. Impossible though she would have thought it, the gleam intensified and a moment later, he was grinning. “On the other hand, I may have found just what we both need to keep our necks and our prize monies intact.”

He drained his cup and set it on the desk, then reached for one of the thickly rolled charts he had brought to the cabin with him. He unrolled the sheets—there were three—and weighted the corners with gold goblets. Beau craned her neck slightly to see over the shadows, a needless exercise as Dante was quick to beckon her over anyway.

“Philip of Spain has been bragging,” he said, stepping aside to give her a full view.

Beau looked down and for a few moments it was not exactly clear what she was seeing. Ships, certainly. A painted forest of masts and great gilded sterns lying regally at anchor in some unidentifed port.

Seeing her frown, Dante slid a blunt-ended finger across the bottom of the vellum, drawing her eye to the artist’s signature. The name meant nothing to her, but the date beside it was very specific.

“This is … April, is it not?” she said hesitantly. “Unless …”

“No, you haven’t been at sea that long, and neither have I.”

He moved two of the goblets he was using as weights and let the top painting curl back into a roll. There was another beneath, of more masts, more ships in a much larger harbor, and again she read the script, aloud this time.

“Maius
—May—
anno
1587.”

“The first port I am not familiar with, but this one”— the pewter eyes glanced from Beau to Spence—“is Cadiz.”

“Cadiz?” Jonas queried. “Why the devil—?”

“The King is showing off his fleet preparations,” Beau said in awe. “He is showing off his armada.”

Dante grinned again. “I told you, you were going to have stop doing that: being so clever.”

“But …” She looked down at the paintings. “How can you be certain these are accurate depictions? How can you be certain it isn’t just braggadocio and wishful thinking?”

Dante gazed at her a moment, then ran the tip of his finger along the soft auburn wisps of hair that curled against her neck.

“I know because of these. They’re standing on end. And because of these—” He reached into the crate again and withdrew a thin sheaf of papers. They had been heavily waxed and sealed with the imprint of the King’s ambassador in Veracruz. With fresh wine shimmering in his cup, he pulled a chair under the lamplight and began skimming the pages, translating from the Spanish as he read small excerpts that might interest his audience.

“‘Like hawks they came out of nowhere, struck, and flew away again in the night, with Satan himself blowing in their wings. We are told the attack was led by the French dog,’” He paused in his reading and scowled. “Dog? When was I demoted from a wolf to a dog? At any rate, ‘… the attack was led by the French dog De Tourville,
with some measurable success, which, I regret to inform Your Most Royal Highness, bears a loss to the treasury of some five hundred thousand ducats.’” Dante stopped again. “The thieving rogue. It was no more than four, by God, although he has put the reward for my head up to fifteen thousand ducats. Five thousand more and I’ll be worth as much as your hero, Sir Francis Drake.”

“Fifteen thousand is tempting enough,” she said wryly. “Believe me.”

He swallowed a mouthful of wine and lifted the papers again. “Then there is this.”

“What?”

“I don’t quite know; it’s in code.”

“Then how do you know it’s important?”

“Why else would it be in code?”

Beau resisted the urge to curse and instead snatched a sheet of paper out of his hand and scanned it quickly. “It looks like perfectly innocent writing to me.”

“You read Spanish?”

“I can read charts and currents, and
this”
—she stabbed a finger at the document—“looks like nothing more ominous than weather reports.”

“Which is precisely what they are. Weather reports, harvest predictions, wind movements…”

“How dreadfully foreboding.”

He took another sip of wine and lounged back in the chair. The black silk of his shirt trapped small puddles of yellow light from overhead and made him look as if he had been gilded. Beau, who could still feel the line his finger had drawn on her neck, tried very hard not to notice how his shirts never quite seemed to be laced to the throat. She failed miserably and found herself staring at the muscular V of his chest with its dark, smooth mat of hair, so lush and thick, it made her want to bury her hands in it.

“Before we reached Veracruz,” he was saying, “we had occasion to prime our guns on a Spaniard just off Barbados. There were dispatches on board from the King to Diego Flores, the governor of Panama. They were also filled with weather reports and harvest predictions and I did not think too much of it at the time … until Victor Bloodstone”— he spat out the name with, if it was possible, more venom than before—“advised me, through knowledge of his uncle’s dealings with spies and so forth, that Philip of Spain has a penchant for putting all of his important correspondence in code.”

“Harvests and such?” Jonas guessed, wanting back into the conversation.

Dante nodded. “I’ve a dozen like this in the papers we took from Veracruz, and there are twice as many more on the San
Pedro.
I had nothing much to do while we drifted at sea for two weeks, so most of mine are translated. If there is a code there, I have not found it yet. A fresh pair of eyes might help, though, if you had someone on board who could read Spanish and perhaps see something I missed.”

“Spit,” Beau said.

Dante’s dark head came around again with a frown. “I fail to see how that would help.”

“Spit McCutcheon,” she explained on an exasperated sigh. “He reads and writes Spanish. Latin as well. He was a church cleric at one time.”

“A minister of the Lord?”

“Try his patience sometime and you will have him spouting psalms.”

“From the pulpit to a gunport is still an interesting leap for the imagination to take.”

“So is the one from a French chateau to the deck of a pirate ship.”

A smile was startled into his eyes, and a moment later
it turned into quiet laughter, directed as much at himself as at anything she had said.

“Touché, mam’selle. Rarely have I been called a pompous goat with such delicious finesse.”

Spence laughed as well and clapped his hand to his thigh to call for another toast. “Paintings be damned! Spain be damned! Philip an’ all his blatherin’ papists be damned! Come here, the pair o’ ye, an’ take my hand. Captain! Ye already know what I think o ‘yer skill on the seas; there’s naught I could say to add to it, save that I was honored to share a deck with ye today. An’, Beau! I’m not forgettin’ I’ve got the finest damned helmsman a sailor could ever want guidin’ the keel! I’m that proud o’ ye, Isabeau Daria Spence. Proud enough to burst the heart clear out o’ my chest!”