Captain of My Heart (42 page)

Plunge and dip . . . plunge and dip . . .
ever forward. Ever faster.

“Pray that we’re not too late,” she
whispered.

Beneath her,
Kestrel
lifted her bows
in answer and found more speed.

###

"Enemy in sight!"

Brendan, stumbling painfully out of
Viper
’s hold early the next morning under heavy guard, would
never forget the glorious sight of his schooner rising up from the
waves and filling the horizon behind them, stacking a mountain of
sail that glowed white against black storm clouds, the sea parting
beneath her bows, and her colors streaming in the wind.

And neither would the hastily-summoned
Crichton. He took one look, dropped his telescope, and roared, “Man
the braces! Stand by to wear ship!
Wear ship!”

The British, staring in openmouthed awe at
the magnificent vessel bearing down on them with her rail awash,
were slow to react. When they did, there was only frantic activity,
panic, and confusion.

And
Kestrel,
coming on like a
glorious, winged angel of vengeance.

For Brendan, time and place slipped away. The
horrors of the last hours faded . . . of seeing what Crichton had
done to poor Matthew. Of Crichton stringing him up to the gratings
and laying his back open with the whip in front of the frigate’s
assembled company, then tearing him down and furiously kicking him
in the ribs because he’d refused to cry out. Of the noose that had
been strung from
Viper
’s foreyard sometime overnight, and
which now swung ominously in the wind, waiting for him. There was
only
Kestrel—
and nothing else. His heart sang, and despite
the agony in his back and ribs, he laughed out loud—and gauged the
distance between himself and the rail.

“
Wear
ship!”
Crichton yelled,
seizing the boatswain’s rattan and laying it across a seaman’s
straining back.

Men ran to the braces, and slowly,
ponderously, the frigate began to respond. And Brendan, left alone
in the confusion, limped calmly to the gunwales, gave Crichton a
mocking salute as he whirled around, and dove over the rail.

His bloodied back screaming in agony, he
struck out through the icy seas, blinded by waves and choking on
seawater so cold, it sapped his breath and left him numb and
gasping. But his Irishman’s luck was with him. Or maybe one of
Mira’s many cats had donated a life or two. One moment the waves
were closing over his head; the next,
Kestrel
was coming on,
faster and faster, passing—

He managed to grab a line that someone threw,
and clung to it with all his strength. The bow wake thrust him down
and back, but he held on, desperately. And then Liam was throwing
the Jacob’s ladder down.

He caught it and clung there, the heavy seas
battering him and breaking against his face. With the last of his
strength he hauled himself upward, his hands bleeding, his limbs
frozen, his back on fire and every rib blazing in pain. He was
almost to the rail of his beloved schooner. Water rushed from his
clothing. Hands seized his arms, grasped his shoulders, and hauled
him aboard. Someone tore off his coat; someone else wrapped a
blanket around him while cheers thundered in his ears. The rain
began to hit the deck in fat, angry droplets. He heard himself
shout a desperate order to shorten sail. And then he was running to
take the tiller, hoping no one would see him stumble and almost
fall as agony brought a blackness that came and went.

“Faith, these decks are slippery!” he
managed, hoarsely, to cover his weakness.

His hand closed around the tiller, and the
schooner’s life sang up through keel and rudder, suffusing him with
its vitality, restoring him. The wind began to strengthen and back
with the mad approach of the storm, and from the rigging came an
ominous keening whistle—

"Get the topsails and fore in,
now
!"

Viper
had completed her turn and, with
the wind behind her, was coming on like a charging bull.

“Sir, she’s runnin’ out her broadside!”

“Then run out ours, Mr. Wilbur! Starboard
side, and be quick about it!”

Viper
, approaching fast, gunfire
already booming from her bow chasers. . . .

And
Kestrel,
bravely swooping in to
meet her. . . .

“Stand by to come about!”

Bowsprits aligning, swinging around . . .

He shoved the tiller hard, hard,
hard.
Jib-booms crossed, passed, and nearly touched as
Kestrel
swung across
Viper
’s path and up her other, unprepared side.
Musketfire began to rain down on them from the marines in her tops.
Somewhere a cannon cracked out, then another, and the schooner
yelped in surprise.

And then she was past, showing her heels to
her enemy as the rain began a mad tattoo on the deck.

“Huzzah! Huzzah!”

“Three cheers for the Captain from
Connaught!”

Aft,
Viper
was staggering, hauling her
yards around, unwilling to give up.

“Mr. Keefe!” He had to get aloft, where
Crichton could see him, where his
men
could see him. He
coughed, the effort of yelling too much for him, and grabbed the
speaking trumpet from Liam. “John, take the helm,
now!”

He shed the blanket and leapt for the
shrouds, the pain ripping a silent cry of agony from his throat,
his feet finding a toehold, his hands pulling him aloft.

“Sir, are you all right?”

Higher and higher he climbed.

“Sir!”

The rain slashed against his face and the
wind rose, thundering in his ears, keening in the rigging as he
climbed higher . . . and higher. . . .

Thirty feet above the heeling deck he paused,
the wind whipping his hair into his eyes, the rain lashing his
cheeks. He saw Crichton standing angrily on his own deck. He saw
that the frigate would never catch them. Laughing in triumph, he
lifted the speaking trumpet to his lips.

“Mr. Doherty, run out
Freedom
and put
Mr. Starr—”

The dizziness struck, dark speckles dancing
across his vision as he swayed sideways and the speaking trumpet
fell from his hand, down, down, down to the plunging deck so far
below “—on it. . . .”

Blindly, Brendan grabbed for the shrouds—and
found nothing but empty space.

He’d misjudged it.
Misjudged his own
ship.

The luck of the Irishman had finally run
out.

And then he felt himself falling, heard the
shouts of the men below, felt only empty space as he tumbled down
and down and down. He heard a woman’s voice, screaming . . . and
then he knew he was fading, because it sounded like Mira’s. . .
.

Mercifully, he was out before he hit the deck
some thirty feet below.

“Captain!”

“Jesus!”

“By God and Mary—”

Shouts, screams, cries—

“
Here comes Crichton!
”

And then the storm struck with savage wrath.
Leaderless,
Kestrel
was left to face it—and
Crichton—alone.

Chapter
26

Mira would never forget it. The crew fighting
to shorten sail as the storm roared down on them in full fury;
chaos, as she’d raced to the helm to get
Kestrel
out from
beneath
Viper’s
guns after John Keefe took a ball to his
thigh; Liam, sobbing as he’d picked up Brendan’s broken body and
cradled it in his huge arms—and the long journey home.

They had outrun Crichton, but it had taken
Kestrel
a good three days to reach Newburyport. She’d had to
beat against angry, shifting winds left over from the storm, her
sails reefed and her bowsprit buried under foam. Giant combers had
lifted her high, rolled beneath her keel, and left her staggering
in the troughs, where she barely had time to catch her breath
before having to lift her bows and crest the next mountain of
water. Perhaps if her captain had been at the helm, they might’ve
made the journey in two days; with a distraught Liam standing in
his place, it was a wonder they even made it back to port at all.
But Brendan had never regained consciousness after that terrible
fall, and
Kestrel
’s escape from
Viper
without his
leadership, her survival of the storm without him at the helm, had
been nothing short of miraculous. Yet somehow, some way, she had
done both, solemnly bringing both fallen warriors back home to
Newburyport.

Dr. Plummer, a gruff, competent man who’d
served the town well for years, came often. Matt would recover, the
physician said, especially with such a capable and attentive nurse
as Eveleen Merrick tending to his every need. Bruises faded, cuts
mended, and swelling went down. And his eyesight? Only time would
tell.

But Brendan was another story, and Dr.
Plummer did not smile as he examined his inert body and
straightened up from the big four-poster where he lay. “There’s
nothing I can do for him, Miss Ashton,” he said sadly. “He is in
God’s hands.”

And he was. God’s—and Mira Ashton’s.

She refused to accept that he was dying, that
the likelihood of his regaining consciousness dwindled with every
passing day, that his lilting, musical brogue would never put goose
bumps on her arms, tingles up her spine, laughter in her heart,
again. About the only thing she could accept was that it was her
fault that he lay dying in this big bed.

All her fault.

If only you’d forgiven him—and told him who
you really were . . . maybe you could’ve stopped him.

But she hadn’t. God help her, she hadn’t.

She shut her eyes in silent agony,
remembering their horror as they’d stripped off his clothing after
Liam had gently laid him out in his bunk. There, terrible to
behold, had been the evidence of Crichton’s brutality. . . .

Now the bruises on his torso had faded, his
bound and broken ribs were healing, and the angry lash-welts on his
back no longer oozed blood.

But he had not woken.

A tear slipped from Mira’s eye. With laughter
and a grin, he’d mustered his crew and got
Kestrel
to safety
as best he could; yet the pain he’d silently suffered had been so
intense, he’d misjudged the layout of a ship that he had designed.
And now it was too late. If only she’d had faith in him. If only
she’d believed in him.

If only she’d told him.

But no. She hadn’t. She’d allowed him to seek
Crichton out, allowed him to go to his death thinking she hated
him. He’d proclaimed his love for her and in return, she’d refused
forgiveness and given him only rejection. What was there in this
world for him to come back to, except a lonely schooner down in the
harbor and a crew who thought he could walk on water?

That crew visited often. The people of
Newburyport, however, stayed away, too ashamed over their earlier
treatment of him to even make an appearance, though in his state,
he would never have known whether they were there or not. One or
two made brief visits to put their consciences at ease, and Abadiah
Bobbs’s five-year-old daughter, eager to visit the tall captain
who’d grinned, teased her, and given her a drawing of her father
standing with Mr. Starr at
Freedom,
brought him a cluster of
wildflowers; but when she approached his bed with them clenched in
her little fist and he did not awaken, did not thank her for
them—and did not laugh and grin and lift her up high—her face
puckered and she began to cry, frightened and confused.

After that, she did not come again.

Mira spent her nights sleeping in the chair
beside Brendan’s bed, where the heavy silence was broken only by
his shallow breathing. She spent her days reading to him from naval
books borrowed from Ephraim’s library. She held his hand and talked
to him, praying that her words would get through to him—though he
never moved a muscle, never made a sound, and his hand lay heavy
and lifeless in her own. She cared for him, flexing his arms and
legs so they wouldn’t stiffen, washing his face, and tenderly
kissing the now-faded laugh lines around his lax mouth. She had
Eveleen help her turn him on his side so his back could heal; she
combed his hair and queued it with a neat black bow.

And one night when it grew too hard to hope,
too hard to
pretend
to hope any longer, she went to the
waterfront and boarded the silent
Kestrel.
There, she sobbed
out her anguish to the schooner, who listened quietly and shared
her grief; there, she lifted her face to the stars perched above
the dark, crossed yards and learned how to pray again; there, when
she could cry no more, she lowered the huge, shot-torn,
red-and-white striped American flag with her own hands and, with it
filling her arms, brought it home and hung it on the wall so that
if he awakened
—when
he awakened—that proud, glorious banner
would be the first thing he’d see when he opened his eyes, and he
would know he was a hero again.

But he didn’t awaken.

Days and nights passed, and became a week.
Grass grew tall and sweet in the meadows, on the lawn, in Miss Mira
Ashton’s School of Fine Horsemanship. Pink and red roses burst upon
picket fences, wildflowers spread perfume to the sea wind, robins
stole the hair that Eveleen combed from Shaula’s mane and tail and
threaded it through their nests.

Down in the harbor, the weed began to grow on
Kestrel’
s tallowed bottom.

Up in Maine, the British invaded a little
peninsula called Bagaduce.

And in a quiet bedroom in a morgue-silent
house, the Captain from Connaught lay silent and still.

###

Guilt and tension took its toll on everyone.
Purple shadows bloomed beneath Mira’s haunted eyes and she stopped
eating. Abigail, who’d taken Eveleen under her wing when Mira had
sneaked off aboard
Kestrel,
got into a squall with the girl
over who would cook and care for Matt, a squall that Eveleen
eventually won—and only by the persistence and loyalty she’d shown
in nursing her patient. Ephraim, with his son laid up, his daughter
a ghost of her old self, and no one to fight with, grew so bored
and irritable that he wound every clock in the house tighter and
tighter until the big Willard piece in the front hall finally broke
a spring and the clockmaker had to be hastily summoned to fix
it.