How to Be a Proper Lady: A Falcon Club Novel (4 page)

“Then make it so.” She paused. “But don’t tell Seton or his crew.”

Crazy nodded his white head and went off to see to her orders. Viola’s shoulders relaxed. When they came into port in an hour or so, she would tell a tall tale to the constable of a stranded ship that fired on her accidentally. Of how she had taken the crew aboard and tied them up in case they intended trouble. Of how, still and all, she was convinced they weren’t any harm. Hell, they couldn’t even keep their own vessel afloat. How much of a threat could they be?

The
Cavalier
’s papers had gone down with her. Without proof of identity her crew would be held overnight. But with Viola’s story they wouldn’t be held any longer than that unless Seton opened up his arrogant mouth and proclaimed his identity and the identity of his ship.

Viola wouldn’t be at fault in his hanging. She would allow the Pharaoh to take care of that all by himself.

Chapter 3

T
he port constable, an old friend, bought her story hook, line, and sinker. Or pretended he did. The sack of gold she’d taken off a Spanish brigantine two months earlier and slipped into his pocket probably didn’t hurt matters any.

She saw the crew of the
Cavalier
off her vessel and into the harbor jail, and wiped her hands of them.

“You done the right thing, Miss Violet.” Crazy walked with her along the lantern-lit quay toward the street bustling with sailors, dockworkers, merchants, and the bawdy women who gave them all pleasure. Laughter and raucous amusement tumbled from pub doors, and mist still hung in the night air. “Had myself a chat with some of them boys from the
Cavalier
. They weren’t none of them a bad lot.”

“Except their captain.”

“Rumor is as rumor does. Some men’s bound to change.”

Viola slanted her quartermaster a narrow look, unwinding her thick cravat and scratching her neck, her legs steadying to land slowly. The ten-week cruise had not wearied her. She would appreciate a hot bath and clothes washed in fresh water, but she was anxious to get back aboard her ship and head south.

To Aidan.

She was nearly five-and-twenty, and she had decided to tell him she was willing to live on land for at least six months every year. This time, he would marry her. He would.

“Think your wife will take you in this time, Crazy?”

He rubbed his hand across scruffy white whiskers. “Said she would when I left last time, but she’s none too consistent, you see.”

“Good luck to you. We’ll pick you up when we return in August.”

“Heading on to Port of Spain, then?”

Viola passed her hand across her brow, shoving back matted hair. Everything was damp, from her coat to—oddly—her anticipation.

“Mm hm.” She stared at the torchlight illuminating the doorways along the street. But she would not find answers there, only in the bright Caribbean sun.

“Haven’t heard from Mr. Castle lately, now, have you?”

“Not since December.”

He cleared his throat. “Them planters gets busy sometimes. And he’s still learnin’ the ropes, mind you. ’Taint every day a sailor sets onto land to farm.”

“It’s hardly a farm, Crazy.” With the money Aidan had saved from six years as lieutenant aboard her father’s ship, he had purchased fifty acres of sugarcane.

His brow frazzled. “You go on down there and see what’s what.”

“Will you check up on my house on your way home? The renters are good folk, but I should see if they’ve need of anything.”

“You won’t be pushing off for another fortnight. Why don’t you take a stop by yourself?”

“Too much work to do here unloading the cargo we took on, and refitting. I won’t have the time.” Or the will.

“Got no fond feelings for that old house, have you?”

“You know about that jail we just sent those boys off to?” She gestured. Crazy nodded. She lifted a brow.

He chuckled. “Never did like to be left there, did you, Miss Violet?”

“No, sir.” But her father had left her there nonetheless, for months on end with her aunt and three baby cousins while he’d gone off smuggling, then in 1812 when the war began, privateering for Massachusetts. Viola had never cared for cooking or washing or sewing. She’d only liked to read the newsprints and, when she could get her hands on them, stories of adventure.

Every spring when he’d taken her back aboard, he swore she was born to it. He couldn’t keep her ashore.

Serena had always said she would take to sea life like a natural. Serena . . . her beautiful, sweet elder sister who long since believed her dead, just like their mother. Who probably never thought of her at all now. Who would be shocked to see how her little sister had turned out, tanned and uncouth and leading a scruffy band of seamen working for Americans.

For years after her father stole her out from under her sister’s eyes, right off the property of the man she’d always thought was her father, Viola had hoped to return to England. She had written letter after letter, sending them off when her real father wasn’t ashore so he wouldn’t know and be hurt by it. For a hardened sailor, Fionn Daly had a heart of jelly when it came to the females he loved—his widowed sister, Viola, and Viola’s mother, whom he never gave up on despite the fact that she married another man. Right up to the day his extravagant devotion killed her.

Serena never replied to Viola’s letters, not one in six years. So at sixteen Viola ceased writing. But sometimes she still wondered, and wished she had a spyglass that reached all the way to Devonshire. Serena would surely be wed now, with a handful of babies of her own . . .

But Viola might never find out. She was going to marry Aidan. Since he refused to go back to England until he made his fortune, she wouldn’t be going there anytime soon either. Her life was here. In America. With Aidan.

“Good luck with the missus, Crazy. Hope she takes you back this time.”

“God willin’, miss.” He chuckled. “Could use the extra prayers if you got the time.”

“Oh,” she laughed, “God doesn’t listen to me about that sort of thing any longer. Hasn’t for years.” She waved and continued on to the boardinghouse. On a quiet, narrow street removed from the bustle of the docks, it boasted the peace and quiet she never got on board her ship. She couldn’t stand it for more than a fortnight or so at a time.

A withered old lady answered the door.

“Mrs. Digby, your apple cobbler has beckoned me back once again.”

“Miss Violet.” The woman’s eyes crinkled. “Welcome home.”

Hardly home. But the linens were always dry and hadn’t any bugs.

“For your trouble.” Viola pressed a dozen coins into the proprietress’s shaky palm and climbed the stairs to her room. She couldn’t afford extravagance, but Mrs. Digby kept her in reasonable comfort.

In her chamber she stripped off wool and linen thick with rain and salt and sweat. The serving girl came to make up the fire and Viola gave her a penny, then stood in a tin basin with a pot of hot water to wash. Before the hearth she dried her hair, finger combing out the knots, then fell into bed. She would sleep till Sunday if she didn’t have to rise early the following morning to see to the
April
’s cargo.

Before her eyelids fluttered closed, her gaze rested on a tiny statuette on the table beside her bed. Her most prized possession except for her ship.

Her father had traded a whole set of silver plate he’d taken off a Dutch merchantman for this treasure, her thirteenth birthday present. About the length of her forefinger, it was intricately carved and painted with graceful precision. Gold, red, blue, green, yellow. A tiny figure of an Egyptian king.

A pharaoh.

Years later, when she first heard of a pirate with that name—a sailor so brutally successful even Spanish buccaneers feared to cross him—she wanted to meet him, to see with her own eyes the man who was bigger than life. A real legend. Recently, when talk at dockside taverns said the Pharaoh had turned to wrecking pirate vessels
exclusively
, she wanted to meet him even more.

Now she had.

And because of her, a mere woman, the mighty Pharaoh was sleeping in a jail cell tonight. Also because of her, come the morning, he would be free. If he kept that gorgeous mouth shut.

She fell asleep smiling.

J
in awoke shivering.

He clamped down on his body’s reflexive reaction. Not to the cold. To the iron bars hovering before his eyes.

He shrugged up straighter against the wall, pulling in long, chest-deep breaths, willing away the crawling damp of his flesh and the throb of panic weakening his limbs. Dawn light filtered through the tiny square of a window just above a man’s head in the ten-by-ten cell. About him and in the adjoining cage his crew slept or slumped on the musty floor. The lot of them rested soundly anywhere. So could Jin. Usually.

He hadn’t been behind bars in twelve years, since he was seventeen. On that occasion, two men had paid for his liberty. At his hands. With their lives.

Eight years before that, with wrists in irons, he’d been dragged fighting onto an auctioneer’s block in the blaze of the Barbadian sun. That time a boy had paid for Jin’s freedom. With gold. A twelve-year-old boy to whom Jin owed his life. Each day of freedom since then still seemed like a stolen gift.

A steady, muted click turned his head. In a corner of the cell across the way, Little Billy knocked a battered wooden die against the wall. His neck craned up and he flashed a quick grin.

“Mornin’, Cap’n.” At sixteen, Billy had not yet outgrown his name; short, skinny, gangly, and grinning like a lad. “Ready for the judge?”

“There will be no judge, Bill.” Jin ran his gaze along the walls and bars of the port jail cell, searching for weakness in the structure. Out of habit. He needn’t. They would be released within hours. He had already heard it from the harbor officer the night before when the fellow delivered the rags Jin and his crew now wore in lieu of their own clothes. The
April Storm
’s master had lied to the port master about him and his ship.

She was mad. He would be taking a madwoman back to her respectable family in England.

Beside him Mattie expelled a great cavernous yawn. Lifting hands as big as hams, he rubbed them up and down his face and shook his heavy head, then set a glowering look on Jin.

“What’s the plan, Cap’n?”

“I am working on it.”

“Why don’t you just pays these fellas for her, Cap’n?” Little Billy scuttled toward them and gestured to the ceiling, apparently intending to indicate the coastal officials. “Take her off their hands, like?”

“You ain’t thinking straight.” Mattie slugged the lad on a bony shoulder. “That mort ain’t nobody’s property.”

“Didn’t matter with that gal he took up with back in Coruna.” Billy’s pale brow wrinkled.

“What’d you know ’bout that?” Matouba’s bass sounded from his barrel chest. Across the narrow cell, his round eyes were two spots of white in his ebony face. “You weren’t but a mite at the time.”

“He didn’t take up with that one,” Mattie grunted. “And she weren’t free. Master Jin bought her off that bloke as was beating her.” He turned his head to Jin. “Whatever happened to that little Spanish girl?”

Jin shrugged. But he remembered. He remembered every one of the people he freed, their faces, their names. He had found that girl a post as a domestic servant in an old spinster’s house. The woman was ancient but respectable. It was the best he could do in a foreign city. In ports he knew better, he had an easier time of it.

It didn’t matter. Every time he bought someone’s freedom, another chip of the hard, cold stone of rage and old despair inside him fell away. But they were, each one of them, tiny chips indeed, and the stone still quite large. He had a thousand more to go before the rock finally disappeared.

“I sez you buy yourself ’bout four ships, Cap’n, maybe five or six, and stock ’em with crews,” Matouba intoned. “Then you sneak up on that
April Storm
in open water, close her in, and ’scort her to England like that.”

“No.” Jin shook his head. “She must come willingly.” A woman like Violet la Vile would not come any other way, unless he tied her up and stuffed her in the bilge for the month’s journey. But Jin did not treat other human beings like that. Not any longer. “No,” he repeated. “I have another plan.”

When he first started searching for Viola Carlyle, he had harbored hope he would find her holed up in some little house ashore, anxious to return to England, merely lacking the resources or even the gumption. But after months of searching, when clues finally led him to the privateer captain Violet the Vile, he had been forced to reevaluate. Her real father, Fionn Daly, had been first a barely successful smuggler then an even less successful privateer. He probably only allowed her aboard for practical purposes—to see to the domestic tasks so he would not have to pay a sailor for it. No doubt she’d be glad to return to England and society, Jin guessed.

He’d guessed wrong. The captain of the
April Storm
—confident, brash, and nothing like a lady—quite obviously would not come easily. Jin must convince her. But he had spent a lifetime alternately lying and knifing his way to victory after victory. In the end, Miss Viola Carlyle would sail to England with him of her own accord and take up again the life she was born to live. He had no doubt of it whatsoever.

Neither did he have a choice.

Twenty years earlier Alex Savege had bought his freedom and saved his life. Nearly a decade after that, when Jin had been nothing but a thieving, scrapping ball of anger directed against the whole world, Alex again offered him another option. He had taken him aboard the
Cavalier
and shown him how to be a man. Alex’s new wife still believed her half sister to be alive. A lord now, Alex did not need Jin’s money or even his assistance with his ship any longer. All Alex cared about now was his wife’s happiness.

And so, unbeknownst to either Lord or Lady Savege, Jin had set out to find Viola Carlyle. To repay his debt. He would return her safely to the bosom of her family, or he would finally die trying.