Lord Of The Sea (27 page)

Chapter 29

Brendan, favoring his bad knee, made his way back to the schooner’s main cabin.

It was little changed from the days when he and Mira had shared this small space. The little woodstove was still there, the old bunk, the same beams and sweet curve of the hull.

He put his hand against the wood. It was cool to the touch, firm and hard and familiar.

But what lay beyond it?  What weakness deep in
Kestrel
’s old frames?

He was worried, though he would do his best to hide it from the others. He was worried about Connor’s reckless determination to prove himself equal to a legend that Brendan didn’t feel he deserved. He was worried that
Kestrel
, despite all outward appearances, no longer had the strength of hull to stand up to the onslaught of cannonfire, or even a particularly strong storm.

And he was worried about his beloved wife.

Worried sick.

“
Moyrrra
,” he said quietly, going to the bunk where she lay. “Can I get you anything?”

“Another blanket,” she mumbled. “And a linstock . . . gotta make sure the gun is pointed low . . . fire on the uproll.”

“What?”

“And where’s Matt? Is he sneaking off without me again?”

Brendan knelt gently beside the bunk and took his wife’s tiny hand. It was hot and dry, and fear suddenly gripped his heart.

“
Moyrrra
, my love.
Stóirín
.
You’re here, with me. On our old friend,
Kestrel
.”

She turned her head on the pillow then, and her pale green eyes were distant and unfocused. She looked at him. Through him. A trickle of sweat ran down from her temple and she closed her eyes once more.

“Brendan.”

“I’m here,
mo bhourneen
.”

She looked over at him, her gaze lucid once more. “I love you . . . have always loved you, more than I ever loved anything else in my entire life. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

He swallowed hard against the rising tide of emotion. “I wish we’d never come south. We should have stayed in Newburyport, long, cold winter or not.”

“No, Brendan. I needed to see our grandchildren . . . one last time.”

Tears suddenly burned behind Brendan’s eyes and choking back the lump in his throat, and the sudden, desperate pounding of his heart, he gripped his wife’s hand all the harder. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

“I’m so sick, Brendan. I’m not going to get better. You . . . you know that, as well as I do.”

“It’s the fever talking, my love. You need to rest. Please, please rest. I will stay right here.”

“I know you will.”

“I’ll never leave you. Not in this life, or the next.
Never
.”

“I know you won’t.” She shut her eyes once more. “Oh, God . . . I’m so cold.”

She didn’t see the tears slipping from his beloved eyes and slowly tracking down his cheeks, didn’t feel his trembling hands or hear the strange, guttural sounds coming from the back of his throat as he tried to choke back sudden, towering sobs that threatened to overwhelm him. But she felt the hard warmth of his body as he carefully climbed up into bed beside her, took her in his arms, and cradled her tenderly to his chest.

There, his tears melded with the trail of perspiration that trickled down her brow.

And above, his son, oblivious to just how critical his mother’s illness was, continued to send the willing little
Kestrel
closer and closer to her date with destiny.

A date that would be her final one.

*     *     *

“What do you make of her, Con?”

Toby had joined him, and now the two of them stood well forward at the larboard rail, watching the distant ship.

Connor was aware of the way his young cousin was watching him, hanging on his every word. It was hard not to feel a bit swelled up by such open admiration, hard not to derive confidence from it when that same confidence had been dented by his father’s admonitions only an hour before.

Confidence that made him reckless.

Connor’s fingers were drumming against the hot breech of a nearby gun.

“She’s riding low in the water. Looks like they’re hoisting topsails now, maybe her royals, too.”

“Think they’ve gotten spooked by our presence?”

Connor grinned. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?” He turned to One-Eye, coiling a line nearby. “The wind’s veered a point. Let’s get the stuns’ls on so we can run down on her before she can take advantage of it. She’ll be faster than we are with it abaft the beam, but given how sloppily she’s being handled, I think we’ll have the advantage if we fly the kites.”

“Aye, Captain.”

There was movement behind him. It was Nathan and Rhiannon, who had given the tiller over to Jacques.

“I thought you said we wouldn’t attack,” Nathan said, frowning.

“I’m not attacking. But only a fool would blindly share sea space with a ship whose colors and intent are unknown.”

Rhiannon reached out and touched his arm. “Are you sure we should be doing this?” she asked gently.

Sudden anger lanced through him. “For God’s sake, I’m the damned captain here. Why is everyone questioning my judgment? First my father, and now you two.”

She didn’t back down. “I’m not questioning your judgment, just your actions. Your mother is ill, Connor. Sicker, I think, than your father is either letting on or willing to admit. I’m sure he’d like to just get her home without incident or delay.”

“Hailing that ship and discerning her identity will take all of fifteen minutes, and we’ll
all
sleep better tonight for my having done it!”

She had found a chink in his armor, but to acknowledge it would be to admit weakness or error, and that was something he could not do. Not with everyone looking at him for guidance and orders.

And not when his father was aboard, the first time they had ever sailed together in wartime, the first chance that he, Connor, would have to show him that he was his son and equal in every way.

One-Eye and several others were climbing the shrouds now, going aloft to set the studding sails that would extend the surface area of
Kestrel
’s square topsail and make her all the faster with the wind coming off their starboard quarter.

The distant ship, rolling heavily in the seas, was now directly off their larboard bows, the distance between them rapidly decreasing.

“Ease out the main a little more,” Connor snapped, willing more speed from the schooner. “We’ll fire a shot across her bows and get this business concluded before anyone even knows what we’re about.”

Time went by too slow for his liking, and his fingers drummed a faster tattoo on the rail. Finally, high above their heads, the studding sails were on and sheeted home at a speed that had Connor frowning.

“We need more crew, Con,” Nathan said quietly.

“Stow it.”

Connor gave the order to let the schooner fall off a point. Around them, the sound of the hull cutting through the sea changed in pitch as
Kestrel
began to run hard and fast, chased now, by the long ocean swells and the wind itself.

Ahead, the ship was growing larger as
Kestrel
eagerly closed the distance on her.

A sudden hush fell over the deck, and feeling it, Connor turned.

There was his father standing a short distance away, his face pale beneath that absurd old hat. He looked confused. Lost.

“Da, what is it? You’re not sick, too, are you?”

“No, lad. I’m not sick. I need to talk to you. It’s about your—”

“Captain!” It was Jacques at the helm. “She’s tacking! Your orders, sir?”

“Look, Da, I can’t talk right now. Can it wait?”

His father looked up and across the rapidly decreasing stretch of water to the merchant ship. She had come about and was now on a beam reach, running almost perpendicular to them, and it occurred to Connor, in that moment, that it was a bit odd that she would be doing that instead of taking advantage of the easterly wind in an attempt to get away.

One-Eye hollered down from above. “Captain, she’s not flying any colors!”

“Two points to sta’b’d,” Connor called tersely to Jacques at the tiller.

“What was that, sir?”

“Two points to sta’b’d! Stay to windward of her, damn you!”

 “Shear off, lad,” said Brendan, quietly.

Connor stabbed his fingertips into his temples and shut his eyes as he tried to focus his thoughts and control his temper.

“Don’t worry, Da, I know what I’m doing, I’ve got it all under control.”

Kestrel
was all but flying now as the wind sent her closer and closer to the merchantman, a ship thrice her tonnage and still continuing on that strange and intersecting course.

“Connor, I—”

His temper blew. ‘You know what your problem is, Father? You’ve lost the fire in your belly, that’s what! Or maybe you never had it to begin with and all those stories about you were one big, fat lie. There’s a war going on! You built this ship for war, and now you want us to run away and hide! I wish you would just get the hell off my deck and go away, you’re distracting me, I can’t think, damn it,
I can’t think
!’

“Connor!” Rhiannon gasped, trying to pull him away from his father.

“Well it’s true! Lies, all of them. Lies!”

Brendan just looked at him, his eyes tragic.

Connor, feeling as though his head was going to blow apart, stalked away, hurt, humiliated by his father’s actions, and betrayed by the dawning truth—a truth that he had spent a lifetime believing, a truth that was now coming apart before his very eyes. To think that he’d been raised on stories of his father the legend. To think that all these years, he’d been deceived into thinking his father was someone, something he was not, and he suddenly felt like a fool for having been duped for so long. “It’s true! It was all a lie, wasn’t it? All those stories that Mother and Liam told me, they were nothing but nursery tales, embellished each time in order to make you look like the hero you never were, to make me see you as bigger than you really are,
to make a little boy worship you
! You’re a sham, Father! You’re an old man, a fake, and worst of all,
you’re a damned coward
!”

A terrible silence fell over the ship, and even the seas beneath
Kestrel
herself suddenly seemed to hush.

Clenching his fists, Connor turned to Nathan, hating him for his silently condemning eyes. Hating all of them for the way they were looking at him as though
he
was the one who had done something terribly, unspeakably wrong here. “Fire a shot across that pig’s bow. I’m done wasting time.”

“Aye . . . sir.”

Quietly, Nathan turned to give the order, and a moment later
Kestrel
’s most forward gun banged out an impudent demand that the other ship heave to. The ball skipped across the water, slicing harmlessly through the crests of blue, blue waves before finally sinking.

The other ship did not heave to.

And in that moment Connor, leaping barefoot up atop the old gun his mother had dubbed
Freedom
so long ago, saw movement along her steep sides, and to his horror, gun ports, previously closed and their seams blending in against the paintwork, yawning open. One by one by one.

They had found the armed pirate ship.

“Oh,
Christ
,” he swore, and turned to shout an order for
Kestrel
to head up and to run like she had never run before.

It was too late.

With an unholy, ear-splitting roar, the other ship’s great broadside flashed orange and a hail of iron came slamming into the little schooner.

*     *     *

Kestrel
never had a chance.

As she obeyed her captain’s frantic command to turn away from the danger, her sails in confusion and her sleek black side coming straight on to the bigger ship as she came about, the hail of iron found her. An eighteen-pound cannonball smashed into one of her two boats, sending an explosion of deadly splinters in all directions and reducing it to kindling wood in its cradle. Others tore into her rigging, sliced through sails and severed her standing rigging, bringing spars, cordage, and the topsail’s yard crashing and bouncing off her deck in a deadly rain of debris. The proud studding sails that had sent her so swiftly down upon her quarry were cut to ribbons. Several of her guns were upended, her captain was hurled twenty feet into one of them, and everywhere there was screams of pain and confusion and the smell of smoke.

 “Connor!” Rhiannon screamed, picking herself up from the deck where she had fallen and peering desperately through the smoke. “
Connor, where are you?
”

She never felt the gash on the back of her hand that spilled blood down her arm and onto her pretty yellow gown. Her ears ringing, her senses dazed, she stumbled across the wreckage on deck. She saw Jacques, groaning and crawling on hands and knees near the untended tiller. One-Eye, desperately trying to get old Liam Doherty out from beneath the jagged, broken spar that had been the topsail yard, now lying in pieces across the deck. Nathan, grabbing an axe and hacking desperately at rigging in a frantic attempt to free the schooner from the tangle of sail, rigging, and spars that hung, swinging, from a few last lines so far above, Toby running to take the tiller as
Kestrel
lay helpless and vulnerable under the other ship’s guns, and Brendan, bending down beside a man lying draped and face-down across one of the overturned cannon, arms and head hanging, apparently dead.

A man with canvas pantaloons cut off at the knee, bare feet and calves, and a straw hat, spattered with blood, lying upside down on the deck beneath his head.

“Connor!”

Rhiannon was running now, sobbing as she leaped over debris on deck, slipped in blood, and plunged to her knees beside her father-in-law. She grabbed one of her husband’s hands, her thumb feeling for a pulse at the wrist.

“Uncle Brendan!” It was Toby calling from the tiller, his voice rising in fear. “They’re running out their guns again!”

Brendan, blinking and dazed, looked up.