Pirate Wolf Trilogy (100 page)

Lawrence would have to believe her now!

She crushed the letter to her chest and
turned huge watery eyes to the owner of the sweet shop. "One more
favor, please, I beg of you. May I take this letter to show to
someone? I promise I shall return it."

"Oy, I don't know 'bout that, luvie," the
woman said, shaking her head.

Eva found two more coins in her purse and
held them out. As soon as the silver winked, it vanished into the
shopkeeper’s hands. "Keep it long as ye like, there’s a good
girl."

Eva released a puff of breath and ran out of
the shop. She hurried back to the shipping office and made straight
for Ross’s door, ignoring Reginald Bernard who jumped up and tried
to block her path.

"Master Ross is with a customer."

"This is important. He will not mind the
interruption, I assure you."

"Oh, but—"

She brushed past him and opened the door to
Lawrence Ross’s office, her face glowing, her smile wide.

He was there, seated at his desk, the chair
turned to one side and his head leaning against the leather
backrest. At first she thought he was asleep, catching a midday
nap. But then she caught a glimpse of fiery red hair bobbing up and
down in his lap. It was the woman who had bumped her on the street.
She was on her knees, wedged between Lawrence's thighs and what she
was doing with her mouth was making him grunt like a rutting
boar.

"Lawrence?"

His eyes flew open at her shocked gasp and he
stared at the doorway. The head in his lap stopped bobbing and the
woman looked over, her mouth still formed in a circle, her chin
smeared with spittle. Lawrence’s breeches were open, his flesh
stood at attention, thick and hard and smeared with the same
scarlet lip rouge the woman was wearing.

Eva staggered back a step. She averted her
eyes but found nothing to look at that would make sense out of the
scene before her. Retreating hastily, she stumbled out to the
street. She heard her name being called as she climbed into the
carriage but the driver responded more to her angrily hissed
"Drive!" than to the commotion spilling out of the shipping office,
and within minutes they were galloping well away into the tangle of
coaches and horses.

~~

Eva groaned and rolled onto her side. Her
head ached and her fingers came away wet with blood when she gently
probed her temple. She felt the deck shift beneath her as the
Eliza Jane
dipped into the trough of another wave and she
looked slowly around hoping against hope it had all been part of
the same nightmare.

But no. The bodies were there, laying where
they had fallen. Twilight had descended in shades of purple and
blue, the air had become heavy with moisture. She could just make
out the shape of the single canvas sheet glowing blue-white against
the night sky as the last hint of light touched it.

She drew the edges of the woollen cloak
tightly around her shoulders. Thankfully there were no bodies
staring sightlessly at her on the forecastle deck. She could not
bear the thought of returning to her coffin-like cabin, and so she
crawled into the tiny space beneath the thick arm of the bowsprit.
She hugged her knees to her chest and bowed her head, resting it on
her arms, helpless to know what to do next.

CHAPTER THREE

Gabriel Dante awoke with a huge yawn which he
immediately regretted. After four days, neither his face nor his
bruised and battered body was healing with its usual swiftness.
Groaning at the persistent aches, he swung his long legs over the
side of the bed and sat swaying on the edge for as long as it took
him to control the wave of pain from his abraded back, and to glare
around his ornate surroundings. He was not yet accustomed to the
softness of the mattress or the whorehouse ambience of the crimson
draperies and velvet chairs and made a mental note to have Eduardo
start stripping away the gewgaws.

He yawned again, with more caution this time,
then staggered and scratched his way to the narrow door that led
out to the stern balcony. He opened his breeches and sent a long
yellow stream out through the rails, noting as he did so the pair
of dolphins streaking alongside the wake of the ship. When he was
finished and tucked away again, he stretched to test his bruised
ribs, his arms, his legs, bending from the waist and rolling his
head side to side. His finely shaped and astonishingly unbroken
nose twitched at the smell coming off his own flesh.

Before returning to
the
Iron Rose
,
Nog Kelly had concocted a noxious blend of camphor oil, boar lard,
and island herbs, giving Eduardo orders to apply to Gabriel's back
and shoulders every night, which made him smell like a lamp and
frighten bugs away. Most of the cuts and lash-marks had sealed and
begun to scab over, and the worst of the bruises had mellowed from
black to a yellowish blue. His eye had shrunk from the size of a
small coconut to a ripe plum and if he tried very hard, he could
just manage a squint through the purple lids, enough to reassure
himself that his vision was intact.

He stood at the rail, his hands resting on
the dark oak. Watching the wake peel out behind a ship never ceased
to fascinate him. Dependant upon the light and angle of the sun,
the peaks of the waves could be blue or green, clouded or
translucent. The caps could be light foam or hard white curls, and
at dusk, ripples of phosphorescence often made the water appear to
glow, an effect caused by a particular kind of fish that swam near
the surface. At this time of day, with the sun barely risen above
the line of the horizon, the wash was clear enough to see the
schools of silvery fish chasing after the dolphins.

His practised eye could
tell by the height and width of the curl how fast the galleon was
moving. Despite crews working day and night to trim some of her
excess bulk topside, the newly christened
Endurance
still plowed through the
water like a wallowing hog. He estimated at this rate it might well
take another week to reach Pigeon Cay, a prospect that had him
grinding his teeth yet again over the loss of his swift,
agile
Valour
. The
galleon's top speed under full sail was eight knots; the
Valour
had cruised at
fourteen.

Gabriel returned to the cabin, where he
washed and dressed, then checked the day’s charts, making a rough
estimate of their position and how far they had sailed through the
night. Stubs had confirmed they were well clear of the Straits and
had turned east into the Providence Channel. Charting a course
directly south would have pared days off the journey, but with the
Spanish fleet scattered and looking for revenge, the Dante ships
were forced to take the safer route, circling around Eluthera and
Cat Island.

Despite insisting they were
all returning home, the
Avenger
and the
Tribute
had fallen away, and after a heated family
conference, were bound for New Providence where the Pirate Wolf and
Jonas would rendezvous with the other captains to tally their
successes. In a month or so the privateers who had come together so
willingly to attack the Spanish fleet, would disband and sail their
separate ways. It would be every man for himself again, but for the
time being they were brethren and had unified into a magnificent
fighting force to shatter Spain’s hopes of amassing another
armada.

Juliet’s
Iron Rose
, carrying the
gravest of the wounded on board, had kept her ship apace with
Gabriel, but once they reached open water and clear seas, she had
loosened the reins and after three days with nary another ship in
sight, she had signalled her intention to speed ahead and would
likely reach the Cay long before the laboring galleon.

Gabriel took one of the charts and rolled it,
then left the cabin and climbed topside. He was struck, as always,
by the ungainly sight of the galleon’s high sides and towering
fore- and aftercastles. Further encumbering the ship's speed was
the enormous weight of her ordnance. Two tiers of thirty-two
pounders gave her fearsome firepower, but cost her the agility to
best deploy it.

As he climbed to the stern deck, Gabriel made
a mental wish-list of changes to make on the galleon, not the least
of which was a new design for steering the ungainly beast. At the
moment, turning her felt much like trying to turn a horse in
quicksand, with about as much response from the helm.

Stubs was on deck and touched his brow with a
forefinger as Gabriel appeared. "Cap’n."

Dante squinted his good eye to look up at the
sails. "A fair wind blowing this morning I see."

"Fair and clear," Stubs nodded. "Cook has
finally managed to tame the galley stoves without blowin' himself
up an' there's hot porridge an' boiled pork in the offing."

"Praise be. I'm hungry enough to turn
cannibal. Any sightings through the night?"

"It were quiet an’ dark enough, but the watch
up in the tops just reported a sighting. A single ship with no
sails showing."

"She’s laying still in the water?"

"Still... or barely moving."

"Flags?

"Too far to say but he don't think she's a
Spaniard." Stubs handed him the telescoping spyglass and pointed to
a spot on the seemingly empty horizon. Gabriel drew the glass out
to its full length and after a moment of slowly scanning the
surface of the water, he honed in on the tiny dark blot. There were
no riding lights twinkling in the distance, and no sails set, which
would explain why the watch had nearly missed it.

He swung the glass toward
the south, yet despite making three passes, there was no trace of
the
Iron Rose
ahead. Juliet had sailed beyond the line of the horizon
during the night, but he was not worried. His gun captains had run
drills on the cannon and his crew was more than able to blast a
single ship out of the water. Any English or Frenchman returning
from the battle with the
flota
would recognize the Dante colors. The only wild
card was a privateer newly arrived from across the Ocean Sea,
bristling with a crew eager to make its first kill.

"What do you make of it?"

Stubs explored the inside of his cheek with
his tongue as he considered his answer. "Aye, well, it could be a
Spaniard runnin' scairt. Could be English or French, doin' like us
and favorin' an easterly arc to stay out o' harm’s way. Could be
any damned thing, as a fact. We bear the silhouette of a fully
armed warship, which'd cause many a common merchantman to steer
well clear of us."

"Thus we can rule out a Spanish straggler or
any ship out of Havana patrolling the line, for they would likely
make haste toward us rather than away."

Stubs nodded and spat over the rail. "True
enough."

"Alter our course a point or two. Let's see
what she does." Gabriel folded the glass and handed it back to
Stubs. "The smell of food beckons me. Let me know if she
balks."

~~

Nothing changed over the
next hour except the direction of the unknown ship. At first
sighting she appeared to turn onto a parallel course with
the
Endurance
. By
the time Gabriel had enjoyed a thick chunk of boiled pork belly and
a steaming bowl of burgoo thickened with eggs, the unidentified
ship had swung on a westerly path and turned north. He was about to
dismiss it as being of no further consequence when the topman
hailed from the crows nest and said she was tacking east
again.

"The Devil only knows why," Gabriel murmured,
looking through the spyglass again. "But it looks like she is going
in a fixed circle."

The change of course he had
ordered had brought the
Endurance
close enough that the vessel could be seen with
the naked eye, and when viewed through the glass, had borne the
recognizable silhouette of an English merchant ship. They could see
that most of her sails were furled, leaving only an upper mainsail
to keep her moving.

"I was ever a curious fellow, Master Stubs,"
Gabriel said slowly. "Bring us closer. She may be in distress.”

“If she is, I ‘ope the king himself is on
board, otherwise Cap’n Simon will ‘ave your gizzards for
garters.”

“Luckily for me then, that he does not wear
garters,” Gabriel murmured through a smirk.

“For this, I warrant he’d make an
exception.”

The order was, nonetheless,
passed to the tops and within seconds, cleats were loosened, yards
and rigging creaked as the huge canvas sails were swung about and
angled to catch the wind. The
Endurance
responded with enough
spirit to put a grudging smile of approval on Gabriel’s lips. That
smile vanished, along with any further thought of approaching the
English vessel when they came within half a mile and saw the large
yellow flag flying from the masthead.

"God save our souls," Stubs said under his
breath. "She’s a plague ship."

"Keep our distance," Gabriel ordered quickly.
"Hold us upwind if you please."

Second only to fire, disease was feared the
most on board a ship. The crew had seen the flag and stood silent
at the rails, staring across the open water at the lifeless ship.
No one had appeared on deck. No one had sounded an alarm at the
galleon's approach.

Examining the ship
carefully through the spyglass, Gabriel could see that the
whipstaff was tied off by cables to keep the vessel circling. One
of the foresails had come loose from the lines and a corner of
canvas flapped listlessly in the breeze. He could also see the
bodies, slumped where they had fallen. There was no movement on
board. No sign of life above or below decks. When she turned, he
could read the name painted in gilt across the stern:
Eliza Jane.