Pirate Wolf Trilogy (107 page)

"Where did you get this?"

"It was in the packet of
letters my father sent me,” she said quietly. “It came a year after
he sailed on the
Gull
."

"Just so? He put the coin into a letter and
sent it to you?"

"Not exactly. It was
on
the letter, not in
it. But I think it was deliberate. He knew I, alone, would find
it."

"Explain."

Eva moistened her lips. "When I was a little
girl, Father would send letters back from wherever his business
ventures took him, mostly to France and Italy and the Netherlands.
He would seal them with discs of wax and when he discovered that I
carefully peeled off the discs and saved them, he started sending
them in various colors and shapes, some with fancy designs pressed
into the wax. The seals that came on the letters he sent from the
Indies were thick and bold. Three peeled off with no trouble; the
fourth cracked against the knife as I tried to take it off."

"The coin was inside?"

Eva nodded. "At first I thought it was part
of the game, for he was always testing me with riddles and hiding
messages inside of messages. I broke the other three disks, found
three more coins, and thought myself very clever for having found
them. There again, he had always sent little trinkets or coins home
when he was away, so I thought nothing of it and simply tossed them
into a drawer and all but forgot about them."

Dante was still studying the coin, but when
she stopped talking, he glanced up. "What made you think of them
again?"

"As you can imagine, when
the one year absence stretched into two, then three without any
further word, I kept reading and re-reading his letters. Seeing his
handwriting was the closest thing to contact that I had, and it
kept me believing that he was still alive. In the last letter he
wrote, his words and thoughts seemed to be more scattered. He
mentioned the ancient Greek poem
Argonautica
and Jason's quest for
the golden fleece. It was as if he was trying to tell me something
but not saying it outright. I tried every trick I could think of,
every cipher we had used in the past, even waded through the
wretched poem in Latin, no less. Nothing really fell together until
I remembered the coins and thought perhaps the clue was there; that
the key to his message might be in the coins.”

Dante held the open locket in his hand with
the chain draped over his long, blunt-tipped fingers. He used the
point of a jewelled dagger to pry the escudo free and flip it onto
the desk. “Go on. What did you find out about them?”

“The year the coins were minted is clearly
stamped: 1586. Beyond that I wasn't sure what all the markings
meant."

“Did you show them to anyone else?”

She answered with a troubled nod. “I needed
help from someone who could access the naval records.”

"Go on. What were you told about the
coins?"

Eva's eyes showed a spark
of eagerness for the first time. "According to the markings and the
year it was minted, the escudos were part of a silver shipment
placed on board a galleon that was lost at sea. The NSV on the face
of the coin identified the ship as the
Nuestra Senora de Valencera
. It was
wrecked in a storm that year on its voyage home to
Spain."

Dante took a slow sip of wine as he studied
the flush in Eva's cheeks and the rather remarkable shade of green
that her eyes took on when she was excited. It took no special
powers of perception to guess that she believed her father had
discovered a shipwrecked galleon with a cargo bay full of silver
coins.

The problem, of course, was that everyone
thought they were in possession of secret maps showing the location
of a sunken galleon, or heard tell of a hiding place where someone
had buried chests of gold and silver. If even a hundredth of those
maps or rumors were actually true most of the islands in the
Carribee would have sunk long ago under the weight of all that
buried gold.

Dante ran his thumb over the surface of the
coin and studied it again. The escudo itself looked genuine enough.
The silver was pitted from being tossed in the surf and sand and as
he identified each marking and stamp, he shared them aloud.

"It was indeed minted in 1586,” he said
slowly. “The P with the shield and cross tells us it was mined in
Peru—in Potosi to be precise. The symbol next to it—" he waited
until she walked around behind the desk and leaned over his
shoulder to see it in the brighter light— "is the mark from the
mint in Nombre de Dios, and this tiny nick on the edge is no
accident. It was put there by the clerk in charge of counting every
coin that left Panama bound for Hispaniola. This little beauty went
on quite a trek down from the Andes and through the jungles of
Panama before it ended up in the hold of a galleon bound for
Spain."

Her mouth was an inch from his ear, close
enough for her breath to tickle his cheek as she spoke. "Then you
believe it's real?"

"Oh, it's real all right.
It was part of the last shipment of bullion bound for Seville to
finance the armada Phillip was amassing to attack England. But I'll
stake my soul it didn't come from the hold of the
Nuestra Senora de Valencera
."

"But I was told—"

"You were told wrong. Deliberately so, I
imagine."

Eva straightened, taking
the rush of warm breathiness with her. "I was shown a copy of the
records. There
was
a galleon by that name lost in a storm in 1586."

"No doubt there was. The
storm... the hurricane you refer to took at least twenty ships down
that year. I'm familiar with it because it was the same year and
the same storm that drove my father's first ship onto a coral reef
and damn near sank her with all hands. As it was, he and his crew
were stranded on an island for six months before he could make
repairs. And because he was stranded for those six months, he was
not with Sir Francis Drake when Cartagena and Santo Domingo were
sacked, two incredible feats unmatched to this day. I say that only
to add to the reasons why someone with even the most rudimentary
knowledge of ships and shipping legends would have cause to recall
the events of that year. And if someone told you it was the
Nuestra Senora de Valencera,
he most likely had reasons for not telling you the absolute
truth."

"But… why would anyone do
such a thing?" she asked softly. "And how can you say with such
rich authority that this coin did
not
come from that particular
ship?"

Gabriel half-turned in the chair, inherently
wary of women with sharp little teeth and nails who had just been
told they had been deceived.

"The Spaniards have limited
imaginations when christening their ships and most are named after
saints or holy prayers, even some noteworthy sinners whose names
vary only by a letter or two. However, not all of them are treasure
galleons. The
Nuestra Senora de
Valencera
, for instance, was likely an
India Guard. An escort ship, if you will. Small, fast, heavily
armed as a deterrent for blackguards like myself who might try to
nose up too close and cull one of the fat prizes from the fleet.
She would have carried soldiers and guns, not gold or silver, but
she was certainly not important enough to have coins minted with
her name stamped on them."

She was studying his face, trying to decide
if he was being truthful with her or not. It also told him that she
was genuinely unaware of the value of what she wore so casually
around her neck.

"There was another ship
lost that year. One with the same initials: NSV. Anyone worth their
weight in salt water should have known the name without having to
'search' any records. The
Nuestro
Santisimo Victorio
was one of the largest
treasure ships ever built. She disappeared in that same storm with
all hands and a belly full of cargo reputed to be worth more than
the crown jewels of England and Spain combined.

“Losing the treasure she carried not only
meant the armada sailed without being fully supplied, but the army
of invasion that marched overland was held up in the Netherlands,
unable to acquire enough ships to cross the Channel. The Spanish
navy never recovered from the humiliation and it took two decades
to fill the treasury enough to try again.”

Eva frowned. “They tried again? Why am I not
aware of that? I thought England and Spain signed a peace
treaty?”

“They did. And the… fracas… we were recently
engaged in was, in effect, making sure Spain honored that treaty.
If we had lost and the fleet had made it back to Spain, the treaty
would not be worth the paper it was written on.”

Eva had moved back against
the outwardly slanted gallery windows. She looked a little numbed
as Dante recounted the details of their recent battle and how close
Spain had come to amassing another invasion fleet. Adding to that
was her confusion over the false information she had been given
about the
Nuestro Santisimo
Victorio
for which she had every right to
look confused, upset, and disheartened. She did
not
have the right to look at him
with those big green eyes as if it was his personal fault that some
bastard had lied to her.

He could almost hear Jonas
whispering in his ear.
Look away, little
brother, look away. You know what happens when you get distracted
by soft lips and pretty titties.

Jonas would be right. There was something
alarmingly vulnerable about the way she stood there with the
gallery windows behind her and the star-filled night framing the
tangled blonde mass of her hair. The fact she was wearing his
clothing, that it was one of his shirts conforming to the shape of
her breasts, and a pair of his breeches being warmed by her thighs,
made him briefly lose the focus of his thoughts.

He scowled and concentrated
on the coin. "Men have been searching for
La Fantasma
as long as they've been
searching for the lost city of gold."

"La Fantasma?"

"The Ghost Ship. Every now and then a rumor
blazes throughout the Main like wildfire about someone finding the
wreckage, salvaging the treasure. They turn out to be just that:
rumors. Even my mother, who I consider to be in complete command of
her faculties, heard tell of a map that reputedly showed the
location where La Fantasma was run aground. She and Juliet scoured
the area for weeks, coming back with nothing more than some
incredibly well-detailed charts of the islands."

"Doesn't this coin prove that someone has
found her?"

Dante pursed his lips.
"Frankly, I’m not sure what it proves. It could be a clever fake,
although someone would have had to go to a great deal of trouble to
make it. The stamps for the coins would have been broken as soon as
she sailed. Shall I tell you what else I know about the
Victorio
?"

"Please. Yes."

He handed her her wine goblet, which had
gone untouched until now.

"She was a big bitch, built
to be Spain's grandest symbol of power and wealth in the New World.
She was over eight hundred tons, with fore- and aftercastles that
towered three storeys above the water. She mounted fifty heavy guns
and a score of smaller nut-busters and was intended not only to
transport the king's treasure back to Seville, but to become the
flagship for the
grande y felicisima
armada
when it sailed against
England.

"She led the plate fleet out of Havana that
September carrying home over a hundred of the king's wealthiest
courtiers and hidalgos, as well as generals and soldiers who had
learned first-hand how to deal with a conquered nation and who
would become England’s new royalty once the invasion succeeded.

“The flota left in clear
weather. According to reports, the
almirante
sailed out of the harbor
like a glorious angel, bedecked with flags and hundred-foot-long
silk pennants trailing in the wind.

"She led the fleet for six
days without incident, but on the seventh, the hurricane struck and
caused most of the galleons in the convoy to break formation. Many
were driven into the shallows and smashed upon the reefs. Many more
were forced to scatter and seek shelter. For three days and nights
the wind and waves drove the ships further apart and when the sun
rose on the fourth morning, the
Victorio
had vanished. There was
never any wreckage recovered, no sign of where she had run aground.
The convoy escorts searched for days, weeks, but no member of the
crew was ever found, dead or alive. And, as I mentioned before, no
trace of her cargo ever surfaced."

"Until now," Eva said quietly.

"Until now," he agreed. "You said there were
four coins?"

"Yes. Three of them were stolen along with
my father's letters."

"Stolen by... the same person who shot
you?"

"Yes. A man by the name of Augustus George.
He worked for my fiancé, Lawrence Ross, who was the only other
person who knew about the coins."

“Your fiancé? He was the
one who misled you into believing it was from the
Nuestra Senora de Valencera
?”

“Former fiancé,” she said through clenched
teeth. “And yes. He was the one who lied to me and then ordered
Augustus George to kill me.”

CHAPTER EIGHT