The Pirate Captain (29 page)

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Nathan drew up before his men amid nervous coughs and throat-clearing. They were mute, most fixing their eyes on the deck. He watched and waited, alert for the first sign of how it was to be, what course they were going to chose in light of what they had just heard, a confession, for all intents and purposes. No sense in tipping his hand just yet. If at all possible, this needed to be their decision, or them thinking as much. If he were too mutton-fisted, it could all go pear-shaped, and quickly. Sometimes it was like trying to drag a dead ox to drink, but as always, pulling was ever so much easier than pushing. If he had his way, he’d rig the grates and let the lot of them taste the nines, but this wasn’t his decision to make. The matter hung in a fine balance; one wrong word could tip the scales, setting a course that could never be reversed. Even if it were to go right, there would always be the chance of betrayal. The coin’s call was ever so much louder than a pledge. Brotherhood could purchase precious little on the streets of Tortuga.

It was Pryce who stepped into their midst, Hodder at his side.

Good men!

“Be there one of you motherless whoresons what fancies the King’s coin might weigh more agreeable in his pockets?” Pryce waited, providing each the benefit of a gimlet eye, one that could dissect a liver without one’s knowing. “Anyone?”

Pryce waited, daring anyone to speak. At length, he nodded in satisfaction. “Very well, then, so be it. And if any of you blessed plagues o’ the sea decide those pounds are a-callin’ a bit too loud, see me and I’ll double it.” He gave that a moment to sink in. “Now, who’s with me?”

A hearty “Aye!” went up.

Pryce turned to Nathan with a reassuring smile. “She’s safe with us, Cap’n.”

###

Cate flung herself across her bunk and sobbed. She kicked her feet and pounded the bulkhead at the unfairness of being forced to drag up and bare what she had strove so valiantly to suppress for so long. She kept the memories locked away, for once loosened, like a pillaging horde of Teutonic ogres, they could seize her and pull her toward the pit from which they rose.

It was her fear of those demons that had always prevented her from seeking the pleasant memories and the benefits found there: the comfort of a familiar face or the reassurance of a smile. Now she cried until exhaustion weakened the demons to the point of losing their grip and were washed away. She was free then to pick through her memories, in search of what she needed: human contact.

Through all the deprivation and squalor of the last years, the lack of the touch of another person—other than in anger or in passing—was what left her the most bereft. Starvation of the belly is nothing compared to the spirit hungering with the need to be touched. Cate knew the inexorable yearning for warmth, to feel the spring of skin and the pulse of life throbbing just below the surface: to be held. Not necessarily of a sexual nature—God knew she missed that, too—but just…held. Finding such an embrace, one of consolation and tenderness, in her memories, she gave herself over, wrapping herself in it like a cloak.

Sometime later, Cate found herself sitting on the stern gallery. How she came to be on there she wasn’t quite sure. She felt drained, empty and hollow, like a glass bubble, and curled deeper those imagined arms for protection.

Her confession before the Morgansers had put a massive “C” for “criminal” on her chest, or perhaps “W” for “wanted,” or more significantly, “R” for reward. Stripped of her anonymity, she felt exposed and naked.

“As if Nathan would notice,” she said ruefully to the night.

The running was over, a five-year cat-and-mouse chase finished. It wasn’t an unpleasant thought. From a certain point of view, it was what she had wished for: no more hiding, no more fear. Imprisonment and death were no longer an amorphous hazard; they were now a fixed feature on the horizon. Her trial would be a brief interlude, and then death. Drawing and quartering was traditionally reserved for men, but the Crown had vowed to make an exception for her. Such executions were carefully orchestrated. She would be hung just enough to fulfill the obligation, then laid out and eviscerated, her still-beating heart displayed before her. Beheading would be next, a welcomed end by then. Her body would be burned, the ashes scattered. The lack of a grave would be of little consequence, however, for there would be no one seeking it in order to grieve.

The first impulse was to wish for more time, but that would mean going back to running. Time suddenly seemed a commodity, each ring of the watch bell slicing away another 30 minutes.

Cate rested her arms on her bent knees and allowed the breeze to cool her face, still hot from tears. The crying was long ended, but her head still felt heavy and tight. Nathan’s step was overhead; his absence from the cabin was glaring. He had no more to say to her either.

She wondered what Nathan's response would be to her deception. It couldn’t in truth be called that, for she had been straightforward about her criminal status from the first. It had been revealed with purpose, in the hopes the prospect of a reward would bring her out of the pirates’ clutches. She had always had the impression that Nathan had been suspicious of her truthfulness, but he was yet to press her on it. The question rose again as to why he kept her aboard. She groaned aloud, too tired and too emotionally spent to explore that, yet
again
. After such a confession, she held little doubt that he would be forced to either tip his hand or just give her over.

Head propped against the window’s frame, Cate gazed at the silver-lit sea stretching behind the ship, and allowed herself to slip away to another night, a world, an age away.

So lost in thought, she didn’t notice Nathan until he was standing near the mizzenmast, gaping a yawn. With the cabin dark, he would have assumed she had retired and didn’t look for her. He seized his chair and dragged it toward the sill. He pulled up short, startled to find her there.

Recovering quickly, he leaned against
Merdering Mary
’s carriage. “I thought you to be abed.”

“No.” Her voice was scratchy and thickened from crying.

“So now we know,” Nathan said lightly crossing one ankle over the other. “There are no secrets on a ship. We’d seen your shoulder and the…other bit.” He winced at that admission.

“Have a jolly good gawk did you, ogling the freak?” she asked bitterly.

Most of her first minutes aboard were blurred. There were flashes of being mauled, and the mortification of being exposed, her clothes being torn away. Half-drowned and terrorized, she hadn’t been aware of anything other than escaping.

“That’s not how it was,” he said evenly, “for the most part, at any rate. We saw one who had suffered greatly and lived to tell of it. We saw a comrade, a mate, one christened by the same blade as we.”

“I show them to no one,” Cate said, balling her fist. She had never seen the scar on her back—could never bear to—but it was described in the broadsheets. It might as well have been a brand, for it labeled her, and doomed her if ever caught. She pressed her hand to her stomach, some of the scars there thick enough to be felt through the fabric.

As for those, she couldn’t think about it.

Nathan’s levity faded. “There’s no shame in it, darling. We all bear our marks. Take pride. You can spit in the world’s face, because you’ve lived to tell of them.”

“You think I’m lying, don’t you?”

How could he not?
How could anyone believe such a tale: a single woman riding foolishly into battle to save her husband? To her own mind, the entire ordeal possessed a dream-like quality, as if she had watched someone else.

The corner of his mouth quirked. “And what of it, if you were? The effect is the same: the marks would still be there. You suffered no less, regardless the cause. Any fool can see there’s more to it and only a fool would inquire. Hell, no one tells everything,” he said with a mirthless laugh. “Couldn’t get a bloody word in edgewise, what with everyone jabbering.”

Nathan wasn’t being cavalier, nor taking her story lightly. With a body more battered by far, he spoke with the eloquence and weight of experience. He spoke not down to her, but as equals, joining her into a brotherhood of those christened by battle, either on the decks of a ship or fields of war.

Cate rested her chin on her arms and turned her attention to the night once more. Clouds swathed the moon’s hips, its three-quarter brilliance illuminating the night in silver and the purplish-black hunched shapes of islands, which dotted the horizon. The stern lamps gilded the
Morganse
’s wake. Beyond the glow of the lamps, the ship’s path streamed away in a phosphorescent V-shape.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she sighed.

“Aye, ’tis beautiful.”

She turned to find Nathan’s gaze fixed on her, his profile frosted by the moon.

The space between them was filled with the sounds of the ship and low-voiced hands. Sails reefed, her wings clipped for the night, the
Morganse
’s voice was but a whisper of her daytime chorus, the water barely rustling as she slipped past.

Stillness, however, was not Nathan’s natural state. He soon began to shift, the creak of his belts and tinkle of bells seeming to shatter the silence. He hazarded further movement only enough to resituate, and then settled. Soon, however, came the drumming his fingers on his belt. He was clearly troubled by something.

Little wonder what,
she thought ruefully. He would be glad to be shut of her. Then he could have back his cabin, his bed and what answered for a peaceful world in a pirate’s way of life.

After clearing his throat several times, Nathan said, “You jumped on a horse?”

It took Cate a moment to smoke his meaning. Her shoulders moved in a half-shrug.

“I grew up on a farm with five brothers.”

“Five brothers.” He gave a low whistle. “Your father must have been proud.”

“Would have been prouder with six, but settled for five.” She was disinclined to elaborate; it hardly seemed worth the effort, at that point.

“So, Witch o’ the Moors, is it?” he asked.

Cate twitched at the raw nerve touched.

“Scary, isn’t it?” She heaved a sigh and ruffled her hair in frustration. “How can they make up such outlandish drabble from something so horrible? Do they think it was some kind of a game?”

Nathan nodded knowingly. “Happens all the time, darling; a fascination with the macabre and the grisly.”

“You never inquired much regarding my past.” Nathan had been keenly interested in her identity when she first arrived, and then seemed to have lost interest, never pressing for further details.

He shrugged. “We all have a past. Backgrounds—where we came from, who we are ’tis many times best left unsaid. If a man desires you to know, he’ll tell you. You might find yourself learning far more than intended, and then you’re obliged to carry that secret, share his burden. Not many shoulders are wide enough to carry all that.”

“How much are you carrying?”

His gaze dropped quickly to the sill between them. “Enough.”

Nathan paused considering, the space between his brows furrowing. “All I care is that the men know a sheet from a shroud and live the by ship’s articles. From there…” A shifting of his shoulders finished the thought.

A wide smile flashed in the moonlight, as he said, “Most believe their former lives were drowned when they crossed the Tropic of Cancer.”

“Drowned?” It was an intriguing thought. If only His Majesty’s Courts would see it the same way.

“’Tis the superstition at any rate,” Nathan said, the grin widening.

Cate made a low growling sound as she rubbed her forehead on her arm. “I never wanted to be famous.”

Nathan pursed his lips, his sprouting beard making a soft rasping sound as he rubbed his jaw. “Fame’s not so bad. It can bring you free rum and your choice of the best whores.”

“Can’t say as I ever pined for either one.”

“People recognize you. They know your name.”

“I’ve rather been striving to avoid that,” Cate said tartly.

He ran a thoughtful hand along the curve of his mustache. “You can control it…mostly. Sometimes it takes on a life of its own, begins to grow with or without you.”

Suddenly Cate felt so very tired. “All I wanted was Brian alive. The rest was only what was necessary to that end.”

“People who do what they must to get what they want are to be admired.”

“Including killing?” She shot Nathan a doubtful look. “Do you find that an admirable trait?”

“Admiration comes in many forms, luv, under many masks,” he said evenly.

Nathan’s eyes found hers and held them. Glittering in the moonlight, the umber depths were laden with wisdom far too advanced for his years, the fruits of hard-earned lessons.

“When you came in, I was thinking about the night before Brian was supposed to be captured,” she said, looking to the night once more.

He looked up, scowling. “
Supposed
to be captured?”

Cate nodded, ruefully smiling. “Arrangements had been made for one of the tenants to turn him in the next day. We were all starving. It was a way for his family to receive the reward, rather than risk a stranger reporting him.”

“What about you?”

“I left that morning, before he was to be taken. The authorities were too interested in him to notice me.”

“Lord deliver us from noble men,” he grumbled with a barely tolerant roll of the eyes. “You got nothing?”

She smiled weakly. There had been a reward for both she and Brian. Dreading a life without him, she had been willing to sacrifice herself as well. The arguments had been passionate, Brian intransigent, claiming to see her safe away would allow him peace of mind to face what was to come. Her name was stricken from the family Bible; she no longer existed. And then she was spirited away to a series of clansmen and sympathizers, escorting her under the cover of darkness, night after night, until she was far enough south and no longer readily recognized.

“His family sent me a little when they dared through connections. The mail or couriers were too risky,” she said.