The Pirate Captain (31 page)

On that basis alone, he was ready to skewer the bastard on first sight…if and when he was ever found…and he
would
find him. God strike him blind, by all that was holy on this earth and sea, he would find him!

###

As the days grew into a fortnight, Cate gradually became inured to the pirate ways and their “wee bit o’ pirating,” as Pryce called it. “Cap’n’s on the prowl!” the hands declared, with an anticipatory gleam in the eye and knowing nods.

The
Morganse
stalked like a large black cat. Once the unwitting prey was spotted, a small cat-and-mouse would ensue, probing to discern who and what the prey might be. The meeting was usually a quiet affair, anticipation and preparation—making ready the guns, hauling up cartridges, wads and shot, clearing the decks, laying the splinter netting, dispersing weapons, wetting the sails, and sanding the decks—requiring more than the taking itself. If the sight of the blood-dripped sails weren’t sufficient, the sight of the massive black-and-white banner bearing the haloed skull framed with wings caused the hapless prey to douse its topsails. When she did give chase, it rarely lasted more than a watch. On rare occasion, a shot from the bow-chasers was necessary, with great caution lest the hull be breached, the precious prize destroyed. Within hours the ship was stripped of everything deemed valuable, and the
Morganse
was again on the hunt.

Cate sat on the forecastle—or “f’c’stle” as a true mariner would say—one afternoon. She loved it there. The wind whipping her hair, the spindrift touching her face, whatever sailing was, it was that much more on the forecastle. The deck and ship were more alive; the rush and power of wind and water that much more stirring; the sails overhead that much more immediate. Up there, if she was to close her eyes, it was the nearest thing to be free of the Earth as any human could wish. Noticing her joy, the jacks had made an arrangement of boxes and crates into a seat, which she used whenever conditions allowed.

There were drawbacks. It meant she was obliged to discreetly look away when any of the hands were on the head, for the bows were their only convenience, just as she did whenever someone stepped up to a pissdale. Having had five brothers and a husband, the call of nature was unremarkable. It was of mortal consequence to the men, however, and so she made a great show of pretending not to notice.

From the corner of her eye Cate saw the lad Jensen sidling near. When she was first arrived, he had been painfully shy. Then he stumbled into a loggerhead, a heated iron used to melt tar. Stinking of slushing the masts—an odious job of lubricating with galley fat—he stood like a deer ready to bolt while she treated the burn.

Now blushing brilliant, Jensen knuckled his forehead. “G’day, mistress…sir!” he corrected quickly.

His hand shot out to present Cate with a small box. Barely the length of her little finger and only slightly larger in circumference, it bore an intricate knotted rope detail carved at each end.

“It’s a needle case,” Jensen beamed. He took it from her to demonstrate how the top pivoted to reveal a hollowed-out groove. Going near purple with embarrassment, he gave it back and clutched his hands behind his back.

“It’s beautiful, Jensen.” And it was. The polished surface glowed, its grain a deep reddish color. “Is it mahogany?”

The joy from Jensen’s face faded. “No, ’tis salt horse, ma’am.”

“Beef?”

Cate gaped at the box. She had heard the men laughingly allude to carving it, but had thought it as jest.

Jensen’s young brow furrowed with the intensity of a craftsman discussing his trade. “I picked through a week’s ration just to find the right piece.”

Cate bit her lip. How does one ever go about giving a proper “Thank you” for something so thoughtful as that?

“Wanna come help?”

She looked up at Nathan’s voice. He stood poised at the top of the forward companionway, lantern in one hand and ring of keys in the other, looking expectant.

Cate glanced around. Sailing free with the wind two points aft, this according to Pryce. A cloud of snowy sail was on display overhead. Practicality must have prevailed, for the ivory of those flying off the forestays was unadulterated red. The expanse of sail was fashioned to catch the wind, for precious little was to be had. The
Morganse
moved at a crawl. Only with generosity did the log lines read four knots. It was making for a long day. Tucking Jensen’s gift in her pocket, she rose to follow.

Nathan trundled down the steps, pausing there to snag a horn lamp from a post. Once lit, he handed it off to Cate and, with the same lightness of foot, ascended to the hold. It was a marvel how his feet never seemed to touch the wood. Years of living on a ship bore its rewards.

She groped her way down, lurching with jarring effect at the bottom when she expected another step, but there was none. Nathan forged ahead, the darkness immediately swallowing him. She had been in the hold twice before. It was no less foreboding now.

The lanterns were a weak defense against the pressing gloom. Fearing that to lose sight of Nathan meant to be doomed to an eternity of roaming in the dank netherworld, Cate doggedly kept on his heels. Struggling to maintain her footing on the treacherously slippery boards, she followed Nathan’s bobbing glow appearing and disappearing as he wound through the cargo. Through the creak and rumble of the ship’s working came the scuttle and scamper of tiny feet. She preferred to believe it was His Lordship hunting. The lantern cast grotesquely distorted shadows, and she scolded herself for allowing her imagination to run too freely. Still, she still couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes on her. Fearful of something jumping out to grab her by the leg, she kept tight in Nathan’s wake.

Cate felt it before she saw it, a whoosh of air overhead, something—a shadow—coming straight at her. A part of her knew it was only a shadow, and yet there was no denying the press of flapping wings. She shrieked and dove, throwing her hands over her head. Looking up, she found Nathan wearing a look somewhere between perturbed and amused.

“What was that?” She risked a peek upward, afraid to see her imaginings hadn’t strayed far.

Nathan stood there smiling,
the bastard
!

“Our dear Artemis.” He raised his lantern a higher and gestured with his head.

Cate cautiously straightened. It was her worst fears: two eyes stared back. Her vision finally adjusting, she could make out the low hunched shape of…

“An owl?”

“Artemis.” The lamp flashed on his widening grin. “Goddess of hunting, wild things, and the moon. Appropriate, don’t you think?”

Biting back a few rude remarks, Cate peered closer. Perched atop a platform wedged between the ship’s knees, the bird was not unlike those she had seen before: moon-faced with a buff-colored body.

“A barn owl?”

Nathan shrugged, regarding the creature with pride. “I suppose so. No one’s asked and to my knowledge, she’s not said.”

“She?” Her suspicion grew as to why every animal on board—and a menagerie it was growing to be—was always female.

“She just appeared one day, off Portland Point…Jamaica; blown in on a storm, more than like. She sat in the ratlines for the day, and then—after a bit of a commotion on the part of several men—we found her ’tween decks. Hung about there for a while she did, and then came down here. She moves about, especially at night, but seems to fancy here best.”

Nathan grinned again at that. “Shortly after she arrived, we noticed a marked drop in the rat population, no reflection on His Lordship, of course.”

“Of course,” she muttered, still not fully recovered.

“Earns her salt, does our dear Artemis,” he said almost lovingly. Cate felt a pang of jealousy for anything that could elicit just pride and admiration. “But don’t go trying to pet her. She’s a bit ill-mannered when it comes to that. Beatrice’s influence, I expect.”

It would figure that Nathan would blame Beatrice. Other than His Lordship, he didn’t seem inclined toward an amenable relationship with any of the animals, but apparently an owl had won him over.

“You’ll have heard the ship is haunted?” he asked with an odd combination of shyness and pride, pleased when she nodded. “That would be our dear Artemis. Makes quite the mournful noise when she’s of a mind.”

The back of Cate’s neck prickled. She had been wakened her first night aboard by just such a sound. The ship being haunted seemed quite possible at that point.

“So, she just…stays?” she asked.

“Aye, well, unless we’re in port,” Nathan said judiciously. “More often than not, she goes skulking about. Out cutting about I suspect,” he said with a scolding glower at the bird. “Floozy!”

Artemis returned an unblinking, broken-necked glower.

“But, she always comes back, catches up if we’ve weighed without her. We put in for careening once. Gone for a couple of weeks, she was; we began to think she’d found a better home. But then, she came back with a mate just as we cleared the reef. Set up housekeeping. You know how women are when they have that nesting urge,” he said as an aside, suggestively rolling his eyes. “Been a wretched nursery down here every since.”

Now that he mentioned it, she could see bits of twig, straw and feathers sticking from underneath the owl. Artemis seemed to know that she was the object of conversation, striking several noble poses.

“I don’t see any little ones,” Cate said.

“Oh, once they’ve grown, she runs them off. Sort of the natural way of things, don’t you think?” There was an odd glint in his eye and he chuckled. “Thoughtful she is, always making sure land is near.”

“Where’s her mate now?” Cate asked, peering cautiously around.

“Open-minded sort, she is. He goes gallivanting off, but she always takes him back.”

“Lucky man.”

Nathan caught the lilt in her voice, but opted to ignore it. He gestured toward the floor directly below the roost and the pile of small, dark, pellet-like things.

“There are three or four rats apiece in those. Not bad, eh?” he said, proudly. “The men sell them and the feathers for charms and such, mostly to the conjure women in these parts. One hand feeding the other, or whatever.”

Artemis’ attention swung around, her head making circular movements like the speeding hands of a clock.

“Ah, see there. She’s on to something, now,” cried Nathan.

Cate looked warily over her shoulder into the darkness, wondering what the owl saw.

“Just mind your hair.” He straightened with a meaningful look. “Don’t want any unfortunate incidents and have to cut Artemis free.”

Cate’s reflexively hand went up to smooth it, just in case. “What about His Lordship? I thought he was for the rats.”

“Oh, aye,” Nathan said, unfazed. “Had a bit of a falling out there at first. There were a couple of nasty rows in the middle of the night.”

He frowned at the memory, and then waved it away as he did with so many other things. “Beatrice had a few things to say on the matter, but an accord was met. Parrots don’t to cotton to hunting rats and Artemis didn’t care about the masthead, during the day, at any rate, so…” He shrugged. “There’s enough for everyone, and each unto his…or her territory.”

The bobbing light signaled he had moved on.

“Don’t owls eat lizards, too?” she asked, thinking of the ship’s geckos as she followed close behind.

Nathan’s chuckle came from out of the darkness ahead of her. “That’s why only the fast ’tis aboard. Once in a while, snakes and the like stumble their way aboard, what with the cargo and all. Between dear Artemis down here and His Lordship up there, the little slimmers don’t stand a chance,” he said without sympathy.

Cate's mind reeled at the staggering amounts of philosophies and commentaries in that and so much categorically askew, she had no way of knowing where to begin to respond. What went on in that mind of his was a marvel.

“A few men complained—bad luck and all that—but once they found the rats no longer were chewing their digits, they were agreeable.”

Sometimes his pragmatism could be staggering, she thought as they pressed on.

Over the slosh of water and ship’s rumbling, she heard the rattle of keys, and then the raspy squeak of hinges on a heavy door. Nathan stood aside to beckon her through. The door slammed shut behind them with a crypt-like thud that felt as if she had just been entombed. Judging by the duller echoes, it was a smaller room that Nathan now picked his way through, lantern on high. Then he stopped and turned.

“Here we are,” he announced, the lamplight flashing on his grin.

Cate gaped as the light fell on a long pile, well over shoulder high. “What is all that?”

“Swag.”

Nathan was already making his way around the perimeter and disappeared behind it. Cate stood awestruck. Gleaming bright in the lamplight, she had heard of piles of pirate treasure, but seeing it was entirely different. It was a dazzling array of everything anyone, in the wildest corner of their imagination, could consider valuable. If it had ever been made of gold or silver, it was there. If it had ever been used in any way, shape, form, or fashion by those of privilege, it was there.

In any circle, it would have been considered a king’s treasure trove. One could have easily set up housekeeping from what spilled from the cargo nets, crates, and hogsheads, and an elegant place it would have been: chairs, paintings, fire screens, porcelain, and clocks. A sequined, silk lizard with jeweled eyes stared out from a knot of plumes and brocades. Next to it was a statue of a naked woman reclined in a chaise, flung against a crate of what looked to be champagne bottles, amid a tumble of royal-looking staffs, orbs, and chalices.

Cate moved the lamp, its light catching additional stacks along the bulkhead of the more mundane: bags of rice, tea chests, sugar, salt, cocoa, coffee, spices, bolts of fabric, and bricks of indigo.

“Where did all this come from?” It was a fairly stupid question, but the only one she could conjure.

Nathan popped up beside her, waggling his eyebrows. “Pirate!”

He pushed past and ducked out of sight.