The Pirate Prince (42 page)

The admiral’s massive first-rate ship of the line loomed off the starboard stern, trying to drift up alongside
The Whale
. The bounty hunter’s guns cracked at them from the port side, and the fight erupted.

For the next two hours they did not know the thunder from the deafening roar of broadsides, the wall of waves crashing over the taffrail and the bulwarks from the sleeting rain. Lightning clashed fiery swords with the flare of cannon fire above the ships’ mast tops like battling archangels. In the darkness they could scarcely see their hands before their faces. At one point Lazar was forced to grab hold of the capstan to keep from being swept overboard. He noticed a body going by him and reached out to grab the man by the collar, only to find that the bedraggled creature was none other than Darius, the young hero.

“Bloody
Miles Glorioso
!” Lazar muttered. He glared at the boy and, never letting go of his collar, marched across the zigzagging deck and dropped him bodily down the hatch.

“But she said she didn’t need me!” Darius protested as he got up from the wet floor, rubbing his backside.

“You’re bound for the brig if you don’t mind your orders!” Lazar slammed the hatch down and stomped back to his post at the quarterdeck with an ominous sense of foreboding, which there was no time to entertain.

The Whale
shuddered with each roar of her guns. There was a gigantic sound of ripping canvas and splintering wood.

He looked up just in time to see the mizzen topsail collapsing over its broken yard a split second before the round slammed down onto the fo’c’sle and smashed through the planks. This was followed a second later by another sickening crack of wood from above. He winced, like any sea captain, feeling his ship’s injury in his very bones. The broken yard arm fell, pulling down heavy, drenched canvas and a tangled web of rigging, which slowed its descent by a few precious seconds.

The men swarmed like ants into the waist just before the beam crashed athwart the stern, but Lazar had seen the sea swallow two of his Brethren as they clung to the crumbling rigging.

That did it.

The British bastards weren’t following the bloody
Fighting Instructions
, and neither would he. He’d take that damned first-rate and make it his royal flagship! he thought with a Cap’n Wolfe-like laugh.

He bellowed for the sweeps to be lowered and the grappling hooks made ready.

He chased the aft crew out of the waist, back to their sternward posts, with rich oaths, then he ordered the helmsman to swing the ship around five degrees south. He heard the rattle of the giant sweeps being lowered. The great oars splashed down into the water, and the shift in position he’d commanded was soon effected. He shouted for Harcourt, but it was Donaldson whose face appeared before him in the pale blue light of another lightning bolt.

“Harcourt’s dead, Captain! The yard fell on him.”

Lazar cursed, gripping a shroud as another wave rose over the bulwark. He wiped off the water’s cold, salty sting and hung over the quarterdeck, shouting for the lads abeam to hold their fire and those weatherward to shoot faster. They were bearing down on the admiral even as the mysterious bounty hunter did likewise to them.

Blindly, shrouded by pitch darkness,
The Whale
battered the weatherward vessel with everything she had until the other ceased fire. A blaze flared for a moment or two on the enemy’s forecastle before the rain and the waves put it out, but it provided light long enough for Lazar to see they had thoroughly disabled her. Her foremast and mainmast were lopped in half like felled trees. Her crew was leaping hopelessly into the longboats.

Lazar’s crew sent up a cheer to see it.

Then the rain turned back to hail.

The bounty hunter began firing in their faces. There was nothing to be done but return the volley. Lazar knew his ship was taking a beating, but at the moment he was more concerned about his own hide, especially when a fat round plopped down onto the deck in front of him and went crashing down to the mid-deck. He thanked God the weather was too rough to permit snipers to nest in the rigging, as was usual.

He ordered the helmsman to shift them seven degrees northward. Once the change was accomplished, the gale, he calculated, would drive them quickly out of reach. They passed the bounty hunter side by side and made the passing with everything they had left, the portside’s full forty guns, knowing neither how much damage they’d incurred nor how much they’d inflicted, then they caught the wind and were flung out of range.

The enemy did not venture after them, because the squall line hit.

The sea became a witch’s cauldron, and Lazar began to wonder if they’d snagged upon an early hurricane. The waters seethed like black, bubbling pitch.
The Whale
teetered up over the crests of twenty-foot waves and plummeted into the troughs, meanwhile swinging side to side with sickening motion.

“Cap, we must drop our sails!” Donaldson cried. “We’re gonna broach!”

“
I’ll
give the bloody orders!” he shouted back through the roaring rain.

Donaldson looked at him as if he were more than a little mad. God’s truth, storms did make him feel a trifle touched, all the element he was made of. It probably was an unnatural passion to love the rage of Nature as he did.

He strode the zigzagging decks to the helm to feel the rudder for himself and found it was a good thing he had, for the big helmsman’s strength was spent. Lazar nodded firmly at him and took the wheel.

Immediately he knew it would be a struggle, but he refused to believe it was impossible. If he didn’t keep running, the British would catch him easily when the storm was through, thanks to the damaged mizzen, and, the bloody limeys aside, he did not doubt this French bounty hunter was only the first of many to come.

“Come on, big beautiful gal. Steady now. You’ve got to get me out of here,” he murmured to his ship. “Those waves can’t hurt you, darlin’. Cap’s got you. We love storms, you and I.”

Arms burning, he threw all his strength into the wheel, fighting the sea’s attempt to turn her broadside and flip her over beneath the massive waves.

“At least let us drag an anchor!” Donaldson demanded.

“All right—one drogue!” he said. “Quake-buttocks.”

Just then the lightning swiped at them with its one claw and a wildcat cry, and now their battle was purely with the elements.

He was not sure how long he grappled with sea and sky when the lightning ceased, the winds dipped, and the waves slackened to half their height, still formidable.

By the time the storm was over, the east was gray with dawn, his arms and back and shoulders were numb, and the enemy was nowhere in sight. Russo’s, Landau’s, and Bickerson’s vessels were missing also. Lazar’s men lay scattered across the deck, beaten by their ordeal, waiting for the rosy glow of dawn to bloom into full sunlight and dry their clothes.

Ragged with exhaustion, it was all he could do to drag himself across the Swiss-cheese decks toward the hatch, but through his exhaustion came the distant elation of victory. He and his vessel had brazened it out and cheated death again.

Now it was going to be a chore to reckon what quarter the wind had blown them to, for he had no idea where the hell they were. They’d probably run a hundred miles. Before tackling that puzzle, though, first he needed his woman and sleep.

As he picked his way around the half-dead sailors and the holes in the deck where various rounds had hit, Donaldson came weaving across the deck toward him.

“Captain, sir!”

“What is it?” He stifled a yawn.

“My report, sir—”

“Oh, yes,” he said, mildly annoyed that this necessary detail would keep him from his bed. “Go on.”

“A thirty-two burst on the lower gun deck, port side, amidships. The gun crew was killed. The explosion caused a breach of the hull, but the carpenters plugged it up straightaway, so the water we took on was minimal. As for the mizzenmast, well, er, you’re aware of that.”

“Indeed,” he said, rubbing his neck as he glanced at the mast and all the tattered sails. “Poor old gal.”

“Twenty-three dead and fifty injured—” Donaldson stopped and cleared his throat.

A prickle of foreboding crept down Lazar’s spine as he noticed for the first time how nervous the shipmaster seemed. “Well? I assume Doctor Raleigh has the situation well in hand? He has enough laudanum and bandages and so forth?”

“Aye, sir, it’s just that—” He broke off.

Lazar waited. “Aye, Donny? What do you have to tell me?”

“I’m afraid I have such news, sir, I scarce can think how to tell it.”

Lazar’s fatigue fell instantly away. “What is it?”

“Sir…a, uh, that burst cannon that I told you about—”

Lazar stared at him with his blood slowly running cold.

Allegra
.

“Yes?”

“They were in the cargo hold.” The shipmaster looked up at him, his eyes stark. “Sir, the cannon burst just below the cargo hold. Sir, Vicar has been grievously wounded—”

“Allegra?” he cried, grabbing the man by the shoulders.

“She is unhurt—the gypsy boy got her out of there moments before it went off. But sir, Vicar is dying—”

Lazar was already reeling away, half stumbling down the companionway.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Allegra met Lazar at the foot of the companionway on the lower deck. She already knew he had not been injured in the battle, but she feared how he would take it when he saw Vicar. The old man’s wounds were grievous, his chest seeping with blood that would not stop.

“I’m fine,” she told him in answer to his frantic, searching glance. He jumped down from the ladder, he brushed by her and ran to the sick bay. She followed.

“Lazar, wait!”

He didn’t.

By the time she turned the corner into the sick bay, a chaos of amputations and loathing and terror, Lazar was standing over Vicar’s cot, looking horrified. Quickly she went to him. Then it was as if all the strength went out of him.

“Oh, Jesus.” He sank down on the stool beside the cot and sat there, unmoving and forlorn.

The long, wooden space of the sick bay was like the inside of a pine coffin, the rusty lanterns creaking on their hinges with the battered ship’s motion. The choking sound of Vicar’s breath was horrible. His eyes didn’t open.

“Doctor Raleigh did all he could,” she told Lazar, laying a hand on his broad shoulder. “The broken ribs have pierced his lungs.”

Lazar sat in utter silence, shoulders slumped, his bronzed face etched in exhaustion and grief.

She did not leave his side. Standing behind him, she kept her arms around him as Vicar passed away quietly less than half an hour later. Lazar let the old man’s hand go and hung his head in both hands, elbows on his knees.

More losses. How would he ever bear it?
she thought.

Tears streamed down Allegra’s face for the kind gentleman scholar, but even more so for Lazar’s pain. Her mother’s suicide had taught her all too well as a child that it was the living left behind who suffered most. She knew no words could help at a moment like this. She caressed the muscled curve of Lazar’s back as if she could wipe some of the anguish away from him.

He finally rose, gave his nose a quick swipe on his arm, and turned away without a word. She drew the blood-misted sheet over Vicar’s face as Lazar left the sick bay, then followed him at a respectful distance as he walked to his cabin.

The elegant cabin had been wrecked by the battle. The door had been blown partly off its hinges, so he couldn’t shut it properly behind him. She had the feeling he would have locked her out if the door weren’t broken. She ventured in after him warily with a sense of foreboding.

Still he never turned around or looked at her. In silence, he stood in the middle of the room, looking around with a lost expression at the holes in the floor, the smashed desk, the shattered diamond panes of the stern windows.

Allegra hung back in the doorway, watching him in a mixture of fear and concern.

“What a mess,” he said.

“We’ll clean it up,” she began soothingly.