The Rebel Pirate (6 page)

“No. You were right earlier. I fear what I will do to protect them.”

•   •   •

The doctor, when he arrived, towed along by Ned, was surprisingly young. That was Sparhawk’s first impression. A closer look revealed that Dr. Corwin—as Ned introduced him—was not so much young as youthful. He was probably near to Sparhawk’s age, but with the sort of slight build and round boyish face that would preserve the illusion of youth well into middle age. He wore a very old-fashioned wig to counteract the effect, and carried a salt-stained bag that must have seen sea service. That, at least, was reassuring.

Corwin was more capable than Sparhawk expected. He ordered Sarah to take hold of Sparhawk’s upper arm, while he himself manipulated the bone at the wrist. “We’ll do this just like we did when Ned fell out of the tree, Sarah. You pull down and I pull up.” The doctor smiled at her. Sparhawk saw in the expression a shared history—and possibly a shared future. To his surprise, that rankled. He could not recall ever being jealous about a woman before. Certainly not one he had never bedded.

He forgot all about such concerns when Corwin started to manipulate the breaks. It was a strange sensation, to feel his bones being pulled into place, and for about half a minute, it hurt like the devil. But then it was over, and the doctor was splinting and wrapping Sparhawk’s arm in soft new wool. There were smaller splints for two of his fingers as well.

The short ordeal left him exhausted, but relieved. His arm no longer hung crooked at his side, and he could curl and uncurl his unbroken fingers, a good sign, or so the doctor told him.

“You won’t feel like it,” Corwin said as he tied the bandages, “but you should eat something. A chop or a beefsteak. Rare and bloody. Then rest.”

“When can I travel?”

The doctor shrugged. “A week.”

“I cannot stay here a week.”

“If you could get a ship,” the doctor said, “you could travel tomorrow. But you won’t find a king’s vessel in this harbor. You are lucky to have found a doctor. Our other sawbones in Salem is the brother of Joseph Warren, and just as radical. The Rebels ran the customs men out of town last September. They have sunk hulks in the harbor so that British ships cannot enter without a pilot, and the guns that Colonel Leslie failed to capture from the Rebels in February have been mounted on Juniper Point and Winter Island.”

“By coach, then,” Sparhawk said.

“The Wards and the Corwins are known Loyalists. The Patriots of Salem are unlikely to lend either of us a coach,” said Corwin.

“I can get one,” said Sarah.

Corwin shot her a speaking glance that Sparhawk could not interpret.

She ignored it. “But it can hardly drive up to our door in the middle of the day without attracting attention.”

“She’s right,” Corwin acknowledged. “We take a risk, both of us, helping you. Sentiment against the navy is running gallows high in Salem just now. Your squadron has been seizing men and cargo off Cape Ann ships with the abandon of buccaneers. The Port Act might have been meant to punish Boston, but it has kindled rebellion up and down the whole coast. In February, your Admiral Graves swept the Marblehead docks with a press gang and carried off twenty-seven seamen—husbands and fathers—crippling the fishing fleet. So when a box of candles intended for the admiral came their way, the selectmen there impounded it. In response, your admiral sent the
Lively
to Marblehead Harbor and threatened to shell the town.”

“You sound,” said Sparhawk, “as though you sympathize with the Rebels.”

“We asked for the protection of government, for the king’s ships and the king’s soldiers to safeguard our property from the Rebels, not kidnap our young men and confiscate our goods to line their own pockets with prize money. If the Committee of Safety discovers you here, it will go hard—very hard—on Sarah and her father. Not to mention,” he added, brightening, “that the Sons of Liberty will likely take you for a spy and string you up from the nearest tree.”

His cheer, Sparhawk saw, was not entirely in jest. The good doctor did not like a fox in his henhouse.

James reminded himself that he could not have Sarah Ward. He was not his father. He would not seduce a vulnerable girl. An affair with a naval officer—and there was nothing more he could offer her—would be unlikely to improve her situation. Given the town’s political climate, if they were discovered, it would only put her in greater jeopardy. And that would be a poor way to repay her care of him.

Yes, the good doctor was an altogether better choice for Sarah Ward.

“Beefsteak or a chop,” Corwin repeated. “My wife has a rack in her larder. I am certain we can spare something for you.”

Or perhaps not.

The doctor left. Sarah went with him, in search of a rig, and Sparhawk reclined on the four-poster and considered his prospects.

The door creaked open. Ned hovered on the threshold, looking nervously over his shoulder.

“It’s all right,” Sparhawk assured him. “She has gone to find me a coach.”

Ned came into the room. “She wouldn’t like me telling you, but everyone in town knows, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t. And she likes you. I can tell.”

She did like him. He could tell. And she mistrusted herself with him. He’d seen that on the
Sally
when she had become so brisk and businesslike after the allusions to her
ration of grog
.

A mutual attraction then, but not like so many of the others he had known, based entirely on physical appeal. “I like her too, Ned, but I’m not free to court your sister.”

“Why not? You aren’t married, are you?
Everyone
who likes my sister is married.”

“No,” he said carefully, “I’m not married, but I’m not free to marry either. I would, however, like to help her.”

Ned’s eyes narrowed, and he looked very much like his sister when she was suspicious. “So do all the married men who like her. She doesn’t need that kind of help.”

Had Sparhawk been so worldly at that age? He had known what his mother was doing with her visitors, but he hadn’t really understood it, not until later.

“No,” Sparhawk agreed. “She doesn’t. But perhaps I can aid in some other way. Tell me about Wild.”

“She was engaged to him,” Ned said. “Until we lost all our money in that business with the tea. Then he married her best friend instead.”

•   •   •

There was only one person in Salem who might lend Sarah Ward a carriage: Elizabeth Wild.

Dr. Corwin, of course, had been right. If Sparhawk was discovered in their home, the Sons of Liberty would hang him.

And punish the Wards for harboring a spy.

She had little choice but to apply to her friend and rival for aid.

Sarah had always believed that there was no better childhood than to be the daughter of a ship’s captain. She had been born on the
Charming Sally
—though the schooner’s name had been the
Sea Witch
then. She had taken her first steps upon its deck, to the despair of her mother, who worried about the prospects of a daughter with a sailor’s rolling gait.

Sarah had learned to climb the
Sea Witch
’s rigging the way other children learned to climb trees, only trees were not peopled with sailors who spoke six different languages and knew where tea and pepper and ambergris came from and how to carve whalebone into a pie crimper with a picture of the king on the handle. And how to pick pockets.

Her playmates had been her brothers and the Sea Witches, and her chores had been those of a hand. She reefed sails and cooked porridge on a galley stove and got drunk for the first time in her life not on punch or brandy but on sailor’s grog.

Until Sarah turned fourteen and her mother put a stop to it. Abigail Ward had sailed with Sarah’s father, Abednego, a reformed pirate turned douce merchant, to Barbados and back for all the years of her married life, but she wanted her daughter to have a proper education, to become a fine lady, and marry a fine gentleman.

The dame school her mother chose educated the wealthiest girls in Salem and Marblehead. It was the first time Sarah had realized that not everyone thought being a pardoned pirate’s daughter was a blessing. She found that socially, she ranked below almost everyone in attendance, except the daughter of a fisherman who owned a small fleet. Her money smelled of fish. Sarah’s smelled of blood.

Evidently blood smelled nicer.

When she tried, earnestly, to ape the fine manners of the other girls, they called her Lady Frankland, after Agnes Surriage, the barefoot Marblehead serving girl who had gotten pregnant by a visiting English baronet at fourteen, and was spirited away by him to learn polish and manners—and deliver her child—in Boston. When Sarah failed, at anything, they called her Agnes.

Sarah hated the dame school and she hated the dame, until Elizabeth Pierce enrolled.

Elizabeth had a razor wit and she used it to cut people—particularly people who were unkind to Sarah Ward—to size. Their friendship was built on an equal exchange. From Elizabeth, Sarah learned to enjoy novels, needlework, and gossip. From Sarah, Elizabeth learned to navigate the docks of Salem, to cadge oranges and pineapples off the sailors, to wheedle ribald stories out of the tavern bawds.

From ages fourteen to twenty they were rarely out of each other’s company. They determined together that if they could not captain ships and sail to great adventures themselves, then they could at least marry men who did.

And no one in Salem had sailed as far or dared as much as Micah Wild. Calvinist-leaning Salem regarded Wild’s success as a divine endorsement. He had taken a small inherited fortune and made it a large self-earned one. Smuggling was the source of his wealth, cunning the source of his success. By the time he was twenty-five he owned seven ships.

Sarah had a fortune to rival Elizabeth’s, but not an ancient family name, so when Wild entered their circle, she assumed his intent was fixed on her friend. When he cornered her outside the assembly hall between dances and kissed her, his tongue in her mouth and his hands on her body, she was surprised, but also elated. The thrill of desire was new to her, and intoxicating.

She found she liked his quick wit and the way people gravitated to him in a crowded room. He liked being able to talk hulls and hawsers with a woman. Abednego had never warmed to him, but when Wild sought Red Abed’s permission, he gave it grudgingly, and Sarah embarked on preparations for her marriage.

Until the Wards lost all their money. And Micah decided to marry Elizabeth instead.

The two women had spoken only once since then. Sarah still burned with shame at the thought. She’d begged Elizabeth not to marry Micah. A true friend, Sarah argued, would not, could not do such a thing. But Elizabeth argued that the opportunity was too good to pass up, Wild’s fortune and standing too great to refuse. A true friend, Elizabeth had believed, would encourage her to accept him.

That was when Sarah had lashed out, telling her that Wild was marrying her only for her fortune. She regretted it almost instantly, but there was no taking the words back.

Sarah knocked upon the door of that imposing brick house with as much dignity as she could muster. When she asked to see Mrs. Wild, the maid hesitated, and Sarah’s heart sank. If Elizabeth refused to see her, if she did not find Sparhawk a carriage, if he was discovered in her home, their neighbors would punish them. And not just with the cool regard the Wards had endured of late.

The maid left her waiting in the hall, surrounded by the block-printed wallpaper Sarah had chosen herself, the bold geometric in blue and green that complemented the dove gray paneled wainscoting. The floorcloth she had selected was crisply executed in a marbled diamond pattern with a compass star. She wondered if Elizabeth knew that another woman had chosen so much of her home’s decor, if she was reminded every day in her own house that she had been Micah’s second choice.

Sarah had picked out all the furnishings in the hall when she had been engaged to Micah, and now she felt poor and shabby amidst such elegance. She was relieved when the maid came back and led her not into the grand parlor with its Brussels carpets and damask sofas, but into the smaller sitting room at the back of the house. She did not know whether the choice of rooms was a slight or a sign of consideration, and she resolved not to care. Sparhawk’s life, her family’s safety—these things were more important than her pride.

The little parlor was dark, the blinds drawn, the chairs covered in cotton ticking for the summer heat. She had prepared herself to greet Elizabeth—to beg for the loan of her carriage—and plastered what she hoped was a look of contrition and conciliation on her face.

All for naught. The woman waiting in the lolling chair at the tea table was not Elizabeth Pierce Wild, the friend of her girlhood, but a very different lady. Older than both Sarah and Elizabeth by a decade, she was seated with a posture and poise that mimicked the straight backs of the chairs and called to mind the grace of a swan. Her gray sack gown was striped silk damask, the train suitable for a woman of leisure, and at odds with the lady’s active, alert demeanor.

Sarah had seen her before. Angela Ferrers had appeared in Salem shortly before Micah Wild proposed the
Sally
’s voyage to Saint Eustatius. Stylish, sophisticated, said to be a widow of means, known to be political, and certainly no friend of government, the woman had quickly become a fixture at the town’s fashionable gatherings.

An exodus of wealthy and influential Loyalists had followed close on the heels of her arrival, driven by threats, intimidation, and blackmail. The Wards, thankfully, had been spared. At the time Sarah had attributed their good luck to their poor fortunes. Now it occurred to her that the Wards might have been allowed to remain in Salem for another reason: because this woman wanted something from them.

“Won’t you sit down?” said the lady, gesturing toward the other chair.

Sarah had to stop herself from treating the invitation as a command. There was cold steel behind the cultivated voice. It rang with the authority of the quarterdeck and carried with the borrowed vibrato of the pulpit sounding board.