The Ugly Duchess (11 page)

Part Two

After

Fourteen

Nine months
later

Aboard the
Percival

Somewhere in the
Maldives

“W
e can’t
outrun it, my lord. We’re too heavy.” The quartermaster, a stout man named
Squib, had to shout at James to be heard. Wind stripped the fear from his voice,
but not from his face.

“Hold the wheel.” James turned around, scanning the
horizon. The approaching ship was barely visible, but she was skimming the waves
as if she had taken wing. “You’re sure she’s a pirate vessel?”

“Lookout confirmed it,” Squib said, blotting his
forehead. “I’ve managed to avoid pirates all these years, dammit, and I have new
grandbabies at home. I should have just stayed in London.”

“Is she flying a black flag?”

Squib nodded. “We’re done for. It’s the
Flying Poppy.
” He gave an involuntary moan. “Got a red
flower on black; easy to spot.”

James had been standing at the rail, rigid, staring
at the ship as if his hard stare could make it disappear. The moment he heard
the name, relief made his shoulders slump. He knew about this ship, and if he
was right, they had a chance. A slender chance, but it was better than nothing.
“Could be worse,” he said, hoping he was right.

“The
Poppy
has taken
five ships this season alone, from what I heard at the last port. The only thing
can be said is that they don’t generally kill the crew, but they sink the
vessels. We’re done for, my lord.”

James grunted. “Are the cannon ready to fire?”

“Yes.”

“We’re not done for until the last moment. Steer
ahead. Doesn’t really matter where you go.”

James leapt down from the forecastle and ran below
decks. His crew was busy with the cannons, slamming the huge sticks that tamped
the powder into place. They didn’t pause until he addressed them.

“Men!”

They all looked up. An hour earlier, they had had
the sun-bronzed lethargy of men on a long voyage, tired of salt beef, tired of
flying fish, their eyes and noses full of salt. But now, to a man, they were
terrified.

“Our goal is to stay alive,” James told them.

There was a moment of surprised silence.

“We’ll give the cannon a try. We might get lucky
and hit her broadside. But those pirates want what’s in our hold. And I don’t
want all of you killed fighting hand-to-hand with men who have spent their lives
doing it. If we don’t sink the ship on the first go, I want you all on the deck.
Face down.”

At that, there was a babble of angry voices.

“I’ve never turned down a fight in me life,”
Clamper shouted. He hailed from Cheapside, and had a rugged face and a handy way
with a dagger.

“You will now,” James said. “You pull that blade of
yours, Clamper, and I’ll consider you mutinous.”

Silence again. He and the crew had been together
nine months. There had been difficult moments as he learned the ways of the sea
and sailing a trading vessel, but Squib had stood at his shoulder the entire
time. And he’d be
damned
if he’d let his crew be
massacred. “I intend to challenge the captain,” he said. “To invoke sea
law.”

“Pirates don’t have no sea law,” someone
shouted.

“The captain of the
Flying
Poppy
does,” James said. He’d made it his business to find out
whatever he could about the pirates known to operate between India and the
British Isles. “His name is Sir Griffin Barry; he’s a baronet and a distant
relative. We met when we were both boys. He’ll remember me.”

“So you can talk to him in yez language,” Clamper
said, a flicker of hope dawning in his eyes.

“I can try,” James said. Barry was an unregenerate
criminal, of course. But he had gone to Eton. And they were third cousins. In
short, there were other degenerates in his family besides his father and
himself. “Don’t fire those cannon until I give the word.”

But in the end, the word never came. The crew of
the
Flying Poppy
was far too canny to expose her
side to a vessel they were bent on plundering, and the
Percival
was too heavy in the water, thanks to its full load of
spice, to move nimbly. The
Poppy
danced around her
until the pirates pulled up alongside and boarded without incident.

Men flowed over the railing in a rush. Upon seeing
the
Percival
’s crew lying face down on their own
deck, they spread out along the railing without a word, backs to the sea,
pistols in one hand, knives in the other. Apparently the
Percival
was not the first ship whose captain had surrendered at the
sight of that bloodred poppy sewn onto a field of black.

The captain was the last to board, landing on the
deck with a knife between his teeth and a pistol in his right hand. He certainly
didn’t look like a scion of gentle English stock; he was dressed like a
dockworker. A small poppy, matching the one on his flag, was tattooed below his
right eye.

“Sir Griffin Barry,” James said, inclining his chin
precisely the degree required by an earl greeting a baronet. He stood in the
midst of his prostrate men, all of them surrounded by a loose ring of pirates.
He was dressed, weirdly but calculatedly, in court attire: a coat embroidered in
gold thread with buttons made of gold twist. He even wore a wig—rather hastily
plopped on top of his head, to be sure, but it was there.

Barry took a lightning look at this vision, then
leaned back against the railing and burst into laughter. It was not a benevolent
laughter, by any means, but at least he was laughing.

James felt a pulse of courage at not being shot on
sight. “Under sea law, I could challenge you to a duel,” he remarked, his tone
as casually fearless as he could muster.

The baronet’s eyes narrowed, and his hand tightened
on his pistol. “You could.”

“Or we could simply retire to my cabin and have a
drink. After all, we haven’t seen each other in—what?—five years?”

His entire crew could be dead in a matter of three
minutes, by his estimate. But James was gambling on the ancient system of
British courtesy, drilled into the head of every aristocratic boy from the time
they could toddle. He added, deliberately, “I believe our late Aunt Agatha would
prefer the latter.”

“Bloody hell,” Barry said, his eyes widening with
dawning recognition. “Thought you were any fool aristocrat. But you’re the
Dam’Fool Duke’s son.”

James bowed, flourishing the pristine lace at his
wrists. “Islay. James Ryburn at your service. Something of a pleasure to meet
you again, Sir Griffin Barth—”

Barry cut off the utterance of his second name with
an obscenity. James felt a prick of satisfaction, along with another wave of
courage. Who knew one could intimidate a pirate captain with private information
such as the fact his middle name was
Bartholomew
?

“What in bloody hell are you doing out here, other
than waiting to be marauded by me?” Barry growled. But the balance of power had
shifted. James’s status as heir to a dukedom had leveled the playing field, for
all Barry was both a pirate and a baronet.

“Making my fortune after my father lost one and
embezzled another. Surely you, Coz, could be the one to teach me to do that? The
Poppy Two
, perhaps?” Holding his cousin’s eyes,
he threw off the embroidered coat, revealing the coarse shirt underneath. With
another quick gesture, his wig spun through the air and overboard.

“I’ve been captain of this vessel for nine months.
I’ve learned the wind and the water and the stars. I have a hold full of spice,
but I’d like to do something new. You might say, Coz, that the criminal instinct
runs in our family.”

Whatever Barry had expected to hear, it wasn’t
that. James held his breath. He didn’t let his eyes drift downward toward his
men, lest it be taken as a sign of concern and therefore of weakness.

“I’ll have that brandy,” Barry said, finally.

“My men are unarmed,” James remarked, as if he were
commenting on the weather.

Barry jerked his head toward one of his men. “Round
them up and put them over there by the rail while I talk to his lordship here.”
He looked back at James, the cold ruthlessness of a pirate captain in his eyes.
“If I don’t come above deck in an hour, kill them all, Sly. Kill them all.”

An hour passed, and Barry did not reappear. Sly,
however, knew better than to carry out his captain’s orders before taking a peek
downstairs. By the time he took a look, James and Griffin were well into their
second bottle of cognac.

Night fell with the
Percival
towing the
Flying Poppy
, their
respective crews conducting their business in an orderly fashion (albeit with a
few pirates looking over Squib’s shoulder).

James and his cousin, whom he had reverted to
addressing by his given name, continued drinking.

“Can’t drink like this normally,” Griffin muttered
at some point. “Captain can’t fraternize with his men.”

“I’ll remember that,” James said, slurring his
words a bit. “Do you remember what we did when we first met?”

“Climbed up on the roof,” Griffin said after a
brief pause to recollect, “slung a rope from one of the chimneys, climbed down
far enough to bang on the nursery windows and try to scare your nanny to
death.”

“That was the plan,” James agreed, taking another
slug of cognac. They drank straight from the bottles. “Didn’t work out that
way.”

“My sister ran around shrieking, but yours didn’t.
She opened the window, remember? I thought she was pulling us in, but instead
she threw a basin of water at us, laughing as if she was cracked. She could have
killed us.”

“Not my sister,” James said rather owlishly. “I
married her. She’s my wife.” Before he knew it, he found himself talking, for
the first time, about what had happened nine months before. It spilled from his
mouth. Not all of it—not what he and Daisy had been doing in the library—but
enough.

“Damnation,” Griffin exclaimed. “She heard it, all
of it?”

The ship caught the side of a wave and James nearly
fell from his chair, but he managed to catch himself. “Drunk as a stoat,” he
muttered to himself. “She heard every word. Told me never to come back. I took
over the
Percival
the next morning.”

“I’ve got a wife somewhere, too,” Griffin said, not
sounding in the least regretful at having misplaced her. “Better off
without.”

With rather elaborate care, they clinked their
bottles. “Here’s to the
Poppy,
” James said.

“And the
Poppy Two,
”
Griffin added. “See this?”

He tapped the wrong cheek, but James understood
what he meant and felt a surge of apprehension. No tattooed man could ever
return to English society. Tattooed men did not bow before the queen, nor dance
the minuet at Almack’s, nor kiss their wives goodnight.

There were times, in the dark of the night, when he
yearned for Daisy so much that he could hardly breathe. Times when he thought he
must
return to her, beg her to take him back,
sleep at her doorstep if need be. They had been friends his entire life, after
all, and lovers . . .

He still woke up shaking and aroused from dreams of
her.

But if he were tattooed, those dreams would be
over. There could be no prospect of going back. And that’s what she wanted.

She had told him to never come back, that she never
wanted to see his face again. Daisy never said anything she didn’t mean. She was
straight as an arrow. Not like him.

“Right,” he said, standing up with hardly a wobble.
“Have to board your ship, I suppose. Gotta get my tattoo so I can be a real
pirate.”

“You can come over there, but no poppy,” Griffin
said. “You have to earn your tattoo. You can’t just get one for the asking.”

James nodded. “Damn, my head is starting to
ache.”

“Three bottles of cognac,” Griffin said, standing
as well. He lurched against the wall. “I don’t hold my liquor so well anymore.
Did I tell you never to drink with the crew?”

James nodded, which made his head throb. “I’ll
learn it all,” he said.

Back on the deck, the sea air woke them up.

“How are we going to get to your ship?” James said.
The
Poppy
had drawn close to the
Percival
earlier, close enough that the pirates had
easily leapt from their deck, caught the
Percival
’s
railing, and swung over. But now the two ships were tethered with a good
distance between them, sails furled.

With a wild shout, Griffin kicked off his boots and
launched himself straight over the railing and down into the blue water.

“Mad,” James muttered. English lords didn’t do more
than dip in the ocean, though, of course, he could swim.

But over he went, dropping into water as warm as a
bath, stroking after his cousin, who swam not like a fish but like a shark.

Then up a rope ladder, hand over hand nearly as
fast as Griffin. James’s head had cleared, and he was almost sober as he pulled
himself over the railing.

For all the brandy and the bonhomie, Griffin was a
pirate lord.

His pirates were clustered around him now. They
turned as James drew himself upright, dripping.

Griffin’s face was different in the midst of his
men: it was sinister and grim, without a trace of his fine breeding to be seen.
“This is my cousin,” he stated. The pirates nodded, though a few narrowed their
eyes. “He’ll be captaining the
Poppy Two.
You can
call him The Earl.”

They went below to Griffin’s cabin, where Griffin
threw James some dry clothes: rough clothes, fit for a fight at sea. Without
ceremony, he took a pair of scissors and chopped off James’s hair above his
ears. “The last thing you want is some cutthroat to jerk you backward by your
pretty locks,” he explained.