Wicked at Heart (44 page)

She got to her
feet and faced him, her eyes sparking violet fire.  "There is plenty I can
do, Damon, plenty I
will
do.  They say you're the notorious Black Wolf,
do they?  Well then,
you tell me who tried to take that American boy off the
hulk while we were at Morninghall!
"

"That is
not for me to say."

"Damn it,
Damon, the answer might save your life!"

"Nothing
can save my life," he answered quietly, "except a supreme act of
God.  And given His opinion of me, that, my love, is highly unlikely."

The marine was
there, unlocking the door.  "Time's up," he muttered, beckoning
impatiently for Gwyneth.  "Let's go."

She swept to the
door, eyes blazing defiance.  There she stopped, only to turn and point a
finger at the man who sat on the bench, watching her.  "Very well
then," she said tightly, glaring at him, "we shall just have to see
what God says about it, won't we?"

And with that,
she picked up her skirts and stormed out, determined to save the life of the
man she loved.

Chapter
28

The
court-martial convened the following morning.

For Gwyneth, who
was excluded from witnessing it, it was the beginning of a week of hell.  With
a tireless fervor that eclipsed anything she had ever done before, with a
frenzied devotion that overshadowed the combined efforts she had made on behalf
of all the other causes she had ever embraced, she threw herself into the task
of saving the life of her husband.

On the first day
of the trial, she wrote a long, passionately desperate letter to her former
brother-in-law, begging him to use his influence in Parliament and in the navy
to obtain a pardon for the Marquess of Morninghall.  She called together her committee
and the wives of Portsmouth's upper naval crust, hoping they could somehow
influence their husbands who served on the court-martial to show leniency.  She
consulted with various naval personnel, she visited with her husband that
afternoon, and sometime late in the wee hours she fell into her bed exhausted,
depleted from her efforts.

The following
morning and for every morning thereafter, she looked down from her window upon
that massive flagship sitting out there in the harbor, and willed her wishes
upon those she knew were deciding the fate of Lord Morninghall behind the flat,
shining panes of its elaborate stern gallery.

To no avail.

The
court-martial went into its second day.

Growing more and
more desperate, Gwyneth fired off another letter to Lord Simms.  She obtained a
copy of the navy's Articles of War and brought them to her solicitor, hoping,
with no success, that together they could find a loophole.  She wrote to
members of Parliament, to the prime minister, to the lords of the Admiralty, to
everyone of power and influence she knew.

No one could
help her — and the court-martial continued.

On the third day
she went to London and pleaded with as many of those individuals as she could
gain appointments with.

On the fourth
day she garbed herself most splendidly and sought an audience with the prince regent,
who promptly granted her request and then sat listening to her story with
amused patience, all the while discreetly ogling her bosom, making sexual
innuendos with his eyes, and letting his gaze rove up and down her trim frame. 
The ogling continued, as did the amused grin, until Gwyneth finally brought out
her heavy guns, the one thing on which she was banking to save Damon:  the fact
that the Black Wolf had struck the prison hulk while Lord Morninghall wasn't
even
in
Portsmouth, but at home in the Cotswolds, gravely injured and
near death.

The Regent
stared at her for a moment, then kneaded his fleshy chin before promising to
give the matter what thought it merited, cutting her audience short with a
faint excuse about having a hundred other matters to attend to before teatime.

And Gwyneth felt
her hopes running out.

On the sixth day
the trial ended, and the thirteen captains and admirals who served on the
court-martial came to a unanimous decision that was immediately confirmed by
the Admiralty in London:

Lord Morninghall
had been found guilty of the crimes with which he was charged, and was
sentenced to die.  Execution would be carried out at dawn the following morning
by a firing squad of ten Royal Marines.

And Bolton,
cruel in victory, allowed him no final visitors.

Not even his
wife.

That evening,
after Gwyneth watched the sun sink in a bloody ball into the western sky, after
the shadows in her room deepened and finally succumbed to the darkness, she got
down on her knees beside her bed.  Tears streaming down her cheeks, she prayed
with all her heart that God would help her plight, and in those last, desperate
hours before dawn He did.

God came in the
form of Reverend Peter Milford.

~~~~

"Lord
Morninghall?  If you'll come with me, please."

The night still
lay heavily outside the great gallery of the wardroom, but the mist was not as
black as it had been the previous hour, and Damon knew that dawn was on its
way.

He had not slept
at all this night, but then he supposed that his body somehow knew that it
would soon sleep the eternal rest, and was trying to snatch what few hours of
life remained to it, even if those hours had been long, reflective, and
tortured.  Raking his hair back with his fingers, he sat up, wide awake and
resigned to his fate.  Simon Wordsworth, the young lieutenant who had been
given the duty of being his so-called "gaoler," stood quietly and
patiently in the shadows.  Around him the other lieutenants still slumbered,
their rasping snores and sleepy grunts disturbing the quiet of the large cabin.

"It will
soon be time, sir," Wordsworth whispered.  "I thought you would like
a wash and a shave, uh, beforehand," he finished lamely.

"And some
breakfast too, I hope?" Damon added, with a little smile he hoped would
ease the poor lieutenant's distress.

"Of course,
sir.  If you'll come with me . . ."

Damon followed
the junior officer out of the wardroom.  Two armed marines awaited them
outside, quickly taking up the rear of their small procession.  To Damon's
surprise he found his stride felt sure and confident, his heart firm, his head
clear.  He thought of God and wondered at the thought, until he rationalized
that most men who were this close to death probably did the same.  Strangely,
his impending death brought him no fear.  He envisioned the neat row of ten
Royal Marines, all dressed in scarlet uniforms with white belts crossing their
chests, their boots shining, their faces expressionless, their muskets stiffly
at their sides; he could imagine the marine drummer, could imagine someone
coughing, could almost hear the commands:  "
Ready!
" — the
muskets all jerking up as one — "
Aim!
" — all training on his
body —

"
Fire!
"

It would be
quick and violent and, with ten bullets ripping into his heart at once,
painless.  He had a vision of his body jerking and convulsing before finally
falling dead to the deck, his chest nothing but a ravaged, gory hole, his eyes
staring and his mouth open in a soundless scream.

And still he
felt no fear, nothing but a strange, resigned calm.

Perhaps this was
God's way of making these last hours easier.  Perhaps the attacks of senseless
panic he'd had up until so recently had prepared him for the real thing.  Perhaps
. . .

Who knows, he
thought as Wordsworth showed him into a small cabin, where a young servant
waited beneath a hanging lantern.  On a bench was a plate of food, a bowl, and
a pitcher.  Wordsworth turned to Damon and nodded, and Damon plunged his hands
into the cool water, splashing it over his face and into his hair as the marines
waited stiffly outside.  He was keenly aware of every sensation, knowing it
would be the last time he'd ever experience them; the slippery coolness of the
water, the play of light over the bowl and the shadows his head cast across it,
the light scent of the soap, the feel of the deck beneath his shoes.  He
toweled his face and hair and sat down on the bench.  The servant boy
immediately lathered his face and neck and began to shave him.

Through the cabin's
open gunport he could see the dark, clinging mist lightening to charcoal as
dawn approached.  He glanced at Wordsworth as the boy pulled the razor over his
cheek.  The lieutenant's hands were clasped tightly behind his back, and he was
rocking back and forth, obviously very ill at ease.

He did not meet
Damon's gaze.

The lieutenant's
distress only brought home the reality of what was happening.  Damon shut his
eyes and instead of thinking about it, concentrated on the simple pleasure of
the razor moving over his skin.  He thought of Gwyneth, as he had done for most
of the past, endless night, and he thanked God who had sought to comfort him in
this, his final hour, that she would not have to see his bloody end.

All too soon the
shave was finished, the breakfast was eaten, and Lieutenant Wordsworth and the
two armed marines were escorting Damon out of the cabin, up through a hatch, and
out onto the deck, still bathed in early-morning mist, where a contingent of
six armed marines waited silently near the launch that would be swung out and
over the side.

A mild offshore
wind, ripe with the scent of the mudflats, stirred the heavy mists and ruffled
Damon's shirt.  Above, lines hummed and the admiral's pennant gave a single,
half-hearted crack.  Somewhere off in the mists to starboard came the splash of
oars as a fisherman headed out to sea to ply his nets.

"Ready,
sir?"

Damon nodded. 
Moments later, he was sitting in the launch, Lieutenant Wordsworth and the
escort of armed marines flanking him on all sides.

"Gonna be a
fine day," one of the oarsmen said tactlessly as the breeze pushed through
the mists and made the sea ripple against the launch's hull.  Wordsworth shot
the sailor a severe look, and shame-faced, the man looked away.

Slowly the
launch moved away from the flagship in a swirl of bubbly foam.  Damon kept his
gaze straight ahead and did not look back.  He could well imagine Bolton
standing in his cabin, a satisfied smile on his face, watching.  Or perhaps Bolton
wanted to savor his final act of revenge in person, and already awaited him at
the place of execution.

The wash of
water beneath the hull became louder as the launch gained speed.  The mist
clung, sticky and damp, to skin and hair, but the breeze was already beginning
to make short work of it, scattering the thick grey skeins and pushing them out
toward the sea.

Wordsworth
leaned over into Damon's ear.  "The sentence will be carried out aboard
Athena
,"
he said quietly.  "You — you understand."

Of course
,
Damon thought.  Bolton would not have wanted blood and guts fouling the deck of
his precious flagship.

"That is,
unless there is a royal reprieve," Wordsworth added, lamely.  "If one
should come, it will be revealed during those moments just before the command
to fire is given."

"Aye,
they'll want to make ye suffer, first," grunted one of the seamen, leaning
into his oar.

"I do not
entertain any false hopes," Damon said softly.  He bestowed an earnest
look upon the lieutenant.  "And neither should you."

Biting his lip,
the young officer looked away, deeply troubled.

The mist was
thinning now, and through it the shore appeared in patches, with long,
gray-brown docks stretching like stiff fingers out toward them.  Off to
larboard the hull of a '74 made a seemingly insurmountable wall, its wet wales
glinting in the virgin light, its gun ports all open to catch the morning
breeze, its anchor chain disappearing into the gray sea.  Was it
Athena
? 
No.  The launch kept moving, a speedy knife through the sleepy harbor, the
water rushing against its bows, the oars rising and falling with perfect
dripping precision.

Damon looked
wistfully at the nearby shore and at the many brick buildings, all fuzzy in the
mist.  He thought of Gwyneth out there, somewhere.  He hoped Rhiannon was with
her.  He hoped.. . .

That she would
be all right.

Already the
world was awakening.  On the shore ahead he could see movement:  fishermen
loading their nets into weather-beaten craft, a group of seamen stumbling along
the beach, still reeling from a night of hard drinking, and there, just ahead,
a hoy, one of those dockyard sailing boats that brought stores around the
harbor.  Its mast stuck up like a pencil into the thinning fog; the tide and
current were causing it to jerk and pull against its mooring line, which
slackened and snapped taut with every rise and fall of the sea beneath it.

Coming up out of
the mist off the starboard bow was the hull of the warship
Athena
.

"Lay on
your oars!"

The rush of
water beneath the launch lessened in pitch as the boat crew brought their oars
up and feathered them, letting the craft's momentum carry her forward.

It'll be
quick
, Damon reminded himself, refusing to let the sudden prickles of fear
show in his impassive face.  He could feel the eyes of the boat crew and the marines
on him, no doubt consigning to memory every detail of his face and form so they
could someday tell their grandchildren about him, and how they had accompanied
the Black Wolf across the harbor to his death.  No doubt some were morbidly
envisioning what he was going to look like as a corpse, or thinking about the
unlikely events that had led him to this inglorious end.  Perhaps some of them
pitied him, while others secretly admired him.  Either way he knew that none of
them envied him, and were already seeing him as a dead man.