CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
LUCY HAD IMAGINED A MYRIAD OF REACTIONS to her revelation, but the stark horror reflected in Gerard’s eyes was not among them. He sank back on his heels, gazing at her in mute shock.
She supposed it was a bit late for modesty, but she drew the counterpane over her shoulders just the same and swiped a bothersome tear from her cheek. The attack had come too soon after their loving, leaving her with no defenses.
She forced a watery smile through her chattering teeth. “It seems Kevin and I have more in common than you thought. We’re both bastards.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s all in my mother’s diary.” Lucy sniffed, dabbing at her nose with the back of her hand. “The really tragic part is that she loved the Admiral just as much as I once did. But she finally had to accept that he would never return to her bed, that his interest in her had been nothing more than a brief infatuation, another conquest of the French. That’s when she turned to other men. We should be celebrating, you know. I’m not the daughter of your enemy after all.” She disguised the pain of the words with a flippant shrug. “I’m not anyone’s daughter.”
Lucy had thought herself privy to the most potent tenderness Gerard could offer, but his hands cupped her face with such reverence it was as if he could absorb her pain through his fingertips. A rumbling salvo of cannonfire rocked them.
His eyes darkened with dawning agony. “Dear God, what have I done?”
Then he was gone, snatching his shirt and leaving her shivering in the heap of blankets that still smelled of the spice of his skin and the musk of their coupling.
Wracked by chills, Lucy hugged the counterpane around her and stumbled to the porthole. The Argonaut, nearly obscured by smoke, belched another round of fire. Was the Admiral pacing the freshly swabbed deck, she wondered, bellowing orders in his stentorian voice? Orders that would reduce the Retribution and the woman he had given his name and raised as his daughter to splinters of wood and bone.
Anger surged through her veins, warming her. She had always believed that if she could only be good enough, her father would love her. But now that Gerard had given her an intoxicating taste of true love, she realized the Admiral was nothing but a petty tyrant, incapable of loving anyone but himself.
Lucy narrowed her eyes as the smoke cleared, its ugly columns dispersed by the rising wind. A full moon bathed the Argonaut in unholy light. The seventy-four-gunner sat motionless, poised to pounce on its helpless prey, the abrupt silence of its guns more ominous than a fresh barrage of cannonfire.
A terrible suspicion flickered to life in Lucy’s mind.
“No,” she whispered. Then more loudly, “No!”
She dropped the blanket and snatched up Tarn’s shirt. The hem fell to her knees so she wasted no time wriggling into the breeches. She raced for the door, praying she wasn’t already too late.
This time the twists and turns of the Retribution’s hold failed to confound Lucy. Most of the lanterns had been extinguished by the ship’s uneven pitching, but she plunged through the darkness with blind confidence, her love for the vessel’s captain the only light she needed.
Within seconds she’d reached the mirror hiding the secret companionway. She pounded on it, but it refused to budge. Its hidden latch had been wedged shut by one of the Argonaut’s blows. Lucy collapsed against the cool glass, fighting her first impulse to weep with frustration. Instead, she shoved back the hair straggling over her eyes and glanced frantically around, finally locating a fallen timber small enough for her to lift. Without an ounce of remorse, she drew it back and smashed her reflection into a thousand fragments.
Heedless of its sharp edges, she swept the glass aside and scrambled up the ladder. She heaved open the trapdoor only to be engulfed in roiling smoke. She batted at it, coughing to clear her lungs. A pile of crippled sail dangled to her left, extinguished, but still smoldering.
She fanned the smoke from her stinging eyes only to have them fill with tears.
She was too late.
The flag of surrender rippled against the pallid circle of the moon, its grace a stark contrast to the charred destruction surrounding it. It was a measure of his men’s faith in him that even as Gerard prepared to surrender their beloved vessel, not one of them protested. They stood silently on the battered deck, their heads bowed, but their shoulders unbent.
Lucy passed among them like a pale wraith. She knew she should be embarrassed by her flimsy attire, her tangled hair, the scandalous signs of Gerard’s possession, but she had found among their ranks all the things the Admiral had taken such perverse pleasure in withholding—acceptance without judgment, affection without reproach, a nobility born not of birth or military stature, but of behavior.
She stopped in front of Gerard. Her low voice trembled with emotion. “You can’t do this. Do you hear me? I won’t allow it.”
He stared right through her, as if he’d been struck both blind and deaf by the enormity of his actions. Seeing no help there, Lucy turned to Tarn. His freckled face was stark white.
“You mustn’t let him do this, Tarn. I forbid it!”
The young Irishman gazed at the distant horizon, his hands fumbling with a battered string of rosary beads.
Lucy ran to Pudge. Her heart lurched to discover a fat crack running through the right lens of his spectacles. Somehow that was the worst affront of all. “Please, Pudge. Try to talk to him. Tell him he’s making a terrible mistake.” Pudge only shook his head sadly. “Is this what you ran away for? So that wretched wife of yours could watch you hang at Newgate?”
Dashing her tears away before they could blind her, she turned to Apollo. An ugly gash marred his temple. She clutched at his arm. “Oh, Apollo, dear Apollo, if anyone can stop him, you can! My father won’t bring him to trial. He’ll kill him. Now. Tonight. And he’ll see the rest of you hanged or jailed. Is that what you want? To spend the remainder of your life in chains?” The former slave stood unmoved by her pleas, his features carved in stark ebony.
A lone man slouched against the quarterdeck rail. Lucy seized upon him with desperate hope, fighting hysteria. “Kevin! He’s your brother! Surely you can make him see reason. Even if we surrender, the Admiral will find a way to silence me. He’s realized that I know about his privateering scheme. I can discredit him. Destroy his precious reputation!” A thread of blood trickled from Kevin’s fair hair. She brushed it from his brow with trembling fingers.
Kevin gently pushed her hand away, his wry, pitying gaze so like his brother’s that it chilled her to the bone.
She pivoted on the deck, turning her beseeching gaze on each man in turn. Once she had stood in that very spot and demanded they betray their captain; now she would entreat them to spare his life. The wind whipped at her hair, tore the tears from her cheeks.
“Don’t you see? He’ll find a way to silence all of you. Why do you think he only brought one ship? Because he didn’t want any bloody witnesses!”
She nearly collapsed with relief when a warm pair of hands closed over her upper arms from behind. At last, someone to help her make their captain see reason! But the voice in her ear was Gerard’s, its rich cadences deepened by regret.
“I can’t risk battle with you aboard. At least this way you’ll have a chance. If the Admiral blows us out of the water, you’ll have no chance at all. These men chose this life and, by consequence, this death. Even Digby had a hand in his own fate.” He steered her to port, showing her not out of cruelty, but out of love, the grim, canvas-wrapped bundle lying limp on the fo’c’sle.
Lucy’s knees faltered, but Gerard was there to support her as he had always been.
Grief roughened his grip as he drew her against him, shielding her from the wind. “You’re not like them, Lucy. I dragged you away from your safe, orderly life and carried you aboard this vessel by force. You had no choice.”
Lucy pulled away from the refuge of his grasp to face him. Determination banished her hysteria; her voice
was as crisp as a bell ringing across the waves. “I’m choosing now. Don’t do this. I’m not worth it.”
Gerard threw back his head with a despairing laugh. His eyes shone with admiration and another, far more fragile, emotion, that robbed Lucy of her breath. “Oh, God, but you are, angel. You’re positively priceless.”
Hope flared in her heart. She fisted her hands in his shirt and shook him, her voice rising to a shout to combat the wind, the flapping of that terrible flag, and loudest of all, the smug silence from the Argonaut. “Then don’t let him win, by God! Fight! Fight for me!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
GERARD GAZED DOWN AT THE DELICATE, but determined, fists tangled in his shirtfront. It seemed Lucy was no longer content to be the Admiral’s puppet, but was willing to seize all of her hopes and dreams and shake them until they surrendered. She’d finally chosen him over the man she’d spent a lifetime believing to be her father. His enemy had become her enemy.
She’d proven herself willing to beg for him. Willing to fight for him. Willing to die for him. Could he offer her any less?
When he lifted his head, the familiar glint of resolve in his eyes caused a hopeful stir among his men. He called out, “What say you, gentlemen? Are we going to let this bold lady prove us all to be craven cowards?”
A rousing cheer went up from his crew.
“I’d say not, Cap’n,” Tarn yelled, his freckled face split in a wide grin. “If she’s armed, we’re all done for anyway!”
Squealing with joy, Lucy threw her arms around Gerard’s neck. He spun her around, lifting her clear off her feet.
Pudge whipped off a salute, his broken spectacles only adding to his roguish air. “Shall I withdraw the flag, sir?”
Gerard’s gaze flicked to the rippling symbol of their capitulation. A wicked smile slanted his lips. “Not … just … yet.”
Lucy recoiled in mock horror. “Why, Mr. Claremont, you wouldn’t!”
He leered down at her. “I’m a villain, remember. I don’t fight fair.”
“Neither does he.”
His smile faded at the somber reminder of all they were risking—his ship, these devoted men, that precious, tenuous emotion binding them in common accord. As he brushed his lips against hers, savoring her taste, his men each found a task to occupy their hands, some vital preparation for the battle to come.
His mouth hovered above hers, reluctant to break contact. “You’re to go below and stay there. Don’t come up no matter what you may hear.”
“Is that an order, Captain?”
“Damn right, it is. And I expect to be obeyed.”
Lucy took a step backward and snapped off a salute that would have made Smythe beam with pride. “Aye, aye, sir. I live to please.”
Gerard chuckled, raking an appreciative gaze over her unconventional uniform. “That you do.”
Lucy flew back into his arms for a final embrace. Her lips devoured his as if her kiss alone could infuse him with the strength he needed to face down the Admiral. Gerard rubbed her slender back, absorbing the essence of her right through his bones.
When she drew away to obey his order, his arms had never felt quite so empty.
Lucy made it as far as the lower gundeck, where she found several gunners preparing for battle, and five powder monkeys, most still in their teens, arguing over who should be promoted to gunner now that their master was dead.
A willowy lad, his cheeks cratered with the scars of smallpox, stabbed a bony finger at the other boy’s chest. “I’ll be eighteen next month. The job needs a man, not some pimple-faced boy.”
His companion’s voice cracked with dismay. “You may be older, but I come aboard first. I been with the Cap’n since ’is maiden voyage.”
As the others chimed in, the argument quickly disintegrated into a shouting match with each of them casting aspersions not only on the others’ manhood, but on the marital status and temperaments of their respective mothers, a futile exercise since the majority of them were orphaned at birth.
“Gentlemen!” Lucy’s unladylike bellow startled them into silence. “We haven’t much time. Is this squabbling necessary?”
They gazed at her nervously, knowing the Captain’s woman, though slight in appearance, was a force to be reckoned with.
Lucy softened her voice to the cajoling tones she’d frequently used on Sylvie’s younger brothers when she needed them to fetch her shawl or some lemonade. “I’m sure Mr. Digby would have wanted you to settle this dispute in a reasonable manner.”
They exchanged a baffled glance. Reason wasn’t a word they’d associated with the cantankerous “Mr.” Digby.
Lucy sighed. “Very well, then.” She pointed to the only gunner who hadn’t threatened to resort to fisticuffs to solve the dilemma. “You, sir, are promoted to gunner.”
While his companions muttered in timid protest, the soft-spoken youth scratched his head. “Aye, but that’ll leave us one monkey short. Who’ll carry me shot?”
Eyeing the kegs of gunpowder and the eighteen-pound iron shot stacked like dragon eggs in the womb of the long, narrow gallery, Lucy smiled wanly.
Jeremiah Digby might have treated the world at large with loquacious contempt, but he had showered affection on his beloved cannons. Their ebony barrels gleamed in the checkered moonlight streaming through the gunports as if polished by a lover’s caress. Lucy had learned enough about the subtleties of piracy at Tarn’s feet to know that only in the most dire of circumstances, when all attempts at subterfuge had failed, would the captain actually give the command to fire them.
As she crouched beneath a gunport, watching the Argonaut plough through the inky billows in a direct course for their bow in preparation for boarding them, she was hard-pressed to imagine a circumstance more dire. The warship painted a silvery wake against the canvas of night, a shimmering highway to heaven. Or hell.
“Wot the bloody ’ell is ’e waitin’ for?” one of the gunners muttered. “An invitation?”
Lucy might have echoed his sentiments had she been able to squeeze a word past the icy lump of dread in her throat.
Her stomach knotted in kind as the seventy-four-gunner swelled to monstrous proportions, blocking the moonlight, blocking the sky. The gundeck was swallowed by darkness, its sputtering lanterns casting more shadows than light.
“Do something,” she whispered. “Anything.”
As if to fulfill her reckless wish, the narrow oak gallery listed to port with a grinding creak, sending them all careening across the sand-sprinkled floor. Lucy caught the barrel of a cannon before it could swing around and smack her insensible. Groping for handholds, she staggered back to the starboard gunport, dropping to her knees to compensate for her lost equilibrium.
Her foresight cheered her. Now she would have far less distance to fall when she collapsed in her death throes. For it seemed that Gerard had unfurled every remaining scrap of sail and set them on a collision course with the Argonaut.
“Christ, the Cap’n’s gone balmy,” a scrawny boy breathed, suddenly looking more the fifteen he was than the seventeen he’d claimed to be to gain a coveted berth aboard the Retribution.
Lucy threw one arm over the nearest cannon to brace herself for impact. She longed to close her eyes, but couldn’t drag them away from their imminent destruction. A curious exhilaration seized her, tempering her terror. At least Gerard would die not at the whim of others, but standing proudly at the helm of his ship, master of his own fate. Tears of pride burned her eyes, fierce and hot.
They sliced through the indigo water toward the massive warship, so close she could see the tiny figures scrambling in panic on its deck. It was too late for the Argonaut to negotiate a retreat or even a turn. Its sail pattern was too complex, its lumbering weight too awkward. Its very might damned it to ruin.
But not so the Retribution. Just prior to impact, just before that fatal instant when the scream building in Lucy’s throat would have erupted in blind terror, the sleek, graceful schooner swung ab
out, raking down the Argonaut’s hull with a hideous scrape that made Lucy want to clap her hands over her ears. The risky maneuver was not without cost. Somewhere abovedeck, a mast snapped with the macabre crack of splintering bone.
Like a bellow of pain at the needless destruction of something precious came a mighty roar. “Fire!”
Lucy gaped at her new compatriots, wondering if her own expression was as comical as theirs. Realization dawned in a flash of gunpowder. Gerard’s brilliant, if dangerous, maneuver had enabled the smaller, lighter ship to come in under the warship’s guns, rendering the pride of the King’s fleet as helpless as a kitten without its claws. Gerard might be risking damage to his own vessel by firing at such chilling range, but it was a risk carefully calculated and weighed against the odds.
They might have stood frozen that way forever were it not for the booming eruption of a quarterdeck cannon and an exasperated shout Lucy recognized only too well. “Halloo! Is everybody asleep down there?”
The gunners and monkeys scrambled as one to begin the steps of the complicated minuet that would start their cannons firing in synch.
As he touched the hissing match to the first fuse, one of the gunners gave a jubilant crow. “This one’s for Digby, ye bloody bastard!”
The cannon roared in response. Lucy rather thought Mr. Digby would approve of the tribute.
Time stumbled to a halt in the narrow gallery, reduced to the stench of burning gunpowder, the deafening thunder of the cannons, and the protesting shudders of the Retribution at being caught too near to her prey. Lucy lost count of the number of times she staggered back and forth across the pitching floor, her arms aching beneath the weight of an iron cannonball or a keg of gunpowder.
Smoke burned her eyes; heat scorched her fingers; powder blackened her arms and hands. Yet still she pressed on, driven by the sheer exhilaration of battle. After a life wasted on surrender, she’d finally discovered someone worth fighting for.