Merline Lovelace (20 page)

She knew better than to argue with him, however. He was an officer used to command. He’d not take kindly to having his orders questioned or his sacred plan meddled with.

She said nothing while he exchanged his greatcoat for a canvas jacket that allowed him more ease of movement. Nor did she comment when he tied a kerchief around his neck, dragged it up to cover the lower half of his face and tipped her a two-fingered salute.

Only after he’d disappeared among the mangroves did she turn to Throckmorton. “Have you a pistol on you?”

“I’ve a brace of ’em, missus.”

Hooking his thumbs in the lapels of his coat, he pulled them back to reveal the butts of the two weapons thrust into his belt.

Barbara held out a gloved hand. “I’ll take one, if you please.”

“You don’t need a pistol aboard the
Chesapeake.
You can trust me.”

“I wouldn’t trust you with my pet monkey, had I
one, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s Mr. Morgan I’m concerned about. I’m going after him.”

“If I put a pistol in your hand and let you stumble along after him, Morgan will carve a hole in my gullet.”

Calmly, Barbara reached into her pocket and drew out the knife Zach had given her less than an hour ago.

“I’ll carve one if you don’t.”

A measure of respect glinted in Throckmorton’s good eye. Rocking back on his heels, he rubbed a finger against the side of his nose.

“Well, now, I’ll admit it goes against the grain of my pirate’s soul to miss out on this bit of fun.”

Fun! Dear God, fun! Gritting her teeth, Barbara battled a touch of near hysteria.

“I’ll tell you what, missus. You stay here at the boat and I’ll sneak along after Morgan. My mate here can steer a straight course back to Washington, if it comes to that.”

Out of patience and fast running out of time, she didn’t bother to reply. She swung around and started through the mangroves.

“Here now! You can’t go off by yourself.”

Her jaw set, Barbara marched on. Throckmorton scrambled after her.

They heard the crack of rifle fire while still some distance from the drawbridge. Barbara’s heart jumped straight into her throat as she counted three shots. Four. A near fusillade.

Davenport had betrayed them!

Or been betrayed himself!

Picking up her skirts, she broke into a run. The marshy ground sucked at her half boots. The palmettos sliced at her with sharp-edged stalks.

Throckmorton raced along beside her. Over the pounding of her heart, she heard the snick of his pistols being cocked. She threw a quick glance sideways, saw he held one in each beefy fist, and ran on.

She heard the shouts. Saw the fan-shaped palmettos ahead sway madly. Cursing, Throckmorton shoved her behind a clump of mangrove roots and dived in after her.

A mere heartbeat later, Zach charged through the brush. He carried a cocked pistol in one hand and Harry slung across his shoulders.

Barbara’s heart seemed to stop in her chest. “Dear God!”

From the way her brother flopped about on Zach’s shoulder, she couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. She started to rise, but before she could get her feet under her, another crack of rifle fire split the air.

Grunting, Zach went down. Harry tumbled to the marshy earth with him.

“No!”

With a small, animal cry, Barbara scrambled up and ran toward the two men. She didn’t see Throckmorton pop out from behind the tangle of roots. The weapon went off behind her, almost deafening her with its roar.

There was a flash of red. A royal marine crashed through the brush. Stumbled forward. Fell onto his face.

“Over there!”

The shout came from somewhere off to the right. Close. Too close.

“We’re in for it now,” Throckmorton muttered.

Keeping his head low, the captain scurried after Barbara.

Harry was alive, she saw with a sob of relief. Cursing and kicking and fighting the leg irons that still shackled him, he struggled to free himself from Zach’s sprawled body. He shoved to his feet just as his sister reached his side. Whipping around, he spared Zach one swift glance.

“Well, he’s done for.”

Barbara heard him as if from a distance. Horrified by the red stain spreading across Zach’s back, she sank to her knees beside him.

“For God’s sake, Babs!”

Harry wrapped a fist around her arm and yanked her up.

“We’ve a whole platoon of marines after us. Where’s this sloop Morgan said he’d have waiting?”

Throckmorton was already charging back toward the boat. “This way!” he yelled over his shoulder.

Harry dragged Barbara two short, shuffling hops before she wrenched free.

“We can’t leave Zach! He’s still alive!”

“He won’t be for long,” Harry snarled. “He’s done for, I tell you.”

He grabbed for her arm again, but she whirled away and rushed back to the fallen man.

“Dammit, Babs!”

Swooping down, she snatched the pistol from Zach’s outflung hand. Her heart pounded with fear and desperation as she leveled the barrel at her brother’s midsection.

“Pick him up and carry him, Harry.”

W
hen Barbara broke out of the brush and ran onto the muddy spit, Throckmorton and his mate had already shoved the dinghy into the water and were fumbling for the oars.

“Wait!”

“Here, missus. Get aboard.”

She splashed into the water and scrambled for a hold on the slippery gunwale. The captain reached for her arm to drag her in. She whipped it free and dug in her heels. She’d hold the boat on this spit by the sheer force of her will, if necessary.

“My brother’s right behind me,” she panted. “He’s bringing Zach.”

Throckmorton threw a doubtful glance at the palmettos, as if expecting a wave of red-coated marines to pour through them at any moment.

“Please! Help him.”

Muttering a curse, the captain jumped over the side and disappeared back into the scrub.

He reappeared long, agonizing moments later with Zach slung over his shoulder. Harry short-stepped behind him. Both men splashed into the shallow water. Throckmorton dumped his burden into the dinghy, shoved Barbara in almost on top of Zach and hooked a leg over the gunwale. Harry flopped belly first over the side.

“Row!” Throckmorton barked to his mate. “Row!”

The marines broke through the scrub when the dinghy was still a good hundred yards from the sloop. Running out into the shallow tide, the marines took aim.

Gunfire rattled across the bay. The gray-green waters around the dinghy began to dance. Barbara heard the soft plunk of a bullet thudding into wood, saw the plank just inches from Zach’s head splinter. With the blind instinct of an animal protecting its mate, she threw herself forward and covered his body with hers.

Throckmorton’s arms pumped. His mate blued the air with curses. The two sailors skimmed the dinghy around a tall mangrove and used the tangle of its roots as a shield. Long, agonizing moments later the boat careened into the
Chesapeake
’s hull.

Barbara could never think back on the horrific hours that followed without shuddering.

The
Chesapeake
’s crew laid on every inch of sail in the ship’s locker. The sloop picked up speed in the relatively calm waters of the bay and plunged into the Atlantic. Timbers creaking, she plowed through troughs and crested waves. Barbara paid little attention to the frantic activity of the crew, still less to Throckmorton’s warning to keep a sharp lookout for pursuit by British warships. Her wet skirts wrapped around her like a shroud, she crouched beside Zach and tried desperately to staunch the blood running in pink rivulets from the bullet hole in his lower back.

She couldn’t imagine how the bullet had missed Harry, slung over his rescuer’s shoulder the way he was. She could only pray it had missed Zach’s spine.

“Still breathing, is he?”

Her brother hunkered down beside her. His matted blond hair lay plastered against his skull. Hollow-eyed and gaunt, he looked like the angel of death waiting to claim another soul.

“Yes,” Barbara ground out, “he’s still breathing.”

“Well, he’ll be feeding the sharks before dawn.”

“Not if I can help it. We need to get him below-decks and see about removing the ball. Find someone to help us carry him.”

Harry’s careless shrug said she was wasting her time, but he went off as instructed. He returned a short time later with the short, bandy-legged seaman who went by the nickname Ropes. To Barbara’s
intense relief, the man had served as a surgeon’s mate in the British navy before jumping ship and throwing in his lot with the rumrunners. He helped carry Zach down to the main cabin, stretched him out on the plank table and put a tin bucket of tar on the galley stove to heat.

“I know more about sawin’ off limbs than digging out spent cartridges,” Ropes warned.

He used a long-bladed knife to cut through Zach’s jacket and shirt. When he saw the wound, his breath whistled through his teeth.

“Blimey!”

Using the tip of his knife, he probed the hole. Fresh blood poured from the wound. Zach jerked and contorted his body.

“Hold ’im still!”

Barbara gripped Zach’s ankles, Harry his wrists. Ropes dug deeper. Sweat dripped from his forehead. Using the blade, he pushed aside skin and muscle to expose white, glistening vertebrae.

“Bloody ball’s caught between the bones,” he muttered. “Can’t get the knife under it.”

He dug deeper. The blade scraped bone. Zach went still. Horrified by the blood pouring from the wound, Barbara called a halt to the torture.

“Leave it!”

“It could poison ’im. Lead balls like that have made more ’n one man swell up with gangrene.”

She couldn’t worry about gangrene now. Zach was bleeding to death right before her eyes.

“Leave it, I said!”

Shrugging, Ropes tossed aside the knife and reached for the rum bottle.

The amber liquid he splashed into the wound must have set Zach afire. He jerked and writhed and kicked free of Barbara’s hold. She made a grab for the flailing leg and tucked it under her arm as Ropes retrieved the tar bucket from the stove. The thick black pitch inside bubbled and spit. The stink of it stung Barbara’s nostrils.

“Is that really necessary?”

“It is if you want to seal the hole and stop the bleedin’,” the surgeon’s mate said. Stirring the pitch with a wooden paddle, he issued another warning. “This will make him dance some.”

He tipped the paddle. Boiling pitch streamed onto the open wound.

Zach’s flesh sizzled. The shock of it ripped a shout from his throat. He jerked his arms and legs and almost knocked the tar bucket from Ropes’s hands.

Between them, Barbara, Harry and the sailor managed to keep Zach pinned until his frenzied thrashing stilled and he dropped into unconsciousness.

“Hell and damnation.” Harry wrinkled his nose. “He’s got the stink of a roast pig.”

“Carry him to my cabin,” Barbara snapped, near to tears and thoroughly out of patience with her brother. “I’m going to fetch a bucket of seawater.”

When she lugged in a sloshing bucket, Zach lay facedown on the narrow bunk. Barbara dropped to her knees beside him and tore a strip from her petticoat. Trying not to gag at the stench of burnt flesh and tar, she began to bathe his face.

Her stomach rolled rebelliously with every pitch and yaw of the boat, but she refused to give in to it. She wouldn’t be sick. She couldn’t. Not with Zach swimming in and out of delirium.

Harry shuffled in once to bring her a mug of tepid tea. He returned again, late in the day. This time he walked with a full stride.

“The captain struck off the irons,” he said with a delighted grin. “It took some doing, I’ll tell you, but Master Throckmorton knows his way around a set of shackles.”

Hitching up his ragged canvas pants, he displayed bleeding ankles. Barbara gave them a cursory glance.

“You’d better pour some rum over those scrapes.”

“I already did. Poured a good measure down my throat, too.” He took a couple of turns about the small cabin. “Ah, Christ, it feels good to walk like a man again.”

Shoving back her bedraggled hair, Barbara sank onto her heels. The thrill she should have felt at seeing Harry shed of his leg irons after so many months of imprisonment couldn’t make it past her desperate fear for Zach.

Her brother didn’t fail to note her lack of joy in his newfound freedom. Joining her on the floor, he propped his back against the bulkhead and stretched out his legs.

“What happened, Babs? How is it I sent you off to fleece a woman of her inheritance and you return with her son in tow?”

“It’s a rather complicated tale.”

“Tell me.”

With a weary sigh, she dipped the rag in the bucket and dabbed at the sweat beading Zach’s forehead.

“Louise Chartier wasn’t the ignorant half breed we thought she’d be. She’s shrewd and sophisticated and not about to be taken in by the sudden appearance of a long-lost niece by marriage.”

“She didn’t buy your story?”

“Not entirely.”

“What about the affidavit from the bishop of Reims? Did she challenge its authenticity?”

“I never showed it to her.”

Harry sent her a sharp glance. “What’s that?”

“By the time I came face-to-face with the woman, I’d already tangled with her son.”

Her touch gentle, Barbara drew the damp cloth over the stubble darkening Zach’s cheek. He hadn’t taken a razor to it this morning. There hadn’t been time.

“He’s fiercely protective of his mother, Harry, and well versed in the law. I knew he’d challenge the af
fidavit in the courts. I couldn’t spare the time for that.
You
couldn’t spare the time for that. So I smiled and pouted and seduced him into providing the funds I needed to buy your freedom.”

“How much did you get out of him?”

She turned then, fury licking at her veins. “Did you hear me? I said I whored myself.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

The utter callousness of the reply stunned her. Her brother’s months in the hulks had toughened him, she realized with a sense of shock, then immediately berated herself. He’d spent months in leg irons. He’d nourished his tall, once-muscular frame with one watery bowl of stew and a few crusts of moldy bread a day. He’d fought to stay alive while the men around him dropped from starvation, exhaustion or disease. The wonder would be if he
hadn’t
grown hard.

Or perhaps the coldness had always been there, and she’d never seen it. The awful truth of that became apparent when he gave a careless shrug.

“Why do you look so stricken? I avenged your honor the first time a man abased you, didn’t I?”

Icy dread spilled through her veins. Those footpads in Naples… She’d always wondered, always suspected. Now she knew.

“I would avenge it this time, as well.” Harry flicked a glance at the man in the bunk. “Fortunately, a royal marine has already done the job for me.”

Dear God! It wasn’t enough she’d lied and cheated and drawn Zach into danger in an effort to save her brother. Now she’d set him up as a target for the vengeance of the very man he’d taken a bullet for.

“Listen to me, Harry! Zach didn’t abuse or abase me. I accomplished that entirely on my own. Despite my lies, despite everything I tried to steal from him and his family, he stood by his vow to aid me. He’s a good man. An honorable man. If he survives…”

Her voice cracked, her fury with it. She stared at her brother with wide, frightened eyes.

“He
will
survive,” she whispered hoarsely. “Tell me he will, Harry.”

Shrugging, he pulled her into his arms. As effortlessly as that, they slipped into their old, familiar roles. She leaned her cheek against his bony ribs, seeking the security and comfort he’d always provided, finding it in his grudging admission.

“He’s a tough one, I’ll give him that. When those marines came charging down the road from the naval base, Morgan threw me across his shoulders like a slab of beef and took off at a dead run.”

“Why did the marines appear so suddenly?”

“I’m damned if I know.”

He fell silent, reliving his desperate escape, Barbara guessed. Moments slid by undisturbed except for the rasp of Zach’s labored breathing.

“Tell me something,” Harry said at length.

“What?”

“When you aimed that pistol at me, would you have pulled the trigger?”

She eased upright and looked into the eyes so like her own. “I’m damned if I know.”

He gave a hoot of sheer delight. “By damn, Babs. You’ve grown into a woman worthy of the Chamberlain name.”

Indeed she had. Unlike her brother, she took little joy in the fact.

“You may as well know the rest of it,” she said. “There will soon be another to bear the Chamberlain name. I’m breeding.”

The amusement left Harry’s face. Anger chased across his gaunt features. “So Morgan dropped a bastard on you, did he? Well, that can be attended to easily enough once we reach dry land.”

“No!” Barbara crossed her arms over her belly. “I promised I’d return to his family’s home until the babe is born. I intend to keep that promise.”

His forehead creased in a frown. She could almost see the moment his anger gave way to cold calculation.

“Are you set on that course?”

“I am.”

“Then we’ll make them pay. Handsomely.”

“They’ve already paid! Zach financed your rescue from his own funds. I can’t… I won’t take any more from him or his family.”

“Very noble, my dear sister, but what about your child? Do you intend for it to scrabble for its dinner as you’ve had to so many times?”

With everything that had happened, she’d all but forgotten the package Zach had slipped her at the Somerset Arms.

“The child won’t have to scrabble for anything.”

Her coat still lay in a sodden heap where she’d dropped it hours ago. Snagging one of the sleeves, Barbara dragged it across the deck and rooted through its deep pockets. The package was still there, right where she’d shoved it. She passed it to Harry without bothering to unwrap it.

“I suspect there’s more than enough here to keep a body clothed and well fed.”

He yanked on the strings, rifled through the stack of banknotes and let out a low whistle.

“
Very
well fed, indeed. I’d better keep this safe for you.”

He tucked the package inside his canvas jacket and shot Zach another glance. It was tipped with respect and the envy great wealth had always engendered in him.

“You hooked a ripe one this time, Babs. If Barrister Morgan here becomes shark bait, as I suspect he soon will, we’ll give the bishop’s affidavit a try. Between that document and the child you’re carrying, we should be able to milk the Morgans of most of their worth.”

His good humor restored by the prospect of another scam, Harry lifted the latch and left the cabin.

Barbara sat on the floor, unmoving. She felt a
hundred years old, with a body as withered as the Egyptian mummies on display at the British Museum. Her glance lingered for long moments on the cabin door before shifting to the traveling valise stashed in a corner.

On hands and knees, she crawled across the tilting deck. The oilskin packet was in its hiding place. She’d tucked it back inside the lining after Zach had tossed it at her in disgust. She’d held some vague thought of presenting it as a gift when they said farewell.