The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) (17 page)

A marksman from her own ship picked off one of those French sailors with a bullet; the man dropped fifteen feet, glancing off a beam with a dull thud, then plunged broken into the water.

She clapped a hand over her mouth.

No one else seemed the slightest bit moved at the sight.

“Can we close, Captain?” yelled Sebastian towards the quarterdeck. “Can we board her? I need to get to the men on that ship! I need to learn who gave the order to pursue us!”

“Nay!” called the Captain. “She’s moving off, and she’ll still have some speed on her. And we’ve taken damage low on the hull.”

“You must give chase! We can catch her!”

“I’m sorry, my lord. She can head back to France, which we most certainly can’t. We’ll have to get ourselves all the way to the Port of Corunna, and it’ll be a close thing as it is.”

“I
need
to take those men!”

“I’ve my own men’s lives to consider. There is no other choice.”

Sebastian swung back to his cannon, screaming at his crew to load another charge.

As Sebastian’s men struggled with the gun, the French hulk swung at a long, slow, ungainly angle away from them, her guns still booming, though not as rapidly or as rhythmically as before. The shots were haphazard, like stones hurled by a boy running from a street fight.

Against the French ship’s retreating stern, the
Calliope
’s cannon crews continued to return fire, Sebastian’s more briskly than any of the rest, but the French ship drew quickly out of range. Already, the canopy of smoke was thinning, and the cannonballs splashed futilely into empty water.

The battle was over.

A pure, clear rush of relief ran through Rachel’s body.

But when she turned to Sebastian again, his look was one of absolute fury.

He whipped around, frustration searing his expression, and stabbed a finger to her chest. “You should never have come above-decks! It’s sheer luck we hit that main-mast when we did, and if we hadn’t, things would have got much hotter for us.” His eyes glowed like coals. “If you want to live through what’s to come, you’ll learn to obey me!”

Anger flared through her chest, washing away every last trace of the fear that had gripped her for hours, and wiping away the tenderness she’d felt between them when he’d held her in the bed last night.

“Appearances to the contrary, sir,” she said, “I’ve never learned the habit of obedience. To anyone. And I have absolutely no intention of starting with you.”

Chapter Nine

She hadn’t spoken a word to him during the slow, limping ride into the port of Corunna. Any time he approached, she averted her eyes, her back so ramrod straight, her prickliness so palpable, it jabbed his skin even from five feet away.

Little hedgehog.

But he’d been
right
to tell her to keep below during a battle, for pity’s sake. When he’d seen her walking towards the cannon crew, all desperate eyes and vulnerable flesh, something had cracked inside him, and a great, flaming roar of fury burst out through the fissure. He’d wanted to snatch her up and hurl her bodily back below-decks.

Lock her in
.

That had been the problem of course.

Goddamn those aunts of hers. They must have been madwomen to subject little girls to disciplines like that.

His mind pricked with memories of Sal balking at narrow spaces—her fingers like talons on his arm when they’d had to go through that tunnel beneath the Château de
Vaux-le-Vicomte
, and her inevitable preference for running rather than hiding. Sal rarely spoke of the hardships of her childhood. And he’d never pressed her for details.

No weakness, only strength.

That had been their policy because it
worked
.

Perhaps with a day or two of rest while their ship was repaired, Rachel’s temper would cool again, as it had before, and she’d see reason, and see that she really ought to listen to him. “Listen” was a far more agreeable word than “obey,” after all. He rather wished he’d started with that.

But luck was not working in his favor just now. As they drew near port, he knew in his gut that something was wrong: Corunna was supposed to be a place of safety for them, but Corunna didn’t look like Corunna.

The gorgeous green hills that ringed the port were streaked with white—with
snow
, which he’d never seen so thick along the coast before. And instead of the glow of the city’s sunbaked stone, a glow he could usually spot miles from shore, Corunna was shrouded in a pall, a lifeless, almost English fog-gray.

Stranger still, the small bay was choked with ships, merchant ships, primarily, by the looks of them, perhaps a hundred or more, with scores of longboats running back and forth between them. An extraordinary crowd for Corunna at the best of times, and inexplicable for midwinter. The ships crammed together, colliding here and there like corks in a bucket, their crews screaming insults. Lubbers all, from what he could tell, given how they’d left their lines fouled, their sails bedraggled.

Twice during their approach, tremendous booms sounded from the outskirts of the city, making the decks of the
Calliope
shudder. He knew of only one thing that could make such a sound: large stores of gunpowder being ignited.

Why in hell?

By the time they reached the wharf, his stomach had sunk to his boots.

The docks swarmed with British soldiers. Everywhere, officers and ship’s captains argued in tense knots. And worse, far worse, ragged clusters of troops lined the wharf, a startling number of the soldiers barefoot or wrapped with bloodied bandages, or both. They gazed out at the ragtag vessels in the harbor as if at their salvation.

The more able-bodied were wheeling cannons up the gangplanks and onto the sturdiest of the ships at the docks.
Cannons
.

Good God—the British army was evacuating.

Just six months before, this army, thirty-five-thousand strong, had come to Spain with proud fanfare. They were supposed to deal Napoleon’s troops a spanking defeat on the Peninsula, send the tyrant home with his tail between his legs.

How had they managed to muck it all up in such a short space of time?

The moment he and Captain Whitmore stepped out onto the gangplank, a beefy colonel from the 57
th
Foot came jogging up the dock towards them. “Sir!” called the colonel in a peremptory voice. “Are you the master of this ship?”

“I am,” answered Whitmore, a cautious edge in his voice. A sea captain in wartime had deep experience with military officers who took peremptory tones.

“The French have seized the cliffs above the city,” declared the colonel bluntly, with a bite in his voice as if he held Captain Whitmore personally responsible. “They’ll have their full guns in place at almost any time, and if their infantry break through our lines, we’ll have no chance to get these men to safety. Admiral Hood’s brought what ships he could from the south, but every ship in port must be pressed into service.”

Whitmore cut him off. “You may have noticed, Colonel, the rather gaping hole in the forward hull of my vessel. I cannot conceivably leave Corunna before at least temporary repairs are made, and then I have passengers to carry to Vigo with all possible speed.”

“Corunna is under martial law, Captain. You have twenty-four hours, if we’re lucky, to make your ship tolerably seaworthy for troop transport. You can’t make port again in Spain in any case—the British army’s gone from everywhere but Lisbon.”

An ugly look came into Captain Whitmore’s eye. “Pardon me, Colonel,” he bit out, “but shouldn’t your guns be still ashore? Will you not stand and fight the French?”

The colonel’s face darkened by a shade or two, as if he’d just been plunged in a steam bath. “That matter has been decided by General Moore. My orders are that nothing of military value be allowed to fall into Bonaparte’s hands.”

For the moment, Sebastian rather pitied the man—it must gall him to watch his cannon head to sea, but Napoleon loved to boast of captured ordnance in
Le Moniteur,
and English generals answered to an English public notoriously intolerant of such humiliations. At least that was one benefit of working for Helm: most Englishmen did not even know his service existed, and so could not protest any choice he made.

Captain Whitmore was clearly rousing himself for more argument, but Sebastian raised one palm. Sebastian could produce certain papers from Whitehall and tell the colonel exactly where to stuff his martial law. However, he had no wish to reveal himself for so little reason.

Nor did he wish to leave those desperate-looking men on the docks at the mercy of French gunnery crews. Still less did he want to abandon the wretched women and children who might be out of sight at the moment, but who invariably traveled with an army of this size.

Those people needed to get out of Spain as soon as humanly possible.

And he had other ways of getting where he needed to be.

Harder ways, to be sure, since it meant traveling eighty miles south over mountainous terrain to Vigo, but somehow the idea of Rachel Covington facing a little more hardship—and hardship in which she’d have to rely exclusively upon him—had a certain strategic appeal.

“No need to put the colonel out, dear Captain,” Sebastian said in his most convincingly lazy aristocratic one. “My party and I do not mind sharing our quarters with men who risk their lives to protect our homeland. I myself should gladly have volunteered to serve, did not my shoulder . . . ” And here he reached his left hand up to massage the joint, gingerly, as though it were deeply tender, “Did not my shoulder trouble me far too much to permit me to lift a sword.”

Hearing this, the colonel seemed unable to decide quite which expression to put on his face: gratitude for compliance, or utter disgust at the claim of an obviously able-bodied man that he could not fight for his country against the Napoleonic menace.

At last he settled on a gruff bow, and a grumbled, “I thank you for your patriotic spirit, my lord.” He paused a moment, then added. “A word of advice, though, my lord. If your party includes ladies, keep them out of sight. The men have suffered in retreat from the French—starvation, illness, roads ice one day and mud the next. French bayonets never far behind. And now they wait here to be turned into mincemeat. All for a shilling a day. They’ll take their compensation in any form they can get it, if you take my meaning.”

Sebastian understood precisely. The idea of Rachel walking among troops in such a mood was not one he cared to entertain, any more than he’d liked seeing her walk the Calliope’s deck under the French ship’s cannonade.

As if to underscore the colonel’s warning, a series of pistol shots rang out from a cliff just above the beach, accompanied by a terrible, inhuman screaming.

A moment later, the sounds were repeated.

Sebastian’s head whipped in the direction of the screams, and his stomach turned at the sight of a something large and dark and writhing pitching from the cliff-top towards the beach. Then another like it, but this one silent and motionless. “What in bloody hell were those?”

“Horses, my lord.” The colonel’s throat clenched visibly. “As few ships as we have, and as many men, there are cavalry mounts which cannot be accommodated onboard. Battle horses, you understand. Well-bred, well-trained. They cannot be left behind for the French.”

Nausea roiled his gut.
Horses
? Being slaughtered like pigs. “I see,” he answered tightly, fighting to keep his fury banked. “A most unsavory scene in Corunna, then.”

The colonel’s chin came up like a fist. “It’ll only be worse under the Spanish, my lord. The British army will be gone from here within a day, on ships or in pieces, and Iberia will be left to the French.”

Well, Sebastian had his work cut out for him. The best way he knew to weaken Napoleon’s army was to weaken his network of spies. And every instinct told him that whatever was in that book Sal had found, whatever it was she’d died for, would prove a most effective weapon.

Victoire de Laurent was still somewhere in Vigo, he’d stake his life on it.

And now at least he could find a cavalryman or two who’d rather see his horse taken off by a lace-cuffed fribble than shot in the head and dumped like rubbish on a foreign shore. A promise to have the animals shipped home to their masters within the month would be a bribe far stronger than gold.

Rachel had said she’d never ridden a horse, but she could ride with him, and a few hard days on horseback across the harsh Galician hills might be the best thing possible for working out the terms of their relationship.

He thought suddenly of a trick his father had once taught him—something his father had learned in turn from the old groundskeeper who’d taught him so much about the natural world. How to catch small birds with his bare hands. The little creatures would struggle at first, wings straining, heartbeats drumming against his palms. But if he held them gently, stroked his thumbs along their heads and necks, they’d settle. His hands became a nest rather than a cage. And when he set them gently down again, they’d stay where they were as often as they’d fly away.