Under the Lash (12 page)

Still without any regard for her own safety, she dashed below decks and gathered everything in her arms that she could find that she thought might be of assistance and dashed back up, stopping at the first wounded man she found and reaching beneath her skirt to her slip, cutting and tearing it into bandaged sized strips. At first she was shy about lifting her skirts in front of a strange man, but then she realized that he was hardly in a position to be trying to see under her skirts.

In fact the man was embarrassingly grateful for what little she could do, taking her hand before she left to move on to the next one and pressing a frankly revolting, bloody kiss on the back of it, blessing her repeatedly for her attentions.

Cassie nodded and detached herself so that she could work on the next man. Some were just in need of bandaging, some were in need of splints which she found herself fashioning from whatever was handy, others were beyond hope but still alive and conscious. She stayed with those men as long as she could, seeing several of them off to their reward – or whatever such men thought there was in the afterlife – praying over and with others. She treated everyone she encountered, without thought to which side of the war they were on, discovering two British soldiers whom she had either missed or had fallen after she had arrived. They were both conscious, but were bad off enough that she didn’t think they would remember what she’d told them, and by the time she encountered a third she didn’t even bother to try to explain her situation, she simply treated him as best she could and moved on.

It was an Englishman from Liverpool that she was hovering over when she felt a shadow fall over her, realizing with a start that all was quiet and the battle must’ve ended. She had no idea who won until she felt herself yanked rudely into a standing position by her upper arm then mashed uncomfortably up against the Captain.

And if the look in his eyes was anything to judge by, he was not at all happy.

“Take this prisoner to the brig.” He kicked carelessly at the young man’s leg. “Rabby, you and Mercer get the decks cleaned immediately.” She could barely recognize his voice. It seemed several octaves deeper and a whole lot louder when he was commanding his men. “I want everything ship–shape in minutes, men, because there’s going to be a flogging.”

What little chatter that had sprung up in the aftermath of the battle died down immediately at that pronouncement, and everyone scrambled to do his bidding. Cassie was hauled unceremoniously back down to the cabin from whence she’d come, only to be thrown into it, followed closely by him as if he were a bloodhound on her scent.

“How did you get out of my cabin?” he demanded, his nose practically butting up against hers as he bore down on her like the wrath of God.

Cassie did her best to remain neutral, recognizing that showing him any kind of emotion would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull. “You left it open.”

“I –” he began, set to explode all over her at the way she had carelessly risked her own safety. Then he quickly thought back to an hour or so before, when he had had to quickly take his leave of her. Damned if he hadn’t left it open.

“Regardless, there was a bloody war going on up there! Whatever could have possessed you to set foot on deck?” he asked, already knowing the answer for himself but singularly unable to prevent himself from asking the question, wishing there could be a different reply.

And he had to admire her. She wasn’t cringing, she wasn’t backing down, and she didn’t try to tell him a watered down version of the truth. “I was hoping I could find someone on the other side that would help me escape.”

He had heard her screaming to the men on the British ship, obviously desperate to get someone to notice her. Anjel hadn’t been able to catch the specifics or even get to her, since he was trying to keep himself from being killed at the time, but he’d known as soon as he’d seen her on deck what she was trying to do. She had been a terrible distraction while he was fighting, but he tried to keep an eye on her – not really for her since there was little he could do to help her one way or the other – while dealing with several extremely skilled swordsmen on the other side who would have been delighted to see him dead.

He’d seen her methodically go to each of the fallen Brits, seen her shoulders fall when she found what she thought was the last of her compatriots, and then watched her disappear below decks with a relieved sigh, only to feel his already incensed anger rise to epic proportions when she appeared again a few minutes later and began to minister to the first man she came to, which happened to be Little Sammy Hobart.

Before he was able to make it back onto his own ship, she’d worked her way through the ones she could help – his crew and the Brits alike, doing what little she could. The Doc, who was none the less one of his best swordsmen, had begun following along after her as soon as the fighting had stopped, and Anjel had already told the man to come to him with his assessment of what she had done as soon as he could.

Although he usually calmed down pretty quickly following a fight, as he stood in his cabin and looked her in the eye, the blood – fueled by rage – still barreled through his body at record speed, and he was amazed to find himself rock hard just from looking at her, or perhaps from the flood of heart–stopping relief he felt in realizing that she was all right.

But he was not. He wasn’t hurt or injured in any way, but his mind was about to explode at what he knew he was going to have to do to her in a few minutes. As altruistic as her intentions might have been – eventually, when she realized that she wasn’t going to get any further in her plans for escape – in helping all of those men, one fact remained: she had aided and abetted about thirteen of the enemy. Some had survived, some hadn’t. But he couldn’t just ignore her behavior. If any other person on this ship had assisted a member of the crew of the ship they had just fought, it would be considered a traitorous act.

And in all likelihood, he would lose his life for his efforts.

Some ships were run in a more democratic fashion. He had been aboard several such vessels himself while working his way through the ranks, but he found their crews to be less cohesive and in general believed that they were pretty badly run. A ship – like a woman – needed a firm, undisputed master who consistently applied correction to those who broke the rules.

He
set the rules.
He
issued the punishments, or, at least, issued the orders for them. He only occasionally actually carried them out himself. But there was no voting about anything. His ship was not and never would be a democracy, for anyone on board, including Miss Cassie.

In this case he would definitely be administering the punishment himself. And as much as he wanted not to have to do so in front of his crew, they had as much of a right to see justice done to her as they did to any other person on this ship, especially since what she had done could have cost any one of them – or all of them – their lives.

Before he could take her to task for what she had done, though, he heard the Doc at the door, and he didn’t really think he wanted to hear what he was going to say as he stepped outside into the cramped hallway.

“The truth is, Cap’n, that she helped everyone she could almost as well as I could. She made them comfortable, dressed their wounds, and comforted the dying...I can’t see any instances where she hurt more than she helped. In fact, she saved several of your men’s lives.”

“Thanks, Bones.” The older man turned reluctantly away from him at his clipped response, and he could hear the captain slam the door shut behind him as he returned to the deck and the last of his waiting patients.

In his cabin, Anjel ran his hand through his sweaty hair. “Do you even know what you’ve done, Cassie?”

She looked at him, obviously puzzled by his question, but very disturbed at his demeanor and growing somewhat frightened for herself. “I know I tried to escape, and you can’t be too happy about that, but you couldn’t have thought I wouldn’t avail myself of the opportunity to try to get away from you.” She snorted indelicately, but caught herself and cut it off, trying to remain more neutral, although her next sentence belied that effort, too. “I mean, Captain, Sir, that I think I would give my life not to be raped by you ever again.”

He jerked back from her as if she had hauled off and slapped him squarely across the face, his expression dark and foreboding, and Cassie wondered if she was going to get herself punched for her candor.

Instead, she watched the muscle in his jaw jumping furiously as he took a step towards her, returning, “I would think that one could hardly call it rape, especially considering how the entire ship rang with the sounds of your pleasure every time I brought you to it.”

All of the color drained from Cassie’s face. She had never thought of how loud she was being, and on top of that she realized – if everyone heard her when he fondled and misused her, then they could also hear when he disciplined her, and she wasn’t sure which was worse! She would never be able to face any of them ever again.

But just then they both heard a high pitched whistle. Cassie had no idea what the tones meant, but he did, of course, and seconds later she was being hauled back up to the deck behind him – bright faced and mortified by what they all must know about her; the Captain wasn’t taking that into consideration in the least. The men were assembled on the main deck, in front of the mast, in loose lines. Cassie hadn’t had the chance to get much of a look at it while she was up there, but she was pretty sure that the quirt he’d used on her before hadn’t been hanging off of the mast, as it was now.

She recognized some of the men, who smiled and shuffled in an embarrassed manner when she nodded to them. Rory was there, but he looked pained and didn’t return her slight smile. The Captain was looking fit to bust that she’d acknowledge any of them, but then, keeping a tight arm around her as if he thought she might bolt for some reason, he turned his attention to the matter at hand and cleared his throat, saying, “All of you did extremely well, men, and in the face of an overwhelming enemy. The bounty from the HMS
Insuperable
will make your purses considerably fatter at the end of the voyage, and cook tells me that there’s even some beef that several men were able to liberate from its larders before it went down, so there will be meat in everyone’s stew tonight, as well as a double ration of ale.” He was given three cheers for his generosity, but he calmed their exuberance quickly afterwards.

“Your brave efforts are the reason why I have assembled you. One person on board – although she isn’t exactly a part of the crew – is known to have given aid and comfort to the enemy – to the very men who were trying to kill you.”

There were a few boos in response to his revelation, but surprisingly few.

And then one lone, shy voice was heard out of the crowd. “But Captain, Sir, the miss helped me – got my arm set by wrapping parts of her underskirt around two pieces of wood from where a cannonball landed on the quarterdeck, she did. The Doc says it’s going to be right as rain in a few weeks.” Midshipman Ellis wasn’t the type to speak up for nothing. He was a good lad, kept his head down, and did what the hell he was told to do with little complaint.

Anjel opened his mouth, but not before he was interrupted by yet another crewman, a swabby this time, by the name of Smitty, who had come aboard the ship not more than a year ago, who echoed his shipmate’s comments about what a help the “little miss” had been to him about the gunshot that had ripped through and through the upper flesh of his arm.

And before their Captain could say another word, he was fairly assailed by members of the crew who had been assisted by the female at his side, if not directly then they confessed to being comforted merely by the presence of someone who was so selflessly giving of herself, without any thought to her own danger.

“She was dodgin’ and weavin’ like a pickpocket in Leicester Square with a bobby after ‘im,” one of the men said, and Anjel was treated to a chorus of how angelic and brave the men felt she had been.

Even Rory joined in, having apparently been keeping an eye on her himself, just like Anjel had been, equally as unable to do anything to assist, but trying to keep track of where she was and not get himself killed at the same time.

But Anjel wasn’t going to back down. “And what if, lads, this little lady,” and his tone conveyed that her status as such was deeply in question, “had treated a man who got up and sliced two or three or four of you down in your prime before some one of us was able to get to him? Or, worse than that, if he had managed to turn the tide? Where would we be now – rotting at the bottom of the ocean or in an English brig, which isn’t all that different, especially when there’s a noose waiting for you at the end of your voyage, gentlemen.”

Some of the men nodded, but the majority remained unconvinced – not that he needed their consent, anyway. Aiding and abetting was bad enough in and of itself, but then there was the matter of her escape, the fact that she had bitten him back when he had first abducted her...True, he had already made her pay – in spades – for some of the misbehaviors on the list he was compiling in his own mind, but Anjel still couldn’t just ignore the fact that she had helped the people who were trying to kill them – even if his men apparently could.

So without further conversation, Anjel turned and guided Cassie over to the mast, where he had already had one of the men lower the cross beam enough that he could bind her wrists to it.

Cassie was deep in denial about what was about to happen to her, and she didn’t put up any kind of resistance at all when he bound her arms above her head, and well out to the side, where they would be of no use to her at all.

Then he bound her ankles together and also to the mast, as well as looping a strong band of leather around her waist. By the time he was finished, she couldn’t move a muscle.

To her horror, the next thing he did was to lean down and pull up her skirts, being sure to catch the hem of what remained of her petticoats and gather all of that material up to tuck it into the leather band around her waist until her entire backside was exposed to anyone who cared to see it.