Across a Moonlit Sea (38 page)

Those sharp-nosed, keen-eyed vultures had lost no time hastening to the docks either. It was up to them, caped in somber black like birds of prey, to make a fair accounting of any plunder taken in the Queen’s name. If they were quick enough on board, they could almost get an honest tally. If they were delayed, they could hear the pocketfuls of coin and jewels walking off the ships and marvel at the remarkably rotund girth of some of the sailors who had lived months at sea on rations of salted fish and biscuits.

The Talon had not disappointed anyone. The crates of gold and silver bullion taken from her hold had staggered all but the most seasoned of the Queen’s men—God only knew what their reaction would have been had they known he had stopped off first to unload half of her bounty into his private cache.

As it was, great roars had risen from the crowds each time a group of heroic sailors had disembarked, the greatest of all coming when Victor had appeared on deck. He had stood in the last of the afternoon’s golden rays, his handsome face bronzed, his sand-colored hair streaked blond from exposure to the sun and salt air. Large hazel eyes, sensually hooded and long lashed, had sent many a gawping female swooning. He had
looked magnificent. He had looked like a man who had defied all odds and sailed halfway across the world to raid the King’s treasure depot.

Some of the hopefuls had continued to scan the watery horizon for a glimpse of the
Virago
and her dashing captain, Dante de Tourville. Bloodstone had known, the day they sailed out of port, that no one predicted their success in Veracruz. But Victor had gambled on Dante de Tourville’s star riding high, and, by Christ, it had risen clear to the heavens. They had taken nearly four hundred thousand ducats out of the treasure house—a hundred thousand English pounds, and if not for the storm that had hammered them in the Atlantic, they would have escaped cleanly away.

Of course, if it hadn’t been for the storm and the damage to Dante’s ship, the opportunity would not have been handed to him to double his profits, double his fame, double his pleasure in watching the Spanish zabras send the bastard to hell where he belonged. Arrogant bloody Frenchman, always giving orders, always
telling
him the way it was going to be, always looking at him with those cold blue eyes, flaunting his noble blood.

He probably hadn’t looked very noble screaming for his last breath, his mouth and lungs filling with water, his ship spiraling to the sea floor beneath him.

When word spread that the pirate wolf was dead, there was another rippling wave of swooning women and men with downcast eyes, for despite the exorbitant wagers against success, many had gathered in London, anticipating the privateers’ return. Most had stared, stunned, at the
Talon
, finding it difficult, if not impossible, to believe the infamous
Virago
, her captain, and crew were gone.

Elizabeth had scarcely believed it either. She had summoned Bloodstone into her presence immediately and demanded to hear every last detail of the raid and the ensuing
battle with the zabras. She had questioned him so closely, he began to suspect she was searching for some false note in his reporting of the events, which was why, in the end, he had made the Frenchman out to be a hero and a martyr. Moreover, he had done such a splendid job, she had wept—actually wept!—over the loss of the rogue. And Walsingham, the same bastard who had once slapped him halfway across a room for daring to call him “father,” had swelled with pride and dared to call
him
son. He had called for the first toast and nearly wept into his cups when the Queen had rewarded Bloodstone with two fat estates in Devon. It wasn’t the knighthood he wanted, but that would come. It was sure to come if he stayed close enough on Drake’s heels.

Victor was smiling now as he nodded and accepted the respectful greetings of the other captains.

“You heard he took the
San Pedro de Marcos?”

“What’s that you say?” Victor’s sandy eyebrows came together in a sharply demarked bridge over his nose as he caught a snatch of conversation between two captains nearby. “Who took the
San Pedro?
When?”

“Captain Jonas Spence. He is the reason we have been stopped here and summoned for a council. It seems he found some interesting intelligence on board the
San Pedro
—interesting enough to have Drake hobbling about on three legs, if you catch my meaning.”

Bloodstone disdained the crudity with a slight curling of his lip. “This … Jonas Spence. Does anyone know him?”

In the brief consultations that followed, no one seemed to be acquainted with with the privateer personally but everyone had heard the buzz that his daughter was none other than the Black Swan.

“The cartographer? A woman, you say?”

“Ugly as the name implies, I am told, but possessed of a skilled hand, nonetheless.”

“And his ship? The Egret? Equally ugly,” avowed another voice. “I am anchored off her beam and must say, I find the notion of her taking on a Spanish carrack to be almost fantastic.”

“What do you think she would carry? Ten or twelve culverins at best?”

“Closer to twenty,” said the same knowledgeable neighbor. “And she’s carrying demis. Big bronze teeth … exactly like your own, Captain Bloodstone.”

The stony gaze raked over the speaker but the response came from Bloodstone’s second, Horace Lamprey, an ugly brute with vicious eyes and a lip half missing. “I hardly think a mere merchant’s guns could be
exactly
like Captain Bloodstone’s. The Talon’s demis were acquired by special custom through Dante de Tourville, and there are none other like them in the
world”

The captain who had made the comment met Lamprey’s sneer. “I could swear they are similar—scrolled snouts with eagles on the barrels?”

“Impossible,” Bloodstone decreed irately. “The only other guns like mine went down with the
Virago”

“Which, of course, you say you saw go under.”

Victor turned his head to acknowledge the bemused voice behind him and saw Drake, standing by a small chart table, a glass of brandy poised at his lips.

“I saw her surrounded,” Bloodstone said carefully, “staggering under full cannonades from six India guards. With the damage my own ship had sustained in the fighting, I could not risk another pass to see if the last board did, indeed, go under, but I daresay no ship could have survived such a pounding as I bore witness to. I wish, with every fiber of my being, that the
Virago
, her courageous captain,
and crew could have survived, but I know in my heart they did not.”

Drake smiled and his bright hawk’s eyes looked past Bloodstone’s shoulder, fixing themselves on the shadows outside the cabin door.

“Wish for something too devoutly, too passionately, Captain Bloodstone,” he murmured, “and it might surprise you by coming true.”

One by one the captains turned to stare at the door. Voices tailed away and conversations ended on unfinished words and half-formed thoughts. Those unaccustomed to seeing tall, black-haired ghosts with white, wolfish smiles felt the need to vent a hastily muttered expletive before they, too, fell back and stared.

Victor Bloodstone turned slowly on his polished heel. At first he saw nothing ominous in the burly, bald-headed captain who beamed a nervous greeting through the frothed red fuzz of his beard. But then a cold chill of foreboding swept down his spine and his eyes followed a line of shadow to where a dark, gleaming ebony head was just straightening from having to duck to clear the lintel.

A moment later a breathless, choking, constricting moment later, he found himself staring into the iced, cobalt-blue eyes of the recently dead and departed Simon Dante, Comte de Tourville.

 D
ante kept his smile firmly in place as he walked fully into the brighter light. He advanced slowly on Victor Bloodstone, stopping only when he was close enough to smell the shock that oozed instantly to dampen the Englishman’s brow. Dante’s hands ached with the need to close around the stolid, patrician neck; his arms throbbed with the desire to channel all of his strength and power into squeezing, tearing, choking the life out of the treacherous thief’s miserable body.

Horace Lamprey sent his hand instantly to the hilt of his sword, but a white-lipped hiss of breath from his captain stopped the action before it could be noticed by anyone other than Dante. The hazel eyes narrowed and he managed a taut “Simon.”

Dante smiled. “Victor. I gather, from the look on your face, you were not forewarned?”

Bloodstone’s jaw tightened. “No. I was not.”

Sir Francis shrugged amiably. “For such a happy occasion I thought not to spoil the surprise.”

“Where the devil have you come from?” Bloodstone asked, his eyes not wavering from Dante’s.

“Kind of you to ask. And I suppose the devil would be the one to answer, but since he isn’t here with us today— in his normal guise, at any rate—it falls to me to be the bearer of bad tidings.”

Aware of every owlish eye rapt upon them, Bloodstone made an admirable recovery of his wits and stepped forward. “Bad tidings? I should think it is nothing less than miraculous. Allow me to be the first to … welcome you back to life.”

Dante could hardly push away the hand Victor braced on his shoulder, though the sentiment was obvious enough in his eyes to have the intrusion swiftly withdrawn.

“The
Virago”
said Bloodstone attempting a smile. “Did she survive as well?”

“Alas, no. The zabras did their job well. She lies at the bottom of the sea.”

“Then we can only thank God you do not lie there with her. But … how did you escape, man? The last I saw, I would have said there was no hope.”

“Perhaps if you had stayed around awhile longer, you would have seen more.”

A few breaths were drawn in, a few more let go on soft whistles, but otherwise, the cabin was as silent as a tomb.

“I had no steerage,” Bloodstone said in a quiet, even tone. “The main was cracked, the rudder sloppy. I tried to follow our initial course of action, but the wind turned gusty and I could not bring the
Talon
about.”

“I have no doubt she handled like a bitch,” Dante agreed. “Especially with all that added weight on board. The barrels of food and water—?”

Lamprey cut brusquely into the conversation. “That was my doing, Captain. I did not think we should leave what
few supplies we had behind to benefit the Spaniards in the event you did what damage you could and escaped. They could have used the island and our stores to refurbish and come after us.”

“Indeed,” Bloodstone added blithely. “I had no notion you would even be so foolhardy as to stand and fight, especially when you could see the trouble we were in. One ship against six?” He lifted his hand in an airy appeal to the logic of the other captains present. “Who would have expected it?”

“And when the wind died and your rudder was stronger, did you not think to circle back and search for survivors?”

“Frankly? No. If there were six enemy ships pounding me to splinters and the last you saw, I was leading them away so that
you might make good your escape
, would you have let the gesture go for naught and circle back—possibly to be captured and killed yourself—just so you could vanquish your conscience and say ‘We searched for survivors and found none’?”

He was smooth and convincing. Logical. Reasonable. And lying through his teeth, Dante knew.

“I suppose you thought it best to take the gold out of harm’s way as well?”

Bloodstone’s eyes betrayed a small flicker. “After all we had gone through to steal it from the King? Would you not think it the wisest course as well?”

“The Queen was pleased? I am looking closely but see no sword imprints on your shoulder.”

Bloodstone’s high cheekbones warmed under a flush. “She was too distraught over the loss of her favorite Frenchman to think of aught else.”

Dante offered up a wry laugh. “I can well imagine how she must have wept over my untimely demise.”

Dante’s apparent humor seemed to be the signal for others to relax
and for one brave soul actually to join in on the exchange.

“More likely she wept over the share of her profits that went down with the
Virago.
For another twenty thousand, she would have danced on Leicester’s grave.”

“Twenty thousand?” Dante mused. They had easily taken six times that much; the Crown’s share should have been closer to fifty.
So you not only cheated me, you arrogant bastard, you landed the
Talon
before you reached England and off-loaded some of her cargo.
“For that much I would dance on my own grave.”

It was a timely jest and served to break the tension with the other captains. The shock of seeing a ghost gave way to the pleasure of seeing the pirate wolf in their midst again and the captains started to jostle forward, finding their voices all at once. Dante’s back was pounded and a glass was pressed into his hand. A flood of eager questions came from all quarters and toasts were offered. Praise was heaped on the heads of the two valiant captains who had dared raid the King’s treasure house at Veracruz, both of whom continued to stare steadfastly at one another, seeing and acknowledging the true way of things in each other’s eyes.