Across a Moonlit Sea (45 page)

 D
rake’s fleet spent the remainder of the night burning and destroying what they could of the outer harbor of Cadiz. The next morning he took his fleet of pinnaces through the channel to the inner harbor, where he proceeded to burn seven of the King’s prized galleons and a score of smaller vessels loaded to the gunwales with wine, cannon, seasoned timber, and victuals for the King’s armada gathering at Lisbon. Considerable damage was done and little had been suffered, although the patience of El Draque had been sorely tested the previous evening when confronted with the sooty faces of Spence, Beau, and Simon Dante.

Victor Bloodstone’s treachery, the loss of the
Talon
and the
Scout
, had caused the infamous sea hawk to glow as red as his hair. The audacity of Jonas Spence, following in their wake despite orders to take himself and his cargo safely home, caused only moderately less apoplexy, and Drake seriously contemplated confiscating the Egret for their impertinence. Only Dante’s intervention, supported
by a veiled threat of mutiny from every other captain in his fleet, prevented it.

Drake then took his small force, which now included the
Egret
, out of Cadiz two days later, leaving a pall of smoke in their wake. Over the course of the next six weeks he made good his promise to wreak havoc on smaller ports, and in doing so destroyed enough shipping and vital supplies to eventually throw the King’s plans for invasion back a full year.

It was also on this homeward journey that Sir Francis happened across another of Spain’s treasure galleons, the
San Felipe.
He was pleased to attack her, especially when her holds relinquished bullion, plate, and spices in such quantities as to make the plunder from the
San Pedro
seem a pittance by comparison. It was, in fact, the largest single prize ever taken by a privateering vessel, and bristling in triumph, Drake returned to England, satisfied his fame and fortune were fully restored, if not at their most rousing and inspiring level ever.

After the Queen finished counting her share of the profits, a month of celebrations were planned that she might properly thank her bold sea hawks for not only leaving the King’s pride in shambles, but for infusing the royal treasury with enough funds to start building England’s navy.

Beau emerged from the dressing room with a frown on her face. She was certain she was missing something. Although the three servants who had been assigned to help her bathe, powder herself, crimp and coif her hair, and dress her from the stockings up like some child too addlepated to know how to lace a garter, she was convinced a crucial article of clothing had been forgotten.

“Simon—?” She had her head bowed when she came into the salon, concentrating on the combined task of easing
the wide wings of the farthingale through the doorway and not tripping over the wide hoops and multiple underskirts that kept snagging her toes. “You know more about these things than I do. Would you not say something is amiss here?”

She looked up and saw a stranger standing by the window. “Oh! Excuse me, I thought you were …”

Dante turned around. He had been waiting in the salon exactly two hours, the interminable ticking of the ormolu clock relieved only now and then when he heard a muffled string of blasphemies make its way through the door of the inner chamber. Pitt had kept him company the first hour, but a summons from his dark-eyed little duchess had sent him scurrying to his own apartments. Geoffrey Pitt had not waited to return to England to marry Christiana Villanueva. There had been a Catholic priest on board the
San Felipe
who had agreed, for the sake of the soul of one of Spain’s daughters, to wed them. They certainly hadn’t waited for much else, either, for Pitt had come today, full of the news he was going to be a father.

Spence, likewise, had blustered about the delicate furnishings of the salon like a whale out of water. He had lost another finger and half an ear in the fight with the
Talon
, and had declared his intention to take his profits and build a small fleet of merchant ships that
other
captains might take out at risk to life and limb. He and Spit McCutcheon would take to the helm for pleasure only. Or when his supplies of rumbullion threatened to run perilously low.

McCutcheon had also been outfitted to attend the Queen’s presence. He had been scrubbed, shaved, and clad in a new suit of clothes that made him look like a colorful marionette. Dante could only imagine how Beau would fare in the transition. He had seen the maids and the armloads of frilly clothing go into the dressing room. He had also
seen the maids stumble out hours later, their necks clammy with sweat, their caps askew, and their shoulders sagging with exhaustion.

Now she was out and the suspense was at an end. He turned when she called his name, and for a second or two the glare from the window remained too bright on his eyes to see much more than a dark blur.

“Excuse me, I thought—I thought you were my husband,” Beau said, her voice trailing off to a whisper. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at the tall, elegant figure who stood in front of the twenty-foot-high mullioned window, certain her eyes were playing tricks on her.

It was their first full day in London, the first time she had seen him not at a dockyard helping Spence supervise the repairs on the
Egret
or cloistered in a stuffy warehouse haggling with guild merchants over the sale of the cargo. He had waited to the last minute to come to his house in London, despite a flurry of dispatches from Drake and the Queen. He had used the excuse of a fever to delay their leavetaking from Plymouth, but the only heat he suffered from was doctored quite adequately in Beau’s arms.

Reluctantly he had come to London and even more reluctantly he had left their bed this morning to be attended by a barber, a valet, a tailor; all in anticipation of being received, feted, and berated by the Queen. To the latter he had already weathered a storm of letters regarding his insolence in marrying someone not of noble or even elevated birth. To each of those he had simply sent back a card embossed with the De Tourville coat of arms and a very large fleur-de-lis, expressing the regrets of the Comte and Comtesse that his fever was still too high to permit travel.

Spence had expected warrants any day. Dante had simply
made love to his new wife and gone about his business at the shipyards.

And now here they were, a half hour’s coach ride to the Queen’s audience chamber, and Beau felt as if she ought to curtsy to
him.
Dante’s hair had been trimmed to within an inch of ebony perfection, his jaw scraped clean of the rough fur she had come to appreciate in more ways than one. He wore a white satin shirt beneath a midnight-blue velvet doublet, edged and banded in gold, with a row of jewel-encrusted buttons glittering down the front closure. The narrowest of embroidered collar and cuffs stood out in breathtaking contrast to the deeply tanned color of his face and hands, while his legs—long and thewed like iron—were cased in hose the same rich blue as his doublet. His shoes were made of the finest, softest leather, buckled in pure gold. The dress sword he wore at his hip was sheathed in a bejeweled buckler, the hilt an elaborate weave of scrolls and curlicues.

He looked, for the first time ever, like a member of the royal French aristocracy, like the urbane and elegant Comte de Tourville. His only obstinate act of rebellion was the wink of gold prominent in his earlobe.

He walked slowly forward, his approach drawing even more air out of Beau’s lungs, if that were possible.

His eyes were as blue as the sky as he made a deliberate, measured perusal of her hair, her gown, even the tiny rows of pearls that ornamented her belt. He had chosen the gown himself—everything, in fact, from the sheer silk drawers and corselet to the wheel-shaped farthingale with its descending layers of wire hoops. Her sleeves had enough rich cloth in them to fashion two normal shipboard shirts. The bodice was flat and rigid, narrowing past a surprisingly small waistline, dipping to an elongated V to exaggerate the flaring velvet skirts. All was in the deepest, purest
black, seeded with black pearls and glittering jets. Her hair was a puff of soft auburn curls around her face, then pulled back into a coif and decorated with tiny clusters of jewels. Around her neck she wore ropes of De Tourville diamonds, so dazzling against the dusky hue of her complexion, it would make the Court’s eyes water with envy. On her finger she wore another de Tourville heirloom, an enormous pearl circled by more diamonds, reputed to have once belonged to a Plantagenet princess.

Dante could think of no one more suited to wear it.

“Mon
cygne noir magnifique,”
he murmured, his voice husky enough to allow a little color to leak back into her face. “I never imagined you could look so beautiful … with or without your breeches on.”

“You are just saying that to be kind.”

“My dear Comtesse”—he advanced closer and took both her hands in his, kissing each palm before he spread her arms wide and let his silvery eyes feast on all her splendor—“a blade at my throat could not make me be
kind
to anyone in my present mood. But it warms me to know Bess will be so envious, she will undoubtedly banish us from Court for a very long time.”

“Because of me?” Beau gasped.

“Thanks
to you, my love. Moreover, her ladies will suffer to remove all of the mirrors from her sight so as not to allow too harsh a comparison to her wrinkled skin and painted white complexion. The courtiers will all be springing out of their codpieces like schoolboys. I will be forced to defend my claim a thousand times ere this night is over.”

Beau laughed and curled her arms around his shoulders, coming to him in an irreverent crush of silk and velvet. “Be silent, fool. Or put your mouth to better use.”

“Gladly.” He bowed his head, kissing her with a lusty
vengeance that left her lips redder than any rouge wash could have done.

When he released her, she continued to stare up at him, her eyes so round and compellingly flecked with gold, he laughed and kissed her again. “Here? Now? What of all the hard work your maids have done?”

“I would not give it a moment’s thought,” she breathed honestly.

“Well”—he gave her a husbandly peck on the cheek— “I would. Once I come out of this stuffed peacock’s costume, I stay out of it.”

Beau grinned. “I would not—”

“—Give it a moment’s thought, yes. I know. And if that is the case, I shall have to occupy your mind with other things. What were you asking me when you came into the room? You thought something was missing?”

She stood back and ran her fingers over her bodice. The cut was so snug, her breasts compressed so flat, there seemed to be far too much plumping of flesh over the squared edge of the neckline. “I tried pulling up the ruff of my corselet and down the strands of the necklace, but there still seems to be too much of me to cover.”

Dante tried not to smile. “It is the French cut, I will admit, and probably too scandalous for a court of English Protestants.”

“Then why did you put me in it?”

He feathered a fingertip over the mounds of tender flesh. “So I can ease my boredom over the next few hours by imagining the pleasure of taking you out of it.”

“And in the meantime? If I bend over?”

“If you bend over, mam’selle,” he murmured. “The Court will be more than simply scandalized.”

The suddenly very young and not very assured Comtesse Isabeau de Tourville sighed and pressed her cheek against
his broad shoulder. “I wish we were a thousand miles away, with a deck beneath our feet and canvas over our heads.”

Dante wrapped his arms around her briefly, then straightened with a smile. “Perhaps I can make your evening a little easier to bear by giving you your gift now.”

“Gift? What gift?”

He kissed her on the tip of her nose and led her to the window. “You have to understand she isn’t quite finished. Pitt still has to put in her teeth and Lucifer has to do something with rooster gizzards that I’m not altogether certain you want to know.”

Beau frowned and looked out the window. Dante’s London house sat on the banks of the Thames, giving him a mariner’s view of the busy river. Lying at anchor in the deeper water midcourse was a new galleon, so closely resembling the golden replica of the
Virago
, it sent a small shiver down Beau’s spine. There had been some slight changes made in the design. Her lines were cleaner, her castles almost level with the main deck, allowing space for an extra sail on the mizzen and fore.

“I had ordered her keel laid before we left for Veracruz,” he explained softly. “I just hadn’t thought of a name for her yet.”

Beau followed the gracious sweep of her bow and found the carved figurehead beneath. It was a woman’s head, as shockingly familiar as the one she saw in the mirror each morning, but below, it was the body of a swan with her wings outspread to catch the wind.

“My other magnificent
Black Swan”
he said. “Do you like her?”

“Like her?” Beau whispered. “She looks … like she could fly.”