Pirate Wolf Trilogy (77 page)

Happily, Juliet
had not yet taken a mouthful of her own wine and when she coughed,
it was just air.

“She offered to
show me a breathtaking view of your island, and was kind enough to
take me up to the summit,” Varian said without missing much of a
beat. “I must say, I am in awe, Captain, for you command the
horizon as far as one can see in any direction. A pity you do not
hold sway over the insects that attacked us on the way up and again
on the way down.”

“Vicious little
beggars, were they not?” Gabriel agreed raising his glass. “I was
forced to use my sword to clear a path for us.”

“You went up
the mountain?” Simon looked at his younger son as if such a
strenuous activity was not a common day occurrence.

“It was a
mood.” He shrugged. “It came upon me unawares. Besides, someone had
to chaperone these two. Jolly might have tossed him off the cliffs
before we had a chance to hear his pretty speeches from the
king.”

Dante glanced
pointedly at the bruise beginning to darken on his son’s cheek then
turned to Varian and smiled as he raised his glass. “Your continued
good health, sir.”

“And yours,
Captain.”

They drank,
their gazes locked over the rims of the goblets.

“And so you
have come to offer the brethren an Act of Grace. All sins and past
transgressions pardoned if they will but abide by the terms of the
treaty with Spain—have I the fair gist of it?”

“There are a
few additional incentives, but yes. That would reduce the three
pages of whys and wherefores in the king’s intent to a single
sentence.”

“Was this Act
signed by the king’s own hand? Or did he have one of his ministers
do his dirty work?”

“It was the
king himself. I witnessed the signing with mine own eyes. It was
signed in the presence of the Spanish Ambassador as well, who then
sent a copy to Spain.”

“You have this
decree on your person?”

“
Unfortunately, no. It was lost with the
Argus
.”

Jonas snorted
from across the room. “Convenient.”

Varian turned
and looked into the amber eyes.

“Well it is
true. I could say I was travelling with papers to prove I was the
Emperor of China, but if they went down with the ship, how would I
prove it? For that matter,” Jonas added, “we only have your word
that you even are who you say you are.”

“I have no good
earthly reason to lie, sir,” Varian said quietly. “And my word is
good enough for most men of my acquaintance.”

“Look around
you. Do we appear to be like most men of your acquaintance?”

“Oh for
heaven’s sake.” Juliet, who had been sitting with a leg draped over
the arm of a chair, rose and went to the sideboard to refill her
wine. “Why not just fetch a pot of boiling oil and have him pick a
stone off the bottom. If his flesh melts off the bone, you will
know he is lying, if it remains unblemished, you will know he
speaks the truth.”

The only one
who responded to her sarcasm was Lucifer, who grinned and nodded as
if he approved of the idea.

Simon gently
swirled the contents of his goblet. “I am inclined to give our
guest the benefit of the doubt—for the moment anyway—unless you
have a damned good reason why we should not?”

Jonas snorted.
“I don’t trust him. That’s reason enough for me.”

Isabeau came
walking through the open door. “If he had brown eyes instead of
blue, that would be reason enough for you, Jonas dear, when your
belly is full of rum.”

She went
directly to the enormous cherrywood desk in the corner of the room
and slapped down a sheaf of papers. The topmost ones were curled at
the edges; some still had bits of wax stuck to the parchment where
the seals had been broken.

She joined
Juliet by the sideboard and poured a full measure of wine, draining
it before she turned to address her family.

“
I have
been reading for most of the day,” she announced. “Aside from the
manifests of crew and cargo, there were the logs—which I will get
to in a moment—and an inordinately thick sheaf of personal letters
entrusted to the
capitán
to carry
home to Spain. The Spaniards are effusive, to say the least, and
whine at endless length about the food, the bugs, the swamps, the
conditions in port, the noise from the garrison barracks, how much
they long to be going home, how they miss the warm plains of
Seville, the breezes off the Pyrenees, the snow, the olive trees...
Pages and pages of tear-blotted script bemoaning their plight to
lovers and mistresses and wives and families. I am ready to pull my
teeth out to save them grinding together every time I read the
salutation,
mi amore
!” She
paused and held out her cup for Juliet to refill. “Then there are
the official reports from the commandants, from the
gobernador
, from
the damned lackey in charge of seeing there are enough linens on
the tables in the officers mess. And the cook! Dear Christ weeping
on the cross, the poor bastard is beside himself for the short
supplies of vessie. Three pages he goes on about it. Three damned
pages about vessie, written in a hand that looked like it used a
chicken foot as a quill! For the blood of God, what is vessie? Is
it the name of a girl or something to eat?”

When no one was
able to answer, Varian ventured to raise a finger. “If I may, I
believe it is the bladder of a pig, used for steaming meats and
stews.”

“Can it steam
away a pounding head and bleary eyes? If so, I shall demand a crate
myself. As it is, I was driven to stab the letter a dozen times to
gain relief. You’ll find the shreds there, right beside a second
letter from the same poor bastard, bemoaning the fact that although
there were over twenty ships in Baranquilla preparing to embark for
Havana to join the most glorious armada to set sail in his
lifetime, alas he was not destined to be on board one of them.”

“God bless
cooks who aspire to greater things,” Gabriel mused aloud.

“Happily for
us, he was not always a cook,” Isabeau said. “Apparently his family
had wanted him to become a priest, but he preferred to worship at
the altar of greed instead and I gather he was banished to Nuevo
España by way of punishment. Believe me, I know all of his miseries
and complaints, even to the state of his bowels. You must be the
Duke of Harrow,” she said brightly, coming forward.

“Comtess,” he
said, offering a formal bow. “Your servant.”

“Comtess?
Beware of another stabbing, sir, if you address me thus again. You
may call me Beau, and I shall call you... ?”

“
Varian.”
He seemed startled by the instant informality, almost as startled
as he was by his own dreadful
faux pas
in instinctively reaching for her nonexistent hand to kiss.
“The honor and the pleasure is, of course, mine.”

She studied his
face through narrowed eyes. “I see my daughter has been practising
her stitchery again. You have improved, my dear,” she added,
smiling over her shoulder. “And thankfully so, for it would have
been a shame to mar such a handsome fellow.”

Varian touched
his fingertips to the wound on his cheek. Apart from one brief
glimpse when Beacom had shaved him yesterday, he had deliberately
avoided examining the wound that ran along his hairline. Handsome
was not a word he would have applied to what he had seen in that
reflected mess of knotted threads and mottled bruises.

“
As for
the log,” she said, turning to her husband. “It reads like a travel
journal. The captain sailed her from Havana to New Leon, in Mexico,
then south to Vera Cruz where he took on his cargo of silver coins.
From there he continued on down the isthmus to Nombre de Dios,
where he agreed to carry crates of spices from the Manilla galleons
that were in excess of what the merchant ships could hold. He also
acquired Captain Recalde and a hundred troops from the garrison. A
week after they left Nombre de Dios, it appears the
capitán del
navio
of the
Santo
Domingo
had an accident—he fell off the
forecastle deck in a rain storm and broke his back—at which time
Recalde assumed the post. They touched in at Porto Bello,
Baranquilla, Cartagena, and Margarite Island. At each stop, they
took on cargo and more soldiers who were bound for Havana. At their
last stop, after heading due north to Hispaniola, the captain was
relieved to find a large number of ships waiting in port—eighteen
of them, to be precise. Some of the troops he had taken on earlier,
were transferred to these vessels to ease the overcrowding on his
decks, which had at one point reached nearly seven hundred
men.”

“Seven
hundred?” Juliet asked.

“
Not
including the seamen. So you were even luckier than you realized,
m’dear. If you had come across the
Santo Domingo
a week earlier, you would have been outnumbered
six to one instead of just three to one.”

Geoffrey Pitt
was frowning. “Eighteen ships at Hispaniola? A normal count would
be six or seven.”

“And don’t
forget the Dutchman’s report of seeing more ships than usual off
Maracaibo,” Gabriel added. “You might want to ask our guest about
that, however. He has an intriguing explanation about three fleets
overlapping, putting as many as one hundred treasure galleons in
Havana waiting to leave for Spain.”

“One hundred
galleons? There hasn’t been a fleet that size in—”

“Over twenty
years,” Varian said, saving Pitt the trouble.

“
I should
think closer to thirty,” Isabeau said quietly. “That was the last
time they ordered all of their naval ships, and most especially all
of their warships home, and no, it was not because of three fleets
overlapping. It was in anticipation of launching
la Felicissima
Invencible
—the biggest
invasion fleet the world had seen—against England the following
spring. Do you read Spanish, Varian?”

“Why... yes,
yes I do.”

“Good. Then
this should be of special interest to you.” She returned to the
sheaf of papers she had left on the desk and raised the topmost
sheet. It was a single page of heavy parchment bearing the remains
of two wax seals and the florid signature of the governor of New
Spain.

“It seems the
king has recalled all of his top ranking officials and ordered most
of the troops and warships home to Castile. He also indulges in
some bragging, stating that they have had great success in lulling
the English king into believing they are committed to upholding a
lasting peace, and that with the return of the fleet to Spain, they
will at last have sufficient men and ships, as well as the
financial means to launch another invasion armada in the new year
whereupon they will finally avenge the honor of their noble
ancestors as well as eradicate the heretic devils from England once
and for all, restoring the power and glory of the One True God.”
Isabeau came forward and presented the document to Varian. “As I
understand it, you have been sent here to convince my husband and
the other privateers to keep their ships in port? Are you quite
certain that is what you want to do?”

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

Varian was
invited to accompany the pirate wolf and Geoffrey Pitt to the chart
room. It proved to occupy one of the largest areas on the main
floor and was aptly named for the breathtakingly huge reproductions
of continents and coastlines painted directly onto two of the
sixteen foot high walls. The territories that comprised the Spanish
mainland in the new world—the Spanish Main—occupied one full
quadrant and included minute details of the coastline that flowed
from the tip of Florida around the gulf coast to the New Kingdom of
Leon, down to the Yucatan, Panama, and across the northern coast of
Tierra Firma from Cartagena to Paria. Painted inside the great gulf
were the islands of the Greater Antilles, the Baja Mas Islands, and
the Caribbee Isles. Each known city, port, cay and islet was neatly
identified, the sea lanes and passages marked as well as the thin
blue latitude line denoting the Tropic of Cancer.

England, the
western coast of Europe, and the Mediterranean filled another wall,
while the third was filled with shelves of books, racks upon racks
of maps, charts, astrological tables. The fourth wall was
interrupted by doors leading out to the terrace, but between the
two tall banks of doors was an enormous table the size of a dining
board on which had been built a three dimensional map of the
Spanish Main. It showed islands with any recognizable landmarks,
channels, reefs, coastlines, and rivers. Forts were represented by
small stone blocks over which flew tiny flags identifying the
nation that controlled the island or port. Most were Spanish, but a
surprising number of French and Dutch flags showed that inroads
were being made, especially in the easterly Caribbee Isles.

At either end
of the room were desks, a drawing table, assorted chairs and small
reading tables and, as Varian raised disbelieving eyes to the
ceiling, suspended overall was a map of the star constellations
identical to what one could see if one stood on the roof and gazed
heaven-ward.

“My wife’s
handiwork,” said Simon Dante, waiting an appropriate amount of time
for Varian to absorb the stunning details and close his mouth
again. “She was as restless as a piranha through all three of her
confinements and I either had to find something for her to do or
maroon her on an island somewhere for several months each
time.”

“I confess, I
am speechless. I have never seen such extraordinarily fine work,
not even in churches or cathedrals. The king’s admirals would
ransom their souls to have a war room like this.”