Pirate Wolf Trilogy (90 page)

“
All
hands up top,” he ordered calmly. “Open the ports and clear the
decks for action. On my signal... ” He stopped and glanced swiftly
at the
Tribute
, still
apparently oblivious to the danger looming in the darkness. Jonas
wouldn’t be able to see any signal shy of a gunshot or a flare, and
if they were going to do that... .

“As soon as
they’re primed I want the gunners to fire a full broadside.”

“A broadside,
sir? But we’re still well out of range and won’t accomplish more
than letting them know we’re not wogs.”

“I suspect they
know that already. But if you can think of a better way to get my
brother’s attention, I am all ears.”

The helmsman
grinned. “Aye sir. Full broadside it is.”

“Oh, and
Riley... since we’re not doing more than spitting in the pond, load
the guns with double charges of powder. Might as well give the
bastards an impressive show of fireworks while we’re at it.”

Recalde
groaned. Marisol was abusing him with the same degree of determined
savagery he had displayed earlier, and he was not only seeing
stars, he was seeing lights explode across his vision. Moments
later, he saw more lights, but by now the muffled volley of thunder
from the first explosions had rolled over the harbor and Recalde
knew it had nothing to do with Marisol’s skills with her mouth.

“
Jesu cristo
!” He
twisted his fingers in her hair and jerked her head away from his
groin, all but kicking her aside in his haste to run to the rail.
Far out in the soupy darkness of the night, a ship was firing its
cannon, the concussions reflecting orange and gold across the water
and in the hovering thickness of the air.

There
were running footsteps above and below him as other members of
the
Contadora’s
crew
were drawn by the exchange, likely the same reaction as on board
every galleon in Havana harbor. Fingers pointed and stabbed the air
excitedly as a second ship opened fire, then a third... then a
fourth! There were two smaller silhouettes in front—one of them
shockingly close to the harbor—and three much larger ones behind.
The two smaller vessels were being driven toward land, but as they
piled on sail, their speed increased and they were able to peel
away, one to the east, one to the west.

The one to the
west found open water, but the one heading east was met by the
patrolling pataches, bristling with ten guns apiece. As the
pataches drew within range and opened fire, the vessel had to veer
yet again to avoid sailing into range, but by then the galleons had
used their forward speed to good advantage and were emptying their
batteries as fast as the crews could load and fire.

Recalde was
transfixed by the scene unfolding less than a league away, as was
every other man on board. His hands gripped the rail as if to crush
it, for he could tell by the silhouette that the trapped vessel was
an English privateer.

“Use your chain
shot,” he urged, willing his command to carry across the distance.
“Take down her sails. Close in tight, by God, and you’ll have
her!”

Like a
fascinating dance executed in excruciatingly slow measures, the
privateer backed his sails hoping to elude the converging pataches
and outrun them to the open sea, but instead, he ran straight into
the guns of the two closing galleons. All five ships were spitting
orange flames, some of the shots striking their targets, some
throwing up tall spouts of white water on the sea. The echoes of
the shots did not take quite so long to reach the harbor now, but
the ships were engulfed in clouds of white smoke that hung in the
air like a blanket and drifted toward shore, cloaking the action
from view.

The last clear
glimpse Recalde had, the privateer was struggling. Her sails had
been holed by shot and some hung in tatters. There was a fire on
the upper deck, almost indistinguishable from the constant blasts
of the guns on both decks and when she moved out of sight behind a
low promontory of land, she left a wide streamer of smoke boiling
out behind.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

It had
taken twelve back-breaking days to remove the guns from the
Santo Domingo
and mount them in batteries
onshore. Frenchman’s Cay had a natural embankment that sat like a
shelf along the length of the beach, but the earthworks on
Spaniard’s Cay had to be laboriously trenched and built. There were
few complaints aside from aching muscles, however. Food was
plentiful and the days, stretching into September, were neither as
hot or as humid as they might have been a month earlier. Morning
came with the ringing of a ship’s bell and the men would work until
well after dark before crawling into the hammocks they’d strung
among the trees. Canvas tents were erected along both beaches but
most of the men preferred to sleep under the stars.

Juliet
worked alongside her crew. The culverins each weighed between four
and five thousand pounds, fired shots that weighed thirty-two
pounds apiece and required a powder charge of eighteen pounds each
time they were primed, all of which had to be transferred from the
galleon to the tents erected on shore. What Juliet lacked in brute
strength she made up for by supervising the reassembly of each gun
carriage on shore. The brass barrels had to be bolted to the
trunions
, then the sights
adjusted by driving in a quoin for the proper elevation. When the
last monster was winched overboard, rowed to one of the beaches,
and hauled to its final resting place, she ordered Crisp to sail
the
Iron
Rose
through the channel
so that each gun could be aimed to achieve maximum damage when
fired.

Four types of
shot were stacked in makeshift magazines built behind the treeline.
Ball shot was effective for holing the decks and hulls. Chain shot,
consisting of two cast iron balls attached by a length of chain,
would wrap around spars or yards and reduce them to splinters.
Grape shot was used mainly for keeping an enemy under cover. Dozens
of small round balls were packed into the throat of the cannon and
when fired, would spray across a deck in wide fan, killing or
maiming anyone exposed. The fourth and last type of shot was
sangrenel, a cloth bag filled with jagged scraps of metal. The bag
disintegrated when the powder ignited and the razor sharp bits of
iron sheared through flesh and bone like hot knives through
lard.

Varian St.
Clare worked, stripped to the waist, alongside the other members of
the crew. Spending long days in the sun, his skin started to turn a
deep bronze, making his smile appear wider and whiter than before.
Muscles that had not been soft to begin with hardened to oak and
laughter that had not seemed to come easily before, had the men
around him grinning, especially when he was laughing at his own
inability to do things that came second nature to seamen. As good
as he was with a sword, he was all thumbs when it came to wielding
a glaive or a black bill, both weapons that were used for fighting
in close quarters when there was no room for fancy footwork or
orderly quadrants. When instructed on the use of a boarding pike,
he managed to somehow hook his own breeches and fling himself
through the open gangway. And when he climbed the rigging one day,
he shouted at Juliet to show her how well he had done, only to
twist his foot around a ratline and dangle upside down in a shroud
until someone could go up and rescue him.

Regardless how
menial the task, he showed a willingness to learn. He spent an
afternoon with Nathan being shown the finer points of how to set a
sail, and when Nog Kelly demonstrated the proper way to nail
together one of the gun carriages, it was Nog who took out a front
tooth with a hammer, leaving Varian, his grin intact, to finish the
job. He even went hunting one afternoon with Johnny Boy and while
he skinned the inside of his forearm learning to shoot the longbow,
he proudly presented Juliet with the coconut he had skewered
through the heart.

Juliet was
smiling more too. It seemed to start at first light when she opened
her eyes and found herself curled against Varian’s big body, and it
was the last thing she did at night when they lay naked and sated
in each other’s arms. It was unfortunate that reality kept
intruding or she would have been quite content to wile away her
days swimming in the tidal pools and making long, languorous
love.

“They should
have been back by now,” she said, scanning the clear and
disturbingly empty horizon with her spyglass. “It has been nearly
three weeks. We’ve moved cannon, laid traps, built fortifications.
Faith, we’ve even taught you how to climb a tree and bake crabs in
the sand.”

At least once a
day Juliet made the climb to the highest vantage point on the
island. Most times Varian accompanied her, which meant they would
not quite make it directly there or back without taking some manner
of detour. On this particular day they had arrived at the top well
before sunset and relieved the two lookouts an hour before the
regular watch was due to be changed.

Standing behind
her, he gathered her hair to one side and placed a kiss on the
sensitive curve of her neck. “Your brothers strike me as being more
than capable of looking after themselves. Indeed, I would allow
they are the type who would show their backsides to the Spanish and
run before them like hares taunting a hound.”

She lowered the
glass and sighed. “But three weeks. The pinnaces we’ve sent out
have seen nothing either. No ships. No fleet. No movement
whatsoever in the Straits and frankly, Father is concerned some of
the other captains may grow impatient and leave.”

“Maybe the
French and Dutch privateers did their jobs too well and the Viceroy
of Nuevo España has ordered the fleet to remain in port.”

“Maybe the next
time you crack open a coconut you will find it filled with gold
doubloons.”

His hands
slid down from her shoulders and circled around to cradle her
breasts. “You dare to mock me, madam? I, who this very day risked
life and limb to catch a turtle so that you might dine on
potage de
tortue
tonight?”

She leaned
against his chest, her nipples rising instantly beneath his palms.
After three weeks she would have thought the fires within would
have burned down to more tolerant levels, but no. A touch, a look,
the crooked little smile he seemed to have reserved for her alone
could start an entire welter of sensations flaring to life inside
her.

They flared now
and within a few laughing breaths she had him on his back in the
grass. Straddling his hips, she tugged his shirt free of his
breeches, shoving the loosened folds up under his arms to expose
the bulge of muscles across his chest. She laid her hands flat on
the hard surface, letting the dark wealth of hair tickle her palms
and fingers before dragging them down over the smoothness of his
belly. When they encountered the wide black belt he wore, she
watched his face while she unfastened it and reached for the
buttons below.

The first
few days they had been on Frenchman’s Cay he had attempted to
maintain the neatly trimmed imperial and thin moustache, but for
the past fortnight, he had forsaken the blade and the chestnut
stubble on his face had filled in thick and smooth. He had also
taken to wearing his hair in a tail with a bandana tied around his
brow to keep the sweat out of his eyes. When combined with the
loose cambric shirt, the chamois breeches, the tanned skin and
gleaming white smile, he looked increasingly more like a pirate,
less like a duke than she would ever have envisioned the first time
she saw him on the deck of the
Argus
.

“Do you not
miss your purple plumes at all?” she asked in a low murmur, her
hands inside his breeches now, his body tensing beneath her.

“I, ah, beg
your pardon? I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”

She laughed and
shook her head to negate the question and was about to bend over
and distract him further when her gaze strayed to the rocky knob of
land that marked the peak of Spaniard’s Cay. The vantage points of
the two islands were perhaps three fourths of a mile apart, too far
to hear the sound of an alarm bell, but close enough to see the
small puff of white smoke that rose from the signal fire. She sat
straight a moment, then reached for her spyglass and pushed to her
feet.

“What is it?”
he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,
I can’t quite... ”

Juliet
cursed the angle of the sun and the glare that was causing spheres
of colored light to refract around the inside of her spyglass. It
was just a speck well to the south, lost between every other trough
of the waves, but she soon recognized the sleek lines of the
Christiana
.
Geoffrey Pitt had taken her out three mornings ago to do a little
reconnaissance of his own along the cays.

“It is Mr.
Pitt, coming in hard and fast, under full sail.”

She
trained the glass west and scanned the distant horizon but it was
still clear. The
Christiana
,
however, was skimming over the waves like she had a fire under her
keel and Juliet thrust the glass in Varian’s hands.

“I have to get
back down to the beach. Will you stay and wait for the watch
change? It’s probably nothing, but if you see anything unusual...
anything at all, light the signal fire and ring the bell.”

Varian nodded,
fastening his breeches and tucking his shirt back inside. “Light
the fire, ring the bell. Aye Captain.”

She did not
acknowledge either his salute or his grin; she was already
gone.