The Pirate Captain (105 page)

His toes curled slightly in self-consciousness, the tip of one considerably shortened.

“Frozen rounding the Horn,” he said. “Lost part of me ear on another.” He lifted his hair to show that a goodly portion of the top curve of his ear was missing.

“And here?” she asked.

It was the first time she had dared to touch the scar at his neck. It lay in the soft notch of his neck, between his Adam’s apple and the notch. The delicate skin tortured into a thick gnarl, it was a reverse branding of sorts, the curving arcs of a rope’s twist permanently etched in the skin.

“Were you hung?” Cate bit her lip at her boldness.

The amber and cinnamon eyes held hers for the briefest bit, and then fell away. Nathan smiled grimly. “Aye, but dancing the hempen jig of a different sort.”

Nathan was hesitant, taking time to form his thoughts, deciding how much to reveal. “A cabin boy I was, as fresh and hairless as a lass. You’ll mind of me stowing away?”

She nodded. Living in Matelotage—a pirate haven and a place he loathed—driven by the death of his mother and a deep-seated hatred for the man who assumed his custody, he had left.

“Mark me, I’d made precious sure it was a merchant and not a pirate ship,” Nathan said, with a wag of a finger. “I’d seen enough of that pestilent hellhole to know what it was about. Captain Pope was known to be fair-minded; one can’t desire better than that. As for the hands, months at sea can put thoughts into a man’s head, ones what can be readily seen for anyone who cares to heed. I managed to cat-and-mouse about the ship, dodging them for the first while. I took a right hazing for clinging to the captain’s coattails. But then, he was taken with a fever.”

Thomas had told her of Nathan’s nickname, “Scupperbait.” Being so small of stature at that age, he had been easily swept away by the waves that washed the decks, leaving him stuck in the scuppers.

Nathan fell quiet, a number of thoughts tracking his features.

“They were thorough, I’ll give the bastards that,” he said in grudging admiration. “I was blindfolded, so as unable to accuse, and a rag in me mouth…”

He clamped his lip in his teeth, the muscles in his jaws flexing. “They bound me. I fought…” The hand resting on his leg curled into a fist, the knuckles going white as he shook. “God help me, I fought, but…”

His voice grew raspish, tightening with the memory, as if the rope was still about his neck. She sorely regretted having said anything. It brought back too many of her own memories. It called to mind too easily her story: the bite of the ropes, the desperation of helplessness, the struggle…

As disquieted as he was, he pressed on, as if the telling gave him ease.

“’Twas a blessing, I think” Nathan said frowning slightly. “I was fair out of it through most of it. I have no idea how many…”

The last was choked off.

She blinked back the rising shimmer of tears when she thought he wasn’t looking. “What…?” She cleared a suddenly constricted throat. “After…? I mean, what—?”

“The report to the Master was I’d tangled me foot in a sheet and tumbled down the companionway, which answered well, since I’d been thrown down it. Broke me arm in the doing,” he said, meditatively rubbing a spot just above his elbow.

“Cap’n Pope didn’t credit a word of it. A fall doesn’t leave a lad bleeding…And me neck…” Nathan left the thought to finish itself.

“Didn’t he ask…? Couldn’t you tell…?” she asked.

Nathan smiled, tolerantly. “No man before the mast betrays another. A brotherhood of silence it ’tis on the f’c’stle. I couldn’t speak for nigh on to a week, and a broken arm prevents one from writing. I couldn’t eat or drink. I just…cried. Made nothing more than little squeaking sounds like a half-drowned kitten,” he said, looking away. “Ripped breeches, a bleeding bum, and legs slick with spunk…not much to be said. He knew.”

Nathan stared off for some time. Then he shook himself, as one did to rid oneself of a bad dream.

“No charges could be made, because there was no proof, other than a lad’s word against those willing to speak for the bastards’ character,” he said. “I knew the ones what nabbed me. As for the rest—at least some—I knew by the looks after; gloating they were. And the smell of them I’d never forget,” he finished in a flood vehemence.

Her stomach clenched, as the ghosts of smells rose in her nose. The sense of smell could be the most damning. No matter how valiantly one tried, one sniff, and it all came tumbling back.

When Cate had first come aboard, she had inquired as to why there were no cabin boys aboard, a time-honored tradition at sea, as she had been given to believe. Nathan had turned away, mumbling something under his breath. Now she understood.

“By some strange coincidence, the pair what nabbed me died within hours of each other,” he said, brightening somewhat. “The ship’s chirurgeon declared it bad beef.”

The lilt in his voice suggested something more.

“You?” she asked.

He gave her a sidelong look, the light sparking on the burnt-molasses orbs. “I only said I was fresh, I didn’t say I was innocent. There are benefits to be had from living in that festering hellhole Matelotage. The chirurgeon knew, and ’tis a good chance he told the Cap’n as much. The Cap’n put a pallet on his cabin floor; like a dog sleeping at its master’s feet, but I slept sound, at any rate. Me voice hadn’t changed before, and after I sounded like…like a man old before me time.”

She wondered what the ravaged voice might have been: as soft and gentle as he, or deep and melodic, a clear tenor which might have carried from the forecastle on the night air, instead of the labored grate heard on those rare occasions when he was taken with song?

“It still bothers you, doesn’t it,” she said.

“Me throat? Aye. As for the rest?” he mused. “Ancient history, darling, the trials and travails of a lad growing up is all.”

It was spoken with the pragmatism of a mariner with regard to anything bad: since the worst obviously hadn’t happened—death—then it couldn’t have been so bad.

Nathan probed his neck, grimacing slightly, but it was unclear if it was from physical discomfort or the recollection of it all.

“Eating doesn’t come so easy,” Nathan finally admitted. “Something hot to drink, or rum helps ease the ache of a night.”

As often as Cate had seen him in drink, never had she considered the physical comforts it might be affording him from the residual aches and pains of so many years at sea.

“The Cap’n knew. Those sorts can’t help but brag, and there are no secrets on a ship,” he said with a wry twist. “Pope wasn’t one to often let the cat out of the bag, but he did so then: fifty lashes, and I the first stripe, had I wished.”

“Did you…wish?”

He made a caustic noise. “To what point and purpose? Flaying their skins wouldn’t heal mine.”

She couldn’t argue that. Nothing reversed time or undid what had been done.

What color is hope when it fades?

When the innocence of youth is dissolved by the reality of life, it is rarely gentle. The question might be whether or not it was compulsory for such lessons to be particularly brutish, or otherwise go unlearned. Earlier in his boyhood, Nathan had seen his mother beaten. Had he learned the lesson of the treachery of men then, could he have been saved from the classroom of this harsher lesson? Hindsight. Regret. Remorse. One could starve if they sought sustenance on those.

Cate touched her lips to the twisted skin in benediction for all that had happened, at the same time giving thanks that he had survived to be there now. Nathan's arm tightened around her in acknowledgement.

“S’all right, luv,” he said into her hair. His fingers brushed the back of her shoulder and the thick scar there. “Only bloody fools brag in Hell, and St. Peter shan’t pass fools through his gates.”

Coming from many, it could have come across as quite cavalier, but he bore the marks of experience to give it wisdom.

She urged him to sit up and moved around in order to see his back. Pushing his hair out of the way, she gasped.

“You’ve been flogged!”

It had once been a beautiful back, wide-shouldered and carved with muscle, tapering down to a narrow waist. The deep curving groove of his spine ran between the sculptured shoulders, the hard curve of his buttocks half-buried in the folds of the quilt. The once-smooth skin was marked with claw-like grooves of silvery-white against the antique ivory.

Nathan grimly nodded, a dark eye over his shoulder looking mildly surprised. “You recognize the marks. When I was a cabin boy; it was me first and second voyage. The handiwork of that blighter, Beecher.”

He had told her of it one day by a hot spring, and she had been shocked then. Still, knowing that he had been whipped and seeing the marks was two entirely different things.

“They flogged a cabin boy?” Cate asked in disbelief.

He looked off, squinting in calculation. “Three, no four times, all told. First was only two strokes, and then five, the second,” he rationalized then shrugged, mirth lurking around his mouth. “I was mouthy and brash.”

“The mind strains to imagine,” she mused.

“The others were…” Nathan looked off, his mouth working for a word, “indiscretions” being the one he finally landed upon.

What Nathan didn’t say Cate could see. He had been whipped as a lad, but there was a vast difference in the age of the marks. Some, the faintest and oldest, had been applied with care, light and even, meant to punish and no more. A vast number more were vivid with relative newness. Their thickness revealed the savagery with which they had been applied, their criss-crossing meant to maim and destroy, breaking the spirit if not the body. Creswicke’s hand, again.

Amid all that ruin, just below Nathan's shoulder blade, laid the divot of another musket ball. The margins blackened like the one on his chest, this one was from a smaller caliber weapon, the sort a woman might carry.

How does one go about asking if a man’s love—his precious Hattie—had been the one to shoot him in the back?

Overwhelmed by the horror of it all, she pressed her lips to the slope of his shoulder. His hand came to rest on hers, and squeezed in silent acknowledgement.

Nathan lounged against the bulkhead once again. He looked down to scrutinize himself with an odd look. “Seems to be the map of me life,” he murmured, with a mystified smile. He looked blandly at the brand and sobered. “Only a few I really mind.”

She pressed her hand over the “S,” as if somehow that simple action might erase it. “I wish I had been there for you.”

His hand closed around hers and squeezed lightly. “Nay, lass. You couldn’t have stopped it, and there was bloody little to be done after.”

“I could have helped you heal. I could have helped you…with all of those.”

Nathan clasped both of her hands between his. Holding her eyes with his, he stroked the backs with his thumbs.

“No regrets, darling. Those can cut worst than any blade. If you can’t control it, you can’t help it, and if you can’t help it, then there’s nothing to be regretting.”

Nathan angled his head toward Cate's stomach, and then her shoulder. “Wear your marks proudly. If they are to be seen, it’s because you have survived. There’s no shame in living. And if it’s to be laying on of the hands, I’d rather it be here in me bunk than on some wretched deck, with some cod-handed cove stitching me up.”

He kissed her lightly to emphasize his point. He then ran a pensive finger along her jaw, setting off trails of goose flesh up her face and down her neck. “Come to mind, I may just have something those hands could do well by,
if
they were so inclined.”

A warm rush flooded her cheeks and several other places. “Well, I do like to keep my hands busy.”

“Ah, a woman after me own heart,” he said with a gold-glinted grin, pulling her with him down onto the mattress.

“Why, Captain Blackthorne, I didn’t think it was your heart we were speaking of.”

He ducked his head lower, and began doing things that made her shiver. The clanging of the watch bell shattered the quiet.

“Suffering Jesus on the cross! Goddamned—!” Nathan checked himself, and shifted into another language, still swearing, for the spirit of it was still to be heard.

He braced his forehead against hers. He heaved an exasperated sigh, and then watched as she struggled to interpret the seven rings.

“’Tis nigh the end of the forenoon watch,” he said at last, putting an end to her suffering. “I’ve courses to lay and a glass to check, before I report at eight bells. They do say duty…”

“Is a heartless master,” she finished. “You’d best go. We don’t want anyone thinking we’ve been up to something.”

Nathan sat on the bunk’s edge, angling his head to admire the view as she bent to search through the pile of discarded clothing on the floor.

“They already know what we’ve been up to, darling.” Sighing, he rose and began his own search.

“I’ll never get used to that.” Handing him a sock, she pulled on her shift.

Scrutinizing the sock for a moment, he pitched it over his shoulder. He rummaged further, making a little sound of discovery at locating his breeches.

“Used to what?” he asked as he pulled them on.

“Everyone knowing everything; eyes always on you, seeing everything.”

“You get used to it,” he said through the folds of his shirt. Settling the linen on his shoulders, he worked to free his braids and scarf tails from the collar.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” she said.

Sitting on the bunk again, his grin was a bright flash of ivory as he pulled on a stocking. “You learn to keep up a front; never let them really see.”

She sat next to him and studied him intently. “That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it? A front, a mask?”

He sobered, his eyes searching hers.

“Aye,” he answered softly, touching her cheek. “And you, and those cursed eyes of yours, have seen through it. You’re the only one who ever
really
has.”

“Does that bother you?”

Nathan thoughtfully examined her face further, taking in every detail. “No,” he said softly. “No, I’m safe with you.”

She pulled her stays free of another of Nathan’s stockings and tossed it his way. He adroitly caught it one-handed.