Authors: Donna Thorland
The Gages and Howe rejoined the party, leaving Sarah alone, for the moment, with Trent. Somehow, with only the two of them, the chamber seemed smaller.
“Are you really all right?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I should have spoken with you earlier, but I have secured a license, and a willing parson, albeit a radical one, from the college. I am arranging the passes now. He will not enter Boston, for fear of arrest, so I have suggested that he meet us in Charlestown, and perform the ceremony at the Three Cranes.”
I will marry him and gladly.
Here was abstraction become reality, and she found she was not glad of it, not with Sparhawk so near, but out of reach. “How do you know a radical divine?”
“He married my first wife and me, and he took an interest in her and my son when I was away at sea.”
This, then, was the cleric Sparhawk had come to Boston to find. That he was willing to perform another marriage for Trent argued that Trent could not have arranged the arrest of his first wife and murder of his son.
He crossed the room to her, and she took a step back. Her shoulders touched the door behind her. Trent stroked her neck where the fine gold chain lay close against her skin.
“Sarah,” he said, continuing to stroke, his hand moving lower now with a practiced, skilled sensuality. “Have I made a mistake with us? Left this”—he dipped his head to press a kiss against her neck, making her skin tingle and her nipples tighten—“too late?”
His hand dipped into her stays, found a nipple, squeezed it into a tight bud. His knee pressed into her skirts and up until it met her sex through the silk, and friction kindled the inevitable response.
He was Sparhawk’s father.
“Please don’t,” she said.
He stilled immediately and stepped away.
“I am sorry,” she said. “It is nothing to do with Sparhawk.” It was everything to do with Sparhawk. “My brother was with him. They came back,” she lied with near-convincing smoothness for the first time in her life, “so that I would know Benji was all right.”
Regret played across Trent’s handsome features, so very like Sparhawk’s, now that she looked for the resemblance. But she had always known he was a seducer. It did not mean he was a murderer.
“I am sorry,” he said.
But it was her fault. It was not his touch that had unnerved her, but her unsettling—and unexpected—response.
Sparhawk was determined to remove Ned from the
Diana.
Mr. Cheap agreed that it was the likeliest way to get Sarah away from Trent. Sparhawk still thought the likeliest and most direct way was to tie her up in a sack, but the infuriating Ward family and their amanuensis would not hear of it.
But there was a chance, given the sound of the guns and the smoke rising to the north, that if the
Diana
was still engaged with the Rebels, there might be an opportunity to spirit one small boy off that British man-of-war.
Cheap and Sparhawk made their way around the island, seeing everywhere evidence of the Rebels’ success: burnt barns, dead livestock, trampled grass indicating the passage of great herds of beasts. They followed this path of desolation to the creek separating Noddle’s Island from the mainland at Chelsea and found the tide out and the Americans fled across the shallows. Cheap and Sparhawk crossed in their footsteps, followed the sounds of fighting, of ship’s cannon, and surprisingly, fieldpieces, to the west.
The scene they found at the mouth of the sandy creek north of Noddle’s Island beggared imagination. The Americans, some six hundred of them, were massed on Chelsea beach, near the ferry landing. They had two fieldpieces with them, and were firing upon the
Diana
.
She did not return the American volleys with her sixteen guns. She did nothing at all, because she was stuck fast in the mud, her draft too deep for the shallow creek, the angle of her deck too steep for her guns to be of any use. The tide was ebbing more with each passing minute. She had six boats out in the shallows, their crews rowing furiously to pull her off, but the Americans were peppering the British sailors with small-arms fire and they could make no headway. The
Diana
was Gulliver caught fast by the Lilliputians.
Every once in a while a ball hurtled out of the darkness from the hill on Noddle’s, where a handful of British marines had set up two of their own fieldpieces, but the Americans were undaunted.
Sparhawk scanned the
Diana
’s
deck for some sign of Ned, but there was not a head to be seen above the schooner’s tilted rail, and when so much as a pennant moved in the breeze, an American discharged his rifle with astonishing accuracy.
Under heavy fire, one by one the boat crews, trying to pull the
Diana
off, cut their lines, and once freed, shot toward the safety of the British guns on Noddle’s Island. Sparhawk could not blame them.
The last two boats became caught in a race to hack themselves free, their crews knowing the final vessel tethered to the
Diana
, heeling hard as the schooner was, would be lashed by the recoil of the rope.
The second-to-last boat got free. The sailors in the final shallop took turns sawing at the rope while the others crouched low to escape the fire of the Americans. Finally, with a loud snap, the cable broke. The rope whipped wildly through the air. The little boat capsized, and her sailors stood up in waist-deep water and splashed desperately toward the shore.
A voice Sparhawk recognized as belonging to Thomas Graves, older brother to Francis, excoriated the fleeing sailors in the strongest terms, but the effect was somewhat spoiled when he raised his head above the rail and had his hat shot off. It fell into the mud with a splash and stayed there.
A few minutes later, the
Diana
followed its example. For one hopeful moment the outgoing tide lifted her up over the sandbar that had snared her. Then she settled and rolled with unexpected grace onto her side, beached like a whale.
The Americans on shore were silent at first, the spectacle of a British naval vessel helpless and impotent almost impossible to believe. There was something indecent about the sight of her keel above water, like a forbidden glimpse of a woman’s knees, and the men lining the beach were uncertain how to react.
Until one fellow let out a whooping Indian war cry and the others took this up, Mohawks all now that the
Diana
could not level her guns at them. Then the most uncouth American Sparhawk had ever seen, gray, round, and wearing a coat even older than Abednego’s, waded up to the stranded schooner and offered the captain of the
Diana
and his crew quarter in a bellowing voice.
Graves refused to surrender.
A cannonball hurtled out of the night from Noddle’s Island and passed between the gruff American’s legs.
“That would be Old Put,” supplied Mr. Cheap.
Old Put—Israel Putnam—ignored the ball and laid out his terms. The British could abandon the
Diana
, or the Americans would burn her, and every man in her, including Sarah Ward’s little brother Ned, to the waterline.
• • •
Sarah woke with a start in the predawn hours to the sound of thunder. She listened for rain but heard none. The rest of her sleep was fitful, disturbed by traffic in the street below and voices—the soldiery drilling far too early—on the Common.
She tried to return to sleep, but every time she closed her eyes and allowed her mind to drift, it returned to Trent and his hands on her body in that small chamber. At the borders of sleep, her body replayed its response to his skilled, calculating touch. Then she would come awake with a start, awash in a sea of guilt.
Because she loved Sparhawk.
She had lived under Trent’s roof and accepted Trent’s protection, knowing that a physical relationship—congress—could and now
would
be the inevitable result. But she had always shied away from imagining it. There had been so many excuses: her ill-fated encounter with Wild, her abandoned promise from Sparhawk, Trent’s own delicacy where such matters were concerned following his candor the night they met.
Somehow she had thought that once they married they would be able to become lovers with a safe distance between them, one that preserved her tenderness for Sparhawk, whom she now knew to be his son, without cheating Trent of her whole affection.
Now she understood that it would be impossible to be the focus of Trent’s singular passion and remain unmoved; that she had always, even from the start, been drawn to him. Their age difference, smaller than that between many couples, particularly when one partner was widowed, had never concerned her. This was in part because of his youthfulness and vigor and in part because her own father was so much older than Trent, having been nearly fifty when she was born. She did not see Trent as belonging to her father’s generation.
If Sparhawk had meant nothing to her, she might have married Trent with no impediment. It was not that she and James had gone to bed together. It was the unalterable fact that Sparhawk was the man she wanted to share her troubles and joys with, whom she wanted to amuse with the eccentricities of Lady Frankland and turn to for comfort when she worried about Ned.
She could not marry Trent.
When she finally gave up on sleep and dressed and went down early to breakfast, she found Trent drinking his coffee and writing letters while his servant stood by.
“This to the admiral,” said Trent, handing off a sealed letter. “And this to the general at Province House. And this, by whatever means you can contrive, to Israel Putnam with the Rebel army at Cambridge.”
“What has happened?” she asked.
“The
Diana
is taken, burned to the waterline. The Americans say they killed three hundred British last night, the navy says it lost no one, but the crew of the
Diana
is not to be found.”
Sarah sat down heavily in one of the dining room chairs. Trent knelt in front of her. “Do not think it. There is no reason to believe Ned was among those, if any, killed. The Rebel numbers smack of exaggeration; the
Diana
’s whole complement was barely sixty men. I will find him for you, and Graves or no, I will bring him back to you.”
She nodded dumbly. “Don’t tell my father,” she said. “Not yet. Not until you have to.”
“I have already instructed the servants to bring no newspapers to Abednego. His brushes and paints usually consume him of a morning. By midday, I hope to be back, with news.”
He left. She remained seated in the chair. The servants brought coffee and laid dishes on the table and left her, no doubt on Trent’s instructions, to herself. It was only when she felt a tug on her sleeve that she realized she had been there for too long.
She looked up into the scrubbed face of the cook’s child from Sparhawk’s house—her house—in the North End.
“He has a message for you,” said the child.
She knew who
he
was.
“He said to tell you that Ned is safe. And that he wants to see you. He asks if you will meet him at the house.”
He had told her he loved her, and she believed him. She understood love, not because she had shared it with Micah Wild, but because she had a family that loved and infuriated her in equal measure. After twenty-seven years in a loving, maddening family of roguish mariners, she could predict Sparhawk’s next move.
And because she loved him in return, she wrote not one reply, but two. The first she addressed to Mr. Cheap, and filled with precise instructions. She closed it with her father’s seal. The second she wrote to Sparhawk, appointing a time to meet, and this one she closed with Trent’s seal.
• • •
Sparhawk was used to giving orders, not debating them. The Ward family, unfortunately, did things differently. At least in their little democracy everyone cast an equal vote, and Ned was now his devoted ally.
Sarah’s younger brother had boarded the
Sally
and run straight to Benjamin Ward with the tale of how Sparhawk had rescued him from the beached
Diana
.
“The Rebels were going to burn her to the waterline,” said Ned to his older brother, who lay in a hammock, favoring his wound.
“They were only threatening to burn her,” said Sparhawk. “They wanted the stores off her, the powder and cannon and swivels. They would not put her to the torch so long as there was a hope of plundering her.”
“Quite right,” said Benji.
“They
did
burn her,” said Ned, who wanted to tell his tale. “Later. But Captain Sparhawk got us off first. Well, Dr. Warren got us off, but it was Sparhawk’s idea. The doctor waded up to the
Diana
—not so far as Old Put, who just stood there while the cannonballs whistled through his legs—but close enough for all that. He said that he knew the
Diana
was holding pressed men, Americans, and that the Rebels would stop their fire if any of us wanted to come off. Two men jumped. Then Captain Graves said there were no more Americans on board, only Englishmen. Then Captain Sparhawk whispered in Dr. Warren’s ear and Dr. Warren began calling out names, saying they had a list of pressed men on the
Diana
. It was no one’s name that I knew, but one of the tars, who was an Irishman and no American of any kind, leapt up and answered to Ezekiah Martin of Malden, and another from Glasgow to Giles Fitch of Boston. I did not know what they were about, but the Irishman took me by the collar and told me that it was better to be a live American than a dead British sailor. Half the crew deserted. Captain Graves did not have the men to defend her after that. His boats came back and took him and the rest of the crew away under the cover of the guns on Noddle’s. And then I found Mr. Cheap and Captain Sparhawk. And we got the
Diana
’s cannon.”
At this Benjamin Ward sat up. “How many?” he asked.
“Not all of them,” said Sparhawk. “I agreed to help Old Put bring the guns and their carriages off in one piece if he would give me two swivels and six four-pounders for the
Sally
. It seemed a wise precaution, given Micah Wild’s designs.”
“If we have guns,” said Benji, “there are nearer and more profitable sources of powder than Lisbon.”
There might very well be. The whole harbor knew that three supply ships had set sail from Portsmouth at the same time as the
Cerberus
. They had become separated during the crossing and were now overdue.
“The
Diana
,” said Mr. Cheap sensibly, “was a fluke. It’s not likely another ship will oblige you by grounding herself in a creek.”
“Not,” said Benjamin Ward, “without help.”
“You are forgetting the more immediate problem of your sister,” said Sparhawk. “She is living under the roof of a murderer.”
Benji and Mr. Cheap exchanged looks.
“Captain Trent?” asked Ned. “He’s not a bad fellow. He bought me a sextant.”
He had bought Sparhawk a sextant too. It had been smashed to pieces the night the men came for his mother.
“I do not doubt your word,” said Benji. “Perhaps the man was once a monster. But he is not now. He has been good to Sarah, and Ansbach also says he is a fine fellow.”
Sparhawk knew he was not.
“And you cannot
make
my sister do a thing against her will. I have twenty-seven years of experience in the matter and know it cannot be done.”
“There are other, confounding factors that would make a marriage between them an abomination,” said Sparhawk.
Ned’s brow furrowed. Mr. Cheap looked away. And Benji said, “When I am up to it, remind me to call you out and kill you.”
• • •
Trent returned in the late afternoon. He looked tired, and Sarah did not doubt that he had called upon every ounce of interest he possessed to discover news of Ned.
He took the parlor chair opposite her. “There is reason to hope,” he said. “The Rebels offered the pressed Americans on the
Diana
their freedom. That is why the admiral is claiming no casualties. He does not want it known that half the crew of his nephew’s ship, which had no Americans besides your brother, deserted him. As best I can tell, only Thomas Graves was seriously injured in the affair. Burned quite badly, I’m told. He tried to get back aboard her after she was set afire, devil knows why. I will cross to Cambridge myself in the morning and try to find Ned among the Americans.”
“There is no need. I’ve had word. Ned is safe.”
Trent looked equal parts relieved and concerned. “How do you know this?”