Authors: Donna Thorland
Their chatter stopped abruptly. There were three maids and two cooks and a burly footman in the mold of the late, loathsome Dan Ludd. He got up from his place at the table, where one of the maids had been feeding him slices of apple, and took a step toward Sarah.
The room spun. She felt hands reaching for her, then a chair being thrust under her, and she looked up to find an anxious sea of faces peering at her, including that of the cook, a smiling woman Sarah recognized, Mrs. Friary, the best baker in town. Micah had hired her for the new house because Sarah loved her ginger cakes.
“Get the captain,” Mrs. Friary said to the wide-eyed maid beside her. “Miss Sarah,” she said in the voice one reserved for children and invalids. “Miss Sarah, you’ve been very ill. Captain’s only just brought you home, and you’re not to be out of bed.”
She was ill, certainly, but only because “the captain” had dosed her with opium. Even seated, she still felt dizzy, and when she attempted to stand, the yellow shutters on the windows, the copper pots over the fire, the iron hooks over the hearth, moved in a kaleidoscope of fragmented colors.
“Fetch some water,” said Mrs. Friary.
“The poor thing,” said the wide-eyed maid.
“Filthy British bastards,” spat the youngest of the footmen.
Which was peculiar, because these were Micah’s servants, and they seemed to be full of righteous indignation and sympathy
for her
.
Sarah heard booted feet running. The sea of faces parted. Micah Wild knelt in front of her, and the look of concern on his handsome face was unfeigned. “I’ll take her from here, Mrs. Friary.”
“What did you tell these people?” Sarah asked, trying—and failing—to stand.
He caught her as she slumped into the chair and lifted her into his arms. She was too sick and dizzy to protest.
“I told them the truth,” he said in his orator’s voice, intended to ring through the house as he carried her out of the kitchen. “That you are a heroine. You were wrongfully imprisoned by the treacherous British in Boston for saving Ned from the press and took ill in their barbarous jail. And I brought you out of there, brought you home.”
That explained their caring and concern, the kindness they had been too afraid to show her when she had defied Micah Wild and refused to become his mistress.
“Only the jailer, as it turned out, was treacherous,” she said. “And only because he was deceived and bribed by you.”
Wild sighed. “The doddering old fool gave you too much opium. I am sorry for that. But Mrs. Friary is making you ginger cakes. And you will recover quickly now that you are home.”
Home and not home. The house he had built for her, with the furnishings she had picked out, and the cook hired to please her. The familiar voices outside her window, calling down the river, the sound of the water lapping at the reeded banks. The scent of molasses-sweet air from the rum distilleries wafting on the breeze, and beneath it, the salt tang of the sea. It was what she had longed for, shut up in Castle William—what she thought she might never see again.
Now if her head would only stop spinning, she might be able to take some comfort in these little things at least.
She had to close her eyes as he bore her up the winding stair to avoid being sick. If she had been capable of even crawling back to her room, she would have preferred that to enduring Micah’s touch. She could not blame his servants for swallowing his lies. People would believe anything he said in that honeyed voice. In Sarah’s experience, if there was a grain of truth in Micah’s words, they were taken as gospel.
He deposited her gently on the bed in the blue and gold chamber and brought a wet cloth with which to dab her forehead. She swatted him away.
“Where is Elizabeth?” she asked, remembering that her former friend’s family had called her home in light of Wild’s newly precarious circumstances.
“Gone back to her family. This time for good. They are having our marriage dissolved.”
“And how is it you are welcome in Salem once more?”
He refreshed the cloth and laid it across her forehead, and this time she did not stop him. “I’m not, exactly. Or I wouldn’t be without you. The pamphlet that Benji’s friends printed has made you quite the heroine, defending Ned from the press and such. And now I am your rescuer. Salem’s Committee of Safety allowed the
Conant
to enter the harbor because we carried you.”
“Why Salem? And don’t tell me because it is my home. You burned my home.”
Another wave of nausea swept her, and she twisted on the bed. He replaced the cool cloth with a fresh one. “Your house would still be standing if you had been reasonable that night.”
“And Ned would have been pressed aboard the
Wasp
if I had been reasonable that day.” She sat up. “But I am not reasonable, and you are not a romantic. Why are we here?”
Wild laughed. “You may not be reasonable, but you are certainly made of tougher stuff than Elizabeth. You would not have run home to your father over a little double-dealing.”
She was not so sure he was right about that, but she let it pass.
“We are here,” he said, “to retrieve my property. It is my hope that the Committee of Safety and the Continental Congress will soon welcome me back into the fold, but I have made provision in case they do not.”
For a moment she was puzzled; then she understood. “The French gold. The admiral paid you for the
Conant
and the
Cromwell
with the French gold. It is still here.”
And it was the most damning evidence against both Micah Wild and Admiral Graves, if she could lay hands on it.
“Just so,” he said. “If Salem will not welcome us, then Providence or Newport will. We have enough capital to provision the
Conant
for a profitable cruise. The
Sally
’s success in Boston Harbor has ignited a fever for privateering, and the admiral’s latest threats of retaliation have sent the ports scrambling to arm vessels for their defense. Salem cannot fit out ships fast enough.”
“What success?”
“You have not heard? Benji took a British supply ship, loaded with powder. Dr. Warren and his Provincial Congress may be willing to overlook my recent defection if I will fly their pine tree flag on the
Roger Conant
and do the same.”
“And will you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Why this change of heart? The admiral gave you letters of marque to hunt the
Sally
. The Congress may not.” The Provincial Congress, to judge by the machinations of Angela Ferrers, wanted James Sparhawk. Fast ships and bold seamen. Ones they could be sure of.
“I still mean to claim the
Sally
,” said Micah Wild. “She is my lawful property, and the courts will return her to me. But the admiral betrayed me. He reneged on his promise to release the
Roger Conant
at the end of her lease, told me he had the right to press her into service, without payment, a necessity of war.”
“How did you get her back?”
“I
took
her,” he said.
From Admiral Graves, a man who brooked no insult, who would have hanged Sparhawk to conceal his own cupidity, who had ordered Sarah thrown into a dank cell, who threatened children like Ned, and who would have shelled Marblehead over a box of candles. There would be no changing sides again for Micah Wild. “Why?” she asked. “When you could not be sure the Rebels would have you back?”
“Because the admiral’s ‘necessity’ was you. He intended to double-cross Trent and transport you for trial. I couldn’t let him do it. It was always an abstract set of principles for me, liberty, the cause. I did not like anything that Parliament was doing, but that was because it hindered trade. I was always prepared to sail whichever way the favorable wind blew, for independence or reconciliation, but Graves . . . Graves was going to send you across the ocean and hang you,” said Wild. “It was no longer about tea or pamphlets or taxes.”
Sarah had dreamed of this, in her cold bedroom in her vanished house, after the curtains and carpets had been sold. And she had dreamed of it on the chilliest nights, when she slept down on the trundle with Ned and there was no other way to stay warm.
But Micah Wild was only saying it now that Elizabeth and her money were no longer available to him, and Sarah Ward was once more useful to him, a safe conduct to enter Salem Harbor.
“I should have married you, Sarah,” he said. “I was going to. But then you came to me, and I knew I didn’t have to.”
When Sarah said nothing, he went on. “I thought I could have Elizabeth’s money and you and no one would think the worse of me for it. On the contrary, they would envy me. But when I thought you were going to die, that the admiral would see you hanged, I realized that the only thing that mattered to me was you.”
And a heavy chest of French gold.
“If my happiness matters to you,” she said, “you will let me go.”
“Your safety,” said Micah Wild, in the voice that had long since ceased to sway her, “is more important than your momentary happiness. And there is no safety for you inside the British lines while Admiral Graves has control of the squadron. Whatever trick Trent used to free you will not work again. Nor would the admiral bother with the niceties of the law this time. If you go back to Boston and your lover, you will die.”
• • •
The question was how to get into Salem Harbor.
“The guns on Winter Island and those at the point will blow you to bits,” said Abednego Ward. He ought to know. He had helped place them there, before Micah Wild had jilted his daughter. “And you cannot run around them, or you will be holed by the chevaux-de- frise.” These were ten-foot-square pine boxes weighted with lead and sunk in the channel, bristling with iron spikes. “And then there is the chain across the harbor.”
They returned to the question over and over again, late into the night, with the candles blazing in the parlor of Trent’s mansion. The Reverend Edwards had stayed on, and though the cleric was not a military man, Sparhawk took some comfort from the presence of this fixture of his childhood.
Finally Sparhawk acknowledged the truth. “We cannot enter Salem Harbor without the permission of the Rebels there. It must be negotiated, and quickly.”
Trent nodded. “I will go,” he said.
“No, Father,” said Sparhawk. “I will go.” He knew what Angela Ferrers would demand, and he was prepared to give it.
• • •
He reached the Rebel camp at Cambridge before dawn, the pretty redbrick buildings of the college nestled in broad meadows within sight of the river. The smell was less appealing. The farmers and farriers and lawyers and innkeepers he had met on the road to Boston after Lexington were not soldiers. They did not know how to build a hygienic camp for ten thousand men, or how to set a picket line. Their officers had not been drawn from the ranks of military or aristocratic families and trained to leadership from a young age. They were elected by their men, or chosen by the Provincial Congress for their initiative, which was demonstrated by recruiting enough volunteers to form a command.
Sparhawk presented himself and asked to see Angela Ferrers. He was directed to a fine manor house of three stories with a hipped roof and carved balustrade, occupied at present by a company of mariners from Marblehead. He had a little sway with them, as their leader, a man named Glover, knew Abednego Ward and had overseen the refitting of the
Sally
.
Glover sent for the Merry Widow, and Angela Ferrers came down to meet Sparhawk in the parlor, wearing a blue silk night robe with her hair falling loose over her shoulders.
“Captain Sparhawk, or should I address you as the heir to Polkerris?”
“You knew, didn’t you, that my father was no murderer?” he said.
“Your father is in point of fact a murderer, several times over. He has killed seven men in duels. The privilege of rank, private law. It is still murder, even if they all deserved it. And while I knew that the Milton family had engineered the death of Trent’s first wife, your mother, I did not know how culpable Lord Polkerris himself might have been in the affair. That was not something I had the need, or the time, to investigate. Are you going after Sarah Ward for yourself or for your long-lost father?”
“Does it matter?” asked Sparhawk.
Angela Ferrers caressed the pearl-crusted mourning rings on her right hand. It was an unconscious gesture in a studied woman. “What matters is that this army is supplied with the matériel of war. We have veteran soldiers aplenty, but their cartridge boxes and powder horns are empty. And we lack guns. Benjamin Ward’s victory in Boston Harbor was an easy one. The next British supply ship will not be so handily gulled. And blockade runners are bold when it is a cargo of rice or French molasses they carry, but few men have the nerve to sail with a hold full of powder into the jaws of the most powerful navy in the world.
“Smugglers have served our needs up to now, but with open war upon us, we need men who have been trained in piracy, who can fire a shot across a merchantman’s bow and will blow her to flinders if she does not heave to. And for such as that—for genuine, old-fashioned piracy—there remains no better school in the world than the British Navy. If you wish to enter Salem Harbor with the
Sally
to find Sarah Ward, then I will require you to accept this.”
She drew a sealed document from her robe and placed it on the tea table. He broke the seal and read its contents. “I was not aware that the Americans had a navy,” he said.
“At present there are only provincial navies, mostly made up of flotillas of whaleboats and gun barges. You will notice that your commission is postdated. It will take effect on June fifteen, when I anticipate that a new commander will take charge of our forces, and it confirms you as captain in the army of the United Colonies, and charges you to seize and make a prize any British ships you encounter, though not to engage with men-of-war carrying superior guns. Fifty percent of civilian cargo will go to you and your crew, but all powder, muskets, cannon, uniforms, and ordnance must go directly to the army. I cannot sanction your actions in Salem, nor take any part in your quarrel with Micah Wild, but I
can
make certain that you are allowed to enter the harbor. I believe that Dr. Warren also offered other incentives, including real estate. You will find deeds for suitable properties enclosed.”