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qqueenofhades · 7 years ago

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The Rose and Thorn: Chapter XXII

summary: Sequel to The Dark Horizon. The New World, 1740: Killian and Emma Jones have lived in peace with their family for many years, their pirate past long behind them. But with English wars, Spanish plots, rumors of a second Jacobite rising, and the secret of the lost treasure of Skeleton Island, they and their son and daughter are in for a dangerous new adventure. OUAT/Black Sails. rating: M status: WIP available: FF.net and AO3 previous: chapter XXI

HMS Griffin was – it could not be denied – a fine example of her kind. Rather too fine, in fact: a fifth-rater, upward of forty guns, and still light enough to make good speed. She was not one of the slower, lumbering ships of the line, which were floating fortresses intended to blast the enemy to kingdom come with their superior firepower, but a sleek vessel ideally suited to pursue and capture smaller craft, crisp-lined and freshly painted, sails snapping in the morning wind as they were untethered. It was clear that Matthew Rogers took great pride in his command, and if that speed could help them catch up to Sam in time, Emma would not say another word against it. Still, it had given her a frisson of instinctive revulsion to step aboard a Royal Navy ship, and Flint, Killian, and Liam practically had to be dragged. This was their one choice, possibly their only one, but nobody had any illusions about how quickly it could go wrong.

Once aboard, Matthew instructed Lieutenant Warwick, his second-in-command, to find them suitable quarters, while he himself offered his arm to Charlotte. “May I show you the ship, madam?”

“Ooh,” Charlotte said, fluttering her eyelashes. “Is it very big?”

As they moved off, Emma raised an eyebrow. “Do you think we should warn him? Rogers, I mean? He’s going to get himself into trouble.”

“No,” Flint and Killian said in unison. “Let him.”

“We have to keep sight of what we’re doing here,” Emma said quietly. “I know none of us like him very much, but he’s still the captain, and our best chance of catching up to Sam and Gold – and for that matter, her husband. So, tempting as it may be, we can’t just let Charlotte – ”

“Charlotte is…” Killian seemed to be deciding what to say. “If Rogers wants to think there’s possibility there – and Charlotte wants him to think that – why not? He might tell her things that he wouldn’t let slip to us. Reminds you a bit of his parents, doesn’t it? Woodes Rogers, always cool and in command of every situation, until he met Eleanor Guthrie, who was just as intent on using him for his position and to save her neck, and yet he fell for her anyway. It’s not quite the same, but – ”

“Eleanor sold out her former friends for Rogers’ sake,” Flint pointed out, with considerable and undimmed asperity, as he himself had been one of those friends, Eleanor’s mentor and frequent partner-in-crime. “We best hope Charlotte doesn’t.”

“We settled this in Philadelphia,” Emma reminded him. “She’s on our side.”

“Aye,” Flint allowed. “And I think she knows what she intends by the dalliance, far more than he does. Besides, Matthew is the bloody image of his father, he looks just like him, acts just like him. And I doubt he inherited anything pleasant from Eleanor. I agree he’s our best chance for now, but when this is through – ”

“We can’t kill him,” Emma insisted, keeping her voice down, as this was the exact sort of conversation that, if overheard, would get them all murdered belowdecks one night. “This Rogers isn’t that one. This isn’t the war we fought against his father. If we killed everyone in the world who might ever mean us harm, we’d never stop. And we did. We stopped.”

Flint took this in with an expression as if he had just bitten into a juicy apple and found it infested with worms. He stole a glance at Miranda and Regina, who were standing by the rail and making lively conversation with some of the sailors – Regina’s knack as an old brothel madam used to making men talk, and Miranda’s ever-polished diplomatic courtesies, were as much an asset to the information cause as Charlotte’s clear intention to play Rogers like a fiddle. It was also a reminder that none of them could do anything too reckless, with wives and spouses to be caught in the crossfire if Flint felt too much like pursuing old grudges. Emma herself was willing to overlook a great deal of past bad blood if it got them closer to Sam. She had been feeling more and more anxious about him over the past several days, and had no idea why.

They stood on deck, thrown occasional suspicious glances by the crewmen, but nobody daring to outright question Matthew’s determination to take these elderly vagabonds along, as the anchor was winched up and they began to get underway. Due to the prevailing clockwise circular of the trades, they could not just sail directly back up along the Leewards, retracing the route they had taken down – it was comparatively easy to sail south and west in the Caribbean, but a considerable battle to go north and east, as all of them were well aware. To get back to the Bahamas and Skeleton Island, as they thought the Titania was most likely to be headed, they had to swing out considerably into open waters north of the Spanish Main, navigate the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, and head up past the Turks from there.

It was a considerably risky journey for a British Navy ship to make in wartime, deep into Spanish waters and near Havana itself, and the heavy square-rigged Griffin, fast as she was for her kind, was still slower than the light, junk-rigged Nautilus. They would be quite a bit more time getting back than they had going out, and Emma struggled with the frustration that they had not at least asked Nemo to stay until they were certain of the situation on Barbados. He was not their personal courier, and his business freeing slaves was much more important, but still. They were behind and falling further so, stuck on a ship with the son of one of their most dangerous old enemies, and her son was out there, with an individual whom Liam had warned her was vicious, unhinged, and capable of unnatural powers and abilities. Not even to mention, Gold.

Emma tried not to pace too much as the Griffin picked up speed, navigating out of Bridgetown harbor while the bo’sun shouted at the crew to set the sails for their westerly course. The man certainly did do a lot of shouting; she overheard him call one of the hands “Shitbag,” and doubted he was known for his tender and gentle leadership style, as the Navy rarely was. Nobody felt like shutting themselves up for what would be the first day of several, and she kept an eye on Flint and Killian, who had retreated to the quarterdeck and were talking low-voiced, heads together. Liam had wandered off to inspect the general workings of the ship, and Miranda and Regina were still entertaining gentlemen, so Emma found herself, for the moment, almost alone. She tried to take a deep breath, trying to shake the claws of the beast that had clutched hard into her heart. Sam was fine, he was fine, he was a resourceful lad, he –

“Mrs. Jones?”

She turned with a start to see Matthew, who had apparently managed to divert himself from Charlotte’s charms for the moment. He politely inclined his head. “Your pardons. I was only going to suggest that you needn’t remain out here in the sun and wind. You may go below.”

“I know.” Emma considered him. “You know I was a pirate, though – you know we all were – so why do you expect me to scruple at it?”

“Indeed. You are now a gentlewoman of some years, however, so protocol dictates that the offer should be made. Unless you and the rest of your family suspect that if any of you should take your eyes off me for a moment, I shall treacherously alter course and deliver you up to the hangman at Port Royal?”

“The thought…” Emma paused. “The thought had crossed our minds. Some of them.”

“I am a man of honor, Mrs. Jones. Though I am aware you will consider my word counterfeit, even as I still wonder the same of yours.” Matthew’s pale blue eyes were reserved and intent. “But there is no reason for us not to conduct this enterprise productively and in mutual interest, like civilized people. Unless you fear that your husband’s old prejudices – and more pertinently, I suspect, your father’s – may well interfere?”

“My husband and my father both have good reasons for their, as you call them, prejudices,” Emma said, politely but coolly. “But I do not think they will interfere, no. As long as you can offer us the same guarantee of safety from your crew.”

“None of them are old enough to have fought the pirates themselves,” Matthew said. “And I do not tolerate insubordination on any front. Anyone flouting my word will pay for it.”

Emma felt a slight chill go down her back. Knowing it was something of a personal question, but unable to restrain, she asked, “How old are you, Captain Rogers?”

“I will be twenty-four in January, madam. I received my commission at the age of nineteen. This is my first dispatch to the Indies, but I assure you, I have learned quickly.”

“So you have.” Emma couldn’t help but being impressed by him, and also to catch strange, then-and-gone, oddly poignant glimpses of Eleanor Guthrie. After a pause, she said, “I knew your mother. Long ago.”

Matthew’s lips went thin, as he doubtless did not care to be reminded from whence this association stemmed, but he answered courteously. “I am sure you did, Mrs. Jones. My mother is a… complicated woman. She raised me mostly by herself after my father went to prison, then was released to lingering debt and personal scandal, then finally was offered an opportunity to atone by – of all the ironies – accepting a second term as governor of Nassau, the place that had ruined him in the first instance. From which, you will be aware, he did not return. I was fifteen when he died, and had never seen him for more than a few weeks at a time.”

“Do you… remember your father?” Emma asked tentatively. “Perhaps you’ve been told, but you are very much like him.”

Matthew shot a slightly startled look at her. She could see him debating whether to answer, as he was obviously conversing with someone who had known Woodes Rogers as a mortal enemy, but it also seemed the case that he’d never had someone to speak with this about. After a moment he said, “I have scattered memories. When he was home, he and Mother were usually rowing about money. His hair had turned grey in prison, it made him look more like my grandsire than my father. His first wife and their children occasionally sent solicitors’ notices demanding their share of the settlement, and he and Mother were not received in Bristol society because of the irregularity of his remarriage to a pirate Jezebel and the disgrace of his downfall. We moved to Cheshire when I was five, to another of his properties. They often slept in separate bedrooms, on the occasion he was there at all. So if it pleases you and your family to know that Eleanor Guthrie received no happy ending from what she did, there is that.”

Emma couldn’t help feeling a brief pang of sympathy for Matthew, the child caught up in this war like the rest of them, living it at home long after it had ended for the adults, who had at least had the choice of participating in it. Awkwardly she said, “I’m sorry.”

Matthew shrugged, clearly attempting to brush it off. “My father was a great man,” he said, as if he had not quite meant to, but couldn’t help himself. “He was given an impossible task, and he achieved it, no matter that it ruined his entire life to do it, the same as the voyage around the world that made him famous. He was thanked with debtors’ prison, with ingratitude from the Admiralty, with hatred from his neighbors, with scorn even from his wife, with a return to Nassau – he must have been no more eager to see it again than any of you – and a death there alone, unmourned, for men to spit at the mention of his name. I know he opposed you and your cause, and dealt stringently in doing it, but tell me. Did he deserve that?”

“I… couldn’t say,” Emma answered at last, carefully. “He was a dangerous and subtle enemy, but a most formidable and competent one. We respected him, as much as we hated him.”

Matthew looked at her as if he was oddly gratified to hear this, from someone who had at least known his father personally and could testify to his worthiness, damaged or otherwise. When he did not answer at once, Emma said, “So is that what you set out to do? Clear his name, prove the Rogers family to be worthy of all the recognition it had lacked, and that England was a fool to ever take it so callously for granted?”

“Something like that, yes.” If Matthew was startled at how accurately she had diagnosed his motives, he was good at masking it. “Lord Robert Gold has been most… helpful on that accord.”

“I imagine he has,” Emma agreed, with an edge she did not quite succeed in disguising. “But surely you must know that if you are attempting to wash out a stain of dishonor, adding his treason will only deepen it.”

“You are going to speak to me of what constitutes treason?” Matthew raised a consummately skeptical eyebrow. “But yes, your son did have something to say on that accord as well. He is an… opinionated lad.”

Emma could imagine that her blazingly forthright, adventurous, innocent, feckless, up-for-anything Sam had mixed like oil and water with this reserved, cool, upright, strictly rules-abiding, more than slightly dangerous young captain. “How much did you and Sam have to do with each other, exactly?”

Matthew hesitated. “Not much. I was suspicious of his origins, but I thought – mistakenly, as it turned out – that his companion was Captain Hook’s son. He seemed the sort. I was more interested in transporting them to Lord Robert for his verification and examination.”

Emma’s old sense as to whether or not someone was being entirely truthful took exception to this, but not clearly. She herself had warned against antagonizing Matthew, but it suddenly made her more willing to encourage Charlotte to continue her little play-act, to see what the captain might let slip. After a moment she said, “So you became captain at nineteen? That is certainly quite prodigious. Have you worked with Gold all that time?”

Matthew gave her a rather arch look, as if to say he recognized that she was trying to dig for information, but would humor her nonetheless. “As I said in Bridgetown, he has been generous with his sponsorship. But my first assignment was to sail to the Barbary coast of Africa and attack the corsairs, who have grown uncommonly audacious in their capturing of European ships and impressment of the crew and passengers into Ottoman slavery. Perhaps he felt it best from the outset that I learn how to deal with pirates. That voyage taught me a number of unpleasant lessons, and the hard necessities of command. I lost half my crew to smallpox on the return to England. We were so shorthanded upon arrival that they took us for a ghost ship, and we were kept in quarantine for six weeks to be sure the pox would not spread.”

“Oh?” Emma frowned. “Did you – ”

“Did I have it? No, madam, I was fortunate. If you are concerned about lingering contagion, I can assure you the ship was stripped and scrubbed from stem to stern.”

“No, actually, we can’t get it. Killian and I, that is.”

“Is that so?” Matthew, despite himself, was listening. Smallpox was the feared scourge of crammed tenements and close quarters, whether on land or sea, and he examined her closely. “You survived it, you mean?”

“No, not exactly. In 1721, HMS Seahorse arrived in Boston – from Barbados, incidentally – and brought the pox with her. We lived there at the time, and it spread quickly. The African slaves in the city suggested a treatment called inoculation, customary in their homeland, that involved deliberately introducing a bit of the infection into the body. A small replication of the disease, thus to provide the same protection against it once recovered. The newspapers and one Dr. William Douglass fulminated against it extensively, claiming that it was a scurrilous plot by the black devils to trick the white man into killing himself. Killian and myself, however, took their advice, and had the procedure done on ourselves and our children. It was not a pleasant several days in our household as a result, but we never caught the pox, even though the epidemic did not fully subside until the next year.”

Matthew looked equal parts horrified and intrigued. “So you trusted Negro slaves, rather than eminent medical doctors? That was a fortunate wager.”

“We’ve learned certain things about the relations of white and black men in this world,” Emma said, even more coolly, “to make us confident in our choice. Perhaps you will not be aware, but in the pirates’ republic, the two often lived together as equals.”

Matthew’s expression at that was somewhat incredulous, but not necessarily opposed – not that he felt it was innately impossible, but that he had simply never encountered such an idea being put successfully into practice. Then he said, “How is inoculation performed, precisely?”

“You take a penknife,” Emma said, “well washed in lye or some other caustic soap, and wipe the upper arm with alcohol. Then you make a small incision. You place some of the pus from a smallpox variole into that incision – the physician who performed ours used the hollow point of a quill. The wound is stitched and bandaged. Within a day or so, you will have some flushing and fever, a lump in the arm, and a slight rash. It subsides usually within the week, and after that, you are as unable to catch it as one who has already survived it.”

“You deliberately made your own children sick,” Matthew said, “in an attempt to ensure their future health? That seems paradoxical, but I suppose I am not a parent.”

“I had misgivings,” Emma admitted. “At least Henry and Geneva were old enough to understand what it was, and to bear the pain in the name of not being deathly ill, but Sam was just one, and he had no idea. Killian and I sat up with him, despite being sick ourselves, all day and all night for most of the week. We wondered if we’d made a terrible mistake. He cried and cried. It’s a unbearable thing to hear from your child when you cannot stop it, when you know you are the cause of it, and yet it is the best of bad options. If there was anything else I could have done to make his suffering go away, I would have. Anything.”

Matthew glanced away. “As any mother would, I suppose,” he said, after a slightly long moment. “So inoculation cannot be performed unless the pox is already present. Do you know anyone else who attempted this daring maneuver successfully?”

“We convinced a few of our neighbors. None of them got it either, though one of the girls had a bad… a bad reaction.” Emma winced at the memory. “You will know that the suffering the pox brings is singular. There were whole streets in the city cordoned off.”

“I buried more men at sea on that voyage than I care to ever repeat,” Matthew said. “Your method sounds quite sorcerous and strange, Mrs. Jones, as no doubt you know. But if we should be so unfortunate as to have it aboard again, I will keep your recommendation in mind.”

Surprised and somewhat gratified, Emma nodded. “Here,” she said, pulling up her sleeve to show him the small white weal on her upper arm. “That’s where they did it.”

Matthew bent briefly to examine it, then straightened up. Just then, a shout from one of his men turned his head, and he nodded crisply to her in return. “Thank you for the conversation, madam. I found it illuminating on several fronts. Good day.”

With that, he strode off, as Emma glanced out at the distant, glittering horizon, the blue waves that surrounded them to all sides as Barbados vanished astern. She remained lost in a reverie for some moments, until another shadow fell over her, and she looked up to see Flint, who had joined her at the railing. “So,” he remarked. “Instructive interchange, that?”

“In some ways, yes.” Emma didn’t feel that Flint needed to know all of it, but remained aware that cordial palaver or not, Matthew was still capable of being just as dangerous as his father. They were, after all, on board his ship, heading into Spanish waters, and they needed to keep their wits about them. “For what it’s worth, I think his motives are sincere in working with us, but he’s hiding something. I think it’s about Sam. Something that happened when he and Jack were aboard, after he picked them up near Nevis.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Flint remarked, shooting a cold look at Matthew’s back. “He’ll be brimful of notions about wanting to polish up his father’s tarnished halo, no doubt? If he has Rogers’ cunning and Eleanor’s self-interest, that will be quite the bloody devil’s brew instead. I still don’t like this.”

“I don’t particularly like it either,” Emma said, somewhat shortly. Much as she loved Flint, he did have that regrettable tendency to assume that his feelings or perspectives were the only important ones in any given situation, and was shocked to discover that anyone else might have thought through the problem in any depth, much less venture to offer an informed opinion. “I know it isn’t easy for you or Killian to be back here – I don’t know about Liam, but I don’t think it’s comfortable for him either. But no matter what, you can’t provoke them.”

“I will behave,” Flint promised. “So long as they do.”

This was somewhat less than a ringing guarantee of peace, but Emma supposed it would have to do. She nodded to him as well, and took her leave.

They managed to get through the first night without being jumped or ambushed, though Emma had to confess to opening an eye every time a board creaked too loudly. Then again, that might just have been the discomfort of sleeping in a hammock at the age of almost fifty-four; at this rate, they would also mark her birthday, the twenty-second of October, away from home. They had been assigned a semi-private spot forward of the bulkhead, likely to prevent any unfortunate encounters between them and the crew, but the accommodation was no different from the usual, and Miranda in particular was clearly in pain the next morning. “You know,” she said, as they sat on the deck to eat their breakfast, “it might be easier to clap me in a trunk and shut me in the hold for the rest of this, if that’s what I have to endure nightly.”

Flint scowled. “If Rogers junior had any decent notions, he’d give you his cabin. Then again, that might detract from his aims of getting Charlotte to share it with him.”

Charlotte herself, who was sitting just a few feet away, looked blandly back at Flint. “And I thought you were the one eager for me to give him a few nudges?”

“I was,” Flint said. “And still am. But Miranda shouldn’t have to suffer in whatever cut-rate arrangement his flunkey sees fit to foist off on us. They should at least offer up the lieutenants’ quarters, those have proper bunks. Unless, heaven forfend, Warwick be deprived of his beauty sleep. Or that other one, what’s his name, who looks like the wrong end of a troll.”

“If he looks like the wrong end of a troll, all the beauty sleep in the world isn’t going to help,” Killian put in, with a tone that made a joke of it but was trying to rein in Flint’s anger before it sparked any further. “But if Matthew does consider himself gentlemanly, he has to at least listen to the request. Charlotte, would you be willing – ?”

“I’ll do it, yes,” Charlotte said, after another look at Miranda. “Though what I see fit in that regard, and anything else, is my own concern. I think we can all agree that it would be best to keep some influence over our friend the captain, so don’t go asking too much about Jack or your son or anything else to overturn it. Whatever happened on the voyage with them before, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care, and neither should you.”

Even as much as she had said essentially the same thing, at least in regard to literally not rocking the boat, Emma frowned. “You really don’t care what could have happened to your husband while he was with these – ”

“Of course I care,” Charlotte said, somewhat impatiently. “Of course I hope it was nothing bad. But Jack and Sam are alive, aren’t they? Rogers didn’t kill them, and while I doubt they had a pleasure cruise, it wasn’t any irreparable damage. Either way, we’re not here to avenge any of their mistreatments, imagined or otherwise. There are bigger things at stake.”

“Aye, lass,” Killian agreed. “But for you to give us that warning at all – have you had some inkling of whatever Matthew’s keeping back? Emma thinks it’s something.”

“No,” Charlotte said. “And frankly, if I did, I’m not sure the lot of you could be trusted to hear it objectively. Of course you love your son, and I my husband, but my concern is that you would use your long-rooted hatred of the Navy to fan a petty insult into something much larger, and curse this voyage’s already precarious chances of success past the point of no return. Which seems quite a bit less beneficial than shutting our mouths and getting to them in time, but I could be mistaken. I have no reason to love the Navy either, by the way, and Jack bloody well doesn’t. I’m not asking you anything that I’m not also asking of myself.” She shrugged, then put down her bowl. “In fact, Matthew has invited me to breakfast, and I’d rather eat whatever he’s offering than this slop. I’ll ask about new arrangements for Miranda. I’ll see you later.”

With that, she got up and walked off, confident in her stride despite the roll of the deck; the sky was overcast and the sea was somewhat rougher than it had been yesterday, nothing to concern the old salts, but Charlotte could not have spent much time aboard a ship in open waters. Flint watched her go with a mixture of admiration and irritation. “She’s not going to tell us even if she does find anything out,” he concluded. “I’ll have to make my own enquiries.”

“She’s… a bit blunt in how she puts it, but she still has a point.” Emma laid a hand on his arm. “Remember, we can’t – ”

“Yes, I remember. I’m not that old yet. We can’t provoke Matthew fucking Rogers, even if he provokes us.” Flint shook her off. “Sit there and take it like good loyal subjects, since any hint of dissension confirms us as the pirates they’ll still hang us for if they get the first chance. Jesus. I’d hope I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to gulp that down with this admittedly shit gruel, but likewise, I too could be mistaken. Good morning.”

As he in turn strode off, a small dark stormcloud almost visible over his head, Emma discovered that she had lost her appetite for reasons only incidental to the quality of the cooking. She looked anxiously at Killian. “Do you… do you think we agreed too quickly to this? There could have been other options. We could have waited for Nemo to come back, or tried to book passage on another ship. If this does go wrong, and it’s my fault…”

“It’s not your fault, love.” Killian took her hand, chafing her cold fingers with his own. “It’s not easy, I’ll say that much, to have all the most uncomfortable parts of our past thrown in our faces like this. Every time one of those Navy pups looks at me with a sneer, or I hear muttering about cripples and traitors behind my back – I remind myself what’s at stake, and that reacting angrily would just prove what they think we are. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to. Even if, for nothing else, to shut them up. But I trust you, and I trust what you’ve decided to do about it, and I already went through this once with the Lost Boys. I’m not terribly eager for a repeat. It might half-kill me, I won’t lie, but I’ll keep my temper.”

“Thank you.” Emma leaned to kiss him quickly on the cheek, then glanced at Liam, Regina, and Miranda. “Do you think we shouldn’t try to find out? Whatever Matthew’s hiding about Sam?”

“I am opposed to anything that causes unnecessary friction,” Miranda said, after a moment. “As indeed are you. But if we should discover a point on which necessary friction presents itself… well. If Matthew Rogers’s is the unlikely vessel on which we reach Sam, that is the great vicissitude of fate. Yet even in so doing, we cannot allow him to think that he has unlimited right to dictate the terms, or that he can push us forever without reprisal.”

Emma looked at her mother in surprise and some disquiet, as she had been expecting a more unambiguously conciliatory response. All of them were used to Miranda’s customary role as family peacemaker, mediator, and voice of reason to Flint, and she had played it so well for so many years that they relied on it deeply in all aspects of their life. But just then, it had to be remembered that Miranda’s present physical frailty was largely due to the legacy of her ordeal and near-death in Charlestown, when she had raged against Peter Ashe’s betrayal as ferociously as Flint, and paid a terrible price. Miranda’s fire was banked, long-burning and slow as if in underground peat, but it was not by any means extinguished, and could still roar back to life. And while Miranda might be willing to forgive far more than most folk, she had never forgotten.

“Flint needs to take care what questions he asks,” Liam said. “We can’t fight an entire ship if it turns on us. Perhaps the both of you, Miranda and Regina, had best keep your ears to the ground among the men, if indeed Mrs. Bell does not feel inclined to share everything with us.” He considered, then got to his feet with a muffled wince. “I’m not terribly fond of those bloody hammocks either, so let’s hope the wind cooperates.”

“I could find you a better bed,” Regina said. “If you’d just – ”

Liam shook his head. “No, I’ll live. Good morning, all.” He nodded correctly to the women, bent quickly to kiss his wife, and departed in turn.

This was likewise something less than totally reassuring, but at least the tenuous peace held for the rest of the day. Matthew even agreed to move Miranda to one of the forward berths, where she decided to lie down for a while. This apparent show of good faith on his part might have been expected to conciliate Flint somewhat, but instead it seemed to make him even more suspicious, staring evilly at Matthew whenever he was on deck and looking close to barging below whenever he wasn’t. He then disappeared for several hours, which it was rather too much to hope was spent in profitable occupation or peaceable reminisce. As the Griffin sailed steadily into the sunset that evening, the red western horizon was streaked by darker clouds, shot like veins of ore through the cracked porcelain sky, and the sea remained unsettled. Emma did not have to be a superstitious old sailor to feel that this was less than good-omened.

They ate supper above, despite the chill edge in the wind, rather than go below and mingle with the rest of the crew. Flint had still not reappeared, and Emma’s imagination began to conjure morbid fantasies of him jumped and attacked in the hold – whether as payment for snooping around or in revenge for old slights, it did not matter. He had, after all, suffered the same fate already in Philadelphia, and his reflexes would be off. Nervously, she set her hardtack aside, and not only due to the likely presence of weevils. “I should go look for him.”

Killian looked as if he had been wondering the same thing, and rose to his feet. “Well, you can’t go alone, love. It’s not that large of a ship, we should be able to – ”

At that moment, however, they were interrupted by the timely entrance of their quarry – which, it became apparent in the next, was far from an unqualified blessing. Flint was half-marching, half-dragging a beefy individual who Emma thought dimly might be the gunner’s mate, a man with tree-trunk arms and a healing, if nasty-looking, bruise on his throat. He looked inclined to fight this current mistreatment as well, but Flint drove an elbow savagely into his kidneys, dropping him to his knees before the rest of the family. “There,” Flint announced, with considerable and vindictive self-satisfaction. “John Sherwood, gunner’s mate. Why don’t you tell them what I heard you boasting about, you son of a bitch?”

“James!” Aghast, Emma turned on him. “It doesn’t matter, leave it, it won’t – ”

“Since he’s not going to,” Flint went on ruthlessly, “allow me. Said that the lieutenants – Warwick and Johnstone – the gunner, and the purser had helped the captain beat the truth out of a pair of molly boys, and he only regretted that he couldn’t have helped. Due to that, apparently.” He gestured sharply at the bruise. “Seems our friend Jack Bell punched him, to stop Sam from a flogging, but the rest of them got it back later.”

“I – what?” Emma stared at Mr. Sherwood, who stared back at her just as defiantly. “What – why would the officers beat a pair of – what?”

“Your lad and the other one, who was buggerin’ him.” Sherwood wiped his mouth and spoke at last. “Molly filth. Would have properly lashed the little sodomite for failing to trim the sheet right, as the bo’sun ordered, but the other one – ”

Flint dealt him a cuff that sent him sprawling onto the boards. “One more, I kill you.”

“James, no.” Emma gripped his arm, looking around frantically for any signs of the crew returning from supper. “I don’t know what exactly happened here, I don’t – stop. You’re going to get all of us killed. Stop.”

“They had four men beat Sam.” Flint’s arm remained tense under her grip, and she knew he was referring to more than just the mistreatment of his grandson – also to that grandson’s namesake, and the suffering he had likewise endured at the hands of the Navy. How Flint had managed to save him on Antigua, by killing his abuser Captain Josiah Hume, but couldn’t save his life, and the weight of the guilt he had lived with ever since. “Seems Jack intervened to put a stop to it before it got too far out of hand – but never mind. So what, you’re going to look at this scum and tell him not to worry, that you’ll just overlook it? Are you?”

“What?” Killian frowned. “They had four men beat Sam? A skinny nineteen-year-old boy? Why?”

“Cap’n thought the older one was your spawn, Hook.” Sherwood grinned tauntingly. “Oh aye, I know who the lot o’ you are, for all he’s being closed-mouthed about it. So he had the pathetic one beat a bit until Bell lied, said he was your son. As I said, wouldn’t have done if they weren’t a pair of filthy – ”

Charlotte raised her eyebrows, looking considerably intrigued by this information, but in either case, Sherwood did not get the chance to finish his sentence. He was punched hard across the face, having just managed to recover from the earlier blow and thus sent tumbling again – not by Flint this time, but by Killian. He stared at his hand as if it did not quite belong to him, as if he had taken himself aback by the violence of that response, but he did not apologize. Sherwood remained down, holding a hand to his jaw; something small and white had skittered across the boards, clearly a tooth. Even he thought better of another provocative remark after that, as Killian blew on his knuckles. “I will join my father-in-law,” he said, politely but with a terrifyingly cold edge, “in asking you to choose your words more carefully when it comes to my son. And you’re lucky I didn’t hit you with what I used to wear on my left arm. It would have torn your bloody head clean off.”

“Both of you.” Emma gripped Flint’s arm with one hand, and Killian’s with the other – as much as to stop from hitting Sherwood herself as to restrain them. “We – we can’t, we just can’t – ”

“Is there some difficulty here?”

Everyone swiveled around to behold Matthew, with his instinctive nose for trouble, emerging from his cabin. At the sight of the gunner’s mate on his knees, his eyes narrowed. “Mr. Flint, Mr. Jones. Surely this situation is nothing to do with you?”

Well past the point of backing down, Flint turned on the younger man. “When were you planning to tell us what you did to Sam, exactly?”

Matthew blinked. “I do not recall that I did anything to your son.”

“That scum there tells a different story.”

“Well then, he is either considerably exaggerating, or inventing outright. I have in fact not laid a hand on him. Mr. Sherwood, I catch you telling tales again, it’s a flogging yourself. Get below, I seem to recall you’re still on shift until the next bell.”

It was Sherwood’s turn to blink, then splutter. “Captain, if you’re going to say you never – ”

“Now,” Matthew repeated. He had not yet raised his voice, but Emma saw the gunner’s mate – several inches taller, several dozen pounds heavier, and five or six years older than Matthew – visibly shrink as if a cold wind had passed over him. “Was that unclear?”

“No, Captain. It was not.”

“Good. You’re dismissed. Good evening.”

As Sherwood made for the deck hatch with something that could only be called a scuttle, Matthew watched him go, waited until the latch clicked, then turned back to the family. “I advise you neither to gossip with the crew, nor to place excess credence in whatever they may tell you. Sailors are prone to rumor and invention, you know that. Besides, one might conceivably view it as a deliberate and unwise thwarting of the arrangement which I have generously offered you. I have already ordered my crew that they are under no circumstances to physically engage with you or to take the initiative in any misbegotten vigilante attempts – which means that you, sir, must have engaged first.” Matthew looked straight at Flint. “That was foolish.”

“What did you do to Sam?”

“I have already informed you. Nothing. Or you may repeat that question, and call me a liar. You had better hope that Mr. Sherwood does not return to spread lurid tales to his mates. I have protected you once. You would be unwise to think I would do so again.”

“Look, you – ” Flint took a furious step. “We all know you’re twisting the truth every which way, just like your fucking father, and I’m not going to stand for – ”

Without moving quickly, but nonetheless in cool, swift decisiveness, Matthew pulled a pistol out of seemingly nowhere and aimed it directly at Flint. “Do not think that I will not, in fact, shoot you right here,” he advised. “There is, after all, a vast fund in the Admiralty payable upon verified capture and execution of the pirate James Flint. But if all I wanted was money, or to toady upon fools and bureaucrats, you would have been dead long before you set foot on the Griffin. Do not make me regret my decision.”

Flint’s eyes burned green fire. Emma clutched Killian’s hand, while Charlotte had made a move as if to go for her own pistol, but hadn’t drawn it fully. Liam and Regina had decided to eat with Miranda, so it was only the four of them and Matthew on deck, facing each other down. The tension was nauseous. Then Flint shifted his weight halfway, raised a hand, and nodded jerkily. “Fine, Rogers,” he said. “After all, I can’t prove anything. We’ll speak again when I can.”

“I await that day with bated breath,” Matthew said, with cold, precise sarcasm. He eased his grip on the gun in turn, tucked it away, and nodded to the women. “Miss Bell, Mrs. Jones. My very best to you. Good evening.”

With that, he turned and strode back into the captain’s cabin, shutting the door with not-quite-a-bang, as Emma sucked in a ragged breath as if surfacing from a deep and freezing dive. She could sense how close the situation had come to disaster, and did not in the least think that the danger of it had passed. “James,” she said, reaching for him. “We have to – ”

Flint pulled back from her touch without a word, the lines of his face set in cold, furious relief like marble. Without looking at her, he walked away.

That night was even more interminable than the first, as every creak or squeak seemed to herald a mob of angry crewmen coming to murder them, and Emma finally fell into an uneasy doze just before dawn. Her dreams were murky and unsettling, and Sam was always in them, but just out of reach, or hidden behind a high wall, or screaming voicelessly, reaching out for her as her fingers slipped through his. Then it was the day of his birth, and the midwife saying he had the cord around his throat, and the searing cold terror that had pinioned Emma flat to the bed. But this time, they couldn’t get it untangled, as they had in life. He wasn’t breathing, he wasn’t breathing. He was small and pale and lifeless in her hands, and he wasn’t breathing –

Emma woke up with a jerk, covered in cold sweat, heart racing as if she’d just been chased by the bulls of Pamplona. She lay flat (or as flat as one could in a hammock) staring up at the low, scratched ceiling. Killian was still asleep beside her in his own hammock, so clearly he hadn’t been visited by any night terrors, and as ever, she tried to reassure herself. But it echoed brittle and hollow and hopelessly in her head, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the threatening incursion of tears. She did not know. She did not know, she could not find him, and even if they made it through this voyage without everything coming to pieces, it might already be too late.

The weather was still holding that morning, but in what felt like a far too-on point metaphor for shipboard conditions, it was decidedly getting worse. The mercury in the glass was down at least two marks since yesterday, and the sea was iron-grey, whipped with white-frothed spume that crashed and hissed. The Griffin was large and solid enough that nobody was being pitched off their feet, but it was hard to stand upright on deck without holding onto something, and this forced everyone except the sailors on shift into the uncomfortably close quarters below. Emma, Killian, Liam, and Regina played cards with a tattered pack (Charlotte having been invited to billet in Matthew’s cabin, leading Flint to make several cynical remarks about how they would be passing the time) and Flint himself had vanished to Miranda’s berth; it was unclear if he was finding sympathy there or not. They could hear the crew talking beyond the bulkhead, and kept straining to catch any incriminating words or subjects. They were fairly sure, after all, that they were the topic of conversation, and with them all shut up here, if the men turned bored or fractious or decided to investigate Sherwood’s story –

As far as Emma could tell, fear of Matthew’s wrath was possibly the only thing keeping the crew from breaching the fragile truce, and if this lot – clearly no shrinking violets – were shirking from it, that was a signal that they should do likewise. Finally, however, she asked something else that had been on her mind since last night. “Why would Jack claim to Rogers that he was Hook’s son, apparently in order to protect Sam? Sherwood seemed to be under the impression that they had been… well. Intimate.”

“Sam?” Killian raised an eyebrow. “Manage to successfully talk to a lass or a lad he might like, much less anything else? Seems unlikely.”

Emma hit him on the arm. “I don’t recall you were terribly adept when we first met.”

The tips of Killian’s ears went slightly pink, as Liam muffled a snort. Then the elder Jones brother remarked, “I don’t know your lad, Killian. But it seems that Jack and Charlotte may view their marriage vows as rather… optional, given this and the conniving she’s doing on Rogers.”

Killian opened his mouth, paused, and shut it. Then he said, “My conversation with her would incline me to agree in that direction, yes. It’s not what you think, and I did promise her I wouldn’t tell, but… Jack is her friend, not her lover. Their marriage was made for other purposes. So perhaps neither of them would see it as infidelity to entertain another suitor, but I still can’t see Sam managing that. I’d wager it was just an attempt to stop a thrashing.”

“Aye, but…” Despite herself, Emma could not shake the feeling that there was more to the story. “Who is Jack, exactly? This sounds strange, but I still keep thinking we should know him from somewhere, or that we’ve met, when I know we haven’t. And a man called Black Jack, Black Jack Bell…” She knew that it was nothing but a faint, desperate wish, but couldn’t stop herself. “Are we entirely sure that Sam’s son with Mariah Hallett died?”

Killian’s hand shook hard enough to drop his cards. “What?”

“His son, the one he received the letter about, that made him want to go back to Massachusetts and apologize to her. It said the boy only lived a few hours, but what if – what if, I don’t know, Mariah’s father wanted to discourage Sam, or make him think there was no hope, or – ”

Killian took rather too long about picking up the cards. “I know why you want to think it, love,” he said at last. “But we went back, remember? We went back to Eastham, we went to the place where the Whydah… where it…” He swallowed. “The Halletts were still there. If there was any word about a boy who could have been Sam’s son, we would have heard it. It can’t – ”

“But we didn’t find Mariah.” Emma turned to him, their hands reflexively clutching the other’s. “We tried to find her and make it right, but we couldn’t. If she did leave and take a child with her… her family could still be on Cape Cod, but if she – ”

Liam was watching them with a troubled expression, as he had only met Sam Bellamy briefly, and that not in the warmest of circumstances. But the man had saved him, Regina, and Miranda from their days adrift after escaping Jamaica, and he knew how much Emma and Killian had both loved Black Sam. Finally, Liam said gently, “It’s likely just an odd coincidence.”

“Aye,” Killian said, in a voice that meant he was trying to convince himself. “We can’t go getting mad ideas like this, not when we’ve finally reckoned on letting him…” He paused again, clearly fighting to finish the sentence, until Emma thought sadly it was no wonder they had told their children so little, when they could barely do it with each other. “Letting him go.”

“Do you think we should – ” Emma began –

“Tell Flint and Miranda?” Killian completed, reading her mind as usual. “Christ, no. Flint is barely managing to not to fly off the bloody handle at the thought of the Navy mistreating another Sam, and you know better than I do how much Miranda misses him. So what, we’d tell them we’ve taken it into our heads that somehow, some way, a dead child managed to survive for over twenty years and now cross paths with ours? That would be unspeakably bloody cruel. We’re grasping at straws, love. Liam is right. Whoever Jack is, he’s someone else.”

Emma looked down, then nodded. “I just wished,” she said after a moment, still more quietly. “I just wished there was the smallest chance he wasn’t completely gone.”

“I know.” Killian’s voice was soft and resonant with pain. “But he is. He is gone. The Sam we have now is the Sam that matters the most, and we both know that. We have to – ”

At that moment, they heard a thunk from above, and then a few seconds later, another one. It could have been cargo or cannon shifting, but something about it pricked their communal instincts. The tenor of the crew’s conversation from down the gantry had shifted as well, curious and then sharp, and footsteps pounded, dim and muffled, as they started up the ladder. Emma and Killian exchanged a look, and then they, Liam, and Regina all reached for their cloaks at once, card game forgotten. They started at a trot toward the hatch, then faster.

The wind was like a stiff-arm in the face as they emerged, knocking Emma back into Killian, who caught her and then didn’t let go, both of them sharply conscious of the presence of danger. They and the rest of the crew struggling topside were thus confronted by the sight of James Flint, jacket stripped off and sleeves rolled up over his freckled arms, preparing to take another swing at Lieutenant Warwick, who was bleeding profusely from the nose and trying to punch back. By the looks of things, Flint had surprised Warwick while he was distracted with the need to manage the vessel through the foul weather, in his capacity as on-duty deck officer, and some of the men up in the yards were shouting down, but the gale stole their voices away before they reached the others. Then the Griffin’s bow rode down heavily into the trough of a wave, which soaked everyone with a blast of frigid spray, and which seemed to awaken Flint to the realization of an audience. Instead of restraining him, however, it seemed to give him license to cut loose, which he did with another blow to send Warwick somersaulting over a coil of rope. The lieutenant struggled to rise as Flint stalked toward him, and –

“Hey, you pirate bastard!” Lieutenant Johnstone, Warwick’s compatriot and the one Flint had derided as looking like the wrong end of a troll, came rushing out of the crowd and jumped on Flint’s back, forcing him to his knees with a crash. He got his arm locked around Flint’s throat, threatening to crush his windpipe if he kept struggling. “One more twitch, and you finally get that good long look at hell!”

“Mate!” Killian bellowed. “Jesus! Don’t!”

Flint struggled to look around as much as he could in the headlock, spotted them out of the corner of his eye, and – well, it was difficult to see what exactly his reaction was, given the circumstances. He did mount an energetic effort to get to his feet, however – and then, eyes fixed beyond Killian and Emma’s shoulders, abruptly stopped. The look on his face was terrifying.

Killian and Emma themselves both spun around, just in time to see Mr. Sherwood marching Miranda toward them, her feet dragging like a broken puppet’s. “Keep fighting, pirate,” he said, “and I break your wife’s neck. Want to risk that?”

It was at this exact flammable moment that the door of the captain’s cabin opened and Matthew Rogers emerged – wearing his jacket, waistcoat, boots, and sword, but with his cravat undone and hair untidy enough to make Emma think that Charlotte had not been adverse to offering him a few bribes of a physical nature. Charlotte herself was on his heels, staggering slightly as the wind hit her, and her eyes went briefly wide as she took in the scale of the imbroglio on deck. Then they went very narrow as they fixed on Flint, and Miranda across the way with Sherwood clamped on. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she said. “I knew you were going to do this.”

“He did it,” Flint managed, jerking his head at Warwick. “Him and the other three, they were the ones who beat Sam. So if I was doling out some just desserts – ”

He cut off with a gagging noise as Johnstone tightened his grip. Every eye turned to Matthew, who was staring at the disorder aboard his vessel and the ignoring of his express orders with an ugly, ice-white look that most unpleasantly recalled his father at the depths of extremity. He did not noticeably react for a long moment, a muscle twitching in his cheek. Then he said, “Mr. Sherwood, let go of Mrs. – Hamilton immediately.”

“What?” The gunner’s mate goggled. “The old bitch will just – ”

It was-possible that Matthew would have taken him to task for once more questioning his orders in the slightest degree, but he never got the chance. Sherwood was not bothering to pay much attention to an elderly, frail lady, clearly considering her a negligible threat, and at that, Miranda stamped violently on his foot, flailed out, and snatched hold of the boat hook from where it was mounted on the mast. She spun around and swung it with both hands, hard as a quarterstaff, and it caught Sherwood on the side of the head with a sickening, split-fruit crack. His eyes rolled back, showing their whites, and he dropped like a stunned ox.

By the looks of things, Miranda was on the verge of braining him again and thoroughly, but she staggered as the ship hit another trough, and had to steady herself on the hook like a cane. Then she looked up, eyes hot and wild. “Any other man touches me,” she said, half-hysterically, “and I will kill him! The lot of you! I will kill you all, I swear to fucking Jesus!”

The Navy sailors might have laughed at such a threat coming from a small, silver-haired woman, but none of them did, and more than a few hands seemed to be reaching for pistols or sabers or anything else, in case she charged. Then Emma struck out into the middle of the circle, pierced by a hundred eyes, until she reached Miranda, put an arm around her shoulders – Miranda barely seemed to notice her, staring straight forward, blind and furious – and pulled her back toward Killian and the others. Sherwood was out cold, blood trickling from the gash on his head, and Emma in fact was not sure that he wasn’t dead. Her eyes swung to Matthew, panicking.

For his part, Matthew seemed transfixed on the edge of an impossible abyss. His lips moved briefly, as if he was saying something, or talking himself into it. Then he said, “Tie the pirate to the mast. Hands and feet. No lashes – yet. He is to be left there until he finds himself in a more cooperative frame of mind. As for the rest of you, you will come to my cabin and account for this deplorable scene immediately and full, and if I am not satisfied that this was merely some fit of temper on the part of your blood-maddened patriarch – ”

Johnstone and Warwick, still bleeding, tried to wrestle Flint to his feet, one on each arm, but he twisted violently and head-butted Warwick, making him take a few reeling steps backward. Miranda fought like an alley cat to get away from Emma, and both she and Killian had to hold her, trying to stop themselves from losing their footing on the slippery boards. It was reasonably plain that Flint would never consent to be lashed to the mast in any sense of the word, and yet since this was on the brink of open brawling or worse, they were fortunate that Rogers had not summarily shot him as he had threatened earlier, and just –

For a moment, Emma thought that some of the men had managed to get the cannons on the deck turned and pointed at the fracas, though why they would fire at their own comrades, she didn’t know. A boom and flash lit up the fog, there was a high, eerie whistling sound audible even over the wind, and then the far railing crumbled into splinters as men scrambled for cover. Lieutenant Warwick looked around angrily, as if likewise thinking that Emma and company had brought a carronade to the party, and the next shot exploded his head into pulp, blood and bone splattering onto Flint and Johnstone. Warwick’s body swayed, then – almost in slow motion – fell.

“FIRE! WE’RE UNDER FIRE!” That was Liam, his old captain’s instincts apparently picking up what nobody else had managed to put together. “AFT PORT QUARTER!”

Right on cue, they glimpsed a series of dazzling muzzle flashes from that precise direction, and Liam lunged at Killian, Emma, Regina, and Miranda, knocking them painfully flat to the deck. An instant later, the third round came shrieking in, and Flint likewise dove away barely in the nick of time. Lieutenant Johnstone, still stunned by the instant and grisly death of his comrade, was not quite as fortunate. The cannonball punched straight through his chest, gutting him like a fish, as he was blasted backwards against the broken railing as a sprawled and jerking corpse. With both tiers of second-in-command thus removed within the space of a few moments, the men appeared almost frozen. They followed orders, they didn’t give them, and this –

“Evasive action!” Liam bolted to his feet and spun on the helmsman – who wasn’t more than nineteen or twenty himself, and to judge from the petrified look on his face, the Griffin had not yet taken heavy fire since her deployment to the Indies. “EVASIVE ACTION!”

The poor sailor fumbled at the wheel, clearly unsure how to work the ship with the wind; if he pointed them too far into it, they would go into irons, slew, and come to almost a dead halt, a sitting duck. Rather than take that risk, or try to shout instructions, Liam apparently decided that it would be more profitable to cut out the middle man. He ran to the wheel and grabbed hold of it himself, hauling them around to run on broad reach as much as was humanely possible in the rising tempest. “You two!” he bellowed at Flint and Killian. “You know what to do!”

Flint and Killian stared at each other, stared at Liam, and almost inadvertently, stared at Matthew. It was true, of course, that they were trained as Navy lieutenants, and that the Griffin had just lost both her own lieutenants in spectacular fashion, but like this –

A fourth round came hailing in, as Liam just managed to steer them away from it, and that broke the spell. Flint and Killian spun off in separate directions, shouting, as Matthew seemed to decide on the instant that if any of them were getting out of this, punishment would have to wait for later. He barked at Killian to take over the gun deck, Flint to run the sweeps, and even more surprisingly, both of them wasted no time in argument. Matthew himself scrambled for the quarterdeck to take charge of the aboveboard defenses, and Regina clutched at Emma’s arm as they took another swinging yaw. “What the – what the hell is going – ”

“It’s wartime, we’re in Spanish waters, and this is a fully-flagged Royal Navy ship!” Emma instinctively shielded Regina, Miranda, and Charlotte, keeping them low, as the Griffin got off her first return volley, the broadside thundering nearly enough to deafen them at close range. She had no idea who or what they were shooting at, but it was almost surely a frigate on patrol from Havana or Spanish Hispaniola, since they would not be obliged to bother with any niceties of a warning shot; they were entitled to open fire to disable and destroy on the spot. Emma was in fact having nasty flashbacks to Henry Jennings sneaking up on her in the fog, taking her and Miranda prisoner, and sinking the Blackbird – somewhere which must be not that far from here, really, given as they had been leaving Jamaica at the time. “We’ll have to try to outrun them!”

Regina opened her mouth as if to ask what made Emma so sure, remembered that she had been a pirate in her own right (and that Regina had tried to have the Jones brothers sink her for the fact) and for once, decided not to argue. It was clear that the unknown aggressors had been able to get close to the Griffin without raising the alarm due to both the bad weather and everyone being distracted with Flint’s fiasco, and nobody felt like a repeat venture. Oh God. This was bad.

With Liam steering, Matthew commanding the topside batteries, Killian on the main gun deck below, and Flint on the long nines, the Griffin started to stretch the distance, as everyone kept their eyes strained for any telltale fireball in the murk that would mean they had scored a fatal hit on their enemy. All they had to go on for its position was to return fire in the direction that it came from, and once or twice, Emma thought she glimpsed the faintest black shape of the other ship in the swirling mist, but could not be sure. Was it the Spaniards? Had João da Souza slunk away from Nassau, tail between his legs, and rushed back to Cuba to recruit more help, brooding on payback for the insults the family had done him? Emma was sure they had not seen the last of that greasy scoundrel, alas, and Governor Güemes and the rest were not about to relinquish the hunt for their long-lost treasure so easily. It was perfectly possible that they would reach Skeleton Island, sail in, and find a Spanish man-of-war already anchored in the bay.

Still. They were distant enough that she could not be sure, but these guns sounded the wrong bore to be Spanish tercias, the long-barreled bronze twenty-four pounders. Emma paused, waited for the next break to be sure there was no chance of being gruesomely dismembered, and then crawled across the deck. Trying not to look at the blasted body of Lieutenant Johnstone, she followed the trail of smudged and splattered blood, reached the deformed ball, and checked it for a maker’s mark. Spanish cannonballs were fairly easy to identify, usually had a foundry stamp and Philip V's royal sigil, but it took only a quick check to see that this was not one. There was some other mark, but it didn’t look familiar, and it was molten and distorted too far to make it out precisely. It couldn’t be English – or so Emma thought, because why would an English ship be firing on a fellow countryman, especially the Navy? But –

Something occurred to her just then, and she jumped to her feet, pelting across the deck, awash in gun smoke, to the helm. “Liam,” she said breathlessly. “Liam, did you – did that – you said on the crossing from England, Lady Fiona’s ship attacked the Nautilus and that was when you escaped, but that’s the one we’re chasing from Barbados – so did any of that sound – ?”

Liam, still occupied with wrestling the recalcitrant fifth-rater into line, almost didn’t hear her. Then it got through to him, and he looked up with a jerk. “What? Do you mean – you think that was the Titania? Bloody hell, I thought – for just a minute, but with the wind and weather and the distance, there’s no way to be sure. It’s Spanish waters, it’s – ”

“It’s not the Spaniards.” Emma showed him the cannonball. “This isn’t Spanish ordnance. I couldn’t think why an English ship would be firing on a Royal Navy vessel, but if it’s them, of course Lady Fiona wouldn’t want Matthew trying to rescue Gold – ”

“Jesus.” Liam wiped his grey-brown curls out of his soot-smeared face with the back of his forearm. He spun around and stared back at the ominously empty and silent horizon – which five minutes ago would have been a very good thing, but it was sinking into both of them that they had very likely just been firing on the ship with Sam (and Jack) aboard as well as Gold. Without another word, Liam heaved on the helm, trying to bring them back around, but the wind shrieked and skidded against the sails, rocking them without result. Even a comparatively agile man-of-war like the Griffin did not change course on a sixpence, especially in gusts this strong. Liam cursed. “We need to reset the sails! Do you know the rig into the wind for a three-master?”

“The Blackbird was a brigantine, it’s different.” Emma’s heart was pounding in her throat. She was aware that if they altered course and captaincy on the Griffin without Matthew’s express permission, it counted as – quelle surprise – an act of piracy, and commandeering another Royal Navy vessel was stretching their luck well beyond its limits. But if that was the ship they had been chasing – if they, God forbid, had done enough damage to sink her –

She remained frozen a moment longer, then whirled off toward Matthew, who was shouting at someone to hold steady. “Captain Rogers.” She grabbed his arm, even as he jerked around with an outraged look. “Captain Rogers, I think the ship that was attacking us, it was the one with Gold and Sam aboard, the Titania. You need to give the order to pursue.”

Matthew clawed his loosened, blowing hair out of his face, as the ribbon holding it back had broken. “What?”

“The ship!” Emma’s chest felt as if a huge fist had closed around it, squeezing and squeezing. “It wasn’t the Spaniards, it was – I think it was Lady Fiona’s. Bring her around. Bring her around!”

Matthew’s nostrils flared. Without further ado, he pulled his spyglass from his jacket, untwisted it, and scanned the endless grey banks of fog back and forth, searching for some sight of the enemy, anything to give them a hint as where to set out. Emma squinted as hard as she could, praying for any break in the turmoil of clouds, the distant grey shadow of rain pounding the foaming sea. Oh God. Oh God. Where are you? Where are you?

Matthew looked back and forth for a long moment more. Then he cursed, dropping the glass to his side. “I can’t see a damned thing. They could be anywhere. If it even was them.”

“Trust me,” Emma begged him. “It’s not Spanish, I looked at the cannonball, it’s not. Liam thought he recognized the sound of the guns. Please!”

Matthew searched her face. For a moment, she thought he was going to refuse, to remind her that the lot of them had been on the brink of naked mutiny less than an hour ago, he had no reason to trust them, and if all was fair in love and war, he might well have ordered Flint to be flogged. But something – she didn’t know what – must have convinced him. He turned away and raised his voice over the screaming wind. “Club haul her!”

The men darted to the capstan to unship the massive leeside anchor, and Emma shouted at Miranda, Regina, and Charlotte to brace hard. Club hauling was the fastest way to turn a square-rigger going full speed, but it was also a risky maneuver in the best of times, and necessitated a captain who knew what he was doing to the nicety, and the exact moment to cut loose. Emma herself grabbed hold of the railing as they heard the anchor dropping, rope paying out, and Matthew yelled at the crew to get ready to change her. The men clawed up the swaying shrouds, crawling on hands and knees on the yards, which were vibrating hard enough that Emma feared they would plunge into the sea. But they were tenacious bastards, as the Navy scabs always were, and managed to get the sheets reset, even as lines tore out of their hand like whips. It was at least twenty minutes since Emma had first suspected the identity of their attackers, and every second they lost felt like death by a thousand paper cuts. The Titania was somewhere, somewhere, desperately near and agonizingly far away, unseen, inchoate. Please, Emma prayed, she wasn’t even sure to who. Please, please, please.

They had an instant of warning before it happened, and then the anchor caught, slamming through them like one of Zeus’ thunderbolts. With the wind as hard as it was, they were inviting themselves to be torn apart if Matthew misjudged this in the slightest bit, and out of the corner of her eye, Emma could see Flint trying to struggle back from the foredeck, apparently in the interest of giving the order himself. But she shook her head at him violently. Flint had already gotten them into enough trouble as it was, and if he tried to usurp this too –

Just when the anchor cable moaned and shrieked as if it could take no more, and they were almost on their side, a wall of iron sea rushing up at them, Matthew roared for the cut. The crewmen standing at the ready with hatchets swung them down violently, the Griffin defied gravity and any law of physics known to Sir Isaac Newton, and suddenly they were free, sprinting across the waves in the opposite direction. The loss of an anchor was one of the unavoidable sacrifices of club hauling, another reason it was only called for in dire circumstances, and now they only had one, which would have to hold her in high seas. Emma was soaked and shivering to the bone, but she didn’t care. Matthew lifted the spyglass again. “There!” he yelled. “There! Six degrees starboard!”

Emma struggled up next to him, almost forgetting to ask if he could give the glass to her and nearly prepared to snatch it from his hands if not. But she could just see it even without it, the distant dark tip of a mainmast. A powerful, sick relief scourged her insides like acid. So the Titania was still afloat, there was still a chance, there was still –

– unless this wasn’t the Titania, but another ship altogether, and this was wrong, all wrong, she was wrong, and they were about to be pounded to splinters by a proper Spanish broadside –

Once more, Matthew Rogers raised his voice.

“Fire!”

#captain swan #cs ff #cs au #cs next gen #the rose and thorn #treasure island #black sails

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