Sparhawk owed Sarah Ward some measure of the truth. She had risked her family’s safety to bring him here and save his hand, and tried to fight off her former fiancé on her own to save him from discovery. She was staring up at him expectantly, and he knew that if he did not tell her now, she would always regard it as a betrayal.
“James Sparhawk,” he said, “does not exist.”
“The bullion on your coat looked real enough,” she said, a note of challenge in her voice.
“My rank,” he said, “is real. Earned without interest or advantage of birth. But I did not enter the navy a midshipman and rise to captain like other young gentlemen. I was kidnapped from my home as a boy and pressed aboard a ship bound for Bombay as a common sailor.
“My father,” Sparhawk said, choosing his words carefully, “was the second son of a country gentleman, with no great expectations. What property there was would go to his elder brother. The navy seemed a natural choice. His father approved, and he went for a midshipman when he was not much older than Ned is now.
“He met a girl, a parson’s daughter, while he was on leave visiting the West Country and eloped with her against the objections of her family. His father would not give him money, and he could not keep her snug in England on a lieutenant’s pay, so he brought her and their infant son—myself—to Nevis, where his ship called frequently, though not frequently enough to keep him out of other women’s beds. He was young and feckless, and he forgot to send her money as often as he forgot his marriage vows. He never took the trouble to introduce her to society in Nevis, and most of the English there doubted she was really his wife.”
They had called him a bastard, and his mother a whore.
“My father’s visits and his financial support became increasingly irregular, and my mother began taking in mending and washing to make ends meet. For a time, it was enough to keep us. Then his money stopped coming entirely, and the letters started to arrive. My father’s uncle and elder brother had died in quick succession, leaving him the heir to an ancient barony in Cornwall. Scrubby land. Poor for farming but rich in metals, if someone had the capital to mine it. But the estate was drowning in debt. My father needed money, fast, and hoped to acquire it in the time-honored way of his class—by marrying it. Unfortunately, he already had a wife.
“But the union, he decided, had been irregular. A hole-and-corner affair, contracted when they were both too young to be held responsible, never recognized by their families. He presented this view to my mother, who rejected it out of hand, not necessarily for herself—but for me. She was raising me on the little money she scraped together, to be a gentleman.”
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays he had gone to the Jewess for Hebrew and mathematics. Thursdays and Fridays to the English parson for Latin and Greek. An old Spaniard tutored him in destreza, the true art of the sword. A bookish child, small and weak, he varied his route each day, hoping to avoid the island children who threatened and bullied him.
“My father attempted to buy my mother’s silence with his future wife’s money—he already had a candidate in mind, some plantation owner’s daughter whose family were eager to secure a title for her—but my mother would not acquiesce. She even vowed she would write to his intended and reveal him for a bigamist. So he turned to threats. Rumors were rife on the island that my mother accommodated men. For money.”
By then the rumors were true. The first time he had awakened to the sound of the bed ropes creaking, he’d thought his father must be home—an unexpected visit, but welcome. Peering into the darkness, he had seen the shape straining over his mother, distinctly that of another man, thicker and fairer than his darkly handsome father. He’d been stricken with a deep feeling of dread, a sense that something was profoundly wrong, as chilling as if he’d seen a ghost or a monster.
“My father finally condescended to return to Nevis to speak with her. They quarreled. She told him she had already written to his intended, and sent the proof of their marriage lines. We were living in such squalor then that all I could think as I looked at him was how he glittered with gold, how the braid and buttons of his uniform could have fed us for a year.”
His father did not stay in the cottage that night, and in the morning, his mother discovered why. His fiancée and her family were aboard his ship. He was to fete them that night with a grand party, to introduce his betrothed to English society on Nevis. Sparhawk’s mother had sobbed and raged, gut-wrenching grief alternating with helpless anger. Then she had taken his hand and led him down to the docks, and spent one of their precious coins to have them rowed out to his father’s ship.
There were musicians playing prettily as they came alongside, and paper lanterns hung from the rigging. Tropical flowers dripped from the rails, and their heady scents disguised the fug of bilge water, hemp, and tar. His mother had climbed awkwardly up the side, as foreign, he recognized at the time, to that wooden world as the colorful blooms trailing over the side. He had followed, watching in horror as she caught sight of a tall, lithe young woman in green silk and made straight for her. His father intercepted her, and, bellowing in a voice Sparhawk had never heard him use before, he ordered his marines to drag her from the ship. He watched his father turn his back on his mother, and on him, forever.
“A few nights later, five men broke down the door to our cottage. Two of them carried me to the docks. Their instructions were to drown me, but sailors, even the worst of them, are a superstitious and sentimental lot. They pressed me aboard a brig bound for Bombay. Later, I learned that my mother had been taken to the magistrates and imprisoned for debt and prostitution. I was never again to see her alive.
“I was not, as you might imagine, a midshipman, and I learned—at the wrong end of a cat—to obey orders. The captain of that brig was a tyrant with a taste for boys, and I suffered accordingly.”
The details, to the daughter of a seafaring family, would be easy to guess.
“I was two years on that unhappy vessel until the Admiralty replaced our vicious captain just in time to forestall a mutiny.
“I was more fortunate in my next commander. He guessed that my origins were not as they’d been entered in the ship’s muster—I could read Latin, Greek, and French—and he invited me to study with the midshipmen. When I confessed my true identity, he cautioned me not to reveal myself to anyone else, lest my father learn that I was not dead and send men to finish the job. And in any case I had no proof of who I was, and my status, in the navy and thus in the wider world, was the lowest of the low.
“So we bided our time, and when one of the midshipmen, always sickly, and now consumptive and unlikely to live, was transferred to shore, I accompanied him as a servant. This boy—the real James Sparhawk—had no living family. When he died, the captain helped me to assume the boy’s identity, and I remained ashore to ‘convalesce’ until the crew was changed out. When I returned, not a man but the captain had known me, nor the dead Sparhawk.
“Under my new name, I passed my lieutenant’s exam at fifteen, captained my first prize at sixteen, achieved a command of my own by eighteen. I have worked these past twelve years to assemble the proofs of my true identity, and my father’s crimes. I do not have them all yet, but I will shortly. That is why I requested service in North America. I have tracked to the Massachusetts Bay the cleric who married my parents on Nevis and tutored me as a child. If I can find him, I hope he can be persuaded to swear out a statement validating their marriage and my identity. But from the moment I step forward and declare myself, my life will be in danger—and so would that of any woman I married, who might be carrying an heir to the title and fortune my father was willing to kill to secure.”
Sarah did not doubt a word of his story. Men had done as much and more when great titles and fortunes were at stake. The Annesley case had still been dragging its way through the courts when she was a girl—and James Annesley, the heir to the Earl of Anglesey, who had been kidnapped by his uncle and endured ten years of indentured servitude in America, and nineteen years of litigation in pursuit of justice, had died of natural causes before he could regain his birthright. But not before surviving two attempts on his life.
On the Sally, Sparhawk had shown himself to be brave, but Sarah was stunned, momentarily, by the determination that must have carried him from Bombay to the quarterdeck of his own brig.
“I am tempted by your offer,” she said. “But I cannot leave my father and Ned without a word. And you must go tonight.” Abednego Ward had run his family the way he had run his crews, democratically. Everyone had responsibilities, and everyone had a say.
A smile quirked the corners of Sparhawk’s perfect mouth. “Miss Ward, does that mean that if you could confer with your family, you would consider accepting my offer?”
“Would you really take me with Father and Ned in tow? And possibly Benji, whom you have never met, as well? We are a passel of rogues, and unlikely to advance your naval career.”
Sparhawk laughed. “I will reserve judgment on Benjamin until I have met him, though I am disinclined to like this brother who leaves you to the mercy of men such as Wild. Ned, however, has promise. And your father would make me a sought-after dinner guest in naval circles. There is nary an admiral save perhaps Old One-Foot-in-the-Graves who would not like to pass the port with Red Abed.”
It was not, to conventional thinking, an honorable offer; yet she thought it the most honorable offer she had ever received. Sparhawk was not interested in her money, because she did not have any. He was not lying to her or holding out false hope of marriage, because there was none. He was being completely honest with her. He was offering friendship and physical pleasure and financial support. She had lived too long without all three.
“Then yes,” she said. “If you would welcome my family, I will consider your offer.” She rose on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. The close contact, the way his body tensed and hers hummed, promised future passion. But tonight, with the memory of Micah’s hands on her, she could not contemplate more.
Nor did he press her for it. “Will they take you in at this judge’s house, until your father returns?” he asked.
“The Rideouts are old friends, and despite pressure, loyal to the king. If they have not been driven out of town yet, it is only because the judge is bedridden and too ill to go—and he has nothing but daughters.”
“Who aren’t handy with a pistol,” Sparhawk replied.
“We were at school together. They are obedient, genteel creatures,” Sarah admitted.
“Thank God,” said Sparhawk. “If there were more such as you in Naumkeag, Miss Ward, the sea-lanes would not be safe for the British Navy.”
Together they descended to the hall. She reached for the latch on the door, but before her fingers touched it, Sparhawk pulled her back and motioned for silence. He angled his body to peer out the sidelights, then beckoned her to do the same.
There were men in the street. Dan Ludd. And others. Ranged in front of the house. Cutting off Sparhawk’s escape. Ready, no doubt, to drag him to the common and hang him.
In this, she was determined that Micah Wild should not get his own way.
• • •
Sparhawk had just acquired a mistress.
Sailors tended to collect things on their travels. His bosun kept a small box stuffed with plant seeds from foreign ports, a whole future garden in potentia; his carpenter kept a bag of heathen votives and shrunken heads. Curiosities, both natural and artificial, were difficult for wandering seamen to resist. One of the hands on Sparhawk’s first snow had found a giant clamshell on Fiji and brought it aboard. When his shipmates quizzed him on what he planned to do with it, he said he hadn’t the slightest idea—but he knew that he should regret leaving it behind.
Sparhawk had not expected to find a mistress in the cold waters off Boston Harbor, but Sarah Ward was a natural curiosity herself, and he knew that he should regret leaving her behind.
She barred the front door of the house and led him back up the stairs and into a disused bedroom that looked out over the roof of the service ell. The window was small—the relic of a previous century—and narrow, but it rose with a soft hiss in smooth channels. Sarah climbed out onto the cedar shakes and motioned for him to follow.
It was tricky with his arm in the splint, but he managed. From there she led him over the shingles to another lower roof, this one a shed in a neighboring yard that rubbed close up to the Ward house, and from there she dropped to the ground in someone’s vegetable garden.
He placed his faith in her and followed, landing softly in a bed of cabbages.
“You’ve done this before,” he said.
“Of course,” she whispered. “Benji and I used to sneak out of the house to meet Elizabeth and drink rum in the Sally’s jolly boat when the schooner was in port.”
“Your father,” he replied as quietly, “does not seem like an easy man to sneak past.”
“He wasn’t. When we were old enough that we no longer had to sneak out, we realized that Mr. Cheap used to follow us.”
She was leading Sparhawk through a maze of low wooden fences, narrow alleys, and neat kitchen gardens, negotiating them with the skill of long practice. “Very intrepid of Mr. Cheap,” he remarked.
They picked their way through a dark passage between two long narrow houses, breathing the distinct aroma of molasses and rum. A distillery. Then they reached the mouth of the alley and a broad street, and Sarah peered cautiously out.
She drew back at once. “There are men in the street.”
“They could just be out for a stroll,” said Sparhawk hopefully, edging toward the opening with a hand on his pistol.
They were not just out for a stroll. It was the beginnings of a mob. There were groups at both ends of the street, the town’s main thoroughfare by the looks of it. They were sailors, mechanics, dockside ruffians. Old capstans had been rolled up from the shipyard to serve as barricades, and the toughs congregating around them held torches, buckets, and pillows.
Tar and feathers, no doubt.
One of the sailors carried an ominous coil of rope over his shoulder.
“Is there another way round?” Sparhawk asked.
“No. It is the manse directly opposite.”
“Very well,” said Sparhawk. It was a pretty house, gambrel roofed but larger, by far, than the Ward home, surrounded by a painted wooden fence carved with swags and urns, with a brick enclosure and carriage house behind. Built on a high fieldstone foundation, with stout shutters without and within, it would be a veritable fortress.
And impossible to reach without being seen by the mob.
They would have to make a run for it, and pray someone stood by the door at the ready to let them in. Sparhawk cocked his pistol. Sarah nodded, that same flinty expression in her eyes that she had worn on the Sally when she’d taken him prisoner.
He could not think of a man he would rather have at his side than Sarah Ward, who was of course not a man at all. It was the highest form of compliment, in one sense, and in his experience of women, unlikely to be taken as such. He refrained from speaking it.
They ran, Sarah taking the lead and Sparhawk following with his pistol at the ready. They were spotted almost immediately, a pockmarked sailor with a length of wood closing the distance faster than Sparhawk would have liked.
Then they were up the steps and Sarah was hammering on the door. A gust of candle-scented air met them, and they were through with a rush.
The door slammed behind them. After the Wasp and the Sally and the bare Ward house, the Rideout mansion overwhelmed the senses, all polished mahogany and satinwood and glittering ormolu and gilt. There was the distinct aroma of beeswax from the fine tapers, of brandy from the crystal that littered the glassy surface of the long table in the dining room. Continental landscapes hung above the sideboard and fireplace; carved mirrors between the windows; the famed wealth of New England’s codfish aristocracy on proud display.
Before Sparhawk could take it in, he was surrounded by a flock of females who led him into a large double parlor, cooing and fluttering in a rustling cloud of silk and lace. They called him “dear” and “brave,” and forced him into an ancient and uncomfortable chair. It was hard and oak and straight as a mast, and Sparhawk suspected it had come to the New World on the first boat from England. It had pride of place in an otherwise perfectly classical scheme, and Sparhawk could only presume it was some sort of Puritan heirloom.
He had not marked Sarah’s faded jacket or frayed hem before, but beside these fashionable creatures in their brightly colored silks, she looked like a ragamuffin. No powder, no paint, no art to the dressing of her honey gold hair. And yet she drew the eye like a sail on the horizon.
She would be the first woman he noticed in any room.
The flock settled, and Sparhawk spied a lady standing a little apart: tall, graceful, dressed in a gray sack gown closely molded to a lithe, athletic body. Her calm too singled her out. She was not one of the Rideout sisters. Sarah was watching her warily.
“The carriage,” said this unusual lady, “is waiting in the enclosure. The judge’s coachman, unfortunately, is inebriated. You will need to sober him.”
This she had addressed to Sarah. Now she turned a cold, assessing eye on Sparhawk. “I know your face,” she said.
He rose and bowed. “Captain Sparhawk, madam. At your service.”
“I think you rather at the king’s service, which is a pity, as I have heard of you, though Sparhawk is not the name that your face brings to mind.”
Three sharp raps on the door were followed by a demand, in the honeyed voice of Micah Wild, to send the British dog out. There was no need to put the implied threat of fire into words—the torches dancing beneath the casements spoke for themselves.
The Rideout sisters paled. Sarah’s lip curled. And the singular lady in gray silk raised one plucked eyebrow and said, “I believe it is about time for the captain to leave.”
• • •
Judge Rideout rose from his bed and bought them a little time by addressing the mob. Now that he was seventy-two years of age and ailing, his oratory was not the equal of Micah Wild’s, but he had built the smallpox hospital on Winter Island and paid for the inoculations that had saved so many lives—though not Sarah’s mother’s—in ’72. They were bound to hear him out.
While that worthy man spoke, Sarah poured coffee into the coachman. She had brewed it strong, and when Phippen balked at swallowing the sludge in the bottom of the cup, she threatened to make more.
He swallowed it.
The widow and Sparhawk muffled the horses’ hooves with blankets. Then they were out in the walled enclosure behind the house with the widow dictating instructions to the judge’s not-quite-sober man and Sparhawk checking the powder in Abednego Ward’s pistols.
“I shall send them back to you,” Sparhawk said, “with money for the trip to Boston. Enough to keep you until I return if the Wasp and I are not in port.” Then, suddenly hesitant, he added, “Say you will come.”
She had not seen him look so vulnerable before, even lying injured and half drowned in her father’s bed on the Sally. She wanted to say yes, without condition or qualification, but she had her family to think of, and could not. So she said, “I shall speak with my family.”
And then she kissed him. She had to grasp his shoulders and rise on tiptoe to reach him, but when she brushed her lips against his, she realized with a shock that it was the most intimate she had been with this man whose protection she had so blithely accepted.
He froze and she feared she had misjudged him; that a man who was so used to command would not welcome such forwardness. Her doubt lasted only a moment. Sparhawk slid his good hand around to the small of her back and pulled her close, then deepened the kiss. Fierce desire, long dormant in her, woke.
She felt a pang of loss when he climbed into the carriage, and a sudden, giddy elation when he stopped on the running board and turned to her. “The Three Cranes in Charlestown is where I stay. The landlord there knows me. I have money banked with him. If I am not in port, he will extend you credit on my account.”
She nodded.
“The Three Cranes,” he insisted. “Say it so I know you will remember it.”
Sea captains, she knew from experience, could be very trying. “I am not one of your midshipmen, to repeat orders and say, ‘Aye, aye, sir.’”
“I understand that you take orders from no one, but the last time I parted with a woman in dangerous circumstances, I never saw her again.”
He meant his mother.
“The Three Cranes,” she said.
Sparhawk smiled. There was a boyish, hopeful light in his eyes. On impulse, she reached out to stroke his hair. He caught her hand and pressed it to his lips. The coach jerked forward, breaking them apart. With a rueful smile he climbed inside and took a position at the window, resting a pistol on the sill. Phippen struck up in earnest, and the carriage thundered out of the enclosure.
It was only when Sarah had shut and barred the gate that she realized the widow was no longer in the yard. Nor in the parlor. A sound drew Sarah up the rope-carved staircase and to the open casement, where Angela Ferrers stood looking out, the barrel of a long hunting rifle in her hand. In the moonlight, Sarah noted ink stains on her fingers, and she recalled the printed broadside with its row of black coffins.
Sparhawk’s carriage emerged from the alley at the end of the street.
The mob stirred. Those nearest saw and gave chase. A few shots rang out. A man climbed onto the running board.
Angela Ferrers braced a shoulder in the window frame to the open casement, raised her rifle, sighted, and fired.
The man gave a cry and fell off. The carriage broke free of pursuit and disappeared around the corner.
The widow nodded. “And they are away.”
Sarah watched as the man the widow had shot climbed unsteadily to his feet, grasping his shoulder. Sarah recognized him—a sailor from one of Micah’s regular crews.
“Thank you,” Sarah said.
“Don’t thank me, Miss Ward. I didn’t do it for you or your captain. The rumors in the street are true. The British fired on the militia at Lexington. They bayoneted old men and children in their homes. That is the tale printed in the Gazette, and that is the tale that must reach London and be taken up by our supporters in Parliament. The hanging of a British captain in a New England port would tarnish that story. We have been allies tonight because our aims converged. Tomorrow we will be enemies again.”
“Are politics the determinant of all your actions?” Sarah asked.
“Is sentiment the determinant of all of yours?”
“Not sentiment,” Sarah said. “Loyalty.”
“A scarce commodity indeed,” said the widow. “Spend it wisely, Miss Ward. And if you can spare a little for your country, seek me out. I could make good use of your knowledge of the ships and seamen of Cape Ann.”
“I’m not free to play politics with you, Mrs. Ferrers. My elder brother is abroad, and my father is no longer young.”
“Your brother Benjamin has been in Boston these three months. He understands what you do not. Cleaving to the authority of the Crown will not protect your family. It didn’t protect your brother Ned from the press. You did. Those who lie down meekly in a civil war are always the first to be trampled.”
• • •
They got the judge back into bed and waited out the riot that ensued, the Rideout sisters clustered on the settee and Sarah and Mrs. Ferrers in the chairs opposite in the pretty gold and green parlor, listening to the tumult outside: the shouting and sounds of destruction as the mob took its frustrations out on the Rideout home.
Micah’s followers ripped the ground-floor shutters off the windows and hurled rocks through the transom lights. Then, when it became evident that the Rideout house was too stoutly constructed to tear down, the rioters began on the fence, hacking the urns from their balusters and pulling the posts out of the ground.
The violence lasted the better part of an hour, and then ended when there was nothing fragile enough left to break. A little while later, when the street was finally empty, Angela Ferrers took her leave, a muff pistol concealed in the folds of her cloak, and Sarah and the Rideout sisters breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Sarah herself set out half an hour later—unarmed, and all the more cautious for it—and picked her way home through the evening’s wreckage.
There were broken bottles littering the gutters, paper wrappers, discarded items of clothing, and here and there a bit of stray vandalism had occurred: a broken shutter on one house, a shattered transom on another, lanterns smashed to cover the actions of the mob in darkness.
She had spent two days in nearly constant company with James Sparhawk, and the impulse to turn and share her thoughts with him now was ingrained, but of course he was not there. Sarah longed to discuss the enigmatic widow, Micah’s oratory, the antics of the Rideout sisters, with a mind that ran on a parallel course with her own.
She’d felt a similar sense of loss when Benji left for London, but there had been nothing she could do about that. This was different. There was something Sarah could do about this.
She could join Sparhawk at the Three Cranes in Charlestown. She could take a lover. Become a mistress. Keep house for a man she desired and who desired her. Matters had to be settled with the Sally and her family first, but for all Mr. Cheap’s surliness and her father’s caginess, they liked Sparhawk. And Ned, of course, already worshipped him.
The damage to the Ward home was remarkable in its thoroughness. There wasn’t a single intact pane of glass, not even on the third floor. The mob had gone to some effort—Micah’s doing, no doubt. The front door was hanging on one hinge and mud spattered the bare floors inside, along with other less pleasant fluids.
Sarah did not want her father or Ned coming home to this. It was bad enough that the house had become a shadow of the home they had once enjoyed. She drew a pail of water and began washing the worst of the filth. Lucas would have to help her rehang the door. They could board up the third-floor windows—no one slept up there anyway—and perhaps use oilcloth on the lower floors until they could afford glass.
No. Without the Sally, they would not be able to afford glass. And the house must be sold to keep the Sally out of Micah’s hands.
A door creaked open at the back of the house. Her father and Ned had returned. She wished she’d been able to put at least the kitchen to rights before they saw it, but she was heartsick over Sparhawk and wanted nothing more than to see the people she loved best in the world.
She rushed into the kitchen and stopped dead in the middle of the room.
It was not her father, and it was not Ned.
It was Dan Ludd and three other men.
The first held a bale of straw.
The second a bundle of rags.
The third carried a bucket of pitch.
And in Dan Ludd’s callused hand was a burning brand.