The Phillips family was unfailing in its kindness. The guard would not permit Sarah to leave the apartments to see the natural beauty that Major Phillips swore was to be found on the island, so they brought that beauty to her. Mrs. Phillips picked wildflowers and refreshed the bowl in Sarah’s room each day. Her wan, distracted daughter, Rebecca, dried and pressed the discarded blooms, and labeled them in a book in a neat flowing hand.
When Rebecca was searching for pencils one day, Sarah saw an abandoned project lying hidden at the bottom of a drawer: a compass rose made completely out of dried flowers, the points picked out in rich violet and the rings in bold, verdant green. There were three points yet to be completed, and it had clearly been made as a gift, with part of the recipient’s name, Martin, visible in the corner, but when Sarah questioned her about it, Rebecca just smiled her sad, distracted smile and closed the drawer.
Looking out the windows seaward during the long afternoons when Mrs. Phillips and Rebecca walked the beach, Sarah was reminded of her first weeks at the dame school, when she felt imprisoned in the dame’s rambling waterfront house, the sea sparkling within reach but forbidden. She had come to enjoy school, in the end, and cherish Elizabeth Pierce’s friendship, now lost to her, but she had always felt the shackles of the dame’s expectations, and when she became engaged, had thought that Micah Wild would set her free.
While Major Phillips’ wife and daughter were out during the afternoons, he often invited her into his little study and encouraged her to borrow any books she might like—he had a prodigious library, as many as twoscore volumes—and discuss anything she might have read recently. He did not have any novels, but he had several histories, and these she enjoyed. He also had many trays of dried and pinned insects, which she did not.
He was not in the habit of offering her any refreshment during these interludes, and he always seemed vaguely embarrassed, like his wife, by the poorness of his hospitality, but today he surprised Sarah by placing a decanter of brandy on the table between them. She was even more surprised when he rummaged in his secretary and produced two cut glasses.
“My dear,” said Major Phillips, pouring the brandy, “today your ordeal is at an end. You are to be released.”
Her hand trembled. She was not going to hang. She brought her shaking glass to her lips and drank it off to steady herself. Phillips patted her hand.
Then panic overtook her. “And James Sparhawk? Is he to be freed as well?”
Major Phillips refilled her glass. “I believe so.”
“When may I leave?” she asked, and then regretted it. They had been so good to her, and she did not want to appear ungrateful. “That is, your family’s kindness has sustained me, but I long to see my own.”
“Of course. Of course. That is my wish, to see you restored to your family. We will miss you, my wife and I and Rebecca. I believe that your stay with us has done her some good. You will have guessed, I think, that she was disappointed.”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “As was I, once,” she said. But she had not been entombed on a rock. She had possessed the freedom of the sea. And now she would have James Sparhawk, who was necessary, for her, to life.
“That is what I was given to understand,” said Major Phillips. “It is a fault of fathers, I think, to raise their daughters too protected from the world. Our Rebecca was not prepared to resist the lures of a rogue.”
Sarah had not been protected. She had climbed rigging and picked pockets and cadged oranges, been raised by rogues and adventurers, and she had been taken in by Micah Wild as easily as Sparhawk’s mother had been beguiled away from her country parsonage by Anthony Trent.
“I was commander of the castle in those days,” said Major Phillips. “And Martin was a boat pilot and a frequent guest at our table. He thought Rebecca would have an income, but when I lost my post, there was no possibility of that. I told him as much, and when they ran away together, we knew to expect the worst. It lasted a few weeks, and he left her penniless and in debt in New York. She was preyed upon. By the time we found her, she was much changed.”
“I am so very sorry,” said Sarah, “but I do not believe there was anything you could have said to dissuade her.” Abednego Ward had not been able to talk Sarah out of an alliance with Micah Wild. He had warned her not to go to him that night.
“No,” Major Phillips agreed, recharging her glass once more. “That is why I am anxious to see you returned home safe.”
“There is time, if I hurry, to make the mail boat,” she said. There had been a clock beside the door, but in the shadows of the room she had to squint and could not make out the dial. She rose out of her chair, but too quickly. Relief made her light-headed, and she sat back down.
“My dear, you cannot go back to this Trent,” Major Phillips said, reaching across the table and sliding the brimming glass into her hand. “He has worked to free you and that is well, but you do not owe him what he will expect when you return. And his reputation is such that I have reason to believe he has designs upon you.”
Something was not quite right, but Sarah’s thoughts were muddled. “Trent is a good man,” she said. “He was going to marry me. But Trent is . . . now he will be . . . he will be my father,” she said. “Father-in-law,” she corrected. It was all suddenly very confusing.
The fort major looked concerned. “That is not what I was told,” he said.
She tilted the glass in her hand, stared at the thick sludge on the bottom, tried to puzzle out what it might be. Sniffed it. Cinnamon, but not. A spicy scent that sometimes clung to her father’s sea chest, and Mr. Cheap’s. A captain’s private cargo. As valuable as nutmeg or pepper, gram per gram. Opium.
“You’ve drugged me,” she said, her tongue thick.
“You will take no harm from it,” he promised, his voice a little anxious.
The door opened and Micah Wild stood framed in the light from the hall.
She stood up, grasping the table for support. “That man,” she said, pointing at Wild, “burned my house down.”
“That is the opium talking,” said Micah Wild.
The room swirled around her, the red of the chairs, the black of the clock, the green of the fort major’s coat blurring into streaks.
Then Micah was behind her, grasping her by the waist and keeping her from falling, pulling her back against his chest, and encouraging her to give in to the drug’s pull and sleep.
“No,” she said, but her vision was dimming, and the room was being taken from her by the opium one color at a time until all was gray and blurred.
“I don’t like this,” said Major Phillips.
Her head felt heavy; her limbs would not answer. “Please,” she begged the fort major. “Send for Trent.”
“Trent is a seducer,” said Wild, his voice coming from far away. “He has tired of her and intends to hand her off to his son.”
She clung for one last moment to consciousness, long enough to feel Wild lift her and carry her to the daybed, to feel him stroke her face and tuck a hair behind her ear and say in his honeyed voice, “Everything is going to be all right, Sarah. I’ve come to take you home.”
• • •
General Gage sent a detachment of his own men to search Castle William for Sarah Ward. He also posted a guard at the Long Wharf to inspect the small boats putting in, but there were far too many little wharves and anchorages in Boston and Charlestown to search them all, and by that time Sparhawk and Trent had already come and gone from the island. They questioned the maid, Mrs. Phillips, her morose daughter, and the guard at the gate. And then they searched the island for Major Phillips.
They found him outside the walls on a secluded stretch of beach, staring out to sea. They did not need to resort to threats or bribes. The man poured forth his tale. He knew he had been deceived when he saw Micah Wild carry the girl to the daybed. His hands on her had been too possessive, too familiar, for a chastely devoted suitor and family friend. Major Phillips had taken money from Wild, as he had taken money from Trent, and he had received his thirty pieces of silver. The incident was a stain on his soul. The pieces could not be given back.
Wild had paid him to drug the girl. He had explained that it was a precaution, that she was highly excitable and liable to do herself an injury if he had to take her away against her will. His tale was one of innocence seduced, a simple seaman’s daughter, promised to a doughty merchant, beguiled away from hearth and home and lawfully betrothed by a worldly rake named Trent.
There was enough of fact, when the fort major quizzed the girl on her family and origins, to burnish the story with the aura of truth. And enough similarity to his daughter’s sad tale that he was predisposed to believe it. Sarah Ward was from Salem, her father had been a mariner, she had been engaged to marry, but had not. She lived under Trent’s roof. Trent had a certain reputation with women, and he had paid for her upkeep at the castle. Her gowns were lavish and costly, the kind a kept woman wore.
Wild told him Trent was about to pass her on to another naval officer. It would be the beginning of a steep, fast slide into degradation. Unless Wild could spirit her away from her seducer before the man got his hooks into her once more.
Sparhawk saw his father’s hand return again and again to the hilt of his sword, felt his own fingers twitch to do the same. But the fort major was a dupe, and his spiritual agony already exceeded any physical chastisement they might mete out. They needed two names from this man and nothing else: that of the ship on which Wild had taken her, and that of its intended port of call.
Sparhawk was not surprised when he learned the first, but taken aback at the second. The ship was the Roger Conant, with her four-pounders and her swivel guns and her twoscore hired men. And she was bound for Rebel Salem.
• • •
Sarah woke beneath a silk canopy in a soft feather bed. The posts of her bower were polished mahogany carved with swags and urns. The drapes were pale blue figured damask. A quiver of Cupid’s arrows picked out in gold paint adorned the tester.
The dimensions of the room felt strangely familiar, but the mustard yellow walls, flowered carpets, and plump upholstered chairs did not. She could not place where she was, nor how she had come there.
Then she remembered the fort major’s study, the drugged brandy, Micah Wild’s hands upon her. Someone had removed her gown and loosened her stays, and she knew with certainty that Micah had touched her while she slept, could recall through the poppy’s haze the way he had stroked her hair and her face on the daybed in the major’s parlor, then as he held her across his lap in the boat.
Micah Wild had said he was bringing her home, but her home was gone, burned by his longshoreman.
She slid from the high bed and clung to the posts for a moment, her head still thick and fogged from the opium. Her gown lay across a chair, her shoes on the floor beside it. The dressing table and washstand were unfamiliar, but the size and placement of the windows, and when she looked out, the patchwork of rooflines and clapboard colors, told her where Micah had brought her, and whose house this was. She was in Salem, and the house was Micah Wild’s.
The bedrooms had not been completed by the time Micah broke their engagement; they had been only plaster and planks when she saw them, but if she remembered correctly, based on the views, this was the guest bedroom at the back of the house with the prospect of the North River. Another chamber across the hall, where Micah and Elizabeth must sleep, looked out on a similar view. She knew that room had been intended for the master and lady of the house, as it adjoined a small study where Micah had planned to conduct his more private business transactions, to keep ledgers and write receipts for French molasses and Dutch tea and all the other smuggled goods that flowed in and out of Salem.
She took a step forward, and then retreated to the bed. She did not feel well at all. She could still taste the brandy and the dusty dry spice of the opium in her mouth, and felt the tangle of dried saltwater spray in her hair. Micah could not have brought her all the way to Salem in a rowboat. He must have had the Conant hidden somewhere in the channels of Boston Harbor.
Even if Sparhawk or Trent discovered that much, they could not reach her here in Rebel Salem. General Gage had tried to send a column of regulars up under Colonel Leslie in February, and they had been driven back by the combined militia and townspeople.
Gage could not even break out of Boston now. The navy was unlikely to go haring off in pursuit of a woman it had only grudgingly released on a charge of piracy. And if Micah Wild was welcome in Salem once more, the Sally certainly wasn’t.
Which meant that if she wanted to see Sparhawk and her family again—and stay out of Micah Wild’s bed—she would have to get out of Salem herself.
Shoes and a dress would be material to a successful escape. And sweet cooling water. She drank half the pitcher on the washstand and bathed in the rest, combed and pinned the tangle of her hair, reserving the longest pins in the dressing table for a more important purpose than her coiffure.
It took her longer to pick the lock than it should have. Standing up, she became dizzy; kneeling on the floor, she began to sway. Finally she accomplished her task with her cheek pressed to the grain-painted door and her heart beating wildly from the exertion. She knew sailors who took opium because they enjoyed it, but she could not understand the attraction. Unconsciousness, strange dreams, and nausea held little appeal.
She kept the pin that had vanquished Micah Wild’s brass door lock, and tucked it into the front of her gown. The hall, thankfully, was empty, because there was no way to slip discreetly down that broad curving stair.
The latch on the front door lifted just before she reached it. In a moment, she would surely be discovered. The parlors to the left and right offered no concealment. She darted instead for the opening beneath the stairs and found herself in the service ell, broader and taller than Sarah’s whole house had been, and full, just now, of servants.
Their chatter stopped abruptly. There were three maids and two cooks and a burly footman in the mold of the late, loathsome Dan Ludd. He got up from his place at the table, where one of the maids had been feeding him slices of apple, and took a step toward Sarah.
The room spun. She felt hands reaching for her, then a chair being thrust under her, and she looked up to find an anxious sea of faces peering at her, including that of the cook, a smiling woman Sarah recognized, Mrs. Friary, the best baker in town. Micah had hired her for the new house because Sarah loved her ginger cakes.
“Get the captain,” Mrs. Friary said to the wide-eyed maid beside her. “Miss Sarah,” she said in the voice one reserved for children and invalids. “Miss Sarah, you’ve been very ill. Captain’s only just brought you home, and you’re not to be out of bed.”
She was ill, certainly, but only because “the captain” had dosed her with opium. Even seated, she still felt dizzy, and when she attempted to stand, the yellow shutters on the windows, the copper pots over the fire, the iron hooks over the hearth, moved in a kaleidoscope of fragmented colors.
“Fetch some water,” said Mrs. Friary.
“The poor thing,” said the wide-eyed maid.
“Filthy British bastards,” spat the youngest of the footmen.
Which was peculiar, because these were Micah’s servants, and they seemed to be full of righteous indignation and sympathy for her.
Sarah heard booted feet running. The sea of faces parted. Micah Wild knelt in front of her, and the look of concern on his handsome face was unfeigned. “I’ll take her from here, Mrs. Friary.”
“What did you tell these people?” Sarah asked, trying—and failing—to stand.
He caught her as she slumped into the chair and lifted her into his arms. She was too sick and dizzy to protest.
“I told them the truth,” he said in his orator’s voice, intended to ring through the house as he carried her out of the kitchen. “That you are a heroine. You were wrongfully imprisoned by the treacherous British in Boston for saving Ned from the press and took ill in their barbarous jail. And I brought you out of there, brought you home.”
That explained their caring and concern, the kindness they had been too afraid to show her when she had defied Micah Wild and refused to become his mistress.
“Only the jailer, as it turned out, was treacherous,” she said. “And only because he was deceived and bribed by you.”
Wild sighed. “The doddering old fool gave you too much opium. I am sorry for that. But Mrs. Friary is making you ginger cakes. And you will recover quickly now that you are home.”
Home and not home. The house he had built for her, with the furnishings she had picked out, and the cook hired to please her. The familiar voices outside her window, calling down the river, the sound of the water lapping at the reeded banks. The scent of molasses-sweet air from the rum distilleries wafting on the breeze, and beneath it, the salt tang of the sea. It was what she had longed for, shut up in Castle William—what she thought she might never see again.
Now if her head would only stop spinning, she might be able to take some comfort in these little things at least.
She had to close her eyes as he bore her up the winding stair to avoid being sick. If she had been capable of even crawling back to her room, she would have preferred that to enduring Micah’s touch. She could not blame his servants for swallowing his lies. People would believe anything he said in that honeyed voice. In Sarah’s experience, if there was a grain of truth in Micah’s words, they were taken as gospel.
He deposited her gently on the bed in the blue and gold chamber and brought a wet cloth with which to dab her forehead. She swatted him away.
“Where is Elizabeth?” she asked, remembering that her former friend’s family had called her home in light of Wild’s newly precarious circumstances.
“Gone back to her family. This time for good. They are having our marriage dissolved.”
“And how is it you are welcome in Salem once more?”
He refreshed the cloth and laid it across her forehead, and this time she did not stop him. “I’m not, exactly. Or I wouldn’t be without you. The pamphlet that Benji’s friends printed has made you quite the heroine, defending Ned from the press and such. And now I am your rescuer. Salem’s Committee of Safety allowed the Conant to enter the harbor because we carried you.”
“Why Salem? And don’t tell me because it is my home. You burned my home.”
Another wave of nausea swept her, and she twisted on the bed. He replaced the cool cloth with a fresh one. “Your house would still be standing if you had been reasonable that night.”
“And Ned would have been pressed aboard the Wasp if I had been reasonable that day.” She sat up. “But I am not reasonable, and you are not a romantic. Why are we here?”
Wild laughed. “You may not be reasonable, but you are certainly made of tougher stuff than Elizabeth. You would not have run home to your father over a little double-dealing.”
She was not so sure he was right about that, but she let it pass.
“We are here,” he said, “to retrieve my property. It is my hope that the Committee of Safety and the Continental Congress will soon welcome me back into the fold, but I have made provision in case they do not.”
For a moment she was puzzled; then she understood. “The French gold. The admiral paid you for the Conant and the Cromwell with the French gold. It is still here.”
And it was the most damning evidence against both Micah Wild and Admiral Graves, if she could lay hands on it.
“Just so,” he said. “If Salem will not welcome us, then Providence or Newport will. We have enough capital to provision the Conant for a profitable cruise. The Sally’s success in Boston Harbor has ignited a fever for privateering, and the admiral’s latest threats of retaliation have sent the ports scrambling to arm vessels for their defense. Salem cannot fit out ships fast enough.”
“What success?”
“You have not heard? Benji took a British supply ship, loaded with powder. Dr. Warren and his Provincial Congress may be willing to overlook my recent defection if I will fly their pine tree flag on the Roger Conant and do the same.”
“And will you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Why this change of heart? The admiral gave you letters of marque to hunt the Sally. The Congress may not.” The Provincial Congress, to judge by the machinations of Angela Ferrers, wanted James Sparhawk. Fast ships and bold seamen. Ones they could be sure of.
“I still mean to claim the Sally,” said Micah Wild. “She is my lawful property, and the courts will return her to me. But the admiral betrayed me. He reneged on his promise to release the Roger Conant at the end of her lease, told me he had the right to press her into service, without payment, a necessity of war.”
“How did you get her back?”
“I took her,” he said.
From Admiral Graves, a man who brooked no insult, who would have hanged Sparhawk to conceal his own cupidity, who had ordered Sarah thrown into a dank cell, who threatened children like Ned, and who would have shelled Marblehead over a box of candles. There would be no changing sides again for Micah Wild. “Why?” she asked. “When you could not be sure the Rebels would have you back?”
“Because the admiral’s ‘necessity’ was you. He intended to double-cross Trent and transport you for trial. I couldn’t let him do it. It was always an abstract set of principles for me, liberty, the cause. I did not like anything that Parliament was doing, but that was because it hindered trade. I was always prepared to sail whichever way the favorable wind blew, for independence or reconciliation, but Graves . . . Graves was going to send you across the ocean and hang you,” said Wild. “It was no longer about tea or pamphlets or taxes.”
Sarah had dreamed of this, in her cold bedroom in her vanished house, after the curtains and carpets had been sold. And she had dreamed of it on the chilliest nights, when she slept down on the trundle with Ned and there was no other way to stay warm.
But Micah Wild was only saying it now that Elizabeth and her money were no longer available to him, and Sarah Ward was once more useful to him, a safe conduct to enter Salem Harbor.
“I should have married you, Sarah,” he said. “I was going to. But then you came to me, and I knew I didn’t have to.”
When Sarah said nothing, he went on. “I thought I could have Elizabeth’s money and you and no one would think the worse of me for it. On the contrary, they would envy me. But when I thought you were going to die, that the admiral would see you hanged, I realized that the only thing that mattered to me was you.”
And a heavy chest of French gold.
“If my happiness matters to you,” she said, “you will let me go.”
“Your safety,” said Micah Wild, in the voice that had long since ceased to sway her, “is more important than your momentary happiness. And there is no safety for you inside the British lines while Admiral Graves has control of the squadron. Whatever trick Trent used to free you will not work again. Nor would the admiral bother with the niceties of the law this time. If you go back to Boston and your lover, you will die.”
• • •
The question was how to get into Salem Harbor.
“The guns on Winter Island and those at the point will blow you to bits,” said Abednego Ward. He ought to know. He had helped place them there, before Micah Wild had jilted his daughter. “And you cannot run around them, or you will be holed by the chevaux-de- frise.” These were ten-foot-square pine boxes weighted with lead and sunk in the channel, bristling with iron spikes. “And then there is the chain across the harbor.”
They returned to the question over and over again, late into the night, with the candles blazing in the parlor of Trent’s mansion. The Reverend Edwards had stayed on, and though the cleric was not a military man, Sparhawk took some comfort from the presence of this fixture of his childhood.
Finally Sparhawk acknowledged the truth. “We cannot enter Salem Harbor without the permission of the Rebels there. It must be negotiated, and quickly.”
Trent nodded. “I will go,” he said.
“No, Father,” said Sparhawk. “I will go.” He knew what Angela Ferrers would demand, and he was prepared to give it.
• • •
He reached the Rebel camp at Cambridge before dawn, the pretty redbrick buildings of the college nestled in broad meadows within sight of the river. The smell was less appealing. The farmers and farriers and lawyers and innkeepers he had met on the road to Boston after Lexington were not soldiers. They did not know how to build a hygienic camp for ten thousand men, or how to set a picket line. Their officers had not been drawn from the ranks of military or aristocratic families and trained to leadership from a young age. They were elected by their men, or chosen by the Provincial Congress for their initiative, which was demonstrated by recruiting enough volunteers to form a command.
Sparhawk presented himself and asked to see Angela Ferrers. He was directed to a fine manor house of three stories with a hipped roof and carved balustrade, occupied at present by a company of mariners from Marblehead. He had a little sway with them, as their leader, a man named Glover, knew Abednego Ward and had overseen the refitting of the Sally.
Glover sent for the Merry Widow, and Angela Ferrers came down to meet Sparhawk in the parlor, wearing a blue silk night robe with her hair falling loose over her shoulders.
“Captain Sparhawk, or should I address you as the heir to Polkerris?”
“You knew, didn’t you, that my father was no murderer?” he said.
“Your father is in point of fact a murderer, several times over. He has killed seven men in duels. The privilege of rank, private law. It is still murder, even if they all deserved it. And while I knew that the Milton family had engineered the death of Trent’s first wife, your mother, I did not know how culpable Lord Polkerris himself might have been in the affair. That was not something I had the need, or the time, to investigate. Are you going after Sarah Ward for yourself or for your long-lost father?”
“Does it matter?” asked Sparhawk.
Angela Ferrers caressed the pearl-crusted mourning rings on her right hand. It was an unconscious gesture in a studied woman. “What matters is that this army is supplied with the matériel of war. We have veteran soldiers aplenty, but their cartridge boxes and powder horns are empty. And we lack guns. Benjamin Ward’s victory in Boston Harbor was an easy one. The next British supply ship will not be so handily gulled. And blockade runners are bold when it is a cargo of rice or French molasses they carry, but few men have the nerve to sail with a hold full of powder into the jaws of the most powerful navy in the world.
“Smugglers have served our needs up to now, but with open war upon us, we need men who have been trained in piracy, who can fire a shot across a merchantman’s bow and will blow her to flinders if she does not heave to. And for such as that—for genuine, old-fashioned piracy—there remains no better school in the world than the British Navy. If you wish to enter Salem Harbor with the Sally to find Sarah Ward, then I will require you to accept this.”
She drew a sealed document from her robe and placed it on the tea table. He broke the seal and read its contents. “I was not aware that the Americans had a navy,” he said.
“At present there are only provincial navies, mostly made up of flotillas of whaleboats and gun barges. You will notice that your commission is postdated. It will take effect on June fifteen, when I anticipate that a new commander will take charge of our forces, and it confirms you as captain in the army of the United Colonies, and charges you to seize and make a prize any British ships you encounter, though not to engage with men-of-war carrying superior guns. Fifty percent of civilian cargo will go to you and your crew, but all powder, muskets, cannon, uniforms, and ordnance must go directly to the army. I cannot sanction your actions in Salem, nor take any part in your quarrel with Micah Wild, but I can make certain that you are allowed to enter the harbor. I believe that Dr. Warren also offered other incentives, including real estate. You will find deeds for suitable properties enclosed.”
He opened the document she indicated, and found deeds for a fine house he had seen in Salem, a warehouse and a cottage he had heard tell of, and the lease for a significant portion of Misery Island.
“It is a generous offer,” said Sparhawk.
“But it is not an English barony. What say you? Will it be Captain Sparhawk, or my Lord Polkerris?”
“Sparhawk,” he said without hesitation, because it was not an English baron’s son but James Sparhawk who was worthy of Sarah Ward.
• • •
Micah sent for ice from his icehouse and fresh water, and once both arrived, he warned Sarah against making another escape attempt.
“I will tie you to the bed if I must,” he said. Then he left to speak with Eli Derby.
Sarah rested for a little while and considered whether she might be able to climb down from the window.
The Ward house had been a humble antique structure in its bones, with ceilings barely seven feet tall—an easy drop from a second-story window.
Not so this monument to Micah Wild’s ambition. The ceilings of the ground floor were a lofty twelve feet. There was a porch roof she might climb out to and use to lower herself to the iron railings, but it would take a clear head and a strong grip, neither of which she now possessed.
She resolved to use one of the Chinese vases lining the fireplace mantel to brain whoever next opened the door, and make her way out down the back stairs. She only hoped that it would prove to be Micah Wild.
It was not Micah Wild. When Mrs. Friary put her gray head through the door, her face a mask of worry, a tray of cakes in her hands, Sarah hid the vase behind her back and sat down on the bed.
The old woman praised her courage for saving Ned, asked politely after her father’s health, and told her how happy everyone was to see her back where she ought to be. It wasn’t for her to say, of course, but everyone knew Micah had made a mistake marrying Elizabeth Pierce. And no one was going to mind when Sarah moved into the bedroom down the hall, even if the divorce took time to arrange.
Sarah resolved to go out the window as soon as Mrs. Friary left.
She ate the cakes first. Then she knotted up her skirts the way she used to when sneaking out of the house with Benji to drink rum in the Sally’s cutter, and swung her legs out the window. The porch over the door below was two feet from her window, and she was forced to swing, jump, and scramble onto it, clutching the painted white balustrade and thanking the architect for fastening it to the slate tiles with iron spikes.
From there the way down to the ground was easier. She lowered herself from the balustrade, wrapped her legs around one of the supporting columns, and shimmied down until her feet met the iron rail. Then, with relief—and scraped knees and elbows smudged with roof soot—she found herself outside the back door, looking toward the river.
And unfortunately, standing on the granite steps below was Micah Wild. “Is that how you used to get out of your father’s house to come see me?” he asked incredulously.
“It was easier with a smaller house,” she said. “I am leaving, Micah.”
He took her by the elbow. “We are both leaving. That damnable interfering Ferrers woman has poisoned the well with Eli Derby. There’s nothing for it now. We must collect the gold and make for Providence.”
She backed toward the door, but his men were waiting there for her, and when she tried to run, they caught her and forced her into the boat. Her screams, before they gagged her, brought Mrs. Friary and the servants to the door, but too late to help her, and then they were away down the river, heading for the harbor.
When they went aboard the Conant, Sarah recognized her skipper, Jerathmiel Finch, who had been her father’s first choice to captain the Sally on the run to Saint Eustatius. Micah had vetoed the choice, judging Jerathmiel insufficiently dedicated to the Rebel cause, but Sarah had suspected he was just insufficiently dedicated to Micah Wild. He was a sensible man and a better sailor than Molineaux had been, and Sarah hoped she might be able to prevail upon him to release her.
Micah shocked her when he ordered Captain Finch to clear the deck for action and make for Misery Island.
“What is happening?” she asked her former betrothed as he scanned the harbor with a spyglass.
“Derby would not partner with me, but we have been friends since childhood, and he had the decency to warn me. Your lover has been given permission to enter Salem Harbor and retrieve you, with the Sally.”
“We should run for it,” said Finch. “I do not have a man-of-war’s crew. I have boys lured by the promise of prize money. Farmers’ and shopkeepers’ sons. They have never fired a cannon.”
“We cannot run,” said Wild, “until we have landed at Misery Island and taken my property off.”
They made for Misery Island. Finch ordered netting rigged. It was meant to catch splinters during a battle, which meant he anticipated one. Next he called for powder. By the time the Conant came within sight of the windswept rock that Salem’s early settlers had dubbed Misery Island, they had spotted a sail on the horizon.
It was the Sally. Finch turned to Micah Wild. “Take the girl with you in the cutter, and leave her on the island until this business is done.”
Wild balked, but Finch, who, as Sarah recalled, had served in the navy in his youth, gave him no choice. “I won’t fight Abednego Ward’s schooner with his daughter aboard. It’s not right. It would be dishonorable, and damnably unlucky.”
Micah took his sword, two pistols, and a shovel and hurried Sarah into the boat. She watched the Sally draw near, her sails stiff in the breeze. Sarah’s heart rose in her throat. She had not seen the schooner fly like that since her father had been well. She stood up and waved, hoping her brother or Sparhawk, whoever had command of the Sally, might see her and forgo engaging the Conant, and come for her.
Her heart sank when the Sally tacked and disappeared behind Misery Island. They had not seen her. They likely meant to engage the Conant, to come up into the wind and gain the weather gauge, the crucial advantage in any fight at sea.
Sarah lost sight of the schooner as she went around the other side of the island, and now she had no doubt that the Sally meant to fight the Conant.
Micah dragged the boat up the rocky strand, and Sarah followed him through the scrubby trees to a clearing within sight of the water. He checked one of the trees—Sarah saw notches in the trunk—then crossed to the other side of the glade, then paced, counting, to a point slightly north of the clearing’s center.
Then he began to dig.
He did not look up when the guns of the Conant spoke, but Sarah did. Both ships were visible now from this vantage.
The Conant had fired high into the Sally’s rigging and struck a spar. One of her topsails tore loose and flapped in the wind. The Sally’s guns made no answer until she tacked and came up on the Conant again. Once more the Conant fired high, meaning, Sarah realized, to take her a prize. No doubt these had been Micah’s instructions to Jerathmiel Finch. He still wanted the Sally, after all.
The Sally exhibited no such delicacy. She fired on her downward roll, low into the hull of the Conant, and the Conant’s side exploded in a shower of splinters.
The Conant had been holed below the waterline—a crippling blow. She could not run now. And neither could Micah Wild.
Sarah turned to her former betrothed and saw that he had unearthed the familiar French chest. It was no longer filled as it had been in Molineaux’s cabin, but a small fortune in Spanish gold remained, and Wild was filling his sack with the glimmering coins.
“The Conant is crippled,” she said.
“But we have the gold,” replied Wild, scooping coins out of the chest. “And there is a snow docked on the other side of the island. We can take her to Marblehead, buy another schooner, hire another crew.”
“You may have the snow, sir,” said James Sparhawk, who had approached silently through the trees, pistol in hand, “but Sarah, and the gold, belong to me.”
• • •
Micah took the snow. As he crossed the island, his hangdog expression suggested he saw little scope now for his powers of persuasion and had no stomach to put his fencing lessons to the test.
“There is water aboard, and she is seaworthy,” said Sparhawk as they watched Wild go. “Though where he will be welcome now is difficult to say.”
“Providence, perhaps,” she said. “The Browns have a reputation for boldness, and an idiosyncratic understanding of private property.” When Wild’s boat was out of sight and Sparhawk lowered his pistol, she threw herself into his arms.
“How is it that you are here? Who is commanding the Sally?” she asked.
“Benji captains her, and my father and yours shared command of her guns. They have cruelly mauled the Conant, by the looks of it. Mr. Cheap is with them as well, and Ned.”
They returned, hand in hand, to the clearing, where Micah Wild’s unburied gold lay glittering in the sun.
“It is evidence,” she said, “against Admiral Graves. You can use it to prove your innocence, to regain your rank.”
“Or I could use it to repair the Conant. Your brother, as Red Abed’s eldest, lays a legitimate claim to the Sally. And means to rebuild your family’s fortunes with her, as a privateer. And as it happens, I have already accepted a commission from the Americans, and been amply rewarded for it. I believe we hold the lease to a quarter of this island. There is a warehouse in town, no doubt intended for my ill-gotten goods, a cottage that I suspect we will sell immediately, unless my father wants it, and a house to which I understand you are attached.”
“What of Polkerris? Your father has acknowledged you. If you went home to England, you would be a baron.”
“England,” he said, “has never been my home. I was born on Nevis. And raised aboard frigates. And my father cannot go home to England. He traded the Americans’ intelligence to obtain the papers Angela Ferrers held, to obtain my freedom. He will settle, he tells me, wherever I do, at least until he has had time to correct my swordplay. The ‘dropsical Spaniard,’ apparently, has much to answer for.”
She laughed. “Perhaps he can teach Ned as well,” she said.
“Does that mean you will have us?” he asked. “I will not be a baron. Or a naval officer.”
“I had always planned to wed a sea captain,” she said. “That is, if you intend to marry me.”
“I was waiting to do so in my father’s house the day Wild took you off Castle Island. I have been waiting ever since. I will marry you on the Sally, if you like. Or in Salem, if you would prefer.” Then he added with a smile, “The Reverend Edwards is with us. And I do hope you can endure the man’s Puritanical thunder, because my father has already paid him.”
They were married on the Sally, in a mercifully short ceremony with less thunder than tenderness, because the reverend had known James Sparhawk from the day he was born, and had certainly not hoped to see an occasion as happy as this for the boy he had long thought dead.
Ned and Abednego and Benji and Trent stood by, and afterward Red Abed patted Sparhawk on the shoulder and kissed his daughter. Trent retired to the rail with the old pirate to share a jug of rum.
The Sally met no opposition entering Salem Harbor. Sarah had been unconscious when Micah had brought her in on the Conant, but now she saw that the wharves were alive with a bustle they had not known since her childhood, since the trouble had started with Parliament and the navy’s predation had cast a pall over the port’s trade. Now hammers and axes rang, and all up and down the waterfront vessels of every size and description, from tiny snows to substantial schooners like the Conant, were fitting out.
There was a committee of Salem selectmen, mariners all, and headed by Eli Derby, waiting for them when they dropped anchor at the Long Wharf.
Sparhawk and Abednego and Benji spent an hour closeted with these men, bargaining for water and cordage and spars for the Sally and repairs for the Conant’s hull. They paid for these in hard cash, Spanish gold to be exact, which was very warmly received.
Sarah took Ned and Trent to the house Micah Wild had built for her, and, after explaining the change in circumstances to the anxious servants and showing them the deeds and leases, she took up the responsibilities, so long delayed, of a new bride. She arranged for her father and Trent to have the principal chambers on the second floor, and chose a smaller, more modest room for herself and Sparhawk. Ned and Benji, she knew, would sleep on the Sally.
By the time her father and Benji and Sparhawk returned, there was a breakfast of sorts laid in the parlor, the best Mrs. Friary could do at the moment, with a ham and bread and a bowl of potent milk punch sprinkled with nutmeg; and because there was a tower of ginger cakes sparkling with castor sugar, Sarah thought it was a very good breakfast indeed.
It was evening by the time she and Sparhawk were finally alone. Mrs. Friary had taken the ticking covers off the furniture for the occasion, and Sarah and her husband sat together on the sofa, looking out the windows at the river.
“I am very glad to have the house,” she said, “but I do not intend to live in it. Not all the time. I want to sail with you, like my mother did with my father.”
James Sparhawk turned to his new bride and drew her into his arms, then had a better idea and pulled her into his lap. “On runs to the sugar islands,” he said. “And when we carry safe cargo. But never with a hold full of powder, and never when we are looking for a fight.”
“Agreed,” she said. “Provisionally.” She unlaced the ribbon that bound his hair and kissed him, then kissed him again. She had the life she had hoped for, dreamed of, since girlhood, and she could not remember a time when her heart had been as full.
But for her joy to be complete, she had to know that it was the same for him. “Your father,” she said, “has his son. Mine will see his schooner taking prizes once again. Benji has the Sally. Ned no doubt will serve aboard her. And I have a home, my family, and the man that I love, but what is there for you, James Sparhawk?”
“Everything, Sarah. Everything I need. The freedom of the sea. And you.”