CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Eight long years had passed. Yet for him it seemed only yesterday. It had happened late in May. He’d been in Georgia for three torturous years, days of heat, and bugs, and backbreaking labor. He was full of hate back then, blinded with it. He wanted his freedom and he would do anything to get it.

He’d tried to escape, of course, but the dogs never failed to find him. They had flogged him, beat him nearly to death, but even that could not stop him. Jason was determined to get away.

The fourth time he tried, odds were they would kill him, but his luck had finally changed. In the dense pine forest not far from the camp, he crossed the path of an ancient black man, also on the run. Samuel needed a man with a strong enough back to pole his flat-bottomed boat through the Georgia swamplands. If there was one thing he had it was strength.

“I had the power and he knew the swamp,” Jason told Velvet. “Samuel headed north once it was safe. I went south to the Carolinas, a place I had heard of called Charles Town. There were ships there, I’d heard, sailing for ports around the world. England was out of the question, of course, but there had to be somewhere I could go, someplace I would be safe.”

He rested his head against the cold gray stone, staring up into the darkness, letting the memories rush in. “As it turned out, legitimate ships were on the lookout for escaped convict labor. If I’d tried to leave aboard any boat in the harbor, the captain would have turned me in.”

Velvet’s hand found his in the darkness, warm and gentle and comforting. He wondered which exact moment she would pull the hand away.

It took the full force of his will to continue, to tell her of the ship he’d finally found anchored just outside the harbor, a ship of privateers, the captain, Miles Drury, told him. Desperate men, Jason saw, men willing to ignore the limits of their conscience.

The Valiant was a British barkentine. It wasn’t until later he discovered it was stolen.

And the men weren’t privateers. They were nothing but black-hearted thieves. Jason remembered them well, misfits and drunkards, cutthroats and pirates, the lot of them. Any other time, he wouldn’t have set foot aboard a ship crewed by such men, but at the time he didn’t care. He’d spent three long years with riffraff just like them and he had survived. He would survive again.

Six days out of port, the pirating began, a brigantine headed for Bermuda. It was the first of half a dozen such ships, the crew growing fat off the stolen bounty, Jason ignoring his conscience. He deserved a share, he told himself, for the grave injustice he had suffered. He could use the money to return to England, to prove his innocence and Avery’s guilt. To set things right for his father.

And so far, except for men injured fighting to protect their goods, no one had been needlessly killed.

His riches grew and an odd sort of friendship developed between him and Captain Drury, a Welshman who had come to the Colonies as an indentured servant.

“You’re a gentleman,” the stout, gray-haired Drury proclaimed one night after supper as he stood at the wheel smoking his long-stemmed clay pipe. “And educated in England. Hard commodities to find, my friend, for a man in my business.”

And so they sailed on, until that ill-fated morning in May, that warm, breezy unsuspecting day when the passenger ship, Starfish, bound for Barbados, sailed over the blue horizon.

“She’s a choice one, eh, mate?” Black Dawson, the beefy first mate, strode up to where he stood at the taffrail.

“Aye, that she is,” Jason replied uneasily. “But perhaps our time would be better spent looking for a ship laden with goods instead of one that’s simply carrying people.” Merchant ships were one thing. Passenger ships another. He didn’t like the notion of Drury’s bloodthirsty crew descending on a boatload of innocent travelers.

Black Dawson grunted. “They’ll be money and goods aboard ’er. A handsome bit more than ye think.”

The rest of the crew felt the same. Jason grew more nervous as the Valiant closed on the big full-rigged ship in the distance, then a little after noon, they sailed into position.

“Fire the forward cannon across her bow,” the captain commanded. “We’ll see if the blighter hoves to.”

Jason tensed at the roar and splash that barely missed the front of the ship, but the Starfish didn’t slow, just continued to lumber forward in its dogged attempt to escape, her captain making a courageous but futile effort to avoid the rapidly gaining barkentine.

It took several more carefully placed rounds of cannon shot before the Starfish finally ran up the white flag of surrender and the Valiant lowered its topgallant sail and began to hove alongside her.

“Have your passengers come up on deck,” Drury commanded the captain of the Starfish. “Tell them to line up along the starboard rail.”

Black Dawson watched eagerly from beside where Jason stood. “Take a look at that, mate.” A thick elbow jabbed him in the ribs. “Ye see them skirts? I been three months wi’out a taste of wagtail. Looks like me dry spell is ended.”

Jason felt suddenly sick. Even from a distance, he could see half a dozen pale-faced women standing near the starboard rail. Wordlessly, he left the bulky first mate and made his way toward the stern of the ship in search of Captain Drury.

“Your men mean to rape the women. You have to do something to stop them.”

The captain peered at him from over the top of his pipe. “You aren’t cut out for this, Hawkins. You never were. I shouldn’t have taken you on.” He turned to assess the crew, who were set to board the Starfish the moment the grappling hooks were in place and the two ships brought together.

Captain Drury pulled the pipe stem from between his teeth. “I’m sorry, lad. I may be the captain, but I can’t stop them from taking what they’ve earned. Besides, most of those women are married. A little bedsport won’t hurt them. They’ve had a man between their legs long before this.”

“It was far more than bedsport,” he told Velvet, the pain of that day washing over him in thick, aching waves. “They dragged the women down on the deck and tore off their clothes. The men who fought to defend them were sliced open with cutlass and saber, ripped from bowel to sternum then tossed overboard to feed the fish.”

Velvet made a sound in her throat. The hand that held his began to tremble. Still, he forced himself to continue, to describe the scene on the deck, a scene out of Dante’s Inferno, a scene he had begged the captain to stop, then unsuccessfully tried to stop himself. For his trouble, he wound up unconscious, lying in a pool of his own blood atop the shifting holystoned deck.

Several hours later, he awakened to the sound of bawdy laughter and raucous singing, the men drunk on the kegs of rum they had found in the hold of the Starfish.

His head throbbed, his vision blurred, but he dragged himself upright and stared out over the rail. The Starfish bobbed like a ghost ship in the rising sea, her deck completely deserted. Every man aboard had been tossed overboard, every woman used by the crew until she lay bleeding, then tossed into the water to join the men.

Standing next to the captain, a gash on his head and one along his jaw, Jason stared at the bloody deck of the Starfish, his foggy mind unable to believe what had occurred. That was when he saw her. A young girl no more than eleven or twelve, a slender, wraithlike creature with huge, frightened green eyes and long chestnut hair. Black Dawson had found her below, hiding somewhere in the belly of the Starfish, which he had just finished setting ablaze.

Now he dragged the girl triumphantly toward his shipmates, brandishing her slender form like a succulent prize, one he intended to ravage himself before passing on to the crew.

Jason started forward, fury nearly blinding him, a rage so great he could barely control it. Drury’s hand clamped like a vice on his arm.

“There’s nothing you can do.”

Jason swung on the man he had once considered a friend. “You have to stop them. She’s only a child.”

The captain shook his head. “It’s too late for that. If it’s any consolation, you were right. We shouldn’t have stopped the ship. I regret it, but what’s done is done.”

“But the girl—”

“They’ll take her, every man jack of them. Then they’ll get rid of her, just like they did the others. They’re running on bloodlust now. If you try to stop them, they’ll kill you, and the girl will still wind up dead.”

“No! You can’t just let them kill her!” Jason shook his head in utter disbelief. “She’s a child, forgodsakes. A child!” Whirling away, he started across the deck, but hard arms clamped around him from behind.

“Ya ain’t goin’, mate. The cap’n wants ya to stay alive and so ya shall.” Serge Baptiste was a mountain of a man, a big Portuguese sailor the crew called the Baptist. As big as Jason was, the Baptist was bigger. Coupled with the strength of Patsy Cullins, another stout member of the crew, they jerked his arms up behind him and forced him down to his knees on the deck.

“Her clothes were ripped off,” Jason continued in a voice that was flat and toneless. “Four of the crew held her down and Black Dawson knelt between her legs.”

Sick at the sight, he had tried to look away, off toward the building sea, but the thin blade of a shark’s fin cutting through the surface of the water did nothing to give him ease. A shrill, terrified scream brought his eyes swinging back to the girl.

He would regret the next few moments every second of his life for as long as he lived, and yet he would do it again. With a bellow of outrage, Jason wrenched an arm free of his captor’s hold, grabbed the pistol the huge sailor carried stuffed into his belt, raised the gun, and aimed it at the girl.

One shot was all he had. It wouldn’t help her to kill Black Dawson, though he itched to lay the crosshairs over the man’s thick skull—a dozen more waited to take his place. Jason aimed and fired the pistol, the sound reverberating across the deck of the ship.

“The ball hit squarely,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “I remember the way her eyes slid slowly closed. She’d been so frightened. Now her pretty face looked almost peaceful.” His voice cracked on this last. “Whatever they did to her now, at least her suffering was ended.”

“Jason…” Velvet whispered his name, but he didn’t hear her. He was remembering the way he had dropped the gun and looked away, remembering the slickness of tears sliding down his cheeks.

He didn’t care who saw them. He didn’t care if they killed him. He wished he were dead. Wished he were the one lying in the spreading pool of blood instead of the pretty little girl.

But Black Dawson only laughed, a sharp bark of mirth that went on and on and finally had the whole drunken crew falling to the deck in gales of uproarious laughter.

Miles Drury’s hand came to rest on his shoulder, but Jason jerked away.

“I’ll have you put ashore the first chance we get,” Drury said. “Your share will ensure some sort of future. Until then keep your mouth shut and stay below as much as you can. Maybe I can keep you alive until we get there.”

Jason didn’t answer. He didn’t want the captain’s blood money. He didn’t care if he lived or died. He didn’t care about anything but turning back the clock to the day he boarded the cursed ship, and God knew he could never do that.

Instead he was as cursed as the ship was, as doomed as the men aboard her. He would never forget what happened that awful day, never forgive himself for what he had done.

And he knew then as surely as he knew now, no one else who knew the terrible truth would be able to forgive him either.

Soft sobs drew his attention from the darkness of the past, a warm touch lingered against his skin, her small hand still tightly clutching his. A gentle voice whispered his name, and the sound was thick with tears, heavy with undisguised anguish. Slender arms slid around his neck, a cheek wet with tears pressed against his own, and their salty tears mingled.

“Jason…”

“Forgive me,” he whispered, knowing she never could, knowing only God could do that and he hadn’t had the courage to ask. Hadn’t felt he deserved forgiveness, even if God were good enough to grant it.

Against him, Velvet’s body shook with grief, her chest moving in and out, the muscles in her throat constricting.

But no words whispered past her lips. There was only the soft sound of her weeping. He shouldn’t have asked her, shouldn’t have pressed her for something she could not possibly give him. It only made his pain all the greater.

Something warm touched his cheek. A trembling hand tenderly cupped his face, a gentle touch, a soft caress he never thought to feel again.

“Beloved Jason. You don’t need my forgiveness. You never did. That day on the ship, you did what you thought was best. You risked your life to help her.”

“I killed her. I murdered her.”

“You saved her. You saved her the only way you knew how, and wherever she is, she knows that. I would have welcomed your bullet and so did she.”

Jason shook his head. “She was only a child. A child. She never had a chance to live.”

She pulled back to look at him, her cheeks shiny with wetness in the faint light of the candle. “What about you, Jason? You haven’t really lived a single day since that girl died.”

He didn’t answer. His throat hurt too much to speak.

“You’re only a man, Jason. Only a man. Sometimes you make mistakes, just like any other man. Sometimes you have to make choices. You made a choice that day, a terrible choice between two unthinkable, inhuman courses of action. You knew they would probably kill you, yet you chose to help that innocent young girl, to ease her suffering the only way you knew how.”

He dragged in a shaky breath of air. God, he hated for her to see him cry.

“You’re only human,” Velvet said. “God knows that. Make your peace with God, Jason. As for me, I love you even more than I did before. And I was right. You’re everything I believed you were and more.”

A painful ache rose in his chest. He turned her into his arms and crushed her against him. “Ah, God, Duchess.” His hands slid into her hair, destroying her careful coiffure, tearing the pins loose, allowing the heavy curls to tumble down her back. “I love you, Duchess. I love you so damned much.”

She was crying again. He could feel her small body shaking, but when she looked up at him, in the faint light of the candle, he could see her smile.

She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and dabbed at her eyes. “You love me. You mean it wasn’t just lust.”

“I kept hoping it was.”

The smile returned, brighter this time. She started to say something more, but the guard rapped hard on the door.

“Time to go, miss.” The key grated and the door swung wide.

Velvet’s eyes clung to his face. “The darkness can’t hurt you now, Jason. It can’t hurt you ever again. You’ve come out of the dark into the light, and the past is no more than a memory.” Her hand cupped his cheek. “Promise me you will remember. When the darkness threatens, think about the light, Jason. The light is love. Will you remember?”

He swallowed past the tightness in his throat. “I’ll remember,” he said softly.

She kissed him then, a kiss of love and tenderness, a kiss of promise and determination. Jason kissed her back with all the love, gratitude, and hope he felt in his heart. He thought that he had never known a woman like her. And that if he lived, he would never let her go.