Chapter Four

Roarke stepped out of his cabin into the chilly air. Before him, the harbor’s edge of the Breton city of Roscoff glimmered. For a full week his ship had been anchored here. He grew restless at the forced inactivity, especially knowing that the rest of the British fleet was already racing across the Atlantic Ocean.

If only the delay were due to repairs, he thought, as the tip of his rolled tobacco glowed. The mizzenmast had been replaced and new sails had already been attached to the yardarms. The cordiers of Roscoff had completed their work on the rigging. The entire hull had been fixed and then made fast with tallow, soap, and brimstone. The cause of the delay lay with the small-minded, paperbound bureaucrats of the French Admiralty.

After days of a formal inquest, where a stiffly dressed idiot asked question after question about the seizure and contents of the ships, Roarke still waited for word from the Vice Admiral about whether the Princess and the Dartmouth were legitimate prizes. Today, he visited the offices only to find that an answer had not yet arrived. With his drawn sword, he had ripped the wig off the man’s balding head and told him to have an answer tomorrow.

He needed to hunt down the rest of the British Warships. Captain Samuel Leighton of the British Navy was on route to the Caribbean in one of those ships. Roarke had seen the man with his own eyes through the long telescope of his glass. Roarke had stood on the forecastle amid two smoking prizes and waved to the murderous bastard until he was sure Leighton knew who’d inflicted the damage. Roarke liked the idea that the naval captain now felt the hot breath of retribution on the back of his neck.

But every day he spent delayed in this port was one more day he’d have to make up to catch the captain who’d killed his brother.

He tossed the glowing tobacco into the sea and listened to the sizzle as it extinguished. He could threaten the authorities that he would leave with his prizes. That would force the Vice Admiralty to either make a decision or relinquish all possibilities for profit. The thought of that bourgeois’ face reddening in anger when he discovered Roarke’s audacity almost made the risk worth taking. Unfortunately, in order for his threat to be valid he had to be fully prepared to carry through with it.

He didn’t have enough men to sail three ships across the ocean. So any threats he made would be idle.

He never made idle threats.

Roarke suddenly heard an odd sound on the ship. He stilled. The ship lay low and heavy in the water due to the weight of the extra provisions. The slow undulations of the tide slapped against her hull. The wind whistled in the rigging, and the loose edge of a sail on the mainmast flapped against the yardarm. But the sound he heard was higher and more melodious. He followed the noise until he reached the forecastle and saw that the man on watch was the little mouse of Saint-Malo.

The boy was singing in a high, thin voice. As he watched, the urchin put the lemur on the railing and held the animal’s paws as the creature danced on his hind legs. When the boy finished singing, the lemur jumped into his arms and the boy buried his face in its fur.

A weakness pierced him. This boy was too young and too soft for this life, just as his own brother had been.

Roarke considered turning away and leaving the imp to his privacy, but curiosity kept him still. The boy had a tongue as sharp as a knife and he wasn’t afraid to use it on men three times his size, yet when the boy played his Breton horn, the music often turned melancholy. When Roarke saw him reading the Bible to a dying sailor, the boy’s voice had cracked, and Roarke knew that it wasn’t solely from growing pains. And yet this boy was so quick to respond to a shift in winds that it seemed seawater flowed in his veins.

The urchin belonged on a ship and yet he didn’t belong at all. He was a puzzle Roarke couldn’t solve.

“Captain?”

The boy clutched a dagger in his hand as he braced himself atop the forecastle stairs.

“Don’t wave that thing at me,” Roarke said. “I know your aim is true.”

The figure relaxed. Roarke climbed the steps to join him.

The boy stepped back. “You’re still limping. That should be healed by now.”

“A certain surgical novice sewed it tight.”

“You made me do it.”

“So I got what I deserved.” Roarke glanced around and said, “You are the only one on watch tonight?”

The boy shrugged, a movement of his whole upper torso. “I told the other sailor to go in town. I can take care of everything.”

“You’ve had the night watch every night since we’ve anchored in Roscoff.”

“The sailors like to drink. Wine makes men stupid. I don’t want to be stupid. I’d rather be paid to sit and do nothing.”

“Bartering again.”

The boy just shrugged. Roarke wondered where the kid was keeping his stash of coins. This one was as wily in business as any portside peddler.

“There are women in port, too.” Roarke didn’t need a lantern to know the boy’s shoulders had stiffened. “Fifteen isn’t too young to have a woman, lad.”

“You aren’t with one.”

“We’ve been in this particular port too long.” He remembered, with a tightening in his loins, the evenings he’d just spent in a discreet little house with a lusty, russet-haired butcher’s wife. “I find that if I linger, a woman gets to thinking about rings and swaddling clothes.”

The boy crossed his arms. “You’ve only been with strumpets.”

“On the contrary. Strumpets tell you up front how much they cost.”

“You don’t think very highly of women.”

“And what would you know of them, lad?”

“I had a mother.”

Past tense, Roarke noted, and clearly a sensitive subject. The boy’s pet sensed the sudden tension, for he leaped from the rail to the deck and then the lemur sprung to the nearest stretch of rigging.

“You really can’t blame a woman,” the urchin said, “for trying to marry.”

“I’d like to meet a woman who could enjoy a bedding without sinking her teeth into a man like a shark on flesh.”

“But what can a woman do without a man? She can’t work on a ship. She can’t work as a shoemaker or a cordier or a blacksmith. Oh, there are some things she can do—in Saint-Malo some women weave sails—but a woman makes less than half of what a man makes for the same work.” The boy did that whole-body shrug again. “Unless a woman is born into money, she has three choices: she must marry, become a whore, or starve.”

Roarke raised his brows. He had never bothered to think too deeply about the women who came willingly to his bed. He enjoyed their bodies and made sure they received pleasure from his touch, but considering his tumultuous career, there was no possibility of any relationship beyond that. Yet with a few words from this young sailor he suddenly had an inkling that some women were as firmly trapped in the confines of a ruthless society as he had been in the British Navy, all those years ago.

It was a disturbing thought.

He let it pass.

“Quite a comment from somebody so young,” Roarke said. “You’ve crushed my suspicions that you were a bourgeois’ son who ran off for a life on the sea.”

“If I were born rich I’d not be so fool-headed as to leave a warm house and a well-stocked kitchen.”

“Not even for the opportunity to see new worlds, new peoples?”

“To risk whippings, to eat rancid meat and moldy bread? Give me a good leg of mutton and I’d give up all this adventure in a moment.”

His gaze rested on Joubert’s tangled thatch of dark hair. A well-read, deep-thinking urchin, too wise for his youth.

Strange, strange creature.

“My mother once had to make a choice.” The boy spoke while plucking at splinters on the gunwale. “My father died in a shipwreck, leaving my mother and me with nothing but debts. We were thrown out of our home. My mother had no skills, no family. No one would marry her because she was penniless and not young and pretty any more. So she…”

“She sent you to work on a ship,” he finished, so the boy wouldn’t have to speak the obvious. “When you were barely off the breast.”

“Pretty much.”

“You’re not the first boy who’s been sent to sea young. My brother Adam,” he said, rushing over the unexpected hitch in his throat, “was barely twelve when he signed onto a naval ship.”

“Was he a bourgeois’ son who ran off for a life on the sea?”

“Yes, in fact.” Why did he bring this up? He didn’t talk about Adam to anyone. “In any case, your mother should be proud. She made a fine sailor out of you.”

He tousled the boy’s hair. The boy ducked out from under his touch. Roarke didn’t know why he felt compelled to do that, but he suspected it was because he had his brother on the mind.

Adam died because of his mouthy impulsiveness.

And because of Captain Samuel Leighton.

“Captain?”

Roarke shook off his darkening thoughts. “What is it?”

“Will there be lots of riches in the Caribbean?”

The boy’s lips stumbled over the unfamiliar word. Roarke knew that the new orders had caused some grumbling among the sailors. From interrogating the English officers on his ship, he’d found out that the English fleet that had attacked Saint-Malo had been commissioned to go to the colony of Jamaica in the Caribbean Sea. Because Leighton was on one of those ships, Roarke was determined to follow.

So he said, “The Caribbean is swarming with Spanish ships loaded with gold and silver and jewels from the mines on the mainland.” That much was true. “There’ll be ships with holds full of sugar and molasses and rum, tobacco, and rice from the islands. We’ll be riding the same trade routes that the English and Spanish ships take back from their colonies. This time of year, they may not even be guarded.” Roarke noticed that the boy shifted to his side to gape. “Are you counting the legs of mutton in your head already?”

The boy reached for Chou-Chou as the lemur jumped to the deck. “So it’s riches we’re after?”

“There’ll be greater riches crossing this ocean than sitting about waiting at the mouth of the English Channel.”

“I’m asking,” the boy continued, “because there are rumors, Captain.”

He shook his head. “Pirates are always complaining.”

“They say you’re chasing the British ships not for profit, but for revenge.”

His jaw tightened. He supposed it was no secret. Many of the men he’d signed onto the ship had spent years in the Indian Ocean, and probably knew what had happened with him and his brother all those years ago. And if anyone of those sailors had heard him interrogating the English prisoners before they reached shore, they might have heard a mention of Captain Samuel Leighton.

“When they signed up,” the boy ventured into the stretching silence, “the men expected to be on a privateer that would sail through the Channel and catch English prizes. They didn’t expect to be sent halfway across the world.”

“Two days ago, I gave them a choice to take an advance for the sale of the two English frigates and leave.”

“It’s the dead of winter, Captain.”

He didn’t want to hear that truth. Surely there were still a few ships around who’d sign up new sailors despite the bad weather.

“Mind, I’ll go to Jamaica or Timbuktu,” the boy said, “so long as there’s a profit in it. But if I were captain—”

“If you were captain?”

“—I would tell the crew that tale of Spanish gold, and I’d do it real quick.”