Chapter Five

Roarke sat in his cabin calculating latitude from the measurements he had made the previous evening. A month had passed since they had left the harbor at Roscoff. He expected to reach the Americas, if nothing went wrong, in six to eight weeks. He leaned back in his wooden chair and stared out the wide stern windows at the rolling sea.

The sound of edgy laughter filtered through the walls, followed by the high, angry voice of the boy. The inhuman scream of the lemur rose above it all.

He sighed. He had tried over the past week to keep the sailors so busy that they had no time to think of mischief, especially mischief against the ship’s mouse. It had started at the baptism ceremony as they passed the Raz de Fonteneau. The boy’s objections that he had already sailed past this end of Brittany twice had been ignored. While the ship churned in the swift currents, the master’s mate dressed in a ragged cloak and knighted the boy with a wooden sword. Then, each of five score and ten sailors doused the boy with buckets of seawater. The tarred leather jerkin that hung from the boy’s neck to his knees was useless against the frigid waterfall.

Roarke caught a whiff of vengeance in all this. After the drums had beat for the departure of this ship from Roscoff last month, thirteen sailors still had not reported on deck. So Roarke delayed departure in order to scour the waterfront for his delinquent seamen. He found them cowering in sundry taverns and inns. Dragging them through the bustling streets, he forced them onto the ship and imprisoned them in the dank hold of the ship until they were too far to swim to shore. Roarke suspected they blamed the boy for their discovery, since ship’s mouse had been the only one on the ship the night before.

Now the urchin’s voice rose to a pitch he didn’t think any boy could reach. He supposed he should go on deck and see what the fuss was about. The storms of the North Atlantic had kept the sailors busy, but they were far behind them now. Caught by the balmy trade winds that would sweep them to the Caribbean, the sailors had too much time on their hands.

Hauling himself out of his seat, he walked out of the cabin, through the separate officer’s dining room, and onto the upper deck. He squinted against the blinding noonday sun.

Suspended in midair by the Welsh sailor, Joubert struggled like a sailor possessed by bad rum.

“Sayer,” Roarke barked. “What’s going on here?”

“Just having some fun, Captain.”

Roarke glanced at the lemur tied up by the mainmast, baring his teeth and breathing hard. “I thought someone was being tortured.”

Sayer dropped the struggling boy to the deck and Roarke heard the breath whoosh out of him.

“Torture, it was.” The imp struggled to his feet. “They were going to throw me into the sea.”

“We were talking about it, sir,” the Welshman admitted, “but we wouldn’t have done it.”

“You held me over the side, you round-bellied whor—”

“We just wanted to give the stinking whelp a bath, Captain.” The Welshman gripped the boy and held him at arm’s length. “He stinks like the devil.”

Roarke couldn’t deny the obvious. The boy’s only concession to the heat this week was to remove his tarred leather jerkin. He still wore his full-bottomed breeches and an oversized linen shirt. Roarke could smell the boy from where he was standing, several paces away.

With the mood among the sailors so black since they left Roscoff, he was of a mind to let them have this fun, if only for the boy’s unwitting benefit.

“Lieutenant.” Roarke squinted up at Drake watching the drama from the quarterdeck. “Any words?”

“A scrubbing,” Drake said, with a twinkle in his eye, “never did anyone any harm.”

Perhaps Drake was the wrong man to ask. During the Atlantic storms, the terrified lemur had bit and torn through anything he could get his teeth into—including several sailors and one of Drake’s best waistcoats.

Roarke said, “Come here, Joubert.”

“No.”

Stupidly defiant, as always. The boy still struggled under Gwynn’s meaty grip. The urchin should know that it’d go easier if he just submitted to the inevitable. But the boy’s pert, impish face crumpled in frustration and something else. Roarke couldn’t be sure, but it looked a lot like panic.

Well, he knew this urchin wouldn’t be the first sailor to be terrified of drowning.

“Give him a scrubbing,” he ordered the Welshman. “But don’t throw him into the sea. Am I understood?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. As he headed up the forecastle stairs, he heard a rush of footsteps and the Welshman’s triumphant laughter. As the first pail of water crashed against the footboards, the boy cried out.

“Captain!”

His voice was so desperate that it made him pause. He turned to find the boy racing toward him with the crew in pursuit.

“Captain, please—”

His words were lost in a gurgle as a second and then a third pail was emptied over his head. The seawater sprayed on Roarke’s legs. Undaunted by the proximity of the captain, the crew gathered in a clump behind the boy and lifted their pails in the air. They baptized him, one pail after another, until the boy was driven to his knees at the bottom of the forecastle steps. The urchin struggled to lift his head, sputtering captain, captain.

Roarke frowned. He had battled men with knife and cutlass and saw the terror in their faces when they knew they were outmanned. He’d stood on the deck of a ship under attack among sailors who knew that at any moment a cannonball or a sliver of broken wood could put an end to their lives. It disappointed him to see that terror on the boy’s face now. He’d thought the boy had more courage.

And yet the urchin’s fear was so palpable that he felt an unwitting sympathy.

The pails of water kept coming. The urchin’s filthy clothes sagged on his body. His linen shirt slipped off one narrow shoulder. The boy crossed his arms in front of him and bowed low, but not so low that Roarke did not suddenly notice the way the linen clung, showing pale skin beneath and two dark, peaked areolas.

Realization was a bright light exploding in his mind.