Chapter Twenty-Eight

Adriana leaned against the wall of the jail and pulled her sweat-soaked shift away from her chest. Leighton had imprisoned her in a cell on the land-side of the fort, thus no sea breezes sifted through the barred window or winnowed through the ill-fitting logs of the Colleton Bastion. Instead, the foul, noxious swamp fumes filled the small room.

She pulled her shift higher, exposing her limbs to whoever cared to glance through the slit in the door. The dirty cotton hung loosely from her shoulders after two weeks of poor rations.

She’d slept in worse places before. She’d gone hungry before. She’d eaten worse food, too. What she couldn’t bear were two weeks starved of information from the outside world. Her only human contact was the jail keeper who arrived once a day to deliver her rations. He took her old tray and slipped the new one through the opening at the bottom of the door, then rushed out of the bastion each time she addressed him. The only thing she knew for sure, from the fragments of whispers she caught as people passed below the window of her cell, was that smallpox was sweeping through Charles Town again.

She buried the heels of her hands into her eyes to stop her thoughts from spinning. Always, always, her heart whispered, Roarke.

When she heard the scrape of the bastion’s outer door opening, she shot to her feet. She saw the scarlet cloak of Captain Leighton as the door swung open.

He looked her up and down from over the lace edge of the linen pressed to his nose. “Wallowing like a pig in your own refuse, I see.”

She couldn’t help herself. “You, of course, would be familiar with the stench.”

“I see your condition hasn’t humbled you.”

“Was that your intent, Leighton? To humble a woman?”

“I don’t treat traitors with any preference, even if they happen to be of the gentler sex.”

“To an innocent woman imprisoned for a crime she did not commit, shame falls upon her captors.”

“As a pirate’s wench, you clearly don’t understand the way our justice works.”

“The way your justice works.”

“I am an English naval captain on English land,” he snapped. “I am justice.”

She curled her hands into fists until her long, jagged fingernails bit into the skin of her palms. She couldn’t refute that he spoke the truth. Half the pirates she’d known in her life had once been members of the British Navy. They bore the scars of the justice meted out by men like the one standing before her. They’d escaped and become outlaws rather than live under that tyranny.

Now she was trapped within it.

“English law,” she said, “doesn’t prevent me from having visitors, or obtaining counsel for my defense.” She jerked a chin toward the door, behind which the jail keeper lurked. “Yet when I request what any prisoner deserves, my jailor acts as if I have smallpox, and that I can transmit it with a single word.”

“Perhaps you can spread the disease. Everyone knows that you have enjoyed carnal delights with a smallpox victim.”

Victim.

She caught her own gasp. She had been waiting for word—any word at all. Roarke had been feverish when she’d left him, a certain sign of the start of the disease. If Roarke had recovered, Leighton would have arrested him and then gleefully informed her. Since she’d heard no word, she’d assumed that Roarke was still suffering in her home with Joachim, who’d already had smallpox, and Etienne, who had not.

Victim.

“Ah,” Leighton said, drawing out the word. “I was beginning to think you were incapable of shame.”

She could not speak though words gathered pressure in her throat. She batted away mosquitos and told herself that Roarke was not dead. Leighton’s silence on the matter was his twisted way of making her think so.

“Maybe now you understand,” he said, “that my importance in Charles Town is not imaginary. You’ll know it in truth when you sit in the court of Vice Admiralty for your trial.”

The word trial needled through her thickening cloud of worry. Intellectually, she knew what he had just said should make her knees quake, but right now it had no more effect than the pinch of a bug bite.

“What charges,” she asked, “did you create to convince the governor to put me to trial?”

“I didn’t have to create any, my dear.” He wandered further away from her slop bucket and more toward the window. “A factor by the name of Elsworth supplied enough information to charge you with a great deal of criminal behavior.”

Of course. Elsworth had hated his dependence upon her from the very first day. With a little encouragement, he probably happily supplied false documents to implicate her in some forbidden-on-paper business with pirates. Her imprisonment meant he would be free of his debt to her.

Leighton said, “I see you do not deny my charges.”

“I do deny them.” They meant nothing to her while her mind loped and twisted and flexed, trying to justify the word victim in any way but the most obvious. “I did all my business through Elsworth, forbidden as I am to do it myself, as a woman and French. If he incriminates me, he incriminates himself.”

“His name is not on those papers.”

“There’s the proof of falsification. He is a man of known questionable character.”

“As are you, my dear.”

He gave her an oily, condescending smile. She hated that smile. She hated this man. She hated that he held back the news she most wanted to hear. She could see in his eyes that he was waiting for her to ask. To beg was to cede to him the power that he wanted most to hold over her. To ask was to invite the answer she feared.

She had a single advantage over him and so she used it. “You are unfamiliar with this colony, aren’t you, Captain Leighton?”

“It is full of good British subjects who will bow to the laws of King William III.”

“Indeed, you are quite new to the Carolinas.”

Annoyance rippled across his face. “I assure you, the Vice Admiralty court follows English law.”

“But the men who sit upon it are Carolinians.” She lifted one brow. “Nicholas Trott will be the man whose duty it will be to prosecute me, yes?”

“Your questionable charms cannot blind a man to the law.”

“My charms, as you put it, won’t be necessary.” She shrugged a shoulder and the loose sleeve slipped off and fell against her upper arm. “There has never been a piracy conviction in Charles Town. Never. Despite all of England’s attempts to have the Jamaican piracy laws enforced here, the Carolina Assembly has never put those suggestions into law—”

“I’m here to change that.”

“And you think that the first pirate conviction from their court will be against a helpless woman?”

She settled her face into a mask of innocent docility and watched the way he breathed through the linen, a slow but furious intake of breath. His free hand curled into a fist by his side.

“Most harlots can play the innocent, when it serves them,” he said. “Play if you must, it’ll serve my purpose all the same.”

“Come, come. You know my friends will see me released before the trial date is ever set.”

“Your friends have abandoned you.” Leighton turned on one heel and strode toward the door. “You’ve been shunned like a leper in your own town.”

“There is one man who will never abandon me—”

“Your pirate lover?”

Her heart stopped. A strange pressure filled her head. Black spots began to wink before her eyes.

“He left you to rot in this prison.” Leighton turned on her at the cell door with a light gleaming in his eye. “He abandoned you and your charms on the day he escaped quarantine.”

She heard one word.

Escaped.

Her voice rushed out, “He’s alive?”

Leighton’s smile dimmed. “Yes, he’s alive, from what my men could see by the tails of his shirt flapping.”

She fell to her knees to the slimy stone floor with a force that drew blood and would leave bruises.

He’s alive.

“Mark me, woman. I haven’t lost my prize yet.” He bared his teeth as he spoke. “You’d better pray he comes sniffing back for you. If he doesn’t, you’ll soon swing on a scaffold in his place.”