Part 73 (1/2)

Chapter Twenty

The sun emerged from the distant edge of the sea, burning through the fine mist that hung on the horizon. Katherine was standing on the high quartergallery, by the railing at the stern, the better to savor the easterly breeze that tousled her hair and fluttered the cotton sleeves of her seaman's s.h.i.+rt. The quiet of the s.h.i.+p was all but complete, with only the rhythmic splash of waves against the bow and the occasional groan from the masts.

She loved being on deck to watch the dawn, out of the sweltering gloom of the Great Cabin. This morning, when the first light of day brightened the stern windows, she'd crept silently from their narrow bunk, leaving Hugh snoring contentedly. She'd made her way up to the quarterdeck, where John Mewes dozed beside the steering house where he was to monitor the weathered grey whipstaff, lashed secure on a course due west.

Now she gazed out over the swells, past the occasional white-caps that dotted the blue, and tasted the cool, moist air. During the voyage she had learned how to read the cast of the sea, the sometimes fickle Caribbean winds, the hidden portent in the color of clouds and sun.

She'd even begun practicing how to take lat.i.tude with the quadrant.

Suddenly a porpoise surfaced along the stern, then another, and together they began to pirouette in the wake of the s.h.i.+p like spirited colts. Was there any place else in the world, she wondered, quite like the Caribbean? She never tired of watching for the schools of flying fish that would burst from the sea's surface like flushed grouse, seemingly in chase of the great barracuda that sometimes flashed past the bow. And near the smaller islands, where shallow reefs turned the coastal waters azure, she had seen giant sea turtles, green leatherbacks and rusty-brown loggerheads, big as tubs and floating languorously on the surface.

The wildness of the islands and sea had begun to purge her mind, her memory. Fresh mornings like this had come to seem harbingers of a new life as well as a new day, even as the quick, golden-hued sunsets promised Hugh's warm embrace.

After Barbados they'd made sail for Nevis Island, and as they neared the small log-and-clapboard English settlement along its southern sh.o.r.e, the skies had finally become crystalline and dry, heralding the end of the autumn rainy season. They lingered in the island's reef- bound harbor almost three weeks while Winston careened the _Defiance_ and stripped away her barnacles, scorched the lower planks with burning branches to kill s.h.i.+pworm, then caulked all her leaky seams with hemp and pitch. Finally he'd laded in extra barrels of salt beef, biscuit, and fresh water. They were all but ready to weigh anchor the day a Dutch merchantman put in with word that the Commonwealth fleet had begun preparations to depart Barbados.

Why so soon, they puzzled. Where were Cromwell's wars.h.i.+ps bound for now?

Wherever the fleet's next destination, it scarcely mattered. The American rebellion was finished. After word spread through Nevis and St. Christopher that Barbados had capitulated, all the planters' talk of defiance evaporated. If the largest English settlement in the Americas could not stand firm, they reasoned, what chance did the small ones have? A letter pledging fealty to Commons was dispatched to the fleet by the a.s.sembly of those two sister islands. That step taken, they hoped Calvert would bypa.s.s them with his hungry army and sail directly for Virginia, whose bl.u.s.tering royalists everyone now expected to also yield without a murmur.

Still, after news came that the troops were readying to move out, Katherine had agreed with Winston that they shouldn't chance being surprised at Nevis. Who could tell when the Commonwealth's wars.h.i.+ps might suddenly show themselves on the southern horizon? The next morning they weighed anchor, heading north for the first two hundred leagues, then steering due west. That had been six days ago. . . .

”You're lookin' lovely this morning, m'lady.” John Mewes' groggy voice broke the silence as he started awake, then rose and stretched and ambled across the quarterdeck toward the bannister where she stood.

”I'd say there she is, sure as I'm a Christian.” He was pointing south, in the direction of the dim horizon, where a grey-green land ma.s.s had emerged above the dark waters. ”The pride of the Spaniards.”

”What is it, John?”

”Why, that's apt to be none other than Hispaniola, Yor Ladys.h.i.+p. Plain as a pikestaff. An' right on schedule.” He bellied against the bannister and yawned. ”Doesn't look to have budged an inch since last I set eyes on her.”

She smiled. ”Then that must mean we're nearing Tortuga. By the map, I remember it's just off the north coast, around lat.i.tude twenty.”

”Aye, we'll likely be raisin' the old 'Turtle' any time now. Though in truth I'd as soon ne'er see the place again.”

”Why do you say that?”

”'Tis home and hearth of the finest a.s.sembly of thieves as you're e'er like to cross this side of Newgate prison. An' that's the fact of the matter.”

”Are you trying to make me believe you've actually been there, John?”

She regarded him carefully. John Mewes, she had come to realize, was never at a loss for a story to share--though his distinction between truth and fancy was often imprecise.

”Aye,'twas some years past, as the sayin' goes. When the merchantman I was quartermaster on put in for a week to careen.” He spat into the sea and hitched up the belt on his breeches.

”What exactly was it like?”

”A brig out of Portsmouth. A beamy two master, with d.a.m.n'd seams that'd opened on us wide as a Dutch wh.o.r.e's cunny--beggin' Yor Ladys.h.i.+p's pardon--which is why we had to put in to caulk her . . .”

”Tortuga, John.”

”Aye, the Turtle. Like I was sayin', she's the Sodom of the Indies, make no mistake. Fair enough from afar, I grant you, but try and put in, an' you'll find out soon enough she's natural home for the rogue who'd as soon do without uninvited company. That's why that nest of pirates has been there so long right under the very nose of the pox- rotted Spaniards. Mind you, she's scarcely more than twenty or thirty miles tip to tip, but the north side's a solid cliff, lookin' down on the breakers, whilst the other's just about nothing save shallow flats an' mangrove thickets. There's only one bay where you can put in with a frigate, a spot called Ba.s.se Terre, there on the south--that is, if you can steer through the reefs that line both sides of the channel goin'