Page 34

Dante’s eyes narrowed. “I can assure you the Queen will claim the first bloody thrust once she is apprised of how he came to sail so gloriously up the River Thames, his holds bulging with my silver and gold.

She abhors treachery in her Court almost as much as she abhors the thought of marriage and having to share her crown with a man.

“As for Walsingham, he takes pride in his web of spies and puts great store in the accuracy of the information he receives from his hundreds of little moles. No doubt Victor has already dazzled his uncle and the Queen both, by reporting the contents of the letters we took from Veracruz, but since I was the only one with any skill in translating, he would only have been able to base his reports on what I shared with him.”

“Which was not the complete truth,” she surmised with grudging admiration.

“‘It is the nature of every man to err, but only the fool who perseveres in error,’” he quoted. “Cicero, I believe. At any rate, I made an error once in trusting someone completely and paid for my mistake dearly. ”

Beau saw the muscle shiver in his cheek again and she recalled what Spence had said about his wife.

“But what if it isn’t enough?” she asked quietly. “What if a duchess and a few documents are not enough to convince the Queen that the death you plan for Bloodstone is not simply a vengeful, cold-blooded murder?”

“If it isn’t, I suppose I shall have to pray the executioner’s blade is sharp when it kisses my neck, for I plan to kill the bastard anyway.”

Beau found herself staring into eyes that were as cold as ice and she felt a shiver down her spine.

Impossible though she would have thought it, the gleam intensified and a moment later, he was grinning.

“On the other hand, I may have found just what we both need to keep our necks and our prize monies intact.”

He drained his cup and set it on the desk, then reached for one of the thickly rolled charts he had brought to the cabin with him.

He unrolled the sheets—there were three—and weighted the corners with gold goblets.

Beau craned her neck slightly to see over the shadows, a needless exercise as Dante was quick to beckon her over anyway.

“Philip of Spain has been bragging,” he said, stepping aside to give her a full view.

Beau looked down and for a few moments it was not exactly clear what she was seeing. Ships, certainly. A painted forest of masts and great gilded sterns lying regally at anchor in some unidentified port.

Seeing her frown, Dante slid a blunt-ended finger across the bottom of the vellum, drawing her eye to the artist’s signature. The name meant nothing to her, but the date beside it was very specific.

“This is … April, is it not?” she said hesitantly. “Unless … ”

“No, you haven’t been at sea that long, and neither have I.”

He moved two of the goblets he was using as weights and let the top painting curl back into a roll. There was another beneath, of more masts, more ships in a much larger harbor, and again she read the script, aloud this time.

“Maius —May— anno 1587.”

“The first port I am not familiar with, but this one—” the pewter eyes glanced from Beau to Spence— “is Cadiz.”

“Cadiz?” Jonas queried. “Why the devil—?”

“The King is showing off his fleet preparations,” Beau said in awe. “He is showing off his armada.”

Dante grinned again. “I told you, you were going to have stop doing that: being so clever.”

“But …” She looked down at the paintings. “How can you be certain these are accurate depictions? How can you be certain it isn’t just braggadocio and wishful thinking?”

Dante gazed at her a moment, then ran the tip of his finger along the soft auburn wisps of hair that curled against her neck.

I know because of these. They’re standing on end.

And because of these—” He reached into the crate again and withdrew a thin sheaf of papers.

They had been heavily waxed and sealed with the imprint of the King’s ambassador in Veracruz.

With fresh wine shimmering in his cup, he pulled a chair under the lamplight and began skimming the pages, translating from the Spanish as he read small excerpts that might interest his audience.

“‘Like hawks they came out of nowhere, struck, and flew away again in the night, with Satan himself blowing in their wings. We are told the attack was led by the French dog,’” He paused in his reading and scowled.

“Dog? When was I demoted from a wolf to a dog? At any rate, ‘… the attack was led by the French dog De Tourville, wi th some measurable success, which, I regret to inform Your Most Royal Highness, bears a loss to the treasury of some five hundred thousand ducats.’” Dante stopped again.

“The thieving rogue. It was no more than four, by God, although he has put the reward for my head up to fifteen thousand ducats. Five thousand more and I’ll be worth as much as your hero, Sir Francis Drake. ”

“Fifteen thousand is tempting enough,” she said wryly. “Believe me.”

He swallowed a mouthful of wine and lifted the papers again. “Then there is this.”

“What?”

“I don’t quite know; it’s in code.”

“Then how do you know it’s important?”

“Why else would it be in code?”

Beau resisted the urge to curse and instead snatched a sheet of paper out of his hand and scanned it quickly. “It looks like perfectly innocent writing to me.”

“You read Spanish?”

“I can read charts and currents, and this —” she stabbed a finger at the document— “looks like nothing more ominous than weather reports.”

“Which is precisely what they are. Weather reports, harvest predictions, wind movements…”

“How dreadfully foreboding.”

He took another sip of wine and lounged back in the chair.

The black silk of his shirt trapped small puddles of yellow light from overhead and made him look as if he had been gilded.

Beau, who could still feel the line his finger had drawn on her neck, tried very hard not to notice how his shirts never quite seemed to be laced to the throat.

She failed miserably and found herself staring at the muscular V of his chest with its dark, smooth mat of hair, so lush and thick, it made her want to bury her hands in it .

“Before we reached Veracruz,” he was saying, “we had occasion to prime our guns on a Spaniard just off Barbados. There were dispatches on board from the King to Diego Flores, the governor of Panama. They were also filled with weather reports and harvest predictions and I did not think too much of it at the time … until Victor Bloodstone—” he spat the name with, if it was possible, even more venom than before—“ advised me, through knowledge of his uncle’s dealings with spies and so forth, that Philip of Spain has a penchant for putting all of his important correspondence in code. ”

“Harvests and such?” Jonas guessed, wanting back into the conversation.

Dante nodded. “I’ve a dozen like this in the papers we took from Veracruz, and there are twice as many more on the San Pedro.

I had nothing much to do while we drifted at sea for two weeks, so most of mine are translated.

If there is a code there, I have not found it yet.

A fresh pair of eyes might help, though, if you had someone on board who could read Spanish and perhaps see something I missed. ”

“Spit,” Beau said.

Dante’s dark head came around again with a frown. “I fail to see how that would help.”

“Spit McCutcheon,” she explained on an exasperated sigh. “He reads and writes Spanish. Latin as well. He was a church cleric at one time.”

“A minister of the Lord?”

“Try his patience sometime and you will have him spouting psalms.”

“From the pulpit to a gunport is still an interesting leap for the imagination to take.”

“So is the one from a French chateau to the deck of a pirate ship.”

A smile was startled into his eyes, and a moment later it turned into quiet laughter, directed as much at himself as at anything she had said.

“Touché, mam’selle. Rarely have I been called a pompous goat with such delicious finesse.”

Spence laughed as well and clapped his hand to his thigh to call for another toast. “Paintings be damned! Spain be damned! Philip an’ all his blatherin’ papists be damned!

Come here, the pair o’ ye, an’ take my hand.

Captain! Ye already know what I think o ‘yer skill on the seas; there’s naught I could say to add to it, save that I was honored to share a deck with ye today.

An’, Beau! I’m not forgettin’ I’ve got the finest damned helmsman a sailor could ever want guidin’ the keel!

I’m that proud o’ ye, Isabeau Daria Spence.

Proud enough to burst the heart clear out o’ my chest! ”

Beau stared stupidly at her hand as Spence took it and sandwiched it with Dante’s between his own huge paws. She felt a thrill of light-headedness and pride, being praised by the father she loved above all else and toasted by a man who regularly scorned danger and cast his destiny to the wind.

Her gaze drifted upward to Dante de Tourville. He’d asked her what had brought her to this point in her life, if she had any regrets that she was not sitting by a hearth wearing silk frocks and sipping chocolate out of tiny porcelain cups.

For the past eight years she had been sipping life and living adventures those safe at home could not even imagine.

She’d had salt spray, not rice powder, dusted on her cheeks, and instead of sitting cozy by a fire, she had climbed to the top of the mainmast and gazed out across a moonlit sea, standing close enough to the heavens to reach out and snatch at a handful of stars.

Was there anything anywhere half as beautiful as a molten sea at sunrise or half as intoxicating as the smell of a spice-laden breeze off a tropical island?

She had swum in the crystal-blue waters off Tortuga, and she had chipped ice off a floe near Greenland.

She had made friends with Indians in the New World and enemies with gunners on board Spanish galleons.

She had shared the camaraderie and the danger, the excitement as well as the fear.

And she had been kissed, for whatever reason, by a pirate wolf who would not have passed her a second look had she been sipping chocolate beside the Queen.

A round of laughter intruded on the magic of the moment and she realized, with an odd sense of detachment, that Jonas was no longer holding her hand in Dante’s; it was staying there of its own accord.

The long, tapered fingers were closed lightly around hers, cradling her in the warmth of his palm, caressing her with an intimacy that sent a fierce rush of heat spiraling through her body.

Her breasts blossomed with it, her belly shimmered with it, and her blood raced until the heat became as intoxicating as the wine.

She was aware Dante’s eyes had not left her face, but she resisted the compelling urge to meet them.

The penetrating silver-blue was always dangerous, never more so than now as they challenged her to acknowledge something he already suspected: that she wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be, wasn’t as independent, as sure of herself, as indifferent to the feelings she tried so hard to guard against revealing.

He could see that Spence’s praise had set her emotions in a turmoil; was he wondering how deep and how far that turmoil extended?

Beau withdrew her hand and curled it tightly by her side. Jonas was offering another toast to God knew what and calling for a fresh bottle of wine .

“No more for me,” she said quickly. “My head is already spinning in circles. I think I will bid you both good-night.”

Jonas belched, his nose red as paint, and tried to focus on Beau’s face. “Are the watches set an’ armed? We’re twenty feet from an enemy ship an’ we’d not want to be caught with our cods open an’ our pissers hangin’ out.”

It took a second or two for Beau to redirect her thoughts, to concentrate on something as practical as watches and the safety of the ship and crew, but she was thankful for the cold, hard sense required to form an answer.

“Lewis has the deck until midnight, then Hubbard, and Simmonds for the ghost watch, all with full crews.”

“Aye.” The bald head wobbled slightly on its barrel neck. “Keen eyes on all o’ them. We can sleep sound tonight.”

She risked another glance at Dante, but he had moved out of the circle of light and had his back turned while he opened another bottle of wine.

“Good night, Captain Dante.”

“Dormez-vous bien , Isabeau, et revez du plaisir.”