Page 54

“Should I, perhaps, whisper a word in his ear about our unexpected guests?” Carleill inquired.

“And spoil a happy reunion for two members of the brotherhood?” Drake smiled tightly. “I think not. I think I prefer to let them both surprise each other. It will make for a much more interesting evening.”

Victor Bloodstone was tall enough, it behoved him to bend his head to clear the low-slung lintel across the doorway.

He was impeccably dressed, as always, wearing a chocolate-brown velvet doublet with satin inserts, and skin-tight hose that needed no padding around the hips to distract the eye from any flaws.

Rings glittered on every finger-emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds mounted on thick gold bands.

He wore a starched white neck ruff from which depended several long gold chains in varying styles of links.

Around his waist he wore a gold-hilted dress sword and a dagger encrusted with bloodred rubies.

Cool hazel eyes surveyed the roomful of ship’s masters.

There was not one his equal, with the possible exception of Drake himself.

He was disappointed, on the one hand, not to find himself in the austere company of Frobisher, Raleigh, or Hawkyns.

On the other, there was little by way of competition.

None of these petty privateers had done more than plunder a few small fishing pinnaces or sack a village or two along the coast of Spain.

Penny thieves, the lot of them, hunting for their first real taste of fame.

Fame that he, Victor Bloodstone, already had.

As if it had happened yesterday, he could taste the sweet triumph of sailing the Talon into London.

Watchers had sighted her from quite a distance out and sent runners through the city, sounding the alert.

Shops and houses alike had emptied, the men and women spilling onto the docks in a great, boisterous crowd.

The Talon’s flags had been up, signaling a full hold, and because everyone who could walk, talk, or piss upright was aware, by then, of what her mission had been, the quayside had been so congested, there were bodies tipping off the edge and splashing into the sea.

The Talon and her master had been greeted, then swarmed, by a fleet of fishing boats and small harbor craft.

They had acted like a bobbing, cheering escort up the Thames, their crews bartering and bickering to win bids for haulage.

Coins had flashed through the air like water droplets from a fountain, for the Talon’s crewmen had been just as eager to have ready transport for their personal bounty, hoping to keep it safe from the prying eyes of the Queen’s excise men.

Those sharp-nosed, keen-eyed vultures had lost no time hastening to the docks either.

It was up to them, caped in somber black like birds of prey, to make a fair accounting of any plunder taken in the Queen’s name.

If they were quick enough on board, they could almost get an honest tally.

If they were delayed, they could hear the pocketfuls of coin and jewels walking off the ships and marvel at the remarkably rotund girth of some of the sailors who had lived months at sea on rations of salted fish and biscuits.

The Talon had not disappointed anyone. The crates of gold and silver bullion taken from her hold had staggered all but the most seasoned of the Queen’s men—God only knew what their reaction would have been had they known he had stopped off first to unload half of her bounty into his private cache.

As it was, great roars had risen from the crowds each time a group of heroic sailors had disembarked, the greatest of all coming when Victor had appeared on deck.

He had stood in the last of the afternoon’s golden rays, his handsome face bronzed, his sand-colored hair streaked blond from exposure to the sun and salt air.

Large hazel eyes, sensually hooded and long lashed, had sent many a gawping female swooning.

He had looked magnificent. He had looked like a man who had defied all odds and sailed halfway across the world to raid the King’s treasure depot.

Some of the hopefuls had continued to scan the watery horizon for a glimpse of the Virago and her dashing captain, Dante de Tourville.

Bloodstone had known, the day they sailed out of port, that no one predicted their success in Veracruz.

But Victor had gambled on Dante de Tourville’s star riding high, and, by Christ, it had risen clear to the heavens.

They had taken nearly four hundred thousand ducats out of the treasure house—a hundred thousand English pounds, and if not for the storm that had hammered them in the Atlantic, they would have escaped cleanly away.

Of course, if it hadn’t been for the storm and the damage to Dante’s ship, the opportunity would not have been handed to him to double his profits, double his fame, double his pleasure in watching the Spanish zabras send the bastard to hell where he belonged.

Arrogant bloody Frenchman, always giving orders, always telling him the way it was going to be, always looking at him with those cold blue eyes, flaunting his noble blood.

He probably hadn’t looked very noble screaming for his last breath, his mouth and lungs filling with water, his ship spiraling to the sea floor beneath him.

When word spread that the pirate wolf was dead, there was another rippling wave of swooning women and men with downcast eyes, for despite the exorbitant wagers against success, many had gathered in London, anticipating the privateers’ return.

Most had stared, stunned, at the Talon , finding it difficult, if not impossible, to believe the infamous Virago , her captain, and crew were gone.

Elizabeth had scarcely believed it either.

She had summoned Bloodstone into her presence immediately and demanded to hear every last detail of the raid and the ensuing battle with the zabras.

She had questioned him so closely, he began to suspect she was searching for some false note in his reporting of the events, which was why, in the end, he had made the Frenchman out to be a hero and a martyr.

Moreover, he had done such a splendid job, she had wept—actually wept!

—over the loss of the rogue. And Walsingham, the same bastard who had once slapped him halfway across a room for daring to call him “father,” had swelled with pride and dared to call him son.

He had called for the first toast and nearly wept into his cups when the Queen had rewarded Bloodstone with two fat estates in Devon.

It wasn’t the knighthood he wanted, but that would come.

It was sure to come if he stayed close enough on Drake’s heels.

Victor was smiling now as he nodded and accepted the respectful greetings of the other captains.

“You heard he took the San Pedro de Marcos?”

“What’s that you say?” Victor’s sandy eyebrows came together in a sharply demarked bridge over his nose as he caught a snatch of conversation between two captains nearby. “Who took the San Pedro? When?”

“Captain Jonas Spence. He is the reason we have been stopped here and summoned for a council. It seems he found some interesting intelligence on board the San Pedro —interesting enough to have Drake hobbling about on three legs, if you catch my meaning.”

Bloodstone disdained the crudity with a slight curling of his lip. “This … Jonas Spence. Does anyone know him?”

In the brief consultations that followed, no one seemed to be acquainted with the privateer personally but everyone had heard the buzz that his daughter was none other than the Black Swan.

“The cartographer? A woman, you say? ”

“Ugly as the name implies, I am told, but possessed of a skilled hand, nonetheless.”

“And his ship? The Egret ? Equally ugly,” avowed another voice. “I am anchored off her beam and must say, I find the notion of her taking on a Spanish carrack to be almost fantastic.”

“What do you think she would carry? Ten or twelve culverins at best?”

“Closer to twenty,” said the same knowledgeable neighbor. “And she’s carrying demis. Big bronze teeth … exactly like your own, Captain Bloodstone.”

The stony gaze raked over the speaker but the response came from Bloodstone’s second, Horace Lamprey, an ugly brute with vicious eyes and a lip half missing.

“I hardly think a mere merchant’s guns could be exactly like Captain Bloodstone’s.

The Talon’s demis were acquired by special custom through Dante de Tourville, and there are none other like them in the world”

The captain who had made the comment met Lamprey’s sneer. “I could swear they are similar—scrolled snouts with eagles on the barrels?”

“Impossible,” Bloodstone decreed irately. “The only other guns like mine went down with the Virago”

“Which, of course, you say you saw go under.”

Victor turned his head to acknowledge the bemused voice behind him and saw Drake, standing by a small chart table, a glass of brandy poised at his lips.

“I saw her surrounded,” Bloodstone said carefully, “staggering under full cannonades from six India guards. With the damage my own ship had sustained in the fighting, I could not risk another pass to see if the last board did, indeed, go under, but I daresay no ship could have survived such a pounding as I bore witness to. I wish, with every fiber of my being, that the Virago , her courageous captain, and crew could have survived, but I know in my heart they did not.”

Drake smiled and his bright hawk’s eyes looked past Bloodstone’s shoulder, fixing themselves on the shadows outside the cabin door.

“Wish for something too devoutly, too passionately, Captain Bloodstone,” he murmured, “and it might surprise you by coming true.”

One by one the captains turned to stare at the door.

Voices tailed away and conversations ended on unfinished words and half-formed thoughts.

Those unaccustomed to seeing tall, black-haired ghosts with white, wolfish smiles felt the need to vent a hastily muttered expletive before they, too, fell back and stared.

Victor Bloodstone turned slowly on his polished heel.

At first, he saw nothing ominous in the burly, bald-headed captain who beamed a nervous greeting through the frothed red fuzz of his beard.

But then a cold chill of foreboding swept down his spine and his eyes followed a line of shadow to where a dark, gleaming ebony head was just straightening from having to duck to clear the lintel.

A moment later a breathless, choking, constricting moment later, he found himself staring into the iced, cobalt-blue eyes of the supposedly dead and departed Simon Dante, Comte de Tourville.