Page 15

A day or so later, when the wind was strong and the sun high, Chow forced himself to seek out Captain Boukman.

It was not for his own sake, he told himself.

It was for the captain’s good that they have a talk.

A good, honest one, like they used to have years ago, when the war with Napoleon had distracted all the navies and the Ghost had easily struck fear into every slaver’s heart.

Before these strange moods had started overtaking the captain and nothing the crew said could please him.

Captain Boukman was in his cabin, eating a ration of salt pork, hard biscuit, and a bruised apple as he wrote in the logbook. He greeted Chow with a distracted wave. “We’ll need more supplies when we put in at Ponta Delgada.”

“Aye,” Chow agreed. “Fruit especially. Last time, I found a man who sold me barrels of the sweetest oranges. I’m hoping he’ll be amenable again.” The truth was that Chow had paid a premium for those oranges, but they had lasted weeks and put a smile on the lips of every man who had tasted them.

“Gunpowder especially,” Captain Boukman corrected. “We have only a quarter of the supply we should.”

A good entrée into what Chow had wanted to discuss. He found himself waiting, anyhow, because the truth was he didn’t want to find out how the captain was going to react.

But this was all for the captain’s good. For the crew’s good. Someone had to have this conversation, and it might as well be Chow. “The Trojan Horse always uses up our supply. This one, in particular. Took us a while to subdue that flagship.”

Boukman looked up, danger lurking in his eyes. “We took it, didn’t we?”

“Fearsome Fred wishes he had been on the longboat. He wanted to see the whites of the eyes of the men he was fighting.”

“Did he now?” Captain Boukman took a swig from his bottle of rum. “Who has he been talking to about this?”

Chow regretted this angle immediately. He should have led with his own regrets about the battle—namely, that he hadn’t better protected Rebecca—instead of relying on the grumblings of the rest of the crew. “It is more of a general conversation.”

“A general conversation about how they are going to vote me out? Throw me overboard and elect a new captain? Who is it they think is so glorious?” Captain Boukman rose out of his seat and glared out the window.

“It’s that Jack Davies, isn’t it? Even though he can barely grow a beard, he thinks he has the run of the sea. ”

“There are no plots. You are our captain.” Chow kept his voice firm yet gentle.

“That’s right. I am the captain, and the Ghost is my ship, and anyone who forgets that will find themselves dead or deserted. I’m not picky about which.”

“No one has forgotten.” He wanted to retreat, yet he remembered Rebecca, huddled against the goat pen.

And Jack Davies rowing back from Pirate Island, whispering what Chow hadn’t wanted to hear.

He was not here for himself. “We don’t understand some of the decisions you made in that battle.

Why it took so long to attack the Whimsy when normally we fire the cannons as soon as the crew is on board.

” Seeing fire in the captain’s eyes, he quickly added, “I want to learn from you, sir, nothing more.”

“Learn from me?” Captain Boukman advanced around the desk to loom directly above Chow. “Who am I?”

“The captain.”

“What is my name?”

“Dutty Boukman.”

“How did I get that name?”

Chow had been on the Ghost for a few years before he learned about the captain’s name.

That it was not the name given him by his mother nor a surname like everyone else had.

It referred to a specific man, a specific event, a specific fate.

“You seized it,” Chow answered, as he knew the captain preferred to tell the story.

“When you broke free from slavery, you decided to take a new name, and you reached into history to take the name of the voodoo priest who started the great slave revolt in Haiti.”

“And what have I been doing ever since?”

“Fighting slavers.”

The captain prodded a finger into Chow’s shoulder. “And who are you ?”

“The quartermaster.”

“Who were you before I let you join the Ghost ?”

Chow swallowed against the emotion rising in his throat. “A good-for-nothing pirate.”

“A pirate who did worse than nothing,” the captain corrected. As he should. If Chow had done nothing, he would still be at Northfield Hall, angry but innocent. Instead, Chow had done all the wrong things. “And why did I allow you to join my crew?”

“Because you are a forgiving man who gives second chances.”

“That’s right. Second chances. Not third, not fourth. You want to learn from me, Sharkhead? That’s all you need to know.”

He understood that to say anything else was to put his own position on the ship at risk. If he provoked the captain now, he might end up overboard—and this time, the water was deep, land was far away, and the sharks would get him.

But Chow needed the captain to know. “When you sent Rebecca to that flagship, they thought she was a whore. I won’t do nothing again, sir. She should fight like any other pirate, but not like that.”

Captain Boukman sneered at Chow, his lips curling up as if he were preparing to take a bite out of his face. “Get out of my sight,” he ordered, and spittle landed on Chow’s cheek.

Chow did not want to believe this was the captain.

This was not the man who had found him broken in Cartagena, searching for a way to bury his shame.

This was not the man who went out of his way to make the newly freed people on his ship feel safe.

This was not the captain who kept the crew at the forefront of his mind.

Somewhere, somehow, the captain had lost faith in the Ghost . Perhaps even in himself. And now, the great man that Chow had so long trusted was gone, replaced by someone consumed by petty fear.

Chow would have preferred to walk the plank than to see how far the captain had fallen. But every pirate had to accept the fate delivered them, and so now, Chow had to leave the cabin and shut the door as if Captain Boukman was still a man to be respected.

R ebecca was trying not to trail Sharkhead around the ship like a lovesick puppy.

Just because her body craved his presence at every moment did not mean she could—or should— indulge it.

She had learned that the hard way in past love affairs.

So she forced herself to ignore her heart and even to take on extra tasks, to keep from mooning after Sharkhead just because they had settled their differences.

Case in point, Rebecca was practicing her knots with Long Tale Lee when she saw Sharkhead emerge from Captain Boukman’s cabin as pale and gray as the cotton rope in her hands.

She stayed in her seat as he lurched across the deck on unsteady feet.

She forced herself to remain still as he turned away, not even looking around to find her.

But when he bent over the railing, as if to vomit his soul into the ocean, she lost her willpower.

Something was wrong, and Sharkhead needed her.

For some reason, as she approached, the name that came to her lips was “Martin.” The soft, gentle name his mother had bestowed upon him. He didn’t react to it, not even as Rebecca cupped his shoulder.

She told herself that was a sign to retreat. But her heart didn’t listen. She said instead: “Husband.”

Now he reacted—a flinch. “You needn’t be tied to me.”

He didn’t want her at his side, then. Fine. Rebecca swallowed and retrieved her hand. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not a man you want to be tied to.” He didn’t look at her. “You should leave us in the Azores. Find yourself a better fate.”

The words would have stung her if she weren’t already reeling from his first reaction to her. “Is that what you want? To be rid of me?”

“You were right about him. You and Jack and all the rest.” He still stared at the horizon, the unending ocean, as if there were an answer there to whatever tormented him.

“The captain isn’t to be trusted anymore.

I didn’t see it all this time. I chose not to see it.

Not until…” At last, he looked at her, and what Rebecca saw in his eyes was horror.

“Not until it was too late to protect you.”

Her panic receded.

He was not trying to get rid of her.

He was apologizing all over again, even though they had already put it behind them. “I protected myself.”

“You shouldn’t have needed to.”

“What did Captain Boukman say to you to put you in this state?”

Sharkhead looked away again. Still as pale as a man who had foreseen his own death.

“He said something to you the day we took the slavers, too, something that shut you up. About second chances. Is he holding something over your head?”

Sharkhead stared at that horizon. Rebecca waited, watching the waves reflected in his eyes, sensing there were words building in him and that a confession would come crashing out if only she stayed silent.

She was right, in a way. He did speak, at last. Only it was to ask: “Do you believe in a god?”

“Yes.” The question transported her back to the steps of Trinity Church, which she had visited every Sunday as an orphan in New York City, sitting on the stone before and after the service in case one of the women proved to be her long-lost mother.

“I never did. Not the English god. But I do sense some greater force. Evil, I think. Evil swirls around us, and what we call good is only our desire to somehow live outside its clutches.” Nodding to himself, he added, “Evil is the ocean, and we are the whales and dolphins who are trying desperately to escape from its surface but can never completely break free.”

Rebecca had never known Sharkhead to be maudlin. She touched her fingers to his hand that gripped the rail. “If you’re coming up with theories like that, you haven’t enough to do. Time for you to mend some sails, pirate.”

“I can be evil, Rebecca, that’s what I am trying to tell you. It’s why I have ended up as a pirate. It’s why I can’t write to my family. It’s why I won’t go to China. You should leave me at your first opportunity.”

That was Captain Boukman’s poison. Forcing Sharkhead to face a warped looking glass—and making him hate himself rather than the man holding the mirror.

The emotion filled the space between her and Sharkhead like a crate of gunpowder, and Rebecca didn’t know how to address it without lighting a fuse.

“By your theory, we are all evil. I’d say you are one of the strongest dolphins who can leap the highest from the waves. ”

He shook his head. “I am a shark pretending to be a dolphin.”

“Fine.” She slid closer and touched her hip to his. “I’m a helpless little fish for you to eat.”

The innuendo worked, returning some humor and color to his face. He looped an arm around her waist. “You are not helpless.”

“I am when it comes to you.” She said it as another flirtatious tease, even pouting her mouth, but her heart hammered in her chest at its truth.

She couldn’t keep herself from rushing across the ship to aid him, not even when he darted poisonous words at her.

If that wasn’t helpless—if that wasn’t losing her head to her heart—she didn’t know what was.

“I’m not leaving you when we get to the Azores.

If you want to leave the Ghost because of Captain Boukman, fine. But I’m coming with you.”

Sharkhead held her tightly at the waist. “I’m not sure I will live to see the Azores.”

“Why not?” Her first thought was disease, and she reared backward to evaluate him for some terrible symptom.

“He used to trust us. He used to put the whole crew’s wellbeing at the front of every decision.

All I wanted was to remind him of that. To try to get that captain back.

” Sharkhead shook his head. “He feels I have challenged him. I’m lucky he didn’t shoot me for insubordination right then.

He’ll have me strung from the yardarm in the next few days. He has to reclaim his authority.”

Rebecca didn’t know which was worse—this premonition, or the way Sharkhead delivered it, as if he were predicting the weather. “We can’t let that happen.”

“We?”

“You. Me. The crew.” Rebecca stepped out of his grasp to force him to look back at the ship where the pirates were all at work following his orders. “The Ghost is not a monarchy. Captain Boukman is not our king. If he orders your death, we won’t allow it.”

Sharkhead stared at her. “Are you suggesting a mutiny?”

Rebecca hadn’t gotten that far in her panicked thinking. Yet from the way Sharkhead said it—not with horror, not with surprise, but with a certain inflection of excitement—she could tell he had been contemplating it since long before Captain Boukman threatened his life.

And once he said it, it seemed the obvious solution. “How do we go about that?”

He held onto her ever tighter and replied, “We bide our time.”