Page 6 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son (Brides of Chattan #3)

Chapter Five

F lexing her hands to prevent them becoming permanently fixed in a cramped lobster claw, Maggie surveyed her work. She had mended two full sails, and as she’d finished each one, Bash looked it over, gave a satisfied nod, and then ordered it hoisted up the rigging. Now she stood back to admire her handiwork in action.

The ship had been plodding along before, helped occasionally by teams of rowers, but with the wind filling its freshly patched sails, they were flying.

“Well done, Magnus,” Bash said, clapping a big warm hand on her shoulder. “Whoever taught you to sew would be proud.”

She snorted, rather doubting her mother would appreciate anything about her present situation.

“I mean, except that you’re using your skills to aid and abet our sorry lot,” Bash amended.

“I only hope they hold.”

“Couldn’t have done better myself, and I’ve been stitching up sails since I was nine years old. Come on, you’ve earned your grub tonight. You can start on the rest tomorrow.”

What kind of childhood entailed mending ship sails? Perhaps his father had been a harbor master or merchant marine? The siren song of easy riches likely lured away many a man’s son. Had Bash joined this pirate crew for money? Or was it simply the promise of freedom on the open sea? Freedom had been the draw for Maggie, after all.

She stretched her aching back, rolling her neck side to side and rubbing feeling back into her sore fingers. Exhausting work, but she couldn’t help a flush of pride.

Below deck, more candle lanterns had been lit, so Bash didn’t flip up his eye patch, though to Maggie the scant light was still dim as the devil’s cupboard. A variety of smells assaulted her from every direction as they traversed the belly of the ship. There was the usual undercurrent of bilge, almost masked now by the sweaty musk of sixty or eighty men, and perhaps the combined stench of their farts. On top of all that, someone had been preparing food.

Bash led her to the galley, where he drew two tankards of rum. “What’s cooking, Rooijakkers?” he asked the older man who had found them in the hold and forced her above deck. Was that only this morning?

The pirate cook gestured towards an iron stove set atop a stone hearth. Inside burned a wood fire, surrounded by sand. Over the fire, a large pot of something green and sludgy blurped more than bubbled. “Cackle fruits and peas.” He grinned at Maggie. “But you’ll have to sit down to eat it.”

Without meaning to, Maggie rubbed her bottom, which was rather sore from sitting on the hard wooden deck all day. The cook burst out in a guffaw and slapped his thigh. “Poor young’un.”

“I’m sure the young’un could do with a cup of fresh milk,” Bash suggested, putting an abrupt end to the cook’s merriment.

“No milk,” he said with a frown.

“Before the cat led me to this one, I could swear I heard the lowing of a cow. But no, said I, we couldn’t possibly have bought a cow on Orkney. We could barely afford a barrel or two of watered-down ale. ”

The cook stared him in the eye and shrugged. “There’s cackle fruits and peas,” he repeated.

Bash nodded. “Serve it up then, man,” he snapped, and the cook slopped some of the green gunge into two rather fine china bowls, placing, not fruit, but a whole brown hen egg atop each.

Maggie swallowed. “Thank you, Rooijakkers,” she tried to say, tripping over the unfamiliar name, but the cook laughed and waved her off.

“Bashy’s the only one can pronounce it. ’S why they call me Roo.”

She nodded, staring glumly at her egg, then up to Bash for guidance. Was she meant to eat it raw? To suck it from the shell like a weasel?

“Relax. It’s boiled,” he whispered, reaching into a barrel to retrieve a handful of the same dry round biscuits he’d given her that morning. “If you’ve no stomach for it, at least try some hard tack,” he added, handing her one. “Though it’s best to eat fresh while you can.”

He led her through the galley to a sort of dining room, where the fart smell Maggie now recognized as boiled eggs intensified. There, dozens and dozens of men lounged on benches and chairs, devouring their peas and eggs, swilling ale, playing cards, laughing and carousing noisily until they noticed her and Bash.

Silence fell over them then.

The men had mostly avoided her all day as she worked under the sailing master’s watchful gaze, but now they openly stared. She felt entirely exposed, like a rabbit that ventured into a garden party hosted by foxes and owls. Surely someone would notice something that gave her away? Would they spot the binding around her chest or a handkerchief tucked up her sleeve out of habit? Simply smell her and deduce the truth?

“Sounded like you gave quite the tanning, Nav,” a big man with salt and pepper hair called out as Bash led Maggie to an empty seat. “Was that before or after you noticed the lady had a cock? ”

The assembly roared with laughter and banged their tankards on the table. Maggie’s face burned, but she focused on peeling off the shell of her egg.

The instigator picked up his tankard and joined them, dropping down on a bench across from Bash, and casting a discerning eye over Maggie. “Sure and it’s a wonder you can sit if your arse is as chapped as your lips. You should go and see the doc about a salve. Aye, O’Riordan?” he added with a conspiratorial wink before glancing back at his mates, where a red-bearded sailor lifted his own drink in answer.

“A salve? For the lips or the arse?” someone called back, to another round of guffaws.

“Drop into sickbay any time, my boy,” the red-haired O’Riordan offered. “I’ll be more than happy to help. Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle.”

“You try it, Butcher, you’ll be needing a surgeon next,” Bash said in such a light tone you could almost pretend not to hear the threat.

Maggie shot him a look. Surely being too protective would make them all suspicious of her sex, but to her dismay they were roaring with laughter again, half-drunk already.

“O’Riordan’s no physician,” Bash huffed. “He’s a frustrated barber who likes to hack off limbs.”

“It’s good to see you taking an interest at last,” the instigator across from Bash said, winking at Maggie once more. She was beginning to feel lightheaded. There was too much heat and noise, too many people, and she was suddenly overcome with weariness.

She’d made a terrible mess of her egg, bits of shell littered the table but also covered her peas and half of it still clung to the egg, seeming to crumble instead of peel off as it should.

“The right arse’ll do that though. Make you interested,” the man was saying.

Why was he still here ?

“Fuck off back to your food, Balthasar,” Bash growled.

To Maggie’s enormous relief and surprise, the instigator offered a salute and returned to his laughing friends.

“They’re acting as if—” she began in a whisper. She’d been going to say, They’re acting as if they know the truth , but caught herself. “As if they think I’m…”

“You’ve a lot to learn about men at sea,” Bash cut her off in a gruff, low voice, and though Maggie was curious, something told her she ought not hurry to unpack every mystery here.

He took the egg from her trembling fingers and replaced it with his own, perfectly peeled and smooth, then he dragged away her bowl of peas, passing her his own shell-free bowl as well, and began to eat hers, shell and all. She watched in shock for a moment before her hunger took over.

After four days at sea with only dried berries to suck on, for she knew the dried beef would make her too thirsty, she devoured every bite, wiping up the remnants with a hard tack biscuit, enjoying the meal all the more for not having to cook it, nor to navigate the crunchy bits of eggshell.

Why had Bash done that for her? It rather went beyond the protection he’d sworn. It was kind.

Belly full, she leaned back against the bulkhead in a drowsy sort of contentment. Her eyes grew glassy as the rowdy pirates picked up more steam. Several came over to speak with Bash, one after another, or by twos and threes. They spoke of navy captains and ghost ships and loot swallowed up by a whale. None of it felt real.

“Do you think we’ll finally catch Willy Walsh?” asked a young sailor with dark black skin and big, sad eyes. “Sometimes I reckon there is no Walsh, and no gold neither.”

“Sometimes, Samson, I think you could be right. But keep it to yourself, aye?”

The young man nodded, and Bash jerked his head, sending him on his way .

Maggie was impressed with how much authority Bash held amongst the men, though he was younger than most. He must have felt the force of her gaze studying him, for he turned to catch her, and after holding her eyes captive for a too-long moment, he seemed to come to a decision.

She licked her lips, suddenly nervous under the weight of his unrelenting stare after all the bawdy talk.

“You need sleep,” he told her, and got to his feet.

“Aw, now, where you going, Nav?” the instigator, Balthasar, called, holding up his cards. “Stay for a hand. You can wager your cabin boy.” That earned him another roar of mirth from the nearest men.

“You know it’s lights out at eight bells,” Bash answered, steering Maggie, who had tripped over her bench, to another round of raucous laughter.

“Yes, yes, Nav, by all means,” the barber-surgeon, O’Riordan, called. “Tuck your cabin boy into bed.”

The hooting and hollering followed them all the way to Bash’s tiny berth near the front of the ship.

When they stepped inside the alcove, he surveyed it as though for the first time. “There isn’t room to string another hammock,” he observed, like he’d only just realized it.

He scratched his head and looked at her, and she tried to mask her face in stone so he wouldn’t guess she hadn’t expected to sleep in his cramped quarters with him.

“I can’t bed down on the floor,” he said softly. “If I’m needed, they’ll come to wake me and know something’s amiss.”

Maggie suddenly missed her straw bed on Orkney as much as she had the feather mattress of her youth, but she knew better than to suggest a hammock in amongst the rest of the crew. “I’m happy to sleep on the floor,” she lied, and he pursed his lips but nodded once.

From the same cabinet which had produced her new clothes hours earlier, he withdrew a yellow-and-black length of tartan, which rather caught her by surprise. His accent wasn’t pure Scots, and it was such a sentimental thing for a pirate to carry around. Though, as he was a pirate, she supposed it might have been taken off anyone.

“Which clan did you steal that from?” she teased.

His brow furrowed. “D’you want it or not?”

A flash of regret nipped her conscience when she saw he wasn’t laughing. “I want it,” she said, and tugged it gently from his fists.

The borrowed plaid together with her own earasaid made a cozy nest beneath his fold-down desk, and Maggie lay down to go to sleep, afraid to ask the question she couldn’t stop thinking. How long would this ocean voyage take?

She was delighted when Custard, the tattletale cat, padded into the alcove, completely ignoring their privacy curtain, and curled up against her belly purring loudly. Snuggling into the cat’s soft fur, Maggie decided she didn’t mind the journey lasting a bit longer.

Another forty days at least. How was Bash going to survive another forty days in such close quarters with this beautiful, maddening, ocean-eyed girl? Bad enough lying to Dutch, who could read him better than Bash could read the stars, knew him better than Bash knew himself. The quartermaster hadn’t pressed him because Mad interrupted, and for once Bash was glad of the interruption. Dutch would have kept their secret, but Bash didn’t want his friend and mentor held to account if it all came crashing down. When it all came crashing down, more like.

And it would do. Sure as the sun would rise, someone would find out the truth. What man alive could look upon Maggie Mackintosh Budge and not see the feminine curve of her hips sashaying across the deck in his old breeches? He’d never thought of breeches as erotic until now. What man could dwell on her soft, delicate hands and not imagine those hands cupping his face or unfastening his own buttons? Hell, imagining her shaving him made him hard.

He took hold of himself and then thought better of it—not with her lying there an arm’s breadth away.

Staring at the ceiling, he dwelled instead on the terrible realization that she’d hidden in the cargo hold for three whole days without food or water. If the cat hadn’t brought him to her, they’d have likely found her dead before long, her pelagic eyes lifeless and cloudy grey rather than flashing cobalt as they had when he’d struck his thigh instead of her.

Shame flooded his belly, shriveling the last of his erection at the memory of her hand, outstretched, demanding a blow, and the scream that had wrenched from her throat as a result. She’d been thirsting away for so long she cried without tears. He’d only seen such a thing once before, when they’d come across a man marooned by his crew so long he was barely a sack of bones when the Revenge had found him.

On his honor, Bash would do anything to ensure no such danger ever threatened her, nor any such sound ever escaped her lips again. Not while he was living. Calico Jack once told him the Chinese believed if you saved a person’s life, you were responsible for them forever. Bash may not be Chinese, but he was surely responsible for Maggie now, as if she were his own.

But Christ in the desert, it was going to be a long forty days, longer if Mad kept dithering about their direction. Even longer if rumors of the naval ship were true.

There were always rumors, of course. And Bash remained undecided whether it was wise to believe in the eternal threat of Constantin and his HMS Pursuit .

He thought back to Mad’s twitching eyebrow and tapping spyglass. The old man was scared of Constantin, good and proper, and not just afraid he’d recover the gold before Mad did. Nothing else got the captain’s hackles up, not ever, and the fact he was rattled this time set off alarm bells deep inside Bash.

Why would the Pursuit show up now? Had Bash willed her into being with his petulant teasing? Mad was an easy mark, but Bash knew better than to give in to his instinct for deviling the old bastard.

If indeed the Pursuit was out there, could it simply be bad luck and timing? They were both sailing away from the British coast, both caught in the same awful storm? Or had the navy caught wind of the tales Bash would swear on his mother’s grave had been started by none other than Cornelius MacLeod himself, tales of old Willy Walsh absconding with the missing wealth of some baron or other, stolen from the Annabel Grace two decades back as the baron made his way west to govern the rambunctious colonies in America?

The navy had been escorting the Annabel Grace , yet somehow Mad distracted them and slipped aboard. They chased him all the way to Port Royal, where he got very drunk, evaded capture by the skin of his teeth, and managed to misplace a hundred-pound chest filled with gold.

Despite Bash not even being born yet, the captain blamed him for the loss, and blamed him still twenty-two years later for not having found it. But the navy didn’t know the gold was lost. Had Constantin pursued them for decades, hoping to recover the stolen coins and bring the pirate thief to justice as Mad had always claimed? Hell, they actually christened a newly refitted galleon as HMS Pursuit . Why, if not in Mad’s honor?

They even came looking for him on Lewis once, missing him by about two years.

Bastian had been out fishing for brown trout all day. Having caught enough to feed his ailing grandparents and Aunt Jenny’s brood, he was hurrying home with a basket almost too heavy to carry when a stranger came strolling down the lane. The man wore a fine coat of dark blue serge with shiny buttons and gold braid, and they stopped to study each other.

After setting down the heavy basket of fish, Bastian doffed his cap with a polite, “Feasgar math.” The navy man nodded back, then picked up the basket for him and carried it all the way to Granda’s house before taking his leave.

“Thig a-steach,” Bastian had invited, and on the man’s blank expression he switched to English. “Want to come in?” Then he tried his mother’s, “Wa fi cum inna?” just for fun.

The man had smiled at him, but patted his shoulder and shook his head, and that was the last Bastian had seen of him, though he painted his laundry peg sailors dark blue, matching the young officer’s uniform as best he could.

The next day Bastian heard murmurs among the adults about a naval officer sniffing round the MacLeods’ place. Many years later, Bash realized the officer must have been looking for his sire, the infamous pirate of Lewis, bogeyman of bedtime stories and embarrassment to his clan.

Had the officer realized Bastian’s lineage, would he have helped to carry his fish? Or would the navy have kidnapped him as bait for a fishing expedition of their own, supposing the pirate captain might possess an ounce of parental instinct which could be turned against him? More fool them.

Maybe it was their proximity to Scotland after so many years making him melancholy, but Bash had the urgent sense his life was all building to its inevitable conclusion. A week ago, he would have said fine. He was tired—of running, of fighting, of thieving—of loneliness stretching out before him like the endless ocean waves.

He loved the waggoner with its pages of colorful maps, loved the sun shining warm upon his face, and the vast night sky. There had even been a time when he embraced the constant movement, the pitch and roll, the never-ending journey, as though each moment were propelling him forward to whatever adventure came next.

But he was older now, and wise to the fact that there was no great mystery unfolding beyond the horizon. A pirate’s life would be ended by gangrene or the gallows. He’d long since made peace with the inevitability of his doom.

Before leaving to join the Ranger as quartermaster, Calico Jack had been part of Mad’s crew, back when Bash was first brought aboard. Most of the men either ignored the pirate captain’s boy completely or delighted in kicking him out of their way, but Jack had been kind, slipping Bash the occasional sorghum drop.

He’d been sorry to see Jack leave the Revenge , and even more sorry to learn of his execution. Standing there in the shadows of Port Royal’s Gallows Point, Bash had realized at the age of twelve what fate lay in store for him and more or less accepted it, because what else was there to do?

But now?

Now a pale face with sun-pinked cheeks and luminous blue eyes left him unable to sleep, clinging to a shard of hope like a splinter of wrecked timber that maybe—just maybe—there was a way out besides the noose. He couldn’t see it yet, but he was skilled at charting courses, even through uncertain waters when visibility was next to impossible. If there was a way, he’d find it, if only to put Maggie on another ship and see her returned safely home.