Heir To The Sea
HEIR TO THE SEA
Danelle Harmon
Heir to the Sea
Book 7 of the Heroes of The Sea Series
Copyright © 2017 by Danelle Harmon
Edited by Christine Zikas
Cover design by Dar Albert
PUBLISHED BY:
Windward Press
ISBN# 978-0-9892330-9-5
License Notes
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Table of Contents
HEIR TO THE SEA
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
Thank You for Reading
About the Author
More Books by Danelle Harmon!
Excerpt from THE WILD ONE
Prologue
14 May, 1814
Somewhere east of Hispaniola
The merchant ship Penelope lay becalmed in a Caribbean that was as blue as the language spewing from her young captain’s mouth.
He held his tongue as his sister appeared on deck. She glanced up at the flag drooping against the mizzen topmast, the sails that hung wilted and heavy from their yards, and felt the soles of her shoes sticking to the tar oozing up from between the deck seams in the blazing-hot sun.
“Told you we should have plotted a more easterly course, Stephen,” she said for his ears alone, for it would not do to heighten the crew’s anxiety by giving her brother a dressing down in front of them. “But we’re here now, and we’d better make the best of it.”
“Rosalie, we’ve been wallowing here like a bloated whale for three days.”
“Yes, and we may well be wallowing here for another three weeks. I suggest, Stephen, that you give the men something to do, something to take their minds off the fact we aren’t going anywhere.”
Her brother tightened his lips. Rosalie knew it was hard for him to admit that she was the more seasoned mariner, but she was five years his senior and thus, had an advantage he had yet to match. And yet, the thought lay unspoken between them: that he should have heeded her advice when the two of them had sat plotting their course home to Baltimore from their uncle’s estate on Montserrat. Their official manifest listed rum, molasses and sugar, but there’d been another cargo, another purpose. Rosalie—whom his parents had sent along not only to assist him, but to quiet the scandal she’d created—had her own goods that she intended to sell: shoes, necklaces and shawls made by the indentured servants on Uncle Ian’s plantation, all of which should fetch a good price back home in Baltimore.
If they ever got to Baltimore.
The sea in every direction was as flat as glass. No ruffle across its broad azure surface to give the hope of wind, nothing but the relentless sun blasting down on them like a flaming torch. They were in a broiler.
Stephen folded his sweaty, freckled arms across his chest and stared mulishly up at the drooping sails, as if it were their fault they hung flat and lifeless. “Yes, the men are bored,” he muttered. “A bored crew is no good, Rosalie. They’re getting anxious.”
“So find something to relieve their boredom, Stephen.”
“Such as?”
“Organize an activity. Involve them in a game or a competition. Use some round shot and belaying pins and set up a game of bowls. Make it a contest.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
He looked away. “You know, I wish I’d thought of that.”
“We’ll both pretend that you did. Go to it, then. It’ll keep them out of trouble.”
She watched Stephen saunter off, calling the men—most of whom were lolling around the deck, elbows on the cap rail and spitting into the sea, smoking pipes and staring out at the white-hot horizon—together. She saw them straighten up, some of them smiling, all of them grateful for something to do to take their mind off the endless boredom.
The anxiety of being becalmed.
She could join them of course, but the heat, and her own wish to be alone with her thoughts, kept her from doing so.
For the third time since she’d come up on deck, she glanced aloft. The mainsail sagged from its yard like rags off a beggar.
No, they weren’t going anywhere.
Wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, Rosalie found a drop-line and baited the hook. Fishing would not tax her energy on this stifling hot afternoon. She needed something to do, too.
Something to take her mind off what she’d left back in Baltimore.
She threw the hook over the side. Weighted with a bit of lead, it plopped into the glassy sea, flashed once in the sunlight just beneath the surface and was gone. Hanging over the rail, she let the line pay out, gazing down at the still water and idly wondering how deep it was here. The very color of the sea hinted at depths she could only imagine. She paid out more line, her gaze following the taut string down into the sea, her mind wandering to the mess she’d left back home, the shame she’d sought to escape by accompanying Stephen on this voyage.
Somewhere off behind her, she heard roundshot rolling the length of the deck, a crash, men’s cheers and laughter. The guffaws brought her back to Baltimore and a conversation overheard by her young sister, Penelope, at her betrothal ball.
A conversation that Penelope, in tears, had brought to Rosalie….
I’m only marrying her for her money…can’t imagine what my wedding night with that fat sow is going to be like. I wonder if the bed will break?
She had looked up and toward the group of men to which her sister had pointed. A group of men surrounding her betrothed, James, all of whom were laughing and discreetly glancing her way.
“Thank you, my dear, loyal Pepper,” she’d said fondly, using her sibling’s pet name. “I’m glad you came to me.”
“I’ve upset you… I’m so sorry Rosalie, but I couldn’t keep what I overheard to myself…you’re my big sister and you deserve better than that.”
Big, all right.
Rosalie’s mouth hardened and she paid out more line. It was nearly to the end now, the hook buried deep in the sea where currents passed beneath the flat surface, where mysteries known only to the creatures of the deep existed, where the brutal hot sun above had faded, fathom by fathom, into cool and silent darkness.
To think she could run away from the pain, to think that she could forget the shame and humiliation by going away, going far away. James had been right…she was no slim beauty, and no man would ever find her attractive—
Thump. Something str
uck the hook, a hundred feet down.
Rosalie gave the drop-line a quick upward jerk to set the hook, but whatever it was that she’d caught was well and truly snagged. She gazed with disinterest down at the taut line leading into the depths, the tiny quivering ripples that fanned out around the point where it disappeared beneath the surface, and slowly began bringing it in, winding the line around the spool as she went.
The fish did not fight her. Behind her the men’s laughter grew raucous, the sound of roundshot rolling across the deck sounding odd in such a setting. She turned the apparatus in her hand, the incoming line now wet as she laid it over the wooden spool, the fish hanging as lifelessly on the hook deep below the surface as the sails from the yards above. Maybe it had no more energy than she did.
Something touched her cheek. She reached up to lay her fingers there, and realized with a sense of awe and relief, just what it was—a breath of wind, faint, almost imagined. Her gaze jerked upward and there, high aloft, she saw the wilted pennant lift itself for a second, maybe two, before falling lifelessly once more.
Please, God. Please give me more of a sign than that. We are becalmed out here on the sea. I am becalmed, in my life. Please…send both this ship, and me, a little more breeze.
The line was thick on the spool now, wet, briny and swollen, and she leaned over the rail, wondering what sort of fish lay so heavily on its end. She wound more line around the spool, her movements rhythmic, back and forth and around and around and there, she finally saw something taking shape as it came up from the depths, nothing more than a shadow as she pulled it ever upward toward the surface, something dark, triangular, something that had no fight in it at all.
A few more turns of the spool and her catch broke the surface, there to lay dripping and spinning gently on the end of her line.
“What the…?”
It was no fish at all, but an old black hat, sodden, swollen, and dripping. She stared at it for a long moment, despairing of her luck that just as she could not catch a husband, neither could she catch a fish.
A hat.
Sighing, she wound the rest of the line around the spool. No fish, but it would still have to be unhooked and thrown back in.
But as she pulled her unlikely catch up over the rail, she felt it again—that whisper of a breeze on her cheek. Above, the pennant flickered to life and stretched itself out into the merciless blue sky, the mainsail began to fill, and beneath her, the sea lost its flat moroseness and cats’ paws danced off and away toward the northwestern horizon.
A breeze.
The men behind her were cheering, now.
But Rosalie barely heard them. She unhooked the hat and set it down on the deck, where it lay in an ever-growing puddle of seawater, that water itself beginning to move across the planking as the ship gratefully yielded to the gathering breeze and heeled slightly beneath its caress, the joyous crew abandoning their game as they ran to the braces.
Rosalie bent down and picked up the hat. It was nothing but an old black tricorn, the kind that nobody wore anymore. What it was doing out here so far from land and drifting in hidden undersea currents deep beneath the ship was anyone’s guess. Rosalie stood up and brought it to the rail, lifting her arm to throw it back to the sea from which it had come.
But something stopped her.
With the hat had come the wind. Movement, motion, a resumption of their journey…salvation. Perhaps it was a good omen, this odd relic from the sea.
Perhaps she ought to hold on to it.
She shrugged, shook the hat to rid it of what seawater she could, and carrying it tenderly, went below.
Chapter 1
Journal of Captain Kieran Merrick, 17 May, 1814
Left Barbados on Saturday after bidding farewell to Maeve and her family, and having navigated the Mona Passage—where we hove to and paid our respects in our own solemn way—are now steering a course for home. Weather clear, winds out of the east; log registering nine knots. Liam Doherty is with me as my first lieutenant. Picked up some crew in Bridgeton, hope to take some prizes as we head north; plenty of British merchantmen in these waters. Still, my heart is heavy at leaving my loved ones and I expect it to get heavier the closer we get to Newburyport, facing the empty house and the prospect of telling others what happened. Maybe I won’t. It would be easier to stay out here forever….
Indeed it would be, the captain of the American privateer sloop Sandpiper thought as he stood near the helm and, shading his warm amber eyes against the sun, scanned the horizon speared on the ship’s plunging jib-boom as though he could see that dreaded destination two thousand miles away. The Caribbean was the color of a peacock’s plumage today, a vibrant kaleidoscope of blues and greens tipped by sunlight sparkling on each gentle swell. Fair winds and clear weather, a promising crew and a fast little ship; it was enough to make a mariner happy.
He only wished it could.
Liam Doherty was several feet away, splicing line with one of the new hands, when a cry from the lookout up in the crosstrees broke the placid quiet of the day.
“On deck! Ship fine off the starboard bows! Looks to be British!”
In that moment, Kieran saw Liam Doherty glance aft. Searching for his gaze. Finding it. Imperceptibly, the old Irishman raised a brow.
Ye goin’ to go after her, lad?
Do fish swim, Liam?
Of course they did. And of course Kieran would not pass up the chance to take a British prize. Sandpiper, single-masted and sleek, mounted ten guns and two swivels, and while she might not be a big, powerful machine of war, she was lightning-fast and could deliver a fierce sting.
“Fancy a look, Captain?” said his new bosun, coming up to Kieran with a telescope.
Kieran took off his hat and pushed two fingers against his brow. The glare off the water was giving him a headache, and squinting against the hot tropical sun was doing him no favors.
“Thank you, Joel,” he said as the man—his skin as black as Sandpiper’s sleek hull, his long, tightly curled hair braided and pulled back beneath a wide-brimmed hat—handed him the telescope.
Kieran walked to the weather rail, opened the glass and steadying it against the shrouds, looked out across the water. There, two miles to the northeast, he saw the strange sails. Union Jack at the masthead, all right. A fat merchantman, probably separated from some convoy in which she’d been traveling as protection against American privateers like himself that had laid such waste to British shipping. She had damage aloft and plenty of it, as though she’d recently been attacked, and was drifting without purpose or direction on the empty sea.
“She’s in irons,” Kieran mused, scanning her decks and detecting a notable absence of human activity. He studied her, thinking. She might be armed. Then again, she might not be. Was it a trap?
He was a privateer, and privateers made their fortunes by taking prizes. And yet this morning, the thought of doing so brought him no more excitement than the idea of going home to Newburyport and personally telling his aunt and uncle of the tragedy, sorting out the will and estate, and most daunting of all, facing the empty house that would be just as they’d left it several months before when he, Liam and his parents had sailed Sandpiper to Barbados to spend the winter with his sister Maeve and her family. A time capsule that house would be, of pain and sorrow and memories—all of which would have to be addressed.
No, he was in no hurry to get home.
He shut the glass with a decisive snap and replaced it in the rack.
“Let’s go have a look,” he said to Joel, and went to take the tiller himself from Liam. The sloop, grateful for such personal attention from her captain, came alive under his hands.
“Sheet in the main and prepare to come about,” he ordered, and seamen in striped shirts and sailors’ slops ran to the mainsheet and began to haul the huge sail in, their sunburned faces sweating in the sun.
“Ready about!”
“Ready about!”
Kieran pushed the tiller over and S
andpiper was quick to answer, swinging her long, jaunty jib-boom in a graceful arc over the sparkling seas, sliding through the wind and ranging up on the opposite tack. Her great mainsail filled swiftly and was quickly sheeted home. The jib was passed. Up went the Stars and Stripes at her gaff and below that the banner flown by so many privateers: “Free Trade and Sailor’s Rights.”
Kieran held her steady. Sandpiper was eager to please, nimble, responsive, and alert. He stroked the tiller bar with his thumb, silently thanking her for answering him so readily. She could soothe him, if he’d let her. Take his mind off things. His hat felt like a vise around his aching head and he dragged it off, pushed a hand through his glossy dark-brown locks and yearned for a drink of something cold.
Liam came up beside him. He smiled, but in his blue, blue eyes was the same quiet grief that squeezed Kieran’s own heart. Liam and Da had been together since they’d been boys in Connemara, been together throughout Da’s exploits in the War of Independence that had made him and Kestrel famous, been with Da at the end. Did Liam see his father when he looked at him, Kieran, or did he see his son? Kieran had his father’s eyes, his smile, his patient, thoughtful character—or so everyone said—but otherwise his coloring was his mother’s, right down to the thin spattering of freckles across his nose that were all but lost beneath a mariner’s tan.