Captain Of My Heart Read online

  Brendan staggered to his feet. “Eveleen!”

  The pistol barked; the girl cried out, clutching her hand as she fell. And there was Crichton, smiling now, as he narrowed those pale, red-rimmed eyes and raised a second pistol to finish a task left undone.

  The ball hit the flag captain, spinning him around and flinging him backward. Through the blur of tears, Dalby saw him flounder, saw the brief flash of sunlight against his epaulets and gold buttons. Then the back of his legs hit the rail, and staggering, he tumbled over it, falling down, down into the sea below.

  Silence.

  The wind sighed through the shrouds above. A mast creaked. On deck, the crew stood frozen in shock, horror, and fear.

  And Crichton, in command once more and hopeful candidate for the now vacant position of flag captain, smiled, tucked his pistol in his belt, and met the gazes of his faithful lieutenants. Their expressions were carefully veiled, their drawn pistols holding the stunned and horrified crew at bay once more. His officers would not disappoint him. They’d allow no more reports to get to Sir Geoffrey, and they would support his official statement that Captain Merrick had incited a mutiny.

  What they’d seen today would go no further than the wardroom.

  He’d make sure of it.

  The girl lay in a crumpled heap, her shattered hand clutched to her breast, her frilly white petticoats sopping up the young flag captain’s blood. Ignoring her sobs, Crichton picked up the whip and handed it to the boatswain’s mate. Dalby was still lashed to the gratings, his face paler than death. Smiling, Crichton nodded to his officer.

  “You may proceed,” he said coldly.

  The mate smiled back and the whip slashed down, again and again and again.

  And this time, there was no one to come to Dalby’s aid.

  No one at all.

  Chapter 1

  Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1778

  Three years had elapsed since Captain Brendan Jay Merrick had fallen from the frigate Halcyon and, subsequently, out of the Royal Navy. The American colonies had made good use of those years; they’d declared their independence from Britain, they’d won many fine fighting men and sea officers to the American cause, and they’d been busy infecting themselves with healthy patriotic fever.

  The town of Newburyport had no trouble taking up the fight for liberty, for its people had been independent even in the days before the struggle for independence. Situated at the mouth of the mighty Merrimack River some forty miles north of Boston, the town depended only on the sea for its survival. Salmon, herring, striped bass, and bluefish migrated up the river. The ocean provided cod, mackerel, and other fish, as well as oysters, lobsters, and scallops. Clams grew fat in the tidal flats of nearby Plum Island; ducks were plentiful. A few wooden fish flakes dotted the riverbanks to dry the great catches of cod, but Newburyport, unlike Gloucester and Marblehead to the south, had never relied on the fishing industry to support itself to the extent that they had. Commerce was its lifeblood.

  Not so many years ago, it had been common to see great oceangoing ships tied up at the wharves unloading cargoes from distant lands. Farmers had come from the inland towns of Haverhill, Amesbury, and Bradford to trade vegetables, corn, barreled pork, beef, and flour for staples—rum, coffee, sugar, and molasses—as well as extravagances: silk from the Orient, and grapes and oranges from Spain. The docks had bustled with activity, and the shops in Market Square had boasted linen, wool, and porcelain from England, wine from Madeira, broadcloth and satins, iron, paper and glass, nails and gloves, and just about anything anyone could want that Newburyport didn’t make or supply itself.

  The farmers still came. The docks still bustled with activity. But the ships that were now tied up at those wharves were of a very different breed from the ponderous, wallowing vessels that had come before. This new breed was leaner. Battle-scarred. Sharp-toothed, toughened, and hungry—and as independent as the town that spawned them.

  These vessels were the privateers.

  And Newburyport couldn’t turn them out fast enough to meet the demand.

  For if commerce was the town’s lifeblood, then shipbuilding was its livelihood.

  Along the Merrimack’s banks, new shipyards sprang up seemingly overnight, and existing ones grew in size. Each was as self-sufficient as Newburyport herself. Each had its own smithy, sawpit, mast pond, and mast houses. Each had its own sail loft, where bolts of heavy linen were destined to hold the wind as foresails, mainsails, topsails, and jibs. And each had access to the town’s rope walk, where hemp fibers were combed out, spun into yarn, and formed into rope that would see service as rigging in those predatory vessels that called Newburyport their home.

  Prosperous merchants and shipowners who’d gained their fortunes through commerce, rum manufacturing, and the blatant ignorance of England’s Navigation Acts now invested in the privateering boom. On High Street, handsome three-story Georgian houses surrounded by elegant gardens and furnished with fine Chippendale and Hepplewhite furniture reflected the affluence of those who were successful at it. In the spirit of liberty, the men abandoned their silks, velvets, and fancy powdered wigs for clothes of native wool and homespun; the ladies burned their English tea and brewed their own from ribwort and other plants instead.

  Newburyport was as independent as ever. And its patriotism was reflected in every citizen, young and old, male and female; in its militia, in its naval men, and in its privateers.

  Enclosed by woods and a haphazard fence, Miss Mira Ashton’s School of Fine Horsemanship was nothing more than a field that smelled of clover and wet grasses and the fresh pungency of newly churned mud. It had rained the night before, and now moisture dripped from the many oaks, maples, and pines, pitter-pattering down through branches and shimmering leaves that quivered beneath the extra weight. Drip, drip, pitter, patter, on and on until all the woods surrounding the field were alive with the soft sounds of falling rain. Yet the sky above the treetops was cloudless and pale, and sunlight stabbed through the branches, glowing pink and gold through the mists and sending vivid rainbow colors twinkling off the bent grasses like stardust on a fairy’s crown.

  It promised to be another scorcher of a day.

  Sounds broke the tranquility of the new morning: the steady beat of a horse’s trot; the snap of a whip licking the air; the snort of a dappled colt whose chiseled head and short back spoke of desert blood and whose color was so pure a gray as to appear almost blue; and from the slight figure in the middle of the field, around whom that colt trotted in a doughnut of deepening mud, an exuberant voice belting out the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”

  “Fath’r and I went down to camp, along with Captain Good-ing! And there we saw the men and boys, as thick as hasty pud-ding!”

  A quarter mile away, Ephraim Ashton, shipbuilder, sat down to breakfast and the Essex Gazette, a pot of strong black coffee at his right elbow, a basket of hot buttered corn muffins at his left, and a jug of New England rum before him, blissfully unaware that his daughter stood ankle-deep in mud with her head thrown back, her chest puffed up, and her voice belting out a song with all the lusty fervor she might’ve lent her favorite fo’c’sle chanty:

  “Yankee Doodle keep it up! Yankee Doodle, dan-dy—”

  Rigel flicked an ear but knew better than to slow his stride.

  “Mind the music and the step, and with the girls be han-dy!”

  But then, there were a lot of things Father was unaware of; he didn’t know about Rescue Effort Number Thirty-One, he didn’t know that she was going to ride Rigel for the first time tomorrow, and he didn’t know that she had a bet going with her brother, Matt, that she could sneak aboard Matt’s privateer, Proud Mistress, at least two more times before Father caught her at it and flew off into one of his rages. No, Father would be reaching for one of those muffins just about—Mira squinted up to look at the sun’s angle—now, dipping it in maple syrup, and shoving the whole sticky mess into his mouth as he thumbed to the newspaper’s Marine News section, w
here he would scrutinize each and every word until he found mention of an Ashton ship. He might get a smudge of syrup on the top right corner of the page—but not on the Marine News section. Heaven forbid. And it would take him exactly one third of the hour he allotted to the paper to study that section, snowy brows curling out over his nose like fishhooks and throwing shadows across the page, and his fist slapping the table with a good hard wallop when he found what he was looking for. And then he would hoot and holler, and heaven help the neighbors if they were still abed, for they’d be asleep no longer.

  “And there we see a thousand men, as rich as Squire Da-vid, and what they wasted ev’ry day, I wish it could be sa-ved! Yankee Doodle, keep it up, Yankee Doodle dan-dy. . .” She sucked in a great gulp of air and shouted to the treetops, “Mind the music and the step, and with the girls be han-dy!”

  Hers—like her father’s, her brother Matt’s, and Newburyport’s itself—was red-hot rebel’s blood. Yet Mira’s patriotism didn’t end with a mere song, nor the limitations of her sex, though she’d shunned English tea, donned native homespun, and worn her dark hair in thirteen braids, one to represent each colony, as the other women had. As she was a sea captain’s daughter who’d come into the world some one hundred forty leagues east of Newfoundland in the middle of a raging gale, with a pitching, yawing ship her cradle and a piece of sailcloth her first blanket, the role she took in the defense of liberty was a bit more . . . active. But it was damned hard to man a cannon—and win a wager—if Matt kept sneaking off on Proud Mistress without her, which was the only reason she was standing here in the muddy field this morning and not beside him on the brig’s stout decks.

  “And there we see a whopping gun, as big as a log of ma-ple, mounted on a little cart, a load for father’s cattle! Yankee Doodle, keep it up . . .”

  She bawled out the rest of the verse, then hummed the next one through her nose, pacing the song to Rigel’s hoofbeats and plotting, as she’d been doing all morning, the best way to sneak the latest cat—Rescue Effort Number Thirty-One until further named—into the house without Father’s knowledge.

  She could hide him in the stable and wait till Father left for his shipyards, which he would do at precisely one o’clock. She could smuggle him in through the back door. Or she could simply put him in the front hall and hope he mingled well enough with the other Rescue Efforts that Father wouldn’t notice him.

  But whatever she did, she’d have to be careful, because Father was in one of his moods this morning, and with good cause.

  The client—not just another client, but the client, whose drafts for a fine new schooner would’ve pulled the Ashton Shipyards out of their slump and made Ephraim’s name famous—had never shown up last night. And it was no wonder he hadn’t shown up, because the gallant captain of the American privateer Annabel, who’d outfoxed a British frigate at the mouth of the river last night, had been swept overboard during the ensuing sea fight and was, by all reliable accounts, presumed dead.

  That captain was the client.

  So much for all their efforts to make a favorable impression on this naval architect whom only Matt had met, several months ago off Portsmouth. But these drafts of his had so impressed her brother that Ephraim, stopping to listen to him for once, had finally posted a letter to this unknown captain and invited him to Newburyport in the hopes of snaring his business.

  The preparations they’d gone through to make sure they got it! Abigail had cooked up a supper that could’ve fed the entire town. The rugs had been beaten, the table rubbed with beeswax, the silver polished till it shone. Mira had even donned a gown and put her hair up under a little lace mobcap, managing to look demure and ladylike enough to please even Father, who’d been just coming up from the cellar with several bottles of his finest Madeira when he’d spotted her uncharacteristic appearance and almost dropped them on his toe.

  But it had all been for naught. Just like Matt’s dire warnings to mind her behavior, now dancing through her head like singsong verses from a nursery rhyme, shaping themselves to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” and filling the morning with sound:

  “Don’t race El Nath down High Street, the client mi-ight see you! Stay at home and mind yourself, and please try to be go-od!” Laughing, she threw her head back, let the sun splash across her face, and belted out, “Mira Ashton, you’re a brat! Mira, you’re naught but trou-ble! All boldness and all brazenness, and don’t feed Luff beneath the table!”

  Hmm. That last phrase didn’t quite fit within the confines of the tune; she’d have to work on it a bit, then bawl it out on the fo’c’sle the next time Matt took Proud Mistress to sea. Nice and loud, loud enough to send the company into a fit of guffaws and Matt into teeth-gritting anger. She could already envision him going as red as his hair, his spectacles steaming up, his lips thinning out the way they always did when he was particularly annoyed about something. . . .

  Her laughter, fresh as the sea wind that drove across the marshlands and dunes of nearby Plum Island, soared up to the hazy blue sky above, for the rest of his silly warnings didn’t have a prayer of fitting within the confines of “Yankee Doodle.”

  No climbing Mistress’s masts just to prove you can do it faster than anyone else!

  Watch your language, and don’t show up at the supper table wearing those trousers and smelling like horses!

  And for God’s sake, please find a place to hide that cat you snuck home off the docks! When Father finds out, he’s going to have a damned fit!

  Well, it wasn’t as though she kept all of the Rescue Efforts. She did place them in good homes after getting them back on their feet. So what if the number was up to thirty? It was a cumulative count, anyhow; there were actually only nine cats presently living at, in, and around the Ephraim Ashton household.

  Well, ten. She’d forgotten Rescue Effort Number Thirty-One, a scruffy ball of orange fur watching her from atop a fence post and wondering, no doubt, just how she intended to get him into the house and past Ephraim without all hell breaking loose. She’d planned it for yesterday; having this esteemed Captain Merrick around would certainly have diverted Father’s attention long enough for her to get the cat in and placed safely among the others roaming the house.

  She sighed and squinted up at the sun, just beginning to burn through the haze. Right about now, Father’d be reaching for his third muffin and hollering for his second pot of coffee, laced with a generous dose of rum to “wake him up.” And any time now, she predicted with that strange intuition that binds sibling to sibling, Matt would come home with another brave deed under his belt to make the ladies sigh, the young boys idolize him, and the other privateers go green with envy. His name would make the Essex Gazette, of course; Ephraim would have something more to brag about when he met with his cronies down at Davenport’s Wolfe Tavern on Saturday night; and perhaps he’d cool off about the loss of the client whose business he’d been so eager to land, a client whose loss had not been because of her this time. . . .

  Just then she heard the distant, dull thump of a cannon down in the harbor as a ship was welcomed in from the ocean and into the Merrimack River. The report was followed by a steady succession of twelve more—thirteen in all, one for each colony. It was a jubilant salute, repeated by every vessel in the harbor and the great field battery guarding Newburyport at the tip of Plum Island. Finally the reverberations faded, leaving in its wake only the distant screams of gulls and wild cheering from the wharves and shipyards lining the riverfront.

  Matt was back, all right.

  She pictured him standing tall and proud on Mistress’s quarterdeck as the brig glided past the smoking field battery and up the river, his spectacles hazed with dried spray, his coattails flapping in the wind, his red hair whipping about his freckled face as he considered which woman to choose from among the throng waiting to pounce on him at the wharf. It would probably take about an hour for him to drop anchor, make that decision, claw through that throng, and find his way up High Street and back to
the house in time for breakfast.

  Mira would be waiting for him, of course—but the greeting she planned for him would not be as sweet as the one he’d get down on the wharf.

  She continued working the horse. A mosquito bit through her trousers, and she reached down, slapped her leg, swore in a way that would’ve made Father proud had she been his son and not his daughter, and wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her sleeve. Then she heard a commotion coming from the house. Was Matt home? Already?

  Mira could hear Luff’s insane barking, mingling with the frightened whinny of a horse. Above it all came the sound of male voices raised in greeting, or, as one of them was Father’s, more likely battle.

  Already.

  By the time Mira had cooled Rigel down and led him back to the stable, the argument was loud enough to be heard clear across the street, across the town, and across the river in Salisbury. Entering the house, she traced its progress as it moved at what sounded like dizzying speed, from the upstairs, the hall, the parlor, the dining room; Matt shouting at the top of his lungs; Father bellowing ferociously; Matt again, his voice suddenly muffled as he no doubt shoved one of Abigail’s muffins down his craw. Counting the seconds, Mira waited for the hollering to fade toward the back of the house before tearing the front door open. With Number Thirty-One tucked in the crook of her arm, she kicked off her muddy boots and darted across the thick carpet.

  “I’m telling you, Father, he’s not a Brit! How many blasted times do I have to repeat myself? He’s not a Brit! Not a Brit!” Something crashed violently against a wall. “For Christ’s sake, he was wearing an American privateer’s coat!”

  The argument was approaching the parlor now, fading behind wainscoted walls, rounding entranceways, and bouncing off high ceilings as Mira listened with amused curiosity.