The Ugly Duchess

Page 27

The scorn in her words seemed finally to penetrate the duke. He wheeled and stalked back to his chamber without another word.
Theo did not look down the stairs to see if James was still there. She knew he was staring up at her; she could feel his eyes on her back.
But she walked on, leaving Daisy behind. Leaving her marriage behind.
Leaving her heart behind.
Part Two
After
Fourteen
Nine months later
Aboard the Percival
Somewhere in the  Maldives
“We can’t outrun it, my lord. We’re too heavy.” The quartermaster, a stout man named Squib, had to shout at James to be heard. Wind stripped the fear from his voice, but not from his face.
“Hold the wheel.” James turned around, scanning the horizon. The approaching ship was barely visible, but she was skimming the waves as if she had taken wing. “You’re sure she’s a pirate vessel?”
“Lookout confirmed it,” Squib said, blotting his forehead. “I’ve managed to avoid pirates all these years, dammit, and I have new grandbabies at home. I should have just stayed in London.”
“Is she flying a black flag?”
Squib nodded. “We’re done for. It’s the Flying Poppy.” He gave an involuntary moan. “Got a red flower on black; easy to spot.”
James had been standing at the rail, rigid, staring at the ship as if his hard stare could make it disappear. The moment he heard the name, relief made his shoulders slump. He knew about this ship, and if he was right, they had a chance. A slender chance, but it was better than nothing. “Could be worse,” he said, hoping he was right.
“The Poppy has taken five ships this season alone, from what I heard at the last port. The only thing can be said is that they don’t generally kill the crew, but they sink the vessels. We’re done for, my lord.”
James grunted. “Are the cannon ready to fire?”
“Yes.”
“We’re not done for until the last moment. Steer ahead. Doesn’t really matter where you go.”
James leapt down from the forecastle and ran below decks. His crew was busy with the cannons, slamming the huge sticks that tamped the powder into place. They didn’t pause until he addressed them.
“Men!”
They all looked up. An hour earlier, they had had the sun-bronzed lethargy of men on a long voyage, tired of salt beef, tired of flying fish, their eyes and noses full of salt. But now, to a man, they were terrified.
“Our goal is to stay alive,” James told them.
There was a moment of surprised silence.
“We’ll give the cannon a try. We might get lucky and hit her broadside. But those pirates want what’s in our hold. And I don’t want all of you killed fighting hand-to-hand with men who have spent their lives doing it. If we don’t sink the ship on the first go, I want you all on the deck. Face down.”
At that, there was a babble of angry voices.
“I’ve never turned down a fight in me life,” Clamper shouted. He hailed from Cheapside, and had a rugged face and a handy way with a dagger.
“You will now,” James said. “You pull that blade of yours, Clamper, and I’ll consider you mutinous.”
Silence again. He and the crew had been together nine months. There had been difficult moments as he learned the ways of the sea and sailing a trading vessel, but Squib had stood at his shoulder the entire time. And he’d be damned if he’d let his crew be massacred. “I intend to challenge the captain,” he said. “To invoke sea law.”
“Pirates don’t have no sea law,” someone shouted.
“The captain of the Flying  Poppy does,” James said. He’d made it his business to find out whatever he could about the pirates known to operate between India and the British Isles. “His name is Sir Griffin Barry; he’s a baronet and a distant relative. We met when we were both boys. He’ll remember me.”
“So you can talk to him in yez language,” Clamper said, a flicker of hope dawning in his eyes.
“I can try,” James said. Barry was an unregenerate criminal, of course. But he had gone to Eton. And they were third cousins. In short, there were other degenerates in his family besides his father and himself. “Don’t fire those cannon until I give the word.”
But in the end, the word never came. The crew of the Flying Poppy was far too canny to expose her side to a vessel they were bent on plundering, and the Percival was too heavy in the water, thanks to its full load of spice, to move nimbly. The Poppy danced around her until the pirates pulled up alongside and boarded without incident.
Men flowed over the railing in a rush. Upon seeing the Percival’s crew lying face down on their own deck, they spread out along the railing without a word, backs to the sea, pistols in one hand, knives in the other. Apparently the Percival was not the first ship whose captain had surrendered at the sight of that bloodred poppy sewn onto a field of black.
The captain was the last to board, landing on the deck with a knife between his teeth and a pistol in his right hand. He certainly didn’t look like a scion of gentle English stock; he was dressed like a dockworker. A small poppy, matching the one on his flag, was tattooed below his right eye.
“Sir Griffin Barry,” James said, inclining his chin precisely the degree required by an earl greeting a baronet. He stood in the midst of his prostrate men, all of them surrounded by a loose ring of pirates. He was dressed, weirdly but calculatedly, in court attire: a coat embroidered in gold thread with buttons made of gold twist. He even wore a wig—rather hastily plopped on top of his head, to be sure, but it was there.
Barry took a lightning look at this vision, then leaned back against the railing and burst into laughter. It was not a benevolent laughter, by any means, but at least he was laughing.
James felt a pulse of courage at not being shot on sight. “Under sea law, I could challenge you to a duel,” he remarked, his tone as casually fearless as he could muster.
The baronet’s eyes narrowed, and his hand tightened on his pistol. “You could.”
“Or we could simply retire to my cabin and have a drink. After all, we haven’t seen each other in—what?—five years?”
His entire crew could be dead in a matter of three minutes, by his estimate. But James was gambling on the ancient system of British courtesy, drilled into the head of every aristocratic boy from the time they could toddle. He added, deliberately, “I believe our late Aunt Agatha would prefer the latter.”
“Bloody hell,” Barry said, his eyes widening with dawning recognition. “Thought you were any fool aristocrat. But you’re the Dam’Fool Duke’s son.”
James bowed, flourishing the pristine lace at his wrists. “Islay. James Ryburn at your service. Something of a pleasure to meet you again, Sir Griffin Barth—”
Barry cut off the utterance of his second name with an obscenity. James felt a prick of satisfaction, along with another wave of courage. Who knew one could intimidate a pirate captain with private information such as the fact his middle name was Bartholomew?
“What in bloody hell are you doing out here, other than waiting to be marauded by me?” Barry growled. But the balance of power had shifted. James’s status as heir to a dukedom had leveled the playing field, for all Barry was both a pirate and a baronet.