The Ugly Duchess

Page 28

“Making my fortune after my father lost one and embezzled another. Surely you, Coz, could be the one to teach me to do that? The  Poppy Two, perhaps?” Holding his cousin’s eyes, he threw off the embroidered coat, revealing the coarse shirt underneath. With another quick gesture, his wig spun through the air and overboard.
“I’ve been captain of this vessel for nine months. I’ve learned the wind and the water and the stars. I have a hold full of spice, but I’d like to do something new. You might say, Coz, that the criminal instinct runs in our family.”
Whatever Barry had expected to hear, it wasn’t that. James held his breath. He didn’t let his eyes drift downward toward his men, lest it be taken as a sign of concern and therefore of weakness.
“I’ll have that brandy,” Barry said, finally.
“My men are unarmed,” James remarked, as if he were commenting on the weather.
Barry jerked his head toward one of his men. “Round them up and put them over there by the rail while I talk to his lordship here.” He looked back at James, the cold ruthlessness of a pirate captain in his eyes. “If I don’t come above deck in an hour, kill them all, Sly. Kill them all.”
An hour passed, and Barry did not reappear. Sly, however, knew better than to carry out his captain’s orders before taking a peek downstairs. By the time he took a look, James and Griffin were well into their second bottle of cognac.
Night fell with the Percival towing the Flying Poppy, their respective crews conducting their business in an orderly fashion (albeit with a few pirates looking over Squib’s shoulder).
James and his cousin, whom he had reverted to addressing by his given name, continued drinking.
“Can’t drink like this normally,” Griffin muttered at some point. “Captain can’t fraternize with his men.”
“I’ll remember that,” James said, slurring his words a bit. “Do you remember what we did when we first met?”
“Climbed up on the roof,” Griffin said after a brief pause to recollect, “slung a rope from one of the chimneys, climbed down far enough to bang on the nursery windows and try to scare your nanny to death.”
“That was the plan,” James agreed, taking another slug of cognac. They drank straight from the bottles. “Didn’t work out that way.”
“My sister ran around shrieking, but yours didn’t. She opened the window, remember? I thought she was pulling us in, but instead she threw a basin of water at us, laughing as if she was cracked. She could have killed us.”
“Not my sister,” James said rather owlishly. “I married her. She’s my wife.” Before he knew it, he found himself talking, for the first time, about what had happened nine months before. It spilled from his mouth. Not all of it—not what he and Daisy had been doing in the library—but enough.
“Damnation,” Griffin exclaimed. “She heard it, all of it?”
The ship caught the side of a wave and James nearly fell from his chair, but he managed to catch himself. “Drunk as a stoat,” he muttered to himself. “She heard every word. Told me never to come back. I took over the Percival the next morning.”
“I’ve got a wife somewhere, too,” Griffin said, not sounding in the least regretful at having misplaced her. “Better off without.”
With rather elaborate care, they clinked their bottles. “Here’s to the Poppy,” James said.
“And the Poppy Two,” Griffin added. “See this?”
He tapped the wrong cheek, but James understood what he meant and felt a surge of apprehension. No tattooed man could ever return to English society. Tattooed men did not bow before the queen, nor dance the minuet at Almack’s, nor kiss their wives goodnight.
There were times, in the dark of the night, when he yearned for Daisy so much that he could hardly breathe. Times when he thought he  must return to her, beg her to take him back, sleep at her doorstep if need be. They had been friends his entire life, after all, and lovers . . .
He still woke up shaking and aroused from dreams of her.
But if he were tattooed, those dreams would be over. There could be no prospect of going back. And that’s what she wanted.
She had told him to never come back, that she never wanted to see his face again. Daisy never said anything she didn’t mean. She was straight as an arrow. Not like him.
“Right,” he said, standing up with hardly a wobble. “Have to board your ship, I suppose. Gotta get my tattoo so I can be a real pirate.”
“You can come over there, but no poppy,” Griffin said. “You have to earn your tattoo. You can’t just get one for the asking.”
James nodded. “Damn, my head is starting to ache.”
“Three bottles of cognac,” Griffin said, standing as well. He lurched against the wall. “I don’t hold my liquor so well anymore. Did I tell you never to drink with the crew?”
James nodded, which made his head throb. “I’ll learn it all,” he said.
Back on the deck, the sea air woke them up.
“How are we going to get to your ship?” James said. The Poppy had drawn close to the Percival earlier, close enough that the pirates had easily leapt from their deck, caught the Percival’s railing, and swung over. But now the two ships were tethered with a good distance between them, sails furled.
With a wild shout, Griffin kicked off his boots and launched himself straight over the railing and down into the blue water.
“Mad,” James muttered. English lords didn’t do more than dip in the ocean, though, of course, he could swim.
But over he went, dropping into water as warm as a bath, stroking after his cousin, who swam not like a fish but like a shark.
Then up a rope ladder, hand over hand nearly as fast as Griffin. James’s head had cleared, and he was almost sober as he pulled himself over the railing.
For all the brandy and the bonhomie, Griffin was a pirate lord.
His pirates were clustered around him now. They turned as James drew himself upright, dripping.
Griffin’s face was different in the midst of his men: it was sinister and grim, without a trace of his fine breeding to be seen. “This is my cousin,” he stated. The pirates nodded, though a few narrowed their eyes. “He’ll be captaining the Poppy Two. You can call him The Earl.”
They went below to Griffin’s cabin, where Griffin threw James some dry clothes: rough clothes, fit for a fight at sea. Without ceremony, he took a pair of scissors and chopped off James’s hair above his ears. “The last thing you want is some cutthroat to jerk you backward by your pretty locks,” he explained.
James looked at himself in the glass and approved. Not a trace of an English earl looked back at him. He looked like a man who cared for no one, not for his wife or his family or his heritage.
That wasn’t quite true, but he could make it true.
Now he was a pirate.
One year later
Using their perfected (and extremely successful) pincer action, the Flying Poppy and the Poppy  Two had just divested yet another pirate ship, the Dreadnaught, of her ill-gotten gains. Pallets of teakwood and barrels of China tea were now nestled in the hold of the Flying Poppy together with the Dreadnaught’s crew, their ship having followed the body of their captain, Flibbery Jack, into the depths of the Indian Ocean.