The Scot Corsair Read online

  "But... why?" she asked in astonishment.

  They were having dinner together, as they almost always did now, in what had formerly been Captain Cardrew's cabin. She was glad that he never invited the First Mate to join them, and there were no other officers aboard. The rest of the scanty crew were common sailors with a fierce, swarthy appearance and loud foreign voices; she had grown used to the assorted pirates on the Chieftain, and these new faces scared her. None of them seemed to speak English, and none of them paid any attention to her.

  There was a cook amongst them, however, who sent up excellent if exotic dishes of seafood and fresh vegetables while their supplies lasted.

  "Perhaps because I'm an old fool," he said lightly.

  "You are not so very old!"

  He pushed back his chair and looked at her more seriously, over his interlaced fingers. "How old do you suppose me to be, Lady Elspeth?"

  "I—um?" She was taken aback, and flustered. "I have no idea, it is unfair to be asked to judge a gentleman's age. You would never be asked to do that of a lady. I would get it wrong, and offend you either way!"

  "I've no need to guess your age. You have told me, you are twenty years old."

  "Yes."

  "Well then, you may double that neatly, and have your answer."

  She had known the truth was probably fairly bad, and if someone had held her at gunpoint and forced a guess out of her it would have been somewhere around this figure, but she still felt a swoop of dismay to know it for sure. Forty years was old, it was other girls' fathers, it was her elder brothers. It was nothing to do with dancing and flirting and the tantalising hope of matrimony.

  Some of her reaction must have shown in her face, because he smiled sadly and said, "An old fool, you see."

  "No!" she said hastily. "That is not—you are younger than my brother James!"

  He laughed at this. When he did so, his eyes crinkled in a way that reminded her so powerfully of someone else that she finally blurted the question out.

  "Captain Scot—I hope you don't mind me saying—you so strongly resemble an acquaintance of mine—I was quite struck by it the first time I saw you—"

  "Oh yes? Who might that be?"

  "It's too ridiculous, but a gentleman by the name of Sir Duncan Buccleuch. He is laird of an estate in Inverness-shire, I believe, though I know him only in town—in Edinburgh, that is, not London."

  "Sir Duncan? Well, well."

  "You know him, then?"

  "I don't know Sir Duncan. I knew wee Duncan Buccleuch, with worn knees and dirty collars, for he was my little brother."

  "Oh!" She gaped. "Your brother?"

  "Well, my half-brother. You have heard that Dr Johnson said that second marriage was a triumph of hope over experience?"

  "Oh... I never read those kind of books."

  "For my father, it was a triumph of propriety over insanity. God knows why he wanted to be married at all, since he already had an heir and he certainly didn't feel the need for the sanction of matrimony to licence his pleasures. I knew that even as a young lad. But I suppose he wanted to attempt to present a respectable face to the world, so he brought home a bride scarce two years after he killed my mother."

  "So your father was—excuse me, what? You said—" She was sure she had misheard him. She certainly could not repeat it.

  "My father killed my mother," he said again, briskly. "He shot her. By accident, or mostly by accident, I believe, but she died all the same. A lingering and horrible death through poison in the blood. Something I have seen all too often in my later career, but had the misfortune of observing first in my own mother, at the tender age of nine."

  "Oh." Without warning, a great swell of tears choked her and she put a hand to her mouth in horror and distress. She had to turn her head away from him.

  He had left his chair and knelt by hers in an instant, putting his hand on hers tenderly. "Come now, come now, I did not mean to distress you. I should not have spoken about it so baldly. Dear lady, it was my misfortune, you have no need to cry."

  "Oh, I know, I know." She struggled to get command of herself, but something seemed to have broken loose inside her. She did not want him to think that she was merely being silly and falling into hysterics over the long-ago death of a woman she had never heard of before, so she forced herself to go on. "I lost—I lost my own mother—my mother died when I was the same age. No, when I was ten, but only just ten—".

  "Ah. It is a hard thing to lose a mother's love, at any age, but particularly when you are old enough to understand your loss, but too young to know how to reconcile yourself to it."

  "I never—never could. I never think of it if I can help it. I never think of her. And is that not wrong of me?" She was shaking. She could not understand why she could not gain control of herself. Why was she saying these things she had never said before, exposing herself to the man she wanted above all others to impress? "She was the sweetest, kindest mother anyone ever had. And I was her favourite. I was her little pet. I am five years younger than my nearest sibling. She always said she never in the least expected to have another child, and then Providence sent her an extra little angel. We had one perfect last summer together—that year she seemed to spend all day long with me, walking by the lake, reading to me in the temple, driving with me round the country. And then—then she was ill—and nobody would let me see her—and then she was dead. And nobody has ever loved me since. Nobody."

  "I am quite sure that is not true," he said gently. "Your father—"

  "My father shut himself up after she died and he was never the same to me again, never. My sister Henrietta was away at school and all my other brothers and sisters were grown up. Nobody ever loved me again."

  She had not realised until the moment she said it that she had always known it.

  He pressed her face tenderly against his shoulder and stroked her hair, until she managed at last to stop shivering.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered.

  He was silently comforting for a long while, but at length he said in a measured tone, "I think you have been overlooked, and neglected, perhaps, in your large family. Nothing can replace the tenderness of a mother's love, but you are very young. You will have particular objects of affection all of your own, before too long, I have no doubt of it."

  "You mean I will have a husband and then children."

  "Well—yes."

  She sniffed. It was no consolation at all, to hear him talk so calmly of her marrying some unknown person as if it had nothing to do with him. She pulled away from him, and kept her face averted until she was aware that he had left his position by her and returned to his own chair. Then she picked up her knife and fork, blindly cut through a morsel of fragrant fish, and struck out at the first other thing that came into her head. "You said Sir Duncan Buccleuch is your half-brother, but—excuse me—surely he is younger than you."

  "By eleven years, yes."

  "Yet you shared a father? Why are not you Sir—I don't even know your Christian name."

  "Roderick."

  "Why are you not Sir Roderick, instead of your younger brother?"

  "If everyone had their rights, I am," he said quietly. "I didn't know before now that young Duncan had appropriated my baronetcy. However, he's welcome to it. I certainly wanted nothing more to do with my father, or my stepmother, or anything at Lochlannan Castle. I had nothing against my brother, mind you, but he was a little boy when I left."

  "Why—did you leave?"

  "I quarrelled with my father when I discovered—well, the truth about events that had occurred years before."

  Elspeth realised that he had stopped himself referring again to his mother's death.

  "But to be frank, that was merely the final straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. Why a camel, I wonder? My father had been impossible to live with for years. He had a violently unpredictable temper. Sometimes he was full of energy and ideas, and would build a village or seduce a crofter's daughter, the very nex
t week he would break all the crockery in the house or beat a servant half to death or shut himself in his room and howl like a dog. I don't believe he was evil. I believe he was not sane. But he had intervals of self-command enough to prevent anyone taking measures against him, and at any rate—well, you must know the power that the master of a great estate has over everyone belonging to it. Your honoured father's will must be law within the precincts of Dunwoodie."

  She nodded, though she thought of the papery skull lying senseless against the pillows.

  "He should never have married," the Captain continued. "Certainly, he should never have married a second time once his illness had manifested itself. Affliction of the mind can be passed down the generations, quite apart from the misery he inflicted on the family he created. I made a vow early never to marry."

  "And do you... intend to keep that vow? I mean, you are not mad!"

  "Am not I?" He smiled without humour. "I'm as thorough an outlaw as my father was a respectable laird."

  "Oh, but you are not mad."

  "Perhaps you have not yet seen me at my worst."

  "How..." She pushed her food about, wondering how to make so delicate an enquiry. None of the etiquette that her governess Miss Gowrie had taught her addressed the case of asking a gentleman how he came to take up piracy.

  "How did I become a pirate?"

  She blushed in surprise. "I did not mean to—"

  "It's a natural enough thing to wonder, now you know that I would otherwise be in possession of a title and considerable property. And by the by, I now know for sure that my father is dead."

  "Oh! Goodness." She put her hand to her mouth. "I think he must be, I know very little of Sir Duncan's family, but he is Sir Duncan, so his father—your father—I'm sorry."

  "Don't be. As I told you, death can come as a blessing in many cases. Well, I quarrelled with my father, and he threatened to cut me off without a penny—which I don't believe he had any legal power to do—and I told him I wanted not a penny from him in any case, and off I stormed, as hot-head a young idiot as ever set out to sea in pursuit of a new life. I thought I would go to the colonies, or rather what were no longer the colonies—the United States of America seemed a good place to make myself anew. There may have been a girl in the case, too."

  "Oh...?"

  "Very ancient history. She is probably married and fat and the mother of many fine babes, and I hope she is. This was twenty years ago," he added, a touch defensively, glancing at her.

  Elspeth felt an unmistakable, poisonous dart of jealousy, and had to reason to herself rapidly that if this girl had influenced his actions twenty years ago, she must be hopelessly, irretrievably old now. As well as married and fat, indeed.

  "So I fled, with all of twenty guineas in my pocket and a fine suit of clothes upon my back, and booked passage for the Americas on the Fair Wind. My ship had the misfortune to be boarded by pirates, and that might merely have been a quaint interruption to the voyage had we not then been attacked by a rival ship of far less peaceful buccaneers. It was the Scarlet Blade, in fact, and his ship the Ghost—notorious around those waters in those days. He had some grudge against the captain of our first visitors, and he wanted the ship's cargo too, I dare say. The Scarlet Blade proceeded to kill both crew and pirates, and I ended up fighting them in defence of our original attackers. The Fair Wind went down in the end with all hands and I fled with the first pirate crew. I'd like to say we routed the Scarlet Blade and his band of ruffians, but we scurried away as fast as we could in the other pirate captain's rotting old hulk. I joined with them, and I never left them. I never got to the Americas, and I never went home."

  Elspeth's mouth hung open during most of this narration, and she shut it quickly as he shot her another glance to see how she took the story. It was difficult to know what to say. She knew she was probably not supposed to feel rather excited by the tale, but the image of the twenty-years-ago Captain—Mr Buccleuch, though, in fact, as he must have been—young and fit and brave, was a thrilling one.

  If only she could have met him then, her family might just about have considered him a suitable match for her. Now, of course, it was hopeless. And now that she was no longer about to be married, she realised—she had realised some days ago, in one of her lonely nights of thought—that it would be unwise to risk snatching a passionate interlude with him.

  "The Fair Wind must have been reported lost with all hands," he said, after a pause. "One pair of hands being mine, I expect I was declared legally dead. Hence wee Duncan now being Sir Duncan. Well, as I say, good luck to him. I take it you don't know him very well?"

  "Oh! No. Hardly at all. That is—no, not well."

  It was ridiculous to blush. She had a flutter of panic in her stomach, an unreasoning fear that he knew what had happened.

  "Can you tell me anything of him, nonetheless? Is he married?"

  "N-no, certainly not. He is not married."

  The Captain was silent for a moment, attacking his food. Then he put down his fork and said, "I have an uneasy feeling, your ladyship, that you are attempting to conceal an unpleasant truth. Forgive me for being so blunt, but you are by no means as skilled a dissembler as you might think you are. I could go so far as to say you are an open book. Tell me then. Has my brother inherited my father's unfortunate tendencies?"

  "Oh no!" she cried warmly, relieved that his suspicions were so far wide of the truth. "Not in the least, I'm sure. He is a most charming gentleman."

  "My father could be charming too, when the fit took him."

  "But Sir Duncan has no reputation for—the other things you said." She stumbled yet again when she thought of what she knew Sir Duncan's reputation to be.

  "Well, I am glad to hear it."

  "You should write to him," she said eagerly.

  "That is quite out of the question."

  "But we are going to Scotland. You could meet with him."

  "My dear Lady Elspeth, I don't think you fully understand even yet that I am wanted for piracy throughout the British Isles."

  "How can you be wanted for piracy if nobody knows you're still alive?"

  He laughed. "Your ladyship, I can't work out whether you're genuinely simple, or calculatingly naive. Sir Roderick Buccleuch may not be wanted for piracy, but the Black Scot certainly is—and I am he. Roderick Buccleuch may as well have gone down with the Fair Wind."

  "But you did not. You are still alive. I'm sure Sir Duncan would want to know that, and to see you again."

  "Oh yes, I am sure that he would like to know that his elder brother was back from the dead, and meant to take back his lands and title."

  "But you don't mean to do that."

  "If I came back to life, if I was seen and known to be who I am—then it wouldn't matter what I meant to do or not. You should know that, your ladyship. We can't choose not to inherit a title. We can't choose, unlike the kings of old, who will inherit it from us."

  Elspeth thought of her nephew Robert, the family's dissolute heir-apparent.

  "But more to the point," he continued, "If it became known that the Black Scot and poor drowned Roderick Buccleuch were one and the same, it would bring terrible disgrace upon my brother and the Buccleuch family. I have a little sister too, at least I hope I do still—"

  "Oh yes! That I can tell you for sure. Sir Duncan mentioned Miss Buccleuch to me, though I have not met her—she is rarely in town, I think."

  "Ah, thank God. She was a sweet babe in arms when I left, I always hoped she lived. So she is not yet married either?"

  "I believe not."

  "And never will be neither, if I bring scandal on the clan. You see? By now I hope my brother has, by decent living, recovered the family's reputation and standing, undone the damage my father did."

  Elspeth was not so sure about this, but she nodded sympathetically.

  "No," he said quietly, after a moment's reflection. "I must stay at the bottom of the sea."

  "And what am I to call you, sir? Now I
know your true name?"

  "If you call me Sir Roderick I shall keelhaul you, young lady."

  But he did not give her an actual answer, so she continued to address him as Captain.

  Even after that evening, when her head was spinning with the wonder of his strange story and the coincidence of his being so closely related to the man who had, in a way, sent her on her own fantastic voyage—even after she had opened her heart to him and spoken about her mother for the first time in, she fully believed, ten years—he did nothing but brush her fingertips with his lips as he said goodnight at her cabin door.

  Chapter Twelve

  One morning not long after this highly interesting conversation, Elspeth woke early with the sense that something was different. Her sleeping mind had picked up voices calling out of turn, and registered the change even though she could not understand the words. She tumbled out of her bunk with a beating heart, threw on a dressing gown to make herself decent, and ran barefoot up onto the deck.

  If they were to be attacked by pirates—other pirates—yet again, she did not want to be trapped cowering in her cabin, wondering desperately what was happening to the Captain. He was her first thought, and fear for him had her rushing to the ship's rails to see what was going on. The sun was already high and sparkling, the boards were rough and warm on the soles of her feet. There were certainly a lot of activity—men swarming up and down the rigging, hauling at ropes and hollering to each other—but she saw immediately what the cause of the excitement was. Growing on the horizon was a green-white strip of land.

  She felt an odd, tight stirring in her breast. Why was it that she did not welcome the sight of land; for she found that she did not? And how could this possibly be Scotland, when the sea was so blue and the air was so pleasantly warm still?

  "You ought not to run about barefoot, your ladyship," said the Captain's voice by her side. "You might step on a nail."

  "Oh! I heard the men shouting. I thought there might be... trouble."

  "And you wished to run straight into it?"