The Scot Corsair Page 8

Chapter Seven

  A now-familiar lurching sensation, and shouts that sounded disconcertingly like the calls of the real sailors from the Heron, meant that the ship was setting sail again. Elspeth could see nothing but open sea through the cabin's rather grimy porthole, but she saw that they were in motion through the waters once more.

  The cabin they were confined in was about the same size as Lieutenant Wardle's; but while his had been the very embodiment of the phrase ship-shape, spotlessly clean and containing nothing but a few books and a gentleman's grooming-case, this place was a midden. The walls and part of the ceiling were covered over with what looked like plates ripped from books, on a disparate and random variety of subjects; a castle in Austria, a line-engraving of great apes in the African jungle, a colour illustration of English wildflowers with notes, a portrait of King Henry the Eighth. Built-in shelves were crammed with an equally esoteric collection of objects, from a brass telescope to what looked like a monkey's skull. There were a few books, which inconvenient curiosity drove Elspeth to examine after she had grown tired of staring at the lapping waves, so presumably the cabin's usual occupant was at least literate. He seemed to be an English speaker, too, for there was a battered leather-bound Bible with a frontispiece bearing the crest of Stirling Castle, of all things, and a volume of the poetry of Robert Burns.

  Birnie continued to crouch immobile on the floor and whimper, for some time. Eventually, she said, "My lady? Please, my lady, may I speak?"

  "Yes, Birnie. You had better. I think we shall have only each other for company for quite some time."

  "Are they—are they going to kill us, my lady?"

  "No, of course not," said Elspeth, with far more confidence than she really felt. "You must not be afraid, Birnie. I am far too valuable as a hostage for them to dare harm me in any way, and I will not let harm come to you. I promise."

  "Oh, thank you, my lady. I had no idea you would be so kind a mistress."

  "Why... did you expect me to be cruel?"

  Birnie looked down and mumbled, "Of course not, my lady."

  "What is said about me amongst the servants at Dunwoodie? Tell me."

  Birnie, who seemed to blush as easily as any tender maiden, had gone scarlet. "Everyone says you are very good natured, my lady."

  Which meant, Elspeth realised with a pang of dismay that surprised her in its intensity, that the servants all thought she was a spoiled, ill-tempered shrew. She desperately wanted to browbeat Birnie into admitting the truth and drag every little detail out of her so that she could torment herself with it, and she also wanted to repudiate it all and have Birnie assure her that she was nothing like that really, but she fought down both urges. Over-familiarity with servants was demeaning to both parties. And in this perilous situation, it was vital to remain in command.

  "The pirate Captain is a gentleman," she said, firmly leaving the subject. "He will deal with us honourably, I am sure of it."

  "How can a gentleman like him become a desperado, my lady?"

  "A desperado? Birnie, you have read too many romances. I do not know what Captain Scot's personal history is and I suggest you do not speculate. It is not your place."

  "No, my lady. But—he has the Gaelic."

  She always disliked the way that the common folk described the ability to speak the ancient language of the Highlands, as if it were some kind of disease. "And so he is probably a Highlander, and learned it from his nursemaid." She realised she was speculating with her maid anyway, and held her tongue with difficulty.

  A rattle of the door made them both jump. Elspeth hoped for a moment that it was Captain Scot, come back to let them free as he had promised, but whoever was at the door evidently did not expect to find it locked. There was a curse, then more jangling, and finally the door was opened; not by the Captain, but by a slender young man with a bright red kerchief tied around his long dark hair, and a ready, roguish grin.

  "A fine pair of beauties for a man to find in his cabin," he said, and as soon as he spoke she realised that he, too, was almost certainly a Highlander. "Sorry we cannae observe the formalities, ladies. I'm Stirling, First Mate of the Chieftain of the Seas."

  "I'm delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr Stirling."

  "Aye, well, likewise, my lady. This is my cabin you're in."

  "It's very generous of you to give it up for me."

  "Nae bother. If you would just let me get a few of my things—"

  Birnie drew up her legs to avoid being stepped on and Elspeth pressed herself into the corner of the bunk as the pirate reached across to his bookcase to retrieve his Bible and a small leather pouch. She caught a strong whiff of sweat from his body, that was not altogether unpleasant. As he moved back his face passed close to her, and he looked her in the eye and winked.

  Such a liberty from a man of his station would have disgusted her exceedingly had they all been back in their homeland. Here, floating somewhere unknown in the Caribbean Sea, held at the mercy of a band of what Birnie had called desperados, the gesture was oddly exciting. Almost without meaning to, she returned a fleeting smile.

  There was a storage locker deep in the hold, where Roderick was fairly sure Washington stowed extra supplies of a mundane kind; candles and blocks of soap, needles and thread and, he hoped, extra bedding. As Quartermaster, Washington was in charge of all things to do with rations and supplies, but Roderick felt a strong disinclination to ask him outright whether there were such things as clean sheets and blankets on board.

  He found what he was looking for, some spare rough cotton sheets and a couple of surprisingly fine woollen blankets that might well have come as plunder. Somehow he could not imagine Washington going into a general store and solemnly purchasing bedding. He sniffed them; they smelled, unexpectedly, of lavender. A few desiccated purple grains fell to the floor as he folded the sheets over his arm.

  Roderick smiled to himself. Maybe Washington was a more fastidious housekeeper than he had realised.

  Conscious that changing the beds was hardly commensurate with his dignity as Captain, Roderick slipped as unobtrusively as he could back to Stirling's cabin. To his great displeasure, he found the door unlocked and Stirling himself in there, quite at his ease, perched on the bunk alongside Lady Elspeth and apparently chatting to her as if they were equals. Lady Elspeth was actually laughing, tossing back her beautiful golden waves of hair and showing a set of pearly, even teeth. Even the maid Birnie, who had not moved from her position on the floor, had relaxed and seemed to be paying attention to her mistress's conversation in a very un-servant-like way.

  How fragile apparently immutable social boundaries are once we are removed from civilisation, he thought in one of his inconvenient moments of philosophical reflection. In the next moment, he was infuriated again. This was still a ship with its own hierarchies, and he was still Captain, and their bounty depended upon Lady Elspeth being restored to that civilisation.

  "Mr Stirling!" he said sharply. "Haven't you got duties to attend to?"

  Stirling turned a distinctly insolent look on him, still smiling. "Aye, but I'm just helping our lovely guest feel at home, first." He slid off the bunk, and bowed to Lady Elspeth. "Another time, my lady."

  She bobbed her head in response, practically simpering. "Sir."

  Roderick waited until Stirling had definitely gone before he said, "Lady Elspeth, I told you not an hour ago not to allow any of the men to engage you in conversation."

  She pouted prettily. "I did not think you meant the officers. I thought he was one of your officers."

  "Your ladyship, in case it has still escaped your notice, we are pirates. There is no real distinction between the officers and the men, except that we have been elected to have more responsibilities."

  "But you are a gentleman, sir."

  "I'm not Captain because I'm a gentleman. In many ways I'm Captain despite that. I was chosen by the men to lead them because they trust my ability to do so. The next Captain of this ship could very well be an ex-slave
. Do you know what that man is, or was?"

  "Mr Stirling?"

  "His name is not Stirling. He calls himself that because that was where he used to live, where he grew up—Stirling Castle. He was a kitchen boy there. His mother was a pot-scourer and I don't believe he had a father. He ran away to sea when he got into a fight with one of the castle ostlers, as he tells it, over the honour of a milk-maid."

  She looked suitably shocked to find that she had been conversing with a common servant.

  "Not that it makes a whit of difference to me," Roderick continued. "He's a brave fighter and a fine First Mate, and he's quick and loyal. What matters out here is the strength of a man's arm and the quickness of his wits, not the accident of his birth. But I am warning you, your ladyship. Stirling is too fond of the ladies, always has been—it's how he lost his place at the castle, after all. Don't think your rank will protect you from his attentions. He has been a gentleman of fortune too long to care for those distinctions."

  She tilted up her chin. "I think you might trust me to know what is due to me, sir."

  "I know what will be due to you if you disobey," he said shortly, and he thrust the bundle of blankets at the maidservant. "Clean sheets. There will be no need to dress for dinner."

  Though she was sure she would not be able to sleep a wink, when she wrapped a curiously lavender-scented blanket over her head that night, Elspeth was conscious of nothing until she awoke with a start in the dark of deepest night. She blinked, a complete memory of where she was and what had happened flooding back instantly.

  It was not entirely dark in the cabin. Moonlight shone through the porthole, casting silver shadows across the bookcase of fantastic objects and the incongruous illustrations pinned on the walls. Elspeth lay still and listened to the creaks and groans of the ship, so very like the sounds of the Heron, and wondered what had awoken her. What if the pirate ship was caught by a naval patrol? She felt a thrill of dread at the idea, though a second's thought brought the realisation that she ought to welcome that development. They would rescue her, and take her back home with no questions asked. She would not have to argue and wheedle the point.

  She was feeling uneasy about having told the pirate Captain such an outright lie about her supposed cousins in Barbados. Actually to have invented a name for them! But what else could she have done, challenged directly like that? The problem was, she was beginning to think that the Captain would persist in his resolution to take her to Barbados rather than Scotland. Again, she debated whether she ought to confess that she had been on a voyage to be delivered up as a wife, and simply allow the pirates to take her to the safety of Mr Crowther's estate. She—and Birnie—might be free within days. Every time she contemplated this, however, a dreadful feeling of doom settled over her. She had not truly believed in the fate before her, she had—she realised now—at the back of her mind hoped that something would occur to rescue her from the fate of marrying Mr Isaac Crowther and living the rest of her life in a sugar field in the West Indies.

  And now something had occurred to rescue her from it, and even though poor Captain Cardrew and Lieutenant Wardle and all the other sailors had lost their lives, she knew that fundamentally, she was glad it had. She could not bring herself to walk back into that prison.

  Also, she was afraid of admitting to the pirate Captain that she had lied to him. It was shameful, it was unladylike and it would lead to questions about why she had tried to deceive him. It would be hard to continue with the face-saving fiction that she had been going to Barbados willingly to join a fiancé already known to her.

  She turned over restlessly. She wished desperately for someone to talk all this through with, but she could not unburden herself to Birnie. It really was very unwise to give away anything too personal to servants. They might appear superficially interested and respectful and swear to confidentiality, but they simply could not be trusted. You exposed yourself to contempt within the servants' hall if you made your maid a confidante, and whatever their peculiar circumstances now, when they got back home Birnie would disappear back into that mysterious realm and would take her mistress's secrets and weaknesses with her. She was not even a real lady's maid, she was just a seamstress. No, she could not talk to Birnie.

  "Birnie," Elspeth whispered impulsively, nonetheless.

  There was a curious silence. The girl ought to have woken in an instant and been ready to do her bidding, but Elspeth could not even hear the sound of her breathing.

  Fear clutched at her chest and she sat up. "Birnie!" she said, more sharply.

  There was undoubtedly no Birnie.

  Her heart thumping, Elspeth lowered her feet carefully to the wooden floor as if she might still step on her maid's sleeping form. The blankets and bolster with which Birnie had made her bed in the narrow space between the door and the built-in bunk were still there, but empty of sewing maids.

  The door, thankfully, yielded to its handle. Captain Scot had not locked it again after bringing the clean blankets. Elspeth's instinct was to stay safely within—ideally she would have liked to lock it herself, from the inside—but she had to find Birnie. She was responsible for the girl's safety.

  After hesitating for only a moment, she pushed open the door and emerged into the very narrow space beyond, which was not in the complete darkness that she had expected. It could hardly be called a corridor, it was more like a landing with three identical doors leading into other cabins and a steep ladder at one end which she knew went up to the deck. One of the other cabin doors was standing open and spilling yellow light from within.

  Elspeth worked up her courage and peeped around the edge of the open door, which was at the end opposite the ladder. Inside was a cabin about twice the size of her own, with a larger bunk spread with a vividly-embroidered red silk coverlet that would not have looked out of place in the bedchamber of a fine gentleman. It had probably, she reflected, been intended for exactly that, and intercepted somewhere along the way. The light was coming from a lit oil lamp which was swinging gently from a chain on the ceiling. At any rate, there was nobody in the room.

  Elspeth did not dare attempt to open the other door, and she did not much like the idea of climbing the ladder and wandering around a pirate ship in the dark and in her nightclothes; but she had no choice if she wanted to find Birnie, so she bunched up her dressing gown and night robe with one hand to hold it clear of her feet, and carefully mounted to the deck.

  It was surprisingly chilly, and the sky was bare and huge. A pale moon hung near where the dome of the sky met the black of the ocean, bathing its pearly light across the scene. Before Elspeth had even emerged fully onto the deck, she heard voices close by; one caught her ear immediately because it was certainly a woman's, and the other was very deep.

  Birnie was at the far end of the deck, against the rail, and she was not alone. She appeared to be having a conversation with the towering blackamoor; although he loomed above her, he did not appear to be threatening her in any way. They were standing close enough together to talk in low tones, but the Quartermaster was keeping a respectful distance from her.

  Elspeth's first impulse was to dash forward and rescue her maid, as she had earlier in this very long day. But even though she could not hear what they were saying to each other, it hardly looked as though Birnie needed to be rescued this time. Then, with a surge of indignation, she thought that she ought to march upon onto the deck and reprimand Birnie for sneaking out at night to meet with a gentleman-caller. Back home, she could have been dismissed from service without a character for such misconduct. Or beaten by the housekeeper, at the very least.

  Neither course of action was practicable here, and Elspeth was afraid of the huge blackamoor, at any rate. Her courage had its limits. She stayed where she was just long enough to witness the pirate take Birnie's hand in his and raise it to his lips in a remarkably well-bred manner, before she ducked back belowdecks and took refuge in her bunk.

  When Birnie crept back into the cabin, it could
only have been about ten minutes later. Elspeth kept the blanket pulled up to cover her head and pretended to be asleep, but listened as the maid settled herself back down on the floor. The girl gave a single, happy-sounding sigh, and was snoring lightly within minutes.

  Elspeth lay awake for what might have been hours, listening to the lapping of the waves.

  It took seven days to reach land, and after the first couple of days Elspeth found she was not afraid. The pirates might be rougher than the merchant sailors, but they heeded their Captain's orders and left her respectfully alone. She soon felt in no danger from them at all, despite their wild appearance, and she wandered about on deck just as she had on the Heron without anxiety or hindrance.

  In fact, she began to feel somewhat lonely. Birnie had developed a trick of absenting herself, and when Elspeth demanded to know where she had been, she said that she had been asked by the Quartermaster to help with jobs around the ship. There were plenty of garments to be mended, she said, and the galley was in a shocking state, and the ship's cook was always looking for help in preparing meals.

  "You are my servant," said Elspeth indignantly. "You are not theirs."

  "Mr Washington says that everyone on board ship must turn their hand to what's needed, my lady. Not your ladyship, of course," she added hastily.

  Elspeth thought of going to Captain Scot and complaining, but the fact was, she had little enough for Birnie to do on her own account. Once the girl had dressed her in the morning and attempted to arrange her hair, she was useful only as a companion until it was time to put in the curl-papers at bedtime. Sometimes she required Birnie to read to her, but the girl's reading was not very fluent and she stumbled through passages in a flat monotone. So Elspeth had not the resolution to prevent her making herself useful about the ship.

  It meant, however, that she found herself spending much of her time alone. If the crew ate together somewhere, she was certainly not invited to join them; a swarthy man, who did not seem to speak English, brought meals to her cabin on pewter platters. The food was an unappetising succession of salted meats and stews of dubious composition, with tough biscuits that she could only manage to chew by softening them in whatever liquid came with the dish. After the first day or so, hunger drove her to eat the whole of whatever was brought to her. She supposed she would not have to tolerate such fare for long, but she did wonder what had happened to the much superior food supplies of the Heron.