Sparhawk's Angel (22 page)

"I
couldn't help coming, Nickerson," said Lily contritely as she glided along beside him over the dark, dusty paths that passed for streets on Pigeon Island. " 'Tis my great weakness that I'm so tenderhearted. I know you have everything perfectly under control yourself, you and that lovely Monsieur G
é
ricault, but when you left him with the boat and began to look so dreadfully forlorn by yourself I had no choice but to come comfort you."

"Forlorn, hell," said Nick crossly. "How the devil am I supposed to look?"

"I'd expected something more cheerful. You're going off to crack English skulls, a singular pleasure I thought you enjoyed beyond all others."

"I do," he said, shifting his shoulders uneasily beneath his coat. "It's just that—that, well, damnation, Lily, what if Rose doesn't want to be rescued? What if she came here meaning all along to stay, and marry her bloody lordling?"

"Oh, pish," scoffed Lily. "Now whyever would Rose do such a thing?"

"Nay, Lily, do I have to spell it out?" he demanded. "I love Rose, true enough, but how's that going to keep her happy the way a woman wants? I'm a wastrel and a wanderer on the losing side of a war with no end. My own parents will scarce receive me. I don't even have a home port to take her to, let alone a house with all the niceties she expects. What in blazes do I have to offer her, anyway?"

"Yourself, and your love," said Lily wistfully. "That's all Rose has ever wanted. You give her that much, and the rest will sort itself out."

He grumbled incoherently to himself, unconvinced. "Fat lot of good that does me now. Or her."

"But it will, as you know perfectly well in your heart already."

"Not that I've much choice." He sighed with resignation, halfway to a groan. "But that's what you've wanted from the beginning, wasn't it?"

"Of course, though I never meant to be so tediously obvious about it." Her smile was almost bittersweet. "But oh, Nick, you won't be needing me much longer, will you?"

He didn't answer until they'd passed a man and a woman drunkenly supporting one another down the street. Talking to himself wasn't the best way to make himself unobtrusive, even in the middle of the night.

"Don't desert me yet, Lily," he said at last. "Graham's not about to give Rose up without a fight."

"Ah, so now you wish my help," she said archly. "There was a time, my dear captain, when you swore you could save the entire world by yourself."

He snorted with disgust. "Would you like it better if I told you to go back to whatever black cloud you call home, and let me save your sister by myself?"

"Oh, be easy, please! I've no intention of abandoning you quite yet." She let her laughter fade, and her face grew more serious. "But before we begin, Nick, I would remind you again that I can do nothing on Rose's behalf. No matter what danger she tumbles into or mishap threatens her, I can only watch, helpless.
You
must be the one to save her."

"I'm doing my damned best, Lily," he said with weary patience. "That's all I can promise."

"Oh, my, my," she said softly. "Your best, dear captain, is more than I ever dared hope for."

Before the British had come, the town on the banks of Gros Islet Bay had been little more than a handful of buildings surrounding a sleepy, provincial harbor, and Nick had no trouble finding the lodging house with the green shutters that Michel had described.

The previous owner had been a French planter who'd fled farther inland when foreign warships had appeared in his bay, and the new occupant, a Mrs. Nason, had had the good taste to leave his elegant furnishings undisturbed. The widow of a captain recently dead from yellow fever, she also had the good sense to recognize the source of her personal largesse, and to cater to the whims and wishes of the officers with influence, both here and in London. Captain Lord Eliot Graham was one of these, and she'd been quick to find a solitary room for his future bride in the back of the house as he'd requested, away from the noise of the street and above the garden, where he'd thoughtfully placed an armed guard from his own ship so the lady—a pretty, quiet girl with sad eyes and a bandaged arm
—
could sleep in a strange bed without fear, her peace undisturbed.

This much, as well as a great deal of nervous giggling, Nick had heard from a young mulatto slave at the public pump in the street, where she'd been sent by her mistress for water. Now as he stood by the back gate of the garden, he could see that she'd been right about the guard, and hoped she had been as accurate about which room was Rose's. There were five windows overlooking the garden, all of them dark now that it was past midnight; Rose's, God willing, was the second from the end.

But first would come the guard. The man was a common sailor, clearly chosen for his fearsome size alone and not his abilities, for he sat on one of the garden's benches with his musket left forgotten on the nearby grass while he devoted all his energies to inspecting a hole in the sole of his shoe by the light of his lantern.

Nick glanced about for Lily, expecting her to be hovering about to watch the excitement, but to his surprise there was not the faintest wisp of her white gown. Well, he grumbled, so be it. He'd handled worse than this before on his own, and he would again. So why, then, did he almost miss the infernal, meddlesome creature?

Cursing himself for a fool, he drew from his coat a small bottle of rum he'd bought in a tavern and whistled sharply through the iron gate. Startled, the man leaped to his feet, grabbing the lantern in one hand and the musket in the other.

"Here now, who goes there?" he demanded, holding the lantern high as he peered into the shadows. "Come, show yourself, or be gone!"

Nick stepped before the gate and into the light, his hands raised to show he was unarmed except for the bottle in his hand. He grinned foolishly and swayed as if in the breeze, mimicking the drunkenness of nearly every man he'd seen since he'd landed. "John Stone, o' th'
Janus
, 44, Cap'n Henderson," he called, "an' I come as a friend, I swear by all that's good an' holy."

"Now why should I be believin' you, John Stone?" asked the man scornfully. But Nick noticed how he tipped the musket's barrel back against his shoulder, as sure a sign as any that he thought Nick was harmless. "What reason d'you have for swearin' anything at all to me?"

"Bein' one poor jack t' another, that's why." Nick thrust the bottle through the bars of the gate. "Th' whole ruddy fleet's makin' merry for your cap'n an' his lady, an' it don't seem fair for you to be left out of th' sport."

"Friggin' lot Cap'n Lord hisself cares," said the man as he took the offered bottle and lifted it to his nose to sniff. "Him an' them other gilded grandees, may they rot straight to hell. Do this be French brew, or Yankee?"

"French," said Nick, watching with satisfaction as the man tipped back the bottle and let the liquor pour down his throat. "Smuggled in this selfsame day from Martinico."

But the man didn't answer. The best he could do was slowly lower the bottle from his mouth, the last bit of the rum trickling untasted from his lips as he stared glassy-eyed at Nick, swaying, before he finally pitched forward to the grass. Michel had assured Nick that the mixture worked swiftly, and that anyone who drank it would be as if dead for at least six hours, but to be sure Nick waited a moment longer as the candle slipped from the lantern and its flame sizzled out on the dew-heavy grass.

Then Nick was at the stone wall in an instant, effortlessly pulling himself up and over to land silently on the grass beside the unconscious guard. Swiftly he gagged the man with a rag, tied his wrists and ankles and dragged both him and the lantern deeper into the shadows, then he eased the musket into the ornamental pond in the center of the garden.

He lifted his hat long enough to drag his sleeve across his brow, and looked up at the house before him. To guard against thieves, the shutters of the first floor windows and doors were closed and locked for the night, but all five of the windows above, their sills part
of the roof of the first floor piazza, were open to the
breezes from the bay. With a final muttered prayer that he'd understood the slave girl's garbled, giggling French, Nick found a foothold in an espaliered rose tree, climbed to the roof of the piazza and, as quietly as he could, made his way along the roof to the window he hoped was Rose's. He slung one leg over the sill, drew his knife from the sheath behind his waist and slipped inside the darkened room.

"Rosie?" he called softly as his eyes grew accustomed to the shadows. "It's Nick, lass, and I've come for you."

Now he could make out the tall-posted bed, stripped of its heavy hangings for summer and left with only the ghostly gauze of the mosquito curtains. The coverlet was so neatly folded over the bedstead and pillows that clearly no one had slept here tonight, and this time, his disappointment keen, he cursed the slave girl's confusion.

He walked to the wardrobe and jerked open the tall doors, searching for clothes or any other sign that Rose had been in the room. Perhaps he had only missed her; perhaps she had been called to another room in the house, and would return soon. Perhaps—

The flying bundle of clipped velvet caught him hard in the chest as it hurtled into him, nearly knocking him off his feet as he staggered backward beneath the impact, his knife raised to defend himself.

"Oh, Nick, you came, you
came
!" gasped Rose in an ecstatic whisper as she tried to disentangle herself and miles of clipped velvet. "I didn't want you to—I even prayed you'd be sensible and stay in St. Pierre— but now that you're here I can't believe how happy I am to see you, and oh—oh, Nick, how I love you!"

She threw her good arm around his neck and kissed him, long enough and well enough that he briefly considered taking her directly to the bed on the other side of the room. The taste of her mouth, the sweet fragrance of her hair and skin, the soft, pliant feel of her in his arms—all things that were the more impossibly dear to him because he'd come so close to losing her.

"And I love you, too, Rosie." For a long, precious moment he buried his face in the dark silk of her hair before he forced himself to think of Graham and the danger they were in, and gently held her away.

"You're well, then, sweetheart?" he asked, searching her small face for any signs of ill treatment. "Graham hasn't hurt you?"

"He wouldn't dare," she said, her voice abruptly flat and joyless. "He wants my money too badly for that. And we must be quiet, too, for there's an odious old woman who sits in the hall outside my door to make sure I don't try to run away. But look, Nick."

Awkwardly she lifted up the lumpy velvet bundle she'd been holding when she'd thrown herself at him. "I've done the same thing as you did in Charles Town during the fire. I pulled down all the hangings from the bed and tied them together, and I was just going to wrap them around the window frame to climb out when you came."

"You were going to climb from the window by yourself, swaddled in petticoats and with only one arm?" he asked as he imagined with horrifying clarity everything that could have gone wrong. "Didn't you know there was a guard with a musket below? And if you'd somehow gotten yourself over the wall to the street, what then? Where would you have turned in a town that's no more than a camp of drunken, randy sailors and marines?"

Her grin wavered uncertainly. "The guard, I know, often falls asleep on the bench at night, and I meant to wait until he did, but as for the rest, I—I—oh, Nick, they were going to make me marry that awful man tomorrow, and I couldn't stay and let them do it, truly!"

"Now you don't have to," he said gruffly, drawing her back into his arms. Lord, if he'd been fifteen minutes later, even ten… "Michel is waiting with a boat on the beach, and Gideon has the
Angel Lily
not far beyond the harbor. All you and I must do is reach them."

She looked up at him and smiled, melting every doubt from his heart. "We can do that. Together, of course. I don't doubt it for a minute."

"Good lass." Gently he pulled the bundled curtains from her hand and tossed them back on the bed. "This time we won't need these. Is there anyone else besides the woman at the door and the man in the garden?"

She shook her head, and he took her hand. "Then let's be off, Rosie."

Her heart pounding with excitement, she let him guide her across the flat roof of the piazza and then clung to him as he ordered while he climbed down the espaliered roses to the ground.

"I don't see the guard," she whispered. "He must be here somewhere."

"He is," said Nick as he led her across the wet grass, "but he's not going to trouble us. Now I'm going to have to boost you up to the top of this wall, and you wait until I can help you down on the other side."

"No, wait, Nick, there's a gate here to the side that's not locked," she said, breaking away to show him. "That's why there was a guard."

But as she scurried across the grass, holding her skirts above the dew, Nick heard the men's footsteps and voices on the other side of the wall, and instinctively he raced after Rose to grab her arm and pull her into the safety of the shadows. But before he could, the men were suddenly there by the second gate, two men in the uniforms of a lieutenant and a captain. As if caught in the spell of the moonlight, for an instant all four of them froze where they stood.

Then with a terrified little shriek Rose ran back to Nick, her eyes huge with fear. Swiftly Nick caught her arm and pushed her behind him, praying she'd have the sense to stay where she'd be safe, and then evenly met the gazes of the Englishmen before him. It was the captain who held his attention, a florid-faced man with mean, close-set eyes, a bully if ever he'd seen one. He didn't need an introduction.

"Captain Lord Eliot Graham, if I'm not mistaken," Nick said softly, sweeping his cutlass from the scabbard. "I'm Nickerson Sparhawk. Your servant, sir."

"Damn your eyes, Sparhawk," spit out Graham, his hatred rising like a palpable thing between them. "You won't have the bitch!"