The Tiger's Bride

Miss Abernathy bit out an introduction. “This isn’t a visitor, Abigail. This is Lord Straithe, captain of the Phoenix.”

“Lord Straithe!” The young woman clasped her dainty hands to her chest. “Oh, sir! Have you changed your mind? Do you go to find our papa?”

It took some doing, but Jamie managed to tear his gaze from the perfect oval of Abigail’s face. Turning to her sister’s somewhat more irregular features, he laid the decision squarely on her shoulders.

“Do I, Miss Abernathy?”

Gold-flecked eyes clashed with his steady blue ones. After a silent battle of wills, she ground out a terse response.

“Yes, you do.”

Sarah showed him to the door some moments later, her head high and her spirits uncharacteristically low. She was far too sensible to ascribe her dejection to Straithe’s stunned reaction to Abigail. Of course he would stare at her. Every male between the ages of eighteen and eighty gaped like a landed trout the first time he laid eyes on the younger of the Abernathy sisters. Sarah had long since passed the point of expecting any man to remember she was even in the same room with Abigail.

No, she owed her dissatisfaction to the deal she’d struck with Straithe. She would provide the pilot for his nefarious smuggling run, and he would make inquiries about Papa at the ports he put into. She’d have to be greener than the first picking of Souchou tea to believe his inquiries would be anything more than perfunctory…if he made them at all.

The truth of the matter was that Sarah didn’t trust Straithe to hold to his end of the bargain. Nothing in his background gave her reason to do so. His ungentlemanly actions on the two occasions she’d met with him only confirmed his lack of character in her opinion.

Frowning, she watched him stride away. The muggy afternoon sunlight picked up the wide set of his shoulders under his green frock coat and the gleaming black of his hair.

Black as sin.

And sinful the man was. Sarah had only to remember the way her heart had thumped and breath had left her lungs when he’d kissed her to know she was dealing with a scoundrel of the first order.

She shut the door with a snap. She wouldn’t, couldn’t, trust this man. She would have to go with him, will he or nill he.

His mind racing with all that must be done in the next few hours, Jamie took the cobbled streets with a long, purposeful stride. He had his pilot, or the promise of one. Assuming the man knew Chinese waters and the Phoenix successfully dodged both the men-of-war patrolling the Macao Roads and the pirates who swarmed the coast, the entire crew stood to make a handsome profit. Most of Jamie’s share would go into the sinkhole that was Kerrick’s Keep.

He was damned if he knew why he’d repurchased the crumbling, twelfth-century fortress from the squire his brother had sold it to. The place was a ruin, or near enough not to make any difference. Jamie hadn’t taken any joyful childhood memories of its drafty halls and smoke-darkened timbered ceilings with him when he went to sea at the ripe old age of twelve. He’d been happy enough to see the last of the place, and of the stern, disapproving brother who considered it his duty as the head of the family to whip a sense of responsibility into his troublesome, reckless younger sibling.

Kerrick’s Keep belonged to Jamie now, though. He supposed he might return to it some day, when his craving for adventure and the knife-clean air of the high seas ran its course. Which, he thought with a grin, wouldn’t be any time soon. Spurred by the challenge of reclaiming his crew from the fleshpots of Macao, preparing the Phoenix for departure, and snapping his fingers in the face of the Emperor by sailing upcoast instead of upriver, Jamie took the steep, winding steps down to the docks two at a time.

If his luck held, maybe he’d even stumble across The Reverend Mr. Abernathy. His grin widened at the thought of delivering the missionary to his so-grateful and so very beautiful younger daughter.

Strangely, though, as he stepped into the sampan that would take him to the three-masted schooner riding at anchor in the roads, it was Sarah Abernathy’s disdainful face that hovered in the back of his mind, not Abigail’s more classic features. He wouldn’t mind hauling the missionary back with him if for no other reason than to make the snippety spinster eat her pride enough to thank him, Jamie thought with a grimace.

The moment the sampan sculled around a bulky merchantman and the distinctive silhouette of the Phoenix appeared, all thoughts of the Misses Abernathy vanished instantly. The schooner rode at the end of her anchor chain like the thoroughbred she was. Purchased from a Yankee who’d made his fortune privateering, the Phoenix was sleek and sharp-built by a Baltimore house known for its fast ships. At a little over three hundred and twenty tons, she sailed with a crew of twenty-nine…most of whom, Jamie knew, would now have to be rousted from drink shops and brothels.

He leaped agilely from the sampan and felt the familiar roll of the deck under his boots. Tugging his linen stock from around his neck, he shouted for his first mate.

“Burke! Get yourself topside, man, on the double!”

While he waited for the brawny Irishman, he squinted up at the sun. They had three hours until the tide started to turn. Three hours until they hauled up the anchor, doused all lights, and slipped past the shoals. Three hours until they made for the dangerous waters of South China Sea.

Damn! He hoped to hell Cook’s brother’s whoever-he-was knew his business.

The short, stocky Chinese came aboard an hour later, leaping nimbly from a sampan to the taffrail and then to the deck with a skill he thoroughly enjoyed displaying to the foreign demons. His bare feet gripped the boards with an easy familiarity as he strode to the poop deck where Jamie conferred with his bleary-eyed third mate. He waited respectfully until the captain had sent the mate off with a curt order to soak his head in a bucket of seawater.

“Then go in search of Hardesty, O’Rourke, and Smith,” Jamie called after the staggering seaman. “I don’t want to leave without them.”

When he turned to the Chinese who awaited him, the man met his eyes with a directness unusual in one of his polite, self-effacing culture.

“You wanchee pilot, cap-i-tan?”

“Aye, I wanchee pilot.”

“I werry fine pilot.”

“Werry fine maybe, but can do nightee time fast fast?”

“Day time, nightee time, all same same. Can do werry fast.”

Despite the limitations of Pidgin, Jamie conducted a brief but thorough interrogation of the man’s nautical experience and navigational skills. The pilot was named Wang Er, which translated into Son of the Second Harvest. He owed his name, he explained earnestly, to a bountiful rice crop in the year of his birth. A native of Amoy, some miles up the coast, Second Harvest rose to chief oarsman of a war junk in the mandarin’s personal fleet before being accused of sucking eggs pilfered from the captain’s coop. He was sentenced to beheading, escaped, and eventually married a relative of the Abernathy’s cook.

Jamie rocked back on his heels, his eyes narrowed and his ears half tuned to the buzz of activity behind him. During his years at sea he’d learned to trust his instincts where men were concerned. Some, he wouldn’t turn his back on in the narrow confines below decks. Others, like this one, he felt a decided affinity for.

His mind made up, he informed Second Harvest that he was hired. His first piece of business was to make some order of the flotilla of junks and sampans bobbing at the schooner’s waist, all fighting to off-load their supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables and water.

“Ai yah! Can do easy, cap-i-tan!”

Jamie kept a close eye on the pilot as he gestured and shouted the small fleet into submission. At his command, a number of Chinese leapt agilely aboard. They joined the Phoenix’s crew in a human chain that fed basket after basket of stores into the hold. Satisfied that Second Harvest had the replenishment effort well in hand, Jamie turned his attention to the ship’s armaments.

Slowly, inexorably, evening fell and the tide began to turn. The huge ships in the bay began to swing in a half circle at the end of their anchor chains. Towering East Indiamen, each a thousand tons or more, moved ponderously, their lines creaking and their distinctive black-and-white checkered sides swaying. The smaller ships dipped gracefully on the swells. Sampans and double-tiered junks floated lightly.

Lights flickered amidships, and the night came alive. Oars splashed. Laughter carried across the water. An occasional shout rang out. A drunken English Jack called out a price to one of the girls on the Flower Boats, as the decorated junks that served as floating brothels were called.

Jamie ignored the familiar sounds. Leaning both palms on the Phoenix’s rail, he studied the pinpoints of light that identified the British warship patrolling the mouth of the bay. Once, he’d served on a sister ship to that very frigate. He’d strutted her decks with the pride and arrogance that came with wearing Naval colors, and sweated alongside his cannoneers during pitched battles at sea. Now, he used his intimate knowledge of her capabilities and maneuverability to his own purpose.

His first mate’s rich Irish brogue came out of the darkness beside him. “It’ll be a foine trick, slippin’ past that one in the dark.”

“We’ve done it before,” Jamie replied, his intent gaze on the distant lights.

“Aye, that we have.” Burke looked to the shore to gauge how much the ships had turned with the tide. “If we’re a’goin’, we’ll have to go soon.”

“Are Hardesty and the others aboard?”

The fiery-haired Burke gave a snort of disgust. “In a manner o’ speakin’. They’re hangin’ over the bow rail, pukin’ up their guts.”

Jamie shook his head in sympathy, knowing from personal experience that it would take some time for his crew to recover from the potent concoction of alcohol, tobacco juice, sugar and arsenic served in the drink shops.

“We pulled them out of a brothel on Donkey Lane,” Burke added wryly. “The bluidy sods screeched at the top o’ their lungs because we interrupted them just as the girls were going to demonstrate Reversed Ducks Flying.”

Jamie sent his mate a quick, slashing grin. “They’ll not soon forgive us for that piece of bad timing!”

“That they won’t.” Burke shook his head. “Reversed Ducks Flying! That damned book will be the death of us all.”

Jamie’s grin widened at the reference to the crew’s most precious treasure. During a run up the coast some years ago, they’d rescued a Jesuit priest about to be beheaded by the irate mandarin he’d somehow offended. In his gratitude and relief, the priest had let slip that he’d translated into Latin one of the ancient manuals that instructed on ways to increase the pleasures of the bed.

The crew of the Phoenix could become as piratical as anyone on the seas when the occasion demanded. They’d wheedled, cajoled, then forced cup after cup of rum down the priest’s throat. Eventually, the drunken cleric had penned a copy of the translation for the delighted men. Jamie suspected that, out of fear for his life, the Jesuit had employed his imagination when his memory failed, since a good number of the thirty-two positions he described were physically impossible to emulate. Nevertheless, the crew had adopted the handwritten translation of Ars Amatoria of Master Tung-Hsuan as their personal manifesto. To a man, their goal was to accomplish every one of the positions described in the now yellowed and much handled booklet.