Stephanie Laurens – A Buccaneer At Heart (страница 10)

Amid the leaves of the old tree, long brown seedpods hung, dry now, and in the stirring of the breeze, they added their soft rustle to the evening’s chorus. She found the already familiar susurration welcoming. She sat, letting the fine shawl fall to her elbows so she could better enjoy the coolness on her skin.

She scanned the short stretch of lawn below and saw only a single couple who were already heading home. She watched them go, then she raised her gaze to the wider vista of the harbor and its ships, and the estuary beyond. From there, she could even see the opposite shore, so distant it was nothing more than a thick band of jungle green edging the water.

This was a very foreign land.

She told herself that. Told herself it was no real surprise that finding any trace of Will months after he’d disappeared would take time. More, that any trail wouldn’t easily be uncovered.

In search of that trail, she’d returned to sit through two more of Undoto’s performances. She’d spent both observing closely, searching for some hint of what had sent Will there—desperately hoping for some inkling of what he had gone there to find. Other than feeling faintly disturbed by the tenor of the services, she’d learned nothing more.

She’d spoken with Sampson again, but perhaps unsurprisingly given his earlier concern, he’d been discouraging.

His attitude had only added to her welling despondency.

She’d expected to get somewhere by now.

Glumness dragged at her. Instead of giving in to it, she focused on the scene before her. A ship—sleekly hulled and sporting three towering masts—was sliding gracefully up the estuary. Even from this distance, she could make out the tiny figures of sailors scrambling high on the spars, furling a quite staggering array of sails.

The sight of the ship held her transfixed. As she watched, it smoothly slid past the mouth of the harbor and continued up the estuary, still well out from shore.

She wondered why the ship wasn’t turning in. As far as she knew, there was no other settlement—certainly not a settlement of the size to which such a ship might sail—farther along the estuary’s shores.

She continued to trace the stately passage of the ship. Watching it was curiously soothing.

Courtesy of her brothers’ incessant obsession, she was more than passingly acquainted with the latest designs in sailing vessels. In the sleek lines of the ship nosing down the estuary, she thought she detected the telltale shape of the new ships out of the Aberdeen shipyards. Clippers, as people were starting to call them, because under full sail—which was how they were designed to be sailed—the hull rose and sped across the water, clipping the waves.

She imagined how fast the ship before her might go if all the sails she could see were set before a good wind.

It would fly.

Will would have loved it.

“Will will love it one day.” She frowned at herself, at the unintentional surfacing of her deepest fears.

The best way to eradicate fear was to face it. She didn’t want to, yet she forced her mind to consider the unthinkable.

She still couldn’t believe it. Will isn’t dead.

He’d gone missing, but he was somewhere, and still alive.

He was findable. In turn, that meant he could be rescued.

She would do it.

She would not give up—she would never give up—on Will.

Finally, the ship she’d been watching turned its prow toward shore. It came in a short way, then anchored just inside a cove two bays to the east of the harbor.

She wondered why the captain had chosen to avoid the harbor proper. “Perhaps they’re only anchoring for the night, or to take on water.”

Regardless, she’d seen enough; she had more pressing matters to address.

Eschewing the sight before her, she turned her thoughts inward. Doggedly, she retrod—yet again—all she’d learned. Now that she’d worked out why Will had gone to see Dixon—because Dixon had already disappeared and Will had wanted to learn more—that left Will’s attendance at Undoto’s services as the one peculiarity she had yet to explain.

She decided that was a clear enough sign. Either something happened at the services that Will had seen but that she had yet to notice, or...

She couldn’t think of anything that or might be.

Frowning, she refocused on her surroundings and realized the light was fading. In the tropics, night descended like a curtain falling on a stage—with brutal finality and quite surprising abruptness.

She rose. The temperature had started dropping with the setting of the sun. She flicked her shawl about her shoulders and set off at a brisk walk for the lane, the road, and Mrs. Hoyt’s Boarding House.

As she entered the lane, her senses came alert. Pure habit; she didn’t expect to meet with any difficulty in that area.

Nevertheless, as she emerged onto the road by the rectory, she recognized that, with the falling of night, the atmosphere in the settlement changed.

It wasn’t only the view, the surroundings, that grew darker.

She set off along the rough pavement toward the boardinghouse. Lights were already burning on the front porch, and a welcoming glow shone through the parlor curtains.

Then she nearly tripped as her mind connected her recent thoughts. She halted and stared ahead as she realized...

“I might have been looking in the right place, but at the wrong time.” She breathed the words as the possibilities firmed in her mind.

In this place—as in any other rough and dangerous place in which predators lurked—time of day made a very real difference to what anyone watching might see.

Her heart lifted. She stepped out, her stride firmer, more decided—even more determined.

She’d been watching Undoto during the day. She needed to watch him during the evening and night.

True evil walked in darkness, after all.

CHAPTER 3

Robert stepped out of The Trident’s tender onto a rickety pier constructed of old spars lashed together with vines. Better than slogging through the waves, he supposed, and definitely better for the swift execution of his plan than sailing into the harbor proper.

With its usual abruptness in these climes, night had fallen some hours before. The Trident had been in position by then, but he’d deliberately held off and waited until the bustle of early evening activities had faded before coming ashore.

He directed a searching look into the darkness beyond the pale sand, but there were few people to witness their landing—an old man slumped with a bottle in his hand in front of a ramshackle hut, a young man sitting on a stool and frowning over some nets, several women and children flitting like wraiths through the shadows; none seemed to be paying any great attention.

No doubt they knew better than to stare too openly at men like his party, white men who came ashore under the cover of darkness and well away from the lights of the settlement.

With a few quiet words, he and the four men he’d handpicked to accompany him hoisted their bags, then moved silently and swiftly off what was plainly the local pier of a small fishing village huddled around a pocket of the shore of the wide-mouthed bay two bays farther east from Kroo Bay and the main port of Freetown.

Robert led the way up a stretch of deep sand. He paused where the sand gave way to firmer ground and the shadows of listing palms created a pool of deeper darkness and waited for his men to join him.

As they trudged toward him, he looked past them at the tender steadily pulling out through the shallow waves. The Trident herself was a dark, somewhat indistinct shadow that seemed to hover, gently drifting, on the dark surface of the water farther out in the cove.

The four men reached him. With a tip of his head, he indicated that they should follow him; resettling his seabag over his shoulder, he walked on in the direction of the settlement.

He took whatever path offered, tacking this way and that as he steadily led the way westward through the straggling shantytown of crude dwellings that bordered the settlement like lace on a woman’s petticoat.

He’d left all his officers on board; they couldn’t merge into the population of Freetown in the same effortless, unobtrusive way the four men he’d brought with him could. Benson, Harris, Fuller, and Coleman were all sailors, plain if experienced seamen for whom no one in a port city would spare a second glance. All four were also highly experienced fighters, whether on deck or on land. For what Robert imagined he would need to complete this mission, the four possessed the best collection of requisite skills.

Jordan Latimer, his lieutenant and second-in-command, hadn’t liked it, any more than his ship’s master, Hurley, and his quartermaster, Miller, had, but they’d held their tongues. They were accustomed to being the ones by his side; that, this time, he’d chosen others for that role simply illustrated how very unlike his usual missions—which often involved drawing rooms and even ballrooms—this particular mission was.

He’d left his officers to manage the ship and hold her ready to depart at a moment’s notice. He’d given instructions that once the tender was re-stowed, they should let the ebbing tide draw them farther out from shore, back into the estuary proper, and then anchor where, through a spyglass, they could see the rickety pier, yet where their position made it clear they were not intending to engage with—or threaten—anyone.