Cast in Dark Waters

1

Crimson.

The name was spoken in English, German, Italian, Spanish and the mixed musical tongues of the slaves brought from Africa. The French, as was their way, added a touch of romantic milieu to the killer and called her La Belle Dame a Sanglant Cheveaux—the beautiful woman of bloody hair. It made for some middling poetry and the occasional three-verse song.

She inspired a variety of feelings in rogues of all sorts—at least during the course of the tales told on a heavy night of drinking, or while crouched beside a dying campfire… fascination, respect, fear, skepticism, and an angry, bitter lust.

A tiny creature she was, from what they said, but one with a strange hold on most men of the Caribbean Basin, both white and black alike. There was even some talk of a deposed marquis who dueled for her honor although he’d never so much as laid eyes on the lady of sanguine hair. As he thrashed in agony for over an hour, dying from a sword thrust through both lungs, he whispered her name with a beatific smile.

Perhaps it was true.

But one had to be wily—as crafty as she was—for she could be enlisted by anybody who matched her price, and you could never be certain whose employ she was in at any given time. In London, Barcelona, Berlin, and Paris there were such hirelings as this, and they were called confidential agents. Mercenary investigators who would, if paid well enough, help take care of obstacles and quandaries. Perhaps retrieving a jewel stolen from your mistress… or finding useful secrets about your enemies… or tracking down a lost son or corrupt business partner… or carrying cargo past the navies of foreign governments.

Rumor, gossip, fact and exaggeration all lent to a slowly-evolving myth.

This was Crimson, a dark-eyed corsair. La Belle Dame a Sanglant Cheveaux grinning across a floor of broken men, with the molten sun draping over her shoulders… and there were always writhing shadows in the depths of the dark waters she sailed.

He needed air. Maycomb had barely closed the door to his cabin when he heard his wife begin to sob once again within. The plaintive sounds made him champ his teeth and, for a moment, the black rage filled his chest and his vision grew bright at the edges. He had to prop himself against the cold timbers of the inner hull before his eyes cleared. The Virginian felt a relentless sense of guilt burning in him about leaving Eileen behind, but he’d spent the entire night trying to comfort her in their narrow berth and he’d failed for all his efforts. Today was their daughter Daphna’s nineteenth birthday and Eileen was inconsolable.

Trevor Maycomb wanted a taste of the Caribbean sea breeze—to fill him with renewed vigor after five days and nights of lying in the small and poorly ventilated cabin, with the loud and drunken carousing of the sailors on board keeping him from any rest at all. As if the lice and rats and stench of bilge water weren’t already bad enough on this damnable voyage. By now he was desperate enough for relief that he’d even put up with facing the scamps and pirates who navigated this creaking, leaking vessel.

“This pounding sea is cleaving my skull in two,” he muttered before he went up. He wanted his pipe but there was no point in retrieving it. One of the men was a pickpocket who’d cut the strings on Maycomb’s tobacco pouch minutes after he’d boarded. The irony was not lost on him that a tobacco farmer couldn’t even have a decent smoke on this dreadful voyage.

“Rotters.”

He’d come to America from England to raise his crops almost seven years ago. He’d brought Eileen with him though he feared the distance between them and Daphna might prove to be too great a burden. The girl had remained behind in a private school considered to offer the best in education, surrounded by relatives and given a greater sense of freedom than most girls her age. Though the Maycombs stayed in contact with their daughter via correspondence and made an annual trek back to Britain, the separation took its toll on all of them.

But the colonies were no place for Daphna. Virginia was a more primitive land than he’d expected, and the townships were often fierce and uncivilized places. There was little law and he’d been forced to become a much different man than he’d once been. He was accustomed to a life of elegance, and though the profits in Virginia had been worth the pains, life remained filled with fearful uncertainties.

And they became even worse in the Basin.

“I know the scent of my own tobacco, you miscreants.” He checked his flintlock, making certain the gunpowder had not gotten too wet in this damp air. Six years ago he’d never even fired a pistol, and now he could reload his shot in fifteen seconds. “If I catch the smell on any of you, you’ll be hefted over the side.”

With the original buccaneers driven out by the local ruling powers and routed by the Crown, the Caribbean had become a region of chaos. The first freebooters, for all their faults, had brought a certain semblance of order to the area. New Providence, Madagascar, and Johanna Isle all flourished under rule of the pirates. Their decrees had been domineering but fair, especially for the Americas, and their codes of protection had been strictly enforced.

Now, however, there were only armed vessels run by independent smugglers available to take you to sea ports in the West Indies or beyond. Roving bands of corsairs flying under black flags owned the water lanes from Grand Bahama to Bocas Del Toro in Panama. And the stories of these sea wolves robbing and killing their own passengers were legion. Maycomb knew that despite all his precautions he and Eileen would be lucky to survive this venture.

He was about to go up on deck to the foc’s’le, which also served as the galley, when he saw two urchins standing at the top of the stairwell. Not even the warm, sun-filled morning improved their ragged and sinister appearance. Indeed, daylight only showed them to look more like the dregs of the London slums than ever: striped short-sleeve shirts, wide leather belts, filthy pants, and their cudgels sloppily concealed. Ugly, faded tattoos adorned their arms and necks, and scar tissue festooned the boys like jewelry.

Neither could have been more than sixteen years old but their faces bore the disfigurement of many battles, fought in the back alleys of the East End as well as upon the turbulent ocean.

“Guvner, suh.”

“Lads,” Maycomb said.

“Have a bit’a rum here if you’d like to ’ave a sip. Probably not as fine a liquor as you be used to, but it hits the proper spot.”

“Thank you, no,” Maycomb said softly, knowing where this would soon lead. He primed himself for it, prepared to draw his pistol if necessary.

“Reckon you might extend the invitation to the lady, suh. Ain’t seen much’a her above deck since we left port. The shadows aren’t good for a woman’s complexion, ye know. She could probably do with a bit’a nice weather on her cheeks. You might bid her up.”

“No, I think not.”

“And here we was thinkin’ that the aristocratic folks was an overly genial bunch too.”

All the freebooters on this vessel had scrutinized Eileen with open desire, and it was only through his own forceful presence and show of arms—his flintlock and sword—that no one had yet forced himself upon her. Maycomb again cursed himself for being a fool and bringing her on this voyage, and yet he was a fool with little choice in these matters.

“Ah now, suh, no need to be pullin’ such a face. We only come seekin’ our fortunes to this land, same as you, no different than yeself. We do a respectable service bringin’ honorable and decent families across the waters. Why, if we only had us fine wives as you tucked into our berths instead, there’d—”

A stinging salty breeze flowed down to him and he could sense a summer storm in the air. He wreathed his hand around the chain of silver he wore around his neck, grasping hold of both the silver cross and the stone medallion bearing the face of the Celtic deity Anu, mother of the gods. For a moment he almost let himself be swept up in the urge to mount the stairs and beat back the two boys, but it would only serve to cause greater enmity with the others on board. He dreaded there would already be enough blood awaiting him.

“Die and be damned, you scurvy curs.”

The guttersnipes sniggered and gestured for him to come up and the sword at his hip was a reassuring pressure, yet with a grunt of shame he turned and returned at once to his cabin.

But far worse than murderers, he feared that even the dead were at his heels.

Three ships had anchored in nine-fathom waters within the past twenty-four hours outside Port of St. Christopher’s, making the small harbor a battleground of drunken pirates ramming each other’s skiffs as they landed. Every sailor tried to impress and outspend all the others with the plunder he’d accumulated on various recent raids. A crowd of masts cluttered the harbor. Press-gangs, hell-carts, and coaches raised a racket along the streets. The fish-wives went about the wharves and marketplace selling their wares, and the whores did the same.

Neither Neptune nor the lord Jesus of Nazareth held any sway here. Most of the brigands and marauders stuck to the usual ways of losing their money: crooked card games; harlots who’d fill a man with wine and sweet words before lifting a coin purse; dealing with former freebooters who worked all the havens of the Caribbean, rolling the men who’d once been their mates. The dead piled up along the piers while the swindled sought reparation by looting drunkards and the elderly. The cycle had no beginning or ending, it simply continued from day to day and ship to ship. The same gold piece could pass through twenty hands a night.

A few of the larger ports in the Bahamas had some law enforcement, but such courts held no interest in poor men—pirates or not—and could be bought for a few pieces-of-eight.

Certainly none of the officials were going to stop the fight now underway in the Hog’s Head Inn.

It was an odd scene to witness, even in a tavern where the bartender frequently used a machete to lop off the hands of thieves reaching for the till. The throng clattered their bowls and tankards of grog. They knocked furniture back as they eased away from the center of the room where the fray progressed and grew ever more waspish. Cheers and hails went up. Two brawlers laughing in each other’s faces as they circled and slashed.

“Have at ’em, lass, but you’ll likely lose your blade if you peg his overstuffed belly!”

Jessup, a stocky pirate with a graying beard hanging to his huge gut, stabbed with his sword and continued on after the slight woman causing him so much trouble. She pranced around him while he flailed and thrust. He was the new first mate of the Baranaro, now that he’d broken the former mate’s skull and dumped the body out beyond the reef in full view of the other men.

He tried like hell to pin the girl but she evaded him easily with a mocking flourish. She wore a simple white blouse and calico trousers with bone buttons down the front, her bountiful figure stirring the men around the Hog’s Head even as she dodged and attacked. She had a flintlock pistol stuffed in the wide red sash around her waist, but she refused to draw it.

That in itself was another way to scorn Jessup, and it infuriated him until he barked out snarling chortles. She swatted him twice in the ass with the flat of her blade and the crowd around him roared.

Looping curls of her lank red hair coiled across her eyes as she parried with her cutlass. All she knew of this Jessup was that, besides blatantly murdering officers, he’d robbed one of his own mates a while back in Montserrat, a navigator named Owlstead. Pirates usually didn’t keep grudges for long because it was a loser’s game, holding on to such pettiness when there was so much new ill will stacking up each day.

But Owlstead was an exception who had nurtured his malice for six months. He didn’t care so much for the missing money, there was always more to be plundered and squandered, but Jessup had taken a ruby earring that Owlstead had worn for over forty years, since he’d first stepped off land and become a seaman. For that he wanted vengeance. Jessup had to be humiliated, but Owlstead was much too old and discreet to beset the man head-on.

Fights of this sort were so common in the Hog’s Head that usually it only took a few minutes before many of the patrons turned their attention back to their card games, listening to the naughty ditties played by the blind squeezebox man. But tonight almost all the men remained enraptured by the fluid moves of this lively girl as she hacked and evaded, her laughter urging them to gather around a bit closer. The air had turned quite festive and they elbowed each other in the ribs, buying one another rounds. She was a handsome woman if not a true beauty, and yet there was something else that drew the sailors to her. They realized she was one of their own, and it gave each man a moment of wild resolve to make a claim on her.

Sparks flew as the swords clashed and splintered the stools. Some men took note of her style, intent on remembering certain moves and maneuvers. Crimson lunged and parried almost as if dancing, enjoying herself even more as Jessup began to tire. His paunch jostled and wobbled as he sidestepped and ducked her blade, his beard slick with sweat. He huffed and eyed the doorway.

She taunted him now and played to her audience. “So, you men say I shouldn’t poke him in that bulging belly at all?”

“Let us get a whaling crew here first, is all, you’ll let loose sixty gallons of blubber oil, I’d bet!”

“We’ll all drown for sure!”

Crimson nodded at Jessup’s stomach while he drew away, panting. “More air in there than oil, I’d wager! If I let it out we’ll all have a strong wind to fill our sails on the morrow.”

“Do it now, Lady, I says! And make our journey that much quicker from this island!”

With more of a grunt than a bellow, Jessup reared and flung himself forward. It was the kind of stupid and desperate ploy Crimson had been expecting for the last several minutes. He had no land legs and couldn’t keep himself balanced on ground. With his heels clopping, Jessup spun to his left and chopped high as he whirled, hoping to catch the edge of his sword against her neck as he passed.

Crimson waited as the fat bastard twirled about on his toes so slowly that she could have hacked his ears off at any time. How braggarts like him so often tempted her. She drew three breaths and he still hadn’t completed his turn. She poised her cutlass up towards his forehead so that when he came about he saw nothing but the tip of her steel aimed between his eyes.

It was a well-articulated move that brought shouts from the other buccaneers who could appreciate such skill and timing—even if she was only battling against an overstuffed ambusher like Jessup.

“I’d guess you win this contest,” he said, grinning, still trying to hold on to some dignity.

“If you must still make a guess at it, louse, then this is the time for you to lay down your weapon.”

“It’s only been a game so far, girl.”

“One that’ll end much worse for you if you don’t do as I say.”

Jessup tossed his sword at her feet, hoping to appear contemptuous. “You’ve taken all the gold I had,” he said, hoping to keep himself composed. She could clearly read the fear in his face, beneath the false grin. Lamp light flickered off her blade as she moved her wrist, flitting the point around his heart. “Sixty-six pieces.”

“There were only forty-four.”

“Forty-four then! I want them all returned.”

She’d been paid over twice that already just to satisfy this debt. Owlstead, at the back of the tavern, licked his brittle lips, watching her and enjoying this show. “We all face our share of disappointments, you fleshy dullard.”

“Here now, wench!”

“Count yourself lucky. You’ve repaid some of a long-standing arrears, though I suppose you’ve a good deal more to pay out. From what I know, the former first mate of the Baranaro was a well-liked chap and competent at his post. You, I reckon, won’t last to see Rum Cay.”

“You think not?”

“As I say.”

Rubbing at his unshapely belly as though he were ready for a good meal, he asked, “So which one of these putrid sons of strumpets put you on to me, eh? I’ll have that out of ya before I go on.”

Crimson tried hard not to sigh but failed. She let out a stream of breath that tousled hair from the corner of her mouth, shaking her head slowly side to side. She often wondered why it was so often forced to come to this—the men unable to admit defeat even when so close to getting their throats cut. What compulsion drove them to such stupidity?

“Answer me now, girl.”

“Here, have it.” Crimson gave the cur a sizable gash on the side of his neck to remind him of who was in control here. Jessup cringed and squawked like a chicken, finally dropping his arrogant demeanor.

“Blood!”

“You’ll get nothing but your heart plucked out if you don’t leave now while I’m still in a good mood.”

“She bleeds me!”

“The whiskey in this place is thin as pond water so I doubt I’ll be quite so benevolent in a short while. You can run back to your ship and face your mates or you can catch board upon some passing vessel. I suggest the latter choice, if you want to live out the week.”

“You hussy witch—”

“None of that.” She cut him again in the same spot, deepening the wound. Jessup cried out and hit a nice high squalling note that even the squeeze-box musician couldn’t reach on his instrument.

It had been a fine spectacle. Almost everyone in the shadowy, lantern—lit tavern applauded and kicked up a ruckus. Especially loud were the other women freebooters, a few of the fishwives and whores. Though they dressed, swore, and even fought like men, it was still easy to see—with a few notable exceptions—that they too were ladies who needed their liberties. No man should be allowed to speak to a woman thusly in these parts. They raised tankards and cups in salute as Jessup stumbled out of the Hog’s Head Inn, whimpering and holding his collar tightly closed as the blood pulsed between his fingers.

Owlstead gave her one brief nod and was gone, possibly to finish off the job, now that Jessup was beaten down and scurrying for cover.

When Crimson was done with the chubby sod, she sheathed her sword and returned to her table to sit over her cold supper. An old bearded man with a wild shock of white hair and a black leather eye patch sat beside her sipping whiskey.

“I thought ye’d have a harder time with him,” he said.

“He was just an overconfident ass, like most of them.”

“True, but he’s still a butcher, truth be known. Some time ago I saw him cut the sex off a merchant in Mayaguana and stuff it in the dying man’s mouth.”

“Ah, well, and here I was hoping he’d marry me. Pity my na i ve dreams. I need more grog.”

Welsh—he’d never used another name in front of her—grinned with rotted stumps of teeth. His tangled beard smelled of gunpowder. Like Edward Teach, the notorious Blackbeard, Welsh often intimidated foes in battle by wrapping slow-burning lighted coils in his long hair. It was a good trick and kept their minds focused elsewhere. He had trembling hands but they were thick and powerful. “You’ve a poisonous tongue on ye, ye do.”

“I inherited it from my father.”

Ten years ago, while Crimson’s mother lay dying of consumption, she had claimed that Crimson had come from the loins of Welsh. It was a blow she’d never quite fully recovered from, whether it was truth or not. Nobody wanted to hear that they’d been born to that pirate. Welsh denied being Crimson’s father, but once you got past the scruffy white beard, the seamed skin and broken nose, you could see a definite resemblance. At least she could.

“Now don’t go spoutin’ that nonsense again, child. Order a second bowl of stew and get on with yer meal.”

“I’ve lost my hunger. Another round of ale instead. Where’s that damned barkeep?”

“And don’t go sulking either, girl.”

He could talk fatherly enough when he liked. “I do what I please, you goat, and don’t be getting on me about it.”

“Then keep yer jibes to yerself or stick ’em elsewhere.”

“I put them where I like, and you be glad I don’t use something sharper to stick into your sagging flank.”

She was never sure why she pushed this matter, even after all these years. Considering how many families she’d seen ruined by betrayal, deception, and greedy appetites, she’d have thought she’d never want to meet up with any of her own relations, wherever they might be.

And yet there was a certain haunting weakness within her, a hollowness that made itself known from time to time. The need to discover her father. As a child, she’d had idle dreams that she was the daughter of the duke of some distant northern country, where her bedroom resided in a tower glazed with rime year ’round. It gave her something to think about under the burning sun.

Regardless, she enjoyed irritating the old bastard too. No matter how she prodded him or how similar their features were, she knew her mother was out of her head with fever on her deathbed. The woman spoke to the long-deceased and saw leering faces in the draperies.

Welsh tightened his leather wristbands in an effort to help control some of the quivering. His blunt knuckles had been broken so many times that they’d turned black. He could still wield a sword with tremendous might and dexterity, but in the little day-to-day things like rigging a sail or carrying boxes of cargo, his trembling would sometimes get so bad he couldn’t hold on to what he was carting. He was always on the lookout to make sure enemies didn’t spot his weakness.

He caught her eye and smiled, ignoring her unspoken comments. “Yer gettin’ a notable reputation, lass. Word’s been crossing the compass. There was a eighty-footer in yesterday called the Yardarm. One o’ the riggers met up with a sloop called the Hopewell two days back and said a rich man named Maycomb and his wife’re comin’ to see ya about business. They’ve heard how good y’are at settling scores and locating what’s been lost.”

“Maycomb. English?”

“Originally, I’d guess. Scottish, maybe. Now he’s in the Colonies. Virginia, the rigger said. Tobacco farmer.”

“So he’s money to spend.”

“We can hope and pray. Trouble is, I’m thinkin’, the Hopewell is run by Dobbins now.”

“Christ spread on his cross,” she said. “With Dobbins as captain they won’t be alive when the ship comes in to anchor. He’ll rape the woman and steal their coin if his crew hasn’t already.”

“He’s been goin’ easy on that sort of activity lately,” Welsh said. “From what I hear. Cleaned his ship up some. Runs smaller smuggling operations. Keeps his men in hand.”

“Does he now?”

Welsh grimaced and pursed his lips, thinking about it. “Well, most of ’em, leastways. Bad fer business when half the passengers who ship out wit ye turn up dead or not at all.”

Crimson leaned back in her seat. “If this Maycomb is murdered before I get a chance to speak to him, don’t let me forget to kill Dobbins.”

“Be me pleasure to remind ye.”