Katharine Ashe - How to Be a Proper Lady

For years after her father stole her out from under her sister’s eyes, right off the property of the man she’d always thought was her father, Viola had hoped to return to England. She had written letter after letter, sending them off when her real father wasn’t ashore so he wouldn’t know and be hurt by it. For a hardened sailor, Fionn Daly had a heart of jelly when it came to the females he loved-his widowed sister, Viola, and Viola’s mother, whom he never gave up on despite the fact that she married another man. Right up to the day his extravagant devotion killed her.

Serena never replied to Viola’s letters, not one in six years. So at sixteen Viola ceased writing. But sometimes she still wondered, and wished she had a spyglass that reached all the way to Devonshire. Serena would surely be wed now, with a handful of babies of her own…

But Viola might never find out. She was going to marry Aidan. Since he refused to go back to England until he made his fortune, she wouldn’t be going there anytime soon either. Her life was here. In America. With Aidan.

“Good luck with the missus, Crazy. Hope she takes you back this time.”

“God willin’, miss.” He chuckled. “Could use the extra prayers if you got the time.”

“Oh,” she laughed, “God doesn’t listen to me about that sort of thing any longer. Hasn’t for years.” She waved and continued on to the boardinghouse. On a quiet, narrow street removed from the bustle of the docks, it boasted the peace and quiet she never got on board her ship. She couldn’t stand it for more than a fortnight or so at a time.

A withered old lady answered the door.

“Mrs. Digby, your apple cobbler has beckoned me back once again.”

“Miss Violet.” The woman’s eyes crinkled. “Welcome home.”

Hardly home. But the linens were always dry and hadn’t any bugs.

“For your trouble.” Viola pressed a dozen coins into the proprietress’s shaky palm and climbed the stairs to her room. She couldn’t afford extravagance, but Mrs. Digby kept her in reasonable comfort.

In her chamber she stripped off wool and linen thick with rain and salt and sweat. The serving girl came to make up the fire and Viola gave her a penny, then stood in a tin basin with a pot of hot water to wash. Before the hearth she dried her hair, finger combing out the knots, then fell into bed. She would sleep till Sunday if she didn’t have to rise early the following morning to see to the April ’s cargo.

Before her eyelids fluttered closed, her gaze rested on a tiny statuette on the table beside her bed. Her most prized possession except for her ship.

Her father had traded a whole set of silver plate he’d taken off a Dutch merchantman for this treasure, her thirteenth birthday present. About the length of her forefinger, it was intricately carved and painted with graceful precision. Gold, red, blue, green, yellow. A tiny figure of an Egyptian king.

A pharaoh.

Years later, when she first heard of a pirate with that name-a sailor so brutally successful even Spanish buccaneers feared to cross him-she wanted to meet him, to see with her own eyes the man who was bigger than life. A real legend. Recently, when talk at dockside taverns said the Pharaoh had turned to wrecking pirate vessels exclusively , she wanted to meet him even more.

Now she had.

And because of her, a mere woman, the mighty Pharaoh was sleeping in a jail cell tonight. Also because of her, come the morning, he would be free. If he kept that gorgeous mouth shut.

She fell asleep smiling.

Jin awoke shivering.

He clamped down on his body’s reflexive reaction. Not to the cold. To the iron bars hovering before his eyes.

He shrugged up straighter against the wall, pulling in long, chest-deep breaths, willing away the crawling damp of his flesh and the throb of panic weakening his limbs. Dawn light filtered through the tiny square of a window just above a man’s head in the ten-by-ten cell. About him and in the adjoining cage his crew slept or slumped on the musty floor. The lot of them rested soundly anywhere. So could Jin. Usually.

He hadn’t been behind bars in twelve years, since he was seventeen. On that occasion, two men had paid for his liberty. At his hands. With their lives.

Eight years before that, with wrists in irons, he’d been dragged fighting onto an auctioneer’s block in the blaze of the Barbadian sun. That time a boy had paid for Jin’s freedom. With gold. A twelve-year-old boy to whom Jin owed his life. Each day of freedom since then still seemed like a stolen gift.

A steady, muted click turned his head. In a corner of the cell across the way, Little Billy knocked a battered wooden die against the wall. His neck craned up and he flashed a quick grin.

“Mornin’, Cap’n.” At sixteen, Billy had not yet outgrown his name; short, skinny, gangly, and grinning like a lad. “Ready for the judge?”

“There will be no judge, Bill.” Jin ran his gaze along the walls and bars of the port jail cell, searching for weakness in the structure. Out of habit. He needn’t. They would be released within hours. He had already heard it from the harbor officer the night before when the fellow delivered the rags Jin and his crew now wore in lieu of their own clothes. The April Storm ’s master had lied to the port master about him and his ship.

She was mad. He would be taking a madwoman back to her respectable family in England.

Beside him Mattie expelled a great cavernous yawn. Lifting hands as big as hams, he rubbed them up and down his face and shook his heavy head, then set a glowering look on Jin.

“What’s the plan, Cap’n?”

“I am working on it.”

“Why don’t you just pays these fellas for her, Cap’n?” Little Billy scuttled toward them and gestured to the ceiling, apparently intending to indicate the coastal officials. “Take her off their hands, like?”

“You ain’t thinking straight.” Mattie slugged the lad on a bony shoulder. “That mort ain’t nobody’s property.”

“Didn’t matter with that gal he took up with back in Coruna.” Billy’s pale brow wrinkled.

“What’d you know ’bout that?” Matouba’s bass sounded from his barrel chest. Across the narrow cell, his round eyes were two spots of white in his ebony face. “You weren’t but a mite at the time.”

“He didn’t take up with that one,” Mattie grunted. “And she weren’t free. Master Jin bought her off that bloke as was beating her.” He turned his head to Jin. “Whatever happened to that little Spanish girl?”

Jin shrugged. But he remembered. He remembered every one of the people he freed, their faces, their names. He had found that girl a post as a domestic servant in an old spinster’s house. The woman was ancient but respectable. It was the best he could do in a foreign city. In ports he knew better, he had an easier time of it.

It didn’t matter. Every time he bought someone’s freedom, another chip of the hard, cold stone of rage and old despair inside him fell away. But they were, each one of them, tiny chips indeed, and the stone still quite large. He had a thousand more to go before the rock finally disappeared.

“I sez you buy yourself ’bout four ships, Cap’n, maybe five or six, and stock ’em with crews,” Matouba intoned. “Then you sneak up on that April Storm in open water, close her in, and ’scort her to England like that.”

“No.” Jin shook his head. “She must come willingly.” A woman like Violet la Vile would not come any other way, unless he tied her up and stuffed her in the bilge for the month’s journey. But Jin did not treat other human beings like that. Not any longer. “No,” he repeated. “I have another plan.”