LITMIR.BIZ

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what you will with it, Drum. It was obtained illegally and by force. I did not condone Nat’s way of life—and I have to confess that oft was the time I wished it had been different.’

      ‘His way of life was set from the day he seized the Dolphin.’

      ‘That I know. Undoubtedly he was a villain—bold and decisive, and he cut a dashing figure—although his daring deeds made him a charming one, and the scale and brilliance of his villainy elevated him to the rank of one of the most notorious pirates that has ever lived.’

      ‘Aye,’ Drum agreed with a touch of sadness. ‘It did that.’

      Tears clouded Cassandra’s eyes, dampening her lashes. ‘He always made me feel ten feet tall, Drum, and I loved him dearly—pirate or not—to my grief and shame. But he never hurt me so I cannot speak ill of him. When I was thirteen years old and my aunt died and he came to see me, the times I spent with him were the happiest of my life.

      ‘Until then, my life under Aunt Miriam’s dominance had been a complete misery, and she never let me forget the stigma of my birth. There was never a day went by when she didn’t remind me I was her dead sister’s bastard child. Everything I did I did out of a sense of obligation, but, on getting to know Nat, everything I did was to please him, out of love. Now, come,’ she said, walking on with a new spring to her step, the crowd behind them at Execution Dock beginning to disperse. ‘What about these recruits? I must return to Chelsea to get some things and instruct the servants, and in the mean time you have much to do.’

      Drum was of a mind to object, to insist on her remaining at Chelsea, and he would undertake the task of finding men who would be willing to take the risk of releasing the Dolphin from her moorings, men who would know how to keep their mouths shut for a price, but he remained silent, knowing the futility of uttering any protestations.

      There was only one man who could tell Cassandra Everson what to do—only one man she had wanted to please, who she would ever listen to. But he was hanging from the end of a rope at Execution Dock. It would take an exceptional man—the like of Nathaniel Wylde—to master her, to tame Nat’s illegitimate, wilful daughter. It would have to be a man who loved her, a man who could not be swayed by the false promise of a coercive, dimpled smile.

      Captain Sir Stuart Marston strode away from Execution Dock with a profound feeling of relief that it was done. At last he had seen his foremost enemy suffer the punishment he deserved.

      On the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, Nathaniel Wylde had ignored a Royal pardon to surrender himself and continued taking and plundering ships bound for the West Indies. Initially, having no love of Cromwell’s protectorate in England, he had preyed only on Parliamentary ships, but over the years, as his enthusiasm for piracy flourished and his gains became richer, in his greed and lust for more it had come to matter little what flag a ship sailed under if her cargo was worth the taking.

      It was almost a year ago that Stuart’s elder brother had been on one of the ships bound for Jamaica to visit his uncle who owned a plantation there, when his vessel had come under attack from pirates. In a heavy mist the heavily laden merchant vessel, having sailed wide of the convoy in which it was travelling, had stood little chance of outrunning or outgunning the two pirate ships—fast single-masted sloops with forty guns between them.

      Only a handful of those on board had survived to tell the tale, and Stuart had learned that the captain of the vessel that had led the attack was Nathaniel Wylde, and that after removing the cargo he and his cohorts had left the stricken ship and nearly all those on board to sink to the bottom of the sea. News of this sinking had shocked the Admiralty and public alike in England. Driven by a need to avenge his brother, Stuart had approached the Admiralty and been granted his wish.

      He was issued with a privateering mission allowing him to seek out Captain Nathaniel Wylde with his ship, the Sea Hawk, to arrest and bring him back to London to stand trial for his crimes—an unusual concession, for such licence was usually issued to a Royal Naval vessel, but the ships of the Royal Navy were needed in the long-running fight with the Dutch.

      After drawing Captain Wylde out of his lair in the Gulf of Mexico, Stuart had hounded him across the Atlantic to the coast of West Africa, which had fewer hiding places than the islands of the Caribbean.

      Wylde had put up a fierce fight, but eventually Stuart and the seamen under his command had managed to capture the Dolphin, her captain and half her crew. Along with his ship, Nathaniel Wylde had been brought to England in chains and hanged.

      In possession of a feeling of deep satisfaction that he had avenged himself on Captain Wylde for the death of his brother, Stuart proceeded towards the Pool of London where the Sea Hawk, chartered to a private English mercantile company, was moored.

      He had only one more mission to the West Indies to carry out for the Company before he was to retire from the sea and settle down to a life of ease at Charnwood in Kent, home to his family for generations, where he would satisfy his mother’s desire that he find himself a wife and provide her with grandchildren and an heir.

      Absently his thoughts turned to the tall, slender young woman he had observed from a distance watching the execution of Nathaniel Wylde. There had been an intense look of concentration in her eyes, which had turned to open curiosity when they had met his. Each had briefly assessed the other with an unwavering stare, and the woman’s steady gaze had taken on an iron nerve. It was the measure of a woman confident of her own worth.

      Her eyes had been the only feature exposed, but he recalled the long strand of pale gold hair escaping the confines of her hood. It had drawn his gaze like a moth to a flame, for it was the only bright feature to lighten the dreariness of the day until Nathaniel Wylde had appeared, and his own mane of hair had shone to equal that of the woman’s.

      It was then the truth burst on him—that the young woman he had seen could in all probability have been Wylde’s daughter. At first his brain refused to accept it and he smiled at his foolish, fanciful thoughts, for not by any stretch of the imagination could he visualise a man’s daughter coming to watch her father hang. However, recollecting tales told by mariners that Nathaniel Wylde had a daughter of spirit and great beauty, and that she lived with relatives somewhere in London, perhaps he was not mistaken in his suspicion after all—and with Wylde’s blood in her, she would feel neither distress nor out of place at a hanging.

      The more he thought about it—having observed her as Wylde had mounted the gallows, he had seen her knuckles showing white from the force with which she had gripped the hood of her cloak across her face, and recollected how both she and her companion had gone to great lengths to keep their features concealed as they remained hovering on the edge of the crowd—the more possible, the more probable it became that the woman he had seen was indeed the pirate’s daughter.

      He could have turned back and denounced her companion, who was undoubtedly one of Wylde’s associates, but for some reason unknown to him he hired a hackney to take him to his ship, eager to put the unpleasant episode behind him and slake his thirst and eat his dinner in the warm comfort of his cabin, reluctant to condemn another man to the same gruesome fate as Nathaniel Wylde.

      But the following morning he had grave misgivings and was compelled to examine his failure to turn back and denounce the man when the bosun informed him that, unobserved, the Dolphin had slipped quietly from her moorings in the dark of the night and was last seen heading down river towards the sea—a woman, with pale blonde hair flowing down the length of her back and dressed in breeches, her feet planted firmly apart, standing in the prow of the ship.

      When the tide had receded it was also revealed that Nathaniel Wylde’s body had been cut free of the hangman’s noose at Execution Dock.

       Chapter Two

       A fter encountering severe storms off the mainland of South America, which severely damaged the Dolphin’s hull and forced her to put in at the first landfall, which happened to be the island of Trinidad, it was with sadness and reluctance that Cassandra, eager to reach Barbados and her cousin Sir John Everson, parted company with the Dolphin.

      The

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