Wicked at Heart (9 page)

Well, Gwyneth
had sure learned her lessons well.

If nothing else,
their impoverished upbringing — not to mention old Lord Simms' tutelage — had
made sure of it.

Gwyneth was back
to kneeling in the dirt, spade in hand, bucket at her elbow.  "Another
five minutes," she said, fussing with her daffodils.  "Please, Rhia,
don't wait for me, your tea will get cold."

But Rhiannon
stood unmoving, watching her sister quietly, her eyes thoughtful, her mind
remembering . . .   Remembering Gwyneth, the oldest of the three, taking a job
in the local public house all those years ago after Mama and Papa died, so that
Rhia and little Morganna would have food in their bellies.  Gwyneth, never
complaining about the slave-like conditions and never shying from the hard
work.  Gwyneth, always enduring the patrons' endless groping and lewd
suggestions with a brave face, but retreating to her tiny room after closing
time to suffer in silence.  Even now, Rhiannon's heart filled with guilt as she
thought of Gwyneth, dividing the food on her plate between her sisters as she
blithely pled a sour stomach.   They had taken her complaints at face value and
wolfed the food, but how many nights had poor Gwyneth gone to bed without any
supper so that her little sisters would not go hungry?  Swallowing a sudden
lump in her throat, Rhiannon watched the weeds thumping into the wooden bucket,
the movements of Gwyn's delicate shoulders.  No wonder Gwyneth felt the
sufferings of the poor and the unfortunate so keenly.  Their own hard
beginnings were not so easily forgotten.

And then Lord
Simms had come into their lives.

The elderly but
kind-hearted widower had been en route to visit a friend in Cardiff when he and
his small entourage had stopped at the public house for the midday meal.  It had been only natural that he should notice the lovely, fair-haired Gwyneth, only
natural that he, as most males who'd set foot in the tavern, would become
immediately fascinated with such a model of sophistication and beauty in the
midst of such country commonness.  The earl had remained in the area, and then
the offers of marriage had come — repeatedly — until the day the pub burned
down after a chimney fire, and Gwyneth, as head of the family, had had no
recourse but to accept his hand in order to keep her sisters fed and clothed.

Rhiannon alone
knew the sacrifice that Gwyneth had made.

Rhiannon alone
knew the tears that Gwyneth had cried behind her closed door the night she had
finally decided to marry the old man.

And she alone
knew that old Lord Simms had never laid a finger on his wife, who was still as
pure as she was the day she'd married him.

Now Rhiannon
watched as her sister bent down to her flowers once more, her simple frock
pooling in the dirt around her knees.  Even with her hands stained with earth,
her hair falling down about her neck, Gwyneth still managed to appear regal. 
Lord Simms might not have made a woman out of her, but he had managed to turn a
clever country girl into a lady.  And Gwyneth, who had loved the old man in her
own way, had done him proud.

The last
blackbird called out a farewell, and the dimming garden was quiet save for the
rhythmic scraping of Gwyneth's spade.  Leaving her sister to her flowers,
Rhiannon quietly went back inside.

Chapter
5

Deep in another
part of the prison hulk
Surrey
, one that did not receive the morning
sunlight,  fresh breezes off the harbor, or even the cry of gulls, two people
sat together in the foul and wretched gloom.

Nathan Ashton and
his little brother Toby were Americans whose only mistake had been to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time.  As a lieutenant and midshipman, respectively,
aboard Captain Connor Merrick's Newburyport, Massachusetts-built, forty-four-gun
frigate
Merrimack
, the two had enjoyed a salty, swashbuckling adventure
at sea until finally falling prey to the British.  Outmanned and outgunned,
Merrimack
had fought bravely, sinking before the British could take her into their own
navy, but her people had not fared so well.  Given the choice of joining the
Royal Navy or being incarcerated in one of the prison hulks, what remained of
the American crew had patriotically chosen the latter.

Patriotic, they
had been.  And, naive.

Now, three
months later, their patriotism was stronger than ever, but naivete had died the
day they'd set foot on the prison hulk.

And a hellish
three months it had been, too, thirty-year-old Nathan thought, as he sat in
near darkness and, by the light of a cotton wick set in an oyster shell and propped
in fat saved from their rationed meat, worked steadily on the hole he was
boring in the ship's hull.  It was impossible to hear the desperate grinding of
his tiny knife, due to the loud, incessant racket made by the prisoners on the
deck above as they scraped and rubbed it with sand, but then, he had planned it
that way.  Nine inches deep the hole was, but Nathan had just managed to saw
through to the other side, and now a shaft of daylight rewarded him for his
efforts.

He put his nose
to the coin-size airhole and then motioned for his little brother to do the
same.

Frail and
suffering badly from malnutrition and cold, Toby scrambled to the hole, put his
face against it, and sucked in huge gulps of the chilly air.  His eyes closed
and tears began to course down his freckled face, pooling in the lower corners
of his cracked spectacles and tracing paths through the grime on his hollow
cheeks.

"Oh, Nathan,
I've not felt anything this sweet since before the
Merrimack
went
down."  He pulled back, his brown eyes full of emotion in his gaunt and
sickly face.

Nathan swallowed
hard.  The youngest of the Ashton brothers and born very late in their mother's
childbearing years, little Toby had never been strong and hearty like the rest
of them.  He had wanted to become a lawyer or physician, and had signed on to
their cousin Connor's ship only because he was a New Englander and their father
had been a patriot in the first war, and he had considered sea service to be
his prescribed duty.  But seafaring life had taken its toll on the
thirteen-year-old, and life aboard this wretched prison ship was wasting him
away to nothing.

Nathan reached
out and put his hand on Toby's bony shoulder.  "Don't you worry none,
little brother.  We'll get out of here soon enough and back home."

"I'm cold,
Nathan."

"I know.  I
am, too."

"And
hungry."

Pressing his
face against the hole and digging sawdust out of the edges, Nathan jerked his
elbow at the tin plate behind them.  "Then eat, Toby.  I know it ain't fit
for a dog, but they ain't going to feed us anything better, and if you don't
eat, you're gonna come down sick."

Still sniffling,
trying bravely to stop, Toby pulled the plate toward him.  On it were a chunk
of rock-hard bread and a piece of maggot-infested beef that looked as though it
had been dragged through the mud flats and smelled no better.  His head bent,
his greasy ginger hair clumping on his brow, the boy methodically began picking
out the maggots, laying them in a squirming row on the deck beside him.

"I'm gonna
die here," he said, quietly.

"Jeez, Toby,
don't talk like that, you're scaring me."

"They guard
us more closely than they do the Frenchmen," the boy mumbled, turning the
hardened lump of bread over and poking a broken nail into it to extract a
wiggling maggot.  "Why is that, Nathan?"

"Because
we're American, little brother.  If you'll watch those Frenchies, you'll see
they're content to spend their time gambling, gaming, and fighting; stay away
from 'em, lest they suck you into their vices.  But you don't see any of us
Yanks wasting the contents of our purses on stuff like that, do you?  Nay,
we
put our energy into tryin' to escape. 
That
, Toby, is why the British
guard us more closely."

"I wish we
could've got off when Connor did."

"He'll be
back for us, Toby.  He won't desert us, I can promise you.  But we'll have to
be ready for him when the time comes."

Toby was quiet
for a long moment, thinking of their brave, likable cousin, who, even during
the bone-chilling, brutal months of the English winter, had always found a way
to make him laugh.  It had been Connor who had showed him how to make friends
with the rats; it had been Connor, grimacing, who had shut his eyes, held his
nose, and choked down the weevily bread, joking as he did so about the
"extra meat"; Connor who had paid a whopping forty-four shillings per
month for the
Statesman,
just so they would have news of the outside
world, Connor who had kept their spirits alive with stories about home.  Connor
had been the one to make them think about tomorrow, and Connor had been the one
who, on those wretched nights of bitter cold and rotten herring for supper,
reminded them that God had not forgotten them.

Hard to believe,
but then Connor had never led them astray.

Toby cupped his
hand around the squirming maggots and pushed them into a small pile.  Once he
had been unable to even touch the things.  Now the sight of them no longer made
him want to wretch, but he still couldn't eat the bread as long as they infested
it. 
Connor.
  He loved his pragmatic, solid-tempered brother, but he
missed his cousin.  How bleak life had become since Connor had made his escape
. . .

Connor had been
one of the lucky ones.  One night a month ago, right before the new captain had
taken over the hulk, a prisoner had managed to overpower a guard and leap
overboard, musket fire following him down into the cold, black harbor.  The
following morning his body had been discovered on the mudflats, where he'd been
caught by the tide and drowned.  Connor and Nathan had tried to prevent Toby
from seeing the fellow, but under the captain's orders Lieutenant Radley of the
Royal Marines had marched all 460 prisoners up on deck and made them look at
the poor fellow.  Crows had been tearing at the dead flesh, and Toby had been
violently sick over the rail.  For two days the body had been allowed to lay
there, until several angry and disgusted prisoners had petitioned the captain
to be allowed ashore to bury their poor comrade.

It was the last
permission that captain had ever granted.  Upon their return a mutiny had
developed over the treatment of the dead man, and in the ensuing fracas the
captain had been knifed in the back by one of the Frenchmen.

Lord
Morninghall, the new commander, had arrived to take over a week later.

Toby idly moved
the clump of wriggling maggots with his knife, training them into a large
letter C.  Five feet away a rat — this one christened Polly by Connor himself —
lifted its nose, whiskers quivering as it crept toward Toby's neglected piece
of meat.

He looked up,
watching it with disinterest.  "The Black Wolf's gonna rescue us, ain't
he?"

"The Black
Wolf won't stop until he's either caught or there's no one left on this hulk to
rescue.  Relight that wick, would you?  The damned stench has snuffed it out
again."

With a trembling
hand, Toby put down the knife and got the wick going once again.  Then, drawing
the filth-encrusted tatters of his yellow Transport Office clothes around his
skeletal body, he huddled against the damp hull.  His brother looked around at
him in impatience.

"Eat, Toby. 
For God's sake."

"I can't. 
Not that."

Nathan closed
his eyes on a silent prayer.  Above his head the deck cleaning suddenly
stopped.  His hand froze with it, so the sawing sounds would not betray him.

"If
Morninghall finds out about what you're doing, he's gonna put you in the Black
Hole, Nathan," the boy murmured, watching with lifeless eyes as his older
brother pushed his finger into the opening and dug out more sawdust.  "You
don't want to spend another ten days down there like you 'n' Connor did before,
do you?"

"Morninghall's
not going to find out.  Have you even seen him since he took over command of
this thing?  'Tis Radley that I'm worried about, the infernal son of a
bitch."

Above, the
scraping sounds started up again, accompanied by the sloshing of buckets of
water being thrown across the deck.  Nathan immediately turned his attention
back to the hole.

"I can get
two fingers through here now, Toby.  By the week's end, we ought to be able to
grease ourselves up like pigs and slide right on through."

"I'll never
survive the swim, Nathan.  You go."

"I'm not
going without you, and you damn well know it."

"Then I'll
wait until I'm stronger and I can make the swim, too."

"You ain't
gonna get any stronger if you don't eat."

"I can't
eat," the boy whispered, pitifully.  "And so I guess I'll just have
to wait for the Black Wolf to come and get me." He pressed his nose
against his tattered sleeve to strain the foul air, and as one fat, hopeless
tear ran down his cheek, he watched the rat as it made off with the meat.

The maggots
remained on the dark planking.

No matter.  By
dark the rats would have found them, too.

~~~~

The Black Wolf
struck again that night.

The following
morning the papers were ablaze with the latest news, the headlines screaming
out their message for all to see:

PRISON SHIP
SURREY
RAIDED BY MASKED AVENGER!  BLACK WOLF MAKES OFF WITH THREE MORE AMERICAN
LAMBS!  ROYAL NAVY IN DISGRACE!
  And so on and so forth,
ad nauseam
.

The papers
already tossed out the stern windows to educate the fish, Damon sat staring
down at the
Peterson's
.  It lay open to the appropriate section, headaches,
and diagnosed Damon's as being anything from a brain tumor to an overload of life's
stresses.