Brendan looked aggravated. “You’re Roberta, Bobbie to me, no matter what charade we’re playing. We’ve survived this far together, but we used to be…you used to listen to me. I have a terrible feeling we’ve taken things too far.”
The set of Red’s features was stubborn. “Brendan,” she said, and there was steel in her voice, as well as a certain compassion, “if you wish to quit, you may do so. I can set you ashore at a safe harbor of your choosing, and you can take passage on a ship to the colonies. You can claim to have been the victim of a kidnapping for all the time we’ve been at sea, God knows, it will not have been the first such time that has happened.”
“Bobbie, God knows I have fought, and fought hard, at your side. I have risked my life, just as you have risked yours.”
“No one has fought harder,” she agreed.
“But I can’t help but admit to this strange desire to survive.”
“I want to survive, too. Instinct, I suppose.”
“There is a life out there for you…somewhere.”
“Brendan, what, in all the time that we have shared together, have I known that might be construed as an actual life?”
She saw the pain in his eyes. Brendan had shared so much with her from the beginning. Terror. Poverty. Servitude, threats, abuse, and an elite governing body that had turned its collective back upon them. She had finally discovered the only true kinship she had ever known among the pirate brethren.
Brendan rose suddenly. “Who knows? Maybe if our wretched old mistress had sent you off to a decent and compassionate—albeit old and disease-riddled—man, things would have been different.”
She cast him a furious stare.
“What a wonderful suggestion, Brendan. I could have lived a wretched life as a syphilitic whore and then died a wretched death. I’ll take a sword,” she added softly.
“Bobbie—”
“Stop calling me Bobbie!”
“The men know your name.”
“Our prisoner does not.”
“The prisoner you’ve been spying on. If you’re so intrigued, come out and join your men, Captain Red Robert.”
“If you wish to be nothing but a pest, you should leave and enjoy the company of the prisoner and the men,” Red said irritably.
“I’ll do so,” Brendan said, and grinned.
When he was gone, Red stared at the door, wondering why she felt so ridiculously annoyed. And worried. Brendan’s certainty that they had taken their act-turned-real-life too far was beginning to make her uneasy despite herself. She gritted her teeth, looking at the lists she was preparing regarding the division of their take. The words seemed to swim before her. She was getting cabin fever. She had stayed locked up in her small realm on the ship for too long. She needed air.
Brendan’s accusations were true. She was obsessed. But he was out there. And she meant to find him, to kill him, or die in the trying.
Blair Colm.
So many years had passed. But if she closed her eyes…
When she slept too sweetly…
She could see it all again as if it had happened just yesterday. They’d been but children then.
There were men who fought because they fought for a cause. Others sought riches, titles, to better themselves in life.
And some were simply cruel. Some enjoyed watching the pain they caused others. They considered it only a bonus that slicing men, women and children to death often came with a reward, as well. Blair Colm was one of those men.
It was amazing that she and Brendan had survived….
But there had been so many others to kill.
And so they had been sold into indentured servitude in the colonies instead.
She had hated Lady Fotherington almost as much as she had hated Blair Colm. Prim, bony, iron-haired, iron-willed, she had thought that indentured servants did best when beaten at least once a week. To her way of thinking, certain nationalities created beings of lesser value, and Roberta and Brendan were certainly that.
Red looked at her hands, and sniffed. It had not been difficult to play the part of a man as far as the delicacy of her hands went. She had spent her days scrubbing…anything from the hearth in the kitchen to Ellen Fotherington’s hideous feet. The only kindness she had ever known had come from Ellen’s spinster daughter, Lygia. As tall and thin and bony as her mother, she rarely spoke in front of anyone. Red had finished with her tasks late one night and slipped into the office that had belonged to the late Lord Fotherington, and had found Lygia there, reading. Red had been terrified, certain she would receive an extra beating, but the great rows of books had beckoned to her forever. Stammering, she had tried to think up an excuse, but Lygia had actually smiled, and the smile had made her, if not beautiful, compelling. “Shh. I’m not supposed to be here, either. I am supposed to follow other arts, such as music and dance, but I do so love my father’s room. If only he had lived….”
He hadn’t lived, however. He had died of a flux. And so Ellen Fotherington had come to rule the mansion in Charleston, where she entertained statesmen, lords, ladies, artists and the gentry. She ordered the finest merchandise from England and France, and tea all the way from China. She ruled her house like a despot, and her only regret in life was that her daughter resembled her, and not her dashing husband.
The promise of a fortune should have seen Lygia well married, but she had read too many books over the years. She refused. She refused the young swains who were not old and ugly, but were only after her money. She refused the fellows who were so old they did not deem her ugly. Her mother had forced misery upon her, just as she did her servants, indentured, most of them, and little better than slaves. But Ellen had never been able to whip or bully Lygia into marriage.
So Red had been blessed with one friend. One who virtually gave her the world, because they shared a passion for books.
Ellen had a way of truly making slaves of her servants. If their time of servitude should come to completion, they were accused of taking something, using something…doing something. And so they owed her more time.
Red had seen many die in her service.
They had died because they had no hope. Their eyes had died long before their bodies had given out. Their spirits had perished. Mortal flesh could do nothing more than follow.
Ellen Fotherington did not hack people to pieces. She did not steal their birthrights. She took what made life most precious: freedom, and their very souls.
In Red’s case, she had determined to curry favor by shipping her to France and giving her to a hideous little count with gout and a dozen other wretched diseases to use as he wished. Under lock and key, Red was sent back across the Atlantic.
It was then that Red Robert, the most deadly pirate on the high seas, had been born.
Red lowered her head, inhaling deeply. She steadied herself, and then almost smiled. The captain of a merchantman they had once seized off Savannah had told her that Ellen had died. Slowly. Painfully.
She did believe in God.
And it might have been the only time she had ever believed that God also believed in her, no matter how un Christian such a thought might be. Ellen, who had paraded her entire household to church every Sunday, deserved to be in hell. God could afford to be forgiving; she could not.
Still, Blair Colm, the man who had slain infants in front of her for the sake of expediency, was still alive, a fact that desperately needed to be rectified. God had allowed him to live far too long. God had allowed him to commit far too many atrocities.