Chapter 14 #2
And she was. Piracy being a business, one that competed for men with profitable merchantmen and others, the crew were each contracted to Varfolomey’s fleet in renewable terms of four or six months.
Written into said contracts was a mandatory stay upon each of the seven ships—excepting the Birch, which didn’t allow men and didn’t share crew.
For everyone else, sixty days each year were required upon the Sévère and no longer, to discourage coveting of her and also laziness.
Not that sailing a meregildo allowed for layabouts.
It was fair and equal to divide it such, Vitaliy insisted—kinglike again.
And, Everard supposed, also practical: keeping an end date in mind for each man probably helped with mutinous feelings while at-anchor with no prizing.
“A pirate’s summer home!” D’Arcy proclaimed, chuckling. “With a firmly established hierarchy, despite what your pirate spouse proclaims of equality.”
“Hmm.” Everard was curious what he meant, but didn’t want to press for specifics, not up there in the open where anyone might hear. “You’ve retained your sapphire, anyway. And gained not one but two pistols, I see.”
“But two are loaded,” D’Arcy said, offhand. “You’re not the only one with a reputation, you know.”
“You alarm me,” Everard said, truthfully. He hesitated. “I know you have. I heard what kind of captain you became.” What kind of legacy he’d given up.
D’Arcy squeezed his arm. “Isn’t that something?” he said lightly.
Below, Romilly René had interrupted Vitaliy’s tête-à-tête with the French governor, and the two pirates’ attention turned to the multitude of crates, hogsheads, and jute sacks being swung over the rail and stacked on Sévère’s deck. Vitaliy frowned as he looked up over the creak of block and rope.
So, this was the unwanted thing René brought, then: not a person but cargo.
But what could it be? They were quite full up on provisions for the foreseeable future, so it could be nothing needed upon the Sévère herself.
Was Alarie thrusting stolen goods upon Vitaliy to transport, with the fleet master as go-between?
Weapons? Coffee, or sugar, or maguey? It could be anything, but whatever it was, its presence troubled Vitaliy.
Everard disengaged his arm from D’Arcy’s, murmured a goodbye, and stepped down the ladder to meet René at the gangway rail.
Maybe Vitaliy would let himself be bullied by a pretty deceiver, but Everard had no such bias. Like it or not, the Sévère was now legally half his, and it gave him an advantage: he had a say in what she carried.
“As far as I am aware,” he said to the fleet master, “we have plenty of provisions. What are we taking on?”
René laughed. “You do not know.” She whistled and gestured, and a barrel was rolled their way. She caught it agilely, produced a mallet and wedge from her belt, and in very few thumps, had cracked open the head. A sweet, familiar, and extraordinarily rare smell rose.
“Vainilla!” Everard exclaimed. He looked up to the stacked barrels with the same marking as this one’s and made a quick count. There were many. “Vanilla, by God. No wonder you made good time.” Cargo like that, one wanted more than a swivel gun and a rowing crew to protect it.
René made an agreeing noise. “It meets your approval?” She buried her hands in waxed linen and brought forth two bundles of brown-black beans, each as thick as a man’s arm. The scent came in waves to Everard, dense and heady.
“Goodness. It’s wonderful. Now put it back,” he said hastily.
René snorted and replaced the vanilla. “Relax, matelot. It sat in a beach warehouse while our capitán was set to hang. It will bide a little more air.”
Not sugar. Not tobacco. Not cannabis. This was how the smuggler V. Varfolomey made his money, how he came to do business with revolutionary México, how he could afford to take a loss on Haitian coffee, why he had business in New York and Kingston and Philadelphia. Vanilla.
But why would Vitaliy frown over such a bounty?
“All this in exchange for a printing press?” he asked. “The crew must be ecstatic.”
“Non, this barrel alone is worth much…” She looked up. “Oh, now you are jesting.” She grinned, showing sharp eyeteeth, well-kept, and Everard smiled back. It was a contagious grin.
“We took a prize with vanilla cargo once,” he remembered. The Growler, two guns, two masts, schooner. “It was by accident that we came upon her, and the captain didn’t flee, though she was tiny. Must have thought to bluff his way through the boarding.”
“No stone unturned, you Navy.” René tapped the barrel hoops back into their places.
“Yes.” Everard couldn’t tell if this was judgment or not. “It was only a pair of crates, unmarked; we found them at the utmost by smell alone. The captain cried.”
The final hoop slotted into place with the ringing of iron. René’s smile looked different now. Vicious. “At the end, they all cry.”
Everard paused. He had, despite his best efforts, seen too many men dead to be able to contradict this.
“She wasn’t one of yours, I presume?”
She laughed, replaced the mallet to her hip. “Non. One of ours would not be accidentally taken upon by a man-o’-war.” She gestured to the boy Thom, who was going round distributing grog to the loaders.
It had been a brig, in fact; but Everard said nothing.
Handed his own mug, he sipped gratefully, though really he’d done no work at all.
René drank heartily. “And as you can see, there are more than a pair of crates,” she remarked. “And are not stolen, besides.”
“Oh, really?” Why did that surprise him… not at all? “What is its provenance? Obviously New Spain; but where?”
“A tribe in the mountains, once conquered by Aztecas for their crop,” she replied. “The Totonac. I have never been, and cannot pronounce the ville.” She grinned. “The silver with which to pay them, I do not regret to say, is stolen, and Spanish.”
Everard laughed. “Naturally.”
Romilly René studied him for a moment. She had a startling pair of grey eyes, wide and deep-set, and a smudge of kajal only made them more mesmerising, only reminded him more of Vitaliy as he’d first met him.
“Pretty, when you laugh,” she said, abruptly. “Such a voice. And very black eyes. I see it now.”
“Er…”
“At first, I wondered you would be so loud about your alliance. I thought you stupid, to put it in frontpage. I thought, there is a man who will get himself lucky to be tossed over.”
Everard frowned. “Because… we are lovers?” Presumably. Presumably lovers.
“Non, not with the scary brows, mon amour. Not at all. Vee has never hid himself to anyone; what more means the world? It is because you are Navy officer.”
Ah, yes; that problem. Only the reason entire he had done the cartoons at all.
“Was,” Everard corrected. “No longer. You think it means I’ll hinder Vit—Vee—in his endeavors?”
René blinked at the slip, and damn Everard for a fool. Did she, too, know Vitaliy’s true name?
“It doesn’t matter what I am thinking,” she said.
“And yet you are telling me. I shan’t. I’ve no reason to.”
She patted the vanilla barrel. “And plenty of reason not, I hope.”
Everard nodded once, let her keep her assumption. “Anyway, there’s really no moral distinction between illegal and sovereign-sanctioned plunder. At least not for officers-in-charge.”
“Oh, no?”
“Not in my experience. God knows no one forces a person to sit the lieutenant’s exams. Now, a Navy crew…”
“They are not free.”
“Precisely.” He ducked his head. “Responsibility scales, you see.”
René put her hands on frothy panniers. “You are a career man, and understand this?”
“Nobody paid my commission, ma’am.” Not that it worked quite like that in the Navy.
“Hm. Best to leave moralistics to Vee; with these I am not so good. I do what the crew ask of me, nothing much more.” She eyed him. “I do have a question for you in especific, matelot. A favor.”
A favor? “Venga,” he prompted, curious. Go on, then.
“How free you are with your self.” René’s eyes narrowed in amusement; rouge-red lips stretched wide. “I will ask: how much of his ear do you have? Truly?”
Damn. How much pull did he have with Vitaliy, indeed.
What could he say? If he said hardly any, his status as matelot was immediately in question.
If he said he had his explicit trust in all things, he would be lying through his teeth, boasting dangerously to the one person who could refute the lie.
If he said he didn’t actually know... which was the truth. ..
“That’s dependent on the favor,” he said slowly. “Do not you also have his… ear?”
She laughed. “Non, I do not. You are so very Navy. I am not and cannot be his, and he cannot be mine. We are opposite, quartermaster and captain, as is meant to be. Democracy, yes?” She grinned. “The checks and the balances. Maybe you are not so familiar.”
Everard blinked.
“Anyway,” she said, “I thought you would wish me to owe you for this favor, but I see not. Only give your counsel, then?”
Everard bit his tongue and nodded, somewhat hesitantly.
“Now that Vee has a…” René paused. “… kept man, do you think he ought to once again take receipt of his rightful shares of reward?”
Kept man—?
Everard sipped at the half-decent grog, gave her a cool look.
She thought he didn’t know about Vitaliy’s take?
And thought he would care, upon learning this fresh unknown?
He couldn’t give less of a damn about how many shares Vitaliy kept or didn’t.
He hadn’t even held on to his own captain’s salary, save to pay for room and board.
But not even Vitaliy himself knew this. It was one thing to give up a Navy salary voluntarily, with promise of pension and future; another thing entirely to be penniless and desperate before the man who had offered him half a bloody ship.
“Or shall he continue on as he has? Refusing them?” she asked, blackened eyelashes lowering. “He has not yet informed me, so I would ask you,” René said. “And of course it is entirely my business, if new articles need to be signed.”
Ex-lovers, Everard thought suddenly. Almost definitely.
He frowned, made it obvious. Scary brows. They were effective. “You needn’t remind me who you are, ma’am. I am perfectly aware. He hasn’t told you of a change,” he said, “because nothing need be changed. His shares will continue to be distributed to the crew at large.”
René apparently could go as flat and expressionless as Vitaliy; she did so now. But it was a tell of its own. He wondered who had learned it first. Who had approached whom, to be co-pirates. How long they had been lovers. If she knew his true name. If she knew of his sleeping issue.
Then Everard did begin to lie through his teeth.
“What is more, you’re quite mistaken. I may be matelot, but I am not ‘kept,’ as you say.
I was a Royal Navy captain for twelve years.
A career man.” He raised his hand in salud, smiled blandly.
“How wealthy do you suppose that will make one?” He leaned in, and whispered, “Why do you think he wanted me?”
René recoiled, nostrils flaring.
He let victory show on his face, just a little, before finishing off his grog.
She slapped the mug out of his hand. His left hand.
The tin fell to the railing, bounced off with a loud clang and flying drops—Everard winced—and dropped into the water below, ker-plunk. Then Everard had a lot of woman and lace threateningly close to his person.
Holy good God, she was truly as tall as he was.
“You are a fool,” she hissed, directly in his ear, “and a liar. You think Vitya’s motivated by something as small as wealth?
Or you’ll just imply that? To me? Who holds his balls?
To anyone? After so much paper farce?” She leaned, spat rougey phlegm directly on his boot, and came back up to the level of his nose.
Everard saw nothing but grey eyes, fury, a vague dark halo of curly hair.
“You should know better. It is this thing that separates Vee from le crétin Lafitte, Vee’s ungreediness that holds him in higher esteem than Lafitte to Ha?ti and México, the reason why they will even give him time of day.
And you, the man supposed to him closest, you will refute it? ”
Everard hadn’t known this. Hadn’t realised it at all. “I—”
René leaned even closer, ’til he thought she might try to bite off his nose.
“Lucky you said those liar’s words to me, and me alone.
If I catch you again spreading shit about Vee, undermining him to save only your pitiful pride, matelot…
I don’t care who you are or what kind of magic cunt you have.
You will not live to kiss him goodnight.
And Vee will not care, for his business is utmost. You are… convenient.” She sneered.
Then she about-faced, bows fluttering, skirts heaving, and stomped across the cross-gangway to the Birch, out of sight.
Everard leaned heavily on the rail. Naturally, the commotion had caught everyone’s attention; the stunned quiet that had fallen over the loader crew was already giving way to speculative murmurs.
Worst of all, Vitaliy stared over, Louis-Michel Alarie curious at his side. Vee’s expression was as flat as René’s had been, and he stood deadly still. Everard couldn’t look away. Some mate he was.
At last, expressionless, Vitaliy turned back to Alarie. Arm-in-arm, they went into the companionway and then the greatcabin; the door shut firmly behind. Everard frowned.
Someone thrust a fresh, undented mug into his vision: two fingers of straight rum, unwatered. He took it gratefully and looked over. He expected D’Arcy, but it was León.
“Words of advice, matelot,” he rumbled. He, too, said it mat-low. “You know no one fucks with Vee?” A broad brow waggled. “Excepting you.”
Everard grunted. Thankfully, his face couldn’t get much more enflamed.
“Pues hombre,” León said, thumping him on the shoulder with a palm and a knowing look, “entiéndalo. Not even Vee fucks with Romilly René.”
Everard wished he could believe that.