A | B | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14A | 14B | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

---

PART II

---

APRIL, 1780
VEREENIGDE OOST-INDISCHE COMPAGNIE
DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY
ROTTERDAM, HOLLAND

CELIA SWAYED AGAINST JUDAS where they stood on the wharf, the Silver Shilling having been granted a mooring as close to his warehouses as he could get.

“Will you meet me in London?” Judas asked softly, brushing his mouth across her knuckles.

“No,” Celia murmured, looking at him whilst her heart broke. It was a familiar pain, but not a welcome one, a hazard of how easily she gave over her affections. “There is no future in it for me.”

“You who will return to Ottoman waters to fulfill a blood oath and expects only to die victorious have no right to speak of a future.”

She feigned a scoff. “I would never die defeated.”

“Which is one reason I do not want to let you go.”

“Judas,” she muttered, exasperated. “Please do not make this more difficult for me. Train your virgin bride to bite and swing a cat ’cross your arse, and you will forget me by the time she bears your heir.” He dropped her hand with an angry huff, his disgust undisguised. Her brow wrinkled. “You really do not comprehend, do you?” she asked wonderingly. “Of everything you know of me, of every conversation we have had, what in God’s name makes you think I would ever agree to be your second no matter how you hound me?”

“You are the one who does not understand,” he spat. “You would be first.”

Her eyebrow rose. “If you cannot wed me, I will never be first.”

His mouth tight, he swallowed, but did not answer.

She smiled wryly. “I would give up the sea for a faithful husband and a home. I begged for it at twenty, but was refused. I did it—gladly—at twenty-five, but lost it not even six months after the vows were spoken. I would do it now did you ask.”

“I … can’t.”

“Then that is that.”

“Fury—”

“You will not even give me your name!” she cried, now hurt beyond anything she should have felt, considering her short time with this man. “If I cannot have even such a small part of you as that, why would I think you would give me anything else?”

“JACK!” She turned at Maarten’s roar to see him dockside with a speaking trumpet. “I want to catch this tide to London, so we must depart now and we await only you. I need to get back to my offices and months of neglected paperwork.”

“What did he say?” Judas demanded, and only then did Celia realize Maarten had spoken in Dutch.

“Ja!” she called back likewise. “Weigh anchor! I’ll be along shortly.”

He gave a curt nod and disappeared into the crowd of busy sailors, vendors of pickled herring and overly sweet cookies, worn-out doxies of all ages.

“Well?”

“I must go,” she muttered, attempting to step around him, but he took the step to block her passage, as she had known he would. He wrapped his hands around her arms, but she looked down at the wood beneath her feet to keep him from seeing her tears. She was resolute, but he would take her weeping as some sort of silent request to pursue her.

“Help me find you,” he whispered desperately. “If not, I will still find you.”

“No, you won’t,” she croaked. “I could be right under your nose and you would never know ’tis me. Release me, Judas, before I stick a dagger in your throat as I did at the Bloody Hound.”

He opened his hands, but caressed her arms in the way he knew that she loved—lightly, the brush of fingertips, a breath. Any patch of sensitive skin on her body, he would find and lavish attention there, for he could not force her insensate breasts to feel again.

Lord only knew how he had tried.

She loved him for that.

And other things.

He lowered his head to press his mouth to the underside of her jaw. She closed her eyes and dropped her head back to allow him to seduce her. “Fury,” he whispered against her ear. “My love. Please. Tell me your direction in London.”

She could stand no more.

She broke away from him and strode up the dock to the cobbles, not daring to look back, ignoring him calling her name: Captain! Fury! Jack! Calico Jack! even. Then—

“JACQUELINE DUNHAM!”

She gasped and stopped short. She put her fist to her breast and pressed. Hard. “Oh, God,” she whimpered, then broke into a run, down the street to where Maarten’s yacht and skeleton crew awaited to take her to London.

Maarten’s look of somber pity once he had hauled her aboard only magnified the pain, and she went directly to her berth for a nap. It would not take long for the British-registered yacht, an ostensible British West India Company vessel, to reach port. If she wanted a nap before the next watch, she had really no time to waste.

Thus, she stripped down to her skin, then encased herself in the comfort of her kimono before rolling into her hammock. She would allow the sea to rock her to sleep whilst she cried.

Anger with Rafael’s refusal to wed her after five years together, to be faithful to her, would never abate and indeed, only grew worse with each liaison. Her grief now lay more in the fact that she could not bring herself to cut him off than the fact that he continued to take her for granted.

Talaat would never have chosen to leave her, but then again, there was a reason he had been alone for years. He deserved far better than Celia, but all things considered, she was the best he could hope for—and she had gotten him killed. Now, four years after his murder, she still grieved his loss so much that, occasionally, she locked herself in her cabin to weep.

But of all the heartache she had borne, she thought this might be the worst: A man who had wanted her badly enough to chase her down and demand her attention, to declare himself happy with her, had then deliberately chosen something else over her.

Celia did not know or understand such constraints. No contract was unbreakable. No obligation was, in fact, an obligation. Those promises she made, she chose to make and chose to keep. Should she choose not to honor them, well, that was part of being a pirate.

Yet Judas did not know how to be a pirate. Duty was part of his blood and his siren call. He would follow it to his death.

Jacqueline Dunham!

He would never know how much that wounded her and for how many different reasons, why the very act of calling her by the Christian name she despised and the family name she could not claim at all pained her beyond bearing.

A knock at the door broke into her thoughts.

“Come,” she said, forgetting this was not her ship, not in command, and she had no obligation to answer it.

“Celia— Oh.”

“I shall be up in a moment, Mama,” Celia called softly. “I am weary.”

“Georgina,” Mary murmured to the shadow behind her, “would you please go ask Captain Gjaltema how you can assist him?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Mary stepped into the tiny cabin the three women would share and shut the door. “Is this a temporary separation or a permanent one?”

“Mama, please don’t, I pray you.”

Something in her voice must have convinced Mary to leave it be. “Would you like a mother’s company, then?”

“I have never had it before,” Celia snapped. “I can do without it now.” Mary gasped. Celia knew it was cruel, but at the moment, she resented everything about her life. And she was not so forgiving that she could forget its origin was in her mother’s long affaire with Dunham.

Yet she did not leave. Curious, that. Did mothers routinely keep company with their contentious daughters?

“He called me Jacqueline Dunham,” she finally whispered when it appeared Mary had no intention of leaving. Her tears were soaking the pillow beneath her head. “He doesn’t know my name because I have none to give him. I haven’t the security of my sire’s name nor the one I was born with because it would get me killed. ‘Calico Jack’ is my only birthright. Calico bloody Jack, the most cowardly man who ever sailed the Spanish Main, yet I am named for a bloody cat.”

“I’m sorry,” Mary whispered in return. “So very sorry. I … forget. Jamie did such a fine job raising you that I forget you were not born to this life.” She paused, then continued briskly. “Celia, I want to tell you something.”

She stopped and waited for Celia’s permission to continue. “Aye?”

Mary did not hesitate. “When I first saw you four years ago in Philadelphia, swaggering down the street with your crew, armed, pounding on doors and bellowing for someone to tell you where I was … I was in awe of you. My daughter— I knew you were. I could not help but know who you were immediately, though I had not seen you in nigh twenty years. You are every inch your father’s daughter, yet rendered so beautifully. I simply wanted to speak with you, just once. Touch your sweet face. To know that you were alive and well— But you were not only alive and well, you were larger than life itself. It was the most incredible …

“I didn’t know what would happen when I bade Jamie take you. I agonized every day that he had perhaps abandoned you or sold you to a sultan, but I could never fully credit him with such a notion. But when I saw you, I knew that only he could have made a pirate out of a princess.”

“Aye, and he still sees me as a princess,” Celia said bitterly. “I am ever eight years old, all frothy white ruffles and lace, relentlessly seasick and crying for her mama. Until I grow a prick, I will never be able to fulfill his expectations. I have seen no sign of a prick growing ’twixt my legs lo these past twenty years, though I have a chest full of them. Glass, wood, clay.”

Celia heard a thump as Mary was tossed against the wall when the ship heeled on its way out of the harbor and into open waters. “Are you well?”

“Just a bump on the elbow,” she murmured.

“Do you know why Papa hates Rafael so much?” Celia said abruptly.

Fabric rustled as Mary sat on her bunk. “You say so, but in that circumstance, I simply cannot comprehend why he sent you to him.”

“This is what I want to explain.” Celia swung around until she was sitting in her hammock cross-legged, swinging lightly, as comfortable there as she was in a bed. “He sent me to Rafael to finish the job of making a man out of me.

“But instead! Rafael taught me how to be a woman. To enjoy being a woman. He knew I was a girl the moment he saw me and refused to let me play the part of a boy, especially as I did it so badly. Ruffles and ribbons and lace … colorful gowns, wigs, cosmetics, beautiful shoes and lavish underthings— I never outgrew my love of them. And here they were, all around me, in the flocks of women about Coimbra. I was enthralled and envious in the way girls can be, because I had only a trunk full of breeches and shirts, two pairs of shoes, a sword and dagger, and my ditty bag full of navigation instruments and sailor’s tools. So, ’twas a choice between being thought a catamite—and treated that way—or being defiantly presented as a girl to be educated and trained like any male. He felt the first too cruel and the second too brazen a dare to resist.

“Rafael gave me anything and everything I wanted—and I wanted so much. Not only did he not continue the work Papa had begun, he set asunder all Papa had done. He made it impossible for Papa to forget he had whelped a girl who mayhap was superior to any son he could have whelped. And that is why he hates Rafael.”

“I shall never believe it,” Mary muttered, anger thrumming in her voice. “Rafael took you as his mistress when you were too young to know better and too fragile to resist his charms.”

“Aye, and you were Papa’s when you were an adult who knew better, strong enough to resist his charms, and had everything to lose by lying with him. Not even Papa dares deny that being Rafael’s mistress improved my fate by orders of magnitude.” Her mother flinched and Celia sighed. It seemed that she was bound to lash her mother with her own bitterness.

Still Mary was not deterred. “Rafael gads about, lying with anything that has two breasts, but never weds even though his station demands it. He was Pygmalion looking for a block of marble to carve into his perfect woman, then he found his Galatea in you. His questionable loyalty to you is the loyalty of a creator to his creation, not the love of a man for a compatible woman. I would have thought your time with your husband would have taught you the difference.”

“Mama!” Celia cried. “I know his faults but I love him anyway and I cannot abide being at odds with him! Are you not happy enough with the nature of our relationship that you remind me of his vices?”

“Of course not! But I despised how he treated you on that last voyage, how he spoke to you. And I wasn’t the only one.”

Celia knew that. Smitty had taken her aside and lectured her as if they were once again equal officers aboard the Carnivale, when he would override her decisions with a tie-breaking vote. Of course, Celia knew the value of having a lieutenant who would do that. Beyond that, Smitty was her best friend and didn’t hesitate to bring her up short when she needed it.

Either he goes or we’ll have a revolt on our hands. Ye ain’t inspirin’ confidence when ye let ’is insolence slide just cuz he’s yer professor an’ ye’re fuckin’ ’im. If I ’ave to put ’im down, ’twill not go well fer yer command. No crew’ll tolerate its captain bein’ led ’round by ’is yard for long, an’ Rafe’s leadin’ you around by yours.

It hadn’t taken long for Rafael’s insolence to resurface, at which point Celia had stripped him of his navigation duties and thrown him in the brig. She had then unceremoniously dumped him on the docks in Portugal with his trunks.

“We are simply at odds with one another,” Celia said absently, “which, I gather, happens ’twixt men and women who have been together as long as we have.”

“You are at odds with Rafael because you have outgrown him.”

Celia gasped, jerked fully back into the conversation. “Outgrown him? Like a slipper? He is eleven years older than I!”

“Celia, he wants his sculpture back so he can smooth out the rough edges it acquired in his absence, not a flesh-and-blood woman who can meet him on equal ground and does not need smoothing. Why he did not wed you to keep what he carved from being chipped away, I do not understand.” Neither did Celia, and she resented it. “Your experience with men is different from mine, and you’ve had precious little female influence in your life. I can see that you have never observed such interactions, so I will tell you: Rafael expects you to be the thing he trained you to be.

“Unfortunately, I have seen it all too often, the men who came to me who could not bear the possibility their wives were someone other than they wanted them to be. Their pretty women to show about to society, ever treating them like dolls to be admired but not soiled with base lust, never mind their women’s needs.”

It was rare enough Mary referred to her time as a minor courtesan, but it did make Celia think—

“Is that what happened ’twixt you and Papa? He did for you what Bancroft wouldn’t?”

And there it was, the name, laid out between them. They had not spoken of him since Celia had taken her to sea. “Not … precisely,” Mary muttered with a flush. “Nathan was never unfaithful to me and he loved me tenderly with all the care of a gentleman.”

Celia’s mouth pursed in a moue. “I take that to mean Papa was not so considerate.”

“Correct.”

“And you liked that. Mayhap … Bancroft could not love you to climax?”

Mary harrumphed. Celia smirked. “For your information, Little Miss,” Mary said with false airiness, “Nathan was quite skilled. I enjoyed … that …  with him. ’Tis that your father—”

“Mama, please. I’ve no wish to know Papa’s proclivities any more than you wish to know mine.”

“Celia!” she cried suddenly, desperately. “Do you not see? ’Tis not only that. You do not know what it is like to love two men at once, equally, precisely for their vast differences and not in spite of them. To be unable to choose. To then have the choice made for you, and that choice is to lose both men and—worse!—to immediately lose both children made with those men, never to see them again. My son, taken by his father. My daughter, taken by her father. Gone in an instant, in a whirlwind of rage and hurt, leaving me to my own devices. Then I am tossed out of my home like so much rubbish. God’s punishment for my wickedness.”

Forced to survive as a whore to the very men she had once hosted at lavish dinner parties as the wife of a British Navy commander and incidental politician during the Seven Years’ War. She had had no skills, no family, and no friends until a woman from Boston, wed to a wealthy Dutch East India Company man, had found Mary weeping on a park bench and taken her in.

As it pertained to Mary’s situation between her husband and her lover, no, Celia could not imagine it. She had options and power very few women had: She was a law unto herself and had been since she had spit in Dunham’s face. Death was the price she had been willing to pay to declare her independence, emerging with scars that declared it for her.

And Dunham still did not understand.

“There is no sin in wanting your desires met,” Celia offered weakly.

“Wanting my desires met,” she snapped, “cost me everything I held dear and more besides.”

Celia was out of answers. “I cannot take away what you have had to do to survive, Mama,” she murmured. “And I am sorry for it, but know this: Papa could not have foreseen that Bancroft would immediately abandon you or he would have returned to fetch you straightaway. He loves you and he has been so very lonely without you all these years. Why will you not believe me?”

“Has he been faithful to me?” she snapped.

Celia raised an eyebrow. “Have you been to him?”

Mary’s nostrils flared.

“Aye, he goes ashore, but what would you expect of him? Twenty years? For God’s sake, I’ve been in love with one man or another for fourteen years, and still cannot go six months without putting into port for a quick tumble.”

Mary looked away and muttered, “I could live for the rest of my life without having … relations.”

“Oh, I doubt that. The women in this family are a lusty lot, and if Papa—”

Mary flushed to the roots of her hair. “Yes, well, perhaps with your father.”

“And yet you refused him. This makes no sense to me.”

“Things changed.”

“Papa is not blameless, I ken,” Celia said matter-of-factly. “He was wrong to seduce another man’s wife.”

Mary looked away, and Celia watched her for a moment. “Mama,” she asked slowly, “is there something you have not told me?”

“Nothing important,” she muttered.

Celia doubted that also, but would not press. Everyone needed their secrets. Certainly, Celia had her share of those.

“And he was wrong to let so many years go by. I’ll not dispute that. But Bancroft was wrong to abandon you on the spot and immediately create a new family. Of the constellation of sins amongst you, his is the worst by far, and the most unforgivable.”

Mary pursed her lips. “I would not dispute that,” she murmured.

“’Tis only by Washington’s order that I do not kill him for it. Why he wants Bancroft alive, I do not know. ’Twould only help the cause for an admiral of the British Navy to meet an unfortunate and untimely end.”

“You would do that?” Mary whispered, her high color now drained.

“I ache to do it, but I am under orders. My husband,” Celia went on before Mary could protest, “used to say that we are born to misery, and ’tis a test of faith to bear what God has visited upon us. Like Job—and! further! to do so with grace and honor.”

Mary’s brow wrinkled. “He was a religious man, then?”

“Oh, aye, very. He was a … ” Celia searched for the proper word. “ … righteous man.”

“Do you believe that?”

“In God’s will?” At Mary’s nod, Celia pursed her lips in thought. “Sometimes I am tempted to. The first time I heard Maestro Handel’s masterpiece, I was convinced, and every time I sing it, I am without doubt. Likewise, with Talaat, it was easy to believe when he would point out all the ways in which he saw God’s hand in his life, to the good or ill.” She shrugged. “He thought the ill was still ultimately to the good, as it made him stronger and more wise.”

“And so?”

“And so? I have no time to give it any thought at all, much less believe it. But when I sing Messiah, aye, I believe it to the very depths of my soul.”

Mary was silent for a moment, then murmured, “You do not talk about your husband much.”

Celia hesitated. “There are many reasons for that,” she said low, then rushed on, “Nay, I cannot know what it is like to love two men equally, as you did—”

“Do.”

“—Papa and Bancroft. I do know what it is like to love two—” She laughed bitterly. “—three men at once, though not equally and in differing circumstances, and I am unable to have any of them.”

“Judas— He is so dear to you then?”

They both started with the fist pounding on the door. “Jack!” Maarten called. “Go aloft. A storm’s brewing. I need specifics and more hands on the sheets.”

“Aye,” Celia returned immediately, hopping out of her hammock, stripping off her wrap, pulling on her breeches and shirt. She was headed out the door, then stopped and bent to give her mother a kiss. “I love you, Mama.”

• • •

THE GALE BLEW THEM into London five hours ahead of time, but Celia was worn out from hauling sheet against the storm and teaching George the fine art of same whilst making sure the girl didn’t get washed overboard. Once they had traversed their tortuous way up the Thames and found their mooring, she dropped into her hammock in the small hours like everyone else. Thus, she arrived at her land destination at the same time she would have anyroad.

Her mother balked as soon as she realized what it was. “A house of ill repute?” she whispered in horror, clutching at Celia’s sleeve.

“I inadvertently allowed the lease on my townhouse to expire and have nowhere else to light until I get another, which may be hard to come by as the Season is nigh upon us.”

“But Georgina!”

Celia slid a glance between her mother and her cabin girl, who blushed. “George knows well enough what goes on ’twixt a man and a woman. The only difference,” Celia grunted absently as she pulled out a key and tried it in the lock. It was ten of the clock, the sun was high, and every inhabitant of the house would be asleep. “Is that here, money changes hands.”

“You have a key?” she hissed.

The tumbler turned and Celia swept the door wide, then directed the wherrymen to bring their trunks inside. “Up three flights to the second door on the left, if you please.”

“Ah, there you are, Jack!”

Celia looked up the stairs at the abbess. “You’re up with the roosters, Nonny.”

“Wanted me pay. A week, at least.”

Celia dug a gold coin out of her pocket and flipped it up at her. She hefted it, then bit. “Ye’re a generous jack, Jack.”

“You seem to forget that about me from visit to visit. Nonny, this is my mother, Mary. This is my cabin girl, Georgina, who is the one needing to be trained as a lady’s maid. Mama, George, this is Nonny, the keeper of this fine dovecote. I trust you have made all the arrangements I requested?”

Nonny looked affronted. “O’ course. I swear, Jack, playing innkeeper and clerk to you is more tryin’ than gettin’ Lord Williams’s hoops and bodice laced together.”

Mary choked. George gasped. Celia’s brow wrinkled. “He’s still alive?”

“Unfortunately. Yer new townhouse ain’t available for ten days,” she said as she draped her cotton-covered arse over the banister and slid all the way down it to land lightly on her feet in front of Celia.

“Remind me to try that,” Celia said, looking at the banister speculatively. “What is its distance from Rathbone House?”

Nonny leaned close and murmured, “Directly across the back alley.”

Celia grinned, surprised and very, very pleased. “Nonny! You deserve a bonus!”

“A night in bed with you would suffice,” she simpered, running the finger of one hand over Celia’s collarbone and putting the other between her legs. “I like big-tittied women in britches.”

“You’ll have to take it in gold, m’dear. Oh, what a pout! Your feelings are not so bruised as all that. Now behave in front of my mama and girl.”

“Ye brought ’em to a bawdy house,” Nonny sniffed, retrieving her wandering hands. “Wha’d’ye expect?”

“Indeed. Well, then! Have I appointments with my solicitor and banker?”

“T’morrow. Ten an’ three.”

“The abigail who will be instructing George? Er, Birdie. ’Tis her new name.”

“Waitin’ in yer rooms. Are ye gonna be needin’ your usual … services? As it ’appens I scared up two willin’ blokes for ye. Brothers, no less, ’andsome an’ the youngest not a day over nineteen. Had a go at ’em meself. Might again when you’re finished widdem.”

Celia almost laughed when both Mary and George whimpered a little. “Nay, but your foresight is noted and appreciated. I’ve a man fresh from my bed and lingering in my head.”

“Oh, ye do, do ye? That’s int’restin’. Anybody I know?”

Celia leaned in close and murmured, “Judas. He has the most wicked game I have ever played. It involves stays.”

Nonny’s gasp nearly echoed, it was so loud. “Begorra! Ye don’t say!”

“Aye, I do, but you better not.”

“Me lips is sealed.” It would be up and down the Thames by sunset.

“What of an appointment with the wig maker?”

“In an hour.”

“My modiste?”

“Not your modiste. Your modiste refuses to do what ye want. I took the liberty of engagin’ a talented young lass who needs the business. Yer appointment’s at six this evenin’. Ye’ll find breakfast in the kitchen, but don’t put me cook out about anythin’ special.”

“Understood.” Celia turned to her mother and George. “After we eat, we shop.”

If spending money could not dispatch Judas from her mind, nothing could.

---

If you don’t want to wait 2 years to get to the end, you can buy it here.

Pirates!