DARE THE WILD WIND (43 page)

Brenna's head began to clear.  The ship rode the calm sea like a child's paper boat.  It was either the dim gray of dawn or twilight.  Then she stiffened. 
The storm
.  Her heart skidded in her chest.  She clasped convulsively at her stomach, terrifyingly hollow and flat.
 

"My baby!"  She struggled to rise.  "Is my baby safe?
"

His gaze was solemn but direct.  "You lost the child."
 

"
No
."  The cry tore from her, ragged in her throat
.

Fletcher took her hand and allowed her fingers to bite into his.  "There was nothing I could do.  You were hit by flying gear that broke loose from the compartment overhead.  Precisely
what I can't say. The cabin was a shambles when we found you.
 

"In the sort of storm we had, I've seen men impaled by a salt cellar.  You were fortunate to escape with your life.
"

Brenna fell back on her pillow, denial and grief welling up inside her.  His voice sounded distant and muffled in her ears.
 

"Great as your loss seems, trust that I have enough experience as a physician to tell you this.  You'll bear other children."  Her hand dropped limply away from his.  "You've had a dangerous fever, but you'll mend.  But it will take time before you're yourself again.
"

Brenna spoke in a dull voice.  "Was the baby a boy or a girl?
"

"You were barely more than two months gone," he said quietly.  "It was too soon to tell."

Too soon even to give her baby a name.  To say the proper words before the tiny body was consigned to the sea
.

"You mustn't take any risks for a time.  You won't be completely out of danger until your pain subsides, and you've lost a great deal of
blood.  You can't chance losingmore.
"

"What are you trying to say?
"

"Only that it's wisest to stay confined to your bed for now.
"

"How long?" she asked, though it hardly mattered now.
 

"At least a fortnight, perhaps longer.  And since you're awake, you have a visitor," he finished in a tone meant to cheer her.   Crossing to the cabin door, he spoke to a member of the crew in the passageway.  "Send word to the captain." 
 

Brenna wished it was Drake when
Camducked to squeeze his massive frame through the low narrow doorway.  Drake would grieve as she did, ache as she did, share her loss.  Even blaming her, rightly despising her, he would know the depth of her pain.
 

But
Camcould scarcely fathom how she felt.  At the sight of her, he looked as if a great weight had lifted from his shoulders.
 

"Thanks be to God," he said with feeling, "you're awake.  Well done, Fletcher," he added over his shoulder as the surgeon departed.   He leaned over Brenna and very gently brushed away a damp tendril of hair from her forehead.
 

"How
do
you fare, Brenna?" he asked, a faint husky note in his voice.  "Can you speak?
"

"I've lost my baby," she said, her voice choked and low.

Some of the light left his face at her pain.  He swallowed, suddenly awkward and uncertain.  He covered her hand with his for a second. 

"There'll be other babes," he said.  "Yours and mine.
"
Brenna stared at him.  He was to blame as much as the storm.  If he hadn't kidnapped her, she would still carry her baby.  Why hadn't he listened to her and put her ashore before the
Red Witch
sailed?  At her sharp accusing look, he expelled a harsh breath.
 

"Damn
me, but I can be a fool.  I didn't mean to sound so callous.  How could you help but grieve?"  He dropped to one knee to kneel beside the bed.  "I only meant to try to cheer you, to tell you how grateful I am that you'll heal, that you'll be yourself again."  He bent his head as if he couldn't let her see his emotion.  "Dear God, Brenna.  I thought you'd die.
"

On the brink of hurling a barrage of recriminations at him, she swallowed her anger. 
Cam had tried to protect her.  If she had stayed in the hammock of netting he lashed around her, she might have escaped injury, might have saved her child.  The blame was hers as much as his.  With an unsteady half reluctant hand, she reached out to smooth his thick russet curls. 
 

"But I didn't die," she said in a soft bleak voice, torn by a jangle of colliding emotions.  "And I won't.
"

Despite all Bartholomew Fletcher had said, she couldn't be certain that might not still be in doubt.  But some stubborn part of her refused to die so easily, despite her desolation
.

Cam
's head lifted.  "You can't," he said in a thick uneven voice.  "I've lost everything, Brenna.  My title and my birthright.  Everything but you."  He attempted a crooked smile
.

"I'll swing Fletcher from the yardarm if you so much as catch a chill before we land in
Cap  Haitien
.
"

Defying Bartholomew Fletcher's advice was more than folly.  It was impossible.  Brenna's strength was alarmingly sapped by her ordeal.  Simply sitting up against a propped pillow exhausted her.  It was nearly a week before she could stand and cross the cabin, even on the calmest of seas
.

Cam
looked in on her whenever he could, amusing her with tales of his travels since the mutiny aboard the
Providence
.  He extolled the tropical beauty of the palm fringed islands of the Indies.
 

"You can be as free as we were on the moors
.  Freer, in truth.  You can bathe in the sea with no one to watch.  And the water is warm, even in January.  It's clear as a pane of glass, and fish of every color swim close enough for you to touch."
 

The picture he painted was enticing, but he never spoke of their past in
Scotland.  She guessed it was too painful for him to call up those happy memories, to look backward even for a moment.   And she suspected that underneath Cam was relieved by her miscarriage.  His resentment of her unborn child had been plain from the start.  At times, his good spirits set her teeth on edge.  And the extravagant plans Camhatched were impossible.  She was still married to Drake.
 

The
Red Witch
hadn't swung westward on the trade winds at the Canaries but sailed on down the coast of Africa.  Their next port of call would be the island of
Gorée
at the mouth of the Senegal.
 

"Why are we going such a distance south?" Brenna asked one afternoon as the doctor ended his customary call.
 

Fletcher snapped his bag of surgeon's tools and potions shut.  "The cargo we take on there brings the highest price in the
Antilles.
"

"After
Nantes, I thought the hold was already full.
"

He responded with a sharp surprised look.  "Far from it, or the ship's carpenter couldn't  make such a racket below."
 

For the last few days, it had been impossible to ignore the hammering.  When she had asked if they were repairing damage from the storm,
Cam had laughingly reassured her the Red Witch was seaworthy, and his crew wasn't occupied in patching holes in the hull
.

Cam
had teased her about her returning appetite, and she had thought no more of it until now.  But Bartholomew Fletcher seemed no more inclined than Cam to elaborate.   When the
Red Witch
nosed into the Senegal's harbor, Tad quickly discouraged Brenna from peering out the porthole.
 

"
Gorée
is a scurvy place.  You'll spoil your breakfast.
"

Round grass roofs and the stink of offal greeted her.  Garbage floated by them on the jungle river and snagged in heaps around the slimed pilings of the wharf, but in another sickening moment, Brenna knew why Tad had warned her away
.

They were packed into square wooden cages, and chained together by the ankles on the bare beaten earth.  The last squatted listless and weary on their haunches, deaf to the howls of the caged.  Hands thrusting out through the bars, maddened by the suffocating press of bodies, the penned prisoners were walled so close together no one of them could be distinguished from the next.
 

Gorée
was a slave port.
 

Brenna whirled back to Tad.  "Is this a slave ship?
"

"Oh, no, m'lady, not till now.  The
Red Witch
sails under a French pass to harry British shipping.  It's only to make this voyage pay.  The captain says we'll divide three times the gold if we bring back ebony for the plantations.
"

Brenna swallowed the taste of bile in her throat. 
Cam and his crew already had made a fortune selling his cargo of sugar and rum in France.  Wasn't that enough?  It would have been for Cam before Culloden Moor.  How could the chief of a proud Highland clan deal in such misery?
 

Shaken by chills despite the steaming equatorial heat, Brenna watched fettered and naked Africans wearing padlocked iron collars prodded aboard the
Red Witch
by the armed and short  tempered crew.  Their satin black skins mutilated by the half healed scars of branding with red  hot irons, deprived of every trapping of human dignity, they went to servitude on the sugar plantations of the West Indies, where they would very likely be driven brutally to their deaths by forced labor or perish under an overseer's whip
.

"In the name of heaven, how can you do this?" Brenna demanded when
Camappeared at last in the cabin.  "How can you buy and sell human souls?
"

He tossed his hat on the table.  "They're savages, Brenna.  Better off anywhere than here.
”

"Better off free in
Africa," she blazed back.  "We have no right to trap and sell them like this.
"

He sank into the cabin's hardwood chair with a tired breath.  "White men don't bring black ivory to
Gorée
.  Their own African brothers sell them into slavery.
"

"They sell their own people?
"

Cam
poured a ruby stream of claret into a pewter goblet.  "They sell their tribal enemies    when they defeat them in war.
"

"There are women among them, and children," Brenna objected.
 

Cam
shot her a direct look over the rim of his goblet.  "Forgive the indelicacy, Brenna, but handsome women have their uses, and the ugly ones make house servants.  When their men are taken prisoner, the whole village is forfeit to the victors.  The women bargain to bring their children with them, if either can survive overland to the coast.  I'd rather not take babes in arms, but I don't have the stomach to tear them away from their mothers."    
 

Brenna stared at him for a second.  "A fine point, isn't it?"
 

Sweat beaded her face and plastered her bodice damply to her skin in the breathless closeness of the cabin.  A salty runnel of perspiration stung her eyes, and she wiped it away, refusing to let him see her sway in the heat.  "Only think how they'll be treated, how they've been treated on that hellish island.
"

"They'll be better treated aboard the
Red Witch
.  The quarters my carpenter has thrown up for them may be a bit cramped, but they're clean.  And we'll have the iron collars off them as soon as we're a day or two from shore.
"

"You'll take off their chains?" Brenna asked.  
 

He shook his head and took a swallow of the wine.  "Only the collars.  They're just to discourage the poor black fools from trying to jump into the ocean and swim back to land.  Chains don't seem to deter them, but they understand the weight of the collars.
"

Brenna thought of the desperation that drove the captive Africans to dive into the water in chains.  "They'll spend the entire voyage manacled and helpless?
"

"Brenna, leave off,"
Camsaid with an impatient gesture.  "They'll be decently fed and allowed to take the air on deck, and we'll let them wash in sea water to keep down disease.  They're far too valuable to let them starve or sicken on the trip.
"

Brenna couldn't put any faith in the last.  It was common knowledge in
England that half of a slave cargo could die during the Atlantic passage.  After what she had seen today, she had strong doubts Cam's men would show their black charges any more mercy than a hardened slaver's crew.        

"Is the money they'll bring so important?" she c
ountered.  "The cargo of sugar you sold in France must have made you richer than you ever hoped to be in Scotland.
"