The Following Sea (The Pirate Wolf series) (11 page)

He looked at the locket, then back up into her face.

"Take it," she said softly. “Open it.”

The chair protested as he leaned forward and took the locket out of her hand. He tilted it toward the lamplight and turned it over his fingers, noting the scrolled initial, E, that he had seen before. Locating the tiny indent on the side, he flicked the halves apart with a thumbnail. Unsure of what he expected, to see—a tiny painted portrait or a precious curl of hair—he was moderately surprised to see a coin. A Spanish escudo to be precise.

He started to lift his free hand in a gesture of confusion but then his gaze flew back down and he stared hard at the small silver coin. After a moment, he drew the oil lamp closer and turned the wick brighter, slanting the coin this way and that in the light, inspecting every tiny detail.

"Where did you get this?"

"It was in the packet of letters my father sent me,” she said quietly. “It came a year after he sailed on the
Gull
."

"Just so? He put the coin into a letter and sent it to you?"

"Not exactly. It was
on
the letter, not in it. But I think it was deliberate. He knew I, alone, would find it."

"Explain."

Eva moistened her lips. "When I was a little girl, Father would send letters back from wherever his business ventures took him, mostly to France and Italy and the Netherlands. He would seal them with discs of wax and when he discovered that I carefully peeled off the discs and saved them, he started sending them in various colors and shapes, some with fancy designs pressed into the wax. The seals that came on the letters he sent from the Indies were thick and bold. Three peeled off with no trouble; the fourth cracked against the knife as I tried to take it off."

"The coin was inside?"

Eva nodded. "At first I thought it was part of the game, for he was always testing me with riddles and hiding messages inside of messages. I broke the other three disks, found three more coins, and thought myself very clever for having found them. There again, he had always sent little trinkets or coins home when he was away, so I thought nothing of it and simply tossed them into a drawer and all but forgot about them."

Dante was still studying the coin, but when she stopped talking, he glanced up. "What made you think of them again?"

"As you can imagine, when the one year absence stretched into two, then three without any further word, I kept reading and re-reading his letters. Seeing his handwriting was the closest thing to contact that I had, and it kept me believing that he was still alive. In the last letter he wrote, his words and thoughts seemed to be more scattered. He mentioned the ancient Greek poem
Argonautica
and Jason's quest for the golden fleece. It was as if he was trying to tell me something but not saying it outright. I tried every trick I could think of, every cipher we had used in the past, even waded through the wretched poem in Latin, no less. Nothing really fell together until I remembered the coins and thought perhaps the clue was there; that the key to his message might be in the coins.”

Dante held the open locket in his hand with the chain draped over his long, blunt-tipped fingers. He used the point of a jewelled dagger to pry the escudo free and flip it onto the desk. “Go on. What did you find out about them?”

Eva's eyes showed a spark of eagerness for the first time. "According to the markings and the year it was minted, the escudos were part of a silver shipment placed on board a galleon that was lost at sea. The NSV on the face of the coin identified the ship as the
Nuestra Senora de Valencera
. It was wrecked in a storm that year on its voyage home to Spain."

Dante took a slow sip of wine as he studied the flush in Eva's cheeks and the rather remarkable shade of green that her eyes took on when she was excited. It took no special powers of perception to guess that she believed her father had discovered a shipwrecked galleon with a cargo bay full of silver coins.

The problem, of course, was that everyone thought they were in possession of secret maps showing the location of a sunken galleon, or heard tell of a hiding place where someone had buried chests of gold and silver. If even a hundredth of those maps or rumors were actually true most of the islands in the Carribee would have sunk long ago under the weight of all that buried gold.

Dante ran his thumb over the surface of the coin and studied it again. The escudo itself looked genuine enough. The silver was pitted from being tossed in the surf and sand and as he identified each marking and stamp, he shared them aloud.

"It was indeed minted in 1586,” he said slowly. “The P with the shield and cross tells us it was mined in Peru—in Potosi to be precise. The symbol next to it—" he waited until she walked around behind the desk and leaned over his shoulder to see it in the brighter light— "is the mark from the mint in Nombre de Dios, and this tiny nick on the edge is no accident. It was put there by the clerk in charge of counting every coin that left Panama bound for Hispaniola. This little beauty went on quite a trek down from the Andes and through the jungles of Panama before it ended up in the hold of a galleon bound for Spain."

Her mouth was an inch from his ear, close enough for her breath to tickle his cheek as she spoke. "Then you believe it's real?"

"Oh, it's real all right. It was part of the last shipment of bullion bound for Seville to finance the armada Phillip was amassing to attack England. But I'll stake my soul it didn't come from the hold of the
Nuestra Senora de Valencera
."

"But I was told—"

"You were told wrong. Deliberately so, I imagine."

Eva straightened, taking the rush of warm breathiness with her. "I was shown a copy of the records. There
was
a galleon by that name lost in a storm in 1586."

"No doubt there was. The storm... the hurricane you refer to took at least twenty ships down that year. I'm familiar with it because it was the same year and the same storm that drove my father's first ship onto a coral reef and damn near sank her with all hands. As it was, he and his crew were stranded on an island for six months before he could make repairs. And because he was stranded for those six months, he was not with Sir Francis Drake when Cartagena and Santo Domingo were sacked, two incredible feats unmatched to this day. I say that only to add to the reasons why someone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of ships and shipping legends would have cause to recall the events of that year. And if someone told you it was the
Nuestra Senora de Valencera,
he most likely had reasons for not telling you the absolute truth."

"But… why would anyone do such a thing?" she asked softly. "And how can you say with such rich authority that this coin did
not
come from that particular ship?"

Gabriel half-turned in the chair, inherently wary of women with sharp little teeth and nails who had just been told they had been deceived.

"The Spaniards have limited imaginations when christening their ships and most are named after saints or holy prayers, even some noteworthy sinners whose names vary only by a letter or two. However, not all of them are treasure galleons. The
Nuestra Senora de Valencera
, for instance, was likely an India Guard. An escort ship, if you will. Small, fast, heavily armed as a deterrent for blackguards like myself who might try to nose up too close and cull one of the fat prizes from the fleet. She would have carried soldiers and guns, not gold or silver, but she was certainly not important enough to have coins minted with her name stamped on them."

She was studying his face, trying to decide if he was being truthful with her or not. It also told him that she was genuinely unaware of the value of what she wore so casually around her neck.

"There was another ship lost that year. One with the same initials: NSV. Anyone worth their weight in salt water should have known the name without having to 'search' any records. The
Nuestro Santisimo Victorio
was one of the largest treasure ships ever built. She disappeared in that same storm with all hands and a belly full of cargo reputed to be worth more than the crown jewels of England and Spain combined.

“Losing the treasure she carried not only meant the armada sailed without being fully supplied, but the army of invasion that marched overland was held up in the Netherlands, unable to acquire enough ships to cross the Channel. The Spanish navy never recovered from the humiliation and it took two decades to fill the treasury enough to try again.”

Eva frowned. “They tried again? Why am I not aware of that? I thought England and Spain signed a peace treaty?”

“They did. And the… fracas… we were recently engaged in was, in effect, making sure Spain honored that treaty. If we had lost and the fleet had made it back to Spain, the treaty would not be worth the paper it was written on.”

Eva had moved back against the outwardly slanted gallery windows. She looked a little numbed as Dante recounted the details of their recent battle and how close Spain had come to amassing another invasion fleet. Adding to that was her confusion over the false information she had been given about the
Nuestro Santisimo Victorio
for which she had every right to look confused, upset, and disheartened. She did
not
have the right to look at him with those big green eyes as if it was his personal fault that some bastard had lied to her.

He could almost hear Jonas whispering in his ear.
Look away, little brother, look away. You know what happens when you get distracted by soft lips and pretty titties.

Jonas would be right. There was something alarmingly vulnerable about the way she stood there with the gallery windows behind her and the star-filled night framing the tangled blonde mass of her hair. The fact she was wearing his clothing, that it was one of his shirts conforming to the shape of her breasts, and a pair of his breeches being warmed by her thighs, made him briefly lose the focus of his thoughts.

He scowled and concentrated on the coin. "Men have been searching for
La Fantasma
as long as they've been searching for the lost city of gold."

"La Fantasma?"

"The Ghost Ship. Every now and then a rumor blazes throughout the Main like wildfire about someone finding the wreckage, salvaging the treasure. They turn out to be just that: rumors. Even my mother, who I consider to be in complete command of her faculties, heard tell of a map that reputedly showed the location where La Fantasma was run aground. She and Juliet scoured the area for weeks, coming back with nothing more than some incredibly well-detailed charts of the islands."

"Doesn't this coin prove that someone has found her?"

Dante pursed his lips. "Frankly, I’m not sure what it proves. It could be a clever fake, although someone would have had to go to a great deal of trouble to make it. The stamps for the coins would have been broken as soon as she sailed. Shall I tell you what else I know about the
Victorio
?"

"Please. Yes."

He handed her her wine goblet, which had gone untouched until now.

"She was a big bitch, built to be Spain's grandest symbol of power and wealth in the New World. She was over eight hundred tons, with fore- and aftercastles that towered three storeys above the water. She mounted fifty heavy guns and a score of smaller nut-busters and was intended not only to transport the king's treasure back to Seville, but to become the flagship for the
grande y felicisima armada
when it sailed against England.

"She led the plate fleet out of Havana that September carrying home over a hundred of the king's wealthiest courtiers and hidalgos, as well as generals and soldiers who had learned first-hand how to deal with a conquered nation and who would become England’s new royalty once the invasion succeeded.

“The flota left in clear weather. According to reports, the
almirante
sailed out of the harbor like a glorious angel, bedecked with flags and hundred-foot-long silk pennants trailing in the wind.

"She led the fleet for six days without incident, but on the seventh, the hurricane struck and caused most of the galleons in the convoy to break formation. Many were driven into the shallows and smashed upon the reefs. Many more were forced to scatter and seek shelter. For three days and nights the wind and waves drove the ships further apart and when the sun rose on the fourth morning, the
Victorio
had vanished. There was never any wreckage recovered, no sign of where she had run aground. The convoy escorts searched for days, weeks, but no member of the crew was ever found, dead or alive. And, as I mentioned before, no trace of her cargo ever surfaced."

"Yes. A man by the name of Augustus George. He worked for my fiancé, Lawrence Ross, who was the only other person who knew about the coins."

“Your fiancé? He was the one who misled you into believing it was from the
Nuestra Senora de Valencera
?”

“Former fiancé,” she said through clenched teeth. “And yes. He was the one who lied to me and then ordered Augustus George to kill me.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

"I'll take them letters."

The looming black shadow of Augustus George stared at her down the barrel of a long-snouted flintlock pistol. She remembered thinking his eyes and the hole at the end of the barrel were identical: black, cold, and empty.

"Augustus? What are you doing here? What are you—?” She stopped and looked around, aghast. “Surely you didn’t do all of this!”

“Ye’re the sneaky one, aren’t ye?” he asked, glancing at the niche in the fireplace. “Never woulda found ‘em in there, would I. Now hand them letters over. The coins too.”