Read Chapter 18: New Orders

The Swan groaned beneath their feet, a sound Hartley felt in his teeth. They were making six knots on a broken wing and a prayer, the sea a sullen grey glass that promised nothing. He stood at the taffrail, the wind whipping the loose ends of his scarf against his throat, and watched the English coast sink astern. Plymouth was a ghost now, a memory of safe harbors and clean charts that had turned to ash in his mouth.

“Cornwall, Captain?” the bosun asked, his voice pitched low so the men working the sheets couldn’t hear. His name was Pember, a broad-backed man with a face like weathered rope, and his eyes were hard with suspicion. “We lost the Spaniards in the storm. There’s no need to run for the rocks off Land’s End, not when Plymouth’s just a day’s sail further.”

Hartley turned from the rail. His shoulder throbbed where Alvaro’s blade had bitten, a constant low fire beneath the binding Isabel had pressed tight. He had hidden it well, but each pulse of the wound was a leak of its own. “We’re not bound for Cornwall.”

Pember blinked. “Then where?”

“France.”

The word landed like a cannonball on a deck of cards. Pember’s jaw worked for a moment, chewing on the impossibility of it. “France? With our holds empty and our hull patched with tar and prayer? Captain, the men have been promised Plymouth. They have families there. Port dues to pay. A chance to be shut of this whole cursed venture.”

“The men have been promised a share of the prize,” Hartley said flatly. “And I mean to give it to them. But the prize is not in Plymouth. It’s coming to a rock on the Breton coast, and I intend to meet it before Cecil’s dogs can swallow it whole.”

He let the name hang. Cecil. The spider in the web. The man who had forged the map, sold them to Spain, and likely set his own wolves loose on the Swan the moment she hove in sight of the home port. Pember’s face shifted, not to anger, but to a colder, more calculating wariness. He was no fool. He knew the score of this game better than most.

“And if the men mutiny when they hear it?”

“Then they’ll hear it from me, and I’ll tell them the truth of what Cecil has done. If they still wish to hang for treason after that, they are free to try their luck.” Hartley clapped Pember on the shoulder, just shy of the man’s own rank. “I’ve led you through fire and she been tight. I need you to walk with me a while longer, Pember. Not for the Crown. For the gold that will set us all free of them.”

Pember held his gaze for a long moment, then dipped his head a fraction. “Aye, Captain.”

Hartley nodded and made his way down the deck to where Isabel stood at the mainmast, her hands folded in the folds of her sea cloak. She looked less a spy and more a ship’s clerk than ever, but he had learned not to trust the cut of her coat. She had come to him as a court clerk who stole an amulet, then a Crown intelligencer sent to protect the map, and finally a liar who had stumbled into truth. Now she wore the amulet on a cord hidden beneath her shirt, and Hartley had no idea whose name she really served.

“You look like a man about to write a letter,” she said.

“Better.” He pulled a sheet of oiled parchment from his coat, folded in on itself and sealed with a plug of tallow. “I mean to leave a message for Walsingham. The man Cecil fears most. If the spymaster learns of the treason in time, he may yet leash Cecil before the trap springs.”

“Where will you leave it?”

Hartley gestured toward the grey coast becoming clearer on the horizon. “There’s a skerry south of Ushant, a bare rock where the fishing boats leave offerings to the saints. The Breton smugglers use it as a dead drop. I did work with one of them in the old days, another privateer named Roche. A hard man, but honest after his fashion. If any ship of Walsingham’s passes this way, they’ll check the rock before they raise sail.”

The words felt thin even as he spoke them. A message left on a rock, unseen hands, a hope that the spymaster’s eyes would fall upon it before Cecil’s blade found Hartley’s throat. It was the best he could do from a leaking ship with six guns and a crew of malcontents.

Isabel’s eyes followed his gaze. “And if it is never found?”

“Then Walsingham will learn of Cecil’s treason when the Armada burns London to the ground,” Hartley said. “Which I mean to prevent, with or without his help.”

He turned to the quartermaster. “Set course for the skerry. Two points east of south.”

The Swan creaked as she came about, the wound in her bow weeping a thin trickle of water into the bilge. They sailed on through the afternoon, the coast of Brittany rising out of the haze like a crumpled grey blanket, and the men began to murmur. The promise of Plymouth had been a girdle holding them together, and now it was gone. They looked at Hartley with eyes that asked questions they were afraid to voice.

Isabel came to stand beside him at the bow. “You trust them?”

“I trust their greed,” Hartley said. “It’s the only loyalty that hasn’t failed me yet.”

The skerry came at last, a dark tooth of granite jutting from the white-flecked water. Hartley ordered the longboat lowered, and he climbed down into it alone, leaving Isabel and Pember to watch. The boat rocked beneath him as he rowed the last hundred yards, the sea slapping cold against his blistered palms.

He scrambled up the rock’s slick flank, the message pressed against his chest. Halfway up, he paused. There was something already wedged in a cleft near the summit, wrapped in sailcloth and lashed with tarred twine. Another message. From Walsingham’s network, or Roche’s, or something darker.

He did not open it. He knew better than to read a dead drop without knowing the sender. Instead, he tucked his own letter beside it, weighted with a stone, and rowed back to the ship. By the time he climbed aboard, dusk had begun to stain the sky the color of rust.

“Captain,” the lookout called, his voice tight. “Sail. Two points off the starboard bow.”

Hartley snapped the glass to his eye. A low, lean shape was cutting through the swell toward them, flying no flag he could yet identify. But the rake of her masts and the eager way she heeled into the wind told him all he needed to know.

“Corsair,” Hartley said.

Pember spat. “French?”

“Most likely.” Hartley handed him the glass. “Raise the colors. Ten flag from a neutral English trader, and we’ll see if she’s hunting Spanish gold or just any fat merchant she can find.”

The corsair closed fast, and Hartley could feel the hearts of his men beating against their ribs. The Swan was in no fighting trim. Her guns were half-greased, her crew exhausted, her hold light as a beggar’s purse. A fight here would be a coin toss, and the coin was loaded.

But the corsair captain did not run out his guns. Instead, he ran up a blue pennant—the mark of a privateer with letters of marque from Brest. He hailed them in French, his voice carrying across the water thick as honey.

“State your name and purpose, Englishman!”

Hartley cupped his hands. “Captain Thomas Hartley of the Swan, late of Plymouth. I carry no cargo, no prize, and a hold full of bad luck.”

A silence. The corsair drew within hailing range, and Hartley saw the captain now—a lean man with grey-streaked hair and a scar that pulled his mouth into a permanent sneer. He studied Hartley with the patience of a falcon.

“I know your name,” the Frenchman said slowly. “You sailed with Roche, once.”

The world tilted. Hartley felt the blood drain from his face. “Roche is alive?”

“Alive and running a tidy trade off Le Conquet.” The Frenchman smiled, showing a gap where a tooth should be. “Who shall I tell him came calling on the rock?”

Hartley made the only gamble left to him. He pulled a coin from his pocket—a silver piece stamped with the English rose—and held it up so the sun caught it. “Tell him the man who owes him a bottle of Madeira for the night we outran the Dons in ’85.”

“That was ten years ago and a different ocean,” the corsair said, but there was a glint in his eye now. “Hold fast, Englishman. I’ll send a boat over.”

As the boat was lowered, Isabel leaned close to Hartley, her voice barely above a whisper. “Do you actually know a man named Roche?”

Hartley straightened, feeling the weight of the amulet against his own chest. “I’m about to find out.”