Read Chapter 24: The Monastery

The dawn was grey and heavy with sea mist as Hartley watched the monks haul their fishing nets along the shingle beach. He had ordered the *Revenge* stripped of her English colours the night before, and now French standards—borrowed from Roche’s lockers at knife-point—snapped lazily in the morning wind. The island rose from the water like a broken tooth, its western flank sheer cliffs, its eastern shore a shallow bowl of white sand and rough grass, crowned by a low stone monastery whose grey walls seemed to grow out of the rock itself.

“You look like a pilgrim,” Isabel said from behind him. He turned; she had bound her hair beneath a coarse woollen hood, and her face was smudged with dirt. “Or a man about to die.”

“Both, perhaps.” He touched the pouch at his belt, inside which lay the forged letter and the fading chart. His shoulder throbbed beneath the heavy wool cloak, the wound hot as coals against his skin. He had not let her look at it again. “You will stay with the ship.”

“I will not.”

“Isabel—”

“I have read more church Latin than you have, Captain. If you meet a monk who expects a scholar’s tongue, you will hang yourself with your own silence.” She stepped closer, lowering her voice. “You need me. Let me be useful.”

He wanted to argue, but the pain in his shoulder stole the breath for it. Roche had anchored his own vessel a half-mile offshore, and from here Hartley could see the Frenchman’s figure leaning on the rail, watching through his glass. Waiting.

“Fine,” Hartley said. “But you do not speak unless I signal. And if you see me put my hand to my belt, you run for the boat and do not look back.”

She nodded once, and they went ashore together in the ship’s longboat, two rowers pulling hard against the swell. The beach was empty when they landed; the monks had vanished among the rocks. Hartley walked up the winding path toward the monastery, the leather satchel of letters slung over his shoulder, Isabel two paces behind him, her head bowed as if in prayer.

The monastery door was oak, banded with iron older than the Spanish Empire itself. Hartley knocked twice, then once more. A small grate slid open.

“I am a merchant of Rouen,” Hartley said in French, the accent roughened by years at sea. “I carry correspondence for the Iberian house of Silva.”

The grate closed. For a long moment there was nothing but the sound of gulls and the distant crash of surf. Then the door swung inward on silent hinges, and a thin monk in a brown habit motioned them inside.

The corridor smelled of damp stone and candle wax. The monk led them through a cloister where herbs grew in neat plots, past a chapel where a single voice chanted Latin in a low monotone, and into a small room lined with shelves of leather-bound books. A second monk stood at the far window, and when he turned, Hartley saw a face that had not spent its life in prayer.

Brother Ignacio had the scarred hands of a soldier and the cold dark eyes of a man who had killed and would kill again. He smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes.

“You are early,” he said. His accent was Castilian, sharp and deliberate. “The letter said the courier would arrive at week’s end.”

“The seas are uncertain,” Hartley replied. “I was instructed to deliver ahead of schedule if conditions allowed.”

Ignacio looked past him to Isabel, his gaze lingering on her bent head. “And the woman?”

“My clerk. She keeps my accounts and my sins.”

The monk’s mouth twitched. “A pretty sin to keep.”

Hartley said nothing. The silence stretched, and he felt the heat in his shoulder spike, sweat prickling his brow. He forced himself to breathe slowly.

Ignacio moved to a locked cabinet, drew a key from beneath his habit, and opened it. Inside lay a leather tube, dark with oil, bound at both ends with brass caps. He held it up but did not extend it.

“You carry something for me?”

Hartley produced the forged letter from his pouch and held it out. Ignacio took it, broke the seal—Brother Ignacio had broken the wax—and read quickly. His brow furrowed.

“This is a copy.”

“The original was lost to pirates off Ushant,” Hartley said, the lie smooth as oil. “The ambassador instructed me to carry this and to confirm the delivery.”

Ignacio studied the paper, then the room, then Hartley’s face. For a moment, Hartley was certain the Spaniard had seen through him—that this was the moment the whole ruse collapsed, and he would die on this island with the map inches from his grasp.

Then Ignacio shrugged and held out the tube.

“The Duke will have his treasure,” the monk said. “And you will have your payment. Go with God.”

Hartley took the tube. It was lighter than he expected, the leather cool against his fevered palm. He tucked it inside his cloak and inclined his head.

“God walks with all men.”

He turned, Isabel at his heel, and they had reached the cloister door when a bell began to toll from the tower—sharp, insistent, three strikes then a pause. Ignacio’s face went tight. He moved to the window and peered out.

“Patrol,” he muttered. “You must leave now. Through the back passage, past the gardens, down to the eastern cove. Go.”

Hartley did not wait to be told twice. He gripped Isabel’s arm and moved swiftly along the cloister’s outer wall, ducking behind a pillar as he glimpsed the sea through the archway—a Spanish sloop, low and fast, gliding around the southern headland, her sails reefed, her gunports open. A cutter was already being lowered from her side, crewed with armed men.

“They will see the longboat,” Isabel hissed.

“They will see a French merchant boat on a fishing island.” But his hand went to his belt all the same, and they moved faster, crashing through a hedge of brambles and down a stony slope toward the eastern cove where the longboat waited. The two rowers saw them coming and pushed off from the shore, oars ready.

Hartley splashed into the surf, shoved Isabel into the boat, and turned to glance back up the hill. The Spanish cutter had landed on the western beach, and soldiers were already climbing the path to the monastery. But they were not looking at him.

“Shove off,” he said, and the boat slid into deeper water.

He did not exhale until they were a hundred yards from shore, the oars rising and falling in steady rhythm, the island growing small behind them. He clutched the tube beneath his cloak, feeling its weight, its promise. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the fisherman still standing on the rocks above the eastern cove—the same monk who had been hauling nets on the beach that morning. The man raised one hand, not in blessing, but in warning, and even across the water, Hartley saw his lips shape words he did not need to hear to understand.

*You are watched.*

The monk lowered his hand and vanished among the rocks.

Isabel followed Hartley’s gaze. “What was that?”

Hartley’s wound throbbed. His vision swam for a moment, and he gripped the gunwale to steady himself.

“We are not alone,” he said. “Someone has been following me since Plymouth.”