Under the Lash Page 10

  She recognized some of the men, who smiled and shuffled in an embarrassed manner when she nodded to them. Rory was there, but he looked pained and didn’t return her slight smile. The Captain was looking fit to bust that she’d acknowledge any of them, but then, keeping a tight arm around her as if he thought she might bolt for some reason, he turned his attention to the matter at hand and cleared his throat, saying, “All of you did extremely well, men, and in the face of an overwhelming enemy. The bounty from the HMS Insuperable will make your purses considerably fatter at the end of the voyage, and cook tells me that there’s even some beef that several men were able to liberate from its larders before it went down, so there will be meat in everyone’s stew tonight, as well as a double ration of ale.” He was given three cheers for his generosity, but he calmed their exuberance quickly afterwards.

  “Your brave efforts are the reason why I have assembled you. One person on board – although she isn’t exactly a part of the crew – is known to have given aid and comfort to the enemy – to the very men who were trying to kill you.”

  There were a few boos in response to his revelation, but surprisingly few.

  And then one lone, shy voice was heard out of the crowd. “But Captain, Sir, the miss helped me – got my arm set by wrapping parts of her underskirt around two pieces of wood from where a cannonball landed on the quarterdeck, she did. The Doc says it’s going to be right as rain in a few weeks.” Midshipman Ellis wasn’t the type to speak up for nothing. He was a good lad, kept his head down, and did what the hell he was told to do with little complaint.

  Anjel opened his mouth, but not before he was interrupted by yet another crewman, a swabby this time, by the name of Smitty, who had come aboard the ship not more than a year ago, who echoed his shipmate’s comments about what a help the “little miss” had been to him about the gunshot that had ripped through and through the upper flesh of his arm.

  And before their Captain could say another word, he was fairly assailed by members of the crew who had been assisted by the female at his side, if not directly then they confessed to being comforted merely by the presence of someone who was so selflessly giving of herself, without any thought to her own danger.

  “She was dodgin’ and weavin’ like a pickpocket in Leicester Square with a bobby after ‘im,” one of the men said, and Anjel was treated to a chorus of how angelic and brave the men felt she had been.

  Even Rory joined in, having apparently been keeping an eye on her himself, just like Anjel had been, equally as unable to do anything to assist, but trying to keep track of where she was and not get himself killed at the same time.

  But Anjel wasn’t going to back down. “And what if, lads, this little lady,” and his tone conveyed that her status as such was deeply in question, “had treated a man who got up and sliced two or three or four of you down in your prime before some one of us was able to get to him? Or, worse than that, if he had managed to turn the tide? Where would we be now – rotting at the bottom of the ocean or in an English brig, which isn’t all that different, especially when there’s a noose waiting for you at the end of your voyage, gentlemen.”

  Some of the men nodded, but the majority remained unconvinced – not that he needed their consent, anyway. Aiding and abetting was bad enough in and of itself, but then there was the matter of her escape, the fact that she had bitten him back when he had first abducted her...True, he had already made her pay – in spades – for some of the misbehaviors on the list he was compiling in his own mind, but Anjel still couldn’t just ignore the fact that she had helped the people who were trying to kill them – even if his men apparently could.

  So without further conversation, Anjel turned and guided Cassie over to the mast, where he had already had one of the men lower the cross beam enough that he could bind her wrists to it.

  Cassie was deep in denial about what was about to happen to her, and she didn’t put up any kind of resistance at all when he bound her arms above her head, and well out to the side, where they would be of no use to her at all.

  Then he bound her ankles together and also to the mast, as well as looping a strong band of leather around her waist. By the time he was finished, she couldn’t move a muscle.

  To her horror, the next thing he did was to lean down and pull up her skirts, being sure to catch the hem of what remained of her petticoats and gather all of that material up to tuck it into the leather band around her waist until her entire backside was exposed to anyone who cared to see it.

  The men were strangely silent, though. Not a catcall or a hoot from any of them. In fact, as he took the quirt into his hand, he was amazed to look behind him and see that nearly three fifths of the men had turned their backs to the proceedings. They hadn’t set foot to leave, because they knew that would mean trouble from him. But more and more of them were executing about faces worthy of the trained soldiers on the ship they had just defeated, until nearly all of them – except Bedlam Bill, who was certifiably crazy – and Rousseau, a Frenchman he knew favored whips all too well – so well, in fact, that he was banned from most of the whorehouses they frequented.

  With a deep sigh and a feeling of trepidation he could do nothing to shake, Anjel nonetheless drew back his arm and landed the first of many wicked strokes across that delicate bottom of hers, hearing several of his men whimper at the sharp sound of thin leather connecting with shrinking flesh, instead of the intended victim, who somehow managed to stay silent despite the fact that he could see the livid red wheal he’d left before he drew his arm back for the second stripe.

  Chapter Nine

  Anjel had no idea how she managed to endure the lashing he was giving her. She gave barely so much as a peep. She was crying and snuffling, but not one scream had passed her lips, and barely even any moans or groans. He knew he wanted to cry out himself every time the lash kissed that delicate skin. Her bottom was a mass of livid red wheals, and he could barely stand what he was doing to her himself, especially considering how she had so selflessly helped his men, but he felt that a point needed to be made, and he was going to make it.

  Finally, on he didn’t even know what stroke, she collapsed against her bonds, not sagging much because he had tied her so tightly but he could see that she had fainted and he was damned glad of it. It gave him an excuse to end this blasted ordeal.

  But when he reached for the straps around her wrists, he found Rory there before him, and Smitty already working at her ankles.

  “Hey, Cap’n, look, she’s bleeding!” he shouted, noticing a small pool of blood at her feet.

  With a roar Anjel pushed the other men away from her and swung her up into his arms, ordering, “Doc, meet me in my cabin,” over his shoulder as he descended to his quarters, putting her on her back on the bed since she was unconscious anyway. Within seconds he had every stitch of what there was of her clothing off her, looking for where she might be bleeding from, and he found it easily. There was a moderately deep crease across the bottom side of her ribcage and it was oozing slowly. The blood had been running in a sluggish stream down the side of her right thigh.

  When the doctor arrived several minutes later, Anjel hovered around her protectively, paying more attention to what he said about how he was going to treat Cassie than he ever had about how he was going to treat his own myriad wounds.

  The foremost concern was, of course, infection, and there were really very few things they could do to prevent it. The problem was that whatever it was – probably a musket ball – that had torn that chunk out of her was probably not the cleanest thing to begin with. They could clean her up as carefully as possible, but there was a good possibility that the infection had already started to set in. And once it did, there was precious little they could do but hope and pray.

  And that was exactly what Anjel ended up doing. By the end of day three, she was burning up with fever, and hadn’t been conscious since she’d been lashed at the mast. He had already turned over nearly all his duties to Rory, who had h
eaded the ship, on his orders, back towards San Miguel, where he knew his uncle had an excellent physician – not that there was much more that he could do for her, necessarily, than they were already doing, but Anjel wanted to assure himself that he had gotten the best treatment he could for her. Unfortunately, the chances were quite good that she’d be long gone before they got there, but he had to hold on to something positive and that was it.

  He bathed her with cool water and hovered over her night and day, spooning a special broth Cook had made for her down her throat when he could, massaging her and tending to the mess he’d made of her bottom, trying to keep her as comfortable as possible and assisting Bones with all of the procedures he came up with to try to save her – draining the abscess, packing it with clean bandages to wick the infected matter out of the area, hot compresses to assist in doing the same and even helping him sew her up.

  She was going to have a scar fit to match any of his on that beautiful body of hers, and it was no one’s fault but his own. In all of these hours mostly alone with her, sitting in his huge chair by her side, or holding her next to him on the bed, Anjel had taken stock of just what it was that he had put her through, and peasant or whore or highborn courtesan – whatever she had been before he had taken her – he realized that it had not been his right to kidnap her, regardless of the potential threat against his men if she had managed to alert the townspeople.

  When she awoke – if she awoke, he corrected with a lump in his throat the size of a barrel of ale – he was going to do his level best to make it up to her. He’d set her up in her own house wherever she wanted to be – on any continent – and take care of her financially for the rest of her life, as penance. And, more than that, he’d leave her the hell alone, if that was what she chose. He could hardly blame her if she never wanted to set eyes on him again, and if that was her wish, then all he could do was his level best to fulfill it.

  He wished he thought that she would agree to have him in her life – as her lover and more – but he couldn’t imagine that she would after what he’d forced her to endure. And then he heard something that compounded his remorse a thousand fold.

  She had been hallucinating from the moment her fever had begun to spike, but the words she shrieked and the visions she seemed to be having weren’t anything of any importance – a missing kitten, apparently, that she was trying to coax to her in a voice much higher pitched than her normal one, as if she had drifted back into her childhood. And once, when he had joined her to get a few hours of sleep, gathering her tight up against his side, she had asked him, clear as a bell in a rather plaintive tone, to tell her a story, a request which he found surprisingly endearing.

  But as her fever climbed, her imaginings seemed to become more and more based in actual, specific life events, and not happy ones, apparently, either. She became very agitated in the middle of one night, obviously dreaming about something that had happened that had caused her great anguish. She was so restless that Anjel couldn’t get any sleep himself, so he rose and lit a candle, watching her as she struggled against some unseen demon, then called out several times to her father with such pleading in her voice that he got back into bed to hold her as she sobbed, although she was so feverish that she had few actual tears to shed.

  Somehow he gleaned from those ramblings that her grief was caused by the recent loss of her father, at least recently enough that the grief was apparently quite fresh in her mind. He tried to soothe her as best he could, although she wasn’t having much of it, because as soon as she recovered from her sobs, she became equally as angry at her mother about something. She kept repeating, “Mama, no!” over and over again and crying fit to break his heart, and then he heard something from those parched lips that had the hair on the back of his neck standing up.

  “Duque Gregorio!” She fairly screamed his name as she reached a peak of agitation that had Anjel holding her with arms that were more than faintly shaking at what he’d heard.

  Duque Gregorio de la Fuente, the governor of San Miguel, was his uncle. Because his father had died early in his young life, they had always been close for a nephew and uncle, and he could remember coming down to San Miguel occasionally as a child and having the time of his life because his uncle wasn’t nearly as hawk–eyed about his behavior – as the first born son – as his mother was, and he thoroughly enjoyed the freedom he was given to roam the island at will.

  Gregorio’s somewhat precipitous marriage to someone he’d just barely met was why Anjel had set a course for the island in the first place – he wanted to meet this woman that his heretofore confirmed bachelor uncle had married.

  But how had Cassie come to know his name? Was there more than one Duque Gregorio in the world, he wondered, doing his best to hope against hope that she didn’t mean his uncle, but as he had captured her on San Miguel, he knew it was beyond hope to think that there was anyone else on that island by that title.

  Anjel left her in as comfortable a position as he could manage for her, and went to his desk, rifling through the last few letters he’d received from the older man, although they were several months old. He did mention in a few of them that he had met a wonderful woman – a Lady who had lost her beloved husband to the cholera epidemic that had ripped through England over the winter. As the letters drew closer to the current date, he had written that he intended to marry this paragon, and vaguely mentioned that she had an eligible daughter but didn’t go into any further detail about them, except to mention that his intended was of exquisite beauty but that her daughter easily surpassed her. Anjel had laughed when he’d first read this letter, knowing that that comment was expressly included to try to tempt him into visiting. Although his uncle wouldn’t have expected Anjel to attend the wedding, since he was privy to and a partner in Anjel’s less than honorable pursuits, he knew there would always be a room waiting for him at the Governor’s mansion.

  It was then that he remembered that, when he had first taken her aboard, she had had a bag with her, and he hadn’t bothered to pay much attention to what had happened to it. Perhaps it would provide some clue as to her identity, since she was unable. He quickly summoned Rory to his side and asked him if he knew what had happened to it. Anjel didn’t explain exactly why it was that he was only looking for it just now, but he knew that Rory would assume that it was to see if there was any way to identify her better if the worst they all feared actually came to pass.

  As it happened, Doc had been given first crack at its contents, in case it had contained any useful medicines, and it did look somewhat like the kind of bag he might carry if he was practicing on land. And, luckily, when he found it just contained some clothing and a few personal mementos, he hadn’t thrown it overboard or even passed it on through the ship, but had tucked it into one of the cupboards he had at his disposal in the tiny dispensary, and Rory was able to retrieve it with relative ease and bring it to the captain, who descended on it as if it held the secret to life, and it might well indeed.

  Rory backed quietly out of the room after glancing at where Cassie lay immobile on the bed, seeing that Anjel was in no mood for company of any kind.

  When he finally slumped back in his chair, Anjel took a hold of Cassie’s pale hand and saw his own tears fall onto the back it. Several of the things in the little kit she’d had – perhaps she was running away for some reason but he couldn’t be sure – were letters from her father, the Earl, on his personal stationery, which showed his crest.

  There was no doubt about it, even if she wasn’t somehow involved with the woman Duque Gregorio was probably already married to, she was the daughter of an Earl, and just about as far from the type of woman he had been trying to paint her as all along as a beggar was from a Prince. Anjel ran his hand through his hair. What a mess he had gotten them both into, and all because of his impetuousness, and the fact that he’d wanted her on sight. That beautiful hair of hers had shone like a beacon in the dim moon and torchlight, and he had had to have her, consequences be dam
ned.

  In fact, he had arrogantly assumed, as he was wont to do, that there wouldn’t be any consequences – at least not for him, anyway.

  The picture that he was piecing together had him even more horrified at his own behavior than he already had been, and he didn’t want to think about what would happen if what he suspected were true. And he was relatively sure that it was: he had kidnapped the daughter of a British earl, the woman who had only recently become his uncle’s stepdaughter.

  Why hadn’t he been more concerned with determining just who it was that he’d kidnapped that night? If he’d just stopped for a moment and asked her a few pertinent questions, they would have turned back to the island no matter where in the world they were, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t even allowed her, for the majority of her relatively short time with him, to speak to him, especially at first when all of this could have been resolved with relative ease.

  But no, he had gotten it into his head that she was a wench, a whore – someone he could play with for his own amusement and then dismiss when he inevitably became bored with her. It was one of the most atrocious things he’d ever done in his life, and he was no angel, despite the name his mother had chosen for him. But he was usually the one who treated his women much, much better than most. Now he had to come to grips with the fact that he was no better than the lowliest seaman who ever raped a strange woman who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time during a raid.

  Not that it absolved him of his own bad behavior in the least, but he couldn’t help but wonder just what it was that she had been doing in an old, faded dress, alone on the beach in the middle of the night? San Miguel was a small enough island, but it wasn’t as if there weren’t untold numbers of men in residence who would have taken advantage of her if they had come upon her that night.