in his voice suggested further intrigue was involved, but was disinclined to elaborate. “Nathan had Creswicke’s eye from the very first.”
“Because of his success?”
He glanced sideways at her, and then away. The wide shoulders squirmed under the linen of his shirt. “Ehh, let’s just say Creswicke has unique appetites and Nathan made him particularly hungry.”
Cate tasted the bile of disgust. Having lived in London for several years, she was familiar with such “tastes:” sodomy, bestiality, fetishes, depravities, and other deviations yet to be named. She was yet to meet the man, but already possessed a deep hatred.
She ground her feet deeper into the surf’s sand, as if it might abrade away the sickening sensation. “And?”
“And, eventually Creswicke made Nathan an offer he couldn’t refuse: sail for him or never sail again. It was a credible threat. He’d seen Creswicke destroy others who had dared defy him. Being the pragmatic sort, Nathan agreed. He figured sooner or later he’d find a way out of it. It wasn’t an all-bad arrangement: he was the youngest captain in the Company and still sailing his own ship.
“It wasn’t long after,” Thomas went on, “before Creswicke made Nathan another offer, aiming to make Nathan a part of his scheme. Indentured servants come cheap and die by the hundreds in transit. Creswicke was manipulating the books, listing people as dead, and then selling them for the profits. If anyone in London was to question, he’d claim the losses were due to pirates.”
Indentured servants.
It was nothing more than a polite term in delicate circles for slavery. Some were prisoners, banished into it. A good many more sold themselves to a benefactor as a means of gaining passage to the Colonies or elsewhere, where they would work off the debt in a given period of years. The reality—often discovered too late—was years could be added at the benefactor’s whim for anything from food and shelter, to labor lost due to illness or pregnancy. Many owners preferred indentured servants to Guinea slaves. They were considerably cheaper, came with none of the language barriers, and fewer rules governing them.
Brian had been transported as an indentured. Slavery was what it was, which was how she knew he was dead: he would never live that way. She closed her eyes, sickened further to think Brian might have been a victim in Creswicke’s insidious scheme.
Suddenly too restless to remain still, Cate started down the beach once more. Thomas easily fell in step beside her. The rhythm of his long strides next to her was disquieting, like a ghost walking at her elbow. They were away from the light of the campfires by then, the brim of his hat casting a shadow by starlight.
“Nathan told him to go to hell, at least that’s the version that can be repeated to a lady. The sniveling worm drug Nathan into it anyway, and gave him a shipload of them,” Thomas said grimly.
Her hatred of Creswicke rose exponentially. Even if Brian hadn’t been a victim, the possibility was enough to ignite a deep loathing.
“Nathan tried to refuse, but Creswicke was his boss, his word final. Every man has his limits and Creswicke found Nathan’s that day. It’s a rare thing to see, but Nathan has a black temper: he came near to killing the man. We wondered why Creswicke didn’t have him arrested on the spot. We didn’t know that would have disrupted his grander scheme: he didn’t want Nathan miserable, he wanted him destroyed.”
“Why didn’t Nathan just go captain somewhere else?”
There was a flash of white in the darkness as he gave a tolerant smile. “Creswicke’s charter gave him the same control of the West Indies as the Company has in the East. To refuse him would mean to never sail as a merchant again. Besides, the Beneficent was Nathan’s first command; ’tis a special place in a man’s heart.”
She flinched at seeing Thomas rub the back of his neck under the heavy tail of hair, just as Brian would have done.
“None of us liked it. We sailed for Nathan; we didn’t give a goddamn about Creswicke or his company. The manifest looked well enough. We thought it odd when there were Company guards at the gangways, but they represented it was an uncommon bad lot, and we believed them,” he said, sounding even more miserable. “We’d barely set the courses, when we began to hear such caterwauling from the hold, ’twas like the Sirens themselves. And the smell…”
Thomas coughed and cleared his throat of a