easily spotted, steady and constant as an ever-nearing North Star.
The crewmen off-duty hunched on the hatch grates. There was no pretext of merriment. The grog ration proved woefully inadequate at lifting their spirits; if anything, they grew more melancholy. On land or sea, a storyteller was worth his weight in gold. The cook served the body, but the storyteller kept the spirit. The Constancy’sresident narrator was a man by the name of Barnstable, seemingly the oldest aboard, if for no other reason than the deference with which he was treated. A shockingly deep orator’s voice emitted from his spare, horse-faced frame. The men tended to follow him like chicks after a hen, to perch around wherever he finally sat, eagerly settling in for the night’s entertainment. In desperate need of distraction, Cate hung at the group’s margins to listen.
That night, Barnstable was in his glory. With a mind like the library of Alexandria, he called upon his cornucopia of pirate tales. Each darker than the one before, his stories painted a picture of violence and inhumanity that bordered on madness. The individual pirates became lost in a jumble of barely familiar names, some remarkable only by virtue of their horrific uniqueness: Low, who cut off a man’s lips and cooked them in front of him; Montbars, who nailed a captive’s gut to a tree, and then made him dance.
And then there was Morgan. Rumored to have harbored a hatred of women, he had married fourteen over time, throwing each overboard when finished with them.
Cate shuddered, and not from the chill in the air. “Vile and inhuman,” she said aloud without meaning to.
“’Tisn’t the half of it, missus,” said Sullivan with a roll of his eyes. “If only that were all. Heaven help any woman what’s taken by those slavering curs.”
###
Cate stepped on deck the next morning and her knees sagged. When last seen, the pirate ship had been a foreboding blotch in the night. Now it loomed large.
The ship unfurled her banner into the sun’s early rays, and Cate felt a surge of panic. Larger than the ship’s asymmetrical aftersail, the massive, black banner bore a white skull with a halo at a rakish angle, and framed by a pair of angel’s wings. Red streaked down the skull: tears of blood.
One of the men swore vehemently, his last hopes of false identity shattered. “It’s the Sarah Morgan.” He swore again and spit, making horned signs with his fingers. “Blackthorne’s ship.”
“It’s his flag,” said Ivy, resigned. “The Angel of Death. Not even the Dutchman can catch her. Ol’ Blackthorne’s outrun the Devil.”
“Some say he is the Devil,” hissed Barnstable.
There was no further discussion. Meaningful looks were exchanged, agreeing not to unduly alarm Cate. She appreciated the concern, but it was a bit late.
In many ways, seeing the Sarah Morgan so near was a relief. No expert on ships, Cate knew beauty when she saw it and the ship was all of that. Three-masted, with elevated stern and forecastles, she was a bit of a throwback to another era. With an ornate roundhouse and bowsprit, she was by no means fancy or ostentatious; she was a glorious vessel, nonetheless, a lady who knew the value of discretion in her appointments.
In spite of the forewarning, the sight of blood dripping from her deck and sails was still disconcerting. On closer inspection—and small application of logic—the tops had been reddened, but certainly not blood; it would have taken butchering of several oxen for such a vast expanse of canvas. Instead of the traditional bands of colored trim, the sanguineous drool from her deck down between the gunports was actually red paint, skillfully drizzled.
With her guns staring like eyes, the ship was very much alive, exuding a palpable presence.
“Sixteen pounders,” announced Coombs at her elbow, nodding toward the black maws. “She outranges our nine-pounders by a good measure. Another reason Ol’ Black Nate prefers his big ship: those guns would shake apart anything smaller.”
He made a skeptical noise, shaking his head. “Goddamned difficult to fight when we can’t even get close enough to strike, beggin’ yer pardon, Missus.”
Cate now knew what it was to be in the water with a shark. She made a game of how long she could go without looking, all the while knowing the longer she held out, the closer the ship would be, her sails a little larger, the details of her rigging a little clearer. At one point, she turned to find instead of being squarely astern, the ship