Dark Before the Rising Sun Read Free Page B

of a stranger. And as he had stood before the man he no longer knew, those gray eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and Kirby had shivered. He’d never seen so cold and calculating a stare. And strangely enough, he had known for a certainty that had he not measured up to Captain Dante Leighton’s unyielding standards, he would have been thrown overboard like so much bilge water being pumped into the sea.
    There had been times during the following years, when cannon fire splintered the deck beside him, that Kirby had seriously doubted the wisdom of following his master to sea. He had come close to death too many times not to have wondered whether he and the captain would ever again see the towers of Merdraco.
    He had not been at all displeased, therefore, when the Treaty of Paris was signed in ’63, and the hostilities between England and France came to an end. He had been looking forward eagerly to returning to dry land. But only too quickly he discovered that the captain had quite different ideas for their future, and returning to England and a life of leisure on land had not been part of them.
    Instead, the billowing sails of the Sea Dragon had caught a freshening offshore breeze while the captain ordered the helmsman to steer a southwesterly course. Soon the verdant, familiar shores of England disappeared over the horizon. A fortnight passed, and the Canary Islands fell astern as the Sea Dragon ran free before the northeast trades, their first landfall, Barbados.
    A young Alastair Marlowe, now supercargo aboard the Sea Dragon , sailed with them. He had joined the crew rather abruptly one rainy night in Portsmouth two years earlier, and had Kirby been asked about that night, he would most likely have chuckled in remembrance of the fancy young gentleman being carried aboard by the captain. The unconscious beau’s velvet coat had been muddied beyond repair, and his fine silk stockings torn, and he had been sporting a nasty bruise on his forehead, the painful result of a cudgel swung by one of a press-gang. They had been attempting, and quite successfully until the captain interfered, to kidnap for service aboard one of His Majesty’s ships anyone clad in breeches who had been unfortunate enough to be walking the streets of Portsmouth.
    As the younger son of a comfortably well-to-do country gentleman, the estate now in the hands of the firstborn son, Alastair Marlowe’s future had been anything but inspiring. If he had intended to keep his creditors at arm’s length, he would soon have had to become either a clergyman or a soldier, both proper occupations for down-at-heels gentlemen, but neither of which appealed to a young man starved for a bit of adventure and a decent income.
    Only the captain of the Sea Dragon knew exactly why he had taken pity on a young gentleman in distress that night in Portsmouth. Generous displays of compassion were uncommon for Dante. But had anyone been so unwise as to question the captain’s offering a town seedling a berth aboard the Sea Dragon , Alastair would soon have silenced his doubts. He had quickly proven himself no stranger to hard work, and indeed had shown such a willingness to learn that many an old hand had halfheartedly grumbled about being made to look bad by comparison.
    As the Sea Dragon followed a leisurely course north, her ultimate destination Charles Town, the bewitching West Indian sunsets and balmy breezes cast their spell over the crew, who still remembered only too vividly the gale force winds and crashing seas of the perilous North Atlantic. By the time they had sailed past the dense tropical forests and conical-shaped mountain peaks of Dominica, the Sea Dragon was shorthanded.
    Barnaby Clarke, the Sea Dragon ’s new quartermaster and a self-styled dandy out of Antigua, joined the crew in Jamaica. Longacres, the new coxswain and an old pirate with no first name and two missing front teeth, came aboard in New Providence. And Seumus Fitzsimmons,