Buccaneer by Dudley Pope

Author:Dudley Pope [Pope, Dudley]
Format: epub
Tags: jamaica, spanish main, caribbean, pirates, ned yorke, spaniards, france, royalist, dudley pope, buccaneer, holland
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2010-02-11T23:15:19+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The two ships, sails furled, drifted westward half a mile from each other, slowly turning like a pair of ospreys playing in the air currents over a headland. The boat from the Pearl was streamed by her painter from the Griffin’s stern and the five men and one woman who had rowed across in her were sitting or standing round on the Griffin’s low poop talking to Yorke, Saxby, Aurelia and Burton. Mrs Judd and Mrs Bullock made sure they stayed within earshot by busying themselves with various mugs of rumbullion and limejuice, though no one seemed to be very thirsty.

Yorke had stood back and let Saxby greet the visitors, while Burton had a dozen men below with muskets and pistols, waiting for his shout, but very ostentatiously no one was near the Griffin’s great guns. There was no hint that they were loaded.

The visitors were English and had accepted Saxby as the master, Burton as the mate, Simpson as another mate, and obviously did not know what to make of Yorke and Aurelia, whom Saxby had simply introduced as “Mr Yorke” and “Mrs Wilson”.

When the four men and women had been introduced by their leader, Yorke was struck by the idea that the woman’s role on board the Pearl might bear comparison with Aurelia’s in the Griffin: she was English and, at a guess, came from somewhere no farther east than Hampshire and no farther west than Dorset. Like the leader who introduced her, she spoke clearly; meeting her in an English town one would assume she was the lady of the manor. Black-haired with deep brown eyes, she had wide sensuous lips that smiled easily, a tiny nose, a slim body that could become plump and a way of moving that missed being graceful because she moved too quickly. She was dressed in what could in London become a striking new fashion, Ned thought: her skirt had been slit vertically front and back and the edge of each half had been sewn together to make two tubes. It meant she could swing her legs over the bulwarks and thwarts, or scramble up a rope ladder (as she had done before the Griffins realized she was a woman). On her, the divided skirt looked thoroughly womanly. What Ned found disconcerting was the upper part of her body: she wore a man’s jerkin made of fine cloth, and there was nothing beneath it except herself, and she had the most prominent nipples that Ned had ever seen.

He was covertly looking at them when the leader repeated a question and Ned turned with a polite: “I beg your pardon?”

“I didn’t hear your name when the master introduced us. My name’s Whetstone.”

“Yorke. Edward Yorke.”

The man’s eyes lowered a moment, as though searching his memory. “I knew a George Yorke once. About your age.”

Were the waters of the Spanish Main a place to exchange confidences? Ned decided to wait.

“I’ve heard of a Thomas Whetstone, too.”

The men laughed and the woman smiled, saying: “The scapegrace nephew of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, regicide, warrior – and so on.

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