My Love, My Enemy by Jan Cox Speas

Author:Jan Cox Speas
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2011-05-22T07:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Later, when she looked back at those bright sunlit days aboard the Caprice, she was to remember them as the happiest of her life.

At the time, however, she often wondered how it would be to live a quiet peaceful life again, her days marked by nothing more eventful than a county ball or visitors for tea, her world bounded by the slow march of the seasons and the lazy tidewater way of life, her heart stirred by nothing more dangerous than the stale news in a paper three weeks late in arriving. But that tranquil world lay far behind the misty haze that hovered along the horizon; and the past and the future were rudely pushed aside by a clamorous, unquiet present demanding all her attention and interest.

The Caprice was to take four prizes from the convoy before she was done with it, four fat wealthy West Indiamen loaded with sugar, rum, indigo, coffee, and enough British specie to make Mason a rich man many times over.

The two sloop captains, stamping their quarterdecks with enraged fury, could protect their charges only by bunching them together in close formation, a maneuver which necessarily slowed their passage and offered the Caprice even more time to scheme for another victim. She would skim around the huddled convoy with the grace of a dragonfly, standing past it to draw one of the sloops after her, then suddenly coming about to slip down the leeward side of the convoy, her guns roaring at the frightened merchantmen as she passed. Before the clumsy sloop could round the convoy the Caprice would be alongside the other sloop, daring her to fight; and when both protectors and charges were confused and addled, the Caprice would dip her flags in a mocking salute and swing to the westward, not quite out of sight but always out of reach.

Then, just as the British captains thought it safe to draw a deep breath and sit down to an uninterrupted meal, the Caprice would be at her tricks again, seeming to be in a dozen places at once, harrying at their flanks, probing every weak spot, darting in to attack but never holding still long enough to taste their guns, an enemy as infuriating and elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp.

She accomplished her purpose with deadly ease. The naval captains and the merchant masters cursed Mason violently and grew bleary-eyed from tension and lack of sleep, and before two weeks had passed the Caprice had unhurriedly taken her toll, her only payment being a ripped sail and torn shroud lines, damaged when she fouled a merchant ship in the dark to facilitate boarding her.

Mason put prize crews aboard three of the merchantmen and sent them back to American ports, and the fourth he destroyed after transferring her cargo to the Caprice and setting her crew afloat in longboats to be picked up by one of the British sloops.

Page, to her surprise, did not find it at all frightening. Mason knew his ship intimately and

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