“I tell you this woman will make our fortunes,” Pierre replied. “Besides, even supposing I agreed with you—which I do not—how do you suggest we leave? Our ship isn’t due to fetch us until tomorrow. What is one more day?”
Barrabas sat heavily on a large rock on the opposite side of the fire. “If we hadn’t wrecked that boat, we wouldn’t have had to wait. We could have gone to Dieppe and met them.”
“You would have sailed across the channel in that fisherman’s boat?”
Barrabas took a swig of wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “We could have done it.”
“Or we might have drowned.”
“At least we wouldn’t have had to be holed up in this miserable cave, wasting time and waiting for that dolt to bring us bad luck.”
“We would not have to hide among these rocks if you had killed Gawan properly. Nobody would know if he was alive or dead, like those other two.”
“I did do it right,” Barrabas retorted before he took another pull at the wineskin. “He shouldn’t have come up again with all the chains I put around his boots before I threw him over.” He shook his ugly, shaggy head. “You should have let me use my sword. Instead I had to listen to him crying like a frightened child before I smothered the life out of him.” He imitated Gawan’s frantic pleading. “My wife! Our baby!” He scowled. “I wish I’d slit his mewling throat.”
“It’s a good thing you did not,” Pierre said, “or they would have been certain he was murdered when they found his body.Now all they know is that he fell off his boat, although that is more than enough.”
Barrabas scowled. “Youused a blade, on that sheriff and his woman.”
“There was no way to make that look like an accident, not if I was to do it swiftly and get out without anyone hearing.”
He’d nearly been caught as it was. He’d heard the servant stirring and it was only because that woman had been too terrified to scream that he hadn’t been discovered.
He hadn’t expected the woman to be there at all. He had believed the sheriff would be alone, and vulnerable in his bed. It had seemed hours that he’d had to wait beneath it, listening to the sheriff and his lover.
“If you hadn’t decided to linger here, we would have been well away and out of danger.”
Pierre couldn’t refute that, but he wasn’t about to let Barrabas win this argument. “Without the greatest prize I’ve ever seen? I tell you, that blond beauty will be worth her weight in gold, so she’s worth the risk. Hedyn was too clever, and therefore dangerous. Now Myghal is the sheriff, and he’ll never betray us to his overlord. He has too much to lose.”
The still-scowling Barrabas took another swig of wine. “And I tell you it’s bad luck to bring women on the ship,” he repeated, shaking the wineskin at Pierre for emphasis. “And it’s too damned far to Tangier.”
Watching the man across the fire, his grip tightening on the hilt of his dagger, Pierre slowly got to his feet.
“Are you challenging me, Barrabas?” he asked, not taking his steadfast, cold-blooded gaze from his crewman.
He could hear the rest of men muttering among themselves. They knew what had happened to the last man who’d tried to question Pierre’s authority, as did Barrabas. Guido’s death had been a gruesome lesson in the danger of inciting mutiny.
Barrabas seemed to be recalling that particular incident. He stepped back, his arms dangling at his sides and fear in his black eyes as he stared at Pierre’s hand resting on the hilt of his weapon.
Because Barrabas was worth ten men in a fight, Pierre gave him a second chance—although it would be his last. “Women can bring good luck as well as bad, and I feel in my bones that blond beauty will make us rich. I appreciate we have small comforts here, but what will that matter when we are rich and fat in our old age, eh? We leave tomorrow at the night’s high tide and we will take the woman and be gone, never to return as long as that knight is in command.”
Barrabas had seen Pierre kill men and laugh while he did it. He’d seen him rape and heard him brag about it afterward. He had been there when Guido had met his slow, tormented end. Even so, he believed he was right, and if they took that woman on their ship, they would die. “What if Myghal betrays us and doesn’t bring the woman? Will we go and get her?”
Pierre smiled coldly. Cruelly. As he had when he’d tortured Guido. “Myghal will bring her. I will make sure of it. Now, have you anything more to say to me, Barrabas? Or must we draw our knives?”
Barrabas didn’t want the woman on their ship, but he saw death here and now in Pierre’s stance and the murderous gleam in his eye.
“No,” he muttered, picking up the wineskin and heading back to the fire.
While Pierre sat and thought about what he’d do when he had Lady Beatrice on his ship.
It was indeed a long way to Tangier.
ASPIERRE WAS DEALINGwith the mutinous Barrabas, Bea stroked her beloved’s ruddy hair in the spluttering flicker of the candlethey had not even stopped to snuff. “Now I know why Constance smiles all the time.”
Still lying with his head upon her breasts, Ranulf laughed softly. “Bea, you are the most remarkable woman.”
“Am I?”
