Page 103 of The Pirate Queen

“The Dark Lady of Doona”

Grace is thirty-six years old

A hand shakes her awake. Gutty. Head turned away. Eyes closed. As though embarrassed to find her in bed.

“What?” she asks, and looks to the window. It isn’t yet dawn.

“There’s a ship wrecked on Achill Head,” he says. “We’ve time to get there first.”

Grace sits up. Presses warm fingers against her closed eyes, then blinks them open again.

He turns his back entirely so as not to see her slide out from beneath the blankets. “Hurry. Or the scavengers will take what there is to be found.”

An hour later, Niamh cuts a line north through the choppy water toward Achill Island. Grace didn’t think anyone foolish enough to sail in this fog, but then she sees the broken mast and the tattered banner of a Leinster merchant ship at the foot of the cliffs.

“Lower the currachs and see what we can find,” she orders the crew.

Five smaller boats are stacked on Niamh’s deck, and once they drop anchor a hundred yards from the wreck, her men lower the scavenging vessels into the water. They hold several men each and are the best way to pick the bones of a shipwreck in such a dangerous location.

Grace goes down the ladder into the first currach with Gutty and calls out directions as they row between the jagged granite teeth that rise out of the frigid water. The rocks have chewed the merchant vessel to pieces, then spit it back out in splinters. The water is littered with crates and barrels. Shattered wood. And bodies. Dozens of broken men are spread across the area. Floating. Jammed between bits of sharp rock. Tangled in nets. Caught on the ship. Grace frowns at the one nearest her, bobbing face down in the water. Gutty pokes him with an oar as they pass, just to make sure he’s dead.

They have run five loads of salvaged cargo back to Niamh when Grace hears a groan. Fifteen feet away a man clings to a piece of hull, his lower body submerged. He lifts his head, dull eyes trying to focus on her, then drops again.

“Help,” he calls out weakly.

“There,” Grace directs Gutty where to row.

Gutty frowns when they reach the man.

He is bigger up close. Younger, in his twenties. Light hair that curls at the ends. Light beard as well. Grace cannot make out the color of his eyes because he cannot seem to keep them open.

“Help,” he says again, weaker this time. He can no longer lift his head off the board. “I don’t want to die.”

He doesn’t open his eyes again.

“Too late, I think,” Gutty mutters.

“He’s still breathing,” she tells him.

“For now.”

It would be easier to leave the man. No one to witness that they’ve claimed the cargo. But…

The sailor is terribly handsome. And for some reason, that seems a waste.

“Pull him in,” she says. “He comes with us.”

Their arrival causes quite a stir. Gutty and the Murray twins haul the limp—and naked—sailor into the kitchen and plop him directly in the middle of Cook’s worktable.

“What do you eejits expect me to do?” she demands. “Roast ’im?”

“We need to see how badly he’s hurt,” Grace says.

The serving girls squawk and cluck, flit around him like hens. Hands flutter, and necks bob this way and that to get a better look. They smile, then giggle. Nod.

Of course Grace had noticed the beauty of his form when he was lying at her feet in the currach. But to make such a fuss? Absurd.

“A handsome one, ain’t ’e?” Cook asks.