Page 16 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son

“Any sign of the Woebegone Whale?” he asked, and Bash had to credit the man’s commitment to his own farce, but they were far enough off course it almost felt deliberate, and Bash meant to understand why.

He shook his head. “No sign of the Whale. This close to England, I’m more concerned about running afoul of the Pursuit.”

Dutch glanced at him sharply. The navy was a legitimate concern, but mentioning it to the captain was tantamount to poking a bear.

Mad’s eyebrow twitched up and he tapped his spyglass two times against his thigh. Then his lips quirked into a jagged sneer. “Still the same frightened little rabbit, are you boy?”

“It’s His Majesty’s ocean,” Bash replied with a shrug.

Mad bared his teeth and laughed, but it sounded more like a hiss. “Exactly why the blue devil won’t be looking for us here. I haven’t dodged the bastard this long by playing it safe,” he boasted. “I mean to find the bilge-sucker Walsh.”

“And Walsh left word he was headed to the colonies, did he?” Bash countered. “I told you before, we’re too far off course. We’ll come to port in Boston at this rate.”

Mad cut his gaze to Dutch who simply shrugged.

“To be clear, I think New York or Boston could be extremely lucrative, but if Walsh is bound for warmer waters, then we’ve under corrected after the gale.” Bash said we, but they both knew he meant the captain had failed to follow his navigational advice.

“I’ve been sailing longer than you’ve been alive. Perhaps your compass is wrong.”

“The compass?”

Mad shrugged. “Many an inexperienced sailor lets his tools get tossed about on a choppy sea. Maybe you’ve lost true north.”

Bash sighed. ’Tis a poor worker blames his tools. His granda’s words echoed in his head like it was yesterday, making sure his grandson learned the lessons his firstborn had not.

“Shall I recharge it, sir?” Bash asked in a clipped tone.

Mad inclined his head ever so slightly, and Bash nodded once before striding away to retrieve the lodestone from his berth.

He stormed past Maggie, who glanced up at him with such a look of startled delight that he rather wished he could take her below with him, hang the captain, the navigation, his promise to Dutch, and everything else. He ignored the urge, ignored her completely along with his sudden erection, and counted to a hundred while focusing instead on cold wet sleeves, and cold, thin gruel, and the sear of the hangman’s noose.

Dutch had made himself scarce in the few minutes Bash was gone because nothing made the captain dig in his heels like having an audience.

“Will you do the honors, sir?” Bash asked, offering up both navigational tools, but Mad gestured for him to continue, as though the very suggestion were beneath him.

Bash showed the captain the current reading, then removed the compass needle and drew it across the lodestone. When he returned it to its casing the reading was exactly the same. They were sailing west-nor’-west even still.

The captain shrugged. “Perhaps your stone is faulty.” He’d never admit to an error. Either he would course correct for the Caribbean in secret, or they’d have the opportunity to harass the colonies after all. Bash didn’t particularly care either way, so long as there was a port and a ship headed back to the British coast with Maggie aboard.

“Before the earlier excitement,” the captain said, glancing at the girl as though reading Bash’s mind, then taking out his spyglass to scan the sea, “there were murmurs of a ship.”

Whispered rumors had reached Bash’s ears too, but he shook his head. “I’ve seen no sign of the Whale.”

“Not the Whale,” Mad said, his eyebrow twitching up again as he stared down his crooked nose at Bash. “A converted galleon. Idle chatter, of course, but is that why you fear the Pursuit?” He tapped the spyglass twice more against his thigh.

Bash pursed his lips to suppress a smile at the captain’s tell.

In truth, he’d only mentioned the navy to elicit a reaction. Because despite his best efforts not to surrender to paranoia, or maybe because of them, Bash had begun to wonder whether Captain Constantin was any threat at all or a mere figment, his aptly named Pursuit a ghost ship of Mad’s own conjuring. What better way for the captain to maintain order in lean, uncertain times than by uniting his band of thieves against a common foe?

Bash would rather believe it was a ghost ship. The vessel had pursued Mad across time and space in an effort to retrieve the very same gold he’d lost twenty years ago, and they’d been outrunning the ghost ever since. But even now, he couldn’t quite decide what was true.

Bash shrugged. “I’ve seen no ship.”

The captain stared hard, like he didn’t quite believe him, as though Bash weren’t painfully aware that capture by the Royal Navy would mean death for them all. A pirate was a pirate, regardless of rank, and the navy had a powerful appetite for seeing pirates dangle.

“Alert me at once if you do.”

“Aye, Captain.”