Page 2 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son

“Cornelius, you can’t mean to take him with you,” Miss Macaulay pleaded.

The stranger slammed his cup down on the table, but his words were the hushed steel of a cutlass being drawn from its sheath. “You wrote you couldn’t keep feeding him.”

“But a ship is no place for a child.”

“What did you expect me to do? Send coin?”

His laugh was laced with anger, and Miss Macaulay’s face crumpled. “You could give up the sea. Come back here, make a life together. You promised me that once.”

The stranger snorted, and tears sprang to Miss Macaulay’s eyes, which she tried to hide by fussing about with a kettle on the cold stove.

“Go and get your things, Sebastian,” she said in a scratchy voice. “I’ll wrap some shortbread and bannocks for your journey.”

Any excitement was tempered by the squirmy feeling in his empty belly, but Bastian gathered his clean sark and breeches into a satchel, along with one clean handkerchief because it would please his gran. With a heavy heart, he emptied his pockets of the laundry peg sailors, keeping just one for himself. Miss Macaulay wouldn’t begrudge him the one, even if his dinner portions had been too large after all.

His mother’s wooden locket already hung from his neck, but he checked to make sure both their likenesses were still safe inside. She smiled out at him, and he smiled back, tucking her safely inside his sark.

Just before leaving, he snatched his granda’s gold-and-black tartan from the bed and crammed it in so the satchel bulged. He might never grow into the plaid, but he couldn’t leave it behind.

Eager to see the ship up close, Bastian followed the silent stranger out of the village and down to the port where awaited as large a two-masted vessel as he’d ever seen. The figurehead was an ugly, scowling youth, its outstretched arm clutching a writhing serpent as blood seemed to drip from the youth’s bared teeth, and Bastian could swear its eyes followed him, even as he stepped aboard Auldfarrand’s Revenge.

Chapter One

1730, EVIE, ORKNEY

It was a brigantine ship, with two tall masts and square-rigged sails, and the fact that Maggie knew so much about a pile of floating timber reaffirmed she’d lived in Orkney far too long. She watched anyway as it deftly maneuvered through Eynhallow Sound instead of docking in one of the large ports where such a ship belonged.

Perhaps the nearest port was already overrun by ships laden down with letters full of bad news like the two in Maggie’s apron pocket. Her sister Ellen’s note had been brief and kindly meant: an offer to move back to the mainland to live with her and Silas MacKenzie, the big Laird Kintail, at Castle Leod. Much as Maggie missed her quiet, gentle sister, she couldn’t stomach the thought of residing there, playing widowed governess to the growing brood of MacKenzie children—beautiful, lively children who would fill Maggie’s days instead of children of her own. She couldn’t face such a vision of her future, and yet the other letter in her pocket was far worse. She could feel it even as she sat on an old stone wall, watching the ship navigate the sound. It burned hot in her pocket, as though inked with fire, and heavy as though writ on stone.

Her father wrote that Maggie’s one year and one day of mourning were coming to an end, and he’d already picked out a new husband for her: one of his former students, Michael MacFadyen. He and Michael would arrive in one week’s time to collect her and take her back to Inverness, for, at twenty years of age, she was still young enough to try her hand at marriage again.

If she’d been a boy, there would be no trying again. There would only be marching herself down to the captain of that ship and signing on to his crew.

“Maybe this time he’s picked someone better suited,” her neighbor, Lorna, replied when Maggie related the sorry news, and she almost laughed in the other woman’s face.

“Anyone who knew my cousin Jory would have known she was the least-suited woman on earth for holy orders,” she replied. “But that’s what he chose for her when the choice was his. Nor would any have thought my sister a fit match for the son of a laird.”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Lorna chided.

“Aye, Father got lucky with that one. Still, I reckon suitability’s the last thing on his mind.” If it had been, he would never have matched her with Jeremiah Budge the moment she came of age. Back then, Maggie had only been suited to fairytales and romantic novels, not to becoming the real-life helpmeet of a fully grown man.

The truth was, there’d been no dowry left for Maggie’s keeping. Her father had given it all to Silas MacKenzie when he wed Wee Ellen, and while Maggie had felt certain her brother-in-law would have settled a dowry on her himself two years ago, her father had refused to even hear of it. He’d made up his mind she would wed his former student and wouldn’t be swayed on the matter.

Jeremiah Budge had owed a debt of unpaid tutoring fees, and so Mr. Mackintosh had written off the debt as the amount of his younger daughter’s dowry, claiming he got the better end of the bargain, for wasn’t Maggie finally off his hands?

This new man, Michael MacFadyen, was another former student, one who used to ogle Maggie as if he could see right through her stays before she’d even turned eighteen.

Maggie shuddered. She couldn’t marry him. She refused.

As a girl, she had always imagined marriage to be some magical adventure filled with laughter and cozy picnics, whispered secrets and bubbling joy. She’d been sorely disappointed the first time. There wouldn’t be a second.

“Jeremiah brought you here, that’s a bit like an adventure,” Lorna had suggested in a pathetic sort of way. Even she knew it was ridiculous.

Maggie didn’t laugh in her face because she’d learned some amount of tact in the two years since her wedding, but Orkney had been less of an adventure than a prison sentence—her husband’s sudden death a blessed reprieve.

Still, Lorna must have read the incredulity on her face because she refilled Maggie’s cup with strong, hot tea and said, “Go on, then. What sort of adventure would you want if you could have one?”

Staring out towards the sound and the smattering of islands across the water, Maggie tried to recall the girl she used to be. “I always thought… all I ever wanted was to wed a devilishly handsome young man and mother a passel of mischievous, deliriously happy children. But”—she went on quickly, cutting Lorna off before she could suggest Michael MacFadyen might have grown handsome in the years since Maggie had met him—“now, I suppose all I want is to be someplace warm. I’ve never once felt truly warm here. Even sitting before the fire there’s a chill nipping at your back like the creeping fingers of a shadow.”