Page 81 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son

He shook his head. “It was just a song—just a nonsense rhyme.”

“Or was it?” she asked, growing excited as her mind whirled with all the possibilities. “Your father loved her enough to make a baby with her. Maybe he told her where he buried the gold,” she said excitedly, but Bash frowned, and reached for her hand as if afraid to impart bad news.

“I don’t know if he loved her or not, but she was already gone when he buried it.”

“Are you certain?” she asked, deflating.

“Mad had a woman in every port. Perhaps she was one of his particular favorites, but that’s all she was. She didn’t even know he was a pirate until she arrived in Lewis. My auntie tried to tell her he was no good, but she was dazzled by him. So when she realized she was with child, she took herself to the Hebrides to find him and gave birth to me on the journey. I was born at sea, and I’ll die at sea,” he muttered the morose afterthought to himself.

Maggie squeezed his shoulder. “The captain said he buried the gold for his son,” she reminded him.

“Aye. Coming to Kingston meant coming to see her. Only she wasn’t there. Folks told him she’d taken her babe to find its father. He knew about me, and he knew where she was, but he never came looking until years after she died. Maybe in a drunken moment of paternal pride he thought to save it for me, but she couldn’t have known it existed, let alone where he left it.”

He seemed to realize he was clenching his fists and opened them to study the words written on the backs of the pictures, his eyes misting over.

“It’s her song, isn’t it?” Maggie asked. “The one you woke up singing after…” Her eyes darted to his unbandaged ear, which looked almost as good as new, though she still caught him cupping it protectively as though it pained him from time to time.

Bash brushed his dark locks down to cover the ear self-consciously and turned the portraits over again to gaze on mother and son.

“The king once built a town so fair,” he whispered. “She used to make me sing this song over and over. ‘Memorize it, Basti, and one day…’ ” He squinted. “One day it will lead you home.”

His eyes widened and he stared at Maggie in wonder.

“Could he have buried it at her house when he went to find her?”

He shook his head, dazed by the idea.

“Your auntie, the one who told her he was no good, what happened to her?”

Bash shook his head again. “I tried to go and see her once. When I was twelve. I snuck off the ship at Port Royal but I didn’t make it to Kingston before Mad caught me.”

“The scars on your back?” she whispered, knowing his answer even before he nodded, lost in the distant memory.

“Andrew’s spire calls out to thee.” He blinked twice. “There was a church spire. I could just see the top of it from Gallows Point. I remember thinking it must be the tallest thing I’d ever seen, when Mad’s shadow fell across me. I’d never felt so suddenly cold as I did then.”

He blinked again, a few more times, as if coming back to himself. “We have to get you to the harbor.”

“What? Now?”

Bash nodded. “You’ve helped tremendously. I promise I’ll go and look for the gold. If it’s there, I’ll find it. But after all the business with Willy Walsh, Mad’s going to tear up this island looking for it too, and God help anyone in his way.”

Maggie understood this was something Bash felt he needed to do alone. She didn’t like it, but she understood.

So she didn’t argue when he folded his plaid and made a gift of it to her. She didn’t protest when he put out the last dying embers of their fire.

They set off for Kingston arm in arm, and she didn’t even complain when he gave her the money for her passage back to Scotland, or cry when he embraced her on the outskirts of town. They held on to each other as if they were drowning, and part of her wanted to drown. She bit her lip to keep from crying.

“It’s too dangerous for you. I can go on from here alone,” she reasoned. “You must go and seek your fortune.”

He frowned. “The port can be rough. Perhaps I should take you all the way.”

She shook her head. “You mustn’t be seen. Go. Now. And after, you can come back and find me.”

Then she gave him the little frame with pictures of Ellen and Jory. “Find them, and you’ll find me,” she whispered. She clung to him, fighting off tears as she added, “I will wait for you, Bastian MacLeod. I saved you once, and that makes you mine. Our souls are bound, stronger together than apart. I could never love another as dearly as I love you.”

With a last embrace and a kiss on the cheek, she headed off towards the port with the prickle of his eyes on her sweat-slicked neck, determined that this wouldn’t be goodbye.

Bash watched until Maggie disappeared from view and then he kept right on standing at the edge of the road like a lovesick fool, watching and waiting and wishing she’d run back to him, though he was the one who’d sent her away, his heart as raw as an open wound in need of scarring to protect it.