more mission to the West Indies to carry out for the Company before he was to retire from the sea and settle down to a life of ease at Charnwood in Kent, home to his family for generations, where he would satisfy his mother’s desire that he find himself a wife and provide her with grandchildren and an heir.
Absently his thoughts turned to the tall, slender young woman he had observed from a distance watching the execution of Nathaniel Wylde. There had been an intense look of concentration in her eyes, which had turned to open curiosity when they had met his. Each had briefly assessed the other with an unwavering stare, and the woman’s steady gaze had taken on an iron nerve. It was the measure of a woman confident of her own worth.
Her eyes had been the only feature exposed, but he recalled the long strand of pale gold hair escaping the confines of her hood. It had drawn his gaze like a moth to a flame, for it was the only bright feature to lighten the dreariness of the day until Nathaniel Wylde had appeared, and his own mane of hair had shone to equal that of the woman’s.
It was then the truth burst on him—that the young woman he had seen could in all probability have been Wylde’s daughter. At first his brain refused to accept it and he smiled at his foolish, fanciful thoughts, for not by any stretch of the imagination could he visualise a man’s daughter coming to watch her father hang. However, recollecting tales told by mariners that Nathaniel Wylde had a daughter of spirit and great beauty, and that she lived with relatives somewhere in London, perhaps he was not mistaken in his suspicion after all—and with Wylde’s blood in her, she would feel neither distress nor out of place at a hanging.
The more he thought about it—having observed her as Wylde had mounted the gallows, he had seen her knuckles showing white from the force with which she had gripped the hood of her cloak across her face, and recollected how both she and her companion had gone to great lengths to keep their features concealed as they remained hovering on the edge of the crowd—the more possible, the more probable it became that the woman he had seen was indeed the pirate’s daughter.
He could have turned back and denounced her companion, who was undoubtedly one of Wylde’s associates, but for some reason unknown to him he hired a hackney to take him to his ship, eager to put the unpleasant episode behind him and slake his thirst and eat his dinner in the warm comfort of his cabin, reluctant to condemn another man to the same gruesome fate as Nathaniel Wylde.
But the following morning he had grave misgivings and was compelled to examine his failure to turn back and denounce the man when the bosun informed him that, unobserved, the Dolphin had slipped quietly from her moorings in the dark of the night and was last seen heading down river towards the sea—a woman, with pale blonde hair flowing down the length of her back and dressed in breeches, her feet planted firmly apart, standing in the prow of the ship.
When the tide had receded it was also revealed that Nathaniel Wylde’s body had been cut free of the hangman’s noose at Execution Dock.
Chapter Two
A fter encountering severe storms off the mainland of South America, which severely damaged the Dolphin’s hull and forced her to put in at the first landfall, which happened to be the island of Trinidad, it was with sadness and reluctance that Cassandra, eager to reach Barbados and her cousin Sir John Everson, parted company with the Dolphin.
The burial they had given her father at sea had been a particularly poignant moment for her. She had watched through a mist of tears as the corpse of the man who had been tied to her by blood had slipped beneath the grey waters. ‘Goodbye, Father,’ she had whispered, and in the soulful wind blowing over the sea came the tempting strains of an answering farewell, strains that filled her heart, a sound heard by her alone.
And now Cassandra was glad to be moving on, to put the tragic memories of those terrible last days in London behind her. She acquired a passage on a large English merchant vessel, the Spirit of Enterprise, bound for Barbados and Antigua. During the same storms that had battered the Dolphin, the merchantman, which had been travelling in an organised convoy, since lone vessels were in danger of being attacked and plundered by pirates, had been blown severely off course, and the ship’s commander, Captain Tillotson, had put in at Trinidad to take on fresh water.
Uneasy at Cassandra being the only woman on board the Dolphin, Drum had insisted that his daughter, eighteen-year-old Rosa, accompany her. She was a quiet, comely girl, with dark features like her Portuguese mother. Drum had taken her on board when they had made a lengthy stop at Praia, his home in the Cape Verde Islands.
In desperate need of provisions, and to carry out urgent repairs to the badly leaking Dolphin, Drum was to go on to one of the neighbouring islands—an island that was a favourite haunt for pirates. Contrary to his misgivings when he had taken Cassandra on board, the sailors had taken to her like seals to the ocean, and the entire crew would mourn her departure.
Drum bore a deep and abiding love for his daughter; when the moment came to say farewell, he stood still for a moment while Rosa rested her head against him, then he patted her and said gruffly, ‘Be a good girl, Rosa, and do as Cassandra tells you.’ Promising dutifully that she would, lifting her arms she put them round her father’s neck and kissed his scarred cheek. He held her tightly for a moment and then stepped back and turned to Cassandra.
‘Try not to worry about Rosa, Drum,’ Cassandra said, aware of his concern and touched at how much feeling this hard-bitten pirate possessed for his daughter. ‘Captain Tillotson is to give us his protection until we reach my cousin. I promise to take good care of her, and ensure her safe passage back to Cape Verde. Where will you go, when the Dolphin is repaired?’
‘Who knows?’ he said with a roguish, Irish grin. ‘The ship will sail, winged by her oars, and go wherever the wind will take us.’
If Captain Tillotson thought it strange for an English woman to be travelling with just one female companion so far from home, he was too much of a gentleman to show it. However, the occupants of the Dolphin stirred his curiosity and he suspected they were sea rovers, but the captain, though fearsome to look at with his scarred face, seemed a reasonable enough individual and was clearly concerned that the young lady and her companion be delivered safely to her cousin on Barbados.
It was with the dawn on a morning in April, almost five months after leaving England, that Cassandra glimpsed the coral island of Barbados, its encircling reefs giving her a degree of security and immunity. It was a large island, hanging like a teardrop one hundred miles east of the Caribbean chain. Well situated in terms of the north-easterly trade winds and ocean currents that enabled the island to receive shipping from Europe, it rose on the horizon wreathed in a golden mist, like a mirage, bewitching, peaceful and powerfully hypnotic, and, the closer they sailed, the air blowing from inland was heavy with a thousand scents.
The ship anchored in the commodious bay at Bridgetown. The glittering waters were dotted with all manner of craft, from fishing ketches and lighters to huge merchantmen that docked at Barbados frequently. Barbados was successful in its manufacture of sugar, and Bridgetown, bustling to an ageless quick tempo, was the island’s trading centre.
The noise and colour assailed Cassandra’s senses, and the hot Caribbean sun gilded the town and warehouses that lined the waterfront in a silver glow. Everywhere disorder reigned. A never-ceasing army of bare-chested black slaves worked laboriously, driving wagons and manning the oars of the lighters—sturdy vessels utilised to transport cargo to and from the ships anchored in the bay. They were built to carry twenty to thirty tons—and in many cases passengers and cargo would be lucky to escape a drenching.
The figures on the beach were a blur in the trembling heat haze as Cassandra was rowed in a precariously laden lighter from the ship. With no room in the boat for another person or piece of
