Scarlett Read online

  This is a work of Fiction. All characters and stories are fictional although based in historical settings. If you see your name appear in the story, it is a coincidence.

  This book contains examples of extreme violence that were typical of the time. If you are of a sensitive nature, please bear that in mind.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the permission of the copyright owner

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Allison from Allison Leslie Editing & Coaching who edited this book, and to Dawn Spears the brilliant artist who created the cover artwork. My wife who is so supportive and believes in me. Last my dogs Blaez and Zeeva and cats Vaskr and Rosa who watch me act out the fight scenes and must wonder what the hell has gotten into their boss.

  Copyright © 2020 Christopher C Tubbs

  THANK YOU FOR READING!

  I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Reviews are so helpful to authors. I really appreciate all reviews, both positive and negative. If you want to leave one, you can do so on Amazon, through the website, or also on Twitter.

  About the Author

  Christopher C Tubbs is a dog-loving descendent of a long line of Dorset clay miners and has chased his family tree back to the 16th century in the Isle of Purbeck. He left school at sixteen to train as an Avionics Craftsman, has been a public speaker at conferences for most of his career, and was one of the founders of a successful games company back in the 1990’s. Now in his sixties, he finally writes the stories he had been dreaming about for years. Thanks to inspiration from great authors like Alexander Kent, Dewey Lambdin, Patrick O’Brian, Raymond E Feist, and Dudley Pope, he was finally able to put digit to keyboard. He lives in the Netherlands with his wife, two Dutch Shepherds, and two Norwegian Forest cats.

  You can visit him on his website

  www.thedorsetboy.com

  The Dorset Boy, Facebook page.

  Or tweet him @ChristopherCTu3

  Contents

  Chapter 1: A change of profession.

  Chapter 2: The Merlin

  Chapter 3: Double jeopardy

  Chapter 4: Truth and Consequences

  Chapter 5: Crossing the Atlantic

  Chapter 6: St Lucia

  Chapter 7: The Lay of the Land

  Chapter 8: Port Royal

  Chapter 9: No Quarter

  Chapter 10: Pillage and Plunder

  Chapter 11: The Council of Captains

  Chapter 12: Hidden Treasure

  Chapter 13: Where’s yer Buccaneers?

  Chapter 14: Tortuga

  Chapter 15: Campeche

  Chapter 16: Trade and treasure

  Chapter 17: Spirit guides and totems

  Chapter 18: To have and to hold

  Chapter 19: A time to heal.

  Chapter 20: Revenge and Retruibution.

  Chapter 21: Poseidon’s due

  Chapter 22: Homecoming.

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1: A change of profession.

  The passage from Rotterdam was stormy. The lugger had all sail set and was heeled over in the wind, spray kicking up and over the bow. She was heading for Baytown, a well-known smugglers’ village south of Whitby on the Yorkshire coast. They were intent on keeping their illicit cargo of Dutch Gin out of the hands of any revenue cutters in the area, so they drove her hard.

  Ray and Scarlett Browning were twins. Their father, Smoker Browning, was the head of one of the two smuggling gangs that operated out of the bay, and the twins had been given responsibility for getting their valuable cargo safely home. At eighteen years old, they already had many years of experience between them and handled the boat with skill and more than a little daring.

  Scarlett was the older by thirty minutes. She was beautiful by any standards with a mane of auburn hair and blue/green eyes that changed colour with her mood. At five feet eight, a little too tall to suit the fashion of the time, but she didn’t care, marriage and romance were not at the forefront of her interests. Her body was shapely but well-muscled from the rigours of sailing boats in all weathers. She attracted the attention of many young men, but a sharp knife and a pair of pistols were usually enough to cool their ardour unless she found the attraction mutual.

  Ray was out of the same mould as his father. Shaven head, piercing blue eyes, muscular, and athletic. He was renowned for his sailing and fighting skills and for being a fair, even-handed skipper. He was generally even-tempered but when he did blow, it was usually fast, violent, and over quickly. Unlike Scarlett, he was one for the ladies and had a string of conquests under his belt.

  Smoker Browning begat eight children from two wives. The first, Anne, died from the flux after the birth of their second child. The first child died at six and the second got himself shot by a revenue man at sixteen. Smoker hunted him down and gutted him in revenge. His second wife, May, gave him the twins and two more boys, Will and Raif, who were sixteen and fourteen respectively. Scarlett got her looks from May, who was still a good-looking woman at the age of thirty-six.

  The twins had their hands full. The wind had swung around to the Northwest, which meant they were having to tack to make any headway as it was almost dead against the course they needed to ply. The lugger’s gaff-rigged sails let them sail close to the wind but they were still having to sail three sea miles for every mile gained towards home.

  They had gotten to just over twenty miles from port when the lookout spotted a sail to the Northwest. A Revenue cutter found them and was bearing down on the wind, intent on an intercept. Ray didn’t want a confrontation. For a start, if the cutter started shooting, their cargo would probably suffer even if they eventually got away, and anyway, they didn’t want the cutter to get close enough to identify them.

  It was two hours to dark.

  “If we run South, we can lose them in the dark and overnight at Filey behind the point,” Scarlett suggested.

  Ray thought on that for a moment then agreed,

  “Let’s do that. He won’t make much on us in a stern chase and if we look as if we are going to head out to sea before we wear, he might spend the next day looking for us in the wrong place.”

  They tacked and took up a course that would run them South down the coast, the cutter settling in behind them. With the overcast, dark came early and while the cutter could still see them, they eased out to sea. As soon as the darkness swallowed the Revenue boat from view, they performed a long, lazy wear to bring them around to the West.

  Filey was a village that lived behind a peninsula that stuck out into the sea to the East which provided a natural shelter from any weather from the North. They slipped in cautiously, using the lights from the village as beacons, and anchored up for the night.

  The next morning, the wind had swung more to the West and as soon as they could see, they eased out and headed North. The cutter was nowhere to be seen, and they slipped into Baytown before ten where the well-rehearsed team on shore had the cargo unloaded and concealed in short order.

  Smoker greeted the twins in the kitchen of the family home where May had a hot meal waiting for them. The rich lamb stew was topped with dumplings and had carrots, onions, and turnip cooked through it.

  “Expected you in yesterday,” he said as they were mopping up the gravy with thick chunks of crusty home-made bread.

  “That bloody revenue cutter jumped us about twenty-five mile out. We had to hole up by Filey,” Ray replied.

  “They are getting bolder, even sent a press gang into the village,” Smoker stated with a frown.

  “Did they get anyone?” Scarlett asked, concern wri
tten on her face.

  “No, all they got was a beating,” smiled Smoker as he recalled the brawl that ensued when the Navy press gang descended on the Ploughman pub. He paused, obviously thinking about something.

  “I bin thinking we need to get into somethin’ else besides smuggling to spread our interests and I think we will want to keep it in the family.”

  “What you got in mind, Pop?” asked Scarlett, intrigued.

  Her father sat back and lit his clay pipe. He blew out a cloud of smoke and answered,

  “Privateering.”

  Scarlett and Ray looked at each other.

  “Why privateering?” Scarlett eventually asked after the silence stretched out as long as she could stand.

  “Perfect for us. We can make a lot of money in a relatively short time with little risk if we do it right. It will be legal, and gold can’t be traced.”

  Ray sat forward in interest.

  “We will need a ship.”

  “The profit from this trip will pay for a Ketch and arm it. We will need to man it from the brotherhood to start with, and you can pick up more as you take prizes. There’s plenty of men out there looking to make a quick profit.”

  Scarlett looked at Ray and asked the question they both wanted to ask,

  “Which one of us would skipper it?”

  Smoker laughed,

  “Worried I’ll split you two up?”

  The looks on their faces were the only answers he needed.

  “You both go. You are a good team and will watch each other’s backs. In any case, I doubt I could split you up if I wanted to.”

  The following days showed their father hadn’t waited to tell them before putting his plan into action; he had already started the process of acquiring a ship. He surprised them by taking them up to boatyard in Whitby where the hull of a new Ketch was well under way.

  The Ketch was a relatively new design of hull having been introduced around ten years before in around 1650. They were mainly used as large fishing boats and cargo haulers but could also carry up to sixteen guns. They were fast and weatherly and could even make long voyages in open water.

  Ray paced it off, she was around sixty feet at the waterline, a little longer than the usual fifty-five. Fully rigged, she would have a central mainmast and a short mizzen balanced at the bow by a twenty-foot-long bowsprit. She would carry square sails on the upper main and mizzen and gaff sails for the rest. She would be armed with sixteen eight-pound demi-culverin cannon.

  As an armed ship, she would need a minimum of eighty men to sail and fight one side, but for the type of work they would be getting into, they would carry at least a hundred so they could man prizes without effecting the efficiency of the ship.

  The men were busy talking about knees and ribs when Scarlett noticed someone standing on the other side of the yard, partially concealed by some crates, who seemed to be taking an unhealthy interest in them. She walked up to Ray and her father and quietly pointed him out, then she flounced off as if all this ship business was boring her.

  Playing the empty-headed girl, she wandered away towards the gates. As soon as she passed behind a stack of timber, she pulled a pistol from inside the hand muff she wore on a chord around her neck and circled around behind him.

  He was so intent on watching Smoker and Ray, he didn’t hear her come up behind him until she cocked the pistol, pointing it at the back of his head.

  “Hello,” she said pleasantly, “are you having a nice day?”

  The man, who she noticed had long, greasy, dark hair hanging down to the collar of his equally grubby coat, stiffened and slowly turned his head. He had a sharp featured face with a squinty, suspicious look about him.

  “Now, why are you so interested in what we are doing?”

  She stepped back a pace to make sure he couldn’t grab the gun and kept it pointing straight at his face.

  “Me, miss? I ain’t watchin’ no one,” he stammered, noting that the pistol was rock steady and despite the friendly tone, the girl had a very stony look on her face, her blue/green eyes as cold as ice.

  “Turn around and walk over there,” Scarlett ordered, indicating with her free hand where she wanted him to go. He was surprised when he saw it wasn’t towards the ship but to a screened off area where the shipwrights prepared some of the more intricate timbers. He started to get very nervous, on the verge of panic, when Smoker and Ray followed Scarlett into the work area.

  Smoker signed to the workers to leave and once they were alone, he stepped over to a workbench and picked up an adze. He made a show of examining the edge, which was razor sharp.

  “Well, if it ain’t Michael Knight as I live and breathe!” he said, “you still snitching for the revenue?”

  “Master Browning, I didn’t expect to meet you here. I was just watching them building ships,” Knight wheedled.

  “Oh? A new interest of yourn, is it?” Smoker sneered in disbelief, “last time I saw you, your only interest was in selling information to the revenue so you could go whoring. I believe you were told if we ever saw you again, you would pay.”

  “You shouted that at him as he ran away, Pa,” Ray added, hefting a heavy maul.

  Now Scarlett remembered the man. He had informed the revenue when a shipment was being delivered, and he even showed them where they were. Three of their men were killed and they lost half the cargo. They only got it back after they raided the revenue compound.

  “Shall I shoot him, Pa?” she said, cold anger blossoming in her chest.

  “No, that be too good for this scum,” Smoker snarled, “Ray!” he commanded and indicated a large block of wood.

  Ray dropped the maul, grabbed Knight by the arms, and hauled him over to the block, easily overpowering the smaller man. He kicked him in the back of the knees forcing him to kneel and holding the back of the neck in an iron grip with one hand, forcing Knight’s right hand out and down onto the block with his other. All the while, the pistol in Scarlett’s hand didn’t waver, even though she knew what was coming.

  Knight started to gibber and sob in terror as he realised that retribution was nigh. He begged and cried, but all that did was disgust the Brownings and harden their resolve.

  Smoker brought the adze down, Knight screamed, his right hand cleanly severed at the wrist, then Smoker took a piece of wood and dunked it in a pot of boiling pitch, which he smeared on the open wound, cauterising and sealing it.

  “There, don’t want you bleedin’ t’ death, now do we,” he consoled him then nodded to Ray, who wrapped his hand in Knight’s hair, pulling his head back.

  Smoker pulled out his knife, stood over the miserable informant, and said,

  “He deserves to carry the mark for the rest of his days.”

  He split his nose from top to bottom and carved a symbol into his forehead.

  “Now everyone will know you for what you are,” he snarled, “get him out of here!”

  Ray dragged the stricken man out of the yard and threw him into the street. The workers in the yard didn’t take any notice; they knew who Smoker was and owed the brotherhood their livings. A man stepped over the wretch as he landed at his feet and spat in his face. Everyone else carried on as if he didn’t exist. He was a dead man walking. He would receive neither aid nor succour from anyone. He carried the mark of the traitor; this was the justice of The Brotherhood.

  Chapter 2: The Merlin

  The Ketch was finished and at her launch, they named her the Merlin. She was small but deadly. They moved her down to Baytown far away from the prying eyes of any government officials and fitted her out. Along with the guns, they took delivery of two dozen flintlock arquebus and hand cannon, a couple of crates of pistols, flints, ball and wads, cutlasses, boarding pikes, tomahawks, and various other weapons.

  The custom-made powder room was filled with barrels of the best gun powder, and a gunner installed. Simon Rowell, a runner from the Navy who had all the right credentials; needed to disappear, knew guns, how to handle powde
r, and was a mean son-of-a-bitch.

  A month of travelling to the main ports and fishing villages along the Yorkshire coast, visiting taverns where sailors relaxed, and spent their wages followed as they searched for men. They needed a first mate, carpenter, quartermaster, sailing master, and some experienced hands to complement the enthusiastic but inexperienced smugglers and fishermen.

  Smoker took a personal interest in selecting the right men, and they were recruited along with a crew of seventy, mainly unmarried, men from the ranks of the Brotherhood along that stretch of coast.

  The first mate, Steven Day from Newcastle, had sailed the world as far as it was known. They found him in a tavern in Whitby hiding out from his wife, the one in that port, who had discovered he also had a wife in Tyneside. Her brothers were out for his skin and he was only too happy to take ship with them.

  The sailing master, Daniel Brown, had reputedly sailed as far as Madagascar and the Indian Ocean. He was fairly old at forty and carried more than a few scars that identified him as a fighting sailor.

  The quartermaster, Jim White, was an ex-Navy man, his back carried the evidence of several beatings with the ‘captain’s daughter’, a vicious whip made of a yard of rope that was unravelled for two thirds of its length and re-platted into six to nine cords that were knotted at intervals. He was, Ray decided, one to keep an eye on as he was tall, good looking, muscular, and far too smooth a talker to be in close proximity to his sister.

  The carpenter, Frank van der Molen, was a Dutchman. He kept his history quiet, but he knew his stuff, so no one asked any questions.

  Scarlett and Ray were designated joint skippers. The local boys had no problem with that as many were there because Smoker asked them personally and they were loyal to the family. Scarlett, however, knew she would have to prove herself to the new men.