Scarlett Read online

  Then, in mid-May on a beautiful spring morning, they were ready to take her out for the first time. Scarlett stood by the wheel, another innovation, her hair streaming in the wind. Damn, but this feels good, she thought. She dressed in loose trousers that were voluminous enough to pass for a dress when they weren’t tucked into her knee-length boots, a white blouse, and a green jacket that came mid-thigh.

  Smoker surprised them when he handed them a letter of Marque just before they pushed off. Through the brotherhood, he had contact to several rich and titled individuals, and he used them to get it from the crown. Charles II and his government didn’t care who they gave them to as long as they helped keep the French and Spanish in check and topped up the treasury. They could go after any ship flying a flag that wasn’t English or one of its allies.

  The Merlin sailed beautifully. She was fast, stable, didn’t gripe if she was trimmed correctly, and gave up very little leeway. The crew was soon sorted out into topmen, haulers, and gunners and Ray had them run through exercises to get them familiar with the ship and its weaponry.

  “Not very good, are they!” Scarlett observed as the gunners on half of the guns got in a muddle over the sequence yet again.

  “They just need practice,” Ray responded, aware that his sister had limited patience, “they will improve.”

  Scarlett frowned and replied, “They seem to be treating it as a game. They need something to focus their minds.”

  She went to the chart table and looked at the position marked by the master. They had sailed Southwest and were about fifty miles off the Dutch coast level with Den Helder.

  “There are sometimes French ships trading between Rotterdam and Calais. Let’s head down there and see what we can find,” she instructed the Master.

  He looked over to Ray as if to get confirmation; Scarlett reacted immediately.

  “If you want to stay master, you will listen to me and obey my commands without checking with my little brother,” she said quietly, “we are joint captains and agree on all things.”

  Brown looked her in the eyes and said,

  “I ain’t never sailed under a woman, let alone a little girl, and I ain’t about to start now. You ain’t no man and you ain’t no captain.”

  Ray overheard this as he was wandering up to see what Scarlett was up to. They expected this as well as the usual complaints that a woman on board was bad luck and agreed that Scarlett would sort it out herself.

  “You think I’m not able?” Scarlett challenged in a dangerously quiet voice.

  Here it comes, Ray thought with a wince.

  “You think you can better me?”

  Brown smirked and said,

  “Without breakin’ sweat.”

  “Get yourself a sword,” she snarled.

  Ray looked across at the first mate, who was also smirking.

  “A crown my sister can beat the Master Steven.”

  “Aye, I’ll take that. I’ve seen him fight and he’s pretty good.”

  Everyone expected the challenge would be worked out with blunt practice swords or even the wooden staves they used sometimes, but Scarlett fetched her small sword from her cabin, seeing that the master got himself a cutlass.

  Ray stood in front of Scarlett and put his hands on her shoulders, looking her in the eyes,

  “Please don’t kill the master and don’t cut him up so bad he can’t do his job,” he asked, looking into eyes that had gone the dangerous flat green they did when she was angry.

  “I won’t, but he will never question me again,” she snapped back, then softened a little, “I need them to understand that I’m not just your sister.”

  “I know,” Ray sympathized then stood aside and let her pass.

  The master stood on the deck in the space aft of the mainmast where there was plenty of room. Scarlett stepped forward and took guard, right leg forward, left arm behind her. Her grip on the sword was firm but not tight, her wrist supple.

  The master initiated the contest by swinging a crosscut designed to put her off balance, but Scarlett was nimble with the balance of a dancer and pirouetted on her trailing foot. She completed the spin and the master found himself watching her blade swinging for his eyes, his own useless as the momentum of his swing took it to the end of its arc.

  Scarlett stopped her blade less than an inch from the startled man’s eyes.

  “Blind and maybe dead,” she smiled at him coldly. “Shall we go again?” She stepped back and resumed her guard.

  This time, she initiated the first move, a deft flick of the wrist that tapped his blade. The master was more cautious now and held his ground, waiting to see what she did next. She feigned an attack to his right shoulder then reversed to slash across the throat, but the master read it and easily parried, sending her blade high. He had the momentum now to initiate a backhand slash at chest height, which she swayed away from. He was careful this time not to overextend and got his blade back in time to parry another slashing attack.

  They stepped away from each other. Scarlett smiled her sweetest smile then launched a flurry of cuts and slashes, most of which the master parried, but when she stepped back, he was bleeding from several nicks on his arms and torso.

  He frowned. He had underestimated this young girl. He couldn’t bring himself to think of her otherwise, and his pride had been wounded along with the stinging cuts. So he stepped back and resumed his guard.

  “We can stop this anytime you like,” Scarlett offered, but Brown just brought his sword up to the ready.

  Scarlett sighed. She assessed her opponent and knew his reaction time- she was a lot faster. He tended to favour the slash, but she knew the cutlass could be used to thrust as well. She narrowed her eyes as she assessed his stance. He had his weight slightly further forward? Was he going to try something different?

  Brown readied himself. She may have been faster than him, but he was stronger. He feigned a wide attack then dropped his shoulder and charged, aiming to bowl her over. Scarlett saw it coming, stepped neatly to the side and punched him in the temple with her knuckle guard as he passed.

  It was over. Brown was on his back on the floor, eyes rolled back into his head, out cold. Scarlett looked around at the rest of the crew and said,

  “Anybody else want to challenge me?”

  No one stepped forward, and she sheathed her sword.

  “Carry him down into our cabin,” she ordered then caught the eye of the quartermaster, who was looking at her appraisingly. His look was smouldering, and she felt a shudder of anticipation run down her spine, later, no time for that now! she thought.

  Brown came around to the feel of someone tending the cuts on his torso. They were being gentle, but the spirit they were using to cleanse them still stung. He groaned.

  “Stay still. This won’t take a minute,” a pleasant female voice said.

  For a moment, he forgot what happened and was wondering who it was then the memory of the fight came rushing back in. He looked down. He was shirtless. Scarlett gave a last dab to a cut on his bicep and sat back to look at him. It struck him that she was very pretty but a second face appeared over her shoulder.

  “Hello Daniel, how is your head?” Ray asked with a grin.

  “Sore, but I will live.” He winced.

  Scarlett tossed him a shirt. It was clean and much better quality than his old one.

  “Can we put this nonsense about me being just a girl aside now?” Scarlett asked.

  “Aye aye, Skipper,” he grimaced as he pulled the shirt on.

  Ray grinned at him and teased,

  “She has been practicing the sword since she was six years old. You were lucky she didn’t use a main gauche as well. I can never beat her when she does.”

  Twenty-four hours saw them a hundred-fifty-miles further South near Bruges cruising about ten miles off the coast. They had double lookouts up and flew no flag.

  They didn’t need to worry about the attentions of the Royal Navy because at the end of the Tudor per
iod, corruption and neglect had seen the Navy decline to an ineffective level until Blake introduced major reforms ten years before during the parliamentary period. He survived the reintroduction of the Monarchy when Charles II took the throne and was steadily rebuilding and reforming the Navy into a professional force, but it was taking time and the crown was still reliant on privateers to keep the French and Dutch in check.

  “SAIL HO!”

  “WHERE AWAY?”

  “TWO POINTS OFF THE LARBOARD BOW. FRENCH MERCHANTMAN HULL UP!”

  Ray wondered why they didn’t see it before it was hull up and resolved to question the lookout when he was relieved. For now, he ordered an intercept course to be set and a French flag to be shown.

  It wasn’t long before they were close enough to see the Frenchman from the deck and an air of excitement could be felt coming off the crew. The Merchantman was heavily loaded and was making around six knots. She had no chance of getting away from the agile Merlin.

  Scarlett came up on deck and looked across at the other ship. Ray had set them up so it was slightly ahead of them off their starboard bow. She called the men to their stations and had them collect weapons from the stacks set up on the centreline of the deck in preparation. She noted they were better organised now that they were motivated.

  “Run out! Ready the forward gun.” He looked at the youngster he had near him and instructed, “Ready our colours and raise them as the gun fires.”

  The gun was fired and a hole appeared in the Merchantman’s mainsail.

  “So much for a shot across the bows,” Scarlett scoffed.

  “Works just as well,” Ray grinned back and nodded at the other ship as their flag came down and the wind was let out of the sails.

  The ship was loaded with wine, leather, and bales of hemp for processing in the Dutch wind powered mills. The wine and the leather were of good quality and worth a fair amount. They put a prize crew on board under a mate and sent them back to Baytown. The French crew were put ashore unharmed.

  They still had most of the provisions they set out with and what they took from the Merchantman, so they continued South. What Scarlett wanted was a ship that would fight back enough to pull the crew together. What she got was a storm from the West that drove them towards the lee shore. The crew fought valiantly, and they set a sea anchor to try and slow the inexorable drift towards the coast.

  They had men sounding the depth and it was shoaling fast. Ray ordered the sweeps run out and manned, but the sea was so rough they soon gave up on trying to row themselves out of trouble. The depth came up to two fathoms, and he ordered the anchor dropped. Luckily, the bottom was sand and the holding good, which arrested their progress for the time being.

  The wind raged, and the ship rocked, rolled, and pitched all at the same time. It made for an uncomfortable day and a half and it wasn’t until late afternoon the second day that the clouds broke up and the sun peaked through from the West. As the waves reduced from six foot down to two and the wind dropped to a steady breeze from the Northwest, the men slowly recovered from the sea sickness that afflicted almost half of them.

  Ray called Scarlett up on deck and showed her how close to being beached they had come. The stern was a scant sixty feet from the shore and the tide was starting to go out which would bring it closer by the minute.

  “RUN OUT THE SWEEPS AND GET READY TO RAISE ANCHOR!” Ray shouted as soon as he recognised the danger. They needed to get the ship moving before the tide turned her around. Men ran to man the capstan and started hauling in the anchor rope which was wound around it. That pulled the ship away from the shore, but Ray knew that there was a big tidal change in depth here on the entry to the channel and they needed to get out to sea to be safe.

  They had just manned the sweeps when they heard a shout from the shore, a squad of mounted soldiers had come onto the beach and were shouting something at them. Scarlett was at the stern rail and was straining to hear what language they were speaking.

  “Sounds like Dutch,” she noted and waved at them.

  The soldiers laughed and waved back as the sweeps pulled them away from the shore before they turned South under sail to find another victim.

  They were in French waters around Calais when they spotted another likely target, a lugger. They were surprised when the ship didn’t turn away but steered as if it were going to intercept them.

  “I don’t like this,” Ray told her, “I’m not sure that is a merchant at all.”

  “Load the starboard guns with chain!” Scarlett ordered, “be ready to shoot for his rigging!”

  At around two cables, the lugger’s gun ports went up, and seven guns poked their noses out of her hull on the starboard side.

  “Privateer!” called Daniel.

  “Run out!” Scarlett shouted and with a smirk, she said as an aside to Ray, “this will focus their minds.”

  Steven was walking up and down behind the guns making sure each team had all their men in the correct places. He also had the swivels manned in case they got in close enough to use them.

  The lugger was almost their match for fire power even though they had one more gun than him per side, as they both carried the same calibre guns. The difference would come in accuracy and rate of fire.

  The two ships passed and fired as they got a beam of each other. Both ships shot for the rigging, the Merlins working hard and though it was a ragged excuse for a broadside, they scored a few good hits.

  Like a pair of jousting knights, the two ships wore around and reversed direction to have another try at each other. The prospect of getting shot at again spurred the Merlin’s gunners to work as a team and they reloaded in time. The little damage that was caused to their rigging was being repaired on the fly, and Ray called the men down before they got shredded by the next broadside.

  Their second broadside was better and one of the Frenchman’s spars was brought down. Scarlett thought this a silly way to wage war and suggested,

  “We need to get alongside him and board. All this running up and down won’t get us anywhere!”

  Ray agreed and this time, they waited for the Frenchman to wear making a show of having more damage to their rigging than they had. The men armed themselves with cutlasses or six-foot-long boarding pikes. Several were loading hand cannon with bits of scrap metal, which turned them into nasty anti-personnel weapons.

  They kept the men down so the other crew wouldn’t know how many they were up against. The ships came together, and Ray ordered the grapnels to be thrown. The swivels were fired across at the crowd of men on the other deck. The main guns fired one last time at point blank range.

  Then the decks of both ships erupted into violent life, pistols and hand cannon fired and dropped, or more often, thrown at the enemy. Men screamed war cries and threw themselves over the rails onto the other ship and in the middle of it all was a mane of Auburn hair.

  Scarlett had a blade in both hands and was intent on making her way to the quarterdeck of the French ship. She stabbed, slashed, and thrust, leaving a trail of wounded and dead men behind her then she found herself in space opposite a man in a fancy hat with a white plume.

  Françoise le Coq was astonished to see a young woman and looked at her part in surprise and part in admiration as she was quite beautiful.

  “Yield!” she cried and assumed the classic fencing en-guard position.

  Françoise was no mean swordsman and armed himself with a main gauche as well as his rapier, which was full length and therefore almost a foot longer than Scarlett’s. The two focused on each other and were no longer aware of anything else going on in the background. He grinned at her and beckoned for her to make her move.

  Scarlett initiated a cross step on her right foot to circle anticlockwise, Françoise matched her and was ready when she feinted an attack to his face. He flicked her blade aside and reposted with one of his own. She easily parried that and resumed circling to the left.

  She let Françoise settle into the rhythm of the co
unterclockwise circling then suddenly reversed direction and launched a two-handed attack. Françoise was surprised and had to adjust rapidly as sparks flew from the blades of both his Rapier and main gauche. He felt a sting on his neck and knew she had tagged him; this little girl was a much more serious opponent than he first judged.

  He resisted the temptation to touch the cut to see if it was serious or not and focused on her. He watched her eyes. She gave nothing away, was seemingly content for him to make the next move, and was obviously well trained. However, he was taller and stronger and had more reach with his longer sword. It was time to take the initiative.

  He flicked her blade aside and when she reposted, attempted a circular bind but she stepped back and disengaged before he could complete the move. He reversed the direction of their circling and she effortlessly and gracefully matched him. Her sword thrust forward at his left bicep and he brought his main gauche up to parry and swept his sword around in a slashing attack at the same time.

  Scarlett saw the danger. If she engaged the sword with her left hand, he could step in and use his strength to overpower her, so she danced away in a move that took her out of range.

  Mon dieu, she is agile, he thought in surprise.

  Scarlett had not failed to notice that this debonair man with the fancy hat was actually very good looking, even with the trickle of blood running down his neck. But he was also dangerous, and she couldn’t let that distract her. He almost caught her out with that last move, and she knew he would be learning about her with every attack.

  So, she tried another trick. She smiled her most dazzling smile and blew him a kiss. His eyes widened ever so slightly, and she immediately stepped in using her main gauche to slap his longer blade aside while simultaneously slashing his left forearm with her sword.

  His dagger clattered to the floor as the tip of her blade opened up a serious gash and his hand lost its grip; blood ran down and dripped from his fingers. Worse, her dagger was now laid across his throat, her eyes inches from his,