Free On a Lee Shore by Elin Gregory Page A

after he spoke up for you, and all. That would not be a grateful thing to do.”
    Davy was looking worried, unsure what to say. “I don’t… I didn’t…” he faltered, and Kit put his needle down and stood.
    “Davy is a free man,” Kit said, “This is a free company, is it not? One where a man may join and leave as he chooses? Otherwise you’ve merely traded one type of servitude for another with the additional hazard of being hanged at the end of it.”
    “What do you know about it?” Wigram snarled. “You officer boys with your silver spoons and lace in your caps. Davy is a good hand, a fine worker, and I’ll see to it he does well and gets his share of knocks and prizes, as befits a gentleman of our profession. You—you’re here for one reason alone and that’s to navigate when we need you to.”
    At the sound of sharp voices some of the crew had stopped what they were doing and were converging on Kit and Wigram, probably hoping to see some kind of show. Kit ignored them.
    “If I’m here to navigate,” he snapped, “why am I on deck sewing sails? I need to see your charts and your instruments. Dammit, I need a destination so I can plot a course.”
    Wigram chuckled. “His voice goes quite shrill when he’s angry, don’t it boys?” he said. “You sure you’re not a maid in disguise? That would make you far more popular with your watch. Hell’s teeth, it would make you more popular with me.”
    Kit glared at him. “Do you want me to navigate or not? I need to know how the ship sails, how close we can come to the wind, her draught, her handling, whether she’s slow to answer to the tiller.”
    “Listen to him—squeak, squeak, squeak—like a boy with his beard just coming.” Wigram sniggered, his thumbs hooked into his belt. “Trying to convince us he’s a man. He’ll be telling us how many girls he’s had next.”
    There was a murmur of laughter at that little sally, but Kit noticed that not all the men were laughing and that some were edging away or were returning to what they had been doing before they sensed blood in the water. Kit took the warning to heart. Someone had arrived who outranked Wigram.
    Kit swallowed his fury and continued in a more reasonable tone. “Do you have a cross-staff or a quadrant? An astrolabe? How often have you tested your compass against the stars or the sun? It should be done—if you can’t rely on your compass in an overcast…”
    “That’s true, Wigram,” authority said, his voice a pleasant, slightly accented rumble, and stepped past Kit, whose lips tightened as he recognized the broad shoulders and long, easy stride of the man who had split his lip on the Hypatia. He paused shoulder to shoulder with Wigram and turned his head to murmur to him, then turned fully to smile at Kit.
    There was nothing in his attire to mark him out as any different from the rest of the crew. He wore the same loose linen shirt and breeches and carried a brace of pistols in a sash round his waist, as did most of the others. Most of the others had sun-browned skin, some were blond, the ends salt bleached, some looked to be in their mid-thirties, but the captain was handsome. He looked down his well-shaped nose at Kit, the elegant curves of his lips twisting in a derisive grin, but there was no humor at all in his clear gray eyes.
    Kit had been prepared for hatred when he had come aboard. A naval officer thrown among pirates was bound to be treated as an enemy. But so far his stay had been easy. Some of the crew distrusted and disliked him, but most treated him with the same careless ease they extended to everyone else. A few—Saunders, O’Neill—he thought he could come to call friend. But the captain hated him, of that he was sure, and so he braced up, lifted his chin, and glared back.
    “Yes,” the captain said. “I had you brought aboard with some very clear ideas in mind. Why buy a dog, as they say, then bark yourself? O’Neill, take Mr. Penrose below and show