Chapter 232: Through the Back Door
Full dark had hardly arrived before the promised plan was over the Rose’s side. One longboat eased down without noise, her oars wrapped thick in sailcloth so the water wouldn’t carry word of them to every soul awake.
James meant to land well away of the harbor, work around through the scrub on foot, and walk into Havana from the direction not a soul would consider liable for an infiltration. The whole business was to find Esperanza.
Anne had plenty to say about him forcing a shoulder barely sewed shut, most of it loud enough to turn heads across the whole deck and none of it suitable for polite company. Cudjoe said less, but what little he shared had that flat, tired note he’d been using since the day his captain took to throwing himself into one foolhardy plan after another.
Neither managed to talk James out of it. Once he laid the whole plan before them, it made too much sense to keep on arguing with.
Milagros was chosen first, because her years working unseen through this exact city were worth considerably more than any blade.
Bert, Edmund, and Wesley Thorne made up the rest.
There was something almost comical about choosing three men built like church doors and mannered like a royal court for a job requiring stealth. Except discipline, as it happened, made considerably less noise than muscle, and the three of them possessed more of it between them than half the crew put together.
Anne wanted to come too, on the reasonable grounds that someone sensible ought to be there to keep James from trying that shoulder against a wall he had no business climbing. She was told just as simply that a job requiring four soft pairs of feet had no use for a fifth pair loud enough to wake the entire garrison.
Tomás wanted in as well, calm and immovable in his own fashion. He received the same answer, though James gave it to him a little more gently.
As for the plan, it needed a woman who already knew how to move goods through a city that watched its own harbor like a jealous husband, and who was owed a debt considerably older than tonight’s business.
Esperanza’s ships could carry what the Rose, the Dame, and the Fortune no longer had a corner to spare for. They could also finally move the half-forgotten mountain of Kingston convoy goods still sitting unsold in Concordia’s storehouse, nearly an entire season after James had first sworn to sell it through her.
Under both of those reasons lay the simpler debt.
Milagros had been carried off in the chaos of her rescue and had never once been returned to the sister who had bought her freedom. That, more than any cask of quicksilver, was why James meant to see this business done on his own two feet.
Not leave it to a letter he had never managed to finish writing.
Every soldier still fit to stand a watch had his eyes hard on the water, waiting for whatever might come next out of a bay that had already swallowed the biggest ship in the whole squadron.
Very few had spared a thought for the cane rows and scrub behind their own walls.
James kept the bad arm tucked close and let his boots do the work his shoulder could not. When the party came to a low stretch of wall, Bert’s broad hand found his good elbow and hauled him up and over without either man wasting breath discussing the matter.
The five of them crossed the whole distance without so much as a challenge, slipping through a stretch of wall too poor and too far from the harbor for any governor to have thought it worth posting a man there.
They were inside the city before James had worked up a proper sweat, which he considered a fine joke at the expense of the Spanish Crown.
Milagros led them through streets she still plainly knew by feel rather than sight, narrow and dark and smelling strongly of fish guts and old rain.
She brought them to a leaning shack at the poorest slums of the city. It was part of the same loose web of safe doors and paid eyes her sister had been running for years. A boy was sent ahead before they had properly arrived, barefoot and silent, carrying word wherever Esperanza was keeping herself these days.
It was there, crouched in the dark beneath a single lamp guttering low to save the oil, that the waiting began.
Milagros had his sling off and her fingers under the bandage before James had found anywhere worth calling a seat.
"Siéntate, cabrón, and hold still."
She peeled the linen back far enough to satisfy herself that the wound hadn’t torn.
Then she whispered curses rapidly in Spanish that needed no translation at all, involving his mother, his God, and the particular sort of idiot presently bleeding on her hands.
"What’s wrong with that head of yours? Is there rum in there instead of brains?"
"Lass, you could just say you are worried."
"I could also throw you back over that wall myself and let the Spaniards keep you."
She tied the linen snug again, rather gentler than the wound required. "Then I would not have to sit here watching you kill yourself slower and stupider than the last time."
Even then, Milagros kept hold of his arm the entire while, and that told him more than her mouth had bothered to.
Bert, meanwhile, started to admire the shack itself, brushing one broad hand across the wall that looked ready to collapse if he breathed too hard beside it.
"A most serviceable establishment, I must say, given the demands of keeping ourselves unseen."
Edmund glanced up at the broken gap in the roof where a sliver of moon showed clean through. "The ventilation alone recommends it. Superior, I should say, to other lodgings I have known, though I shan’t name them, out of respect for the departed."
Bert nodded gravely. "Quite so. Though I confess I have rarely admired a roof so thoroughly by the simple expedient of looking straight up through it."
Wesley stood near the door, eyes still on the street.
"Certainly."
He left the matter there.
James laughed under his breath, watching three men who had torn a Spanish patrol apart with their bare hands discuss a leaking roof as if it were the finest drawing room in the whole Caribbean.
Then, the backdoor was pushed open without a sound.
Esperanza slipped through alone, leaving two men who had escorted her there outside in the dark street to keep watch.
She went straight past James without so much as a glance and crossed the room in three strides, hauling Milagros into an embrace hard enough nearly to lift her off her feet.
Her voice cracked somewhere in the middle of it.
She only held on, her voice gone thick in a way James suspected she would have denied with her dying breath.
Then she pulled back just far enough to land an open-handed smack across the back of Milagros’s head, sharp enough to make her yelp.
Another smack followed, lighter this time, more scolding than punishment.
She ran rough, quick hands over Milagros’s arms and face with thoroughness.
Only after she had satisfied herself that her sister was whole did Esperanza turn her attention to the rest of the room.
Then she turned to James.
"El Azote de las Antillas."
She looked him over slowly, one eyebrow climbing. "Sitting in the dirt of my city instead of parked outside it, terrorizing my harbor like a self-respecting monster ought to. Tell me, señor, does the whole Spanish Crown know you come around the back door same as a man sneaking in past his wife’s curfew?"
James grinned, warm all the way through it. "Only the doors I fancy walking through, lass. And this one had the better company waiting behind it."
Esperanza’s mouth curled despite her best efforts to keep it flat.
"Bueno..."
For once, there was no teasing in it. She looked at James properly then, and the sharpness left her face. "Thank you, señor. For bringing her back. For saving my sister."
Her voice caught, just once, before she steadied it. "I don’t know what a life is worth to a man like you, but whatever it cost you, I won’t forget it."
James gave her a small grin.
"Wasn’t much of a choice, she needed bringing home."
Esperanza shook her head.
"Maybe not to you, but to me, it is everything."
She glanced toward Milagros, then back at him.
James chuckled outright. "Save the pretty words for later, lass. We’ve business to get done, and I’ve got a hold full of plunder that isn’t going to sell itself."