📖[PDF] The Scarlet Code by C. S. Quinn | Perlego (2024)

CHAPTER ONE

Lisbon, 1789

IT IS NIGHT. THE DOCKYARD IS STILL, SAVE FOR THE CREAK of masts and tap of wood as boats knock against one another. From the crow’s nest of an empty ship, I survey the shore. Guitar sounds and the occasional shout float on the air. A scent of garlic and frying fish from grills outside sailor taverns. As I watch, the last torch on a quay flutters out. The land guard is asleep. There is no time to lose.

I draw my knife; a great curved black blade. Placing it between my teeth I drop silently from the crow’s nest to the deck, landing feet apart, balance perfect, taking the weapon into my hand. I wear assassin’s garb – soft-soled dancing slippers, loose Arabic-style clothes, black silk trousers, a long-sleeved kurta cut short, tied with a thick scarf at the waist. My dark hair is braided up.

I slip across the deck, barely making a sound, step on to the prow, and jump easily across to the next ship. I assure myself the vessel is deserted, the crescent darkness of my knife invisible in the moonlight.

Looking out on to the water, I count the ships. Three to pass over until I reach the one where the captive is held. Her kidnappers have hidden her well: in an empty floating prison bound for Africa, to be filled with slaves.

Since there is no cargo yet loaded, there is a scant guard, but still I am careful. Assuring myself all is clear, I cross the deck, leap to the next boat. I’m in a rhythm now, running, jumping, checking for threats, knife held tight in my fist. I traverse a ship destined to take wool to England, a lumber transporter from Sweden, the smell of cut pine still fresh on deck. I arrive finally on The Saint Jose. A gilded diplomatic ship, old-fashioned, with a broad belly and shapely rear rising to a duck’s tail of decorative carving and small windows.

Now my pace slows. There will be guards here. Quietly, I pad towards the captain’s quarters at the back. As I suspected, the door is tightly secured from the outside. I need to open the padlock.

The first attack comes swiftly from behind. Feet strike the deck, then someone grabs my shoulder. My own hand sweeps back, locating my attacker’s jugular, and I turn to face him. For a moment our stance is almost romantic, my fingers lightly at his throat, his grip still on my shoulder. With our faces only inches apart, his lips part in surprise. He hadn’t been expecting a woman, and other instincts are befuddling him. Before he can resolve his confusion, my knife arrives at the artery my fingers have located. He drops soundlessly, blood filling his lungs.

The second man is only half-awake, a strong smell of drink pouring from him as he staggers to his feet. My eyes log the keys swinging at his hip. I close in before he can point his gun, since silence is imperative. His hand shoots out, grabs my chin. My knife is under his armpit, up and out before he realises. As he loses his grip on me, my knife comes up and around the base of his skull. The right eyelid spasms and he drops. I catch him before he thuds to the deck and lay him softly down.

I stand watching his twitching eye, still trained on me in disbelief. When the dying gaze clouds, I unhook his set of keys, then take the pistol from his belt and launch it through the air. It lands loudly on the deck of the lumber ship and a flurry of footsteps rings out on the adjacent deck. I listen, tense, making sure that any other guards are headed away. Then I approach a magnificent cabin door with its gaudy lock.

Always the way with Catholic countries, I think to myself as I fit the golden key, to keep captives in finery.

The door opens to reveal a woman, fashionably dressed in the latest French style of blousy muslin. She is sat at a table with a carafe of red wine and a silver plate before her. To her right is a bread basket and she holds a torn piece of its content half to her mouth as she stares at me in surprise.

‘Am I being abducted?’ she asks finally. ‘How droll. Did the Duke send you?’ she adds hopefully.

Naturally, as a noblewoman, she reads a good deal too many romance novels.

‘You are Fleur de Lucile?’ I confirm, as she adjusts her dress to expose more of her shoulders.

She nods.

‘You have already been abducted,’ I tell her. ‘It is only that you haven’t noticed.’

She looks around the decorated captain’s cabin.

‘It is a jest?’ she suggests, the slightest frown of puzzlement crinkling her smooth, white forehead. ‘As you can see, I am very well cared for.’ She gestures by way of explanation to the spread of food and wine, the finely set mahogany table.

‘Silver forks do not ensure a host is trustworthy.’ I walk to the window of tiny glass panes, assuring myself no warning torches have been fired on the docks. ‘Your husband’s stance against slavery has gained you powerful enemies.’ I turn back to her. ‘Did you ever question why your door was bolted from the outside? Why you are here alone, with guards placed to keep watch?’

‘They said it was for my own protection,’ she says slowly. ‘The Portuguese ambassador—’

‘Is in the pockets of the slave traders,’ I say, moving closer to her table. ‘You are aware how much money is made by slave trading every year?’

‘Oh yes,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘My husband’s friends are tiresome on the subject. But what has this to do with me?’

‘Your husband is due to address the King and convince him to sign the Rights of Man.’

Her mouth moves slowly, trying to match the words to a memory.

‘The document written after the Bastille was stormed,’ I explain patiently. She smiles in polite confoundedness.

‘Agreeing that all men are equal,’ I say, keeping my frustration in check.

‘Oh that!’ She claps her hands together. ‘Why should plantation owners care if commoners and nobles are equal?’

‘If the King signs the Rights of Man,’ I tell her, ‘he accepts that all men are equal. All men. Including the blacks in the French colonies.’

She does the thing with her mouth again, as though sounding out difficult words.

‘Your captors are ruthless men; plantation owners, who will do anything to protect their business,’ I tell her. ‘Believe me, they have done worse than cut the throat of a lady and toss her in the sea.’

Understanding finally flickers over her features. She stands in shock.

‘Who are you?’ she manages. ‘Are you Portuguese?’ she adds, taking in the shade of my skin and my black hair. I reach into my kurta and remove a letter from her husband. She takes it wordlessly.

‘My name is Attica Morgan,’ I say, as she reads. ‘I’m an English spy. I have come to rescue you.’

CHAPTER TWO

FLEUR STARES FOR A LONG TIME AT HER HUSBAND’S LETTER.

Her eyes dart to me, something in her mind not matching.

‘How am I to trust you?’ she asks eventually. ‘How can I be sure you are a friend?’

In reply I show her the slave brand, hidden under my hair at the back of my neck.

‘My mother was African,’ I explain. ‘We were enslaved together in Virginia when I was a girl. She died.’

Her eyes dart all over me now, looking for clues and inconsistencies. I often have this effect on people, since I am half of one continent, half of another. The medley of tawny skin and light eyes has been a great boon in my spy work, since I can pass for many nationalities.

‘As soon as I got old enough to outrun my captors, I escaped to England and found my father. Lord Morgan,’ I tell her.

‘You are Lord Morgan’s daughter?’ She says it that way people always do, when they know rumours of my bastard origins. ‘I have heard of Lord Morgan,’ she says slowly.

‘Everybody has,’ I say, unwilling to have the same tired conversation about my brilliant, yet erratic, father, and his brief awful decline into laudanum addiction. ‘He is better now,’ I add. ‘Remarried. We should go.’

My family history has been enough to convince her. Fleur follows me on to the dark deck, and then grips my arm tight at the sight of the slaughtered guards littering the floor outside her cabin.

‘They’re dead,’ I assure her, but it doesn’t have the effect I hoped. I wonder briefly if I should have brought smelling salts, but Fleur manages to collect herself.

‘This way.’ I draw her to the prow, looking out on to the inky black water of the docks.

We creep along the edge of the boat. Moving to the side of the deck, I pull out my tinderbox and strike it. There’s a pause and then across the docks another light flickers in reply. I count the flashes. Three.

‘That’s the signal,’ I tell Fleur, identifying the ship. ‘Our rescuers are near. We will sail by night, and you shall be back with your husband by morning.’

‘You surely will not attempt to sail us out of these docks?’ says Fleur, panic rising. ‘They are guarded. As soon as we raise anchor, they will gun us out of the water.’

‘You must keep faith, madame.’

I unwrap the scarf from my waist and begin fashioning a makeshift grappling hook, tying the end to my knife handle.

Fleur watches the black curved blade in amazement.

‘It is a Mangbetu,’ I say proudly, ‘awarded to the fiercest fighters of the African Congo. My mother gave it to me.’

I send the blade winging over the side of the ship to lodge in a little yacht bobbing adjacent to us. Walking to the ship’s wheel, I attach the other end of the silk and begin turning. Gripping with both hands, I haul on the scarf, winding it in. There’s a creaking sound as the little yacht begins drifting towards us. It’s hard work and sweat beads my forehead, but I manage to pull the vessel close.

I allow the scarf to slacken. Our boats bob naturally against another. I put one leg over the prow and begin climbing down the rungs of the side of our larger boat, with Fleur following above me.

Once aboard I strike the tinderbox again. There is a pause, then a rope at the prow lifts clear from the water and tightens, and, slowly but surely, we are pulled silently between the enormous ships until we reach the hull of a large vessel waiting at the edge of open water.

A grappling hook spins from above and lands loudly on the side of our yacht. Fleur starts bac...