The Least Likely Bride

Prologue

It was the dark hour before dawn. Rain fell in a ceaseless torrent upon the sodden clifftops and smashed straight as stair rods onto the churning, white-flecked sea beneath. Great waves rose in the Channel and surged around St. Catherine’s Point to curl and break upon the jagged rocks in a thundering, relentless roll, sending white spray into the darkness.

There were no stars. No moon. Only an occasional flash of lightning to illuminate the island crouching like a whale at the entrance to the Solent, its downs and valleys black with rain. The melancholy sound of the bell buoy off the rocky point pierced the rushing wind, bringing warning to the ships battling the summer storm in the seething Channel. Warning and a welcome sense of security.

A small boat plunged into the troughs, the men at the oars grim-faced as they fought to keep the fragile craft upright. They approached the bell buoy, the boat vanishing into the waves, then bobbing up like a piece of driftwood. From the stern, one of the men hurled a rope around the buoy and hauled the boat hand over hand until it was touching the rocking buoy and the rhythmic sound of the bell was deafening amid the roar of the water and the wind and the ceaseless battering of the rain.

No one spoke; the words would have been torn from them anyway, but they had no need of speech. The oarsmen shipped their oars while the man in the stern held the boat fast to the buoy and one of his companions swiftly, deftly, with hands of experience, wrapped thick cloth around the bell’s tongue, silencing the dull clang of its warning.

Then they sprang loose from the buoy and the small craft headed back to the beach. As they pulled against wind and tide, one of the men raised a hand, pointing to the clifftop. A light flickered, then flared strongly into the wind, a beacon throwing its deadly message into the storm-wracked night.

Willing hands waded into the surf to pull them ashore, hauling the boat up the small sandy beach. The men shivered in their soaked clothes and drank deep of the flasks thrust at them. There were maybe twenty men on the beach, dark-clad, shifting figures, blending into the darkness of the cliffs as they huddled with their backs to the rocks, their eyes straining across the surging sea, watching for their prey.

There was a sudden brighter flare from the clifftop and they moved forward as one.

And she came out of the darkness, white sails torn and flapping from her spars, the strained rigging creaking like old bones. She came heading for the light that promised a safe haven, and with a dreadful grinding and splitting she met the rocks of St. Catherine’s Point.

Screams rose to do battle with the wind. Figures flew like so many remnants of cloth from the steep, yawing sides of the ship, plunging down into the boiling cauldron of the sea. The vessel cracked like an eggshell and the watchers on the beach raced into the foam, eyes glittering, voices raised in skirls of triumph. Desperate men, women, children, drowning in the maelstrom around the sinking ship, called to them, but they slashed with cutlasses, hammered with broken spars, finishing by hand what the sea would not do for them.

They dragged chests, boxes, bodies to the beach. They plundered the bodies, cutting off rings and ripping away fine garments, prancing around the beach in a mad and murderous dance of greed.

Above them on the clifftop a man stood close to the firelight of the treacherous beacon, his cloak pulled tight against the lashing rain. He gazed out at the doomed ship and smiled as he listened to the murderous mayhem in the foam as his men did their work. They had snared a fat pigeon on the rocks this storm-wracked night.

He turned and doused the fire. All was darkness again, only the sounds of the madness on the beach competing with the wind and the rain and the sea.

Out beyond the point, another ship wrestled with the storm. She carried no sail and her master stood at the wheel, holding her into the wind. His slender frame was deceptive, belying the hard bunched muscles, the strength in the long, slim hands, that fought the storm that would tear his ship from him, while he listened for the warning bell off St. Catherine’s Point.

“The beacon’s gone, sir,” the helmsman shouted in his ear against the tempest’s roar.

The master looked up at the clifftop where the betraying flare had shown, and now they could hear the screams that were not the screams of gulls in the wild night, and under a great flash of lightning, the stark outline of the vessel on the rocks sprang out, for a second hideously illuminated.

And still there was no sound of the bell off St. Catherine’s Point.

A strange and heavy silence fell over the ship, its men for an instant falling still in their fight with the storm. To a man they had all sailed these waters from boyhood, and they knew their hazards. And they knew that the worst danger of all came from the shore.

“May God have mercy on their souls,” the helmsman muttered, crossing himself involuntarily.

“She looks like a merchantman,” the master returned, his voice cold and distant. “There’ll be rich pickings. They chose a good night.”

“Aye,” the helmsman muttered again, his scalp crawling as the screams of the dying were lost in the crash of the waves that pounded the broken-backed vessel to so many shards and splinters.