"I'm afraid I already know what they're shipping. I picked a hell of a day to come back." The stranger rubbed absently at a long scar across one cheek, then continued, as though to himself, "Damn me, I should have guessed all along this would be the way.''
The crowd had fallen silent to listen, and Katherine could make out that his accent was that of a gentleman, even if his dress clearly was not. His easy stride suggested he was little more than thirty, but the squint that framed his brown eyes made his face years older. By his looks and the uneasy shuffle of the Council members gathered around them, she suddenly began to suspect who he might be.
"Katy, who the devil?" Jeremy had lowered his voice to a whisper.
"I'm not sure, but if I had to guess, I'd say that's probably the smuggler you claim robbed you once." Scarce wonder Briggs is nervous, she thought. Every planter on the shore knows exactly why he's come back.
"Hugh Winston? Is that him?" Jeremy glared at the newcomer, his eyes hardening. "You can't mean it. He'd not have the brass to show his face on English soil."
"He's been here before. I've just never actually seen him. You always seem to keep forgetting, Jeremy, Barbados isn't part of England." She glanced back. "Surely you heard what he did. It happened just before you came out." She gestured toward the green hillsides. "He's the one we have to thank for all this. I fancy he's made Briggs and the rest of them rich, for all the good it'll ever do him."
"What he's done, if you must know, is make a profession of stealing from honest men. Damned to their cane. He's scarcely better than a thief. Do you know exactly what he did?"
"You mean that business about your frigate?"
"The eighty-tonner of ours that grounded on the reefs up by Nevis Island. He's the one who set our men ashore—then announced he was taking the cargo in payment. Rolls of wool broadcloth worth almost three thousand pounds sterling. And several crates of new flintlock muskets. He smuggled the cloth into Virginia, sold it for nothing, and ruined the market for months. He'd be hanged if he tried walking the streets of London, I swear it. Doesn't anybody here know that?"
She tried to recall what she did know. The story heard most often was that he'd begun his career at sea on a Dutch merchantman. Then, so word had it, he'd gone out on his own. According to tales that went around the Caribbees, he'd pulled together a band of some dozen runaway indentures and one night somehow managed to sail a small shallop into the harbor at Santo Domingo. He sailed out before dawn at the helm of a two- hundred-ton Spanish square-rigger. After some heavy refitting, it became the Defiance.