Page 56 of Rears & Vices

“Goodness. It’s wonderful. Now put it back,” he said hastily.

René snorted and replaced the vanilla. “Relax, matelot. It sat in a beach warehouse while our capitán was set to hang. It will bide a little more air.”

Not sugar. Not tobacco. Not cannabis. This was how the smuggler V. Varfolomey made his money, how he came to do business with revolutionary México, how he could afford to take a loss on Haitian coffee, why he had business in New York and Kingston and Philadelphia. Vanilla.

But why would Vitaliy frown over such a bounty?

“All this in exchange for a printing press?” he asked. “The crew must be ecstatic.”

“Non, this barrel alone is worth much…” She looked up. “Oh, now you are jesting.” She grinned, showing sharp eyeteeth, well-kept, and Everard smiled back. It was a contagious grin.

“We took a prize with vanilla cargo once,” he remembered. The Growler, two guns, two masts, schooner. “It was by accident that we came upon her, and the captain didn’t flee, though she was tiny. Must have thought to bluff his way through the boarding.”

“No stone unturned, you Navy.” René tapped the barrel hoops back into their places.

“Yes.” Everard couldn’t tell if this was judgment or not. “It was only a pair of crates, unmarked; we found them at the utmost by smell alone. The captain cried.”

The final hoop slotted into place with the ringing of iron. René’s smile looked different now. Vicious. “At the end, they all cry.”

Everard paused. He had, despite his best efforts, seen too many men dead to be able to contradict this.

“She wasn’t one of yours, I presume?”

She laughed, replaced the mallet to her hip. “Non. One of ours would not be accidentally taken upon by a man-o’-war.” She gestured to the boy Thom, who was going round distributing grog to the loaders.

It had been a brig, in fact; but Everard said nothing.

Handed his own mug, he sipped gratefully, though really he’d done no work at all.

René drank heartily. “And as you can see, there are more than a pair of crates,” she remarked. “And are not stolen, besides.”

“Oh, really?” Why did that surprise him… not at all? “What is its provenance? Obviously New Spain; but where?”

“A tribe in the mountains, once conquered by Aztecas for their crop,” she replied. “The Totonac. I have never been, and cannot pronounce the ville.” She grinned. “The silver with which to pay them, I do not regret to say, is stolen, and Spanish.”

Everard laughed. “Naturally.”

Romilly René studied him for a moment. She had a startling pair of grey eyes, wide and deep-set, and a smudge of kajal only made them more mesmerising, only reminded him more of Vitaliy as he’d first met him.

“Pretty, when you laugh,” she said, abruptly. “Such a voice. And very black eyes. I see it now.”

“Er…”

“At first, I wondered you would be so loud about your alliance. I thought you stupid, to put it in frontpage. I thought, there is a man who will get himself lucky to be tossed over.”

Everard frowned. “Because… we are lovers?” Presumably. Presumably lovers.

“Non, not with the scary brows, mon amour. Not at all. Vee has never hid himself to anyone; what more means the world? It is because you are Navy officer.”

Ah, yes; that problem. Only the reason entire he had done the cartoons at all.

“Was,” Everard corrected. “No longer. You think it means I’ll hinder Vit—Vee—in his endeavors?”

René blinked at the slip, and damn Everard for a fool. Did she, too, know Vitaliy’s true name?

“It doesn’t matter what I am thinking,” she said.

“And yet you are telling me. I shan’t. I’ve no reason to.”