The Map

Tricked

Usual Disclaimer:

Many, many, many thanks to Dixie for all her hard work in Beta reading this. And remaining mistakes are all my own!

Also thanks to Robyn Maddison, who I should have credited last chapter! Thanks for helping a land lubber a bit more sea worthy.

This chapter is divided into two chapters for length and also content... which hopefully will become clearer upon reading.

This chapter takes place in the same time frame as the last chapter. Hope you enjoy it.....

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Beaumont was beginning to get extremely frustrated with the turn of events. First the Black Pearl  had come to the aid of the Ardent, which completely took him by surprise. He had expected him to make for La Romana with all speed, not turning to aid another ship that wasn't even a pirate vessel.

This left him with the decided notion that in firing upon the Ardent, he had made a grave tactical error. Not only had his ship taken damage, but he now had to waylay slightly to make repairs.

He hissed under his breath as he thought of Brown, the Master of the Ship who was now lying at the bottom of the sea with a pistol shot through his heart.

If he'd so much as even begun to imagine the idiot would not only intercept the Ardent, but then tattle about the Rose, he'd have never appointed the idiot in the first place. He wished now he'd taken over as Captain at Plymouth but he had decided to stay in his cabin with Tristan and play the passenger and now he was paying for that.

But he'd had no choice when it came to the Ardent; he couldn't afford word getting back to Port Royal that it had been the Black Pearl who had attacked the Rose and taken Lady Davenport. Beaumont knew there were several pirate ships that roamed these waters and he had been hoping that the time it took for the Navy to work out who took her would delay them long enough for him to catch up with the Pearl.

But he hadn't bargained on the Pearl  interfering with the Ardent. An oversight on his part; he didn't like making oversights and he certainly didn't like things going wrong.

And going wrong is what they were doing, and had been doing since that ungrateful brat, Nell, had left the convent.

That had been something that he had never seen coming. He had given over so much of his money to that dratted place to keep her there and allow him to see her once a year, but it had all been to no avail when he'd received the message that she had run away.

Fortunately for him, Tristan had been with him at his estate in Cornwall and it had taken them literally hours to determine where she had gone. He had always been under the impression that Nell was fairly bright, but when he'd discovered she'd left, not only in her convent clothes, but that she'd been seen regularly in them, giving them a clear path to trace her to the Port of Plymouth, he'd had to re-evaluate that notion.

Unless, of course, she had no idea that he would follow her. Which naturally led to him surmising that she hadn't known the significance of the chart tattooed onto her back.

Either way he could quite easily and probably would strangle the girl when he caught up with her.

But her being on the Pearl  put a whole new slant on things. He hadn't mentioned to Tristan how Jack Sparrow was probably the one pirate that he really, really wished he didn't have to pit his wits against.

He sat forward in his chair, leaning over the chart of the Windward Islands. He rested his arms on the chart; his hands clasped together, his eyes closed.