“I... I can’t read, sir. I... I didn’t know.”
“Faugh!” The messenger withered him with his disdain.
“Well, now you’re informed. See to it that you are at the Secretary’s office before noon with the ten pounds surety into which you are obliged to enter.”
The pompous officer departed, leaving Nuttall in a cold perspiration despite the heat of the morning. He was thankful that the fellow had not asked the question he most dreaded, which was how he, a debtor, should come by the money to buy a wherry. But this he knew was only a respite. The question would presently be asked of a certainty, and then hell would open for him. He cursed the hour in which he had been such a fool as to listen to Peter Blood’s chatter of escape. He thought it very likely that the whole plot would be discovered, and that he would probably be hanged, or at least branded and sold into slavery like those other damned rebels-convict, with whom he had been so mad as to associate himself. If only he had the ten pounds for this infernal surety, which until this moment had never entered into their calculations, it was possible that the thing might be done quickly and questions postponed until later. As the Secretary’s messenger had overlooked the fact that he was a debtor, so might the others at the Secretary’s office, at least for a day or two; and in that time he would, he hoped, be beyond the reach of their questions. But in the meantime what was to be done about this money? And it was to be found before noon!
Nuttall snatched up his hat, and went out in quest of Peter Blood. But where look for him? Wandering aimlessly up the irregular, unpaved street, he ventured to enquire of one or two if they had seen Dr. Blood that morning. He affected to be feeling none so well, and indeed his appearance bore out the deception. None could give him information; and since Blood had never told him of Whacker’s share in this business, he walked in his unhappy ignorance past the door of the one man in Barbados who would eagerly have saved him in this extremity.
Finally he determined to go up to Colonel Bishop’s plantation. Probably Blood would be there. If he were not, Nuttall would find Pitt, and leave a message with him. He was acquainted with Pitt and knew of Pitt’s share in this business. His pretext for seeking Blood must still be that he needed medical assistance.
And at the same time that he set out, insensitive in his anxiety to the broiling heat, to climb the heights to the north of the town, Blood was setting out from Government House at last, having so far eased the Governor’s condition as to be permitted to depart. Being mounted, he would, but for an unexpected delay, have reached the stockade ahead of Nuttall, in which case several unhappy events might have been averted. The unexpected delay was occasioned by Miss Arabella Bishop.
They met at the gate of the luxuriant garden of Government House, and Miss Bishop, herself mounted, stared to see Peter Blood on horseback. It happened that he was in good spirits. The fact that the Governor’s condition had so far improved as to restore him his freedom of movement had sufficed to remove the depression under which he had been labouring for the past twelve hours and more. In its rebound the mercury of his mood had shot higher far than present circumstances warranted. He was disposed to be optimistic. What had failed last night would certainly not fail again to-night. What was a day, after all? The Secretary’s office might be troublesome, but not really troublesome for another twenty-four hours at least; and by then they would be well away.
This joyous confidence of his was his first misfortune. The next was that his good spirits were also shared by Miss Bishop, and that she bore no rancour. The two things conjoined to make the delay that in its consequences was so deplorable.
“Good-morning, sir,” she hailed him pleasantly. “It’s close upon a month since last I saw you.”
“Twenty-one days to the hour,” said he. “I’ve counted them.”
“I vow I was beginning to believe you dead.”
“I have to thank you for the wreath.”
“The wreath?”
“To deck my grave,” he explained.
“Must you ever be rallying?” she wondered, and looked at him gravely, remembering that it was his rallying on the last occasion had driven her away in dudgeon.
“A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,” said he. “Few realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.”
“You may laugh at yourself all you will, sir. But sometimes I think you laugh at me, which is not civil.”
“Then, faith, you’re wrong. I laugh only at the comic, and you are not comic at all.”
“What am I, then?” she asked him, laughing.
A moment he pondered her, so fair and fresh to behold, so entirely maidenly and yet so entirely frank and unabashed.
“You are,” he said, “the niece of the man who owns me his slave.” But he spoke lightly. So lightly that she was encouraged to insistence.
“Nay, sir, that is an evasion. You shall answer me truthfully this morning.”
“Truthfully? To answer you at all is a labour. But to answer truthfully! Oh, well, now, I should say of you that he’ll be lucky who counts you his friend.” It was in his mind to add more. But he left it there.
“That’s mighty civil,” said she. “You’ve a nice taste in compliments, Mr. Blood. Another in your place....”
“Faith, now, don’t I know what another would have said? Don’t I know my fellow-man at all?”
“Sometimes I think you do, and sometimes I think you don’t. Anyway, you don’t know your fellow-woman. There was that affair of the Spaniards.”
“Will ye never forget it?”
“Never.”
“Bad cess to your memory. Is there no good in me at all that you could be dwelling on instead?”
“Oh, several things.”
“For instance, now?” He was almost eager.
“You speak excellent Spanish.”
“Is that all?” He sank back into dismay.
“Where did you learn it? Have you been in Spain?”
“That I have. I was two years in a Spanish prison.”
“In prison?” Her tone suggested apprehensions in which he had no desire to leave her.
“As a prisoner of war,” he explained. “I was taken fighting with the French — in French service, that is.”
“But you’re a doctor!” she cried.
“That’s merely a diversion, I think. By trade I am a soldier — at least, it’s a trade I followed for ten years. It brought me no great gear, but it served me better than medicine, which, as you may observe, has brought me into slavery. I’m thinking it’s more pleasing in the sight of Heaven to kill men than to heal them. Sure it must be.”
“But how came you to be a soldier, and to serve the French?”
“I am Irish, you see, and I studied medicine. Therefore — since it’s a perverse nation we are — .... Oh, but it’s a long story, and the Colonel will be expecting my return.” She was not in that way to be defrauded of her entertainment. If he would wait a moment they would ride back together. She had but come to enquire of the Governor’s health at her uncle’s request.
So he waited, and so they rode back together to Colonel Bishop’s house. They rode very slowly, at a walking pace, and some whom they passed marvelled to see the doctor-slave on such apparently intimate terms with his owner’s niece. One or two may have promised themselves that they would drop a hint to the Colonel. But the two rode oblivious of all others in the world that morning. He was telling her the story of his early turbulent days, and at the end of it he dwelt more fully than hitherto upon the manner of his arrest and trial.
The tale was barely done when they drew up at the Colonel’s door, and dismounted, Peter Blood surrendering his nag to one of the negro grooms, who informed them that the Colonel was from home at the moment.
Even then they lingered a moment, she detaining him.
“I am sorry, Mr. Blood, that I did not know before,” she said, and there was a suspicion of moisture in those clear hazel eyes. With a compelling friendliness she
held out her hand to him.
“Why, what difference could it have made?” he asked.
“Some, I think. You have been very hardly used by Fate.”
“Och, now....” He paused. His keen sapphire eyes considered her steadily a moment from under his level black brows. “It might have been worse,” he said, with a significance which brought a tinge of colour to her cheeks and a flutter to her eyelids.
He stooped to kiss her hand before releasing it, and she did not deny him. Then he turned and strode off towards the stockade a half-mile away, and a vision of her face went with him, tinted with a rising blush and a sudden unusual shyness. He forgot in that little moment that he was a rebel-convict with ten years of slavery before him; he forgot that he had planned an escape, which was to be carried into effect that night; forgot even the peril of discovery which as a result of the Governor’s gout now overhung him.
CHAPTER VII. PIRATES
Mr. James Nuttall made all speed, regardless of the heat, in his journey from Bridgetown to Colonel Bishop’s plantation, and if ever man was built for speed in a hot climate that man was Mr. James Nuttall, with his short, thin body, and his long, fleshless legs. So withered was he that it was hard to believe there were any juices left in him, yet juices there must have been, for he was sweating violently by the time he reached the stockade.
At the entrance he almost ran into the overseer Kent, a squat, bow-legged animal with the arms of a Hercules and the jowl of a bulldog.
“I am seeking Doctor Blood,” he announced breathlessly.
“You are in a rare haste,” growled Kent. “What the devil is it? Twins?”
“Eh? Oh! Nay, nay. I’m not married, sir. It’s a cousin of mine, sir.”
“What is?”
“He is taken bad, sir,” Nuttall lied promptly upon the cue that Kent himself had afforded him. “Is the doctor here?”
“That’s his hut yonder.” Kent pointed carelessly. “If he’s not there, he’ll be somewhere else.” And he took himself off. He was a surly, ungracious beast at all times, readier with the lash of his whip than with his tongue.
Nuttall watched him go with satisfaction, and even noted the direction that he took. Then he plunged into the enclosure, to verify in mortification that Dr. Blood was not at home. A man of sense might have sat down and waited, judging that to be the quickest and surest way in the end. But Nuttall had no sense. He flung out of the stockade again, hesitated a moment as to which direction he should take, and finally decided to go any way but the way that Kent had gone. He sped across the parched savannah towards the sugar plantation which stood solid as a rampart and gleaming golden in the dazzling June sunshine. Avenues intersected the great blocks of ripening amber cane. In the distance down one of these he espied some slaves at work. Nuttall entered the avenue and advanced upon them. They eyed him dully, as he passed them. Pitt was not of their number, and he dared not ask for him. He continued his search for best part of an hour, up one of those lanes and then down another. Once an overseer challenged him, demanding to know his business. He was looking, he said, for Dr. Blood. His cousin was taken ill. The overseer bade him go to the devil, and get out of the plantation. Blood was not there. If he was anywhere he would be in his hut in the stockade.
Nuttall passed on, upon the understanding that he would go. But he went in the wrong direction; he went on towards the side of the plantation farthest from the stockade, towards the dense woods that fringed it there. The overseer was too contemptuous and perhaps too languid in the stifling heat of approaching noontide to correct his course.
Nuttall blundered to the end of the avenue, and round the corner of it, and there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon an irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothed him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broad hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from the rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloud to his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the shipwright poured out his dismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of it was that he must have ten pounds from Blood that very morning or they were all undone. And all he got for his pains and his sweat was the condemnation of Jeremy Pitt.
“Damn you for a fool!” said the slave. “If it’s Blood you’re seeking, why are you wasting your time here?”
“I can’t find him,” bleated Nuttall. He was indignant at his reception. He forgot the jangled state of the other’s nerves after a night of anxious wakefulness ending in a dawn of despair. “I thought that you....”
“You thought that I could drop my spade and go and seek him for you? Is that what you thought? My God! that our lives should depend upon such a dummerhead. While you waste your time here, the hours are passing! And if an overseer should catch you talking to me? How’ll you explain it?”
For a moment Nuttall was bereft of speech by such ingratitude. Then he exploded.
“I would to Heaven I had never had no hand in this affair. I would so! I wish that....”
What else he wished was never known, for at that moment round the block of cane came a big man in biscuit-coloured taffetas followed by two negroes in cotton drawers who were armed with cutlasses. He was not ten yards away, but his approach over the soft, yielding marl had been unheard.
Mr. Nuttall looked wildly this way and that a moment, then bolted like a rabbit for the woods, thus doing the most foolish and betraying thing that in the circumstances it was possible for him to do. Pitt groaned and stood still, leaning upon his spade.
“Hi, there! Stop!” bawled Colonel Bishop after the fugitive, and added horrible threats tricked out with some rhetorical indecencies.
But the fugitive held amain, and never so much as turned his head. It was his only remaining hope that Colonel Bishop might not have seen his face; for the power and influence of Colonel Bishop was quite sufficient to hang any man whom he thought would be better dead.
Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the planter sufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the two negroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It was a bodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations since a slave had made an attack upon him and all but strangled him a couple of years ago.
“After him, you black swine!” he roared at them. But as they started he checked them. “Wait! Get to heel, damn you!”
It occurred to him that to catch and deal with the fellow there was not the need to go after him, and perhaps spend the day hunting him in that cursed wood. There was Pitt here ready to his hand, and Pitt should tell him the identity of his bashful friend, and also the subject of that close and secret talk he had disturbed. Pitt might, of course, be reluctant. So much the worse for Pitt. The ingenious Colonel Bishop knew a dozen ways — some of them quite diverting — of conquering stubbornness in these convict dogs.
He turned now upon the slave a countenance that was inflamed by heat internal and external, and a pair of heady eyes that were alight with cruel intelligence. He stepped forward swinging his light bamboo cane.
“Who was that runagate?” he asked with terrible suavity. Leaning over on his spade, Jeremy Pitt hung his head a little, and shifted uncomfortably on his bare feet. Vainly he groped for an answer in a mind that could do nothing but curse the idiocy of Mr. James Nuttall.
The planter’s bamboo cane fell on the lad’s naked shoulders with stinging force.
“Answer me, you dog! What’s his name?”
Jeremy looked at the burly planter out of sullen, almost defiant eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said, and in his voice there was a faint note at least of the defiance aroused in him by a blow which he dared not, for his life’s sake, return. His body had remained unyielding under it, but the spirit within writhed now in torment.
“You don’t know? Well, here’s to quicken your wits.” Again the cane descended. “Have you thought of his name yet?”
“I have not.”
“
Stubborn, eh?” For a moment the Colonel leered. Then his passion mastered him. “‘Swounds! You impudent dog! D’you trifle with me? D’you think I’m to be mocked?”
Pitt shrugged, shifted sideways on his feet again, and settled into dogged silence. Few things are more provocative; and Colonel Bishop’s temper was never one that required much provocation. Brute fury now awoke in him. Fiercely now he lashed those defenceless shoulders, accompanying each blow by blasphemy and foul abuse, until, stung beyond endurance, the lingering embers of his manhood fanned into momentary flame, Pitt sprang upon his tormentor.
But as he sprang, so also sprang the watchful blacks. Muscular bronze arms coiled crushingly about the frail white body, and in a moment the unfortunate slave stood powerless, his wrists pinioned behind him in a leathern thong.
Breathing hard, his face mottled, Bishop pondered him a moment. Then: “Fetch him along,” he said.
Down the long avenue between those golden walls of cane standing some eight feet high, the wretched Pitt was thrust by his black captors in the Colonel’s wake, stared at with fearful eyes by his fellow-slaves at work there. Despair went with him. What torments might immediately await him he cared little, horrible though he knew they would be. The real source of his mental anguish lay in the conviction that the elaborately planned escape from this unutterable hell was frustrated now in the very moment of execution.
They came out upon the green plateau and headed for the stockade and the overseer’s white house. Pitt’s eyes looked out over Carlisle Bay, of which this plateau commanded a clear view from the fort on one side to the long sheds of the wharf on the other. Along this wharf a few shallow boats were moored, and Pitt caught himself wondering which of these was the wherry in which with a little luck they might have been now at sea. Out over that sea his glance ranged miserably.
In the roads, standing in for the shore before a gentle breeze that scarcely ruffled the sapphire surface of the Caribbean, came a stately red-hulled frigate, flying the English ensign.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 382
