A Bottle of Rum

by Steve Goble

  Even as she said it, a cutlass flashed at her arm. Someone had crept around the corner of the barn and snuck toward the door.

  The blade caught the barrel of Ruth’s gun. The weapon fired uselessly into the ground and fell from her hand. She grasped the swordsman’s wrist and pulled him into the barn. She tripped him, and he toppled onto the dirt.

  He rolled, started to rise—and Odin planted the sickle in his back.

  Spider gritted his teeth. The dead man was Hugh, the Frenchman who’d served with Fawkes and who’d promised to share his wine.

  You spoke true, Hugh. Fortune is a bitch.

  “Get on the damned wagon!” Spider placed Hob into the back and exhaled heavily now that the lad’s weight was off his shoulder. He climbed in behind Hob.

  The wagon bed was covered by a frame and thin oak planks. “This will protect us somewhat from guns,” he said. “I hope.”

  “Aye,” Hob said.

  Odin and Ruth helped Michael finish with the skittish horses as guns fired and balls thumped against the barn.

  “Does anyone know how to run a team?”

  Spider’s question drew blank stares.

  “I’ll do it!” Odin tossed his bloodied sickle into the wagon bed, then ran forward. He started clambering up to the bench, but fell, grabbing his leg.

  “Goddamn it!” Spider jumped out of the wagon.

  “No!” Odin rose, and started climbing again. “I still have plenty of fight in me! And I won’t drive the cart into the goddamned wall if a fucking chicken flaps at me!”

  Goddamn it, old man. “Climb up, then!”

  Odin climbed up to the bench and grabbed the reins and whip. He urged the team forward with a crack of the latter.

  The horses bolted, and Spider lunged at the back of the wagon. Ruth and Michael lifted him in.

  Spider noticed his own leg had resumed bleeding, but not badly. His thigh stung.

  “This is exciting,” Daphne said through gleaming clenched teeth. Her smiled widened. “Someone might die!”

  “Heads down!” Spider yelled as more guns erupted.

  Mrs. Fitch, Michael and Ruth joined Spider in ducking low as the wagon rolled out of the barn, Odin shouting like a madman. Daphne and Hob, however, kept looking out the back.

  “Hob, goddamn it! Get down!”

  “I saw someone come out of the house!” The boy lifted the knife that Spider had given him.

  “I don’t care! Death is flying all around us, you fool!” Spider tugged at Hob’s shirt and Daphne’s nightgown.

  Hob pulled away. “I am not afraid, Spider!”

  “That is the trouble,” Spider said as he fell backward. Daphne rolled off him. “That is always the trouble!”

  Spider rose again, trying to grab Hob and pull him down as three men came running. Then the wagon lurched crazily as Odin guided it around the house.

  “I should have grabbed that big gun, Spider! Get down!”

  Spider fell back, but not before seeing Ambrose Oakes standing near the kitchen door, raising the massive blunderbuss from his sitting room.

  The man was dangerously close.

  Spider gasped. That big gun will rip the hell out of this thin wood.

  “Goddamn it, Hob!”

  Spider grabbed at the lad.

  Hob threw the knife. “Tallyho!”

  The gun thundered.

  Hob’s knife flew uselessly into the rising smoke.

  Oakes had aimed too high, though, and the balls flew over their heads. Wood splintered and flew apart as though it was made of eggshell. Oakes staggered and toppled as the gun’s vicious recoil slammed him.

  The wagon jolted its way down the road, past the graves and toward the gate at a speed Spider thought surely would send the whole damned thing toppling. He’d ridden rough seas many times, but this was wholly new to him.

  Guns fired behind them, and swords glinted in the sun. Looking back, Spider saw a small gray object arc toward the wagon.

  “Fuck and bugger! Duck!”

  The ball hit the ground a few yards behind the wagon and exploded in a flash of green and orange. A sound like a cannon boom caused the horses to lurch.

  Odin shouted, “We should have found some of those!”

  They sped down the hill, rocking madly and praying. Another blast erupted in the road behind them, and Spider closed his eyes against the spray of dirt.

  “Shit,” Hob said. “I remember those!”

  Odin cried out. “The fucking gate is closed!”

  “Stop the horses!” That was Ruth.

  “I can’t!”

  Spider cursed. “It’s a horrible old gate! Ram it! It’ll fall apart!”

  Spider pictured the gate in his mind: A weak latch, rotted wood, and bad hinges. It should shatter, he thought, if the horses charge through it.

  Please, God, let it fall apart.

  “Hold on!”

  He was still wondering if the team was frightened enough to tear the gate asunder or if it would try to halt when he heard the monstrous crack of wood and saw splintered boards flying in the air. Spider bit his tongue when the wagon turned into the road and swiped one of the stone pillars at the gate.

  “Goddamn! Ha!” Odin shouted, “Hold on, all. We’re Lymington-bound!”

  36

  The horses ran at a headlong pace, and Spider worried that a wheel might have been cracked at the gate. “Get the horses under control, Odin!”

  “They are in command, Spider! Ha! Hope they know the way!”

  “They’ll tire soon,” Ruth said. “I hope!”

  Michael nodded.

  “We should have had Michael hold the reins,” Mrs. Fitch said.

  Michael nodded again.

  “Too late for that,” Spider said.

  The horses did slow down once they were beyond range of the gunfire and once Odin stopped cursing at them like a madman. Spider inhaled deeply, and all the passengers caught their breath as the wagon slowly came to a full stop.

  Daphne held out her hand to him. It was streaked with blood. “I was shot.”

  “What? Jesus.” Spider looked her over and saw a red smear on her gown, just at the left elbow. He ripped the fabric away.

  “Will I die?” Daphne whispered. “Will I finally know?”

  “No, you won’t die,” Spider said. “You got scraped. It’s already stopped bleeding. You will be fine, lass.”

  He could not tell if she was disappointed or merely stunned.

  “It was the blunderbuss,” she said, quietly. “I always wondered what it would sound like, what it would feel like, to shoot it.”

  She peered behind her, where the lead had blown a large hole in the wagon bed’s cover. “It might have done that to me.”

  “It might have done that to all of us,” Spider said, “if he’d aimed just a bit lower.”

  “Well, he didn’t,” Hob gasped. “And we all shall live long happy lives, at least for a few days. How did you ever find me, Spider?”

  Spider started to rub the lad’s head, then stopped at the sight of the bloody bandage there. He clasped Hob’s shoulder instead. “Little Bob Higgins killed a man with the knife I gave you. The knife you just threw away. That started us on the trail, though.”

  “Little Bob! I hate Little Bob! Where is he? I’ll kill him!”

  “He’s dead, Hobgoblin. Throat cut.”

  “Good!”

  Spider agreed. “No one will miss him.”

  “Little Bob is shit.”

  “Aye.”

  “I’ll miss the knife, but I am glad I threw it,” Hob said. “Oakes deserved it, locking us up that way. I am damned glad that fat bastard is dead, Spider John. Damned glad.”

  “He probably lives, Hob. You missed him by a yard, at least, you goddamned fool of a dandiprat! Did I teach you to throw a blade when you can’t see beyond your own whore-sniffing nose?”

  Hob tried to laugh. “Sorry, Spider. Blurry as he was, Oakes is fat as a whale. I thought I could not miss.”<
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  “Well, you did. And you lost a good knife.” Spider shook his own head at a memory. Ezra, the best friend Spider had ever had in the piratical life and now gone to whatever afterlife pirates go to, had always admonished Spider about throwing a good weapon during a fight. “You might find you need it again quick and can’t get it back,” Ezra had told him.

  Now, here he was, berating Hob for the same thing. He wiped away a sudden tear and wished he could bring his own son’s face to mind.

  Then he remembered his own knife, thrown over Little Bob’s head in a Lymington alley, and laughed.

  “We all misjudge, Hob. We’ll get us some new knives.”

  He glanced over the low wall, but no pursuit was coming. “I guess we won’t need the knife just now, anyway,” he said, shaking his head at Hob.

  Spider turned toward the rest. “Hob may be useless, but you have skills, Missus Fitch. I know a nice lady in Lymington, the Widow Bonnymeade, who might appreciate help running a tavern called the Crosskeys. You and Michael might fit in nicely there. And me and Odin need to stop in there, anyway, to tell that nice lady some news. Justice is done.”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Fitch said, looking confused. “I still don’t quite know what all this is about!”

  “I’ll explain, as best I understand it,” Spider said. He climbed out and hung his hat on a nearby elm branch. He peered at the others through the jagged hole left by the massive blunderbuss. “God damn, what that would have done if it had hit one of us!”

  He muttered a brief prayer. Thank you, Lord, for the luck I do not deserve. Then he clutched Em’s pendant.

  “I am going to give this wheel and axle a look, but listen while I sort all this out,” Spider said.

  “Michael, see that the horses are not hurt,” Mrs. Fitch suggested. The giant climbed out of the wagon bed to comply.

  “There was a lot of death at Pryor Pond,” Spider continued. “A lot of it, I say, and I was not convinced men were just getting sick. Sick one at a time? It did not seem likely, and Gold Peter and Simon and Oakes never seemed worried they’d catch it. I’ve seen men jump off a ship rather than stay close to sick men dying. It just did not make sense to me.”

  He took a look toward the gate. No one was coming after them.

  “There were other odd things, too. It took me a good while to figure it all out. That might be because my head was full of bad rum. Poisoned rum, actually.”

  Mrs. Fitch gasped. “Poisoned?”

  Spider stared at her, giving her time to worry and fret, waiting to see what she’d do.

  But she simply stared back at him.

  “Aye. I reckoned you were killing those patients, Missus Fitch.”

  “Me!”

  “Aye,” Spider said. “I thought you felt bad for them, stuck mad in this life, and so you were sending them on to the next.”

  “Why on earth would you suppose such a thing?”

  “You had a bottle locked away, and I snuck me some and got sick drinking from it. And Oakes thought you had taken a, what did he call it, a sedative, from him. So I thought you stole poison from him and put it in the bottle.”

  “I should thrash you,” she said.

  “Aye,” he answered. “Probably. Devil likely will do that for you one day. Were you killing men?”

  “I was not.”

  Spider said. “You went on so about how miserable the patients were, and how death might be a mercy.”

  “Master Oakes gave me those bottles, he did, and he told me which patients could have some. As for mercy, I do not get to decide such things, Spider John.”

  “Aye,” Spider said. “That is a task best left to the Lord.”

  Mrs. Fitch clasped her hands in prayer.

  “Horses fine,” Michael said, clambering back up into the wagon. Spider crawled under the wagon. “Hold the horses steady, Odin.”

  “They do what they want, Spider.”

  “Do what you can, old man.” Once underneath where he could examine the axle, he continued. “Not everyone died by poison, though, did they? There was that Wilson boy in the village, and Raldo, the Spaniard. They both died by violence, not poison.”

  Mrs. Fitch shouted. “For the Lord’s sake, man, I never leave the grounds and that Raldo died in the fight!”

  “Well,” Spider said, climbing out from beneath the wagon. “I did not suppose you did. You could not have killed the Wilson lad. And Raldo died by knife and I doubt you could take him in a fight, Missus Fitch. No, someone stronger and faster killed them, whatever else was going on with the poison.”

  Ruth pointed at Michael. “He is big, and very strong.”

  The giant seemed bewildered.

  “Michael?” Mrs. Fitch turned to the farmhand. “Not possible!”

  “You told me Michael kept sneaking off, Missus Fitch. Remember? And I saw you, Michael, come across the wall one day, sneaking about. You are a right powerful bastard, you are. That Wilson lad, Odin told me he was mangled something terrible. You would be just the man for that.”

  Michael looked puzzled, while Mrs. Fitch glowered.

  “I told you I thought he had a girl nearby!”

  Michael lowered his head and blushed.

  “Aye, you told me that. But I wondered if maybe you were just making excuses for him. Maybe you really thought he’d gone off killing. And maybe that was somehow tied to the poisonings—it just does not seem likely they were not tangled up together, somehow— and maybe you and Michael were working together.”

  Michael shook his head slowly. His lips formed the word “no,” but without sound.

  “No,” Spider said. “You really did just have a girl, like Missus Fitch said, didn’t you?”

  The big man shrugged.

  “So that left me wondering for some way to knot up the Wilson death with the poisonings, and I just could not see why you, Missus Fitch, would be connected to both. The Wilson boy was not killed to put him out of any misery, not that I heard. He was guarding his village because young men had vanished, and he paid with his life. I still reckoned that was connected to the patient deaths somehow, but I could not connect you to both. And I could not figure any way Michael might be tied to the patient deaths. So I had to look elsewhere for the killer.”

  “Or killers!” Hob’s eyebrows arched. “Maybe there was more than one!”

  “It occurred to me,” Spider said.

  Hob nodded. “You mentioned Raldo, too. I heard that name before. Was his death knotted up with the others, too?”

  “Aye,” Spider said. “Raldo. That death was not at the hands of Ambrose Oakes. Was it, Ruth Copper?”

  “What?” She blinked.

  “I found Raldo dead during the fight, but he was already cold and so I knew he’d been killed earlier. I supposed Half-Jim maybe killed him, because there was a bad feeling between those two. I noticed that more than once.”

  Spider reclaimed his hat, shook an errant leaf from it, and plopped it back on his head. “But then I thought it probably wasn’t Half-Jim. Raldo got stabbed in the back of the head, a hard place for Jim to get to on his crutches and all and him being the type to come at a man head-on. But someone hugging Raldo, up close, might easily shove a knife up and into his brain, aye?”

  Ruth stared. “I had nothing to do with Raldo.”

  “Not willingly, perhaps.” Spider walked about as he thought out loud. “He was killed during the day, between the house and the south wall, where you normally patrol during the day watch. And he had a bit of blood around his mouth, and you have a bite or a cut on your lips that was not there when you tried to pull down my pants. Did Raldo kiss you, and maybe he got rough?”

  “Lord,” Mrs. Fitch muttered. “This is all too much.”

  “It is exciting!” Daphne leaned forward and clapped her hands, seeming to have forgotten her recent close call with death. Spider was happy to note the rapid movement did not cause the bleeding to start again. Daphne smiled broadly. “I have never had such a day as this! Never!”


  Spider nodded. “Aye, we’ve made a full cargo of corpses in this place, for certain. Anyway, I am guessing Raldo came looking for you, Ruth, and tried to pay you more attention than you wanted.”

  “Spider John, I . . .”

  “Jim mentioned the gentlemen sniffing after you and warned me off of doing the same,” Spider said. “Raldo came looking for you, tried something you did not like, and you snuck a knife behind his head and killed him. Do I have it reckoned well enough?”

  “Oooooooh,” Daphne cooed.

  “You are making wild guesses,” Ruth said, coldly.

  Spider reached into the brim of his hat and pulled free the scrap of cloth he’d tucked there after the skirmish with Anne Bonny’s buccaneers. “You had a torn blouse after the night fight. This little scrap seems to be the same color and cloth,” he said. “I pulled this from Raldo’s dead hand.”

  She touched her shoulder, then blew out her breath. “There is no rip in my blouse.”

  “You wear a different garment now,” Spider said. “But you did not remember that fact when you reached for your shoulder, did you? And I did not mention your shoulder just now, by and by, but that’s exactly where I saw the rip when I was tied up in that damned laboratory.”

  Ruth’s shoulders sagged.

  “You only carry two knives now,” Spider continued. “You used to carry three. I am betting you left one in Raldo’s skull.”

  She squirmed. “You . . . you pulled cloth from a dead man’s hand? And counted my knives?”

  “He does things like that,” Hob spoke up. “A great one for puzzles, is Spider John. They itch his brain, he says, and he has to figure them out.”

  “Aye,” Spider said. “Raldo’s death by knife, with the corpse left on the ground and all, did not fit in with the deaths from upstairs, or the death in the village. So I thought it a separate matter—matter, I say, not a crime. Maybe he deserved it. I am not a judge, for certain. But you killed Raldo, didn’t you?”

  She nodded, defiantly. “I choose my lovers, and I choose who to decline. Not him. I choose.”

  Spider nodded. “No one here is going to mourn for Raldo, I think.”