Shark Island

by Joan Druett

“Any particular kind of shirt?”

  “All I could tell was that it had been one of those common blue and white striped ones that find a good market with seamen—though it did have an unusual deer horn button.”

  Wiki dug around in his pocket and handed it to George, who turned it over in his fingers. Then he handed it back, and said, “So you reckon the man who killed Kingman got rid of his bloodstained shirt in the galley fire—because he was handy to the galley already?”

  Wiki hesitated, and then said quietly, “Zachary Kingman wasn’t killed at the back of the galley, as I’d thought—he was killed on the larboard side of the after house.”

  Silently, without meeting George’s penetrating stare, he remembered the bloodstain on the planks at the sheltered side of the after house. His vision had grayed, and Annabelle had taken hold of him because she thought he was going to faint. He remembered the grip of her hands, and how she had hurried him back to the after house; he remembered her shutting the door to her stateroom, and how she had trembled as she explored the texture of his spiral tattoos. She had been frantic for him; what happened had been unstoppable.

  George prompted in his clear, cut-glass accents, “How did you find that out?”

  Abruptly brought back to the present, Wiki said, “Pedro da Silva—the seaman who was aloft at the time Captain Reed was killed—was also aloft during the spree that followed the prayers. He said that after Hammond had given the order to take him to the beach, Kingman woke up and stumbled off to the after house, and so they took Forsythe, instead. Then I found a big stain on the planks on the larboard side of the deck.”

  “But his body was anchored by the bow, you said.”

  “The current must have dragged it there.” Wiki hesitated, looked around, lowered his voice, and said, “Where’s Forsythe?”

  “He and his men are up at the fort, sizing up those beams. Why?”

  “Apparently he and Kingman had a quarrel during the spree; Kingman was cheating at cards, and Forsythe had to shake him around a bit before he would give back the money.”

  Rochester whistled. “That’s bad.”

  “And da Silva saw someone on the quarterdeck just before Annabelle ran back into the after house and found her husband dead.”

  “Did he recognize him?”

  “No—but he described him as burly, and either very short or bent low down.”

  “That fits a number of men as well as Forsythe.”

  “Aye,” said Wiki. “The cook is short and squat, and the bo’sun’s mate is heavyset.”

  “What about Annabelle Reed? Does she still reckon that it was Forsythe she saw on the quarterdeck?”

  Wiki was silent, realizing that he had completely forgotten to check. Acutely aware that Rochester’s frown was deepening as he studied his face, Wiki turned away, pretending to contemplate the pleasant scene. In the uncomfortable silence gulls screeched, circling the afternoon sun. Then he saw that Forsythe was heading their way down the cliff.

  Rochester set off to meet the lieutenant, but then abruptly stopped a dozen yards up the trail. When Wiki caught up with him, he was bent like a heron to look at the ground.

  George straightened, and said, “Something has been dragged along this track.”

  “Aye,” said Wiki. “I noticed those ruts the day of Reed’s burial. I thought they might have been made by construction stones.”

  “For the fort? They seem too recent for that. And do they lead upward or down?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Wiki, and crouched down to look. As expected, the marks in the dust and stone meant little. Shaking his head, he pushed himself to his feet.

  The movement disturbed a bird. It burst out of the scrub and soared straight up into the sky, circling in the air directly above the patch where it had been roosting. When Wiki tipped up his head to follow it with his eyes, he was unsighted by the bright sun directly behind it, so that for an instant the bird was a black beckoning flicker against a kaleidoscope of color.

  The circling bird cawed a challenge. Back home in New Zealand, it would have been a potent omen. With a fine disregard for snakes Wiki pushed through thorny bushes toward the place where the bird had risen, tripped on something, and nearly measured his length in the scrub. As the bird cawed again in the sky right above, he recovered his balance with a few running steps, and went back to see what had caught his foot.

  It was a spar of timber, about five feet long and four inches in diameter, roughly rounded, evidently cast aside there when it had finished serving its purpose. Wiki picked it up, tested its weight and heft, and then whirled it around his shoulders, swinging it from hand to hand, closing and unclosing his fists as its balance shifted. It was a skill he thought he’d forgotten. For a moment memories of childhood days were as vivid as the sun and sand of Shark Island—he could almost hear the voice of the warrior elder who had coached the village boys in hand-to-hand combat, and see his fiercely handsome tattooed face.

  “What’s that?” said George.

  “It was the shaft of an oar, I think,” said Wiki, balancing the spar on his palms and then sighting down its length. A dense, strong, finely grained hardwood, it was surprisingly rigid—because of the way it had seasoned as it lay in the sun, he supposed, as it was ash, which was usually more flexible. He braced his legs, whirled it powerfully a few more times, and then peered along it again, taking great pleasure in the way it maintained its straightness.

  When he looked down at the ground where the spar had lain, he found that the bird had left two feathers behind—long, primary feathers, deep blue-black rimmed with white and with white shafts. This was another omen. Carefully, he put them in his shirt pocket. Then, carrying the staff over one shoulder, he made his way back to the track.

  Forsythe, arriving, said, “What the hell are you going to do with that?”

  “I’m going to make myself a taiaha.” Wiki enjoyed saying the aggressive word with its long vowels, and wondered if Forsythe, who had once hired himself out as a mercenary to a Maori chief, and had led a musket-armed taua—war party—in a massacre of enemy warriors who were armed just with traditional weapons, knew what a taiaha was.

  Apparently he did. “Don’t see the point,” he said. “The best damn war club in the world ain’t nothin’ better than a broom straw when seen down the barrel of a gun.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Wiki, but didn’t bother to finish the sentence, which would have pointed out that there was little honor in killing a man with a gun. Instead, he thought about how alive the spar had felt in his hands as he whirled it, luxuriating in its promise of deadly strength. Already abundantly blessed by omens, his taiaha-in-the-making needed no justification from him.

  Forsythe said, “Have you picked Zack’s murderer, yet?”

  Wiki shook his head. The southerner was looking a lot better, he thought; immersing himself in hard work had done Forsythe good.

  “What about the knives? Have you sorted out how they switched my knife for the one that killed the old man?”

  “The steward, who was the one who sewed Captain Reed up in the rug they used for a winding sheet, says the knife had been removed from the body before he arrived.”

  George said unexpectedly, “Hammond informed me that he was the one who had taken it out—he freely admitted setting a boot on the dead man’s back and yanking out the blade.”

  “Strong stomach,” said Wiki with distaste.

  “Well, he’s a sealer—even if he’d make a better horse jockey, according to popular opinion—so must be naturally cold-blooded.”

  “So what did he do with the knife after that?” Forsythe demanded.

  “He says he wrapped it up and put it away in the bo’sun’s locker.”

  “Then someone must have got a hold of it there.”

  Rochester said, “Why have you come back?”

  “There’s some hoisting tackle in the hold of the wreck that could be useful.”

  Forsythe led the way back down to the beach, with Ro
chester just behind him, and Wiki, having shouldered his spar, tailing at the rear. They clambered up the plank to the deck, and then down to the hold. As Forsythe had said, hoisting tackle had been dumped at the bottom of the hatch, in a tangle of stout ropes and heavy blocks. While he sorted through it, Rochester went over to another corner, evidently having glimpsed something in a stray shaft of light. He dipped down, and came back with a big silver coin in his hand, which he bounced.

  Forsythe said, “What’s that?”

  “A Chilean dollar,” George said, and handed it to him. Then he said pensively, “I’ve been wondering about those privateers—and what happened to the cargo.”

  “Cargo?” Forsythe’s expression became alert. He looked from George to Wiki, and said, “What do you know that I don’t?”

  They told him about Reed’s letter and the hundred thousand in specie, and he whistled, impressed. “That’s a hell of a haul. The revolution could do with that kind of cash, I’m sure.”

  “Indeed,” George agreed, and then added, “If the privateers got it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The captain of the sloop might have run her up on the beach so that he and the crew could get the bullion out of the hold before the insurgents caught up with them. Somebody certainly hoisted something out,” Rochester observed, indicating the tackle.

  Wiki said slowly, “It struck me all along as very odd that Captain Reed should break the sealing season to come north after hearing the news in Rio. It doesn’t make sense for him to come to salvage the sloop, because it’s an almost worthless wreck. But if someone from the crew told him they had managed to hide the bullion, he would have sailed here as fast as he could, before someone else—like the privateers—beat him to it.”

  Forsythe said, “How do we know Reed got here in time to save it?”

  “You told me yourself that he behaved as if he had something to celebrate.”

  “By God, that’s right!” the Virginian exclaimed. “So you reckon he was all excited and in a holiday mood on account of he’d found the bullion?”

  “It sounds very likely—so what did he do with the silver after he found it?” Rochester asked. He led the way back up to deck.

  “Hid it on the schooner?” said Forsythe. He was staring at the Annawan, which was still spewing water down her side, but was lower in the water than ever.

  “A hundred thousand silver dollars take up a lot of room,” Wiki objected. “My father once carried specie to Canton, and it was stowed one thousand coins to a box—which in this case means a lot of boxes, and no small weight. Yet there’s nothing much at all in the holds of the Annawan—just casks of salt and the freshwater tank. Though I didn’t look in the lazaretto,” he allowed, thinking of the small hold beneath the captain’s cabin, traditionally the place where the captain’s personal trade goods were stored.

  “She’d be fearfully down by the stern if it had been stowed there, though,” Rochester objected. “Too, Joel Hammond would be taking much greater pains to keep her pumped out if he had any idea that when the ship sinks a heap of bullion goes with her. If the crew of the Annawan had carried out such an interesting task as retrieving a lot of heavy boxes from a hiding place, surely at least one of them would have gossiped about it. And there are those interesting ruts in the track that goes up to the fort.”

  “You reckon they hauled the boxes up there, and hid them somewhere in the prison?” queried Forsythe. Rochester nodded, and the southerner’s thick lips pursed in and out as he deliberated. “I didn’t see anything significant while I was hunting for poor Zack,” he said at last; “but I wasn’t looking for anything like that. Hell of a haul to get it up there, though. How many was there in the sloop’s crew?”

  “Eight,” said Wiki. “Two bunked in the after cabin, and six in the fo’c’sle.”

  “Eight could manage it,” said Forsythe, and headed down the plank for the track.

  Zigzagging up the slope was strongly reminiscent of the morning of Reed’s burial—the same dust burst up from around Wiki’s feet, and the same thorny branches snagged at his legs. As they passed by the archway to the graveyard he could see the piled dirt of Reed’s grave, and the place under the tree where Rochester had struggled to adapt the ritual for burial at sea for an interment on land. The path straggled on for about twenty yards past the gate, ending in a battered wall with a diagonal flight of stone steps that led up to the great, sunbaked forecourt of the ruined prison.

  In contrast to the way Wiki had seen it last, it was a hive of activity. The cutter’s men had hauled out all the big balks of timber, and were devising tackle to lower the beams down to the beach. After handing them the ropes and blocks he had been carrying, Forsythe led the way into the cavernous hall. Just as before, it was abruptly cooler as Wiki passed over the threshold. “Hmm,” said George, looking up and round and about, and contemplatively stroking his fluffy fair sideburns. “I hadn’t realized it would be quite so spacious.”

  “I could’ve told you that,” said Wiki, feeling beaten before they even started. They explored all the corridors and cells of the ground floor, figuring that the boxes of big silver coins would have been too heavy to carry up or down stairs easily. The same sense of endless endurance assailed Wiki at every turn, and he was the first to abandon the search. Forsythe was the most obstinate, but even he gave up in the end, joining Wiki and George in the yawning entrance hall after a fruitless hour of poking around in dismal dungeons.

  “It must be someplace else,” Forsythe decided. “Though I think I covered the whole damn island in the hunt for poor Zack.”

  Rochester asked, “Do you remember seeing anything that had been recently disturbed?”

  “Only that hole they was a-diggin’ for Reed’s coffin.”

  George sighed heavily, looked up at the sun, and said, “I have to get back to the brig, so I’ll borrow the cutter, if I may. Then I’ll get them to drop me at the Annawan on their way back to the cove.”

  Forsythe nodded, but said as they set off down the track to the camp set up by the cutter’s men, “What’s happening on the Annawan?”

  “When Joel Hammond wanted to know what the hell you and your men were doing on the wreck—which, as he pointed out, belongs to Captain Reed’s heir, and not to the goddamned navy—I explained that we hope to careen his schooner and fix her for him. Naturally, he’s delighted. He issued an invitation to supper so that we can discuss our plans in detail.”

  As they sailed to the brig in the cutter, Wiki thought that George was unusually quiet. Every time he looked around at him, his friend was studying his face, and there was a definite coolness in his demeanor. Surely, Wiki thought uncomfortably, he hadn’t guessed—surely it wouldn’t be possible for even such a close friend to read his mind so easily.

  As they clambered back on board the brig, he broke the silence with forced lightness. “It’s excellent news that Joel Hammond is so pleased that we’re to fix the Annawan, e hoa,” he said, and added, “I’ll dress more properly, this time.”

  “You’re not coming with me.” Rochester’s gaze was steady. “I’ll take Midshipman Keith along, and would be obliged if you would take care of the brig while we’re away. In fact,” he deliberately elaborated, “I’ll put you in charge the entire time that we are working on the Annawan. Lieutenant Forsythe will be supervising the raft-building gang, and I’ll give young Keith the job of overseeing the work on the ship. Until the job is finished, I would prefer you not to leave the brig at all.”

  And with a guilty, uncomfortable knot in his gut, Wiki realized that George had guessed very accurately what had happened in Annabelle’s stateroom that afternoon, and was coldly furious about it.

  Twenty-seven

  In the captain’s cabin of the Annawan, the atmosphere was convivial. Joel Hammond, as delighted as any other shipmaster whose command was on the verge of foundering and who’d been handed a reprieve, had personally ushered Rochester into the cabin, where the massive furniture was hau
led around to make room for company. Now, they were seated around the table, Midshipman Keith on one side, Rochester on the other, and Mrs. Reed at the foot, while Joel Hammond presided at the head.

  The steward paraded around serving a snack of succulent little salt pork dumplings, along with saucers of molasses for dipping. Hammond had defied expectations in that a Madeira wine was being poured—and such a remarkably fine one that George was glad it hadn’t gone overboard with the grog.

  He leaned back in his chair as he sipped, thoughtfully observing his hostess. If he’d felt any doubts at all about what Wiki had done that afternoon, they had been thoroughly dispelled the instant he’d entered this room. One of the few advantages of the dog’s life of a junior midshipman was that a fellow quickly learned to sum up his shipmates, and sort out the likely lads from the potential mischief makers by studying the way they spoke, acted, and looked—and Annabelle Reed had the same catlike, complacent, slumberous look that Wiki had worn as he’d waded out of the sea. Too, as Rochester had come into the cabin she had smiled brilliantly with her eyes focused beyond him, and when Midshipman Keith had hove into sight instead of the man she expected to see, her face had gone blank, just the way Wiki had looked when Rochester had brutally informed him that he was confined to barracks for the duration.

  Annabelle Reed had covered up quickly by chattering vivaciously about Rio de Janeiro, and what she would do when she got there; evidently the massive furniture that surrounded the table would furnish a house in that city. Joel Hammond, though he cast her a brooding look every now and then, didn’t even pretend to be listening. Midshipman Keith, on the other hand, was hanging on her every word. He was dipping and eating freely, and his wine glass wasn’t neglected, either, but otherwise the silly young salt could scarcely wrest his yearning gaze off their hostess—and watchable she was indeed, George allowed. Despite his innate good taste and the beautiful manners instilled by the grandparents who’d raised him after he was orphaned, he couldn’t help thinking of feather beds and rumpled linen every time those enormous, languorous, lambent eyes slid sideways in his direction.