Captain Crossbones

by Donald Barr Chidsey

  “The men are all chained!”

  “Aye, but they’re desperate. I’ll call out the guard.”

  He did this, and he summoned the armorer as well, and for a few minutes he made a deal of bustle. He even went into the cell—with the armorer and two others.

  “To what am I indebted for this service?” asked George Rounsivel as they knocked the chain off his ankle-ring.

  “Show you when we get outside,” muttered Corporal Pugh.

  There was no need to extend this information. Rounsivel saw the girl the instant he stepped through the doorway.

  “Oh,” he said softly. He went to her, and made a small stiff bow. “You pleaded for me after all? Thanks. You’ve been kind.”

  “Sir, not kind, only human. I saw you in court, and heard you.”

  “I shall remember it, whether or not your uncle relents. I’ll know at least that somebody spoke up.”

  She hung her head—not at all in shame but shaking it a bit, as though irked to find herself at a loss for words.

  “Master Rounsivel, my . . . my uncle is an extraordinary man.”

  Here was an understatement. Woodes Rogers stood alone. A mariner in Rounsivel’s position might have said: “I am about to meet the finest seaman alive.” A merchant: “Here’s the fellow who on an investment of less than £14,000 came home with loot of more than £800,000, the most profitable privateering trip in history.” A patriot: “The Spaniards fear him more than anybody since Drake.” He of literary tastes could be awed by the prospect of meeting the author of that classic: A Cruising Voyage Round the World.

  George Rounsivel’s reaction was different. He wasn’t thinking of past glories. He was about to meet, not an author, a navigator, a maker of money, but the captain-general of the royal plantations of the Bahamas. He was not asking himself. What kind of man is this? He was asking. Will this man let me off?

  “I don’t know what he’ll say to you, Master Rounsivel. I think he might ask you something.”

  “Ask . . . me?”

  She nodded, mute for the moment.

  Surely there was nothing sleek about this young woman, Tonight, with the worriment that was upon her, and her earnestness, she showed rather tousled. But her small smooth head was adorably shaped for caresses, so that, seeing it, you were tempted to try to pick it up, like a separate thing, a warm, pulsating thing, and fondle it, the way the aged Chinese fondle their jade fingering-pieces.

  Standing there a few feet from her in the fitful light, George Rounsivel had all he could do to keep from reaching out, with tender fingers, for the sides of that head. Pugh and the other soldiers, of course, had their hangers out, and they would have cut him down if he took a step toward her.

  She, on her part, could hardly be harboring a wish to fondle him, he reflected grimly. Smudged, ashen, hollow-eyed, his wigless pate covered by no more than a fuzz, while the stench of the cell was upon him, he was no figure of romance.

  “You must realize that the governor is in . . . well, in a position of great peril, Master Rounsivel.”

  “For that matter, so am I.”

  “Yes, but in your case it is but your own life—”

  “The only one I happen to have.”

  “—while in the case of my uncle it’s his career. It might mean his life as well . . . and the lives of all who are dear to him.”

  “Meaning yourself? You shouldn’t be abroad on a night like this.”

  They had been whispering, as though in church, but he said this last aloud, Corporal Pugh nodded a meaningful agreement.

  George stared down at a small shapely head, and he was all one marvel inside. A short while ago she had seemed so crisp and sure of herself, and now, though her shoulders didn’t sag, she had about her an air of helplessness. She was extremely feminine.

  “Ask me?” he repeated, dropping his voice again. “Ma’am, forgive me, but until now I had supposed that the purpose of this interview was to get me a chance to ask him for something?”

  He did not, properly, mean a pardon. Only the king could grant that. What he really meant—as he the lawyer knew—was a commutation of sentence pending royal decision on an application for pardon. In other words, Woodes Rogers might have recommended that this one prisoner be freed, keeping him from the gallows until word came back from London. Such recommendations almost always were acted upon favorably. But this would have been difficult to explain to the small beauty who stood before him.

  Now she raised her head. There were tears in her eyes.

  “Master Rounsivel, my uncle is not made of putty. I know that he loves me, but even for me he wouldn’t have consented to receive you if he did not have something else in mind.”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure that I’d tell you if I did, but I don’t anyway. But whatever it is, I hope you’ll consider it. And as you consider it I hope you’ll think of his position.”

  “I am not likely to forget it, ma’am. Now . . . where do I go?”

  “This way, sir,” said a soldier.

  Delicia Rogers for the first time put out a hand.

  “Good luck.”

  He did not touch the hand, only bowed over it.

  “Thanks,” he said again, and he turned and went upstairs, a soldier before him, a soldier behind.

  One floor above the level of the court they paused. There was a door, but no light slid from around it. A light did glow, faintly, indirectly—for the stair curved—above.

  “Yours,” said one of the soldiers, and they clumped away.

  George Rounsivel fetched a deep breath.

  He went upstairs.

  There was a narrow door, light beneath it. He knocked.

  “Come in,” said a voice.

  He opened the door and went in.

  CHAPTER II

  THE ROOM was large, the ceiling high. The windows to right and left were real windows, not musket-slits. Floor and walls were bare. On a table was a branch of candles, and by the side of this an unpowdered wig and a sword-and-sword-belt.

  Behind the table, asprawl in an X-chair, was Woodes Rogers.

  The governor was alone. Since he received a felon this implied either high courage, not to say foolhardiness, or else a naiveté not likely to be found in the man who had held Guayaquil for ransom and captured the Acapulco treasure galleon. He lounged. His coat was open, the waistcoat unbuttoned, and it was patent that he carried no pistol. The sword he had tossed upon the table was not even near his hand. It was no seaman’s cutlass but long and thin, a “court” sword.

  Bristling with defensiveness, George gave a bow.

  “Ave, Caesar! Moriturus saluto!”

  “There’s no call to be caustic,” said Woodes Rogers. “Sit down.”

  A large man, he had a high, curiously effeminate voice. He seemed indeed to speak with difficulty, as though the words hurt his mouth. George remembered that this man had had a good part of his upper jaw carried away by a Spanish ball.

  George glanced at the indicated stool, and shook his head. In the first place, he was nervous. In the second place, the thing had the look of a penitent’s chair in some puritan church, or the sort of stool you’d find in the prisoner’s dock in court, and George wished to avoid all hint of guilt.

  “I’ll not crawl before you,” he declared.

  “I didn’t ask you to crawl. I asked you to sit down.”

  Still George stood. He was angry.

  “I can’t tell your Excellency more than I told the court, for that was the truth,” he blurted. “I was a passenger in the brig Barkus out of Philadelphia bound for Jamaica, but I was to be put off here. Somewhere south of Hatteras we were beset by as mangy a pack of rats as ever prowled around a garbage dump—my so-called ‘associates’ downstairs. They stripped us of everything, as they stripped the brig itself. But when they learned that I was a lawyer they insisted that I go with them. And when I say they insisted I mean they pointed pistols at me. So of course I went.”


  “Of course.”

  George looked sharply at him. Was this meant to be ironic? The captain-general, however, waved for him to go on.

  “The Barkus had no extra canvas or line left then, so she put back for Philadelphia. They took everything, those scavengers. Everything! Deck fastenings, belaying pins, lanterns, even the skipper’s small square of rug from his cabin.

  “The skipper wouldn’t risk coming down here in that condition, right in the middle of the hurricane season. And those damned pirates, your excellency, treated me like a pig in a sty—”

  Here Governor Rogers held up a hand. Though amazed and seemingly somewhat amused by George’s presumption in breaking into speech before he’d been granted leave, Rogers had listened to the first part with a wry smile; now he called a halt.

  “That will do. A vice admiralty court has heard you and has found you guilty, and there’s enough for me.”

  “Then why in the name of the Devil are you having me up here?”

  “I am not doing it in the name of the Devil, my impious friend. I’m doing it in the name of self-defense. I need help.”

  “Eh?”

  ‘Your sentence stands. There is nothing I can do about it. But there are a few facts that I’d have you know—”

  “Damn any facts you’d have me know! You’re cat-and-mousing, and I won’t stand it!”

  Then he did a very foolish thing. Augur, Cunningham, Lewis, and the others had thought of George Rounsivel as a man without emotion. They were mistaken. He had seethed inside. And tonight, the unexpected summons after those hours of waiting, the talk with Delicia Rogers, the abrupt dismissal of the plea he had forced himself to start—these were too much for him. Something snapped. He sprang.

  To snatch the sword and lug it out was the work of an instant.

  Had the governor tried to cover himself it might have been his last living movement. But the governor only smiled.

  “Captain Robinson,” he called.

  The door was flung open. George whirled around.

  Thomas Robinson was no ordinary member of that tatterdemalion company of foot the governor had brought from Bristol. He may have come along for adventure or simply to escape his creditors Whatever the reason, he was young and elegant. His shirt was silk, his manner silken. His wig hung almost to his waist, a notably narrow one. He wore blue velvet garters just below the knees, caught up at the side with gold buckles. The heels of his shoes were scarlet. Yet though he was a dandy it was evident at once that he was no coward. He smiled. He drew.

  “Stand aside,” cried George, shifting toward him, meaning to spring past him to the door.

  For answer Robinson swept into a long exquisite lunge. George’s parry, a left counter, was instinctive; it was barely in time.

  Robinson, who had recovered with the speed of a cobra, attacked again.

  Again George, though he did manage to parry, by reason of the other’s phenomenal speed could not get in a riposte. Choking with humiliation, he crouched low and began to move forward, his point going in small tight circles.

  Robinson still was smiling, though not so much.

  “That will do,” called the governor. He had not stirred, but his voice cut the air like a whip. “Captain Robinson, retire, please. Rounsivel, put my blade back where you found it.”

  He was obeyed. Eyeing one another warily, the swordsmen stepped back, each lowering his guard. Then Robinson gave a creditable bow, and sheathed, and departed.

  “He’s no fool,” panted George Rounsivel.

  “That’s more than I can say of you. Don’t you realize, man, that with one shout I could have had this place thronging with guards?”

  Miserably, “Yes.”

  Rogers made for the window on the shore side, moving with a limp, for his left heel had been shot away in another Pacific encounter. Despite this, he was lithe, and though thin certainly strong. George, a runner, a swimmer, a fencer, could appreciate this. Woodes Rogers had been well assembled, and was all of one piece, brain and organs, muscles and nerve-ends working exquisitely together. Though mild in his manner, he was possessed of a tremendous impatience, a power that it cost him all his strength to control. When he crossed a room he resented the strides necessary, the pieces of furniture to be circumvented; he wished to be there, instantaneously.

  “Lookee, Rounsivel. You can see it from here.”

  Fascinated, George went to the window.

  His first sight of the tropics will stun any man. The magic is quick to strike. The polychromatic unreality of the scene refuses to vanish when the eyes are blinked. The breath is caught up, never to be wholly released again, no matter how long the onlooker lives in those parts.

  George Rounsivel was seven weeks out of Philadelphia, but much of this time had been spent at sea. The pounce of the pirates under Augur had come almost as a relief after that monotony. They had, however, cooped George in a bilge-fragrant hold, where they kept him while they tried to decide what it was they wanted him to write—they never did make up their minds.

  Then they were surprised at Exuma by an armed sloop from New Providence, and captured, every one. George’s surge of hope was soon squashed. The leader of this patrol, the redoubtable Ben Hornigold, was not one to trust a pirate or anything even remotely resembling a pirate, possibly because he himself had for so long been on the account. Dazzled by the unaccustomed sunlight, hardly able to see anything—not that there was much to see at Exuma anyway—George had been hustled from one vessel to another, from one hell to a second, equally portholeless, and if possible even more vile. Nor had he been granted more than a glimpse of Nassau. Fearing that the sight of pirates being led through the streets in chains might raise a riot, the canny Hornigold had sneaked back under cover of darkness. Still protesting his innocence, George in the dead of night had been dumped ashore and hauled up to the fort without being given a chance to make note of his surroundings. Since then, except for a few hours in the court room, where the windows were blocked by morbid spectators, he had lain in a cell whose only outside opening was a grill far above his reach.

  Thus it was that after a month in these fabled isles he was being vouchsafed his first look at them.

  And he gasped.

  The moon was scounched low against an horizon outlined with cabbage palms and Spanish bayonet, and its light lay bland upon the bay. Wavelets were susurrant along the beach, which gleamed like molten gold, while arched above it, now gawky, now incredibly graceful, the coconut trees bobbed and flirted, their fronds atwinkle in the moonlight—pink, deep blue, orange, red, yellow, and most of all a giddy bright green. The boats at anchor did not rock, so tranquil was the water.

  “No, not out that way,” cried Woodes Rogers. “There!”

  George dropped his gaze—and saw the gallows. It looked incalculably strong, and it was tall. Nine ropes hung from it.

  “Those men deserve to hang, Rounsivel, and hang they shall. But how long d’ye think the townsmen back there are going to stay honest? They’ll watch this execution a few hours from now, and they’ll be impressed—for a little while. Then they’ll begin to mutter that I only got some small fry. And they’ll be right! It isn’t the John Augurs and Will Cunninghams I want. It’s the leaders. But . . . what can I get them with? You’ve seen the soldiers I brought. I’m organizing several companies of militia, but they’d desert to a man if some popular pirate sent in word that he wanted recruits.”

  “The Navy?”

  “I yield to no man in my admiration of the British Navy, sir. But I tell you the Navy don’t want to stamp out piracy in these waters. Lookee, here’s a map—”

  He hobbled to the table, George following him.

  “Here’s Panama. Hispaniola. Jamaica. And here we are. Any seaman will tell you how the trade winds blow in this part of the world. Vessels sailing home from Jamaica have to come near us here. They might use the Mona Passage to the east or hug Florida to the west, but either way they come close to this island. Right?”

 
“I see.”

  “Now if the pirates have this place to themselves, the way they did before, then the merchants in Jamaica have to ship their stuff by convoy—with a warship.”

  “But I don’t understand why the Navy—”

  “Do you see any frigates out there in the bay, Rounsivel? No. The Navy keeps one stationed back in your Philadelphia, and they keep three at Kingston. But they never even drop in here to say hello. Why? Why, because the R.N. captains are being paid by the Jamaica merchants to guard their vessels in convoy. That’s the truth! They get as high as twenty per cent of the value of the combined cargoes. They’re waxing rich!”

  “Why hasn’t London been notified of this?”

  “London has been. But by the time somebody in Whitehall gets around doing anything about it we might be all dead here. Why, I can’t even get an answer from London!”

  “I see,” said George Rounsivel. “But what I don’t see,” he added, “is why you are telling me all this?”

  Woodes Rogers appeared not to have heard.

  “It’s the leaders I must lay hands on. Not the rank and file. Barrow’s loose, and so is Martel. Teach and Bonnet are in the Carolinas, but they’ll be back here if they hear that the place is wide-open. England’s gone to Madagascar, good riddance. Hornigold has stayed on, and Cockran, but I think they’ll hold fast; they made their pile before I came. But . . . Vane? I’ve got to find him. I’ve got to get a man to go after Charles Vane and learn everything about him—where he is, where he careens, where he gets his supplies, everything.”

  “And how can your excellency find such a man?”

  “I believe that I have found him.”

  “Eh?”

  “I regarded you in court. My niece has spoken for you, and I have faith in her judgment. Just now I saw you fight—”

  “He was very fast,” George muttered.

  “To my knowledge he has killed four men on the so-called field of honor. He’s rated as one of the finest swordsmen in Christiandom.”

  “I see. But . . . what’s all this to do with me?”

  “Only that, as I said, perhaps I have found my man.”

  “I’m honored,” George remarked dryly. “But I am also puzzled.” He pointed to the gallows. “Has your Excellency forgotten that within an hour or so I shall be dangling? A dead man can’t catch Charles Vane.”