“You could escape, couldn’t you? Come here—” He limped to the other side of the room, the other window—“Suppose I went below—to the jakes, say? Couldn’t such a man as yourself, left alone here, climb down the side of this tower? A lot of cement’s been knocked out from between the stones. That makes toeholds and handholds. An active body should be able to reach the wall, and run along it a little way to where it’s been knocked down. After that he’d only have to slide on his bum through a heap of rubble. Oh, some sentry might shoot! But the sentries ain’t very observant just before dawn, and they’re damnably bad shots anyway.”
“But still—how could I learn all about Charles Vane?”
“By becoming a pirate. You were caught up in a pirate band when you didn’t want to be, you say, so why should it be hard when you do? Truth is, you’d be a hero to them . . . now.”
“These are strange words from a royal governor.”
“This is a strange place.”
George stared again at Nassau Bay, so serene, assured. He saw sand, palm trees. The magic prevailed, but there was an uneasiness about it now.
“And if I was to bring you a good report—”
“Then I’d recommend your pardon.”
“You’d trust me?”
Woodes Rogers looked at him for a long while.
“Yes,” he said at last, “I would.”
“And if I refuse?”
“If you refuse,” said Woodes Rogers, “I’ll hang you.”
“Even though you believe my story, as I think you do?”
“I would infallibly hang you.”
Bemused, George leaned out of the window and looked down the side of the tower. He saw the cracks. He believed that the thing was possible, though speed would be needed, for already the east was pale.
“That’s against the law, of course.”
“It is,” the governor agreed. “So many things are against the law, out here. But there would be nobody to punish for having permitted such an escape—nobody but the governor himself, which is unthinkable.”
“Yes.” George grinned a little. “All right,” he said.
“Good!”
They shook hands.
“You’ll need money. Here’s a purse. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I shall go down to the necessary-room.”
“Yes, your Excellency. But . . . one thing more. What if I should fail? What if I should be caught and hailed before your court?”
The governor nodded toward the gallows.
“That,” he replied.
“I see,” said George Rounsivel. “Thank you, sir.”
CHAPTER III
MOONLIGHT can be deceptive. Those cracks proved not nearly as deep as they had seemed, and the wall of the pineapple-shaped tower turned out to be much steeper than it had showed from above.
Given time, George was sure he’d make it, but already the wall whitened, and soon he would be visible for miles.
He moved as quickly as he dared, making every split-second count. Dreading dizziness, he would not let himself look down. If he fell he would land upon the ramparts, which this tower abutted. That was his immediate aim anyway. If then he toppled over to the ground—which was rock-strewn—he might crack his skull. Even if he managed to stay on the wall he could fear a turned ankle. They’d hang him all the same. One leg less to kick with, was his thought.
A sentry passed below, stumbling as though in weariness. George froze. The sentry did not look up.
Precious though the moments were, George made himself stay motionless a little longer against the fear that the sentry would return. The way he had gone, to George’s right, was a place on the wall where Spanish cannons had opened a breach. This breach was backed from the inside by spike-topped logs, a palisade intended only to be temporary, a stopgap. It was here that, as Governor Rogers had said, an agile man need only to slide to the safety of the ground outside, for the rubble had not yet been cleared away. A few planks had been thrown across this gap. George, breathless above, had not heard the sentry cross those planks; he paused. After a while, however, he started down again.
His hands were wet with sweat, making his grip unsure. He had taken off his shoes and left them in the governor’s chamber, just below the window, for he believed that he could climb down better in his stockinged feet. But the stone was spikey and cut his toes, which began to bleed. The pain was not great, but he was in an agony of suspense lest a foot slip.
He calculated that he was about two-thirds of the way down to the ramparts when the alarm was sounded.
It came from an unexpected quarter. George’s fear had been centered below. It was from above that he was challenged.
He heard the door of the governor’s room opened, and heard a step. It was not the walk of Woodes Rogers, for there was no limp in it.
The window was agape, and George’s shoes just below the sill could be seen by anybody in that room.
George looked up just as Thomas Robinson leaned out.
Robinson’s face was shadowed, but there could be no mistaking that periwig or the magnificent spread of rose-point at the throat.
The two faces were twelve or thirteen feet apart, George’s being bathed in moonlight.
“Stab me, the dog’s . . . The guard! Ho, the guard!”
Robinson’s head and shoulders vanished.
George drew a deep breath . . . and let go.
It was not far. He landed lightly, never in danger of tumbling backward over the rampart. He turned to the right and sped away.
Almost immediately he came upon the board bridge. At the far end stood a sentry, a matchlock in his hands. Startled, this man stared at George. The match lighted his face a little from underneath.
George dived for the space below the planks.
It was dark there. He took the word of Woodes Rogers that rubble was heaped high. For all he could see, he might have been pitching head-first into a chasm.
But here was rubble. It buffeted him. It caused him to cough. But it didn’t do much about breaking his fall. He felt that he was plummeting. His chest got tight.
Choking, gasping, spitting, he started to run.
He heard a gun, then another, and a little later he heard a third.
That a prisoner who had escaped from the persecutor of pirates would find welcome anywhere in Nassau went without saying. But George’s presence at a time like this might start a riot. The cry would go up: “Let’s take out the rest!” No more than a spark was needed.
He surmised that this fear of an explosion was the reason for the failure to chase him. Woodes Rogers would not risk sending search parties into Nassau. Indeed, he probably couldn’t have made them go there.
If the fort was taken Delicia Rogers would be taken too, and it did not call for much imagination to know what would happen to her. She was there instead of at Government House, he remembered, because of him.
So he altered his course, and made for the hills.
Doors were being opened, heads thrust forth, questions shouted. Nassau was no teeming metropolis. Many of the houses were mere shacks of thatch and braziletto. Others were tents. The only ones with floors and proper roofs were the rumshops, of which however there were many. The rumshops had been operating all night. Hundreds, womanless anyway, had stayed up to get in shape for the ceremony down by the beach. It isn’t every morning that you can see nine men strangled.
Figures loomed in the doorways, blurred by dawn. Men shouted at George, who shook his head and ran on. The truth is, he was at the end of his tether. At any moment he’d collapse. It was his wish to be far from everything—alone.
Soon he was behind the town, climbing, and nobody paid attention to him, their eyes being drawn, naturally, toward the fort.
George came to the corner of a sugar field. A less inviting spot for a nap it would have been hard to conceive, for the ground was bumpy and damp, the canes close together. George didn’t care. He plunged in, fought his way for a few yards, then fell, sobbi
ng; a great empty roaring blackness, like that of the outer spaces, engulfed him.
The sound that George heard was not a keening, though it was high, as it was thin. A sea gull? He sat up, his head throbbing.
No, it was not a sea gull. It was not that . . . that . . querulous.
On hands and knees, groggy, George inched toward the sound.
The cane was thick. It was almost like poking his head out through a doorway when at last he came within sight of the man seated on the stone. This man was short, dumpy, a pudding. His lips protruded. His jowls waddled. His eyes were gooseberries. Across his lap lay a piece of canvas, and on this rested a cutlass. His left hand held the hilt, and with a stone in his right hand rhythmically he honed the edge. His movements were exact—yet he gazed toward the bay.
“Trouble?” asked George.
The man didn’t jump, he only turned his head; he put his hone away very carefully. The cutlass he simply held in his right hand.
“There’s trouble down there, yes,” he said, pointing.
Pain skittering through him like small bolts of lightning, George got to his feet, and straightened, and looked back toward Nassau.
He knew instantly that several hours had passed. The sun was well above the horizon, shining full and fierce.
The show was over. People already were leaving. He could see them drifting away, small and buglike from this distance.
The water was a blue not known elsewhere in this world. No catspaws ruffled it. The fronds of the palms were limp, like the black flag. There was not a wisp of breeze. The bodies of the men, too, hung motionless; they did not seem real.
“He can’t do that to us.” The pursy man, with a grunt, got to his feet. “I said he wouldn’t dare to, but he did. So I’m going away. What about you, stranger?”
“I . . . I’m going away too.”
The short fat man came around before George, and stood there looking up at him. He rubbered out his lips, twirking a mouth that, incongruously, was a Cupid’s bow. But the eyes were ice.
“Well, he did do it!”
“Yes,” said George.
He was enthralled by the sight of the crowd moving away. Gulls wheeled low over those bodies.
“But he did do it. And so I guess I’ll go and look for some goods that maybe are assigned to me.”
George chafed his temples.
“You mean,” he asked, “that you’re going on the account?”
“There’s other ways of putting it.”
“Whom?”
“Eh? Well, damn me, stranger, I don’t know you from Adam.”
“Vane?”
“Um-m. Charlie Vane has always been square in his dealing. Leastways as far as I’ve had anything to do with him.”
“And where do you find him now? How do you get there?”
The little fat man was glaring at him, but George still looked at the bodies.
It had happened. There had been no riot, no assault. Woodes Rogers ruled here, and his niece, that girl with the small dark head, still lived.
A great victory had been won, without huzzas.
Yet the threat remained. Nassau was a powder keg to which anybody might apply a match. Those ragged men down there, who, having looked their fill, were slowly moving away from the fort; they were sullen, unconvinced, quiet but not yet cowed.
“I’m not sure I like your face, stranger. But I’ve got a periagua over on the far shore that’s not big but it’s strong.”
“Vane?”
“Yes. Charles Vane. I know him well.”
George sighed, and sat down for a while.
“You know about this business?” the man asked suddenly.
“Enough.”
“Well, come along then. Look—” He gestured imperiously. “That’s what we’ll get if we wait, mister.”
“Yes.”
The cutlass glistered in the sunlight. Past it, the way it pointed, those bodies never would move again. John Augur . . . Will Cunningham . . . laughing Dennis Macarty . . .
“So’re you coming?”
“Yes,” said George Rounsivel. “Yes, I’m coming.”
CHAPTER IV
CAYO JOROBADO—or, as the English had Englished it, Hunchback Key—might have been built by sea robbers. It stood alone. All of its beaches had a gentle slope, ideal for careening. In addition, on the north side there was a small bay, the pass to which was narrow, and probably, George Rounsivel reflected as he paddled through it, too shoal for a warship yet deep enough to permit the passage of a sloop. Pirates, understandably, favored shallow-draft vessels.
The island, lush, would have wood and water, probably also plantains and coconuts, and the bay would furnish fish. Upthrust at the center, it even provided its own lookout tower in the form of the knob of shards that had given it its name. On this mound, or hump, starfished in all directions, had been mounted half a dozen brass cannons. In the midst of these, on a wooden platform, a glass across his knees, sat a sentinel who could see for many miles south in the direction of Cuba, west toward Andros Island, east toward Eleuthera, and to the north the channels that led on one side to the open Atlantic, on the other to the Florida Passage.
In a failing light the cannons gleamed like bosses on some great shield. Blue-purple shadows slipped out across the bay. Beyond a half-circle of sand the dark banana fronds, nasturtiumed at the edges where sunset smeared them, moved with a lazy languor like great tired birds that fuss themselves to rest. Despite the human beings, here was a scene calculated to stir the soul of any artist.
George Rounsivel was not an artist, and he was so tired that he could hardly hold up his head. He didn’t care how lovely the place was. All he cared about was sleep.
The plump man was named Monk Evans. For all his flabby flesh he was hard. For all the red round mouth and gooseberry eyes he was mean, suspicious. He seemed to have taken an actual dislike to George, whom he placed in the bow of the periagua, a tippy narrow craft. Evans himself did little paddling, but he did guide the boat with an uncanny skill, having no sort of navigating instrument. He must have been one of those men who could find their way among the islands unstumblingly, moving not by instinct so much as by sure familiarity, as a man might walk about among the articles of furniture in his own pitch-dark bedroom. Evans was a dirty-mouthed little man, who cursed George each time George paused to rest on his paddle, and threatened him with that cutlass; but George was so tired that he couldn’t care, and ignored the fat man now and then to slump forward on the thwarts for a short stunned sleep.
These cat naps, if they could be called that, might have done more harm than good. For the sun was terrible through all that long day, and it seemed to hit him the hardest when he did not stir. The blistered hands, and the ache of shoulder and back muscles, together with the agony of cramped legs—for he scarcely dared to stir for fear of upsetting their small frail craft—these he might have endured. But he feared that he was about to succumb to the sun. He giggled, light-headed. What remained of his shirt helped somewhat to protect his shoulders and even a part of his neck, but his head, having no hat or wig, at first began to itch, and then to sting, as though literally on fire. The dizziness was as bad as the pain itself, so that George swayed where he sat.
It was Evans who saved him by passing forward a flimsy raffia hat not unlike the one he himself wore, albeit even dirtier. Much of the damage had been done before Evans produced this garment, but George, under it, was able to survive.
George was never to forget that trip, a paddle through hell, his first prolonged exposure to the sun of the Caribbees.
They were not challenged when they beached the canoe. At this spot George would have collapsed, but Monk Evans seized him by the arm and marched him to the center of the camp.
“Got to report. They’d only wake you up anyway.”
“Yes.”
It made sense. Even in such a sloppy place it was unthinkable that two strangers could be accepted at sunset without being called upon to give
an account of themselves. Only half awake, George lurched along.
The camp churned. There showed no sort of plan to it. Fires were being lighted, but these were as irregularly spaced as the men who tended them. Most of those men were drunk; it seemed to be an accustomed condition. There were no fights, true, and there was a certain amount of singing; but for the most part the camp at Jorobado, if raucous, was not gay. Neither was it solid. There was not about it even the air of semipermanence that Nassau could show. Even the cooking arrangements were primitive, temporary. Indeed the one splash of human ingenuity in this out-of-the-way place was provided by the sloop that they’d hauled up on the beach for careening. She was a slim craft named Agnes. Her masts had been drawn, her deck and hold stripped of everything movable. In this condition, and by means of a series of windlasses anchored deep in the sand, she had been tipped to her side, where she looked singularly helpless, like a fish out of water, one that has ceased to flop and simply lies there with gaping mouth and pop-out eyes. The exposed side of her, the larboard side, already had been scraped, and men even now were stuffing the seams with a mixture of sulphur, tallow, and tar, the tangy smell of which mingled with the more humdrum odors in the air of Jorobado—rum, rotting fish heads, molasses, urine, sweat.
“I’d climb, I’d fight,
“To pray all night,
“To be my manhood back-o!”
In the middle of this, seated on a stump, in his fist a mug of bumboo, was Charles Vane, a course giant, drably dressed, without jewels. The features of his face were bulbous, bloated, except for the small sunken vulterine eyes, bloodshot now.
“Where’s Rackham?” he asked, and belched.
‘Out looking for Anne. He wants to be sure she’s in her own hammock when it gets dark.”
Vane belched again, then sampled the bumboo and made a face.
“I hope he don’t find her with her breeches down,” he said, “or we’ll have another murder in this camp.”
Captain Crossbones Page 3
