“Wouldn’t she take ’em down for you, skipper?”
“Shut up.” He had noticed Monk Evans. “They hang?” he asked.
“Aye.”
“All of ’em?”
“All except this man here. He’s a lawyer.”
“You mean a real lawyer? Not just a sea lawyer?”
“Aye, that he is, captain.”
Charles Vane put down his mug, making a little hole in the sand with it, and then, the heels of his hairy red hands pressing his knees, he regarded George Rounsivel.
These pirate captains or chiefs were known as “kings.” There was nothing regal about Vane, and surely nothing that suggested a court about the place in which he sat. Yet the man’s very massiveness could impress. A brute, a beast, he was not without cunning, and it was clear that he was used to being obeyed.
Now he hiccupped thoughtfully. He started to pick his nose.
“All right,” he said at last. “We’ll take you. Now you sit right down and draw me up some articles of comradeship. And don’t forget to put in there that the captain’s supreme—even over the quartermaster, and in fact especially over the quartermaster.”
“No,” said George Rounsivel.
That word jolted Vane forward like a blow between the shoulder blades. He gawped, temples throbbing, while his face became so dark as to be almost purple. Somebody sniggered. Vane heaved himself to his feet, fists clenched.
Fatigue lent insolence to George Rounsivel, who knew anyway that boldness would be the best policy here.
I’ll write your God damn’ paper for you,” he added, “but not now. Why, I’m whipped for sleep! I couldn’t hold a pen in my hand!”
“Oh,” said Vane.
“Besides that,” George went on, “I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”
Vane sat down again. He waved his hand.
“Feed him,” he commanded.
The men of Jorobado might be fussy about their personal possessions, such as trinkets, bits of treasured loot, but it was clear that their food was communal. They ate any time, anywhere, and as much as they pleased.
George was handed two calabashes, one for food, one for blackstrap, and these were kept full despite his protests. The blackstrap was rum and chowder beer spiced with nutmeg. The food was better. There was a salmagundi of uncooked herbs mixed with oil, leeks, garlic, and hard-boiled green-turtle eggs; there were, as he’d expected, bananas; there were chunks of cane for chewing, chunks of coconut too, and there was a great deal of tender white meat which George at first mistook for some notably tasty fowl. By the time he learned that he had been eating iguana he was too tired to care.
His early supposition that he had scarcely been noticed proved wrong. Two minutes after his interview with Vane every man in camp knew that George had been captured and sentenced to hang but had escaped, and that he was a lawyer, a real one. These facts enormously interested them, and they plied George with questions.
Silent, sagging, George shook his head. He was filled with loathing of these greasy uncouth scoundrels who jabbered for details about the killing of their own kind, and with the same breath made suggestions for the articles he was to draw up. But he knew that he could not let this contempt show. Pirates, as he had already learned, are a touchy people, ludicrously easy to insult. Outcasts, they were forever in a position of furious defense. So he kept his head averted, wolfing the salad and meat.
At last he got away and made for the hill. This was wooded and might afford some protection in case of a shower, but his real reason for going there was to be alone.
It had been his first thought to flop down anywhere just outside the camp. He soon saw that this wouldn’t be wise. There was no latrine; while some of the pirates performed right where they were, causing the fires to spit and splutter, others, more fastidious, would retire to the edge of the camp at a call of nature. A man sleeping in the darkness there might be wakened most rudely.
So George climbed, dragging his feet.
When he stepped among the trees it was almost as though somebody had whuffed out a lamp. He paused, waiting for his eyes to get used to the darkness. Overhead the tree branches were javelined by the sun’s last rays, but immediately around him it was hard to see anything.
“Looking for a blanket?”
The speaker was seated, almost at George’s feet, as he saw with a start, and was indeed on a blanket. He was a slim slight lad, pale. Smiling, he moved aside.
“Thank you,” said George.
The blanket looked thick, the boy clean, and they were deep enough in the wood to be safe from prowlers George fell full-length.
Sleep did not seize him instantly, as he’d expected Probably the pain accounted for this. His limbs shrieked, the joints too, as though he were being stretched on a rack; his head was all flame.
“You’re the one that came back with Monk Evans,’ the lad said, his treble voice reaching George as though from far away.
George made an effort to be polite.
“I suppose you’re going to ask for some special article too?”
“Yes. I think you ought to write in a provision against prostitutes. You see, I don’t want any competition.”
George’s face was turned away, and he grimaced. “Good God, one of those!” was his thought. But he was too tired to move.
“You don’t know who I am?” the lad pursued. “I’m Anne Bonney.”
Oh, fine! He was so far depraved that he let them call him Anne!
“Why ‘Anne’?” George asked coldly. “That’s a woman’s name.”
The other giggled. George heard a string drawn, a button popped. Then his hand was lifted from his side and placed over something soft and warm.
“And what do you think this is, mister—a mosquito bite?”
He sat up, gasping, snatching his hand away. His eyes told him now what that hand already had reported. Despite the dim light, despite the male clothes, beyond all doubt this was a woman who sat by his side. She laughed softly, and exposed her other breast.
“There are two of them,” she whispered.
“There usually are.”
She reached for the belt that held up her trousers.
“Would you like to see more?”
George groaned, falling back on the blanket.
“Save it, sister,” he advised. “I’m too tired. Besides, I haven’t any money with me.”
He had in his pocket the purse the governor had given him, but it was his experience that the quickest way to get rid of a trollop is to tell her you are cashless. He expected this one to relapse in a huff. Instead she slapped him, hard.
The slaps stung, one on each cheek. Startled, he opened his eyes.
Anne Bonney, girlish, slender, blonde, might have been easy to look at in any light, in any mood too. Now, furious, her eyes flashing, she was lovely. As she leaned over him her mouth worked in rage.
“By God, I’ll teach you to call me a whore!”
“What else was I to think?” he asked bluntly.
With one hand she covered her breasts, buttoning the shirt back into place. With the other she drew a small sheath knife, and she held this before George Rounsivel’s face.
“I’ll slice you so’s no woman will ever look at you again! I’ll—”
Fascinated, George did not hear the step of the man who approached. But the girl did—and she was off like a frightened deer.
The man came quickly, from the direction of the beach, the camp. His mouth was a little open, his eyes darted here and there, and when he saw George Rounsivel he stopped short.
George didn’t stir, pretending to be asleep.
This man was young, strong, well set up, and handsome in a brash, coarse way. For a pirate he was uncommonly trig. A stiff black enameled hat was perched on his head, held there by red ribbons that went under the chin. His trousers and shirt were made of fine calico, striped vertically in red and dark blue. Around his waist was a white silk sash, and into this had been thrust
two silver-hilted pistols. A sheath knife hung at his right hip. In his hand he carried a cudgel.
This man should have swaggered. Instead he paused, irresolute, even a mite frightened. It was plain to George, who watched him through slitted eyes, that he was thinking of a challenge. He decided against this, visibly shaking his head, and ran on.
George waited a little while, though he didn’t stir. He half expected Anne Bonney back, and he was prepared now to resist her. But not even the thought of those flashing blue eyes—and that knife so near to his own eyes—could hold him back from the brink of sleep, which engulfed him with a great soft roar.
CHAPTER V
CHARGED to report on the system of piracy as practiced in Caribbean waters, George Rounsivel was lucky to be given, thus early, a lesson.
His visitor of the previous night, he now learned, was none other than John Rackham, “Calico Jack.” George had heard of this desperado whilst lying in a cell at Fort Nassau.
Calico Jack was Charles Vane’s quartermaster. A quartermaster in a pirate gang was no mere assistant! Vane had a mate, one Robert Deal, a dour middle-aged man. The quartermaster was an officer of almost as much importance as the captain himself. He raised supplies, settled personal squabbles, and oversaw the distribution of the loot. As such he was close to the men and a natural center for any dissidence. A wise pirate king kept his quartermaster on short rein.
In the morning Rackham appeared as he should have done when George first saw him—and would have done, had he not been tortured by jealousy. He had thought himself alone then, and was suffering. Now, his hat gleamed in the sun. The long thin black cudgel hung from his right wrist by means of a leather thong, and now and then he would fan the air with it.
“We don’t want you, is that clear?” (Swish!) “We’re sick and tired of your timidness! We should have gone after that Frencher, but you called us off because you were afraid. You heard what I said—” (Swish!)—“I said ‘afraid’!”
Vane rose, trembling with rage, yet already he was in retreat; he knew he was beaten.
“You can’t call me that!”
“I have, haven’t I?”
“By God then, Jack Rackham, you’ll fight me!”
The quartermaster deliberately turned his back.
“I don’t fight graybeards,” he drawled.
Swaggering, he winked at his doxy. Anne looked much as she had last night, though indisputably a woman now, for her hair fell down over her shoulders: it was wavy, dark gold or light brown in color, depending on the light. Her lips were fixed in a permanent pout. Her eyes were sultry.
This woman had been born to get into trouble, George reflected, and so far from bemoaning her destiny she gloried in it. When she saw George, for instance, though she did not actually smile her eyes lit up noticeably, and she gave him a lingering significant look.
If Calico Jack had chanced to see that look there would have been bloody doings on Cayo Jorobado.
Rackham, pleased with himself, cocky, his thumbs hooked into the top of his sash, the cudgel swinging authoritatively before him like the sporran of a Scottish Highlander, strode back and forth.
“You can have the Agnes and whoever’ll go with you,” he tossed off. “She’s almost fit. You can clear out today.”
“We’ve got to take a vote,” Vane shouted.
“We have taken a vote, Grandpa.” (Swish!) “But if it’ll make you feel any better we’ll do it again. Here—” He drew a line in the sand. “Now, all those that want to refit the John and Elizabeth and go out and get some goods that might be consigned to us . . . let them step over here And any that want to crawl along after Charles Chickenliver Vane, let them stay where they are.”
Twelve men, including Monk Evans and the mate Deal, took the Vane side of the mark. The others, about sixty in number, ranged themselves alongside of Calico Jack, who beamed.
George paused. Anne Bonney touched his elbow.
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
“I don’t rightly know. Haven’t any notion what the spat’s about. I wasn’t here then.”
Whether Rackham overheard him or suddenly remembered him, he looked up sharply, pointing the cudgel, a sceptre now.
“You, lawyer, you’ll stay here anyway. You’re going to draw us up the best God damn’ set of articles in the whole Brotherhood of the Coast. So start looking for ink and paper, right now.”
Until that moment George had been uncertain. His assignment was to track down Charles Vane, who was now about to leave the island. Should he go with Vane? In a larger sense, though, his assignment was to study piratical methods and conditions in this part of the world, thus helping to remove the immediate threat to New Providence. Rackham, then, would be the best leader. Calico Jack not only had youth on his side, he also had the men.
Rackham, however, had given George no choice.
“So that,” he muttered, “is that.”
“I . . . I’m sorry I waved a knife at you last night,” the girl whispered. “But I wouldn’t have slashed you, really.”
“I’ll know better next time.”
They saw that Rackham was eyeing them, and prudently they drifted apart. George turned back once. Rackham still was staring after him.
This camp abounded in shocks. Seeing them as he first had, all besotted—and many were still drunk this morning—George Rounsivel would have assumed that these men would take at least a week to right, refit, and refloat the sloop Agnes. Yet they had it done by sunset. It was patent that there were no privileges where work was concerned. They all joined in. And they knew their ships, as they knew their guns. They might have been ignorant in many other respects, but these things they did know.
The farewell was curt, even savage.
“You’re lucky we let you take the Agnes,” Calico Jack said.
It was an opinion in which Charles Vane undoubtedly concurred.
“Well, I was never personal about these matters,” Rackham went on. “You’re a cowhearted rascal, that’s sure, but you didn’t try to use anything that belonged to me. So you can go. That’s what I wouldn’t ever want to happen,” he continued, speaking very slowly, while his eyes went back and forth in search of the woman he worshipped. “I wouldn’t want anybody to touch something that belongs to me—not ever.”
The reason he had not been able to see Anne Bonney was that she was standing behind George on the outskirts of the crowd. George knew this when he felt her hand slip into his.
“Not ever,” Rackham said again, swishing his cudgel.
Anne leaned close, so that George could feel her breath on his neck.
“They’ll all get drunk tonight. Why don’t we go to that same place again, as soon as the sun sets?”
The sloop Agnes was making for the pass, her rail lined with men who jeered and were jeered at. Obscenities flew Some of the pirates fired their muskets.
“Now d’ye know, that’s a good idea,” George whispered over his shoulder “I’d admire very much to meet you there.”
For he had, at last, a plan.
If these men were for the most part simple, easily moved to excesses of rage or grief, and as easily mollified, Calico Jack was an exception. He was complex. Not only could he read and write, he could even reason. He was a man to be watched.
George learned about Rackham from two sources: indirectly, Anne Bonney; directly, the king himself. And what he learned was disquieting.
Rackham had planned this action with care, biding his time, in constant conference with disaffected members of the gang. The details of the event that had brought about the overturn George Rounsivel did not know—something about a French ship that they had started to chase. In pursuit and in actual combat traditionally the captain of a pirate crew was supreme. In this particular case, though most of the men were eager to go for what looked like a rich prize, no vote was taken. Vane simply had decided against it. It was then that Jack Rackham struck, coming out into the open, insisting upon the general council that wa
s held a few days after their arrival at Jorobado. And Rackham had won, as he knew he would. Charles Vane was vain indeed; he was harsh, grasping, unpleasant, and when it seemed that he was a coward as well, howsoever fleetingly, his doom was sealed.
His successor would not make that same mistake. Jack Rackham believed that he should expect no obedience from a man he couldn’t whip. With pistol, knife, cutlass, or cudgel, even with his fists, Rackham was willing to fight at the drop of a sombrero. Not that he was a truculent character! Quick with a quip, a shoulder-slapper, he loved to sing, was willing to do his share of the work, and—though he was cautious here—he never seemed to refuse a drink. But he was the master. He wanted the men to know that, and know it they did.
Jack Rackham had one weakness, as George had surmised even before the overthrow. In truth it was no secret. Subtle in many respects, in love he was a fool. He would become a different man when he spoke to Anne Bonney or even mentioned her name. Sometimes as the chief was conferring with George about the articles his voice would trail off and a faraway look would come upon his face. That meant that he had glimpsed Anne, who might have been strolling down the beach or brushing her hair. Then it was another Rackham, a man caught up in a dream, fatuous.
She, taking advantage of this, in time had done herself out of friends; for with a cat’s fondness for torture, she strove to flirt with every man she saw—and was snubbed for the reason that they were all afraid of Calico Jack. Thus she was lonesome. She had swung her hips too often, and smiled provocatively too many times.
Jealousy must have hurt Calico Jack like a band of steel squeezing his ribs, making his eyes pop, closing his throat Maddened by the pain, he might do anything.
“Like to kill Andy Thompson, that afternoon on deck,” a pirate told George. “Took four of us to peel him off.”
“Don’t you have enactments against felonious assault?”
“Huh?”
“Well, mayhem. Physiological attack. Smashing somebody.”
“Oh, that? Sure. But it’s not a very strong article, and everybody’s afraid to bring it up against Jack. They might get killed theirselves. Because the next one he did kill”
Captain Crossbones Page 4
