Captain Crossbones

by Donald Barr Chidsey

  George looked around. Even a club might do. A picket from the fence? But they had felt sturdy when he vaulted that fence, and to rip one off would make a noise—an immediate noise, a near one, as distinguished from the mumble of the mob—that might bring soldiers.

  The garden was not large, the space between fence and house at this point being no more than twenty feet. George indeed was lying almost directly beneath a projecting part of the house, a sort of small low Spanish balcony, the railing of which was overgrown by a stout vine. The French windows to this balcony stood wide-open, and the space beyond seemed dark.

  The cries, the jumble of voices, the thud of running feet, grew nearer . . . and nearer . . .

  George climbed the vine to the balcony.

  The window, it developed, was covered by two sets of blinds overlapping where they touched. The slats were tilted upward on the outside. This was why he had not been able to see the light from the ground. He could see it now from the top of the railing, and it disconcerted him. Also, he heard voices. He tried to crawl back. A heel caught in the vine. He fell.

  He landed on his feet, but he was windmilling his arms to catch his balance, and in this way he burst like a hurricane between the two sets of blinds and into the room beyond.

  The blinds clacked back into place behind him, but he didn’t hear this, for he stood transfixed by what he saw.

  “Well, I’ll be God damned,” he muttered.

  The room was high-ceilinged, as are so many rooms in the lands where architects know the need to catch each vagrant breeze. It was square, its floor smooth and well waxed, the ceiling white, the walls cream. Government House, George had been told, was in part an administrative building, and in part the residence of the captain-general. What George had burst into must have belonged to this latter section. Some attempt had been made to make it resemble a chamber in Woodes Rogers’ own Bristol. Only at one end was there an exotic touch—a teakwood chair that had a Spanish colonial look about it, and above that, on the wall, a panoply consisting of a wierdly tinted leather target that must have come from some cannibal island, with two long crossed cavalry sabers above it, and below it a cluster of small curved daggers, all, obviously, souvenirs of the governor’s celebrated trip around the world. The rest of the furniture was domestic, inexorably plain, homey.

  It was the two persons in the room who had caused George Rounsivel to gasp. They were face to face, near a table with candles, and they had been quarreling.

  Delicia Rogers stood very straight. There was nothing on her head, nothing to decorate that tight-fitting dark hair, which indeed needed no decoration. There was a small diamond in each earlobe, but no ornament around her neck. Her arms were bare, the shoulders too, and George, looking at them, wondered why he had never suspected their existence when the rather prissily clad governor’s niece brought flowers to the felons at the fort. They made up a breath-taking ensemble. Below them swept a gown of pink silk with variegated leaflike figures over a blue silk hooped petticoat. The skirt was open, and pinked at the edges. He could not, of course, see her slippers.

  It was her attitude that told the most. She was a bowstring just touched, as taut as that, quivering. The two spots of crimson high on her cheeks were caused not by rouge, and her eyes hurled poniards at her companion.

  Thomas Robinson a little while ago had been much at his ease, as was attested by his plumed hat and cloak, together with his sword and swordbelt, which were folded on a chair at his side. He was not at his ease now. He had stepped back in rage and mortification. On his left jaw, the one toward George, shone a bright red imprint about the size and shape of a woman’s hand.

  George’s urge was to laugh. He stifled this. Yet the setting was undeniably ludicrous, and what had happened was as plain as a pikestaff. The elegant captain of the guard had tried to take advantage of his chief’s absence to seduce the said chief’s relative—and had been most ignominiously repulsed.

  “Forgiveness,” George murmured as he swept into a bow, making a leg, holding that absurd straw hat over his heart as he looked upon the floor, for he knew that Delicia would not care to be grinned at.

  George could not pose as a gallant rescuer. The girl was not in the slightest trouble, and surely would have known what to do in those circumstances even if she had not been able to summon with one scream a dozen servants. But she was embarrassed.

  It was George Rounsivel who stood in peril. He could hardly hope to get back between those jalousies, nor yet past Robinson, without being skewered.

  “Forgiveness.” he said again. “Any intrusion would have been unmannerly, but this one is positively gauche.”

  Robinson whooped. He slapped his hip.

  “Gut me, he’s fallen right into my lap!”

  “Not so, captain,” cried George, and ran to the other end of the room.

  He jumped on the teakwood chair, reached into the panoply, wrenched out one of the sabers, and hopped back to the floor again.

  Robinson had drawn. His point was firm, his guard high.

  Delicia, not from prudence but in astonishment, had stepped back a little. Her hands went to her breast.

  “Defend yourself, sir!”

  George attacked.

  It was ridiculous, preposterous. The blade he wielded was very long and heavy—it was meant to be swung from the back of a horse—and against even a poor fencer he could not have prevailed. But what did he have to lose? He slashed the air wildly, advancing.

  It is said that the best swordsman in the world would not fear to meet the second-best swordsman, but he might well be afraid to meet the twentieth-best. He wouldn’t know what that fellow might do. Thomas Robinson assuredly was not afraid, but he required a chance to think. So he sprang back, his guard still high. His left foot jarred the table on which the candle-branch rested. The branch wobbled, the lighted candle in it swaying. Delicia screamed. Robinson broke his guard position to put out his left hand and steady the table. And George Rounsivel, laughing, ran out of the room.

  “Another time, captain,” he called.

  From the doorway he threw a kiss to Delicia.

  He slammed the door behind him.

  He found himself in a large and well-lighted entry hall. On his right was a big door that might have been the main outside one. Before him was a smaller door that could have led to offices, while on his left was a flight of stairs. There was nobody in sight.

  The stairs were the way they would least expect him to take. He went up, three at a time.

  He found a window, opened it, put the saber between his teeth, wriggled over the sill, clung by his fingertips for a breath, praying that he wouldn’t twist an ankle—and dropped.

  A minute later he was making himself part of one of the wild little groups that cluttered the town, while he swung the saber fiercely.

  “Where is that rat?” he screamed. “I’ll kill him!”

  Ten minutes later he was leaving town.

  CHAPTER VII

  IT IS A MATTER to marvel at, what the human body can endure. Noon was near, the next morning, before George Rounsivel let himself collapse to the bottom of the boat, willing at last to die.

  He had found Boar’s Bay easily enough—but not Hay. There still had been some moonlight then, though it was wishy-washy stuff, and he could see that no periagua floated there. He had been about to whistle when he heard a footstep. A man had passed, not twelve feet away, sidling wraithlike through a column of moonlight. This man had been roughly dressed, and in his hand he held a huge horse pistol. The pistol had been cocked.

  A moment later George had heard a sibilant whisper somewhere near at hand, and then a click, a small sharp metallic sound that might have been the cocking of another firearm.

  He believed, though he could not be sure, that the man he had glimpsed was the same who had been seated beside Monk Evans in the rumshop early that evening. From this he could deduce what had happened. Evans had given up the hunt in Nassau, guessing that George had somehow slippe
d out of town and would make for Boar’s Bay. So he had summoned a few companions and made for the south shore. Knowing the way better than George did, and not being obliged to avoid farmhouses, they had reached the place first.

  George had made his way out of the thicket for a mile or so along the shore in an easterly direction. He had come upon nobody, nor any sort of habitation, when he stumbled over the dugout.

  It was very small and looked rotten. It contained only half a calabash, presumably for bailing purposes, and a barrel stave. An uninviting vehicle, but George had not hesitated. Monk Evans and his friends at any moment might be pushing east and west along the shore, if they had not already started. So he had shoved off. It had not even occurred to him to cast about for fresh water.

  At first he had been too eager to get out of gunshot to feel dismay at the sight of the fading stars. Indeed he had even been pleased when the moon, completely smogged by clouds, at last had gone out: this would make it harder to see him from the beach.

  The stave was a clumsy paddle, and the blisters on his palms, scarcely healed in the week since he had made this trip with the irascible Evans, swelled again, and broke, stinging him.

  Coming across with John Hay the previous night, he had studied the stars, and he believed that he could find his way back alone. After all, Cayo Jorobado was scarcely more than over the horizon from the eastern tip of New Providence.

  What he had not taken into account was an absence of stars. The ones he had marked in memory, the ones high in the sky, had been missing from the beginning, and those near the horizon soon blinked out as well, leaving nothing but a low ugly dirt-gray, once the moon was gone. George could not even see any light behind him, on New Providence.

  He was lost.

  Nevertheless, and even at the risk of moving in a circle, he had kept the dugout in motion. It had been his hope that by taking one stroke on the right side, then one on the left, putting the same force into each, he would keep moving in the same general direction.

  At that, he had done well enough until the rain started.

  It could not be said simply to have rained, as it might have done in any proper place, such as Philadelphia. Rather the surface of the sea was lashed, now this way, now that, as an ambidextrous bosun’s mate who is laying lashes on some poor devil’s back crosses his cuts by switching the cat from one hand to the other. There was the same satanic deliberation about these rains. They were jumpy, jerky, and remorseless. Sometimes they’d stop altogether. Sometimes George could hear a storm coming, whether from right or left, from before or behind, announcing itself by a tinny clatter; but other showers appeared to come from directly above, and were upon him, engulfing him, before he could catch up his breath.

  He had started to shiver, and kept up the paddling only in a half-hearted way to keep warm.

  The dugout did not leak, but a few minutes of such rain half-filled the small round-bottomed boat. It wouldn’t have sunk, of course, being wooden; but unless he kept it empty he’d have a hard time propelling it. As far as his own person was concerned, he was as wet as he could be. He was more concerned about his thirst, which was furious, scratching him (and it was a measure of his light-headedness that he never realized, at the time, that he was bailing out quarts and gallons of good rain water). He would hold his face up, his mouth open, and catch a drop now and then, though it had seemed as though the air was solid with water. He held out the calabash too, and caught a little in this, but it was brackish stuff from the bailing, and made him retch.

  He did not know when the dawn came. His ears rang with the clang of rain that had some time ago ceased, when groggily he became aware that it was day.

  There wasn’t a thing in sight, not so much as a sea gull.

  He bailed again, clearing the boat. He paddled for a while.

  The sun came up. From the beginning it was hot, savage. It seared him. His clothes started to steam. He did not dare to take any of those clothes off. Fortunately he still had his raffia hat.

  It was then that he began to have the fainting spells. There was nothing dramatic about them. He simply found himself, from time to time, with his head between his knees, or sprawled halfway across the thwarts. The spells sapped his strength; he was babbling like a man in delirium; his thirst was horrid.

  It was when he had pulled himself out of one such swoon and couldn’t find the paddle that he gave up. The thing must have fallen overside. He might have been unconscious for half an hour, an hour. With eyes that throbbed from the reflection of the sun on the sea, he scanned the water all around his boat. There was no sign of the paddle.

  He quit. He slumped over backward, not caring about anything any more. He tilted the raffia hat over his face.

  Not until that hat was removed did he know that anybody had been near at hand. If there had been any shout he hadn’t heard it.

  ‘Oh . . .” he said, blinking.

  He was gazing into the small sardonic face of John Hay.

  “Trying to kill yourself?”

  “I . . . I guess I was.”

  Hay, no stranger to these parts, had a flask of water, and he passed this to George before George could ask for it. Later he helped George to get into the periagua. But the saber flabbergasted him.

  “What’s this?”

  “It belongs to the governor,” George mumbled. “I . . . I borrowed it.”

  Hay seemed unsure of himself, which was not like him. He studied George, his brow corrugated with perplexity, and twice he looked back toward New Providence, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. George was too dazed to pay him much heed.

  George took another long drink of water, and then he curled up on the bottom of the periagua, in the shade of the sail.

  The distance between the two islands must have been greater than he had calculated, or else he had gotten far off his course. At any rate, it was at the very edge of sunset when at last they nosed into the small bay on the north side of Cayo Jorobado.

  The camp was strangely quiet. Few were preparing dinner, as ordinarily would be the case at this hour.

  They stared at John Hay and his charge. Hay seemed uneasy.

  “Where’s Jack?”

  “Here he comes now. He’s been talking to Anne Bonney.”

  “With a razor strop,” somebody added.

  Calico Jack Rackham did not have his usual swagger as he approached. His eyes were fire, his mouth a steel-toothed trap.

  “I think I have an interesting report, captain,” George said.

  Rackham ignored this, glaring at Hay.

  “I told you to leave this man on Providence!”

  “I did, Jack. But he found some foreigner’s tub and started back this way on his lonesome. I spotted him this morning. I couldn’t let him stay that way. So . . . I brought him back.”

  Rackham nodded abruptly.

  “I’m glad you did,” he said.

  He turned to George Rounsivel.

  “I told Hay to leave you there because I didn’t like the way you was looking at Anne.”

  George wetted his lips, but said nothing.

  Rackham drew a breath that might have been flame, scorching his lungs. When he moved at all it was with the stiffness of a marionette.

  “But I’m glad they brought you back anyway, because I’ve been talking to Anne, just now, and she tells me that you and her—”

  His voice was rising, a screech. His face was so dark a red as to be almost black, and huge blue-purple veins pounded at his temples.

  “That you and her—that the two of you—”

  Then he sprang.

  He was swinging a cudgel as he came, and George jumped back, raising his arms.

  Somebody seized Jack Rackham, as somebody at the same time seized George, from behind.

  Rackham raved, gibbering. He struggled. George even thought that he saw a fleck of foam at each corner of the man’s mouth.

  “Trice him up! Tie him to the muzzle of that cannon over there!”

  Men
began to jostle and hustle George toward the cannon, a brass twelve-pounder, one of those taken from the sloop when she was about to be careened. Others got rope.

  “What’re you going to do with him, Jack?”

  “I’m going to blow him in half, that’s what Tm going to dot I’m going to blow the middle right out of him!”

  They were afraid of Rackham. Even while he struggled in their arms, as he cursed George, they were afraid of him.

  What startled George, was the realization that they were also afraid of him.

  Yet they went about their preparations.

  With a long brass conical-ended ladle they slid a pile of powder into the cannon, and, turning the ladle, left it there. They tamped this home with ram and rag. But they didn’t shot it. They stood George so that the cold metal mouth was pressed against his back. They tied his ankles separately to the wheels, and his arms they extended behind him, fastening the wrists to lines that they passed through the trunnions, afterward making them fast beneath the barrel. But all the while they seemed frightened. It was as though they feared that George, rather than the cannon, might explode.

  They even—under their breaths—begged his pardon.

  He offered no response. The sensational nature of the act made it hard, just at first, to take it seriously; but once he was fastened, and saw that they meant it—or that Rackham did anyway—his mouth went dry, his throat got tight, and he decided against speaking until he was sure that his voice would be firm.

  In addition, he was puzzled. If they wished to kill him, why didn’t they hack him to pieces? He had heard of this business of blowing a man to bits. The Spaniards had introduced it into the Little Indies, though they used it sparingly, and largely against escaped slaves and deserters, or else captured spies, seldom against one of their own kind. Not a ball—there was no ball—but the outburst of burning gases, smashing against a man’s soft middle parts, would, quite literally, tear him in half. There was no torture connected with it. Death itself would be instantaneous. Yet so spectacular was the setting, so loud the deed itself, and so gruesome the results, that the device was esteemed by certain governors as one to be used for its effect not upon the prisoner but upon the onlookers.