Why should Jack Rackham go to such lengths? At first, clearly, he had chanced to see the cannon, which shone bright in a westering sun, and with a wild rage upon him had screamed for the most violent death immediately imaginable. It was different now. His fury had turned cold; the lips no longer were working; the face which had been thunder-black became the color of old ashes. He was blind no longer, but had a purpose. What was it? George, not seeming to be interested in what went on around him, as they bound him to the twelve-pounder, yet from the corners of his eyes watched Calico Jack.
The king recovered his cudgel, and the feel of it, the swish of it through the air, seemed to settle his resolve. Whether or not he consciously knew this, there was something symbolic about that whippy black stick. It represented power. It epitomized him, the dark, the brooding, unpredictable chief.
“All right,” he said. “Now where’s your passing-box?”
The gunner was a bulky moon-faced man named Walker, a man who never smiled. George knew him. They had played draughts together one night after George’s return from the fatal glade, and had sat up late, drinking.
Tom Walker was the only man—unless Woodes Rogers did—who believed that George had been forced aboard a pirate vessel. Walker however did not appear to find this any cause for spleen. He took it that everything was for the worst in this worst of all possible worlds, and he had long since passed, if ever he had passed through, the need for tears. A lumbrous fellow, Tom yet was curiously good company—when you could get him to talk. There was something about his very largeness, and his imperturbability, that comforted a soul. He had been a blacksmith, unmarried, the support of an invalid father in a small town north of Portsmouth. On a visit to that seaport one day he had made the mistake of falling into talk, over a few drinks, with some seamen. When a press gang accosted them, grabbing the seamen, Tom had made another mistake: after protesting in vain that he had never set foot on any ship and wouldn’t know a stays’l from a whipstaff, when they started to drag him away he had fought. He remembered little of what happened for two or three days after that and he never saw the seamen again—or the members of the press gang.
He had spent three years aboard of a third-rate named Charon. He was never permitted to go ashore, and never paid, it being feared that with silver in his fist he might bribe his way to freedom.
The Navy had not used Tom Walker as a blacksmith. There were forges on the first- and second-rates, but not on the third- and fourth-rates. The naval blacksmiths ashore were mainly civilians, and it would never do to allow Tom to go ashore. So he became a gunner’s mate, and later a gunner.
He was a very good gunner—thorough, precise, if a trifle slow. It was in his nature to do whatever he did well. For example, he played an excellent game of draughts.
No swimmer, Tom Walker had not found a chance to desert until the Charon was hauled up for scraping at Port Royal, Jamica. After that, piracy was the only thing open to him—unless he wished to skulk in the hills, starting at every sound, living a beast’s life. He couldn’t get back home (he never did learn what had happened to his father) on a merchantman. They were all escorted by Navy vessels, and inevitably, with a war coming on, checked in the Channel for deserters. Tom couldn’t afford that. Mere hanging he might have risked; but he had seen what the Navy did with yanked-back deserters; he had no wish to expire slowly, after hours, perhaps even days, of savage slashing. No. There were lower forms of life than piracy, he had decided, and so he joined up with Vane.
The twelve-pounder was Tom’s gun, and he would not permit another man to fire it. But he did not like what he had been ordered to do, so he took an inconscionable while doing it.
There was no laying or aiming. The target was right there, unmissable. Nor did the situation call for special precautions against a flare-back: George’s body, plus the wadding, would offer even less resistance than an iron ball.
“Gunner, do your duty!”
Tom Walker fetched out his linstock and strung a new wick through it, paring it with his knife. He struck the sharp end into the sand, changing the spot several times. He took a brand from one of the fires, dropped it as though he had burned his fingers, and took up another, and dropped that. At last he got the match, a piece of tow, lighted. He blew on it—and blew it out, and had to light it again.
All of this George Rounsivel couldn’t see, but he could guess it from the sounds he heard, also from the expressions of such men as remained within the fine of his vision on right and left—for an obvious reason nobody was standing directly before him. There was something strained about those faces. The men knew and largely liked Tom Walker, and it could be that now they sensed a spark of revolt in him
Rackham at least showed in no way alarmed. George looked squarely at him, meaning to demand a fight. But George forebore. For Rackham was smiling.
It was not a pleasant smile. It was small and tight, and had thorns in it.
Swaggering again, fists on hips, the cudgel swinging from its thong, Jack Rackham came over to the mouth of the cannon.
Everything was still. Even Walker must have ceased whatever it was he had been doing. Nobody moved his feet or cleared his throat. It seemed as though nobody breathed.
“You were asking for mercy?” Rackham drawled.
The sun some time since had plummeted into the sea. The stars were tumbling out. The moon had not yet risen. The camp was lit only by the jumpy red flames of cooking-fires.
George shook his head.
“Not mercy, only justice,” he answered. “But what’s the use of asking that of a man who is afraid to fight?”
“Pimp!”
Despite the poor light, George saw the cudgel start up, and he moved his head. The blow might have been meant for the side of his jaw, which it could have broken; but it flicked past his face, no more than grazing his lips, which started to bleed.
There was a quick snatched-away hiss from the crowd, an angry hornetlike sound. Rackham, knowing that he had gone too far, stepped back. But the smile still was fixed upon his face.
“Maybe you would like to stay here a while? Until sunrise?” Then, without moving his head: “Anne!”
It was here that George surmised Jack Rackham’s intent. The chief would expose his, George’s, humiliation. Gloating, he would let his doxy look upon it. He would even force her to do so. At the moment triumphant, Rackham still was not sure of himself with Anne Bonney. She might harbor a fond thought or two for the memory of George Rounsivel. He wished her to see George—for the last time—as a suppliant. That would be the ideal end. If George would but break down, whimper, weep, plead for mercy, it would be wonderful, a sight Anne could never forget. And if not now, then perhaps later. The night would be long. Many a man who puts up a brave show in the face of death at first, will weaken after a few dark uncomfortable hours alone.
She came. Stooping to get through the door of the tarpaulin-and-thatch hut that was known in camp as the Palace, she looked as though she would have been hunched over anyway: she hardly straightened, outside. Her head was bowed, chin on chest. Her hair, silken, tawny in the firelight, fell all around her head. Her shoulders sagged.
“Come here,” called Calico Jack Rackham.
She moved toward him like a somnambulist. Gone was the slut of yesterday, the flirt. When at last, trembling, she stood before Jack Rackham, she suggested nothing so much as a dog that expects to be kicked—and hasn’t the spunk to run away.
He scarcely looked at her, though the others, all the others, gawping, saw the tip-ends of welts at the back of her neck, and the great ungainly bruises that blackened her wrists.
“Bring me a drink of rum!”
She turned, and all but scurried away.
George licked the blood at his lips. It tasted salty.
Anne returned, nobody meanwhile having moved, and handed up a shell of rum to her master. Then Anne gratefully crept back into her Palace.
“Put the match out, but keep it handy,” Rackham said. �
�And pull a cover over that priming, in case of rain.”
“Ain’t you going to let him loose even for a little while, Jack?”
“No.”
He drained the shell, but he did not swallow the rum, instead swirling it in his mouth for a moment, as he made a grimace. Then he spat it all out into George Rounsivel’s face.
It stung George’s eyes and burned like fire on his cut lips.
“Keep him here,” commanded Calico Jack. “And call me whenever he changes his mind.”
And he turned and went back into the Palace.
With a shrug of weary graciousness, as though doing the world a favor, slowly the moon rose. The bay was strewn with sequins.
George Rounsivel remembered the saw about a drowning man having his life flash through his mind in an instant. Who invented that? He at least was having trouble in recollecting events of his boyhood and youth in Philadelphia; of his mother and father, newly landed from the west of England, Devonshire folk, whom he had scarcely known; of Uncle Paterson, dead now, who had brought him up; and London, where he’d studied. Since he was so soon to die he took it to be his duty to remember those persons and places; but he couldn’t. Two much more vivid sensual memories crowded all the others out—one of sight, one of smell.
They were not really of his past at all, being too recent.
He remembered the way the earth smelled behind that oleander bush—damp, clean, deep, as he lay panting, pressing a grateful cheek against it. This might have been silly, or addled, but he couldn’t help that. The smell was sharper in his nostrils right now than the acrid smell of smoke, frying fish and rum.
Also he remembered how Delicia Rogers had looked, in pink silk over a blue hooped petticoat, as she stood, furious, in the light of that single candle. This was romantic, knightly, an attitude suited to Galahad or Bayard, but not to George Rounsivel. He hadn’t the time for chivalry and such, but should be devoting himself to thoughts of how to live a little longer.
Nonetheless those were the things he thought of—the damp earth around the oleander at night and the superb proud figure that the governor’s niece had made—for all of an hour, perhaps longer.
Then he began to speak.
For some time, despite his reverie, he had been conscious of faintly stirring figures all around him. No pirates roistered, as they ordinarily would have done; they huddled in small groups, whispering. Now and then one would pass, on his way between fires, but giving George a wide berth. Yet one did proffer him a half-calabash of rum, which he refused, asking for water; the man got water. Another, furtively, hastily, clucking his tongue, with a wetted handkerchief wiped the blood and spittle from George’s face. Most amazing of all, a man George did not remember ever having seen before came directly to him and asked outright if he couldn’t help George to relieve himself. George thanked him gravely, accepting the offer. The man untrussed George’s breeches and stood by patiently during the process, afterward carefully trussing the breeches up again. Then he left without another word.
This incident touched George Rounsivel. He wondered: Do you always find a friend, somehow, where you least expect one?
These things for some time, however, did not coax his thoughts far from the memory of Delicia and the earth around the oleander.
He shook his head, reminding himself again that he had an obligation to struggle.
Not struggle in the ordinary sense. That would have been wasted. Even if he could break loose—he wasn’t tightly fastened—how could he get away from Cayo Jorobado?
He sensed that the pirates were troubled. The ethics of the action bothered them. The code was being violated, the very articles George himself had framed. Two brethren of the coast who had a private quarrel customarily settled it in a private manner, like gentlemen. Jack Rackham was not doing that. He was ordering a cold-blooded execution for an offense that had nothing to do with the band as a whole.
It was only in part a sense of fair play in these depraved men: it was also a realization that any such act could form a precedent they might live to regret.
George had heard the gasp that went up when Rackham struck him with the cudgel, and the even louder gasp when Rackham spat into his face. Each of those events, he believed, had helped him.
Now it was time for him to help himself. If he waited until dawn it might be too late.
“Where’s Tom Walker?” he asked suddenly.
Utter silence greeted the question.
They squatted, most of them, each in the middle of his own shadow, for the moon by this time was almost directly above, and they might have been men smitten by some magical spell, paralyzed. Food was stopped half way to mouths; jaws hung open; George even saw one man who had been about to toss a piece of wood onto a fire stiffen to a statue, his hand not more than a few inches from the flame.
But there was no verbal answer.
“Bring him here, please,” George went on.
After a long while while somebody quavered: “Mister, we can’t do that.”
The “mister” might have been significant, for the breathren of the coast hated all manner of title.
George nodded sadly.
“No, I suppose you can’t,” he replied with a mildness that struck them. “But . . . will you do this: Will you tell Tom that I don’t blame him for what he’s going to do, so long as he has to do it? I don’t hold it against him. Will you tell him that, please?”
There was a mumble of acquiesence. George had scored.
“And tell him if things had been different I might yet have got to where I could beat him in a game of draughts now and then.”
After that he was silent, hanging his head as though in thought.
Somebody coughed, apologetically. Somebody else cleared his throat. And from the middle of the bay came a resounding splash as a fish jumped.
“A pity,” George muttered at last, as though to himself. “Anywhere else, anywhere in the world, I’d be given a right to fight . . .”
He waited a long while, but nobody spoke.
But they edged closer to him, sidling like sand crabs, fascinated. And after a while he started again to speak, in a low voice, bitter, as though to a single friend, a confidant.
He had defended felons in court. He had never thought to be defending himself before such a court as this, a jury of ragged outlaws.
He pointed out that he had committed no crime according to the articles of comradeship, the only ones they acknowledged. He asked if they were prepared to do murder on a man simply in order to balm another man’s vanity. He reminded them that power corrupts, and warned them that if they allowed their leader to ride high like this their own lives—their loot as well—would no longer be safe.
“Look at me,” he commanded. “Did I do a damned thing that any one of you wouldn’t have done if he got the chance? Jack Rackham says I diddled his whore. And what if I did? Was I the first? Or the tenth? D’ye suppose I raped her? Hell, I didn’t even have to say please!”
They liked it, shuffling closer. He had most of the camp within his hearing now. And still there issued no sign from the Palace.
Grimly, looking down, George called upon the shades of Demosthenes and Cicero to stand by him. It is an eerie thing to plead for your own life.
“If Rackham thinks he’s been affronted, why doesn’t he stand up and fight, like anybody else? Are you going to allow him to go on leading you, if all he wants you for is to do his dirty work? What kind of men do you call yourselves?”
He used no tricks, didn’t look up, didn’t raise his voice, and could not have made a gesture had he wished to do so, being fastened. But he was telling them what each had told himself, if secretly; and that was the strongest talk of all. He was their concentered conscience, speaking like an oracle.
“Now there’s something more I want to say—”
He was about to picture their future under a tyrant like Rackham, to tell them how they would be crushed, each right, so dearly won, snatched from them; he wa
s about to assert—when the flap of the Palace was thrown back.
“That will do!”
Jack Rackham should have spoken sooner. Perhaps he knew this as he strode toward the center of the camp.
“We’ve had enough,” he cried brusquely. “Stand back, everybody. We’ll get this thing over with right now. Walker, fire that gun.”
There was a pause, during which nobody stirred. Then Tom Walker’s voice came out of the shadows, clear and harsh:
“No.”
“What!”
“He’s right, Jack,” somebody said.
It was as though a dam had broken.
“You’ve got to fight, Jack. Just like anybody else.”
“We’re going to let him loose.”
“You and him can have it out, face to face.”
The pirate king whirled his cudgel above his head, but it appeared to have lost some of its power.
“What’s this—a mutiny?”
But they were in command, all of them, none hanging back, and they went about the business of untying George Rounsivel, who stood impassive, knowing when to keep his mouth shut.
Calico Jack swallowed, trembling with the intensity of his effort to hold his temper. But he was no fool. He nodded.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll be delighted to kill him personally. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that in the first place. Fetch out the cutlasses.”
“Not now, Jack. This man’s got to get some sleep first.”
An arm beneath him, Tom Walker started to help George toward his tent.
“You better get some yourself,” he called over a shoulder. “Because this is going to be a real fight, this fight.”
CHAPTER VIII
ONE OF THE prime purposes of Caribbean piracy, George had learned, was the avoidance of a fight. Personally pugnacious, when they worked together these outlaws preferred to gain all without any struggle. You tried to overwhelm an enemy by sheer force of fear, as you closed with him. A boarding party was a risk, a last resort; you never knew how much resistance desperate men might put up.
Captain Crossbones Page 8
