George winced at the word “pirates,” and so, oddly, did Caleb Hands. Hands looked embarrassed as he shook hands with Simonson and with George.
“I used to, uh, go looking for some goods that might be assigned to me sometimes, as Jack’ll tell ye. But this is no time for the coastal brethren—not here in the Carolinas anyway.”
“Stede Bonnet?” asked George.
“He went before Teach. They got him last September down the coast a short piece. I tell you there’s no room for a rover in these parts any more. The people are very unfriendly.”
“Major Bonnet himself, eh?” said Rackham. “They didn’t hang him?”
“Him and thirty-two others. Out on the mud flats at a place they call White Point. They buried ‘em below the high-water mark. Right in Charles Town itself, mind ye!”
“Aye. Things have certainly changed.”
“It was when I heard about that that I decided not to go on. I thought I’d take my chances waiting here and just eating fish.”
“I can see your point,” Rackham muttered.
“Moody came down from Boston not long ago. But he took one look into that harbor, and he sailed away. Dick Worley came down from New York, he went in, and they banged him. He got himself killed in that fight, which made him luckier’n his men. Twenty-four of them they took, a round two dozen, and they hanged every last one. Out at White Point again. More corpses for that mud. It must stink something fierce there at low tide.”
The little man harrumphed woefully, and spat.
“That’s why maybe I seemed a bit skittish, back a little while ago there. No telling who might be coming along, these days. It’s been right lonesome here sometimes, but it’s better’n kicking air.”
“I can see your point,” Rackham said again.
Hands was a fussy little fellow, very prim in some of his ways. Quite formally he asked George if the John and Elizabeth might be thought to need help “on the account.”
George replied that he had no doubt of it, though of course it was a matter for the council to decide. He himself did not fear an addition to the Jack Rackham forces just now. Also, Hands amused him. The little man’s voice, like the roar of a hon coming out of a mouse’s mouth, was wonderful to hear, his elaborate avoidance of the word “pirate” wonderful to consider. Hands would say “roving” or “cruising” or even, once, “coursing”—a word George had never heard in that connection—but he would never say “pirate” or “piracy.” He would speak of “handling goods on the account,” or “transferring cargos at sea,” but he’d not speak of stealing.
Hands was extremely serious, and strove to be business-like. He asked George about the number of the crew, their quarters, their experience. He even asked to have the articles of comradeship recited to him, something that George, who knew them from memory, having written them, easily did. George did not add that he himself never had sworn to those articles, the ceremony having taken place while he was away from Cayo Jorobado. This had slipped the notice of everybody else; but he remembered it.
Solemnly, nodding, Caleb Hands approved the articles. He consented to go to the sloop. But first, at George’s request, he would show them the spring.
In fact there were two springs. One was conveniently near the beach, but its water, probably as a result of this proximity, proved brackish. The other was several miles inland, and they never would have found it in that pathless land had not the infallible Hands guided them. They marked it in their minds, and on the way back to the beach George was busy with plans for landing and filling the casks.
“ ’Tis a trim vessel you have out there, Captain, from what I saw of her,” Caleb Hands ventured. “Ideal size, I’d think, for . . . well, for patrolling the seas.”
“Yes, she’s good for that,” George said. “Take a look at her lines astern, when we get there. Ah, here we are now!”
He pushed through the last mass of palmetto, and waved grandly toward the bay.
“You see what I mean?” he said.
“What?” said Caleb Hands.
George, who had gestured, now looked along his own arm.
Spritsail Inlet was absolutely empty. There wasn’t a trace of the John and Elizabeth.
“Hm-m,” said George, and took snuff.
As he repocketed the box, flicking a speck from his stock, he might have posed as a model of imperturbability, a man without a care in this world. Instead he reeled.
The numbness of the shock had faded before he finished his brushing, and a succession of fiery emotions tore his breast.
Exultation was first. He was free! He didn’t have to desert the ship; the ship had deserted him.
On the heels of this came stabbing swift emptiness, a feeling of lost hope, desolation. He had hated the John and Elizabeth; yet in its way, if only for a little while, that sloop had been home. And now it was gone—with all the supplies.
At last he knew puzzlement, and, tumbling over this, swamping it, indignation and anger.
Where in Hell did they think they were going? He, George Rounsivel, might not know much about navigation, but by God he did know something about law, and by piratical law or ordinary maritime law or just everywhere-accepted usage, as it were common law, the captain of a vessel dictated that vessel’s movements, none of which could be made without his assent.
Granted that in an emergency an acting captain should use his own best judgment—how could an emergency have risen here?
Anchorages, George had been told at the most awkward times could prove tricky. Mud might shift; the erosion of sandbars, especially near the mouth of a harbor, sometimes resulted in a change of current habits.
Yet Spritsail was renowned as a haven. All mariners averred that its bottom was reliable. It was indeed for this reason rather than its location that the pirates preferred it. Also, Ezra Garde, who had been in and out of Spritsail half a dozen times, with glee had pronounced the place to be, geographically, the same as ever.
Nor was there any threat of a squall. The sky, one huge bruise, though low was not menacing. The wind was damp and disagreeable, but it stood unwaveringly off the land.
There was nothing wrong with the John and Elizabeth’s cable. George himself had examined it that very morning.
“What dye suppose happened to those fools?” he drawled.
He sat on the overturned Moses-boat, and stretched his legs.
If he had ever feared that this disappearance meant a rising of the pro-Rackham element—but he hadn’t—Calico Jack’s behavior now reassured him. The former quartermaster, the short-time king, was in no way flustered. He too, and naturally, made himself comfortable, as did Si Simonson, kicking off his boots, punching a pillow out of his coat, and stretching himself upon the sand. As for the hard-bitten small Hands, he went, humming, about the business of finding firewood, driftwood, as readily and unconcernedly as though sloops in this God forsaken inlet evaporated every afternoon.
“Sighted a topsail and went after it,” Simonson said in casual answer to George’s casual remark.
“Of course,” said George.
Yes! He should have known it! Pirates used sneak tactics, pounce tactics. They leapt, hit, ran. A chase in the open might be spoiled by the coming of night and a shift of course, or by the appearance of a warship, or even a spell of nasty weather. The experienced, practical freebooter preferred to work offshore, operating out of coves, small bays, creeks, inlets like Spritsail. It was for this reason that skippers, save when they neared their destination, or when they were not sure of their bearings, kept away from shore. When coasters did come close, to check their reckoning, it was likely to be at or near some outthrust landmark—Hatteras, Lookout, Fear—which was why those points were well patrolled. But it could happen here as well. And seemingly it had.
That Tom Walker would give instant chase was to be expected. The men would have consented to nothing less. No doubt Tom had seen that there wasn’t time to send a party ashore to seek out the skipper. In addition to the
Moses, John and Elizabeth carried only a longboat, which it could have taken twenty minutes to launch, even in this weather, and which might be needed in the capture.
If the pirates, gazing across that myrtle-blanketed spit of land, could see the top-hamper of a vessel that was outside, then those aboard the oncoming vessel could easily spot the sloop. Tom had done right.
Caleb Hands caught a mullet and a couple of blues with as little effort and in scarcely more time than it would have taken him to scoop up three handfuls of sand; and soon they had a fire going. George ate absently, striving to show bored, forcing himself to keep his gaze from the entrance of the inlet. Not so Hands. Though he was the smallest of the four, or perhaps for that reason, Hands was determined to be the first to see the return of the sloop, and while still munching a fish-head he climbed to the top of a scrub-pine, from whence, after a couple of hours, came his shout.
“Here they are! With a prize!”
George’s mind was in a whirl. His show of nonchalance had become a strain. On the one hand, he was glad that they had broken what seemed a spell of bad luck, so that his own standing as skipper might be maintained at least a mite longer. He was glad too that he had not been obliged to be present when this happened. On the other hand, he hoped that there had been no slaughter.
“Big one?” he asked after a while, daintily wiping his hands.
“No-o-o, she don’t look big. Smaller’n the sloop even. They got her right alongside and I guess they’re shifting cargo. But we’ll know pretty soon anyway. Here comes the longboat into the bay.”
This was in charge of Walker’s mate, Eb Nast, who, like the rowers, was in a state of jubilation. They all talked at once.
The prize itself, it came out, was insignificant—a pink out of Kingston, bound, probably illegitimately, for Boston, carrying a low grade of molasses and not much of it. Nevertheless, trifling though she was in herself, she had broken the streak of luck. What’s more, she had put in at New Providence for more than a week, and several members of her crew, who had already agreed to sign on the John and Elizabeth, had had a look at the ramparts of Fort Nassau and had talked at length with some of the gunners.
“They swear we could smash that place in an afternoon, cap’n sir!”
“Do they?” George was icy. “Doubtless they had a better look than I did.”
“Oh, they must have! They say—”
“We’ll discuss this later,” said George.
His manner was a cold douche on the ardor of the hands, and soon he shifted his ground, becoming milder, more conciliatory. He asked how many of the pink’s crew had agreed to go on the account, and was told five. He asked if they had any other reason to think that the Fort Nassau walls would prove weak, and Eb Nast eagerly replied—yes, the prisoner.
“Prisoner! We don’t want any damned sniveling prisoners!”
“This one is different, cap’n sir. You see it’s—Well, here we are.”
George scrambled up the ladder, cheered by men who had watched the long-boat approach, and immediately and angrily accosted Tom Walker.
“What the Devil’s this about a prisoner?”
“Why yes, cap’n. Here—”
Coming across the waist was Delicia Rogers.
CHAPTER XIV
THE DECK might have been pneumatic, the way she walked. Her chin was high, her eyes bright with scorn. Not for her the cringing of a captive, the wide-eyed horror of a woman left alone among monsters. In a brown camlet gown over a yellow silk petticoat, she swished saucily. Her breast was bare, frilled along the top of the bodice, and the only ornament she wore, saving her rings, was a large emerald hung at the throat by a thin gold chain.
The sight of George did not unsettle her. She’s heard my name here, she remembered it! was his thought. He made a leg, bowing low to cover his fluster.
She raised a quizzing-glass.
“Ah, yes, we have met before. You’re the ruffian who broke into my uncle’s house by the garden window and stole that very sword you’re holding now. La, ’tis a small world!”
There was a snigger, and the men edged in. George wished he had some place to put the sword, that large Spanish cavalry saber. He could hardly swing it authoritatively here. There wasn’t room.
“Madame’s memory is remarkable,” he said.
So, he might have added, was Madame’s voice—at least it was remarkably unlike the one he remembered. In New Providence this girl had been earnest, crisp, nobody’s fool, neat but never officious, and at all times quiet. Now, as though by a trick worked with light, she had been transformed. Not only her voice but also her accent, and her whole demeanor, had changed.
George thought that he knew the reason; as he studied her under lowered lids he became certain of this.
She was afraid. She was all but convulsed with fear as she faced him. Under the rouge, hastily put on, her cheeks had been drained of color. Whenever she didn’t bite it her lower lip wobbled. Yet she had decided, probably in the instant before capture, that bravado was her only resource. She must frown them down, never letting her uncertainty show Once she wavered she was lost.
It took courage, that attitude. It took valor of a high order. George felt like cheering.
Instead he bowed again, whispering to her as his face was averted.
“Do they know who you are?”
“Of course,” she whispered back. “Some of them have seen me scores of times, at the fort, at Government House.”
He gave a grim nod. He had expected that answer. The exuberance of the men told its own tale. Now there was not a doubt in their minds that soon they would take New Providence back; for didn’t they have the governor’s niece as hostage?
On the way back to the John and Elizabeth, seated beside her in the sternsheets, he asked her under his breath, out of a corner of his mouth, how she, a woman alone, had been passenger aboard of a vessel that sailed such dangerous waters.
Her reply was as low, and hurried.
“My aunt was to have been with me, and two armed servants. My uncle wished to get us off the islands because he’d heard that the pirates might storm Nassau. But my aunt became ill at the last minute, after I’d gone aboard, and the skipper wouldn’t wait for her—or for the servants. He was panicky. He’d heard too that the pirates were about to pounce.”
Then, in a louder, more imperious voice:
“Captain—if they call you that—permit me to point out that I am no kid to be nabbed in the streets.”
“True,” he conceded.
On deck of the sloop courageously, if pathetically, she smoothed her petticoat.
“Then let’s put an end to this farce. Your scoundrels have tripped that vessel I was aboard of. But the proposal that I myself should be your prisoner is—why, la, sir, ’tis preposterous!”
George Rounsivel looked around. He was willing to fight, but to fight against such crushing odds would be to defeat his own purpose. The men from the pink, excepting the quintet that had elected to join the John and Elizabeth crew, were a cowed pack, without arms. His own rascals were too excited even to consider any rational argument.
The eyes he saw were avid, hot. The mouths worked. Even stolid Tom Walker, George believed, would not stand by him if he proposed so outrageous a breach of piratical law as the release of Delicia Rogers.
“I fear that I don’t agree,” he blandly replied. “We rovers of the sea, ma’am, pick up such treasures as we can. Ofttimes we don’t put a price on ’em till later, after the peril’s past.”
“Peril! Faith, man, there was no combat at all! They swarmed aboard of us like cockroaches!”
She stamped an unseen foot.
“Captain, let’s have no more of this nonsense. I demand that you return me to my own vessel at once.”
“Ma’am, I will see that you are accommodated here as comfortably as lies within our power.”
“Skipper,” somebody falsettoed, “why couldn’t she bunk in the forecastle?”
There was
a great laugh at this, and Delicia colored, anger for a moment swamping her fear.
George however was solemn. He stepped around her, facing all the men in the waist and on the foredeck. He held up the saber.
“Listen! Lady Luck was with us today for sure!”
“And she wasn’t the only lady either!”
“That’s right, she wasn’t. But you know these women. They stick together. They compare notes. And what’s more, this one behind me happens to be the niece of Governor Rogers.”
He paused as though he had just made an announcement that should startle them; but nobody stirred.
“For that reason, if for no other,” George went on, “she should be handled with gloves.”
“Her uncle didn’t handle John Augur that way! Or Jennings! Or young Dennis Macarty!”
“Need you tell me that? Wasn’t I there?”
There was a mutter of approbation. George’s escape was like a legend in the gang, the members of which were proud of it.
“But this woman didn’t hang us. No, she tried to comfort us. I ought to know. She brought us fruit. She brought us flowers.”
“That helped a hell of a lot when they kicked away that platform!”
“She’s entitled to our respect,” George pursued. “What’s more, she’s goods! Aye, goods and chattels! You know that. Now listen: If we don’t deliver those goods in prime condition d’ye think any bargain we might have made will be respected by the party of the second part? If she’d been banged about, if she’d been dishonored, wouldn’t we lose the best card in our hand?”
He did not wait for an answer but turned to the after-deck ladder. With his saber he pointed to a line traced on the deck in tar.
“More than ever this rule holds: Nobody goes aft of that line for any reason whatever excepting officers and the helmsman. Is that clear?”
There were nods, not all of them amiable. But nobody said anything.
George crooked his right arm to Delicia Rogers.
“If you will do me the honor—”
“Is that customary among pirates too?”
“It might be as well,” he whispered, “not to use that word.”
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