Captain Adam

by Chidsey, Donald Barr, 1902-1981

  Another reason for Adam's popularity was purely fortuitous: the second morning he was on the island he was accosted by a personage into whose sash had been thrust no fewer than three pistols and two daggers, a sign of distinction at Providence. This man was older than most of his fellows, and clearly a personage. On his head was knotted a red silk kerchief.

  "You're from Newport, Cap'n?"

  Adam stopped.

  "Aye," he said.

  "Think I remember you. Used to work for a man named Sedgewick?"

  "Aye. He's laid up now. Paralyzed."

  The pirate kept staring at Adam.

  "You were a heap smaller then. About this high— And Sedgewick's house was right near the public pillory."

  "It's still there. Mr. Sedgewick's house, I mean. So is the pillory, for that matter."

  "And you don't remember me, eh?" Slowly the pirate took the kerchief off his head. "Maybe this'll help you?"

  His hair was scanty and long, and it was pasted hard to his head by sweat; but it wasn't remarkable. What caught Adam's eye were the holes in his ears—not those in the lobes, from which swung gold rings, but those in the upper part of the ear, small, old holes, scarcely more than pinpoints of white skin tissue.

  "Sharpy Boardman!"

  "That's right, lad. It was a long, long while ago, but I'll always remember the drink you brought me that night. It was the sweetest I ever drank. God bless you."

  He held out his hand. There were tears in his eyes.

  "I'll give you a drink now, lad, you come to my hut. It'll be the finest French brandy, but it'll never mean as much as the water you handed me that night fifteen years ago. Come on—meet some of my friends."

  Sharpy had many friends. One of the oldest and richest of the pirates, he was a man of much influence on Providence, and he never tired of telling the story of how the little Long boy had brought him that jack of water when he was nailed to the pillory. "Stood to have the skin whopped half off him, they caught him doin' it. Mates, I tell you that took sand."

  The shack assigned to Adam and Maisie, doubtless as a tribute to the first lady ever to visit this settlement, was, as Providence dwellings went, downright palatial. It had no floor, but the ground it enclosed was strewn with Oriental rugs. Walls and ceiling consisted largely of tarpaulins strung between spars sunk into the earth, but there was an actual, practicable, jalousied door, ripped, doubtless, from some once-gilded galleon. And when they ate it was from silver, and when they sipped wine or rum it was out of costly Venetian glass goblets. Certain of the amenities of civilization might have been lacking at Providence, but of loot there was always plenty.

  As Adam approached it today he saw a man leaving this shack, a very large man who did not look back. Adam frowned. Major Kellsen was unmistakable, even at that distance.

  The major had been much about, from the beginning. With some reason he considered them his personal prisoners; but it was not only this. The man was smitten with Maisie: his infatuation was obvious. And he was jealous of Adam Long.

  Major Kellsen wished to be king of the colony, no less. Providence

  being what it was, a democracy, where each skipper and mate and saiUng master was elected by popular vote at the beginning of each voyage, he sought personal popularity. Like a politician, he moved among the men making himself amiable. He had built up a following. He hoped to increase this.

  The camp as a camp was more or less in a state of permanent anarchy. Easily its most powerful personal member, though he kept out of sight, was one van Bramm, a spiderlike figure, indefatigibly busy, though scarcely moving, a man who never sallied forth, seldom even raised his voice. Van Bramm had small dark reptilian eyes, and his skin, too, cold, shiny, dry, suggested a serpent. He smiled at all times—maybe even in his sleep, if he ever did sleep—a fixed meaningless half-smile that had thorns in it. As he was without warmth or wit, so he was without pity. He was no fool. He'd stop at nothing. If Major Kellsen was summoning forces with the purpose of snatching the leadership from Everard van Bramm—and it looked as if he was—then Kellsen was playing with sudden death. Kellsen himself must have known this.

  A liaison or even the appearance of a liaison with the lovely Lady Maisie would go a long way toward building up Kellsen's prestige. And prestige was almighty important among the pirates.

  Resolved Forbes came out of a neighboring shack. Forbes was always to be depended upon. Jethro Gardner, the bosun, had been left aboard the schooner as a sort of watchman, it being assumed that a one-legged man could not play much of a part in any plot to cut that prize out. Seth Selden, made much of as soon as his calligraphical accomplishments became known, had openly gone "on the account," and had given Adam a paper asserting that he, Adam, was the rightful skipper of the Goodwill to Men, to whom Seth was selling his one-eighth share for (though the price wasn't mentioned in the paper) twenty-five pounds. This was cash, gold, part of the money Horace Treadway had paid for the transportation of his cousin to New York. The reason Seth was willing to let his share go at such an absurdly low price was because he considered the schooner lost to the outside world, community property here on Providence now, where Seth intended to remain. Adam did not agree with this. Adam had plans to escape.

  Carl Peterson and Eb Waters, too, while they had not gone over to the enemy as openly as had Seth, were fascinated by the life here on this Bahaman island, and it was clear that they'd sign on for a piratical jaunt one of these days. Good riddance.

  John Bond was laid up with fever.

  The Rellison boy, dizzied by the sunlight, blinking at the things he saw, was by no means sure of himself; and he couldn't be counted upon.

  Resolved Forbes alone was there, reliable; and Adam never left Maisie

  at the shack without checking first to make sure that Forbes was next door, watching.

  Now Adam nodded toward the departing giant.

  "Been here long?"

  "Not long. I didn't have any orders."

  "Ten minutes, maybe?"

  "About that."

  Adam nodded. He didn't like it; but he did not wish to show his perturbation too publicly. To change the subject he shifted his gaze toward the Goodwill.

  "Still no boom?"

  "No, but it might come in any day now. They've got a shipment of timber expected."

  "Looks like we're going to be here for quite a while yet."

  "Aye."

  Adam went inside. There he paused, had to, until his eyes got used to the darkness.

  Fully a quarter of this shack was taken up by a huge four-poster bed. A massy, carved thing from which all tophangings had long ago been ripped, and the posts of which had been chipped and scarred by knives, it remained an impressive piece. And it was comfortable.

  Adam could not see Maisie at first, but he knew, sensed, that she was on this bed, her accustomed place.

  Her whisper came from right about in the middle of the bed.

  "It's so hot—already. Lock the door, dear."

  He locked the door behind him. He heard her stir.

  "That Major Kellsen's been here. A bore. As soon as he went away I got into something cooler. Come over here, darling. Don't keep standing there."

  "I want to talk to you about him."

  He found the bed, sat on the edge of it. He was seeing things more clearly now.

  "Don't scold me, Adam. It's too hot to quarrel."

  "I don't think he ought to be allowed in when I'm not here. Even if it's only for a few minutes."

  "Adam"—and she looked the other way—"you trust me, don't you?"

  "Of course!"

  "I wouldn't—I wouldn't've—let you do—what you've done—if I didn't think you trusted me. I'm not a whore, Adam."

  "No, no! But this man—"

  She rolled over. She took his hands. Her own hands were warm, dry. She held his against her neck, and he could feel the blood throb and course there.

  "Sh-sh-sh! No quarrel! Adam—"

  "Yes?"

  "Uh
, how was the fencing?"

  "It was all right."

  "You must forget about Jervis Johnston. 1 shouldn't have told you— And it was a long while ago."

  "You know what I'm going to do."

  "You haven't changed your mind about that, Adam?"

  "I don't change my mind."

  She had released his hands. Her breathing was loud. He could see her clearly now. Her hair tumbling every-which-way, she wore a yellow silk wrapper, and though the curves in her body were clear there was again about her, here, something of the girlishness, the long-leggedness he had knovim aboard the Goodwill to Men. It was touching, the sight; and it caught up his breath.

  Now she turned her head again, facing him, and she smiled a little, her eyes almost closed.

  "Let's not talk about that, Adam."

  "All right."

  "It's so hot— And I've been lying here waiting for you. . . ."

  The strips of sunlight that were javelined in between the jalousies crept toward the center of the room, stealthy as thieves, as high noon approached, while the day drowsed.

  From the bay side came the thin high ree-ee-ee of gulls, the closer, more querulous squeal of timbers as various vessels rocked, the rattle of blocks, the rubbing of hawsers, and through it all the lazy monotonous slap-slap of wavelets striking the sand, to hiss up, spreading thin, and slither whisperingly back.

  From the other three sides came curses, drunken snatches of bawdy, the hullabaloo of the marketplace.

  Inside Tarpaulin Hall the chief sound was a rustle of silks, though occasionally when Captain Long stirred, just to prove to himself how exquisitely exhausted he was, the bed creaked.

  "Don't recollect that brown thing," he said sleepily.

  The place might have been a shop. Though much larger than the Goodwill's cabin, it was even more crammed with stuffs, as though these had somehow expanded in the heat; so that wherever you looked there were petticoats, bodices, skirts, chemisettes, stockings, corsets, of muslin, sagathy, satin, drugget, silk, perpetuana, rich brocade. Ribbands serpentined ever)'where; lace lay in piles; and the dressing table and each stool were heaped high with fleecy frivolous furbelows.

  The brown thing he had mentioned was a hunting jacket, small, trig, made of velvet. Maisie wore it with a man's high broad-brimmed beaver, a man's lawn cravat passed through a ring of gold, a box-pleated green twill skirt. She canted a riding crop under her arm. She strutted the floor for the benefit of Adam's eyes alone.

  A warmish outfit? True; but she wore nothing underneath it, not a stitch. And in a moment anyway she had whisked the whole business off and was fumbling for something else, bent over, her back to him.

  She was putting on a sort of fashion show. It was these between-number moments that Adam especially enjoyed, and he didn't pretend not to. He gloated. He suspicioned that Maisie hoped for a renewal of their recent activity; and he wouldn't be surprised, he told himself, if she got it. Tarnation, what a body!

  He dropped an arm over the edge of the bed and picked up the brown velvet jacket.

  Now Maisie was wriggling into something more feminine, something yellow—her favorite color. Her head reappeared, frills and flounces cascading away from it, and she was smiling at him: she upcocked her eyes.

  Shopping was Maisie's only pastime here at Providence, and she delighted in the bargains, dickering, making to go away, returning, all that. She would have spent three-quarters of her time at the marketplace, had Adam permitted it. Not because of the pirates, who stood in awe of her and punctiliously brought down their voices and scrubbed their speech when she approached, but rather because of the camp women, who understandably hated Maisie, he had forbidden her to go out unless accompanied by him. Somewhat scared at first, she acquiesced; but now she chafed under the restraint.

  For a person in bankruptcy she was marvelously well equipped with cash. You could buy anything at Providence; and Lady Maisie, though wont to crow over the prices afterward, didn't care what she spent.

  True, these things were stolen, and more than one of them no doubt had been stained by blood; but Maisie looked wonderful in them all the same.

  "D'ye fancy this, m'lord?"

  She dropped a curtsey, half in mockery, half in order to show off the yellow skirt.

  But he was absorbed now in the brown jacket. Of all the multitude of small sartorial absurdities in the shack, this suddenly had become, to him, significant.

  "Swogged if I remember it," he muttered. "When did you buy it?"

  "And what if I didn't buy it? What if somebody gave it to me?"

  He looked up quickly.

  "Who?"

  "La, I've been obleeged before this to make complaint of your pos-sessiveness, Captain. Please to remember, sir, that we're not truly married." She giggled. "Though I'll grant that you showed wit when you named us man and wife on the spur of the moment."

  She raised her arms and started to slip the dress off over her head. The fact that she wore no underclothing was made dramatically evident, there in the dimness of the shack where her skin shone. She moved her hips, and her shoulders, so that her breasts swung, as she worked the dress off.

  Adam came off the bed with a bound.

  "Who gave you this?"

  She was angry, and it was a hot morning. She was out of the dress now. She held it in front of her, partly covering her nakedness.

  "Ah well, if you must know—rather than have my eardrums burst by such unmannerly shouting—'twas Major Kellsen."

  "That popinjay!"

  " 'Tis a good thing he's far away when you say that. Captain."

  He paid her no mind. Adam's blood was not the sort that is easily agitated by words alone; and this particular taunt he scarcely heard. For he was thoughtful, a whit sad, too. It was clear to him what he would have to do, and he didn't like it. But he could not pass a thing like this by. Kellsen would exploit the gift to the full, telling of it everywhere, trying to get Maisie to wear the thing, alerting others to watch her then, pointing, purring, pleased with himself. And on Providence, where so much depended upon prestige, if the men and even more the women fell to sniggering at you behind your back, then you might expect no favors, no leniency. On Providence, if they weren't afraid of you they despised you. It was not a matter of personal pride with Adam, though he had his pride, too, and he was angry; but it was rather a matter of getting a chance to escape.

  Kellsen had taken an inch. If he wasn't pushed back, and that promptly, and with unmistakable force, he would try to take a mile. Then it would be too late.

  Adam fingered the jacket. It was good velvet, expensive. He grunted. He thrust it behind his shirt, and went outside.

  Resolved Forbes, as faithful as any cuckoo in a cuckoo clock, appeared at his elbow; and Adam, squinting, frowning in the sunlight, told him what he was about to do. The mate rubbered out his lips, shook his head.

  "I don't like it, sir." io6

  "I don't like it either. But it's got to be done."

  "You— You ain't going to get killed now?"

  "I hope not," Adam said soberly.

  Nodding to acquaintances, right and left, as neighborly as all-get-out, Adam Long made his way to the marketplace; and there he came upon One-Eye.

  Now this odiferous obnoxious cantankerous ugly man was disliked, but he was feared. He had standing as Kellsen's familiar. His bluster, his irascible, self-important squint, were not laughed at openly. He would carry any sort of tale, no matter how harmful, to the massive major, who, to do him justice, never failed to back this toady. Like the small fish that pilots the shark, One-Eye was nothing in himself, a great deal in what he represented.

  "Where's your master?"

  "We don't have masters here," said One-Eye. "We are the Brethren of the Coast. No man is the master of us."

  "I can hear you. Parson. Stop singing hymns. Where's Kellsen?"

  Men were gathering. It was easy to raise a crowd here.

  One-Eye thrust his face close to Adam's face. It was a
nasty habit he had. He grasped Adam's shirt.

  "When you speak of Major Kellsen you will please give him his title, understand?"

  "And when you speak to me, Mr. Skunk, you will please keep your hands to yourself," said Adam, and punched him in the mouth. "Understand?"

  It was not a hard blow, scarcely more than a slap, but it brought a swift bubbling of blood to his lips. One-Eye gasped, his eye popping. His hand went for the hilt of his knife.

  Then Adam stepped in and really jlid hit him.

  One-Eye went backward, the croWd quickly parting to give him room to fall. One-Eye lay still.

  Adam sighed.

  "Reckon I'll have to seek the fool out myself," he said, and strolled on.

  He was playacting, sure. He knew perfectly well that there was no need to hunt out Major Kellsen. The whole camp was abuzz by this time, jabbering, spitting, gesticulating, they were telling one another what had happened—and what would happen next. Kellsen was being informed, assuredly. And Kellsen would act. He'd have to.

  They met in the middle of the marketplace—it seemed casually, informally, by chance—and the scene could not have been better set if they'd rehearsed it. Kellsen was all done up in what Bosun Gardner would have called his "damnation regimentals," a huge cherry-red coat with a vast amount of froggery, and trimmed with lace that was positively

  frivolous. He carried a gold-headed walking stick almost as tall as himself. His periwig was stupendous; it must have cost fifty pounds. Adam wondered whom he had stolen it from.

  He came to a graceful halt, his right foot slightly forward, garter ribbons dangling almost to his shoes. He flipped a lace handkerchief negligently at Adam.

  "You sought me?"

  "It's about my wife," said Adam.

  He slightly stressed the word "wife" for the benefit of bystanders. In the four weeks since the taking of the Goodwill to Men he had more than once congratulated himself upon the presence of mind which prompted him to claim marriage to Maisie. He couldn't have conceived a more telling lie. The sacrament hushed the pirates. Though they professed, publicly and noisily, to hate all authority, even the authority of God, of which marriage was so clear an example, they must have had their doubts in the very presence of it. Though they jeered, they were filled with uneasy awe.