Captain Adam

by Chidsey, Donald Barr, 1902-1981

  doorway was deeper and seemed solid, like a wall, or a pile of some black material—sand, loam.

  The instant after the point of his sword had passed the threshold Adam jerked it back. Yet he himself sprang forward, crouching.

  Something hit the floor with a thudding shock, just inside the threshold, about where his hand would have been had he followed the sword as he'd started to. The miss, he calculated, came from the right. So he skittered around that way, plunging into the dark as though into water, and stabbed blindly—once, twice. His steel met something soft. There was a high thin, piglike sound.

  Adam whirled around, still crouching. Something slished past his left shoulder and touched his left elbow with as dainty a sting as a bee might have made. He cut, but hit nothing. There was a gasp—and the door was slammed.

  Previously there had been at least a drizzle of light from the street. Now there was no light whatever.

  Adam didn't move his feet, and he resisted an urge to reach out with both hands. He did not know this hall; but the man who had closed the

  door, the man with the club, did. Adam swished the air—right, left, high, low—with his sword. He had a long reach.

  A door was opened upstairs. There were steps up there. On Adam's right, high, a feeble light appeared.

  "Henry! You get him?"

  From a few feet in front of Adam: "No! 'E got John instead!"

  "Look out, Henry!"

  Adam had lunged instantly at the sound of the second voice, the one near him. As someone upstairs walked a hall holding a candle, the shadows of rail palings flicked erratically across the wall, one by one; but none of the light, yet, reached the entrance hall.

  Adam's point met something, he couldn't tell what. He tried to retrieve the blade. It was stuck.

  There was a screech of either pain or fright, probably fright.

  Adam got the blade loose.

  There was a scrabbly sound on his right, like that of a very large rat. Adam advanced in that direction.

  He stumbled, but did not lose his balance. The man upstairs rounded the head of the staircase, the newel post there, and was holding his candle high. For the first time Adam could see something.

  It was a lower step he had stumbled over. Immediately around him there was nothing. The door was shut, and there were no windows. There was no furniture or arras behind which a person might hide. Adam shared this space with a single man, or perhaps it was no longer a man, merely a corpse. John, the one who had tried to sandbag him, sat in a corner, hunched forward, his head averted, his hands, palms up, limp on either side. There was a great deal of blood.

  The stair before Adam was steep but it was wide, and the railing on his right—there was a wall on the left—was low.

  Halfway up this stair, sidling like a scared crab, was a smallish man, presumably Henry.

  At the head of this stair stood the man with the candle. He was a very large man, even allowing for the tricks of light and for his altitude, allowing that is, for the fact that x'dam looked up at him. He held the candle in his left hand. In his right was a rapier.

  "You beefwit! Here—hold this!"

  Henry had reached the comparative safety of the upper hall. He squirmed around behind the big man. He took the candle.

  "Hold it," said the big man, "while I carve the whoreson."

  There were three things Adam might do now, and he reviewed them in as little time as it takes a flea to jump from here to over there.

  He could run. But he could be overtaken, even supposing that he got outside. Nobody would interfere with a brabble in a London street after

  dark, unless the watch happened along, one chance in fifty. And the big man would doubtless be reinforced.

  He could wait for the big man to start down the stairs, as in fact the man was about to do, and meet him halfway. Here he'd be at a disadvantage.

  Or he could rush to the top of the stairs and meet the man there. This was what he decided to do.

  Four at a time he went up.

  He had reached the third step down before his steel met the other's.

  Adam cut in low, raising his blade as he straightened it into line. This forced the other point high. Not giving the man a chance to disengage, Adam went up another step. Both blades were out of line now, the points high. The hilts clacked together.

  The men were so close that if either had had a dagger he could have finished the fight with his left hand. Neither did.

  Recovered from his surprise, the big man pushed hard, trying to force Adam down the steps. But Adam made the top. He slithered his buttocks around the newel post and sprang backward, disengaging.

  The big man attacked. He was fairly fast and had a long reach, but he was wild. He fought contemptuously—not as one who puts no value on his own life but rather as one who puts none on the skill of his adversary. That is, he fought like this at first.

  Adam's riposte caught him high on the right arm, near the shoulder. It couldn't have hurt much, but the big man stepped back. He was panting.

  "Get that candle over here! How can I see to slice the bastard!"

  This upstairs hall was wide and the ceiling was high. When Henry got closer, timorously placing himself about midway between the men as far off on Adam's left as he could get for the railing, Adam for a wild moment thought of snuffing the candle. But he would not be lunging here under the watchful gaze of the man who called himself Carse. This candle was not held in a golden stick stolen out of a galleon, but in the hand of a highly nervous man who might and probably would move it or even drop it if he saw Adam switch his attack. Besides, what if Adam did put it out? What then? Even if in the dark he slipped past the big man and got downstairs and out, how would that help Lillian Bingham?

  Adam thought of Lil's mother, the shadow that swung across the wall of the Hearth Cricket ordinary while the woman wailed. He attacked.

  He did not go in full-length. He had plenty of time—and indeed the longer he could make this last the better—and he wanted to feel the big man out.

  The big man's defense was weak. It could be that he wasn't accustomed

  to parry, having always been the aggressor. When flustered, he really only had one counter. It would be easy to double-counter.

  Adam nodded, and stepped back. Deliberately he put his blade under his left arm, undid all the buttons of his waistcoat, hiked up his breeches, took the sword again, and fell back into guard position.

  He attacked.

  He made the double-counter neatly enough and hit the big man again on the upper right arm near the shoulder, a much deeper wound this time. But the big man did not give ground. Instead, his blade straight-out, his arm stiff, he attacked.

  Here was Adam's meat and gravy. Carse on Providence had spent many an hour teaching him various ways of disarming a man who attacked in this fashion—because, Carse had said, so many of 'em do, especially when they get excited.

  Adam smiled. He might have been making the moves in time with directions called out by a master. In low; point high; catch the steel far down on your own; cut out and high until your point's in line again; flip it up.

  Obedient as any goshawk to a whistle, the sword leapt from the big man's hand. It turned twice in the air, and fell on the floor at Adam's feet. Adam stepped on it.

  The big man was no fool. He hesitated not an instant, but turned and ran.

  Henry dropped the candle and ran after him.

  There was a door at the end of the hall, a door Adam had not previously hoticed. The two kidnappers went through this, fast.

  Adam got his foot in the doorway and pushed.

  He might have forced it open, but the candle, on the floor, was guttering out. He ran to the candle, and the door was shoved shut and he heard a bolt thrown. He got to the candle barely in time.

  He was about to pick the sword from the floor—not that he wanted it for himself but he didn't care to leave weapons behind him while he explored this house—when a sound from above caused him t
o straighten, his head lifted.

  It could have been the crying of a child, perhaps a small girl.

  Sword in hand, holding the candle high, he went upstairs.

  He found nothing in the hall above but four doors, each locked. He heard the sound again—from a place still higher.

  He went up to the next floor, the top one.

  Here the crying was clearly audible, and it was that of a girl. It came from behind a heavy door that was bolted on the hall side.

  "Is that yoti, Lillian?"

  The sobbing ceased.

  He pushed back the bolt. This could be a trap. He footed the door open, then stepped back, the candle held high.

  What met his gaze was surely one of the strangest sights any man ever beheld.

  A f^ This was a large room: it must have taken up the entire top J^*~J story. Along three sides crumpled figures lay, figures that might have been piles of poked dust except for the faces.

  You have looked into a bird's nest soon after a hatching to see that the little ones are all mouth, their eggshell heads, the scrawniness of their bodies being mere appendages to the overwhelmingly urgent part presented—their bills'? So it was here with the eyes. Adam scarcely saw the pale cheeks, the trembling lips, the hands each like a rickle of sticks, much less at first the leathern thongs, the staples, the pails, all the accumulated filth. He only saw the eyes—eyes that screamed in fear.

  There was a dry rustling. The faces retreated from Adam for as far as they were able, and beat and bobbed against the wall, giant soft moths that, unlike ordinary moths, battered themselves in an effort to get away from the light.

  There was a gibbering such as might have been made by monkeys. No words were distinguishable. This could hardly have been human'speech: it was frantic, whittled thin with fear; and it ceased abruptly when Adam, his heart pounding, stepped into the room.

  Something was thrown around his knees, locking them together. Something batted his thigh.

  "Cuftain Long, it's me! It's Lillian!"

  He knelt by her, and put his arms around her, babbling words of reassurance.

  Lil had been through hours of hysteria, possibly twelve minutes of true time by a clock. Thrust here by one who from her description must have been the man Adam had just disarmed, the big man, she'd had no more than the briefest conceivable glimpse of the room and its occupants. Then the door had been slammed and locked, leaving her in a darkness crowded with sibilant whispers, with soft squeals and scuffling. She had cringed beside the door, as far from those chittery sounds as she could get. An adult might well have gone mad then.

  "I—I'm glad you're here."

  "I'm glad I am, too, my beauteous." 204

  "Where's Father and Mother?"

  "Your father's gone for help. Your mother's baking a special pie for the party we're going to have when you get back."

  He rose, and together they surveyed the prisoners. For these cocoons of squirming rag and skin were no nightmare: they were children. They were not many, or not as many as had at first seemed. Lillian had supposed that there were scores, perhaps hundreds; and even Adam had estimated them at thirty or more. By actual count, now, there were eleven. The oldest might have been fourteen, the youngest about Lil's age, six; though it was difficult to make estimates here, so shriveled were they, so sunken their cheeks, while their eyes watered and blinked, red in the unaccustomed light.

  They pressed against the wall, against the floor, whimpering, curs that had been kicked and expected to be kicked again.

  Lillian moved, if with timid step, toward them. She held out a hand.

  "Don't be afraid," she pleaded, though her voice did quaver. "This is Captain Long. He's from America."

  She couldn't have said anything worse. Oh, the cackling that came! Some of the children hid their faces, seeming to strive to dig a hole in the floor. Some, kneeling, vninging their hands, pleaded piteously not to be taken to the plantations.

  Adam had placed the candle on the floor, and from its light their shadows swooped, bobbing, twisting, suddenly collapsing, to rise again, a grotesquerie of thin heads, bone-thin arms, shoulders that could have been porcupine quills. Those shadows suggested witches making queer invocative contortions.

  "No, no," Adam called. "I'm not going to take you to America. I'm going to take you back to your mothers and fathers."

  They did not believe him. They whimpered.

  "Let's cut 'em loose first," Adam whispered to Lil, who nodded.

  Now these children, weak though they were, feeble from their confinement, all were fettered. At regular intervals along the baseboard of three sides of the room—the door by which Adam had entered bisected the fourth wall—iron staples had been fixed. Each child had a small iron ring on his or her left ankle. Not chains, as in a dungeon, but tough round leathern thongs connected the irons with the staples. Each thong went through one staple and each end of it was fastened to a leg iron, so that when one child moved away from the wall the child at the other end of that thong was pulled closer to the wall. This allowed them a certain amount of liberty if they worked together. Either, for instance, could reach one of the wooden buckets or even the large wooden tub in the center of the room, provided that the other permitted it. But in no circumstances could any of them have reached the door.

  The room was bare, and it looked uncommonly solid. The two windows, which were high, were strongly boarded. Even a man with a crowbar, and with something to stand on, would have required hours to open them. There was a second, much smaller door in the middle of the wall facing Adam—leading out, it would appear, into space, for here must have been the very back of the house—but this was bolted with a bar held in place by a huge padlock. There was no furniture, except the tub and the buckets. It was dry in the room, but cold.

  When Adam started for the nearest child, a girl, she screamed and beat the floor. She must have supposed not that she was about to be killed but that she was about to be beaten. She'd been beaten before, and recently. Not daring to look up, with one hand she stripped off her sleazy dress—she wore no underclothes—and pointed to her back. It looked like raw veal. The welts crisscrossed, some coiling up over the spindly shoulders, others reaching as low as the bum.

  "I won't hurt you— Tell her that, Lil," as though the Bingham child were an interpreter. "I just want to set you loose."

  Done up in his flame-colored coat like this, he did not carry a sheath knife. He had only his sword, an awkward tool for a task like this, since the edge went scarcely one-third of the way down from the point, making it hard for Adam to get leverage without cutting his own hand. He sawed at the thong; while the girl, her eyes squinched shut, bent over, quivering, waiting for the first blow.

  "Look out!"

  Henry had crept into the room. He carried a long, lean, very bright knife. He didn't give fight when Adam turned. He simply ran. But he had the door closed and bolted before Adam could reach it.

  "Now that was a fool's thing to do, to forget that—"

  Louder, forcing a smile, he said: "So you see, now I'm locked in with you. But it's all right. We're all gcing to get out."

  "My father's going to come and save us," said Lil Bingham. "Captain, here's Anne Lamson!"

  "Good," said Adam. "Now let's cut these cords."

  The thongs had been clawed and gnawed, and run back and forth through the staples, in an effort to sever them. It was for this, Adam was told—for they were beginning to talk now, beginning to look up, blinking, and especially since Anne Lamson had introduced Lillian—it was for these attempts to free themselves that they were most often whipped. Sometimes the men didn't even come into the room, the children told Adam. Sometimes they just stood on the threshold and pitched food in, or shoved in a water jug.

  Didn't they ever empty those buckets or the tub? The children shook their heads. None of them had ever known this to happen. 206

  Hacking the bonds away took a long time, and Adam fretted inwardly while he toiled, though he tried t
o keep a cheerful face, talking, encouraging the children to talk, promising them again and again that he wasn't going to drag them off to America.

  What had happened to Hal Bingham? So many things could happen to a man alone in a London street near the river at night.

  Nobody but Hal knew where this house was.

  Now and then Adam would shush the children and stop his sword-sawing and hold up his head and listen. But there was no sound. The children told him that they never heard sounds from the street and seldom from the house itself. More than once, they said, they had tried screaming and yelling in chorus. There never had been any sort of answer. The kidnappers had not objected to these tactics, which argued that the kid-napj>ers were sure of themselves here.

  So Adam worked, sweat rolling down his body, a lump of fear in his breast, but trying to keep up light talk.

  Even after the children had regained confidence it was impossible to learn how long they had been here. They had no way of telling day from night, and apparently their feeding was not regular. Most of the newcomers were so badly scared, or sometimes so bruised and beaten, that they weren't sure what time it was, or even what day.

  Two, Freddy and Phoebe, brother and sister, had an undisputed claim to seniority. They figured that they had been in this room for at least a month. They had been the only children here when Bully Bill was brought in, the one who caused all the trouble. Bully Bill, a small fellow, but fierce, had charged the kidnappers every time the door was opened. It didn't make any diflference how many times he was bashed, he always fought back. And when the leathern thongs and the staples were introduced. Bully Bill again and again tried to cut himself loose, though he knew what the men would do to him. Two other children had been in the room when Bully Bill was given his last beating, and they remembered it as clearly as Phoebe and Freddy did. The men had taken turns, hitting and hitting Bully Bill long after he ceased to move or to make any sound —for at least an hour afterward.