“Could have, but why?” Hunter replied. “I mean, the ship’s abandoned, a derelict. If you wanted the guns gone, why not just sink the whole bloody bark and be done with it?”
“Cap’n!” called the voice of Mr. Conway from up on the quarterdeck. “Ye need to attend here!”
“What is it, Mr. Conway?”
“Sorry, sir. ’Fraid ye need t’ see this for yerself!”
“Blood and blast,” snapped my uncle. “Now it’s mysteries we’re having. As if anything could be worse than this floating tomb!”
Up we went, me hurrying along behind. Mr. Conway moved aside and we saw what he had summoned us to see. For the second time since boarding the Elizabeth Bingham we all stood speechless.
The captain of the derelict bark lay on the desk. He had been slashed with a sword and sprawled there on his back, dead and past hope. A pistol rested near his outflung right hand, showing that he had died trying to defend himself and his vessel. The man lay with his head slightly propped against the bulkhead. And hanging from a cord around his neck was a sheet of stiff parchment on which someone had carefully lettered the message:
SO DIE ALL ROBBED BY MAD WILLIAM HUNTER!
The only sounds were the complaints of the remaining gulls and the hushed voices of our boarding party, calling out to one another.
There were too many dead to bury them properly, so Captain Hunter instead ordered the sea cocks opened. It took a lot of work since the derelict was practically swamped with water. One of the men dropped into the main hold, though, landing in water that went up to his armpits. He ducked under to find the lever. Finally he succeeded, letting seawater flood into her holds. He came scrambling out, shivering, and we rowed back to the Aurora to watch the other craft settle herself lower and lower into the water. The seaman who had dived into the hold muttered that he had the stink of death upon him from the water in the Elizabeth Bingham, and he dipped into the ocean to wash it off before he came up the side.
“Thank you,” Captain Hunter told the man as he gave him a hand up onto the deck. I think we were all grateful that he had let the water into the bark. The only other choice would have been to fire our cannons at her, and that seemed cruel after all she had gone through.
So in the end, we stood off and watched the bark and her crew slip with a sort of crippled grace beneath the sea. The last thing I saw of her was the gleam of the gold lettering on her stern.
And then even that was gone.
The Mystery
HARDLY HAD THE WATERS closed over the Elizabeth Bingham and her ghastly crew of dead men before Captain Hunter and my uncle left the deck. I followed them into the cabin of the Aurora. Captain Hunter sat at his table, and my uncle sat on the lockers under the stern windows, leaning back and interlacing his fingers across his chest. The light streaming through the great stern windows glinted in his copper-red hair. “Someone does not like you, William,” he observed mildly.
Captain Hunter shook his head, making his blond queue sway back and forth. I shrank into the chair in the corner, drawing up my knees and keeping as still as any mouse, for far too often the two of them chased me out just when their talk became most interesting.
From where I sat, I could see the parchment that had hung around the neck of the unfortunate captain of the Elizabeth Bingham. It lay on Captain Hunter’s table. He tapped it thoughtfully with his long fingers. “Well, Patch,” he said, “we have enemies enough, Lord knows. After we broke from prison in Port Royal, every honest sailor’s hand was against us. And after we and Don Esteban worked together to smash Jack Steele’s armada at Tortuga, a number of pirates have decided we are enemies.”
“Aye,” Uncle Patch said tartly. “But would any sailor, honest or crooked, leave such a message for Lord knows who to find? ’Tis clear to me that someone is working at cross-purposes with us. For very close to a year now you have been making yourself known as a pirate—friendly to British buccaneers but hostile to the Spanish. Now, this was an English ship, and a brutal set of murders. Not even the Brotherhood of the Coast would wish to do business with the bloodthirsty fiend that the note implies you are.”
I slipped out from my chair and came to stand behind the captain. Something about the note had caught my attention. “Captain Hunter,” I said suddenly, “there is something very strange about this note.”
“Strange indeed, and wicked,” grumbled the captain. “It has been penned by some modern-day Ananias, for it is a lie from first to last.”
“No, sir.” I reached out to pick up the piece of parchment. “There is only one letter S in the entire message.”
Captain Hunter read through the words. “Why, so there is, Davy, but what has that to do with the price of fish?”
I handed the parchment back to him. “It is also the only letter of the message written in red ink.”
My uncle gave a sudden creak, the closest he ever approached to a laugh. “Look closer, nephew. ’Tis red, sure enough, but it is not ink.”
I felt my skin crawl as I realized the brownishred letter had been written with a pen dipped in blood. Swallowing my horror, I said, “What if the note is meant to let the reader guess about the real murderer? What if the man who really killed all those sailors has left us his initial?”
Captain Hunter was smiling, but without any real trace of amusement. “S is for Steele.”
My uncle creaked again, and he suddenly broke into a childish singsong:
“P is for pirate, who’s up to no good;
“Q is for Red Queen, the color of blood;
“R is for rogue, a murdering cad;
“S is for Steele, the worst of the bad!”
With a chuckle, Captain Hunter said, “You have unexpected talents, Doctor.”
“Sure, I shall set up to be a poet,” returned my uncle. “I shall go to live in Grub Street in London Town, and stain my fingers with ink and stuff my pockets with air, for that’s all the payment most poets receive for their scribbling!”
I had to laugh at the thought of my hulking uncle becoming a poet, for in truth he looked to be the most dangerous man aboard the ship—broad-shouldered, tall, and muscular. It had taken me months to learn that this explosive man could be a good uncle, and a good friend. “It has to be Steele,” I said.
My uncle raised an eyebrow. “Did I say ye nay? You have a good eye, Davy, and a quick mind. I’m positive you are right. Our pretending to be pirates will not fool Jack Steele. He knows you are searching for him, William, and this is his way of throwing stumbling blocks into your path.”
Captain Hunter waved the note. “I am not so certain that we ourselves were not intended to find this parchment. Steele knows what waters we have been sailing. It would be just like that villain to want to sign his bloody work. His mind is twisted and bent like a corkscrew—”
“A rusty one,” Uncle Patch put in. “Aye, but sharp as a new needle for all that. Well, William, and what are we to do about this? So far the English have not seriously hunted us, for we have disturbed mostly Spanish privateers. But if this sort of word gets abroad, you may be sure that even Sir Henry Morgan will not be able to keep the Royal Navy in check.”
When the captain did not immediately reply, I said, “Much would depend on how fast this word gets about. How many ships has Steele taken? And how many of them are English? And on how many of them has he left such a calling card?”
“All good questions, Davy,” said Captain Hunter. “But ones we cannot answer, not while we are at sea.”
“They do need to be answered, though,” Uncle Patch said. “How far has the word spread about you? We need to solve that mystery, and soon. Otherwise we shall find ourselves fleeing from every larger ship we meet.”
The captain put both of his hands flat upon the table. “There is only one thing for it. We must look in on Port Royal. That’s the center of news in these parts, and there we shall learn what Steele is up to with these tricks of his.”
Uncle Patch snorted. “And are we to sail boldl
y in beneath the guns of Fort Morgan and Fort Charles, then? As I recall, they tried their best to sink us when last we were in Port Royal Harbor. They may have better luck if you give them a second chance!”
“Of course we cannot take the Aurora in,” the captain acknowledged evenly. “It would be foolhardy even to try, and I am not about to put the lives of my men at such risk. But where a whole ship could not peep into Port Royal Harbor, a small fishing craft would have no trouble. Particularly if it were manned by a youngster.”
“No!” My uncle’s face flamed a brilliant crimson. “I smoke what you intend, William, and I tell you flat, the answer is no! My nephew is no more to be put at risk than your sailors!”
“I can do it,” I insisted, for I, too, had caught Captain Hunter’s drift.
Green eyes flashed at me. “This has nothing to do with you!”
“It has everything to do with me,” I told Uncle Patch. “Am I not a member of the crew? I eat the same rations as they, and I do my job aboard ship, the same as they. And the captain is right. When we lived in Port Royal, I saw all manner of boys and men set out a-fishing at all hours of the day and night. ’Twould be easy for me to hang some nets over the bows of one of the gigs and sail her in amongst the other fishers.”
“Exactly,” Captain Hunter said. “Doctor, there really is no question about it. Of all aboard, Davy is the one likeliest to slip in and out of port without being noticed. Descriptions of us are out, but I’d stake my wig that no one here would know Davy. His hair is longer than it was, and the sea air has bleached it lighter. He’s grown nigh a foot, and his skin is brown with the sun. He’s not at all the pasty twelve-year-old anyone in Port Royal would remember!”
They quarreled far into the afternoon, with the captain urging the sensibility of his plan and my uncle steadfastly condemning it as an idiotic way to get me shot. That day ended with no resolution, but I knew that, by and by, Uncle Patch would come around to the captain’s way of thinking. As the captain reminded him, Uncle Patch was the one who had insisted that solving the mystery and learning something of Steele’s movements was so important. Uncle Patch hated having his own words used against him, and he swore that he would never consent to such a plot. But I knew them both well, and from that moment onward, I planned to go ashore in Port Royal.
The next morning the question was still unsettled. Uncle Patch and I had the usual sick call, but by and large, the Aurora had a healthy crew. I think the men were kept that way by the constant exercise of sailing the ship, together with their diet, for Uncle Patch was scrupulous about taking on fresh food at out-of-the-way harbors and anchorages. Never were the men without greenstuff and salt meat that was less than a year old. Even the ship’s bread was fresher than the hard tack of the Royal Navy, and mostly free of the weevils and maggots that crawled in the king’s bread.
However it fell out, we had not even one patient that day, so I was free until lessons began after noon. I went onto a strangely busy deck. “Watch your step, Davy!” shouted Mr. Jeffers. He knelt on the deck, and I noticed again how his left ear was strangely crumpled after having been sliced to ribbons by a flying splinter and sewn up again by my uncle.
Now Mr. Jeffers rose to his feet and stood over a long strip of canvas, three feet wide and stretching the whole length of the deck. Six sailors were slapping paint over it, sky-blue paint, but were being mindful not to splatter any upon the precious deck. “What is this, Mr. Jeffers?” I asked, carefully stepping over the corner of the canvas.
“’Tis a sort of disguise, ye might say,” responded Mr. Jeffers with a low, gurgling chuckle. “Want to help, lad?”
Soon enough I had a paintbrush in my hand and my own section of canvas to paint. Work went rapidly, and as soon as the canvas was painted, the sailors hauled it up and hung it out to dry. The deck had been fouled after all, but the men hurried to correct that with turpentine and the flat grinding stones they called bibles. Soon they had rubbed out all traces of paint.
Meanwhile, a work party had lowered platforms from the larboard bows. Men sitting on these began to repaint the sides of the Aurora, making the black-and-yellow hull the same sky blue as the canvas we had painted. Mr. Jeffers enjoyed my puzzlement, and he steadfastly refused to explain anything to me.
My uncle conducted lessons that afternoon, as he always did. I was coming along well in anatomy and in the compounding of medicines. I was even becoming tolerably good at writing, and some of the books my uncle made me read were passably interesting. Mr. Adams joined us later in the afternoon watch for mathematics, for he had been a midshipman in the Royal Navy before we began to masquerade as pirates. He would never achieve his heart’s desire—becoming a full lieutenant—without mastering the mathematics of navigation. Mr. Adams had long believed himself too stupid to learn trigonometry and angles and all the rest. Lord knows my uncle was the worst teacher in the world for all this, for he had barely a grasp of multiplication beyond five times nine.
Yet he was so willing to teach, and he had so many books to teach from, that Mr. Adams applied himself with a will and had begun to understand much more than he had ever believed he could. Indeed, my uncle himself was picking up more and more mathematics as we went along, and though I felt myself dull when trying to make out some of the problems, even I had begun to clutch at a few concepts.
The last lesson for me was Latin, and Mr. Adams left us then. By the time we had finished with Cicero that day, it was nearly eight bells, or four o’clock in landsman’s terms. I emerged blinking from the cabin and walked into the smell of paint and turpentine. The change in the frigate’s appearance amazed me. One side of her was now a sunny blue, and the other side was beginning to get the same treatment. Our figurehead, a bosomy woman holding a torch and representing Aurora, the pagan goddess of the dawn, lay in the bows, stretched out and lifting her torch as if pleading for someone to give her a hand up.
Aloft, sailors were creeping through the rigging and gingerly handling the foretopgallant mast, which they had taken from its seat and were lowering on lines to the deck. All of this was a puzzle to me.
Mr. Jeffers and his crew had unfurled the strips of blue canvas, for there were two of them now, not one, and both had more or less dried in the hard glare of the tropical sun. Now his men were busily painting black squares on the blue canvas.
“Gunports!” I yelled, suddenly understanding what the squares were supposed to represent. “You’re painting false gunports on the canvas! But why?” I meant that we had real gunports. The Aurora was a frigate, a narrow, sleek, French-built ship, with almost all her cannons ranged on both sides of the main deck.
Mr. Jeffers laughed. He had a long smudge of black paint across his nose. “’Tis a merchantman’s trick, young Davy. To make a pirate or any enemy think she’s got teeth, a merchantman will paint false gunports along her side.”
“But we have twenty-eight real cannons!”
“Aye, so we have.” Mr. Jeffers dipped his brush into a pot of black paint and began to make the edge of his false gun port a little uneven.
Then I realized they were all uneven. Some were six inches too high, some six inches too low. They were not all one size, either. At a distance, they might fool another ship, but if one came within telescope range, it would be obvious that these were poor imitations.
Perhaps the figurehead of Aurora shed some light into my thick skull at that moment. “You want people to think we’re just a disguised merchantman!” I exclaimed.
A hand clapped my shoulder. It belonged to Captain Hunter, who looked strange in a smockshirt and gray pantaloons, both of them daubed and smeared with blue and black paint. “Just so, Davy,” he said with a laugh. “As soon as our last coat of blue paint is dry on the transom, a couple of fellows will paint our new name there: the Fairweather. We will lose our fine towering masts and instead show the world the stumpy sticks of a trading ship. To all the world we will be a British merchant ship out of, oh, say, Edinburgh. It won’t be a thorough enough dis
guise to let us into Port Royal Harbor, but I reckon we can fool most vessels we meet.”
Over the next four days I came to believe that Captain Hunter was right. In fact, I was not sure that we would not be able to sail into Port Royal, or into any harbor in the West Indies, without being known for what we were. Once the topgallant masts were all struck, the figurehead stowed, and the ship transformed into a sky-blue beauty, the false gunports were tacked to the side, neatly covering the real ports. In an emergency it would be the work of a moment to rip the canvas away, or even to fire right through it. Yet, from a distance the illusion was wonderful.
I learned that when I rowed Captain Hunter and my uncle one-half mile away to admire the new look. With her shorter masts and her new paint, the Aurora seemed somehow fatter and slower than she really was. Captain Hunter had ordered the oldest, grayest sails to be run up, too. There was nothing of naval smartness about our poor ship now.
To add to the deception, the captain had ordered the decks to be cluttered with barrels and boxes. A small pyramid of these stood amidships, covered with a tarpaulin and lashed down. Anyone would have sworn we were an innocent ship, somewhat slovenly, loaded to the scuppers with trade goods.
“The paint don’t go all the way to the water,” observed my uncle critically. “There’s still a dark rim.”
“It makes no great odds,” Captain Hunter declared. “A ship’s always dirty right around the waterline, from the slush and muck heaved overboard. Anyway, we cannot careen her out of the water and do a proper job of painting her right down to the copper. This will do. If anyone comes near enough to spy the black paint, we’ve let him come too close, anyway!”
Uncle Patch still shook his head, as if unsatisfied. “We’ve far too many men for a merchant vessel. What are our numbers? One hundred and sixty?”
“One hundred and fifty-seven,” Captain Hunter said softly.
I wondered if he was thinking of the men we had lost in battles and through illness, for that was what I was thinking. We had begun our cruise with some two hundred men.
Heart of Steele Page 2
