Heart of Steele

by Brad Strickland

  “’Tis true,” said her mother in a guilty voice. “Business has been rather brisk of late.”

  Miss Fairfax was tapping a finger on her chin. “That is a clever idea, Jessie.”

  Jessie beamed at her.

  Then Miss Fairfax turned her startling eyes on me. “I would strongly suggest that you abandon your idea of wandering the city, Davy, and instead settle yourself here to gather information for the good Captain Hunter.”

  “As opposed to the one everybody’s talking about,” muttered Jessie.

  I sighed, for I know when I’m outgunned and outmaneuvered. They were right, and arguing would not change that. So that afternoon I started to help Mrs. Cochran as her new potboy, running back and forth with food and drink for the guests and boarders of King’s Mercy. No one would notice me, for people never notice the folks who wait on them. I would run and fetch and go.

  And listen.

  The Drunkar’s Tale

  I SWEAR, HAD I known that my spying would take the form of being a servant at the beck and call of every rough customer who tottered in the door of the King’s Mercy, I would have had second thoughts. For days I ran my legs to stubs, fetching and carrying. Through it all, for my pains I got mainly curses and abuse, though at an odd time a sailor would toss a halfpenny piece my way. It was a small enough reward.

  But to top off my misery, Jessie Cochran had come to stay with her mother for a spell while Miss Fairfax was away visiting her cousins in Port Maria, away on the north shore of Jamaica. Now that girl had ways of tormenting me that her mother would never dream of. Somehow she had yet to forgive me for having shown up months and months before at the front door, alone, orphaned, and friendless.

  On that occasion she had flung a basin of dirty water squarely into my face and had called me a thief and a runagate. Never mind that from the pity in my heart I had taught her to read, or that I had rescued her from captivity on the island of Tortuga. To be sure, I did have my uncle’s help in the rescue, and some from Captain Hunter as well, but to hear Jessie tell it, you would have thought she had planned the whole thing herself and that our coming with the very ship she had sailed away on was just part of her scheme.

  Be that as it may, as the owner’s daughter, she naturally outranked a mere potboy, and so she was forever ordering me to do this or that, to scrape and wash dishes, to mind the fire, to chop stove wood, to run to the market for more molasses, for four good fat chickens, for this or for that or for the other. Pillar to post it was, so that by the third day I began to dread the sun’s peeping in my window, for it brought with it sixteen hours of harder work than I had ever known aboard ship.

  And the devil a word did I hear of Steele. Drunken sailors babble and yarn, much to Mrs. Cochran’s disgust, but none of them babbled of Steele or told stories of his whereabouts. They did speak now and again of Captain Hunter. For months after our escape from Port Royal, the King’s Mercy had suffered, for the honest sailors avoided the place where the notorious doctor-pirate Patrick Shea had lived.

  But somehow that had worn off with the passing of time, and now the drinkers at Molly Cochran’s tables seemed rather proud of the place’s reputation. “Aye,” one sailor had roared the first night I was waiting tables, “Bill Hunter’s a man, so he is! Snatched a neat sloop from under the guns of the fort, got clean away, and sinks Spaniards by the shipload! A health to him, says I!” No one joined in the toast, but I saw several men nod at the words.

  As the days and nights passed, I began to despair of learning any real news. On my trips to market, or whenever I could get away from the King’s Mercy for half an hour all together, I kept my ears open. For all I could tell, though, Steele had not yet left enough derelicts with his vicious calling cards on them to make a very terrible impression at Port Royal. Nor did it seem likely that I would fulfill the second part of my mission and learn something of the hiding places that Steele might have in this part of the world.

  Finally, though, my luck changed on the unluckiest day of the week for sailors—a Friday. That was the first night that I was to sail out and rendezvous with the Aurora, at midnight. Long before then, however, a stumbling, grizzled old sailor blundered into the King’s Mercy, squalling for rum.

  He was bald on top, with a long, unkempt fringe of iron-gray hair. His face was all scarred and battered, his nose so broken that the tip of it almost touched his lower lip. He wore no shoes, pantaloons that might once have been blue, and a raggedy calico shirt with a blue-and-white pattern. He had lost all his teeth in front, and he spoke in a hoarse, mumbling roar. “Rum! Rum here for a sailor man! Be quick about it!”

  I got him seated, and it was then that I noticed all the tattoos on his sinewy arms. Mermaids and spouting whales, compass roses and anchors crowded the flesh, most of them sun-faded and ancient. But on the back of his right hand, where it must have hurt like blazes as it was being done, was a laughing skull above two crossed cutlasses, picked out in red. It looked more recent than the others.

  And the image was the same as the one that Jack Steele flew on his bloodred pirate flag.

  As I drew a measure of rum, I told Mrs. Cochran that this might be the very man who could answer at least some of our questions, and I begged her to let me hover in his corner as much as I could. She agreed, but warned, “He’s a rough-looking customer, Davy. Be ye careful, hear?”

  The old fellow drank the rum greedily and called for another. I brought him another measure, a double one, and when he had finished that, yet another. By then he was staring and snorting, and I felt bold enough to ask, “New in these waters, Captain?”

  He glared at me with a bleared brown eye. “Shut your gob, cabin boy!” And he snatched the latest round of rum from me as if he feared I would take it away from him.

  By and by he began to talk, in a muttering, grumbling undertone. He was not speaking to me, but to himself, or perhaps to companions he only imagined to be sitting by his side. “Call ’emselves pirates. These don’t be pirates nowadays,” he said in a thick voice. “None of ’em is a patch on old Morgan. Bunch of lily-livered landlubbers, the lot of ’em!”

  You may be sure I kept the rum flowing, and I hung about to hear as much as I could of his rambling. The old man stared down at the glass in his hands and talked to it. After a time, as I took away one glass and set down a fresh one, I again spoke to him. “They say Jack Steele’s a man.”

  “Aye!” he snapped. “Steele! There’s a right gentleman o’ fortune for ye. Strong as a ox, mean as a snake, that ’un. Sailed with ’im once on a time, did I.”

  Since he had not snapped my head off, I said in a low voice, “I’d give a lot to run away and join him, I would. This is no life for a lad of spirit.”

  He glared at me again. “You! You wouldn’t last a day on Steele’s ship. Show me your hands, boy!”

  I held out my hands, which were callused from my climbing the rigging on the Aurora. He grunted. “Well, well, so ye can do a day’s work, at that. But ain’t no odds, boy. Join up with Steele, says ye? No chance, says I. And for why? Ye can’t find old Steele, that’s why! Nobody can, as he don’t want anyone to find ’im.”

  “But you’ve sailed with him. Do you sail with him still?”

  “Not I, laddie buck,” the old fellow told me. “Nah, ol’ Gaff is too broke of arm an’ wind to climb the riggin’ or point a cannon. Dismissed me, did Jack, with a bag o’ gold an’ not so much as a thank ye. But that’s better nor what most o’ my shipmates got, a knife in the back an’ a berth in the ocean!”

  He maundered on, going back to his youth in the north of England, where he was a minister’s son, or so he claimed. Then he talked of taking prisoners at Barbados when Steele raided that island in 1682. Then he was off on some other thread of memory. I saw that he was going to pass out soon, so at half past nine I asked again where Jack Steele might be found.

  “Anywhere,” was his slurred response. “’E might be makin’ the Pirates’ Round and be off to Madagascar for the India trad
e. Or ’e might have sailed round the Horn an’ be makin’ ’is way to Panama.” He hiccupped. “If ’e’s off the Spanish Main, ’e’s got a snug harbor at Bloodhaven. In these waters, maybe San …” His head reeled loosely on his neck.

  “Santiago?” I asked, naming the principal port on the southeastern coast of Cuba.

  “Nah, nah, San Angel. Tight little town, easy t’ keep the Spaniards quiet, quiet, qui—” He pitched forward all of a sudden, his old head crashing onto the splintered table. In a flash, I was back in the kitchen, tugging at my apron.

  Jessie, who stood at a tub full of soapy water and pewter dishes, scowled at me. “What are you about?”

  “I’ve got to get to sea,” I said, and in a few words I told her of what I had heard.

  “San Angel?” asked Jessie, with a frown on her freckled face. “I’ve never heard of such a place, and I’ve lived here as long as I can remember. The man was drunk!”

  “Drunk or sober, he’s given me the first clue I’ve struck,” I told her, and a moment later I was away.

  A full moon was rising toward zenith, and in its light a good many small craft were gliding in the harbor. I got to my skiff, loosed the lines, and climbed in. A sentry on a wharf asked my business. “Fishing,” I called back.

  He was silent, and I rowed on until I fetched the harbor channel and ran up my single triangular sail. Again, I was not alone, for a good many of the working people of Port Royal went late-night fishing on nights with a good moon, and as one of a dozen or more small craft, my skiff was not easy to notice.

  It was uncomfortable to sail, for even with the fair sky there was a storm stalking out on the sea somewhere, and it sent a choppy swell rolling through the darkness. I shipped some water and had to bail for a good while before getting the hang of it.

  My navigation was nothing more than simple dead reckoning, but the wind favored me. I sailed out onto the dark ocean until Port Royal was only a smear of yellow light low on the horizon, and there I struck my sail and dropped my small anchor.

  I lit my lantern and looked at my uncle’s treasured silver pocketwatch. It was but ten minutes to eleven, and the Aurora would surely not show up before the set time. I had more than an hour to wait out on the open sea.

  It was miserable, with the swell bobbing me up and down like a cork in a millrace, and waves breaking over the bows at times, so that I had to bail again and again. Once two other fishing craft came toward me from the darkness, and I doused the lantern. They passed me by without even noticing me, calling to each other as they made wagers on how many fish they were going to take. Before long they were out of sight and out of earshot.

  Then the devil’s own time did I have striking another light, for my tinder was damp, but at long, long last I had the lantern alight again. By then it was nearly midnight, so I ran the lantern up the mast, where it hung pitching and bobbing. Looking at it made me feel seasick. I seem never to be bothered with that illness except when aboard a small craft.

  I forced myself to look away and scan the dark horizon. Nothing. Time crept by like an aged beetle, and every minute seemed an hour.

  If the watch had not told me that only twenty minutes had passed, I would have sworn that it was near dawn when I sighted the twin lights that had to be the Aurora. To make sure, I loosed the line that held my own lantern and lowered it and raised it again.

  Sure enough, the top lanterns of the approaching vessel rose and then moved from side to side. Men at the masthead had seen my signal and were giving me the agreed answer. Now all I had to do was stay put until they got to me, but that was a wearisome business, for the wind that was fair to me was foul to them.

  At long last, though, she hove to, and I rowed to her side and tied my skiff fast before climbing aboard. My uncle met me with, “What news?”

  “Let me tell it all at once,” I begged. “For I am weary, and I don’t want to repeat it.”

  He and I joined Captain Hunter in the stern cabin, and there I poured out my story. “’Tis little enough, I know,” I said as I finished the tale.

  “It may be enough,” said my uncle. “Bloodhaven, is it? And San Angel? William?”

  In the light of the hanging cabin lantern, Captain Hunter went to the map chest and rummaged through its contents. He produced a chart and unrolled it atop his table. All three of us bent over it. “There is a San Angel in Mexico, I think, but that one’s landlocked. Hardly the spot for a sea dog like Steele. But if I am not mistaken …”

  His finger traced the southeastern tip of Cuba, drawn on the chart in a large scale. “I see it,” said my uncle, stabbing his forefinger down at a spot well to the west of Santiago.

  “Aye, just a fishing village of a few dozen souls,” said Captain Hunter with a nod. “A narrow inlet, but uncommonly deep for these waters, and a rocky island just off the coast big enough to hide even a large vessel.”

  “Steele’s hideout, then?” asked Uncle Patch.

  “A rare place for smugglers, at any rate,” returned Captain Hunter. “The Spaniards are forbidden by law to deal with any but their own ships. But the Spanish king charges such high prices for his goods that there’s a brisk trade in stolen booty. San Angel is one of those quiet little corners that calls no attention to itself, but it’s just the spot where, on a dark night, a British or French captain might quietly transfer a hold full of goods to an honest Spaniard’s merchant ship—or the ship of a Spaniard who passes for honest, at any rate.”

  I was not to go back to the King’s Mercy, it seemed. For that I was grateful, being worn out from my week of hard work and my night of rowing and sailing a cross-grained little skiff on that rolling sea. Straightaway I went belowdecks to my hammock, climbed in, and dropped into as deep a sleep as I have ever known.

  The next morning we had cleared the eastern tip of Jamaica and were making our way north and west, toward San Angel. The wind almost failed us, and with the topsails set, we glided along at less than two knots. “It’s just as well,” said Captain Hunter, “for we must change our disguise.”

  He called for Mr. Grice, the sailmaker, and told him to make up all the flags appropriate to a Spanish trader. Then he had some men paint out the false name, Fairweather, that ran along the ship’s transom. He walked the decks for more than an hour before exclaiming, “I have it!” He went to his cabin for a short space of time and came back with a sheet of paper on which he had hand-lettered Cielo Claro. He handed that to Mr. Tate, who was in charge of the painting crew. “This is to be our new name, Mr. Tate. Paint it on as fancy as you please.”

  “Dark blue and gilt?” asked Mr. Tate with a gleam in his eye. He loved gold, even if it were only paint.

  “Gilt, dark blue, whatever you wish,” said Captain Hunter with a grin.

  Uncle Patch peered over Mr. Tate’s shoulder. “Cielo Claw?”

  “We shall be the Clear Sky,” answered the captain. “It’s very close to Fairweather. Just the sort of unremarkable name that will draw no undue attention from the dons.” He looked around. “Alonzo!”

  A sailor in the mizzen top leaped from his perch as though he had lost his mind and was bent on dashing out his brains on the deck. He caught a stay, though, and slid down it, dropping off lightly and landing just before the captain. “Yes, sir?”

  “How’s your Spanish, Pedro Alonzo?” asked Captain Hunter.

  Mr. Alonzo scratched his head. “Well, sir, I might be that bit rusty. I was brought up a-speakin’ of it, but I’ve had small occasion to talk it since I was twelve or thereabout.” I thought that Mr. Alonzo might now be three times that age. “What does your honor need?”

  The captain grinned. “A ship’s master, if a Spanish vessel hails us. Think you could tell ’em all that we’re the Cielo Claro, fresh from Seville, if they ask?”

  A relieved grin split Mr. Alonzo’s dark, craggy face. “Oh, aye, that I can do with no trouble at all. I thought you wanted something more in the—the—litterarywary line.”

  “Just the talk of an hon
est Spanish merchant seaman, that’s all,” the captain assured him.

  When Mr. Alonzo had left us to climb back to his post, Uncle Patch shook his head dolefully. “Cielo Claro, in faith! This will never answer, William. Any sailor with half an eye can see that the Aurora is French-built.”

  “Aye, but what of that?” Captain Hunter said carelessly. “I hope an honest Spanish merchant may buy his ship at any port he chooses. We’ll get close enough to see whether the Red Queen is riding at anchor in the fairway to San Angel, you may rest assured of that.”

  “And then?” asked my uncle.

  Captain Hunter shrugged. “One thing at a time, Doctor. First let us see whether this drunkard’s tale of Jack Steele is just vaporings, or whether it has any sober truth at its bottom.”

  And not another word on the subject would he speak.

  Death and Desolation

  IN THE DAYS that followed, we sailed along the southern coast of the great Spanish island possession of Cuba. Sparkling white beaches and mangrove swamps, lush forests and the distant mountains that formed the spine of the island slid past, broken only by small white villages and the occasional flocks of fishing boats. We sailed fast and silent, ignoring all hails. Captain William Hunter had one goal and one goal only.

  San Angel.

  Finally we were there. The passage was a bit tricky. A long, low island thick with trees protected the indifferent harbor from the sea.

  “Doesn’t look like much for all this fuss, does it, Uncle?” I asked as the two of us stood by the rail. Uncle Patch grunted in reply, but he, too, was scanning the little town before us.

  San Angel was a small cluster of white buildings huddled around a tiny ivory-colored Catholic church. Behind it towered a tangled wall of dark green trees. The water in front was a deep blue. And not a sound or movement came from white or green or blue.

  “I have no liking for this stillness,” Uncle Patch muttered. “I have no liking for it at all.”