Only Life That Mattered

by Nelson, James L.

  Jack had seen Ben kill a man in an argument over a spilled drink, had once personally hauled the corpulent villain out of a ditch, after finding him there, delirious with drink and covered in mud and his own vomit.

  But now Ben was dressed like a country squire, with a velvet coat and silk waistcoat, powdered wig on his head. The silver buckles on his shoes glinted, and his thick fingers and meaty, calloused hand rested on top of a gold-headed walking stick. The sweet trade had been good to Ben Hornigold.

  “Halloa, there, Ben. What’s acting?” Jack sidled up beside him, looked in the direction he was looking.

  “John Rackam!” Ben Hornigold looked Jack up and down and his eyes took in the bare feet stuffed in his shoes, the shirt and waistcoat as yet not buttoned. “Dress in a hurry, boy? Was her husband coming in the door?”

  “Nothing of the sort, Ben. I told her, says I, ‘I must go now, Mrs Hornigold, lest your husband need my help.’”

  “Need more than you, young Calico Jack. See, yonder is H.M.S. Rose, and if Woodes Rogers ain’t aboard her, then he’s aboard one of the other three men-of-war in the offing.”

  Off to the east Rackam could see her, a frigate with fore course and topsails set, sailing across the mouth of the harbor. Just as she began to pass from sight beyond the far end of Hog Island she tacked smartly and settled on her new course, back and forth across the mouth of the harbor. The blockade had begun, the first offensive thrust in Woodes Rogers’s war against the pirates.

  “Well, damn my eyes, Ben, this whoreson Rogers must want to see you hang something awful, to send such a force.”

  “Perhaps.” Hornigold stared off at the Rose, thoughtful and somber. “Rumor has it Rogers brings with him a pardon to any will give up the sweet trade. Some of the lads are thinking on taking it, get us a bit of breathing room, see what this Rogers is made of. See if he wants to play with the devil once his little men-of-war are gone, and it’s but him and us, eh?”

  A pardon? Sure, you fat old son of a bitch, easy for you to say, Jack thought, running an eye over Hornigold’s rich clothing. Old Ben had been at the business for years, probably figured his luck had run its course anyway. Ben had not just given over his last bit of coin to some doxy whose name he could not recall.

  “You’re a respectable man now, Ben Hornigold, a right gentleman, and I wish you pleasure on your retirement. But as for me, I should rather greet old Rogers with a cannon full of shot than tugging my forelock with my hand outreached, so I’ll off to my ship.”

  Hornigold took his eyes from the distant frigate, met Rackam’s. “Captain Vane’s ship,” he corrected.

  “It’s all of one.”

  “If you’d have command of a privateer, Jack, you had best make your move, and soon. This life,” he made a sweeping gesture with his hand, taking in the crowd on the dock, the town of Nassau, the pirate ships riding at their moorings, “will not be around so very much longer.”

  Jack smiled, chuckled a bit. “If in all the world, Ben Hornigold, there is but a canoe with a fistful of groats aboard, there will still be fellows such as us to take them. I don’t reckon that will change soon.”

  “Perhaps not,” Hornigold said, but there was no conviction in his words. “God speed to you, Calico Jack.”

  Jack shook hands with the old man and pushed his way back through the crowd and down to the strip of sand where the boats were pulled up. He found a crew, just shoving off, that would take him out to his ship.

  Captain Vane’s ship. The pirate brig Ranger.

  Jack came up the side, stepped through the gangway into the waist. There was Vane up on the quarterdeck rail, one hand on the main shrouds to steady himself, looking east through a glass.

  The rest of the men, about thirty in all, were in various states of sobriety. Some were sleeping, some eating or drinking, some working at repairs to the running gear, each after his own whim.

  Empty bottles that had been tossed into the scuppers rolled slowly back and forth and clinked against each other as the brig rocked in the swell. A roasted goat, partially eaten, hung from a spit over the portable cook stove. Great heaps of cordage were piled up on deck. The old fore topsail, torn beyond repair, lay partially folded in the bows, the task of striking it below abandoned before it was half completed.

  The pirates were sailors to a man, but they did not pay much attention to the niceties of seafaring tradition. They had their fill of that in their former lives, as merchant seamen and men-of-war’s men. There was no one now to tell them their duty. The pirates did nothing that they did not care to do.

  Richard Corner came lumbering up. He moved slow, seemed too huge and too stupid to move fast, but his lethargic appearance was deceptive. Rackam had seen him in many a fight, wielding a cutlass like it was a twig, a powerful and dangerous man. Corner was always the first to plunge into any brawl, seemed to crave a fight the way Jack craved women, as if he had no understanding of danger.

  He held out a bottle of rum, and Rackam took it and swallowed, let it settle and swallowed some more. “If I’d known you was coming aboard, I’d have taken a boat over,” Corner said, “waited for you.”

  “Never you mind, Dicky,” Jack assured him. “Didn’t know myself till an hour ago I was coming back so soon.”

  Jack took another swallow, handed the bottle back, nodded his head toward the quarterdeck. “I best go see himself,” he said and Corner nodded, watched him as he stepped aft. Good to have the love of a fellow like Corner, Jack thought. It was like having a big, vicious dog as your loyal pet.

  Up on the quarterdeck, and Captain Charles Vane took the glass from his eye, looked down as Rackam approached. “Ah, Quartermaster, I was afraid we might leave you on the beach.”

  “Are we to get underway directly?”

  “Oh, we shall see. I have sent message out to this rogue, Woodes Rogers. Offered to accept the buggering King’s buggering pardon if we can keep all of our booty. Told him we’d bloody well fight if he didn’t agree.” Vane laughed out loud at that, at his own audacity. “We’ll see what the bastard says to that, eh?”

  Captain Charles Vane was not some small-time picaroon or petty sea robber. He was a pirate, a genuine pirate. He was what civilized people pictured when they thought of a pirate: a sword on his belt, pistols thrust into cross belts on his chest, the long locks of a once fine wig tumbling down his back. A red silk coat and a red silk sash around his waist.

  He was bold but not reckless, smart, daring, utterly ruthless. Rackam had seen him burn an uncooperative captive’s eyes out with a lighted match. He was one of that small cadre of pirates who were considered not merely troublesome, but a genuine menace because they were so vicious and so successful at what they did.

  Jack Rackam was his quartermaster, which in the hierarchy of the pirate ships meant he was second in command, sort of a go-between for the captain and the men.

  The Rangers looked up to Rackam, like they looked up to Vane. Both smart men, both ruthless, with a certain flair that was beyond the nature of most of the simple, rough seafarers who drifted into the pirate life.

  But Rackam alone understood that he, Calico Jack, was not a ruthless and charismatic leader, but rather a sham, and that Vane was the genuine article. Quartermaster Rackam liked Captain Vane. And he wanted to take his place. And he feared him.

  “You expect a reply soon?” Rackam asked.

  “Aye. Yonder comes our long boat, standing in with the lug-sail set.”

  The long boat swooped up the harbor with the wind astern and when at last it drew up to the Ranger’s side Jack could see that the crew were well into a good drunk, flinging bottles at their comrades aboard the Ranger, shouting and cursing Woodes Rogers’s name.

  George Fetherston climbed up the side of the ship and staggered aft to the quarterdeck. “Captain Vane,” he called, “the bloody bastard would not even see me, can you believe it?”

  “Did he give you word as to his intentions?”

  “Aye, the sodomite. He sat in
his cabin like the fucking Lord and Master, sent one of his little arse-lickers out to tell me he would not be sending a reply to your demand. And me being the soul of reason, saying we but want to keep that what we earned through our own hard work.”

  Jack watched Vane, waited for his reaction. He could not always tell which way Vane would go—he was not the most stable of men. But this time Vane laughed and made an obscene gesture in the direction of the blockading frigate. “Well bugger him then, the sheep-biter. I’ll burn his goddamned ships for him. But first we must be away.”

  “Now?” Rackam asked. Did Vane intend to try fighting his way past the Rose? An unsettling thought, and even if they managed it, there were the other ships coming up behind.

  Vane was generally more sensible than that. He would take risks, sure, but he would not plunge in when the odds were that much against him.

  “No, no, not now, Quartermaster, you fire-eating son of a bitch!” Vane said, slapped an arm over Rackam’s shoulders. “Wherever are your manners? We have to welcome the grand fucking governor proper, and then we shall take our leave.”

  Midnight, and Calico Jack Rackam stood on the sloop’s deck, idly swinging his sword back and forth.

  The first time he had set foot on that deck, two months before, he had been the cock-sure, swaggering Jack Rackam, pirate quartermaster, and the sloop had been another in a string of victims of Captain Charles Vane and company.

  The sloop had run from them, for a bit, but the Ranger was fast and had quickly overhauled it. The sloop had struck her British merchant ensign to Vane’s black flag with its leering death’s head.

  Vane beat the captain senseless, in part for having had the audacity to run, in part because he liked it.

  Calico Jack strutted it in front of the terrified crew of the little sloop. It amused him to play at the vicious killer; he took pleasure in the terror he could evoke without drawing a drop of blood. He had been bold then, when there was nothing aboard the little captive sloop that he need fear, the heavy armed pirates outnumbering the unarmed crew ten to one.

  They spent hours tearing the sloop apart, drinking the wine they found aboard, terrorizing the crew. Finally they put the frightened men in a boat, took the sloop with them. It was the kind of plundering Calico Jack most enjoyed.

  He was not so calm now, though there was no one aboard the sloop but his own shipmates. There were no lights burning, no activity, beyond the murmured conversation of the others, hunkered down on the deck aft and drinking steadily.

  Below his feet, in the low hold of the sloop, cask upon cask of gunpowder. And between the casks, stacks of straw, canvas covered with oil, old barrel staves, anything that would burn. They were standing on top of the most volatile cargo imaginable, and when the time came Jack would have to set it on fire and get away before it blew him straight to hell.

  This was Charles Vane’s idea of welcoming the new governor. He left it to Jack Rackam to execute, presented him the task like it was some kind of a goddamned reward, and Jack did not dare act otherwise.

  He paced fore and aft, slashed at the air with his sword. It made him look menacing, eager for a fight, but in fact it was a nervous habit, a way of working out the fear he felt before any situation that might result in injury to himself.

  He heard the soft padding of bare feet and George Fetherston was there, still as drunk as he had been that afternoon. “I think I sees them now, Quartermaster. Son of a bitch coming right up under topsails, the whoreson.”

  Rackam walked aft with Fetherston, stared out into the dark. Yes, there it was, a big ship, coming up out of the night, and not so far away. In the darkness and with the quantity of alcohol they had consumed, the Rangers had allowed the frigate to get within two hundred yards before spotting her.

  Jack felt the panic seize him, felt his throat constrict, his stomach twist. He wanted to order them to light the sloop and be gone, right then, but he did not. Any show of cowardice on his part and he would meet with a death at the hands of his fellow pirates that was far, far worse than being blown apart when the sloop exploded.

  He swallowed, tapped the deck with his sword, watched the frigate approach.

  “You have a match lit, Fetherston?”

  “No.”

  “Well then, light a buggering match. Corner, get your ax and stand ready to cut the cable. The rest of you, get the boat alongside.”

  Dark shapes shuffled off. Richard Corner came looming out of the dark and stepped forward, grinning wide. The Rose fell off a point, a ghost ship in the starlight. Well handled, closing fast.

  Damn, damn, damn, damn, Rackam thought. Had to time this perfectly. If he lit the sloop too early, it would be mutterings of cowardice, and next he would find himself marooned on a spit of land, with only a pistol and a single bullet to put through his head when the thirst became unbearable.

  Light it too late and he would be blown into fragments, tiny pieces of his beautiful body dropping like rain into Nassau harbor where they would be eaten by the fish. The last of Calico Jack Rackam, crapped out a fish’s arse.

  And so, held in check by those twin terrors, Jack watched the Rose looming up through the night. A voice shouted out, the cadence of an order, and then a deep rumbling as the frigate ran her great guns out.

  “Fetherston! Light her up! Corner, cut the goddamned cable!” No panic in his voice, and Rackam was proud of that fact.

  A glow amidships as Fetherston touched the match to a torch of oil-soaked rags, and then the torch burst into bright flame that illuminated the entire deck. From forward, the whump, whump, whump of Corner’s ax, hacking at the cable.

  Eager hands pulled the main hatch open, and Fetherston tossed the burning torch down into the volatile hold. Jack tensed, grit his teeth, waited for the sloop to explode under him. The fire in the hold flared, crackled, shot up through the hatch, but the vessel did not blow.

  Jack felt the sloop moving under his feet, sweeping sideways, and he knew the cable had been cut through.

  “You men, in the boat, get in the damned boat!” Jack wanted to push them all aside, to race down into the boat himself, but he knew he could not. He could not leave the ship until the others had, and so he urged them on. But the men, fearless drunk, watched with amusement as the fire in the hold built higher and higher.

  “Get in the damned boat, you stupid bastards!” Jack roared, and finally the men tore themselves from the great pyre and began to climb down the low-sided sloop and into the boat floating alongside.

  The fire was rising up from the hold like a great yellow and orange spirit. It grabbed hold of the main boom and the main sail stowed down on top of it, and in a flash the dry canvas was burning, the fire running along the length of the spar and lapping over the various lifts, sheets and halyards made fast to the fife rail at the base of the mast.

  Big Richard Corner came loping aft. The fire played over his face and his thick beard and would have made him look utterly demonic were it not for his wide, stupid grin. Jack wanted to slap him, to shove him down into the boat. Instead he opened his mouth to urge the idiot to hurry, but before he could speak there was a loud snap, a rending of wood aloft, a flash of flame from the hold.

  Rackam and Corner looked aloft at the same instant, looked up just in time to see the long, thin gaff plunging down from the masthead, the halyards burned through, the line whipping through the blocks. And then the heavy triple block of the throat halyard, fifteen pounds of wood and rope and iron, plunged down from the dark and slammed into Richard Corner’s head and sent him sprawling back.

  The gaff landed with a crash on top of the burning main boom, scattering the fire in a hundred directions, igniting the sloop fore and aft. The deck was all but covered in flame and the fire in the hold was roaring, leaping up, ready at any moment to blow the powder casks.

  From over the side the men in the boat were calling out. Forward, Jack could see Corner’s body sprawled out on deck, could see it plain as day in the bright fire that ringed him.<
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  Leave him, leave him, he’s dead, he’s dead, son of a bitch, he’s dead anyway, Rackam assured himself. He took a step toward the side and stopped. If he left Corner they would call him a coward. That would mean the island. The bullet.

  “Goddamn it!” He plunged forward, through the fire, driven on by his terror of being marooned, greater even than his terror of blowing up.

  Forward, and he grabbed Corner’s motionless body by the arm, pulling him up just as the main boom fell and sent a shudder through the sloop and Jack thought that the gunpowder had gone off and he nearly wet himself. He pulled Corner up, got his arms under Corner’s arms, dragged him to the side of the sloop.

  Now what, now what? he thought, but there was George Fetherston, climbing up over the side, and together they tossed Corner down into the boat and then leapt after him, heedless of how or on whom they landed.

  “Pull, you bastards, pull!” Jack shouted. No need to appear calm now; everyone in the boat was near panic. They leaned into the oars and the boat drew away from the sloop; and the sloop now carried by the wind and tide, whirled away from them, spun into the path of the man-of-war.

  And in the light of the burning vessel they could see the Rose, the mighty Rose, putting her helm up and running for all she was worth back toward the harbor entrance.

  Fore course, main course, the big sails tumbled from the yards and were sheeted home. The fire from the sloop illuminated the great spread of canvas, reaching high enough for them to see the topgallants being set as well. The light lapped over the yellow stripe along the frigate’s side, the black muzzles of the great guns, still run out, the towering stern windows as the man-of-war fled from the awful sight of the inferno bearing down on them.

  The long boat was a hundred yards or more away from the sloop when it finally blew. The concussion from the blast rolled over the men, hit them like a solid object, tumbled them into the bottom of the boat.

  They pulled themselves to their knees, looked back across the harbor.

  Blast after blast shattered the night with each barrel that went off, great columns of flame shooting up from the sloop’s wrecked hull, and the cannon along her side, loaded and shotted, firing off into the dark, like the vessel herself was lashing out in her death throes, making one last attempt to strike her tormentors before she died.