Captain in Calico

by George MacDonald Fraser

  For a moment Rackham was touched. He was on the point of thanking the jailer when a suspicion crossed his mind.

  ‘What’s it to you whether I’m shaved or not? I’ll hang no quicker without a beard, damn you.’

  ‘Why, matey.’ The jailer tried to look hurt. ‘I was on’y thinkin’ – I mean, I thought ye’d be glad—’

  ‘You thought nothing. What do you want?’

  The jailer glanced round at the door and dropped his voice to a confidential murmur.

  ‘Well, ye see, pal, it’s like this. Yer big mate along the way – ‘im wi’ the yellow beard, wot’s ‘is name? – Bull, that’s it – well this mornin’ there’s a woman comes inquirin’ for ‘im. Quality she were, too – leastways, rich quality – an’ she give the sergeant five guineas to let ‘er in, an’ me another five.’ He sniggered. ‘Well, there y’are. They was snug as ye like in an empty cell, an’ me five guineas better off. Where’s the harm, eh? No one’s to know, seein’ there’s women comin’ an’ goin’ all the time round the sojers’ part o’ the fort.’

  A vivid image rose in Rackham’s mind of the fleshy-faced woman who had watched Bull so intently at the trial, and he suddenly felt sick. There was something unutterably horrible in the thought of Bull, who would be a mangled lump of flesh in a few days’ time, and that woman. He let out an exclamation of disgust, but the hoarse voice of the little ghoul at his elbow went on:

  ‘So, I thinks to meself, why just Bull, when there’s the famous Calico Jack wi’ nothin’ to put by ‘is time all day? See? So if you was to trim yerself up, pal, an’ I’ll pass the word along, why, there’s good in it for the both of us—’

  His snickering little laugh ended in a startled yelp as Rackham swung a hand at his head. He leaped back, stumbled, and almost pitched headlong.

  ‘Wot the ‘ell! Well, you’re a touchy ‘un, so ‘elp me! Why—’

  ‘Get out,’ growled Rackham. ‘Get out before I break your neck.’

  Quite unabashed the jailer slipped through the doorway. ‘All right, pal,’ he said amiably. ‘No offence. Just lemme know if you change yer mind.’ He slammed the door, shot the bolt, and went off whistling.

  Rackham heard no more from him that day, and the hours wore on until sunset, when the din in the common cell down the passage broke out afresh and continued until well past midnight. He slept in spite of it, waking only when the measured tramp on the ramparts far overhead and the shouted commands of the under-officers announced the beginning of another day in Fort Charles. There would be five more mornings like this, and no more mornings thereafter.

  He fell to pacing up and down, up and down the narrow limits of his cell – for how long he had no means of knowing. The jailer came and went, leaving his bread and gruel and flask of water, but they lay untasted. Then gradually that energy which he expended in his restless march up and down gave way, and he was overcome by an odd reverie of confused thoughts and memories that held him motionless as he stared with unseeing eyes at the narrow patch of sky limited by his window.

  He might have been standing there only a few minutes, or it might have been an hour, when he heard the bolt snap back. Still he did not move, and when he felt the jailer tugging at his sleeve he was conscious only of irritation at an unwanted interruption.

  ‘Go away,’ he muttered. ‘Go to the devil.’

  ‘Matey! Come on, pal!’ The tugging was persistent. ‘‘Ere, matey, you got a visitor. Wake up!’

  Rackham half turned his head. ‘If it’s any of your …’ he was beginning, and then he stopped, for what he saw sent an actual physical shock through his body and left him speechless. Kate Sampson was standing in the heavy grey arch of the doorway.

  At first he did not recognise her in this beautiful, stately young lady, and he stared uncomprehendingly while the jailer slipped past her apologetically and closed the door upon them. And then recognition dawned.

  ‘Kate.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘You … Kate … you … here?’

  The shock of the meeting was even greater for her. It seemed impossible that such a short time could have wrought so great a change in him. Unkempt, with that scrubby beard on his cheeks, his tan faded, the dark pouches of fatigue under his eyes, and his ragged clothes, he was more like a scarecrow than the immaculate Calico Jack of old.

  Pity prompted her first words. ‘Oh, John, what have they done?’

  He seemed not to hear. ‘Where in God’s name have you come from?’ he asked.

  As briefly as she could she told him. She related how she had heard no word of him from the night of his theft of the Kingston at New Providence until that chance conversation at King’s House had reached her ears. She could not tell him what had passed in her mind during that night and the following day, because she did not truly know herself, and possibly because of that omission he was to draw a false conclusion to explain her presence. As she stood there, telling her story in hesitant, broken sentences he knew a warmth that at least he was not entirely alone, and was thankful for it.

  ‘And so … and so, I came,’ she finished lamely.

  ‘God bless you,’ he said, and then the strain imposed by the foregoing hours and by the sight of him and his surroundings was too much for her and she broke down, covering her face with her hands and sobbing uncontrollably.

  It was a natural enough reaction for a girl of nineteen finding herself plucked from her placid everyday existence and brought face to face with brutal reality, and his reaction was no less natural. He put his arm about her shoulders and she was too distressed to resist.

  ‘There, now, lass. For God’s sake, it’s none so terrible. Here, rest easy.’ Gently he brought her head on to his chest. ‘There, that’s it, now. My shirt’s not as dainty as it was two years gone, but I’ve no better to offer.’

  Perhaps she was astonished to find comfort where she could hardly have expected it, or she may have been too overcome, but she did not draw away. He touched a tendril of blonde hair that had escaped from beneath her hood.

  ‘It seems a long time, Kate. A long time. And ye’ve changed. Grown lovelier than ye were, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. And that’s something that can’t be said for me,’ he added wryly. ‘I think the greatest kindness they’ve done me is not giving me a mirror. I don’t wonder you’re crying.’

  She heard him with mounting amazement. In coming to see him she had not known what to expect, but it had certainly not been this. Anger or bitterness she could have understood, but this gentleness, as though there had never been two years between this moment and the evenings in the garden at New Providence, was something beyond her. It served as a spur to the half-awakened conscience which had been at work in her.

  ‘I am to blame – oh, I know I am to blame! And now you—’ She shuddered against him. ‘Oh, God, if only I had known!’

  ‘What’s this? You to blame? For what?’ He took his arm from about her and put his hands on her shoulders to force her gently away. ‘In what are you to blame, child?’

  ‘I … I might have waited, perhaps,’ she faltered, and then it came pouring out in a disjointed stream of words. ‘When you went away, on the night when the King’s ships came to Providence, I thought my heart would break. Oh, I loved you, and I believed you loved me, and I told myself that you must have been carried away by chance. I waited and waited, sure that there must be word from you, but it never came. And then it was so long – months without knowing what had become of you, and I still prayed and hoped that you might come back, but you never did. Sometimes I thought you must be dead and I wished myself dead, too. I was foolish, I suppose – my father told me so, and in time I came to believe him. And then Woodes – Governor Rogers – came to the house, and – and I was beginning to forget, you see … and then he asked me to become his wife … and so I agreed.’

  She paused, but he said nothing, and she went on. ‘I never thought, then, that you would come back at all. And when you did, I didn’t imagine for a moment that it was for me. Y
ou remember that morning, at the Fort, when you came up to me, and he struck you … only then I realised that it was for me you had come back.’ She looked up at him. ‘And I did not love you then. Do you see? I can’t tell why; perhaps because it was so long since I had seen you, and I was no longer a girl, and besides there was Woodes. And when you went away, I was sorry for you, I think, but that was all. But … but now …’ Her lips trembled. ‘To think of you … you see, if I had waited, this would never have happened … and you would have been …’

  He considered her for a long moment. ‘And you count yourself to blame? Kate, if ever there was a woman in this world without blame, it is you. Why, lass,—’ he reached out to take her hand – ‘what fault there is is mine, and no other’s. Oh, believe me, I know. Were you to wait two years for a man gone roving, breaking his word to you as it seemed?’ He shook his head. ‘The wonder is that you should wait at all.’

  ‘But you came back,’ she insisted.

  ‘Aye – after two years.’ He sighed. ‘But you were right in one thing, Kate; it was by no will of mine that I went out to sea with the Kingston that dawn when the King’s ships came to Providence. You would hear how it was with us, how a frightened fool touched off a gun and the King’s men thought we were firing on them and sailed in to board us. There was no way but escape then, and I knew that there was an end to you and me.’

  He turned away from her and walked slowly towards the window, looking out at that blue patch of sky.

  ‘That was why I never sent you word. Could I believe you were waiting for a pirate who was beyond pardon? But I never forgot you, even though I knew I should never see you again. Then there was talk of this new pardon – oh, eighteen months after or perhaps more, and within a day of hearing of it from a ship we spoke, we put into Tortuga and I met Hedley Archer, who was lately from New Providence. He told me you were not wed. And I thought, perhaps …’ He stopped and shrugged. ‘Ye may ask how vain a man can be. But to say you were at fault – no.’ He shook his head. ‘You had waited overlong for a man who was lost two years. It was no fault of yours if that man came back to claim you too late. I’ll own I was sick and sorry for myself, but it passed, and if I resented you it was for a moment only.’

  ‘The resentment was not all on your side,’ she told him. ‘When I heard how you had fought over that woman I was …’

  ‘Fought over whom? I fought over no one. Ye mean with La Bouche? That was no more than a tavern quarrel, God knows over what, for I was not sober at the time. As for Anne Bonney, she dressed my wounds, poor soul. Better for her if she’d left me be – aye, better for all of us. Penner would be alive, and she would still be riding in her carriage about Providence. Instead she’ll go with the rest. And I’m sorry for that.’

  Seeking to cheer him, she recounted a detail of what she had overheard at King’s House.

  ‘I think you may set your mind at rest over her. She is not likely to hang, if what they say is true. This Bernard, the justice, has looked kindly on her. The talk is that she has become his mistress, and that he will contrive to postpone her execution. It may be gossip, but I think not.’

  ‘Well, then God be thanked for that,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose you loved her,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Loved her?’ He smiled wryly. ‘No. Men don’t love the Anne Bonneys of this world. They only think they do, for a little while. She knew that, and so she must use every man for what she can get. Who shall blame her? Not I, God knows. I can pity her, now, although but for her it’s odds I’d be an honest privateersman this day. It seems women are unlucky for me, and I for them. I’ve brought little good to you, my dear; we should be thankful it’s no worse.’

  ‘Could it be any worse?’ she demanded. ‘Can anything be worse than death?’

  He smiled. ‘No – although there are some will tell you it is preferable to dishonour. Myself, I think they cannot know what death is like. They should go roving a while; it might teach them things.’

  Her lip trembled and she bit it in an endeavour to keep back her tears. He put his hand beneath her chin and raised her face.

  ‘Nay, now, what’s the matter?’ His voice was gentle. ‘What would you have me say? Cry and whimper because I must pay my shot, or curse and rant against the King and the law and aught I can lay tongue to? That would mend nothing.’ It was remarkable how easy it was to sound brave when he spoke to her; it seemed almost virtuous to lie if it would comfort her.

  ‘I know.’ She drew in a little quick breath and tried to keep her voice steady. ‘But it is … different for a woman. If only … oh, if only it had gone otherwise … any one of a thousand things could have happened rather than this. Perhaps if you were angry or hated me it would seem better – I don’t know how. But you talk as though it was no more than … than, oh, nothing at all!’ Her voice choked and she turned her face away. ‘I am sorry. I only make things worse for you. But I cannot forget that but for me … oh, but for me it would not be like this.’

  He shook his head. ‘That’s not so, as I’ve told you. And if it was that belief that brought you here, why then, you were wrong.’ He paused. ‘Was that why you came – to blame yourself to me?’

  ‘I … I don’t know … perhaps.’

  ‘Was it because you still loved me, Kate?’

  She turned and looked at him, her face very pale. She could lie, and say ‘Yes,’ or she could try to explain what she did not truly understand herself – that she could not stay away while there was that tiny voice forcing her on. It was impossible to tell him what had brought her. It was a question she had not been able to answer in the past thirty-six hours: she wondered could she ever answer it.

  While she stood irresolute there was the soft pad of feet in the passage followed by a rapping at the door.

  ‘Commandant’s rounds in a few minutes, m’lady,’ said the jailer’s voice, and after a pause he sidled in, looking apologetically at Kate. ‘Beggin’ your pardon, but I thought as you’d wish to be gone afore he come, m’lady. Not that ‘e minds womenfolk in the cells, but seein’ you ain’t one o’ them, I thought …’

  She nodded. ‘I shall come at once,’ and the jailer slipped out.

  She forced herself to meet Rackham’s eyes again. There was that question still unanswered, and her own doubts still unsettled in spite of his protestations. And time was running out.

  ‘Oh, if only there was something I could do!’ It was a cry of frustration born of her own helplessness. ‘Some way …’

  His voice was not quite steady. ‘God bless you for that.’ He seemed to be about to add something more but changed his mind. Then he motioned towards the door. ‘Best be gone.’

  To stay longer would only be to protract her own misery, to say nothing of the risk of detection.

  ‘Good-bye, then,’ she said. It was almost a whisper, and she realised with horror that the phrase held a terrible finality.

  ‘Good-bye, Kate. It was … it was like you. To come, I mean.’

  Then she was in the passage, and the little jailer was snapping home the bolts.

  ‘Pardon me, m’lady, but we’d best make haste. If ye’ll follow me as quick’s ye can.’

  She had the presence of mind to pull her hood forward to shield her face as they passed through the vaulted guard-room at the end of the passage. There were a few soldiers lounging there, but their ribald invitations went unheard, and presently she was at the main gate, having parted with another ten guineas to the grateful jailer.

  She passed the sentries and was in the street once more, in a thoroughfare coloured and alive, a place of noise and bustle where the sun shone and the strong salt breeze from the sea held its own even with Port Royal’s varied odours. It seemed impossible that two such worlds could be so close together – this one and that other of stone and iron that she had left.

  She heard behind her the rattle of a side-drum from the fort and turned to look back through the gate. On the other side of the parade was the solid pile of
the main fort building from which she had lately emerged, and down the stone steps from the battlements a party of officers was descending. There was something familiar about the leading figure, something unpleasantly familiar, and she recognised him as Colonel Coates. She stepped quickly back into the shelter of the wall, but he and his party turned aside at the foot of the steps and vanished presently round the angle of the keep.

  The sooner she was away the better; if Coates had noticed her and made enquiries it could have been embarrassing both for her and Woodes Rogers, and Coates, she was certain from her brief acquaintance with him, was the kind who would enjoy stirring up mischief. She could not picture him turning a blind eye unless it was in his interest to do so. Since he was reputed corruptible he would possible even sink to blackmail, and … She stopped dead in the act of stepping into the street, overwhelmed by the thought that drove everything else from her mind.

  The sentry outside the gate watched with mild interest the behaviour of the young lady who stopped so abruptly as she was passing his post. He saw her go pale, and stare back at the empty gateway with a tense expression for which he could see no good reason, and then set off down the street at a pace which he considered undignified in one who, if he was any judge, was of the quality.

  Kate found her carriage where she had left it in a narrow by-street. She took her seat and ordered the coachman to drive to the address of her father’s agent in Port Royal – she had intended to visit him over that gift of land which was to be her wedding-present, but that had nothing to do with her present urgent business. As the carriage jerked and rolled slowly along to the accompaniment of a flow of imprecations from the driver at the lumbering vehicles which impeded them, she sat in an agony of impatience, fearful that the resolve taken so quickly outside the fort would cool if she were delayed in committing herself. She knew the folly of the course she intended; it was frightening to think of it, but even more frightening to think that her courage might fail her if she was not quick to put it into execution.