Читать книгу Captain Crossbones - Donald Barr Chidsey - Страница 7

CAYO JOROBADO—or, as the English had Englished it, Hunchback Key—might have been built by sea robbers. It stood alone. All of its beaches had a gentle slope, ideal for careening. In addition, on the north side there was a small bay, the pass to which was narrow, and probably, George Rounsivel reflected as he paddled through it, too shoal for a warship yet deep enough to permit the passage of a sloop. Pirates, understandably, favored shallow-draft vessels.

The island, lush, would have wood and water, probably also plantains and coconuts, and the bay would furnish fish. Upthrust at the center, it even provided its own lookout tower in the form of the knob of shards that had given it its name. On this mound, or hump, starfished in all directions, had been mounted half a dozen brass cannons. In the midst of these, on a wooden platform, a glass across his knees, sat a sentinel who could see for many miles south in the direction of Cuba, west toward Andros Island, east toward Eleuthera, and to the north the channels that led on one side to the open Atlantic, on the other to the Florida Passage.

In a failing light the cannons gleamed like bosses on some great shield. Blue-purple shadows slipped out across the bay. Beyond a half-circle of sand the dark banana fronds, nasturtiumed at the edges where sunset smeared them, moved with a lazy languor like great tired birds that fuss themselves to rest. Despite the human beings, here was a scene calculated to stir the soul of any artist.

George Rounsivel was not an artist, and he was so tired that he could hardly hold up his head. He didn’t care how lovely the place was. All he cared about was sleep.

The plump man was named Monk Evans. For all his flabby flesh he was hard. For all the red round mouth and gooseberry eyes he was mean, suspicious. He seemed to have taken an actual dislike to George, whom he placed in the bow of the periagua, a tippy narrow craft. Evans himself did little paddling, but he did guide the boat with an uncanny skill, having no sort of navigating instrument. He must have been one of those men who could find their way among the islands unstumblingly, moving not by instinct so much as by sure familiarity, as a man might walk about among the articles of furniture in his own pitch-dark bedroom. Evans was a dirty-mouthed little man, who cursed George each time George paused to rest on his paddle, and threatened him with that cutlass; but George was so tired that he couldn’t care, and ignored the fat man now and then to slump forward on the thwarts for a short stunned sleep.

These cat naps, if they could be called that, might have done more harm than good. For the sun was terrible through all that long day, and it seemed to hit him the hardest when he did not stir. The blistered hands, and the ache of shoulder and back muscles, together with the agony of cramped legs—for he scarcely dared to stir for fear of upsetting their small frail craft—these he might have endured. But he feared that he was about to succumb to the sun. He giggled, light-headed. What remained of his shirt helped somewhat to protect his shoulders and even a part of his neck, but his head, having no hat or wig, at first began to itch, and then to sting, as though literally on fire. The dizziness was as bad as the pain itself, so that George swayed where he sat.

It was Evans who saved him by passing forward a flimsy raffia hat not unlike the one he himself wore, albeit even dirtier. Much of the damage had been done before Evans produced this garment, but George, under it, was able to survive.

George was never to forget that trip, a paddle through hell, his first prolonged exposure to the sun of the Caribbees.

They were not challenged when they beached the canoe. At this spot George would have collapsed, but Monk Evans seized him by the arm and marched him to the center of the camp.

“Got to report. They’d only wake you up anyway.”

“Yes.”

It made sense. Even in such a sloppy place it was unthinkable that two strangers could be accepted at sunset without being called upon to give an account of themselves. Only half awake, George lurched along.

The camp churned. There showed no sort of plan to it. Fires were being lighted, but these were as irregularly spaced as the men who tended them. Most of those men were drunk; it seemed to be an accustomed condition. There were no fights, true, and there was a certain amount of singing; but for the most part the camp at Jorobado, if raucous, was not gay. Neither was it solid. There was not about it even the air of semipermanence that Nassau could show. Even the cooking arrangements were primitive, temporary. Indeed the one splash of human ingenuity in this out-of-the-way place was provided by the sloop that they’d hauled up on the beach for careening. She was a slim craft named Agnes. Her masts had been drawn, her deck and hold stripped of everything movable. In this condition, and by means of a series of windlasses anchored deep in the sand, she had been tipped to her side, where she looked singularly helpless, like a fish out of water, one that has ceased to flop and simply lies there with gaping mouth and pop-out eyes. The exposed side of her, the larboard side, already had been scraped, and men even now were stuffing the seams with a mixture of sulphur, tallow, and tar, the tangy smell of which mingled with the more humdrum odors in the air of Jorobado—rum, rotting fish heads, molasses, urine, sweat.

“I’d climb, I’d fight,

“To pray all night,

“To be my manhood back-o!”

In the middle of this, seated on a stump, in his fist a mug of bumboo, was Charles Vane, a course giant, drably dressed, without jewels. The features of his face were bulbous, bloated, except for the small sunken vulterine eyes, bloodshot now.

“Where’s Rackham?” he asked, and belched.

‘Out looking for Anne. He wants to be sure she’s in her own hammock when it gets dark.”

Vane belched again, then sampled the bumboo and made a face.

“I hope he don’t find her with her breeches down,” he said, “or we’ll have another murder in this camp.”

“Wouldn’t she take ’em down for you, skipper?”

“Shut up.” He had noticed Monk Evans. “They hang?” he asked.

“Aye.”

“All of ’em?”

“All except this man here. He’s a lawyer.”

“You mean a real lawyer? Not just a sea lawyer?”

“Aye, that he is, captain.”

Charles Vane put down his mug, making a little hole in the sand with it, and then, the heels of his hairy red hands pressing his knees, he regarded George Rounsivel.

These pirate captains or chiefs were known as “kings.” There was nothing regal about Vane, and surely nothing that suggested a court about the place in which he sat. Yet the man’s very massiveness could impress. A brute, a beast, he was not without cunning, and it was clear that he was used to being obeyed.

Now he hiccupped thoughtfully. He started to pick his nose.

“All right,” he said at last. “We’ll take you. Now you sit right down and draw me up some articles of comradeship. And don’t forget to put in there that the captain’s supreme—even over the quartermaster, and in fact especially over the quartermaster.”

“No,” said George Rounsivel.

That word jolted Vane forward like a blow between the shoulder blades. He gawped, temples throbbing, while his face became so dark as to be almost purple. Somebody sniggered. Vane heaved himself to his feet, fists clenched.

Fatigue lent insolence to George Rounsivel, who knew anyway that boldness would be the best policy here.

I’ll write your God damn’ paper for you,” he added, “but not now. Why, I’m whipped for sleep! I couldn’t hold a pen in my hand!”

“Oh,” said Vane.

“Besides that,” George went on, “I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”

Vane sat down again. He waved his hand.

“Feed him,” he commanded.

The men of Jorobado might be fussy about their personal possessions, such as trinkets, bits of treasured loot, but it was clear that their food was communal. They ate any time, anywhere, and as much as they pleased.

George was handed two calabashes, one for food, one for blackstrap, and these were kept full despite his protests. The blackstrap was rum and chowder beer spiced with nutmeg. The food was better. There was a salmagundi of uncooked herbs mixed with oil, leeks, garlic, and hard-boiled green-turtle eggs; there were, as he’d expected, bananas; there were chunks of cane for chewing, chunks of coconut too, and there was a great deal of tender white meat which George at first mistook for some notably tasty fowl. By the time he learned that he had been eating iguana he was too tired to care.

His early supposition that he had scarcely been noticed proved wrong. Two minutes after his interview with Vane every man in camp knew that George had been captured and sentenced to hang but had escaped, and that he was a lawyer, a real one. These facts enormously interested them, and they plied George with questions.

Silent, sagging, George shook his head. He was filled with loathing of these greasy uncouth scoundrels who jabbered for details about the killing of their own kind, and with the same breath made suggestions for the articles he was to draw up. But he knew that he could not let this contempt show. Pirates, as he had already learned, are a touchy people, ludicrously easy to insult. Outcasts, they were forever in a position of furious defense. So he kept his head averted, wolfing the salad and meat.

At last he got away and made for the hill. This was wooded and might afford some protection in case of a shower, but his real reason for going there was to be alone.

It had been his first thought to flop down anywhere just outside the camp. He soon saw that this wouldn’t be wise. There was no latrine; while some of the pirates performed right where they were, causing the fires to spit and splutter, others, more fastidious, would retire to the edge of the camp at a call of nature. A man sleeping in the darkness there might be wakened most rudely.

So George climbed, dragging his feet.

When he stepped among the trees it was almost as though somebody had whuffed out a lamp. He paused, waiting for his eyes to get used to the darkness. Overhead the tree branches were javelined by the sun’s last rays, but immediately around him it was hard to see anything.

“Looking for a blanket?”

The speaker was seated, almost at George’s feet, as he saw with a start, and was indeed on a blanket. He was a slim slight lad, pale. Smiling, he moved aside.

“Thank you,” said George.

The blanket looked thick, the boy clean, and they were deep enough in the wood to be safe from prowlers George fell full-length.

Sleep did not seize him instantly, as he’d expected Probably the pain accounted for this. His limbs shrieked, the joints too, as though he were being stretched on a rack; his head was all flame.

“You’re the one that came back with Monk Evans,’ the lad said, his treble voice reaching George as though from far away.

George made an effort to be polite.

“I suppose you’re going to ask for some special article too?”

“Yes. I think you ought to write in a provision against prostitutes. You see, I don’t want any competition.”

George’s face was turned away, and he grimaced. “Good God, one of those!” was his thought. But he was too tired to move.

“You don’t know who I am?” the lad pursued. “I’m Anne Bonney.”

Oh, fine! He was so far depraved that he let them call him Anne!

“Why ‘Anne’?” George asked coldly. “That’s a woman’s name.”

The other giggled. George heard a string drawn, a button popped. Then his hand was lifted from his side and placed over something soft and warm.

“And what do you think this is, mister—a mosquito bite?”

He sat up, gasping, snatching his hand away. His eyes told him now what that hand already had reported. Despite the dim light, despite the male clothes, beyond all doubt this was a woman who sat by his side. She laughed softly, and exposed her other breast.

“There are two of them,” she whispered.

“There usually are.”

She reached for the belt that held up her trousers.

“Would you like to see more?”

George groaned, falling back on the blanket.

“Save it, sister,” he advised. “I’m too tired. Besides, I haven’t any money with me.”

He had in his pocket the purse the governor had given him, but it was his experience that the quickest way to get rid of a trollop is to tell her you are cashless. He expected this one to relapse in a huff. Instead she slapped him, hard.

The slaps stung, one on each cheek. Startled, he opened his eyes.

Anne Bonney, girlish, slender, blonde, might have been easy to look at in any light, in any mood too. Now, furious, her eyes flashing, she was lovely. As she leaned over him her mouth worked in rage.

“By God, I’ll teach you to call me a whore!”

“What else was I to think?” he asked bluntly.

With one hand she covered her breasts, buttoning the shirt back into place. With the other she drew a small sheath knife, and she held this before George Rounsivel’s face.

“I’ll slice you so’s no woman will ever look at you again! I’ll—”

Fascinated, George did not hear the step of the man who approached. But the girl did—and she was off like a frightened deer.

The man came quickly, from the direction of the beach, the camp. His mouth was a little open, his eyes darted here and there, and when he saw George Rounsivel he stopped short.

George didn’t stir, pretending to be asleep.

This man was young, strong, well set up, and handsome in a brash, coarse way. For a pirate he was uncommonly trig. A stiff black enameled hat was perched on his head, held there by red ribbons that went under the chin. His trousers and shirt were made of fine calico, striped vertically in red and dark blue. Around his waist was a white silk sash, and into this had been thrust two silver-hilted pistols. A sheath knife hung at his right hip. In his hand he carried a cudgel.

This man should have swaggered. Instead he paused, irresolute, even a mite frightened. It was plain to George, who watched him through slitted eyes, that he was thinking of a challenge. He decided against this, visibly shaking his head, and ran on.

George waited a little while, though he didn’t stir. He half expected Anne Bonney back, and he was prepared now to resist her. But not even the thought of those flashing blue eyes—and that knife so near to his own eyes—could hold him back from the brink of sleep, which engulfed him with a great soft roar.