Читать книгу The Privateer - Elizabeth Mackintosh - Страница 6

Table of Contents

A man may own a ship, but unless he is captain of a crew he goes where the ship goes. And not one of the men from that camp in the forest would go anywhere near a British possession as long as they had anything to do with the ship they had taken. They would go to Tortuga, they said. From that bleak and wind-swept little island off the north coast of Hispaniola they could get passage anywhere. It was a sort of clearing-house for the whole Caribbean; and, for those who needed it, an unfailing source of employment, lawful and otherwise. To the sheltering wing of the French and the gratifying tolerance of Tortuga they would go; far from Admiralty courts and the stinking English conscience and the curiosity of the official mind.

So north away from Barbados sailed the Fortune, beating up through the islands into the north-east trade, day after blue-green day. Her Spanish crew worked the ship, and the victors lay about the deck in attitudes of ostentatious idleness. They ate, slept, and gambled; and were monumentally bored. The stores of pearls changed hands continuously. By early afternoon they were drunk. By night they were either moribund or quarrelsome.

It was Chris, that man with the face of an unfrocked priest, who kept them in order; and that was because Chris could drink immense quantities of neat rum without succumbing and because they were afraid of him. Even Timsy, who when drunk was a maniac, kept in some recess of his crazy mind a recognition of the lethal quality in Chris, and would stop in his tracks and whimper as the long, thin man got to his feet to correct him. When at last peace reigned because everyone else was insensible, Chris would pour a final mugful for himself and would fall asleep only one degree short of flash point.

Only one man on board the Fortune had a harder head than Chris. And that was Henry Morgan.

'You do not drink, Señor?' Don Christoval de Rasperu asked him, as the 'passenger' was having his daily outing and they were walking round the deck together.

Henry said that, on the contrary, he drank a great deal. But it went missing somewhere between his throat and his stomach. Which was a sad thing for more reasons than the obvious one. It snared one into drinking more than was good for one in the tropics.

'It is sad,' said Don Christoval, looking at the large, slack form of Tugnet lying unconscious in the evening shadow below the break of the poop, 'it is sad to be given this precious gift of life and to find nothing better to do with it than seek ever for temporary death. Life embarrasses them, it would seem. They run away from it. They do their best to give it back.'

Don Christoval de Rasperu had been sent from Spain to inspect and report upon the colonies on the South American seaboard, and Henry regarded him with the tender interest of a man for his latest investment. Spain might or might not be willing to ransom the crew of the Gloria, but for the excellent Don Christoval de Rasperu they would pay willingly and high. It was important that Don Christoval stay whole and healthy. Don Christoval therefore got the choice times of the day for his enlargement from the after-cabin, and if sometimes he forgot to go back when his appointed time was up, no one was officious enough to call his attention to the lapse. Unless it was the captain. Who, having got over his initial fright, and being now fairly certain that neither death nor torture lay in the offing, lived in a state of fret and fume that was melting the flesh from his bones even more effectively than the heat of the after-cabin. To be a prisoner on his own ship was bitter, but to take second place to a passenger was gall and wormwood. The only person who did his best to make Don Christoval's life a misery on board the Fortune was his fellow-captive and countryman, the late captain of the Gloria.

The Spaniard with the dark ringlets was kicked daily by the Dorset man for his bad taste in having once made one of the Santa Marta's crew; but that little matter of principle having been attended to, he was left in peace. Indeed, he sometimes fell heir to the dregs in the Dorset man's mug because they shared an experience that was not common to anyone else on board.

The mate of the Gloria was freed altogether, so that he might run the crew and attend to the navigation; and Henry became his pupil in the matter of chart and compass. Don Christoval, who was a mathematician, would make a third at these sessions; and he and the mate would compare and argue this still new science, Don Christoval full of theories and the mate stubborn with practice; and Henry listened and learned.

This was his first real voyaging among the islands that he came to know so well—the magic, small, anonymous islands of the Caribbean. In endless permutations of innocence they stood about the empty seas fresh, it seemed, from creation's dawn. The little bays with sand so white, so virgin, that it was one with the breaking wave; the reefs with their single rank of crazy palms, like some divine awkward squad. To a practical sailor-mind they represented shelter or a lee shore, as the case might be; fresh water, food, and refreshment of body; landfall or bearing. But long after they were commonplace he would pause in the ploy of the moment to stand astare, mazed with their beauty.

And the Fortune was their equal in the mind of every man who sailed in her. She had been careened in America, and she handled like a dinghy. She would come about 'like a lady going back for her prayer-book', as Bartholomew said. And her speed in a following wind was such that her victors, used all their lives to the sheer dead weight that crusted the products of English and Spanish slips, could hardly believe it. It took only a week for boredom to drive the conquerors to the ship's service, and they polished, spliced, caulked, cleaned, and painted with a proprietary pride; half-surreptitiously at first, as if it were beneath their new dignity as millionaires, then openly when no one remarked on their activities. Bart contrived a Union flag out of the store in her sail locker, and it was under the proper colours that she sailed into the roads at Tortuga.

She came nosing her way through the reefs round Tortuga on a day when the wind was blowing the tops off the cobalt seas, so that the whole dark-blue ocean was shot with rainbow as the sunlight caught the spindrift. On the innermost reef, cruelly bright and clear in the pitiless light, was the remains of a ship, and they crowded to the side to look as the Fortune picked up her skirts and sidled past.

'That looks to me like Jack Morris's ship,' Bluey said, watching the waves spout up from her broken bows. 'I mind them dolphins as I mind my girl's eyes.'

'Your girl got eyes?' they mocked, Bluey being no beauty.

'The Dolphin, she was called, cause of them there dolphins at her bows. Or t'other way about. But that's Jack Morris's ship. Take my oath on that.'

They looked at her with the slight embarrassment of sailors in the presence of a wreck. Bart, standing by Morgan, said: 'She looks sort of ashamed, don't she? As if she was naked and we shouldn't be looking.'

But they kept on looking, fascinated.

'She can't have been long there, or they'd have broken her up,' Chris said. The seas, he meant. The seas combed over her tilted stem and rocketed into the air.

'Well, praise be to Christ and all His angels, I don't never have to go to sea again,' Tugnet said, turning away. And that was the verdict of them all. They went below for their little handkerchief bundles and their fortunes of pearls, and when the Fortune anchored off the port they rowed themselves ashore. They did not want any of the problematical ransom for the Spaniards, they said. They had more riches now than they would ever spend if they had nine lives, and they wanted no more.

'I'll miss Bluey's jew's-harp,' Bart said, leaning over the side, watching the boat pull away. Their farewell to him had been of the briefest; not because he had chosen to stay behind (in the weeks at sea it had become obvious that Bart was Morgan's ally, and they had accepted the fact without remark and without rancour) but because casualness was their way.

Henry wanted to say: 'How long do you think it will be before they are penniless?' but he did not know how much Bart himself had left of that heap of pearls. Bart had gambled like the rest, and it was understood that he had been unlucky; but to what extent Henry did not know. It warmed his heart, and would warm it as long as he lived, that Bart, with his fortune intact in his pocket, had elected nevertheless to sail with him.

'Well, what now?' asked Bart, at last; having watched the Fortune's boat pull ashore, and having reviewed the ships in harbour.

The Spaniards, with the exception of the mate, who was standing at their elbow, were locked up below. They were alone with their captives and the ship.

'There will be a bumboat along presently, trying to sell us stuff, I don't doubt. I'll go ashore with it and see if I can muster a skeleton crew to take us as far as Jamaica. It can't be more than two hundred miles from here, and the "trade" behind us all the way.'

But the day wore on to noon, and then to afternoon, and no boat came out to greet them or to hawk their wares. They freed the cook and set him to cooking dinner for all on board, and dinner was almost ready before a sail came shooting over the water in their direction.

'Too small and fast for a bumboat,' Bart said, watching the light craft come. 'Perhaps they're going to arrest us.'

The same thought had crossed Morgan's mind, and he was therefore very scornful of Bart's silly idea. What would they arrest a ship flying an English flag for?

'Yes, mighty fast and official-looking to be just paying a social call,' Bart said, glowering at the approaching boat.

The boat lowered her sail and swept round to the ladder on the lee side with an effortless piece of timing that spoke louder of seamanship than of pen-and-ink.

'Not so official,' Bart said, in a more hopeful tone.

There were three men in the boat, and they came up the ladder with no sign that any one of them had ever held a pen in his life. The first over the side was not very much older than Morgan; a spare, self-contained young man in good clothes that looked as if they had been made for him but were nevertheless not the clothes he habitually wore. Seaman ashore, said the clothes.

The man looked from Bart to Henry and then said to Henry: 'Captain Morgan?'

And with the magic word 'Captain', Henry's belief in his luck came back full and strong. He never forgot that Jack Morris was the first man to give him the title.

'My name is John Morris. Old John Morris's son, if you ever knew my father.'

'It's your ship——' Henry began involuntarily.

'Yes, it's my ship out on the reef yonder. And several good men besides. I don't beat about with words, Captain Morgan, so I'll tell you straight out that I heard you were looking for a crew. The Dolphin's crew are looking for a passage out of this hell-hole, and we'd be very glad to sail with you if you're bound for a British possession. Or anywhere, for that matter of it. This is my mate, Bernard Speirdyck, and his nephew, Cornelius Carstens.'

The stocky, blond man bowed in a jerky continental fashion, and the boy with the thatch of taffy-coloured hair smiled.

Henry, aware that his clothes were the best he could do with judicious confiscations from the Spaniards' wardrobes and that he had never in his life commanded as much as a yawl at sea, was a little overcome. He wanted to blurt out: 'You mean you'd sail under the command of a tyro like me?' But his unfailing vanity shook him to rights. 'You're not only captain of this vessel, you're the owner,' his vanity reminded him. 'You're the owner of one of the fastest craft of her size anywhere in the world today, with a clean bottom and well found, and you're a very desirable person to be acquainted with.'

So to John Morris he said that dinner was ready and they were about to sit down and they would be honoured if Captain Morris and his friends would join them. It would be sea fare, since they had not yet replenished, and not as good as Captain Morris would get ashore, but if he did not mind salt pork they would be glad of his company.

'Mind!' said Jack Morris. 'You don't seem to understand, Captain. We are on our beam-ends. We are on the rocks even more hopelessly than the poor Dolphin out there.'

And Henry, who if the positions had been reversed would never have confessed to any such state, loved him for his frankness. As they went below it occurred to him that dolphins brought him luck. A Dolphin in Bridgetown brought him the Fortune, and now a Dolphin in Tortuga was providing him with a crew. He must remember dolphins when he was in need of luck.

Over the enormous meal of meat and strong drink that they thought suitable for a tropic afternoon, Henry explained that he was looking for an English authority to take custody of his prisoners and eventually accept ransom for them on his behalf. Where was the nearest English official? Jamaica, presumably?

'Here,' said Morris, and began to laugh.

'In Tortuga!'

'He must meet our Elias, mustn't he, Barney!'

'But Tortuga's French!'

'Not just at the moment. The Spaniards threw them out not long ago. But when we took Jamaica from the Spaniards they fled out of Tortuga in a panic to defend San Domingo against becoming a second Jamaica. And in walked Elias Watts with wife and family. He's living up at the castle; with his wife and brats and a battery of four guns, one of them workable. Making a success of it, too. Very popular, our Elias is. The French will be back in no time, of course, but until then Elias is the official governor.'

Elias Watts, however typical a piece of English colonial history, did not seem to Henry a very safe deposit for his prisoners. He still wanted to go to Jamaica, where he would find English officials of a more permanent type; officials who would not only accept his prisoners and give him his due share of their subsequent ransom, but would also supply him with letters of marque as a privateer.

'They are not very fond of privateers in Yamaica yoost now,' Speirdyck said. 'Every time a privateer slap Spain in the face, Spain come and slap Yamaica. The planters they do not like that.'

'Ay,' said Morris. 'They yell for help and say the Spaniards are treating the seas like their own, and then when we do account for a few Spanish privateers they yell because Spain is offended and comes and burns a village or two. They can't have it both ways.'

'These planters,' the Cornelius boy said, pausing in his swift, silent consumption of food to speak for the first time, 'they care for nothing but their crops. They do not care what Spain does to poor sailors or how many innocent men are rotting in Spanish prisons. For them it has never been a holy war.'

'I know someone who would think it a holy war,' Morgan said suddenly. And then, a little dashed: 'But he is away off in Barbados.'

'What's Barbados!' said Morris, whose world was the sea. 'Just a biscuit toss. I could find my way there blindfold, any time out of the hurricane season. If it's letters of marque you want, let's go to Barbados and get them. Who is your man in Barbados? Goodson?'

'Is that the Governor? No, there's a man who is just going to be Governor. A good Cromwell man,' said Henry, trying to keep his lip from curling. 'The great under-propper of the Roman Babylon, Cromwell says Spain is. I think Sir Thomas Modyford will be prepared to fight the Lord's battles to the extent of letters of marque. His estates in Barbados are not as handy to Spain as the Jamaican ones are, so he can serve the Lord, and Cromwell, and himself at the same time. There's just one thing. The Fortune will have to be victualled to take us back there, and I haven't a penny until I get the ransom for the prisoners.'

Bart looked up from his plate and said: 'If five pearls are any good to you, Harry, they're yours.'

'Five!' said Henry, involuntarily.

'Yes,' Bart said, shamefaced. 'That's all.'

'Bart, I'm ashamed of you. Who was the lucky one?'

'Not any one of them specially,' Bart said. 'They just went little by little. I'm still better off than I was before,' he added; and then, looking up at Henry: 'Much better off.'

Because Henry for once had no words ready, Morris said: 'Five pearls wouldn't get us far, but you can turn your prisoners over to Elias and get credit in the town for them. I hear you have an important one. On security like that Tortuga with supply you with anything you like to ask for.'

'I see my late colleagues have been talking.'

'Fluently.'

'I think when we have dined, Captain Morris, you and I had better go ashore and have a talk with your Elias.'

And so it came about that Don Christoval de Rasperu found himself being welcomed on the most infamous and disreputable of all the Caribbean islands by a worthy British matron of the most domestic type: a kind little woman who fussed over him, wiped her son's running nose, and lamented the shortage of gunpowder all in the same breath. Her husband accepted the custody of the crew on condition that he might put them to 'honourable employment' until such time as ransom was forthcoming for them. Tortuga swarmed with men of all nationalities, but not one of them would do what his lady called 'a hand's turn' on the island. They were prepared to be blown up, drowned, maimed, starved, and overworked at sea, but at the sight of a spade or a hoe they blenched. As long as the Spaniards were prepared to work for their keep, Elias was prepared to be responsible for them. For their health, that was. For any escapes from the island he could by no means hold himself responsible. He had no space to imprison nearly forty men, even if any of the Castle locks had keys. And with the sea at their doors escape was an ever-present possibility. But he would try to make their stay so pleasant that a normal return to Spain in due course would appear to them more desirable than turning themselves adrift on an unfriendly ocean.

The two sea-captains shared family dinner at the Castle, which was enlivened by the sneezes of one child and the proud recitation of the nine-times by another, admired Elias's highly ornamental battery, took a friendly farewell of an amused Don Christoval, and went down to the port to profit from the unbridled boastings of Chris, Tugnet, Bluey, and company.

And so next day, the third since the Fortune's arrival at Tortuga, a two-way traffic was being conducted over the ship's side. Boats brought stores in quantity and took away prisoners in batches. The prisoners shook hands all round before they left. They had had a wonderful time, they inferred. Short of a permanent pension, give them a cruise as prisoners of the English any day.

Only two made a scene. One was the boy who had played with the dog on the beach at Barbados, and the other was the ship's cook. The boy said that he, Manuel Sequerra, was a Portuguese, that he had done nothing against the English, and that in any case he wanted to sail with the Captain Morgan, who was his beau ideal of what a commanding officer should be. Toni, the cook, said that he was a Neapolitan, and as such had nothing to do with these insane wars that everyone was always indulging in; a stove, he inferred, was of all things the most international; it was inconceivable that he, Antonio Toscanelli, a Neapolitan and an artist, should be left to rot on Tortuga.

Since they were still short-handed on the Fortune, and since one of the men drowned on the reef had been the Dolphin's cook, neither Manuel's tears nor Toni's dramatics were necessary. Henry was very glad to have them. Toni was a very bad cook, but he was cleaner than most, and drank hardly at all.

On the night before they sailed, very late in the evening, the mulatto arrived at the bottom of the ladder, having spent his last poor coins in hiring a boat to take him out. Indeed, he had not had quite enough, and the boatman was loud in his demands for the balance from the Fortune; the mulatto had promised that the few odd pence would be paid when he arrived at the ship, he said. The mulatto was in tears. They had sold the dogs to a man who was going to Cuba, and the man had no need of him. He was lost without the dogs. He had also lost every pearl that he had ever possessed, but that seemed hardly to concern him. He could think of nothing but the parting with the dogs that had been his life. If Captain Morgan also had no use for him, then indeed his life was at an end.

'Manuel!' shouted Morgan.

'Captain! Sir! I come! I come!' Manuel came plummeting to the deck with a swoop that gave the unnautical Henry heart-failure.

'Kringle here has lost his friends the dogs, Manuel. He is——'

'Amigo!' said Manuel, throwing his arm round the mulatto and not waiting for further explanation. 'And your heart is torn open and you are as if you had no skin. Come! I know. Come, and we will talk!' And he led the weeping man away forward without a backward glance.

'We didn't need that mulatto,' Bart said, watching them go.

'I wouldn't turn a dog away tonight,' Morgan said.

So the Fortune when she sailed with the tide in the morning, for the first time under her new name, was a happy ship. She had no pressed men on board and no prisoners. She was, on the contrary, the symbol of fortune and freedom to all on board. To Henry, who had taken her, and who had preferred her to riches. To Jack Morris, and his crew, whom she rescued from the beach. To Bart, who was Mr Kindness again and a person of importance in the world of the sea. To Toni, who was back in his own galley. To Manuel, who was sailing with his hero. And to a greatly comforted mulatto, who had strong hopes of taming a rat before they reached Barbados.

Bernard Speirdyck, being a Hollander, took personal credit for the Fortune's good points, and at each evidence of adaptability would say: 'Ah, yoost look at her, yoost look at her! A Hollander down to her bilges.' He called them 'biltches'. And Cornelius, when reproved by his uncle for some shortcoming, would retire to the fo'c'sle and imitate him. 'Ah, yoost look at him, yoost look at him! A Hollander down to the biltches!'

Jack Morris made good his boast of being able to sail to Barbados blindfold, and the Fortune dropped anchor outside Bridgetown long before the mulatto had tamed his rat. Indeed, it was a little too soon for Henry, who had secret qualms about the coming interview with Modyford. He kept remembering the elegant clothes and cool, expensive air of the man who had dined that day at the Dolphin, and wondering what such a man would think of his borrowed Spanish finery. Which, since he had no ready money, were all the clothes he still possessed. He longed to borrow that very fine bottle-green suit of Jack's, but could not bring himself to suggest it. He would have to go ashore in his Spanish things.

Bridgetown looked very neat and civilised in its green setting after Tortuga; and its familiarity after so many strange scenes made it seem oddly like home. And Henry, being rowed ashore, took comfort in the thought that Spanish clothes, however outlandish and open to misconstruction, were an undoubted improvement on denim breeches and a frieze coat. It was a thing to marvel at that only the other day he had trudged into this town carrying a kerchief bundle that might have belonged to Bluey or Tugnet. His affection for Bridgetown increased every time he remembered it. When Elias Watts had asked him where, in this new unstable world, a letter would find him, he had said: 'The Dolphin at Bridgetown will always find me.' The Dolphin had seen the beginning of his luck; it should witness the progress of it. Every now and then he would come back and trail his latest successes through the dark, cool room on the harbour front where he had spun his first gold piece.

'Meet me at the Dolphin,' he said now to Jack Morris, who had come ashore with him, 'and we'll drink to the letter-of-marque.'

Morris had come ashore entrusted with one of Bart's five pearls and instructions that he should buy drink for the whole crew with it. The crew had been promised time ashore as soon as the Fortune was proved acceptable to the authorities, but they had said: 'Pad round Bridgetown with nothing in our pockets! Not us!' And when the third mate had said couldn't Mr Kindness treat them to the pearl's worth just as well on shore, Bart had said dryly: 'It's drink I'm treating them to.'

It amused Morgan to find that the same loafer was still leaning at the door of the Dolphin and still picking his teeth with a fish-bone. He stopped and said: 'Well, is he Governor yet?'

'Who?' asked the man.

'Sir Thomas.'

'Modyford? Oh, aye, he's Governor. What made you ask?'

'You prophesied that he would be very soon.'

'Prophesied to who?'

'To me.'

'Never saw you before in my life,' said the man.

Upon which Henry laughed and said: 'See how easy it is to leave denim behind, Jack!' and walked away, still laughing, to call on the Governor.

Henry had imagined himself walking into a room and talking man to man across a table with the man who had sat across the room from him that afternoon at the Dolphin. But it turned out to be not at all like that. At the official residence of the Governor a secretary interviewed him and asked him to state his business, informed him that the Governor's day was nearly over and that in half an hour or so he would be leaving for his home in the country, and that the press of affairs was very great.

Henry said that he, Henry Morgan, was one of those affairs, and the secretary left him to wait in a little hot room, where his heart grew less joyful and his head less confident. When at last the pen-and-ink man came back and said: 'Captain Morgan, please,' irritation, plain itching irritation, had taken the place of that fine flourish with which he had parted from Jack Morris.

And irritation was no quantity to take to an interview with Thomas Modyford.

Sir Thomas was very polite, and apologised for keeping his visitor waiting. He looked tired but not unfriendly. The apology did something to soothe Henry's ruffled vanity, and he in turn had the grace to regret in suitable words his belated arrival; and then, the amenities having been observed, he stated his errand.

'The Fortune?' said Sir Thomas. 'That is the newcomer, out in the roads.'

They were right about this man, Henry thought. Bart was right in his face-reading: you would have to start very early to get the better of Sir Thomas, or he would make you feel unpunctual. The ship had been there not more than an hour and the Governor had had 'press of affairs' all the afternoon, but he knew about the arrival.

He also knew what the arrival looked like. It looked, he said, very like a ship called the Gloria that the Spaniards were much worried about. The Gloria had disappeared off the coast of Barbados, and pressing inquiries had been addressed to the authorities about her.

'She is the Gloria,' Henry said. 'We took her, up the coast a little from here.'

'Unprovoked?' asked Modyford.

'No,' said Henry; 'they provoked us past bearing.'

'What had they done?'

'There wasn't a man of them who hadn't been born in Spain.'

'So you took her on principle. Or was it that you perhaps wanted a better ship than your own? What, by the way, did you take her in?'

'Our stocking soles.'

'What!' said Sir Thomas, startled out of his urbanity.

'Our stocking soles, I said, sir.'

'Yes, but with what ship?'

'We did not have a ship. We were hunting boar in the forest, and the ship put in for water. We liked the look of her and we didn't like the flag she was wearing, so we went out in our longboat after dark and seized her.'

'We?' said the Governor faintly. 'How many?'

'Ten white men, one mulatto, and one Indian.'

Sir Thomas sat digesting this for a little. 'Would it be indiscreet of me to inquire what became of the Spanish crew?' he asked at last.

'It would be very natural, sir. They are on Tortuga, waiting to be ransomed.'

'All of them?'

'When we sailed from Tortuga they were all there. I don't know how many are there now. The castle has no keys, and Mr Elias Watts has plans for them that I don't think they are going to like.'

'Plans?'

'Spade-and-hoe plans, sir.'

'Ah. Torture. That will be another black mark against us in Spanish archives. Am I to understand, then, that there were no—casualties?'

'Only some blood-letting.'

'And this Señor de Rasperu? This Don Christoval?'

'I victualled the ship with him.'

'What!' said the Governor for the second time.

'I exchanged him for some meal and salt beef.'

'You mean that he is safe on Tortuga.'

'I'll take my oath that he is, sir. The dealers are not going to let him out of their sight until they have their hands on that ransom.'

'Is he in prison there?'

'No, sir, oh no. He is teaching little Oliver his eleven-times.'

'Oliver?'

'Oliver Watts.'

A shadow of suspicion was perceptible in Sir Thomas's grey eye. But he said smoothly: 'I am glad to hear that the gentleman is living comfortably en famille with the Governor.'

'Well—en famille,' said Henry; and the shadow in Sir Thomas's grey eye deepened almost to a smile.

'So you want me to give you a letter-of-marque?' He paused and looked benevolently at Henry. 'I think, do you know, that as an example of impudence that defeats even your taking of the Gloria.' And as Henry looked startled: 'You must be aware, young man, that letters-of-marque are given only to men of reputation; to masters of vessels who are well known to us and answerable for their actions. An English commission is not merely handed out to anyone who asks for it.'

'I am not "anyone"!' Henry wanted to say. But instead he said: 'I have taken a ship from my country's enemies without the loss of a life, and I have handed over my prisoners for ransom. What more do you want?'

'I should want, in the first instance, to know more about you. How did you come to be hunting boar in Barbados, for instance?'

Now if I tell him I'm a freed bondsman, thought Henry, he'll never accept me. 'Is there anything of ill-repute in hunting boar?'

'No. But a great many ill-reputed persons do so. I never saw you before this afternoon——'

'But——' began Henry, and stopped. Then, after all, he had been for Sir Thomas only a blank space: a place on which to rest his glance.

'But?'

'Nothing, sir.'

'I had never seen you before and know nothing about you. I have, indeed, only your word for it that Don Christoval is instructing the young in the mysteries of the multiplication table and not being digested by sharks. You must have some background, my friend, before I could be responsible for giving you a commission.'

'I thought the war against Spain was a holy war!'

'It has been so far,' Modyford said with a dryness that was lost on the angry Morgan.

'How immaculate must one be to take part in a holy war? I have never heard that the Crusaders were asked for testimonials or guarantees before they went to fight in Palestine.'

'No,' Modyford said with a half-smile. 'The Crusades might have proved a greater success if they had. I admire your exploit, young man, and I would give you official recognition if it were within my power. But I have a great responsibility vested in me, and I cannot abuse it. If I can help you unofficially, of course, I shall be glad to do so. You want to dispose of the cargo, perhaps. What is it, by the way?'

'Wood,' said Henry, almost unable to get the monosyllable out.

'Wood for dyeing? Logwood?'

'No. If it had been logwood I could have sold it in Tortuga. Wood for building.'

'Oh. Not so good. But perhaps I could find a purchaser for you.'

'I should not dream of putting Your Excellency to that inconvenience.'

'I am not planning to confiscate the ship when you bring her in, if that is what is in your mind.'

'That is very generous of Your Excellency,' said Henry through his teeth.

Modyford cast him a glance that was almost pitying, but Henry did not see it. Even if he had been aware of it, it is doubtful if he would have pleaded where he had requested and been refused. He was sick with disappointment and aching with hurt pride.

'I am sorry not to be able to be of official help to you,' Sir Thomas said.

'And I am sorry to have taken up Your Excellency's valuable time,' said Henry with a sarcasm he was too young and too angry to make light enough to be effective.

He went out in a blind anger, and stood in the dusty road until the mist cleared from in front of his eyes and his breath came more easily. Then he walked slowly back to the Dolphin. The Dolphin that had been going to witness all those progressive triumphs of his.

Jack Morris was sitting where Bartholomew had sat on that afternoon a few weeks ago, and Henry slumped into the seat by his side without looking at him, and reached for the mug on the table. He finished what was in the mug and called on the serving-man for more.

'No?' said Morris, into the silence that followed.

'I made a mistake,' Henry said.

'What kind of mistake?'

'I did not go to school with his son.'

The equable Morris let this pass in silence and waited until Henry had had the drink he had sent for.

Then he said: 'So that was his excuse.'

'That was his reason.'

'Oh, no, it wasn't.'

'What do you know about it!'

'I don't know what his excuse was—except what I can guess—but about his reason for saying no I know a great deal, and believe me, Harry Morgan, it had nothing whatever to do with you. The excellent Governor is teetering on the edge of a chasm, and he isn't going to take any step that may overbalance him. Was he civil, by the way?'

Henry tried to think back beyond the blackness of his defeat, and confessed that yes, he supposed Modyford had been civil.

'Well, that is something to his credit.'

'What chasm?'

'You said you came to Modyford because he was a good Cromwell man and would consider war against Spain a holy war.'

'Yes.'

'Well, it isn't going to do him any good any more to be a good Cromwell man.'

'Why?'

'Because Cromwell's dead. He's been dead for months.'

'No!' said Henry, all his personal failure and fury vanishing in the wonder of this news.

'The town's got over their excitement because they've known for a week, but they're waiting with their breath held for the next news. The gossip is all that young Charles will be king. And the person who is holding his breath tightest is your friend the Governor. The holy war is at an end, and he doesn't want to take any part in anything that has become unfashionable. He wouldn't give his best friend a letter-of-marque against Spain this week.'

'So that was it!' Henry's shrivelled 'conceit of himself' swelled and unfolded into healthy bloom again. 'It wasn't——'

He began to bask. And then, looking back at Modyford from his recovered security: 'The damned sail-trimmer!' he said.