Dark Mondays

PROLOGUE

Kidd wasn’t more than a lad, back then; Teach himself wasn’t even a gleam in the Devil’s eye, not yet.

Thirty-six captains anchored together at Cape Tiburon, summoned by Harry Morgan, bound on gold and revenge. There never was such an assembly of the Brethren before, nor ever afterward until that last wild party Teach held at Okracoke; and that was a sad business, at the end of it all.

But when Morgan was in his prime, a man might muster the ships and men to go looting the Spanish Main, and gentlemen called it privateering. That was, if a man’s commission was in order.

That was the trick, you see; for the British ministers of state, off in London, blew hot and cold on the question of peace with Spain. A man might set off on an expedition legal as you please, and come home to find the rules had changed, with some Madrid grandee in Whitehall screaming to have him clapped in irons. So it required a fine and careful hand, that game.

Nobody played it better than Harry Morgan.

He came out to Barbados in old Cromwell’s time, a young ensign from a family of hard men, mercenaries who’d served with distinction. You mark that; Morgan was no bond-slave boy. Hendrik Smeeks started that story out of spite, and paid dearly for it later, because Morgan sued him. Oh, Ned Teach roared and blazed, and Kidd was a mean hand with a bucket, but a Welshman with an attorney—there’s a thing to frighten you!

What was Morgan doing in Barbados?

It started because Spain had the New World and its gold all to itself, like a boy locked in a room with the biggest fruitcake you ever saw. England and France, and the Dutch too, all knocked on the door politely, asking if they mightn’t come in and share a slice or two; but no, Spain kept that door locked, and gobbled away at the rich stuff until it was so sick it was pissing sugar.

Sooner or later there were pinprick outposts of other nations on all the little leeward islands in the Caribbean anyway, looking enviously over at Hispaniola and the mainland where the gold was. Oliver Cromwell planned an expedition to take Hispaniola. Sir Francis Drake had taken it, a long generation before; why shouldn’t the New Model Army do it too?

Ah, but Drake hadn’t kept it; Drake was out for loot and revenge, not settlements and plantations and careful account-books. He’d come and gone from Hispaniola. Cromwell intended England should invest in the Caribbean. So he sent his generals out to Barbados to muster an expedition. That was in 1655. Young Harry Morgan went with those generals, and served in their ranks, and watched as they made a hash of the job. And learned from their mistakes.

Having failed to take Hispaniola (and what a failure it was: supplies held up, messages crossed, storms, fever, cowardice, infighting…), the generals looked around for some sop, any sop, to offer Cromwell, so as to keep their heads on their shoulders when they got home.

What about Jamaica, they must have said. It was an easy grab; had some arable land, didn’t it? Nice harbor too. Not much of a defense-force stationed there, either.

They took it in a day. The Spanish governor surrendered, packed his bags and got out. He likely caught hell when he got home to his king; the English generals Venables and Penn fared not much better, for they both of them wound up in the Tower at Cromwell’s displeasure.

But Jamaica was in the hands of the Commonwealth now. And if the presidentes, gobernadors and alcaldes of the Spanish Main weren’t waking up with night terrors and forebodings of doom, if their rosaries weren’t squirting out of their sweaty hands whilst they prayed for deliverance from evil—they should have been.

It was a merry time! Spain demanded Jamaica back, and Cromwell recovered his temper enough to see clear that his generals had grabbed a plum for him. So, a fig for the dons and the Pope; the Commonwealth went to war with Spain. Cromwell’s navy had a secure base in Jamaica from which to prey on the Spanish plate fleet. All those timid galleons beating to windward with their holds stuffed with gold and emeralds… why, the Commonwealth could make a fortune.

And anyone could play! Private gentlemen who could outfit a ship had but to apply for a commission from Jamaica’s governor, and they became privateers, duly licensed to attack enemy shipping.

And if a man wasn’t a gentleman, or if his crew had too much the look of thieves and murderers for the governor’s taste, it was no matter. Privateering commissions were also being handed out by the somewhat-less-discriminating governor of Tortuga. The French issued them. The Dutch issued them. Anyone could play…

And then the news came that Cromwell was dead, and King Charles had come out of exile to be welcomed back to England. The new Privy Council, bless their peace-loving little hearts, desired to negotiate a treaty with Spain. Think how many black slaves could be sold to the Spanish, if only there wasn’t a war on!

So negotiations began, and England called its navy home. Jamaica was left out in the Caribbean with no defenses but what she could think up for herself, and all those Spanish presidentes, gobernadors and alcaldes were stroking their beards, and grinning at her thoughtful-like.

Jamaica did what any prudent innkeeper would do, with her man away and Spanish thieves peering round the shutters; she woke up the English thieves that had passed out on her own hearth, fired them up with more rum, and bid them prey for her.

They were the Brethren of the Coast.

So much is history, for anyone to read in books.

This, now, is rumor:

There were once two young officers come out from London with Venables, and they wandered through the streets of Barbados with their mouths open, falling under the spell of the West Indies. One thought it looked like a good place to earn a name of his own; one had only known paved streets all his life, and couldn’t get over such flowers, such fireflies, such blue water. One was blackavised as the Devil himself, and the other had a pale countenance like a poet.

One had luck, and the other hadn’t.

They learned to drink rum together in a grog shop kept by an old seaman. The seaman had a pretty daughter. The blackavised fellow fancied her, but the pale fellow became infatuated with her, went so far as to write her a poem. Then they both shipped out to conquer Hispaniola, and you know how that went.

The dark fellow’s luck stood by him. He stamped, he swore, he beat the Newgate scum he’d been given into fighting troops, he rallied his men to charge when others fled, he survived starvation and storm and the haplessness of his superior officers.

The poet caught fever and died, and was buried on Jamaica.

Well, so the dark one was left in charge of a regiment when Venables departed Jamaica. He sailed over to Barbados for fresh troops and supplies, and as his friend had just been laid in the ground, he took himself to the grog shop for old time’s sake, and had a stiff drink in memoriam.

The girl waited on him and wept at the unwelcome news, for she had loved her poet. The dark one comforted her.

He was climbing from her bed next morning when he looked out and saw the sail coming in, the cutter that must have been just hull-down behind him the whole way from Jamaica, following him hard. He swore, thinking it was some message of disaster that had befallen as soon as he’d been over the horizon. Pulling on his breeches and his boots, he rushed down, to learn that it was only last-minute messages about things forgotten until after he’d sailed. Oh, and a miracle.

His friend had come back from the dead.

It had been known to happen. Overworked, incompetent army doctors failing to notice little details like pulses. Hasty burials under cold, cold clay that brought a man’s fever down wonderfully. Clawing his wild-eyed way out of a shallow grave, the poet had seen his life pass before his eyes and found only one thing of value therein: his love for the girl in Barbados.

He’d staggered back down into camp, filthy, half-naked, and the black men muttered and the white men flinched. Altogether it was thought best to let him have a bath, a suit of clothes and passage back to Barbados, because no one wanted him in camp. It was thought he’d bring bad luck…

What tears of joy the girl wept at her true love’s return! What nervous glances she cast at his dark friend, who bowed gravely, kissed her hand and kept his silence. He was best man at their wedding. He stood godfather to the little girl, born nine months to the day after the joyful reunion.

It’s only a rumor, you see.

Jamaica flourished. Sugar cane was planted, planters grew prosperous. Merchants established themselves. The sandy point that thrust out into the harbor was fortified and a little town built there, a lure to welcome in privateer captains and their crews and keep them happy. Taverns and brothels in plenty, gambling dens, eating-houses, pipe-shops with good tobacco, other shops with anything a drunken sailor on a spree might look for: gowns of silk for whores, maybe, or pretty things that had belonged to some great lady of Spain, just what was wanted to reward a wife who welcomed you home from sea and didn’t ask questions.

Oh, the Brethren of the Coast might take their prizes to Tortuga now and then, if the diplomatic wind from London was foul, if infighting politicians decided to hang a poor captain or two as a gesture of good will toward the Spanish. For the most part, though, Port Royal was their own city.

Its governors came and went, but Harry Morgan ruled there.

He’d learned the privateering trade under little Commodore Mings, as legal as you please, before the navy was withdrawn. They took Santiago de Cuba and sailed home in triumph, leaving the King of Spain the poorer by six fine prize ships and no end of silver plate, cannons, bales of hides, barrels of wine and church bells. If it hadn’t been nailed down, it was stolen; the rest was blown up or set afire. Campeche fell next, with her little, stone houses. She yielded up fourteen prizes, and plunder enough for a celebration that lasted days and days.

Morgan wasn’t the best seaman in the world—in fact he wasn’t especially good at sailing at all, he was always more of a soldier. But he could command, by God, with those coal-black eyes of his. You looked into them and the idea of crossing him never once entered your head, no matter how drunk or cowardly or depraved you were.

Somewhere in all the blood and flame and smoke, Morgan picked up the knack for inspiring men too, as opposed to just scaring them into obeying. He learned all the actor’s craft of putting a throb in his singsong Welsh voice and a flash in his eye, he learned how to stand six inches taller than he really was, and he learned the words that fired men up like hot rum.

Men listened to his voice and followed him through the swamps of the Mosquito Coast, three thousand miles to sack Villahermosa, and Trujillo, and Gran Granada with its seven churches. The Spanish said he was Drake come again, or the Devil, which was nearly as bad.

He came home with his ships stuffed with loot. There he found that his uncle was the new lieutenant-governor, and had moreover arrived in Jamaica with honor, glory, a household of pretty daughters and scarcely anything else. Bravery hadn’t made Colonel Edward Morgan wealthy. It was hoped one of his girls might manage to win the heart of her cousin Henry.

Mary Elizabeth saw him first from her window as he came ashore—wild and handsome as the Devil with his pointed, black beard, and in his train grinning buccaneers throwing Spanish doubloons to the whores all along Queen’s Street.

She met him in a quiet drawing-room with shades over the windows to keep out the tropical heat, and him cleaned up and dressed in his elegant best, curled hair, lace collar, emeralds glinting on his fingers as he took her hand and bowed to kiss it, murmuring something polite the whiles she caught his scent: something subtle and expensive, just failing to mask the tang of rum and male sweat.

They fell in love. They must have. Harry took her as she was, without a penny’s worth of dowry. They settled down on his fine new estate with the intention of starting a dynasty.

Which didn’t happen, somehow.

Oh, there was passion and desire enough. There was good blood: Mary Elizabeth’s sisters married Harry’s friends, and proceeded to raise great broods of babies. There was opportunity: Harry stayed home from the taverns for a great while after the honeymoon, and slept in most mornings.

But no son came to bless his grand new house, nor any little girl.

Still, folk shrugged and said it would be only a matter of time. Hadn’t Harry Morgan more luck than any other man in the West Indies?

Here’s something else you’ll find in the history books.

Around the time that the first Mayflower sailed for New England, her sister ship the Seaflower set sail too, but took her cargo of sour-faced Puritans south and west. They ended up on a tiny speck of land, far out by itself in the Caribbean, which suited them fine. They sang psalms, tilled the soil, and named the place Providence. It came to be called Old Providence, to distinguish it from a place in the Bahamas called Providence too.

Some years later the Spanish reached out from the Main and flicked them away like so many righteous flies, and put a garrison there, and called the place Providencia.

Around the time that Mary Elizabeth was watching her calendar and counting days off in a hopeful kind of way, Governor Modyford of Jamaica sent an expedition to take Curacao. It was headed by Captain Edward Mansfield, who was an experienced old buccaneer, though not the persuasive devil Harry Morgan could be.

Halfway there, his men mutinied. They didn’t want to try for Curaçao, they said; it was defended by the Dutch, who were nasty fighters, and the plunder was bound to be skimpy pickings. Cartago, they said, was rich and undefended, another Gran Granada for sure! So away they sailed to sack Cartago, and bungled it royally. Too much rum, too much quarreling, too much greedy anticipation.

The survivors were lucky to sail away again, with Mansfield—like Venables and Penn before him—wondering how he was going to explain his little failure to the governor. What could he offer up to excuse himself?

He decided to recapture Old Providence. It might make a good base for the Brethren of the Coast, when things got too hot in Port Royal; there was only one little troop of Spaniards to guard it. About half his forces had deserted him and sailed off, as drunken cutthroats will, but there remained enough men for a modest assault.

A modest assault was all it took. The Spanish surrendered to a man, and were put on a ship and let off at Portobelo, according to the terms of truce. Mansfield left a garrison to secure the place and sailed back to Port Royal.

Governor Modyford was not as angry as he might have been, but by no means as pleased either. Old Providence had tactical value, true, but where was he to get the men to hold it? Buccaneers couldn’t be trusted not to desert their posts.

A call for volunteers went out, and two ships were made ready. Thirty-three solid citizens put their marks on paper and took the first ship for New Providence, under command of Major Samuel Smith. The second ship was delayed, waiting for more volunteers, but sailed in its time.

It’s said that on the night before the second ship sailed, a man crept from a Port Royal cellar and made his way to the interior, to a fine grand house owned by a wealthy planter. Here he knocked, and begged leave to speak with the master of the house. It’s said he gave a password that brought the planter downstairs in his dressing gown. They spoke alone together in the drawing room, late at night behind closed doors, but you know how servants are; something was heard through a keyhole, it seems.

The stranger was lately come from Barbados, he said, with his wife and little daughter, one step ahead of his creditors. You wouldn’t think it would be possible to go bankrupt selling grog to seamen, but the stranger had done just that. His luck was as bad as ever it had been.

Yet now Governor Modyford was calling for volunteers to re-settle Old Providence. It lay better than a thousand miles to windward of the stranger’s misfortunes—no one would ever find him there, if he started again under an assumed name—he and his wife and child might make a new life for themselves, and breathe easy, if they were allowed to go.

All that was wanting was a recommendation to the governor. And money, of course.

The master of the house heard him out. Then he called for paper and pen, and wrote out a recommendation in his steep slanting hand, and signed it; then he went from the room, and returned bearing a purse heavy with gold. They embraced. The stranger took money and paper, and crept from the house, and disappeared into the night.

The ship sailed the following day. Two years passed, without a word from New Providence.

One August day in 1668, two men stepped onto the quay at Port Royal. Maybe they sank to their knees in prayer, and kissed the ground; maybe they simply fell, for they were weak as ghosts, mere skeletons under scarred and scabbed skin. One was the British master of a merchant ship. The other was Major Samuel Smith, who’d been sent out to command the garrison at New Providence. They had been released from a dungeon, where they’d spent the last twenty-three months.

The Spanish had retaken the island, landing a force outnumbering the English by ten to one. The English fought with all they had; when they ran out of shot they sawed the pipes out of the church organ and fired those off too. When they saw there was no hope, they surrendered, and were bound in irons.

Then, as the Spanish were mopping up, the second ship from Jamaica sailed into the harbor. Only fourteen men, one woman and her daughter aboard. They were tricked into walking ashore by a ruse, and so were taken prisoner too.

And did the Spanish abide by the terms of the truce, and send them packing back to Port Royal? No indeed.

The Spanish carried them in chains to Portobelo, and staked them to the ground in a dungeon ten feet by twelve. They were made to work at building the port’s defenses, waist-deep in water from sunrise to sunset, naked, ill-fed, beaten, their hands worn raw with stones and mortar, and hectored and abused by priests into the bargain. Many died. Some few were taken out and sent to work on other defenses on the Spanish Main. Major Smith was released at last, sent back to let Jamaica know what pirates might expect who trespassed on the dominion of Spain.

He did not know what had become of the woman and her child.

The loss of Old Providence was bad enough; worse still was the rumor of the treaty that England was negotiating with Spain. Under its terms, it was said, the Spanish were to be left to do as they pleased in the West Indies, and the English must issue no more privateering commissions to those naughty pirates. Jamaica must just look out for herself as best she might.

In vain did Governor Modyford protest that the Spanish, pleased with their success at Old Providence, were arming a fleet for a new expedition to take back Jamaica herself. The King’s ministers wrote back that if any such attack took place, why then England would of course avenge it—maybe six months later. Maybe later still, depending on the amount of time it took for the news to reach home, and the wind, and the tide, and the dance-steps of the diplomats in London and Madrid…

To hell with all this, thought the governor, and he called in Colonel Henry Morgan.

Harry Morgan was now thirty-three, head of the family since his father-in-law’s death, uncle and godfather to many little Morgans, but father to none of his own. He it was who’d organized Port Royal’s militia, and commanded it now.

It was only of an evening he might be taken for a pirate, drinking in the tavern on Cannon Street or the one over on Thames Street, carousing into the late hours. He could drink any other man under the table, and remain upright and coherent a surprising while after too.

Sometimes, though, late at night, when the lamps had burned low and the other drinkers had fallen silent, he’d get a puzzled look in his black eyes. He could be seen putting out his hand cautiously, touching a glass or an onion bottle as though he expected it to vanish at his touch, like a soap bubble. Once he was seen to put his hand into the flame of a candle, as though to learn whether it would burn him.

On the day the bad news came about Old Providence, he went into the Cannon Street tavern at sundown and remained there till dawn, taking on board enough rum to make any other man paralytic drunk; but all he did was stare into a pool of spilled drink for hours, and answer in few words or not at all when approached.

Still, Harry was stone-cold sober when Governor Modyford called him in for advice. He walked out of the governor’s mansion Admiral Morgan, and sent word through the taverns of Port Royal that any member of the Brethren with a ship and a crew might want to get himself to the South Cays, where he would undoubtedly learn something to his advantage.

They came from all the winds’ quarters, did the Brethren of the Coast, to rendezvous with Harry Morgan. It was understood that the object was to strike where it might do the most harm, to prevent an attack on Jamaica, even as Sir Francis Drake had struck the shipyards of Cadiz. It was further understood that no man in the fleet would lift a finger, even to save Jamaica, unless there was plunder to be had. But there was always loot when you sailed with Harry Morgan!

They raided Camaguey first; then Portobelo, with its Iron Fort and Castillo de San Gerónimo and the battlements of Triana. Here there was rare butchery, and no wonder; for here Morgan found eleven Englishmen, chained together in a tiny space, covered with sores, blinking up at the torchlight from their own shite and piss to a foot’s depth. They were from the Old Providence colony.

When they could be made to understand they were free, Morgan heard again the tale of Spanish betrayal, with new particulars he had not heard before. He looked into their faces keenly and saw not one he knew, though never so changed. He inquired whether there were any other survivors. No, he was told, none at all.

He held the place for a month, and what he did there you may well imagine.

The viceroy of Panama ransomed Portobelo at last, for a sum that would take your breath away and one gold ring set with an emerald. Morgan sailed home with more loot than any privateer since Drake. He dipped his ensign as he passed over Drake’s grave, sailing back to Jamaica in triumph.

His luck held, and mad luck it was. Even when his own flagship was blown to hell—some fool with a lighted candle in the powder magazine—Morgan and all who drank with him on his side of the table were thrown clear, whilst all the men who’d sat across the table were killed.

Now, it was claimed afterward that Morgan’s men tortured prisoners to get information from them, and that may well be so; for in every Spanish town they found racks, brands and thumbscrews, thoughtfully provided by the Holy Inquisition for their New World outposts. And what would you expect of filthy English heretics, but that they should use these sacred instruments for profane purposes?

Treasure was taken; treasure was spent in Port Royal brothels, or used to engross estates with yet more acreage of sugar cane. Treasure was pissed against the wall in week-long drinking bouts, or carefully invested with prudent firms. But when it was all spent—why, to sea they’d go again, to get more.

1670: PORT ROYAL

There was once a young fool, and his name was John. He was big and he was strong and reasonably good-looking. His people weren’t rich—he was one of eleven children—but he was apprenticed to a bricklayer in Hackney, and his future was assured.

Then he went and killed a man.

Mind you, the man had been trying to kill him, and both of them in a low tavern, and he’d been drunk and the other man sober. The dead man had been a right bastard, himself up before the magistrate many a time for one kind of viciousness or other. And John’s mother had wept and wrung her hands so piteous at the trial, that the magistrate let her boy off with a sentence of transportation to the West Indies.

So Farewell Mother Dear and away went John, to sweat in the sun as a redleg bond-slave on a plantation in Barbados. It didn’t kill him. When he’d been there two years he escaped, in a dugout canoe he’d made with two other men. They thought they could paddle their way to some other island and shift for themselves there.

It didn’t fall out so. The canoe capsized the first day, and though they righted her again they’d lost their victuals and drink in the sea. They were in a bad way by the time they sighted a passing ship and got taken aboard. The captain was a sometime merchant, a pirate without even the least pretensions to being a privateer, and half his crew had been lost to yellow fever. He put a mug of water in John’s hand and made him take an oath to serve on board his ship. John gulped and reckoned he may as well take it, if it was a question of him living or getting tossed back overboard, which it seemed to be.

He learned the ropes, he learned how to reef a sail without getting himself or anyone else killed. But he did learn to kill when required.

He’d been raised to be polite to ladies and respectful to his superiors, and to sit in a pew of a Sunday and keep his mouth shut except when it was time to sing a hymn; that was morality. Still, the first time somebody came at John with a pike, he reacted just as he had in the tavern in Hackney, only faster.

He reasoned it out that a man may be forgiven for murder; why, if his country is at war it isn’t even murder, but duty. On the other hand, if a man stands like a stock and lets himself be slain, that amounts to suicide, which will send him straight to eternal damnation. Why take a chance with the eternal part of himself, when he was adrift in a land where it was so easy to lose the earthly part?

So John was a pirate, and a good one, and followed his luck from ship to ship. Now and then he heard his mother’s ghost telling him he could get work as a bricklayer, if only he’d try; and he assured her he would try, next time the opportunity presented itself.

He liked looting, if he was taking loot from foreigners. He liked lying on a beach of white sand by night, watching the stars slide down toward the mangrove trees. He liked fiery rum, though not so much after the first time he woke up naked in an alley in Tortuga. He only wanted luck, he thought, to make enough to buy a plantation somewhere and live like a gentleman.

That was why he listened avidly to the stories, whether they were told beside a driftwood fire or on deck under a tropic moon, or beside a guttering candle at a filthy table. The stories were all about Harry Morgan, king of privateers, luckiest man in the West Indies. His luck rubbed off on any man so happy as to set sail with him, or so they said.

They said at the lake of Maracaibo, Morgan took a fortune, and then found his way back to the sea blocked by a Spanish fleet. He sent a dummy fleet among them, loaded with powderkegs, with logs of wood dressed as men on the decks, and the Spanish never realized the trick until the fireships blew up in their faces.

They said he’d got past the high castle guarding the harbor by seeming to land five hundred men in the mangroves, and the Spanish garrison grew fearful and trained their great guns on the trees, expecting an attack from that side; and all the while it was only the same ten men going back and forth in one longboat, sitting up on the way out and lying flat in the bottom of the boat on the way back. Night fell and the Spaniards kept watch on the land, while Morgan’s fleet sailed out under their noses, and they never realized they’d missed him until he was well out to sea. There was no predicament so dire Morgan’s luck couldn’t get him out of it.

John’s luck, on the other hand, came and went.

He was sitting on a wharf one summer evening, watching the yellow moon sparkle on the sea, when he heard the rumor: Morgan’s drinking with his captains, and they’re going out for plunder!

John’s hair fairly stood on the back of his neck. He jumped to his feet and ran to the tavern, praying he had the right one and thinking surely he had; for there were three or four skulkers outside, peering in through the window and looking as though they were getting their nerve up. Timing is all, John had learned that much. He shouldered through the lot of them and, ducking his head, stepped inside.

He blinked in the smoky gloom. The tavern was crowded, each table and settle occupied by men with tankards and jacks, and long-stemmed pipes, and cards, and dice. The rum went untasted, though, and the cards might have been blank and the dice spotless as souls in Paradise for all anyone noticed them. Every man in the place had his head turned, staring at one particular table lit by a hanging lantern.

Harry Morgan sat there in the pool of light with four others, prosperous captains all. They spoke together in low voices. John walked up to the table and took off his hat. “I do beg your pardon, gentlemen,” he said, with a dry mouth. “But I did hear there was an expedition toward, and take the liberty of inquiring whether you might need an able-bodied seaman. Sirs.”

Morgan looked up at him.

“An expedition toward, is it?” he said, and his Monmouthshire voice was sharp as a needle. “And who says so?”

John swallowed hard. He mustered all the boldness he could and grinned. “Why, sir, even the chimney-pots have heard by now. Sure, Fame follows you like a shadow.”

“Flattery, too,” said Morgan, eyeing him. He stroked his beard. “It may be, sir, that we are contemplating certain business. It may be that we need a man or two. Bradley!” He tapped his finger on the table before one of the other captains, and indicated John with a jerk of his head. “There is perhaps a berth wants filling on the Mayflower, is there not?”

Captain Bradley looked around swiftly, but with elaborate casualness yawned, and said: “Perhaps. Who’s this great side of beef? Are you much of a fighter, sir?”

“Please you, sir, a powerful fighter,” said John, showing the size of his fist. “And a gunner too, by God.”

“Not a delicate one, are you?” Morgan demanded. “No trick knees? No weak backs? No fainting in the heat of the sun, eh?”

“No, sir,” said John. “And I’ve had the fever and lived to tell the tale. I’m your man, sir, for a forced march or boarding a ship, either one. Nor blood don’t give me no swooning fits, neither.”

“Well, that is a good thing,” said Morgan dryly. “And how much ready cash have you to hand? For, look you, you’ll want plenty of powder and shot. I should say three muskets and a brace of pistols, in good condition, and cutlasses too. Shall you have all these by the fourteenth? As we sail then, you know.”

“Why—sure, I have them,” said John. “Or will have, by the fourteenth.”

“See that you do,” said Bradley. “And if you are a true gunner, so much the better; you’ll get a double share.”

“Always assuming there is any profit,” said Morgan, setting his finger to the side of his nose. “For we go out on the old terms, you know. No purchase, no pay.”

“Aye, sir,” said John. “The fourteenth, is it?”

“From King’s Wharf,” said Captain Bradley. “Mind you be there by the evening before, so as to sign on. Sooner, if you can; lest the berths be all full then.”

“Aye, Captain,” said John. “I will, indeed.”

They went back to their drinking, so he bowed and backed away. Emboldened by what he’d done, a crowd of men rushed to fill the place he’d just left, and John heard their voices raised in supplication to Morgan. He found his way out alone, and the relative cool of the night wind was sweet on his face.

The plain truth of it was, John hadn’t a penny to his name. He owned a sea-chest, a cutlass, one pistol, a hammock and a pair of blankets, plus the clothes on his back; and he was reckoned pretty well-to-do for a sailor, at that.

He lived, just then, in a camp on the beach some two miles along the sand spit, with some of his shipmates from the old Clapham. It was an easy life, living on fish and turtles, so long as a man had no thirst and wasn’t too particular about sand flies; but his mates were drifting away one by one, and pretty soon the camp would fill up with strangers. It was time to move on anyhow.

Pity about the money, John thought to himself. He wandered away up Lime Street, half-hoping some thief would have a go at him; for he had turned the tables more than once, beating an assailant into unconsciousness and possessing himself of whatever he found in the man’s pockets. No one came near him tonight, however. The only other figure he could spot, all along the street, was a drunken man staggering along some thirty paces ahead of him.

John being sober, pretty soon he came upon the other man, and was about to pass him when the fellow gave a sort of gasping cry and dropped as though he’d been clubbed. John stood back, aghast. He stepped into the shadow of a wall and watched for a long moment, as the cold starlight glittered down. The other fellow never moved again.

So, John came and knelt by him, and turned him over. This took some doing, for the man was exceedingly fat, and soaked with sweat besides. He stared up at the stars unblinking, though sand was in his face and dusted on the lashes of his eyes. Dead as mutton; of apoplexy maybe, for he didn’t stink of fever, but only wine. And maybe his tonnage killed him, for it was all John could do to take him by his soft hands and haul him into Pelican Alley, so heavy he was.

What John had his eyes on was the dead man’s boots, for they were grand things, new, by the look of them, high to the knee, and just John’s size too. John’s ankles stung with sand-fly bites, and his worthless rawhide shoes had worn through to the point where he could feel every broken shell in the lane.

“After all, it ain’t like you’ll need them where you’re bound,” he muttered to the corpse, as he pulled the boots off. Oh, they were new: thick and stiff, fancy-stitched with colored stuff, and they went on John as though they’d been made for him. John was so happy he nearly walked away from the dead man there and then, which would have changed the way his life went considerably.

But as an afterthought he turned back and went through the dead man’s coat. It was a heavy great coat. No wonder the man had dropped dead, if he didn’t know better than to wear something like that in this sticky heat. Then John encountered the bulge of the purse, and hauled it up as eagerly as though he were pulling in a netful of cod.

It was a well-lined purse. John looked down at the dead man and grew thoughtful. This was somebody; this was no nameless redleg like him. People came asking questions after a corpse like this one. It seemed wisest to leave the dead man far in his wake. John took the purse and ran off, in the salvaged boots. Though they kept his feet from harm they were a little hot, and pretty clammy with the dead man’s sweat, and when he saw what sharp, clear prints they left in the sand behind him, John went down to the tideline and walked there, so the sea would wash out his track.

When he got to the camp at last, it was deserted. Some nameless bastard had gone through his trunk and taken his weapons. Much he cared; he rolled up in a blanket and caught what sleep he could until morning, when he broke camp and hauled everything he had left back to town. Come sunrise John was sitting on his sea-chest outside the armorers’, whistling a cheery tune as he waited for them to open shop.

Three hours later John went swaggering up to King’s Wharf where the Mayflower was anchored, carrying a bundle of black doglock muskets over his shoulder as though they were new brooms, and a porter panting after him with his sea-chest and the kegs of powder and shot. Aboard he came, under the gaze of a sour-faced little man with the look of a clerk.

“What’s your business, man?” he said to John.

John tipped the porter, removed his hat and said grandly, “Reporting for duty, sir. As Captain Bradley said I ought, when I spoke to him personal yestereen.”

The clerk took in all that shiny new gear, and his tone was a little more pleasant as he said: “Like enough. Why, then, you must be read in. Step over here, if you please.”

He had a ship’s muster laid out on top of an empty water barrel, with ink and pen to hand. Here he seated himself on a nail-keg, took up the pen and said:

“Your name, sir?”

“John James,” said John, which was half a lie.

“Very likely,” said the clerk with a sniff, but he wrote it down. “Your age, sir, and place of birth?”

John told him, and they were lies too.

“Able-bodied seaman, yes?”

“Please you, sir, and I’m a gunner,” said John.

“We’ll see about that,” said the clerk. “If the captain rates you so. Herewith the articles: Mariner sails conditionally at Captain Bradley’s pleasure, share to be determined according to worth. Venture to be determined at the Admiral’s pleasure. Terms are, no purchase, no pay.

“Mariner provides his own weapons, amounting to no less than two muskets, two pistols, two cutlasses, and powder and ball sufficient for the endeavor. All weapons to be kept clean and fit for service at all times.

“Mariner shall not steal, nor quarrel, nor murder in the course of quarreling, nor dice, nor game at cards. Default in this at thy peril. Mariner shall not desert or turn coward under fire. Default in this at thy peril. Mariner shall not mutiny or propose venture other than ventures heretofore duly determined by the Admiral. Default in this at thy peril.”

“This is hard straits,” protested John.

“This is Harry Morgan’s way,” said the clerk. “We’re none of your pirates here. You may sign articles or you may go back on the beach, as you please.”

“I was just saying,” said John, but he stood down. The clerk cleared his throat and went on:

“Mariner entitled to free use of any garments taken in the course of venture, for his own proper wear. Mariner entitled likewise to victuals and drink so taken, with daily allotment from the ship’s stores, save upon occasion of short commons, when allotment to be determined at Captain’s pleasure.

“In the matter of recompense for injuries: mariner to receive value of six hundred pieces of eight for loss of either right or left leg. Mariner to receive value of six hundred pieces of eight in recompense for loss of right hand. In recompense for the loss of right hand and left hand, mariner to receive eighteen hundred pieces of eight. In recompense for sight of one eye, mariner to receive one hundred pieces of eight. In recompense for the loss of the sight of both his eyes, mariner to receive six hundred pieces of eight.” John was nodding impatiently by the time the clerk had reached the end of the recitation. The clerk ignored him and read:

“In the matter of recompense for singular bravery, if any man shall distinguish himself under fire, or be first to enter any stronghold under fire, or to lower the Spanish colors and raise those of England: that man shall receive fifty pieces of eight, to be paid directly upon division of spoils and the attestation of witnesses.

“Mariner agrees to all articles herein and signs-or-makes-his-mark,” said the clerk, and offered John the pen and a paper. John signed his first name, started to write his last name, caught himself in time and scratched it out, blotting somewhat, at which the clerk pursed his lips. John hurriedly wrote JAMES after and underscored it with a flourish, and the clerk shook sand on the lot, and that was that.

The Mayflower sailed with the rest of the fleet on the day, certain as clockwork, following Morgan in the Satisfaction. Yet they went no further than up the coast a little to Blewfield’s Bay, there to put the ships in trim and take on stores and water. John heard mutterings that Morgan wanted to avoid losing his crews to the entertainments of Port Royal, nor have them talk overmuch while ashore.

“Not that any one of us knows enough where we’re bound to tell,” said the old man with whom John had been set to work. They stood in the shadow of the Mayflower’s hull, vast above them as a dead whale, while they smashed and chipped off barnacles.

“Well, we can’t be going out for Portobelo again, can we?” said John. “That well’s dry. And it won’t be Maracaibo again, neither.”

“I hear it’s to be Vera Cruz,” said the old man dreamily, descending his ladder. He moved it over a pace and squinted upward. “Or Santiago de Cuba, the which I hope is wrong. That’s a hard place to take. Unless rumor’s true and Prince Rupert comes along with us. They say he could crack a fortress like a nut.”

“Prince Rupert?” John turned, staring through the salt sweat that trickled down. He mopped his face with a rag. “What’s he?”

“Only the king’s kinsman,” said the old man. “Fought for the old king against the Roundheads, you know. When they won, Prince Rupert took to sea and privateered. They say he was a right devil! I never sailed with him; but they do say he took Cromwell’s ships along with the Spanish, never mind whose blood he shed. I heard he had a familiar spirit like a dog, that sniffed out treasure fleets for him.

“They say he came out here to try what he could get in the way of good fortune; but I reckon he lost his dog, for half his fleet went down in a storm, and his own brother with it. Gave it up for a bad job and sailed home again.”

“He’d be old now, though, wouldn’t he?” said John. The other man winced.

“That was only in ’52,” he said defensively. “Not so long ago as all that! He was a young devil then; he’d be a prime cunning devil now, you mark me.”

“Aye, but—” said John.

“He was burning Spanish ships when you was puking on your nurse,” said the old man, and dug with particular vehemence at a knotted gob of weed and shell. John shrugged and held his tongue.

However good a privateer he might have been, no Prince Rupert came out of retirement to join them, when they’d all refitted and sailed off to Tortuga. Still it was a great host of the Brethren, French and English, that met with Morgan in the lee of Cape Tiburon. Morgan played the lord, with his brother captains sipping rum aboard his flagship, the great Satisfaction.

Things weren’t nearly so grand for John.

He was learning that he needn’t have hurried so to get aboard the Mayflower, she had plenty of berths free, for it turned out that Captain Bradley was no great shakes as a privateer. He had a reputation for being, you might say, unenterprising. No sooner had the Mayflower put in at Cape Tiburon than half its crew was over the side under cover of darkness, signing on with other captains. John would have deserted, himself, but that Bradley offered him position as chief gunner at three whole shares to stay.

Worse, Bradley discovered John could read and write, and so offered him a fourth share to serve as mate to the pinch-faced purser, Felham. It was surely a better bargain than serving as a plain hand before the mast; and John’s mother started up her doleful crying in his head, and told him all about the respectable little shop he might set up in, if he made his pile on this expedition. So John stayed on, to his regret.

He discovered that there was a deal of a lot of clerking to do, which might surprise those thinking a pirate’s life is all carouse. There were terms and articles, there were ships and their captains to be commissioned, there were shares to be reckoned and set aside for the King and the Duke of York. All of it so much inky nothing, as the fleet hadn’t taken in a penny yet. John climbed into his hammock at night with stained fingers, and heard shuffling paper in all his dreams.

All the while, the steady desertion bled from Bradley’s ship. It wouldn’t do; Bradley wasn’t much of a man for taking prizes, but he was Morgan’s friend, and so Morgan put the order out that berths on the Mayflower would be filled before they sailed.

“They must have scoured the bilges for ’this lot,” muttered Felham. John, seated beside him at the plank table, felt inclined to agree. He cast a dubious eye over the stragglers lined up before them, and sneaked a glance at Captain Bradley, to see what he thought of it all. Bradley was looking pretty bleak.

“Step up, you lot,” said John. “Who’s for a berth on the Mayflower, and riches?”

Someone far back in the line cackled with laughter. There were cripples, and dazed-looking men far gone in drink, and thin, sickly fellows, and one or two clear lunatics. “Read them in, for the love of God,” said Captain Bradley, and stalked off to the wood’s edge to sit in the shade.

“Name?” John inquired of the first to step up. He tilted his head back to see a tall man in shabby black, skeletally gaunt, white-faced, looking down at him. The man gave what must have been intended as a friendly smile. On a wolf, it would have been.

“His name is the Reverend Mr. Elias Hackbrace,” piped a sharp voice, nothing like what John would have expected to come out of that narrow chest, and that was because it hadn’t. A small man stepped around Reverend Hackbrace. He was a pale, mouselike individual, but his glare was flinty.

“Reverend, is it, now?” John looked from one to the other. “Why, sir, with all respect, we ain’t likely to need sermons.”

“We are perfectly aware of that,” said the little man. “It is our intention to pursue the vicious Spaniard, to the greater glory of the Almighty God, trusting in His monetary recompense by way of spoils of victory.”

John and Felham looked at each other. John rubbed his chin.

“To be sure,” said John. “But this is likely to be dirty work, see. I wonder whether the Reverend mightn’t feel a bit faint about killing a man?”

“I assure you, sir, that is not the case,” said the other. “Mr. Hackbrace has a quite ungovernable temper when it is aroused.”

“I have broken the Sixth Commandment on several occasions,” said the Reverend Mr. Hackbrace, in a rusty-sounding voice.

John counted off the commandments on his fingers, and his eyes widened. “Murder?” he said.

“Only Papists,” said Reverend Hackbrace. His hands twitched.

“No worse than what any soldier would do, sir, in defense of his country,” said the little man. “Or, in this case, the true faith.”

“Well, see, some of our mates here is Frenchmen, and they’re Papists too,” said Felham. “If he’s going to go killing just any Papists when his temper’s up, that won’t answer, will it?”

“Oh, no; but the dear Reverend has discovered an unfailing means to check his wrath,” said the little man. “Allow us to demonstrate.”

He pointed to a young palm tree that grew some ten yards away.

“Mr. Hackbrace, regard that tree. Think of it as a sinful tree, Mr. Hackbrace! It is the very lair of the Old Serpent! It is the throne of the Woman Dressed in Purple and Scarlet, Mr. Hackbrace! It is the Pope’s own tree, Mr. Hackbrace!”

The Reverend Mr. Hackbrace obediently regarded the tree, and the tremor in his hands grew markedly worse. He developed a facial tic. A thin flow of spittle started from the left corner of his mouth. His eyes reddened with an indescribable light; his head jerked back, as though he were about to fall in convulsions. Instead he hurled himself screaming at the palm tree.

Such was the force of his assault that the tree snapped clean off at its base, and he rolled with it in the sand, screaming still, stabbing at it with a knife he had pulled from his left boot and biting savagely at the green fronds that lashed his face.

John and Felham looked on, open-mouthed. So did the rest of the queue of men, who had fallen quite silent.

“Mr. Hackbrace!” said a new voice, one high and clear and sweet. John turned and saw the speaker, a short man so fat as to be nearly spherical. He had a beardless face like a painted doll’s. He linked arms with the mousy man and the pair of them lifted their voices in shrill song:

“The little white lamb in the meadow so green

Looks out on the wood where the wolf he is seen

I’ll not be afraid, says the lambkin so dear

For Jesus, sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus is near!”

The song had an immediate effect on the Reverend Mr. Hackbrace. The flailing about and frenzied stabbing stopped. He lay limp, gasping, and lifted his sandy face to croak the last line with them.

“Sweet Jesus,” echoed John.

The two singers turned to face him.

“You see?” said the thin one, with an air of triumph. “What mastiff was ever so vicious in the service of his lord and master? Or so obedient? Of course, we must accompany him.”

“You might sign on,” said Felham, “but—the other one’s a castrato, ain’t he? What the hell use is that going to be on board a ship?”

“I am a deadly fighter, poltroon!” said the fat one, narrowing his eyes.

“Are you insulting my cousin?” said the Reverend Mr. Hackbrace, getting unsteadily to his feet.

“No, not at all!” said John. “Sure, it’d be an honor to sign him on. What’s your name, friend?”

“Dick Pettibone,” said the eunuch, setting his hand on his hip in a challenging sort of way.

“And I am Bob Plum,” said the mouse-man.

“Right,” said Felham, and read them in. They signed, all three, and waded out to take their places in the longboat.

“Christ,” sighed Felham, and wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Who’s next? Step up, you lot!”

They were two who stepped up next, hand in hand. They were boucaniers, rogue men who lived by hunting wild cows and curing the beef over smoke-pits.

Both carried long muskets and wore tunics of rawhide; no brocade for these gentlemen, no plumes nor gold lace. Their limbs were bare, save for leather leggings below the knee, and their naked feet looked hard as horn. Both reeked of the barbecue. Both smoked clay pipes, wreathing themselves in yet more fume, as though to provide their natural element while they were away from it. In this much they were identical.

The differences were, that one was tall and the other was short and squat; one was black, and the other was white; one was clean-shaven, with a mass of knotted and beaded hair on his head, while the other’s face was so heavily bearded only his red eyes and the tip of a little, red nose were visible.

The fact that they were holding hands didn’t weigh much. There weren’t any women amongst the cow-killers and maroons, so they got up to certain practical vices to compensate for it. The gleaming muskets counted for a great deal more, as boucaniers were deadly marksmen and the toughest of fighters. John and Felham exchanged glances, hardly able to believe their luck.

“Names?” said Felham.

“I am Jago and this is Jacques,” said the black. He had lived amongst both Spanish and French, to judge from his accent. The white man merely nodded in confirmation. “We hate the Spanish cochons. We will sail with you.”

“Two shares each, if you’re able marksmen,” said Felham.

Jago’s lip curled in disdain. He loaded his musket, with his pipe drooping over his powder horn—John and Felham drew back involuntarily—and then turned and took aim at the shattered palm tree.

“See the centipede on the trunk?”

“No,” chorused John and Felham.

“I take off his head,” said Jago, and fired. A spurt of sand was kicked up a little way beyond the palm trunk. John got up and went to the trunk, crouching over, squinting to see. There was a centipede there, or most of one anyway, writhing and scrabbling. John squashed it and turned to shout:

“He done it, by God.”

“Three shares,” cried Felham, and grinning broadly he reached out and shook Jago by the shoulder. “Well done, mate!”

Jacques scowled—at least it looked as though he was scowling, under all that beard—and seized Felham’s wrist so hard John heard the bones crack. He began to bellow abuse, in French so far as John could tell, shaking his fist under Felham’s nose. Jago turned round and shrieked more French at Jacques; Jacques let go of Felham but rounded on Jago, thundering away death and destruction. Jago rolled his eyes, threw his hands in the air and screamed something impatient. Jacques wept, tears starting from his little, red furious eyes, and he began to slap Jago. Jago got a double handful of Jacques’ hair and pulled on it. Jacques caught Jago by the wrist and bit him.

John pulled out his pistol and fired it in the air. They stopped quarreling at once and stood apart.

“He very jealous,” said Jago.

“You ain’t going to do that on board ship, I hope,” muttered Felham, rubbing at his wrist. He read them in and they went splashing out to the boat, holding hands once more.

“Next,” John called. The next man stepped up to the table, and John blinked at him suspiciously. He seemed familiar, and not just in that he looked like any one of the down-at-heel cavaliers who’d come out to Jamaica one step ahead of their creditors. No; John had seen him here on Tortuga, three or four times in the past few days. He’d stuck in John’s mind because, each time he’d passed by, he’d looked into John’s eyes. He gave John a smile now, in which there seemed something a little sinister.

John, mindful of the two boucaniers just read in, felt a blush burning up from his collar and glared at the table. “Name?” said Felham.

“Tom Blackstone,” said the cavalier.

“Indeed, my lord?” said Felham. “Age and place of birth?”

“Thirty-one. Waddon Hill, Dorset.”

“Of course,” said Felham, in the politest possible tones of disbelief. John wrote it down, refusing to look up.

“I suppose you ain’t an able-bodied seaman, my lord?”

Clear across the water came the sound of violent quarreling from the longboat, where Jago seemed to have affronted Bob Plum in some way. Felham sighed, drew his pistol and fired a shot in their direction.

“Stand to!” he bawled. Lowering his voice he went on: “Sorry, my lord. You was saying—”

“I was upon point of saying that I am an indifferent sailor, but a damned good fighting man,” said Blackstone. “And well armed, I might add.” He waved a lace handkerchief, and from behind him two shaky old drunks stepped to the fore, each one setting down the chests they’d been bearing for him. They opened the chests to reveal kegs of powder, bars of lead for casting, and what looked to be the ready stock of an armorer’s shop.

“Oh, yes,” said Felham, and read him in. Tom Blackstone stepped up and signed to the register in a bold scrawl. The drunks were paid off with gold and backed out of Blackstone’s presence, knuckling their forelocks.

“If you’ll just walk out to the boat, my lord?” said Felham. “Haul them boxes, John, and see them stowed directly.”

“Aye aye,” said John, feeling surly. He hoisted the chests to either shoulder—for John was strong as a bull in those days—and waded out to the boat, with Blackstone prowling along beside him.

“Shame to get those fine boots wet,” said Blackstone.

“They’re sea-boots. They’ll do,” said John.

“Ah, but I think they’re a little more than sea-boots, aren’t they? All that fine cutwork,” said Blackstone. And then he stopped right there, with the sea foaming around their ankles, and looking straight at John said: “Cumberland.”

“Beg pardon?” John replied.

“Cumberland,” Blackstone repeated. When John just stared at him by way of answer, he narrowed his eyes. “Pray tell me, sir: Where might I buy such boots, if I were so minded? In whose shop?”

“Don’t know, mate,” said John. “I had them off a dead man, didn’t I?” As who should say, I’m a killer, friend, and you don’t want to cross me!

“Did you indeed,” said Blackstone thoughtfully, and said nothing more.

They got to the boat, where the boucaniers and the Reverend and his mates were now chattering away and laughing like old friends. John stowed the chests, scrambled in after Blackstone, and watched him sidelong as they rowed out to the Mayflower.

Well, so the captains decided to take Panama. Morgan argued for it, shrewdly, in that way he had of making it seem as though it was somebody else’s idea. Wasn’t Panama the great clearing-house of the world, the place where all the silver and gold of Peru was brought down to be shipped away to Spain? She was open and undefended, she had never been sacked at all!

And no wonder, argued some of the captains: for she lay clear on the other side of the Main, facing into the South Sea, with sixty miles of jungle at her back, steep mountains and a winding river. Morgan pointed out that the perfumed grandees of Panama couldn’t imagine anyone attacking them from the west; they themselves would never risk mud on their fancy shoes, or work up a sweat slashing through the jungle.

Then Morgan mentioned, in an offhand kind of way, those great cities he’d taken on his first ventures: Villahermosa and the rest. He’d led his men hundreds of miles through that stinking, mosquito-haunted wilderness, and out again. Child’s play, he said.

But he didn’t press the point. Morgan was too clever for that. He let the images work for him: the bar silver from the mines of Potosi, the long emeralds and beaten gold, the silks and porcelains and pearls. When the captains had all agreed on taking Panama, he got them to sign a paper to that effect, the wily devil, giving sane and serious reasons relating to the safety of the realm. It stood him in good stead later too.

There was one other suggestion Morgan made, one to which all the captains agreed readily enough. Why not take themselves a base on the Main first, a place near to the business at hand, some island where they could refit and revictual at need? Old Providence ought to do nicely, he said. Recapture it, and get a little revenge into the bargain.

THE ISLAND

The fleet raised anchor and sailed, with a fair wind behind them all the way. Six days it took. On Christmas Eve—as the Papists amongst them reckoned it by the new calendar, which was ten days out from the right one—there were the three mountain peaks of Old Providence, red in the sunrise. By midmorning the Brethren sailed up to the anchorage and saw the battery guarding the harbor, and the black mouths of four silent guns. Morgan had a good look at the place with his glass.

No little figures moved along the parapets; no Spanish banners waved. Nobody moving inland, either; no sight of a living soul.

Morgan closed his glass and, cool as ice, bid his captains enter the anchorage. The Satisfaction first; he stood tall on her quarterdeck as they slipped in, right in range of the guns, but never a shot was fired. Had the Spanish deserted the place, after breaking so many hearts to take it? Morgan landed a thousand armed men, and went ashore to find out.

John led the little party of his messmates that Captain Bradley sent: Reverend Hackbrace with his cousin Pettibone and Bob Plum, who seemed some sort of relation too, and the two boucaniers; at the last moment Tom Blackstone jumped down into the boat too, much to John’s discomfort. He made no trouble, though; he merely bent to the oar like a common hand and kept his mouth shut, though once John noticed him studying John’s boots again.

They splashed ashore and drew the boats up, and John had a long look around. Eerie silence. Inland he could just glimpse a few roofs, bare beams gaping and thatching rotted away. There were wide weedy places that had been fields, maybe. Only, a flock of wood-pigeons rose suddenly in flight, wheeled and circled once, and vanished.

“Do you see, Elias?” Bob Plum pointed to the desolation. “This is the work of the Pope.”

“Here, now, don’t you go setting him off yet,” said John in alarm.

“If you please, I require the proper frame of mind,” said the Reverend. He raised his hands and began to pray; Plum and Pettibone knelt in the sand beside him and joined in. Blackstone watched them with a smirk. The boucaniers were composedly loading their muskets, puffing away at their lit pipes. John shuddered and looked around.

A few yards down the beach, Morgan’s own boat was coming ashore. John thought he’d draw a bit of notice for himself, so he splashed out and helped them pull the boat up. He did his best to catch Morgan’s eye, but the Admiral was staring inland at the ruins, looking grim. So John stood to his full height and saluted smartly, and with him being so big Morgan couldn’t help but see.

“Please you, sir, this plantation ain’t been worked in years,” said John. “Not a sign of a living soul here.”

Morgan looked at him, and John thought he saw a flash of recognition in Morgan’s black eyes.

“Perhaps not,” he said. “Look you, take six men and reconnoiter down the coast.” He pointed, and John set off smart; as he hurried away he heard Morgan ordering other parties out to have a look round.

Well, John led his little party down the beach and saw never a footprint, not so much as a goat’s track; Jago and Jacques cast inshore a ways as they went, and though they walked silent as cats they found nothing either. They met all together at the end of the beach, under the rock cliff, and John splashed out with them to look around into the next little bay.

“Fresh water,” said Jago, pointing. There were some dark wet rocks, with a runnel of clear water flowing down over gravel and shells from the trees to the beach, and white mist blowing along it.

“That’s something, anyway, water,” said John. He blundered forward through the surf and walked up on the glass-smooth sand. He looked again at the mist, and caught his breath.

There was a girl standing there by the water, pale as the mist, still and slender as an egret. She lifted her head and looked at him. John felt a stab of something go right through his heart and lodge there, like the barbed head of a spear. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life, nor would he ever again: nothing like that girl by the water, with her long, wet hair and her gray eyes gazing so quiet.

Jago and Jacques and the rest came up the beach after him and John put out his hand, trying to make them be quiet. He was sure she’d vanish like a ghost; he was half sure she was a ghost. But she didn’t vanish, and then Pettibone had seen her and cried, “There’s a spirit!”

John was sure she’d turn and run, then, but she didn’t. She stood there, watching them; slow and cautious they walked toward her.

Close to, and she was real enough. She looked young, only a maid of fourteen or so, clad in rags faded and stained. Her hair was a tangled mat, pale as ashes.

John was talking low all the time he came near her, like he was talking to a skittish horse, telling her what a pretty little thing she was and how she needn’t be afraid. He never took his eyes from the girl, but Jago and Jacques were watching the scrub pretty sharp. Nothing moved. She was alone.

Ever so careful, John reached out and took her hand. It felt like ice.

“What’s your name, dearie?” he said.

She never drew back from him, but looked at her hand in a sort of wonder, it seemed, and said, “Anguish.”

“She means English!” exclaimed Bob Plum. “Merciful God! She’s one of the Righteous. She must have escaped the Spanish, and been hiding here all this while.”

“It is a miracle,” said Pettibone. “Oh, the poor child!”

Jacques said something, and Jago translated: “Ask her, where have the Spanish gone?”

But she didn’t seem to know. She just looked at them, mute, though she didn’t resist when John pulled at her hand.

“You come with us, sweeting,” he said, and felt her hand warm a little in his grasp.

“Listen to me, girl,” said Blackstone. “Are there others here? Other English, like you? Any men?”

“She’s mad,” said Jago, shaking his head. Pettibone shrugged out of his coat, that was big enough to go round the girl three times, and wrapped it around her shoulders.

They led her away and around the cliff, back to the boats. Morgan was gazing through his glass at the interior, and so did not see them until they were just at his elbow, so to speak.

“Here’s a thing, sir,” said Blackstone. “A young lady.”

Morgan lowered his glass and turned. He saw the girl, and his dark face went clay-color in shock.

“Oh Christ,” he said. He just stood there staring at her, so John, trying to be helpful, said:

“She’s said she’s English, sir.”

Morgan spoke as though his mouth was dry. “What’s your name, child?”

She said nothing. He reached out a hand and brushed back her hair, looked into her eyes.

“Are you alone?” he asked. “Is your mother here? Your father?”

Not a word from her, though tears formed in her gray eyes. Morgan was breathing hard, like a man that’s run upstairs.

“You’re safe now,” he told her. “Safe, and going home. She can’t stay here,” he added, looking around as though he’d only just noticed John and the rest standing there. “Some of you, row her out to the Satisfaction. To my cabin. She’s not to be touched, do you understand? I’ll kill the man who touches her. She needs tending—she must be clothed and fed—” His voice trailed off in a helpless kind of way, as he looked around him and realized he hadn’t exactly the most trustworthy lads to minister to a virgin pure, like.

So John, ever a thoughtful lad, put in his oar. “Please you, sir, Pettibone here’s a eunuch.”

Pettibone shot him an evil look, but stepped forward and bowed.

“In Jesus’ name, you may rely on me. I will minister to the poor child, sir.”

“You were best,” said Morgan harshly. “Go, now.”

So John led the girl into the boat, and Pettibone stepped in after them and Blackstone followed quick to get in too, which John didn’t much care for. The others pushed the boat off, and John and Blackstone rowed back to the Admiral’s flagship. Pettibone hauled his fat, little bum aboard, and the girl ascended easy as though she’d done it a hundred times, with John giving her a lift up. He didn’t peep up her rags, but he couldn’t help seeing her fair white ankles and her naked feet as she went over the side. Then Blackstone headed the boat around, and they were rowing back to shore.

John looked out at the Satisfaction and watched Pettibone, like a mother hen, guiding the girl to the great cabin, and heard Pettibone snapping out short words to the deck hands. He fancied the girl looked for him, as he rowed away.

“I wonder what you’d take for those boots,” said Blackstone, as they rowed.

“Eh?” said John, startled from his dream.

“I’ve conceived a desire for boots of Spanish make, with curious stitchery,” said Blackstone. “Such as those red noughts and crosses on your own boots. Unusual, those. Distinctive. Never seen such a pair, God’s my life.”

“I’d have thought you’d owned plenty of fancy boots in your time, a rich boy like you,” said John, giving him a hard stare.

“Oh, once upon a time, I might have done. My father was a prudent, old devil; bent the knee to Cromwell, and kept his fortune and his lands. He was obliging enough to die untimely and leave me with the lot. Off to court I went, when the king returned, to try my hand at being a courtier. Do you know, it can ruin a man? I’d no notion of the cost of silks, and carriages, and fine sherries. Not to mention the gambling one is required to do!” Blackstone shivered, as though in disgust. “I wasted my substance in a year, who’d credit it?”

“Imagine that,” said John, watching him close.

“The only advantage to ruining oneself so speedily,” said Blackstone, “is that the news doesn’t travel apace, and one can, if one is prompt, find a creditor or two who’ll still advance enough money for a passage to the West Indies. And out here, as you’ve doubtless learned, a man may vastly improve his lot with but an hour’s dirty work.”

“I reckon so,” said John.

“Indeed. I may, therefore, indulge my whims once again, not to my former extent, of course, but handsomely nevertheless. To return, then, to the issue at hand: How much for the boots, my man?”

“I ain’t selling,” said John. “Besides, they ain’t your size.”

“They are,” said Blackstone, setting his foot beside John’s. John, glancing down, saw it was true. “Remarkable, isn’t it? So hard to find ready-mades in my size, as a rule. Why, we might be brothers. And brothers to the man you killed to get them.”

“I didn’t kill nobody,” said John, wondering whether he could club Blackstone with an oar and have it look like an accident. “The bastard dropped dead in the public street, on my life and honor. Look here, the cobbler don’t look likely to set up his stall on this Goddamned ghost island any time soon, thank you very much. What would I do for shoon, if I sold them? What are you after, anyhow? Was it your brother, as died?”

Blackstone looked at him at long moment, as though he was taking his measure.

“No,” he said. “Merely a man with whom I was to exchange boots.”

John stared, dumb as a codfish. Blackstone sighed.

“Oars inboard a moment. Your knife, if you please.”

They shipped oars and John drew his knife, ready to cut Blackstone’s gullet and shove him over the side, if he had to. But Blackstone only reached out with his finger and tapped the fancy-work at the top of John’s boot.

“Oblige me by opening that seam, will you? You have my word of honor I’ll repair it with my own lily-white hands.”

John was a fool in those days, but not so dull as all that. He thought he understood, in a flash as it were, what the man had been driving at. He felt out the seam and cut along it. Neat as a wallet, it opened, and he caught a glimpse of oiled paper that had been tucked flat in there behind the cutwork, before Blackstone reached down, quick as a snake striking, and extracted the paper between finger and thumb.

“Thank you,” said Blackstone.

“Love letter, is it?” said John, grinning.

“Something of the sort,” said Blackstone, opening the paper and reading with difficulty, for the writing was much blurred.

“Well, now, that’s as good as a play!” said John. “You been looking for that poor dead son of a whore, ain’t you? And you was arranged to know him by his boots!”

“As you say.”

“That ain’t half-clever!”

“Mm-hm.”

“And here was me wearing them quite by chance!”

“Astonishing.”

“What’s it say, eh?”

“I’ve no intention of telling you.”

“Oh. Right. Lady’s honor concerned, aye?” John lay his finger beside his nose.

Blackstone stuck the paper inside his coat. He looked at John once more, with that same measuring gaze.

“A man’s life is in the balance,” he said. “One of your own Brethren of the Coast, you might say. And that will have to suffice you.”

The tide ran them up on the beach, then, so no more was said.

The island was secured before two in the afternoon, empty as it was, and it would have been quicker if there hadn’t been so damn many mountains. Morgan found out where the Spaniards were: all holed up in the fortifications atop the little sister islet that lay at Old Providence’s north end, across a stretch of seawater serving as a moat. But the drawbridge had been hauled in, and the first parties who came in sight of the guns met with concerted fire.

“No ghosts in there,” said John, panting as he ducked behind a rock.

“The cowards,” said Bob Plum, glaring as he bandaged the Reverend’s ear, which had stopped a splinter of shattered rock sent flying by a four-pound ball. That had been on their third attempt to wade across the moat, and even the Reverend’s ferocity had begun to flag a little. A tear trickled down his gaunt cheek.

“I have failed the Almighty,” he said.

“Ah, no you ain’t,” said John. “It’d take God Almighty himself to get us in there this side of a six-month. I reckon it’ll come to starving them out.”

“I doubt our Admiral has the time to spare for a siege,” said Blackstone. He turned and squinted back at their own forces, dispersed behind hillocks and clumps of trees, under a lowering sky of black cloud. “Where is our Admiral?”

“He gone back on board the Satisfaction,” Jago informed them, scrambling down into their shelter. “Captain Bradley giving orders out there. We to wait.”

“That’s Bradley, by God,” John muttered. “Wait and see.”

“What’s he gone back aboard for?” demanded Blackstone. Jago shrugged, and Blackstone grinned. “Oh ho. Interrogating the fair prisoner, I dare say.”

“Our Admiral is a married and a God-fearing man,” said Bob Plum. “I’m quite sure he would never do anything improper.”

A cannon ball smacked into the rock behind their redoubt. It sounded like a hammer hitting an anvil under a thundercrack, sending up a smoke of dust and shards of rock. They cursed and fell flat, waiting for the rain of splinters to end. But the pattering did not cease, and John felt the splash on his outstretched hand.

“Il pleut,” said Jago, and spat.

Jacques began to sing mournfully, “Un flambeau, Jeanette, Isabella…”

They lay out there in the rain getting soaked until nightfall, before Bradley called them back. Under cover of darkness they retreated, swearing and hating Bradley, and some found shelter in a few ruined stables. No rations were served out; Bradley sent his apologies, and assurances they’d be along any time now. None arrived that night. Jacques shot an old spavined horse, which they butchered and cut into gobbets, and attempted to cook over a smoking little tongue of blue flame. Hungry men appeared out of the darkness and snatched for raw shares, and fights broke out.

By the time the dawn came, it was a mutinous crew that slogged back through the wet grass, and the usual sea-lawyers from every ship stood around Bradley haranguing him about their rights. The French amongst them weren’t for fighting at all, but for going back to the ships and celebrating Christmas in dry clothes. This seemed like a good idea to the English and to the blacks and Indians too, mince-pies or no. Bradley was upon point of giving in when Morgan returned.

He gave a fine speech then, eloquent enough to make the night just past seem like a little inconvenience. Men were sent back to the ships posthaste for provisions, and great fires were built in the deserted village (a right scrubby place), and rum served round. The slow-match coils were hung out to dry like garlands. The boucaniers scared up a few flights of pigeons and dropped them with quick shot, so there was Christmas squab and jerked beef, cheer for one and all.

Though a fight did break out when Jacques fancied one of the English was eyeing Jago’s charms, and there was screams and slaps and a knife-fight, but it was broken up before anybody got killed to spoil the holiday.

The Spanish were still firing off a few rounds, just to let it be known they weren’t sleeping. Morgan went out to see their defenses, and came back looking haggard. John put himself in Morgan’s way with another sharp salute.

“We done our best, sir, but they ain’t budging,” he said. Morgan turned and looked at John blankly. John wanted to ask how the girl was, but he couldn’t think of a way, and all Morgan said to him was:

“Rig a coracle. I’ll not waste a boat on this.”

“A coracle, sir,” said John stupidly, but there was an Irish boucanier who knew how to make one of the little basket-boats, and he stepped up and said so. In a half-day he had framed a coracle of green wood, and covered it in pitched canvas. All the while, Morgan had retired to one of the deserted shacks to compose a letter, and then rendered a translation into Spanish. He had the Irishman given a clean white shirt, and a white flag made to fly from the coracle, and gave the Irishman his letter to deliver too.

The man hoisted his little boat and carried it down under the battlements, bold as brass, while the Spanish watched like hawks. He paddled about, with the wind whipping the white flag to and fro, until they made up their minds and sent a black down, carrying another white flag, to see what was wanted. The Irishman handed off Morgan’s letter and the black carried it up.

What the letter said, was that if the Spanish governor there did not surrender pretty quick, Morgan swore to him and his that he’d put them all to the sword, no quarter given. A fine threat, with Morgan sitting there in the drizzle with his muskets and pikes and near-mutiny, and the Spanish garrison bristling with big guns.

But Morgan’s luck held.

Two hours afterward the Spanish sent over a canoe of their own, with two emissaries bearing a letter from the governor. John was standing by Morgan when he read it. The funny off-color that had been in Morgan’s face since he’d seen the girl, fled clean away; Morgan laughed heartily. He strode out grinning white as a new moon, and called in his chief captains, Bradley and Morris and Collier.

Bradley came out grinning too.

“What’s toward, Captain sir?” said John.

“Christmas mummery,” said Bradley. He gave orders, and they were followed smart, with sniggers and blank-loaded muskets.

The Spanish governor had sent word that he’d like to surrender cruel bad, but there was the little matter of him getting sent back to Spain in irons and garrotted for cowardice if he did so. To get round this painful chance, he proposed that a mock battle be staged: Morgan’s men would storm the islet and the governor’s men would defend it as fiercely as they might, with everyone shooting blanks. The governor would leave the main fort and rush “to the defense” of a lesser one; Morgan’s men could “capture” him then.

And so it fell out. The sham battle began at nightfall, with a great deal of noise, as men on both sides pretended to take fatal wounds and died most theatrical, and lay giggling amongst their comrades. By midnight the whole thing was over, and not a drop of blood spilt.

Next day all was mutual congratulation, and no few surprises. It turned out the Spanish had been armed to the teeth up there—more than thirteen ton of gunpowder, over a thousand muskets, forty-nine cannon, pistols and slow-match in barrels. They might have kept it up for weeks, if they’d been so minded. But, as the Spanish governor explained to Morgan, they weren’t so fond of the place as to die for it; most of them had been sent there as punishment anyhow. Besides, the island was haunted, and they would be happy to see the last of it.

There were upwards of four hundred people came filing out of the fortresses, with their livestock: soldiers, married settlers and their children, slaves and their children too. Morgan watched them come out, his mood something shadowed and his dark face somber. He had given orders that the men were to be set to work and the women and children sent to the village’s church, when out of the line of slaves one old beldame tottered, calling out to him in Welsh.

Morgan turned on his heel and stared. The old lady fell on her knees, begging him for succor; John heard later she was from some Welsh town, come out to the West Indies as a nurse for somebody’s daughter, but the ship had wrecked. She’d survived but fallen into the hands of the Spanish, who had used her hard twenty years or more.

Morgan took her into the house he was using, and questioned her close. John didn’t know about what, for it was all in Welsh, and anyhow he was trying not to listen too openly, where he stood on duty outside the open door, with another big fellow. But the old lady wept, and carried on no end, and sang sometimes; and John could hear Morgan beginning to sound impatient, and his fingers drumming at last on the tabletop. At last he said something short and sharp, and came outside.

“You; John, your name is?”

“Aye, sir!” said John, ever so pleased his name was sticking in Morgan’s memory.

“Row the woman out to the Satisfaction. She’s been a nurse. Likely she can be some help to Pettibone, looking after the girl.”

“Aye aye!” said John, wondering if he’d get to see the girl, and feeling that spear-point in his heart again. Morgan stepped back inside and led the old creature out. Seeing her close to was no treat; for she was bent and whitehaired, with a nutcracker face and rolling eyes, and she curtsied and simpered for Morgan most unseemly. John thought she was more likely to need a nurse than to be one, but he kept his mouth shut and did his duty.

He had to walk the length of the island with her to get back to the boats, with her singing the whole way, poor old drab, seen by everybody, and that must have been how the story got started that Morgan had brought a Welsh witch with him. All talk. Morgan never needed anyone to conjure trouble for his enemies. He was close enough to the Devil to do it for himself, and in any case there were plenty of conjure-wives in the Caribbean if he’d wanted one.

Pettibone opened at John’s knock, and pursed his little cupid’s bow mouth in disapproval.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded. Seen close to with his jacket off, it was evident he had breasts like a woman, the way fat men will. John shuddered.

“Captain’s orders; here’s a goodwife, to be serving-woman for the girl,” he said, and led the old lady into the great cabin. The girl was sitting quiet, in a dressing-gown of purple silk that must have been Morgan’s own. She’d been having her hair tended, to judge from the brush and combs on the table. She looked up at John with that clear-as-water gaze, and John smiled foolishly.

Pettibone took the old lady in charge and clucked over her. John made so bold as to sit at the table across from the girl, and stretch out a hand.

“You remember me, sweeting?” he said, scarce able to get his breath for the words. “Happy to be rescued, are you?”

The girl smiled at him. He smiled back, a grin so wide he must have looked like a Halloween face carved on a turnip, and there might have been a candle burning in his empty head too, so bright he felt.

“None of that,” said Pettibone. “You take your great boots out of here, and leave the poor child alone.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” said John, feeling like the cock of the walk. He got up to leave, but smiled again at the girl before he went, and whistled as he rowed himself back to shore.

John reported back to Morgan personal and smart, where the Admiral was busy with his captains; Morgan gave order for a party to be got together to move all that powder and shot down to the beach, so it might be parceled out amongst the fleet. John had been without sleep a day and a night, but he was young then, and fearful ambitious of Morgan’s good notice, so he said, “Aye aye, sir!” and went off straightaway.

By this time the Brethren were disporting themselves with rum, or roasting slaughtered livestock, or sprawling out for a good sleep; so the first few times John bawled for volunteers, he was told (and roundly too) what he might do with himself. Thinking his own messmates might be more agreeable, John walked about looking for any of the Mayflower’s crew.

He crossed one of the rubbishy little fields, and there was one of the Spanish prisoners who’d been sent out to forage, with a basket of maize in his arms, and there was Tom Blackstone, as if he were escorting the prisoner under guard. But they were standing still, heads bent, talking serious together. As John drew close he heard Blackstone speaking Spanish, as easy as kiss your hand.

Now John remembered the slip of paper that had been hidden in his boot, and once again the flash of understanding lit up the inside of his thick head, and he reckoned he’d had it all wrong before. Maybe Blackstone was no intriguer ladies’ man, said John to himself; maybe Blackstone was a spy!

But he kept his face bland, resolving to play a deep game and watch Blackstone. He was mild as a May morn greeting him, and gave no sign he’d the least suspicion of anything amiss. Blackstone went readily with him, and on the way they collected the Reverend and Bob Plum, and all that afternoon until dark hauled powderkegs down from the fortress to the camp.

And John did his best not to drop off asleep by the fire, where he’d cannily positioned himself near Blackstone as night fell. All the same, he opened his eyes with a start to find the stars had sunk far west, and the fire gone down to red embers without his knowing anything about it. All around him, men lay snoring something prodigious.

John sat up, grimacing to feel how the cold dew had soaked through his clothes, and in his ear his mother told him he’d catch his death of cold. He looked over at where Tom Blackstone had lain; but the man was gone. So John turned his head this way and that, peering through the night. It seemed to him he heard a murmuring, away out in the dark. It wasn’t the surf, and it wasn’t the ape-bellowing of wakeful drunks. It sounded like someone talking quiet on purpose.

It was coming from the direction of the village church. That was where most of the prisoners had been shut up. John could see the light of a fire still kept blazing before its door, for sober men stood guard there. Round by the back, though, a figure crouched at a little window. Its back was to John.

John got to his feet and walked close, soft-footed as he was able, drawing his pistol as he went. He got to within ten paces and heard for certain the soft hiss of Spanish being spoken, and knew for certain the speaker there in the dark was Tom Blackstone.

He could move quiet when he was young, could John, and so he did now, and came up behind Blackstone and set his pistol to the back of Blackstone’s neck and cocked it. Blackstone fell silent a moment; then he said something in Spanish cool as you please, maybe, “Pardon me, sir, I must be going,” and he stood up slow.

“If you blow my brains out, you’ll never know what I was doing,” he said. “I believe our Admiral might be rather vexed with you on that account. Whereas, if you’ll allow me to make a full confession, you can take it to the Admiral. Glory for John, eh?”

Which shows that he was a shrewd judge of character. John felt his face grow hot for shame, to be so easily read. He grabbed Tom’s shoulder and marched him away a few yards, never lifting the pistol.

“Where are we bound?” said Blackstone, as easy as though they were chatting over two pints.

The truth of it was, having caught Tom Blackstone, John couldn’t think what to do with him next, short of marching him all the way to Morgan’s tent and waking up the Admiral.

“Just you shut your damned mouth,” he said.

“I thought you wanted to hear my confession,” said Blackstone. “See here, my back is like to break after all that crouching by the window. Would you make any objection to my sitting down whilst we have our chat?”

“Sit, then,” said John, and as Blackstone sat John sidled around quick to face him, keeping the pistol-muzzle close the whole while. Cautious, he hunkered himself down. There they sat, in the middle of someone’s weedy vegetable patch, under the winking stars.

“I am in the employ of a certain gentleman,” said Blackstone composedly, “and you should know that he is a loyal subject of King Charles Stuart, God save him, and of no mean birth himself besides. Some years ago, this good gentleman lost his beloved brother at sea.

“A twelvemonth since, my gentleman received a message from persons unknown, bearing the news that his dear brother was alive, but a captive here in the West Indies. Certain tokens were enclosed with the letter, as proof thereof.

“The sum of his ransom was named. The unknown correspondent stated further that circumstances called for the greatest secrecy in effecting the release. Should he wish to pursue the matter further, therefore, my gentleman was informed that he must send an emissary of a certain shoe size to Port Royal. This person must bring with him four thousand pounds in gold.

“Once in Port Royal, he must look for a man wearing boots of a particular curious design, with red noughts and crosses worked into the leather.”

“Oh, bugger,” said John, as the truth began to glimmer through.

“Bugger indeed. Had the emissary been able to find the man in question, he was to have approached him and given a certain password, on the pronouncement of which the other party would collect the ransom money and exchange boots with him. The boots were purported to contain information as to the whereabouts of His Royal Highness’ brother.”

“Oh.”

“I am that emissary, sir,” said Blackstone. “I arrived in Port Royal, only to see the very boots I sought on the legs of some ruffian lounging at the rail of the departing Mayflower. By the time I had arranged passage to follow the Mayflower to Blewfield’s, she had departed for Tortuga. I coursed thence and so tracked you down.”

“Well, but,” stammered John, “I told you what happened. And you got the bit of paper, didn’t you?”

“For all the good it did me,” said Blackstone. “The paper instructs me to proceed to Chagres with another payment of four thousand pounds. I begin to suspect His Royal Highness is being played for a fool.”

“His Royal Highness?”

“No less. I suppose you’ve never heard of Prince Rupert, Duke of Cumberland; he hardly frequents the same bawdy-houses you would.”

“ ’Course I’ve heard of him, hasn’t everybody?” said John. “The king’s own kinsman who turned pirate. And he lost his brother in a storm, didn’t he? Is that the one you’re after?”

“Prince Maurice,” said Blackstone. He turned his head to look at the east, which was glimmering pale. “Learning that this island has been used as a sort of oubliette by the Spanish, I thought it prudent to enquire amongst its inhabitants as to whether there had ever been a prince in residence.”

“Was that what you were doing?” John lowered the pistol. “There ain’t no princes here, that’s certain.”

“But there were, apparently,” said Blackstone. Against the dying night, his profile looked sharp and grim. “I am informed there was an English prisoner of high rank but lately here, held in great secrecy; a year since he was removed, to Chagres as they believe, but do not know.”

“By hell, that’s bad luck,” said John. “And here’s me crossing your hawse time and again. What’ll you do now?”

“Proceed to Chagres, what d’you think?” said Blackstone.

Had John been an older and wiser man, he’d never have believed such a tale, or trusted a man like Blackstone; so it was just as well all this happened when he was young. He scrambled to his feet, and helped Blackstone up with a hearty apology, and went off to build up a fire and see what might be had for breakfast.

Morgan kept his men busy, now, as he sat in council with the captains. There were the island’s stores to be raided, and the fortifications to be pulled down, the big guns spiked and thrown into the sea. Most of this was done by the prisoners, working under armed guard, but they didn’t seem to mind it much. Most of them were overjoyed at the thought of getting off Old Providence and back to the mainland, and a few even went over to Morgan’s side and joined as fighters. Morgan left standing only the fort, which he garrisoned, and the church; hedging his bets, maybe.

The decision was to go for Chagres next; small wonder too. Given the choice between hacking their way overland across mountains to Panama, or going by boat on the river Chagres, all parties present agreed that the river route was the thing. There was only the matter of a bloody big castle guarding the river’s mouth on the Caribbean side, that would have to be got past before the Brethren could proceed any further. And there was no sneaking past this one under cover of night; it would have to be taken, or Morgan would have the enemy at his back all the way up the river, and a gauntlet to run again on his return.

So John and his messmates got ready.

After a few days Pettibone returned from the Satisfaction, with the news that the girl seemed to be mute, but that the old lady had recovered her wits enough to make a passable serving-woman. John longed to row out and see her, but Pettibone told him the Admiral kept her under lock and key.

“And no wonder, in a fleet of brigands and cutthroats,” he said.

“Of which you’re one, ain’t you?” said John.

Pettibone looked indignant. “Only in the service of his king,” said Bob Plum.

“She’s an admiral’s plaything, you great oaf,” said Blackstone to John, as he set an edge on his cutlass, running the stone carefully along the blade. “How should the likes of you compass such a dainty?”

“And you’re mistaken too,” said Pettibone. “I’ll have you know our Admiral has treated her as any true gentleman would treat a lady in distress!”

“Praise God,” said the Reverend.

“Bollocks,” said Tom Blackstone. The Reverend drew on him and he blocked, whereat both Bob Plum and Pettibone screamed, and it took three choruses of “The Little White Lamb” to get the Reverend to calm down, and both Jago and Jacques to get his blade out of his hand.

“I merely meant,” said Blackstone, when things were calmer, “that our Admiral locks up the rum, and being a wise man, locks up the women too.”

“And he no fool,” said Jago. “There is no camaraderie with the ladies present. Scheming like Eve, like Delilah, leading the boys to cut each other throats.”

“Be that as it may,” said Pettibone, “he is sending her back to Jamaica, dispatching a cutter and a trustworthy crew. She is to be put into the care of his own dear wife; so a fig for your lewd thoughts.”

“That is a patient wife!” said Blackstone.

John thought his messmates all a sour and unromantic lot, and he didn’t much like the way Blackstone could read what he was thinking in his face. He resolved to keep his own counsel on the girl henceforth.

Morgan sent three ships to go clear the way at Chagres. There were some quiet groans when it was announced that Bradley would command. There was no arguing, though; away they went, and Bradley’s luck was with them almost from the first, as they ran into southeasterly gales. For a week the Mayflower and her consorts fought their way toward the Main. Her timbers worked so in the crossing seas that she leaked no end, and the pumps were manned watch and watch.

So one evening Captain Bradley sent John down to the powder magazine, to feel if all was dry there. Feel, because he couldn’t see; Morgan had given strictest orders (as you might imagine) about what would happen to any fool caught groping around near powderkegs with a light.

It was all John could do to find the lock, clinging to the cage-door in the dark. He got it open at last and stepped through, groping forward. There—waist height, there were stacked kegs. He turned his head in the darkness. He could smell rats, and bilge, and mold, and all manner of filth; he could hear the groaning of the ship’s timbers, and the muffled shrieking and knocking that was rats fighting somewhere. But did he hear water trickling? He couldn’t tell.

He crouched down and felt around his feet. It seemed dry enough. He stood, and reached out until he encountered something: more stacked kegs. How far back? Three rows? Four? What about the bulkhead beyond them, was that dry?

That was when John put his hand down on another hand. He sucked in breath for a great yell; with the breath came a scent he knew. The hand twisted and took hold of his own, and it was a little hand, and soft. John steadied himself. A voice spoke out of the darkness.

“John,” it said. He hadn’t heard but one other word spoken in that voice, yet John recognized it. It was his girl from the beach.

“Lass!” he cried. “What—”

She sidled close to him, squeezing his hand tight. “Please,” she said, “you must help me.”

John’s heart was jumping like a big, happy dog, yet his head kept some rule. “I’d walk over coals for you, dearie,” he said. “Only, you didn’t ought to be here! This ain’t no place for a little maid. Wasn’t our Admiral himself sending you safe back home? How’d you—”

“I plied the old woman with rum,” said the voice in the darkness, sounding just a little sullen. “When she slept, and it was dark, I went over the side and swam to this ship. The watch were drunk too; they never noticed me come up the cable, or slip down here. I won’t go back to Jamaica. Not until I’ve had my revenge.”

“What revenge would that be?” asked John, fancying he could almost make out her white flesh glimmering like the Pleiades.

“On Spain,” she said. “You’re bound for Panama; I know your Admiral’s intent, I listened to his councils. I’ll go too, and cut Spanish throats if I can…”

“Ain’t you the brave girl!” said John. “But it’s no work for a lady, sweeting. It’ll be hard marching, and worse fighting, cruel bad.”

“You don’t know what’s cruel,” said the girl. “I know; I saw what happened when we were betrayed. I escaped. I lived, stealing to feed myself, creeping out by night. The Spanish came to be afraid of me. Do you think I can’t kill? Do you think I haven’t dreamed of killing, every night these five years?”

“Whyn’t you talk before? I thought you was a mute.”

“Trust comes hard,” said the girl, “but I’ll trust you.”

She pressed closer still to John, and lunging up quick she kissed him full on the mouth. Her cold, slender arms slid inside his shirt. What happened then, why, you may guess at, and it may not surprise you; but it surprised John, though he’d been imagining it for some days. They loved, awkward, and constrained crouching there in the pitch dark, and half-painful but white hot all the same.

When they were done he was murmuring that he’d give her anything, anything, he’d storm all the cities in the West Indies and present her with the loot borne on the backs of a thousand chained Spaniards, so she’d only be his girl forever. He didn’t hear his mother’s voice once.

But the girl said, sharp and clear out of the darkness:

“Just you fetch me a lad’s clothes to wear, and a sword and pistol of my own.”

“Sweetheart, I will,” said John, and staggered away to Felham’s slops chest. There he got her loose breeches of canvas and a great coarse-woven shirt, and thoughtfully a roll of bandage to conceal her breasts; for he was all taken with the romance of it, that his little dear should wish to fight beside him. He got her a cutlass and a pistol too, tied with bright ribbon. He got her a red silk scarf to bind up her hair. It fairly broke his heart, then, when he led her up into the starlight, to see that she’d hacked off her long locks somehow.

But John fell in love again, in a twisty kind of way, with the brave, pretty boy who had such fierce eyes. For her sake John gave up his little snug berth forward of the captain’s own cabin, and slept as best he could on deck. For her sake John went hungry, and took her his share of dry beef and biscuit. Much he cared for food or sleep, when he crept away to her hiding place and she took him in her arms. She about ravished his soul away to Paradise.

THE CASTLE

It was a week’s worth of hard fighting the wind before the Mayflower and her consorts came in sight of Chagres Castle on its rock, with the fortress of San Lorenzo firing at them from the biggest guns John had ever seen in his life.

Bradley bid them stand off a safe distance out at sea, while he thought what he might do.

Getting into the Chagres River was treacherous as picking a man’s pocket, and the pocket full of broken glass. Bad enough that the castle with its fortress stuck out on a headland into the bay, from which it could hammer anyone passing by; there was a reef placed right at the harbor entrance too, most inconvenient.

“Can we storm them, Captain?” asked John, peering out at Chagres Castle. The ball came long before he heard the cannon’s boom, and fell short with a fountain of white water. Bradley folded up his spyglass.

“There’s no climbing that rock,” he said. “And they’ve the range on us with their guns, damn them. We’ll have to go ashore and come at them that way.” He took a squint along the coastline. “Pass the word; we’ll sail north and look for an anchorage.”

Graceful as swans the three ships tacked and glided away, white sails under a mild, blue twilight. John went scrambling down into the stinking darkness, and edged into the tiny cupboard room where he kept his love. The girl was naked, sitting still as an image, with her blade across her knees.

“We’re at Chagres,” she said.

“Aye,” said John. “And I thought up a stratagem, see. If you was to hide in a barrel, we could get you ashore—”

“No,” said the girl. “You go ashore. I’ll slip over the side when there’s none to see, and I’ll find you there.”

She sounded so cool and certain John never once thought to wonder how in hell she’d manage such a thing. He kissed her, until she laid the blade aside and opened her arms to him. There they kept company together, until the late watch.

Then John parted from her, taking his guns and powder horn, and a cutlass with a keen edge on it. He went above with a heart full of little pink angels, in that black dawn, and no thought to the bloody strife to come.

His messmates were already on deck, watching along the rail as the jungle breathed out its night sounds at them, and the night paled. The Mayflower and her consorts had dropped anchor only a league away, in view of San Lorenzo’s lookout.

The stars were fading when Bradley gave order for the loading of the boats. Men were rowed ashore. They milled about on the beach, waiting as supplies were brought, shivering to walk on the soft, cold sand, unwilling to go in among the dark trees. Within an hour of sunrise they were sweating, bored with the long wait, as the boats kept going back and forth. Higher the sun rose, glittering on the bright water so it hurt the eyes, and still the boats came and went, and there was a deal of grumbling from the ones who waited in the narrowing strip of shade.

John kept with his messmates, looking out anxious to see if he could spot a little figure dropping from the Mayflower. By him, Blackstone and the two boucaniers sat, quiet and calm, passing a whetstone back and forth as they put fresh killing edges on their blades. Bob Plum and Pettibone sat either side of the Reverend, on a fallen palm trunk, mopping their faces and complaining of the heat and the flies. The Reverend showed no sign of minding the heat, though he wore his black coat buttoned up high, and a black neck-stock tied tight. He only nodded his head over his big, scarred hands, clasping them together in prayer.

“There’s our lieutenant-colonel coming ashore,” remarked Blackstone, pointing with his cutlass. John looked out and saw Bradley arriving at last, gazing at the jungle as he stepped from the boat. Someone shouted:

“Columns come to order!” and sand was kicked up in flurries as four hundred men scrambled to their feet and formed ranks, grumbling and muttering.

“How like the army,” said Blackstone. “Hardly what one expects of sea-robbers bold and free, eh?”

“Oh, shut your face,” said John, looking around for the pennant he had been assigned. He raised it up; it hung fluttering limply in the glare of the tropical sun. He looked down, blinking his dazzled eyes, and when his vision cleared he saw the girl had slipped in beside him, silent, and stood now at his elbow. She had dressed herself, with her bubbies bound down flat, and tied the red silk scarf about her cropped hair, and smudged her fair countenance with soot.

John heard another gasp. He half turned and saw Dick Pettibone regarding the girl in horror.

“You—what are you—” began Pettibone. The girl reached out, swift, and seized Pettibone’s arm tight, and muttered something into his ear. Pettibone stepped back, looking appalled, but he said nothing more.

At the head of the column, Bradley was consulting with a villainous-looking fellow, a thief they’d pulled from the Spanish dungeon, who’d volunteered to guide them for sheer spite’s sake. Bradley’s second-in-command, Captain Norman, walked up and joined them, gesturing. They seemed to agree on something; Bradley squinted at the sun, just then dead overhead, and swept his arm up in the signal to march.

Two hours they plodded along, keeping to the beach where they could, fighting uphill and inland through the jungle where the headlands stuck out into deep water. The first column tried to hack their way through with cutlasses, though the boucaniers among them frowned and shook their heads; that was no way to do it, they said, it only blunted blades and made a lot of noise. In the end Bradley agreed with them and gave orders to lay off. The boucaniers fell out and went ahead, slipping through the branches without noise, and the rest followed. The girl marched by John’s side, steadfast, without complaint.

Over the last hill, and there were the bastions of San Lorenzo, peeping between the trees. The column of men fanned out now, moving in a thin line through the jungle, and came to a wide cliff’s edge where the land had slid, leaving the trees with their roots hanging out over the air. John parted the leaves with his standard and peered down.

“No more than six or seven feet,” he announced. “We can jump it easy.”

So the men pushed forward, dropping down one by one through the brush and scrambling to their feet below; and the first wave to land turned and stared about them amazed, and soon horrified.

The forest had been cleared from where they stood to the very walls of San Lorenzo itself, making an open plain where there wasn’t so much as a blade of grass to cover them. John could see the Spanish gunners on the near palisade grinning at them, they were that close. He had just time to notice that before he heard the first shots cracking, and a scream from somewhere on his left, and then John was scrambling for his life back up the slope to the cover of the jungle.

“Back! Back!” Bradley was howling, and something big struck the earth right by John’s head with a whap and traveled deep into the clay.

“Ba—” Bradley’s voice broke off. John reached desperately for the creepers, and saw Jacques and Blackstone reaching down to grab for him. He caught their hands and they pulled him to safety. Other men were being hoisted up, here and there among the trees. John saw Bradley being dragged out between two stout fellows, and him bleeding and cursing a blue streak. Down below, though, there lay a score of men who hadn’t turned in time, pierced through with shot or the arrows of the Indian archers. Some were crying for their mothers. Some were quiet for ever and aye.

The Spanish indulged themselves in catcalling and threatening no end, or at least that was what John reckoned they were doing. He was too busy binding up Bradley’s leg to pay much attention.

“What do we do, Captain?”

Bradley had bitten a dry stick clean in half, in his pain. Now he spat it out and glared at John.

“Bring up the grenades!” he said. “And send one of the boucaniers to reconnoiter. Where’s that damned thief? I’ll cut his heart out—”

“He’s down there,” said Blackstone, crawling close. “If he betrayed us, he’s been well and truly paid for his trouble.”

Some men crept up into the trees, and from the screen of leaves took potshots at the Spanish, who kept up an answering fire. In a while, Jago climbed back down.

“Pretty bad,” he said. “Other side of the field, deep deep ditch, the palisadoes they go up straight on the other side. He runs across the field alive, get his death falling down the ditch.”

“We ain’t getting at ’em that way,” said John. “We better fall back, sir, whiles we think what to do.”

“I’ll shoot you dead,” said Bradley, baring his teeth. “Come back here, you sons of bitches! Dick Norman! Take two squadrons with grenades and charge again! They’re only wooden walls!”

John, peeping out through the leaves, saw what he meant; for instead of being stone, San Lorenzo’s bastions were made of wooden planks shored up with posts. Fire might do for them; and John understood why so much trouble had been taken rowing all those barrels of grenades ashore. They were dragged forward now and handed around, and Captain Norman stepped to the fore and led his two squadrons down on that bare ground, where they rushed screaming for the walls.

It was a slaughter. They never got so far as the ditch; half their number were mown down on that field. Though one or two of them managed to hurl their grenades across the ditch and into the dry brush at the base of the palisades, it was no use. The fires caught readily enough, the weather being very dry, but the Spanish soon flung down enough sand to smother them. Bradley, propped up against a tree, watched it all and swore bitterly.

John watched too, and thought he had never seen such a close likeness of Damnation: the dead and dying sprawled across that bare field, frying in the heat and glare of the sun, and here and there a grenade bursting in the dead hand that clutched it, or sputtering down to add its acrid smoke to the smoke coming up out of the ditch.

Captain Norman ordered a retreat, like a sane man, and the survivors regrouped under cover of the trees. There proceeded a fierce debate amongst them, the two opposing points being: that they could not take San Lorenzo, and that they must take San Lorenzo. As these points went back and forth for the next hour, getting louder and more profane with each repetition, John listened close to his mother telling him that there was no sense in him getting himself killed.

He looked round on his messmates with a cool eye. The Reverend and his mates hadn’t been out yet; they sat quiet and pale, all three seemingly praying together. Jago and Jacques were enjoying a quiet pipe, passed between them. Blackstone had stretched out with his hat over his face, cold-blooded fellow that he was. The girl sat still, looking through the leaves at the battlements of San Lorenzo. John sidled up to her.

“See, now?” he said, quiet. “See what a nasty business this is? You’ve had your soldier march; it’s time to go back to the beach. Much safer place for a pretty girl. I’ll take you; let’s just slip away, sweeting, eh?”

She never so much as looked up at him. “I’d not have taken you for a coward,” she said. “A big man like you.”

John fell all over himself trying to deny he’d meant to desert; he was only afeared for her, on his life and honor, and had meant to come straight back and storm the wall himself, single-handed, once he’d seen her to safety. His mother wailed in his ear, asking was he mad, that he’d rather face death than disgust in the eyes of a slip of a girl. John made no answer to that.

The girl shrugged at his fine words anyway. “Not long until sunset now,” was all she said.

John walked away feeling like an empty wine-skin, and saw Blackstone sitting up, grinning at him.

“What are you smiling at?” said John, cross as a bear.

“The follies of the heart,” said Blackstone. “You may as well rest yourself, man. Unless they’ve sent out a party to come around and attack from the trees, we’re safe enough here; and when night falls it’ll be a different game altogether.”

And so it was. Bradley bawled and thundered, persuading the men they’d be worse off if they deserted now. Maybe all he’d needed to make him a decent commander had been pain and rage; if he’d shouted like that when he’d been cruising the Main, he’d have had better luck. Word went out that they’d try again come night, and all parties settled down to wait for dark.

The sun dipped low; the shadows slanted away, and the wind rose, and changed, and blew from the jungle out to sea. All around, in the underbrush, men were getting up and priming their muskets, and rummaging in the crates of grenades.

Then the sun was gone. Bob Plum got up in the purple gloom and led Reverend Hackbrace to the edge, and parted the branches to show him the Spanish gunners outlined against the red sunset. He began talking to him in a low voice. John saw the Reverend begin to shake and clench his hands.

Blackstone watched them sidelong as he wound a twist of slow-match through his buttonhole. Jago and Jacques appeared from somewhere—they came and went silent as cats—and waited beside him on the edge, looking through the screen of leaves. John glanced over at Captain Bradley, who was limping along looking up at the musketeers he’d stationed in the trees. Bradley muttered something to Norman; Norman turned and passed the word, and all along the ragged line men grabbed up grenades and poised themselves to drop.

John felt a squeeze on his hand. He started and looked round. The girl pulled him down, kissing his dry mouth. There was a light in her eyes like the green flare before a thunderstorm. He had a moment’s unease at what anyone should think, seeing him kissing a pretty boy. Then he decided he didn’t give a damn, them being all about to die anyway.

So they dropped, stumbling down the ploughed-up slope, and ran like madmen but without a sound, as they’d been ordered. Meanwhile the musketmen in the trees sent covering fire, picking off the Spanish sentries backlit so nice and sharp as they were. It was what should have been done the first time, and it worked now. Shadows skipping over the bodies of the dead, near invisible in the twilight, the grenadiers were to the ravine and down one side before the Spanish knew what was what.

Their Indians saw what was happening first, and had the presence of mind to start shooting arrows down into the ditch. Even so, John saw the Reverend, frothing at the mouth, going up the side like a spider scaling a web, tearing at the rotten wood with his nails. Bob Plum followed him close, shoving lit grenades all along the base of the wall and scrambling on. Fifty pieces of eight for them, thought John.

He lit a grenade whilst running and lobbed it high and far as he could. The Spanish sentries had made themselves a nice palm-thatched sunshade that ran the length of the rampart, for their ease in keeping watch under the noonday sun no doubt; but it made a pretty target for firebombs now. John missed, but heard his grenade burst and voices howling behind the rampart.

Jago dashed past him, a glint of white teeth in the smoke, his knotted hair bristling. John looked up just as the arrow struck home clean through the saddle of Jago’s shoulder. The force knocked him back on his heels; Jacques was by him at once crying, Petite, ma petite, but Jago’s eyes were red and mad. He pulled the arrow out, not seeming to feel it at all, and shoved it down the muzzle of his musket, making to fire it back at the bowman.

“Wait!” The girl appeared out of the smoke, pulling the red silk from her head. “Here!” She tied the silk about the arrow’s shaft and held an end of slow-match to it. It kindled up bright straightaway.

“Ah!” Jago was laughing as he took aim. Bang, and the arrow flew like a bird and lighted in the palm-thatch sun shade, lighted indeed, for the leaves curled back and the bright fire spread and licked along. The girl was laughing, they were all laughing to hear the shrieks from above as the Spanish tried to put the blaze out, but it seemed all their sand was gone.

By the firelight John could see plenty of arrows scattered along the bottom of the ditch, as could all the other grenadiers. He grabbed up one and tore off a piece of his shirt for kindling; all along the ditch others were doing the same; up went the flight of little phoenixes, and some stuck in the thatch and some in the wooden palisades. The inshore wind, gusting down the ravine, fanned the flames like Hell.

From behind them came a roar as Bradley gave the order for the marksmen to advance, and John heard them dropping from the trees now, charging the field, coming on toward the ravine. They kept up a steady fire the whole time, reloading on the run. John scrambled to and fro, finding dropped grenades, relighting them and pitching them as fast and as far as he could go; for he had a strong right arm then. The girl flitted here and there, bringing him grenades too, and they laughed together to hear the Spanish scream so, when the whole of the burning thatch collapsed on the walls.

Just as the marksmen came to the ditch, something behind the wall exploded, with a crash to tear open the sky and a blaze of light like day come early; John heard later it was the biggest of the Spanish guns. Red-hot bronze shrapnel came out of the air and fell like hail, wounding all men alike. Someone yelled beside him and he turned to see Blackstone on the ground, clutching his head. Someone else yelled above him. John looked up and saw the palisade beginning to collapse, eaten through as it was with flame, and a great wave of earth and stones burst from behind it and came down the slope into the ditch.

When John knew anything again he was clear down the far end of the ditch, toward one of the other bastions, and he and the girl were dragging Blackstone between them. Blackstone was slick all down one side with blood, and he was saying over and over, “My ear, my ear, they’ve blown off my fucking ear,” and there were more explosions sounding.

The palisades had collapsed nearly all the way across, and the earth they had had packed behind them all gone down into the ditch, filling it in in some places, so Captain Bradley’s marksmen had a nice open window through which to shoot at the Spanish who ran to and fro, exposed as though they were on a theater stage. Some were trying to put out the fires; some were fighting hand-to-hand with privateers who’d crawled up over the fallen palisade. John caught a glimpse of one unlucky bastard fending off Reverend Hackbrace, who was on him like God’s own werewolf.

But the defenders weren’t done for yet; some among their officers were rallying to drag over guns from the other batteries, aiming them out at the gap to slay all comers that way and any of the marksmen out there in the night. They loaded the cannon with musket-balls and fired point-blank into the waves of men coming up the hill, and washed them back down in blood. Others of the defenders had run and fetched their own grenades, or even chamber pots, flinging down anything they had to repel the privateers.

John was all for finding a cool place in the dark and waiting for the bullets to do their work up above, once they’d bound up poor dear Blackstone’s bloody head; but the girl went sprinting over the fallen earth with her cutlass drawn, screaming like an Irish witch. To John’s amazement he found himself scrambling after her, and so was Blackstone, dodging grenades and shite. They all three gained the top at about the same moment, and looked straight into the faces of the Spanish defenders, and then it got nasty for a long while.

Now and again John had a moment to notice things, over the red hours; that he was wet to the elbows like a butcher, and that Dick Pettibone had somehow gotten his fat bulk up the slope and was cutting the throats of the wounded, and that the girl seemed to be everywhere at once, lithe as the flames that spread, and spread, and that the Reverend was roaring out a hymn that wasn’t about any little lambs, and that at last the gray dawn was showing up eerie and cold beyond the walls.

The Spanish weren’t firing anymore now, whether from a wish to save powder for the last assault or because they’d used it all, John couldn’t guess. He slumped down behind a mass of smoldering timbers, trying to get his breath, watching dully as the girl bound up a cut that had laid his upper left arm open. He wondered when that had happened. He could see down the causeway the fallen earth had made, where Captain Bradley was in conference with a group of boucaniers, Jago and Jacques amongst them. They were passing their muskets to a couple of Bradley’s aides, who collected them like bundles of firewood. Then they drew pistols and cutlasses.

“It’ll be close work, now,” said the girl, laughing. John looked at her in wonderment. Then he understood: they were readying for the last push, and Bradley must intend for the boucaniers to be the spearhead. It seemed like a dream, or a story someone was telling him. If he turned his head he could see down to the green trees and the Chagres River winding gray away between them, and one and then two and three canoes moving up its placid water. Deserters, he thought. Don’t blame them.

The sun came up, red as a wound in all the smoke and stink; the Spanish had retreated to the inner buildings, seemingly, for there was no sign of them but the dead ones on the bastions. There came a shout from below. John looked down and saw the boucaniers formed up for the charge. Over they came, yelling, Victoire! Victoire!

The Spanish began to fire again, but it was scattered now, and as the Frenchmen rushed over the edge the other privateers followed after them.

Captain Bradley came up and was cut down almost at once by a bullet that broke his shin, so he rolled screaming on the bloody ground. John staggered to him and gripped his leg tight; Dick Pettibone appeared out of the haze and helped him bind and set the leg, and splint it as best they could. So they missed the end of the fight, when the last of the Spanish holed up in the inner castle and their officers died to a man. John and Pettibone dragged Bradley behind a broken wall, into a patch of shade.

John sat beside him, meaning only to wait until the shooting had stopped. When he opened his eyes, the shade had gone clean away. He was all alone. The noonday sun was broiling straight down, and flies were buzzing to celebrate the taking of Chagres Castle.

John went limping like a ghost among the dead and wounded, hoping to find a bottle of rum somewhere that might ease his pains. The slash on his arm had bled through its bandage; he had taken a couple of arrow-points in the fat of his leg, sometime in the long night, and a musket-ball had creased his scalp, and he’d hit his head on something hard enough to raise a lump like a goose egg.

He didn’t know where the girl had gone. He had a sick fear of finding her dead, but could not stop himself searching, wandering to the heap of piled corpses to look into every staring face. He was crying as he tottered along, in an absent-minded way, like a child will do. Ned Cooper was lying there amongst the slain, his old shipmate from the Clapham, but nobody else he knew.

None of the living paid him any mind. Privateers were ordering gangs of slaves and prisoners about; the wreckage of battle was being cleared away and the defenses already being repaired. The Spanish dead were being pitched down the cliff into the sea by their weeping fellows.

Tom Blackstone came blinking out of one of the doorways, shielding his eyes from the sunlight. His head was bandaged, his arm in a sling; he was pale and filthy and looked to be in a savage temper.

“Looking for your little friend?” he said to John. “I shouldn’t fear for—him. He preserved his life through the fray. Pettibone tried to get him to tend the wounded, but the, ah, boy went off with a gang to round up slaves.”

“Oh, bugger off,” said John, ever so grateful.

“I ask myself: ‘Has this pirate swain any wits at all? For surely a certain vicious little fury will do for him when she’s weary of his embrace, or else our dear Admiral will have him hanged for debauching a maiden fair’.”

“It wasn’t like that,” said John.

“Oh, no, of course not.” Blackstone stared down at the heap of dead men. He picked at the dried blood in his beard. “I’ll keep your secret for you; none of my concern, after all. What will you do for me in return?”

“I don’t know,” said John.

“Well, I’ll tell you. Should I get my death-wound on this wretched venture, perhaps you might get word of it back to a certain lady in Port Royal.” Blackstone squinted at John, then leaned down and took hold of the arrow-stump protruding from John’s thigh. One quick jerk and he had it out, taking a flap of skin with it. John stared down dumbly at the little gush of blood, too surprised to curse. Blackstone held the arrowhead up, examining it. “Look at that edge! A man could shave with that.”

“Did you find your prince?” John groped, pulled away his neckerchief and held it to the wound.

“Haven’t had time to look, yet. I hope he wasn’t being kept in the inner redoubt; they were all slaughtered, in there.”

“Or you been diddled again, I reckon, and he wasn’t never here in the first place,” said John, spiteful.

“Entirely likely, damn your eyes,” said Blackstone, tossing the arrowhead away. He glanced over at the prisoners who were at work on the seaward battlements. “But let’s you and I take a walk over yonder, messmate. One never knows who might have had the sense to beg for quarter.”

They went shambling to the parapet together, looking like a couple of beggars, and saw Jacques lounging in a shady corner, with his musket trained on the prisoners. The Spaniards were praying at each body before they cast it over the edge, and every time they made the sign of the cross Jacques would too, solemn and respectful, before pointing his musket at them again.

Blackstone led John promenading up and down once or twice before John realized what he was about; that was when one of the Spaniards noticed John’s boots, and nearly dropped his end of a dead capitano. His mates swore at him, or at least that was what it sounded like to John, and he seemingly apologized and hauled the body up again. All the while he was praying at the edge, though, he kept his red-rimmed eyes on John’s boots. Blackstone grinned.

“Je v’lui parler,” he said to Jacques, jerking his thumb at the Spaniard. Jacques nodded, crossed himself and took aim at the hapless man. Blackstone pulled him aside.

“You like the boots?” he said. The Spaniard, who was small and thin and wretched-looking, said something in Spanish, not surprisingly. Blackstone talked back to him in the same tongue. The gist of what they said was, as John found out after:

Prisoner: Please, sir, you are too late.

Blackstone: I hope you’re not going to disappoint my friend with the fine boots. See what a big man he is? He could flatten you with his fist.

Prisoner: Please, please, señor, I am not to blame. We kept the Englishman here as long as we dared.

Blackstone: Oh, dear, my friend won’t be happy to hear that. I might be able to prevent him from hurting you, but you must tell me everything.

Prisoner: If you had come sooner, all had been well. It was the safest place we could think of to keep him. How were we to know your Enrique Morgan would be so mad as to come here? Now the Englishman has been taken to a new hiding-place.

Blackstone: Gone again, is he? Why, damn your soul.

Prisoner: Did you bring the money, señor? I could serve as your guide thence.

Blackstone: Did I bring the money? You impudent little ape, I’ll find my own way, with fire and sword. When I tell my friend here what you just said, he’ll throw you down the cliff alive.

Prisoner: Oh, in God’s name, señor, have mercy! I am only a clerk!

Blackstone: Then tell me this much: Why all this mummery? Unless you have been lying, and the Englishman was never here.

Prisoner: No! No! Look, señor, here’s proof!

He drew a leather bag from out of the depths of his shirt, digging in it. He held up something that glinted in the sunlight. Blackstone snatched it from him, and studied it closely. John leaned down and had a look at the thing; it was a seal-ring with a curious device on the shield, such as great folks have painted on the doors of their carriages.

Prisoner: I was bid to give you this, and tell you to come to the river-post called Torna Caballos. That is all I know. Please, señor, I am not to blame, I am a poor creature.

Blackstone turned away in disgust, taking John by the arm.

“Another damned feint,” he said. “Let’s go see if we can find some wine.”

You may have heard tales of all the merry times to be had when a city is sacked on the Spanish Main: all the drinking, and looting, and whoring, and happy freebooters lying unconscious in piles of plunder. There was none of that at Chagres Castle, at all.

Captain Bradley lay sweating in a fever, but his shattered leg was cold. If a man were at all inclined to be fanciful, he might almost see the black-robed figure with the scythe waiting patiently in a corner, just passing the time in a game of primero with War and Pestilence. Captain Norman stalked about hollow-eyed and sleepless, seeing to the repair of the defenses; for John hadn’t been the only one to notice the canoes escaping up the Chagres, and everyone reckoned it was a race to see who arrived first, Morgan with the rest of the fleet (please God) or Spanish troops come to the relief of their comrades.

The first night’s watch fell to John and his messmates, by the open palisade. They’d only a low basket of coals to warm themselves, as a cheery fire would have blazed out through the fallen wall good as an invitation for any snipers who cared to pick them off.

John sat with his head in his hands, feeling low. His skull ached and his wounds stung, but all he cared for was that the girl hadn’t come back, and nobody seemed to have seen her.

“It’s on your own conscience,” said Dick Pettibone, shrill as a fishwife. “You ought to have known better than to have brought that poor child. She was half mad, after what she’d suffered. Then, to think of her being pawed by a great brute like you! And now, I don’t doubt she’s run mad in the forest, and will perish miserably.”

“Run mad maybe, but I doubt very much she’ll perish,” said Blackstone. “You didn’t see her fighting! A more bloodthirsting harpy I never saw.” He looked sidelong at John. “She’s left you, you great lout, and you ought to be grateful. Can’t you see that she kept with you only to serve her purposes? You got her where she wished to go, and then it was hail and farewell. If I were you I’d be grateful I still had my prick.”

“So you should,” agreed Jago, where he lay with his head in Jacques’ lap. “She fight like a devil, but they are heartless, heartless.”

“So you say,” said John.

“Men are more heartless than women,” said Bob Plum. “Do they think twice about deserting their faithful wives? Do they care for the helpless infants left to starve? Oh no, they go swaggering off to the arms of other women—or to ale houses—or the wars—perfidious, treacherous beasts!”

The others turned their heads to stare at him. Reverend Hackbrace, so bound up from a score of wounds he looked like a great long roll of bandage, shifted uncomfortably where he sat.

“Now, then, Bob, let us keep our tempers,” he said. “Scripture tells us—

“Oui, Scripture! What about the sin of Eve, eh?” said Jago. “Slut mother sleep with the Serpent and eat of the fruit, get us all thrown out of Paradise. And Jezebel. And Salome.”

“Delilah,” said Jacques.

“And Delilah!”

“That’s true,” said Bob, looking down at his feet. “I must bear in mind the counsels of Saint Paul. Women are of a more natural disposition to sin, alas. After all, there are no male whores.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Blackstone. “You have never been at Court, or you’d never say such a thing.”

“Ain’t you never heard of the Grand Turk?” John lifted his head. “ ’Course there’s boy whores.”

“There are?” Bob’s eyes were wide. The Reverend cleared his throat.

“The sins of the people of the plain, Bob,” he said. “The crime of Sodom.”

“Buggery,” said Blackstone. Bob’s eyes got wider.

“You mean people are still doing that?” he said. Jago began to snicker.

“Don’t be an imbecile, Bob,” said Pettibone waspishly.

“But—but why hath not the Lord rained down fire and brimstone upon them?” cried Bob.

“I often ask myself that question, in the still watches of the night,” said Blackstone.

“No doubt the Almighty is waiting His vengeance for the Last Trumpet,” said the Reverend.

“Yes, that must be the case,” Bob agreed. “How dreadful!”

“Perhaps a more edifying topic of conversation might be begun,” said the Reverend. John listened in wonder; it was the first time he had ever heard the Reverend say so much at one go, in his ruined-sounding voice. “For example, it might be pleasant to contemplate what we shall do with the riches awaiting us at Panama.”

“So it might,” said Blackstone. “For my part, I’ll set up as a planter. Build myself a grand house, live in style; perhaps in Virginia or Carolina. The weather is more temperate there, so I hear.”

“I thought of doing that,” said John. “Or setting up in a shop, you know. I was going to settle down with—” He choked back what he had been about to say, and hated himself for the hot tears that welled in his eyes.

“No, you wouldn’t have done,” said Blackstone, not unkindly. “You’ll spend it all on a spree, my friend, and go to sea again.”

“I ain’t like those poor, stupid bastards you see in the gutter,” John protested. “I could have been a bricklayer, you know.”

“Well, well perhaps you may yet. What about you gentlemen?” Blackstone looked at the Reverend and his mates. “But why do I even ask? Surely you’ll establish a mission for the conversion of the benighted Indian.”

“No, sir, we will not,” said Dick Pettibone. “The Reverend has humbly acknowledged that he lacks the patience for missionary work.”

“I am too great a sinner,” said the Reverend mournfully.

“Being as he is no gentle persuader, he is nevertheless a brilliant man of God,” said Pettibone. “We have resolved to buy a quiet country retreat where he will complete his great scholarly work, so unfortunately interrupted when we were obliged to fly from Yorkshire.”

“It is called One Thousand Canonical Instances Wherein the Claim to Authority of the Bishop of Rome Is Refuted,” said Bob proudly. “With appendices.”

“Really,” said Blackstone. “And what will the two of you do?”

“Why, keep house for him,” said Bob. “A-and perhaps engage in small farming.”

“I see,” said Blackstone. Jago coughed in a pointed sort of way.

“And take ourselves virtuous wives,” said Dick Pettibone. “Of course.”

“Now, what in hell do you need a wife for?” John asked.

“There is more to a marriage than swiving,” said Pettibone, with great dignity.

“Than what?” said Bob.

“Swiving,” said John, and called it by another name. Bob reddened and fell silent.

“What about the two of you?” Blackstone inquired of the boucaniers.

“We need nothing,” said Jago proudly. “Buy ourselves the tabac, buy the powder and shot. New muskets, belike, eh, mon plus cher? Go back to Tortuga, we got Paradise already.”

“Adam avant I’erreur,” said Jacques, nodding.

“If you’ve such a damned Paradise, what are you out of it for?” said John crossly.

“The revenge,” said Jago, with a red light in his eyes. Jacques sighed and shook his head.

“On whom, exactly?” inquired Blackstone.

“All of them,” said Jago. “Spain specially. When I was little boy in Marseilles, my monsieur, he keep me in the golden cage. I wear the ribbon, like the kitten, eh? He feed me the candies, sweet rice, sweet wines. I sleep on his sheets, wear the perfume. Then he gamble away everything and English lord win me, give me to his lady to wear the turban. She make me stand in the livery by her door. But Sir Robert gamble too, and then Don Pedro win me. I am nothing, me, but the object.”

“C’était il y a un longtemps, mon cher,” murmured Jacques.

“Don Pedro ship me off to Hispaniola. Poor little me, never before worked in the fields! I am beat half to death. When I get big, I kill him and run away. Steal the boat, go adrift, almost die of the thirst. Wash up on the little island. There was Jacques.

“My Jacques, he’s too poor orphan, steal the game on the rich man’s land. They catch him, make him row the prison galley. Galley taken by the pirates, Jacques set free, turn pirate. Spanish catch him and take him to be hanged. Beat him bad. But their ship goes on the reef off the little island, they drown, he swim ashore. When he find me, carry me to his refuge with great tendresse.

“My Jacques, he is the, the philosopher. He explain to me: the black, the poor, neither one creatures of reason, say the rich men. They make us only the beasts. Eh bien, then we are beasts, and free. We prey on them like the lions, like the wolves. What they have, we are free to take, if we can take; or die free. There is no, no coupable for the beasts. No sins.”

Jacques said something long and earnest in French, which Jago translated to mean that he and Jacques, playing at being animals, had found their way back into Eden: freedom, and true comradeship. Free air, the forest and the sea, all things held in common between true brothers, far from the jealous eyes of other men or wicked whores. He said further, that he hoped as how Jago might slake his thirst for revenge soon and give over his anger, so they could go back to their island. “It is indeed a noble idyll,” said Bob Plum, “but for being Godless.” They all looked at Bob in wonderment, except for Dick Pettibone, who hid his face in his hands, and the Reverend, who was gazing into the coals contentedly, as though he watched the damned burning there.

For a week they worked on the bastions of San Lorenzo, building them up with as much effort as they’d expended in bringing them down. John, who was reckoned able-bodied compared to some of the others, was sent into the jungle with a gang of prisoners to cut wood and haul logs back through the heat and stink. He searched the green shadows, shading his eyes with his hands, hoping to catch a glimpse of a white leg or a peering face; but he never saw his girl.

He worked with the grave-digging detail too, putting the wounded away in their eternal beds as they died, and he looked closely at each gray face as the dead were sewn into their shrouds; but none of them were the girl.

He wandered amongst the company in the evenings, from watch-fire to watch-fire, questioning all whether they’d seen a young lad in the fighting, no more than fifteen, wearing sailcloth breeches and a blue shirt. He said how the lad was his cousin, run away to the West Indies after listening to pirate tales, and how he’d felt obliged to look out for him for his mother’s sake. Some had seen the boy that night, and some hadn’t; some had seen him since the fighting, but couldn’t recollect where. None could tell him where to find her.

“The fleet!” roared the lookout. There was a rush to the wall, to stare out at the wide sea. The crowd parted to let Captain Norman through, with his spyglass, but the sharper-eyed had already made them out: the foremost of Morgan’s ships, hull-down yet on the horizon. Norman closed his glass with a snap, and looked ever so relieved as he said: “Bleeding Jesus, not before his time. Run up the colors!” So the flag was hoisted up, the English colors true and plain. A shot was fired, and in the anchorage below, the Mayflower and her sister ships, which had been brought down the coast after the victory, ran up their colors too.

The fleet came on under a following wind, swift as gulls gliding across the sea, and how it gladdened the hearts of them on the walls to see the size of that armada! Morgan’s own ship the Satisfaction came foremost of them all.

“There’s the Admiral himself, by God!” said John, waving his hat. “See him, on the quarterdeck?”

“What a brave fellow he looks!” said Bob Plum.

“Do you suppose he’s wondering where his little sweetheart got to?” said Blackstone at John’s elbow. John shivered, and it seemed to him that Morgan turned his dark face up just then and looked him in the eye, a sober questioning sort of look.

“What are they about?” said a seaman on John’s other side. “They’re making dead for the reef!”

“Hard over to starboard!” shouted Captain Norman, waving like a madman.

But the Satisfaction came on straight into the harbor, with all her crew whooping and calling from the waist like a pack of merry-andrews, and only Morgan, with sudden alarm in his countenance, reading the faces above him. He turned and shouted an order, and the helmsman seemed to wake up and tried to put her hard over. No use; the Satisfaction ploughed into Laja Reef, smash! Over went her foremast, yards and shrouds and blocks and all, onto her bowsprit, dangling, as the waving apes on her deck were thrown off their feet.

And while John and his mates were gaping from the castle walls, hardly able to credit what they’d just seen, here came the stately Port Royal, and where her helmsman’s eyes were was anybody’s guess, for she sailed straight into the reef too. Then two more of their number followed close behind, as the sea slewed the Satisfaction and the Port Royal around, so the newcomers pushed them forward across the reef as across a tabletop, with an almighty grinding of keels. In less time than it takes to tell, the four were one knotted wreck together. There was an appalled silence.

Morgan still stood on his tilted quarterdeck, staring, clutching the rail. He glanced upward at Captain Norman. He bared his white teeth in a grin, though John thought it looked more like a grimace of pain; then, quite deliberately, he threw his head back and shouted with laughter. The sound of his merriment echoed off the great rock, loud, long peals, as who should say it was a prime joke!

Uncertainly at first, the men began to laugh with him.

“Damnation, there’s a bold-faced bastard!” said Blackstone. He applauded, and all around the men began to cheer Harry Morgan.

And in cheers and laughter they brought him off the wreck of the Satisfaction, as the rest of the fleet steered carefully to safe anchorage, and led him up to see what good work they’d done.

By nightfall it was all transmuted to Morgan’s Luck; for hadn’t they managed to get all the stores he’d brought them out of the holds of the wrecks, good beef and corn, and rum too? And only one person killed on the reef, think of that! (And that was only the old, mad Welshwoman, who, finding herself unwatched, had crept below to partake of spirits in a quiet corner, and been too drunk or amazed when the water rushed in to save herself.)

And the ships were only ships, after all—soon enough Harry Morgan would take new ones from the Spanish. And if a lot of good fellows had died in the taking of Chagres Castle, well, that was the way of war, and there’d be a greater share of plunder for everyone else. At least Bradley had hung on long enough for Morgan to take his hand, before breathing his last.

John cheered with the rest, even as he labored up the narrow stair cut in the face of the rock, laden down with sacks of dried beef from the Satisfaction’s hold. Only one thing made him uncomfortable, and that was that Harry Morgan had spotted him in the crowd, as they’d brought the Admiral into Chagres Castle. He sore regretted now all the effort he’d expended making sure Morgan knew his name and face. His mother’s voice told him Morgan knew everything he’d done, and he was for the rope’s end. He replied in short words, telling his mother’s voice to hush.

So it gave him a shrewd old turn when Captain Norman sought him out, that evening where he sat drinking with his messmates, and told him the Admiral wanted a quiet word with him.

John was shown into what had been the castellan’s rooms, and then Norman’s command post. It looked for all the world like the Justice’s office in London, with a big table and a Turkey carpet, and Morgan sitting at the table in a big chair just as the Justice had sat, with the lamplight flickering on his lean, dark face, and glinting on his black eyes.

“How might I be of service, Admiral sir?” said John, saluting smartly.

“John James, is it?” said Morgan, looking at him.

“Aye, Admiral sir,” said John.

“You were one of the lads found the girl, at Old Providence,” stated Morgan.

“Aye, sir,” said John.

“I meant to send her to Jamaica, you know,” said Morgan, never taking his eyes from John’s. “To keep her as far away from harm as I might. I was sending her home in the Diana. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”

“I reckon I would have, sir,” said John.

“I believe she is my goddaughter,” said Morgan, and John felt as cold as though Death had clapped him on the shoulder right heartily. “I thought she might recognize me. I couldn’t get her to speak; I thought her too frightened to speak, and Christ knows she must have seen enough horrors to take her voice away forever.

“But it seems the girl could speak well enough, when she’d anything to say. I came back to see her, in the evening after Bradley’s little fleet sailed; and what should I find but that poor, old, mad bitch, that’s dead now, crooning and singing in the empty cabin. Where’s my girl, quoth I.

“Quoth she: O, she’s gone to fight the Spaniard, that made so great a boast. Revenge, revenge, shell eat his black heart out. She’s told me never to say a word till she was gone. Have I not kept my promise to the letter?

“And so I lost her again.”

John saw well enough that he’d sink himself if he denied anything, so he’d best tell as much of the truth as was to his advantage.

“Admiral sir, she stowed away on the Mayflower,” he said. “I didn’t find her till we was three days out. She said she wanted revenge, right enough; wanted to go cut Spanish throats, on account of what they done at Old Providence.”

Morgan kept his dead stare on John, but he nodded ever so slightly.

“And what did you do, John James?”

John took a deep breath. “Why, Admiral sir, I was scared green—a pretty lass like that, amongst the kind of dogs and murderers we had aboard? I knew what you’d said, about killing any man as touched her. So I brought her a lad’s clothes, and I talked to her like she was a little child, see, telling her she could march with us when we took Chagres Castle, only she’d have to disguise herself, and stay hid in my cabin until then. And I slept outside on the deck a’nights, Admiral sir, and God strike me down if that ain’t the truth.”

“And when you came here?”

“I locked her in the cabin, meaning she should stay safe when we went ashore. But damned if she didn’t slip out and swim to the beach, and there wasn’t nothing for it then but keeping her by me in the fighting.”

“Was she wounded in the fray?” Morgan lowered his eyes, at last, to the dagger he was turning between his hands.

“Not she, not that I ever saw,” said John. “I was hurt some, but she danced between them musket-balls like a fairy. The last I saw of her, it was midmorning; she was all right in midmorning. Then Bradley, he got it in the leg, and I pulled him behind a wall… and then I reckon I swounded, Admiral sir. Next I knew, the fighting was over. I been searching for her ever since.”

“So I am informed,” said Morgan.

“Aye. Well,” said John. He watched the dagger turning and turning in the lamplight. Morgan said nothing for a long moment, and then:

“You were Bradley’s aide-de-camp, I believe?”

“Chief gunner and purser’s mate, sir, and I carried the standard on the march,” said John. “Me being taller than anybody.”

“Why then, John James, you’ll be a useful man to keep by me,” said Morgan. “Captain Bradley being dead. For, look you, we’re going up the river next, and I’ll take care you’re at my side by day and by night. We’ll both keep our eyes open for the girl; and you’d best pray to Jesus we find her, and safe too.”

“If we could but find her, sir, I’d forego my share of plunder,” said John. “She weren’t afraid of nothing, Admiral sir. I never seen a girl so brave.”

Morgan turned away and reached for a sheaf of maps.

“In your opinion, now, John James,” he said, in his sharp Welsh voice that made it o-pin-yun, “is the girl mad?”

John hesitated.

“No,” he said at last. “Full of fancies, like a girl, and she hates Spain something powerful. But she’s no Mad Maudlin, not she. You didn’t see her fight.”

Morgan eyed him strangely then. John almost thought he was going to smile, but he looked down instead and opened the sheaf.

“Send in Collier and Morris,” he said. “And leave me now.”

John saluted and left, brave as though his conscience was lily-white; though he had to lean against the wall for a minute once he was outside, his knees were knocking so.

Morgan spent most of a week cleaning up Castle Chagres, until the bastion of San Lorenzo was as secure as before Bradley had taken it; more secure, for Morgan gave orders no thatch was to shade the ramparts, though the sentries’ brains roast in the sun like chestnuts. The open ground before the ramparts, where so many had fallen, had become the cemetery, by reason of convenience. Bradley was laid to rest there, among a hundred brave fellows. Like John had done, Morgan walked among the last dead and looked each one in the face.

And he called the Reverend to him and thanked him personal for being the first to get to the bastion, and wrote him out a promissory note for fifty pieces of eight; the which Bob Plum and Dick Pettibone took charge of, lest the Reverend lose it in one of his transports of religious zeal.

Word had got out that the Admiral was looking for a girl who’d stowed away. One eager man came, hat in hand, to say as how he’d glimpsed a white figure paddling away upriver, when they’d gone to the boat landing to see what the Spanish had left behind. This eased John’s heartache a little, and maybe Morgan’s too.

Dick Pettibone, of all people, came weeping to confess something that had weighed on his mind: which was that he and the old woman, in one of her clearer moments, had fell to gossiping about how the girl must be taught once she was back in Jamaica. They’d spoken of corsets, and face powder, and deportment lessons, and table manners, and the frizzing and curling of hair, and how hard it was to teach a girl to walk in tight shoes with high heels. Dick thought the girl might have overheard and, being used to living wild, decided then and there to slip her cable.

Morgan sent Dick away without punishment, and bent his will to getting ready for the expedition.

THE RIVER

They left a garrison at Chagres Castle, under Captain Norman, and took the main force of fighting men up the Chagres. Morgan gave orders to travel light, on account of the boats and the river being something low that year, for want of much rain. No provender was brought along. They could forage as they went, Morgan said, at the villages and outposts along the river.

Twelve hundred men crowded into canoes, and rafts, and a few little river-craft the Spanish had left behind them.

For a while the tidal bore took them along the Chagres, flat and mud-colored under the glaring sun. It was pleasant to sit in the waist of the little cargo-boat and look out at the green jungle slipping by, and watch the curious birds and the little monkeys, bearded like old men, that watched them back in wonderment. John might have stretched out for a rest, if there’d been room; but he was crowded in with the Reverend on one side and Tom Blackstone on the other, and Morgan himself behind him by the tillerman.

As the sun rose higher, the force of the tide waned; now it wasn’t so pleasant at all, with the sail hanging slack and the green caymans drifting past them, eyeing them contemptuous-like, as their way fell off. Morgan gave the order to set to the oars. John rose to strip off his waterproof jacket, and hit Jago in the eye with his elbow, at which Jacques had something to say. He didn’t say much of it, though, before Morgan bid them be quiet, not loud but with such threat in his voice that they shut up one and all and bent to the oars.

An hour or more after noon John saw one bare trunk of a dead tree jutting up on the bank off to starboard, so scoured down by rain and wind it was silver-white, and having besides a funny sort of resemblance to something that doesn’t bear mentioning in polite company. He nudged Blackstone and pointed, and there were some sniggers in the boat for a while, until it fell behind them. But a great while later there it was again, to larboard this time; and with a groan John realized that they’d just rowed a long weary way to navigate around a point of land they might have marched straight across in two minutes’ time. The river snaked back and forth on itself like this the whole way.

Now and again one of the boats grounded, and all her crew had to clamber out amongst the mangrove roots and work her off, which was a muddy, nasty business, and many a man climbed back onto the thwarts and settled down, only to yell with horror as he spied a leech on his bare leg. They did no real harm; the boucaniers amongst them quite coolly took them off by holding the hot bowls of their pipes against the nasty things. John was grateful for his boots, all the same.

And now and again, and more and more as they went higher up the river, the way branched, with two or three or five riverlets flowing into it, and here were the deserted huts of Indians. John and his mates kept a sharp eye out, but no arrows came sailing out at them from anywhere. Men left off rowing and peered through the green shadows, scratching their heads.

Each time, though, Morgan conferred with the tillerman in a low voice and then directed them the way they must go on. He watched from the stern, his face somber, and John could tell he wasn’t any too happy about the time this was taking.

By twilight, when the monkeys and the birds began to scream loud, they’d made no more than eighteen miles up the Chagres. Then around a bend, they came out suddenly on an open place and glimpsed roof-beams, and John nudged the Reverend.

“Best you start considering how sinful them Papists are, messmate,” he said. “There’s our dinner, but we’ll have to fight for it.”

“What is this place, Admiral?” Tom Blackstone inquired, looking back over his shoulder.

“De los Barcos,” said Morgan, drawing his pistol. He was staring at the empty landing. John knew well enough that barcos meant boats, like as the place was a port; but there weren’t any boats in sight but their own, and not a cry nor a rustle from the huts, but only a thin plume of smoke going up from a bed of gray ash where a fire had been. Even the birds and the monkeys had fallen silent.

“Two volunteers to go ashore,” said Morgan, and Jago stood up brisk and jumped lightly to the bank, with Jacques scrambling after him. They walked in warily amongst the sheds and huts, but nothing attacked. Slipping into the trees they circled the place, before coming back and reporting all was deserted. Morgan gave the order to go ashore; a little late, for hungry men were already scrambling up the banks with cutlasses drawn, eager to kill something.

But, as it turned out, the Spanish hadn’t left so much as a goat nor a chicken behind to be slaughtered. No maize, no manioc cakes, scarcely even a dry stick of firewood; poking around in the ashes of the open fire, John realized the villagers must have heaped everything they couldn’t take away in the boats there and burned it. He noticed something more too; someone had been there since the fire had burned down, for here and there in the ashes were the tracks of small naked feet.

Morgan, following John’s gaze, saw them too.

“Would you know the print of her foot?” he asked John, quietly. John swallowed hard and nodded.

“Well then, that’s something,” said Morgan, and laughed. He had a sick look in his eyes, as though it had just occurred to him (as indeed it had) that the Spanish might well have played this game at every village along the Chagres.

But he turned round and made a fine speech to the rest of his men, about what cowards the Spaniards were, to clear out so before an enemy, and how if they were like to be so bold at Panama herself, why, the privateers might just stroll in and help themselves to the riches there. If there was no food here, what then? He was no weakling, that a night of fasting would do him any harm, nor were they.

There was some grumbling, but most men didn’t mind it too much, as it was such a relief to be ashore after being bent over an oar or a paddle all blessed day. So sentry-duty was assigned, and those not on watch at the boats pulled down some of the huts and built cheerful fires, around which they sprawled, lighting up their pipes.

Sleep came sweet and easy to most of them, even with the mosquitoes, but not to John. He lay awake a great while, looking up at the stars and wondering where the girl was, whether he had missed her by hours or days. He got up once and saw Morgan sitting awake in the lead boat, watching the fires ashore; he reckoned Morgan must be wondering the same thing.

Whether or not he’d slept much himself, Morgan had them up early and back in the boats, rowing on. This day passed much as the first one had, except it was harder; for the river narrowed and grew shallower, and now and again they came to great snags of dead trees, that must be dredged and hacked and hauled to clear their way. The heat was fearful, except when cloudbursts drenched them; but they were cunning enough to catch the rainwater in every vessel they had, and eased their thirst at least.

The sun had sunk down low in the west when they spotted a great cross on a hillside, made of two logs stripped and carved; Morgan nodded and said, “This should be Cruz de Juan Gallego. Weapons at the ready, if you please.”

But when they came up level with it, they saw no village; only a sort of landing and a couple of sheds, and two or three boats abandoned. John guessed that the cross marked only a place to disembark and portage, and talking with the men who’d been up the river before he learned that was so; also that the cross marked a grave.

They’d kept plenty of company with dead men, though, so nobody minded camping there for the night. Morgan did some close talking with the surviving guide who’d come with them from Old Providence, who told him the jungle opened out soon, easy for steady marching.

There were no attacks in the night, not even by the shade of Juan Gallego. Come morning, Morgan left a column of men to guard the boats and took the rest overland, to see whether they mightn’t hack a path through the jungle. He kept John close by his side, and Jacques too. Jacques was the first to spot the cut and broken twigs that meant somebody had passed that way not long before; he pointed to them silently. Morgan looked, and said nothing. John thought he saw again the mark of a slender bare foot, tiptoe here and there as though the girl had been running.

A fairy-lass might slip through the trees easy, but an army of a thousand men is something else again. There were nasty things in the jungle too: spiders as big as kittens, scorpions, snakes, swarming ants whose bite was like the touch of a red-hot poker.

When they’d made not more than a mile or two in two hours, Morgan bid them turn back. The cargo-boats couldn’t get any further up the river, but the canoes could just be floated; so upriver they went, paddle and dig, in shifts, and twice John fell into the muck and had to scramble back to his perch on the thwarts, with his knees sticking up about his ears, and was roundly cursed by his shipmates for being so big.

But by nightfall they had all made it as far as a place the guide called Cedro Bueno, where the jungle thinned out a bit. Here they camped, and here the mutterings of mutiny grew loud around the campfires; for in all that time they hadn’t been able to eat a blessed thing but flower buds and snakes. John was sitting by Morgan when the party of men came to declare their grievances.

The leader was Hendrik Smeeks, because he’d been a barber-surgeon and had an education, and he spoke well. He had short words for Morgan, though: he said it was plain their designs were known to the Spanish, and that all that lay ahead was starvation and ambush, and they’d best turn back now and cut their losses.

Morgan heard him out, and then he began to talk. So artfully! Yes, he said, it would be a great thing if they were ambushed. The Spanish cowards surely had food with them, and horses. He could fancy a lovely bit of broiled horseflesh, sizzling from the fire, belike washed down with the curious dark wine of Peru, or maybe a maize-cake baked in the ashes. And what viands there’d be in Panama! Pickled fish, and sugared cates, beefsteaks, sherry sack such as the rich bishops and cardinals supped, white cheeses and oranges…

Tender and lewd as a procurer he spoke, and all men hearing him groaned with hunger, and felt the painful rumblings of their bellies. John’s own mouth watered so he was near to drowning. Morgan said it was never his custom to be a tyrant; he preferred all parties in agreement whenever possible. So, he said, he’d put it to them: whether they would venture on to feasts and plunder, or slink back like starving curs. And if they were to go on, perhaps they’d agree to leave all but a few of the canoes and march overland, now that the way was open and plain?

Which last made excellent sense, to men sick of fighting through the river mud. So they shouted that they’d go on, and some abused Smeeks for a coward. But Morgan graciously bid them leave off, saying that Smeeks was surely as good as the next man. Smeeks stalked away from him scowling. He had his revenge in time, though it cost him dear.

The next day they set off, with the main body of the men marching and others following in canoes, very much easier now that the damn things weren’t packed to the gunwales. A little after sunrise some of the boucaniers cried out that they’d spotted an Indian watching them from the woods, and took off in pursuit. They lost him, or there’d likely have been servings of long pork for breakfast, so sharp-set they were.

Around noon Bob Plum, marching near the front, shaded his hand with his eyes and stared hard into the distance.

“There’s smoke up there,” he said. Just as the words left his mouth, they heard a cry from the guide who had gone ahead in the lightest of the canoes: Emboscada! Emboscada!

“Take ’em!” said Morgan, and drawing his cutlass he led the charge, men following him like so many roaring lions. Oh, for grilled flesh, and maize-cakes, and wine! And now they could see the huts clear, and the smoke, and…

Nothing else.

The smoke hung low in the sunlight, putting a haze on things, but even so it was plain the place had been deserted. The Brethren milled around like ants, baffled and then angry. Morgan said something in Welsh, what, John didn’t know, but it had a blistering kind of sound to it. He stalked over to the guide, who was just coming up to the bank in the canoe.

“What is this place?” he demanded.

“The outpost of Torna Caballos,” said the guide. Blackstone, who’d been poking through some empty provision-bags, turned his head sharply.

Dick Pettibone found a crust of bread, just then, half-charred from being in the ashes, and straightaway another man made a grab for it. Dick backed away, clutching the crust; the other fellow made to open Dick’s guts with his cutlass, and only the fact that Morgan drew his pistol and fired stopped him.

“Now by God, the next man to raise his hand will get a bullet between his eyes,” said Morgan. “And I leave it to you all to imagine what kind of burial he shall have, look you. Go search the huts! See if any provision was left.”

John saw that Blackstone had already slipped off to the huts, and he followed after.

“Wasn’t this the place where you were bid to look for your lost prince? Torna Caballos?”

“The same,” said Blackstone, throwing back the door of one shelter. Nothing but a dirt floor scattered with straw, and a few dirty hammocks hanging from the ceiling beam.

“Looks like you been done again, then,” said John. Blackstone only gave him a disgusted sort of look and went outside to the next hut. From the shouts of disappointment echoing across the clearing, it was plain no food had been left anywhere.

At the fourth hut they tried, something was different; their boots thudded with a hollow noise as they stepped inside. John looked down and saw that the floor was made of wood.

“This must be the mayor’s house, eh?” he said. Blackstone looked down absent-mindedly, then looked away; then looked back, with gimlet eyes.

“There’s a cellar under this,” he said, bouncing experimentally. Sure enough, there was a hollow sort of boom from under his feet. John took a straw and bent down, poking it between the planks. It vanished its whole length into the dark without touching anything. He reached for another straw, from the heap that had been placed conveniently on the floor, and Blackstone caught his arm. One scuff of his boot through the straw-heap laid bare the trap door underneath.

John drew his pistol. Blackstone drew his too. With his free hand he caught the ring and threw the door back, aiming down into the dark.

“Don’t shoot!” cried someone from below.

John was so hungry, and so tantalized by the thought of hams or wine or whatever else might be hidden down there, that he jumped in straightaway. He landed fair on his feet and saw a fearful-looking Spaniard, and behind him a second figure sitting against the wall. So much he noticed before he saw the provision bags hanging from the ceiling, and as Blackstone descended the ladder John tore a bag down, and stuffed his mouth with dry bread and jerked meat.

The Spaniard had fallen to his knees in entreaty. As he saw John’s boots he began to weep with relief.

“Thank God, you have come,” he said. “I thought you were the pirates.”

John grinned with his mouth full and was on point of telling the poor devil the truth of it, but Blackstone raised his hand.

“Where is His Highness?” he said.

The Spaniard got to his feet. Stepping to one side, he indicated the seated figure.

“Here, señor,” he said.

Blackstone looked horrified, and John didn’t much blame him. The man who sat there didn’t fit John’s idea of a prince. He was naked but for some raggedy breeches, without a hair anywhere on his body; not so much as an eyelash. His skin was white as salt and he had a swollen kind of look, like a drowned man. The blank moon-face was as placid as smooth water in a millpond.

Blackstone went down on one knee before him.

“Have I the honor of addressing His Royal Highness, Prince Maurice von Simmern?” he asked.

“He cannot answer you, I am afraid, señor,” said the Spaniard.

Blackstone looked round, his eyes blazing. “What have you done to him?” he said.

The Spaniard gave a little cough. “We have done nothing, señor. His Highness’ lamentable condition is entirely his own doing.”

Blackstone got to his feet. “You had better explain.”

John had begun to feel a little sick by this time, what with the food he’d gobbled down so fast and the queer way the cellar stank, so he didn’t pay as much attention as he might have, but what the Spaniard explained was: that many years before the crew of a Spanish galleon weathered a fearful storm at sea, and put into an islet to repair their gear. There on the sand was a new-wrecked ship, the Defiance, and lashed to her mast was a man, still alive.

He was taken prisoner, along with a half-dead servant they found belowdecks, and shipped off for interrogation to Hispaniola. There, the viceroy learned that the prisoner was close kin to the English king in exile (as he was then). The Spanish hadn’t loved Oliver Cromwell particularly, so the viceroy put the royal prisoner in rather better rooms than were usually given to English heretics, and then wrote to Spain to ask, what should he do next?

Unfortunately, the royal prisoner, instead of waiting and being ransomed like a sensible man, took it into his head to try to escape. That, at least, was what they learned afterward from the servant.

It seemed he had seen an English play wherein one Juliet avoided an enforced marriage by drinking off a potion that made her look dead. She was buried in the family crypt, and woke afterward, and all had been well but for her true love not being privy to her plan and killing himself before she woke.

Prince Maurice (for this was he) having no true love to worry him, resolved to escape in this manner: to appear to die, and then have his servant break into the crypt and set him free. He sent the man, who had leave to do his marketing and his laundry and such, into the nearest village to ask whether a potion mightn’t be found to make a man appear to be dead.

There was a sort of herb doctor there and he had such a potion, all right, but it seemed the servant hadn’t explained proper as to what it was needed for.

All went off as planned until the servant broke into the crypt to free the prince, when he was found to be alive, indeed, but in his present unfortunate state. They were recaptured by the viceroy’s men, much to the viceroy’s dismay. He had just got word back from Spain that Prince Maurice was to be set free and returned to the bosom of his loving family, in the hope that King Charles would remember this little favor if he was ever restored to his throne.

So he wrote again, explaining what had happened. It was a great embarrassment to the Spanish, who were always ready to abuse common Englishmen but felt that those of royal blood ought to be given certain considerations. They decided to keep the matter a secret; as far as the English knew, Prince Maurice was dead anyway. And, who knew? Perhaps the effects of the drug might wear off and the prince might one day be more presentable.

This proved not to be the case, however. The years went on, and Prince Maurice was moved from one prison to another on the Spanish Main, and now and again a rumor got out that he’d been seen somewhere. Then it became public knowledge that his brother, Prince Rupert, had offered a reward to know his fate.

Well, the Spanish weren’t about to admit the truth, so the order went out that the matter was to be kept concealed. But then, some warden with a keen eye for the main chance saw a way he might turn a profit. He devised all the hugger-muggery with the boots, and wrote in secret to Prince Rupert’s agents to see if they were in the market for one lost prince, somewhat the worse for wear.

“And it has been much more difficult than we expected, señor,” said the Spaniard peevishly. “He is difficult to move about and to conceal, especially with those sons of whores the pirates making war on us, and then there has been the cost of his feeding. I hope you have brought the money, señor.”

Blackstone turned and shot him dead where he stood.

“Neat,” said John, in an admiring kind of way. “You get the prince and keep the money, eh?”

The sound of the shot brought men running to the hut, and in short order there were faces peering down through the trap. Prince Maurice just sat there; neither the shot nor the commotion that followed drew his notice.

It took rope and tackle to get the prince out of the cellar, but once he was set on his feet he’d walk, if prodded on the back, and stop if prodded on the front. The men crowded around him, curious, all save those who were busy in the cellar; and the less said about that the better.

“Aie! Il est un zombi,” said Jago, looking horrified. “They are the misfortune.”

“What, you mean bad luck?” said John.

“We can scarcely have worse luck than he’s had,” said Blackstone. He saw Morgan approaching and went off to have a quiet word with him.

“Phew! He doesn’t half stink,” said one man, holding his nose.

“It is the smell of the living death,” said Jago. “The Indians on Hispaniola, they teach the médecins among the poor people how to make this. It makes slaves of the dead.”

“A dead man! Lord preserve us!” cried Bob Plum, backing up against the Reverend.

“This is sorcery,” the Reverend said, with his hands beginning to shake.

“It’s a big fat fellow who ain’t been washed in a month, more than likely,” said John. “And he ain’t no dead man.” He told them a little of the truth, and they were no less appalled.

“Prince Maurice!” cried Dick Pettibone. “Why, he was a lovely gentleman! Oh, to see him come to this!” He stepped close and shouted up at the prince. “Your Highness! Your Highness, do you apprehend me?”

The prince only stared. Whether there was some memory behind that egg-smooth countenance, of riding with his cavaliers at Lyme or piratical raids out of Kinsale, who can say? Morgan seemed to be wondering the same thing, as he approached and looked him up and down.

“Jesus,” he said at last. “We’ll fetch him along with us; but we are doing his brother no kindness, to bring him home so. Can he walk?”

John said he could, and pushed him a little; the prince started forward obediently, and likely would have kept going until he was in the river, had John not run ahead and stopped him. Morgan shook his head. “Jesus,” he repeated. “Very well; form up! We march on.”

The prince came with the Brethren, and only wanted for a bit of guiding now and then to keep him on the path. They camped that night at another abandoned village, where Morgan gave order that someone should wash the prince, as the smell was starting to offend even Brethren who’d gone a week without a bath or a change of clothes. Dick Pettibone volunteered, as did Bob Plum, once he’d been told that Maurice had been a good Protestant prince and none of your scurvy Papist gentry.

He proved a good beast of burden too. They found they could strap a pack to him and he’d bear it along without the least complaint. So they loaded him with powder and shot and he marched along of them. Blackstone started to object to this and then shrugged; for it really took more imagination than a man’s generally given to see that fat, staring thing as a royal cousin.

That night they found another village, but lately deserted, and camped there. Next day they came to another, about noon, and here had great luck: for Jacques found a cache of foodstuffs, sacks of wheat and plantains, hidden in a little cave. Morgan had the whole mess cooked into a sort of porridge and served out equally to all parties, even those like Hendrik Smeeks, who had been seen picking his teeth as they left Torna Caballos. Dick Pettibone took it on himself to feed the prince with a spoon, like a baby, and the poor creature opened his mouth obediently and swallowed too, but gave no sign that he understood anything.

They marched on, more easily, for the country was more open and there were little deserted farmsteads now and again. One of these made a good campsite that evening, with plenty of dry firewood stored in an outbuilding. The Brethren sprawled at their ease around fires and there was plenty of big talk and praises for Morgan, now that they’d had a few scraps of luck; for everyone assumed the worst was behind them.

The first sign they were in the wrong on the point came when they’d been marching an hour or two next day. The land began to rise, and the going became harder. Around midday they came on another little farm and discovered the barn loaded with ears of dry maize. Most of the men wanted to stop right there and grind it into meal for cakes, and it was only by drawing his sword that Morgan kept them from doing so. He gave them hot words, and there were surly looks and mutters. The maize was portioned out equally to every man, and awkward it was to carry too. There were some who fell to chewing at it whiles on the march, and not a few rash fellows broke teeth doing that.

John was marching along beside the prince, who was moving a little slower as so many had sort of casually draped their bundles of maize over him on the march, when he heard the cry:

“Los indios! Emboscada!”

John drew his cutlass and ran forward, but it wasn’t to be an engagement for blades; he caught a glimpse of lithe brown bodies retreating through the trees, and a man next to him dropped with an arrow in the eye, screaming no end. Still the Brethren raced on, shedding ears of maize as they came over the ground, and were only stopped by a bend in the river. Here they saw the last of a troop of about a hundred Indians scrambling ashore on the opposite bank.

John drew his pistol and fired. Some fellows even plunged into the river, assuming that since the Indians had crossed easy, it must be shallow here. But maybe the Indians had picked up the trick of walking on water; Morgan’s men sank over their heads, and came up gasping and clawing at the mangrove roots.

The Indians jeered and shot at them from the other bank, calling names in Spanish. John bent to pull one fellow ashore, and just as he came level with John’s face he gave a shivering cry and died, pierced through with an arrow. John dropped him and pulled back; as he did, he heard a shot ring out on the other side and saw an Indian drop where he stood, with the red blood starting down over his bare breast. Another shot rang out, another one fell, and the Indians took to their heels, vanishing through the woods.

And someone ran after them.

John gaped to see a pale figure darting off between the branches. He had only one clear sight of her, but it was certainly the girl, carrying a musket soldier-fashion as she ran. He stood, dumb, staring after her. When he turned away he saw Morgan staring too, as though doubting his senses, and knew he’d seen her as well.

“That was her,” said John.

“She can shoot,” said Morgan. And then he swore, not loud but a lot, some in Welsh.

That night the Brethren camped by the river. What weathercocks men are, John soon learned: for all the high spirits and bold talk of the day before were gone entirely, now that the enemy had drawn a little blood. Smeeks, who was getting to be a right sea-lawyer, sat muttering with his friends and casting black looks at Morgan.

Some said as how they’d best to turn back, now that the Indians had found them. If they didn’t, the Indians would pick them off one by one. Other folk were plain hopeless and reckoned it was better to lie down and die right there, rather than fight their way back through the jungle.

Morgan must have heard it all, sitting upright by his fire. It was a strange thing, but John, looking across at him, felt pity for the man, alone there with his thoughts.

John began to talk loud about how the Indians attacking only meant that Panama was near to hand; that folk only fought when they had something to lose. He went on to take wagers as to whether they’d sight the church towers of Panama next day, or the day after, and whether it would be gold or silver or jewels they should lay their hands to first. He allowed as how it was a shame they’d lost a few men, but no one ever made buttered eggs without breaking the shells first.

Some men told him to go to hell, but some took heart and said he was right; weeping and wailing was bootless now, and they may as well laugh and hope for the best, by God.

And so they argued back and forth. And all the while the prince sat a little distance away on the bare earth, looking out of his empty eyes, like an image of Fortune’s Wheel: I was once among the great. Regard me now…

Next morning they saw to their firearms before setting out, for it was plain there’d be fighting soon. Morgan had the canoes brought up to ferry the men across, and on they went, and not long after they saw a great pall of smoke hanging over the jungle ahead.

“What should this be?” Morgan muttered to himself. John clapped Bob Plum on the shoulder and said: “Cooking fires! They’re boiling up our dinner, messmates!” Whereat the men all raised a great cheer and picked up the pace, jogging along with their muskets in their hands. They came to the palisade and stormed over it, whooping and firing, but no one fired back; and now they saw it was another deserted place, so recently left that the houses were still in flames, and abandoned cats and dogs ran here and there.

“Roof rabbits!” cried Jago, and raising his musket drew a bead on someone’s Tibby and blew its brains out. Others fell to following his example, and presently there were little groups of men clustered here and there, cooking succulent bits of house pet over house coals. You’d have thought it was Christmas, they laughed and chattered so.

“Admiral sir!” Dick Pettibone came waddling up, sweating and panting. “Here’s the king’s stables, that aren’t burned; and the lads have found, must be a dozen jars of wine of Peru.”

“Oh Christ,” said Morgan, not as though in thanks, and he strode over to the stables and John followed him close. There were the great clay jars lined up along the stable wall, with a bread-bag hanging in the rafters above them. Two fellows had already hauled out one jar and broached it, and as John watched they gulped down near a quart each of the dark, sticky stuff, scooping it up in their dirty hands. Morgan looked on them with despair in his eyes; for nothing breaks discipline on a march like strong drink, and here was enough to make his whole force stupid.

But Fortune did Morgan another good turn; for the two drinkers turned, first one and then the other, a queer shade of pea-green, and proceeded to puke their guts up. No surprise, guzzling down that much sweet wine on an empty belly. Morgan turned and shouted, “Treachery! It’s poisoned, you stupid bastards!”

As the two groveled and moaned, and the others stood looking on in dismay, Morgan went to the other jars and smashed them, each one, with the hilt of his cutlass, and threw them over. There were some snarls, and one man ran forward to try to stop him. Morgan caught him by the front of his shirt and held him out at arm’s length.

“You’d drink, would you? The whole town in flames about our ears, and the cattle driven away, and this one place left standing, with a drink for the thirsty privateers when they arrive? Fool! It’s a snare!”

Such was the light in his eyes as he spoke, that the man stood down abashed, and so did all the rest who had come up to see; and by then the wine had all spilled out and soaked into the ground. So mutiny was avoided, and whether the wine had been really poisoned or whether no Spaniard had dared to set fire to royal property, who knows? It served Morgan’s turn. It taught John a lesson in quick thinking too.

Now, it happened that this was the place where the Chagres turned north, and Panama lay to the south; so being as it was all hard marching overland after this, and them having taken themselves possession of the palisadoed town, Morgan let them rest up here that day and through the night. Come morning they left the river.

John marched among his messmates in the advance party, peering up at the mountains that rose to either side. Their way lay through the bottom of a gorge that narrowed. Soon there was room for no more than four or five to march abreast. Ahead it narrowed still further, for they could see the mouth of an arch through which they must go single file, a tunnel cut out of the rock. Jacques muttered something uneasily.

“He says, this is where they will make their embuscade,” said Jago. Jacques said more, very earnestly and in a tone of entreaty, to Jago. Jago laughed and said something back, seeming to make mock of whatever Jacques had asked him.

“Gentlemen! Say to one, say to all,” said Blackstone. “Has he noticed something else about which we ought to hear?”

“No,” said Jago. “Only, he is afraid for me. Wish me to walk a little under the cover of the trees.”

Which some men sneered at, and made kissing noises; and so the sound was obscured when it came.

The clouds of locusts coming down on Egypt might have made such a noise, whirring and clattering. John never heard anything like it before or after. He looked up to see what it might be.

There must have been four thousand arrows dropping toward them out of the sky, coming nearly straight down, and no sign of the bowmen who’d loosed them. John never remembered afterward how he’d got under cover, but there he found himself amongst the trees, with other men crowded around him, shaking and swearing. Arrows were still falling, out on the trail, like so many jackstraws. There were four men lying dead that John could see and Bob Plum dragging himself toward the trees, with an arrow sticking up under his chin. Out in the middle of the road the prince marched on, unconcerned, though an arrow had hit him in the shoulder.

Dick Pettibone screamed, and he and the Reverend ran out to pull Bob to safety, heedless of the arrows still falling.

“Hold your positions!” shouted Morgan, for some men had begun to run back the way they’d come.

The Reverend was moaning and wringing his hands. Dick took hold of Bob’s collar and hauled.

“Over there—” he said, panting. “We need privacy, Elias!”

“What are you playing at?” said John, for it was plain Bob oughtn’t to be shifted much. “Get the bleeding arrow out first.”

He drew his knife and sliced open the front of Bob’s shirt. “No!” cried Dick, but too late; for John saw that Bob was already bandaged tight around the chest, and the arrow had stabbed down between this bandage and his skin, cutting only a shallow trench where it had passed.

“No, no, no—” said Bob, fending him off.

“Oh, don’t be such a coward,” said John.

You may think John a capital bull-calf, and you’d be right; for even now he only wondered, When did Bob get wounded before? And he cut the bandage to free the arrow, and the bandage fell away and there was the arrow lying between—

“Bob’s a woman!” said John, astonished. He sat back on his heels, as Bob clutched the edges of her shirt and pulled them together.

“You have looked upon my wife,” said the Reverend, and in a trice his big hands were about John’s throat and his red eyes were peering down into John’s own, and John felt his windpipe squeak shut before he could say anything in apology. Blackstone came running with cutlass drawn, and so did Jago and Jacques.

“Elias! Stop!” said Dick, and began to sing the song about the little white lamb. Bob, where she lay, chimed in feebly. The Reverend joined in at last, easing up his grip enough for John to pull free. He fell back, gulping for breath.

“Bloody hell,” he said, rubbing his throat. Light was dawning at last. Looking at Dick, he said: “And—you’re a woman too! Ain’t you?”

“Les femmes!” said Jacques, horrified. Blackstone began to laugh.

Morgan himself came striding through the brush. “What is this? I’ll have no damned fighting here!”

“Dick ain’t a eunuch after all,” said John.

“What?” said Morgan.

“We have two of the fair sex here, disguised,” said Blackstone, smirking. Morgan looked at them, aghast; for of course now it seemed too obvious. Dick folded his arms and glared at them all.

“You can’t send us back now,” she said. “Have we not been fit companions? Was not Mr. Hackbrace the first to the wall at Chagres Castle? We have fought bravely and well. Do we not deserve our shares?”

“We must apologize, ladies, for our dull senses,” said Blackstone. “Else we’d have penetrated your disguises sooner.”

“Spare us such feigned gallantries, sir,” said Dick.

“You had better explain this,” said Morgan to the Reverend, who was crouched beside Bob, vainly trying to tuck the cut bandage back into place. He merely raised a bewildered face. Dick said:

“We were attempting to repair our fortune, sir. We had lived humbly but honestly, until poor Elias yielded to the sin of Wrath and smote that man dead in Winksley, and we were obliged to flee England. We thought to make his temper, that had been the instrument of our undoing, also the means by which we gained a comfortable sufficiency. Yet Elias could not be trusted to go adventuring alone; only Clementine and I are able to soothe his rages.

“Wherefore, Admiral, we hit upon the stratagem of disguising ourselves and traveling as comrades. But for this sad mischance, none had ever been the wiser.”

“Some at least ought to have guessed,” said Morgan, giving John a look that made him squirm. He in his turn looked accusingly at Bob.

“So you’re Clementine, then?”

“Mrs. Clementine Hackbrace,” said she, pale but defiant.

“And I am Lady Phyllida de Bellehache,” said she who had been Dick, and Blackstone left off leering for surprise.

“But—but you were a great society beauty!” he said. “I’ve heard of you! There was a scandal—”

Reverend Hackbrace was on his feet in an instant.

“ ‘Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise,’ ” he said in a warning tone, flexing his hands.

“Even so,” said Lady Phyllida, putting her hand on her hip. “Time changes us all, does it not? And now, Admiral, you will comprehend our desire for blest privacy to tend to poor Clementine’s hurts.”

“That you may have,” said Morgan. “But understand me, ladies: you would be soldiers, and now you must soldier on. I have no men to spare to convey you safe home.”

“We ask none,” said Lady Phyllida, with a toss of her head.

“Where’s the prince?” said Blackstone, looking around suddenly. John pointed out through the brush, at the distant figure marching along and still drawing an occasional hail of arrows. Blackstone swore and charged after him.

Some Indians had broken cover to come and stare at the prince. One fell dead in his tracks with Blackstone’s musket-ball between his eyes. The Brethren, seeing them, rallied and sent out a volley of shot, which killed two more; and though they retreated, Jago and several others rushed them, reloading on the run. Blackstone caught the prince and turned him round, and half-dragged him back to the cover on their side of the woods.

“Get ’em!” said John, drawing and running from cover; for just then a pitched battle seemed a more congenial place to be. He ran, and others ran with him, as Morgan yelled, “Take prisoners! Twenty pieces of eight for the first man to take a prisoner!”

Yet the prize went unclaimed. There was bloody battle in that pass before the tunnel, with nearly a score of Morgan’s men killed or wounded, and more of the Indians slain, since all they had to fight with close to were spears. They broke and ran at last, swift as deer through the tunnel, and by the time enough of the Brethren came pouring after them they were beyond range.

Strangely enough, the mood in camp that night was more cheerful than otherwise. This though it poured rain half the night, and with no shelter but a few shepherds’ huts. Maybe it was the fact that battle had finally been joined, which likely meant that Panama was near; maybe it was the news that two ladies had been discovered within the party. Morgan had a field shelter rigged with branches, and set John to guard it, along with the Reverend, and there Mrs. Hackbrace and Lady Phyllida sat and conversed pleasantly. Mrs. Hackbrace, once her wounds were tended at last, was found to be not much hurt.

Notwithstanding what he’d said, Morgan was minded to send them back down to Chagres Castle in a canoe, with Jago and Jacques, who could be trusted not to commit outrages on their persons. But in the end he relented. For one thing, the ladies had held their own so far, and nobody else could sing the Reverend out of his rages. For another, they had been the only ones willing to see to the washing of the prince, and he soiled himself pretty regularly.

So when the army moved on next morning, Lady Phyllida and Mrs. Hackbrace marched with them.

John marched by Morgan. The land was all cleared now, the road wide; there were the prints of booted feet that had gone before, so they knew it was not just Indians now but the Spanish too, who retreated from them. Morgan watched the forest with a scowl, and let it be known again that he’d pay for a prisoner to question. The boucaniers slipped ahead and ferreted through the brush, but the Indians were too swift and silent, the Spaniards too long gone.

And then, as they struggled up the switchback road that scaled a green mountain, there was a shout from ahead. Jago came sprinting back, glad-faced, waving; Morgan broke into a run, and John ran beside him, and the whole army mustered its strength and sprinted, until at last they broke like a wave over the mountaintop—

And there was the sea.

Men sighed, and not a few dropped to their knees. John stared at the placid blue expanse, where a ship and half a dozen boats were gliding. That was the first time in his life he beheld the great South Sea. A salt wind came out of it, rolling up the face of the mountain toward them, and blew their hair back out of their faces. Morgan’s cloak rustled with the breeze, and all their banners snapped.

“We’ve done it!” said Morgan, turning to them all. How his eyes burned! “Here we stand, my boys, in despite of hunger and thirst and all that they dared to send against us. And we’re the first. Not Drake nor Hawkins nor Baskerville ever got so far. That great ocean there is henceforth ours.”

Well, that got the Brethren cheering, and John with the rest; though it did seem to him that if boats were putting out from Panama, they might well be carrying the city’s wealth on them, to get it out of danger. He dropped his gaze from the sweet line of horizon to where the mountainside fell away below them into hills and broad meadows. He saw a white flash among the green. He peered harder, and saw the little figure running, holding her musket well away from her body.

“Sir!” He caught Morgan’s arm, and pointed. Morgan turned swiftly and saw her.

“By God, she’s beaten us,” he said under his breath. “There’s a girl for you, eh? Let God preserve us both, I’ll no nurses for her, nor corset-stays and tight shoes. She shall ride horses if she choose, and shoot, and climb trees. Who’d lock up a brave heart?”

THE CITY

The Brethren came down the mountain in good order, at least until they found a meadow where cows and horses grazed together. Then no starving man could think of anything but butchery, and Morgan let them do as they liked. The boucaniers among them dropped the animals with a few neat shots, and waded in with cutlasses drawn. Others scrambled for firewood. In short order they were stuffing themselves with grilled beef, and roasted horsemeat and asses’ flesh too, and nothing in the world had ever tasted so good to John. Morgan himself laid hold of a great gobbet of meat and wolfed it down nearly raw.

The Reverend cut three or four steaks and carried them back on a plantain leaf to Lady Phyllida and Mrs. Hackbrace, who fell to in a most unladylike way, tearing at the meat with their bare hands.

Blackstone, something loath, sliced up a sirloin into little gobbets and fed them on knife-tip to the prince. John came to watch; for there was a sort of grim fascination in seeing the royal jaws champ, mindless as a millstone grinding, and not seeming to mind what he ate nor his arrow-wounds nor the flies that buzzed about him.

“What’ll you do with him, do you reckon?” said John.

“There’s a question to revolve in one’s mind, by God,” said Blackstone. “I can’t think His Royal Highness will be greeted with glad cries of welcome from his brother, can you? Not in his present condition.”

“Perhaps he could be made to look a little better,” said John. “We could get him a wig, eh?”

“We might dress him up,” agreed Blackstone. “Christ knows there’s many a courtier with no more sensibility; no, nor so well-mannered. This poor block will never be prating about his dogs, or his horses, or his debts, and so might pass for a wise man. Even so… it’s a dangerous thing to trust to the gratitude of princes.”

“You’d know, I reckon,” said John. “Ain’t there a little matter of four thousand pounds you was supposed to pay in ransom? Or did you lose it gambling?”

“Not I,” said Blackstone, and for a moment looked as though he were going to draw on John. “Bastard. No, that’s safe in sealed bags, and you needn’t inquire where. But you do have a point, sir.”

He fed the prince another scrap of meat. “Yes, Your Highness, we shall have to fetch you home after all. You’re a right royal embarrassment; but your family’s known worse, I think.”

In grease, blood and great contentment the Brethren marched on, bearing with them whole legs and sides of beef. Morgan, with John, looked keenly to see the girl, but it seemed she kept ahead out of sight.

So did the Spaniards, though Morgan sent out an advance party of fifty men to seek out prisoners. Some of these encountered mounted men, who shouted insults but did not stay to give satisfaction; no, they spurred away as though they fled the Devil himself. Which indeed some of them may have thought was the case. If they’d caught a glimpse of Morgan marching along, with his black beard glistening with horse’s blood and the light of happy Hell in his eyes, they surely mistook him for Old Nick.

By the time the sun was beginning to dip low in the west, Morgan had still not laid hands on a living soul; and then the towers of Panama were sighted, with one tall cathedral-tower above the rest. The Brethren cheered and danced, and lifted Morgan on their shoulders as though he had already waded with them into the counting-houses of Panama, spurning heaps of doubloons as he came.

Standing above them so, Morgan took a sight through his spyglass, and lowered it with a sober face; but then he grinned down at them all.

“Well, my lads, there is an army camped not three miles off. It may be they are those same fearful fellows who have run ahead of us this whole way. You mark me! By cockcrow we’ll see they’ve run again, and left their empty tents fluttering, eh?

“Let’s rest here, my lads, and eat good beef, and build great fires to warm ourselves. Blood and gold come morning!”

They cheered him like madmen, did the Brethren, though John had his own thoughts: that it mightn’t be so wise to make holiday with the Spaniards sitting within easy march. And so he followed uneasily as Morgan walked through the camp they made, from bonfire to bonfire where men sat roasting meat. Some took out the campaign trumpets and drums, and made brave music, singing loud. Some men danced, giddy as though their bellies were full of good rum. John looked out into the dark as it fell, expecting every moment to see Spanish horsemen riding forth on them.

“Jesus bless us, boy, anyone would think you were at a funeral,” said Morgan. “Afraid, are you?”

“I am, Admiral sir,” said John.

“Why then, you have excellent good sense,” said Morgan, clapping him on the shoulder. “And, look you: that army over yonder has good sense too. Sober little clerks defending their investments, see, and officers who like to serve their time behind a desk, and patient blacks and Indians who’d rather serve the devil they know than be so imprudent as to rise against him. They are watching and listening, make no mistake.

“And what do you suppose they’re seeing? Filthy beasts, in their hundreds, dancing around great fires. What do you suppose they’re hearing? Howls of laughter and song. These are no soldiers; they’re madmen. They want gold, and for the love of it they followed me up that stinking river. They want it, and tomorrow they’ll follow me to get it, over the bodies of the slain. Musket-balls won’t stop them. Toledo steel won’t stop them. Would you stand in their way?”

“I reckon I wouldn’t, sir,” said John.

“I dare say that army won’t, either. Not after a few hours’ sober reflection,” said Morgan. He grinned. The firelight gleamed on his eyes, and his teeth.

There was a clatter of hooves, and a trumpet-call, clear and long and loud, from out in the dark; but the voice that followed was shaking badly.

“Dogs! English Dogs! We will meet you!”

And the Brethren catcalled back, and fired into the night, and danced obscenely by the fires; sure invitation, John would have thought, for Spanish snipers, but none fired upon them. Instead, the sound of hoofbeats retreated away into the dark, and not long afterward came the thunder of cannon from the city walls. The which was so stupid (the enemy being so far out of range) that the privateers were cheered even more.

Near to where John stood with Morgan, three or four men got up a morris-dance, and sang:

That was the only time a shadow fell across Morgan’s face. He looked out on the prancing demons he’d charmed so far through desolation, and said:

“God send she has the sense to keep well clear of these.”

“She’s done it so far, sir,” said John. Morgan looked at him thoughtfully.

“I may get my death tomorrow,” he said.

“Never say it, sir! You got the Devil’s own luck,” said John.

“Oh, yes, no question of that; but luck plays a man false, now and again. I think your luck will hold, John James. These poor sots and cutthroats will rush into the cannon’s mouth heedless, but you will think twice about wasting your life. Should I fall, find my girl. Take her away with you, to Jamaica or even to England, and treat her well.”

“Sir, I swear it!” said John. “But I ain’t got your luck, all the same.”

Morgan sighed.

“Then I will give you half my luck,” he said, and reaching out with the heel of his hand struck John between the eyes, a sharp blow that made him see stars. “There. Do you feel fortunate now?”

“I think so, sir,” said John, blinking and wanting to laugh, except it hurt.

“Christ Jesus, what I wouldn’t give for a glass of rum,” said Morgan, looking out at the fires.

John made himself a sort of tent that night, draping his coat over a green bush and stretching out underneath. He lay there a while, thinking on the morrow. He remembered that there’d been an alehouse in London called the Green Bush, and he thought how funny it was that here he lay now, in a green bush, only he wished it was the other one.

Whereupon he heard his mother’s voice in his ear again, pleading-like, telling him how he might open a nice little tavern of his own someday. It was a fine living, for a sober man; why, he could set up at a crossroads, with a painted sign to hang out front, and a clean little brew-house out back, and three snug rooms upstairs with clean linen, so as to attract gentle guests. He would wash the windows often, so as to let in a lot of light, which would shine on the copper pans… and in his own chamber there’d be a grand big bed, just the place for a neat, little wife… a sea-coal fire all cheery in the grate…

But the sea-coal sent up green flames, and the hanging sign was a hanging man. John heard Morgan’s voice then, smoothly arguing down his mother.

A tavern at a crossroads! Aye, and there he’d dream of jungles, and battles, and blood and gold. The gentle guests would shout for him, and order him to take away the chamber-pots and make the beds. His hand would grope for a cutlass to change their tune, but he’d not find one, never again. Gray England would send her winters over him, not the stink and glare and salt sea-haze of Port Royal. And every seventh day, he’d sit in a pew and drone hymns, and mutter Amen, like to die of boredom. What kind of life was that, demanded Morgan.

Well, but there’d be the neat, little wife. She’d be a pink-faced country girl, pious, in yards of white cambric to be groped through before he could get proper hold of her a’nights, and that only when there wasn’t babies coming, which there would be most of the time… lying mouth to mouth with her he’d be dreaming all the while anyway of a girl with flaming eyes, slender and terrible, white as mist, with long, wet hair and the smell of the sea on her…

She began to do things, lying on him, and he was panicked lest his mother see or, worse yet, Morgan, but he couldn’t stop the girl. He didn’t want to stop her.

John woke, gasping, to find that she had her white arms around his neck and was smiling down at him, not an inch away from his face in the darkness. They wrestled close, for five or six minutes, and it was like going to Heaven.

When John could draw breath to speak at last, all he could tell her was how he loved her. She stroked back his hair from his face, still smiling.

“And I love thee,” she said. “You’re my own man, John. I will be your right bride all the days and nights of your life, and never leave you. Wherever you may sail, I’ll be at your side. Let the world quake for fear of us!”

John said something half-witted back in reply, about all the things he’d do for her, like pile the riches of the world at her feet. Then, enough of his conscience woke for him to croak something about how Morgan was worried for her, and only wanted what was best for her.

“Oh, he’d keep me close,” said the girl, laughing. “I know him. But there’s none like Morgan for burning, and plundering, and living free; and am I not his daughter? I must be free too, John.”

Now this news terrified John, as he recollected all that had happened and all Morgan had said, and finally understood the truth. He felt a dull ox not to have guessed it before now; but he loved her all the more, and told her so.

Three times more before the night was out, they struggled together again, in bliss and joy. John drifted off at last, asleep in her arms, so happy. He dreamed of a fair ship, sweet-steering and swift, laden to the decks with loot.

But when he started awake, in an hour when the stars had dropped far down into the west, the girl had slipped away from him once more.

Morning came chill and pale, with cocks crowing indeed. The Brethren woke beside the ashes of their fires, under a pall of blowing smoke, and formed up, and marched off to do battle. Before they had gone two miles, they saw it was even as Morgan had told them: the Spanish forces had fled in the night, leaving their empty tents and gear. There was only a fat, old man riding sadly away, with his priests running after him. It was the viceroy himself, deserted, riding back to pray for his city.

And the Brethren looked at Morgan with wide eyes, remembering that he had prophesied it would happen so, and some among them crossed themselves. John didn’t, but he reached up and touched the place Morgan had struck him, and smiled sheepishly to think of the luck he’d have from now on.

He looked about him for the girl as he marched, bearing Morgan’s standard; but if she followed the army, she was keeping herself well hid. That pleased him. Safer, he thought, for her to stay unseen, and shoot from afar off. Jacques was already in tears, his little, red eyes like rubies, because Jago was in the vanguard with him, and it was no use to march in front and try to shield him with his body. Jago towered over him by a head.

Forward they went, through the bright day, under a clear, hot sun, and clearer and sharper grew the towers of Panama. By noon they could make out the defending army, drawn up under the walls, on a wide open plain.

Now, John marched with Morgan’s troops, that formed the right wing of the main body of men; that was about three hundred, with three hundred more on the left wing under Captain Collier, or Colonel Collier as he was now, because Morgan had assigned ranks so all would be done army-fashion.

Three hundred more were in the vanguard, the boucanier sharpshooters mostly. The rest followed in the rearguard. Blackstone was in Morgan’s column, by John; it had been agreed to keep the prince to the rear of the column, with the ladies. The Reverend needed no goading now, not since the cathedral tower had come into plain view. He was marching along with his eyes fixed on it, muttering to himself about catamites, and the sale of indulgences, and graven images. Every so often he shook as though he had the palsy, and flecks of foam began to appear at the corner of his mouth.

Pretty soon the guns on the walls started up again, thud-thud-thud, and men remembered the bombardment of the night before, and a few laughed for scorn. That fell off as they came within range at last, and the first balls went shrieking through the air and ploughed up earth and bushes to one side and the other. The vanguard kept their heads up now, as they marched, watching for the shots coming in.

Now the Spanish troops could be seen clearly. John glanced over at Morgan and saw him pulling on his beard as he studied the field; for the Spanish outnumbered them, being maybe fifteen hundred men to their thousand-odd, and there was beside a great herd of lowing cattle being kept in place by Indians with goads. The Spanish right flank was drawn up behind a little hill, with a ravine before them. The wind was out of the west, and blowing the cannon-smoke across the Spanish lines.

Morgan called a halt to the march, and sent for Collier, who presently came sidling through the ranks.

“Now, Ned, what say you?” Morgan jerked his thumb at the enemy positions. Collier looked pale, but he grinned.

“They have the sun in their eyes,” he said hopefully.

“And smoke too,” said Morgan. “Still…”

“What do you reckon they’ve kept all those cows for?”

“Why, to fright us with,” said Morgan, and now he grinned too, and raised his voice. “Bless my heart, lads, what sport is here! They’ll drive their beefsteaks at us, to make us run away!”

Which brought a roar of laughter from the Brethren, and heartened them no end, to think anyone could be so stupid as to attack starving men with meat on the hoof. Someone started up the old song again, They shall eat the feathered goose, but we shall eat the roast, oh! Morgan turned back to Collier and pointed at the little hill.

“Look you, how safe their right flank sits back there. I am thinking, though, that they will have the Devil’s own time getting reinforcements to the center, going down into that ravine and up out of it again. It would be easy to turn their flank, see, if we could gain that hill.”

“By God,” said Collier, in admiration.

“Do you think you might take your lads up it, Ned?”

“None readier!”

“And so we shall have the advantage,” said Morgan, with a kind of a purr in his voice.

Collier hurried back, and when Morgan gave the order to advance again, the left flank went wheeling away to storm the hill.

A squadron of Spanish cavalry galloped forward now to attack the vanguard. Glinting eyes, beating hooves, manes flying and the men bending low above, grinning to charge on so many poor bastards without pikes to fend them off. Morgan craned his head to see what the commander of the vanguard would do, and nodded when he saw him forming the French sharpshooters up into a square, where they dropped each to one knee and raised muskets, and blew the slow-matches bright, waiting for the range—

And Morgan glanced over at the left wing, that was storming the hill now, and John followed his gaze—

And they both, in the same moment, saw the girl running with Collier’s wing.

Morgan turned to John, staring, but said nothing. John couldn’t have heard him if he had, with the roar of the battle commencing. John blurted something—he never afterward remembered what—and thrust Morgan’s standard into someone else’s hands, and took off through the lines after the girl.

He’d never run so in all his life, dodging and ducking through charging men, for the attack had begun in earnest. The Reverend went howling past him, clawing slower men out of the way to get at the enemy. But John ran after the force that was surging up the hill now, unstoppable as a wave, and up he went too and he could see the girl again, and the noise of the charge shook the ground under his boots.

He came up alongside—oh, who wouldn’t have noticed she was a woman now, with her shirt torn open and her white breasts bared, and her hair streaming out? But hadn’t she cut her hair?… Yet the men around them never seemed to see, they were so fixed on taking the hill.

A kind of growl seemed to rise out of the earth, as they gained the top, and it mixed with the volley of shots below, for only now had the cavalry charge reached the vanguard. John heard the screams of men and horses caught by musket-fire. He reached out his hand to the girl. She turned her face to him, and there were no eyes in her face but only flames.

She lifted her arms and jumped, or seemed to, for up she rose before him like a kite, and her spread arms and wild hair flowed out like wings or a cloak.

Up she went like the smoke of a fire, and seemed to cover half the sky. Her face was Death itself, and in her left hand she bore a flaming brand, and her right bore blue steel with lightnings playing about the blade. She laughed fit to crack the sky open.

Out she flew as Collier’s men fired down on the Spanish right flank, slaughtering them like they were chickens in a pen. But she soared on to the walls of Panama itself, and it seemed to John the cathedral tower trembled, and where she came fire sprang up and climbed like roses.

John fell to his knees there on the hill, clutching his heart. When he lifted his eyes again there was no sign of her, but only clouds of smoke shot through with curious colors, writhing and descending on the city.

He turned and looked down on the plain, that was now a flailing slaughterhouse of cattle and horses and men. There was Morgan’s standard, and there hard by stood Morgan himself, staring up at John.

He had seen her too. John knew it by the look on his face.

The Spaniards fled, or died. Morgan led his forces on, pursuing close, into the very streets of Panama, but it was already in flames. The people of the city ran to and fro, confusedly, and some tried to put out the fires. Some few attempted to stand against the Brethren that came racing across the little bridge, and so into the city, but in the end most fled.

John crawled down from the hill, weak and sick as though he’d had a fever, and staggered after the army. Looking up, he could just see the backs of Lady Phyllida and Mrs. Hackbrace, scrambling over the dead as they followed the privateers in. They had left the prince far behind. He walked on in his slow way, deaf to the moans of the wounded and dying on both sides.

Someone was screaming to John’s left; he turned and saw Jago on his knees, holding Jacques close and rocking to and fro with him. Jacques’ red eyes were still open, and staring. He’d been cut in the sinews of his neck, likely some cavalryman’s blade going straight down to the heart.

Jago was crying so, John didn’t know what to say to him. He only stood and stared, and wondered at the things that make a man leave Paradise once he’s found it.

John walked on. He caught up with the prince, who’d have marched straight into the sea if John hadn’t caught him by the arm.

“This way, Your Royal Highness,” he said, giving him a shove toward the main road. They trudged along, side by side, toward the city. Flames swept up from most of it now, smelling sweet as incense, for its houses had been made of cedarwood; or maybe that was the churches burning. Women were screaming. There were desperate shouts in English, orders to leave the wine and put the fires out, as Morgan’s officers tried to restore order; but the Brethren were ignoring them, laughing, doing just as they liked.

Blackstone was on the bridge, crawling along on hands and knees. He’d had one foot blown off, by a cannonball seemingly. He’d tied it off himself, but it was still bleeding.

“Good day to you, sir,” he said, as John drew abreast of him. “And to you, Your Highness. I fear we’ll be late to the ball.”

John swore. He tore the shirt from a dead man that lay a little distance off, and wadded it on the stump where Blackstone’s foot had been. Then he was flummoxed, for he couldn’t think how to hold the wadding on.

“You oaf,” said Blackstone, laughing. “Isn’t it obvious? Steal another man’s boot.”

So John helped himself to the dead man’s left boot as well, and when Blackstone’s stump was crammed down in it the bandage stayed in place well enough. John hauled Blackstone up with his arm around John’s shoulders, and they hobbled on.

“You know, there’s six hundred pieces of eight for you if you lose your leg,” said John, with his voice sounding small and funny in his ears. “The articles says so.”

“I don’t recall whether there was payment for losing one’s foot, however,” said Blackstone. “And, you know, that’s just the sort of thing clerks stick at.”

“I reckon so,” said John.

“Do you know Watkin’s inn, hard by St. Paul’s?”

“What, in London?”

“No, you fool, the one in Port Royal.”

“Oh! The Bluebell. No, I never been in there.”

“Well, I’ll thank you to take the prince there, if you get out of this alive and I perish. Ask for Mistress Clarissa Waverly. She’ll pay you for your trouble,” said Blackstone. “Tell her I died singing.”

“Are you likely to do that?”

“It would make a grand gesture, don’t you think?” said Blackstone.

Panama burned to the ground. The Reverend, having left a trail of dismembered enemies in his wake, personally set fire to the cathedral, with its great square tower. One time it had been the tallest building in the New World; and for all the Reverend’s pains, it was still standing after the flames had hollowed it out, though its bells had dropped all the way down the shaft and lay in a molten mass on the stones below. He raved and tried to tear down what was left with his bare hands. His wife and cousin had to get through seven verses of the hymn about the little white lamb before he could be dragged away weeping.

Morgan was by no means pleased with this, for any gold altar plate or cloth-of-gold vestments that might have been left behind were now so many molten lumps and ash. But the Reverend had been the first man into the city, and fought bravely, so he was put down for another fifty pieces of eight, when all the plunder should be counted up.

What with the fires, and the looting, and the fighting that was still going on here and there as some of the townfolk tried to defend themselves, it was hours before Morgan could restore any order; and that only because half the Brethren were too stupefied with wine to cause any more trouble. It was nightfall before John could see Blackstone and the prince squared away, in the hospital that had been left standing. It was another hour before he could persuade himself to walk to Morgan’s headquarters, set up in a plundered convent.

Morgan was in there with his officers, around a table with a map of the city spread out upon it. They were talking over whether it was worth it to blow up any more buildings, or whether the fires were likely to burn themselves out now; and if so, how to organize parties in the morning, to begin searching the wells and gardens, or any other places treasure might have been hidden.

John limped in and sat quiet in a corner, as they went over business. They concluded with talk about who should interrogate the prisoners, and whether any of the Inquisition’s gear had survived the fires, as it should be handy in questioning. Collier agreed to go find that out; whereat they all saluted Morgan, and left him.

Morgan, rolling up the map, looked over at John. John stood and made to say something smart. He choked up instead.

Morgan just went to a cabinet, and got out three bottles of wine. He set them on the table and opened them, one after another.

“Come, boy, and drink for me,” he said. “I don’t believe I could get drunk tonight if I emptied every bottle in this Goddamned city. How do you like my luck, eh?”

John swabbed his face with his sleeve, and said he was sorry. He drank most of a bottle, and only then had the courage to say:

“What was she?”

“A ghost,” said Morgan. “Blood-drinking Revenge, having put on a pleasing shape to accomplish her ends. A man’s sin, come to smile in his face and call him Father. Christ, boy, how should I know?”

EPILOGUE

They were twenty days in that place before leaving.

Blackstone’s leg mortified, and had to be cut away joint by joint. Each time John stood by him and reminded him how he’d surely get his six hundred pieces of eight now, no clerk in the world could quibble over it; but Blackstone died in the end, so it came to nothing after all. Though he did manage to gasp out a few verses of “The World Turn’d Upside Down” before he went, and so had his grand gesture.

A day or so later, it fell out that some witty fellows decided to crown the prince as ruler of Panama. They made him a crown of twisted vines, with spikes of burnt wood sticking up from it, and an empty sack for a cape, and gave him a cup full of ashes to hold; and they set him on the back of an ass, and led him about carousing, until they all fell down dead drunk.

John was away, running an errand for Morgan. By the time he returned and heard what they’d done, the prince was nowhere to be found. John cursed them, and ran here and there asking who’d seen the prince. At last an Indian prisoner said as how he’d sighted him, still mounted on the ass’ back, riding away on the long road out of the city. A party sent out on horseback failed to find him.

For all John was ever able to learn, the prince is riding still.

The Spaniards, having had plenty of warning that Morgan was coming, and being reasoning men, had emptied what treasure was in the storehouses and sent it away in ships before the Brethren ever got there, as John had feared. So every last ditch and outhouse and cesspool was raked through, and some jewels and candlesticks were found, as well as slaves and prisoners to be ransomed. When it was all packed up on mules and brought back to Chagres, though, when it was counted out and reckoned up according to the number of survivors, it was found that each man’s share amounted to no more than two hundred pieces of eight.

There was some debate whether Lady Phyllida and Mrs. Hackbrace were owed shares, being women. There was no question Mrs. Hackbrace had slain a score of men taking the bastion at San Lorenzo, however, and Lady Phyllida, while not so quick on the kill, had made herself useful in other ways, so in the end the ladies were paid fairly.

Then Hendrik Smeeks started up mutinous talk again, the sense of which was, that Morgan had taken the lion’s share of the plunder for himself. So Morgan had every last coin portioned out publicly, and then had each man searched to be sure he kept nothing back. He let himself be searched too, before them all.

Having settled that, the company was disbanded. All parties took ship at Chagres Castle, and sailed home. Some went to Port Royal, and the French among them went to Tortuga; others sailed south, to try to better their luck with piracy.

Morgan got home in the Mayflower. Five hundred of the English Brethren came with him, spending their money so free it was soon gone.

Then Fortune’s Wheel began to turn in earnest, for word came that England had signed to the Treaty of Madrid. A new governor was sent out to Jamaica to arrest Modyford, and Morgan in his turn was arrested and shipped off to London.

But Morgan’s luck stood by him again. Let the Spanish ambassador rave away how he might, Harry Morgan was cheered wherever he went in London. Folk called him Drake come again. The canny king listened, and in the end sent Morgan back with a knighthood and the lieutenant-governorship of Jamaica to boot.

And yet…

Hendrik Smeeks, home in the Low Country, declared himself a reformed man. He took pen in hand to write a book purporting to tell the true history of the privateers (whom he was careful to call pirates). He made the Spaniards the heroes, brave and dutiful to a man, and slandered Morgan no end, beginning by saying he had been brought out to the West Indies as a bond-slave. He went on to invent all manner of abominations committed by Morgan. However, it was that claim of his having been a slave that provoked the lieutenant-governor’s wrath. He sued Smeeks’ publisher, and won damages, and forced a retraction.

And yet…

That was the end of Morgan’s adventuring on the Spanish Main. He never sailed forth with his captains anymore, but stayed home and drank rum punch, playing at politics in Port Royal. The Brethren of the Coast never went out in such numbers again, and when they did sail, it was as outright pirates. A man might have his fill of blood and gold, fire and glory, but when he looked at himself in the shaving-glass of a morning he saw a thief and a murderer, and no hero.

For most of them, it didn’t matter much.

Prince Rupert never found his lost brother, though there were rumors Prince Maurice was still being seen in unlikely places for years afterward. Rupert continued to advertise for news of him, as he advertised for his lost dogs. Some of the dogs, at least, found their way home again.

John made his way in time to the Bluebell, where he asked whether there was a Mistress Clarissa Waverly there. After some wait he was shown up to see a fine lady, and told her a tale. She might have wept, and he might have comforted her. She might have dried her tears and considered his youth, and his size, and his willingness to be of use. And there may have been certain talk of four thousand pounds in gold, in sealed bags; and there might not have been.

Whatever other adventures John had, he did become a bricklayer for a while, and laid many a herringbone floor in old Port Royal. But his mother never spoke in his ear again. Now it was Morgan’s voice he heard there, in warning or counsel; the more so after Morgan died, long years later.

But one night the girl came to John in his sleep, bidding him follow her. He woke, and thirsted for rum, and ached for the smell of smoke and the sight of gold glinting, of white sails filling with a fair wind. He wondered whether he might find her again, a slender wraith wandering some lonely beach.

He ran to Lynch’s wharf and signed on with the captain of a rakish craft, who asked him few questions and answered none. They sailed by night; come morning the colors were run up, a black ensign bearing a skull and crossed bones.