Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key

ELEVEN: Dead Men

WHEN NEXT JOHN KNEW anything there was a hot sun burning his legs. He lifted his head and blinked, dazzled by a confusion of greens and whites and blues that resolved into the beach and grove in the full light of noon. His head burned; he had a raging thirst.

He sat up. Sejanus had crawled far enough forward to be lying in the shade. Mr. Tudeley was curled on his side under a palm tree, clutching a coconut to his bosom. Both men were snoring. John looked around for Mrs. Waverly. He saw only a line of footprints trailing away up the beach.

“Oi!” He scrambled to his feet. Sejanus lifted his head and looked around. Mr. Tudeley sat up blearily. “Where’s she got to?”

They followed the footprints down the beach. “Doesn’t look as though she was carried off by anyone,” said Sejanus. “She wasn’t running, either.”

“What would she run off for?” said John, thinking uneasily of Tom’s letter and the four thousand pounds.

“Where do you suppose we are?” inquired Mr. Tudeley trailing behind them. He was still clutching his coconut. “The Spanish Main, perhaps?”

“I wouldn’t have thought we’d run that far,” said Sejanus.

“How does one open one of these, do you suppose?” Mr. Tudeley turned the coconut round in his hands.

“There she is!” John broke into a run. Mrs. Waverly had come around a low hill, walking back toward them. She carried a bucket. John, reaching her well ahead of the others, said: “You didn’t ought to go off on your own like that. No telling where we are. There might be savages.”

“There aren’t,” Mrs. Waverly replied, in a colorless voice. Her eyes were red; she had been weeping. “We’re on an island. We are alone here, save for the dead.”

“The dead?”

She turned and pointed back the way she had come. “They’re all along the beach. Some from the Harmony, and others I didn’t recognize. Perhaps they were from the Dutch ship. There is a great deal of wreckage. We ought to try to salvage it.” She looked down at the bucket she carried, and held it up. “And I found a spring of water. We shan’t die of thirst, at least. I brought you a drink.”

John grabbed the bucket and gulped the water down before remembering his manners. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and muttered hasty thanks. Sejanus and Mr. Tudeley got to them at last.

“Drank it all yourself, did you, you brute?” said Mr. Tudeley, in indignation. John handed him the empty bucket.

“Fetch more yourself. Where’s the spring?” He turned to Mrs. Waverly.

“Just around the hill. You’ll find it,” she replied. “I believe I’ll go gather fallen coconuts, shall I?”

She walked away from them without another word. They stared after her a moment, and then went carefully around the headland, wading part of the way.

A long expanse of beach opened out before them on the other side. John, shading his eyes from the glare with his hand, squinted into the distance and saw that there were indeed dead men lying all along the line of the tide, and others tumbling in the surf. Far down he thought he saw a broken mast sticking up, from rocks just offshore, but whose it might be he could not tell.

They walked forward in silence, until Mr. Tudeley spotted the spring coming down from the cliff to one side and made for it with a cry. They drank greedily, all three, scooping the water up in their hands when they couldn’t bring themselves to wait for the bucket to fill.

“I reckon we ought to go on and see,” said John at last. Sejanus nodded and they walked on, once more following Mrs. Waverly’s footprints. She had zigzagged along, going down to the water here and there to pull barrels or lengths of rope up on the sand. Here she had paused by Anslow’s body and turned him over, but gulls had already lighted on him and begun to peck at his eyes. John chased them away and pulled Anslow’s shirt up to cover the face.

“We’ll need to bury them,” said Sejanus.

“What with?”

Sejanus shrugged. He found a broken oar and hefted it. They walked on. Mrs. Waverly’s footprints veered away from the dead men, for a great distance after that, until they came to Captain Reynald’s body.

He lay with one arm flung out, as though pointing. They could see where she’d knelt beside him for a while; the print of her gown was quite distinct in the damp sand, where she’d dragged him from the surf. The gulls hadn’t started on him yet and he looked young and handsome, almost as though he was sleeping.

They stood there looking at him a while. John didn’t know what he was supposed to feel. Satisfaction, maybe, that the man was dead; but then again he’d no claim himself to Mrs. Waverly’s affections, had he? Besides, Captain Reynald had been good at his chosen trade. You have to honor a man for that, thought John.

They pulled the body a bit farther up from the tide, and covered its face, before they walked on. Where shelving rocks ran out into the water, all grown over in sea anemones and mussels, they saw that there was indeed a splintered mast tilting up. There was most of a ship there, all broken to pieces, the Dutchman by the look of her. Kegs and crates floated in the tidepools, bobbing in the surge. Mr. Tudeley found a man’s shirt floating in a pool, and wrung it out and tried it on; it fit him, so he wore it. Sejanus found a length of calico in a tangle of weed, and so they tore it between them and made kerchiefs to tie on their heads against the sun. A little farther on there was another oar, which John picked up.

They spent a while wading back and forth, salvaging. There were more bodies caught in the kelp there, smashed up pretty badly. Where a moat of clear water floated around a standing rock they found a black man dead, looking up from the bottom as from a bath.

“That’s not him, though,” said John, half to himself.

“Who?” said Sejanus.

“The mulatto that was helping you loose the boat.”

“Nobody helped me get the boat,” said Sejanus sharply. “There weren’t any mulattos on board.”

“But I saw him, too,” said Mr. Tudeley. “I tell you he was there, sir.”

“You didn’t see anyone,” said Sejanus. “There was no one there to see.”

“Now, don’t you make game with us, mate,” said John. “There was that big one with the sword, when we took the Santa Ysabel. There was a black girl at Tortuga, which I didn’t see, but poor Anslow that’s dead saw her plain. And then we saw the mulatto helping you with the boat. So don’t you tell me they weren’t there!”

Sejanus glared at them. “Chah! Where’d they go, then?” he said. “Where’d they disappear to, if they were real? You tell me that.”

And any other man might have struggled to come up with an answer that made sense, and failed, and looked away sheepishly. But John had once seen a pretty girl turn into a ravening spirit of war, right before his eyes in broad daylight, and he knew there were answers that made no kind of sense to a reasoning man.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” he said. “This is some of your heathen gods, ain’t it?”

“I don’t have any gods,” said Sejanus. “Didn’t I tell you I was an atheist? And they aren’t gods, anyway.”

“What d’you call them, then?” said John, in triumph. “You did see them, and you’re a liar if you say you didn’t.”

Sejanus looked away and made a sour face. “They’re called loas. My mama called them orishas. Just spirits, not gods. Spirits of places; spirits of things. We left them behind in Africa. The obeah-people bargained with them like pedlars, trading them food and drink and I don’t know what, in return for favors.

“My old father was an obeah man. But when the big ship took him away from Africa, the loas couldn’t even cross the water with him. Couldn’t make his chains drop off, either. Not much use, eh?”

“But they must have made it across,” said John, “Or they wouldn’t be haunting you now.”

“There are no loas here,” Sejanus insisted.

“But we saw them,” said Mr. Tudeley, who was only just managing to follow the conversation. “Are they devils?”

“No! They’re only imaginary. I imagined them.”

“But we saw them too,” said John.

“That’s only because I imagine better than white folks can,” said Sejanus sullenly. He stuck the end of his oar into the sand. “These will do for shovels. Let’s start burying all these bodies, before they can stink up the place.”

They buried as many as they had strength for then, and hauled the others above the waterline to bury later. John dug deeper for Anslow than for the others, because he’d known him longer. Anslow was rolled into his grave and John stood there a moment, trying to recall a prayer to say. All he could think of was that he always seemed to draw burial detail. On consideration, he decided he’d rather be the one doing the shoveling than the poor bastard being shoveled under, like Anslow.

When they came back to the grove at last, they found that Mrs. Waverly had indeed gathered coconuts for them, and moreover waded out into the rock pools and gathered whelks, using a knife she had apparently found on one of the bodies.

“Did you salvage much of the wreck?” she inquired coolly, gouging a whelk from its shell.

“Some,” said John, picking up a coconut and wishing he’d thought to take Anslow’s knife before he’d buried him.

“I noticed a great deal of wood. We ought to be able to fashion new oars for the boat, and escape,” she said.

“We’ll need to do better than that,” said John. “I been adrift in an open boat. No shelter, no safe place to keep victuals. We want something bigger. I was thinking we could build something from the wreckage. A pinnace, maybe. We could rig it with a sail. Lots of sailcloth washing about.”

“Better still.” She smiled at him, for the first time in days. She glanced over at Mr. Tudeley and Sejanus, who were attempting to open a coconut, and spoke in a lower voice: “It may be that we shall resume our journey to Leauchaud after all. Only think of that!”

John thought of it, and weighed up matters in his head. Much as he’d enjoyed being back on the account again, there was no denying he was once more penniless and at loose ends, and after nearly drowning at that. He saw in his mind a shopfront with his name above the door, and a yard full of good red brick, and all those folk needing new premises built in Port Royal. It put him in a generous mood.

“I’m sorry about Reynald,” he said. “I know you liked him.”

She shrugged, but did not look away from slicing up the whelk. “He seemed a decent man. A pity he drowned; but such was the risk of his profession, was it not? Nor will all the tears in the world bring him back. Let us go on and live.” She lifted the raw whelk and bit into it with her white teeth, and chewed.

“I think you’re hitting it on the wrong end,” Sejanus advised Mr. Tudeley. “There’s supposed to be three little eyes, somewhere.”

“I don’t see any,” said Mr. Tudeley. He raised a stone and brought it down on the coconut like a hammer, only to hit his thumb.

“I reckon you’ve lost Tom’s letter now,” said John to Mrs. Waverly. “I hope you recollect what was in it, about where the money was hid?”

She looked pained. “My dear Mr. James, every word of that letter is written on my heart. Pray, have no concern on that account.”

“Yeeeeeaaaaarrrgh!” Mr. Tudeley, losing patience, flung the coconut as hard as he could against a rock. It struck with the sound of a cutlass cleaving a skull. He snatched it up and pressed his lips to the cracked shell, sucking avidly at the milk.