The boat went racing back after the Scourge as, clear of shoals, it once more hung in the wind. The bullies clambered aboard and left the longboat, riding to a line, to lunge after the schooner like a leaping dog after its master. Then the sun fell below the horizon and darkness jumped up from its ambush beyond the rim of the sea.
Presently a spark of light appeared on the leeward side of the cay and grew to a crackling radiance as the crisp palmetto fans flared up. About the fire squatted the three brothers, their faces grim in the ruddy glow as they took counsel.
“I would not care so much, save for Margaret,” said Will Graeme, the youngest of the three. “The babe was to come this week. I had thought to be at home.” And a spasm contracted his features.
“Take heart, lad,” said John Graeme, the bald-headed. “We will win through. Aye, and settle accounts with Long Tom Pugh. The rains are not so far off. A month at most. We can eke out. We will. Fret not, Will, the child will be born ere she begins to worry over ye. But we must go carefully. Just keep the life in us till the rains come or we sight some ship. Mayhap we’ll get enough from the wreck to build some sort of craft.”
“The current swings about the cay,” said Alec Graeme. “There was no driftwood on the beach. And we were chased by the Scourge far off the travel lanes. Ye heard what Pugh said about company? How he left four here? This is Quatros Hombres Cay where Turtler Tom buried them that Pugh marooned.”
“Yet we will win through,” said John Graeme. “I’ll handle the rations. Alec, see if the water-keg is full. We can do without tonight.”
“’Tis but a double anker,” grumbled Alec Graeme as he rolled the keg closer to the fire and John Graeme did the same with the barrel of meat. “Now may the flesh rot on his bones while he lives in anguish!” cried Alec passionately. “This is no water anker! ’Tis brandy! And the other bully beef! The lying, grinning devil with his talk of mercy! Brandy and salted meat and the rains a month away!”
III
The Inn at Porto Bello
Oh, sing me a song of a rover,
A tale of the Spanish Main
Of a buccaneer living in clover,
And drink to the jolly refrain.
Ho, yo ho, as black as a crow
Is the flag the bullies sail under;
To Long Tom Pugh and his rollicking crew
And the roar of his carronades’ thunder.
Ho, yo ho, for the swing of the surge,
Show me a schooner as swift as the Scourge.
Gallant and free are the men of the sea
Who sail under Long Tom, the Wonder!
They beat out the time of the tune with their rummers and mugs on the scarred tables while their crimson faces loomed through the blue haze of the tobacco-smoky, low-ceilinged room like sundogs through a mist. The song ended and Pugh tossed a couple of gold pieces to the singer who spun them with a flick of thumb and finger and roared for more liquor.
There were twenty rowdy, blousy wenches, mustees most of them, bred of full whites and quadroons, olive-skinned and flushed with their portions of the tankards thrust upon them by the pirates who shared them, each woman with either arm about a buccaneer, ogling, cajoling for a dividend of the freely spent, lightly gained gold. Presently the wail of violins joined in a pulse-quickening hornpipe. There was a scuffle for partners, half-jovial, half-ugly, and a score of couples thrust back chairs and tables and swung and lurched upon the sand-gritted floor.
Long Tom Pugh and his bullies were in Porto Bello. There were no hovering king’s ships to annoy and the town was theirs, as long as their gold lasted. Pugh did not dance. He sat apart with the quartermaster of the Scourge and his mate and chief gunner, his evil face seamed in a smile that split his henna-stained whiskers.
“I’m done,” said the quartermaster, glowering at the dice he had just cast. “I’m clean as a whistle, curse the bones. There’s the devil’s own luck in them!”
“There should be,” answered Pugh as he scooped in the stake. “They are shaped from the thigh-bone of the man ‘Roaring’ Raines left to guard his treasure-chest when he buried it on Ransom Cay. Raines buried it and I found it with the skeleton of the poor devil he took ashore to do the digging sprawled atop of the chest. Raines didn’t figure on the shifting dunes.
“We got hold of a member of his crew and persuaded him to tell which cay Raines chose to leave the loot on. He told us what he knew and luck did the rest. The wind had blown the sand and there was the hand of Raines’ gravedigger sticking up like a sign-post, beckoning us to come and get even with Roaring Dick. And my bo’sun shaped me the dice. Try your own, man. Come, you’ve a ring there I fancy. I’ll stake a gold doubloon against it.”
The quartermaster hesitated, then drew the ring from his finger. It was of crude workmanship, fashioned to form a snake of gold with a flawed emerald set in the flat of the head and two diamond chips for the eyes.
“I’ll set it against five and no less,” he said.
“Three and no more,” answered Pugh and piled the stake. A minute later and he stuck it on his own hairy digit.
The quartermaster smothered his resentful oath in his tankard.
“Where did ye loot the ring?” asked Pugh, twisting it about. “I do not recollect seeing it in the sharing.”
“I got it from a wench,” lied the quartermaster.
He had taken it from the finger of Will Graeme when he had bound his arms behind him. And in this, he, the chosen representative of the crew in the division of spoils, had cheated. But the lie passed.
“She gave it ye for your handsome face, I suppose,” said Pugh and the others at the table laughed, for the quartermaster’s face was pox-pitted so that his features seemed to have crumbled.
“A winner’s jests come easy,” he growled and the look he gave Pugh was murderous.
The scrape of the fiddles and the shuffling of feet ended and once more the sweating servers scurried about replenishing the empty mugs. A fight over a girl broke out in a corner and the mustee ran squealing from the grappling men.
“Bring ’em out in the open,” bawled Pugh.
With all the blood lust in them flaming from the liquor they had swigged, a dozen men hustled out the combatants to the open space between the tables.
“Take away their knives,” ordered Pugh. “I’ll lose no good men for the sake of a worthless wench. A doubloon to the winner!”
Left to themselves the two pirates, roaring like bulls, rushed at each other swinging arms like flails, locked, swayed and fell together to the floor. One got astride of the other and gripped his throat while the under man’s knees played a tattoo against his back and he squirmed like a seal. The topmost lost his balance and they rolled over and apart to scramble to their feet amid the yells of their comrades.
There was no science to it and much comedy, for one was squat and bow-legged and the other lanky and gangling. But the latter bashed the short one in the face with a straight left so that his nose seemed to split like a rotten pear and the blood spurted. The squat man bellowed, grabbed his long opponent about the buttocks and sent him hurtling over his shoulder to smash against the table-leg with his head.
The unsound support splintered at the impact and the table pitched forward with all its contents while the room echoed with ribald laughter. The lanky man lay stunned and was hauled out by his feet to have a tankard of ale dashed in his face as the victor advanced to Pugh for his doubloon.
A door had opened in the rear and a girl came in whose appearance drew the swift attention of those nearest to her, halting their jesting and buffoonery to a silence that rapidly spread so that she advanced in a strained quietude to the center of the sanded space where she stood for a moment before she gave a nod to the fiddlers and began to dance.
She danced like a reed in the wind, swaying with infinite grace of posture, her feet scarce leaving a circle less than that of an ordinary platter. She was tall and lissome, though full-busted and she looked like a half-opened flower, fresh
, unsmirched with paint and holding an air of aloofness that was eerie.
Her dark gray eyes, almost violet at times in the uncertain lights, seemed to gaze far beyond the tavern walls, she danced as one might dance at will on the sea-sands, as a nymph might dance, strangely incongruous in that assembly of gross-passioned men, unconscious of her surroundings. Her golden hair was coiffed in classic simplicity and her sable draperies were at odd variance with the tawdry gauds of the mustees who viewed her with palpable disfavor yet shared the silent concentration of the buccaneers.
The air the fiddlers played was soft and low, a crooning rhythm that sounded like the murmur of surf after a storm or a breeze playing amid young birches. And, as she danced, to the masterful, masterless men about her, came visions of Spring woods where hyacinths and primrose clustered, of brooks winding amid lush sedges, all set in the far-off days of their own innocence.
The rhythm changed and she floated ’round the room, light as thistle-down or a foam-bell, her eyes passing over the rough, seamed faces with no hint that she regarded them as indices of humanity, hypnotizing them by the sheer beauty of her dance. Then she snapped her fingers to the players and they swung their bows to a wild tarantelle. The violet eyes became black, sudden roses flashed out on her cheeks, her posturing became of the flesh rather than the spirit, provocative, yet so infinitely graceful that it still held the audience in thrall though their heads swayed to the increasing lilt and their pulses pounded.
She was no longer a foam bell, but a curling wave that leaped, upcurving, cresting to the very feet and then swept back in furious eddies that bewildered with their whirl.
A fiddle-string snapped. She stopped, ivory arms flung back, audacious, challenging, as a shower of coins fell upon the floor and one of the pirates, snatching a tambourine from his quondam consort, gathered up the gold and humbly offered it to her as she curtsied low before Long Tom Pugh, whose eyes were ablaze and whose beaked nose showed its ridge of bone as the nostrils twitched and dilated and the great chest lifted and fell.
He rose, sweeping the table aside and, in one great stride, reached and raised her, crushing her to him while his bearded lips sought hers. Then he drew back with an oath as she twisted free and stood, less at bay than ready for attack, a dagger she had drawn from between her breasts flashing in her hand, her eyes holding Pugh’s while one of his great paws fumbled at his beard where blood was oozing its way through the mat of hair just beneath the line of his chin.
All breaths were held, sensing the verge of tragedy. But Pugh, still fumbling at his beard, slowly retreated until his other hand, back-stretched, felt the edge of the table he had pushed aside. His eyes, no longer blazing, but ablink, were fixed on those of the dancer and, as he leaned against the support, he shivered.
“She is a witch,” he muttered. “Look at her eyes. They are not human! By God, she missed my jugular by an inch! She would have let the life out of me!”
And still the room hung on the scene, marveling to see Pugh so strangely tamed yet conscious of the weird power of the woman. Pugh’s hand fetched up against a rummer and tightened about it. He lifted it and drained the raw caña it contained. As he set it down the dancer’s gaze suddenly fastened on the ring he had won from the quartermaster.
She seemed to stiffen in a sinuous pose, while the arm that held the dagger glided like a white-skinned snake, back in an almost imperceptible movement that presaged a lightning thrust. It came, but only to sheath the knife between her breasts once more, and she laughed.
“Know ye not ye must not touch me?” she asked, and her voice, clear as a bell, seemed to come from afar off like the sound of a distant chime. “Ye must not touch me, for I am Death,” she said. “I am the White Death and this dress is the shroud of Love.” Her eyes, absolutely fearless, burned in their absolute belief of what she spoke to Pugh’s brain and to all in that still silent room. The light in them was uncanny, as if the soul no longer reigned behind them in its seat, they were lambent with the high glaze of madness. And they held Pugh as a snake charms a bird.
“You are Death?” he muttered. She nodded.
“But you need not fear me yet,” she said. “I have not harmed you. Only warned you. Did I not dance for you? And you sought to take me. Know ye not that it is Death who comes for you?”
She advanced her hand and the great bulk of Pugh cowered. He crossed himself and many of his men did likewise.
“Where got ye that coiling ring about your finger?” she asked.
He took it off and offered it to her.
“Take it,” he said. “Take it and go.”
“There is blood on it,” she answered. Pugh looked shudderingly at the circlet and laid it on the table, not realizing it was his own gore from the fingers that had pressed his neck that stained it.
“It is yours,” he said shortly. “Take it.”
“Nay, I have not yet earned it. Nor have ye told me its history. Surely it has a history? Mayhap it was a love-pledge once upon a time? Tell me. Then I will sing for ye and so I shall have earned it.”
“I know naught of it,” said Pugh. “I won it but now from him.”
He nodded at the quartermaster and the woman’s eyes scrutinized the pitted face for an instant.
“Ye shall tell me presently,” she said, and smiled.
And with her smile the dread that had stiffened the face of the quartermaster passed and he grinned at her with yellow teeth. The witch had turned siren and his vicious blood responded.
“I’ll spin the yarn,” he said. “I am not so timid as others.” And he glanced sneeringly at Pugh who had sat down and was shading his eyes with his hand.
“No?” she asked. “Then why do ye make the holy symbol?” For the pirate’s bundled fingers still touched his tunic above his heart. “He who woos Death does not always win. Yet Death is kind.”
She stepped back and commenced to sing:
Where lies he now?
Lost love of mine;
His marble brow
Is creased with brine,
His lips caressed
Are chill and gray;
How warm they pressed
The other day.
His body swings
To shifting tide,
No twilight brings
Him to his bride.
Yet do I know
Our tender vow
Shall ever bind,
As then, so now.
When fails my breath,
When life grows dim,
I’ll thank grim Death
For finding him.
It was a dirge that changed into a paean of joy. While she sang there was not a soul-calloused sea-rover, not a hardened drab but sighed to the memory or the lost hope of love, tender, gallant and enduring, not one but thrilled to the credence of the last triumphant lines. In a spell they sat as she took the ring and glided from the room, the tambourine with its golden offerings untouched.
Then Pugh shook off the mood that compassed him.
“Go, bring her back,” he ordered. “Fiend take me, but I’ll teach the jade. I’ll take her, aye, and break her till she sighs for death. Rot me, up and after her, I say.”
No one moved till the quartermaster, with a contemptuous look at Pugh, got up.
“I’ll find her,” he said. “But I’ll not promise to bring her back.”
Pugh started up, coughed and set a swift hand to his mouth. The stab had pierced through to his throat and his mouth had filled with blood as his anger quickened its flow. And the quartermaster, catching up the tambourine as he went, vanished into the night outside.
The tavern-keeper came hurrying with a bowl of water and a pannikin of rough salt. Pugh swallowed his own blood and waved him aside.
“’Tis no hemorrhage, fool!” he said, “Only a scratch. Unless,” he added, half to himself, and his ruddy face paled, “the witch poisoned it.”
“Best let me fetch a leech,” said the tavern-keeper. “Indeed I know little of the wench, sav
e she is a bit mad. She comes from Nassau, some say. She has an infant. She lost her man at sea and it crazed her. But this is hearsay. She has danced here and elsewhere and sings among the sailors, seeking news of her man. Yet she seems not to know her own name. And she was ever harmless until now.”
“I have a leech of my own,” said Pugh. “If the fool is sober? So, Folsom, here ye are. Take a look at this slit the she-devil put in me. Where is the quartermaster?”
“Gone after the witch,” said the discredited medico, who had joined the outlaws of the Scourge.
“May she slash his weasand agape,” said Pugh. “We would be well rid of both of them, What think ye of the wound?”
“I think ’tis clean. Some ointment and a stitch, maybe—”
“Then come off to the schooner. Lads, we sail on the flood close after dawn. I have news of a gold-ship. And,” he added as he left the tavern with the leech, “if she bewitches the quartermaster we’ll sail without him. He is too solid with the men now, for my liking.”
As they went down the beach the chorus broke out again behind them, muffled by the closing door:
Ho, yo ho, as black as a crow,
Is the flag we bullies sail under,
To Long Tom Pugh and his rollicking crew
And the roar of our carronades’ thunder.
IV
Margaret Graeme
It is hard to say if Margaret Graeme was mad. Perhaps it was merely the passing fever of a brain lit by the exaltation of one great concentration of purpose, bred of a mating love and hope—the finding of her man. Will Graeme had promised to be back for the birth of their son; no ordinary circumstance would have held him.
Now he was two months overdue and for six weeks she had been seeking news of him, bending her will to the best ways and means of cajoling sailormen, the use of her beauty, of her voice and of her grace, so used as to keep herself inviolate for Will. So had grown in her a wondrous cunning coupled to her gifts of dance and song that had bubbled up within the sweet fountain of her body in the happy days of love and mating.
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 95