She had thought of the boucaniers. There were other perils of the deep, but it was not yet the season of hurricanes, and the Three Brothers was a stanch and speedy craft, while Alec and John and Will formed a trio of mariners who were innate masters of the sea rather than doomed to be its playthings. In her six weeks of flitting from port to port she had heard more than once of Quatros Hombres Cay and the way of Long Tom Pugh and others of his calling.
Earlier pirates had been different, men big in a crude way, moved by fits of cruelty or generosity as the mood swayed them. Sometimes they would kill, kill for the sheer joy of blood-letting, drunk with the fight, the reek of powder and the drive of blade or point through elastic flesh and stubborn bone. And again they would give some gallant foe his ship after they had glutted their fancies from the cargo, or send the survivors adrift in an open boat to take their chance of landing after having sworn them not to inform.
But Pugh and his ilk took no chances. They were marooners, leaving their victims on desert cays to perish, destroying all witnesses, yet styling themselves merciful.
And Margaret’s grief-shocked brain had determined that buccaneers had taken her Will and his brothers. True, the Three Brothers hull held nothing worth the rifling but she had the heels of the trading fleet and the pirates were apt at changing to a faster or sounder vessel than their own. On these lines Margaret had hidden her identity, asking rather than leading up to information, listening, piecing together, charming her crews and selecting by her woman’s wits the natural chiefs among them.
Even the child came second. With her on her wanderings went a coal-black West Indian negress, a giantess in size and strength, a child in loyalty and admiration of her golden-haired mistress, who played nurse to the infant and guardian to the mother.
Margaret knew, when she left the tavern, that the pox-pitted quartermaster would follow her. It was the compelling urge of her sex, grown to its utmost power in the hothouse of her love, that called to such rough spirits yet held their coarseness in check by the purity of her own spirit’s flame. She was a Circe and she bent men’s passions and wills as one might weave osiers to a basket.
As the quartermaster, the hot blood flooding his brain to one mad desire that was only tempered by a certain dread, emerged, tambourine in hand, its golden coins jingling slightly on the taut parchment, out from the heated tavern into the quiet night, he saw, between the interlacing shadows of the palms upon the shell road, silver where the moon lustered it, the figure of the dancer, vague, uncertain, almost ghostly in the checkered light that shifted with the play of the land wind in the plumes of coco-palms. She had a mantilla about her head, but he caught the gleam of her eyes as she glanced his way, and marked the play of her beckoning hand.
Involuntarily he crossed himself, then swore at his own weakness with a crude sea-oath and followed her in his lurching deck-gait. Followed, for she glided ahead without ever looking back, on beyond the clustering houses of the port, on to where a path led through the sea-bush. She went fast, and the quartermaster, his heart pounding a devil’s jig against the cage of his ribs, lunged after, striving in vain to gain without breaking into a run, from which the same latent, tugging fear at the back of his inflamed brain prevented him.
They came into a scanty clearing where a mud cabin stood and a little stream flowed from the hills and spent itself in the sand. An owl hooted and the quartermaster checked his pace at the omen. It might be the witch’s familiar. But he was a slow-witted man, save in the practice of his calling, and the strength of his body and the triumph of a hundred personal skirmishes had endowed him with a sturdy belief in his own prowess that built up a dogged courage born of the flesh rather than the mind. His purpose once set, he would hold to it. And he followed.
Lights glowed suddenly in the two visible windows of the little cabin and he saw the door open as the woman reached the threshold and, turning for the first time, drew aside her mantilla, showed him the witching oval of her face with its gleaming eyes and, with the tiniest beckon of her head, passed in.
There was but one room in the low-roofed place. By the light of two brass lamps burning whale oil, he saw that it was empty, saw too, that the only other door, at the back, was barred on the inside. There was little furniture. A low bed stood behind a screen and, near the pillows he saw what seemed a small bundle underneath the coverlet.
Who then had opened the door or lit the lamps? He felt the hair rising at the nape of his neck and the incipient goose-quills lifting down his spine. His hands tapped the pistol butts in his belt and the handles of his dirks and the swift wish came to him that he had a silver witch-bullet in the muzzle of one of the former.
But the woman had turned and, radiantly alluring, pointed to a rough chair in which he sat, even while he felt little cold beads break out upon his brow beneath his headkerchief. A slight draft caused him to slightly turn his head and roll his eyeballs toward the door through which he had just entered. It was slowly closing of its own volition. The dancer was holding out a pewter mug toward him.
“It is caña,” she said. “I will pledge you first.”
She sipped a little and swallowed it. He could see the moisture of the liquor on her crimson lips and he took the mug and drained it. The ardent stuff fired him, his eyes became bloodshot and he leaned toward her, swaying a trifle like an amorous bear. God, but she was beautiful! White—and tender and sweet! But some tingling touch of restraint still thralled him.
“What if I should take you, mistress?” he uttered in a deep guttural.
She surveyed him unafraid with her shining eyes. They held a hint of amusement.
“You would be dead long before the dawn,” she said, and the utter conviction of her voice hammered home to him the feeling that she spoke sooth.
“Did I not tell you I was Death?” she almost crooned. “I could kill you in a hundred ways, so very easily. They say I am a witch. You think so as you sit there. Wouldst see my familiar? Look at the window.”
Swiftly she lowered the wicks of the two lamps till they barely showed. The moonlight came in at one window and made a wedge-path to where the quartermaster sat. The path began some two feet from the window where the shadow of the wall below the sill ended. It was very white and luminous, squared off by the woodwork of the panes.
Slowly a blotch began to eclipse its brightness. A drumming noise commenced and quickened as the blotch enlarged and the pulse of the mariner beat faster until it seemed as if the sound were that of the blood flowing through his own veins. Then, suddenly, a face leered in at the window.
The face of a demon, livid, emitting a pale lambency that set off a great, grinning mouth set with pointed tusks between which lolled the tip of a lusting tongue, staring eyeballs floating in white circles, wide nostrils eagerly agape and crisp hair that seemed alive with mysterious lights. The skin was black, like that of a devil from the pit, and it appeared fungused with the phosphorescence of decay. It blotted out the moonlight and shone by its own radiance.
Santa Maria! This dancer was no woman! She was a ghoul, a succubus! The quartermaster snatched a pistol from his belt and pulled trigger. By some mischance the powder had fallen from the pan and it missed fire. But his brain gave no such ordinary explanation. The face was still there. And, by the living God! A snake was twining through the tresses! He flung himself at the door that opened outward. It was of solid hardwood and it resisted his heavy thrust as if it had been of iron.
Behind him the dancer laughed. He turned, sweat clammy on him, at bay, fumbling for a knife. The lamps were turned up again, the face had gone.
“Sit down,” she said. “Since ye can not go, sit down. I mean ye no harm.”
“No harm? Then why—”
“So ye should not harm yourself by trying to harm me. Take more caña.”
She handed him a fresh measure and took a pipe from a stand, filled it and handed it to him with a paper spill that she had lighted above the flame of her lamp. Half-mechanically he drank the liq
uor and accepted the pipe, sitting down once more. “Are ye human or what?” he asked, gaining false courage from the caña and the homely elements of her hospitality. “Or have ye tricked me? By the wounds of God’s Son, that head cast a shadow on the floor. ’Twas no spirit!”
He half rose.
“Wouldst try another pistol at it?” she asked smiling. “Or will ye go outside and seek it. The door is open now. Or closed, as I will. But I am flesh and blood. See.”
She took his rough hand in her smooth one and set it on the warm satin of her forearm. The beast in him leaped to the front. He sprang up, coarse mouth open, eyes crimsoning, his clutching hands apart.
“Sit down,” she said, and her voice rang like the crack of a trainer’s whip. “If ye would win me ye must woo me. Sit down!”
His half-befuddled brain obeyed the dominance of her will and he crouched rather than sat, as an unwilling brute going through a disliked performance.
She had said “if.” Would she come willingly to him? Would she play an obedient, eager beauty to his beast? If only she would take her eyes off his. She might be human, but those eyes were not. They made him blink as they had made Pugh blink. Yet she had preferred him to Pugh. Why not? He was the better man for all his ravaged face. Some day.…
“Ye are a brave man,” she was saying. “Ye have done brave things and ye will do braver, with my aid. Come, ye were going to tell me about this ring.”
There may have been some subtle herb steeped in the caña. The negress, voodoo-worshiper, who had so ably backed her mistress by her startling apparition, her sooty face smeared with match-phosphorus, fireflies in her wool, a harmless snake looped in the kinks, knew many secrets.
It was not the first time she had raised a devil to her mistress’ conjuring, using such simple but not necessarily transparent means as in the present case when she had lit the lamps and swung the door at sight of Margaret’s approach backed by a sailor-gaited man. Then, descending through the cellar-trap, kept covered by a grass rug, she had emerged by the outer hatch to play her demoniac role and set a prop against the entrance door as she and her mistress had planned for such emergency.
And it was small wonder that, with the setting, the suggestion and eerie atmosphere that environed Margaret, the quartermaster, knowing nothing of the existence of her sooty slave, had deemed the apparition supernatural.
Perhaps Margaret Graeme’s stress of will gave her hypnotic power. The quartermaster gazed upon the dull emerald and the twinkling eyes of the golden snake and felt his own will melting into a desire to serve. If she was Circe, he was Caliban.
He had meant to lie about the ring, to spin some yarn redounding to his own prowess, but his words came aside from his own volition and he spoke the truth.
“There were three of them left, all brothers,” he said. “We chased them all day, thinking them a gold-ship from the Plate, for there was one due in that neighborhood. The schooner was fast. We overhauled it at sunset and we sank it. We killed all the crew, for’ard and amidships, with a round of partridge. The Three Brothers it was called. Their name was Graeme.
“We brought them aboard in the longboat. I bound the youngest of them and I took this ring from his finger as I made it fast. One was bald and he mocked Pugh, who sent us ashore with them. We left them with a keg of salt-horse and an anker of brandy. ‘Pugh’s provender,’ we call it. They are dead now and you have the ring.”
“Where did ye land them. Where?”
“Nay, I know not. I told ye we chased them all day. We took no sun that noon. Nor did I check our bearings in the log for Pugh and I were at outs and I bunked for’ard for a week before. And since. Somewhere to the southeast of the Wind’ard Isles.”
He had told all he knew. In the longboat he had not heard Pugh mention the four men set ashore at a time when he himself had been ashore at Skull Cay, their own headquarters, recovering from fever and a bad shot-wound. Nor did Pugh himself know that Turtler Tom had found the shriveled men and styled the islet Quatros Hombres. Margaret repressed a sigh. She was balked of the pith of what she sought even while she heard what caused her heart to leap. For Will was still alive—she was strangely confident of that. He had been on a barren cay for eight weeks, nearly nine, for the quartermaster had said Sunday, and the babe was born on Thursday night. Nine weeks with the food that was an aggravation rather than sustaining, the rains had not yet come though they were overdue, but she was sure that her Will, her gallant, strong, loving Will, would win through. As her love had made her do wonders so his would help him to a miraculous preservation. Then there were John, the canny, and Alec, the capable. Oh, it was impossible to think of them perishing!
So now she bent her wits to locating the cay. “Somewhere southeast of the Windward Islands” was like saying “somewhere in the haystack lies the needle.” There were hundreds of cays—no man yet knew how many cays, since the charts were acknowledged vague—humping themselves above the waves, just awash, arid isles of the ocean desert.
But Pugh knew. And Pugh must tell. Pugh would be more difficult. He was not as plastic as his quartermaster, quicker-witted, more—due to his imagination—of a beast when aroused. Margaret swiftly made up her mind to ply the quartermaster of all he knew of Pugh, his rendezvous, his habits, his next intentions. This she would take to the king’s ship—there was one expected soon at Providence, and she would make her bargain. News of how to capture Pugh in exchange for information to be dragged from the pirate as to the whereabouts of the cay on which he had set the Graemes. She might go farther and ask for passage on the king’s ship.
Yet this course—and she reasoned so swiftly that the quartermaster knew naught of her mental process—was uncertain. Pugh might be kiled in the fight. And the Scourge had outsailed many a king’s ship. She must have two strings to her bow. The quartermaster was her surest method. Later would come the ultimate revenge if aught really happened to her Will.
While the shuttle of her mind shot nimbly through the warp and woof of her brain, weaving in bright strands of hope, the land-wind swept down from the hills in a sudden rush, bringing with it the swift patter of rain. Her heart leaped. It was a sign—a sign that before many hours the season’s fall would be mercifully drenching that scorched cay where Will fought off death. She turned to the quartermaster.
“It is a pretty ring,” she said. “I am sorry it has no stranger history or that we do not know it. Thank you.”
“Thank me not. Thank Pugh, or, rather, thank no one. You paid for it with your dancing. God, it was like the swaying of the seaweed in the lagoon pools when the tide shifts and all the colored fish swim in and out. And that last. It was a flame! See, I forgot the gold they gave ye.”
He took up the tambourine with its jingling coins from the table.
“I need it not,” she said. “Take it. Ye can use it.”
Open-mouthed, he goggled at her insistence, then pouched the gold.
“Ye care not for money?” he said incredulously.
“Not for coins. They pass through a thousand hands a hundred times a year. They are counters in the game. I like jewels. I love jewels!”
She sighed, and looked at him with deliberate languishment.
“I have seen rare ones, aye, and owned them,” he boasted. “I will get ye jewels that have adorned princesses, jewels from sacred shrines, jewels from the hilts of chieftain’s swords. I will outweigh thee with jewels. Why, look ye, once—”
“Go on,” she said. “Tell me of yourself, brave man.”
There is no flattery so subtle as that of Desdemona’s gift. All the world loves a ready listener, and the quartermaster talked until his own experience, his own limited invention, and what he remembered of the yarns of others were combined in his Ulyssean tale. Ever and anon the wind would rise to a gale with spit and slap of rain that passed unnoticed by the teller. At last he paused and emptied the mug she had kept replenished.
“I knew you for an adventurous man and a brave one, Simon Hart,” she sa
id, for he had told her his name. “You have told me your past. Give me your hand. I will read ye the future.”
Then from his horny palm she conjured a vision of success, tinged with suggestions to her own end that so accorded with Simon Hart’s self-estimation that it knit his will to achieve these things. She read and leavened his jealousy of Pugh, of any master, she cajoled him and held out hints of reward until he swore by all the gods of sea and land that she was a marvel and that he would prove her so.
“The men are with me,” he boasted. “Pugh is puffed up with pride and has forgot his fellowship. They are tired of seeing him with the lion’s share and, with their smaller measure, only harsh words. He would forbid them the freedom of the cabin, he would curb their shore liberty, he calls no conferences, he gives only half an ear to what I set before him.
“The wind blows my way now. And when we have given him the black spot, when he is deposed and I rule and reap a harvest of the Caribbean, wilt come with me to Skull Cay and queen it? I will build you a house and bring you mustee slaves, white slaves and black, and I will be the chiefest of them. I will make Pugh your servant. I will humble him as I will elevate thee. Wilt come?”
“Come back to me soon and tell me ye have done these things. We will reap the harvest later. Prove to me you are a better man than Pugh, Bring him to me or me to him—”
“What want ye of Pugh?” he asked with sudden suspicion.
“I hate him. He tried to kiss my lips. He would have taken me by force. I could have killed him but I would rather see you break him and then give him to me. See, the lamps are wan. The day breaks.”
Simon Hart leaped to his feet and looked through the rain-streaked window at the graying east.
“We sail on the flood,” he said. “Pugh would go without me. Farewell!”
He would have embraced her roughly, but she eluded him, and a hint of struggling rose stained the sky above the hills and flushed the room.
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 96