by Steve Goble
It was not a good morning, Spider thought. He had found Lazare’s rum, by God, and had carried off two bottles of it. He’d intended to stow one away for later, but as Sam Smoke’s hard stare arose again and again in his mind, he’d kept drinking. He’d eventually tossed both empties overboard and stumbled back to his hammock. If he’d slept an hour, it was in a stupor. He’d have slept through the Bible reading entirely if Hob had not been sent below to rouse the hands.
Now, with bright Caribbean sun pouring onto the deck, Spider seemed to sway in one direction as Redemption swayed in the other, and Odin had propped him aright more than once.
“I shall call roll,” Nicholas Wright said, approaching the crowd with Abigail Brentwood and the mysterious flame-haired beauty following him. Both women wore dresses of white, reflecting the morning sun in a way Spider deemed angelic. “We shall begin the reading once the captain is with us,” Wright added.
“Might I suggest a reading of Revelation, sir?” The Reverend Down raised his hand. “I believe it would be the proper message.”
“Captain Brentwood left such matters to his Quaker friend,” Wright said, “and I am hardly the best man to judge.”
“I am rather an expert,” the reverend said tersely, “and I assure you . . .”
“I assure you,” Wright said, “my duty is to see the captain’s wishes done.” He turned before the preacher could say another word. “Hiram Allsworth,” he called.
“Here, sir.”
“Thomas Ames.”
“Here, sir.” That call came from the poop deck, where a helmsman remained at the rudder.
“Edward Chambers,” he bellowed, for the man he called was up in the trees as lookout. Redemption was still under way with the rest of the convoy, so some men had to remain on task, though it was a gentle sea and a fine, easy wind.
“Aye, here, sir,” the reply came down.
“John Coombs.”
Odin poked Spider viciously in the ribs, and Spider answered, “Aye, sir.” Still feeling the rum, he’d not been prepared to respond to his departed friend’s last name.
“Were you waiting for him to call Spider John Rush?” At least Odin had maintained the sense to whisper that name.
The master continued the roll.
“Chace Lazare.”
“Aye, sir, and good bread stolen in the night, sir, and a small cheese.”
Mister Wright scowled. “Does any man have an accounting of the cook’s bread and cheese?”
“Cook didn’t mention the rum,” Hob whispered, laughing.
“He’s not supposed to have it, himself,” Spider reminded the boy.
“Aye,” Hob said. “Was the bread good?”
“I didn’t . . .”
Spider closed off his reply when the master’s voice rose. “The captain will be made aware, and no doubt will be displeased that stores meant to be shared by all are being pilfered instead. We treat you well, men, and deserve your respect and obedience. Punishment upon the guilty party will not be pleasant. Do not let this behavior continue.”
Spider noted that Wright’s eyes scanned the entire crew, but fell most often upon Hadley.
The mystery woman’s wind-swept red hair caught Spider’s attention. She was just a few feet away, talking to Miss Brentwood, and the flash of green eyes and the fine face arrested him. She noticed him staring, nodded slightly, then turned quickly and hurried away. Sam Smoke’s odious presence stepped into the space she’d just left, and Smoke watched her vanish into the assembling crowd, his gaze traveling up and down her body.
Odin bowed his scarred head as if in prayer to hide his face. Smoke clamped down tightly on his pipe, shook his head slowly, then muttered something only the devil might have heard. Then Smoke wandered off, too. Spider hoped the man had gone to empty his bowels overboard and prayed for a nice ocean swell to tip the son of a bitch into the depths. That would ease Spider’s mind greatly, although he wondered if it wasn’t a rather blasphemous thought for a Sunday.
Wright continued calling the roll, from memory, his voice rising as he climbed the ladder to the quarterdeck above.
Spider rubbed at his bearded face. When he pulled his hands away, he saw Abigail Brentwood chatting with Rufus Fox, and he regretted his bloodshot eyes and foul breath.
Wright worked his way through the roll all the way to Edward Williams, then declared, “All hands accounted for. Mister Fox, if you will join me here on the quarterdeck, I think you will find it to be an excellent stage for your reading while the men, and ladies, of course, listen below. The captain will join us shortly, I am sure.”
“With pleasure, sir.” Fox tucked his leather-bound Bible under his arm and ascended the ladder, while Wright climbed higher to the poop. The Reverend Down climbed up after Fox and wielded a Bible of his own. Thomas the cat gave a surly meow as the men passed by.
“Ecclesiastes,” the reverend grumbled quietly, “will be lost on this hoard.”
“Ecclesiastes is my father’s favorite of all the Bible,” Abigail Brentwood said, calling aloud to Fox. “I am quite fond of that book as well. It is poetry, to my mind. I think it an excellent choice.”
“Thank you, dear,” Fox said, bowing slightly. “I know your father will approve.”
The Reverend Down cleared his throat.
Wind sang in the cables, and the ship creaked as they waited for the captain. The sun warmed Spider’s face, and he shut his eyes against its brightness. He told himself he would open them again once the reading began. If anyone needed to heed the Lord’s word, he figured, it was a former pirate.
He never heard that reading, though. Instead, he heard a single gunshot. Spider winced as the thunderous sound ripped through his rum-soaked head, and he wondered for just a moment if he’d been shot.
Thomas the cat leapt with a loud screech and hurled himself into Hob’s protective arms. Abigail Brentwood gasped, then let loose a scream more intense than anything Spider had ever heard during bloody combat or the horrible surgeries that followed.
Miss Brentwood crumbled to the deck, and Spider jumped to help her. He expected to see blood on her blouse or skirt, then realized she was staring gape-jawed at her father’s cabin.
All other gazes were aimed in the same direction. The shot had come from within Captain Brentwood’s cabin.
“No! No! No!” Miss Brentwood growled the word repeatedly in drum-like cadence as Hadley forced Spider aside and put an arm around the girl’s shoulder.
Down and Fox looked down from the quarterdeck rail as Wright missed nearly every rung, plummeting from above and landing on the weather deck with a thud. “Make way! Make way, damn ye!” The sailing master shoved through a crowd of hands who had rushed toward the captain’s door. “Captain! Captain Brentwood!”
Wright rattled the latch and growled. “Locked, damn it!”
“This one, likewise,” said a man shaking the cabin’s other door on the opposite side of the mizzenmast that rose between them.
Wright pulled a leather cord from around his neck, and a batch of keys dangled from it. He fiddled with them for a moment. “Where the bloody hell . . . ?”
Wright flung the keys behind him. “Damned thing is gone!”
The master took four steps away from the door. “Stand back!” Wright rushed forward and rammed his shoulder against the heavy oak. He was a powerful man, but the solid door did not budge. Spider ran to a toolbox near the rail and grabbed an axe. Wright rammed his shoulder into the unyielding oak twice more before Spider got the axe to him. “Use this, sir.”
Wright grabbed the tool, men got out of his way, and in four great sweeps of the heavy blade, he shattered the wood and the latch. Another shove with his shoulder, and the way was clear.
Wright was the first inside, and Miss Brentwood tore herself from Hadley’s grasp and rushed in behind him.
Spider thought the girl’s ensuing wail might haunt him the rest of his life.
“Come, Spider,” Hob said, his hand on the carpenter�
�s shoulder. “Let us have a look.”
Spider clamped a hand over Hob’s fingers. “Aye,” he said, though the boy’s eagerness bothered him. He pushed his way through the crowd around the door, Hob following in his wake.
The captain’s quarters were spacious, as far as nautical cabins go, but so many men had spilled into the space that one stood on a sea chest lashed against the bulkhead, and another would have knocked over the towering case clock in the corner had it not been secured with ropes. It took Spider a moment to worm his way through the men and see what had happened.
It was a scene of horror.
Sunlight stabbed through the grating above to show Captain Brentwood, dressed for duty, slumped on the deck near his desk. Blood had spilled across his desk, run down the front of it, and splashed on the wall behind it. The back of the captain’s head was simply gone, and hair and bits of bone clung to the bulkhead.
His right hand had a loose grip on a pistol, and blood had eddied around the weapon.
“Dear Lord,” muttered the Reverend Down, peering through the grating. He closed his eyes in prayer while Fox rose from his spot. Spider heard Fox’s boots drum on the quarterdeck as the man ran to the ladder.
Spider had seen plenty of gun deaths in his day. It appeared the shot had been at close range and that the ball had rammed through the captain’s forehead near his right eye. With his eyes, Spider traced the air where the ball must have flown and found the shattered wood just to the left of the door Wright had hacked to pieces.
Everything smelled like copper. The blood scent was so thick that Spider had half a mind to throw open the doors to the stern gallery and rush out of the cabin. He almost thought he might empty his belly into Redemption’s wake, so foul was the blood scent, but there was scarcely room to move within the cramped space. He swallowed hard.
Abigail Brentwood knelt, her dress nearly touching the pool of sticky blood on the deck. She shook with heavy sobs, and Wright stooped beside her, whispering softly.
“Do not touch him, Abby,” Wright said. “The navy lads will want to look this over, satisfy themselves as to what took place, as we sail under their protection. They will need to make reports to the Admiralty.”
Spider had witnessed many a bloody scene in his day, indeed, he had created more than a few, but nonetheless he fought the urge to be sick. Here was a good but sorrowful man, apparently done in by his own hand. And with the doors closed tight, the blood stench was awful.
“Your father was in great distress, Abby,” Wright whispered. “He missed your mother so. He is with her now. It is what he longed for.”
Spider blinked hard and fought the churning of his stomach and the boozy maelstrom in his head. Focus, he told himself. Find a fixed point. Settle your attention on that. Breathe normally.
His gaze fixed on an uncorked ink bottle in its slot on the desk, and then on a quill, and then on a scrap of parchment. Words were scrawled across it, but Spider could not read them. He could tell, though, that the hand that had written them had been shaking mightily.
“Mister Wright,” he said, pointing at the desk. “I think the cap’n may have . . .”
Wright rose quickly and seized the parchment. He stared at it for several heartbeats, each punctuated by a heavy sob from the man’s daughter. “It says only, ‘I am sorry.’ Oh, God, Abby.”
Miss Brentwood lifted her eyes heavenward. A low wail, starting in a deep tone, but rising quickly in pitch and volume, became an incoherent screech before Fox shoved his way through the gathered hands and into the cabin. He pulled the girl out.
“He would not,” Abigail sobbed. “He would not.”
“Come, miss,” Fox said, tugging her by the arm. “Take the air, the fresh, clean air.”
Wright followed in their wake. “Abby. Your father is in pain no longer. And I have a thought that might give you some solace. A special place your father loved. A final resting place . . .”
Once that trio had left the cabin, everyone remaining grew silent.
“Damn me,” Spider said quietly, suddenly forgetting his churning belly and inhaling deeply through his nose.
Hob stared at him in disgust. “You suck this foul air in like a bellows,” the lad said.
“Aye, foul,” Spider whispered into Hob’s ear as he tugged the boy out of the cabin. “But not foul enough, damn me.”
“What?”
“I do not think the cap’n took his own life, Hob. I will explain,” Spider said tersely, “once I spy where Sam Smoke went.”
7
As things came to pass, Spider had no time to explain himself, nor to explore the vessel in search of the pirate.
“Church must wait,” Wright said to the Reverend Down, who stood clutching his Bible to his chest. Wright looked aloft. “Chambers, signal His Majesty’s frigate, if you please,” he called. “Distress, and permission to come aboard.”
“Aye, sir.”
Wright plunged down a hatch, toward the passenger berths. “Abby . . .”
Spider glanced off the port bow, where Southampton coursed about two hundred yards away, under reduced sail so as to not outpace her slower charges. Redemption, her great, wide hull built for cargo rather than speed, was slowest of all the ships in any wind and thus brought up the rear of the convoy. Spider expected the frigate to signal all ships to close ranks while Redemption’s new commander rowed across to Southampton to report the dreadful news. Instead, he saw the last thing he wanted to see.
Southampton was readying a boat for launch.
“They are coming to us,” Spider said, turning so quickly he almost whispered the words into Odin’s nose.
“What?” Hob asked.
“I said the fucking pirate-hunting Royal Navy is coming over here.”
A call from above confirmed Spider’s words. “Southampton answers, sir, but you are to remain here; she’s sending an officer.” The call was passed below to Wright.
“Ha!” Odin said, heading to the mainmast in no apparent hurry. Nothing, save Sam Smoke, worried Odin, and he seemed somewhat emboldened by the fact Smoke had not apparently recognized him thus far.
Spider, however, was plenty worried. His last close look at the king’s fellows had involved bloodshed and shackles and a desperate escape, and he did not want to risk recognition. Austen Castle had sailed from Jamaica earlier, but crew and officers might well have changed hands, and there was at least a fair chance someone aboard Southampton might have been involved in Spider’s arrest. It was not a gamble Spider wished to take.
A call came from above. “Southampton orders, sir, all ships to drift.”
Hands were scurrying into the rigging as Wright returned to the weather deck and gave orders to furl sails. The other ships in the convoy were already reducing canvas.
Wright’s attention was drawn upward, so Spider decided to go low.
“Orlop for us, Hob. Come.”
The orlop was as low as one could go on the ship, and it meant foul air, bilge water, stifling heat, and rats. But it was as unlikely a place to encounter a visiting navy man as Spider could envision, and so that was where he would hide.
“Coombs!” Wright called.
“Aye, sir.” Spider froze in place, well short of the hatch, and waited to hear the man’s order.
“Stand guard, will you, at the captain’s door. See that no one goes in or out. We shall have nothing disturbed before His Majesty’s fellows have had a good look. Hob, you can assist.”
“Aye, sir,” they said in unison as Spider’s heart did a gannet dive. For once, he wished he were a foretop man. He’d feel much safer up there.
“Well, then, this is a very bad spot,” Hob said once Wright had gone off. “I am supposed to help you saw wood and hammer things, not guard a dead man while naval officers take a right close look at us.”
“Aye, ye lubberwort,” Spider said quietly. “This is perilous. Hush, now. I must think.”
They took positions to either aside of the busted cabin entrance, k
icking aside the shattered remains of the door, and still the smell of blood was thick—and that was amiss, like calm water in a heavy wind. That fact again roused Spider’s suspicions, and his thoughts tossed about wildly.
All he could think of for now, though, was the slow approach of the boat from Southampton and the odds of any member of the visiting crew having seen him during his captivity and escape. He’d altered his appearance, yes, but was shorter hair really enough of a change? He suddenly regretted his haste in chopping short his beard. And then there was Hob, taller and browner and stronger, but still the same boy who’d not long ago been a naval prisoner. And Odin, for Christ’s sake, could anyone who ever saw that mangled face ever forget it?
No, Spider decided. We are foundered, shipwrecked, lost if we remain standing here. No doubt the navy men would want a look into Captain Brentwood’s cabin to satisfy themselves as to the situation. No doubt the buggers would march straight toward the cabin the moment they stepped onto the bloody deck, would stare Spider in the eyes, would recognize him as a wanted pirate, and string him up within the hour.
He could almost feel the noose.
Spider’s throat grew cold, and with his maimed left hand he reached beneath his shirt for the pendant he’d carved for Em, who now seemed farther away than ever. His mind raced as though gale-driven, trying to conjure some vital carpentry work that would get him off the main deck. “Pardon me, sir,” he would call, “but the spars need replaced or the boat needs patched or the capstan needs greased or . . .” It had to be urgent work, and believable, for Wright was not foolish. Unfortunately, the fluyt was in outstanding condition; Spider himself had worked damn hard to assure that. And Wright, a famous ninny at dice and cards but a sailor through to his bones, knew the vessel inch by inch. No bit of made-up busy work was going to get Spider out of this hard spot.
After a long, agonizing wait during which Hob whispered, “We are fucked, Spider,” at least four times, the navy officer and his party were piped aboard. Spider cringed. They stood amidships, a handsome young lieutenant and two seamen, and the officer looked entirely too familiar. Wright and the officer exchanged words, and while Spider could not hear what was said, the visitor’s mannerisms seemed to stir memories. The confident posture, the aristocratic tilt of the head . . .