“Which am I?” asked Jenny, still confused.
“In either case, you plead that you are pregnant, which you both genuinely are, so they don’t hang you. If you’re Mary Read, you die of a fever in prison, after childbirth, never seeing your new husband again. If you’re Anne Bonny, they let Calico Jack come to your cell for a last good-bye before they hang him. Your pirate lover. It is a poignant moment. What do you have to say to him?”
“I . . . uh, my love?”
“You tell him, and these are your words: ‘I’m sorry to see you here, but if you had fought like a man, you needn’t be hanged like a dog,’ and that’s his lot.”
“And what’s hers?”
“Hers?”
“Mine.”
“You don’t hang.”
“Jennnnny!” came the voice of Jenny’s mother, calling from the patio.
“There’s y’r mum,” said the captain.
“Jennnnny!” came the voice again, very insistent, and Jenny went off, promising to see him before he left. Her footsteps retreated down the dock. It was last twilight.
“There’s Venus.” The captain pointed to the darkening sky.
“Way back at the beginning,” I said, “you told me there was something about the pirates that I should always remember. What was that?”
“I don’t remember saying anything about any ‘the pirates,’ being as how it’s too small a word for the collection. That is, there’s Drake, Morgan, Kidd, and Calico Jack, the whole lot, plus lots more we haven’t talked about. Dear boy, we’ve hardly scraped the subject. Of no pirates, I mean.”
“No pirates?”
“Not as a grouping. No such thing by very definition. Just them as lives in the seams and spaces between the rules . . . in governments, churches, academies, businesses, tennis clubs, and pub society—pirates ready to come out and ransack from the spaces between the spaces, as they properly should.”
“Properly?”
“Considering nature. Sparks of life, dancing. Electric opposition of this and that; teeny-weeny particles of energy; flash of opposites and whatnot, balancing; very restless and uncomfortable. If you’ll join me in a beer, we’ll drink a toast to the brotherhood.” I took a bottle from his little cooler.
“To the pirates,” I toasted.
“Pirates are a dime a dozen, and mostly villains, but I’ll drink to the brotherhood,” he said, doing so.
Monday
The offshore fog bank drifted in overnight, “some t’ick,” as Clyde Hirtle put it, after backing his pickup truck over a fire hydrant in front of the bank. He had driven Mother there to finish their business. By the time they got back, the paint crew was working on the upstairs hallway and bathrooms, and the inspectors were there with their clipboards. When they were unable to find fault with the work, they signed whatever paper needed their signature, and I went out to the parking lot to take down the “closed” sign.
I was tacking up a replacement that said “Reopening Thursday” under the inn’s pink portrait of Admiral Anson with his crooked wig, when a black sedan slid out of the fog and paused by the gate. At the wheel was Roy Moehner, gesturing, talking to another man in the passenger seat. Seeing me, he smiled, made a small wave, and drove away. With him went whatever joy I’d had in hanging our hopeful new sign. His smile seemed to say, “You may have won this round, but we’re not done with you yet.”
Jenny came by on her bike in the morning, still sniffing after the captain. He had gone to Baywater with Noel Nauss to try to find a replacement for Merry’s rubber raft at the army-navy surplus store, and replacement flares. Meg went with them. They returned with a raft, and more supplies in the early afternoon, carrying it all down the dock. When they finished with that, Meg went off to spend hours on the telephone, and Noel lugged the captain’s chest back down to Merry, where it was stowed again in its original spot. “What do you keep in it?” I asked.
“Oh, bits and pieces, odds and sods.” He located the key, pulled off the padlock, and threw open the lid. “Needs a bit of air now and again anyway.” There were stacks of papers—mostly papers—with some bound manuscripts, books, and objects hidden in cloth wrappings. A bleached bone stuck out of one.
“That’s Luke Willing’s thighbone, and it’s the last that’s left of him. He wanted to be buried on the slopes of Nevis, with a view of Montserrat. I’ll plant what I’ve got of him there next time I get to Gingerland. And here’s a fragment of Teach’s diary, in his own hand, and the old trial transcripts on a number of chaps. There’s a log by Cavendish in there somewhere, some original Anson letters, and Rogers’s correspondence with London through May, 1719. Rare stuff. I’ll publish it all in my next book.”
“When will that be?”
“No clue,” he shrugged. “Possibly the passion will take me again as I get younger. Meanwhile, I’ve got my little macramé, and the occasional delight in passing, such as your good company, Jim. Now, be a good lad and fetch me two balls of number-two marline from town, plus a cake of beeswax and half-a-dozen three-eighths-inch galvanised shackles, and whatever else is on this.” He handed me another shopping list, and money, and off I went again. By late afternoon, when Jenny returned, prowling, I had lost track of him, immediately arousing her suspicions.
“The cellar!” she pronounced, bringing out the flashlight she had taken to carrying. I told her she wasn’t going to need it, but I went out with her, through fog that made everything drip. The cellar door was closed, and no light burned inside, but Jenny insisted on going in anyway to check the lock on the grating, which did turn out to be again open.
“Aha!” she said, starting below with the flashlight. This time I didn’t have one, which made me nervous and left me no choice but to stay on Jenny’s heels as she descended to the next level and turned left. Her notion was to explore the corridor that the captain had come out of the previous time we found him there.
“That’s where he’s working,” she said.
“Working?”
“Shhhhh,” she shushed me, wanting to find him before he found us, for a change. In order to dim the beam of her light, she held her fingers over the lens as we made our second turn, off the route we had learned, and into the unexplored alleyway. Here was more fallen masonry among pools of tidewater, and a dripping ceiling overhead. We passed doorways to dark chambers at either hand, keeping to the central passage, until it made a fork that we could see by the reflection of our light on wet stonework.
“Now we go left,” said Jenny.
“Shhhhh!” This time it was my turn to make a shush. We listened. From the darkness of the right-hand corridor, there was an unmistakable sound, very rhythmic, like a chant from far away. The small hairs around my neck stood up. What strangeness was this? I reached to take the light from Jenny, but she held onto it, picking her way forward, forcing me to follow. The sound became louder, a song, a familiar song, and the captain’s voice singing the refrain:
“O solomongundy, solomongundy
Good all week long, Mondy through Sundy
Sailing from Lundy to foggy old Fundy,
How I loves my sweet solomongundy.”
Where the passage ahead made a hard turn, directly in our path, Jenny’s light revealed a scattering of stones and a hole in the wall where they had been, before being chiselled out of it. A mallet and cold chisel lay among the debris. Out of the hole came a flashlight beam, picking up both of us. The song dissolved into a rumbling, phlegmatic laugh.
“My little friends. Welcome. I should have known y’d be along.” Inside the hole in the wall, the captain sat propped against the face of what must have been the original passage, before being diverted by masonry. His legs were stuck out in front of him, crossed, and he had his rum flask in his hand. The passage beyond vanished into a darkness that outranged Jenny’s flashlight.
“You’ve found another walled-up passage,” I noted. “Where does it go?”
“Over there,” said he, with a flick of his light into the same da
rkness that Jenny’s had found. We both made our way through the hole he had cut, and Jenny continued onward.
“It just ends,” she said, stopping, causing me to run into her. After a short distance, the corridor was completely plugged by a sloping wall of fill.
“Aye,” he agreed, taking a swallow from his flask. “It just ends. Like all else, including even me and thee, and the old earth herself some day. Meanwhile, here we are, in a passage to nowhere, with no rainbows or any pots of gold at their ends, what?”
“Where are we?” Jenny wanted to know.
“We’re just here,” he pointed to his plan of the cellars, bringing us back, “and that’s a tunnel that goes off to somewhere we can’t get to, because when they modernised the road that’s above us into a highway, a bunch of heavy machines came through, cutting out a new roadbed, and sliced right through this wee tunnel. They probably never even noticed, filling it in. What’s there now is maybe eighty feet or so of dirt, rock, and gravel. So there’s that.”
“Where does the passage lead on the other side?” I asked. “Where does it go?”
“Decent question. Damned decent. I’ll drink to the answer.”
“We can dig . . .” I started to say.
“My digging permit’s expired. Besides, I wouldn’t fancy tunnelling through that lot, right under the highway. Did you feel that?” His reference was to a deep vibration. “That’s a heavy lorry. We’re under the end of the parking lot, and fifty feet farther; we’d be under the wheels of every thundering great truck in and out of Grey Rocks, with our little shovels. I’ll give you my chart to your cellars, but I’d leave this part of it alone, and not mention it.”
“What are you looking for down here?” Jenny asked.
“Mistress MacGregor. What are you looking for down here?”
“I asked you first.”
He considered. “There’s logic and merit in that, and I’ll honour your argument, and drink to your good grasp of the legalistic arts.” He did so.
“What are you after?” she pressed.
“Dear Jennifer. Jenny. One seeks, knowing not what one might find, the treasure being hidden within the process.” He hoisted himself to his feet, shoo’d us back out through the hole in the wall, and followed. I helped him reset the stones he had chiselled out, until it was hard to notice that they had been disturbed.
“What finally happened to Anne Bonny?” Jenny asked, as we made our way out. I wasn’t the only one he’d left with questions.
“Why, she retired and vanished.”
“Vanished?”
“Poof. Just like that. But, after everything she went through, wouldn’t you want to get away for a while? Maybe start being a mother? Close the door on your past?” With a clang, he slammed the iron grating to the subcellar, locking it. “You could say, vanishing’s the greatest virtue of all, the very grail itself. No more strings, and all of your ends are gone.”
Jenny pedalled off into the fog. Meg was starting a cook-up for a special family supper that she called her treat. She had shopped for it. “Time to cheer up,” she said, and the captain and I went off to tidy ourselves, as did Robin, who had been working with the painters all day. Tom came by for a beer, and tipped the captain to be ready for a visit next day, from the same gentlemen who had called for him earlier.
Meg’s special supper was memorable from whichever way you looked at it. First, it was indeed cheerful, and I helped pep it up with stories about the antique dealers of Boston. I got some good laughs, particularly with Madame Lipstick, although I did not mention her ring. The captain got even better laughs with his description of me in my white shorts and kneesocks. Under the cheer, the inn was back on its feet, with a fighting chance for survival.
“When will you start the concert schedule again?” Mother asked Meg. The weekly event had brought in many customers, and promised many more.
“On schedule, next week,” said Meg, “but I’ve found you a good replacement to deal with it, because . . .” Here Meg paused for a deep breath. “I’ll not be here.”
“Are you going somewhere?” Mother asked. Meg began to twist her fingers together. She was indeed going somewhere.
“Ireland, land of my ancestors,” she said, “with our friend the captain, here.” She nodded to him, as soft to him now as once she was hard. The captain sat looking very relaxed, framed by the fire that I had lit against the cold of the fog outside. Meg took a deep breath, and plunged on. “I don’t like long good-byes, so I’ll make ’em now. You’ve saved my life here, and given me the closest thing to a family that I’ve ever known.” She had tender words for each one of us. I could hardly believe what was happening. I had noticed that the captain and Meg had been a lot chummier since our return, but there were obviously bigger forces at work that had evaded me. Mother, too, and Robin, from the looks on their faces.
“I’ve always been better with a fiddle than a mop, and there’s fine music in Ireland, according to him.” She indicated the captain. “And he’s better in my books now. I’m good on boats, and Chloe’s going to have a sandbox, and I’ve got my passport, so . . .” She ran out of words, and there was a long silence.
“On the subject of passports, there are some gents coming to talk to you about yours,” Robin said turning the subject to the captain, who made a languid gesture.
“It’ll get sorted out. I’ve got one or two other things left to do before we sail, so not to worry.” It was a relief that their departure did not seem imminent. Meg had made arrangements for her own replacement at the inn, for her work and to keep the concert series going. “I’m a skip-stone that God threw, and I’ll sink if I don’t keep skipping.” Meg didn’t much cry, but I made up for it. Overpowered by loss, I felt my eyes fill with tears, and then they came rolling out. His Irish lady was Meg, I realised, and I was losing them both.
“Steady on,” growled the captain. “We’re not gone yet.” He turned to Mother, and produced an envelope with a short manuscript inside. “There’s 750 words of good copy about the inn, written so that the Sunday newspapers will like it; get it typed and copied, and send it to every travel editor between here and Florida, with a couple of good photos, and they’ll print it. Not enough people know about you.” He handed the manuscript to Mother. “I predict, madam, that with you at the helm, and with a bit of help from your friends,” he glanced at Robin, “you’ll weather your shoals, and give a pleasing retreat to the ghost of the good Admiral Anson, should he ever wander in this direction.”
“The things you’ve done for us . . .” said Mother. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Madam, by drawing us a beer, and one for Jim, here, so we can all drink a toast.” With only a moment’s hesitation, Mother complied, Meg helping. The captain raised his mug.
“Here’s to vanishing,” he toasted. Seeing our uncomprehending faces, he amended it: “And to the inn, and yourselves, and music, and fair westerlies, and . . . what have I left out?”
“To the brotherhood,” I rallied.
“The brotherhood!” he echoed, and everybody drank, little understanding what they were toasting.
The beer must have gone to my head. I wasn’t a drinker anymore, so I went up and to bed, thinking about what questions I had, and what things to say in the few days before the captain sailed off across the Atlantic with Meg. That was different. Some surprise, although it was no surprise that Meg needed more than the inn had to offer her. I was turning the whole thing over in my mind, listening to the foghorn on the end of the breakwater. It made a loud and mournful moan every thirty seconds, perfectly echoing my sad and lonely frame of mind, until at last I went to sleep to it.
Tuesday
“Jim!” Meg’s voice came with her hand shaking me awake. “We’re sailing, but he wants to give you something, and say goodbye.” I sat up, protesting that it was the middle of the night, two o’clock in the morning to be precise, in a dense fog, and she must be kidding.
She was not; then she was away, leav
ing me to get some clothes on and follow her. On my way down to the dock, I noticed Noel Nauss’s truck in the service drive, and Noel himself stood by Merry, as I trotted toward them.
“Give us a hand with the spring lines,” the captain commanded, casting off sail gaskets. I did it, trying to collect my thoughts, and then there was Meg, giving me a huge hug goodbye.
I had a hundred warnings for her, but all I could get out was “Write!”
“I never write, but I’ll blow you kisses.”
“So will I,” said the captain, imitating her, “kisses from afar.”
“Why are you leaving in the middle of the night?” I protested.
“Fair question, and if you are asked that, you can tell ’em that we left on a fair tide, with a perfect weather report, except for this bit of fog, which is no bother. Tell the coppers who are looking for me, that we can’t delay, the hurricane season being almost on us, and I’ll be sure to check in with the authorities at Nevis, when we get there.”
“Nevis?”
“That’s where I have to plant what’s left of Luke. Must do it. Been putting it off forever. After Ireland. Then, I’ll have to touch Blighty to visit the Ailsa Craig people for my poor old engine parts, after which we might pop down to the Canaries, then toodle over to Nevis in the right season. Some year. No need to mention all of that, just say we’re bound to the Caribbean. Here’s this.” He handed me a pennywhistle, like his own, with an antique-looking instruction booklet.
“It’ll show you how to play it. If you learn some tunes, we can play a duet when our paths cross again. Now, throw that stern line to Meg.” Instantly, he was preoccupied with getting Merry under sail, starting with the mizzen; it luffed in the wet breeze. The vessel swung into poised position, nosing the wind; Noel snubbed the bow line, the little ship’s last restraint. The captain hoisted the mainsail with Meg handling the peak halyard, getting the same kind of instruction he had given me.
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