“Well, I will let you off the hook for the time being,” I said, “on account of we been taking turns cooking and I am sick of salt-junk and boiled turnips.”
He chuckled. “I knows you gonna do right by me, Mr. Graves.”
“Your neck ain’t out of the noose yet.”
He kept smiling. It looked a little strained, but it was a smile. “I knows you gonna do right by me, sah.”
Greybar had come up on deck to see what was going on, and Doc scrunched down, his peg-leg sticking out in front of him. He held out a finger. Greybar stared at him, half-arching his back, and then he trotted over, squeaking with each step.
“Dat’s a boy,” said Doc, rubbing his forehead. “I guess dere’s someone around here dat appreciate ol’ Doc’s cookin’. See dat, Mr. Graves?” he said. “Dis here cat remember me. It all dat fine fish I give him on da way up to Warshington last June, I expect.”
“He just wants to sharpen his claws on your peg-leg, I expect.”
Greybar tilted his head back so Doc could scratch his throat.
“Don’t pay no ’tention to dat awful man,” said Doc. “C’mon, you cat, an’ he’p me find da galley an’ I fix you up a treat.” He stumped off forward with Greybar dancing along behind him.
• • •
I turned to the man that Doc had been chained to. His face was scabbed and peeling, as if it had gotten burned and burned again without healing, and his black hair hung low over his dark blue eyes. He refused all speech until O’Lynn talked to him, and then he became a torrent of Gaelic.
“Says his name is Kennedy, sor,” said O’Lynn. “Says there were Americans here, but they’ve been gone t’ree days, and Agnell left soon after. He’s got them t’ree fellas turrified, there. They suspect to get their toongues cut out for ’em, whether we’re here or no. Ah, they’re morderin’ slyboots in their own right, but they’re afra’d of Agnell.”
“Not Mèche?”
“He says he seems a just man, sor, if it’s the American you’re meanin’.” He listened to Kennedy a moment more, then added, “He was short-tempered and sarcastic, he says, and pretended to be French at first, but his men called him Peter Wicked an’ that gave the game away. An’ for all his pretendin’ to be a hard man, sor, he crewed his sloop with runaway slaves, them that was unwillin’ foremast jacks in the ships he took, an’ they had a great admiration for him. But Agnell is cruel.”
“Thanum an Dhul,” said Kennedy. He touched his sunburnt forehead, his heart, his breast on either side.
“Name o’ the devil,” said O’Lynn, and crossed himself as he listened to Kennedy. “The Stinkard’s own man for the lash, that Agnell, sor, and all were mortal afra’d of the cargo.”
“What’s he mean, afeared of the cargo?”
“Africans, sor. Wild men from the interior, the most ferocious craytures to be imagined, and captured in some war or another as is none of our affair. The Shearwaters stole ’em out of a slaver they came across as it was sinkin’, and all her people dead, there. The men guessed Mr. Martin—himself as was captain of the cutter—he meant to sell them wild men, sor, and they decided among themselves they would have a piece of that money. So they mutinied.”
“Sell them where? In Guadeloupe?”
“No, sor, never in life, he says, for the French would impound the cutter. An’ they cannot go to Havana or some such place for the same raison, even if ’twas legal to trade in a Spanish port. The American is to find a buyer and meet with Agnell, there.”
“Meet where?”
“Dunno, sor.”
“Mèche met the Englishman here to buy slaves?”
“No, your honor, he says. He says the meeting was happenstance.”
“Did Mèche abet the mutiny? Did he aid ’em at all?”
“Dunno what abet is, sor, but he raised not a hand to stop it.”
There would’ve been little that Peter could’ve done, him with a few dozen men against the cutter’s sixty and more. And why should he interfere? The mutiny was King George’s problem, and he was welcome to it.
“Tell me one other thing. Did they paint over the cutter’s name?”
“Aye, sor, an’ so they did. No names an’ no colors. Agnell said ’twasn’t piracy that way.”
I gazed hard at Kennedy; he stared at my feet, but from the looks of him he was just a clodhopper from some boggy hole in Ireland.
“I guess you must be an honest man to believe such a lie,” I said. “Tell him that, O’Lynn. And tell him he’ll be hanged in chains if a King’s ship takes him.”
Kennedy mumbled a few words in Irish. He gave his former captors a contemptuous look, sitting side by side in chains on the deck and sneering at him, and then he smiled at me.
“He says he’ll put his hand to any work your honor cares to give him, sor, an’ be glad of it,” said O’Lynn, “but he’ll meet his fate in the Dear’s good time.”
“Very well. We’ll sign him on.”
Kennedy crossed himself when O’Lynn told him the news. If he was grateful it was to God, not me.
“Now as for you three,” I said, turning to the others, “suppose you tell me your story.”
They were as speechless as if this Agnell really had cut their tongues out. They transferred their sneers from Kennedy to me.
“You’re hard fellows, ain’t you,” I said.
“Aye, that we are,” said the largest one. “Harder than the likes of you, an’ we’ll say no more than that.” He hawked and spat, but his aim was off and he gobbed up his britches.
“Very well. If you can spit on yourself, you can shit on yourself. Simpson and Hawkins,” I said to our two largest men, “put ’em in the hold to stew till they get tender.”
Horne had found two men on the island. They were remarkably filthy even for seamen gone ashore and left to their own devices, not least because of the steady drizzle of guano. They’d had a fight before we got there, too, but whether with each other or someone else wasn’t immediately clear. One’s head was leaking bright blood into the white sand. He breathed, but didn’t respond to questions or poking. The other was curled up around himself, writhing like a snake on a pitchfork, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Not with Horne standing over him with his foot on his neck.
“To stop him running off again, sir,” he said before I could ask.
“Again?”
“Again, sir. Not that he’d get very far, but I thought you’d want to talk to him before he slips his hawser. He’s got a knife in the belly.”
“You can take your foot off him now, thanks.” I knelt down and tipped my hat back on my head. “What’s your name? Here, let me see that.”
“Leave it be! God . . . fuck your . . . eyes,” he hissed, clutching the handle of the knife. “If the blasted thing could be fetched out . . . I’d have done so . . . wouldn’t I? It’s stuck . . . in me spine.”
I had to get down on all fours to hear him. He could barely whisper, and the shrieking and whistling of the birds near deafened me.
“Keep a civil tongue in your head,” I said. “I could hang you out of hand as a pirate.”
He sneered. “You’ve a brave little . . . tongue in your head . . . haven’t you? You and your ‘I could hang you . . . out of hand.’” His breath came in ragged gasps. “I’d regard it as . . . a kindness . . . truly . . . and so would you . . . was you . . . in poor Isaiah B. Harrison’s place.” He waved a hand at himself to indicate he was the poor Isaiah B. Harrison in question, and then jerked his head toward Horne. “First order o’ business—get this nappy-headed barstid . . . out o’ me sight.”
“Why would I do that?”
He bared his teeth in a hideous grin. “On account of . . . you want to know . . . what’s been going on here.”
“Mr. Horne, there’s a pile of goods over yonder. I’d like an inventory of them.”
He reached in his pocket. “Aye aye, sir. Got a list right here.”
“Double check it, please.”
“Aye
aye, sir.” If he’d stepped on Harrison again as he left, accidents will happen; and if Harrison hated him a little more for it, he hated him already. But Horne just walked away.
Harrison watched him go. He chuckled. It was a mistake. He clutched at his belly. When he’d gotten his breath back down to a steady pant he said, “You’re a sorry barstid.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why’s that? Because you’ve been . . . presumed upon, mate. They’ve foisted . . . a nigger bosun . . . on you.”
It was like he’d smacked me on the back of the head. I looked at Horne, moving purposefully about the pointless task I’d given him. It’d be easy to use Horne to get to Harrison. All I had to do was go along. I looked at Harrison, with his eyes bugging out as he grinned at me.
“He bleeds red,” I said. “Now suppose you tell me what happened.”
“What you think happened?”
“I think you participated in a mutiny, threw in your lot with a man I’m looking for, and got in a fight over how best to dispose of the goods once he left.”
“‘How best to . . . dispose o’ the goods.’ I like that, mate . . . An’ you’re not too wrong, neither. But if leading you . . . to your quarry . . . gets a rope around that barstid Agnell’s neck . . . I’d be happy to provide.” He worked his lips. “Providing you provide.”
“And what do you think I should provide?”
“And what ought . . . the gent’man provide? Why, a drop o’ rum . . . would be a good . . . beginning.”
“Rum? Man, in your condition it might kill you.”
He giggled, a nasty, wet sound. “I’m a dead man already, mate . . . don’t think I don’t . . . know it. If you want your man . . . you’ll want Agnell . . . an’ if you want Agnell . . . you’ll give us . . . a tipple.” After whiskey mixed with a little lemon juice and three parts water had been brought, and he had drunk it and complained that it wasn’t rum, he said, “Make for the Virgin Islands. Drop your hook . . . in Deadman Bay . . . an’ I’ll tell you more.”
“If you live so long.”
“That’s right, mate.” The bones of his skull were prominent beneath the skin. He grinned.
I found Horne up in the dunes that ran along the crest of the little island—not that I had to look too far to find him. You could pretty much see the whole place from there. Chests and crates and barrels surrounded him—ship’s stores, mostly, from the look of it—and the sand all around had been dug up. Not recently, though, as it was dry. In his fist, dangling by an ankle, was a doll like the kid had in the Horseneck.
“What did you find?”
He held up the doll. “Bunch of these, sir. No silk cloth, though, except what the dolls are dressed in.” He referred to a scrap of paper in his hand. “Ten barrels of gunpowder of various grains, a large quantity of shot in mixed calibers, and two dozen cartridges for the shore battery down at the cove. But what the people are more interested in is these two casks of rum and that hogshead of wine over there. I got Wright standing guard on it.”
Wright touched his hat at the mention of his name. He was a little fellow with a long nose, a water-only man from Boston, a religious bigot but steady otherwise. He could be trusted to relish the job of denying drink to his shipmates.
“Good,” I said. “What else?”
Horne rattled off a list of pretty much everything you might need for a sea voyage—bedding, hardtack, salt junk, dried peas, lemons. Twenty water butts: ten of them full, one of them half-full, and the rest empty. Firewood. Cordage, pitch, turpentine, and other ship’s stores.
“Seventy-five gallons of blue paint, ten of yellow, five of black, and one pot each of white and red,” he finished. “What were they doing with so much blue paint, I wonder?”
“I guess they captured a cargo of blue paint. Did you find any money?”
“No, sir.”
I took his list and looked it up and down. I turned the paper over and read some more. Even without the eight barrels of silver it was quite a haul, and all of it mine. Well, a quarter of it, anyway, after the government and the commodore and everybody else took their shares. Assuming they ever saw it, of course . . . It would be wrong to load Tomahawk up with what she could carry and make for a free port, with no questions asked or answered and no duty paid but a few bribes. Captains better regarded than I was had abandoned their missions to take prizes and sell the proceeds, with no harm to their careers. They’d retired as rich men who snapped their fingers at Congress. That would be something to bear in mind if I couldn’t bring Peter to heel.
Which it wasn’t worth thinking about just yet. I looked over at the Tomahawk, with her hasty black coat of man-of-war paint looking sad over the old blue and yellow. Then I went down to the cove to take a closer look at the shore battery.
On the southernmost of the two islets that guarded the anchorage, on a raised platform about eight foot square, a pair of twenty-fourpounder carronades squatted like big-mouthed gargoyles on their sliding carriages. Above them hung a lantern on a mast, clearly meant to guide a friend into harbor at night—or to lure an enemy. I got a mild case of the South Carolina quick-trots at what might’ve happened to Tomahawk if the battery had been manned the night before.
Beside me, Peebles stared at the carronades like it was free candy day in Candy Land.
I looked over at the Tomahawk, at Horne already telling off a detail with scrapers to get the loose paint off her sides and rails, and then back at the boy beside me.
“Doing Tom Cox’s traverse, Mr. Peebles?”
“Oh, no, sir. I don’t even know him.”
“He’s the fellow that’s up one hatchway and down another.”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“Then he’s three times around the mainmast and has a pull at the scuttle.”
He still looked blank. I sighed.
“Tom Cox is what sailors call a man who makes himself look busy without actual doing anything. In everyone’s mess and no one’s watch.”
He’d gone back to staring at the carronades. “Yes, sir.”
“Ain’t anybody give you something to do, Mr. Peebles?”
“No, sir.”
“I told Mr. Horne he could paint the schooner. Why don’t—”
He’d lifted a hand to point at the guns. “Oh, sir! Can’t we—”
“No.”
“We could—”
“No.”
“But—”
I held up a finger.
With my hands clasped again behind my back, the way Peter had taught me, I rocked on my heels and cogitated on the logistics of replacing our twelve-pounder with one of them monsters. It would weigh in at about fifteen hundred pounds with all its tackle, not quite twice what the twelve-pounder weighed, but only about three hundred more than a long three. A long gun used a third as much powder as the shot weighed.
“Mr. Peebles, what’s the powder-to-projectile ratio of a carronade?”
“One to eight, sir.”
“Three pounds of powder for each shot, then. I don’t calculate her timbers’ll stand the firing of it.”
Now he looked like a boy with a toothache on free candy day, but it was a small misfortune, as misfortunes go. I climbed up on the wooden platform, which was about waist-high in the front, and looked around.
There was no other anchorage. Birds Island was little more than a crust of sand and guano over a footprint-shaped lump of rock, reaching at its highest about thirty feet above the surface of the sea. It was perhaps two miles long and a thousand yards wide, running from east by north to west by south. No trees grew on it, but, down at the north end, a couple of ancient stumps scraggling against the sky showed that some had grown there once upon a time. The crest was carpeted with survival weed, a tough-looking type of purslane that if you chewed it you could get enough moisture to stay alive a while. An outwork of coral reef on the windward side, the northeast, kept the surf from washing the island away, but hurricanes probably swamped the dunes several times a year. In
addition to the wetter aspects of the island’s atmosphere, the trade winds kept up a steady precipitation of sand. It was one of the miserablest places I’d ever hoped to see.
Far up the beach, near the reef’s southern end, a flurry of gulls seemed to be mobbing something crawling in the sand.
“Mr. Peebles, come up here. What do you make of that?”
“Looks like a naked fat man, sir.”
I jumped down from the platform. “Mr. Horne,” I called across the cove. “Come with me.”
Half an hour later, we discovered that our naked fat man was in fact a large pink pig rooting in a pit. Several seamen who had escaped the painting detail had followed us up the beach.
O’Lynn clutched his head in horror and pointed at the pit. “Oh, the cannibal! The devil swallow him sideways!”
Showing through the sand were human legs, arms, heads with the faces chewed or pecked away. The flies and gulls that had scattered at our approach resettled on the corpses, covering up the hideous grins with a living shroud.
An older sailor put his hands over Peebles’s eyes. Peebles struggled free of the hands and stared into the pit.
“Get him out of here,” I said. “And fill that pit in. No, belay that—Mr. Horne, take Simpson and Hawkins, here.” Simpson and Hawkins were ex of the Royal Navy, strong as oxen and twice as smart, but they were lambs when it came to following orders. “Look for papers, diaries, clothing, anything that will identify these men. When you’re done with that, bury them proper. You others, drive that pig down to the cove and kill it.”
I stalked back down the beach. The pig trotted beside me, jostled along by the men and rolling its eyes with worry. I had the men bury the powder and shot and the rest of the stores. Peebles I put in charge of marking the sites, to help him not think about the pit.
A man came to cut the pig’s throat. The pig broke away, screaming in fright, but another man snatched up a barrel stave and whomped it on the head while his mate stuck it in the throat.
“Hang him up to bleed, Bob Wilson!” cried the man with the barrel stave. “And fetch a basin—you’ll want his blood for pudding.”
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