Peter Wicked

by Broos Campbell

  “Ooh arr. Then I reckon Manson or Jakes did it, zur. One of the mutineers.”

  I shook my head. “No, we’d’ve noticed it in the trim afore now.”

  He clucked his tongue against his teeth. “I reckon ’ee art right, zur, but it were zo gradual I never noticed.”

  “Was that Frenchman ever down here?”

  “Perhaps ’ee were, zur, but ’un means nothing now. What us’n got topsides idden enough vor gettin’ home with.”

  Which wouldn’t have mattered at all if I’d remembered to rewater before we left Birds Island.

  With the sun in the east behind a twist of silver clouds and a damp wind spitting down from the north, we dropped anchor in three fathoms water a quarter mile off the western shore of Salt Key in the Turks Islands.

  “There bein’t a drop of water here except as can be bought, zur,” said Gundy. “And they salt-rakers get begrumpled if ’ee even ax ’un to sell.”

  “I don’t aim to ask ’em.” I took my glass and ran aloft.

  I didn’t dare come any closer yet, with coral all around and the morning sun in my eyes. Salt Key is an inverted right triangle, about three miles long on the southeastern hypotenuse, with an additional mile or so of thick coral reefs thrusting out from the southern and northeastern tips. The land is low and rocky, with a scurfy thicket of pines topping a cluster of limestone bluffs in the northwest corner, and a stretch of mangroves showing as a dull green ribbon along the sheltered southeastern shore.

  From up in the fore shrouds I could see a smaller island to the northeast and a larger one to the north. The smaller was named Cotton on the chart and didn’t look to have much on it but birds and rocks. The larger, Grand Turk, held an on-again, off-again settlement called Cockburn Town, several saltpans, and a huddle of stone huts for the salt gatherers, or “rakers.” The islands stood on a shoal that rose suddenly out of the dark blue deep, about seven miles across from east to west and about twenty miles from the northern tip of Grand Turk to the jumble of rocks and coral that made up Sand Key in the south. The shoal wasn’t but nine or ten fathom in the lowest parts, rising up to within a few feet of the surface in places along the eastern edge, where there were three more small islands; but the sea over it was so transparent and the sand of its bottom so white and fine that I couldn’t have guessed its depth at a glance—where it was free of rocks and reefs, anyway. A particularly long reef ran along the south side of Grand Turk, extending down almost to the north shore of Salt Key, the near island.

  I hadn’t given Salt Key much more than a squint to make sure there wasn’t anyone home, but now I ran my glass across it a bit more carefully. In the great stinking saltpan that filled its southern angle, a bunch of persimmon-headed flamingos moved back and forth amid a shifting gray mist of brine flies. On the near shore of the island stood a few limestone huts. No smoke came from them, no movement except for a haunted-looking cat slinking along the roofs. The huts were deader than last week’s salt cod.

  The bluff at the northwestern corner of the island hid us from any eyes on Grand Turk as we made our approach. The salt-rakers habitually cleared out for Bermuda by that time of year, and there weren’t any salt boats or whalers on hand, neither; but you never knew who might be sneaking around.

  “Watch for any ships,” I said to O’Lynn, perched above me on the topsail yard. “And keep an eye on Cockburn Town over yonder, too. Give a holler if a boat puts out.”

  I took the dignified route down the ratlines rather than slide down the forestay. My trousers were getting to be as tarred as any foremast jack’s.

  “Gundy,” I said, stepping onto the quarterdeck, “hoist out the boat and put the barrels in her.”

  The barrels would weigh a good two hundred and fifty pounds apiece when they were full. A bosun would know how to deal with that.

  The Breeze had hove-to in the deep water offshore, about half a cable’s length off our larboard quarter. I stepped to the rail with my speaking trumpet. “Ahoy, Mr. Peebles!”

  The boy waved his hat. “Sir!” His voice was thin from distance, and the wind whipped it away almost before I could hear it.

  “Come to an anchor and send over Mr. Horne!”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Peter and Corbeau stood behind him, as if they’d stopped in the middle of jawing about something. Probably talking French, too, they being the only men in the Breeze that understood it. Peter had his hands clasped together in front, which wasn’t a usual posture for him.

  “Here, Mr. Peebles,” I called, “what’re them two doing on deck?”

  “Taking the air, sir.”

  “Is Mr. Wickett in handcuffs?”

  “Yes, sir, I dasn’t take them off. He says he’d have a word with you, if you’re willing, sir.”

  “Then let him come to me,” I said, as half a thought tickled the back of my mind. “Send him and Corbeau to the beach with Mr. Horne. And take off the irons—I don’t want him falling overboard and drowning.”

  The salt-rakers had hacked or more probably blown a channel through the coral, the better to ferry their salt out to the schooners that came down from the New England fishing towns. Without Turks Islands salt there wouldn’t be any salt cod, I guess—which the Spaniards call bacalao, which we got boiled on Fridays, and which the Spaniards are welcome to it.

  The Tomahawks ran the boat up on the sand with a crunch, I stepped ashore dry shod, and Eriksson got Simpson and Kennedy and the others busy trundling the empty barrels up toward the stone huts.

  The Breeze’s boat delivered Horne, Peter, and Corbeau to the beach, along with the seamen who rowed it. It also brought Peebles, sitting in the stern sheets with a pair of pistols in his belt.

  “Mr. Peebles,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

  “These are important prisoners, sir,” he said, sitting very straight. “Captain Malloy said that I should be particularly careful to keep my eye on them.”

  “Very well, then, you can sit here in the wet while you keep an eye on Mr. Corbeau and the boats.”

  It wasn’t exactly raining yet, but the sky was boiling up, and the gusts were already plenty damp. I expected we’d all be soaked before the day was out.

  “Oh, but sir!”

  “It’s a small island, Mr. Peebles. I doubt either one of ’em’ll go anywhere without us. Now, Mr. Horne,” I said, pointing my thumb over my shoulder, “get along with the Svensker and them, and see they don’t drop the barrels down a privy by accident. If you need to rig a tackle, you can fetch what you need from the Tomahawk. No breaking into houses.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” He set off up the path with the cheerful look a man gets when his job is mostly telling other fellows what to do.

  “Mr. Wickett, a word with you, if you please. This way—there’s better footing away from the beach.”

  “And fewer ears, too,” he said, but he had sense enough to say it in French.

  Peter shook his hands and rubbed the raw places on his wrists as we climbed up a low limestone embankment. A stiff breeze hit us hard enough to make the scattered raindrops sting. When we were out of earshot of the beach, he said, “So, what happens now?”

  “Same as what has been happening.”

  “Shall we continue to speak in French?”

  “Is there any point to it?”

  He glanced around at the limestone barrens and pine thickets. “I suppose not.”

  I turned to look behind us. Peebles had gotten the boats drawn up on the sand and had moved with Corbeau into the lee of some rocks, which was well enough; and he’d let his men wander all up and down the cove, which might also be well enough. The Breeze’s boat carried a mast, which was unstepped at the moment. I’d have used its sail as a rain shelter, but Peebles could figure that out for himself, or not. The Breeze and the Tomahawk tugged at their anchors against the wind and waves. I trusted Gundy to see to my schooner; the Breeze I didn’t know about, but Malloy had stocked her with some of his Constellations, and I guessed they cou
ld sail her without my help.

  I said, “I’m taking you to Commodore Gaswell.”

  “Young Mr. Peebles seems to be of the opinion that we are going to Washington City.”

  “Mr. Adams and the Congress ain’t due back till November,” I said, thinking of how Peebles would preen in front of the quality. Then I realized it would be at least November by the time we got home again, anyway.

  I looked at Peter out of the corner of my eye. He had gone from thin to downright scrawny, but there was still strength in the set of his jaw and the look in his eyes.

  “Gaswell’s been tarnal tight-mouthed about this whole thing,” I said. “Way I figure it, he wants to keep it quiet. And since I doubt he could keep it quiet was he to hang you, I guess your best chance is with him.”

  We walked in silence a while, and then he said, “I notice that you do not wear a sword.”

  “All I have is that assassin’s sword. Captain Malloy asked me to take it off, and I ain’t been able to put it on again since.”

  “I thought you despised Malloy.”

  “That don’t mean he can’t be right about anything.”

  We found a sandy path leading inland. Low, twiggy pines lined it. They tossed and moaned in the wind. Peter tugged his hat down tighter.

  “You are not, I suppose,” he said, “trying in some clumsy way to do an old shipmate a favor, are you?”

  My heart thumped. “Not this child.”

  We crested a hill overlooking the far side of the island. Below us lay a long inlet overgrown with mangroves. A crick emptied into it, but there didn’t look to be enough water to wash your socks in. Loose rocks shifted under our feet. A small cascade of chalky pebbles clattered down the slope.

  “The whalers’ll start showing up pretty soon,” I said. “Couple weeks, a man might have his choice of berths.”

  I turned my back to him. Down among the stone huts, Horne had found a cistern with a winch and bucket built over it, and had the men employed in filling the barrels. As I watched, they hammered the lid down on one of the barrels, rolled it aside, and dragged another into place. I couldn’t see how Peebles was faring down in the cove, but all seemed well with the sloop and the schooner.

  “Can you imagine me in a whaler?” said Peter, stepping up beside me. “Flensing the leviathan, boiling the blubber, lingering aloft in a crow’s nest filled with straw to keep my feet from freezing . . . I would do all that if I had to. But I cannot picture myself crying out, ‘Thar she blows,’ can you?”

  “You could be a mate, or even a captain.”

  He stared off toward Horne and his men, his eyes clenching against the breeze. “I believe those jobs are in short supply.”

  “It’d get you off this here island.”

  “I know nothing about catching whales.” He looked down at me. “What are you up to?”

  “Trying to save your neck.”

  “Why?”

  “I feel responsible. I let the Rattle-Snake sink out from under us.”

  “You give yourself too much credit. Now, with your permission, I wish to be alone with my thoughts.” He put his hands behind his back and walked away.

  I took a step after him and then stopped. “Well, then, you tell me: How do I make it right?”

  “You cannot,” he said over his shoulder. “You cannot leave me here, because you could not explain it later, and regardless, there is simply no place for me to go. I shall take my chances with the commodore, thank you very much.” He started off toward the mangroves.

  “Consarn it, Peter, come back here.”

  “Leave me be.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  He stopped and spread his hands, his back to me. “I was crippled with uncertainty and melancholy. You saw how Ben Crouch presumed upon me, speaking at my own table without speaking to me first. It was not the limit of his presumption. I was too preoccupied with my own misery to realize how deeply I had sunk. I felt much as if I were slogging through a fetid swamp.” He looked over his shoulder. His brows and lips twisted in a contemptuous scowl. “I proved to be shockingly weak. And then one day we had gone too far, and there was no turning back. I could slow it. I could save the good men. But I could not undo it.”

  “I think you’re right it was shock. From losing the Rattle-Snake.”

  He took his handkerchief out and touched it to his nose and eyes.

  I wanted to shake him. “Don’t tell me you’re suddenly going to get tender-hearted, Peter. You already told me it weren’t my fault and I can’t make it right anyway.”

  “You have hardened.” He turned toward me and tucked his handkerchief back into his sleeve. “I felt a sneeze, but it seems to have passed. You may be interested to know that Captain Tingey’s aide-de-camp, Mr. Crawley, tried to make me sign a confession of having mutinied against your cousin in the Bight of Léogâne. He was insufferable.”

  “So you shot him.”

  His old sneer was back. Deep creases lined his cheeks, and his nose and chin seemed to reach toward each other.

  “He had the gall to attempt to brace me about it in public. I asked him to explain himself. He would not. He could not, I think, as it touched on matters that the navy finds too sensitive for the public stomach.”

  “So you got yourself in a snit and threw away your career by challenging him to a duel.”

  “I would not characterize it as a ‘snit.’ Regardless, it would have been my career had I not challenged him. No one speaks to a man who lets himself be spoken to that way.”

  His face had worked itself into a scowl so deep that the corners of his mouth dragged his face about halfway down his neck. He turned his back to me again.

  “It was not petulance, Matty. Besides the monstrous lie of it, had I confessed to mutiny, I would have implicated you and Dick Towson and John Rogers as well. I had no choice but to refuse.” He shrugged, an odd gesture for him. “Besides, it was in my nature to confront him. I cannot change that any more than you can change your skin—for which you might wish to wear gloves and a broadbrim hat, you know. You are darker every time I see you.”

  I stared at a spot between his shoulder blades. “I thought that was safe with you.”

  “It is. Whether it is safe with you is another question entirely.” He turned and gave me the old bleak smile. “I managed to keep the pillaging to a minimum. I realize that hardly counts, but there it is all the same. And I made sure to put the loyal Breezes in a safe place.”

  “Safe for them or safe for you?”

  “Both. Whichever was convenient. I wished them no harm, for their sake as well as my own. I sent them on fool’s errands in Washington and Norfolk. I stranded half a dozen on Tortola, and no doubt they found their way to one of the forts overlooking the roadstead. I left others here and there, replacing them with volunteers from the ships we detained. All volunteers, my band of fellows.” He bent down and picked up a rock. He threw it down toward the crick. “And all dead now, too.”

  “Except for Freddy Billings.”

  “Except for Freddy. I despise children, I will have you know. But I could not chance that he would be mistreated, so I kept him on.”

  He started to step away again and I took his sleeve. “Crawley didn’t have nothing to hold against you, nor us, neither. You should’ve demanded a court-martial to clear yourself.”

  “I saw Mr. P. Hoyden Blair at the navy office in Washington.”

  “Him! You talked to him?”

  “I did not. I said I saw him. He was skulking out of Tingey’s rooms. Scuttled away when he saw me coming.”

  “Talk about chickens coming home to roost.” Blair the skulker, Blair the liar, Blair to whom all good things came in time.

  “While he yet lives,” said Peter, “he schemes to destroy us. To perjure himself would be nothing to him.”

  “We ought to go back and face him. Elsewise we’ll never get out from under it.”

  He shook his head. “John Rogers is dead. Dick Towson is dead. I am de
stroyed.”

  “So why did you tell me where to find you?”

  He looked at me as if from the bottom of a well. “I never did. Why should I?”

  “When you brought Greybar to me at Mr. Quilty’s hospital, I asked you where you’d go, and you said you’d go to live among the birds. Something like that, anyway. That’s how I knew to look for you at Birds Island.”

  He shook his head. “No doubt I meant it flippantly, as when you ask directions of a clodhopper and he bids you, ‘Ask mine arse.’”

  I put out my hand again, but I might’ve been a feather falling on a mountain, for all the effect I had on him. He was already out of reach. I watched him striding down toward the mangroves on those long shanks of his, and I was tempted to let him alone. But I had one more question to ask. I trotted after him, and then I heard a distant pop, faint against the wind.

  The shot came from down in the cove. The surrounding rise had muffled it, and I might’ve missed it entirely if Peter or I had been speaking at the moment; but as it was I charged down there with Peter on my heels. I expected another shot as I ran—Peebles had two pistols—but it never came. Then at last we clattered down the little bluff to the beach and I saw why. Peebles had dropped one pistol at his feet. The other he held cocked in his hand, but Corbeau had his fingers in the lock so it wouldn’t fire, and the two were wrestling grimly for it. None of Peebles’s men were anywhere around, and I was unarmed. It was a situation that demanded the utmost in subtlety and tact. So naturally I started blabbering the moment I saw them.

  “Hold, hold, hold!”

  I don’t know how many times I said it, but they both looked up at my cry. Peebles had a face on him like he’d come to the edge of the world and didn’t care for the view. Corbeau didn’t seem any more cheerful, but he did have the presence of mind to get a new grip on the pistol. He twisted. Then he stood away from Peebles with the cocked piece in his hand. He waved it to include us all.

  “We will thank you to lend us a little boat,” he said, speaking quick and low. “You have two and will not miss one for a little while.”

  “You’ll have a time of it,” I said, “keeping your powder dry while you get a boat in the water.”