Nightsong

by Valerie Sherwood

  Simmons had understated the case for he had never before seen Port Royal. Two-thirds of the town had vanished, and most of the rest wasn’t habitable. A sand-spit remained.

  He had nervously accepted Carolina aboard as a passenger - at three times the going rate. But he had paled at the first rumour of pestilence breaking out in the city.

  ‘Plague!’ he had cried, his young voice rising in panic, and ignoring the governor’s pleas that he take on more survivors, he had abruptly up-anchored and sailed away.

  ‘Running scared,’ muttered one of the ship’s officers in disgust. ‘Old Captain Simmons would never ha’ done it!’ A red sunset found them beating past Morant Point, heading for the Windward Passage between the eastern tip of Cuba and the northwest corner of Hispaniola. Sunset found Carolina dining in the captain’s cabin and borrowing a needle and thread to mend her torn gown.

  ‘I must apologize for having no women’s clothes to give you,’ said the young captain, eyeing with masculine approval the pretty picture his guest made in her yellow calico gown with bits of her flesh appearing here and there through the rents.

  ‘I suppose I could not expect it since you have no women aboard,’ sighed Carolina.

  ‘I could lend you some of my own clothing,’ he suggested diffidently, his boyish face flushing at the thought.

  Carolina hesitated. She was no hand with a needle and her dress would be awkwardly mended, she knew. But she was the only woman aboard this ship; word had already circulated among the crew that the celebrated Silver Wench was aboard - she had heard mutterings of it on deck - and it seemed to her that to walk about in trousers would put her on a level with New Providence’s notorious Rouge, who wore men’s clothing and swung a cutlass.

  ‘No. I do thank you but I will manage to make do with what I have,’ she said hastily.

  ‘Ah - yes. Would you care for some wormwood wine?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Carolina, who detested absinthe, although it was customarily drunk in Port Royal.

  The young captain looked chagrined. He had heard many stories of the Silver Wench - as who had not? - and he had somehow expected someone more flamboyant, more dissolute, than the steady-eyed young woman who faced him across the sturdy oaken table.

  ‘What happened to your husband?’ he asked suddenly - for everyone had heard of the famous Captain Kells. ‘Was he in Port Royal when the earthquake struck?’

  ‘No, he was not,’ said Carolina. An easy lie - she had already practised it on the governor, who had probably learned differently from the divers by now. ‘And since our house was destroyed, I thought it best to return to England and wait until he sends for me.’

  The young man opposite her fingered his glass and thought about that. The heady thought had just occurred to him that he was captain of this ship and in sole command here - and that this was a very desirable piece of womanflesh seated across from him.

  Carolina caught his thought. ‘My husband is accounted the best blade in the Caribbean,’ she said carelessly. ‘Do you fancy the long or the short sword?’

  A slight shiver went through her host’s thin chest. ‘I favour neither,’ he said promptly, and poured himself another glass of wormwood wine. ‘I am a man of peace.’ It was what his mother had always abjured him to be - a man of peace. And since he was a thorough-going coward, it had seemed excellent advice and he had hewed to it.

  ‘Indeed?’ Carolina laughed. ‘And yet you sail the Windward Passage which as all men know is haunted by pirates from New Providence as well as the ships of the dons! Tell me, how many guns do you carry?’

  Captain Simmons’s father had been brave to the point of foolhardiness. His stories had terrified his son - especially the one about the fever ship, which was the main reason he had turned tail and sailed precipitously out of Port Royal. It had been frightening enough sailing down the Windward Passage with his father’s strong hand to guide him. Now he was sailing back up it on his own - and this buccaneer’s wench was jeering at him across his own table.

  ‘You have sailed the Windward Passage?’ he asked stiffly.

  Carolina nodded. ‘Tortuga will lie on your starboard side once you have passed Hispaniola. I lived in Tortuga.’ Another life it seemed now, far away . . .

  Captain Simmons took another gulp of wine. ‘You must tell me about it,’ he said crossly. ‘For I have not seen Tortuga, nor am I likely to.’

  ‘I am too tired to tell you about it tonight,’ sighed Carolina, who wished to be alone with her grief. ‘If I have your leave to retire to my cabin?’

  Captain Simmons had been toying with the idea of suggesting that she share his cabin but her remarks about her dangerous husband’s prowess with the sword had dissuaded him. He rose. ‘I will see to the arrangements,’ he muttered and disappeared through the cabin door.

  I was right, thought Carolina grimly. He meant not only to charge me triple the going rate for my voyage to England - he meant to have me in his bed as well! She decided she disliked the nervous young captain. And realized she must at all costs keep up the fiction that Kells was still alive to protect and avenge her. Plainly her situation on board this vessel hinged on that. Her lip curled. It was little different from being in Port Royal!

  Bone-tired, she was glad when the captain returned and escorted her to her cabin. She gave him a wan smile and shut the door in his face, then latched it and tottered to the bunk and threw herself down upon it. She had expected to dissolve in tears but so tired was she that she fell immediately asleep.

  Carolina slept - but not peacefully. She tossed and moaned on the bunk, again reliving the earthquake - but with a difference. This time she was reliving, along with her own fate, bits and pieces of what had happened to others.

  In her dream she was standing again atop her house when the earth began to shake. Beneath her the brick building seemed to slant more violently and at the same time to sink. The roof was sliding off seaward and as it slid, Carolina saw what waited for her down below and a scream burst from her throat.

  Below her in the sandy street a great crevasse had opened up, and house and roof - and Carolina herself - were tumbling into it. The house went in first, almost majestically, along with two surrounding houses. And then the roofs. And then Carolina, clinging futilely to the railing as it buckled.

  She went in screaming - and felt the sand close about her like a vice, shutting off her wails, holding her motionless, locked in and suffocating.

  The next shock tore open the crevasse and erupted the newly fallen contents into the sea. In her screaming consciousness Carolina felt herself violently jerked upward, the world around her suddenly changed from solid to liquid. She was in the water, she realized desperately, and she almost drowned as she was sucked upward through the roiling water.

  She broke the surface gasping and saw in that blinding moment a sight she would never forget. Not all the horrors of Port Royal’s fall would ever match that moment.

  She was looking at a clawing hand that was just now rising from the water. A hand in which a ruby and diamond necklace was entangled - her necklace. And beside the hand a head of streaming ginger hair - Gilly! And through a great pounding she seemed to hear Kells’s voice, far off, saying, ‘I had thought to use the necklace as collateral . . .’ and there in the green depths she saw his face, looking up at her accusingly.

  She was threshing in the bed now, her whole body turned into one long wild scream. And the pounding was real - it was someone beating on the door.

  Bathed in perspiration, Carolina came foggily to herself. She was not in Port Royal, not in the water, she was lying in a bunk in a cabin of the Ordeal, and Captain Simmons’s resentful voice was bellowing to her through the door, asking her what on earth was the matter?

  ‘I am sorry,’ she called out in a quivering voice. ‘I was having a nightmare.’

  There was a grunt on the other side of the door and the sound of boots stalking away. She supposed the captain was now regretting having taken her aboard.<
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  But somehow her terrifying dream had dispelled the sense of unreality that had dogged her ever since the earthquake. It was all real to her now - real and terrible.

  Kells was gone. She was alone. She would always be alone.

  There in her lonely cabin she burst into tears. It was like a dam breaking. She could not stop weeping. As the next day passed, she only picked at her food and she stayed in her cabin.

  Captain Simmons was perplexed. At the very least he had expected this beauteous lady’s company at mealtime and for strolls around the deck. But the Ordeal continued to beat its way up the Windward Passage and still the lady did not come out.

  Captain Simmons had an answer for that:

  He stopped having meals sent to her cabin.

  15

  Driven by gnawing hunger - for after all she was young and strong and in vibrant health - Carolina at last decided to leave her cabin. She would take a turn upon the deck and find out why food had abruptly stopped arriving the day before yesterday. Did this green young captain from Philadelphia think he could starve her into taking her meals with him? She had, after all, paid for her passage - and a handsome price at that!

  It was with a glint in her silver eyes that she made determinedly for the door that bright morning. She had dried her tears at last and decided to rejoin the land of the living.

  But she had not made the door before the ship gave a lurch and she was sent in surprise against the wall.

  Quickly righting herself, Carolina made for the deck where she found a flurry of activity, with sailors scrambling over the rigging and a mountain of canvas billowing above her.

  She looked about her. The sun should not be coming from that direction . . . Why, they were heading northwest - not northeast as they should have been!

  The captain hurried by and she hailed him.

  ‘Captain Simmons, why have we changed our course? What is wrong?’

  He turned to her, his eyes wild.

  ‘D’ye not see those ships?’ he cried, waving his arm in an easterly direction. ‘They’re Spanish!’

  Carolina shaded her eyes from the sun and peered in the direction he was pointing. Two very tiny ships seemed to be bobbing on the horizon.

  ‘How can you tell at this distance?’ she asked mildly.

  In truth Captain Simmons had but fancied he saw a flash of red and gold flying from the mast of one of the ships, but it had translated immediately in his mind into the red and gold flag of Spain.

  "Tis obvious!’ he sputtered. ‘I saw it through my glass.’ His beautiful passenger gave him a sceptical look. ‘They are more likely to be salt ships from Turks Islands coming from that direction,’ she observed. ‘And while I have your attention, may I ask why the cabin boy has stopped bringing my meals to my cabin?’

  Up until that moment young Captain Simmons had intended only to veer away from a pair of ships that were most likely in these waters to be Spanish, beat his way northwestward away from them, slip through Crooked Island Passage, and turn eastward into the broad Atlantic on his voyage to England. But in his overwrought condition - for he was certain in his panicky heart that they were being pursued by Spanish warships whose one mission in life was to sink his unarmed merchantman - he now came abruptly to a different decision.

  ‘I have changed my mind about voyaging to England,’ he said testily. ‘We are setting course for Philadelphia.'

  ‘But I have paid passage for England,’ objected Carolina. ‘Surely you - ’

  Captain Simmons regarded this cool island beauty with something akin to hatred. How dare she stand there looking so unconcerned when they might all be blown out of the water if those galleons caught up with them? And to think he had dreamed of her last night, dreamed he was removing that badly mended yellow calico dress from her slim body, dreamed that he was running his eager hands over her silky breasts, pulling off her chemise, kissing her, fondling her -

  ‘Your passage money will be returned to you!’ he exploded, giving this buccaneer’s woman a look of anger. When we reach Philadelphia.’ Where I will sell this vessel, he was thinking. And never sail the treacherous seas again! Lord, but I had narrowly escaped death in Port Royal - if I had but landed a little earlier, my vessel would have been dashed to pieces against the shattered buildings as so many other good ships had been in that cursed harbour!

  Carolina stepped back before the venom in his voice - until she realized that it was motivated by fear. She sighed. After all, what did it matter if she reached England by way of Philadelphia? It would take a little longer, true, but if Captain Simmons returned her passage money she would have enough not only for passage from Philadelphia to England but enough to pay for good accommodation and to buy some decent clothes. She would not arrive in London looking like a beggar wench!

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Philadelphia it is. But I have had no breakfast and I have come to inquire if you intend to starve me?’

  Before her the frightened young captain seemed to draw himself up. His face grew puffy. ‘Find the cabin boy and get him to bring you some food,’ he shouted. ‘There will be no hot food on board this vessel until we have escaped - them!' He flung an arm outward towards the distant pair of ships.

  Thinking how much better Kells had managed matters aboard the Sea Wolf, Carolina went off to seek the cabin boy, who could find only some cheese and ship’s biscuits. She munched them as she watched those tiny ships grow a little closer.

  By late afternoon everyone knew that the captain was right: The ships were Spanish.

  Carolina expected the Ordeal to slip through Crooked Island Passage by night and into the open ocean. But in his panic, sure that the wind did not favour that, the captain drove his ship forward, penetrating even deeper into that vast chain of islands and cays the buccaneers called ‘The Shallows’, but which others called the Bahamas. With Deadman’s Cay to port and Rum Cay to starboard, he was floundering into Exuma Sound. If in desperation he turned west in an effort to reach the Straits of Florida, he could run the ship aground on the Grand Bahama Bank.

  By mid morning Carolina had decided that the captain - who was looking bleary-eyed and distraught as he stood beside the helmsman - was in need of advice.

  ‘Had Kells been in your situation,’ she told him conversationally, ‘and chosen not to engage, he would have played tag with his pursuers among the islands.’

  ‘Exactly what I’ve been telling you, Cap’n,’ muttered one of his ship’s officers, standing nearby.

  Captain Simmons gave them both a grim look. He was fast losing his youth. A grey pallor spread over his face every time he looked past the Ordeal's stern at the steadily gaining galleons which now flashed gold in the sun. ‘And what would you suggest we do now?’ he demanded helplessly of the officer who had spoken.

  ‘I would turn hard to starboard past Devil’s Point and lose them going round Cat Island,’ volunteered Carolina, who had not been asked. ‘I heard Kells say once that he had done that.’

  They both turned to stare at her.

  ‘Of course,’ she added cheerfully, 'he only did it so that he could swing round Cat Island and come up behind them and take them by surprise. You will be doing it to gain the open ocean.’

  ‘Go away and find something else to do, mistress!’ roared the young captain. ‘Running a ship is men’s work.’ Carolina shrugged and strolled away. But she noticed that after a hurried conference the ship changed course. Not long after that, the officer who had been there when she had given the captain her advice found her.

  ‘We are all beholden to you, mistress,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Young Captain Simmons is too green to be in command of this ship and had his father not died so unexpectedly on the voyage, he would not be. Old Captain Simmons would have followed your advice and struck out for the open ocean. But our young captain is fearful. He has heard tales of the Inquisition - all true, I don’t doubt - and he has a terrible dread of falling into the hands of the dons. It is his plan to hug Cat Island’s co
ast and set his course for Eleuthera Island and from there strike out for Philadelphia.’

  ‘What do you think of his plan?’ she asked.

  His answer was a shrug. ‘I think it will most likely get us all killed, but captain’s orders is captain’s orders.’ Carolina leaned upon the rail after he had left and stared moodily at the pursuing galleons. The sea was a brilliant glittering blue, the sky azure. They were so near land that the air was full of seabirds and landbirds, swooping and crying in flight. Above her the white sails billowed, a mountain of canvas. It seemed incredible that on such a day anything bad could happen. And yet there were those galleons, relentlessly pursuing ... If only Captain Simmons could bring himself to steer a bold course. She doubted that he could.

  All day they played cat and mouse with the golden galleons along Cat Island’s eastern coast. Night found them off the dangerous reefs that fringed Eleuthera’s ninety miles of eastern beaches. And there the captain was at last persuaded to strike northward for Philadelphia under cover of darkness. It was an overcast night with no visible stars. The Caribbean night seemed to have closed them in like a dark blanket. There was little wind so they made scant headway, the sails for the most part drooping and flopping. And where would the galleons be tomorrow morning?

  Carolina asked herself that question as she made ready for bed. Suppose they were taken by the Spanish? What kind of treatment could they expect?

  She tried to take her mind off that. It was not too difficult. Indeed a film of numbness had slid over her mind in the wake of Kells’s death. Being captured did not assume the terrible importance it once would have because at the moment she cared little what happened to her.

  She would live or she would die - fate would decide.

  Meantime she leaned her chin on her hands and sat in gloomy contemplation of all that might have been.

  It was better, she decided, to be born lucky than to be born either beautiful or rich. For if you had luck you needed little else.

  Neither she nor her two elder sisters had had much luck, she told herself. Look at what had happened to them! Penny, the eldest, for all her beauty and her wild spirit, was lost these many years and probably long dead somewhere in Philadelphia. Virgie had had a tragic life - but she had won through at last to happiness with Kells’s brother in Essex; whether Virgie’s luck would hold, Carolina, in her present pessimistic mood, would not have cared to wager.