Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom

by A. C. Crispin

  Beckett rose from his chair, walked around the desk, then over to stand beside him. “Now your neckcloth and shirt, Captain Sparrow, if you would be so kind.”

  Sparrow’s expression had gone stony, but he took off his neckcloth, then unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off his shoulders. The smooth-skinned torso thus revealed was lean and fit, not a spare ounce on it. Beckett gazed intently, noting the tiny scar between Sparrow’s collarbones. Then he focused on his left shoulder, where there were two scars, fairly close to each other. The lower one was about the size of a shilling and roughly circular. The other was a thin, brighter red line about an inch higher.

  Unable to stop himself, Cutler Beckett stepped closer, raising his hand. “Which one is from the swordfight?” he asked. “This one?” He brushed the roughly circular mark, barely grazing it with his fingertips, “Or this one?” He touched the narrow red line.

  Sparrow’s control abruptly deserted him, and he flinched away, giving Beckett an outraged glance, before looking down. He moved sideways, fetching up about two feet from his employer. “It’s the topmost one.” A wave of dull red darkened his skin, starting just above the little scar, suffusing his whole countenance.

  Beckett stepped back. “I see,” he said. “Exactly as described. Well, thank you, Captain Sparrow, for your cooperation. You’ll understand, of course, that I did have to check.”

  Sparrow didn’t reply as Beckett went back to his desk and resumed his seat, only busied himself buttoning his shirt, retying his neckcloth, then shrugging on his waistcoat. His eyes were as expressionless and dull as unpolished agate.

  “Well, Captain Sparrow,” Beckett announced, briskly, “that concludes my investigation, and you’ve been vindicated. You’ve proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that you were telling the truth all along. So I owe you an apology. Of course I’m gravely disappointed about not finding Kerma, and the treasure, but, nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say.” Beckett rose from his seat. “I’m sorry I misjudged you, Jack,” he said, and extended his hand across the desk. “Will you accept my apology?”

  Gravely, the two men shook hands. Beckett smiled warmly. It was not returned.

  Sparrow returned to the corner to don his coat and pick up his hat, clearly expecting to be dismissed. “Just a moment, Captain,” Beckett said. “Wouldn’t you like to discuss your next cargo and assignment?”

  “Oh! Yes, of course, Mr. Beckett,” Sparrow said. He came back to stand in front of the desk.

  “Please, have a seat,” Beckett invited.

  Sparrow sat down. Beckett opened a drawer, rifled quickly through a file, then selected a sheet of parchment. “Ah! Here we go. Captain Sparrow, I know your thoughts on this matter, but I fear I have no choice but to insist. This letter is from Lord Penwallow, and, as you will hear, he has asked for you specifically.”

  Beckett began reading aloud: “‘Accordingly, will you please begin gathering a cargo of approximately two hundred prime Blacks for shipment to my new plantation on New Avalon? At least one hundred and fifty will need to be prime strong Bucks, and the rest may be Wenches, preferably those of gentle nature, and trainable in the Arts of keeping a Civilized Household. Montgomery will need the cargo before the spring planting is to begin. If your Captain Sparrow is available to take them, that would also be most Pleasing to me. That young mariner is so careful with cargo, I feel sure that under his Oversight, we will lose no more than, one hopes, a quarter of the cargo during the Crossing.’”

  Sparrow was already shaking his head. “No. No, I’m sorry, Mr. Beckett, but I can’t do that. Lord Penwallow said, ‘If your Captain Sparrow is available to take them.’ I’m not available, and that’s your out. Find another captain.”

  “I’m afraid there isn’t anyone else, Captain Sparrow,” Beckett said, putting the letter down. “All of my ships are out of port. As soon as I received the bearings you provided for the proximate location of Kerma, I gave orders for my expedition to assemble, then sail northward. Surely you noticed when you tied up that the Wicked Wench is the only ship currently occupying the EITC dock?”

  Sparrow shook his head yet again. “Well, another ship is bound to show up within a few days, Mr. Beckett. Besides, the Wench isn’t fitted to haul…that type of cargo.”

  Cutler Beckett shook his head, in turn. “I am sorry, Captain. I checked my scheduling, and we’re not expecting any other ships to return for at least three weeks, and probably more. As the saying goes, my hands are tied. Mr. Mercer just completed the purchase of His Lordship’s order. We must ship that cargo out. The longer they stay in Calabar, overcrowded into the holding pens, the greater the chance of some pestilence wiping out the whole lot of them.”

  Sparrow was staring at him, evidently realizing that Beckett wasn’t going to back down this time. The captain wet his lips. “No, Mr. Beckett. I won’t do it. I’m sorry to have to do this, but I formally resign my position as an EITC captain.”

  “Captain Sparrow, there is something you need to consider before you do that,” Beckett said. “I’ve been sheltering you from an unpleasant truth, I fear, because of your exemplary work for me in the past. When an EITC captain loses more than one cargo within the span of a year—for any reason, even pirate attacks—the company has the option of charging him for the cost of the lost second cargo. It’s a clause we included to protect us against incompetent mariners. Check your contract.”

  “But—”

  Beckett raised a hand, cutting him off. “Captain Sparrow, I’m willing to make it worth your while to carry Lord Penwallow’s order. But if you refuse, even if you resign, you will still owe us for the muscovado sugar you lost. And that sum comes to…” He checked an account book, then did a quick mental calculation. Then he named a sum. Admittedly, he padded it a bit, just for the enjoyment of seeing Sparrow’s eyes widen, and hear him gasp softly.

  “Mr. Beckett, I don’t have that much,” Sparrow said. “It would take me years to earn that much.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain. If you resign, you will owe us this sum. If you refuse to take a rightfully assigned cargo, you’ll owe it, too. But…” Beckett tried to sound reassuring. “If you make this one trip for me, Captain Sparrow, and thus make it possible for me to honor Lord Penwallow’s request, then I will promise you, on my word as a gentleman, that I won’t ever ask you to do it again. If I had another captain to take this cargo I would hire him, but, as you can see for yourself, I don’t.” Beckett spread his hands and shrugged slightly.

  Sparrow sat there. His face was under control, but he couldn’t hide the look in his eyes. If Beckett hadn’t been so focused on humbling, nay, taming the EITC’s West African “free spirit”—as he’d come to think of Jack—he might have felt sorry for him. My Sparrow has just discovered the limits of his cage, I fear.…

  Beckett leaned back in his seat, watching Sparrow’s internal struggle for a few minutes. Time for the coup de grâce....

  “I can see this is difficult for you, Jack,” he said. “I am sorry to have to demand this of you. I’m realizing that this voyage may be a genuine ordeal for you, and I’d like to show that I appreciate your sacrifice for the company. So I’ll make you a proposition. I know you’d like to have a ship of your own. If you will command the Wicked Wench to deliver Lord Penwallow’s cargo, I’ll sign her over to you. You will own her, Jack.”

  Sparrow’s eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. “You’d do that, Mr. Beckett?”

  “I would,” Beckett said. “I will. All you have to do is take her on this one voyage, and then come back here. Look.” He opened another drawer in his desk and withdrew a file. “Here is the title to her. The day you return from the successful completion of this voyage, I will sign this over to you. For the sum of, let’s say, a shilling. Just to keep everything perfectly legal.”

  Jack Sparrow was looking dazed. “I…I…”

  “You want her, right?”

  “Yes, yes, I do.”

  Beckett heard the fierceness underlying his voi
ce.

  “I can’t make you a better offer than this one, Jack. You’d be mad not to take it.”

  “I would be,” Sparrow said. “Excuse me for a moment.” He stood up, then strode over to the corner, and stood staring at the blank wall, fists clenched.

  Cutler Beckett watched him, wondering what he’d decide. He rather thought he knew, but Jack had surprised him before, he recalled.

  Eventually Sparrow turned back around and walked back to the deck. “All right, Mr. Beckett,” he said, his voice low, and rough with repressed emotion. “You have yourself a deal. I’ll deliver Lord Penwallow’s cargo. Just this one time. Never again. Savvy?”

  “Perfectly, Jack,” Beckett said. He held out his hand. “Shall we shake on it, then?”

  Sparrow stared at the proffered hand as though it were a snake. Finally he shook his head. “My apologies, Mr. Beckett,” he said, quietly, “but I would not feel right, doing that. I am sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Beckett said, his tone kindly, understanding. What did he care about a handshake? He’d won! Sparrow was humbled. There was no mistaking that look in his eyes. He was trapped, as surely as a wild creature with its neck in a snare. “I understand that this will be difficult for you, Jack. I want to do everything I can to make it easier on you. I will provide you with experienced men to handle the cargo. You won’t have to do anything except sail the Wench.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sparrow said.

  “We’ll be spending the next few days doing some refitting of the ship, Jack. Nothing that can’t be undone, don’t worry. So find yourself something else to do, and give your crew shore leave.”

  “All right, Mr. Beckett.”

  Jack spent the next four days trying to crawl into a bottle of rum. He was so surly that even Robby stopped talking to him, but the first mate refused to leave him alone, either. Thanks to Robby, Jack usually passed out in his own cabin each night, rather than on the streets of Calabar.

  Each day, when the teams of carpenters came aboard his ship, Jack left before they could walk up the gangplank.

  He’d informed his crew about the Wicked Wench’s next cargo, and some of them quit when they heard about it. Frank Connery and a topman quit, citing personal objections to the institution of slavery. Five more men, including the cook and Roger Prescott, left because hauling slaves was dangerous, and they knew it. There had been slave rebellions aboard ships before, and in several instances all or most of the crew had been killed. But the greatest danger to the crew of a slaver was pestilence. Slaves often became sick, and then the illness would spread to the crew. It wasn’t all that unusual for a third of the slaves and the same percentage of the crew to perish during the five or six weeks of the Atlantic crossing.

  Robby quickly hired hands to replace those who had quit. Cutler Beckett, true to his word, provided a small crew of six “handlers” who would be responsible for the slaves—feeding them, seeing that they were exercised each day, and so forth.

  None of Jack’s crew spoke pidgin, and the captain ordered his men to stay clear of the cargo hold. “Just concentrate on your work, mates,” he told them. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

  Jack was in a tavern, drinking, when they loaded the cargo aboard the Wench. As he’d ordered, Robby dispatched a crewman to fetch him when the slaves were all aboard, and only then did he return to his ship. He wasn’t falling-down drunk, but he was definitely numb.

  The Wicked Wench set sail from Calabar, with a cargo of shackled human beings, crowded together like cattle, in her hold.

  As if reflecting Jack’s mood, the weather turned foul almost immediately. There wasn’t much thunder or lightning, but there was wind and driving rain as they sailed beneath the bulge of Africa. It rained for almost a week, on and off, and the Wench sailed with her hatches battened down against the wind and the water.

  Jack spent a lot of time up on deck. Sailors were used to being wet. And the flask he carried, tucked into Amenirdis’s sash, kept chills away.

  Their first day out, Jack went below, intending to inspect the hold. He’d done that for every cargo he’d ever hauled. He’d bucked himself up by remembering Cutler Beckett’s promise that the Wicked Wench would be his.

  Even though Jack now had many times the price of the ship stashed in his cabin, he knew he wouldn’t dare to turn any of that Kerman gold into pounds sterling—at least not any time soon. He knew Beckett was having him watched. So having Beckett give him the ship would solve many problems for him. His first voyage, he resolved, would be to sail to the other side of the world—as far away from Africa as he could get.

  So after he’d steeled himself to perform his customary inspection of the hold, Jack paused on the ladder to borrow a little liquid courage—and numbness—from the flask, tipping nearly half of the rum down his throat.

  Only then did he continue on his way down the ladder.

  As he reached the bottom, though, and prepared to step out into the hold, he heard them. The dank, dark air was filled with the sounds of hushed, fearful conversations in languages he didn’t understand, mixed with anguished moans, whimpers, groans of pain, and agonized weeping.

  There wasn’t enough rum in all the world, Jack discovered, that would give him the ability to enter his own cargo hold. He turned and fairly fled back up, all the way to the weather deck, where he stood for twenty minutes, hat in hand, his face lifted to the rain, hoping its touch could make him feel clean.

  After that aborted attempt to reassert his normal routine, Jack roamed his own ship like a lost soul, standing his watches, but retreating to his cabin when the slaves were brought up on board and forced to “dance” for exercise. At night, unless he managed to pass out, he lay awake, his fingers tracing the bezel of the ring Amenirdis had given him.

  They hadn’t managed to replace Roger Prescott, so, on their third day of steady rain, Jack decided to go up on the quarterdeck and relieve Matthews so the man could go below, get into clothes that at least were not dripping, and rest. The idea of taking a helm watch cheered him; it would give him something to do besides wander his own weather deck, squelching in rain-sodden shoes, imagining he could hear sounds from the hold.

  But, when Matthews ceded him the wheel, and Jack stepped into place at the helm, the ship felt…different. The Wicked Wench had always been yar—quick and responsive to her helm, a pleasure to steer. But when he took the wheel this time, her yar was gone. She felt sluggish, her response to the wheel almost labored, as though the ship was…oppressed.

  Frowning, he experimented, turning the wheel to port, then starboard, watching the compass. Jack had always fancied that his Wench responded to his touch joyfully, like a human wench with her lover, by turns coy and flirtatious, bold at times, at times shy, needing to be tenderly coaxed. This ship felt like a…thing. Merely a wooden construct with canvas sails…and nothing more. Lifeless.

  Jack tried to tell himself that the difference had to be due to the way the “cargo” was distributed. Perhaps her ballast had shifted while they’d been working on her.…

  Matthews, who had been watching as Jack experimented, nodded. “Aye, Cap’n, you feel it too, don’t you? She’s not respondin’ the way she used to.”

  Jack glanced at the man, relieved to know that he wasn’t completely imagining the whole thing. “I feel it,” he admitted. “She doesn’t feel yar anymore.”

  “Must be the way the cargo’s placed,” Matthews said.

  “Must be,” Jack agreed. “It will be a relief to have this voyage over.”

  “Truer words were never spoken, Cap’n,” Matthews agreed. “Before, this was a happy ship. We were all shipmates. Now, with Roger and Chamba and Mr. Connery gone, she don’t seem like the same vessel.”

  Jack nodded sadly.

  Finally, on the afternoon of their sixth day at sea, as the Wicked Wench approached the point where Jack would order them to turn northwest and start up the African coast, the rain stopped. The sun came out. Magically, the seas turned fro
m greenish gray to sparkling blue. The captain felt his spirits rise as he ordered the crew to remove the hatch and ladder covers, so as to get some light and air circulating aboard the ship.

  Jack hadn’t reckoned on the fact that when the hatches were uncovered, and the air from the holds was free to move upward, it would bring sounds—and smells—with it.

  He was up on the bow, his octant in hand, taking sun sightings, when a wave of stench, so strong it should have been visible, struck him with almost tangible force. It was like having the contents of a chamber pot flung in his face. Jack gasped in shock, and instantly regretted it.

  Clapping his hand over his mouth and nose, he bolted for the railing, then leaned over and heaved until his stomach was empty, then retched till he gagged on bile. Jack had never been sick a day in his life, never vomited before, except when he’d been totally inebriated, and even then he could count the number of times on the fingers of one hand.

  He almost dropped his precious octant over the side.

  Finally, he spat a last time, then wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt and straightened up—only to have his knees nearly buckle. He leaned against the railing, eyes closed, breathing through his mouth, afraid to look around and see whether any of his crew had witnessed that disgraceful exhibition.

  “Feel better now?” It was Robby’s voice.

  Jack nodded. “Think so. I’m going to my cabin for a few minutes. Have to put away my octant.”

  “You’re not on watch, Jack,” Robby said, walking along beside him as Jack made an unsteady way down the ladder from the bow, along the weather deck. The captain unlocked his cabin with trembling hands, then went in. After carefully stowing his octant in his sea chest, Jack collapsed onto his chair. He took out his flask and sipped carefully, mindful of his thoroughly empty stomach.

  The few swallows of rum helped. After a minute, he straightened and opened his eyes. “That’s a little better.”