The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  ‘Not until Morgan’s Valley is safe from Spain,’ Henry had said, dryly.

  And Mansfield had looked suddenly happier. His parting words had been: ‘I shall come back for you, Harry, my little taker of prizes; and you will be sick of the dust in your nostrils, and you will come with me once more to strike at Spain where it hurts.’

  He had sailed away on business of his own to the South Cays of Cuba. Joe Bradley, not caring whether he had a commission or not, had departed for the Bay of Mexico to see what he could pick up. So the only sailor at this party in Morgan’s honour was Jack Morris; who was getting drunk in the same fashion as he did everything else: with a sort of neat circumspection.

  It was stifling in the room. The night hung against the open windows like a curtain, velvet and opaque. The heavy air was so still that the candle-flames stood up like bright lances in their surrounding haze of insects. When, about half-past nine, a small white object sailed in a high curve through the window and dropped through the mist of flies to land with a plop on the table, only two men were sober enough to react normally to the phenomenon.

  Modyford reached forward and took the paper from the table, unrolling it from the weighting stone. But Morgan, even after five hours’ eating and drinking, still thought faster than the Governor. Even before Modyford’s hand had gone out for the thing, Henry had pushed back his chair and made for the garden. There was a cry in the dark, and the sound of physical contest, and Henry reappeared frog-marching a scared maroon.

  ‘Here is your serenader,’ he said. ‘What does the love-note say, or is it personal?’

  Modyford looked up with an odd reluctance from the paper he was reading, as if as long as his eyes were on the paper he could postpone the evil ahead.

  ‘It is personal,’ he said. ‘It is from Major Smith.’

  ‘Smith! Oh. From Santa Catalina. Then why all this coyness?’ Henry shook the man he was holding.

  ‘The man is a runaway slave from Puerto Bello.’

  ‘Oh.’ Henry’s grip slackened. ‘And what was he doing in Santa Catalina?’

  ‘He was never in Santa Catalina. The Spaniards took Santa Catalina nine weeks ago. The survivors are in prison in Puerto Bello.’ He read from the paper. ‘“We fought until there was not a scrape of powder left. When the shot ran out we broke up the organ in the church and fired away sixty of the pipes at one shot. When there was nothing left to fire we surrendered on the same conditions as we had given them. But it proved to be ‘a Spanish promise’. Those of us who survive are doing blacks’ work on the fortifications here. Please reward the slave if you get this.”‘

  There was a long silence.

  Henry felt for the back of his chair and sat down.

  ‘How did you come by this?’ the Governor asked the slave.

  A white man working on the castle of San Jeronimo at Puerto Bello had given it to him, he said.

  ‘And why did you not wait to be rewarded?’

  He did not know what might be in the letter, he said. He supposed that it would tell about the white prisoner of the Spaniards, but it might also tell that he was a runaway slave.

  Henry took out a gold piece and gave it to him, saying: ‘Stay in Port Royal where we can find you.’

  ‘If you give him that,’ Modyford said, ‘he’ll be in jail five minutes after he presents it.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Henry, taking back the gold piece and giving the man its value in silver. Only Modyford, he thought, would be able to consider a detail like that at a moment so shattering.

  The maroon melted into the night, and everyone suddenly began to talk at once. But it was Jack Morris’s voice that overtopped them.

  ‘We are going back to Santa Catalina, aren’t we, Harry!’

  ‘No,’ said Morgan. He looked very white in the candle-light, as if he might be going to be sick. ‘No. We are going to Puerto Bello.’

  There was silence again at this, while they considered it.

  ‘Even Drake failed there,’ Modyford reminded him.

  ‘Put it out of your mind, Morgan,’ Henry Archbould said. ‘If Frankie couldn’t do it, you can’t. No one could.’

  Rob Byndloss laughed a high, drunken laugh and said: ‘Tell you one thing our Harry’s done no man ever did before! He’s made Spain hurry! Terribly shocked over Santa Catalina they must have been to come running so fast to its rescue, all through the nasty steep seas and the hurricanes. Shook Spain’s liver, our Harry has!’

  ‘How many of them were there?’ Henry asked Modyford.

  ‘Half a navy,’ Modyford said, pushing the paper over to him.

  While he read it, the Governor watched him with sympathy and some anxiety. The colour had not come back to Henry’s face. The high cheek-bones stood out sharply, as if he had been wasted by fever, and the wide mouth had lost its curves and straightened into a line. He looked a man of forty; and an ill man at that.

  The hubbub had broken out again, but Henry took no notice of it.

  ‘It will take more ships than Santa Catalina, of course,’ he said at length. ‘Nine at least.’

  ‘Put it out of your mind, Harry,’ Modyford said. ‘The place is notoriously impregnable. We can effect an exchange of prisoners.’

  ‘Can we?’ Morgan said. ‘When we make Spain a present of all we take?’

  ‘In any case,’ a cold voice said, ‘we cannot very well take action when Spain has right on her side in the present instance, can we?’

  This brought even tipsy conversation to a pause.

  Everyone had forgotten the presence of the Opposition in the person of Lynch.

  In another second Rob Byndloss would have launched himself on the Colonel, but Morgan held him while the Governor said smoothly: ‘We have all had too much spirit to think to the letter, Colonel.’

  ‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Lynch. ‘It is with regret that I must leave so delightful a meeting, but I have a long way to go, and the roads are deplorable.’

  It was so like Lynch, Henry thought, to add that flick about the roads at such a time.

  Archbould and two others went with him, not because they loved Lynch, but because their ways lay together and no one rode alone at night along the roads of Jamaica if they could help it.

  ‘Do you think we could do it, Harry?’ Jack asked under the confusion of leave-takings. Not doubtfully, but in hope.

  ‘Do you know that the narrows at Puerto Bello are fortified all the way, so that any ship entering harbour is subject to crossfire at point-blank range?’ someone said.

  ‘And when you are in there is a third castle to welcome you with a broadside,’ another said.

  ‘I can think of something more daunting even than that,’ Modyford said, returned from speeding his guests.

  ‘The mosquitoes?’ they asked.

  ‘No. The cost of such an expedition. No obliging Government is going to finance it for us, obviously. Then how otherwise could it be done? The victualling alone of such a fleet would cost a fortune.’

  ‘It is possible that we might be able to save the Exchequer any anxiety on that score,’ Henry said, drawling.

  Modyford looked across at him, and was relieved to see that the colour had come back to his face. His mouth had recovered its curves.

  ‘When you look demure, Harry,’ he said, ‘my very soul faints within me.’ And being rewarded by the shadow of a smile in Morgan’s eyes: ‘Well? What is your idea of a larder?’

  ‘There are very fine herds in Cuba, I understand.’

  ‘In the interior of Cuba.’

  ‘I walk better than I swim.’

  ‘If you think that I am going to give you a commission for the invasion of Cuba you are not as intelligent as I thought.’

  ‘No, I am going to give your Excellency evidence, gathered in Cuba, of plans and enlistments for the invasion of Jamaica. Honest evidence.’

  ‘Oh, Harry, Harry! Only you would have thought of undertaking one expedition to victual yourself for another. If you don’t get us
both hanged, you may be Governor of America one day.’

  ‘Only I will hang,’ Henry assured him. ‘You will be honourably executed. Your cousin Albemarle will see to that.’

  ‘Well, put our wretched countrymen out of your mind for a day or two at least. Tomorrow is your wedding day.’

  But at the mention of the prisoners, the bleakness came back to Morgan’s face.

  And next day, in the dimness of the church at Spanish Town, Elizabeth looked at him once or twice, doubtfully; wondering if the mere being married to a woman could make a man’s face so suddenly grim, could so steal the youth from it.

  She did not hear what had happened until they were alone in the little upper room at Mr Hauser’s. When he told her, she flung her arms round him in the first caress she had ever given him and hugged him to her in pity and regret. ‘Oh, Harry, poor Harry!’ she said, as she might to a child who had fallen downstairs.

  He had expected her to say: ‘But you’re not going to leave me and go away off there so soon after we are married!’; not because it was particularly true to the Elizabeth he supposed she was, but because it was what he expected a woman to say. Her instant identification of herself with him moved him almost to tears.

  ‘Bart is there,’ he blurted, saying the thing he had not said even to Jack Morris.

  ‘Poor Harry! Never mind. You’ll get him back,’ she said into his ear, and kissed him.

  But in the morning she was brisk and practical. If Henry was going to be busy organising an expedition, these rooms in Spanish Town were not going to be of much use to them. They must find something at the Port.

  ‘There is nothing but standing-room at Port Royal.’

  ‘Mary Speirdyck might find us something. You will be going to see Bernard about—about Santa Catalina, won’t you? Ask Mary if she could find us a couple of rooms somewhere.’

  He had waited, in the cold anti-climactic light of morning, for her to revert to femininity and bring up the subject of Morgan’s Valley, and the desirability of his remaining on shore to develop it. But nothing like that had happened. Her only mention of their future life together was this suggestion of finding rooms near the Port. She took his going to be the obvious and accepted thing, as a male comrade might. He looked across at her in wonder and delight, and promised to give Mary her message.

  But when he had climbed the steep, cobbled alley to Mary’s house and stood looking into her cool, bare living-room, he nearly forgot. For sitting at the table eating a meal was Charles Hadsell, late commandant of Santa Catalina.

  ‘Hadsell!’ he said. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Came in this morning in the Alice from Nicaragua. How are you, Captain? Married, I hear. My congratulations. Perhaps you’ll do us the honour to come to my daughter’s marriage? She and Cornelius here are planning to get hitched in about three weeks’ time.’

  ‘You mean you went on to Nicaragua with the ship that brought the reinforcements to the island?’

  ‘I certainly did. I didn’t fancy being junior to a soldier boy with the down still on his cheeks. Had a fine voyage. Bought myself a share of the cargo, too. Add a bit to Jane’s dowry. Eh, Cornelius?’

  Mary replenished his plate from the stove, and Bernard came in from the street and greeted Morgan with surprise and welcome.

  ‘You are early abroad for a bridegroom, Captain,’ he said, and set glasses for himself and Morgan on the table.

  ‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘A skeleton came to my marriage feast.’

  ‘A skeleton?’ Bernard said into the startled pause.

  ‘Skeleton of what?’ asked Hadsell.

  ‘Santa Catalina.’

  ‘Santa Catalina!’ repeated Hadsell. ‘You mean something has gone wrong on the island?’

  ‘The Spaniards took Santa Catalina nine weeks ago, and our men are in prison in Puerto Bello.’

  ‘No!’ cried Cornelius.

  His uncle let loose a flood of his native tongue and was reproved half-heartedly by Mary.

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Hadsell.

  Henry told them.

  Hadsell put down his knife and fork as if his appetite had of a sudden deserted him. There was the same dismayed silence in the little room as had fallen over the Governor’s board the night before.

  It was the boy who broke it. ‘What do we do, Captain? Take the island again?’

  ‘No,’ said Henry. ‘We won’t have to take it back. Someday it will drop into our laps like a ripe cherry because the Spaniards will be too busy defending the mainland to have spare men and energy for an island.’

  ‘You mean we are going to win back Santa Catalina on the mainland of America?’ Cornelius said, his face alight.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Bernard, beginning to pour brandy.

  ‘Puerto Bello for a start.’

  Bernard’s hand stopped its pouring for a moment and then went on. But Hadsell supplied the inevitable comment.

  ‘Have you forgotten Drake?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And they have fortified the place beyond recognition since Drake went there.’

  ‘Perhaps Drake did not have any men who were prisoners on shore.’

  ‘I knew that soldier boy should not have been given charge of an island,’ Hadsell said, virtuously. Which roused Morgan.

  ‘Major Smith defended the island very gallantly and very efficiently,’ he said, in his quarter-deck voice. ‘They scraped the last grains of powder from the magazine floor before they surrendered. They left the fort only after defending it to the last possible moment.’

  Hadsell recognised both the snub and the comment on his own conduct, and subsided.

  ‘Does anyone know where Joe Bradley is? We must prepare a rendezvous as soon as the gale season is over. And Mansfield. And anyone else who is not too careful of his skin. But no one but ourselves must know where we plan to sail to.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Hadsell said. ‘No one would believe it anyhow.’ And his tone was not complimentary.

  But Bernard had news of Joe Bradley, and Cornelius suggested new names, and so, in Mary’s cool, bare room in a blazing August Jamaican noon, the first tentative ripple began of a wave that would roar across the world and come flooding up the Chancellory steps of Europe. And in the succeeding weeks, through the damp hot days and the flickering storm, a centre of calm purpose sent its radiation through the welter that Nature made of the islands. Men riding out the bad days in the Gardens of the Queen, in the sheltering cays, men in bars and taverns and bawdy houses up and down the islands, told each other that at the end of the year Harry Morgan was sailing again. Harry Morgan was taking the Fortune out on some new ploy when it was sailing weather once more. He would be at Pine Island in November with the Fortune freshly careened, and he was looking for ships and men.

  Mary found not two rooms but three in the dripping huddle of Port Royal, and Elizabeth arrived drenched on the ferry from Passage, with Couba as maid and Remus to carry her unused finery in its little leather trunk. The rooms were small and dark and the roof leaked, and the house was loud with the noise of the wind and the sea, but it was there, only a few steps for Harry to walk at the end of the crowded days, and it was there, close to the sea, for the men from the sea who had business with him. Hardly a day passed but Couba opened the door to some man standing on the threshold with his cap in his hand and an identical phrase for utterance: Captain Morgan wanted men, they said; Captain Morgan wanted men.

  Henry’s own original crew began to trickle back from their various destitutions. And some, indeed, from prosperities of their own. That admirer of zeal, Walter Benrose, master gunner from Lincolnshire, had bought himself a dinghy and was doing quite well as a water-man. The two dog-lovers, Manuel and the mulatto, were found to be running a very profitable little business called LOST DOGS FOUND, in which the mulatto enticed away the dog and Manuel, all eyelashes and innocent charm, returned it and claimed the reward. The mulatto had lately blotted his copybook by enticing
the same dog twice in five days, and a faint breath of suspicion was beginning to mar their relations with Port Royal. They were glad to be going to sea again. Next time, Manuel said, they would think of something else. Fighting cocks. Or find a very fast dog and offer to course it against all comers.

  Even Exmeling turned up, a little vague as to what he had been doing lately. Henry was glad to have him, and remembered with a pang that there would be no Bartholomew this time to object to his presence in the ship. When asked why he had not sailed with his relative by marriage, Captain Mansfield, he said that Mansfield had told him that he was going to the South Cays merely to careen his ship, and to refit afterwards at Tortuga, perhaps, and had no need for a surgeon. He had no news of Mansfield, and neither had anyone else.

  Henry invited Exmeling to drink brandy with him and presented him to Elizabeth. And it seemed that Bartholomew was not unique in his dislike of little Henrik. Elizabeth did not like him either.

  ‘But why?’ asked Henry, genuinely puzzled. ‘He is a harmless creature, surely. No one ever notices that he is there.’

  ‘You don’t notice that a snake is there either,’ Elizabeth pointed out. ‘Do you have to take him with you?’

  ‘I am glad to. He is a good surgeon, considering that he has had no professional training.’ He remembered what Mansfield had said, and added: ‘He enjoys surgery.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I expect he does.’

  Several times they rode out to Morgan’s Valley to spend a night in the half-finished house and to arrange what should be done during Henry’s absence. Henry had tried to persuade Jack Morris to buy a piece of land near them for ‘the day when he would want to settle down’.

  ‘For what?’ said Jack, and laughed.

  But it was Elizabeth’s triumph that he did come very often to the cramped little rooms in Port Royal and seemed at home there. The constraint that normally overcame him in the presence of good women was not apparent in his relation with his friend’s wife. Indeed, he came to treat her as something between a sister and a sister-in-law. He would sit at ease with them of an evening and talk quietly about ways and means, or be silent over his wine. For this, too, Henry was grateful to Elizabeth, and for this, too, he loved her.