The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  ‘I shall miss you, Barney; how I shall miss you!’

  ‘But I shall see you often,’ Bernard said, a faint surprise in his voice. ‘You will come in when I am in port.’

  ‘In? In from where?’

  ‘From Morgan’s Valley.’

  And it was in that moment that Morgan knew that he was not going to stay in Jamaica. For his involuntary expression of regret at losing Barney had been made, now that he looked at it, not from the point of view of a man parting with a comrade, but with the regret of a captain parting with a good mate. ‘I shall miss you, Barney,’ he had said; and what he had meant was: ‘I shall miss you on board the Fortune.’

  He looked at the Fortune, turning to the tides far out in the bay; the ship he had taken from Spain on that calm night on the coast of Barbados; and it seemed that she curtseyed to him. And for the first time since he had heard of Mansfield’s death he went home and slept with no outlandish name tolling in his mind.

  Not that he gave up without a struggle. The sober, sensible, land-owning side of him was still strong. Indeed, in the next few weeks he worked so hard at being the complete planter that Modyford cocked an eye at him and said: ‘You remind me, Harry, of nothing so much as a cat that wants to get out of a room and can’t find an opening.’

  And at that Henry gave up.

  He gave what sounded like a laugh under his breath, and said: ‘When I first had the felicity of meeting your Excellency in Barbados I came to the conclusion that you knew everything, and I have never had any reason to revise my opinion.’

  ‘Well?’ said Modyford. ‘What is it that you want to do?’

  Henry looked out at the harbour, where five of the nine ships that had taken Puerto Bello were still anchored. ‘I want to take that fleet out again before it is scattered beyond recall.’

  ‘Out? Out where?’

  ‘Cruising,’ said Henry, very bland.

  ‘And what is to be the excuse this time?’

  ‘The reason,’ amended Henry. ‘The reason is the long series of unprovoked attacks on peaceful English traders pursuing their lawful occasions in West Indian waters, and the lamentable lack of any apparent willingness on Spain’s part either to put an end to such depredations or to provide compensation for lost or confiscated ships or for the widows they have made.’

  The Governor received this suggested piece of dispatch in silence.

  ‘You have the fleet,’ he said after a little, ‘but would you get the crews? Judging entirely from the state of the town last night, the men are not yet penniless.’

  ‘Judging entirely from the state of the town last night,’ Henry said dryly, ‘it will not be long before they are.’ And added with a spurt of vanity: ‘In any case, the crews would come to sea with me, even with money in their pockets.’

  ‘Would you go without a commission?’

  ‘No,’ said Henry at once. ‘I have no intention of being hanged as a pirate.’

  ‘If I give you a commission I may be hanged as a sacrifice to Spain.’

  ‘Executed,’ Henry reminded him. ‘But in what a magnificent cause, your Excellency!’

  At which Modyford laughed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, mock contemplative. ‘I don’t deny that it would be very pleasant to get the crews out of town. Port Royal is really a very charming little place when not in season.’

  And Henry, taking this as capitulation, forebore to press his immediate advantage. But Morgan’s Valley became in the succeeding days a sort of week-end home for unemployed captains; and Elizabeth creamed her freckled arms, and put on her best dresses for them, and arranged meals, and made no remark. In his more nearly idle moments Henry had the grace to worry about the thing he was proposing to do to her, and to speculate a little unhappily on her possible reception of the news when he broke it to her.

  But again she surprised him.

  ‘If we are going to take in that field on the north side, Harry,’ she said one evening, looking out at the virgin forest of Jamaica that bounded the clearing of Morgan’s Valley, ‘we shall need four more slaves at least. You had better see to buying them before you go, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Go?’ he said. ‘Before I go where?’

  ‘Wherever it is that you are going.’

  He found this acceptance of his intended departure admirable but disconcerting. No woman had any right, he felt, to be so Spartan. There was a decent mean in such things; a due appropriateness.

  When he blurted something about her not being angry, then, that he should leave her, she said: ‘I have always thought it very unbecoming wear for a man.’

  ‘What is?’ he said, at a loss.

  ‘Apron-strings,’ she said.

  And, being Henry, it did not occur to him that this detachment had been achieved at the price of secret tears; nor could he know that the ‘apron-strings’ remark was a quotation borrowed from Johanna.

  ‘What am I to do, Jo?’ she had said. ‘I have tried him with sugar-cane; and horses; and good food; and standing for the Council; and even in bed. But not one of them is any use. I know that he is planning to go to sea again.’

  ‘But that’s why you married him, Bet,’ Johanna had said.

  ‘Because he would go to sea!’

  ‘No, goose. Because he is that kind of man. That kind of man would be no use to me at all. I like to be cherished. I want to be an old man’s darling. Indeed, I am seriously thinking of marrying Henry Archbould.’

  ‘Mother’s beau!’

  ‘Yes. He would be just as handy for Mother to ask advice from if he were her son-in-law. And he is just the kind of adoring man I want to have round the house. I want everything to revolve round me when I get married. I don’t want him to have another thought in his head but me—and poor Henry has not very many thoughts altogether, so that would not be difficult to achieve. But you would not like that, Bet. You would hate a man with apron-strings tied to him.’

  Elizabeth had recognised the truth of this, but it had not made the situation any easier to bear.

  ‘I had no idea when I married,’ she said miserably, ‘that it would have this dreadful softening effect on one’s inside.’ And the tears rose in her eyes again.

  Upon which Jo had hugged her and said: ‘Never mind, Bet darling. Presently you will have children to love, and it will not matter one little bit to you that the silly creature must needs be off after his guns and his glory. You will grow happy and placid, like a turnip; like Anna.’

  ‘A blob of melted butter,’ Elizabeth said, remembering; and began to smile. ‘That was the day that Harry first came to see us.’

  She knew that Johanna was right. She would not have him any other way. And the price she must pay to have him as he was would be the parting with him whenever his daemon drove him to action.

  So she was calm with Henry, and Spartan. And Henry found it admirable but disconcerting. Was it conceivable that so much equanimity could exist in alliance with love? Was it possible that she did not care about his coming absence?

  He had no time to brood on this problem, even if he was minded to, for he was faced with a greater one. He had boasted that the crews would come to sea with him in whatever condition they happened to be; and that was indeed true. But it seemed that not all the captains were willing to sail with him. It had never pleased Charlie Hadsell to serve under the command of a man almost young enough to be his son, and now he was filled with the notion that what Morgan could do he, Charles Hadsell, could do also. When next he went privateering he planned to be in command, and he had already detached two of the smaller ships from their allegiance to their late commander.

  The captains of these ships were both older men who, if they lacked Hadsell’s jealousy, were nevertheless not sorry to take orders from one of their own generation and upbringing. Neither of them had been of any great consequence, but they had what was to Henry the supreme virtue: they were trustworthy. They had fitted into the general scheme efficiently and unobtrusively; doing their part without q
uestion and without faltering. Now he would have to fill the gap they left, and he would have to do it with untried men. There would be no leisurely review and election, as there had been before Puerto Principe. He would have to fill the gap with the best available.

  He sailed, in the end, feeling that he had not done too badly. His brace of substitutes were at least well salted. Nick Gaytor had sailed for years as a privateer with a commission from the French, and his crew was still partly French. And Johnny Toplass—One-eye Johnny—had sailed for years as a privateer without bothering overmuch about a commission from anyone. Both were first-class seamen.

  ‘I am signing this commission, Harry,’ the Governor said when it came to the moment, ‘on the clear understanding that if the treaty with Spain is ratified you will bring your ships into port without delay and without waiting for any summons from me.’

  ‘Is there anything in the treaty about recognising the English occupation of Jamaica?’

  ‘Not so far as I am aware.’

  ‘Then they will hardly be such fools at home as to ratify it.’

  ‘The degree of folly to which the fools at home are prone is incalculable. I want your promise that you will offer no provocation, not even so much as trailing your coat, once the treaty is ratified.’

  And Henry promised.

  He had no intention of being anywhere near English sources of information for the next three months at least; and by that time Maracaibo would be behind him.

  12

  Maracaibo lies on the north east of South America, at the coast end of a great inland sea. The inland sea is large and square, a hundred miles across; but the entrance to all this wealth of water is a narrow strait a mile or two wide and much given to silting.

  To command this unwelcoming entrance, and to add the perils of gun-fire to the terrors of navigation, the Spaniards had of course built a fort. And being confronted on a blue spring day with the astonishing sight of no less than seven English ships coming boldly out of nowhere, English ships so unabashed and unaware of their enormity that every one of them was openly flying the English flag, the fort replied with such a panic cannonade that the ships, having one by one trailed their coats under the fort’s batteries and learned the position and range of every gun in the fort, drew away out of sight down the coast, leaving the fort chattering and aghast.

  Out of sight beyond the green headlands, Henry arranged for attack. And since he was Henry, the attack was to be an oblique one. He had no intention of engaging the fort while trying to navigate his ships through the narrows. It was to be Puerto Bello over again, therefore; except that this time the journey in boats was to be made through the narrows, past the fort. By night.

  Over the side went the boats as soon as it was dark. There would be no moon until an hour after midnight, and by that time they would be ashore beyond the fort. It was a calm night for the time of year; and more than once, feeling the soft air and smelling the green forest-smell in the blackness, Henry was reminded of the night they took the Gloria. He had come a long way from that exquisite piece of petty larceny.

  They let the tide bear them in, as once on the Barbados coast they had let the tide bear them out, with only a dipped oar for guidance; so that no rhythmic warning should mount to the no-doubt nervous ears on the battlements. One by one the boats drew level with the fort; visible now only as a dark bulk against the sky; and one by one passed safely and without being challenged. The navigation through the narrows was done by a Frenchman of Nick Gaytor’s crew, who had been at Maracaibo with l’Olonois, and he did it so successfully that they made landfall at the exact spot on which they had agreed: where the beach shelved on the inland side of the fort. One by one the boats came to rest with their bows in the sand, and the men scrambled out of them and went up the beach to cover until the moon should come to light them to the fort.

  It was to be Puerto Bello over again: the scaling-ropes, the challenge at the main gate to provide diversion, and the swarm over the walls. If this San Jeronimo technique failed for any reason, then Henry had decided to wait until daylight and substitute the method that had proved so successful with Fort Triana: the attack by seamen covered by the excellent musketry of Civil War veterans.

  But it was not to be at all like that. Not at all like either of them.

  The moon came, surprised and brightly curious, from behind the black trees on the headland, and the world turned silver and naked-looking. They picked up their weapons and moved from shadow to shadow until they were standing under the walls, the angular shadows of the fort flung across them like a cloak. The night was so still that their breathing sounded loud in the silence. They strained their ears to listen for a sentry’s step on the ramparts, for a voice, for the clink of metal as a man changed position in his vigil. But the silence was absolute. The silence pressed down on their ear-drums like a tight cloth, so that it seemed to them as if they had suddenly grown deaf, and they were seized with a mad longing to make a noise that they might be reassured that they could still hear.

  Then, loud and shocking, came their own challenge.

  And then the silence again.

  The empty silence.

  Once more Morgan’s voice rang out across the moonlit space, demanding the presence of the Commandant to parley.

  But the fort stood silver and naked and quiet in the night; irrelevant, somehow; like an apparition.

  And then Jack’s voice came out of the shadows on the far side.

  ‘Harry! Have you noticed what is odd about the place?’

  ‘It’s all odd,’ said Morgan.

  ‘No. I mean their flag. Look!’

  And they looked, and saw that there was no flag there.

  ‘They’ve cleared out,’ they said. ‘By God, they’ve cleared out!’ And they moved away from the walls to gape.

  But still they suspected a trap. And it was not until they had pushed open the great gate and taken in the empty spaces of the courtyard, and savoured the panic-mess of hasty departure in the barrack rooms and the kitchen, and appreciated the great store of undestroyed weapons, that they gave way to the realisation that the place was theirs, and fell to rejoicing. They lighted every lamp in the fort, and torches beside, as if to compensate themselves for the chill doubt of those moments in the moonlight outside, and they fell on the food that had been laid out on the long tables for a garrison that had not waited to eat it.

  But something in that waiting meal puzzled Henry and worried him. It was too untouched, too prepared. Surely, if it had been made ready for men who were in too much of a hurry to eat it, at least one of them would have swung a disgruntled arm as he passed and swept some of it to the floor. Something was wrong with the picture.

  Poison?

  No, surely not. It would take all the poison in the Americas to make any impression on a company so large.

  Then what?

  They had been meant to eat that meal; to fall on it exactly as they were falling on it now; eager and triumphant and oblivious and—

  And suddenly Henry was back on Santa Catalina.

  Back in that other deserted fort, that the Spaniards had so reprehensibly left undamaged for their use, when they might have—

  ‘Search!’ yelled Morgan above the din. ‘Search!’

  The terrible urgency in his voice stopped the movement and clatter on the instant.

  ‘For what?’ they said, looking stupidly at him. ‘Treasure?’

  ‘No! A match! A powder train! Search, damn you! Every God-damned one of you! Search!’

  And he made for the stairs, snatching a torch as he went.

  It would be somewhere in the cellars.

  As he flung himself down the circular stone funnel he tried to think how long it was in minutes since they had first come into the fort and found it empty. Six minutes? Ten? Five? How long a fuse would it be? Not less than a ten-minute one, surely. The man who lit it hoped to I get away with his life, if he could. It would not be less than ten. Had I they been as much as nine mi
nutes in the fort?

  The torch hit the curving side of the stairway and faded to a mere glow. He cried aloud in his desperation, and thought quite distinctly how unfair, how inappropriate, it was that he, Henry Morgan, should die so ignominiously; should end without trace, in a great flash of gunpowder on a distant and barbarous coast. He, who had Morgan’s Valley to go back to. He, who had so much in store.

  All his passionate joy in living rose in him and curdled into one great concentration of fear and protest as he stumbled and fumbled his way into the cellar.

  What if it was not here? What if it was here and he could not find it in time?

  It was only afterwards that he was to realise that the quenching of his torch, which had seemed to him at the moment the mockery of unfeeling gods, was in fact his salvation.

  In the full light of the torch he would not have seen the small blue light at the farther end of the cellar. Now he saw it; that small, secret, gloating light.

  Another half-minute, he reckoned, looking down at the dead fuse under his foot. Another half-minute, not more.

  He sat down on the floor and wiped the sweat from his face with shaking hands. His torch went out altogether, and he sat there in the dark; limp as a rag doll, all virtue gone out of him.

  It was Jack, coming clattering down the stairs in search of him, who roused him from his stupor of relief.

  Jack paused on the threshold of the dark cellar, questing with his torch.

  ‘Harry!’ he said, his voice sharp with anxiety.

  ‘I’m here,’ said Henry from the floor.

  ‘What is it?’ Jack said, coming to him. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No. My stomach doesn’t feel very good,’ said Henry. ‘I’ve just trodden on a snake.’ And he pushed his foot towards the dead fuse.

  Jack lowered the torch to look, and then lifted it to see what the cellar contained. ‘Mother of God!’ said Jack. And then, as the stacked tiers of gunpowder kegs drew his eye upwards:’ Sweet Mother of God! It would have blown us to Port Royal.’

  ‘There’s one comfort,’ Henry said. ‘There is so much, that this must be the only fuse. There can’t be more powder than this in the fort.’