The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  He took his eyes away and tried to think what he had been saying. Something about a guard. A guard for someone. A guard. A guard. A guard. She must be alive, because the lace on her bosom had been moving. Something about a guard. A guard for whom? It might be just the air from the quay that stirred the lace. No living woman could look like that. What was it that he had been saying?

  The silence dwindled into small sound as the crowd began their chatter and their protests again.

  ‘You will be escorted to the convent of the nuns of Rosario this evening, and food will be sent to you there,’ he said. And turned on his heel and went out by the opposite door, without looking again in her direction.

  He had been on the way home to dinner with his officers, but this failure in control so dismayed him that he punished himself by thinking up a new duty, and went to see Bart in hospital. Bart was very ill with fever, and was every day looking more and more as he had looked when Bluey had carried him up the steps of San Jeronimo to the daylight. He had also begun to talk again about that cottage in the Mendips: a subject on which he had not touched for a long time. The visit did nothing to strengthen or comfort Henry.

  Nor did the succeeding days bring release. The need to see the woman again was paramount whatever he was doing. Her face came between him and the papers on his desk, and hung between him and the dim ceiling in the small hours. Her face was inside his closed eyelids and inside his mind.

  It was easy to see her again. Interviewing prisoners held for ransom was a normal proceeding, and he had only to wait. He could have placed her first on the list, but that would have been to acknowledge to himself that an unknown woman could have the power to dictate his actions, and that was unthinkable. So he forced himself to wait until the moment when his door opened and the Franciscan friar who was acting as his secretary said that the wife of Don Vincente de Alcandete was here.

  She stood as she had stood by the doorway to the quay, quiet and still. And again he was at a loss for words. It was a very young Madonna; ageless and innocent. Not woman at all. Mere essential beauty. Loveliness incarnate. Perfection made manifest.

  ‘Your husband owns the big house on the other side of the square,’ he heard himself say. ‘Where is your husband?’ And he waited with his breath held to hear her speak.

  Her husband had gone to Peru on business, she said; and it was music.

  ‘Since your home is in the centre of the town and surrounded on all sides by our own headquarters, it might be possible, I think, for you to live there if you cared to.’

  That would be very gracious of him, said the music.

  Unconsciously, Henry had expected her to say that she could not take privileges that were denied to her friends. But of course one could hardly expect a Madonna to be greatly concerned with, nor aware of, human relationships.

  ‘Have you servants to look after you if you go home?’

  Yes, she had servants.

  ‘Then I shall give instructions that from now on you may live in your own house.’

  She bowed her head a little, with no change of expression, and went away.

  And in the evening of the following day he went to call on her.

  She received him without surprise, and he sat for half an hour absorbing and marvelling at that serene perfection. She did not volunteer any remark, and he sat like a tongue-tied schoolboy, but the silences that fell between his questions had the same serenity as her beauty. He felt drugged, and happy for the first time for weeks.

  But there was no happiness for him once he had left her. Only a feverish waiting until it would be evening again and he could go and see her.

  And that became the pattern of his life in Panama.

  The crowded days were full of business; decision, arbitration, contrivance. But the long, full day was merely a tunnel down which he must pass to the thing that mattered; to his hour with the wife of Don Vincente de Alcandete. To that longed-for, waited-for, satisfying, unsatisfying hour with beauty.

  ‘What do you want of her?’ he would ask himself in moments of sanity, and found no answer. He could take her at any time, but to bed with her seemed to him as shocking as it would be to bed with a saint; as unthinkable as that Bet—sleeping alone among the slaves at Morgan’s Valley with a pistol on her pillow—should be forced by some stranger.

  ‘Why are you not afraid of me?’ he blurted one evening, resentful of the serenity that snared him.

  She looked at him with the wide, unchanging grey eyes that had the lavender shade of the sea in a calm dawn. Of what should she be afraid? she asked. The Admiral was a great man, and gently born. He would not make war on women.

  Defeated, he looked round the room, and saw the travelling-chest that he so much admired. ‘I am nevertheless planning at this very moment to rob you,’ he said; absurdly glad to find even this trivial way of asserting his hold over her. ‘I want that chest to carry some of the loot I am taking out of your country.’

  He was welcome to the chest, she said. It was one of a pair. She had brought her trousseau in them when she came from Tobago to be married.

  And at the mention of her marriage he was straightway disorientated again. What was stopping him? She was a married woman, wasn’t she? A human creature, feminine and desirable.

  But her serenity hung between them like some unspoken tabu. And he went away, as always, half-satisfied, half-frustrated; and by now wholly miserable.

  ‘Why the consideration for Don Vincente’s wife?’ Jack had asked one day.

  ‘She is delicate,’ said Henry; and hated all the world. He was being ridiculous, and the realisation added the last ounce to his suffering. If the normally tolerant and silent Morris was moved to speech, then the affair was matter for common gossip.

  For nine days thereafter he spent his spare hours with Don Juan’s reigning mistress, a complaisant lady of extensive talents, hoping thereby to exorcise from his mind the image that haunted it. Perhaps in satiation he would find ease for his torture. He left her in a rage on the ninth evening because she had said, indifferently, between two bites of a fig, as if it were a matter of no great moment, that the wife of Don Vincente de Alcandete was the stupidest woman in the two Americas. ‘She is so stupid,’ she said, her interest on the fruit in her hand, ‘that her nullity is positively dazzling.’ And he had thrown down his table-napkin and flung out of the room and out of her house; unhealed and unassuaged.

  ‘I am sick, that is what it is,’ he would assure himself. ‘It is part of my fever. It is just an illness that will pass.’

  But the illness rose to a climax as the day for departure from Panama drew near, and he was forced to the knowledge that in a matter of hours he would be seeing her for the last time. He clutched at the fact that her ransom had not yet been paid, and that he might for that reason legitimately take her with him.

  Take her where? said the cool Henry somewhere at the back of his sick mind. Home to Elizabeth?

  No, of course he could not do that. But just to keep her with him a few days longer. To put off the moment when she would not be there any more; nor ever again.

  She apologised in her gentle musical Spanish for the inconvenience that the late payment of her ransom was causing him. It would mean an extra mule in the pack-train to carry her as far as Venta de Cruz, but it would not be farther, she promised him. The ransom would catch up with her at river-head.

  Three more days, perhaps four, he reckoned; like a beggar snatching small coins spilled in the street. And he rode behind her all the way across the plain and up the cobbled track into the hills, rode behind her all the way to the Chagres river, so that his eyes should not be cheated of those minutes, so fast running out, when they could still see her.

  More than a mile long that pack-train was. A hundred and seventy-five mules, loaded to the limit. For even without the lost ransom for the city and without the personal wealth of the escaped grandees, the treasure of Panama was fabulous; greater than that of Puerto Bello and Maracaibo put together. T
he number of men who had to share it was also, of course, more than doubled, so the final dole might not be so princely; but no one could take from them the credit of their achievement, and that would be theirs long after the last coin had been rung on a tavern table and they were once more penniless.

  At Venta de Cruz they camped for ten days while the pack-loads were shipped into canoes for carriage down the now swollen river. And on the eighth day two friars came into camp bearing the ransom for Don Vincente de Alcandete’s wife. They brought it in silver, in the second of her trousseau chests; and since it was late afternoon, they waited until morning to begin the journey back. And that night Henry lay awake, staring up at the low-hung stars that looked as if they could be picked out of the sky by any man energetic enough to put up a hand, and saying to himself: ‘There are a million million suns, strung through space unimaginable. Suns. With worlds spinning round them. What does the beauty of one woman matter?’

  But nothing could ease the constriction of loss and grieving in his breast; the desolation.

  He took a public farewell of her next morning, and watched her ride away with her empty trousseau chest and her two attendant friars for just so long as the regulation few moments that politeness enjoined from a host; and then turned away to take up his life again.

  He went down to Chagres with the sick, for the sake of being with Bart; leaving Jack to escort the treasure. Bart looked better, and was radiant at the thought of seeing the Atlantic again. ‘None of these foreign seas for me,’ he said. ‘The old Caribbean’s good enough.’ And Henry laughed, and found comfort in the fact that Bart would, after all, sit in the shade on deck again with his scissors and his measuring tape and his sail-cloth.

  But on their first night back in Chagres, Exmeling sent for him after midnight, when the victorious captains were still sitting round their supper-table celebrating; and he got up from the hot, hilarious, wine-fumed candle-light and walked through the salt darkness to the hospital tents on the shore. Exmeling met him at the entrance, where the lantern hung, and Morgan was puzzled by the odd mixture of apprehension and smugness in his expression. Long years afterwards he would see Exmeling’s face as it was that night, in the lantern light, and try to analyse it. That mixture of secret satisfaction and overt fright.

  ‘What is it?’ Morgan asked. ‘Is he bad again?’

  ‘He’s dying.’

  ‘He can’t be. He was getting better. You must do something.’

  ‘There is nothing that anyone can do—Admiral. Not even you.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Morgan said sharply, thinking he had not heard the last words correctly.

  ‘Not even Henry Morgan can do anything about what is happening in there,’ Exmeling said, very smooth.

  Morgan pushed past him and bent over Bart.

  He looked now as he had looked that morning in Puerto Bello: a little heap of limp bones kept together by his spirit. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be asleep. But as Morgan watched, the eyes opened and recognised him.

  ‘I looked in to say good-night, Bart,’ he said.

  But Bart was not deceived.

  ‘We’ve ‘ad some good times, Harry boy—Captain, sir.’

  ‘We have indeed, Bart.’

  Bart thought over the good times.

  ‘Will you tell me something if I was to ask you?’ he said.

  ‘Surely.’

  ‘Was it a gold piece?’

  Morgan had come so far from Barbados that it took him an appreciable time to identify the reference, and to remember that dark room in which he had found Bart sitting by his side—and Modyford eating dinner beyond the archway. On that first day of his freedom; when Bart had saved him from being cheated by the serving-man and had taken him in charge and put his feet on the road to fortune. On the road to Maracaibo and Panama.

  ‘Of course it was a gold piece!’ he said, surprised. ‘Didn’t you know that it was?’

  ‘No,’ said Bart. ‘I just didn’t like his face.’

  This apparently referred to the serving-man. He thought over the serving-man for a little, and then said: ‘But I liked yours, Harry boy. I liked yours the minute I saw you.’ And after a moment: ‘She was right, wasn’t she? She was right.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That mad woman. She said you’d write your name in water for all the world to read…. And I was right, too, wasn’t I? About you ‘aving the right kind of nose for getting on in the world. Ah, you can’t fool me about faces.’

  His glance went over Morgan’s shoulder to someone in the background, and he said: ‘Send him away.’

  Morgan looked back at Exmeling, and made a dismissing movement with his head.

  ‘But—’ began little Henrik.

  ‘Go away,’ said Morgan; and he went.

  ‘I never liked that little bastard,’ Bart said in his breath of a voice, ‘and I’m not going to have him watch me go to Heaven.’

  ‘But, Bart! That’s nonsense, you know.’

  ‘It’s not. He has the wrong kind of nose.’

  ‘I mean about your leaving us. What would I do without you, for one thing?’

  Bart looked at him with such a wealth of affection and pride that Morgan’s heart turned over.

  ‘I think you’ll be all right on your own from here on,’ he said, as one setting down a child to walk alone.

  ‘But there’s that cottage of yours in the Mendips, Bart. You can retire now, and live like a lord in that cottage of yours.’

  Bart’s eyes had closed, but a small smile—a tolerant smile, as for the frailty of human nature—lighted his worn face.

  ‘Well, it was nice to think about, anyhow,’ he said.

  And did not speak again.

  Morgan sat by him till he died, an hour later. And he went on sitting there for a long time afterwards, the slow tears running down his cheek. In all the long road from Barbados to Panama he had wept neither for himself nor for another. But now he wept for Bart.

  He went to bed in the dawn, and after sleepless weeks fell instantly into unfathomable slumber.

  He was wakened in full daylight by Jack shaking him.

  ‘Wake up, Harry, for God’s sake, or do I have to throw a jug of water over you? Mother of God, Harry, I thought for a moment you were dead. Have you managed to get drunk at last?’

  ‘No, I just went to bed late.’

  ‘Are you awake enough to take bad news?’

  ‘If it’s about Bart, I know.’

  ‘No. What’s wrong with Bart, anyhow?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jack indifferently; and seeing Henry’s face: ‘I’m sorry, of course, Harry; but just now I can’t think of anything but the trouble we’re in.’

  Morgan sat up. If it was worse trouble than Bart’s death—

  ‘What trouble?’

  ‘You know that chest that we packed most of the good pieces in: the Virgin’s jewels?’

  ‘Certainly I do. What about it?’

  ‘That chest had a bit of leather missing where it had been scraped against a pannier edge or galled by a rope.’

  ‘Well, what of it?’

  ‘This is the day of the share-out, and I was looking through the things the treasure-party brought down-river, to get them in some kind of order. And that chest in the storehouse on the quay, Harry, is not the chest we packed the things into in Panama.’

  ‘Jack! You’re mad!’

  ‘I am, very nearly,’ Jack said. ‘The very thought of what we may be going to see when we open that chest makes my mind reel. You get on your clothes and come down to the storehouse with me, before I’m stark raving with terror.’

  He waited while Henry dressed, and in the air between them hung a further question. Something for which there were no words at all.

  ‘It couldn’t be!’ Henry blurted, as they went down to the quay. This was the total sum of their conversation on the way; and Jack did not bother to make any reply to it.

  The two sentries outside t
he storehouse saluted them and then resumed their chat.

  ‘I’m away for two years, and she asks me to believe—’ one was saying; and the homely tale had the poignancy of a safe, familiar country seen from a storm-tossed sea. Drowning, Henry clung to his sole rock: the hope that Jack somehow was mistaken.

  They opened the chest with the only known key to it: the one in Henry’s possession; and it opened easily. The contents, as far as Henry’s stricken senses could perceive, seemed to be small pieces of rock wrapped in scraps of cloth.

  Jack wasted no time in contemplation. He began to collect the fragments of stone and cloth and hand them to Henry. ‘Put these in your pockets,’ he said. ‘And sit down. If you’re going to faint, put it off till we’re safely out of this store.’

  Having emptied the chest, he began to unlash the nearer bundles.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Henry asked, wiping the cold sweat from his face with a child’s unco-ordinated movements.

  ‘That chest has to be filled with something,’ Jack said, taking a handful here and a handful there of the better stuff that remained: gold-inlaid pistols, jewelled sword-hilts, crosses decked with semi-precious stones. ‘Thank God there’s a second lot of trinkets.’ He opened the iron-banded box and seasoned his collection with a liberal sprinkling of necklaces, bracelets and brooches. ‘That looks not so bad. I hope to God no one has set his heart on that ruby bracelet of the Virgin’s. They’ll never believe that we haven’t pocketed it.’

  In twelve minutes from the time they had entered the place the substitution was complete; and Henry walked away again bowed down by more than the weight of the stones in his pockets.

  ‘Those scraps of cloth,’ said Jack. ‘Did they remind you of anything?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Morgan.

  They were the brown frieze of which Franciscan habits were made.

  ‘I thought at the time they were a very worldly looking couple for friars,’ Jack said.

  And that was the only remark that he ever made on the subject.

  For, after all, there was nothing that could profitably be said; and Jack was never a man to waste speech. In the minds of both of them was the picture of the little cavalcade riding away that morning at Venta de Cruz: the madonna, her two attendant friars, and the chest swaying and dipping on the back of the pack-mule.