The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  If England put a cool hand on his fevered senses, then the English supplied the first balm to his galled vanity. He had been a personality in Jamaica long enough to take that distinction for granted, but it had not occurred to him that his fame might have gone in front of him to the extent of making his name as much of a household word in this unknown England as it had been in the islands of his adoption. It was therefore sweet oil on his self-love, still raw from the personal failure of Panama, to hear inn-servants tell each other: ‘It’s Harry Morgan in the coach! Harry Morgan home from the Caribbean.’

  Home, he said in his mind. And liked the sound of it, prison or no prison.

  He distributed largesse to the small boys who thronged round the coach-door at his morning departures to ask how many Spaniards he had killed altogether, and pretended not to notice Romulus’s jealousy of this intrusion. Romulus had exhibited a mounting distrust of this strange country and all its works—a distrust that reached a climax when they made their entry into London. They came into London on a sunny evening when the rose and buff and sepia city lay warm and beautiful beside its pale blue river, and Morgan forgot that he had ever shivered or sweated, and expanded almost visibly into well-being. He had been recommended to the Blue Boar in the Strand, but he found that he could have rooms at the Dolphin; very expensive rooms indeed, but dolphins brought him luck, so why carp at an extra guinea or two?

  ‘We go home tomorrow?’ said Romulus hopefully, as soon as they were alone together in the first-floor room overlooking the street.

  ‘Don’t you like London, Romulus?’

  ‘We go home,’ suggested Romulus firmly; and from that attitude he never wavered.

  But London opened its arms to Henry before he was well awake next morning. He had spent a broken night listening to the incredible racket that was night in London: the thunder of iron-shod wheels on cobbles as late coaches bore revellers home and early carts brought produce from the country, the fights, the singing (did Englishmen never go to bed?), the intrusion of watchmen calling the hour and reporting on the weather (Merciful heaven, could the English not smell tomorrow’s weather the evening before like any good seaman?), and he had wakened tired and short-tempered and apt to remember that he was a prisoner who was being required to pay the expenses of his prison. But with the arrival of the breakfast he had sent for, there arrived, too, an elegant stripling who followed the chambermaid into the room and said gaily:

  ‘Is your levee public, Admiral?’ And as Henry turned from the window to face him: ‘My cousin said that I should find you here!’

  ‘Your cousin?’ said Morgan, at a loss.

  ‘Sir Thomas.’

  ‘Modyford? Is Modyford free, then!’

  ‘Oh, no; he is in the Tower.’

  ‘Then how could he know that I was here?’

  ‘He said: “If the Welcome arrived at Spithead four days ago, then Harry Morgan must be in London by now. And if he is in London he will be staying at the Dolphin, since he is a wildly superstitious creature with no money sense.”‘

  The tall boy said this in Sir Thomas’s own dry drawl, and Morgan looked at him with appreciation. At first sight one saw only the remarkable good looks and the fashionable clothes; but presently one noticed that the eyes in the reckless face were hazel-brown and kind.

  ‘Then you must be—’

  ‘Yes. I’m Albemarle. “Old George Monck’s son.” I expect I shall go to my grave as “old George Monck’s son”.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Morgan, considering him.

  ‘Really?’ said the boy, delighted. ‘Admiral, I am your servant! I had heard that you had courage, and ingenuity, and doggedness, and generosity, and most of the other virtues. But now I perceive that you also have perspicacity. Are you going to invite me to breakfast with you?’

  Morgan was about to give instructions for another cover when he noticed that a second cover had already been provided. ‘I perceive that your grace is gifted with forethought. A valuable quality,’ he said, and laughed a little.

  ‘I learned from “old George Monck” to anticipate events,’ the boy said, dragging up a chair. ‘That is how he became Albemarle.’

  ‘Is Sir Thomas allowed to have visitors, then?’ Morgan asked as they settled down to their steak and ale.

  ‘Oh, yes. He is living in the greatest comfort. He instructed me to ask you to call upon him as soon as you found it convenient.’

  ‘Does one just go and knock?’

  ‘It is customary to say that one has come to see a prisoner on matters concerning his defence. As if anyone could advise that very shrewd lawyer my cousin on any matter whatever! He admires you very greatly, Admiral. I confess that it puzzled me that Tom Modyford should so reverence a buccaneer—’

  ‘A privateer,’ put in Henry, smoothly.

  ‘I beg your pardon. A privateer. But now that I have met you I am no longer at a loss.’

  Henry was used to hero-worship, but not to seeing it in the eyes of a young Court gallant. He was warmed and a little confused by it.

  ‘When you have seen my cousin, and attended to any pressing business,’ said the boy, ‘it would give me great pleasure and make me very proud if you would be my guest at supper. I promised Carlisle and Johnny Vaughan that they should meet you.’ He paused and looked up from his steak with a smile in those unexpectedly gentle eyes. ‘They are going to get a shock, Edward and Johnny. They think you eat babies for breakfast.’

  ‘I could roughen up my manners, if it would be any obligement to you,’ Henry said, a shade dry.

  ‘Oh, pray don’t. I long to see their faces when they find out what a bucc—a privateer really looks like.’

  ‘At any moment now,’ Modyford said when Henry saw him that afternoon, ‘Christopher will “go for a pirate”. The King will never forgive you if you seduce the boy. He is the reigning favourite.’

  ‘I don’t know that he would be much good as a privateer,’ Morgan said, ‘but I think that he might make a very good Governor one day.’

  ‘So?’ said Modyford, raising his eyebrows; and having considered it: ‘So!’ he said. And the two men whose horizons stretched to the curve of the earth sat for a space in the little dark room on Thames-side planning how to shape this material in their hands. Then Sir Thomas said:

  ‘I hear that they have failed to find any criminal charge against you, so there will be no case to go to the courts.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘They are passing the affair to the Trade and Plantations people, I understand.’

  ‘To a Government department! What qualifications have they to try anyone!’

  ‘It is not to be a trial. It is to be an inquiry.’

  ‘Inquiry! I suppose that means that I stand on the mat while a pack of clerks who would not know a stay-sail from a woman’s kerchief lecture me on my misdeeds!’

  ‘It means that you will be able to state your case in public and that it will be written down. That is something. Indeed, it is an opportunity to be valued. Something that you have great need of.’

  ‘Need?’ said Morgan, puzzled by the change in Modyford’s voice; the sudden—gravity, was it?

  But Modyford evidently decided to shelve it, whatever it was.

  ‘It is a gossip-ridden town, London,’ he said, lightly. ‘Worse than any village. And much more ill-natured. It is as well to have the truth written down. Their lordships the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations will at least do you that service.’

  Morgan damned their lordships, and dismissed them from his mind; he was beginning to enjoy London. And it was not until very late that night that he discovered what Modyford had been talking about.

  The supper at young Albemarle’s was a success, except for his disappointment about Lord Vaughan. He had, quite unconsciously, looked forward to meeting another Welshman in this still-strange town, looked forward to getting into the mental undress which one wears in the society of a compatriot. He was also a little flattered, even now, after all hi
s personal achievements, to be meeting someone of so much Welsh importance as Carberry’s heir. But he had disliked Johnny Vaughan at sight. He hated his prim mouth, and his intellectual pretensions, and the suggestion of the spurious that hung about everything he said or did. That this belief in his synthetic quality did not have its roots in personal prejudice seemed to be proved by a thoughtless remark of Albemarle’s. When they had sat over their wine for some time, the boy said: ‘Let us go and visit Mother Temple.’

  ‘No,’ amended young Carlisle. ‘Madam Bennet. Her girls are much prettier.’

  Henry said that he was too old for brothels.

  ‘It is a sad and boring way of spending an evening, anyhow,’ Vaughan said.

  At which Albemarle laughed and said lightly: ‘Johnny will sneak there by himself when we are all in bed.’

  So Henry deplored the Welsh blood in Vaughan and disliked him with all the heartiness of a fellow Celt. But he liked Carlisle, an amiable young cynic, and he went willingly with the three of them to a fashionable party; which was the alternative, it seemed, to Mother Temple’s. He enjoyed the party less than the supper, since it seemed to him to have some of the same spurious quality that characterised his fellow-countryman. Everyone seemed bent on being a little larger than life: whether in wit, rudeness or style.

  ‘What do you want for him?’ asked a man, indicating the Indian boy who, since ‘black boys’ were beginning to be the rage, was allowed to walk at Morgan’s heel.

  ‘He is not for sale,’ Henry said, snubbing.

  ‘Everything in this town is for sale.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Not since half-past six yesterday evening,’ Henry said.

  ‘Half-past six? What happened then?’

  ‘I arrived in town.’

  ‘I see why you conquered Panama, Admiral,’ said the man, and bowed himself away.

  They moved on into the inner room where the gaming-tables were.

  ‘Let us not waste time on Madame Chance tonight,’ Albemarle said. ‘There are too many other charming women waiting the pleasure of your acquaintance.’

  ‘I never pass the tables without throwing Madame Chance a guinea,’ Carlisle said. ‘She likes the little attention.’

  So they paused to risk a guinea each.

  While they waited the result of their gesture, Morgan examined the faces of the crowd round the table, thinking how little they differed in their mixture of the dissolute and the daring from his own ship’s crew gambling round any barrel-top in Port Royal. His glance came to rest on a young man directly opposite, and he forgot about the crowd. He forgot about London, and Albemarle, and Carlisle, and Johnny Vaughan, and the fact that he was Admiral Henry Morgan. He was standing by a jacaranda tree in the dancing wind and the light, and before him was another crowd: a dark-skinned, gay-coloured crowd that moved like a field of flowers in the sun.

  ‘Who is that?’ he asked.

  ‘Who is who?’ Carlisle said, and followed his glance. ‘Oh! Poor little Tim Driffield. For ever trying to make enough to get married on.’ He laughed a little. ‘His inamorata would marry him tomorrow and live on his pay, but she has a dragon of a mother. The result is that he loses his pay continually, and so has neither the pay nor the girl.’

  Morgan picked up the little heap of gold that Madame Chance had returned for his guinea, and moved round the table. The crowd were already busy with the next decision of luck, but the young man had not moved. His pockets were evidently as drained of money as his face was of hope.

  ‘If you will permit me, sir,’ Morgan said; and set the neat, cylindrical, small tower of gold by his elbow.

  The young man (and he was not so young, after all, Morgan noticed, now that he could see the lines) looked first startled, then unbelieving, and then indignant. His face flushed.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, very low and between his teeth, ‘I do not understand by what pretension you feel free to offer me money—’

  ‘By the obligation of a debtor,’ said Henry, cutting him short.

  ‘A debtor?’ said the young-old Mr Driffield, no wise mollified. ‘If you think, sir, that by so transparent a ruse, you may, even in the way of kindness—’

  ‘You lent me a guinea, Mr Driffield. One day in Barbados. I promised to repay you at the usual rate of interest. I hope that the interest may bring you as much luck as the original guinea brought me. We will waive the formality of a receipt. It was a gentlemen’s agreement from the beginning.’

  And, very pleased with this further gesture, he allowed himself to be led away to meet the loveliest women present.

  He was presented to a great many beautifully dressed females who all seemed to have the same well-supported pair of breasts and the same rolling eyes. They all said how enchanted they were to meet so distinguished a sailor, but he had the feeling that not one of them really knew who he was. The men did, though. The men knew all about him, as he could tell by the turning heads, and it was because he had begun to sun himself in the warmth of their interest that he was unprepared for the blow that was coming to him. He was back on his heels. Wide open.

  He had lost the other two for the moment, and was standing by the gaming-table with Lord Vaughan, watching the play, when a middle-aged man stopped to talk to his companion. Henry liked his face, and waited happily to be introduced. And presently Vaughan said:

  ‘Let me present my fellow-countryman, Admiral Morgan, home from Jamaica.’

  The man’s face lost its friendly animation on the instant. He bowed his head the fraction of an inch, nodded to Vaughan, and turned away without another word.

  ‘Don’t let that worry you,’ Vaughan said. ‘He is an ardent Roman Catholic.’

  ‘A Roman Catholic? What could that possibly have to do with me?’

  ‘I expect he can’t forget those nuns.’

  ‘Nuns? What nuns?’

  ‘The ones you used as a screen for your men at Puerto Bello,’ Vaughan said.

  ‘What!’

  Morgan’s voice, at its full hurricane pitch, startled the chattering room.

  ‘Come out of here,’ said Vaughan, hastily; and drew the furious Morgan into the garden.

  ‘Now let us hear about this nonsense,’ said Henry. ‘What am I supposed to have done at Puerto Bello?’

  ‘I can’t tell you if you are going to roar at me again.’

  ‘You’ll tell me any way I want you to, my lord, and without loss of time. What am I supposed to have done at Puerto Bello?’

  ‘The tale is—of course I do not believe it, please do me the credit of—’

  ‘Will you stick to the matter in hand!’

  ‘The tale is that when you were unable to take the fort—’

  ‘Which fort?’

  ‘I don’t know. Was there more than one?’ asked Vaughan, giving Morgan his first acquaintance with the home-front mind.

  ‘Never mind. Go on.’

  ‘The tale is that when you failed to take the fort you sent nuns and priests up the scaling-ladders in front of your men, as a shield. Of course you did not expect that the Spaniards would fire on them, we quite understand that—I mean, that is understood.’

  ‘And did the Spaniards fire?’ asked Morgan, suddenly silky.

  ‘Oh, yes. There was a—there was supposed to be a massacre. That is why Sir William was—was cross with you just now.’

  ‘Cross,’ said Henry, savouring the word. ‘And you are not cross?’

  ‘I have said: I do not credit wild tales. Everyone knows that barbarities are committed in the heat of battle—’

  ‘Such as ordering nuns up scaling-ladders.’

  ‘No, of course, that is an extreme case.’

  ‘It is an extreme case of invention,’ Morgan said. ‘The only fort that was taken by scaling-ladders at Puerto Bello was taken by seamen under cover of army musketry, and you will do me the kindness to say so next time you hear this ridiculous story repeated. Where did you first hear this absurdity?’


  ‘It is one of the stories in the book, of course.’

  ‘Book? What book?’

  ‘The Dutchman’s book.’

  ‘What Dutchman?’

  ‘Eskmellin, or whatever he calls himself.’

  ‘Exmeling!’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘You mean that Exmeling has written a book! A book about me, about the Caribbean?’

  ‘But I thought that you would certainly know, Admiral,’ Vaughan said, uncomfortable. ‘It is the rage of the town.’

  ‘Is it, by God! You mean that all those people in there’—he waved his arm towards the lighted room behind them with its high screaming voices—‘have read this—this enormity and believe it and did not throw me out into the street?’

  ‘But why should they? Your exploits are the pride of England—’

  ‘Including the exploit of using nuns as a battering-ram, it appears. You will excuse me, Lord Vaughan, if I leave you now. I have been troubled by marsh fever caught in the Isthmus, and late hours—’

  ‘But, Admiral, you must not take to heart a—’

  ‘Allow me to bid you good-night. Perhaps you will be kind enough to give my thanks to the Duke of Albemarle for a delightful evening—’

  But the boy intercepted him as he came into the hall.

  ‘Admiral! You are not leaving us so early!’

  Morgan swung round on a heel to face him.

  ‘Does your grace possess a copy of this obscenity, by any chance?’

  ‘Obscenity?’ said Albemarle, startled and at a loss.

  ‘This book that my surgeon has written.’

  ‘Oh; the Exmeling thing. Yes.’ He looked faintly embarrassed. ‘Yes, I do. I—’

  ‘Would it be presumptuous of me to ask for a loan of it? I think that it is time that I found out what I really did in Puerto Bello and Panama.’

  ‘Admiral, I know that the book must be very displeasing to you, but do not blame the town too much for their acceptance of it. They had a picture in their minds—as I had—of the buccaneer as they imagined him—’

  ‘I have never been a buccaneer!’

  ‘No, sir, I know. But the town does not make nice distinctions. And they picture to themselves a pirate—knife between the teeth and pistols in either hand—and have no knowledge of the reality. Most of them have never seen a ship bigger than a vegetable hoy from the Surrey shore. Now that they have the opportunity of meeting you they will—’