The Privateer
Page 30
They had been prepared to offer him up as a sacrifice to Spain, the jacks-in-office, the party men. And they had been not only defeated, they had been disowned. That tap on the shoulder had been England’s answer to Spain.
There remained now only ‘the malice of small persons’, and about that he could do nothing. Wherever there was achievement, there was that: the rats nibbling at reputation. The lying stories would go from mouth to mouth, on into the years, smirching his name; but the truth would be there still for those who wanted it. And there always, beyond argument and denigration, would be the fact that his King had knighted him and found him worthy to administer a province.
He watched London stream past and away from him, grey and magnificent and misty, and remembering the ‘coloured islands’ that waited him knew that he would never come back. He would never see Llanrhymny now. It would stay small and clear and far-away, like something in the wrong end of a telescope. His future was in the islands; the islands across which he had written his name.
Presently Modyford, too, would be back in Jamaica, and life would be sunlit again.
As they left Greenwich behind a pale English sun, doing its best, shot a gleam across the water like a blessing.
But Morgan did not see it.
He was planning how he could give Vaughan’s transport the slip in the Channel and outsail her to Jamaica, so as to have the Council nicely in his pocket before his outmanoeuvred countryman arrived.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
To write fiction about historic fact is very nearly impermissible.
It is permissible only on two conditions:
(a) That neither the inevitable simplification of plot nor the invention of detail shall be allowed to falsify the general picture;
(b) That the writer shall state where the facts may be found, so that the reader may, if he cares, compare the invention with the truth.
The definitive biography of Henry Morgan is by Brigadier-General E. A. Cruikshank: The Life of Henry Morgan; which can be obtained from any public library. It is dispassionate, exhaustive, and accurate, and will prove an excellent corrective to both fictional biographies and biographical fictions.
It is, further, advisable when writing fiction about a period now ‘historic’ that no distortion should take place owing to the use of ‘period’ dialogue. If the characters in the story did not sound quaint to each other, then they have no right to sound quaint to us. What a young man may actually have said to his patron may be: ‘I am vastly gratified by your condescension, sir, and very sensible of my obligation to you,’ but that is not how the words sounded to his benefactor. What his benefactor understood him to say was: ‘Thank you very much, sir. That is very kind of you.’
The End
This file was created with BookDesigner program
bookdesigner@the-ebook.org
22/11/2008