The Privateer Read online

  ‘Stay!’ he said to the obedient creatures, and joined the rush to the stream edge of the hollow. Lying there on the reverse slope they looked down the funnel of land to the sea. There was indeed a ship there. She had arrived, after the surprising manner of ships, from nowhere, and now stood large and immediate in the very middle of the picture. Already she had begun to lower a boat.

  ‘Stopped for fresh water,’ Chris said. ‘They seem to know the coast very well!’

  ‘Seen the flag?’ someone said.

  ‘Yes. Spanish.’

  ‘I like their nerve, anyhow,’ another said. ‘They refuse us the courtesy of wood and water.’

  ‘Ah, well, we won’t have to hump that meat round the Caribbean, after all. Our customers have come to our doorstep.’

  ‘Victual a Spaniard!’ said Henry.

  ‘Why not?’ they said. ‘A Spanish coin rings just as clear on a counter as any English one.’

  ‘But that very ship may blow an unoffending English one out of the water six hours from now.’

  ‘Not her,’ they said. ‘She’s in too much of a hurry to get back to Spain, for one thing. And for another, six hours from now she’ll be just where she is. When the wind drops like this of an evening, it won’t come up again before dawn.’

  ‘Becalmed?’ said Henry. ‘Then why don’t we take her?’

  ‘Take her?’ they said. ‘Have you had a good look at her?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Take a ten-gun ship with eleven men and some sporting guns?’

  ‘Twelve men. And that is not the correct odds.’

  ‘All right, we do have some muskets. How much does that shorten the odds?’

  ‘The odds have nothing to do with muskets. It’s a case of a dozen brains against let us say forty men who haven’t even thought about the subject.’

  ‘Brains!’ they laughed, the only power they had ever used being force.

  ‘How would you go about it, Brains?’ asked one, spinning out the joke.

  ‘I haven’t thought about it—but I can tell you one way.’ And he told them.

  They listened in silence, their eyes turning from him to the ship’s boat and back again until presently their eyes were on him alone.

  ‘Even a small grapnel would make a noise like the crack of doom,’ said one in a slow Dorset voice when he had finished.

  ‘Pad it,’ said Henry, noting with a lift of excitement in his chest that the questioning of a detail implied a respect for the plan itself.

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Moss. Creepers. Anything. You can pad it so much that it bounces like a baby’s wool ball, but it will still stay a grapnel and do what it is meant to do.’

  Their delight in contrivance, always acute in men who live precariously, snared them into interest.

  ‘Yes, and Chakka can do the throwing,’ someone said. Chakka was the Indian. ‘Chakka can make a rope fall round a marline-spike stuck in the sand thirty yards away.’

  ‘Are we going to lose our market just to have our throats cut on board?’ asked a dissenter.

  ‘As for marketing,’ Henry said, ‘I don’t suppose she is going home to Spain empty.’

  And at that reminder interest flared to something like eagerness. They knew the kind of cargo that ships carried from the mainland to Spain. And if she was bound home as far west as Barbados, then she almost certainly came from the South American coast. And South America meant gold, and silver, and pearls. South America was the fabled El Dorado.

  Their interest went back to the boat that was being now rowed ashore, but they made no movement to go down to meet it. Instead they went over to the sea side of the camp and watched it come, through the tangle of creepers that screened them from the shore below. Through the still air they could hear the men in the boat laughing and talking as they rowed. They were glad to be setting foot on land for a little.

  ‘I can’t remember whether we are at war with Spain at the moment or not,’ Bartholomew said meditatively, making his first contribution to the discussion.

  ‘There is no peace beyond the Line,’ supplied Chris, quoting a well-known tag.

  ‘It’s a holy war, anyhow,’ said one. ‘The Protector has said that who fights Spain fights the Inquisition and does God’s work.’

  ‘I’ve no mind to be strung up just to gratify Cromwell,’ said the dissenter.

  ‘A minute ago you were going to have your throat cut,’ they said. ‘Make up your mind!’

  ‘I know a couple of ears that I’d like to hang pearls in,’ said the man who had commissioned Bartholomew to buy the pomade.

  ‘I know a couple of Spanish necks I’d like to screw,’ said the Dorset man.

  ‘Pipe down!’ said Bartholomew as the boat grounded and the men leaped ashore.

  They humped three empty casks on to the beach and rolled them up to the pools of fresh water in the gully. A youth dropped a small toy dog on to the sand and began to play with it. He had brought a ball, and he would throw it and then rush after it, accompanied by the dog, and they would roll together in the sand, each madder than the other with joy of living. The camp watched this pastime with mild contempt.

  ‘Call that a dog!’ said the mulatto, and went back to the fire where the two hunting dogs were standing in unwilling bondage to their training, whimpering with excitement and quivering all over. He soothed them and made them lie down with whispered promises and reassuring caresses, and then came back to watch what was happening below.

  The Spaniards had discovered the longboat and had resolved themselves into a small doubtful cluster, looking up at the unrevealing density of the forest. One of them called something, and was hushed for his pains. They apparently decided that, whatever the longboat might be drawn up there for, it had no immediate significance. But they did not linger, as they had patently been prepared to do before finding the boat. The holiday air disappeared, and they worked quietly at filling their casks and gathering driftwood. The silly little dog, unprepared for the change in the atmosphere, got in their way and was cursed.

  ‘Call that a dog!’ said the mulatto again.

  ‘See that there fellow with the black ringlets,’ whispered the Dorset man. ‘He were one of the crew of the Santa Marta that time I were aboard her after they sunk the Marie Galante off the Mosquito coast. Fresh water, indeed!’ He watched the shining water being shot into the casks. ‘No water at all they gave us, and no food neither, the bastards.’

  Henry, lying silent, noticed that there was no further suggestion of trade. Even the dissenter was no longer vocal. They watched the ship’s crew roll the barrels down the beach and up the planks into the boat, and made no motion either to stop them or to go down and do business with them. Indeed, their only personal reaction to the Spaniards’ departure was to criticise their boat-work.

  ‘What a lot of lubbers!’ they said, watching the Spaniards’ way with an oar. ‘What a lot of tailors!’

  When the boat had reached the ship’s side and the water was being hauled on board they lost interest and remembered that there was still some rum. They drifted one by one back to the fire.

  ‘If their nostrils hadn’t been so bunged up with salt they’d have smelt us for sure,’ Bluey said, sniffing the smoke from the boucan-drying as he turned away from the clean sea air.

  Henry said nothing, waiting for his idea to ferment in their minds of its own accord. They discussed the ship in general terms at first: her tonnage, her rig, her probable cargo. Wood, they thought. Fine woods from the wet South American forests.

  ‘Why couldn’t Chakka just rope the man in the stern?’ Tugnet said. ‘Just rope him and pull his throat shut?’

  ‘Too risky,’ said Chris. ‘If he failed we’d have them all on us.’

  And with this contribution from Chris the subject passed from the academic to the practical. The proposition that they take the ship had been accepted.

  ‘It’ll have to be in the first watch, if we try it,’ Bartholomew said. ‘The moon come
s up after midnight, and they’d spot us as soon as we left the shore.’

  They lay round the fire as dusk closed in, discussing ways and means, and every now and then referring to Henry about a point. ‘What do you think, Brains?’ ‘How does that look to you, Brains?’ It had been his idea, and they were playing fair by him. He was no longer a cipher in the camp; he was, on the contrary, a potential leader. Bluey went down to the longboat and came back with a small grapnel, and the Indian gathered moss to pad it. They slung a canvas on the coast side of the fire so that no hint of a hostile presence should move the Spaniards to double a guard that night. Watching the faces as they bent to admire the Indian’s handiwork on the grapnel, Henry considered his allies. They were not what he would have chosen, perhaps, but if the faces were unintelligent, in some cases stupid, in some cases callous, at least none of them was mean. There was a lack of calculation about them that saved them from being evil, or even bad. That same lack of calculation made them what they were, of course; hand-to-mouth spenders of all they made, world’s vagabonds and permanent tramps. Only Bartholomew, of them all, had a kind of dignity. And he now knew why. He knew, too, why he was looked up to in this gathering of odds and ends. Bartholomew was a sail-maker. Bartholomew had a trade; he was an expert in one particular line; able to make a living and take his place anywhere. It was because of that fact that, even in the presence of a more probable leader like the man Chris, they deferred to Bartholomew Kindness.

  When the dark came they pulled the longboat carefully down over the sand and floated her. An hour before midnight the tide would turn, and they would let the tide float them out to the ship as far as it served them. Then they came back to the camp and cleaned and primed their weapons until it was time.

  ‘Brains has no pistol, Bart,’ someone said. And there was a long discussion as to whose pistol he should take. Not because any one of them grudged parting with his own, but because they were determined that he should have the best.

  ‘It doesn’t matter much,’ Henry said. ‘I’m not planning to kill anyone.’

  ‘If I had my way we’d kill the whole boiling of them,’ Timsy said.

  ‘Anyone can kill a man,’ Henry said contemptuously. ‘It needs only a little piece of lead and a thumb in working order.’

  ‘Brains doesn’t need to kill,’ Chris said. ‘He gets his own way without.’

  ‘And the ransom besides,’ Henry added.

  ‘Ransom?’ they said.

  ‘For the men I’ve kept alive,’ he said; and so cancelled the effect of Chris’s half-sneer.

  They went down to the beach when the time came with the idea firmly in their minds that there were cleverer ways to their ends than by killing. Which—as Brains had shown—was simple, and satisfying, but extravagant.

  As they pushed off into the quiet water, Henry pulled off his shoes and left them in the bottom of the boat. He sat in the bows ready, and beside him was the Indian, Chakka, with the grapnel. They had tried the effect of the padding on a floor of planks collected from various parts of the camp, and had laughed to see how their cleverness was rewarded. The grapnel fell always head down, of course, and they padded the head with moss until it was resilient as a ‘baby’s wool ball’, as Henry had promised.

  The night hung round them like velvet, and the black water bore them gently out towards the invisible ship. She had swung with the tide and lay bows to shore, so that to reach her stern they had to pass her broadside on. She had no riding-lights, but when they came nearer they saw that a dim glow came up from an open hatch on deck, and a lantern hung at the entrance to the fo’c’sle. When they came so close that her bulk was silhouetted against the sky they could see that the guards the Spaniards had set at dusk were still there. One in the bows, one at the stern, and one at the ladder in the waist.

  This was the crucial moment. One cough or sneeze, one incautious movement, and any one or all of these men would give tongue, and up from her bowels would come men by the dozen and the water would be jumping all round them in a hail of bullets.

  But the slow, breathless moments passed, and now they were safe under her counter, and fending themselves off her rudder with their hands. One by one in the darkness they let out the pent breath that had suffocated them and relaxed. They sat there listening to the movements of the man above, and to the subdued sound of talk in the cabin somewhere. Forward of the cabin it was quiet, and it seemed that, glad of the knowledge that they would, for this night at least, not be disturbed in their rest to work ship, the fo’c’sle was asleep.

  Henry stood up on his stocking soles in the bows, and pushed off until he was standing directly below the ship’s rail, the Indian ready behind him.

  ‘Now!’ he whispered to Chris, and Chris flung the stone.

  It dropped into the sea on the port quarter, and the man above moved away from his post to investigate. While the noise of his boots was still loud in the stillness, Chakka flung the grapnel. It fell on deck with a thud that stopped their hearts. To their heated imaginations it sounded like a meteor landing. But Henry had no time to consider the consequences. Chakka drew tight the rope, and the hook slid quietly from the deck and caught sweetly and silently in the rail. And Henry was swarming up the rope and stepping over the broad wooden rail before he had time to think. He crouched there in the darkness.

  The man took a long time over his inspection. He walked forward and talked to the man in the waist, glad perhaps of an excuse to break the monotony of his watch. But presently he came back, humming to himself, and, still humming, came to stand a couple of yards from the waiting Henry. Henry could see him distinctly against the lightening sky. He was standing with his back to him.

  His right hand with the kerchief wrapped round it went over the man’s mouth and his left with the knife in it pressed into the man’s back.

  ‘Be quiet!’ he said.

  He felt his knife go through the man’s leather coat, and a mad longing filled him to kill the man. Excitement boiled in him and sought an outlet; a climax.

  It was something older than either law or Christianity that stopped him. Superstition. There must be no blood on this setting-out of his.

  The man stopped his instinctive struggle as soon as he felt the knife-point against his skin. Henry dragged him back a step or two to the rail and tugged the rope where it hung from the grapnel; and in a moment Chris and Bluey joined him, materialising over the rail as darker shadows in the darkness. They bound and gagged the man that Henry was holding, and passed him to the custody of the next man up.

  Henry walked boldly forward to the man at the waist, and cut short the man’s greeting to a supposed comrade with a pistol shoved into his stomach. The man cried out instinctively, but it was a small bitten-off cry, and they bound and gagged him without hindrance.

  The bored guard in the bows came strolling aft to find what had interested his comrade. Henry pushed the others into the darkness and waited alongside the silent and helpless Spaniard. As the newcomer stopped to gossip, Bluey, not waiting for Henry, flung an iron arm round the man’s throat so that not even a bitten-off cry escaped from his outraged gullet. Henry shoved a rag into his gaping mouth, and Bluey drew his arms behind him and tied his hands to his ankles. The two captives were left in charge of the Dorset man, and Henry moved aft to that glow of light from the cabin.

  The poop dropped to the deck in two shallow descents, and in the middle of the small half-deck was a partly-open hatch. As Henry bent his head to look down into the interior he felt a small sudden chill on the back of his neck, and thought at first that it was the result of his excitement. Then he realised that it was the first breath of an off-shore wind.

  In the cabin five men were sitting round the table playing cards, and two more watched from seats at their side. A man in the forward corner was stringing a fiddle, and two were asleep in bunks. There might be more men asleep on bunks on the side that he could not see. The captain was a podgy man, and he played bad-temperedly. On his right sat a man
of the same age, but elegant in dress and figure. He had the air of a guest; a passenger. On the passenger’s right, lying on a velvet cushion, was a small bundle of silk that Henry recognised as the toy dog. Its head was buried under its paws and its nose in the cushion. All the prowlers in the world might be gathering within a few feet of it without disturbing by a heart-beat its silken slumbers. As the mulatto had remarked: ‘Call that a dog!’

  Judging by the volume of excited breathing behind him that the majority of his following were now on board, Henry pressed a hand on Chris’s shoulder to make him stay where he was, and moved round to the cabin entrance, which was on the forward side and led down a few steps from the main deck. So rapt were the men in the cabin on their game, and so unsuspicious of this quiet midnight on a deserted coast, that Henry stood for a moment on the last step considering them at his leisure, before the captain, who was facing him, looked up and saw him.

  The captain’s eyes bulged.

  ‘Keep still,’ said Henry, standing with his pistol levelled. ‘My friends above are watching you with interest.’

  The captain understood him because he shot an agonised glance up at the faces in the reflected glow.

  ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’ he said in French. ‘No one will move. Don’t shoot!’ his choice of tongue being an instinctive tribute to the French, who had made their island of Tortuga the headquarters of piracy in the Caribbean.

  But his passenger was of different stuff. With a sideways glance at the shaking captain, he bowed to Henry and said: ‘You have come too late for supper, but the madeira is good, monsieur Sansouliers.’

  Even a conqueror does not feel at his best in his stocking soles; and Henry was a very young and new conqueror, and a Celt to boot. The flick stung him.

  ‘You are no more effective than your dog, Señor,’ he said in his island Spanish. The animal was now standing up on its cushion and uttering small shrill yelps, and it looked self-important and silly. And then, raising his voice a little, he said: ‘Bluey! Come down here,’ and Bluey detached himself from the gathering above and appeared beside him on the steps.