Alias Hook (9 page)

There were many as would think it an affront to have their person touched by a black man in public, but I craved human contact after my long isolation and was grateful for his support, besides. I let him guide me down the road through lengthening shadows, across a planked walkway and into a sour-smelling grog shop populated by waterfront types like himself: haulers, loaders, porters, along with a few white mariners off the ships in the harbor. He sat me down on a bench deep in the shadows in the back of the room, went off to the counterman, and presently returned with a couple of jacks of spruce beer. The first long draft settled my nerves somewhat and improved my humor immensely.

“Thomas,” I began, “I’ve got to get up to Eden. Can you help—”

But he was shaking his head. “Oh you dasn’t go there, Mistah James.”

“What? Why not?”

“The island militia post a guard at that place, in case you turn up. They clap you in the guardhouse for true.”

I was too astonished to speak. With an apologetic glance, Thomas drew a paper out of his shirt and handed it to me. I squinted at it in the dim light; it was some sort of handbill. Across the top was printed,
Proclamation by Lord Hamilton, Governor of Jamaica. 18 November, 1712.
In the center was a crude engraving of a smug, fatuous-looking popinjay in a fancy hat, sculpted goatee, and a great foaming of neck lace, above the legend:
Reward offered for James. B. Hookbridge, for the Crime of Piracy and High Treason against Her Majesty’s Ships, Kingston, Jamaica. Dead or Alive.

I stared again at Thomas. My tongue had turned to dust.

“I snatch it off the wall when the tapster not looking,” Thomas murmured. “But the same one posted in every shop in town.”

“But it’s not true!” I exclaimed.

“Best keep your voice down,” Thomas urged me, glancing quickly about the room, then moving closer. “We heard the charge laid against you up in London, oh, a year ago, it must be now. Some fellows here in Kingston swore against you in the Court House ‘round Christmas, and them bills been up ever since.”

“What fellows?” I demanded, reaching automatically for a sword long since taken off me. “By God’s bollocks, I will know who perjured himself to see me hang!”

“Hssst!” warned Thomas again. “Them no-count fellows of no consequence.” He pressed his lips together in an instant of hesitation, sighed, and plunged on. “It was Mistah Ryland laid the charge against you.”

“Harry Ryland?” I gaped at him. Thomas nodded. Harry Ryland, an ambitious young master’s mate on one of my father’s trading ships, eager for adventure. I’d made him my first lieutenant in the privateering trade, my closest confidant, the one I trusted to captain prize ships back to Kingston in my stead. We were friends.

“Where is he?” I asked Thomas. “I need to—”

But Thomas was already shaking his head again. “Gone, Mistah James. Retired to London after we heard you was captured. They say he become a wealthy gentleman.”

“On my profit,” I muttered, as the awful symmetry of the thing began to occur to me. How much had he put away on his own account over the years? All of it? There must have been plenty to pay others to give false evidence against me. But I was not about to roll over like a whipped dog and let him make off with everything I’d worked for, dreamed of, for so long. “Listen, Thomas, I need to send word to my father. Is there anyone you know up at Eden—”

“Murchison’s,” he said quietly. “That’s what they call it now.” Murchison’s, the strange name on the sign I’d seen on my father’s locked warehouse. “It’s not your daddy’s place any more.”

“Since when?” I bristled.

“Since it fall in the hands of the overseer.” Thomas shook his head sadly. “Your daddy’s dead, Mistah James.”

A chill racketed through my bones worse than any I’d felt in all those years in prison. My father could not be dead! That enormous, infuriating presence that had shadowed my entire life, not dead, not gone. Not yet! I still had so much to prove to him. What was the use of all my grand plans to reform myself, to give up the follies of youth and become a man of worth and substance in the world, if he were not here to see it? My father gone to his grave, never knowing the man I was inside? Now he could never, ever forgive me.

“I’m sorry, Mistah James,” Thomas murmured. “You was always good to me. I thought you should know. It happened last winter. We was all let go at the warehouse. I load boats now on the docks.”

I nodded mutely. “My mother?” I whispered at last, but Thomas only shook his head again.

I closed my eyes in that shadowy place to collect and focus my wits. An orphan I may have become, but as long as I had breath and life and spirit, I could regain what was rightfully mine. I hadn’t a sou to call my own here in Kingston, but I was still my father’s heir. I was Caroline’s betrothed. That thought heartened me above all others, and I rallied myself. For her sake, I would persevere.

“Thank you, Thomas,” I began. “I won’t forget your kindness now that I’m back—”

“No, Mistah James, you can’t be back,” he hissed at me. “You can’t tell anybody who you are; it’s Gallow’s Point if you do…”

Of course, I had no means to prove my innocence; my commission had been taken off me long ago, and there was nothing in my appearance, nor indeed, my reputation, to belie the foul charge against me.

“Well, then, I’ll go to London,” I counter. “Lots of people know me there.” I had friends among the peerage who would help me; no one who had ever really known me would ever believe such calumny of me. Caroline would never believe it! I could work my passage back to England, back to my Caroline—

“Jamie?”

Was it the softness of the unexpeted female voice, or the shock of hearing my old pet name after so long a time that so startled me? I turned upon the instant to see a female figure wafting toward me through the gloom of that place. Some gauzy thing covered her head, but her bodice was cinched tight over long, clingy skirts. My heart turned over and I stood up as if in thrall as the apparition approached me. Only inches away, she slid back her veil to reveal the dusky face and shoulders and dark eyes of a dockside mulatta wench who smelt faintly of salt and rum. But her smile was warm as she took my face in both her hands and pressed a long, slow, probing kiss into my mouth that I was too witless or amazed to refuse.

When at last she drew aback, her cunning smile returned.

“Caroline returns your pledge,” she murmured. Then she turned and sauntered away, back into the shadows that had spawned her.

I stood there, staring after her like a simpleton, my mind in too much turmoil to respond, until what little daylight was still sifting in through the doorway was blotted out by two island constables blowing their whistles and shouting. It was Thomas grabbed me by the arm and hauled me out through a little door in the back, out past the cook-hose in the yard and into the maze of alleyways behind the main road. By the next corner, Thomas, too, had melted away, and I was alone, completely alone in the world, and fleeing for my life.

I escaped the island on a trading ship bound for the Gold Coast of Africa, captained by an incompetent drunkard who took it into his head to raid a few ports on the way. We were captured at Cape Coast and tried for pirates by a Vice-Admiralty court at the castle there. I was new to the crew, and the accusations against me had not traveled with us from Jamaica; I was convicted with the rest but received a lighter sentence, not hanged on the spot, nor transported to Execution Dock in London, as a warning to other young bloods who fancied the rogue’s life. No, I was sentenced to hard labor in the gold mines of the Royal Africa Company.

We labored in chains in the belly of the earth by day, shackled together at night in what the Spaniards among us called
barracoons,
the barracks constructed for holding captive slaves for transport to the Indies. We were treated no better than slaves, but at least we were fed, albeit on some foul-tasting mash highly regarded by the flies of that place. Many of my fellows died in that hard service. But on the day I collapsed in my chains, sheer stubborn rage kept me alive. Rage was all I had left, and I nurtured it like a tiny blossom on the withered stalk my life had become.

I came to myself in the choking blackness but did not stir. I knew I’d be unfettered and carried off somewhere; if I were tossed over a cliff into the sea, it could not be any worse than my present situation. Cadavers were subject to dissection in the teaching hospitals of London, and if such were the practice here, some care might be taken to preserve my body intact until the moment came to bolt. The guards who unshackled me from my fellows in the mine hauled me briefly through sweltering daylight into the close gloom of a building, and threw me onto a table in some dim back chamber buzzing with insects. By the stink of medicines, I understood it to be the surgeon’s quarters.

The guard’s voices and footsteps drifted away. I opened my eyes and found myself alone. I got up and tried to push open the shutters of a little window in the wall above a shelf of equipment and a cupboard of potions. I dared not go out the way the guards had gone, for fear they were still nearby. Two or three of the thin jalousie shutters were missing, which accounted for the agitated flies, but the latch on the frames holding the others in place over the window was crusted shut. I was trying to drive a wedge through it with some small, sharp doctoring tool I found to hand when the surgeon entered from a door in the back.

He was a harried fellow of middle years with a long, lined face and thinning hair, his pink pate unprotected by any wig. He was not expecting his latest corpse to be up and about.

“Well, I’m damned—” he gurgled before I grabbed him by the neck and jabbed the cunning little blade into his throat. It was the first time I’d ever murdered a man in cold blood. It would not be the last.

He sank away with a gesture of impotent protest, blood streaming out of his open mouth. I bolted out the door he’d come in, through his private apartment and outside into the blistering sun for the cover of the tropical wood. When nightfall filled the wood with the racket of chittering things, I made my way down the coast to the next port, where I found work on a slaver back to the Indies.

We made port in Hispaniola, and from there I joined a party of desperate fellows heading to the island of Nassau and the pirate haven of New Providence. That’s where I went on the account in earnest. My own account, for I had a score to settle with all the world. I captured a fleet little French brig and fitted her out for a pirate, rechristened the
Jolie Rouge,
in honor of my long and memorable association with the French. I assembled a crew as rash and savage as myself with which to harry the Caribbees, plundering and burning ships and terrorizing outposts. I would make them all pay for what they’d done to me.

The vow I’d made myself in prison now seemed to me the mewlings of a weak, defeated fool. Bravado was all I had left. Power was all that mattered to me now, rage and revenge against the world that had stolen everything from me—family, fortune, fiancee, reputation. I would carve out a new reputation in blood.

Every opponent I bloodied with my sword, every victim I robbed and terrorized was the friend who had betrayed me, the woman who abandoned me, the father who hadn’t believed in me, the world that spun placidly round and allowed such injustice to go on. I learned from an old shipmate that Harry Ryland had gone back to England to woo my betrothed, after seeing to it that I would never return. Or if I did, a well-paid network of spies was in place to make sure I knew my connection to Caroline was severed in the most intimate, devastating way.

My former shipmate also told me that my father died damning me for a pirate. All the follies of my youth argued in favor of the slanders against me, in his ears.

It would be better for all if I died too. Indeed, James Benjamin Hookbridge did die in that squalid surgery on the African coast, forgotten and unlamented. But Hook was born.

Chapter Nine

SUITE: THE FAIRY REVELS

1

It’s taken all morning for our expedition into the wood, to re-set our game traps and hew suitable lengths of timber from the fallen trees. But not even hours of sawing in the fierce Neverland sun has entirely burned off the heat of my anger, so I bid the men row the gig down to the opposite end of Pirates Beach, near the mouth of Kidd Creek, that we may labor another fruitful hour or more in our garden. The men don’t care for it much, but no one disobeys Hook.

I’ve little fear that the boy will launch an unprovoked attack on the skeleton crew I leave behind on board the
Rouge;
that wouldn’t be fair. But a reckoning is coming, and soon, now that Pan’s fairy knows the woman is here. All women are half-witch, as I know to my cost, and who knows what improvements have been made in the Black Arts since my day? But whatever she is, this Parrish woman, confidante of fairies, neither she nor the boy will get the better of me.

Burley I sent out again in the gig with his lines and tackle to catch our supper while the rest of the men and I raked and culled. And now, as we head back for the
Rouge
in the late afternoon, laden with fragrant lumber, ripening fish, and a pile of cabbages and potatoes, I feel something useful has been accomplished. We are well supplied against any siege, and the building of our new barricade may begin directly. I’m prepared to work through the night while the boys sleep to gain ground.

Once we gain the
Rouge,
I am the first up the chains and on deck. Waving off Brassy with his proffered bottle, and some yammering from Filcher, I turn to supervise the others hauling in the gig and offloading her cargo, the victuals to Cookie in the galley, the timber into the charge of Sticks at his work station on the fo’c’sle deck. With this business noisily underway, I plunge down the ladder for her cabin; now she sees I am in earnest, I’ll give the Parrish woman one more chance to speak the truth to me if she means to forestall a bloody battle with the boys.