Captain Adam (22 page)

It fell open to the Song of Solomon; but clearly that wouldn't do, if 136

Maisie was to be permitted to slumber; and he leafed back a bit, coming to rest at last, as he so often did, on Job. He didn't know how many times he'd read Job. Sometimes he read it, as you should read any part of the Book, with devout attention, going back over certain parts that he wasn't immediately sure of, pronouncing each word in his mind, pondering the meaning of that whole story. At other times he would read it rather with his ears than with his eyes, caring nothing for pronunciation and not at all concerned with what God was getting at, but just plain enjoying himself, the way he might have enjoyed himself if he'd leaned back against something and listened to lovely music.

When he put the Book down, then, he felt better; but still he deemed it prudent not to venture another peek at Maisie. He picked up his ledger.

It was Adam's habit not to enter anything in the ledger until he had rehearsed it in his mind. The figures he finally set down were no more than a recording. The calculations themselves, by steps and in the whole, were mental. Adam was not quick at figures but he was thorough.

So that now he did not touch a quill, only stared at the pages, while his mind weighed possible insertions and amendments.

On the whole, he was proud of the report so far. He recapitulated. He'd lost a couple of jibs, the longboat, the foremast boom, a great deal of molasses.

The widow of Eliphalet Mellish would be paid his wages up to the day he died, of course. Adam already had this money put aside, in a place the pirates had not found. Seth Selden, carried as a stowaway, never rated wages, and Peterson and Waters had quit all claim on theirs. The new man, Willis Beach, would not have to be paid until he was officially signed on—if he was. To be sure, this left the Goodwill seriously undermanned, and Adam would have to pick up some hands. But even allowing for this, he was keeping the payroll down first-rate.

Thanks in part to the weather, in part to his decision not to run all the way down to the Leewards, but chiefly to good stowage, very few barrels of eels had gone bad. And he had sold the rest at a record price.

Only a quarter of the one hundred pounds he had taken as passage money for Maisie had been spent for Seth Selden's share of the schooner, a notable bargain.

He'd had another purely personal windfall—those twenty-nine hogsheads of gunpowder the pirates had piled on his deck. Gunpowder was something you could always sell. This rated as a fortune of the sea, something like an act of God. It was, legally, all Adam's. It had been put there by pirates, who enjoyed no standing, being outlaws; and this was the same, in the eyes of an admiralty court, as if it had been thrown up there by the sea.

Well and good. But there remained the matter of the missing molasses.

The hoops and staves and the fish had been paid for in cash, and this he had still, hidden away. But of the molasses from Horace Treadway's plantation fewer than fifty barrels remained. More than three hundred had been rolled into the sea.

Adam feared that he was going to have to ask somebody for a loan. He shook his head, clucked his tongue.

"Are you bankrupt, too, my chick?"

He grinned, slapping the ledger away, slipping out of his bunk, and knelt beside her, and they kissed. They kissed for some time.

"La, what an importunate lover," she laughed when she got the chance. "I do declare, I think you'd beg me for it if we was in a hurricane."

"It'd be a delight then, too."

"Damned undignified though. Not that it ain't always. The position,

I» mean.

He sighed, with a seriousness not wholly mock.

"Some day, sweet, we'll be alone. And we'll do whatever we want, as many times as we can, without worrying about storms or mutinies or pirates or anything else. Some day."

The smile slid off her mouth, which desire now was tugging tight.

"Some day," she whispered as she pressed closer. "And in the meanwhile, my Adam—"

While he was dressing she said lazily that she supposed they were at last making a course direct for New York? No, he replied, they were heading back to Jamaica. She sat up.

"Why?"

"Different reasons," he replied. "Get more for the gunpowder there. It's no safe cargo anyway. Best to get rid of it as soon as possible. Then we need a real boom. And a longboat. And a couple of hands. In Kingston we can get niggers or deserters from the Navy for next to nothing. But most of all it's credit I'm after. To replace that molasses. I'd thought, uh, of going back to your cousin."

"Oh— Horace again, eh?"

"I'd hoped maybe 3'ou might talk him into taking my note, on my share of the schooner.

"I see. Well, I'll try, Adam."

He was about to start up the ladder when she spoke again.

"Adam-"

"Yes, dear?"

"What my poor weak womanly mind still can't encompass is: why do you have to make up for that jettisoned cargo? You were lightening the ship in the hope of escaping, isn't that right?"

"That's right." 138

"Well, wasn't that your best judgment? You're bringing the boat itself back, which is more than most skippers would do."

"The Providencers should never have been allowed to get so close. The man on watch should have spotted 'em earlier."

"Who was the man on watch?"

"Me."

"Oh."

"And I was the only one. And I was down here."

He turned back to the ladder.

"But, Adam, who knows that you were down here?"

He looked at her, open-mouthed. He had been about to blurt: "Why, God does." This seemed to him prefectly natural. It might not seem so to Maisie. It might sound sanctimonious to her. Some folks had odd notions about God and how you should think of Him.

"Well— Well, anyway, that's how it is."

The slide was pushed back. Resolved Forbes was there, discreetly upright, not bending forward to thrust his head in.

"Sail on the starboard quarter. Over Cubic way. A two-sticker."

"What rig?"

"She ain't got no rig. She looks—well, sort of lost."

O f\ When a knave has kissed you (goes an old saying), count «_-/ \J your teeth. A skipper becomes cautious down there in Scaredy-Cat Sea; and Adam had his nose atwitch, ready to smell a trick.

On this fine clear morning there was no land in sight, though as the mate had said Cuba would be off the starboard bow, which is where the derelict, if it was a derelict, was.

It was riding high, as if empty. It might have been fifty feet on the waterline, and didn't look fast, being somewhat puffy at the bows, while its two masts, though stout, were not notably tall. These sticks, all un-sparred, were about the same height, so that the vessel at least was not a ketch or a schooner. The only canvas showing was a jib, but half-sheeted home, which flopped to this side or that, as though the vessel had its own whims, couldn't make up its mind, or did not care.

Nobody was to be seen aboard. The tiller flumped listlessly.

Adam would study this sight for a while through the glass, then with his naked eye. Then, like as not, he would search the seas elsewhere with a suspicious scowl. He couldn't help thinking that somebody was

aiming to trip him up—that if he reached for this purse in the pathway it would be yanked away by a string, if he kicked this old hat, he'd sprain his toe on the rock inside.

It was just too good to be true.

He began to tack. He wouldn't take in an inch of canvas. He wanted to be ready to get away when the trick was discovered.

Maisie appeared at his side and asked to borrow the glass. Break-fastless, she yet was bright, and there was not a wrinkle in her frock. She studied the strange sail with delight, uttering little cries. It might have been a new dress model, a latest-mode bonnet.

"Can it really go on sailing itself?"

"Until some weather makes up, or it drives aground."

"And if nobody's there, who owns it?"

"Whoever brings it in. It's not the vessel that finds it, it's the vessel that brings it in."

"Oh— The owners get it all, then?"

"Depends on what the skipper's arrangement is. In this case, no. In this case the owners'd get only one-tenth, all of 'em together."

"And you're three-sixteenths of the owners, after all."

"Aye. Then the mate gets a tenth and the crew gets a tenth. All this is after expenses have been taken out. And provided the towing vessel ain't had her hull strained coming in. In that case her owners'd have a claim for more."

"Who gets the other seven-tenths?"

He couldn't help grinning.

"I do."

She kissed him right then and there, smacko on the mouth.

"Adam! Then you'll be rich!"

"Well, not exactly rich. You got to accept the admiralty's estimate. And the lawyers'll get a big share, of course. But I ought to clear enough to keep your creditors quiet for a while anyway."

Tears came swiftly to her eyes. They didn't fall, but they glittered there.

"You think of me—first."

"I think of you all the time," he pointed out matter-of-facdy. "Just can't help it."

They did a deal of hallooing as they approached, but there was nothing to show that they'd been heard. Twice they passed the stranger, in real close, one on each tack, but they saw no sign of life. Not until then did Adam give the order to heave to.

He still didn't like it. He kept expecting something to explode in his face.

The other sail trailed no line, and neither did it show any anchor, spar, 140

or gig. Its deck, what they could see of it—for the other vessel was the higher-sided—was as clear as though swept by a hurricane. Yet there was no hint of damage about this idle saunterer of the sea: nothing showed stove in, the sticks were upright, the bowsprit jaunty.

They kept hallooing—and getting no answer.

They did pick out the name, Quatre Moulins. It was a French name, Maisie said. Did it mean anything? She shrugged. "Four Mills"—that was all.

There was nothing else on the counter. No home port was given. But since to give the name of such a port was the exception rather than the rule, they thought little of this.

"Put over the Moses," Adam said.

"Who'll go?" Resolved Forbes asked.

Now this was exactly what Adam had been asking himself for more than an hour.

Jeth was out of the question because of his leg. Resolved Forbes might be thought the logical one, but Adam was determined to go himself and one of these two should remain. Maisie pleaded to be taken, but Adam shook his head. John Bond still burned a bit with fever. The new hand, the tiny Londoner Willis Beach, might have been willing, but Adam didn't know him well enough to trust him. That left the boy, Abel Relhson. Adam nodded to him.

"Take the oars."

There was no port through which they might peer, and even by standing in the stemsheets Adam could not see anything of the deck.

Rellison rowed clear around the vessel, but there was no movement except the groggy swing of the tiller, the flap of the jib.

There was no line, no ladder, but Adam had prepared against this with a length of knotted line to which had been tied a grappling hook. He threw this. It caught the first time. He tested it.

He drew his sword, the beautifully damaskeened Toledo that Carse had given him, and put it between his teeth. He might look tarnation silly, scrambling up the side of a strange sail with that thing in his mouth; but there was nobody to see him—he hoped—excepting his own men and Maisie.

As soon as he'd dropped to the deck he took the sword out of his mouth and held it in his hand.

He looked around.

The deck was singularly clean—that is, not clean as though it had only just been holystoned, but clear of gear, unlittered. Except for the shrouds and the single jibsheet, the vessel was all unrigged. There wasn't so much as a single block knocking around. There was no line coiled or laid. Not only were there no halyards, there were no bits for halyards

to be made fast to. It made Adam think of unrigged ships he'd worked on in the yard where Goodwill was built, though this vessel was not as clean and fresh as all that, nor was there any odor of just-sawn wood, just-planed chips.

It did not take him long to search the deck. He did this alone, having commanded Abel Rellison to stand by in the Moses.

The poop was only a bit higher than the waist. He went there. The binnacle was smashed, the only sign of damage. He examined it. The compass had been ripped out. This must have taken a good bit of work, his carpenter's eye told him. If it was done before the ship was abandoned, that event couldn't have been marked by much haste.

Then he saw the stain. It was on the deck, in the waist, near the larboard rail, a few scant feet indeed from the point where Adam had stepped aboard. It was a large stain, roughly round, perhaps eight or nine feet across. Adam knew right away that it had been caused by blood.

He couldn't have said how he knew this. Bloodstains are not necessarily red—in fact, they seldom are—but can be brown, black, blue, purple, depending on how long ago the stain was made, the nature of the material stained, the condition of the blood itself, and temperature, moisture, half a dozen other things.

This stain was a darkish brown, and it was beginning to peel at the edges and in a few places in the middle. But it was blood all right.

It wasn't just the blood of any one man either. One man doesn't have that much.

He went forward. He could walk anywhere on this deck without being obliged to pick his way, for it had been stripped clean. It would never have been taken to sea like this, and he doubted that it would have been so stripped even at anchor or alongside a dock. From various marks on the masts and from the nature and condition of the chafing gear on the shrouds Adam deduced that it had probably mounted three square on the fore, a fore-and-aft and a square topsail on the main: a brig then.

The forecastle hatch was open, though it slid back and forth vdth the unenthusiastic pitching of the vessel. Adam wetted his lips.

"Ahoy down there!"

There was no answer.