Captain Adam (5 page)

The man at first did not seem prepared to answer. Then he said from a corner of his mouth: "Best not to talk about Tom 'Art." •

"Sorry," said Adam, embarrassed.

However, after a drink the mouselike one relented; and while nothing further was said about Captain Hart he did introduce himself—Willis Beach—and did tell Adam something about Kingston.

Kingston, it appeared, approached a panic. Nobody knew when the news of war would come—it might well be brought by a French fleet. The colony had a few cannons, a small store of powder and ball, half a warehouse full of rusting muskets, but no real soldiers. Nine men out of ten were scared half to death. They busded here and there with the pauseless persistence of ants. They whispered in corners. They shaded their eyes to scan the sea. They hoarded.

"Some wants to arm the blacks, other say it'd be worse'n 'aving the Frenchies 'ere. Now if they was to—"

He broke off. Coming in from the street were three Marines in bright blue coats and pipe-clayed belts. They were large coarse purposeful men. One had a hanger.

Though he had never before seen one, Adam knew instantly that here was a press gang. There were warships in the harbor.

The men made for Willis Beach. One grabbed the little Londoner's arms and twisted them behind him, so that he squealed in pain. One yanked him off his stool. The third, the midshipman, finished his ale.

"Let him alone," Adam said suddenly.

He didn't know why he did that. It was none of his business. He truly

didn't give a hoot what happened to WiUis Beach, even though the httle man was the only one who had said a civil word to him so far in this colony. It was probably the presser's manner that did it. Any man from Rhode Island might have felt the same way.

The men were puzzled rather than angry. One reached for a short wooden cudgel Adam had not previously noticed: it hung by a leathern thong from his belt. Adam punched him in the jaw.

The man staggered backward, maldng low blubbery sounds of astonishment. He tripped over a stool and sat down—hard.

The midshipman drew his hanger.

"O-ho! It's a fight our Yankee friend would like, eh?"

Adam looked at the blade. There was nothing he could oppose to that, physically. He sneered. He whipped a paper out of a pocket.

"And it's a court-martial our officer friend would like, eh?"

Wary, his point still raised, the midshipman looked at the letter. Adam could not be sure whether he could read; but if he couldn't he wouldn't admit this. In any event the signature and seal were sufficiently impressive. The message enjoined one and all to abstain from hindering Adam Long, who was doing some special work of a confidential nature for "Benbow, Admiral, R.N." They had learned the name of the admiral from bumboat women, and Seth Selden, with some such emergency as this in mind, had made a fine thing of the forgery.

"You might've let me know sooner," the midshipman mumbled.

"You might've given me a chance to," Adam snapped.

Willis Beach loudly admired the signature, when the gang had gone.

"Better'n the real one!"

"What makes you think that this isn't real?"

"Just 'appens I know old Johnny Benbow. Used to dark on 'is flagship. You see, Cap'n, it just so 'appens I am a deserter from the bloody Nivy. If they'd 'ad me in, I'd've got fifty-sixty lashes."

He rose. He shook Adam's hand.

"I'm 'eading for the 'ills, and I'll stie there till these wessels've gone awie. Gawd bless you, Cap'n. Good-bye."

That evening Adam announced that there would be no shore leave in Kingston.

"Unless some of you got a hankering to join the English Navy?"

The hoops and staves fetched a fancy price, but nobody would touch the eels. It seemed that the Navy had impounded all the food reserves on the island, or had threatened to. A fleet was expected from Home, the admiral declared, and he must prepare to stock it. But the colonists had to eat, and what's more they had to feed their slaves, the governor had replied, adding that the admiral did not have the right to do any such impounding. The admiral rejoined that he certainly did, and any-

way he was doing it. Voices had been raised, tables thumped. The governor, beset by political enemies, was unsure of his position, for he held only an interim appointment, and word from the new monarch, Anne, had not yet been received. Neither had official news of the declaration of war been received. Something had gone astray, some ship had been sunk? Meanwhile nobody knew whether the admiral's order stood, or in fact just what it was; but the planters in from their plantations couldn't buy food, and Adam Long was not permitted to sell.

"You'd have to get permission from Admiral Benbow himself."

"All right," he said. "I'll go and ask him."

He waited for four days in an anteroom. Nobody paid much attention to him. He was not uncomfortable; but he never did get a glimpse of the admiral. All the functionaries he ever saw, aside from a few clerks who sometimes scurried in to check the spelling of his name or the tonnage of his vessel, were a couple of marine guards, changed too often to make it worth while to hit up an acquaintance with them.

Alone, then, and uneasy in mind, he fell into the habit of surveying his own clothes and wondering what folks thought of him here—either that or else gazing out of a window to where he could see Goodwill in the midst of a cluster of bumboats. The bumboats made more tolerable the confinement of those aboard the schooner, but all the same the captain didn't like them. They were dirty, like the men and women who rowed them, and he misliked to think of dirty people near Goodwill.

He had turned from the window, the afternoon of the fourth day, and closed his throbbing eyes for a moment. The sunlight was merciless, blaring off the roofs, fleering away from the palm trees.

"Is the admiral in, pray?"

Adam opened his eyes.

This was a willowy stripling in silver and blue, who carried one hand on his hip whilst with the other he waved a square of lace doused with perfume. He looked as if a good breeze might blow him away, and his voice was a cultivated screech, a macaw's.

Adam made a leg, mockingly.

"They tell me he is, sir. I wouldn't know. I've never seen him myself. But then, I've only been waiting here since Tuesday."

The stripling's mouth fell open, and he seemed to gasp, Uke a fish out of water. The hand with the kerchief became still.

What if anything this apparition would have replied, Adam was never to know, for at this moment a clerk bustled in, swirling with apologies, milording this and milording that, and offered the stripling his arm and conducted him to the inner chamber.

It was too much for Adam, who left.

He was thoughtful when he called the hands aft that evening. There

were no bumboats then, and the harbor was quiet. Night would come soon, in a rush. The lovely birds that sought garbage were gone. The surface of the water was crumpled with catspaws.

"There's plenty want food but they can't buy it here. So we'll take it to them around the other side of the island. The customs folks won't let us deliver our goods at the front door, we'll use the back."

"That'd be smuggling," Peterson cried.

"Why, so it would," said Adam.

Jeth Gardner pointed out: "But we can't even leave this harbor with-outen we have clearance papers!"

Adam patted the mainsail.

"There's our clearance paper. All right—now let's have the hook up!"

8 Mr. Pendleton was a worried man with worried washy eyes.

His sigh rose full from his feet. Whenever he came to a stop there seemed to settle upon him, invisible until it landed, a gritty sediment, ashes mixed with sand perhaps, giving forth an acrid odor like dust from some discouraged volcano. He dragged, and drooped.

Conscientiously he conducted his visitor around the plantation. It was nothing to be proud of. In those parts you always had a sense of rottenness. You could feel the nearness, the emergence, Hke a stealthy miasma, of decay. But this place was worse than most. It was falling apart.

Mr. Pendleton was the third Jamaica planter Adam had tried. The first had only recently been visited by another Yankee with dried codfish and live horses—so his slaves would eat for a while. The second had wanted the eels, but couldn't pay for them. Four dozen coconuts in exchange for a cask of oysters, was the best that struggler could do.

Mr. Pendleton was not going to be any more profitable.

"Shall we have a drink. Captain?"

"Don't mind."

Not the suggestion but its tardiness was strange. The average planter produced liquor as soon as you hove into sight. For one thing, he welcomed news from outside, and hoped you'd be talky. For another, if you got a bit drunk you might come down in your price.

They were lonesome, these out-of-the-way planters.

Adam decided to try a Frencher next. He'd run over to Hispaniola. Meanwhile it was only mannerly to have that drink.

Mr. Pendleton led the way past a ramshackle garden and into a mouldering house. He clapped his hands. Nobody came. He shouted; but the

echoes of his shout chased themselves to rest. Muttering something about sickness, Mr. Pendleton said he would get the rum himself.

"Why don't you go out there under those roses, Captain?"

Adam bowed gravely and went out to a shabby little arbor and sat down. He could see the schooner from there, which was good. He reckoned he wasn't entirely shoved out of everything when he could command Goodwill to Men, He might own only one-sixteenth of her, but she'd obey him when he put over the tiller. And he would own the whole vessel some day. He was bound and determined that this should be so.

"Here we are. Sorry I took so long. Will you have a cigarro, too?"

They lit up. They sipped. Adam's drink was powerful.

"Shall we talk business?"

"All right."

Adam did not even look at his host but continued to gaze down at the schooner, from which the Moses boat was putting out. That was right: he had instructed Resolved Forbes to send the boat at this time.

He named his price. He heard a gasp. Then came the tale of woe. It was sloppy, slippy, the words like pewter plates with gobbets of food still sticking to them. Mr. Pendleton was willing to pay, but— When his next shipment came—

Adam shook his head. He took a Httle, not much, of his drink. The Moses boat was nearing shore. It looked absurdly small and toylike down there on the blue, blue bay.

Suddenly Adam caught a change in Mr. Pendleton's voice.

"What was that you said?"

"I repeat: I am not going to debase myself with any more pleading. Either you sell me those eels at a price I can pay, or I'll have you seized and sent to Kingston as a smuggler."

"Why, of all the Joe-fired—"

"I mean every word of that. Captain."

He did, too. He was a weak man, but a wildly desperate one. Pasty, skinny, he wasn't going to depend on himself alone. A huge quadroon, the biggest man Adam Long had ever seen, now was standing beside Adam's chair. He must have slipped out of the house, at a signal.

"Well?"

"Go to the Devil! I don't do business that way."

Mr. Pendleton was stubborn as only a weak man can be.

"Your boat's coming in now. If you'll just give the order to unload, I'll pay you everything I've got."

"Go to the Devil," Adam said again, "if he'll have you."

"It means Kingston, Captain. They're touchy about such matters, especially right now. I happen to have some influence there, and I think

1 can promise that you'd be impressed into the Navy. It might be years before your story got out—if it ever did."

Here was no empty threat. The EngHsh Navy was taking whatever it could get, without asking questions; and the port officials at Kingston would be in a lather about Goodwill. They had paid him no mind while he was there, but when they found him gone without proper permission their rage would know no bounds. They'd splutter that he had offended against the dignity of the Throne, when in fact it was their own dratted dignity they thought of. If folks started laughing at port authorities, where would port authorities be? The times being what they were, and sent-out clerks what they were, a man in Adam Long's position might well lose his cargo and vessel, his liberty to boot. Be a smuggler if you must, a corruptionist, even a pirate, but for God's sake don't venture to sneer at the third assistant deputy custodian of the royal high colonial admiralty seal! It is a fact attested by men of sense everywhere that of all pompous asses in a world overcrowded with same, the most vindictive by far is the port official.

Adam rose.

"Reckon I'll go back aboard, where it don't stink so much."

The quadroon stiffened. Mr. Pendleton drew from underneath his waistcoat a walnut-and-blue-steel horse pistol.

"We had better step inside, Captain. You and Oliver and I."

They went only as far as the veranda, where they were screened by long let-down jalousies. Mr. Pendleton watched the sea. Oliver watched Adam Long.

The Moses boat had been beached and two sailors loafed beside it. A third man was walking toward the house.

"From his clothes. Captain, I take it that we are about to be honored by a visit from one of your mates? "

Adam nodded. He had recognized Resolved Forbes. It had not been a part of Resolved's orders to come ashore in person, and the fact that he had done so might argue that he was suspicious—or just that he was bored.

Mr. Pendleton waggled the pistol.

"This will make it the more persuasive. The skipper and the mate."

Resolved Forbes came on. His gait rolled, as a sailorman's should, and he had his thumbs looped into the top of his breeches.

A hundred yards away he halted; and for a long moment he studied the arbor, the chairs, ashtray, glasses, Adam's hat, the still-smoking cigarro.

Mr. Pendleton cocked the pistol, a loud sound.

Resolved Forbes stood as though in thought, then drew a small telescope from one of his pockets and put this to an eye.

After a while he turned back.