Captain in Calico (13 page)

Rackham spoke rapidly to Penner. ‘We still have time enough to make the tide if all goes well with the
Kingston.
Remember your part: a single light, and if we're not with you in three hours, a gun. As for Anne, take her aboard whatever she may say. She'll slip you if she can.'

Penner jerked his head towards Bonney, who had collapsed and was sitting on the floor, a grotesque figure with the sleeve of his coat soaked in blood and the livid cut on his cheek. ‘What of him?'

‘Let him be,' said Rackham. ‘Now run, man, and look for us at Salt Cay.'

Penner scrambled over the sill, and barked a command at the two men who crouched on the verandah with Anne between them. Rackham saw her struggle in their grasp, there was a flurry of her red hair and an oath from one of the men.

‘God damn, she's bit me!' he cried, and then she was swung up by their combined effort and hustled to the verandah steps. She was cursing stridently as they hurried off into the darkness, and then the flow was suddenly cut off, as though one of them had thrust a gag into her mouth.

He was alone in the room now, but for Bonney, and all but two of his men had gone with Ben into the woods. The couple who remained waited on the verandah. For a few seconds he stood listening, but there was no sound of the approach of troops; no noise to re-awaken the panic of a few minutes ago.

He stooped to Bonney and pulled him to his feet by his sound arm. The plump face was ghastly grey; he was near to fainting with his wound, and for a moment Rackham felt a twinge of pity. It was hard to imagine this cringing wreck, with his clothes torn and his face smeared with blood and perspiration, as the monster Anne Bonney had painted. But if our positions had been reversed, thought Rackham. What then? Perhaps she was right. With a mighty heave he threw Bonney over his shoulder, carried him to the window and whistled up his two men.

‘Drop him somewhere out there,' he said. ‘Then wait for me.'

While they were carrying the inert form into the darkness Rackham took from the table a flagon of rum which his looters had overlooked and proceeded to pour the contents
over the cloth and on to the foot of the curtain which screened the passageway. He took one of the candlebranches and applied it to the stain that was spreading across the cloth. It exploded in a puff of flame so sudden that his arm was singed before he could draw back.

He hurled the candlebranch at the curtain and without another glance at his improvised bonfire crossed the room and vaulted out on to the verandah. His two men were just emerging from the darkness, having left Bonney among the bushes, and together the three padded noiselessly down the edge of the drive, while the fire crackled and spread in Bonney's dining-room.

A minute later they were in the trees beyond the road, and Rackham stood listening while the dim forms of his men moved in the shadows about him. Far away on the town road was a distant drumming; it grew into a thunder of hooves as a troop of cavalry swept up to the plantation gates, men and mounts starkly black against the red glare of fire from the house. All was confusion as they wheeled and re-formed on the carriage-way; then their commander was leading them forward to see what could be saved from the blaze.

The trees beyond the road were empty now, and the single file of pirates, with Rackham at their head, were moving silently down to the beach where their longboats waited.

Within the next hour, while the good folk of New Providence were too engrossed over the fire to the eastward to detect what was taking place less than a mile from their own waterfront, the capture of the
Kingston
was effected. The longboats crept out through the narrows past Hog Island and openly approached the brig where she swung at anchor. Those aboard her were far out of earshot of the town, but they could see Bonney's house ablaze, and Rackham turned
this to advantage. He disarmed the suspicions of the
Kingston
's anchor watch by explaining that a party of mutinous slaves had burned the plantation and murdered their master and were still at large in the woods. The Governor, fearing that they might try to escape by sea before the militia could hunt them down, had ordered armed guards to every ship in the harbour and adjacent anchorages. All available men had been pressed into service, hence Rackham and his somewhat disorderly-looking party.

It was well told, with Rackham standing in the stern-sheets of the first boat which lay under the
Kingston
's counter, while the poop lanterns cast their pale yellow gleam over the surrounding water. It satisfied the commander of the
Kingston
's anchor watch, who invited the newcomers aboard, more willingly in view of the alarming news they brought. His satisfaction was short-lived, for within two minutes of Rackham's mounting the
Kingston
's side the anchor watch, taken completely unawares, had been deftly overpowered and disarmed. Thereafter they were persuaded to embark in the boats which the pirates had just left, which they did with blasphemous protest to the accompaniment of ironic cheers from their elated captors.

By the time the commander of the anchor watch had grounded his longboat on the northern shore of Hog Island and plunged his way through the underbrush to bellow to the harbour the alarm which should rouse the town, the
Kingston
was standing away to the north-east, her pale canvas slowly vanishing into the night. So the enterprise was begun.

Overnight the weather changed and dawn came with a grey sky and showery squalls driving from the north-east. With sail spread the
Kingston
ploughed southward over Tongue of the Ocean, and two cables' lengths astern Penner's sloop danced in her wake like a puppy frisking behind a full-grown dog.

Rackham had been on deck since before first light. He had not slept during the night, the false refreshment of shaving and dressing in clean clothes had long since worn off, and he was red-eyed and tired.

They had made the rendezvous with Penner, and had lost no time in transferring twenty hands from the sloop to the brig so that the larger vessel should have a reasonable complement in the event of emergency. It had been a disquieting half hour for Rackham, however, partly by reason of Anne Bonney's behaviour. Remembering how it had been necessary to drag her from Bonney's house, he had expected to find her hostile; instead, to his surprise, she had been in a state of exultation when she greeted him as he boarded the sloop.
Her animation was so far removed from the viciousness and anger she had displayed such a short while before that he wondered, not for the first time, if there was perhaps a streak of madness in her nature.

Her high spirits were not shared by Penner, who, in the brief spell of waiting off Salt Cay, had discovered grounds for anxiety aboard his sloop. While the men were being transferred to the
Kingston
he announced his fears to Rackham.

‘They're asking questions. Of course, it was to be expected. They sign for a cruise with me, and here go twenty of them to the
Kingston
before we're an hour out. They want to know why. I've told them to obey orders and be damned to them, but that won't serve for long. They smell piracy in the very sight of you, John. These lads I've given you are old filibusters, but I'm thinking my gentlemen-adventurers may cause us trouble.'

‘How much trouble?' asked Rackham.

Penner blew out his cheeks. ‘Who knows? There's a dozen taking their cues from a smooth, plume-bonnet rogue of a captain that I suspect of honesty. He'll not be made to play the pirate, for one.'

‘What of the rest, then?'

‘Och, most of the lads'll as soon sail under the black as under the red, white, and blue. Sooner, when they hear what it can put in their pockets, But they'll need to be told soon.'

‘They'll be told to-morrow morning', Rackham had promised. ‘You'll need to send them all aboard the
Kingston
, but for a skeleton crew of safe men to sail the sloop. If your honest captain – what's his name, anyway?'

‘Kinsman, Captain Alan Kinsman, late of the First Foot and be damned to you common sailormen.'

‘Aye, well, if he refuses to come aboard the
Kingston
, threaten to hang him for mutiny. And if the enterprise is too foul for his fancy fingers, so much the worse for him.'

For all his confident tone Rackham had been uneasy as he left the sloop to return to his brig, and to complicate matters Anne Bonney had insisted on returning with him. Silent during the crossing to the
Kingston
, she had been violently passionate once they were alone, and so for a while he must forget the enterprise and the difficulties that lay ahead – the sloop's crew, the engagement with the argosy, and the hundred other details which were now of the first urgency.

Yet when the first crisis had come, and he had been standing at the poop rail, looking down on that packed waist, with faces of every colour from jail-white to jet black staring up at him, he had carried it off none so badly, he assured himself. He had made a brave figure in his new shirt and breeches of spotless calico – he had even heard murmurs of ‘Calico Jack' when the hands assembled – and his air of authority, abetted by vocal support of his own faithful thirty, had given confidence to everyone on board. As Penner had foreseen, the majority of the men from the sloop were no whit disturbed at the proposal of a piratical venture; many had openly welcomed it, for privateering paid none so well and there were irksome disciplines and restrictions attached. The mere mention of the prize involved had won over the waverers, and he had finished his speech in a roar of acclamation.

Nothing was heard from the gentlemen-adventurers. They had come aboard with the sloop's crew, a bewildered and disconsolate little group. Most of them had been sea-sick during the night and were in poor case to protest. Rackham
was gratified to note that few of them really deserved the title gentlemen-adventurer, for while adventurers they might be, gentlemen they were not. Shabby, out-at-elbows ruffians, there were those who might have been poor officers from poor regiments, but far from voicing opposition to Rackham's address, one or two had brightened at the prospect of easily gotten fortune, and the remainder, after uneasy glances at their wild companions in the waist, had wisely kept silent. If they could not be relied on to help, they certainly would not hinder.

One, however, was apart from the rest, and he the only man who could be called a gentleman-adventurer indeed. Rackham had picked him out at once – he was of that type that will command attention whatever his surroundings – and had guessed that this was the ‘smooth, plume-bonnet rogue Kinsman' of whom Penner entertained such deep mistrust. Smooth he might be, but the rest of the Major's description was an obvious libel. He was certainly a soldier, with his trim military coat, faded but well-kept, and the plain, broad-brimmed castor shading his thin, angular face. His top boots fitted like a second pair of breeches, and his long rapier sat as easily on his hip as a quill behind a clerk's ear. There was about him none of the raffish finery of the less impoverished of his fellows, but the workmanlike severity of his appearance, his strong features, and his upright carriage accomplished more for him than airs and tailoring.

He had listened to Rackham attentively, his light blue eyes never leaving the speaker's face, and when the hands dismissed he had turned to the rail without a word to his companions. His attitude plainly said: ‘You see how matters stand. I am your leader no longer', and his former followers presently left him and sought themselves berths in the forecastle. The
philosophic spirit they displayed on discovering themselves too late to secure even a corner of that crowded place seemed to indicate an acquaintance with the hardships of life, possibly gained in the camp but more probably in the jail.

While Penner congratulated him on the success with which he had won the confidence of the crew, Rackham had found himself aware of a vague disquiet linked somehow with the figure of Kinsman, standing down there at the port rail apparently lost in contemplation of the cheerless waste of water stretching away to the horizon. It was a foreboding that possessed him for the next two hours, while he paced the poop, observing the ship's company, as they lounged in the waist, talking in little groups, dicing or playing cards.

In the end he turned his back on that silent figure and retired to the stern rail, where he tried to place himself in the mind of the commander of the
Star
, ploughing southwards a few hours ahead of him. He had no real fear that they would lose track of the prize, even in that waste of waters between the Great Bank to the west and the long line of cays to the east; he had sailed too often to the Windward Passage to suppose that any competent shipmaster would deviate much from a normal course. The
Kingston
was following as fast as canvas could carry her: faster, he was sure, than the
Star
, for all her clean keel, would be sailing.

Thus he reassured himself, but still that vague disquiet remained, and still it was illogically connected with the lean figure of the gentleman-adventurer, now hidden but clearly seen in Rackham's imagination. Damn the fellow, why should he matter? He was nothing, a mere cipher among a hundred others. And yet – and at that moment he heard the rich, husky sound of a woman's laughter and strode forward to the poop rail.

What he saw kindled his irritation against Kinsman tenfold. The adventurer still stood by the port rail, but he had been joined now by Mistress Bonney and Penner, the former leaning on the bulwarks beside him. Kinsman, Rackham noted, was smiling and leaning forward as though the joke they were sharing was a particularly intimate one. She was wearing her black shirt and breeches, with her glossy hair secured in a net behind her head, and it seemed to Rackham that every curve of her brazenly displayed body as she lolled against the rail, every gesture, and every look must be a wanton challenge not only to Kinsman but to every man in that crowded waist.

If anything had been wanted to crystallise Rackham's feelings towards the gentleman-adventurer it was supplied now. The misgivings which Kinsman's mere presence had evoked had been enough to make him dislike the man; that Anne Bonney should flaunt herself at him turned those feelings into a simple detestation.

He stood looking down at them a moment longer and then turned his attention to the starboard side of the waist, where Kemp was setting the hands to the gun tackles. But even his stentorian blasphemies and the thunder of the carriages on the planking could not drown the laughter that every now and then would drift up from the port rail, Anne Bonney's husky contralto blending with Penner's deep-bellied guffaw. Captain Kinsman must be the most damnably amusing poker-backed bastard in the whole American sea, Rackham thought grimly. They would find how amusing he could be boarding the
Star
to-morrow perhaps, but speculation on that head only led to the conclusion that the captain would likely be most infernally able when it came to close-quarter brawling in the scuppers of locked ships.

There was too much to occupy Rackham's attention for him to brood long, however. He was called forward by Kemp presently to assist in the instruction of the gun crews, and from that he was drawn away by Ben, who had suggestions to make for the improvement of certain running gear. Then came Penner for advice on the rehearsal of boarding parties, and so the afternoon passed, the hours almost unnoticed, such was the energy with which he applied himself to matters which he felt he really understood and in which he could engross himself.

Hard work gave him an appetite and restored his temper and when he went below to supper he was in an excellent humour. He shared the meal with Penner and Anne Bonney, the latter at her most enchanting in a gown of green and black silk which she had sent aboard the Major's sloop days before the sailing.

Her mood was as gay as her appearance, and the meal might have passed pleasantly enough, for Penner was an amusing and stimulating companion. Unfortunately he required intervals to apply himself to his food and it was during one of these that Anne Bonney reawakened Rackham's ill temper by suggesting that they should have Captain Kinsman to sit with them in the cabin.

He frowned, remembering how she had sought the gentleman-adventurer's company, and asked himself was Kinsman the reason for the obvious care she had taken with her appearance. Jealousy prompted him to a hasty refusal of her request, and she looked at him in some surprise.

‘And why not?'

‘Because I don't wish it.'

At this Mistress Bonney opened her eyes wide and her voice took on an icy edge. ‘And if I wish it?'

Rackham filled his glass before replying. ‘I still don't want him here. I'd oblige you if I could, but not in that.' Belatedly he made an excuse. ‘It might make bad feeling among the crew.'

‘As if you cared for bad feeling! Is that the best reason you can give?'

‘I need to give no reason,' was his sharp rejoinder. ‘I don't want him or any others of that mincing cattle that call themselves gentleman-adventurers, and there's an end to it.' Angrily he pushed his plate aside and thrust back his chair.

‘“An end to it”, you say?' Her eyes shone with anger. ‘And who the devil may you be to tell me “there's an end to it” as though I was some serving-wench?'

‘I'm captain of this brig,' he retorted, ‘and that means captain over every man-jack – and woman – aboard. So you'll do as I bid you.'

‘You dare – you dare to tell me that?' She was on her feet, her eyes blazing.

‘You've ears, I think,' snapped Rackham. ‘God knows you have a tongue.' He got up and kicked his chair aside.

‘So.' She considered him, standing with her hands on her hips, her mouth twisted into a spiteful smile. ‘I see. I noticed you seemed to like it mighty little when I spoke to him on deck. Well you're not my husband, by God, and I'll do as I please and be damned to your jealousy.'

‘Jealous!' He turned on her. ‘Jealous? Of that mealy, spindle-shanked pimp?'

‘Aye, because he's a gentleman—'

‘Gentleman! The nearest that ever came to being a gentleman was when he stole his master's breeches to go whoring after the milkmaid.'

‘To be sure you'll be a fine judge,' she flung at him. ‘To the devil with you and your carping at a man that's something you'll never be. Aye, you can mouth and rant as much as you've a mind to, but your bellowings don't matter that to me.' She snapped her fingers under his nose and turned contemptuously away from the table.

Rackham started after her, brushing aside Penner's attempt to restrain him. ‘Wait!' he began, and then, across his harsh command, there rang the cry of the look-out, carrying faintly down from the mainmast-head.

‘Sail ho! Ho, the deck! Sail ho!'

It froze them as though in a tableau: Rackham half-way across the cabin with Penner grasping his arm; Anne Bonney with one foot on the companion. She and Penner looked to Rackham with the same thought, and the Major gave it utterance.

‘The
Star
!' He released Rackham's arm and thumped the table with excitement. ‘Holy Saint Patrick! Johnny, d'ye suppose it is?'

There was a rush of feet on the deck overhead as the hands ran to the rails. Anne Bonney stood with parted lips and a flush of excitement on her cheeks, echoing Penner's question.