The Privateer, Page 2

  ‘I’m not Irish, mother,’ he said; but she seemed unaware of him.

  ‘Tell his fortune, Meg,’ someone said; and the others joined him. ‘Tell the young man’s future, Meg,’ they said. ‘He’ll cross your hand with silver.’

  ‘With gold, I’ve no doubt,’ said the waiter, sourly.

  But she moved on with her resumed chant: ‘Ribbons and laces, ribbons and laces…’ and then, as one changing to the second motif of a composition: ‘Woe! Woe! Woe to the evildoers; the fornicators, the lechers, the deceivers, the double-dealers, the ones without conscience or courtesy—’

  She broke off, debating with herself. And then, as if suddenly reminded of business elsewhere, she turned and came back down the room to the doorway. But as she came level with the newcomer she caught sight of him again and paused. In some recess of her mind she connected that face with the telling of fortune.

  ‘You’ll write your name in water,’ she said. And while he stared, held by the unhuman eyes beyond the tangle of hair, and dismayed by her unhappy promise, she repeated: ‘You’ll write your name in water for all the world to read.’

  And she went, rapt and urgent, out into the hot world beyond the door.

  ‘Is that a good fortune or a bad?’ Henry said, into the vacuum that personality leaves in its wake.

  ‘It’s a fine conspicuous one, anyhow,’ Bartholomew said.

  ‘It would be no comfort for failure to know that it was conspicuous.’

  ‘Not you! I could have told you’d be a success in life without telling fortunes. One glance is all I need. You have a nose that’s broad at the point. It’s a sure sign of being able to look after Number One, a nose broad at the point.’

  Henry tried very hard not to stare at Bartholomew’s nose, which was so broad at the tip as to be practically all point. The little man was neat and respectable, but hardly an advertisement for his theory.

  ‘No, not my kind of “broad”,’ Bartholomew said, quite without rancour. ‘The kind that starts bony and has a blob on the end. It’s my hobby: faces. See that man facing us through the archway? That’s a clever one, that is. You’d have to start very early to get the better of that one or he’d make you feel unpunctual.’

  ‘Do you know who he is?’ Henry asked, catching again the absent glance of the man on himself.

  ‘No, I don’t know this place well. Come here now and then on business, that’s all. We supply meat to ships, me and my partners. I like the islands, but I’d give a lot to see Bristol docks this minute. Even Bristol docks in the rain. I was born in London, but I married a Bristol girl. When I’ve made my little pile, me and my old woman’s going to retire to a cottage in the Mendips.’

  Henry said that he was lucky to have a home waiting for him.

  ‘Oh, it ain’t built yet, the cottage. But we’ve picked out the place for it. In a green valley where the moors begin half-way up the sides.’

  And suddenly Henry saw Llanrhymny.

  That, too, was ‘a green valley where the moors begin half-way up’. He saw it small, and clear, and far away, like something in the wrong end of a telescope.

  Llanrhymny.

  ‘I expect a young gentleman like you is handy with a pen,’ he heard Bartholomew say, and turned to him surprised at this apparent change of subject.

  ‘Fairly. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, you see, I can read, but I never learned penmanship, and my old woman, she misses hearing from me, and—well—’

  ‘You want me to write a letter for you, is that it?’

  ‘Oh, not a letter. A few lines would do to say that I’m keeping fine. If it wouldn’t be imposing on you.’

  ‘I owe you much more than that,’ Henry said. ‘Let us dine first, shall we, and then write the letter.’

  ‘Well—about that dinner— Tell me, do you like sucking pig? Roast sucking pig?’

  ‘Of course. Who doesn’t?’

  ‘Well, I was going to suggest that you come back with me to our hunting camp, back up the coast a bit, and eat hearty of the best meat in the Caribbean.’

  Henry, whose appetite for the Bridgetown flesh-pots was not what it had been before the episode of the gold coin, considered a combination of roast pig, a hunting camp on the coast, and Bartholomew Kindness almost too much luck for his first night of freedom. He required a pen and ink from the Dolphin’s proprietor, and wrote the letter there and then, so that it might go to England with the Mary Ryde, which was sailing for Plymouth in the morning. And in the intervals of Bartholomew’s inspiration he watched the man beyond the archway. Henry, whose taste had a Celt flamboyance, thought his clothes a little subdued, but admired the fineness of his linen and his ruffle’s candidness. The man had been joined by his son—a young man so like him that the relationship could be in no doubt—and his clever, worldly face had so softened that he looked like a different person. This was remarked with astonishment by a Henry unprepared for the idea that a father might love his son. Nor could he imagine himself sitting down and chatting happily with his father’s friends, on equal terms, as this young man was doing. ‘If my father had been a Royalist instead of a damned Puritan, it might have been like that,’ he thought.

  ‘Your very loving husband, Bartholomew Kindness,’ finished Bartholomew, released from the pains of composition. ‘And now we’ll ’ave another drink.’

  They had their drink, and gathering up Henry’s bundle and the large sack of purchases that was the result of Bartholomew’s day in town, they made their way out of the Dolphin. As they left, Henry saw that the party beyond the archway was also leaving, and he pulled Bartholomew’s sleeve to detain him, so that the party from the dining-room passed out first.

  ‘Who is that?’ Henry asked the loafer outside who had touched his hat to the man.

  ‘That’s Sir Thomas Modyford,’ the man said. ‘Got one of the biggest estates in the island. Be Governor one day, if the Commonwealth lasts.’

  ‘A Cromwell man!’ Henry said.

  ‘Isn’t it going to last?’ Bartholomew asked with interest.

  ‘Nothing lasts,’ said the man, but his eyes were on Henry. Henry’s disappointment was too acute to be anything but genuine.

  ‘Been everything in his time, they say,’ he added, risking a mild indiscretion, and went back to his tooth-picking.

  ‘A weathercock!’ Henry said disgusted, as they walked away.

  ‘No, no,’ said Bartholomew. ‘A sail-trimmer.’

  ‘What is the difference?’

  ‘Oh, all the difference in the world. All the difference in the world. A weathercock is a poor helpless thing that’s twirled round and round by every breeze that blows. No brains, no sense, no say. But a sail-trimmer—ah, a sail-trimmer is an artist. Sees a change of wind before it comes, chooses his course, makes the wind work for him instead of drowning him, coaxes a little rag of sail to take him into harbour instead of making a distress signal of it.’

  ‘Are you a sailor?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m a sailor. So that’s Modyford. I told you he was a clever one. It’s thanks to Modyford, they say, that the island ever declared for the Protector at all.’ Henry snorted. ‘Which is no small achievement for a man that fought for King Charles.’

  ‘Fought on the Royalist side?’ asked Henry, arrested.

  ‘So they say. I told you he was an expert sail-trimmer. Now we’ll go down here and collect my equipage.’

  2

  Bartholomew’s ‘equipage’ proved to be one small donkey with neither saddle nor bridle. A rope had been arranged not very expertly in place of the absent bridle; it looked like the work of someone who knew more about ropes than about bridles.

  ‘This is Ananias,’ said Bartholomew, and hoisted himself across the donkey’s bare back.

  ‘Why Ananias, poor brute?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Well, I did call it Anna, until I found out my mistake. So I just tacked a bit on.’ He slung the sack of purchases in front of him. ‘Now give me your bundle and I’ll put
it on top.’ Then, to the donkey: ‘Gee up!’

  But the donkey stood still.

  ‘He doesn’t understand English,’ Bartholomew explained. ‘I don’t know his nationality.’

  ‘You don’t need any parley-vous,’ Henry said. ‘Just dig your heels in his ribs.’

  Bartholomew did as he was bid, with gratifying results.

  ‘You know as much about horse-flesh as I know about sails,’ he said, as they moved on their way out of town. ‘Owned one of your own, perhaps.’

  ‘Yes, I had one of my own.’

  ‘What made you leave that nice home of yours? Seeking your fortune?’

  ‘How do you know what kind of home I had?’

  ‘It takes more than a few square yards of denim to cover up breeding, my boy. Found your Welsh valley too narrow?’

  ‘That’s about it.’ He considered the mild-looking little man riding by his side, and said: ‘I would never have said that you were a sailor.’

  ‘Well, you see, by nature I’m not one for a wild life. But tar’s the undoing of me.’

  ‘Tar?’

  The minute I smell tar I come unsettled like.’ He looked back at the shipping in the harbour, and added: ‘But wait till I get that cottage in the Mendips. They’ll have to pulley-hauley me to get me back from there.’

  They walked in a companionable silence along the dusty road.

  ‘Think there’s going to be a change at home?’ Bartholomew asked presently.

  ‘There was no sign of one when I left. Why do you ask?’

  ‘That’s the third time lately I’ve heard a remark about there being an end in sight to this new-fangled way of running the country.’

  ‘The islands are always full of rumours. And what would they know about it, anyhow, four thousand miles away?’

  ‘Ah, but that’s just where you do get to know first about things like that. It’s the chap who’s standing outside that hears the note of the hive. The bees themselves are buzzing far too loud to pay any attention. Don’t think that the Caribbean won’t hear the change in the bees’ buzzing when it comes!’

  He rode on for a little, cogitating.

  ‘Stands to reason it wouldn’t last, anyhow,’ he said. ‘Folk don’t want anyone just like themselves ruling them, do they?’

  He was silent for another half-mile.

  ‘You want more than a gift of the gab to rule England. No one ever loved a Parliament. It was bound not to last.’

  ‘What do you think they’ll do? If it comes to pieces, I mean.’

  ‘Bring the boy over to take his father’s place, I suppose.’

  ‘How can they, if the Army is still the Protector’s? It’s the best army in the world, God blast it.’

  ‘Huh!’ said Bartholomew. ‘Ten armies won’t stop them if they’ve made up their minds about something.’

  The high road turned inland and left them with only a track along the coast. But the track was shaded, and the rains that had come too late to save the cane and the cocoa made the undergrowth green and sweet-smelling. For another hour they followed the track, veering with the coast until all sight of Bridgetown had long disappeared and they had the world to themselves. Here and there a fence marked the limit of some planter’s domain, and now and then a plank flung over a freshet showed that civilisation lurked in the background. But for the most part it was a virgin world, full of the evening chatter of birds and the flight of wild animals from their approach.

  At a gate in a wood fence, Bartholomew dismounted and removed the sack of purchases from the donkey. Whereupon the beast, with relief in every line of him, made joyfully for the gate.

  ‘Hey! Wait a minute! My rope!’ said Bartholomew, and removed the bridle. Then, opening the gate, he smacked the animal on the rump and said: ‘Good-bye, Ananias. Glad to have met you.’

  ‘Isn’t he yours?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Bartholomew, carefully fastening the gate. ‘I just borrowed him.’

  He humped the sack over his shoulder and went on up the path. And Henry, picking up his much smaller bundle, forbore to offer to carry the larger one. To be no longer young, with all the world in front of you, must be bad enough, without having it brought forcibly to your notice.

  Now the forest came down to the water, and the going was less easy. He had begun to wonder how far it still was to that dinner of wild pig, when the silence was broken by the high, hostile yelling of a dog, and in a moment it appeared on the edge of the slope ahead of them, and stood there shrieking their approach to all creation.

  ‘Shut up, Killick!’ Bartholomew called.

  A tall man with the face of an unfrocked priest came to the edge and watched them as they toiled upwards.

  ‘Evening, Chris,’ Bartholomew said, panting.

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked the man, leaning his head at Henry.

  ‘Friend of mine. Did me a good turn. Name’s Harry Morgan. Here! Take this for me.’ He slid the sack from his back and held it out, and the man took it meekly. Which surprised Henry a little.

  They moved together over the crest, and Henry found that the edge on which the man and dog had stood was the lip of a wide saucer of clearing in the forest, and over the floor of the saucer was spread the evening activity of a hunting camp. A man was pegging out freshly-skinned hides to dry, another was jointing meat. On a clear fire just below, a meal was being cooked; and on a second smoky one on the other side of the clearing choice strips of meat were being dried into boucan. Two men were cleaning guns, and one was washing blood from his shirt.

  By the cooking-fire a second dog was standing, uncertain. Chris walked up to it and began to kick it with a businesslike detachment. Henry knew why he was kicking it. Because it had not warned them, like the other, of approaching visitors.

  ‘Let him be,’ Bartholomew said; and, again surprisingly, the man obeyed. ‘I think he’s getting a little deaf, but he still has the best nose a hound ever had.’

  The man picked up a wooden bucket and held it out to Henry. ‘If you’ve come to supper, Harry Morgan, best make yourself useful. Water’s beyond, there.’ And he tilted his head to the farther rim of the clearing.

  Henry took the bucket and walked through the camp, receiving nods or stares, according to a man’s mood or inclination. He climbed the opposite lip of the saucer and found that it was the high bank of a stream; a bank so high and sudden that no sound of water came over it into the camp. Indeed, he found when he made his way down to the stream to fill the bucket that he was out of sight and sound of human activity. The camp on its high hollow shelf of land might not exist.

  And then he saw the longboat.

  It was drawn up from the beach under the sheltering branches.

  So the men disjointing pig so busily up there did not belong to the island. That caused a great many new thoughts to race through his mind while he filled his bucket. Something the Dolphin’s serving-man had said came back to him. Something he had not understood at the time. A play on the word conspiracy.

  He walked the few yards down to the beach, but the sea was empty. Limpid and quiet in the evening light. They had come from some other island, not from any ship.

  He hauled the water up the steep bank and brought it to the fire. Some of the flayed and disembowelled pig carcases laid out ready for transportation looked a little too large and fat for wild ones, but it was none of his business. If honest traders in meat did a little poaching as side-line to their hunting, that, in the Caribbean, was a very small iniquity.

  The smell of the cooking pork made him faint with ecstasy, and for a share of it he would have looked with indulgence on more spectacular sins than cattle-stealing.

  When the men gathered round for supper, each with his wooden porringer or pewter plate, Bartholomew distributed the articles they had commissioned him to buy. Except that he also distributed their change, or announced deficits, he might have been a benevolent uncle doling out gifts.

  ‘Bluey, your jew’s-harp. Tugnet, your pomade
, and keep it for your girl’s benefit; it smells like a brothel. Timsy, your candy, and you owe me two pence on it.’

  When a man stretched forward to spear a piece of meat before his turn, Bartholomew smacked him sharply on the wrist and said: ‘Manners!’ like a nursery governess, and the man desisted.

  It was difficult to know why they should obey him, and still more difficult, in the absoluteness of their freemasonry, to know who the actual leader was. There were eleven of them, Henry counted; and they were all white except for a mulatto and a man who looked like some sort of Indian from Campeche way.

  ‘Know anything of sea business?’ the man called Chris asked him as they ate.

  ‘I came out from England before the mast,’ Henry said.

  ‘That’s hardly a degree in seamanship.’

  ‘Passed his entrance examination, though,’ someone said, and they laughed a little and the atmosphere grew easier.

  They argued in a desultory way among themselves where they should sell their meat. It would be easier to get to one place because the trades would blow them almost straight there, but they would get a better price in the second. The pig melted in the mouth, and they ate until there was nothing left but bones. The rum was heavy and crude and potent. One by one they lay back replete. The dogs, gorged on the offal, came to the fire and sank their muzzles on their paws. Bluey took out his jew’s-harp and began to play softly. The mulatto sang the words to himself. It was all sufficiently Arcadian, and Henry was glad that he was going to sleep in the forest instead of on the office floor. He wondered if they would invite him to join them when they left in the morning. He had no idea whether he was going to say yes or no if they gave him the choice, but it did not matter. This was tonight, and tomorrow was another day. Tonight he was free, excellently fed, and beautifully rummed up; and he wouldn’t call the King his cousin.

  ‘Ssh!’ said Chris of a sudden, sitting up and listening.

  In the instant silence they all heard it. A familiar sound, it was. The long, smooth sound of an anchor cable rolling off the windlass.

  The mulatto dived for the dogs before they could move, and hushed them.