AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She sighed. "It never would have been easy. But - " Another bird flapped past overhead, making both of them jump. Beth laughed weakly. "Well, for one thing, until we arrived here I didn't think my father actively meant me any harm, but now ... well, he doesn't mean me any harm, but ... the day before yesterday, when we were disembarking, I cut myself, and my father was frantic with worry that it might mortify and give me a fever. He told Leo Friend that the protective Caribbean magics," she spoke the words with distaste, "are sluggish here, and they'd have to watch me closely for any sign of illness. But his concern was ... impersonal - it wasn't the concern of a father for a threatened daughter, but more like, I don't know, a captain's concern for the seaworthiness of a vessel his life depends on."
Bonnett hadn't really been listening - he patted the curls of his wig in place and licked his moustache, then stood up and walked over to where she stood - the hut swayed dangerously - and leaned beside her. Grotesquely, his face was puckered into a trembling but insinuating smile. " 'For one thing,' you said." His voice was huskier now. "Is there another?"
Beth wasn't looking at him, and she smiled sadly. "Yes; foolish, but I think so. I didn't figure it out until Tuesday, when the Navy killed him - he was aboard that boat, the Jenny, and Friend says none of them could have survived that broadside - but I don't think I really wanted to get away, without ... well, you never met him. A man who was also a passenger on the Carmichael."
Bonnett pursed his lips and stepped away, letting his paunch relax again. "I needn't take you, you know," he snapped.
Beth blinked in surprise and turned to look at him. "What? Of course you need to. If you don't, what's to stop me from raising the alarm before you're well away?" Abruptly she remembered that this was, despite the good manners, a pirate, and she added hastily, "At any rate, your case will certainly look better to the authorities if you've not only repented but rescued a captive of Blackbeard's as well."
"Something in that, I suppose," Bonnett muttered grudgingly. 'Very well, now, listen. We'll go, right now, by separate routes, to the shore, where one of the Revenge's boats is dragged up on the sand - you'll see me by it - and you'll get in quick and crouch low, out of sight. There's old canvas in there, hide under it. The tide's nigh again, so it shouldn't be difficult for me to wrestle the boat into the water. Then I'll row us out to the Revenge, load as much stuff into the boat as I can without raising the suspicions of that treacherous crew, and then just row away south along the coastline. Can you navigate by the stars?"
"No," said Beth. "Why, can't you?"
"Oh, surely," said Bonnett hastily. "I was just, uh, thinking of when I might be asleep. Anyway, if we just bear south we'll be in the trade lanes before too long. And then," he went on, stepping to the ladder, "if I can get far enough away from him before he learns that I've fled, maybe he won't be able to call me back."
This didn't reassure Beth, but she followed him down the ladder to the sand and walked off, away from him. She hoped to skirt around the three fires and make her way to the shore without being seen by the ever-vigilant Leo Friend.
Slowly and thoughtfully, with lines of genuine sorrow almost ennobling his pouchy face, Stede Bonnett plodded straight down the sandy slope toward the fires, his boots making sounds like slow crickets as the leather soles rasped against the saw grass.
Talking about escape with Hurwood's daughter - and then letting himself be aroused by her, even, foolishly, thinking she might respond in kind! - had brought back with far too painful a degree of clarity the life he'd been deprived of three months before. But of course even if he succeeded in escaping Blackbeard and taking the pardon, he could hardly return to Barbados and his wife. There was some consolation in that.
Perhaps in some other country, with another name, he could start over again - he was only fifty-eight, after all; with reasonable care he was a good decade short of needing to take up religion. There would still be many young women for him to focus his attention on.
For a moment a smile puckered his face, and his hands caressed an imaginary form, and he felt the old confidence, the old sureness of himself - the wife he married four years ago had taken it away from him, had made a cowed little man of what had once been a stern officer, and it wasn't until he met the girls at Ramona's that it was restored - but then, of course, he remembered how he had left the last of those girls, and he was dropped right back into the horror he'd been living in for three months. His wrinkled old hands fell back limply to his sides.
Out on the redly glittering face of the sea, looking in end-on silhouette like the upright black skeleton of some leviathan, Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge stood motionless at anchor. Bonnett instantly looked away from it, not sure Blackbeard couldn't track his thoughts back along the line of his gaze.
This escape has to work, Bonnett thought as he plodded down the ever-marshier slope. Thank God the king has offered total amnesty! None of this was my fault, but no jury would ever believe that. What jurist could understand the way a hunsi kanzo can use your blood to unhinge your mind from your body? I didn't outfit the Revenge ... I'm not even sure it was me that killed that last girl at Ramona's, though I'll admit it was my hand that swung the chair leg - over and over and over again, so that, though I can't remember it, my shoulder ached for days. And even if it was me, I was drugged ... and who do you suppose picked that precise girl for me, with just those features, and who told her to use those words and that tone?
A terrible thought struck him, and he stopped walking, slid a yard or so and almost fell over. Why assume, as he had been doing, that Blackbeard had first noticed him at Ramona's, and had only then decided that a moneyed, landed military man would be a useful partner? What if - and despite all the trouble he was in Bonnett's face now burned with humiliation - what if Blackbeard had wanted him before, and had set the whole supposedly spontaneous thing up? What if that first girl had only been pretending to have sprained her ankle, and in fact been chosen just because she was the skinniest, so that he would be able to lift her and take her inside to her bed? She, and the other girls too, had refused to take any payment from him in his subsequent visits, insisting that his unprecedented virility was ample reward and had in fact become an indispensable remedy for all classes of malaise, vapors and depression; but what if Blackbeard had been paying them? And paying dearly, no doubt, for in addition to their plain services he was buying a considerable amount of ... acting.
Again he glanced out across the water at Blackbeard's lightless ship, this time with hatred. That's how it must have been, he thought; he wanted to rope me in, and he researched me to find the quickest, easiest lever with which to pry me out of my place in the ordered world. If I hadn't been married to that castrating woman, he'd have had to find some other lever ... I wonder what that might have been ... my pride, perhaps, he could have maneuvered me into an illegal but unavoidable-with-honor duel ... or my honesty, put me in the position of having to beggar myself by repaying some dire debt undertaken by my wife.
But of course I made it easy for him. All he had to do was pay
Ramona's whores to give me back what my wife had taken from me, and then eventually to drug me and send a girl in who was a perfect duplicate, in looks and derisive manner, of my wife ...
And then afterward, when my laboring heart had purged my bloodstream of the drug, and I was staring down at the dead girl's face, which no longer bore a resemblance to anyone, that evil giant strode into the room, a grin on him like a stratum of exposed granite in a mountainside, and he offered me the choice.
Some choice.
Chapter Ten
To Beth Hurwood's right lay the vast swamp that penetrated, they said, far inland - a region where land and water blurred into each other, seldom distinct, where snakes swam in the pools and fish crawled along the banks, where the very arrangement of channels and islands would, like a diabolically animate maze, change, rendering maps no more useful for navigating than sketches of clouds would be, where still air became stagnant like still water, and so miasmally thick that insects too large to do more than crawl anywhere else could fly here. Even as she glanced at that dark quarter of the landscape, far off in the marsh there appeared one of the randomly floating spheres of phosphorescence that the pirates called spirit balls; it lifted above the wispy surface of the fog and bounced slowly among the cypress branches and the dangling masses of Spanish moss, and then, just as slowly, fell back into the fog-river, and the glow became nebulous and then died out.
She looked in the other direction then toward the steel-gray sea, below which the sun had sunk half an hour before in so vast and molten a blaze that the high, wispy cirrus clouds still glowed pink; and being on higher ground and undazzled by the fires, she saw the sail a moment before the pirates did.
First a shout came faintly across the water from one of the three moored ships, and then one of the men down by the fires pointed and yelled, "A sail!"
The pirates all leaped up and sprinted for the boats, instinctively preferring to be on the water rather than on the land if there was to be trouble. Beth wavered uncertainly. If the sail - a single one, and disappointingly small - was a Royal Navy craft, she certainly didn't want to be aboard any ship that succeeded in fleeing them; but if she hid and stayed behind, would the Navy craft stop and send someone to check for stragglers ashore?
Someone giggled very close by, and she jumped and smothered a scream.
Leo Friend stepped out from behind a cluster of swamp maple trees. "Going for a walk, my d-d-d - Elizabeth?" His eyes, she noticed, seemed to show too much white around the irises, and a smile came and went on his face as quickly and randomly as something that should have been secured in a wind.
"Uh, yes," she said, wondering desperately how to be rid of him. "What sail is that, do you suppose?"
"It doesn't matter," Friend said. His voice was shriller than usual tonight. "Royal Navy, rival pirates - it's too late for anyone to stop us." The smile poked his pudgy lips out and then disappeared again. "And t-t-tomorrow w-w-we'll - to-m-morrow we s-s-sail from h-h ... damn it ... here." He pulled a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his forehead. "In the meantime I'll walk with you."
