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"I'm going down toward the fires to see what's going on," she told him, knowing that since shooting Davies the fat physician had been reluctant, even with his various protective fetishes, to mingle with the pirates.
"Your buccaneer s-sweetheart's dead, Elizabeth," Friend snapped, his sparky cheer abruptly gone, "and I think it shows at least a lack of imagination to choose his suc-suc-suc-successor from out of the same stew."
Beth ignored him and began picking her way down the slope. To her alarm, she heard Friend following. How on earth, she wondered frantically, can I get away from him and keep the appointment with Bonnett?
A man out on the anchored Carmichael shouted something Beth couldn't hear, but the message was repeated by the men on the beach. "It's the bleedin' Jenny!" came a wondering shout. "The Jenny got free of that man-o'-war!"
With no clear transition point the pirates' panicky rout became a riot of celebration. Bells began ringing on the Vociferous Carmichael and Bonnett's Revenge - though not on Blackbeard's ship) - and muskets were fired into the darkening sky, and the various ships' musicians hastily snatched up their instruments and began clamoring.
Glad now that it wasn't a Royal Navy vessel, Beth Hurwood quickened her pace, while Friend, seeing that the vessel was not one that offered her a chance of escape, sulkily slacked off his own pace.
Having a much shallower draft than the three ships, the Jenny was able to tack in very close to shore before dropping her anchor - the rattling of the chain lost in the general pandemonium - and a few of the men aboard her didn't wait for boats but took running dives off the bow, daringly trusting the speed and angle of their dives to carry them into water that wouldn't be over their chins in depth. A few could actually swim, and took this opportunity to show off their exotic skill by paddling around in circles, splashing and blowing like dolphins, before heading in to shore with theatrically nonchalant strokes.
One of them, though, just dove in and made his way to shore in a swift, unpretentious crawl, and he was the first to stand up in the shallows and wade in through the surge and ebb to the sand.
"Saints be praised!" cried one of the men waiting ashore. "The cook survived!"
"Whip us up one of your dinners, Shandy," called another, "before the captains start inland!"
A few more sailors had made their way ashore by this time, and the ships' boats were being dragged down the sand to the surf to facilitate the more formal disembarking, and Jack Shandy was able to avoid the worst of the welcoming press. He glanced around, clearly trying to keep from ruining his night vision by looking directly into the fires, and then his dark, bearded face split in a smile when he saw the slim figure of Beth Hurwood just now striding into the central clearing.
She hurried across the sand to him even as he broke into an unsteady run toward her, and when they met it seemed to her only natural to throw her arms around his neck.
"Everybody told me you were all killed - in that last broadside," she gasped.
"A lot of us were," he said. "Listen, I've been talking to Davies a lot during these last five days, and - "
"No, you listen. Stede Bonnett and I are going to steal a boat and escape tonight, and I'm sure there'll be room for you too. The Jenny's arrival will postpone it a little, I imagine, but it should at the same time provide a fine diversion. Now here's what you do - linger by the shore for a while until Bonnett can choose a boat, and then watch for me. I'll - "
"Shandy!" came a yell from the fireside crowd. "Jack! Where in hell are you?"
"Damn," said Shandy. "I'll be back." He strode away from her toward the crowd.
"Here he is!" shouted Davies. "May I present, gentlemen, my new quartermaster!" The applause that followed this announcement was sporadic, but Davies went on. "I know - you all think it's cookery and puppets he does best, and so did I, but it develops his real values are brassier; courage and deceit and a quick, steady hand with a pistol. You want to know how we got away from that man-o'-war?"
The pirates loudly indicated that they wanted to know. On the outskirts of the crowd, Beth Hurwood took several slow steps backward, her face expressionless. Shandy looked back at her over his shoulder, clearly wanting to return and say something to her, but a dozen hands, and even an encouraging boot or two, were propelling him toward Davies and the flattened clearing between the fires. The lean old pirate chief grinned at him; though Davies had cursed the absence of a bocor during the past five days, he had, himself, taken the dead bocor's kit and managed to "slap Mate Care-For awake" and to some extent keep that personage's attention on the sloop, and now the wounded men were recovering unfevered and Davies' shoulder seemed to be restored.
"After I was shot off the Carmichael," said Davies loudly, "a circumstance I'll take up with certain parties presently, I was picked out of the water by the Navy boys and taken aboard their ship. I found the Jenny crippled and captured, and all her surviving lads under armed guard - except for our boy Shandy, who'd told the captain, 'Oh dear me, sir, I'm not one of these dirty pirates, I was forced to join them, and I'll be delighted to testify at their trials." Several of the Jenny's crew had attained the shore and joined the crowd, and now they hollered their delighted agreement.
"That's just what he said, Phil!"
"Innocent as a bloody sheep, that captain thought Jacky was!"
"But," Davies went on, "he tipped me a wink when no one was looking, so I waited to see what he was up to. And what Jack did was convince the captain that I should be questioned privately, down in the great cabin, and no sooner had the three of us and a couple of officers got in there and shut the door than Jack snatched a pistol and shot the captain's head clean off his body!"
The applause this time was tumultuous, and Shandy was forcibly picked up and marched around the fires on the shoulders of a number of pirates. Beth took another backward step and then turned and ran toward the dark shoreline, as Davies, behind her, went on with relish to describe the way Shandy had engineered the utter destruction of the British man-of-war.
She found Bonnett standing just to the dry side of the high-water line, staring out at the darkening sea, his hands locked behind his back and the tilt of his three-cornered hat indicating that he was staring into the sky.
"Let's go, quickly," Beth panted. "I'm afraid I've confided our intentions to one who'll betray us, but perhaps if we leave instantly that won't matter. And the arrival of the Jenny can surely be used to our profit - you can pretend that the supplies you take from your ship are to replenish those of the ravaged Jenny, can't you? So for God's sake, let's go, every second - "
She halted then, for Bonnett had turned around to look at her, and his face bore an uncharacteristically sardonic smile. "Ah!" he said gently. "Escape, is it? Furtive flight? That explains his extreme tension and anxiety ... very conspicuous states of mind, if one has learned to smell such things." He shrugged, and gave her a smile not devoid of sympathy. "I'm sorry. Neither of the two pieces you propose removing from the board is dispensable right now."
Beth gasped, then whirled and ran back in despair toward the fires, her most basic assumptions about the world shaken for the first time; for she knew beyond hope of rationalization that, though the voice had been Bonnett's and had come out of his mouth, it had been someone else speaking to her through them.
Shandy swore under his breath, for he'd lost sight of Beth, and he'd hoped to be able to give her his account of Davies' rescue before she heard the flamboyant version the Jenny's crew had come to agree on.
He was about to demand that the pirates put him down when he caught a whiff of the by now not unfamiliar smell of overheated metal. He tensed, trying to remember some of the things Davies had taught him during the past five days. He exhaled totally and hummed one of the simpler parrying-tunes, and he shifted around on his unsteady perch, trying to face all corners of the compass.
