Captain Crossbones - Donald Barr Chidsey

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else knuckle under to these knaves. Bearing a royal proclamation of pardon for past offenses, he had come to a place where piracy was not so much an adventure as a way of life. Bahamans ate and drank piracy, and slept and dreamed and danced it. It was their raison d’etre. They had listened to royal proclamations in the past. They would renounce the wickenedness of stealing on the high seas—provided they were not called upon to give up their loot—and then, when the next opportunity came along, they would once again, in their own words, “go on the account.” It was the accepted practice. If you weren’t a working pirate it was only because you couldn’t get a berth, or else because you were in cahoots with the active ones and as a buyer of stolen goods made more money ashore than you would have made at sea. Nothing else was imaginable, here.

      And then . . . along had come this man Woodes Rogers.

      Hundreds had given themselves up; but when it was suggested that they work—repair the fort, for instance, against expected attacks from the French or Spaniards—they had held up their hands in horror. They were pirates at heart, every one of them.

      It was ironical too. If, as the authorities feared, the residents of the town of Nassau rose in arms and rushed the fort to free the prisoners, it would not be for him, George Rounsivel, the only honest one, but for the other eight.

      Those others, to give them credit, had stoutly stood up in court and sworn that Rounsivel was no pirate by choice but had in fact been forced. Nevertheless this plea was thrown out. It was, after all, too common. Three out of four pirates, caught red-handed, protested that they’d been forced. Many refused to sign articles of brotherhood-and-association for that very reason—fear of putting themselves on record as members of a conspiracy. Instead they were satisfied with a lesser share of the loot. Others, when they joined a pirate crew, first pleaded with their companions to give them a paper testifying that they had been coerced. This was a regular practice. Indeed, it was precisely because they craved somebody who could frame a document with long legal words and phrases that these outlaws had seized the young attorney, George Rounsivel, from a vessel they’d sacked at sea. Illiterate, they had immense respect for the written word. If it was on paper, they thought, it couldn’t be wrong.

      And so George Rounsivel too had been convicted—by a court that had no jurisdiction in such a case.

      To be hanged as a pirate would be bad enough. To be hanged as a pirate illegally was insufferable.

      The ruffians to right and left of him had fallen silent. His thoughts were not with his Maker, as they should have been, but rather with the possibility of a final speech, a speech from the very gallows. He had never heard of such a speech being effective. They were for the most part given out of vanity, he supposed. But the instinct to live is very strong. George Rounsivel’s law degree could not protect him here, nor yet his taut, trained athlete’s body. Would he become like the others, or even lower, and scream and plead for mercy? Could he find the power to make a last-minute speech of the sort traditionally permitted of the felon who was about to be “turned off”? Would words come?

       “I tell you I was forced! I was a prisoner, not a pirate, and I could prove it if they hadn’t thrown my papers overboard!”

      He could picture in his mind’s eye the hangman stolidly waiting for him to finish, the officer of the day with drawn sword, the governor fingering a timepiece, and the nervous guards, who would watch the crowd.

      “Send to Philadelphia, if you don’t believe me! Ask anyone in Philadelphia who George Rounsivel is!”

      Would he rant on, repeating himself, hysterical, sobbing? It was a thought to turn a man’s stomach. But you never knew. You never could know until you were there what you’d do.

      If on the other hand he did speak with some eloquence and did stir the spectators—it was certain that everybody on the island would be there—he would stir them only to anger against the new governor, not to pity. George Rounsivel might precipitate a riot; he was hardly likely to survive one.

      He was pondering this point when there came the sound of a scuffle, and a woman screamed.

      They called her the Angel; in truth in that scorched pestiferous frontier of civilization she loomed angelic, a vision.

      Previously the women of the Bahamas had been divided into two classes—the bad and the worse. This difference was but one of price. There was no large plantation, and properly speaking no household. There were no slaves. The colony did not boast any commercial firm, or naval station, and until the arrival of the new governor with one hundred aging soldiers it had no military establishment. The population might have been ninety per cent seafaring, and almost all English. If any of these men had wives they didn’t bring them out to the islands, where until lately a lady never had been seen.

      This made the jolt harder when Woodes Rogers sailed into Nassau Bay attended, not only by those shakey soldiers, but, also by a bevy of secretaries, a wife, two small children, and a niece.

      The latter, Delicia, daughter of the governor’s beloved younger brother John, who had been killed by the Spaniards, was the Angel.

      Small, dainty, in her hoop petticoats, and her bonnets, she looked a marionette—and proved a whirlwind. There was a great deal to be done; unhesitatingly she set about doing it.

      As though it had been another passenger aboard the governor’s vessel the plague came. The attack was abrupt, but the ache was long, the pain debilitating. At lurk in these waters, raiding any vessel they met, regardless of flag, and perhaps preparing to pounce upon Nassau itself, were Charles Vane and ninety-odd unreconciled rascals who had broken out of the bay the very night Rogers arrived.

      Bigots averred that this plague had been brought about as a punishment for the colony’s many sins. The governor pointed out that Vane’s men, before they made their hasty departure, had skinned out all the cattle, leaving corpses widely scattered, polluting the air, so that for almost a week the island was encased in an unholy stink, a miasmatic infection. There was your sickness, Woodes Rogers had said.

      Whatever the reason, the Angel, asking no questions, had sallied forth to nurse the ailing. She was what they chiefly remembered of that bad time, when the vomiting and fever had faded from mind—Mistress Delicia with her serious smile and that unfailing bottle of brandy.

      It was the same when the Augur gang was rounded up. Delicia was not as affable with them as she’d been with the victims of the plague, but she was fully as efficient. All on her own authority she had ordered their cell scrubbed and fresh straw strewn there; she brought them fruits, food and wine . . . rum too, for Lewis. She even brought flowers. “Why shouldn’t they have flowers?” she had snapped at a scandalized jailor.

      She had been solemn as she went about these ministrations, greeting the prisoners and departing from them without a smile. A determined woman, dedicated to her duty, but not graciousness personified, as she had been with the victims of the plague.

      The men answered her when she spoke, and were respectful, but they did not have the courage to engage her in talk. Only once had George Rounsivel ventured to speak to her.

      This was the previous day, just after the conviction had been announced, the sentence passed.

      “You must know, ma’am, that my case is different from the others. If I could speak to your uncle in private . . .”

      She had looked up in that swift birdlike way of hers, and her eyes, the color of Parma violets, for an instant swam with moisture, but she had looked down again.

      “My uncle makes it a point of policy never to interfere with the findings of the court.”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      That was all that had passed between them.

      Yet it was this same girl who had given the scream outside of the cell door—the scream that turned nine heads as though they were worked by a single wire.

      It was not all her blame. Corporal Pugh, admittedly, had sprung out of the shadows with an abruptness that might have jogged anybody. For Pugh himself was scared.

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