Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key (16 page)

Still clutching the smoking swivel gun, John shouldered his way down into the great cabin. “Ma’am!” he roared. “Ma’am! Are y’in here?”

“I told you, you filthy brigand, I shall never yield my honor!” cried a voice from the stern gallery head.

“It’s me, ma’am! John James! We’ve rescued you!”

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Waverly, flinging the cabinet door wide. “Oh, Mr. James, how heroic!”

She wore her nightdress, a lace one with ribbons; he’d seen it in her trunk when he’d opened it, that one time. There wasn’t a bruise or any other mark on her, that he could see. She flung her arms around his neck. He smelled perfume as she kissed him.

“Oh, Mr. James! I have been beside myself with fear! However did you find me? I reclined to rest in the heat of the day—I think I must have fallen asleep—and when next I opened my eyes, there were the most dreadful grinning blackguards standing over me! Why I wasn’t ravished on the spot I cannot imagine, unless that they intended their chief should dishonor me himself.

“They carried me off, along with my effects. Yet I was able to break free, dear Mr. James, and barricade myself in that closet. What might have happened had you not effected your timely rescue, I shudder to think!”

“Well, it don’t signify now,” said John, noting that her hair had been neatly brushed, and wondering whether he hadn’t just murdered three innocent men. “We’re off the island and back on our way to Leauchaud. No harm done, eh?”

“None, I faithfully promise you,” said Mrs. Waverly, melting against him. He helped himself to another kiss. He would have helped himself to more but her eyelids fluttered, and she passed the back of her hand across her brow. “Oh, dear—I feel faint—oh, to consider what I so narrowly escaped!”

“Maybe you ought to have a lie down then,” said John, resignedly helping her to the captain’s bed, which was in a certain state of disarray. He went out to see that her lover’s blood was sluiced off the deck before she should come out and have to notice it.

Mr. Tudeley and Sejanus were already pitching bodies over as he came up the companionway, aided by the one man who had surrendered.

“John, this is Portuguese Fausto,” said Sejanus. “He’s given us to understand he was only hired on as a cook two weeks ago, and the crew treated him badly so he doesn’t hold it against us that we had to kill them. He says he doesn’t see how you could have done any different, what with them running off with your wife and all.” Portuguese Fausto nodded in vehement agreement.

“And the hold contains several crates of china porcelain and twenty-five kegs of Spanish brandy,” said Mr. Tudeley in satisfaction. “Which will, I suspect, fetch us a goodly price in Tortuga. Such of it as is not consumed on the journey, of course.”

“Would he cook us some breakfast?” said John.

“Sim, senhor!” Portuguese Fausto’s face brightened. “Breakfast, straightaway!”

“I’ll just go watch, to see he doesn’t put too much salt in anything,” said Sejanus, drawing his cutlass and following the cook below hatches. John and Mr. Tudeley rigged a tow line to the pinnace, struck her sail, and let out a little more of
Le Rossignol
’s canvas. John sagged into the helmsman’s seat, bone-tired suddenly, and took the tiller.

Mr. Tudeley, by comparison, strutted up and down the deck admiring their new vessel.

“All that exertion, and yet, do you know, I feel as nimble as a boy?” he remarked. “Only think of it, sir! I have just killed a man; I have just taken a prize by main force, and am about to enjoy my ill-gotten gains; I’d be hanged for this in any court you care to name, and damned for a villain of deepest dye. Yet, sir, yet, my heart is as light as thistledown! How full of promise is this bright morning! Is it not extraordinary?”

“ ‘
You see the world turn’d upside down
,’ ” quoted John dully.

“So it has,” said Mr. Tudeley, and hummed a few bars of the old song. “Ah, well!”

THEY WERE NINE DAYS out from Leauchaud, as it happened, which was plenty of time to wash and shave and put on good clothes. Sejanus, who had no sea-chest, took possession of the dead captain’s, and found that most of the fine garments fit him. So they were quite a civilized-looking crew that sailed into Maingauche Harbor, except for Mr. Tudeley, whose appearance had been rendered permanently disreputable.

“Much I care,” he said cheerily, over his breakfast brandy. “I’ve gone on the account! I should think a fearsome countenance suits a pirate.”

“It don’t hurt,” John admitted.

“You ought to join us,” said Sejanus, tilting his hat back. “We need a good crew, Wint and me. It’ll be profitable, I can promise you.” But John shook his head.

“I’ve pushed my luck far enough. I’m done with the Brethren. Always fancied dying in my bed.”

“You’ll certainly die in
her
bed,” said Mr. Tudeley with a snigger, glancing in the direction of the great cabin. Mrs. Waverly was in there, singing serenely as she combed out her hair.

“Oh, har har har,” said John. “I should hope so. I reckon we’ll get married after all.”

“Good luck,” said Sejanus. “But it’s been known to happen, now and again, that a woman changes her mind. We’ll lie up here a few days. Take on some supplies, see can we sign on a few crewmen. You need a berth after all, you just come by and see us.”

So John went ashore at Leauchaud, carrying both his sea chest and Mrs. Waverly’s trunk, just as he’d started out the journey. Mrs. Waverly walked beside him, closely eyeing the place.

“Oh, it’s very like Bath,” she said.

“Is it?” John, who had never been out of London in all his days before being transported, looked up curiously. The whole place was built of cream-colored stone, from the eating-houses and taverns along the seafront to a few grand-looking buildings farther back. The green jungle came down behind.

“Very like,” Mrs. Waverly repeated. “Perhaps we ought to find lodging first. You have still a little money left, have you not?”

Which John had, his three pounds from sacking the
Santa Ysabel
with the last pitiful scraps of his loot from the Panama expedition. Grumbling rather, he bespoke them a room at the Dancing Master, and was grateful to set down the trunks and take a glass of rum whist the room was got ready. Mrs. Waverly introduced herself to a quite respectable-looking sugar merchant and his wife and wife’s sister, who were there to take the waters. She chatted away with them gaily, quite charming the merchant, if the ladies not so much, and from them learned a great deal. At last the landlord came back down and told them their room was ready.

“One bed, eh?” John observed, when they had got upstairs.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Waverly. “We can afford better once we’ve recovered some of the money.”

“Fair enough,” said John, looking at her bubbies with regret. “Well, what do we do now? Borrow a shovel from the landlord, and go digging?”

“No,” said Mrs. Waverly, looking a little pained at his simplicity. “You shall have a bath, Mr. James.”

She explained no more until they were walking in the portico under the great iron sign reading SHILLITOE’S BATHS, watching well-to-do folk wander in and out of the pump room clutching little cups of water.

“Tom’s instructions were to go into the baths reserved for gentlemen,” said Mrs. Waverly. “Which you shall do, and seek out a third alcove on the left hand side. He said that if you go to the midmost ring set in the wall, and wait until you are alone, you may then dive down to the step below. He said there is a stone loose there; he said that if you pulled it out and reached into the hollow space behind, you should find the money.”

“He said that, did he?” said John, irritated, for he now saw clearly enough why she had needed his help. She gave a little apologetic shrug.

“Poor Tom. He was a close man, as no doubt you came to know. I do not think it was in his nature to trust anyone. Shall we go in? I quite envy you. After so long on that island and aboard ship, I positively long for a lovely bathe.”

“How am I to carry the money out with me? Folk will notice.”

“So they should, if you brought it all out with you at once! But of course we shan’t do that, dear Mr. James.” She squeezed his arm. “I have been revolving in my mind how Tom managed it. I think it likeliest he stayed a few days and smuggled in the sealed bags two and three at a time, perhaps. And so we must remove them in the same wise, you see?”

“I reckon so,” said John, wondering how big a hole Tom had been able to make in the stone wall of a bath, and how nasty might be the flooded place behind it. Mrs. Waverly must have seen his doubts in his face, for she kissed him and said gaily:

“Think how much pleasanter this shall be than diving on the wrecks. It should be a most importunate shark that swum ashore and came creeping about bathhouses!”

So they went into the pump room. Here Mrs. Waverly found an impressive-looking gentleman in a white plumed hat who was the Bath Constable. She gave him a song and dance about her dear husband requiring the waters for his health, and wanting to know to whom he might apply to bathe?

Whereupon the Bath Constable smiled broadly, and paid Mrs. Waverly many compliments, and recommended to her many excellent establishments on the island for millinery, shoes and the like, as well as notable local wonders worth renting a coach to see. He discoursed a little on the state of modern medicine and quackery nostrums one ought to avoid, and listed the multitude of complaints and diseases completely cured by resort to Shillitoe’s Baths, which were after all compounded by no less an eminent apothecary than Almighty God Himself.

But the end was, John had to pay out the very last of his Panama silver to be led into an antechamber where a couple of mournful-looking youths in white canvas clothes disrobed him, and handed his clothes out the door to Mrs. Waverly. They then dressed him in loose trousers and a sort of shift of canvas, so immense John might have made a pretty commodious tent out of it. They then led him through another door and, taking his arms, walked him down some steps into the Gentlemen’s Baths.

“I can wash myself, mate,” said John, shaking them off.

“You’re a h’invalid, ain’t you?” protested one of the youths.

“Do I look like a fucking invalid to you?” said John, and they admitted he didn’t, and retired posthaste back up the stairs.

He gazed around. The Gentlemen’s Baths looked like a church with all the pews taken out, and flooded, and having no glass in the high windows. He was in a big domed room, from which an aisle led with alcoves opening off it to right and left. All around the edges, set halfway up the walls, were bronze rings. Here and there was a miserable-looking old gent in a canvas shift, holding on to a ring for dear life, while attendants stood by watching lest he drown. The whole place stank like a fart.

Third alcove, left hand side,
John thought to himself, and waded down into the pool. At once the trapped air in his clothes ballooned up, buoying him, and before he had taken more than a few awkward steps across the room, the water down by his feet became scalding hot. He danced, back, swearing. An attempt to launch himself forward and swim across nearly got him drowned as well as boiled, for the clothes kept hindering his arms and legs. He fetched up against the wall, clutching for one of the bronze rings, and hauled himself up on a sort of shelf that projected below the waterline.

“D’you need assistance, sir?” called one of the attendants, grinning.

“No, damn you,” said John, wiping his face. He worked out that the shelf was continuous around the room and down the aisle, so he proceeded to follow it, wading and bobbling from ring to ring, out of the main chamber and so along the wall.

He wondered how Tom had ever managed this while carrying gold, even small sealed bags of five-guinea pieces. He had a sudden powerful memory of Tom, with his little pointed beard and his knowing smirk. Tom indeed; tomcat cavalier fallen on hard times, living by his wits. He’d been clever enough to hide a prince’s ransom in here, safe against Spanish intriguers or English cutthroats. Or his own dear lady love…

It hadn’t escaped John that Mrs. Waverly had firm custody of his clothes. Not that he would be able to make off with the loot in any case; the windows were too high and well barred, the canvas garments impossible to run in. Smuggling the stuff out, at least, ought to be easy enough; John might have stowed a barrel under his shift, with room for a couple of kegs.

He made his way past the first two alcoves on the left and into the third, which was deserted, perhaps because there was a nasty-looking slime the color of orange peel growing in a wide patch on the wall.

…Go to the midmost ring…

Balancing on the shelf there, he took a deep breath and ducked under the water, feeling with his fingers for a loose stone. Almost at once, before he could discern anything there, the air-bubble of his shift pulled him back up again. He tried a second and third time before standing up on the shelf and stripping off the shift, muttering to himself as he hung it through the ring. Then he took a deep breath and dove down.

In the simmering gloom, peering through the vaguely rust-tinted water, John saw that he might have crouched there groping about forever without finding the loose stone; it wasn’t above the shelf but under it, only just visible for the dark rectangle where the mortar had been chipped away. How long had
that
taken Tom?

John caught hold of the edges of the stone and rocked it to and fro and so out by degrees, though the edges bit into his fingertips and he had to come up for air again before he pulled it away. Panting, he laid it on the shelf and reached into the hole.

Almost at once his fingers struck solid stone. He grunted in pain and withdrew his hand; he’d fair skinned his knuckles. More cautiously, he reached in and felt about. He encountered only the flat sides of the hole. It was big enough to accommodate the stone that had occupied it, and nothing else.

No…his palm encountered something. Smallish. Flat.

He drew it out and surfaced, gasping, to peer at it. A single coin? Not even that. It was a brass slug, engraved with the number 5.