Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key (7 page)

“Oh, Mr. James!” Mrs. Waverly tossed her head impatiently. “How can you imagine I should so demean myself as to dishonor Tom’s memory with a person like Captain Reynald? I but play a role, as you do. Circumstance has placed us at the mercy of these wild and vicious men; what is more prudent than to smile, and flatter them, and make myself generally agreeable to preserve myself from harm?”

“You’re not staying on in hopes of getting yourself some more earrings, then?”

“Sir!” said Mrs. Waverly, pulling away from him and sitting straight. “That insinuation is unworthy of you! One might as well ask why
you
have made no move to escape. We need but slip over the side, after all.”

“Well,” said John. “Where’d we go? The island is all bloody pirates. We’d only be leaving devils we know to trust ourselves with devils we don’t. And anyone agrees to take us to Leauchaud for a price is going to want to know why we’re going.”

“You’re not staying on because you find a brigand’s life suits you?”

The shot hit home. John scowled at her.

“You can argue like a lawyer when you’ve a mind, can’t you?”

“Of course I can. Consider, Mr. James: you are a
man
. You have at your disposal tremendous strength and courage with which to defend yourself, to say nothing of cutlasses and pistols. What have I, a weak and feeble woman, by comparison? Naught but my wit, my grace, my politesse!”

“True enough,” said John, though he remembered a girl who had wielded a cutlass and pistol well enough and feared nothing.
Her
kiss had burned his mouth like white rum; and the memory of that gave him a bleak feeling, and suddenly he didn’t feel like having Mrs. Waverly right there on the steersman’s bench anymore.

“You’d best go below,” he said, turning away from her and looking out at the lights of Tortuga. “I won’t tell a soul what you done. You mustn’t do it anymore, mind. Not as long as we’re aboard this craft.”

“You have my most fervent gratitude, Mr. James,” said Mrs. Waverly, rising and adjusting her garments, which had become a little disheveled in their embrace. She wished him a pleasant goodnight and went below.

JOHN WOKE WITH THE sun in his eyes and the awareness of having heard a loud crash. He leaped up and fell sprawling from his hammock. The crash came again; something was striking the hull, amid a great deal of drunken laughter. He scrambled to his feet and went to look over the side.

One of the boats had come back from town. Mr. Tudeley lay unconscious in the bottom and Sam Anslow sprawled back on the oars, so their blade ends rose dripping from the sparkling sea. Sejanus was attempting to jump for a bit of knotted rope that hung down from the rail. As John watched, he caught it and pulled himself up, giggling.

“Good morning, sir!” he declared. “How was your delightful conjugal evening?” He fell over the rail.

“Hope yours is as nice,” said John, feeling mean. “If you ever get a woman to marry you. What the hell happened to
him
?” He jerked his thumb downward at Mr. Tudeley. His question provoked a fit of fresh laughter from Sejanus, and Anslow sat there snickering too.

“Oh, that’s quite a story,” said Sejanus, getting to his hands and knees. “Yes sir, that’s what you’d call one of those epic stories. Where to begin. Where should we begin? How would you say we ought to begin, Mr. Anslow, sir?”

Mr. Anslow made a gurgling noise in reply.

“Well, sir,” said Sejanus, pulling himself up on his knees via the rail. “Well. Little Mr. Tudeleley, or
Winty
as he asked us to call him—short for
Winthrop
, don’t you know? He had this rotten tooth. We went ashore, he said, ‘Oh, please, for the love of Jesus let us find a barber-surgeon to draw my tooth, before we do aught else’. So we were agreeable—weren’t we agreeable, Mr. Anslow, sir?”

“Was,” said Anslow.

“We searched high, we searched low, but no place could we find us a barber-surgeon,” Sejanus continued. “So I said we ought to go drink some rum, as it might take the edge off Winty’s toothache. And first he said he couldn’t possibly, and then he said he really couldn’t, and then he said, ‘Oh, well, if you fellows are having some too I suppose a dram wouldn’t hurt’. So we went to a little rum-shop and we set about drinking.

“By and by, this other fellow noticed Winty’s groaning and swishing rum around on his tooth, and he asked what was the matter with him. We replied for Winty, didn’t we, Mr. Anslow?”

“We did,” said Anslow.

“And this man said, he said, ‘Monsieur, I shall be happy to draw your tooth, in return for a drink.’ I asked him was he a barber-surgeon and he said no, he was a blacksmith. Same thing really. And before Winty could do more than scream, Mr. Blacksmith had Winty’s head under his arm and a pair of pliers out. Luckily—” Sejanus rose, with infinite care, to his feet and stood there swaying. “
Luckily
, one of us thought to stop him before he pulled out a tooth at random, and told Winty to point out the rotten one. Was it you thought to stop him, Mr. Anslow?”

“Naw,” said Anslow.

“Why then, it must have been me. And, crack! Out came that tooth, and Winty was on his hands and knees on the floor spitting blood. So we picked him up and told him he was a brave hero. We bought rum for him, and the jolly blacksmith too. Little Winty liked the rum so well after that, he had another, and still another. By and by he said, ‘Let’s go roistering, my lads!’

“I said to him, I said, ‘Define roistering for me, Winty, my man’ and he replied with a word that is not generally used in polite company. And as I recall Mr. Anslow said—what was it you said, Mr. Anslow?”

“Hell yes,” said Anslow.

“And we asked Brother Blacksmith if he knew where there was an establishment properly fitted up for the purpose Winty had in mind. Brother Blacksmith said ‘Why, yes, indeed, I do know of such a place!’ So we went there. We bought a bottle of rum to take with us, just in case there wasn’t any where we were going.

“But it turned out the ladies kept a fine cellar full of good drink. Which was fortunate. I will draw the veil of discretion over what we did there, sir, but Winty astonished everyone by his fortitude. We could scarcely believe it, could we, Mr. Anslow?”

“Could have knocked me over with a feather,” said Anslow.

“Even if we hadn’t had those two other bottles,” said Sejanus. “The ladies begged us to take him away, at last. They were exhausted by his company. They had to send out to the house down the lane for reinforcements. So we loaded Winty on a chair and carried him back. And here he is.”

“You forgot the part about the tattoo,” said Anslow.

“Bless me, so I did.” Sejanus hiccupped. “Well. What do you think? Shall we pass a bight of rope around him, and haul him aboard?”

“We’d better,” said John grimly.

So they brought Mr. Tudeley over the side. He never woke once during the process, so boneless that John and Sejanus had to carry him down to his cabin between them. Then Anslow fell into the sea while attempting to climb aboard, and they had to lower the rope and pull him out too.

“Rig a bosun’s chair for the lady,” he said, when he had come over the rail at last and lay there with a pool of seawater spreading around him.

“What lady?” asked John.

“One in the boat,” said Anslow. “Sejanus’s girl.”

“There’s no girl in the boat.”

“Is so,” said Mr. Anslow, and belched. “Pretty little neeg-a-ress. Powerful taken with him, she is. Come along with us in the boat.”

“Well, she ain’t there now,” said John. Sejanus, who had stretched out in a triangle of shade and gone peacefully to sleep, was unavailable for comment.

“Awwww,” said Anslow. He rolled on his side and went to sleep too.

All the ill-gotten gains of the cruise were unloaded over the next day or two, into flat-bottomed boats rowed out by M. Delahaye and his servants. Most men spent their share of the profits quickly, on rum and roistering (though Mr. Tudeley went no more ashore; his hoarse scream on discovering his tattoo had awakened half the ship). John prudently stowed his share, which amounted to about three pounds, in the bottom of his sea-chest. He still entertained ideas of quitting the life piratical and taking up his trade like an honest man, whatever Mrs. Waverly might say.

He did go so far as to venture ashore for an afternoon, and walk the lanes where he had once lost a fortune in a night, in days gone by. He tried to imagine himself setting up shop there. He even went into one or two grog shops, and looked around at their sandy floors to calculate how many bricks it’d take to do the common room. He tried to interest the landlords in making improvements to the premises, but they shrugged and shook their heads.

In the end he went back aboard the
Harmony
. He helped load the new stores aboard her, and did such an excellent and methodical job of stacking them, Captain Reynald appointed him Ship’s Purser thereafter.

They stayed a month in that place, till all the money was spent. Then they hoisted sails and moved out, in search of more loot.

Mrs. Waverly did not resume her place in John’s cabin, but kept to her own henceforth; and there was a lot of muttered talk about that, though more people were sympathetic to John than otherwise.

“Happens in every marriage,” said Anslow, thumping him helpfully on the shoulder. “I been married three times, so I know. Once the honeymoon’s past, they find all sorts of reasons to turn cold.”

John just shrugged and said he reckoned so, and everyone complimented him for the stoicism with which he was taking things. He didn’t much care what Mrs. Waverly was doing a’nights, having concluded that she was a bit too sharp for his liking. Her mania for stealing oddments put him off too.

There was no further talk of that, at least. No one mentioned that their lost goods had been found again, though that was likely due to a disinclination to admit they’d simply misplaced things rather than had them stolen. John was grateful. Still on thinking it over he remembered how Mrs. Waverly had stowed her little trifles in
his
bedding rather than her own, and that further armored his heart against her charms.

“HOLD ON TO THE shrouds and put your feet on the ratlines,” John advised. “And don’t look down.”

“And which are the shrouds, pray, and which the ratlines?” inquired Mr. Tudeley, with a peevish glance aloft.

“The shrouds is the upright bits; the ratlines is what’d be rungs, if it was a ladder,” said John.

“Then why not call them rope ladders and be plain?” snapped Mr. Tudeley. He bore little resemblance now to the meek clerk who had come aboard the
Fyrey Pentacost
. He wore no shirt at the moment, having been advised that the quickest way to make his tattoo less noticeable was to acquire a tan. He was unshaven, red-eyed, with a prominent gap in the teeth of his lower jaw. His spectacles were bound on his head with string, and his graying hair stuck out on either side of the bind, over his right ear and the scabbed stump of his left ear. He gave off a pronounced smell of rum when he exhaled, for he had acquired the habit of taking a dram at intervals to calm his nerves.

“A ship has its own language, like,” said John.

“Sounds like damn’d idiocy,” said Mr. Tudeley, grabbing hold of the ratlines and starting up toward the crosstrees. “Oh, Jesus Christ, and I’m expected to mount upward like this in such a gale? I am a Job, a very Job, sir, that’s what I am. Is there no end to my suffering?”

“This ain’t a gale,” said John, smiling involuntarily. “This is just brisk. I’m coming up behind you, so you needn’t fear falling. You’ll get used to this so you run up and down just as though it was stairs at home, you mark my words.”

“ ‘
At home
’ you say? What home have I? Shunted from one place to another, all my bloody life, ever since I left school. The wife and I took a pretty little cottage on Hampstead Heath; she committed adultery with our landlord, and he had the effrontery to tell
me
to look for other lodgings, if you please! I lived in one wretched lodging-house after another until coming to the West Indies, and what a sty I was given for residence on that plantation! And to what had I to look forward at my sister’s, even supposing this filthy chance had not afflicted us, but a spare bed made up in a dusty corner of a gable?”

Spleen carried him as high as the crosstrees, where he paused, peering upward at the lubber’s hole and futtock-shrouds.

“Don’t go through the lubber’s hole there,” said John. “That’s only for—er—lubbers. Climb up around the outside, leaning backwards and hanging onto the futtock-shrouds to pull yourself over the edge of the top. That’s how a real mariner does it.”

Mr. Tudeley stared up openmouthed.

“Go fuck yourself,” he said at last, and went straight up through the lubbers’ hole onto the top platform.

“There ain’t any need to be uncivil,” said John, following him up over the futtock-shrouds.

“What’s a lifetime of civility ever gotten me?” said Mr. Tudeley, who had wrapped his arms and legs around the join where the topmast was fished to the mast and clung there like a limpet.

“Not killed afore now?” John stood up and surveyed the wide horizon. There was, as he had said, a brisk breeze, and the
Harmony
cruised along pleasantly. Only, far off to the east, was a smudge of some dirty color.

“Ha! I should welcome the quietus, sir. Here am I, obliged to wear spectacles after a lifetime of ruining mine eyes on copy-work, and who does the captain send up to keep lookout? Who but I, fortune’s whipping-boy? It makes no
sense
!”

“Things don’t make sense, much,” said John. “On the other hand, you ain’t any use at hauling and you don’t know the ropes. I reckon Captain Reynald is being charitable-like finding you something you can do. It ain’t so bad. All you have to do is watch all round the horizon, and sing out if you see a sail.”

“And meanwhile live up here exposed to the wind and the rain like a sodding stylite,” said Mr. Tudeley. “Though I suppose if you can bear your present lot, sir, I must bear mine.”