Silver (26 page)

Stone noticed Natty slow down as she looked at them, and tugged
at the rope around her hands. ‘What’s the matter with you, eh, my lad? Never seen a doo-dah before, is that it? Eaten all the doo-dahs in England, have they?’

She said nothing, struck by the strange beauty and great vulnerability of the birds.

‘Look at them all you like,’ Stone went on, apparently not in the least put out by her silence, and enjoying his own ramble. ‘You won’t be seeing them for long. Nor be eating them either. Not eating them at all, I should say.’ He hauled at the rope again, until it bit into her skin. ‘Nor you, you scum,’ he added – which was aimed at Scotland. ‘Worms and grass for you. Worms and grass.’

Scotland did not reply either, but continued walking patiently with his head bowed until they had reached the centre of the yard, and came to a stop beside the court. A single glance told Natty that this also owed a great deal to the
Achilles
, in the sense that certain items of furniture, such as the judge’s chair (a captain’s lounger), the witness stand (an arrangement of biscuit boxes) and the jury stall (the bench from a galley), had been looted from it wholesale. When I later saw the almost lunatic assembly of these different parts with my own eyes, I was reminded of Mr Silver’s house in London – which I did not like to tell Natty.

Although very roughly made, the prisoners’ hut was more sturdily built than this monument of sighs and groans. Natty herself has said it seemed like a box rather than a house – and no doubt it offered the same comfort as a box would do. But it was a box full of valuables, with a guard outside, who was slumped in a comfortable old chair with a battered tricorn on his head (pulled forward to cover his face) and his arms folded across his chest. He was fast asleep – and the empty pitcher at his side, with a tankard fallen over beside it, showed that he was likely to remain so for some time.

Stone had no intention of allowing this to happen. ‘Jinks!’ he
barked, with as much irritation as if he had been speaking to his prisoners.

There was no response.

‘Jinks!’ he shouted again. ‘Budge, you skulk!’ – then he dragged Natty and Scotland closer, so that he could knock his mate’s hat from his head with the point of his sword, revealing a state of complete baldness. Natty thought he deliberately mis-aimed, since he nicked the scalp itself, and let a trickle of blood flow across the bare and sun-blistered skin.

This brought the fellow to his feet in a swirl of hands, one of which eventually grabbed the sword hanging from his belt. When he saw it was Stone that had woken him, and not his charges escaping, his fury gave way to a cringing smile. It was not the look one friend gave to another.

‘What’s this, Ben, what’s this?’ Jinks said gruffly, sweeping his hat from the floor. He then pulled a foul handkerchief from his breeches’ pocket, draped it across his skull, and fitted his collapsed old tricorn back in place – very gingerly, because of his sunburn. ‘Wake a man from his beauty sleep, would you?’ he said, once this little performance was done. ‘Wake him and deny him his rest?’ He was still so fuddled, then so busy sliding his sword back into its scabbard, he had not yet noticed Scotland and Natty. When he did, his face cleared to a malevolent simplicity – and Natty recognised him as the accuser in the trial scene we had witnessed together. More nearly sober now, his bulging eyes were still red and swollen, and the flesh of his cheeks very flabby. When she considered his age, and the deprivations and excesses of his last forty years, she was surprised to find him capable of even the little energy he had already shown. It was clear, however, that wakefulness and thought were a burden to him. He wheezed heavily as he re-dressed himself.

When this operation was complete, Jinks put his hands on his
hips. ‘But never mind that, never mind that,’ he said, looking very insolently at Natty. ‘What have we here? Been hunting, have we, Ben? Brought us something to play with, something to beguile the time? This one I know’ – here he spat at Scotland – ‘but where did you find this one? We’ll be drawing lots for him, I can see that …’

Jinks stumbled forward and chucked Natty under the chin as he finished speaking. There was such a horrible insinuation in this gesture – such a creeping weakness disguised as independence of mind – Natty wanted to knock him away from her. Stone, in his different way, also thought it was foolish, and growled as if he were chastising a dog. Then he twitched again on the rope attached to Scotland, and lugged him onto the raised porch of the cabin.

Natty lifted her eyes enough to watch, and wished that she had not. Scotland’s back was entirely covered in lacerations, which Stone had inflicted during their march from the foot of the Spyglass. He had endured these wounds silently, with no sign he might retaliate, but it was clear a storm was raging inside him. His head, now bent until his chin almost touched his chest, bobbed uncontrollably – so that he seemed in perpetual agreement with something being said. The sight was very shocking to Natty, since it showed her how deeply Scotland had fallen into humiliation. None of his feelings were secret any more.

It occurred to her that Stone might kill him there and then, or perhaps order Jinks to do his murdering for him. But the man’s disdain was so absolute, he did not think the trouble worthwhile.

‘Take him,’ Stone said, meaning Scotland. ‘We can think how to punish him later. Throw him in the hole. This other one’ – he pointed towards Natty – ‘I’m keeping with me. I’m taking him to the poop deck and the captain.’

Jinks gave a tittering laugh, then set about the task Stone had given him. He hauled Scotland round and – once he had unlocked
the door to the log-house – punched him once or twice in the kidneys before dismissing him with a heavy kick. This would certainly have sent Scotland sprawling onto his knees, had not several outstretched black-skinned arms appeared in the doorway to catch him and immediately drawn him inside. There was the sound of weeping, and a stifled cry. It was a most melancholy greeting, and yet at the same time comforting, since it showed how much Scotland was loved by those he lived with – his wife among them.

‘Now,’ said Stone, when the door was locked again and Jinks resumed guard with his silly hat flopped down over one ear. ‘You come away with me, my English sparrow.’

The use of this word, which in other circumstances might have sounded like an endearment, made Natty wonder whether he had finally seen through her disguise, and was about to take advantage. This idea made her think very longingly of the
Nightingale –
where, along with the rest of the crew, I was just about now waking to find her gone. She knew her disappearance would be a mystery. But she also trusted I would know what she had done, and for what innocent reasons. I have not always been able to give her my reassurance about this.

Be that as it may. As far as Natty was concerned, two thoughts were now more important than all others. One was how to survive for as long as it took a rescue party to arrive; the other was how to give away as little as possible about the
Nightingale
and her whereabouts. Both were very difficult to calculate. The first because she could not be certain the captain would assume she was inside the stockade. And the second because Stone – now that he felt safe inside his camp – behaved with much less urgency than before. After leading her away from Jinks, he even allowed himself to untie her hands, then pushed her with his boot so that he could once again look her over at leisure. Natty suspected his eyesight might not be
all it had once been – which was relief of a kind. But the inspection was alarming nonetheless, as well as disgusting, and she made sure to square her shoulders, and pull in her chest and stomach, to make herself as much like a boy as possible.

While she grew more certain that Stone had not seen through her pretence, Natty’s confidence rose. During the march that had followed her capture, she had assumed the maroons would be desperate to collect information about her means of arrival on the island, the number of her companions, their arms, and so forth. But all she had so far discovered was a lazy kind of curiosity. This, she was beginning to realise, was the result of several factors, among them drunkenness and sloth in Jinks, and a sort of vicious complacency in Stone.

Stone was so completely accustomed to controlling everything on the island, he had forgotten the ways in which he might be overthrown. At this very moment, she thought, he was not examining her to decide whether she was male or female – only to admire the fact that she was completely his creature. Furthermore, he appeared to think that because she had hitherto given him no resistance, there would also be no difficulty in capturing her companions – supposing she had any. This was his vanity, and although grotesque, she welcomed it with all her heart, knowing it might encourage delays in a course of events that would otherwise have meant the speedy end to our adventure.

‘What do you think of the weather on our island?’ Stone said abruptly, when he had finished leering. This was very unexpected, and the best answer Natty felt able to give was a shrug. She did not want small talk with a man who was considering whether to cut off her head.

‘I can tell you,’ he went on, ‘I am heartily sick of it. This time of year, you see what we get. A few hours of sun, then a bucket of
rain and enough wind to blow your topsail away. Give me your English skies any day, your beautiful English skies.’

Natty could hear this was said with real yearning, but continued to say nothing. The difference between Stone’s white face, with its absolute lack of kindness, and the turn towards softness that his talk had suddenly taken was very confusing. It made her realise again that he was still suffering from simple needs, after so many barbarous years on the island. To put it simply: he was lonely. A new face, even if it belonged to an enemy, was irresistible to him.

This returned Natty to her earlier idea: she might still distract Stone by giving him news of home. For the moment, however, his talk ran on so quickly, in such a torrent of sentiment, she could not find a way to begin.

‘Hideous rains,’ he said, ‘that’s what we have here; hideous rains. Time was, I’d creep indoors and wait them out with a song and a glass of grog. And oh we have singing and grog here all right, precious little else but singing and grog. But they’re nothing compared to what I mean.’ A peculiar scratching noise came from his throat, which was his laugh. ‘Hideous rains,’ he then said again more gently, brushing away the strands of white hair that had drifted across his face, and seizing on the subject that had seemed about to elude him. ‘Rains and blowing all night. Blowing so a soul can’t get his forty winks but has to wander abroad.’

He drew breath once more, only long enough for a twisted flame to kindle in his eyes. ‘But look what my wandering brought me to, eh? It brought me to you.’ He lurched close to Natty, then swung away. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, my pretty sparrow, it brought me to you, and now here’s this beautiful morning. Wind and rain gone. Sunlight come. All magic and calm. But you’ll see, you’ll see. We’ll sweat in the rain soon enough. We’ll all roll round in the wheel.’

These last few sentences were not so much spoken as sung, and
might have been the words of a ditty he half-remembered from his earlier life. They brought a glimmer of something like contentment into his face – but this vanished as soon as it appeared, and he slapped his skinny thigh to admonish himself for his levity. It had been an extraordinary performance. Natty no longer felt certain that she should feed him with any thoughts of home, because she might only nourish his madness. Nevertheless, she threw him a scrap to see how he would take it.

‘This year our summer in England was perfect,’ she said. ‘Healthy crops everywhere.’

Stone looked about him very quickly as she spoke, narrowing his eyes and scrutinising the prisoners’ hut, then back to the cabin where he slept with his mates (if he slept at all). He seemed to be looking for any small sign of change or disturbance. Finding none, he turned again to his habit of giving a shiver and rubbing his hands together, as if he were cold.

‘Summer, you say.’

‘I said it had been warm.’

This seemed a remarkable sentence to Natty, given her circumstances. For Stone, who now seemed to have forgotten everything he had been talking about, it was quite meaningless. His eyes roved over Natty’s face with none of the wistfulness he had shown a moment earlier, but only the usual careless savagery.

‘No one told you to talk,’ he snapped. ‘Here you never talk unless you’re told to talk. Understand?’

Natty refused to say she was sorry but only waited for what came next. This was a cuff round the ear (which would have knocked off her hat if it had not been pulled down so tight), and a snatch at her arm, and a shove across the yard towards the distillery that leaned against the pirates’ cabin. A foot-long metal spike had been driven into the ground close to the door – no doubt another bone from
the body of the
Achilles
; Stone now forced her hands behind her back and attached her to this, so that she had no choice except to collapse onto the ground. To judge by the gouge-marks in the soil all around her, she was the latest of many who had been kept prisoner here.

‘The staging post,’ Stone said, bending down so his foul breath again swarmed across her face. ‘You’ll see soon enough what it’s a stage to.’

With that he straightened again and, after prodding her chest with the toe of his boot, strode round to the door of the hut where his fellows were still asleep.

Natty reckoned it must now be about seven in the morning, because the sun was clear of the horizon and pouring its first ration of heat over the camp. Enough heat, at any rate, to remind her she was very thirsty. This drought was all the more painful thanks to the tinkling sound that came from a small spring she saw rising near the door where Stone had disappeared. It battered lightly against a metal basin, mixing with sand like a porridge beginning to boil, before draining across the yard and disappearing beneath the wall of the compound.