Silver (28 page)

Natty heard this with her head bowed, as though the words were blows, but when they ended and she looked up again, and saw the court arching above her, she knew that everything she had heard was the simple truth as Smirke understood it. The shock jolted her into speech.

‘I have lost my friends,’ she said, which made him gaze at her in utter bewilderment, as though she were an idiot.

‘Have you not understood me, young man?’ It was the strangled voice of a schoolmaster that Natty heard, and a schoolmaster’s snatching hand that grabbed her chin, and pinched her face. ‘This is our
courthouse
. Our courthouse, where we hold our assizes and punish all liars and other wretches. This is where we see
fair play
. Where we set
everything right
.’ He released Natty, and bent close to
her again. ‘You see that, boy? If you see that, you will answer my questions and our justice won’t trouble you. Otherwise …’ He did not complete the sentence, but straightened and wiped his chin, to clear the saliva he had ejected there.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Natty told him, which was truth of a kind but really none at all.

‘You don’t know what to say?’ Smirke repeated, much more quietly now, as if he were suddenly exhausted. In truth, he had remembered another way to enjoy himself with her. ‘By my reckoning,’ he continued, ‘you need to look sharp and make it your trouble to know, if you want to keep your head on your shoulders.’

With this, he pushed back the sleeves of his jacket, in a gesture Natty thought must be the prelude to his drawing a sword. But no. Rather than that, he proceeded to wrap his arms round her and lift her up as if she weighed no more than an infant, and then to carry her in the same upright position until he reached the dock of the court, where he installed her like a peg in a hole. In this strange embrace, the fear that rose in Natty was continually checked by the foul smell of dampness, and rotten flesh, that rose from Smirke and filled her head to the exclusion of almost every other thing.

‘This is where not knowing will land you,’ he said as he released her. ‘You will stand
here
’ – he jabbed at her with his finger – ‘and I shall sit
there
’ – he pointed at the chair raised on its platform behind her – ‘and Mr Jinks will be
here
’
–
he stabbed the air close to her head – ‘and Mr Stone will be waiting
here
, in case we think you are guilty.’ As he said this last phrase, he indicated the stained ground on which he stood, and scuffled his feet as if he were trying to colour his shoes with blood.

The performance was so bold, Natty insists she found it more farcical than anything, and actually had to resist a compulsion to smile. I have since told her this was merely an aspect of her fear,
and nothing to be surprised at. Yet she was right in thinking Smirke was not about to put an end to her. He was enjoying himself too much for that, like a cat with its mouse. After frowning at her for a moment in her new place, and finding this still did not loosen her tongue, his hand went nowhere near his sword but only flew back to his tufts of beard again, from which he wiped the spittle and sweat a second time.

This scowling gradually became a long grumble, delivered more to himself than Natty, about the growing warmth of the sun, and the impossibility of working any more, and the need for Natty to ‘consider her fate’ and suchlike. From this, Natty understood that her silence had won her a victory of a kind: it allowed Smirke to remain convinced that not even a whole army of her friends would be capable of organising an attack on his camp. In this respect at least, she silently gave thanks for his degradation, which allowed him to remain complacent about the extent of his own power on the island.

At the same time, Natty understood the balance of his mind might very easily swing in a different direction. So when Smirke eventually turned his back and ordered Stone to put her in the distillery, she complied with the order in a way that must have seemed close to grateful. She followed across the compound without a word. As the door of the distillery closed behind her, and the key turned in the lock, and the smothering reek of the place wrapped round her like a cloth, she actually mouthed, ‘Thank you’ into the darkness.

When I was a child helping my father in the Hispaniola, I very often saw men made drunk by the fumes of their grog, as well as by grog itself. Natty had found the same in the Spyglass; it is a common enough sight. Now she herself became like one of those topers. The distillery might not have been visited for several hours, and the barrel that was the climax of the operation might have been only half full – but every part of it smelled so strong, it quickly made her feel intoxicated. For this reason, you might say she began her captivity by seeming to celebrate.

Perhaps this was all for the good, since it allowed her the drunkard’s opportunity of taking an excessive interest in matters that deserve only a moment’s attention. Bars of sunlight, slanting between the planks of the walls, soon became objects of great sentimental
interest as they illuminated the dust in the air, and turned it into a stairway for miniature angels. The scratching of birds’ feet along the roof created a melody as fascinating as the music of the spheres.

At the same time, in the familiar paradox of drunkenness, Natty felt liberated from immediate circumstances, and able to concentrate instead on remote figures and places. Her father, for instance, whom she saw on his bed overlooking the River Thames as clearly as if she were lying beside him; when she pressed the hard ground on which she was sitting, she might have been touching the bones of his hand. She assures me that I also appeared to her, and by looking closely into her eyes showed how much I wanted her safe return. From this I conclude that she welcomed the thought of me – which, had I known it at the time, would have consoled me more than I felt able to comfort her.

Such dreams, alas, were never solid enough to occupy Natty for more than a few moments. Fear continually dragged her back to the present – fear stoked by the sound of the pirates’ voices, which reached her through the wall of the shack that was also the wall of their hut. Every word of their conversation was audible, and its subject was mainly herself.

Smirke had begun talking the moment he went in through the door: Natty heard the clump of his boots across the wooden floor, then a terrific creak as he hurled himself onto a bed; the rest arranged themselves more gently.

‘What kind of scrape have you got us into here, you swab?’ he growled.

Natty understood this to mean that she was the scrape and Stone was the swab – which hardly seemed fair, despite her loathing of him. Stone, to her surprise, seemed almost contrite.

‘I wish it had never happened, Captain. Just a lad. But a dangerous lad, seeing we don’t know what comes along with him.’

‘Give me the word and I’ll tear out his tongue. That will make it start wagging soon enough.’ This was a voice Natty did not recognise – perhaps another guard off the
Achilles
, who had stayed behind when Jinks and the other men left to oversee the prisoners at work.

‘If we tear out his tongue,’ replied Smirke, in a sarcastic parody of reason, ‘how shall we ever hear what we want?’

This produced a burst of laughter, and a babble of voices all talking together, wondering quite what they did want, and whether it need involve words. Smirke stamped his foot to silence them.

‘Quiet, you dogs. Quiet, and use your heads. There’s a question we must consider. A whole heap of questions in fact, and I’ll now proceed to lay them out for you, along with the answers. One: is the boy alone? I’ll wager not. Two: who comes along with him? I’ll wager a party. Three: what sort of party? I’ll wager a party with weapons. Four: what will they want of us?’ Here Smirke paused, and Natty imagined him widening his eyes to solicit opinions – for rather than continuing with his own next ‘wager’, there was a sudden outburst.

‘The silver! The silver!’ said half a dozen voices together. ‘They’ll want the silver!’

Smirke said nothing to this, which again allowed Natty to do some imagining. She saw much nodding of heads, and apprehensive rubbing of hands, and squaring of jaws, as the pirates reminded one another that nothing mattered more to them than their treasure.

‘So there we have it, shipmates,’ Smirke continued eventually. ‘A question. What we might call a di-lem-ma.’ He spoke the word trippingly, as if it were something too hot to swallow. ‘And this di-lem-ma is: do we need the lad Nat to help us solve our difficulty? Or is he just … 
in our way
?’

Although these last three words were slowly drawn-out, they also
produced a squall of voices, which showed that, as far as the majority were concerned, the question had already been answered and the dilemma solved. ‘Show him the sword!’ they clamoured; ‘Make him into pork!’; ‘Hang him with a rope!’; ‘Squeeze out his eyes!’ – and other gleeful cruelties that came with such a wild clattering of feet the whole cabin shook.

When this fusillade had died away there was further pause before Smirke spoke again. ‘Very well, lads,’ he said, with a surprising loftiness, as though to remind them he was their captain. ‘I’m obliged to you. I’ll take your advice under consideration – indeed I shall. I’ll do my considering, and I’ll digest all these things that you’ve given me to chew upon, and I’ll render you my verdict in my own good time.’

More mumbling followed this, rising into another ragged crescendo when the third voice (the voice Natty did not recognise) asked, ‘Why not make him a hostage? We’ll have his mates where we want them, if we have their pretty boy to trade.’

There was a pause, then a snigger. ‘Course, if that’s too much trouble we could just string him up now and be done with him. We’ll deal with his
party
likewise, when they show – we’ll –’

But there was no chance for Natty to hear what new violence might be proposed, since just as this voice began warming to its theme, Smirke interrupted. There was none of the dignity he had attempted a moment before – only a flash of anger. ‘I’ve told you, Noser,’ he snapped, ‘I’ll have no mutiny from you. Not from any of you shipmates. I’m your captain, and you’ll do my bidding. And my bidding is: wait while I consider. Understand that?’ Natty pictured him glaring round, his wide mouth half-open like a cod.

This outburst seemed to quench the pirates’ appetite for more talk – and to confirm that he reckoned the debate was finished, Smirke now smacked his hands together and gave a decisive ‘Very well!’
A turbulent silence settled inside the cabin – if it can be called silence when men are dragging off to lounge on their beds, and complaining about the temperature, and berating one another, and quarrelling about a bottle found beneath a table. In truth this sound-show was commonplace in all its details, yet it gave Natty such an impression of brute stupidity, she began to fear Smirke was more likely to kill her for entertainment than any other reason.

In this respect, the effect of the distillery became a kind of salvation: when the log-house was eventually quiet, Natty fell asleep. This might seem surprising, since it suggests she was not sufficiently terrified by the idea of death to stay awake. But in reality our bodies often choose to obey their own laws, rather than the operations of our minds. Many condemned men, when they wake and remember they will be hanged within the hour, take the trouble to eat their breakfast, and show concern for themselves as though they expect to live. Even Jordan Hands bound his thumb before leaping over the side of the
Nightingale
. To dignify this, I might add that Natty had not slept all the previous night, and was tired.

She woke again to the scrape of her door opening, and a flood of light in her eyes – through which appeared the silhouette of Smirke. Her first thought was: she had a foul taste in her mouth. Her second was: her head thundered, as if she had been drinking. Her third was: regret that she had not been awake to hear Smirke announce her fate. These first two made her sorry for herself. The third made her frightened.

‘On your feet, lad,’ he ordered. ‘We must do this man to man, or I’ll be thinking I’ve murdered a baby, and that will hang heavy on me.’

Given the number of Smirke’s other sins, this seemed a strange concern – but Natty was glad to hear it nonetheless, since it suggested a grain of charity still remained in him. How much chance it had
to develop was another matter, which Natty realised as her eyes grew accustomed to the brightness, and noticed that behind him stood Stone and the other man whom she had heard in the cabin saying he wanted to cut out her tongue. She assumed this must be Noser; he was the tallest of the three, with a very lean body, and childish goggle-eyes that were separated by the unnaturally large proboscis that gave him his name. This made him look odd enough. Stranger still was his dress, for he was clothed with tatters of canvas and sea-cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork was held together by a system of the most various and incongruous fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick and loops of tarry gaskin. About his waist he wore an old brass-buckled leather belt, which was the one solid thing in his accoutrement, and squeaked very noisily whenever he moved. He might have been the jester in a medieval court.

Natty felt as certain there was no compassion in this man as she was sure there was none in Stone and Smirke. All the same, she kept staring bravely at each of the pirates in turn, and then around the yard as they led her forward, to give the impression that she was undaunted. Because the sun was two-thirds of its way across the sky, she calculated it must be late in the afternoon. By this time, as she knew, the evening storm would be brewing out to sea, and very soon would dispatch clouds to spew their rain and wind over the island. Whatever the pirates had in mind for her, it was clear they wanted it finished without delay – so they would not get a soaking.

Smirke kept his hand heavily on Natty’s shoulder until they reached the open ground close to the Fo’c’sle Court – where he relaxed his pressure. ‘Now,’ he said, wiping his blubbery face. Natty understood from the new deliberation governing his behaviour that for the first time he was genuinely concerned to discover whatever secrets she knew – while still wanting to entertain himself with
cruelties. ‘Damn me if you don’t know something I need to know, lad. Something we all need to know, which you’re going to tell us.’