Bonney struggled wildly in the grip of the pirate who held him, and Penner came forward to Anne Bonney’s side.
‘There’s been enough of this, mistress. Had you set in to cut his throat without these frolics, it’s like enough you wouldn’t have been hindered, or if your man, John Rackham, there, had called him out and planted his iron in him, I’d have stood by and thought no wrong. But I don’t like this eye-scratching devilishness. It looks ill from a woman,’ he added, oddly solemn, as though he were reproving a child.
She spat at him in reply. ‘You! You great ninny, to tell me what looks ill!’ She flung out a hand to point at Bonney. ‘That swine has made life hell for me these two years past; he’s polluted the very ground he has walked on. You and that clout-pole Rackham, who’ve been sea-rovers and done God knows how much bloody murder and more, to tell me that I mustn’t have the carbonadoing of a scoundrel who’s done worse to me than I could ever do to him! Go and chase your ships if you’ve a mind to, and leave me here. By the time the troops arrive Bonney’ll be past speech, and I’ll swear it was you lot that killed him.’ She stopped, glaring at Penner.
The Major looked at Rackham. ‘The woman’s mad. For God’s sake, John, let’s do as she says, and leave her here. The militia may be about our ears at any minute. What does she care for the silver, anyway? Look at her, man – it’s blood she’s after.’
‘She’s coming with us,’ said Rackham. However much his feelings had been revolted he knew he could not leave her behind.
‘Anne,’ he said gently, ‘let him be, lass. It does no good to take his life, any more than it does to tramp on a slug. Come away.’ He put out a hand, but she ignored it. Her fury had subsided, but her voice was still hard and determined.
‘I’ll come when I’ve finished with him,’ she said, and Bonney whimpered in terror.
‘There isn’t time,’ snarled the Major, losing his temper. ‘Rot it, you bloody-minded hussy, there’s the Kingston to see to, and a tide to catch.’
‘Then the sooner you let me at him, the better,’ Anne Bonney shot back. ‘I’ll not take long, I promise you – although it may seem long to James.’
Bonney, still held by his guard, caught at Penner’s coat. ‘Major, for mercy’s sake,’ – he was literally crying – ‘don’t leave me! Don’t, for Christ’s sake! She has gone mad, she’ll tear me!’
‘It’s no more than you deserve,’ snapped Penner. ‘Holy Mother!’ He jerked round, and every head in the room turned towards the windows. From somewhere not far off, in the direction of the town road, the report of a musket shot echoed in the sudden silence.
For a few seconds they stood motionless, listening. Then Rackham broke the silence.
‘The militia! We waited too long, by God!’ He strode to the windows and shouted for Ben.
‘Get the men into the woods! Get well into cover and keep quiet if you value your hides. Away with you; we’ll follow.’
Penner cursed and shook himself free of Bonney’s clutch at his coat-tails. ‘Pray heaven it’s the militia and not Harkness’s soldiers, or we’ll be trapped nicely.’
Rackham pointed to Anne Bonney. ‘Get her out of this, Harry.’ She was opening her mouth to interrupt, but he silenced her with a roar of fury. ‘D’ye want Harkness to find you here, then, with a dead man in the passage and Bonney to tell his story?’
His anger permitted of no retort, but if she was baulked of her main purpose she was still determined to do her worst by her husband. The rapier was still in her hand, and without warning she whipped up her point and lunged at the kneeling wretch with all her strength.
The merest accident saved Bonney’s life. The buccaneer who was holding him was in the act of jerking his captive roughly to his feet as Anne Bonney’s lunge was launched, and the sudden movement marred her aim. The point passed within an inch of Bonney’s face, and before she could regain her balance Penner’s heavy hands were on her shoulders, dragging her away.
‘Take her out,’ said Rackham to the two pirates who stood by Bonney. ‘Never mind him; he’ll give no trouble,’ he snapped as they hesitated. ‘Hold her outside until the Major comes.’
They obeyed him with an efficiency that gave Anne Bonney no chance of protest. She was swept away neatly and speedily and bundled unceremoniously on to the verandah, her curses stifled by hairy fingers clapped over her mouth.
Rackham spoke rapidly to Penner. ‘We still have time enough to make the tide if all goes well with the Kingston. Remember your part: a single light, and if we’re not with you in three hours, a gun. As for Anne, take her aboard whatever she may say. She’ll slip you if she can.’
Penner jerked his head towards Bonney, who had collapsed and was sitting on the floor, a grotesque figure with the sleeve of his coat soaked in blood and the livid cut on his cheek. ‘What of him?’
‘Let him be,’ said Rackham. ‘Now run, man, and look for us at Salt Cay.’
Penner scrambled over the sill, and barked a command at the two men who crouched on the verandah with Anne between them. Rackham saw her struggle in their grasp, there was a flurry of her red hair and an oath from one of the men.
‘God damn, she’s bit me!’ he cried, and then she was swung up by their combined effort and hustled to the verandah steps. She was cursing stridently as they hurried off into the darkness, and then the flow was suddenly cut off, as though one of them had thrust a gag into her mouth.
He was alone in the room now, but for Bonney, and all but two of his men had gone with Ben into the woods. The couple who remained waited on the verandah. For a few seconds he stood listening, but there was no sound of the approach of troops; no noise to re-awaken the panic of a few minutes ago.
He stooped to Bonney and pulled him to his feet by his sound arm. The plump face was ghastly grey; he was near to fainting with his wound, and for a moment Rackham felt a twinge of pity. It was hard to imagine this cringing wreck, with his clothes torn and his face smeared with blood and perspiration, as the monster Anne Bonney had painted. But if our positions had been reversed, thought Rackham. What then? Perhaps she was right. With a mighty heave he threw Bonney over his shoulder, carried him to the window and whistled up his two men.
‘Drop him somewhere out there,’ he said. ‘Then wait for me.’
While they were carrying the inert form into the darkness Rackham took from the table a flagon of rum which his looters had overlooked and proceeded to pour the contents over the cloth and on to the foot of the curtain which screened the passageway. He took one of the candlebranches and applied it to the stain that was spreading across the cloth. It exploded in a puff of flame so sudden that his arm was singed before he could draw back.
He hurled the candlebranch at the curtain and without another glance at his improvised bonfire crossed the room and vaulted out on to the verandah. His two men were just emerging from the darkness, having left Bonney among the bushes, and together the three padded noiselessly down the edge of the drive, while the fire crackled and spread in Bonney’s dining-room.
A minute later they were in the trees beyond the road, and Rackham stood listening while the dim forms of his men moved in the shadows about him. Far away on the town road was a distant drumming; it grew into a thunder of hooves as a troop of cavalry swept up to the plantation gates, men and mounts starkly black against the red glare of fire from the house. All was confusion as they wheeled and re-formed on the carriage-way; then their commander was leading them forward to see what could be saved from the blaze.
The trees beyond the road were empty now, and the single file of pirates, with Rackham at their head, were moving silently down to the beach where their longboats waited.
Within the next hour, while the good folk of New Providence were too engrossed over the fire to the eastward to detect what was taking place less than a mile from their own waterfront, the capture of the Kingston was effected. The longboats crept out through the narrows past Hog Island and openly approached the brig where she swung at anchor.
Those aboard her were far out of earshot of the town, but they could see Bonney’s house ablaze, and Rackham turned this to advantage. He disarmed the suspicions of the Kingston’s anchor watch by explaining that a party of mutinous slaves had burned the plantation and murdered their master and were still at large in the woods. The Governor, fearing that they might try to escape by sea before the militia could hunt them down, had ordered armed guards to every ship in the harbour and adjacent anchorages. All available men had been pressed into service, hence Rackham and his somewhat disorderly-looking party.
It was well told, with Rackham standing in the stern-sheets of the first boat which lay under the Kingston’s counter, while the poop lanterns cast their pale yellow gleam over the surrounding water. It satisfied the commander of the Kingston’s anchor watch, who invited the newcomers aboard, more willingly in view of the alarming news they brought. His satisfaction was short-lived, for within two minutes of Rackham’s mounting the Kingston’s side the anchor watch, taken completely unawares, had been deftly overpowered and disarmed. Thereafter they were persuaded to embark in the boats which the pirates had just left, which they did with blasphemous protest to the accompaniment of ironic cheers from their elated captors.
By the time the commander of the anchor watch had grounded his longboat on the northern shore of Hog Island and plunged his way through the underbrush to bellow to the harbour the alarm which should rouse the town, the Kingston was standing away to the north-east, her pale canvas slowly vanishing into the night. So the enterprise was begun.
12. UNDER THE BLACK
Overnight the weather changed and dawn came with a grey sky and showery squalls driving from the north-east. With sail spread the Kingston ploughed southward over Tongue of the Ocean, and two cables’ lengths astern Penner’s sloop danced in her wake like a puppy frisking behind a full-grown dog.
Rackham had been on deck since before first light. He had not slept during the night, the false refreshment of shaving and dressing in clean clothes had long since worn off, and he was red-eyed and tired.
They had made the rendezvous with Penner, and had lost no time in transferring twenty hands from the sloop to the brig so that the larger vessel should have a reasonable complement in the event of emergency. It had been a disquieting half hour for Rackham, however, partly by reason of Anne Bonney’s behaviour. Remembering how it had been necessary to drag her from Bonney’s house, he had expected to find her hostile; instead, to his surprise, she had been in a state of exultation when she greeted him as he boarded the sloop. Her animation was so far removed from the viciousness and anger she had displayed such a short while before that he wondered, not for the first time, if there was perhaps a streak of madness in her nature.
Her high spirits were not shared by Penner, who, in the brief spell of waiting off Salt Cay, had discovered grounds for anxiety aboard his sloop. While the men were being transferred to the Kingston he announced his fears to Rackham.
‘They’re asking questions. Of course, it was to be expected. They sign for a cruise with me, and here go twenty of them to the Kingston before we’re an hour out. They want to know why. I’ve told them to obey orders and be damned to them, but that won’t serve for long. They smell piracy in the very sight of you, John. These lads I’ve given you are old filibusters, but I’m thinking my gentlemen-adventurers may cause us trouble.’
‘How much trouble?’ asked Rackham.
Penner blew out his cheeks. ‘Who knows? There’s a dozen taking their cues from a smooth, plume-bonnet rogue of a captain that I suspect of honesty. He’ll not be made to play the pirate, for one.’
‘What of the rest, then?’
‘Och, most of the lads’ll as soon sail under the black as under the red, white, and blue. Sooner, when they hear what it can put in their pockets, But they’ll need to be told soon.’
‘They’ll be told to-morrow morning’, Rackham had promised. ‘You’ll need to send them all aboard the Kingston, but for a skeleton crew of safe men to sail the sloop. If your honest captain – what’s his name, anyway?’
‘Kinsman, Captain Alan Kinsman, late of the First Foot and be damned to you common sailormen.’
‘Aye, well, if he refuses to come aboard the Kingston, threaten to hang him for mutiny. And if the enterprise is too foul for his fancy fingers, so much the worse for him.’
For all his confident tone Rackham had been uneasy as he left the sloop to return to his brig, and to complicate matters Anne Bonney had insisted on returning with him. Silent during the crossing to the Kingston, she had been violently passionate once they were alone, and so for a while he must forget the enterprise and the difficulties that lay ahead – the sloop’s crew, the engagement with the argosy, and the hundred other details which were now of the first urgency.
Yet when the first crisis had come, and he had been standing at the poop rail, looking down on that packed waist, with faces of every colour from jail-white to jet black staring up at him, he had carried it off none so badly, he assured himself. He had made a brave figure in his new shirt and breeches of spotless calico – he had even heard murmurs of ‘Calico Jack’ when the hands assembled – and his air of authority, abetted by vocal support of his own faithful thirty, had given confidence to everyone on board. As Penner had foreseen, the majority of the men from the sloop were no whit disturbed at the proposal of a piratical venture; many had openly welcomed it, for privateering paid none so well and there were irksome disciplines and restrictions attached. The mere mention of the prize involved had won over the waverers, and he had finished his speech in a roar of acclamation.
Nothing was heard from the gentlemen-adventurers. They had come aboard with the sloop’s crew, a bewildered and disconsolate little group. Most of them had been sea-sick during the night and were in poor case to protest. Rackham was gratified to note that few of them really deserved the title gentlemen-adventurer, for while adventurers they might be, gentlemen they were not. Shabby, out-at-elbows ruffians, there were those who might have been poor officers from poor regiments, but far from voicing opposition to Rackham’s address, one or two had brightened at the prospect of easily gotten fortune, and the remainder, after uneasy glances at their wild companions in the waist, had wisely kept silent. If they could not be relied on to help, they certainly would not hinder.
One, however, was apart from the rest, and he the only man who could be called a gentleman-adventurer indeed. Rackham had picked him out at once – he was of that type that will command attention whatever his surroundings – and had guessed that this was the ‘smooth, plume-bonnet rogue Kinsman’ of whom Penner entertained such deep mistrust. Smooth he might be, but the rest of the Major’s description was an obvious libel. He was certainly a soldier, with his trim military coat, faded but well-kept, and the plain, broad-brimmed castor shading his thin, angular face. His top boots fitted like a second pair of breeches, and his long rapier sat as easily on his hip as a quill behind a clerk’s ear. There was about him none of the raffish finery of the less impoverished of his fellows, but the workmanlike severity of his appearance, his strong features, and his upright carriage accomplished more for him than airs and tailoring.
He had listened to Rackham attentively, his light blue eyes never leaving the speaker’s face, and when the hands dismissed he had turned to the rail without a word to his companions. His attitude plainly said: ‘You see how matters stand. I am your leader no longer’, and his former followers presently left him and sought themselves berths in the forecastle. The philosophic spirit they displayed on discovering themselves too late to secure even a corner of that crowded place seemed to indicate an acquaintance with the hardships of life, possibly gained in the camp but more probably in the jail.
While Penner congratulated him on the success with which he had won the confidence of the crew, Rackham had found himself aware of a vague disquiet linked somehow with the figure of Kinsman, standing down there at the port rail apparently lost in contemplation of the cheerless w
aste of water stretching away to the horizon. It was a foreboding that possessed him for the next two hours, while he paced the poop, observing the ship’s company, as they lounged in the waist, talking in little groups, dicing or playing cards.
In the end he turned his back on that silent figure and retired to the stern rail, where he tried to place himself in the mind of the commander of the Star, ploughing southwards a few hours ahead of him. He had no real fear that they would lose track of the prize, even in that waste of waters between the Great Bank to the west and the long line of cays to the east; he had sailed too often to the Windward Passage to suppose that any competent shipmaster would deviate much from a normal course. The Kingston was following as fast as canvas could carry her: faster, he was sure, than the Star, for all her clean keel, would be sailing.
Thus he reassured himself, but still that vague disquiet remained, and still it was illogically connected with the lean figure of the gentleman-adventurer, now hidden but clearly seen in Rackham’s imagination. Damn the fellow, why should he matter? He was nothing, a mere cipher among a hundred others. And yet – and at that moment he heard the rich, husky sound of a woman’s laughter and strode forward to the poop rail.
What he saw kindled his irritation against Kinsman tenfold. The adventurer still stood by the port rail, but he had been joined now by Mistress Bonney and Penner, the former leaning on the bulwarks beside him. Kinsman, Rackham noted, was smiling and leaning forward as though the joke they were sharing was a particularly intimate one. She was wearing her black shirt and breeches, with her glossy hair secured in a net behind her head, and it seemed to Rackham that every curve of her brazenly displayed body as she lolled against the rail, every gesture, and every look must be a wanton challenge not only to Kinsman but to every man in that crowded waist.