This time Modyford smiled quite broadly. ‘That does not surprise me,’ he said; and added wickedly: ‘Did you miss them?’
‘No,’ said Henry. ‘It was perfect. A family party. Just the right size, and no strangers. There was only one thing wrong with it. Mansfield was not there. Where is he, do you know?’
The Governor made a little movement with his head that Henry took to be negation.
‘Have you no news of him?’ he asked.
But the movement had been one of regret.
‘He’s dead, Harry.’
Henry put down the glass he was drinking from, and sat without words.
‘How?’ he asked presently.
‘He had gone to the South Cays to refit, and was attacked by a Spanish warship. The Endeavour was sunk.’
‘You mean he went down with her?’
‘No.’
‘Well? Let us have it! What?’
‘They took him to Havana. With the survivors of his crew.’
‘And?’
‘Put him to death.’
‘By shooting?’
‘No. They hanged him. And fifteen of his crew.’
‘On what charge!’
‘Piracy, I understand.’
‘Piracy! On what evidence?’
‘Oh, no evidence. I don’t think that there was any question of evidence being required.’
‘No? Why not?’
‘Evidence is one of those tiresome conventions demanded only by a properly constituted court.’
‘You mean they just strung him up?’
‘I don’t know. But Davila boasts that he has executed more than three hundred pirates in the last two years; and even in the Caribbean he would find it difficult to achieve such numbers if he were hampered by a small thing like evidence.’ He glanced at Harry and added: ‘I loved the old man; and I think that you loved him too.’
‘Yes.’ He wanted to say: He was the kind of father I should like to have had; but it sounded childish and a little absurd.
‘I wish it were not now that you had to hear about it: on your first day home and in the middle of so much rejoicing. But life is like that. It is never unspotted glory.’
No, it was never unspotted glory. He went away from Kingshouse with Mansfield’s voice in his ears: ‘I shall come back for you, Harry, my little taker of prizes, and you will come with me once more to strike at Spain where it hurts.’ He was glad that he had bitten back the words he had nearly shouted at the Governor: ‘And are you still sending Spanish prisoners home safe and sound?’ For of course the Governor was right. It was no answer to meet the Spaniard on that level. The answer was to meet him with a fleet; to teach him manners with an army.
So Henry went soberly back to the town, only half aware of the people who stopped him, the salutes and the curtseys and the blessings, hoping that Elizabeth might by now have arrived from Morgan’s Valley and that in her warmth and companionship this small personal desolation that was marring his public triumph might be dissolved. But Elizabeth was not there. Half the island was in Port Royal, being rowed round the fleet or toasting the returned heroes in the taverns, but Elizabeth was not there. And a more immediate emotion woke in Henry. All Spain was of no more consequence than a rotten apple if anything had happened to Elizabeth. The ships had been hull-up at dawn, and the news must have gone to every comer of the island before they had beaten their way into harbour. Now they had been nearly a whole day in port, and the town swarmed with planters and countrymen, but there was no Elizabeth. Foreboding fell like a blight on him. She was ill, she was dead, she was lost. Something had happened to her between Morgan’s Valley and the Port.
He went down the stairs from the emptiness of the little apartment with panic on his heels, commandeered the horse of a man who was dismounting opposite the Brown Duck, and rode away into the sunlit afternoon that stretched hot and quiet beyond the noisy town. His borrowed mount, shocked by a change of routine, shied at the shadow of every moving frond, and he dug his heels in and cursed it. The world was all of a sudden black and frightful. A life without Elizabeth would be unthinkable.
He met her coming riding down the forest path, at a walking pace because of the bad going. She was riding decently side-saddle, and she was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat tied with ribbons under her chin. That it was a slave’s hat, made of coarse straw, detracted a little from its allure; but it was evident that allurement had not been in her mind.
‘Harry!’ she called. ‘Oh, Harry! I was over at St Ann’s Bay, and so I did not hear until— Oh, Harry!’
He had forgotten that she was so small and light.
‘You haven’t remarked on my hat,’ she said presently. On the lips of any other woman this would mean ‘on the hat I am wearing’. With Elizabeth it meant ‘on the fact that I am wearing a hat’. ‘I am wearing it for you,’ she said, ‘so that my skin shall not be freckled.’
‘It seems to have been an afterthought,’ he said, and kissed her sunburned nose. Only Elizabeth, he thought, could manage to look delightful with a skinned patch on the bridge of her nose.
Her eyes went on towards the horse he had been riding, and she said: ‘You haven’t bought that, have you?’
This piece of practicality at so heart-full a moment was so much Elizabeth that he began to laugh, and being a little silly with relief and over-wrought after the emotions of the day, he went on laughing, so that he must needs sit down by the forest path and drag Elizabeth down with him; and they sat there laughing helplessly together because they were glad.
But as he was aiding her to remount she said: ‘Did you find him, Harry?’
‘Who?’ said Henry; who had come a long way from his wedding night.
‘Bartholomew Kindness.’
‘Yes,’ he said shortly; and then remembered her strictures about men ‘putting off’ women when they asked questions.
So as they rode back to Port Royal he told her about the dungeons of San Jeronimo, as he would have told another man, sparing her nothing. And she listened in silence, looking straight in front of her between her horse’s ears.
Their entry into the town proved, unintentionally, to be in the nature of a triumphal procession. Port Royal, having eaten and drunk all the afternoon, had poured itself, no longer very sober, into the open air to enjoy the evening; and through the press of people rode the hero of the hour with his wife.
‘The Captain’s lady!’ yelled the Fortune’s crew, and converged as one man on this new subject for a toast. They had drunk to each other, to their ships, to the King, to the Duke of York, to the landlord’s daughter, to the landlord’s wife, to absent friends, to sweethearts and wives, to a short life and a merry one, and of course to Harry Morgan; and their invention was failing. Here, like a gift from heaven, was the Captain’s wife; as pretty and suitable a Captain’s lady as ever wore shoe-leather. They swarmed round her, clutching at her bridle and urging that she should dismount and come and be drunk to. It was Jack who saved the moment from embarrassment and turned it into a procession. He appeared at her horse’s head in the unobtrusive way in which he did everything, took the bridle from the huge sailor who was hanging his weight on it, and led the frightened horse through the crowd; who closed in happily on either side and escorted their Captain and his lady to their lodgings.
‘Dear Jack,’ said the lady. ‘How nice it is to see you again; safe and well.’
It was Jack, too, who got rid of the crowd when they arrived at the apartment. When Henry had obliged, very readily, with a speech, and the crowd began to require a speech also from the lady, Jack demanded to know if they had no bowels. Had none of them ever had a wife, and had none of them ever been parted from her for more than six months, and had they in such circumstances ever wanted to stand gossiping on the bottom step of a flight of stairs?
As the crowd let them go, with sympathetic laughter and frank felicitation, Elizabeth said: ‘But you are coming up. Jack, aren’t you? Just for a little!’
But Ja
ck would not come up. ‘I’m a lot drunker than you’d think,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll just go and complete the process. But thank you all the same.’
So they went up alone, on this night of rejoicing, to the cramped little rooms to which they had first come after their wedding nearly a year ago, and though the shouts of the town came up through the open window, they sounded distant and irrelevant.
‘What is that, Harry?’ Elizabeth asked, noticing for the first time the emerald on the hand that was unbuttoning her bodice; and she caught the hand away from her to look at the ring. ‘What is that?’
‘An invitation to Panama,’ he said; and stopped her mouth from further questioning.
But Elizabeth lay awake that night looking at the great emerald where it rested below her shoulder. And she decided that she would not mention Panama again, even to find out about the ring; so that he might not be reminded even for a moment of that invitation. He was home; here, safe beside her; unharmed and triumphant. And not even by the utterance of a word would she remind him that there were still other worlds to conquer.
Which was an excellent resolution if the word that haunted Henry had been Panama. But it was not Panama. The word that haunted Henry in the weeks to come was Maracaibo.
‘Maracaibo,’ said his horse’s hoofs as he rode round the growing estate at Morgan’s Valley and admired what Elizabeth had done in his absence. ‘Maracaibo,’ said the rain dripping from the eaves at night. ‘Maracaibo,’ said the long surf on the beaches. ‘Maracaibo,’ said the palm leaves clattering in the wind. ‘Maracaibo,’ said the racket of pails in the stable, the tinkle of hammer on anvil, the chatter of spoon against plate. Maracaibo, Maracaibo, Maracaibo.
When his mind was idle for a moment he would hear Mansfield’s voice saying it. As he had said it through those weeks before his marriage when he would not listen to him.
With his conscious mind he repulsed the word; repudiated it. What had Maracaibo to do with him? He was a planter, a married man, and he was rich. He had done what he set out to do: he had avenged Santa Catalina and brought home his men; what more had he to do with a world outside Jamaica? Let the English Navy teach Spain manners henceforth; that is what the Navy was for. It was the business of Henry Morgan to stay on his new plantation and found a family. More especially to found a family. As Anna Petronilla bluntly pointed out when he went to pay his respects to her.
‘A year!’ she said, her wide, china-blue eyes indignant. ‘And not a sign! She must embroider more, she must embroider.’ And, before he could remark on this odd recipe for conception: ‘How can she expect to have a child if she is for ever running hither and thither? She is out every day, in all weathers, riding round the estate like an overseer. You have no money for a factor?’
Oh, yes, Henry said; he had ample means to pay a factor now; it was just that Elizabeth happened to be interested in estate matters and found it boring to sit at home.
‘A set of chairs,’ said Anna Petronilla. ‘Put her to a set of chairs. That is very absorbing; practically a life’s work.’
They laughed together over the set of chairs, Henry and Elizabeth, and it became a catch phrase with them. ‘When I begin my set of chairs.’ ‘The kind of woman who embroiders a set of chairs.’ Henry did not mind that she had no child yet; she was still very young, and they had all their lives in front of them. Some day, of course, he would have a son: a child like that Cuban boy, upstanding and independent. But meanwhile he had Elizabeth.
He had Elizabeth and Morgan’s Valley and an unassailable standing in the land of his adoption, and with all that for his pleasure it was absurd that an outlandish name should toll at the back of his mind like a bell, like a summons.
He refused to be seduced by the tolling name, and busied himself with the affairs of the island and with the colossal task of assessing and sharing out the treasure from Puerto Bello. The courts did the assessing, of course, and sharing out was a matter of strict privateer agreement and precedent. One fifteenth of all went to the King; one tenth of all to the Duke of York as Lord High Admiral; and so on down the scale to the carpenter who got an allowance for the use of his tools, and the surgeon who was paid so much for the upkeep of his medicine chest. All these admitted of no argument. But besides these unvarying percentages, there was a long list of compensations to be awarded, and a list almost as long of rewards for special bravery. It was in these lesser matters that Morgan’s advice was continually being sought. Privateer custom decreed that for the loss of a leg a man was entitled to four hundred pieces-of-eight, but if Dick Buttonshaw had lost his leg by getting drunk and falling between the ship and the wharf, how much compensation, if any, was he entitled to? And if Ted Budge, Jeremy Willett and Ben Twizel all claimed to be the man who hauled down the Spanish flag on Fort Triana, to which of the three should go the recognised amount of fifty pieces?
If he was not being summoned to give his advice, he was being summoned to have Government dispatches read to him. This happened almost every time a ship put in, for if Port Royal had been stirred by the affair at Puerto Bello, its effect on the chancellories of Europe had been cataclysmic. The authorities in Madrid were still short of breath from the body-blow of Puerto Principe, when they were rocked back on their heels by the upper-cut of Puerto Bello. Their rage knew no bounds; and neither did their eloquence. The Spanish ambassador to the Court of St James’s was kept busy. Why, asked the grieved and furious Spaniards, when their one wish was for friendship and peace, did the English make both peace and friendship impossible by acts of barbarism for which there was no precedent, excuse, nor adequate description?
The Court of St James’s deplored the hot-headedness of privateer captains who exceeded instructions; and directed its ambassador in Madrid to ask for the release of Captain Robert Delander and his crew, who had been in prison in Seville for the last nine months, having been deported there from Havana after their ship was confiscated and sold by the Cuban authorities. It was not, said the Court of St James’s gently, notably conducive to either peace or friendship to grant the captain of a dismasted ship the courtesy of a harbour, and then to confiscate the ship and send both captain and crew to prison half across the world.
Meanwhile the dispatches being hurled out with such speed and in such numbers to Port Royal said (at least in their private enclosures): ‘My God, Thomas, what have you been up to? How do you think we are going to get you out of this? How are we going to get out of it ourselves? For the love of Heaven send us some ammunition!’
So Modyford, week and by week, sent them ammunition.
One week it would be the case of Rocky Garretson, who had just come into port in his tiny three-gun ketch, bringing with him as prize a Spanish warship of twelve guns. This great bully, said Rocky, had left a fleet of fourteen sail to harry him and to say that if he did not surrender they would ‘hoist him in’. However, they were what Rocky called with delightful euphemism ‘much deceived’, and on examination after capture the ship proved to be His Majesty’s ship Griffin, which had disappeared with all her crew on the way to England two years ago.
Another week it would be the affair of Captain Edward Beckford, who, hailing a friendly ship off the South Cays, was met by a volley and the sight of Spanish colours being run up. On this occasion, too, the assailants had been ‘much deceived,’ and the ship, which was now at Port Royal, proved to be the property of Alexander Soares, who had sailed in it from New England eighteen months ago, since when there had been no word of either ship or company.
‘They may say that papers found in Puerto Principe are forgeries, my dear James,’ wrote the Governor to his brother, ‘but even the English cannot forge ships. Tell your Spanish correspondents that they may come here—as our guests—and inspect the ships at their leisure. They may also, you had better assure them, depart at their leisure when it seems good to them. We have no dungeons at Port Royal.’
And to his cousin Albemarle: ‘There will be no sure future for Jamaica without peace, but there wi
ll be no peace while Spain sits like a great jealous hen over every egg in the Americas. I understand that the treaty you propose to ratify makes no mention of the West Indies. I take it that that means that Spain reserves the right to apply it to the West Indies or not as it may suit her. If we attack her, the treaty applies; if they attack us, the treaty will be held to apply only to European waters. It seems a puny mouse to have been brought forth with such mountainous labour. Meanwhile I reprimand the privateer captains daily, and nightly give thanks for them.’
So Morgan drank the Governor’s good brandy while he was having dispatches read to him, and from his fertile mind produced more ‘ammunition’ for Modyford’s replies.
And when he was tired of both planting and Government business, he would go down to the harbour and help Bernard Speirdyck to admire the Mary and Jane.
For Bernard had bought his ship.
She had been the Isabella: another Spanish ship which had indulged in aggression and been ‘much deceived’. The Spaniards had used her for trade, and she was light and fast and roomy, and altogether the ship of his dreams. So Bernard had not only spent his last penny of privateering gains on her, but had mortgaged his future for some years ahead in his desire to be master of her. Cornelius was his partner in the enterprise, having one share to Bernard’s two; and they had renamed her the Mary and Jane: Mary for Bernard’s wife, and Jane for Cornelius’s bride. They were spending the bad-weather months in re-fitting her, and when it was sailing weather again she would be ready to go out on her peaceful trading life as trim and well-found as two Hollanders bred to the sea could make her.
‘Mary says if the child were coming sooner she would sail with us,’ Bernard said, ‘but I think better she stay and be something to come home to. A man who lives by the sea wants always something to come home to.’
‘Where do you plan to trade?’ Morgan asked, hanging with Bernard over the rail and admiring the line of her bows to the bowsprit.
‘With the Indians on the coast to begin with. Hides, shell and log-wood.’