The Buccaneers Read online

  “End to end,” he said. “In layers, boy. Pencils in a box.”

  “They'd suffocate,” I said.

  He sniffed. “Maybe two in ten.”

  I thought of the Dragon stuffed with men and women, the howls that would come from the hatches. “Get off,” I said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Get off my ship. Now.” I was livid, disgusted just by the sight of the sunburned man. “If I were bigger, I would throw you off,” I said.

  He blinked at me, peeled-away skin flapping like doubled eyelids. “Now, boy,” he said, unruffled. “You need a cargo.”

  “Not a human one,” said I. “I'll carry sugar, but I'll have no part in slavery.”

  “And who do you think cuts the canes, boy? Who do you think loads the ship but slaves?” He smiled at me. “Whatever you do, boy, you'll be a part of it.”

  “Then we'll take no cargo,” I said.

  He laughed at the idea, at my foolishness. “Come, come, boy. You don't make money that way.”

  “And I won't make money your way,” said I. I drove him from the deck like a great, fat pig and gave him a push to help him over the side. With a squeal he tumbled down to his waiting boat. When I looked away, Abbey was behind me, and he was grinning.

  “Good for you,” he said. “Good for you, young John.”

  News of what I'd done spread like a plague through Kingston. When Captain Butterfield came back to the Dragon in late afternoon, he knew every detail of it.

  “So we're sailing empty,” he said. “All the way to Trinidad. Without so much as a ballast stone, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. Slaves loaded ballast stones.

  He tried to scowl, but I could see humor in his eyes. “Well, you're as hotheaded as you always were,” he said. “As stubborn as your father. But I'll stand by your guns, John, if that's what you want.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We weighed anchor before the day had ended, passed the English fleet, and headed out to sea. Then we turned to the east and beat our way into the trades. With no cargo, with the guns on her deck, the Dragon was more like a boat than a ship. She lay to one side and then to the other, soaked in showers of spray. But the wind was crisp and clean, and I reveled in the change.

  Jamaica fell astern; Hispaniola rose ahead. And for three wonderful days we followed its shore in a friendly current, as pelicans passed like flocks of flying clowns and dolphins leapt all around us. The sails never needed tending, and the men lounged on the deck while I picked away at the little dory's crust. Bits of weed and flakes of white flurried away from my fingers as I worked forward from the spade-shaped transom. I had bared the paint for nearly half her length when Horn came and sat beside me. He took out his knife and started working.

  He pressed hard with his blade. It squealed along the wood, lifting a whole strip of growth and the paint along with it. “You want to get right down to the planks,” he said. “A fresh coat of paint and start anew, that's what you want.”

  “But I hoped to keep her the way she was,” I said.

  “No, you don't want that,” he told me. “You have to lift all the old paint. Every speck.”

  I didn't see why. My knife kept scraping, lifting the crust of sea growth, leaving the paint undisturbed. I saw splotches of black on top of the white and knew I was looking at ghosts of old letters, at the name of the ship still borne on her dory. I picked away, baring a letter, baring another.

  “Scrape harder,” said Horn. He elbowed in where I had been and scraped off all the paint, and the shadows of the letters. “Harder, I tell you.” He worked so frantically that his knife nearly took off my fingers. The weeds and the paint flew in a flurry, and the ghostly letters appeared and vanished as his blade flashed along the planks.

  “Stop!” I shouted. I pushed at his arm, then brushed away the dried weeds, the flakes of paint. Then I stared in shock at the dory's planks, suddenly knowing why Horn had come to help, why he had tried to scrape off all the paint, why he had never wanted that dory brought aboard at all.

  I knew it all, and I glared at Horn.

  “It's not what you think,” he said.

  “Where's the captain?” I asked, turning around.

  Horn grabbed my shoulder. “Listen, Mr. Spencer. Let me tell you.”

  “You knew that ship and her crew of mummies,” I said. “As soon as you saw her, you knew. You looked back at me because you wondered how much I knew myself.”

  “No,” said Horn. “You don't understand.”

  He tried to hold me down, but I twisted away, shouting for the captain. In my excitement I cried, “Uncle Stanley!” and faces looked up at the sound of a name they'd never heard, that I hadn't used myself in ten years or more.

  Horn had me in his grasp, my wrist in one hand, his knife in the other. But he argued no more, and didn't try to stop me from pulling away. He only bowed his head, let go of my wrist, and put his hand to my brow.

  Butterfield ran down from the quarterdeck. Mr. Abbey came too, drawn like a shark by the sudden commotion, by any sign of an attack upon Horn. They came and stared at the dory, at the name on her side, the remains of the letters that once had spelled Meridian Passage.

  Chapter 8

  THE BLACK BOOK

  So that was your ship we found,” said Butterfield, glaring at Horn. “Your sunken ship adrift on the ocean.”

  “Sir, I said I believed she sank,” said Horn. “I never said she did.”

  “And you never said that her men had been murdered. That they'd been triced to the rigging like slaughtered sheep.”

  “Because I didn't know,” said Horn.

  “You were on her,” snapped Butterfield.

  “I wasn't,” said Horn. “And I never claimed that I was.”

  Abbey almost danced a jig. “Spin us another!” he shouted.

  “Won't you listen?” said Horn. His great arms bulged as he tightened his fists. “I saw her at sea, and I gave you her name because I couldn't tell you what ship I was really from.”

  “And which was that?” asked Butterfield.

  Horn's face twisted into something like agony. Then he sighed and said, “The Prudence.”

  “Oh, there's a lovely yarn.” Abbey shrieked with his cackling laughter. “He gets caught in his lie and tells us another. He gives us the name of the only ship we can never find to prove him wrong.”

  Horn glared at the gunner. “What are you saying?” he asked.

  It was I who answered. “She's lost,” I said. “The Prudence has vanished.”

  “No,” said Horn. His brow was deeply wrinkled. “That can't be true.”

  “Well, it is,” cried Abbey. “And you knew it already.”

  I sided-with Horn. “No he didn't,” I said.

  Horn had been in the rigging when the young lieutenant had come with the news of the missing Prudence. He couldn't possibly have known. Then I thought of his ship in the bottle. “That was the Prudence you showed me,” I said.

  Horn nodded, still frowning. “She can't be lost already. There must be some mistake.”

  “You're the mistake,” shouted Abbey.

  Horn ignored him. He spoke only to me. “It's too soon, John. They're never lost before I make the model.”

  “You sound as though you meant it to happen,” I said.

  “The pattern. It's according to the pattern.” He seemed confused, then quietly angry. “Well, I hope it's true. I hope she's gone, and that devil's gone with her.”

  “What devil?” I asked.

  He said the name slowly, with a hiss like a snake's. “Bartholomew Grace.”

  Abbey laughed. “He's spinning yarn!”

  “I'm not.” Horn raised his fists together, not to strike the gunner but to plead to the captain. “Sir, it's the God's truth,”

  He said, and I could see that it was. No man in the world could lie as convincingly as that.

  Butterfield, too, seemed to accept it. “So the Prudence is lost?”
r />   “I don't know,” said Horn, in an anguished voice. “She was fit and healthy when I left her.”

  “Then why did you choose to leave her?”

  “It wasn't by choice,” he said.

  “Good God!” the captain roared. “Must you always spin tales?”

  Abbey was delighted, but Horn sounded desperate. “Every word is the truth,” he said. “I swear it.”

  “Then how do you explain that dory?”

  Horn looked down at the boat. We all did the same, standing beside it like mourners by a casket. It was a long time before Horn spoke. “It's complicated,” he said.

  Butterfield sighed. For the second time in our voyage I went below with him and Horn, to hear a story as wild as any. We went to the stern cabin, now bright and airy with its open windows, and the captain and I sat at the table like judges at a trial. Horn stood before us, not under the skylight but below the beams, where his height was greater than the overhead. His bent neck and bowed shoulders made him seem small and meek.

  “I'm on the run,” he said, and so began his tale.

  It started in 1778, when Horn was pressed aboard the Prudence to the Indies with Bartholomew Grace for his captain. “A toff,” Horn called him; Grace had risen through the ranks like a rocket, from midshipman to post captain in less than ten weeks. “His father was an admiral,” said Horn. Then he paused and chewed at his lip.

  “The Indies do strange things,” he said at length. “The heat, the sun, the wildness of the place. They get inside a soul and twist it up like old rope. They drive some men to madness.”

  “You?” asked Butterfield dryly.

  “Bartholomew Grace,” said Horn, ignoring that jibe. “He was young and full of fancies about pirates and buried treasure, barely out of boyhood. Sent to the land of the buccaneers, to sink ships and kill men—is it a wonder that he came to think of himself as a pirate?”

  “He commanded a warship,” said Butterfield.

  “But in his mind a pirate ship.” Horn smiled. “Piracy was all around us. Where we anchored, the buccaneers had anchored. Their ports of call were ours. He took to pirate ways; you can win a battle before it starts if you fight hand in hand with fear. Fly a bloody flag, come blazing down like a thing from hell, and who won't run from you?”

  He paused, and the captain said, “Carry on.”

  “We did well,” said Horn. “We drove the French from the Windward Isles and followed them through the Caribbees. We lived like pirates, from our plunder. Every ship we took was a new suit of sails, a stronger spar, a galley full of food.”

  Horn shuffled sideways then, and stood to his full height below the skylight, his hands hanging at his sides.

  “We lived by the Black Book,” he said. “The old laws of Oleron.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” said Butterfield. He leaned back in his chair, staring up at Horn. “The Black Book hasn't been used in centuries.”

  “Except on the Prudence,” said Horn.

  “It vanished from the High Court—”

  “Because he had it.” Horn leaned forward, and his big hands lay flat on the table. “Sir, it's the truth. Bartholomew Grace, I tell you, kept that Black Book in his cabin, and he called us down to stand there as he turned through its pages. Every crime you could think of was in there, and for each, a punishment you couldn't imagine. I saw a lookout nailed to the mast when he fell asleep at his post, another tossed overboard for stealing a drink of water. He was a mate of mine, that one. I told Grace it was murder. I called him a devil, and he took me below. He thumbed through the Black Book until he found what he wanted. He said, ‘Ye shall be taken on deck and a rope shall be fixed round thy middle, and ye shall be put over the side and keelhauled.’ “

  Butterfield scowled. “Is this the truth?”

  Without a word Horn turned his back. He lifted the tails of his shirt, and I looked quickly away. I'd seen his scars and didn't care to see them again. But I thought of the horror of how he'd got them, and imagined myselfbeing tossed to the sea, being hauled right under the ship as the barnacles cut me like knives and my lungs ached from a want of air.

  “Cover yourself, man,” said Butterfield. He was very pale, sitting with his hand over his eyes. He waited until Horn turned back, then asked, “But how could this happen? A ship of the British navy.”

  “The navy made Grace a captain,” said Horn. “Nay, it made him a king, with a ship for a kingdom. The wonder is that this didn't happen more often.”

  “But what happened, exactly?” asked Butterfield.

  Horn was tucking in his shirt. “Bartholomew Grace took it into his head that he knew where Captain Kidd's treasure was buried. Why, I think he took it into his head that he was Captain Kidd. When the peace came, we poked around the islands for months, until the navy sent us home. It might have ended there, if we hadn't stumbled on the Meridian Passage. “

  “You attacked her,” said Butterfield.

  “Not I,” said Horn. “For three days we followed her, both of us bound for England. Then we had a mutiny of the strangest sort, not the crew against the captain, but the captain against the crew. ‘We'll go buccaneering,’ said Grace. ‘We'll take that ship,’ he said. I told him I'd have no part of it, that I'd kill him if he tried. But I was the only one who stood against him—-who dared to stand against him—and he bundled me below and read from that cursed Black Book, and set me adrift in the lifeboat. Just me and my sea chest, to rid the ship of all I was.”

  “And then he attacked the Meridian Passage?”

  Horn nodded. “Apparently so.”

  “But an English ship?” Butterfield held up his hands. “It makes no sense.”

  “It would if you knew him,” said Horn. “By that point he hated the English as much as he hated anyone.”

  “Why?”

  “In the last month of the war we were sent to Guadeloupe to sink a French cutter. We were told we'd find a single ship, but instead we found a squadron.” Horn closed his eyes. “They knocked the foremast down, and set us afire in the stern. Bartholomew Grace was burned by molten tar, and all the skin was melted from his face and one hand. He believed the English had betrayed him.”

  Horn's story seemed at last to be complete. I understood why he had stayed so high aloft when the young lieutenant had come with his news of the Prudence, why he hadn't gone ashore at Kingston. “You're a deserter,” I said.

  “Yes, Mr. Spencer,” said Horn. Then he hesitated. “Well, yes and no. I was cast adrift, so I didn't really desert. But I was in the navy and now I'm not, and that's all the admiralty needs to know to hang me. That's why I was sailing east when you found me. If I'd showed my face in England, the navy would have hanged me. If I'd gone back to the Indies, Grace would have done much worse than that. So I made for Africa, for the Ivory Coast.”

  “Well,” said Butterfield. He pushed back his chair, but didn't get up. “I thank you for your honesty, as slow as it was in coming.”

  “What will you do with me now?” asked Horn.

  The captain looked him straight in the eye. “It's my duty to turn you over to the navy.”

  I said, “Sir!”

  He held up his hand. “It is my duty, John. However, I'm not sure if it's the proper course. We shall have to see.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Horn in the most heartfelt way. He saluted again, with that tiny toss of his hand to his forehead, and he seemed so mild and kind that I thought the world of him then.

  We carried on to the east, and the wind grew light. In the evening, fog rolled in, covering the sea in dark swatches of purple and blue. And the night was so utterly black— without a single star and scarcely a swell on the sea—that Horn steered us from sunset to sunrise. Only Horn could steer a ship when there was nothing to steer her by.

  At dawn he'd been standing for nearly twelve hours, but he stayed at my side when I took the wheel, and offered words of encouragement as I chased the compass round a quarter of its dial. Then the wind began to rise and slits of sunl
ight shattered the fog into patches and banks, and we sailed from gloom into sunshine and back into gloom.

  The day was just an hour old when the merchantman came. Butterfield stood on my left and Horn on my right, and we saw her rush from a fogbank with all her sails drawing. She changed in an instant from a gray, dim shape to a solid thing in the sun. Then her yards braced back, and she turned away, becoming a ghost again as the next bank of fog closed round her masts.

  We were used to seeing ships flee at the sight of us, but this one was different. She seemed stricken with terror— the ship herself driven by panic to run without aim, like a deer from a wolf.

  And on her heels came another ship, black as death, with thirty men in the rigging and a spot of bright red at her helm. Painted on her hull was the name Apostle and the number 1219, all crudely—quickly—drawn. At her masthead flapped a ragged flag as black as the ship herself, a white skull grinning.

  The men stood along the footropes of the topsail yard, at the crosstrees, in the shrouds. We saw the flash of their cutlass blades, and heard their shouts, softened by the distance to a single voice, an awful wailing like the wind. They rode the ship through skeins of clouds, and at times the hull vanished below them, so that all we saw were those hellish figures racing through the sky. Then that ship, too, passed through the sun and back to the clouds, and only the voices were left.

  All three of us trembled with fear, but Horn worst of all. He nearly fell to the deck with shock, and only I knew why. That ship had looked much like the Dragon, and I knew her at once as the one that Horn had shown me.

  “Prudence!” I cried. She was free from her bottle and back from a watery grave.

  “Aye,” said Horn. “The devil still lives.”

  “But why does he call his ship Apostle?” I asked.

  “Who can say what a madman thinks?”

  “And those numbers?” asked I. “What does it stand for, twelve hundred and nineteen?”

  Horn threw his hands apart in a gesture of bewilderment. Then Butterfield startled us both by slapping hard on the binnacle.

  “Not twelve hundred. Just twelve,” he said. “Twelve-nineteen. Romans, blast it!”