Chapter 247: Threads Pulled Tight
Hours had gone by since James and Cudjoe left Radcliffe to his silence. The Rose was making her slow way toward Concordia, with Winchelsea trailing behind on a tow. For once, James had managed to keep his mind on work and little else.
He’d seen to Anne’s satisfaction before the night was an hour old, then seen to it twice more before either of them had the good sense to stop.
By the end of it she was curled against his chest, breathing slow and heavy. James eased himself free without waking her, found his breeches by feel in the dark and left the rest of his clothes wherever they had fallen.
The deck received him barefoot and bare-chested, and the night air found skin that had spent the whole battle buttoned to the throat in good black wool.
Naturally, the captain could look like the end of the world before noon and nearly ordinary again by midnight. James thought that was probably a good thing, and suspected he was supposed to mind it more than he did.
His eyes went to the frigate first, as they seemed to do on nights like this now.
In the end, one battle was enough to teach a sailor that habit, and one battle too many made it permanent.
Winchelsea rode low and dark off the Rose’s stern, a hawser stretched tight between the two ships. Her broken mainmast had left her unable to do much for herself, and her skeleton crew moved across the deck beneath the lanterns, keeping watches as any crew would, only much calmer than the fools who had sailed her out before.
James laughed once when he saw her.
The very ship that had come looking to finish him was now following the Rose like a dog that had finally discovered what a leash was for.
Four months out from Havana, and a captain could apparently build himself a respectable reputation by doing little more than puttering around his waters and taking whatever came too close. Some prize here, a lucky chase there, until more than a dozen sloops were flying his flag.
The crew had started calling the whole ragged collection the Runts, because none of them could sit beside the Rose without looking like a pup beside a wolfhound.
James privately suspected at least two of the ships had names Doyle had given them on one memorable night deep in his cups. Those were names no sober man would have chosen, and by the time the crew was sober enough to object, it was far too late.
And now there was a frigate riding behind the Rose at the end of a town, as if she’d been caught poaching. Thirty guns and a reliable hull. Far too fine a prize to burn, and far too battered yet to trust beneath a full spread of canvas.
As for the whole might of the Calloway’s Fleet, it amused him because it had come together so neatly without requiring a single command from him.
The Rose, the Fortune, and the Dame came first in every conversation that mattered, three ships that fought like one beast whenever they sailed together, whatever had brought them into the same fight.
After them came the Runts, an ever-growing collection of sloops that Concordia’s dockside gossip figured it counted as auxiliary strength. They were useful for numbers and noise, but not a soul mistook them for fighting ships.
Above them stood the free companies, answering to not a crew but themselves. Thatch had his East Indiaman, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, Bellamy had his Whydah, Vane had his Ranger, and the rest had theirs lasses.
They drank Concordia’s rum and fought beneath her name when it suited them.
No one had sat down and planned any of it. That was what made James laugh less when he thought about it.
Sooner or later he would need every captain who called Concordia home sitting around one table. Each would have a cup in his hand and a promise of his own making.
He needed something with enough teeth to matter when the town called for all of them at once, rather than whichever three or four captains happened to be in port that particular week.
As for the battle aftermath early in the day, that part had already taken care of itself hours ago, without requiring much from James.
Winchelsea’s surrendered men, marines and common sailors alike, had gone over the side and onto the navy sloop. She lay dismasted and drifting where the mortars had left her that morning.
They had been stripped of their weapons, along with whatever pride had left them. Then they had been turned loose to make their own way home or go wherever the current chose to carry them.
It was more mercy than those poor bastards would have offered James in the same situation.
Rose’s crew hadn’t come through the fight untouched, although the lass herself had suffered little more than a scratch.
This ship could come out of battle looking almost new and still lose a face or two by the time the muster was called. James had grown accustomed to that.
It didn’t hit him as hard as it once had, and the simple fact that he had learned to carry the burden more easily was probably the part he liked least.
Belowdecks, Radcliffe was still keeping silence. But the words he had let slip stayed with James longer than the marine himself probably meant them to.
Some commodore with a name now, and a governor behind him.
James had always known a day like this was waiting ahead. Either the pardon or a noose, ready to make its great debut in Nassau, and the whole Bahamas at large.
He had simply expected to have little less than a year before they arrived. Instead they had come early enough to make him wonder how much of that lost time had been his own doing.
He muttered into the open from old habit, with no expectation that the voice would answer him.
"That clock of yours run early on its own, or did I go and wind it myself?"
I don’t set the clock, only watch it, and I’ve noted, with some professional curiosity, how hard you keep striking it.
"Comfortin’."
I mentioned it, repeatedly. You were, at the time, considerably more interested in raising a town out of a sandbar and checking which of your women could out-drink the other. I filed the warning under ’ignored.’ It remains the single largest folder in your file.
James snorted.
"So it’s my own doin’, then, that what you’re sayin’?"
I’m saying the experiment has produced a great deal of interesting data on how quickly a pirate can hurry along his funeral while under the impression he’s simply enjoying himself. Whether that counts as your doing depends entirely on how much credit you’d care to take for it. You tend to be selective about that.
"Cheerful as ever."
I try.
James thoughts then wandered towards his experiences in this new, chaotic life.
They went back to the black stone key, carved with the same coiled serpent that existed through the ruins beneath Concordia’s swamp. To the temple and the simple fact that some Crown official had cared enough about it to seal a private letter about its existence.
And behind that came a name he had buried without much ceremony, some small-time Nassau extortionist who had sworn, while dying, that the Royal Navy stood behind his racket.
James had dismissed it at the time as the last useless lie a desperate man told to buy himself another breath. Now he stood with a captured frigate riding dark behind him and a commodore’s name freshly dragged out of a broken jaw.
He wasn’t nearly so sure anymore.
Before he finally returned to his cabin, James made up his mind.
Once they reached Concordia, he would have a look at the temple again. He would also send word to Milagros and Esperanza in Havana, for both of them to keep their ears open for anyone asking after serpents, keys, or drowned commodores.
Whatever the coming year had in store for him, it clearly had no intention to allow idle time.
Standing alone in the dark with nothing on him but his breeches and a fair share of the world’s troubles riding across his shoulders, James couldn’t say whether that prospect troubled him or pleased him more.
In the end he decided he didn’t much care to find out.