Chapter 236: Fat With Prize

The merry band brought the merchant to the safe house in the slums, and it took the sisters considerable time to finish with him.

Ambrosio squealed through every minute of it, exactly as promised. James had made one promise that night and, credit where it was due, the man gave him full value for it.

James kept his shoulder turned toward the room and watched the moon, as he figured that whatever was happening next door was none of his business. It’s a useful attitude when murder is being committed nearby, provided the murderers are on your side.

The wet sounds told him enough regardless.

Esperanza began with her fists, and the man’s face gave with a crunch like a boot through a crab shell. Milagros had evidently been listening at the door, because she followed James’s instructions to the letter, breastbone to belt, the way a butcher opens a hog.

The squeal that came after it would have embarrassed a hog in Havana. Which is saying much, and Havana slept through every note of it.

By the end, the house looked like a butcher’s block after market day, which was not an improvement on the original decoration.

The famous mustache lay across what remained of Ambrosio’s lip like a drowned caterpillar, and there was nothing left about the face to suggest that such an ambitious owner had ever worn it.

Some greedy merchant who had spent every dawn oiling and waxing his face had gone into the dark in a piss-soaked nightshirt, with features his mother would have needed a lantern to identify.

Vanity is a curious thing to spend a life on. Sometimes it pays handsomely, and sometimes it leaves you looking like this.

James looked him over once and found that he had no regret to spare.

There are nights when a man ought to feel righteous fury, but James had already spent his feelings elsewhere.

The sisters straightened, scarlet to the elbows and breathing like winded horses.

In the alley outside, one of Esperanza’s boys waited with a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. She peeled it back and handed over [Verdict] and [Counterargument] one after the other with solemn care, although she was crimson to both elbows.

The argentsteel slid home as though it had never left, and the fat pistol went into his belt with a familiar thump. Buckling up one-handed took three tries and four oaths kept behind his teeth, until Wesley reached over and finished the job without a word.

There are times when a man’s pride has to make room for another man’s hands, particularly when the first man’s other hand is no longer available.

James stood straighter, he was down one arm and up a sword and a pistol, which by his tally put him ahead.

Before he left, he hooked Milagros around the waist and kissed her.

It was the slow, deep, open-mouthed kind. Her fingers knotted in his collar, her teeth caught his lip, and her hand slid down his back and stayed there, her whole hard little body pressed against him from knee to breastbone.

Her palms were still sticky to the wrists, and she left a print on either side of his jaw. There are men who might object to being kissed under such circumstances, but James wasn’t one of them.

The brothers watched the stars with sudden attention, as gentlemen who had been taught not to stare, and had been taught the lesson well.

Esperanza stood through all of it with her arms crossed and her expression frozen, flushed from her throat to her ears. The glare and the blush arrived together, and neither could beat the other.

James let go of her sister and swept her a bow, broad and shameless enough to tell her that she had best get used to the sight.

Milagros had already made up her mind to stay in Havana. A trade this size needed one soul with a foot on either side of it.

The smugglers trusted her because she was her sister’s blood, and the pirates trusted her because they had watched her put a blade through Spaniards without breaking stride. She was as good a go-between as the Caribbean could ask for, fluent in two tongues and two very different kinds of accounts.

A woman who could make smugglers and pirates trust the same handshake was worth more than another dozen men with complaints.

Nobody treated it as an ending, least of all Milagros. She watched them go with the grin, as if she had only left a room she fully intended to walk back into.

Some farewells are only departures with better atmosphere.

James went back the way he had come, over the wall and across the pale beach to the longboat, with its oars still wrapped in sailcloth. He climbed in one soul short of the party that had left the Rose.

The brothers sat in a row on the middle thwart like three enormous choirboys. Bert and Edmund spent the time whispering over whether the fourth sentry’s hymn had been a Te Deum or a Salve Regina, and agreed, out of courtesy, to call it a draw.

There are arguments a man may win and still be wise enough to call a draw.

The watch on the Rose took one look at their captain’s grin, the handprints on his jaw, and the sword at his hip, and returned to their dice. Cudjoe took one look at the same three things and went below to count the powder. Each man, apparently, knew what he needed to know.

The days that followed fell into a rhythm as smooth as any customs house. Merchant crews struck their colors the moment the Rose’s claret sails appeared in the horizon, and the Spaniards soon took to doing it from a mile off, like hurrying to an appointment they had no wish to keep.

Kwaku hadn’t unwound his chain in six days and was beginning to sulk about it.

The holds emptied nearly as fast as they filled, because each evening one ship slipped off the blockade to meet Esperanza’s boats down the coast, well away of the forts, and came home lighter in the hold and heavier in the strongbox.

The most feared pirates in the Caribbean had become an orderly trading concern, with a manifest, a fixed hour, and a good many more corpses in its history than any respectable merchant house would care to advertise.

The only real difference was that respectable merchants generally had the good sense not to mention the corpses.

On the tenth day Hobbs cut the sling off with a flourish, prodded the wound until James swore, and drank to his own handiwork. He was quite satisfied with himself, which was fortunate, because nobody else had any intention of congratulating him.

The strongboxes stayed shut in the quartermasters’ keeping, since the old rule of the Articles held that shares got counted once a voyage was done and not a shilling sooner. That promise alone kept spirits high through every dull watch, as sailors with nothing in their pockets can endure a surprising amount if they know coin will be put there later.

The blockade held nearly two weeks, longer than any gambler would have wagered.

Word has never yet been good at staying where it was put.

In the first days, a fast Spanish sloop slipped the line on a moonless night with the whole tale aboard. That was all it took, once news gets aboard a ship, it has better legs than the sailors do.

From there the news spread, from mouth to mouth and port to port, west to Veracruz and south to Cartagena.

Everywhere it landed, some governor put down his cup of chocolate to hear that a ship of the line lay on the bottom of Havana’s bay. Governors have many duties, but bad news has always had a way of finding the shortest road to them.

Spain’s wounded pride took its time to become Spain’s Armada. There were letters, signatures, and a bishop’s blessing on every keel before, at last, sails came together out of the mess.

James weighed it for exactly as long as it took to spit once over the rail.

He had never seen glory in pounding a beaten ship into the sea. He saw less in fighting a fresh squadron for the sport of it, with nothing left to prove and everything already won.

The command went up the halyards and across the water, and the blockade broke. Every hull that had answered the call fell in behind the Rose.

The Queen Anne’s Revenge was last and slowest, the way a man leaves a good tavern when the company is still pleasant and the bill hasn’t yet become his problem.

Behind the Rose’s stern, the forts of Havana dwindled into two pale smudges, glaring at nothing.

Seven hulls stood out for Concordia with the business done and the Spaniard still days off, exactly as James had promised the Broken Crown. Every one of them rode so low and fat that the sea licked at the lower gunports.

Ahead lay a reckoning of shares that would keep Whitlock and Roberts quarreling until Christmas, which was perhaps the most reliable part of the whole voyage.