Chapter 266: Knights-Errant at Service

By the second night at Nassau, Hobbs had used up all the clean linen and started cutting up the captain’s spare shirts.

The Rose stayed another two days, just as promised. James came aboard before dawn, which saved Cudjoe from having to develop a mood about it, and with the first light he lifted his order and let the crew ashore in parties.

They walked the same roads he had walked and found pirates lying face-down with their boots gone, women wiping blades on their skirts and gutters throwing shite straight into the wellheads.

The Rose’s crew sailed under a captain who was considerably more civilized and moral than any black flag in Nassau, and them lads had carved their names into a stone that said a woman’s body belonged only to her. Looking away wasn’t a habit they had managed to acquire, and if came to it, none of them would mind a fight against injustice.

Robbers hunted the roads in packs, women were attacked in doorways, and starving people cheated other starving people.

Not a soul had some government to appeal to. Nassau had no watch, law, nor court beyond whichever man happened to be in port that week and had enough crew to become the king of the hill.

Hobbs’s table stood beneath a tarp on the main deck and spread like a field hospital after a battle that, rather inconveniently for him, no one had actually been killed from their side.

Split scalps came in, along with broken knuckles, a knife buried in a thigh, and an arm needing splints. There were more cracked ribs than Hobbs cared to count aloud.

Every man got rum first, and Hobbs got rum second. Then came the probe and the catgut.

It was the busiest stretch he had seen since Havana, and not a single gun had been fired to earn it, which Hobbs considered an absurd reality. Every sailor who came down the gangway went back up breathing, and the saw never had to leave its roll.

Cudjoe watched from the quarterdeck with his arms folded.

James could see the table from where he stood. The rest of the news reached him afterward, over breakfast, delivered in the formal diction of Edmund reading a notice from a pulpit. Bert, drunk, had come upon six men violating a laundrywoman in a back street and broken six heads like melons dropped from a yard.

Wesley confirmed the whole account with one word.

Sober, Bert was the courtly giant who apologized to doorframes. Drunk, he became one that wouldn’t think twice before he mauled every single pirate on the island.

By breakfast he was asking after the lads health with manners that might have shamed a bishop.

Meanwhile, Jim held court on the pier from the top of a barrel, counting figures off on his fingers. By his reckoning, he and the crew had become the knights-errant of Nassau, sworn to the service of dozens of women.

Every one of them had thanked him, he said, in the manner a sailor valued most.

No one could confirm the number, and Jim supplied it with the same solemnity he used for his brushes with death. He had about the same quantity of evidence for them.

Nassau required no further proof.

James listened from the quarterdeck, grinned, and saw no reason to interfere.

As for Anne, she went down into the well-house again and again with a sack over her shoulder, visiting the friends she had once kept doors with. James went down with her every time out of simple worry.

He kept his promise exactly. His hands stayed where they could be seen, and his mouth stayed shut unless she asked him for help, following her through the cellar like a very large shadow under strict orders.

By the third trip the children had stopped hiding behind skirts and begun inspecting his scars instead. He learned the routes between the doors as he went, but kept that to himself.

Dan came down the pier on the second afternoon, gray-bearded and stiff with salt, and stopped at the foot of the gangway with his hat in his hands.

Tib had said yes.

Whether the hunger had moved her, or the sight of the Rose’s crew working through the streets had done it, or the two things together, James never found out.

The plan was short enough. The Runts would come in after dark and stand off the harbor, then the fishing boats would carry the people from the doors out to them in small parties. Tib herself would go in the first batch, so she could see Concordia with her own eyes.

She would find out whether a knife really lay beside the bill before sending a single soul after her.

The Rose cast off that evening with the trade wind behind her.

The trip home took a couple of days.

Back then, Concordia had no particular need for its founder. The Assembly had turned its attention to the fishing villages scattered across the reefs, and to how far the Code and the market roads ought to reach toward them.

It argued the question by bell and token without needing him for any part of it.

He left word with the Assembly and at Meg’s to expect the first batch from Nassau, while Anne stayed to meet them, because a frightened woman steps off a boat more easily when she knows one face waiting for her.

Across the bay, Vallon’s bastion stood on double watches by torchlight, and impossible, as the Frenchman had promised, had yet to stop him.

Thus, James was left with a cup out onto the estate balcony, as he watched the whole headland burning with lanterns, and discovered that there wasn’t much to chairman for now.

The sighs came between the rum and the dark, long and theatrical and directed at no one except him. Chally, patient in her chains beneath the swamp, had a gift for making patience noisy.

James told the empty balcony more than once that he was working on it.

Then one sigh arrived while he was deep with Anne in their nightly passion, and he stopped pretending the Crown would wait for his convenience.

King’s ships had already come looking for him at sea once, a commodore’s pennant had passed through his head, and he had promised a lady in chains that he wouldn’t be long.

At first light he walked the stone pier between the Rose and the Fortune and looked up at both lasses. The Rose sat heavy at her berth, forty-four guns, ox-blood hull, and claret sails that every lookout from Havana to Port Royal could recognize at two leagues.

The Fortune lay lean and black beside her, hull and canvas the hue of a moonless night. Time was of essence, and the corvette could reach their destination in record speed in these waters.

James took her for her heels, this time as a passenger, and left the Rose with her quartermaster to hold the harbor and send the Runts to Nassau. Cudjoe received the order with his notebook open, and wrote beneath the tally of things the captain might die from, then asked for the beans one more time.

James gave him a grin and a handshake instead.

Bonnet took the mission and the passenger with grave delight, while Crick spat over the rail, rapped the mainmast three times, and declared the Grey Lady left behind with the harbor.

The Fortune left the channel under black canvas, passing the beacon cairns one by one.

Behind her, the Rose and Cudjoe dwindled on the pier.

She leaned into the wind like a blade coming free of its scabbard, her wake stretching behind her as straight as a ruled line. They were headed south and east, toward the island of Hispaniola and the western third of it that France called Saint-Domingue.

James stood at the quarterdeck with a picture behind his eyes, the a star-shaped fort, a white ensign, cane smoke, a blue wall of mountains, and a fold in the hills that pulsed like a heartbeat.

Fortune had once been some French corvette, and now her bow was pointed toward a French harbor with a star-shaped fort sitting on its point.