Chapter 269: Merry Dread in Tortuga

The Black Fortune lay at her cable off the strand, with the fort above her like a hen on a nest, and there was no pier reaching out to meet them. James leaned on the lee rail and watched Bonnet and Whitlock wait at the entry port.

The Union flag hung from the ensign staff. The captain was a Barbados Englishman, the quartermaster English to the marrow of his tally board, and the passenger an Edinburgh Scot whom an Act of Union had made English without bothering to ask him.

French colors would have earned the crew a Frenchman’s hatred and contempt the moment they tried the language. The Union flag was paper, and that gave the officer respectable words to write beside trader.

The harbor authority came up the side, a small gray man with the eyes of a hound that had been woken for no good reason. Bonnet swept his hat off in a bow and loosed the French a Bridgetown tutor had caned into him for the benefit of duchesses.

It came out so thoroughly perfumed that every vowel arrived curtsying. "Ah, monsieur! The whole world, it adores the genius of France, naturellement, and not a soul has adored her longer, nor from a more devoted distance, than your most humble servant!"

The officer received this like rain, with a sniff and a squint at the sky. He replied in French, with English words nailed across it like planks over a rotten floor.

"Trader, eh? Pfff. Ze trrader, ’e is always a trader. Wot you carrry, hein?"

"Ballast, Mounseer."

Whitlock was the one to reply, his face blank while the chalk came down on the slate with one dry tock.

The officer’s eyes went down the row of gunports, lips numbering the count. Whitlock let him reach eleven before he spoke again.

"Cast iron, for stowage and fitted with carriages, for the convenience of the carpenter."

The officer nodded like he listened to a sermon he intended to forget. His gaze brushed across the Fortune’s French-built lines, slowly.

James’s gaze dropped to Whitlock’s hands.

A small leather pouch went under the slate and came out in the officer’s palm so smoothly that only a watcher would have noticed it.

Every harbor that took its King seriously, a black-sailed, thirty-gun trader in a French hull would have earned a search by dawn and a rope by noon. Tortuga wore the coat of a colony over the skin of a pirate, and the skin still itched in the old places.

A bribe was the surest door on the island.

The officer weighed the pouch like a butcher weighing a thumb, and for the length of one bow he was the most naive man on Tortuga. Whitlock turned the slate, wrote paid against the harbor dues, and underlined it twice, because no one had ever caught him underlining a note only once.

With the dues paid, the Fortune docked into the night like an old dog finding its place by the hearth. The shore leave went down in tens, every sailor swearing to come back whole while Mary left the cannons to a gun captain, and Crick took the taffrail.

James had spent the last hour of daylight leaning over the rail among the bumboats, asking who on the island knew things that were in no chart. Some pork-seller pointed east along the swamp and told him to look where the lamps stopped, then warned that no Christian soul went there after dark.

Naturally, he set the hour himself.

At full dark, the ship’s rowboat grated onto the landing stage.

Enslaved porters worked the landing by torchlight, bent beneath sacks and casks, and no one on the swamp looked at them twice. That was simply how the island lived.

Bonnet led with a dark lantern shuttered to a slit, carrying it like a relic in a procession. Mary followed with her hat tugged low and one hand near her belt, while James came last with his pulled lower still, since he was warned that every fool from Tortuga to Port Royal knew his ugly mug.

The place smelled of smoke, hog fat, cane spirit, and tar. Hunters in hog-hide stiff enough to stand by itself drank beside planters’ sons in good coats, while the talk came in Norman and Breton and the clipped French of the porters.

From a lamplit door, a woman with her bodice laced for business called to the slim lad in the low hat and named her prices by the hour or the night.

Bonnet tipped the dark lantern toward the doorway, and its yellow slit fell across the woman. He pressed a hand to his breast, and every syllable came out with a sigh in it.

"Mark, my dear fellow, I do believe the lady has conceived a tendresse."

Mary hat stayed low and the boots stayed in step, and her voice came out gravel-flat. "Tell ’er I’m wed already. Thirty ladies, I’ve got, all cast in iron, and not a one of them’s ever answered me back."

The merry band kept their journey, and three taverns along was the longest silence Bonnet had ever kept, and it left him like a cork leaving a shaken bottle.

He clutched the lantern in both hands and rose onto his toes. "James, I cannot bear it a moment longer, I positively cannot! Are we hunting some grizzled old buccaneer in a hog-hide jerkin, with a wooden leg and, oh, do say it, a parrot? Say it is a parrot, James. I shall weep."

Mary herself felt the need to add, more suspicious than eager. "Aye, out with it. What are we after? Or I’m off back to count powder, which at least, answers when it’s spoke to."

James let the silence ripen until a land crab crossed it, taking its time, as though it wished to hear too.

Then he dropped his voice, and the burr came up in it like peat smoke. "The gold in those ruins was the least of it. There’s more from that place around this coast, and it’s the kind of business a priest would cross himself over. Ah’m needin’ a guide."

Bonnet hugged the lantern to his chest like a mother with her first-born, and the slit of light turned his eyes into two bright coins.

"Oh, James, you spoil me! I have read every blessed page of Hakluyt, and the scoundrel never once promised me a guide to the old things."

From there, the merry band walked further into the island until the lamp hung over a shuttered brothel with its sign taken in. Past it the road shrank to a cart track, and Bonnet slid the shutter wide on rotted smokehouse frames, hog skulls on posts, and ground gone bone-white.

The first hunters had cured their meat here on the boucan, and one frame still threaded smoke into the dark with no one tending it.

The island had more noise besides. Land crabs clicked across the track in their hundreds, and a dog lay across a doorway with its eyes open and its muzzle shut, watching them pass.

At the fork stood a wayside cross, and beside it there was a pattern in cornmeal, a cross with curls and stars, with a bowl of rum and cooked rice set before it. James knew the look from the other life, where they called it voodoo and made stories of it.

Here the locals stepped around it in silence.

A shutter closed as they passed. Far off, a drum spoke once and stopped.

Bonnet crept along on the very tips of his shoes, holding the lantern out before him like a communion cup, and pitched his voice to a whisper.

"I have read of such places since I could first read, James, and every last one was a great deal more agreeable from a window seat with a cup of chocolate! One step, I am delighted. The next, I am quite frightened to death. Delight, terror, delight, terror."

Mary snorted, short and wet, half laugh and half nerves, and kept her eyes on the black either side of the track, where the crab-clicking never quite stopped.

"Bonnet, ye’ll make a lovely corpse, ye will. Best-pressed coat in the whole boneyard, an’ every ghost for a mile gone green over the tailorin’."

James clapped Bonnet on the shoulder and grinned with every tooth he owned. "Och, leave the gentleman be, Mark. Now, mind. The first rule with ghosts is being polite, never ask how he died, for that’s the question that gets you haunted. Ask after his family, agree about the weather, and if he’s a Yorkshireman you agree it was better in his old day. And you don’t, not ever, take the second cup."

Bonnet, who had never once refused instruction from a pirate who sounded sure of himself, bowed from the waist to the nearest hog skull and asked after its family.

The track ended in a clearing ringed by driven stakes hung with strips of white and red cloth and the skulls of birds. Behind them leaned a low hut of plank and palm thatch, propped on its own post, and herbs and feathers dangled from the eaves, while a gourd rattle hung from the lintel beside strings of teeth that clicked though the air stood dead.

A ring of ash and salt circled the door. Before it on the beaten earth lay a calabash of rum, a heap of cooked food, and a cornmeal pattern finer than the one at the cross.

The window held a lamp burning a cold white that no oil flame could create.

The drum spoke again, three beats this time.

Bonnet seized James’s sleeve, and Mary’s hand settled on her pistol.

Her voice dropped into flat caution. "That’s a house ye’d want a letter o’ invitation for afore ye so much as scraped yer boots. I’ve seen friendlier gallows."

The door stood a hand’s width ajar, the same white light lying across the gap, as though it had been told to expect them.

James grinned.