Chapter 272: One Day, Then One Night

The charm stayed snug on his left wrist all night, right against the old rope scar, which was more than James could say for himself. By first light he had given up on the berth, pulled his hat down over his eyebrows, and gone ashore.

A witch wanted one day and one night, and no amount of waiting in the deck was about to change her mind. Since there was time, one ought to know the place, and considering his name had travelled the ocean ahead of him, James kept his hat low and his mouth shut.

From an upturned cask beside a rum stall, he watched Tortuga wake up, with hams and charts side by side over smoking frames.

Some buccaneer flung his arms wide to tell the empty dawn the whole of his chest, like a tenor who had been promised a full house and a better class of audience.

"Jambon! Jambon! Hams for ze ladies, hams for ze fine gentlemans who have been too long upon ze sea, who have forgot, Mon Dieu, what a fat sow look like by ze lamplight! Cochon! Hog! Pig! Come, come, come!"

Beside him, a ham swung on its hook as if helped the marketing.

From the other side of the shore, Crick stepped off the Fortune with his purse in his fist and stopped dead.

No superstitious sailor with any sense named that animal while afloat, because the beast was bad luck and only cold iron would answer it. Crick walked towards the ham, then reached the frame with his lips moving through the three raps he was saving for a post.

He addressed them with anxious caution. "Mornin’ t’ee, friend, mornin’. Now I be wantin’ a chart of the French shore, and I’ll pay good silver for it. But keep the curly-tailed gentleman out of my sight, d’ye hear me? Him, and the long-nosed gentleman in your pen, Lord keep ’em away, and all their kin with ’em, amen."

Understanding rose over the buccaneer greasy face gloriously, like a sunrise over a midden, and he drew breath to the very bottom of his boots.

"Aaaah! Ze word, it hurts you! It pinch you, mon vieux, here, in ze heart?"

He thumped his chest, ecstatic.

"Cochon! HOG! PIG! Pork! Boar! SOW!"

Two more hunters rushed over to roar it with him, then ten, then the whole shore, while three bumboat sailors began laying bets.

"COCHON! COCHON! COCHON!"

"Ten livres ’e faint before ze sow!"

"Fifteen ’e weep!"

"Me, I say ’e kneel, ’e pray, an’ then ’e faint!"

Crick spat to leeward and rapped the post three times, each knock more desperate than the one before. Then the sow arrived, a lady the size of a rowboat with an iron ring through her nose, and leaned her whole flank against his knees.

The buccaneer clapped both hands over his heart and reeled back, while tears, God help him, welled in his eyes. "Ah! Ma belle! Look how she lean on him! Ten year, TEN YEAR, Mon Dieu, she love only me! I give her ze best acorn, ze best mud, ze whole of my heart, and now she leave me for a sailor! Take her, mon ami! Marry her quick, or she sulk, and when she sulk, who must listen? Moi!"

The nose ring was the only iron within reach, so Crick put his thumb against it and crumbled a biscuit over his shoulder for the widow. The sow ate it.

He paid with his eyes shut and accepted the ham into his hands for luck. James watched the chart roll open, showing the French shore in brown smoke all the way down, and beyond the cane, the page went blank except for a hog drawn upright in the empty space, grinning.

The witch’s cord, then.

Crick brought the chart and ham to the shore, then threw the ham into the roadstead with a word to the widow. "No harm meant to her, mother, no harm. ’Tis the sea I be givin’ to, not thee. Take it up with the tide and leave me boots."

James had one hand over his mouth, his shoulders shaking from laugh.

From there, and by noon, he had climbed the some rock, meaning to enjoy the view.

Far below, on the black coast, a small figure with shells in her hair bent over a hole. Then a neat man walked the shore with a notebook under one arm, and James knew exactly who it was.

Whitlock set his tally board on a barrel, unrolled a sheet as long as a hammock, and ruled it into sections. A hunter’s son in a waistcoat came first, and the quartermaster stopped him with one finger.

"A moment of your time, monsieur, the merest sliver, I assure you, and do hold still."

He brought up the board. "I am compiling, for the benefit of the Fortune, a complete register of every species of person upon the island of Tortuga, as in, whom to bribe, whom to bow to, and whom, in the fullness of time, we may expect to sell her. Ah. Good waistcoat."

The pen scratched.

"Bad debts, section six. Quite splendid."

The young man drew himself up until his waistcoat buttons begged for quarter. "Monsieur, I tell you, in my heart I am a hunter! Ze blood of ze boucanier, run in me like ze river! My papa, he say so himself!"

Whitlock ruled a fresh section with a delicate stroke and put his question in a gentle voice.

"And have you ever, monsieur, in the whole course of your life, killed a hog?"

The young man considered this.

"I have eaten a great many."

Whitlock wrote it down. Section nine.

By the time the shadows had stretched across the ground, the tally held forty-one kinds of hunter, nineteen kinds of widow, and a long section headed ’Dogs That Think They Are Persons’, with two entries and a quarrel.

Whitlock tipped his head toward the city watch. "Garrison, nine, by my ear. Nine distinct sleepers, the third from the left has a whistle in it, quite charming, and one hen. And the hen, I am bound to report, has been awarded a section of her own, being the only member of the garrison presently awake and on duty."

At last the tally ran out of paper. Whitlock turned it over, wrote ’OTHER’ across the back in letters a hand high, and moved the entries across one by one until the front was bare and the back held the whole island.

James stuffed his hat into his mouth.

Then evening came, and lamps came out across the shore.

James took a bench at an open-fronted tavern facing a lit doorway, because an island talks where its sailors drink. The talk was about sugar roads hogs, and when a buccaneer got as far as ’la Sib,’ an old one splashed spirit onto the floor between his boots and started talking about the tide.

Naturally, no one asked him to take the charm off.

The doorway across the streets belonged to a brothel with a crimson shutter, where an abbess stood with her bosom laced high and her arms folded over it.

Into her light came the tallest gentleman, Ezra and Silas Hollis stacked inside seven feet of hog-hide coat stiff enough to stand without either of them, with a tricorn on top and the lower head down in the belly, where the coat had grievances of its own.

The giant swept off his tricorn with a flourish that came within an inch of snuffing the abbess’s lamp and bowed from a great and swaying height, in a French so counterfeit it ought to have been hanged for forgery.

"Bonsoir, madame! You see before you a rich gentleman, very rich, of Port-de-Paix, and very, very tall. Ze height, madame, eet is a burden! I’ll have ze finest girl in ze house, ze very best, for ze one fee. Ze one fee, madame. Because I am only ze one man, ze one, entirely."

The abbess tipped her chin back, a long way, and looked up the length of the coat. "Ah, non. Non, non, mon petit géant. Listen to me, six livres ze head, ze hour, then ze night, no refund for ze quick. I see one head, I charge one head, but now!"

Then her finger rose, long as a tent-peg.

"Now I hear two voices, so I charge also for ze listening."

A voice came up out of the belly of the coat, muffled by a mile of hide. "Twa heids, madame! TWA! An’ one fee, an’ don’t go blamin’ me for that, it’s the long streak o’ misery up there’s doin’! I’m Ezra! Mine’s the head, mine’s the brains, an’ I’m holdin’ up this great rotten plank o’ a man besides, so ye’ll listen to me!"

The French went out of the top man, who replied enraged. "Ezra’s me, ye daft, sodden, deaf old bladder! The head’s the one with the FACE, an’ I’m the one with the face! Is there a face down there? Just yer bloody prick!"

A shutter banged open above, and a whore leaned out with her chemise slipping and the rushlight pouring down her arm like honey. Her voice came down the streets like warm brandy poured over the whole transaction.

"Eh, bring him up, ze tall one, bring him up! I take ze head, I take ze rest also, I take ze whole of him!"

The streets roared like a gale, and odds came flying from every doorway.

"Evens on ze ’ead wiz ze face!"

"Five to one ze coat, she win!"

"Ze belly, ’e say nothing, ze quiet one, ’e is ze dangerous! Ten to one!"

"Ze middle, eet is ze favourite!"

The one underneath lost his temper and heaved to prove who was head. The stack went over, but the coat stayed upright regardless, with both brothers fighting inside it. The abbess took the fee for the doorway, the stink, and the show, then shut her door.

The twins crawled out into the streets, each swearing that he had been the head.

Then the lamps went out one by one, and James walked down to the shore to see his crew home. Whitlock checked heads aboard by lantern, Crick held the chart at arm’s length, while the twins were slung over two bumboat men.

Over the swamp, a thin voice sang names, and James heard his own go by, with two more after it.

Instead of worrying over it, he went to sleep, only to wake up in the black hour before dawn with his right hand closed around his left wrist. The cabin had no noise in it, the hull creaked as it turned with the tide, and the watch bell struck the hour.

The charm rattled against the bunk board, shell against shell, bone bead against tooth.

It was time.