Chapter 291: A Fortnight of Fair Weather

James had been right about the thought nagging at the back of his mind, and it had waited a fortnight to prove it. Those were simple days, the kind that pass before you notice them, leaving behind a few changes and the trouble they bring.

In that fortnight, a harbor changed locations, streets full of women found work, a smuggler’s sister made herself at home in the sheets, and a friend who owed the sea escaped his death verdict.

First and foremost, the bell was rang, and the assembly rounded up the idle. James and Adrienne put forward both questions, with Mateo speaking for the harbor and Isaiah for the arsenal.

The tokens went into the cask, and the harbor edict was approved for the oldest reason in public affairs, every captain and fishwife was done with timeless mornings stuck in the jam of ships and cargo, and no one wanted to repeat the experience.

The arsenal edict was approved simply because the chairman raised its importance.

Both measures were voted by a resounding majority, cutting open the far shore and the arsenal ground for construction.

The first timber crib went down on the far beach at dawn, while the evicted goats watched from the scrub with the interest of creditors waiting to be paid.

Vallon lay the construction boundaries, and then Sawyer’s cribs came next, great wooden boxes as large as houses, sunk where the stakes showed and filled with rubble until they came to rest on the bottom.

The great stone piers would eventually curve out from shore to shelter the armada, though the construction would take a season just to clear the tide, and a few extra days for Sawyer to coax every block as he worked, much as he might address a cousin who owed him money.

Into the reefs, Grey marked a water lane for the beacon cairns with his lead and line, though no ship would use those waters before next spring.

Up the western slope beyond the workshop district, smiths and freedmen cut a foundation for the furnace into the coral rock, safely to leeward of the trade wind. The charcoal burners sent smoke up across the edge of the pines, a lime kiln was fired, and a wall of stakes marked out a powder magazine well away from the other works.

The furnace had yet to see a flame, but the smiths strutted around it like cocks in a yard, pleased to be there first as a free town prepared to make its own thunder.

On the headland, the new fortifications advanced one stretch at a time.

The embrasures were set right, and the mason responsible for a crooked breach had first blamed the tide and now blamed the moon. The curtain wall stood a man’s height across the landward front, the bastion had reached halfway up, and the rampart climbed over the hill.

Vallon considered the construction as a victory over the goats.

At the Code stone, Anne checked newcomers just as Meg checked them at her door, and every woman who had come from Nassau wrote her name or made her mark. The laundresses took over the wash-lines, the tapsters claimed the Freeman Bar and the Broken Crown Tavern, and the caulkers’ widows went to the harbor berths.

There was also the fishermen, who departed to the fishing villages, the chandlers’ wives that took the market, and the children that filled the schoolhouse benches.

A few women chose Meg’s business, where the Code’s sixth rule kept everyone’s hands off their choices, a rule with the advantage of leaving little room for argument.

Tib found no trade to suit her at all, and before noon her temper had driven off two foremen and a cook. By afternoon, she had become everyone’s go-between, tracking down lost shoes, lost goats, and lost husbands, then settling the quarrels that followed when the missing property turned up.

Back into James’s estate, the sibyl kept up her pretense that she was no witch, dressing in plain linen. Some sailors still spat to leeward when she passed, which was as close to a greeting as some of them cared to offer.

Every dawn she walked into the woods behind the ridge, returning after dark with burrs caught in her hem and river clay on her shoes. James asked her once where she went, and she answered with a smile that might have belonged to a woman eleven hundred years old or a woman of thirty-four, depending on who was asking.

He had sense enough not to ask again.

The boats bearing Esperanza’s sign came through the reefs on the tide, and Milagros stepped off onto the customs house, her hat tipped back and her hands marked by rope burns, before setting about managing the smugglers.

She reported that Havana still had soldiers on every wharf, patrols on every corner, and a governor who had forgotten how to sleep. Ambrosio’s old business had been divided between Esperanza and a dozen rival factions, each ready to knife the others over a single cask, while the sentence of hanging against Milagros and James still stood.

She stayed for most of a week and spent her time quickly, thoroughly, and in as many places as possible.

The first night belonged to James alone, and by midnight the netting around the four-poster bed was ruined, the copper tub had proved too small, and the balcony had been asked to bear far more than only elbows.

Anne joined them on the second night, and from then on the two women bit, wrestled, and returned every favor with interest while the Chairman lay between them, a man who had discovered that an idle life could be remarkably demanding.

At the third night, the office desk got its turn as well.

On the seventh day, Milagros returned to the boats with the tide, leaving Enzo a sack of Havana sugar and a jar of orange-flower water, while taking his list of everything else with her.

Enzo’s papers worked their way slowly through the clerks, and the boundary was walked with a cooper on one side and a sailmaker on the other. The cooper objected to the smell of sugar smoke, and before long the two men were finding fault with each other.

The land was allotted by a roll of the dice, and when the dice went against the shop, Enzo lost, appealed the decision, and got stamped regardless. The bill reached the estate tied with sugar twine and marked by a thumbprint of treacle, openly flouting the order that it be written in ink, and James paid for it.

The clerks also insisted that the oven be built of stone, and Enzo went about town looking for workers and searching the boats for spices.

The brown-curled courtesan counted the empty strongbox, the dry courtesan tasted the empty plates, and the pink courtesan asked where the wee bell ought to hang, even though there was not yet a door beside which to hang it.

Across the city, Whydah’s masts appeared above the harbor and Black Sam entered the bay with Williams at his shoulder. James met them on the piers with such a loud and generous welcome that a lesser man might have wondered what he was after.

There was a feast every night, Sawyer offered the careening cradle for a hull that hadn’t yet dried, and Sam was given a seat in the planning of the harbor. The captain accepted it as friendship, which it was, while Williams took one look at the arsenal construction and began putting a price on the future guns in his head.

James had a reason for all this hospitality, on the night of the twenty-sixth, a gale would strike off Cape Cod, and he knew when it would come and which waters it would cross.

A man who knew a storm that well could head it off cheaply enough.

The night passed under clear skies above the reefs, the Whydah’s keel turned toward the heavens and her captain asleep on Concordia’s rum. Black Sam would live to see September and the Act of Grace that came with it, but James kept the reason to himself.

During those days, the Chairman acquired ink on his fingers.

He walked through the township at dawn, checking chimneys, thatched roofs, and cooking fires, while leaving aside the question of whose silver was paying for the town.

That could wait, but fire could not, as dry spring, timber, and thatch made a town easy to burn. He drafted plans for stone chimneys, a bucket line equipped with ladders and fire hooks, and the volunteer watch’s duty, then turned to ballast bricks, marsh clay, and setts laid with crowned gutters to carry water down toward the bay.

He added more wells, privy pits, and a pest house on a cay to receive any ship that brought fever. Last came house plots beyond the ridge for the curious, the hopeful, and the bold, all drawn to the town by its growing reputation, though only the Assembly could open those plots for settlement.

He wrote every page, crossed out ’be it ordered’ whenever he remembered the chapel bell, changed the edicts into proposals, and put them away in his desk.

The town had other concerns, and the harbor, the arsenal, the bastion, and one oven were keeping everyone busy enough that no one had time to listen to the plans.

Then, at last.

On the ninth of May, in the year 1717, the Spry Eel came through the reefs at dusk, a full week ahead of schedule, with every scrap of canvas set and not a soul aboard singing.