Cape Cod (37 page)

It was defiance had driven her into the arms of Sam Bellamy. Her father had told her to resist him. But how could she resist Sam Bellamy? Cape Cod farm boys talked about the number of herring they needed to manure a good cornfield, Cape Cod fishermen about the number of cornfields a good herring catch could manure. Sam Bellamy spoke of London and the Caribbean and the riches he would seek among the sunken treasure ships of the Spanish Main. He said no woman of his would hoe corn rows or make sewing needles from fish bones.

She would never forget the sense of danger she had felt when he first slipped his arms around her and told her he loved her. She knew he was no more than a wastrel looking for a warm quim. But she stepped back and raised her skirts, and when he entered her, she felt that she had defied the world.

As she drew breath to shout her defiance this night, she saw something that caused her to call God’s name instead. Two lights were glimmering through the black rain—the stern lights of a ship, a mile north and not more than a mile offshore. The lights were moving, which meant the vessel was still making headway, but she had entered the graveyard of ships.

That was what they called the back shore from Chatham to the Provincelands, where great underwater waves of sand shifted with the current and rose from the sea as the tide ran out, protection for the bluffs against the full force of the Atlantic but treachery itself for the mariner lost in a gale.

Serenity raised her lantern and began to run. She knew that by dawn, there would be dead men on the beach. She prayed that Sam Bellamy would not be among them.

She had not gone far when the stern lights stopped and began to swing toward shore, as if the captain were turning toward her lantern. In panic she doused the flame. She had heard of mooncussers, plundering scoundrels who waved lanterns to lure lost ships onto the shoals.

The lights stopped. Their motion had no bearing on her lantern. The captain had seen that wind and sea were taking the ship, and he had thrown out the anchors to hold her off the outer bar. The giant flukes had dug into the sand and the cables had snapped taut, turning the bow straight into the northeast wind. It was a last desperate maneuver, for a ship on the run could ride the waves, but a ship rooted to an anchor was no more bending than a fence post.

Serenity was close enough to see in the blackness the black shadow of the ship and the waves exploding skyward as they struck. Then the stern lights began to slide. The anchors could not hold against the force of wind and sea, and the flukes became like great plows, cutting furrows across the sandy bottom.

And Serenity ran, driven by the fear that her father’s prophecy had come true. She imagined Sam, screaming orders at terrified seamen, flogging them into the rigging to save what was left of the blown-out sails, driving them forward to cut the cables for a final seaward run, firing his pistol to keep them from the liquor store, where some would seek strength or oblivion, and clinging to the helm that might already have shattered the mate’s arms in a mad come-about spin. Her Sam, facing death because he had come back for her after all.

Then the lights stopped moving. The ship had struck. A wave swept over the great shadow and the lights were gone.

iv.

The crying of the gulls woke Serenity, the crying and the strange quiet. The roar had receded, had all but ceased. There was sand in her mouth. Her cloak was soaked through. And her breasts ached with the fullness of her milk. She crawled out from under the holly bush where she had collapsed and looked over the edge of the bluff.

The clouds were lifting off the horizon, like a ragged curtain, revealing a lurid band of red sky and a sea the color of slate. That sea now rolled over a shattered shoal of wood a thousand feet offshore, and with each crump of the surf, it carried more debris to the beach, so that the sand was strewn, for a mile in either direction, with spars and line, casks and crates, bolts of cloth and bottles… and bodies.

Serenity pulled herself to her feet, and the bluff collapsed beneath her. Her stomach dropped; then her head seemed to follow it. She fell a hundred feet in an instant, tumbling and spinning down the steep embankment like a little girl in a giddy, dangerous game.

She had forgotten that storms could tear great chunks of sand from the bottom of the bank, leaving the bluff loosened and unsafe. But there was no gentler fall, and no faster way to reach the beach. She landed, sitting upright, a few feet from the body of a man in a fine greatcoat. He lay on his stomach, his head twisted at a strange angle.

“Sir?” she said. “Sir?”

The man did not answer.

She crawled over to him and nudged his shoulder.

He did not move.

She rolled him onto his back, and he sloshed like a half-filled cask. Water bubbled up out of his mouth. His eyes stared blankly at the gulls. And beneath his greatcoat he wore nothing but breeches and a cutlass.

Not the dress of a civilized gentleman. She looked around at the other bodies, broken and bloated, dressed in rough clothes and rags. Pirates… honest men… She could not tell. Some of their faces were serene, sleeping peacefully in death. Others were twisted grotesquely, mirroring the last sight that had passed before their eyes.

She staggered among the bodies, protected from the horror by a numbness, an icy cold that came, not from her wet clothes or the wind, but from within. She knelt beside this one, turned over that. She did not smell the gassy stink puffing from the mouths or recoil at the clammy flesh and stiffened limbs. She called for her Sam, but the only answer came from the gulls.

Then someone groaned. She stopped and looked around.

The sun had appeared on the horizon. Flecks of light danced on the gray water like bloody coins, and the bluffs were turning red behind her. Down by the water, someone was rolling over, lifting himself to his knees, looking about to make sure he was in this world and not the next.

At first she was frightened. Here was a pirate, a desperate man. Then she saw the whales’-tooth necklace and cried out his name.

John Autumn stood and tried to run, but he tripped over a shattered spar, and gold coins fell glittering from his pocket. He stared at them for a moment, then at Serenity, and like a frightened animal, began to limp up the beach. He did not go far before he collapsed in the sand once more.

She knew him. He had lived on Jack’s Island, and they had played as children. He claimed Autumnsquam as uncle and Serenity’s great-aunt Patience as aunt. He said it was Patience who had fixed the necklace of Autumnsquam and given it to him. No one was certain of such things. There were many legends. What was certain was his seamanship. He knew the Cape shoals as well as any, and it had been rumored that he had taken his knowledge on the pirates’ account with Black Bellamy.

She knelt by his side. “Was this Sam’s ship?”

He pressed a finger to his lips, as though he could not tell her. His hair was a tangle of salt and snarls, his dark skin darkened by his time in the southern sun. And whatever had given him the gash on his forehead seemed to have knocked him senseless as well.

“Johnny, my Sam! Tell me about my Sam.”

“Can’t stay.” His left foot and ankle were twice the size of his right, but still he tried to rise.

“You’ll be goin’ nowhere on that leg.”

He grabbed a broken piece of planking and levered himself to his feet.

“I’ll help you. Just tell me about my Sam.”

“Can’t stay. Can’t stay or I’ll hang.”

“I bore his child, Johnny. Tell me.”

“Cap’n Sam’s dead.”

Serenity felt the milk in her breasts let down, whether from fullness or the sudden rush of emotion, she did not know. “Is he among these dead?”

He shook his head again. His mind seemed to be clearing. “The last I seen him, he lashed hisself to the helm. I was goin’ to cut him loose when we turned turtle.”

“Were you… were you really pirates?”

He pulled a piece of eight from his pocket. “You’ll find these on most. Weighin’ ’em down to their deaths. Look through the wreckage, you’ll find plenty more. If I could stay, I’d be rich.” He scanned the top of the bluffs. “But they’ll be comin’. Soon they’ll be all over the beach.”

He dug the plank into the sand and tried to move again, but he did not go far before giving up. “I have gold enough in my pockets to let you and your babe live half a year in Boston. I give it all to you if you get me up that bluff.”

The sun was full above the horizon. Its light was now hard and white and made the dead on the beach seem of no more value than the broken spars and smashed casks. To the scavengers who soon would come to pick over the wreck, they would be worth less.

Serenity told Johnny to get himself to the base of the bluff. Then she went about the business of collecting two hundred feet of line. She found a length wrapped around one of the broken spars, another around a cask, another lying loose. For all her exhaustion, she worked quickly, stopping only to pick up gold coins spilled from a dead man’s pocket. She could not bring herself, however, to put her hand inside.

She tied the line under Johnny’s arms. Then she climbed to the top in a switchback pattern, as she had when she was a little girl disobeying her father’s order to stay off the bluffs.

At the top, she wrapped the line twice around a tree. With Johnny using his arms and his good leg, she hauled him to the top and hid him in the small clump of bushes where she had collapsed.

“You can’t leave me here,” he said.

“No one’ll see you, and I must go to my baby.” She put her hands on top of her rock-hard breasts and massaged them. “I’ll come back with my father’s cart.”

“Where can we go?”

“Jack’s Island?”

“They’ll be waitin’ for me there.”

“Do you fear witches, then?”

“I fear nothin’ I don’t believe in.”

“Then we’ll go to Billingsgate, to Goody Daggett’s.”

v.

The news spread quickly that Bellamy’s flagship, the
Whydah
, had struck the bar. And a haul from pirates’ heaven she was, a three-hundred-ton trader and slave galley taken off Jamaica with twenty thousand pounds of gold in coin and dust, indigo, ivory, Jesuit’s bark for quinine, and an armament of eighteen twenty-four pounders.

No one knew how many people plundered the wreck in the days after. It was the law in Massachusetts Colony, which by now had swallowed up Plymouth Colony, that whenever a ship was wrecked, the town clerk took possession until proper disposition of vessel and cargo were made. This meant until the town and colony took their share.

A more time-honored law said that abandoned vessels were the property of those who salvaged them, and in the God-fearing hamlets of Cape Cod, this was the law that mattered. After all, Cape Codders lived isolated and independent at the edge of the earth. They endured nature’s worst and counted the best as part of God’s Providence.

From the
Whydah
they hauled off spars, line, broken barrels, casks of wine, planking, whatever cargo survived the surf. One man even found an elephant tusk rolling in the waves. Many found pieces of eight and other coins. And a few found more than ever they would admit.

Captain Cyprian Southack, sent by the colony a few days later, found nothing. The seas were too rough to save any of the treasure that the shoaling sands had begun to bury, and few Cape Codders had any intention of surrendering what they had secreted in their barns and mattresses.

When they did not bring forth their spoils, Southack sent men to every farmhouse on the Lower Cape. One he sent was a Cape Cod barrister whose family was well connected to the Colonial government—Ezekiel Bigelow, son of Brewster.

During the second week of May, he and his associate, a fat Boston man named Worthington, reached the settlement at Chequesset Neck. They sailed over to Great Island and stayed the night at the sign of the Spouting Whale—“Samuel Smith, he has good flip, Good Toddy if you Please, The Way is Near and Very Clear, ’Tis just beyond the trees.” After they turned in, Smith sent word to his aunt, Sarah Daggett, that the king’s men were coming.

The next day, they crossed Jeremy Island to Billingsgate Island, the windswept stretch of dunes where Jack Hilyard had put up his first tower. Other whalemen still kept a tower, trywork, and whaling house on the island. Fishermen had also come, and oystermen as well. Most built shacks to stay for a season, though a few lived there the year through, Josh Daggett’s widow among them.

“What do thee want?” Goody Daggett squinted in the harsh sunlight, of which there was no other kind on Billingsgate Island.

Ezekiel Bigelow removed his hat. “We come to ask, marm, if you’ve anythin’ from the pirate ship
Whydah
, or know of any who does.”

She laughed and her three teeth stood out like jokes in a sermon. “Oh, most certain I do. I’ve fifty gold sovereigns in me budge, if thou cares to fish for ’em, and me cat’s got a gold bell ’round her neck give to ’er by Black Bellamy hisself.”

“We merely do a job, marm. And what about him?”

John Autumn glanced up, then went back to carving a piece of whalebone. He little resembled the Indian people remembered. He had taken off his necklace, shaken his hair out of its English knot, and sat by Goody Daggett’s door, bare-chested and breechclouted, with a blanket around his legs to conceal his splinted ankle.

“He ain’t been off the island in two weeks, ’cept to go up to Sam Smith’s and fetch me a bucket of beer.”

Bigelow brought his face close to the Indian’s. “Do you sip the beer as you bring it?”

John shook his head.

Worthington grabbed the Indian by the chin and twisted his face. “A question was asked. Answer with your tongue.”

Control your temper, thought Serenity, who hid beneath Goody Daggett’s bed. She had come to Billingsgate that morning to tell of the rumor now running about Eastham: the only known survivor of the
Whydah
, a carpenter kidnapped by the pirates, had seen Johnny Autumn’s body on the beach as he climbed the bluff before dawn. When he came back with the townsmen, the Indian was gone.