Heart of Steele (8 page)

FROM ALL I
could tell, the
Aurora
was sound in body, though the Spanish broadsides had shattered her limbs. The main topmast was gone at the partners, shot clean away, and the foremast had been so badly sprung, a strong wind would snap it in two like a dry stick. The whipstaff had been shot through, and the crew had rigged a makeshift, meanwhile steering the frigate by means of pulling on ropes belowdecks, directed by a crewman shouting orders down through the cockpit.

But most of this I learned later, for busy were my uncle and I with the wounded. Three men had been killed outright: George Sawyer, Lloyd Jones,
and Pondoo, who was one of the score or so of freed slaves who had willingly joined our crew. I had come to know these three men over our months at sea, and their deaths hit me hard. George Sawyer had been a navy man, mostly silent, but friendly and always willing to give a crewmate a rest by taking on part of his job. Jones had been a Welshman who loved a joke and a song, aimed his cannon as true as any could wish, and was our best fiddler. Pondoo, if that were even his real name, we had taken from our first prize. The poor man had been a slave, belonging to the Spanish captain of the very first privateer we had taken. When he heard our crew’s voices, he had pleaded, “I know English! Take me from this man, please. He beats me.”

Strong as any ox, many a time he had talked to me in his soft voice of his harsh life. He was taken from Africa, he had said, when he was but a child, and for a time was a slave on Tortuga, when that island was in English hands. Taken then by the French and sold to the Spanish captain, he lived a life of misery for many years. Once I had asked if he wished to go back to Africa.

“Don’t know,” he had said quietly. “My whole family was taken. What is Africa without my family?” His hope was that somehow he could find his mother, father, brothers, and sister in the New World, but that was a dim enough wish. Come to that, he thought his family might have died on the slave ship coming over from Africa, for on it they were treated like animals, separated one from the other, and chained, and half or more of them had died.

But though we had lost those three, the seventeen others who were wounded still had hopes of living, and my uncle worked like a dog over them, stitching and splinting, patching them up as best he could. It was remarkable to me always that the men seldom cried out or complained, even with the most terrible wounds. One old fellow, Davis by name, was placed on the operating table by some of his shipmates. The moment my uncle cut away Davis’s shirt, he shook his head. A horrible long spear of wood, probably part of a spar, had pierced him through the chest.

Blood dripped from the corners of his mouth. He said in a wheeze, “It’s bad, ain’t it, Doctor?”

“Bad enough,” Uncle Patch said shortly. “Your lung is pierced, Davis.”

He nodded, his eyes dull. “Be I goin’?” he asked in that same rusty wheeze.

“I’ll do what I can,” said my uncle.

Old Davis raised a hand, flailed it, and caught my uncle’s wrist. “Be I dyin’?” he said with a grim insistence.

My uncle gently released the clutching hand. “Davis, I think you are.”

“Put me aside, then,” Davis answered at once. “Work on them as can be saved.”

“One thing at a time,” insisted my uncle.

But Davis died before Uncle Patch could even remove the splinter, and a moment later we were dealing with a man who had a fractured skull and concussion of the brain.

Hours passed in this bloody work. Even with five lanterns hung, the light was bad, and my uncle’s eyes soon grew nearly as red as cherries from the strain. We lost no more patients, though, and in the small hours before dawn we were down to broken arms and ugly bruises that were spectacular but not dangerous.

We were dealing with the worst of these, a sailor named York with a broken arm, when I became aware of someone behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw that Captain Hunter had come below. His face was pale as he stared at my uncle, who was well-nigh drenched with blood.

“Davy,” Uncle Patch said sternly, “strap him down.”

“You ain’t goin’ to cut, are ye?” asked York, clearly terrified that he was going to lose his arm.

“No, lad,” my uncle assured him. “This is going to hurt like the very devil, though, and ’tis better if you can’t thrash about.”

I fastened the buckles of the big leather straps and put a length of leather between York’s teeth. “Bite on that when it hurts.”

“Ready?” asked Uncle Patch. He wrenched the broken arm back into shape. York’s whole body arched, and he bit down hard on the leather. A high-pitched
eeeee,
almost more a whistle than a cry, escaped from him, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he passed out.

“He’s fainted,” I said.

“That’s a mercy, anyway,” shot back Uncle Patch, feeling the arm to make sure the bones were in
position to knit together. Then, working with a speed that few surgeons could equal, he splinted the arm and bound the splints tight with bandages. He raised his head and glared at Captain Hunter. “Four men dead already,” he said in an accusing voice. “William, what d’ye think you’re about? Steele’s a butcher! When are you going to put an end to his capers?”

Roughly Captain Hunter snarled, “As soon as ever may be.”

“It should have been long before now,” grumbled Uncle Patch. “Before he slaughtered that town. Before he led us into his bloody trap!”

I felt my cheeks grow hot. What bothered me was something I had been thinking ever since I had first heard the word “trap” back in San Angel. Had the drunken sailor been a spy, too? Was his babbling meant to lure us to destruction? If so … if so, then I was to blame for the deaths of those men, for I had given the word to Captain Hunter to sail to San Angel.

“I don’t need a lecture, Doctor,” the captain said in such a cold voice that I looked at him in surprise. His eyes were level and unblinking. There was
something of a serpent’s stare in those eyes.

“Ye need something!” my uncle growled as he tied off the last bandage.

“Not from you!” Captain Hunter’s words were like the lash of a whip. “I tell you, Doctor, that I shall kill Jack Steele. If I have so much as a plank to sit on, a rag to hoist as sail, and one cannon to fire, I will kill that man or die myself.”

“William—,” began Uncle Patch.

“Give me the report!” Hunter snapped. “What is the butcher’s bill?”

With his own weary face set in hard lines of anger, my uncle said through clenched teeth, “Sixteen wounded, three in danger of death. Four dead—Davis, Pondoo, Jones, and Sawyer. The rest I will answer for, if their wounds do not mortify.”

“I will enter that into the log.” The captain turned on his heel and stalked away.

We had only one more patient, a man with a broken finger, and that was set easily enough. Then we made the rounds and checked on the men we had treated. Uncle Patch had given them all rum with the alcoholic tincture of opium added, and all were asleep, or rather, unconscious. “I believe we may
turn in for this night of Our Lord,” murmured Uncle Patch.

We washed ourselves as well as we could in basins, though my uncle had to scrub hard with a pumice stone to remove the caked blood from his forearms and fingers. At last we crept into the small booth of the sleeping cabin that we shared. He rolled into his cot, and I climbed into my hammock. “Prayers,” Uncle Patch said, and I whispered my evening devotions.

He blew out the single lantern, plunging us into darkness. After a few moments, I asked, “Did I cause all this misery, then, by being fooled by the drunk in the King’s Mercy?”

“No, lad,” came my uncle’s kind voice. “Who knows if the drunkard’s tale was true or false? Not I, nor the captain. Jack Steele is cracked in the brain, I think. Perhaps someone in San Angel looked at him the wrong way, or smiled when he should not have. Or, yes, it could have all been a deep-laid trap to murder us and take William off his trail. ’Tis no shame if that’s the case, for older heads than yours were misled.”

“I’ve never seen the captain that angry.”

I heard a long, drawn-out sigh in the darkness. “Faith, Davy, I worry about my friend. His mother and father were both killed by Steele when William was hardly older than you are now. And just when William thinks he has the rogue in his hands, Steele slips through his fingers. Now all this death weighs heavily upon him. Sawyer was what they call William’s sea-daddy when William was just a midshipman. It was Sawyer who showed him the ropes and taught him to tie his square knots, bowlines, and sheepshanks. It’s as if …”

His voice trailed off, and for long moments I thought that he had gone to sleep in midsentence, but then he spoke again. “As if William has been broken in some way. He’s a smart man, the smartest man I’ve known, but he’s aware of that intelligence within himself. When Steele out-thinks him, beats him at his own game, William blames himself. In some way his mind has been cracked by all this, and I fear the pieces no longer fit.”

I suppose I must have slept in the few hours that remained of that night, but I cannot remember for sure. Indeed, all the next few weeks are a blur of action in my memory. The next morning Captain
Hunter read the funeral service over the bodies of our shipmates, as he had done so many times before, and we dropped them into the ocean. Their bodies had been sewn into hammocks and weighted with round shot at their feet, and the four vanished into the depths of the water.

Perhaps that day, perhaps the next, Captain Hunter ordered the men to throw off the
Aurora
’s disguise. Up went our topgallant masts again, and out came the black and yellow paint to restore her to her former looks. Our figurehead came out of the hold and returned to her place below the bowsprit.

We took two ships in close succession, a French privateer first and then a Spanish one. Neither stood a chance. Our crew stripped them of powder, shot, and cargo, and Captain Hunter interrogated their captains in his cabin. From the deck we could hear his voice raised, almost raving, as he demanded to know any news of Jack Steele.

A day later we overhauled a sloop flying the Jolly Roger. She seemed to strike her colors, but then as we drew alongside, she opened up with a broadside. Furious, Captain Hunter gave the order to fire into her, and our gunners pounded the little craft so
hard that she keeled over almost at once. I saw bodies floating on the surface, but by the time we had closed the few hundred yards that separated us, the sloop had sunk.

“Search for survivors, sir?” asked Mr. Warburton.

“No,” Captain Hunter snapped. “Let ’em learn not to offer resistance if they hope to live.”

I could not help thinking that Jack Steele must be very much like this. Somehow, Captain Hunter was becoming the very thing he hated most, losing his humanity in his desire to strike vengeance at Steele. The captain never laughed anymore, where once he was fast to roar out with the sheer joy of play-acting the part of pirate. Now his face was always cold, and his voice showed no touch of mercy.

The captains of the ships we took always rowed back to their stripped vessels with speed born of fear. Indeed, more than once I thought that only Uncle Patch’s presence aboard the
Aurora
kept Captain Hunter from torturing his captives to see if they knew anything of Steele.

The captain’s anger came to a head some days later. The lookout had reported a sail hull-down and to windward of us. Captain Hunter altered
course so that our paths gradually converged over six hours of sailing, and by that time we could see the other vessel plain: a bark flying the flag of an English merchant ship.

“Veer off, Cap’n?” asked Mr. Warburton at the whipstaff.

“Belay that!” shouted Captain Hunter. “We’ll take her.”

“English, Cap’n?” asked Mr. Warburton uneasily.

Uncle Patch was standing at the leeward rail. He came over with concern in his expression. “William, you cannot—,” he began.

Captain Hunter whirled on him, his face flaming. “Cannot? Cannot, sir?” He looked forward and called, “Mr. Adams! To my cabin now!” And in a furious whisper, he said to my uncle, “You too, sir. We have a question to settle at once.”

I followed. As soon as Mr. Adams had closed the door, Captain Hunter said to him, “Mr. Adams, as first mate of this vessel, kindly tell the doctor here who is the captain aboard this ship!”

Mr. Adams blinked in surprise and unease. “Sir?”

“Fire and brimstone, man! Who is the captain?” roared Captain Hunter.

“Y-you are, sir,” said Mr. Adams.

“Very good. You may go.”

And when Mr. Adams had left us, Captain Hunter said to my uncle, “You are never—
never
—to stand upon my quarterdeck and tell me what I can or cannot do, Doctor. If you do so even once more, I shall have you clapped in irons. Is that plain?”

“Aye, sir,” said my uncle stiffly.

We did not try to take the English vessel, for she suddenly seemed aware of us. She had the wind gage—that is, the wind was blowing from her direction toward us—and so her captain could decide whether to let us approach or not. Something about the
Aurora
must have stirred his suspicion, for suddenly the bark made all sail and stood away from us. She was smaller, lighter, and faster, and by sunset it was clear she would outrun us. We gave up the chase in the gathering twilight.

From that day the mood aboard the ship changed. A ship is like a little village, with people so used to one another’s ways and words that nothing goes unnoticed or unremarked. I felt a kind of tension in the air, and it did not take long to realize
that it was between the old buccaneers who had belonged to Sir Henry Morgan’s crews and the smaller number who were navy men. The latter were appalled at Captain Hunter’s intention to attack a British ship. The former seemed happy with the change. “More to chink in our pockets, mates,” one of them said with a chuckle.

But a third party of Morgan’s men was deeply upset. “If this ’ere captain goes off ’is ’ead an’ sinks English ships,” one of them complained, “why, ye can kiss our pardons good-bye, and ye may lay to that!” He rubbed his neck. “I don’t fancy doin’ a hangman’s jig at the end of a rope, not I.”