On Stranger Tides (39 page)

Another groan from upstairs made his hand shake so that a splash of tea landed in the saucer instead of in the china cup. Damn, thought the man who called himself Joshua Hicks as he pettishly clanked the teapot down. Can't a man have a peaceful breakfast on his own balcony without all these…lamentations? Six more days, he reminded himself, and then I'll have fulfilled my bargain with that damned pirate, and he'll do his tricks and take her away from here and leave me alone.

But even as the thought passed through his mind he recognized it as a vain wish. He'll never leave me alone, he realized, as long as I'm still even a remotely useful tool.

Maybe I should terminate my usefulness, as poor Stede Bonnett had the courage to do when he was in this sort of a
situation, with Blackbeard—turn myself in, confess…hell, I
met
Bonnett a couple of times when the vagaries of the sugar market brought him on business trips to Port-au-Prince, and he was no hero, no saint…

No, he thought, looking past the polished balcony rail, and past the palm fronds waving in the cool mountain breeze, at the descending terraces of white houses that were the residential area of Spanish Town, and, distantly, just visible along the edge of the blue sea, at the red of the roof-tiles of the surviving, land-ward end of Port royal. He reached to the side, lifted the stopper out of a crystal decanter and poured amber cognac, glowing gold in the morning sun, into his tea. No, whatever else he was, Bonnett was a braver man than I am. I could never do what he did—and Ulysse knows it, too, damn him. If I've got to live in a cage, I prefer a luxurious one, with bars which, though stronger than iron, can't be seen or touched.

He drained the fortified tea and got to his feet, making sure he had a calm smile on his face before he turned around to face the sitting room…and face the stuffed dog head mounted on the wall like some paltry hunting trophy.

He crossed through the wide sitting room to the hall, but he maintained his smile, for there was a dog head mounted here too. He remembered, with a shudder that made his smile falter, the day in September, shortly after his arrival here, when he'd hung a cloth over every dog head in the house; it had given him a welcome sense of privacy, but within the hour the fearsome black nurse had come in, without knocking of course, and padded all over the house and taken all the cloths off. She hadn't even glanced at him, and of course she couldn't speak with her jaw bound up that way, but the visitation had so upset him that he'd never again tried to blind Ulysse's monitors.

Braced by the brandy, and by the knowledge that the nurse didn't usually arrive until midmorning, Hicks clumped up the
stairs and listened outside the door of his guest's room. There was no more moaning, so he pulled back the brass bolt, turned the wooden doorknob and opened the door.

The young woman was asleep, but she woke with a cry when, tiptoeing into the dim room, he accidentally kicked the untouched dinner she'd left on the floor—the wooden bowl turned over in midair and thumped against the wall, scattering the greens all over the carpet. She sat up in bed and squinted at him. “My God…John…?”

“No, damn it,” said Hicks, “it's me. I heard you moaning, and just wanted to make sure all was well. Who's this John? You've mistaken me for him before.”

“Oh.” Beth Hurwood slumped back, the hope fading from her eyes. “Yes, all's well.”

There were three dog heads in this room, so Hicks drew himself up to his full height and gestured sternly at the scattered leaves and herbs. “Trying to avoid your medicaments again?” he asked. “I won't have that, you know. Ulysse wants you to have them, and what he wants, I enforce!” He just stopped himself from nodding virtuously at the head that was nailed up over the bed.

“My father's a monster,” she whispered. “Some day you'll enforce your own immolation.”

Hicks forgot the heads and frowned uneasily. In the early days of her captivity he had laughed at Beth's claims that Ulysse Segundo was her father, for she always claimed too that her father had only one arm, while Ulysse very obviously had two; but on the pirate's next visit Hicks had glanced at the man's right hand—it was unarguably living flesh, but it was pink and smooth as a child's, and had no tiniest scar.

“Well,” he said now, gruffly, “less than a week from today it will be Christmas. At least then I'll be rid of
you.
”

The young woman flung the bedclothes aside, swung her legs out and tried to stand, but she couldn't lock her knees, and fell
back across the bed, panting. “Damn you and my father,” she gasped. “Why can't I have
food?
”

“What do you call this stuff you leave around for people to trip over?” Hicks demanded, stooping to pick up a leaf and then waving it furiously in her face.

“Let me see you eat it,” she said.

Hicks stared dubiously at the bit of vegetation, then flung it away with a snort, as if to indicate that he didn't have time for childish dares.

“Let's see you lick your fingers,” Beth pressed.

“I…don't have to prove anything to you,” he said.

“What
is
to happen Saturday? You said something once about some ‘procedure.' ”

Hicks was glad the curtains were drawn across the windows, for he could feel his face getting red. “You're supposed to be taking your damned medicaments!” he snapped. “You're supposed to be—” Sleepy, he finished mentally; somnambulistic. Not wide awake and asking awkward questions. “Besides, your fa—Captain Segundo, I mean, will almost certainly be here by then, so I won't have to do the—what I mean is, you can take it up with
him!
”

He nodded resolutely and turned on his heel to leave, but he spoiled his dignified exit by emitting a shrill squeak and skipping backward, for the black nurse had silently entered the room and was standing right behind him.

Beth Hurwood was laughing and the nurse was just staring in her usual blank, unnerving way, and Hicks fled—wondering, as he edged hastily around the nurse, why the woman's dress was always sewn shut rather than just buttoned, and why, if she was so crazy about sewing things, she didn't repair her ripped-out pockets, and why she always went barefoot.

Also, he thought as he relaxed on the stairs and fished a handkerchief out of his sleeve to mop his forehead with, I wonder
why other blacks fear the woman so. Why, the black cook that used to work here took one look at her and jumped through a second-floor window! And so after I discovered that any black would rather be flogged all day than set foot in this house for one second, I had to hire servants, white people. And even a lot of them have quit.

He went back to his chair on the balcony, but the morning's tranquility was shattered, and he flung the lukewarm tea out of his cup and refilled it with neat cognac. Damn Ulysse and his “help,” he thought. I should never have left Haiti and changed my name.

He sipped his brandy and scowled, remembering how convincing Ulysse Segundo had been at first. The man had arrived in Port-au-Prince in the first week of August, and had immediately begun negotiating letters of credit from the most respected European banks. He had made a good impression, socially: he spoke French beautifully, he was cultured, well-dressed, the owner of a fine ship—which, though, he kept at a remote mooring, ostensibly because of a woman aboard who was recovering from a brain fever.

Hicks had been impressed with the man's evident wealth and independence when he was introduced to him, and, a few days later, when Segundo had dinner with him and quietly offered to let him participate in a couple of less than ethical but lucrative-sounding investments, was impressed too with his intimate knowledge of the international web that was New World economics. Evidently no deed or grant or purchase or fraud was too ancient or obscure for Segundo to know of it and make merciless use of it. Hicks had thought one would have to be able to read minds, or talk to the dead, to know some of these things.

And then, very late one mid-August evening, Segundo had come to Hicks' house with bad news. “I'm afraid,” he had said
as Hicks blinked sleepily at him and sent an awakened servant for some brandy, “that you're in danger, my friend.”

The man who now called himself Hicks had only been awake for a minute or so, just since Segundo's midnight pounding on the door, and at first he thought Segundo meant that robbers or escaped slaves were approaching his house. “Danger?” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I have ten trustworthy servants and a dozen loaded guns—what—”

“I don't mean danger of injury tonight,” Segundo had interrupted, smiling. “I mean danger of legal prosecution soon.”

That had awakened him. He took a glass of brandy from his servant, sipped it, and then stared cautiously at Segundo. “On what charge?”

“Well,” said Segundo with a laugh as he sat down in one of the dining room chairs, “that's difficult to say. You and I have a…business associate in common, and I'm afraid he's been captured, and is trying to ingratiate himself with the authorities by implicating everybody he has ever had extra-legal dealings with…smuggling and fencing, mostly, I believe, but he's been known to do other sorts of favors for certain Caribbean businessmen, the odd kidnapping or murder or arson. Thank you,” he added as the servant brought him a glass.

Hicks sat down across the table from Segundo. “Who?”

Segundo glanced toward the yawning servant, then leaned forward. “Shall we call him…Ed Thatch?”

Hicks drained his glass, started to ask for a refill, then told the servant to leave the decanter and get out. “What,” he said when the man had gone, “extra-legal dealings has he told them about?” God knew Blackbeard had assisted him in a number of such, starting with the drowning of a too-knowledgeable maiden aunt when he had begun forging evidence to support his story that his brother was dead.

“Well, now, there's the rub, you see. I don't know. As much as he can remember, we must assume.” Hicks groaned and lowered his face into his hands, and Segundo reached across and refilled his glass. “Don't despair,” he told him. “Come on, now, look at me—I'm implicated too, at least as direly as you are, and am I downcast? There's a way out of every disaster except your last one.”

Hicks had looked up then. “What can we do?”

“That's easy. Leave Haiti. You can take passage on my ship.”

“But,” Hicks had protested unhappily, “how could I bring along enough money to live comfortably? And they'd be sure to come after me.”

Ulysse Segundo had winked. “Not if you were still here. What if a body were found in your bedchamber, in your night-clothes…a body of your height and build and color…with its face destroyed by a load of shot from a blunderbuss…and a suicide note beside it, in your handwriting?”

“…But…who…”

“Don't you have some indentured white men working for you? Would one be missed?”

“Well…I suppose…”

“And as for money, I'll buy you out right now—your house, lands and everything. Foreseeing this eventuality, I have had my solicitor draw up a series of quitclaims, promissory notes and bills of sale, back-dated throughout these last two years, which will seem to indicate that you've lost everything, piece by piece, to a group of creditors—it would take an international army of accountants years to discover that each of the creditors, tracked back through all the silent partnerships and anonymous holdings companies, is me.” He smiled brightly. “And that way there will be a motive for your suicide, you see? Financial ruin! For I suppose you do owe various people money, and when they try to collect from your estate, our manufactured story will come out.”

And so they had done it. Hicks had signed all the papers; then, after Segundo left, he went to the indentured servants' quarters, woke up a man of the right age and build, and curtly told him to come to the main house. Without explanation he led the man up to his bedchamber and gave him drugged wine, and when the man's mystified eyes had finally closed in unconsciousness, Hicks stripped him and threw his clothes into the fireplace, then dressed the slack body in his own nightshirt. He loaded a blunderbuss pistol with a good double-handful of rings and coins and gold chains, and packed all the rest of his gold and jewelry into three chests. Segundo returned with several ill-looking but powerful sailors before dawn, and the last thing Sebastian Chandagnac did, before abandoning his ancestral home and adopting the name Joshua Hicks, was to fire the gun into the face of the unconscious servant. The recoil sprained his wrist, and he was appalled by the noise and the instant destruction—the shot devastated one entire side of the room, and blew the servant's head, in a million pieces, right through the closed window and out into the garden.

Segundo, though, had been in good spirits, and as they'd ridden away in a four-horse wagon he had claimed to be able to smell the murdered servant's blood on the night breeze. “That's what I'm going after now, you know,” he had remarked as he'd cracked the whip over the horses. “I've got just about all the wealth I need—what I've got to get
now
is sea water and blood—positively
insane
quantities of fresh, red blood.” His hearty, almost boyish laughter rang away among the coconut palms and breadfruit trees on either side of the shoreward road.

Now, sitting on this balcony in Jamaica, Sebastian Chandagnac grinned unhappily into his brandy. Yes, he thought, I should have waited, and checked for myself. Segundo simply wanted an absolutely captive servant—a well-mannered puppet—to guard that girl upstairs; and, in case Segundo is not
back here by Christmas, to…how had Segundo put it…“perform the ritual that will make of her an empty vessel ready to be filled.” I hope to God he is back before Christmas—not only because I can't bear the thought of performing that ritual he made me memorize, but also because of the dinner party I'm giving here Christmas night; after I've gone to all the itchy trouble of growing a beard just in case someone might otherwise have recognized me as Sebastian Chandagnac, it would be a shame if I had to attend my own introductory party all covered with blood and chicken feathers and smelling of grave dirt.