Pirate Freedom (26 page)

"It does not trouble me that you see so much of me, for I have always loved you. How many nights I have made your picture in my poor, fretted thoughts and clasped it to my heart, mi marinero!"

I made her shut up and hold still.

"Will you not kiss my wound? For me?"

When I got her back in the bigger cabin with Novia and Bouton, I sat down again. I was getting pretty tired by then and trying not to show it. "Okay, Bouton," I said, "here's what happened. If anything I say is wrong, they can sing out. Only they'd better tell the truth, or we're going to get into it.

"Jaime Guzman beat them both. I won't ask them what was going on, or what he thought was going on. Or what may have gone on before. He did what he did. Sabina wouldn't take it. She ran away."

"He beat me because I was in love with you." Sabina's voice was so low I could hardly hear her. "I can draw. Have you not seen my pictures, Crisóforo? I learned in my father's house. In my tocador in Coruña, I had drawn your picture over and over. Many pictures. He found them."

"I see," I said, and wondered whether I could believe her. I turned to Bouton. "She ran away. I don't know why she didn't go to her father, but my guess is that he'd have taken her back to her husband. She was afraid her husband would find her—"

"I searched for you!"

I nodded. "Yeah. That's what you said when you said you were Estrellita. If you lied about one thing, you could be lying about a hundred."

Bouton said, "They all lie, Capitán. I have never known a woman who did not lie, not even my mother."

"I could not make myself known!" Novia jumped up screaming. "I was a married woman! You were a sailor!"

I tried to say okay or something like that, but she kept yelling. "I watched, every night! You had eyes for my maid! Only her! I watch and envy her! Holy Mother, how I envy!"

I pushed Novia back into her chair, and she finally shut up.

"She bought sailor's slops," I told Bouton. "She's slender, and small in the chest. She tied a rag around those to keep them in and passed for a boy. There was one thing she said to me when we first got together that ought to have bothered me a lot more than it did. She said she would be my lady, wear a gown, and stay in my cabin. And pretty soon her hands would be soft for me again."

I reached over to Estrellita, felt her hand, and put it down. "Only Estrellita's hands hadn't been soft. We'd held hands, and hers had been almost as hard as mine. They're soft now because she hasn't been doing the work she used to do when she was just the Guzmans' maid, sweeping floors, washing dishes and so forth."

Estrellita's chin went up. "
I
had maids. Two! One for the house, and one for me alone."

"I've got it. Ugly girls, I'll bet. I wish I could see them. You were sleeping with Jaime."

"He forced me!"

Novia laughed. "For one real. 'How could I refuse, Mother? He gave me a real.' "

"He did! Defend me, Crees!"

I told them both to shut up. "So you lived together as man and wife, only you couldn't be the real thing. You couldn't get married, because everybody knew Guzman had a wife already. She'd run away, but he was still married just the same."

"Adulteress!" Estrellita hissed it. It does not hiss as good in Spanish, but she hissed it anyway.

"Right," I said. "She was, only he's dead now. You two couldn't marry in Coruña. Nowhere in Spain, really. Or anyhow, there wasn't any place where he'd feel safe. Some people must have known you'd been the maid, too, and that can't have been nice. Maybe he could have gotten a different girl, but he still wouldn't have been able to marry her. So you two decided to go to New
Spain, where you could play lady and he could tell everybody you were his wife."

When I had translated it, Bouton laughed. "I'd have told them to go to the devil."

"So would I, but they were his business connections, or some of them were. Besides, this was better. He'd buy a big place, build a house for her, and raise cattle and corn. Have a bodyguard of vaqueros. Any man who lived within a hundred miles would pull his hat off when Jaime Guzman rode by. De Santiago told us a fairy tale about Guzman's losing his money. He hadn't. He had a lot. What he'd lost was his wife. If he'd really lost his money, I doubt that de Santiago would have agreed to take him across the Atlantic."

"You said he was dead, Captain. Did we kill him?"

I shook my head. "He killed himself, or that's what they say. When they were a week out of Coruña, he wasn't around anymore."

"It is accursed," Estrellita burst out, "this horrible ship! Will you not take me from it?"

"Yeah, sure." I went back to Bouton. "I've got two ideas. I'll give you both of them. First idea—he really did kill himself, like everybody says. He'd beaten his wife and lost her, he was giving up his house, his friends, his country, everything. And he was giving up all that for a girl who was already cheating on him."

"That is a lie!"

I told Estrellita to sit down. "The heck it is. You were cheating on him with de Santiago."

In French, Bouton said, "It was this de Santiago?"

"Right. When I first saw that trick hiding hole, I thought both of them must have known about it. When I'd had time to think it through, I saw that couldn't be right. In the first place, de Santiago wouldn't have trusted Guzman that much. If Guzman knew, he could open the cabinet on his side and take de Santiago's money. So he didn't."

Bouton scratched his chin. "But he let de Santiago put his money in there?"

"No, of course not. He had his money in his cabin, locked up. Or maybe hidden someplace, although there aren't a lot of places to hide things in there, because it's so small. I asked Estrellita how she'd been able to put food and wine and all that stuff in there when you and Rombeau showed up, and
she said she hadn't. It had been in there already. She didn't tell me, but what she really did was grab the gold—the money she thought was hers now that her man was gone—and take it with her when she hid."

"Smart girl."

Novia laughed. "She is a fool. Even I know that. I know her far better than either of you."

"She was sure a fool to start fooling around on the voyage," I said, "so you've got a point. Besides, she wasn't smart enough to remember in all the excitement that she'd left her jewelry on top of that chest. When things quieted down, she was fool enough to sneak back out and get it."

"Holy God!" Bouton had seen the light.

"That's the goods. It's what tipped me off to start with. Me and Novia had looked all over the ship for the missing woman. After we gave up, it hit me that it wasn't just the woman who was missing anymore. Now her jewelry was missing, too, even though it had been locked in. The simple explanation was that she'd popped out and taken it. That meant she was hiding in the cabin where it was, which had always been the logical place—she wouldn't have known her way around the ship."

Novia said, "In a better world, you would be an admiral, Crisóforo." She sounded as if she meant it.

I said, "Thanks, Sabina."

Bouton said, "But she would not have known about the place unless that man who owned this ship had shown it to her. I see."

"You've got it. There were blankets and a pillow in there. Two wineglasses, not just one."

Estrellita whispered, "You did not have to tell that, Crees."

I felt pretty bad right then. I have felt pretty bad quite a few times in my life, but I have always gotten over it. I said, "I didn't have to tell Bouton and I sure as heck didn't have to tell Sabina here. But I had to tell me. I need to understand what it would be like if you and I got together the way I wanted to once, and the only way I'll ever understand it is to say it out loud. Say it a lot."

Estrellita said, "I confess to you the truth. José surprised me in the dark. I was asleep. Jaime was still on deck but I think he has come back to our room. We kiss, we make love. Then he reveal himself. He is not Jaime. He is José. After that, I must do as he ask, or he will tell Jaime."

Novia made a noise that sounded like I felt.

I said, "Sure. To you, one man's just like another in the dark. I got it."

I translated for Bouton, then I said, "So as long as Jaime was around, they used the space between the cabins. She just hated it, but she lay down in there with Don José and had a little wine and ate some dried apricots every couple of days. Then Jaime jumped—I can guess why—and after that they didn't have to. They had nobody to fool but Pilar, so they could use the Guzmans' cabin and—"

Novia cut me off. "Two ideas you say, Crisóforo. One I know. What is the other?"

"It's pretty obvious, isn't it? Jaime didn't jump. De Santiago killed him. He wanted the money, and he wanted Estrellita. Jaime had them both."

Bouton said, "He would have to get rid of his wife, wouldn't he, Captain?"

I shook my head. "He might want to, but he probably wouldn't. He'd set Estrellita here up in a cute little house someplace, with enough money to keep her happy. He had Jaime's money, and he'd tell her he was keeping it for her, and give it to her in dibs and dabs. She'd keep hoping to get it all, and she'd know that if she left him she'd never see another real of it. You haven't seen much of Don José and Pilar, but Sabina and I have. He'd have about as much trouble managing Pilar as you'd have managing a cabin boy."

We said a lot more, but there is not a lot of point in writing it all out. After that, sleeping arrangements were the problem. Novia and Estrellita wanted to sleep with me, although Novia was too proud to say it. Estrellita just about begged.

I did not want to sleep with either of them—but I did not want to get them raped either. On top of all that, I was worried about what Novia might say or do if I left her with somebody like Rombeau or Jarden. She was a good-looking girl, and I knew by then how smart she was. I ended up tying Estrellita's hands and sending her over to Rombeau to be held with the other prisoners, and locking Novia in the Guzmans' cabin. From inside, it was not hard to jam her trick cabinet's latch so she could not open it. That was what I did, and I never unjammed it. That night I drank most of a bottle of wine trying to get to sleep. Eventually, it worked.

And when we got to Port Royal, those cabinets went, along with the whole fake wall. I cannot tell you how much I hated that whole deal by then.

There is just one other thing I ought to say before I wrap up for tonight. The next day I was on the quarterdeck trying to forget my headache, which was about like trying to forget that somebody had just whacked off your
thumb. Boucher came up and said that one of the men had seen something funny.

It had been a man. Nothing fancy, just a man. Only this guy had seen him, and felt like he was not one of our crew but somebody he had never seen before. He had yelled at him, and then he was gone.

Boucher said this guy had seen his own shadow, and Bouton thought he might be having hallucinations. I told everybody about it just the same, knowing they would find out anyhow, and told them to keep an eye out. I think it was a day out of Port Royal.

YESTERDAY I TALKED
to a lady who has come to the U.S. from Jamaica. I asked whether she had lived in Port Royal, and she laughed and said she had been born and raised in Kingston. I said I knew it had been a bad town a few hundred years ago. That was gone, she said. It had been destroyed by an earthquake, and a new Port Royal built near the same site.

Yet I know that it is not gone. It is back there, where she is, where the hurricanes blow and lean, hard ships snap at the edges of the Spanish Main like wolves around a sheepfold.

Before I went to bed, I spent an hour or more just studying those maps. When I was at sea, I was crazy about maps. Give me a map, and I wanted no other book. I knew that many details were wrong or at least inaccurate. I committed them to memory just the same, knowing that it was better to know them than not, yet knowing that we would have to proceed cautiously always.

That was how I proceeded when we brought the
Rosa
and the
Castillo Blanco
there, getting the best price I could for
Rosa
, and making sure that the carpenters I hired to alter the
Castillo Blanco
knew their business.