Pirates (3 page)

Alex rolled his eyes. “I have it,” he said in the next instant, feigning a rapture of revelation. “We’ll capture Major Sheffield, truss him up like a Christmas goose so he can’t cover his ears, and force him to endure the full range of your vocabulary! He’ll be screaming for mercy inside half an hour.”

Despite the memories that had overtaken him, Duncan clasped his friend’s slightly stooped shoulder and laughed. “Suppose I recited the whole of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
,” he said.

“In Italian, of course,” Alex agreed. “With footnotes.”

Duncan withdrew his hand, and he knew his expression was as solemn as his voice. “If you want to beat your sword into a plowshare and spend the rest of your life tilling the earth,” he said, “I’ll understand, and not think less of you for it.”

“I know,” Alex said. “And I am weary to the soul from this blasted war. I long to settle down, take a wife, father a houseful of children. But if I don’t fight, the sons and daughters I hope to sire will stand mute before Parliament, as we do now.” He stopped and thrust his fingers through his hair, which was, as always, hopelessly mussed. “No, my friend, to paraphrase Mr. Franklin, if we don’t hang together, we shall surely hang separately. I will see the conflict through, to its end or mine, as God wills.”

Duncan smiled just as the supper bell chimed, muffled and far off. “You are right, and so is Mr. Franklin. But I must take exception to one of your remarks—we rebels can hardly be accused of ’standing mute before Parliament.’ Our musket balls and cannon have been eloquent, I think.”

Alex nodded and smiled.

Again, the supper bell sounded. Insistently this time.

Without speaking, the two men moved through the great house together, mindful now of their empty stomachs. They sat at the long table in the dining room, with its ten arched windows overlooking the sea, watching as the sun spilled over the dancing waters, melting in a dazzling spectacle of liquid light. A premonition touched Duncan’s spirit in that moment of terrible beauty, a warning or a promise, or perhaps both.

For good or ill, he thought with resignation, something of significance was about to happen.

“Welcome to Paradise!” boomed a plump, middle-aged man with a crew cut and a Jack Nicholson smile, scrambling out of the van to greet each member of the small party of potential investors with a handshake. They stood on the grass-buckled tarmac, numb with exhaustion. “Don’t make any snap judgments, now,” he warned, before anyone could
express a misgiving. “After all, it’s late and you’ve had a long trip. Tomorrow, in the bright light of day, you’ll get a good look at the place, and, trust me, you’ll be impressed.”

Phoebe didn’t want to think about tomorrow, didn’t want to do anything but take a quick shower and fall into bed. Jack was certainly right about one thing: It
had
been a long trip. After leaving Seattle, the plane had landed in Los Angeles, Houston, Kansas City, and Miami to pick up a dozen other weird characters, before proceeding to Condo Heaven.

The motley crew boarded the minibus, yawning and murmuring, and despite her decision not to think, Phoebe found herself studying the others, each in their turn, out of the corner of her eye. She’d eat every postcard in the hotel gift shop, she thought, if a single one of them could land a mortgage to buy a fancy island hideaway, let alone scrape up the cash to buy one outright.

The young couple who’d boarded the plane in Kansas City were newlyweds, Phoebe figured, because they’d been necking and staring into each other’s eyes for most of the flight. Some honeymoon. The man in the plaid pants and golf-club sweater had come along strictly for the ride, providing his own liquor, and the Human Beacon, whose batteries had finally run down, appeared to be the sort who’d try anything as long as it was free.

So what’s your excuse?
Phoebe asked herself.

The hotel appeared suddenly out of the night, looming like smoke from some underground volcano or an enormous genie rising out of a lamp. Phoebe’s breath caught on a small, sharp gasp, and she sat bolt upright on the bus seat. A strange progression of emotions unfolded in her heart.

Recognition, for one. And that was impossible, because she’d never seen the building before. Nostalgia, for another. And a strange, sweet joy, as if she were coming home after a long and difficult journey. Underlying these emotions was a sense of poignant and wrenching loss, threaded through with sorrow.

Tears sprang to Phoebe’s eyes.

“Here’s the Eden Hotel now, folks,” the bus driver announced, with relentless goodwill. “It’s a grand old place.
Belonged to a pirate once, during the Revolutionary War, name of Rourke, and before that, to a Dutch planter who raised indigo.” The minivan’s brakes squealed as it came to a sprightly stop under an ugly pink and green neon palm tree affixed to the wall. Two of the fronds were burned out. “Near as we could find out, the house was built in 1675, or thereabouts.”

Phoebe sniffled, dried her eyes with the back of one grubby hand, and got off the bus, staring at the shoddy hotel in mute grief. She’d read a brief description of the place in Professor Henning’s book about Duncan Rourke; that explained her complicated and overwrought reactions. The odd sensations lingered, though—Phoebe felt certain that she had known every nook and corner of this house once, had loved it when it was grand and elegant, and taken refuge within its walls when storms swept in from the sea. She had come home to a place she had never seen before, and she had arrived too late.

Like the foul brew in a witch’s cauldron, the storm roiled and grumbled on the horizon, shrouding the rolling waves of the deep and blotting out the light of the moon and stars. Duncan stood on the balcony outside his room, the wild wind playing in his hair and catching at the loose fabric of his shirt. The
Francesca
, always his first concern, was safe at anchor, in a sheltered cove some two miles down the shore. He would go to her all the same, and had no explanation to offer for delaying even this long, save the eerie certainty, imprinted in the marrow of his bones like a seal pressed into warm wax, that his life was about to change for all of time and eternity.

Behind him, in the shadows, stood Old Woman. If she had any other name, Duncan had never heard it, though he considered her a friend of sorts and had heeded her advice
on more than one occasion. The servants and other islanders feared and revered her, believing she had magical powers, a notion Duncan privately scorned.

“Come inside, Mr. Duncan,” she said. Although she spoke in a tranquil voice, he heard her distinctly over the noise. Beyond the terrace, earth and air and water met to spawn the tempest, and the birthing shrieks rode the wind. “It’s dangerous out there.”

Still unsettled, and with regret, Duncan turned and obeyed Old Woman’s summons, closing the heavy shutters and then the French doors themselves.

She stood in her regal robe, a seamless garment woven of some fabric Duncan did not recognize, holding a candelabra high, so that it shed a thin, shadow-streaked mantle of light over the both of them.

“She’s on her way,” Old Woman said. “At last, she is coming to us.”

“Who?” Duncan demanded impatiently, taking the candelabra from the strong, wrinkled hand and starting toward the inner doors. “Mother England? She won’t be an amicable guest, I fear. No need to brew tea and bake sugar cakes.”

Old Woman caught at his arm and stopped him with easy strength, even though she weighed no more than a bird and the top of her grizzled head barely reached his breastbone. “Not the soldiers, with a whip for your back and noose for your neck,” she said firmly. “The woman. She comes from a world very far away and yet”—with ancient, withered fingers, she reached out and plucked at nothing—“so close that you might touch her.”

Duncan felt a chill trickle down his spine, like a droplet from a northerly sea, but he was not a fanciful man, despite the strange, glorious, and unnamed fear stirring in the pit of his belly, and he put no stock in spells and enchantments and invisible worlds near enough to touch or otherwise. “Superstitious rot,” he grumbled. Then, somewhat unchivalrously, he shoved the candelabra into her grasp and muttered, “Here. Take this and go on about your business, whatever it is.”

She thrust the exquisitely wrought piece of sterling silver, candles wavering, back into Duncan’s hand with an insolence none of the men under his command would have dared employ. It was no accident, either, he thought, when hot wax dripped onto his wrist in stinging splotches. “Old Woman see fine,” she said. “It is Mr. Duncan who has empty eyes.”

In silence, he watched her move away into the shadows with sure and unhesitating steps.

“Poppycock and bilge water,” Duncan said under his breath, but he found himself thinking, as he made his way down the wide, curving staircase, carrying the candelabra in one hand, of the odd, inexplicable noises he had heard in that house on rare occasions. Music, sounds he did not recognize from instruments he had never seen. Footsteps where no one walked. The muted laughter of invisible men and women, and the melodic chime of glass striking glass.

He supposed he was going mad. He considered confiding his terrible secret to Alex but, after long and hard deliberation, decided against the idea. He wasn’t sure his friend could be trusted, if confronted with such a confession, to show the proper degree of surprise.

Phoebe’s room was roughly the size of a phone booth, and the bed looked as though it had been designed for a doll’s house, but she could hear and smell the sea, singing softly in the night. When the sun came up, she would have an ocean view, and the promise of that lifted her spirits.

She took a shower under a spindly trickle of cool water, causing a rusty rumble in the pipes, brushed her teeth, pulled on an old T-shirt and a pair of cotton boxer shorts, and crawled into bed. Her last conscious thought was that the sheets were clean; she sank into the depths of her mind and slept without dreaming.

It was still dark when the music awakened her, its sad and beautiful strains twisting and turning through the profound silence like ribbons.

A tiny muscle leaped, somewhere deep in Phoebe’s middle, and then subsided into a steady quiver. She listened
harder, groping for sounds she had heard earlier and barely noticed—the clamor of the old-fashioned elevator, creaking and rattling along its shaft, the shrill, metallic moan from the plumbing, the ponderous drip-drip-drip of the faucet in the bathroom—and heard only the swelling, heartbreaking eloquence of the music.

Phoebe bit her lower lip and settled into her pillows, listening, reaching for memories that eluded her, but just barely. Her face was wet with tears she could not have explained, even to herself, and she wondered fancifully if the hotel might be haunted. The notes of the harpsichord surrounded her, caressed her, and finally lulled her back to sleep.

The next time she woke up, tropical sunlight was spilling in through the window, full of dancing diamonds snatched from the sea, bathing her in a dazzle of gold and platinum. But the music had stopped.

Phoebe stood on her bed, grasping the windowsill in both hands, and gazed out at the blue-green sea and the white sand, stricken to the heart by their splendor. It was worth it, she thought, as her soul stirred, painfully at first, like something long frozen. Here and there, in the uncharted regions within, a dream trembled into wakefulness and reached for the light.

Someone hammered at the door of her room, startling Phoebe so thoroughly that she nearly toppled off the bed.

“What?” she demanded, annoyed.

“I got your costume,” answered an unfamiliar adolescent voice.

“What costume?” Phoebe asked, after wrenching open the door to find a teenage girl standing in the hallway, chewing gum and holding out a pile of cheap muslin.

“There’s a party tonight,” the young woman said, orchestrating the words with a series of crisp snaps. “After you’ve seen the condos and stuff, I mean.” She smiled, revealing enough braces to set off the metal detector in an airport. “My name’s Andrea,” she said wistfully. “I wore that outfit last time we had a batch of investors out from the mainland. It was kinda fun to dress up.”

Phoebe frowned. This, she thought, must be the “gala affair” the brochure had mentioned.

She decided to feign a headache that night and sneak out to walk on the beach. “Great,” she said without conviction.

Andrea waggled her fingers. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll make a great wench.”

Phoebe stepped out into the hall, not caring, at that point, that she was wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts. “Wait a second,” she called. “I’ll make a great
what?
”

“Wench,” Andrea replied blithely, without slowing her steps or looking back. “You know, one of those chicks who served rum and grog and sat on pirates’ laps.”

Phoebe closed the door and leaned against it, holding the muslin dress against her bosom and gazing into the murky mirror on the opposite wall. “You deserve whatever happens to you,” she told her reflection.

P
hoebe sincerely tried to be philosophical.

Breakfast consisted of two wilted croissants and a cup of strong coffee. The condominiums faced the sea, and they were nice enough, though cheaply built and alike down to the last carpet tack. An extensive sales pitch followed the tour, involving slides and brochures and flip charts and overhead projections, and seemed to go on forever. Lunch—fruit salad on a wilted lettuce leaf, strawberry gelatin, and hard rolls—was brought in by tanned and slender young women in shorts and the standard Paradise Island T-shirts. Once the meal had been served, the Amazons took up their posts beside the door again, arms folded, expressions impassive, clearly prepared to foil any attempt at escape.

It was three o’clock when the captive audience was finally released, though the reprieve was only temporary, of course. Everyone was expected to attend the costume party that night, the man Phoebe had privately dubbed Jack announced, explaining that anybody who skipped the festivities would be required to find his or her own way back to the States.