Silver (24 page)

I must now describe things I did not see with my own eyes, but have been told by Natty. When I suggested the account would be more truthful if she wrote it herself, she told me I have enough words in my head for the two of us, and might as well use them. I said I was willing to do so, on condition that she allowed me some freedom to
interpret
, as well as merely to
report
. She bridled a little, then accepted – saying the difference between our views would never be very great. I could not disagree.

When I had retired to my cabin, after failing to catch Natty’s attention as I have just mentioned, the captain and Bo’sun Kirkby and Mr Lawson soon followed my example. Natty and Scotland were left alone together – and they decided, because the rain had so far held off, they would go on deck and see something of the
moon and stars, which Scotland said would be pleasant for him after his long incarceration. Although our nightwatchman (who on this occasion was Mr Stevenson) was still in the crow’s-nest, he did not notice their arrival because he was asleep – which they discovered by calling his name and hearing no answer.

I say the rain had delayed, but Natty could still dimly make out the large mass of turbulence on the horizon beyond the estuary. These clouds, which were now a sinister ivory colour, had been fluffed up by the wind into an enormous size, then hollowed out to give the appearance of a cave. In the centre of this cave, the storm was waiting to arrive, occasionally firing off impatient bolts of lightning.

Although it seemed this storm might now begin at any moment, Natty and Scotland decided they preferred to walk on deck rather than take cover again, and so began a slow perambulation of the ship. Natty maintains that despite their lack of an audience, they knew they made a peculiar couple – she with her hat still pulled down around her ears; Scotland wearing the captain’s shirt and the threadbare rags in which we had found him. Neither of them felt any embarrassment. Indeed, I understand they talked quite freely – which at that time Natty had not often felt able to do with me, who knew her much better.

When I have asked the reasons for this candour, Natty has never given a clear answer. My own conjecture is: whatever feelings Scotland provoked in her were somehow akin to those she felt for her father. Ever since helping to rescue Scotland from his trap, she had shown an exceptional absorption in him – almost a fascination. This is because she was excited by proof of what I will call
experience in the world
, even when it could not always be condoned (as with her father), or when it was impossible to enjoy (as with Scotland). I knew my own place in her affections must
be curtailed, because I had not yet lived variously enough. This was difficult for me, and stimulated feelings I do not like to name, but I dare say will become manifest in what follows if they are not already.

Their main topic of conversation seems to have been how the captain should proceed – and this soon led them into a greater danger than any we had faced, as I shall show. In Natty’s opinion, the captain was so offended by everything he had heard about the stockade, he was bound to launch an assault as soon as possible. How he would manage this with so few men and such paltry firepower she did not explain – but made do with imagining we would break into the pirates’ log-house and then overthrow its tyrants like the populace entering the Bastille.

While Natty was still warming to this theme, Scotland interrupted her. Was she dreaming? Had she not seen the stockade was well geared to resist an attack? What was needed, he said, was not directness but guile. Surprise and guile. The former he proposed leaving to the captain – perhaps by launching his assault very early in the morning, when the maroons were still groggy with their pleasures of the previous night. The surprise, he said, he would manage himself. It would come in the form of encouraging his friends to rise against their oppressors in the same instant that the captain began his assault. And how would he guarantee this? By the expedient of returning voluntarily to the stockade, where he would become his friends’ commander-in-secret.

It is easy to give Natty’s reaction to this idea, in so far as it mixed respect for courage with dismay at risk. What is more difficult to describe is the clash of these things in her mind – and how her reply to Scotland fought to do justice to the greater good. That is, the good of the greatest number. If ever she strayed from this principle while they continued talking, Scotland held up his hand, or shook
his head, and brought her round. And when she had almost agreed with him, he led her into complete accord by reminding her of his wife, whom he said he particularly wanted to protect from dangers she would otherwise have to meet without him.

In this way they decided – with the appearance of perfect good sense – a plan that seemed entirely unreasonable to the rest of us, when we eventually discovered it. And having achieved this feat, Natty then compounded it: she volunteered to accompany Scotland on his walk back to the stockade, and at some convenient point to part with him, before returning to the
Nightingale
, where she would tell the captain everything that was afoot. I can only assume she meant it as kindness, and an expression of the sympathy between them, and that Scotland took it in the same spirit. I have told her since that what she thought of as charity was in fact foolishness.

When they had reached their decision, the two conspirators quickly acted upon it. Not so much as a note was left behind – only the captain’s shirt, which Scotland folded on a bench in the roundhouse. Once this was done, they slipped over the side of our ship, waded ashore (which they could do because the tide was low), and vanished into the foliage. If Mr Lawson had been awake at his place in the crow’s-nest, he would have heard nothing but the slap of another wave against the mud.

The route that Natty and Scotland took across the island was the same we had followed with Bo’sun Kirkby a short time before – but darkness made it seem strangely un-like, albeit still very difficult. The very dense vegetation in the valley, which had previously appeared exciting and abundant, was now sinister and chilling. The leaves of plants appeared to rub themselves quite deliberately over their faces. Roots seemed too sticky, or too cold, or too mobile, whenever their hands touched them. The noises of animals, as they quacked, or snorted, or grunted, or growled in protest at being
disturbed, were not merely curiosities but reasons to feel alarmed. It was here, Natty admits, so near the beginning of her journey, that she realised how long she had been without sleep, and how exhausted she would soon become.

This weariness ebbed when they reached the pine woods and found the walking easier. On the other hand, the wind now began to blow more strongly, and when they looked out to sea they found the ivory sky-cave had broken up, and a succession of more compact clouds was rolling over the horizon, which sometimes let through shafts of moonlight. Although these gleams were only intermittent, they were very bright (the moon being close to full), and showed the waves beneath had been churned into an overall creamy whiteness. These gave Natty a strong impression that certain things in the world had worked loose from their usual ties – and that she herself might also be hurrying towards a conclusion she did not want, but could not avoid.

The idea of catastrophe increased as the wind rose. Up to now, the two travellers had been talking to one another very easily – about such matters as how Scotland would lie low until one of the slaving parties went into the fields, when he might join them unnoticed. Now they fell silent except to warn one another of hazards – striding through the thickened air, often with one hand before their faces to deflect the dust and pine needles blown up from the forest floor.

Natty says that if the weather had not been so bad, she would have kept a better lookout for patrols sent from the stockade. As things were, she did not think the maroons would be bothered to stir from their sleep, but would rely for their protection on the traps and other defences they had laid around the camp. This was reassurance of a sort but also a warning, because it reminded her she would very soon have to leave Scotland and make her way back to the
Nightingale
alone.

To prepare for this separation she took shelter behind a large boulder, and pulled Scotland in beside her; they had reached the edge of the pine forest, with the bare black slopes of the Spyglass opening ahead, looking dull as charcoal when the moon was hidden, but like a frozen torrent when it entered a patch of clear sky. No sooner had they found this bit of quiet than Natty realised she could not give the message of hope she wanted. Less than two hours before, she had sat in the roundhouse and felt equal to any emergency. Now she was like a creature pushed back through history into a more primitive existence.

Whether or not Scotland noticed this, he confirmed that he must now leave her – and seemed to crouch down so that she thought he might actually be about to break into a run.

She could only nod.

‘Remember,’ he said, ‘you must tell the captain to catch them off-guard. If you are successful, you will hardly need the rest of us to help.’

‘And if we are not?’ said Natty.

Scotland looked at her gently. ‘If you are not successful, we will do what we can.’

Natty nodded again.

‘You have not asked me about the silver,’ Scotland said, in the same quiet voice.

Natty shrugged. ‘We decided – you heard the captain. We will help your friends first. The silver can wait. It has waited long enough already.’

‘That’s true. But it will not wait for ever. You will see.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It will find you.’

Natty felt puzzled by this, as well she might have been, and did not especially like the feeling that Scotland was teasing. She therefore
changed the subject and made herself more practical. ‘The attack cannot be tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We need time to prepare. Not tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow. Then you must listen for us and be ready.’ She had no authority to speak for the captain in this way, but knew that whatever she affirmed now would be difficult for him to change later.

‘Bright and early with the lark,’ replied Scotland – which I have always thought was a strange phrase for him to use, since it conjured a feeling of England, where he had never been. It was evidently intended to reassure Natty, and at the same time make himself seem the master of the occasion.

Natty tells me she then laid her hand on Scotland’s shoulder, and looked at his face for what she thought would be the last time this side of his liberation. He smiled, and when she glanced beyond him she saw a burst of kindly moonlight showing a way back through the pine trunks towards our ship.

Then she turned towards him again. Scotland had moved away from the boulder and was still facing Natty; the wind poured across the open shale and buffeted him so much, he was forced to keep moving his weight from one foot to the other. A yard behind him, a darker shadow than any produced by the clouds seemed to rise from the bare rock. A shadow with a cocked hat pulled back to show a wolfish face, and a jacket buttoned to the throat.

Natty recognised him at once. It was Smirke’s man – Stone. A bare sword flickered in his right hand, and the forefinger of his left was pressed against his lips in a horrible gesture of conspiracy. Natty shook her head, refusing him, but Stone’s pale face remained absolutely blank as he rested the point of his sword in Scotland’s bare skin between the shoulder blades.

Scotland’s own face crumpled – but he said nothing: he knew.
Natty also said nothing. They only stared at one another, with their unhappiness passing between them.

‘I know this one,’ said Stone, looking into Natty’s eyes as if he were staring straight through her head; his voice was surprisingly high, almost squeaky, as she had heard it before in the stockade. ‘But who might you be?’

As Natty returned his stare, she felt herself beginning to tremble. The man’s hair was as white as his skin, and blew in revolting thin hanks across his sunken cheeks. He might as well have been a ghost, yet the hunger in his eyes spoke of distinctly human appetites.

‘Who indeed might you be?’ he said again. ‘I shall enjoy finding the answer to that question.’

Here are Natty’s own words, unmediated for once. ‘Scared me to death,’ she said. ‘Really, scared the life out of me when I saw that old pirate, with the wind blowing dust in my face and Spyglass Hill all black in the distance. Every drop of blood in me sank to my feet. Although a strange thing. I felt on fire, like a tiger.’ Does this mean she made a run for it? No; even though Stone was a man in his sixties, he was very lean and wiry and she thought he would have caught her. Did she panic? No; she kept her eyes wide open. She even remembers Stone’s large metal belt-buckle, shaped like an eye, which she saw when the moonlight poured across him in a sudden flash; it winked at her from below the buttons of his jacket, which he had done up very properly.

As for Scotland – he stood still as a rock. Natty reckoned this was
sensible, but she saw a terrible change in him as well. All the confidence he had found in the last few hours was suddenly worth nothing. His shoulders sank; his face was closed. She remembered the sound of his fear in the trap, which had led us to find him in the first place, and knew he was imagining how he would be punished.

Natty’s instinct was to put her arms round his shoulders and comfort him – but of course Stone would have none of this. As soon as she began to lift her hands, he withdrew the tip of his sword from Scotland’s back and pointed it directly at her throat. ‘As I was saying …’ he began, then paused to lick his thin lips. ‘As I was saying, who might you be?’

Natty has told me it was only when she heard these words that she fully understood how much danger her night-walk had made for others besides herself. In the first shock of Stone’s appearance – his seeming to rise from the rock like a spirit – her only thought had been how to survive. Now there was room in her mind for larger ideas to appear. Ideas of how she must not betray her friends. And of how she must keep her identity a secret, or face a worse fate than already seemed likely.