The Dagger X (The Dagger Chronicles) (29 page)

“W
ait here for me, Richard,” Dame Bethany said, stepping from the carriage and into the dirt lane. “They shan’t allow me but a moment.”

Bethany approached the iron bars of the doorway. It was a suitably grim-looking place, the prison. Its walls were composed of gray stone, and it was set into a steep hillside as if the earth might have thought to swallow it but wisely reconsidered. Only along the second story were there any windows at all, where the constable would bring inmates for questioning or to prepare them in the event of a trial.

Bethany put a hand to one of the bars and peered in toward the alcove inside. The floor was covered in straw, and on that straw lay a man of titan proportions, sleeping on his side with his back to the locked door.

“Gibbs, my dear! Come and see me.” The body stirred and pushed up onto an elbow. “ ’Tis Dame Bethany, Gibbs, and I have brought something for you.” The man was slow to stand, and when he finally found his feet, he did not bother to brush the straw from his
rumpled clothes. Gibbs towered well over six feet, and when he walked through the alcove door to the main hall, he had to duck low. He had big droopy eyes and a bulbous nose, hair the same color as the straw that clung to his shirt.

“Mmmmm,” he said, rubbing his stomach. He was looking at the basket hanging at the crook of Dame Bethany’s arm.

“Yes, Gibbs. Something for you. My Janie just made it.” Bethany withdrew from the basket a meat pie wrapped in a white cloth. Gibbs reached out a grubby hand for it. He rotated it to draw it through the bars and then lifted it to his nose. His mouth opened wide in a smile that consisted of a single brown tooth. Bethany smiled back at him.

“Gibbs, I need you to fetch Mr. Sims for me. Will you do that for Dame Bethany?” Gibbs turned doleful brown eyes on Bethany. He looked down at the warm bundle in his hands. Bethany could see that he was considering giving the pie back rather than fetching the jailer.

“Shepherd’s pie, Gibbs! Fresh meat, too. Now run get Mr. Sims and be a good boy.” Gibbs brought the bundle to his chest and cradled it between his two massive hands. He nodded slowly, then turned to shuffle back to his alcove. He covered the pie beneath a bundle of straw, then exited the room again and turned to walk down the dark corridor out of sight.

After a few minutes a man emerged from the utter darkness of the passageway—as from the depths of hell
itself—the musical jangling of keys accompanying him. Bethany stepped back from the bars. Vernon Sims sauntered up the dark hall, the perpetual smudge of a sneer spread across his face. Sims spent his days doing what he could to pique the torment of those unfortunate enough to find themselves in his prison. He was never short of work and never tired of it.

“You must have bought old Gibbs off.” Sims flashed a tangle of teeth. “I hope it was worth it to the dumb ape.”

“I have brought you more than a meat pie, Mr. Sims,” Bethany said.

“Better have. I don’t like being interrupted when I am tending to my inmates.”

“I have no doubt your heart is in your work. I know, too, that you love a few coins in your pocket.”

“If they be silver, then you’re right.”

“They are.” Dame Bethany pulled herself up straighter. “You have a prisoner, a new one?”

“The Pirate Quick!” Sims rubbed the knuckles of his right hand. “I was just teaching him some manners.”

Bethany’s jaw clenched, but she choked back her anger. That would have to wait.

“He is an old friend of mine,” she said.

“And he’s gonna die with a rope about his neck soon enough.”

Bethany nodded. “This I do not doubt. Which is why I am here now. I would like to pay my respects.”

“Constable says no visitors for that one.”

“Of course he did.” Bethany reached into her basket
and withdrew a small bundle wrapped in burlap and tied with twine. “But you are not a man who takes orders from such an oaf lightly. After all, you are the jailer and not he. Is not that right, Mr. Sims?”

Vernon Sims reached a hand out through the bars to take the bundle from her, but Bethany withdrew it from his reach.

“William Quick,” she said.

Sims led Bethany through a maze of dank corridors and past countless dreary cells, many of them occupied. Most jailers kept petty criminals—pickpockets, thugs, cheats—in large holding cells, but not Sims. He found that separating inmates into solitary units added to their torment.

After what seemed like a long walk, Sims set down the stool he carried in one hand and pointed into a dark hole. He handed Dame Bethany the lantern.

“There’s your pirate,” he said. “Don’t bother trying to walk out alone. I’ll come fetch you.” Sims slunk off into the darkness, unbothered without the lantern.

Bethany dared not look into the cell until she heard Sims’s echoing boot heels fade away.

“William!” she whispered. Bethany peered into the gloom. The chamber was only a few feet wide but several feet deep. It was made fast by thick bars that reached floor to ceiling, interrupted only by a narrow barred door set in the middle, from which hung a large padlock. Matted black straw clung to the stone floor and piled up at the rear.

Bethany lifted the lantern and squinted her eyes. Yes, she could make out a dark form at the back, a man lying down.

“William! We have little time! It is I, Dame Bethany. The Grand Dame.” The dark form stirred. It gave out a moan. “I have fresh water,” she said. “Come and get it, William.”

It took William Quick nearly an entire minute to find his feet. Without the wall to lean upon, he would not have been able to do it. Slowly he rose, looking as if at any moment his knees might buckle. He shuffled toward the barred door, grimacing with each step.

Bethany set her basket on the floor and withdrew from it the flagon of water. She plucked the cork out and lifted it to William, whose grimy fingers curled around the thick bars. The flagon was too wide at the base to pass through, but it had a narrow neck, and with Bethany’s help the two of them were able to lift the container to his lips.

William took a long drink, sputtering once or twice. Finally Bethany withdrew it. “More shortly,” she said. She set the flagon down and brought the lantern closer. “Let’s have a look at you.”

What she saw gave her a start. One of William’s eyes was entirely swollen shut and his face was smeared with some combination of blood and dirt. His cheeks were sunken and his skin pale, giving him a cadaverous look that chilled Bethany. The mustache he once wore with such flair drooped lifelessly and lost itself into tangles
of matted beard. Had she not looked closely, she never would have recognized him.

“Time has not spared you, William. You look terrible.”

A slight smirk curled beneath the mustache. “Hello, Grand Dame,” he said thickly. His eye adjusted enough to the light to allow him to squint. “Though you are not changed at all.”

“Yes. I remain an old and wrinkled woman.” She reached out and wrapped a hand over his on the bar. She sighed. “What have they done to you? What has
he
done?”

William gave a grunt that was intended to be a laugh. “The usual things on the ship,” he said. “Nothing so surprising. The jailer, though, he has paid me a visit I did not expect.” Bethany felt her face flush with anger. She would deal with Sims.

“I shall take care of him,” she said. William grunted again.

“Pardon me, but I must sit,” he said, and leaning his back against the wall, he slowly slid to the floor with a chorus of moans and grunts. Bethany pulled the stool close. She reached into the basket and withdrew another bundle.

“Have some meat pie,” she said, and placed it in his lap. William unwrapped the cloth and dove into the small pie with shaking fingers. He dug at it ravenously, bits of pastry crust and gravy clinging to his beard. Bethany was quiet until he was finished, then reached through the bars to wipe his beard clean for him with the cloth.

“Do you need anything else?” she said.

William’s smirk had recovered a bit more of its former sauciness. “Not unless you happen to have a set of keys like the jailer’s.”

“Do not think I have not given thought already as to how to spring you from this hellhole.”

William turned his good eye upon her. “Not just me. My men are here too. I would never leave without them.”

“Yes, yes. You and your men,” Bethany said. “I remember when Henry Morgan was one of them. Or rather you one of his.” She reached out and took William’s right hand, turning the back of it toward the golden light. She saw on his hand a blackened square.

“I see you have covered over the skeleton hand tattoo,” she said.

“Aye. Couldn’t stand the remembrance. I had that done in prison in Cuba.”

“Is that where you have been then? All these years? I figured Morgan had caught up to you after all and made you to disappear.”

“No such luck. The Spanish were ahead in the line.”

“And yet you escaped? Certainly they would never have let you go.”

William attempted to wink, but with only one eye working, the effect was lost. “My charm finally won them over.”

“Oh, please.” Bethany looked down into the blackened hallway, hoping that the occasional stirrings she
could hear were those of other prisoners and not Sims trying to eavesdrop. “Your charm was never as impressive as you thought it was.” Bethany leaned closer to the bars.

“William, we must speak in earnest. Do you know of a boy who goes by the nickname of ‘Duck’?” William’s head came up from the wall where it leaned.

“Yes. Of course. He is her son.”

“Whose son?”

“The woman I have fallen in love with, and the one who is either already dead or will be so at any moment from exposure to the elements.”

“Duck did mention something to me about her.”

“Wait.” William touched his hand to his head. “Say again, now. ‘Duck mentioned’ . . . You have spoken to this boy? How? Last I knew Kitto and Van had hidden him somewhere aboard the
William
, but that was weeks ago!”

It was Bethany’s turn to smile. “He is your nephew, William. I think he got more than his fair share of your charm, and possibly all the luck you never had.”

“Explain, woman!”

“Don’t get irascible with an elderly wench who brings you hot meat pie! Somehow the boy stayed hidden. Apparently there was a sailor who helped him, and then he came to land in a barrel—with a monkey of all things!”

“I hate that monkey.”

“Julius seems quite harmless to me. He is in my parlor now back at the rooming house.”

“Duck is at your house too?”

Bethany explained how it had come to pass.

“Hid beneath your dress? I shall have to try that sometime. . . .” William smirked.

“You will get the heel of my boot if you do. But his mother?” Bethany said.

William explained what he had heard, that Duck’s mother had last been seen adrift in a rowboat with Kitto during the battle.

“And Frederick, too, is dead?” she said.

William grunted in assent. “I am a plague of disasters for that family.”

“Not such a plague as I have been, William,” Bethany said softly.

“Whatever do you mean? You took Kitto’s mother Mercy in, made her like a daughter to you. You risked Morgan’s contempt, did you not? And you treated her boy like your own grandson despite his clubfoot.”

“I killed her, William,” Bethany whispered. William grew quiet. “I killed her.” William waited for her to elaborate, but she did not.

“Old age has addled your brain, woman.” He patted her hand. You were her faithful friend.”

“I am the one who told Morgan.”

William’s hand froze. “Told him what?”

“I told him that Mercy and Frederick intended to leave. I told him that she knew about the nutmeg.”

“I don’t understand. Henry Morgan is the one who told Mercy about the nutmeg,” William said.

“Morgan told Mercy to convince her to stay. He said
he would share the treasure with her and Kitto if she would just stay in Jamaica.”

“But she was married by then! The fool! He never stopped loving her, did he?” William said.

“I do not know if
that
is the best word for his attachment. He was both obsessed and repulsed by her. But he would never allow her to leave Jamaica for good.”

William grasped Bethany about the wrist. “Then why did you tell him she intended to leave!”

Bethany snatched away her arm and covered her face with her hands in shame. “I, too, I could never allow her to leave. Her and my sweet Kitto both? No. I was sure that if I told Morgan, he would convince her somehow. That together we could keep them near us.”

William scoffed. “Morgan’s convincing was a bit on the deadly side.”

“Yes.” Bethany puzzled. “I have never understood that part. Poison her? Why?”

“Because she was going to leave him. Makes perfect sense.”

Bethany shook her head. “You did not see him after he returned from Panama—or rather, returned from chasing you. For months he was like a walking dead man through the streets of Port Royal. He neither ate nor slept; he spurned everyone who was close to him, even Morris. Why would he have seemed so distraught if he was the one who murdered Mercy?”

William reached to twist the ends of his mustache. It pleased Bethany to see some of his old habits again.

“Maybe he did not then. But who did? Frederick?”

“Never. Frederick was a lamb with her. No one but Morgan makes any sense.”

William patted Bethany’s hand anew. “A curse to the whole family line, we are. A matched pair of killers.”

“Yes. But now we have an opportunity for not so small a penance.”

William’s eye glinted in the lantern light. “Duck, you mean?”

“We’re all he has left in the world, you and I.”

“He’s my nephew. He is nothing to you.”

“When he smiles I remember the look on his father’s face when Mercy was in the room. It is not much, but that boy’s smile might be as close to Mercy as I will ever get.”

The meat pie had renewed William’s spirits, and his wits, too. He leaned against the bars to peer into the darkness. Paranoia is a hard habit to break, especially when it has proven useful for many years.