Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (94 page)

Camilla Macartney continued to sit, outwardly unmoved, where she had received him when black Jens had shown him into the drawing room. She had not been looking at her cousin during this characteristically confident and even impulsive declaration of his. Her eyes were upon her hands which lay, lightly clasped, in her lap, and she did not raise them to reply. She did not, however, keep him waiting. She said in a perfectly level voice in which there was apparently no single trace or indication of the tearing, internal emotion which surged through her outraged heart at this last and unforgivable insult – ‘I shall not become your wife, Saul – now or ever.’

Then, as he stood before her, his buoyant self-confidence for once checked, his face suddenly configured into something like the momentary grotesqueness of Axel Petersen’s, she added, in that same level tone, which had about it now, however, the smallest suggestion of a rising inflection: ‘Do not come to me again. Go now – at once.’

This final interview with her cousin Saul was unquestionably the element which served to crystallize into an active and sustained hatred the successive emotional crises and their consequent abnormal states of mind which the events here recorded had stirred up within this woman so terribly equipped for vengeance. The seed of hatred was now a full-grown plant.

Upon a woman of Camilla Macartney’s depth and emotional capacity the felonious behavior of Saul Macartney had had a very terrible, and a very deep-reaching, mental effect. She had adored and worshipped him for as long as she could remember. He had torn down and riven apart and left lying about her in brutally shattered fragments the whole structure of her life. He had smashed the solid pride of her family into shreds. He had disgraced himself blatantly, deliberately, with a ruthless abandon. He had piled insult to her upon insult. He had taken her pure love for him, crushed and defiled it.

And now these irresistible blows had had the terrible effect of breaking down the serene composure of this gentlewoman. All her love for her cousin and all her pride in him were transformed into one definite, flaming and consuming purpose: she must wipe out those dreadful stains!

Arrived in the empty library, Camilla Macartney went straight to the great rosewood desk, and without any delay wrote a letter. The black footman who hurried with this missive down the hill actually passed Saul Macartney, likewise descending it. Within a very short time after its reception the captain of the little packet-vessel – upon which, anchored quite close to shore, Camilla Macartney had been painting her nearly finished panorama of the town – had gone ashore to round up his full crew. The packet itself, with Camilla Macartney on board, sailed out of St Thomas harbor that afternoon in plain sight of the restocked
Swallow
, whose great spread of gleaming white canvas showed gloriously under the afternoon’s sun as she laid her course due southwest. The packet, laying hers to the southward, rolled and tossed at a steady eight-knot clip under the spanking trade, straight for the Island of Santa Cruz.

Captain the Honorable William McMillin was summoned from his seven o’clock dinner in his estate house up in the gentle hills of the island’s north side, and only his phlegmatic Scottish temperament, working together with his aristocratic self-control, prevented his shapely jaw from sagging and his blue eyes from becoming saucer-like when they had recorded for him the identity of this wholly unexpected visitor. Camilla Macartney wasted none of the captain’s time, nor was her arrival cause for any cooling of the excellent repast from which he had arisen to receive her.

‘I have not,’ said she downrightly in response to the astonished captain’s initial inquiry as to whether she had dined. ‘And,’ she added, ‘I should be glad to sit down with you at once, if that meets your convenience, sir. It is, as you may very well have surmised, a very deep and pressing matter upon which I have ventured to come to you. That, I should imagine, would best be discussed while we sit at table, and so without delay.’

Again the captain demonstrated his admirable manners. He merely bowed and led the way to the door of his dining room.

Once seated opposite Captain McMillin, Camilla Macartney again went straight to her point. The captain quite definitely forgot to eat in the amazing and immediate interest of what she proceeded to say.

‘I am offering the reward of a thousand English sovereigns for the apprehension at sea and the bringing to St Thomas for their trials of the freetrader, Fawcett, and his mates. It may very well be no secret to you, sir, that a member of our family is one of these men. I think that any comment between us upon that subject will be a superfluity. You will take note, if you please, that it is I, a member of our family, who offer the reward I have named for his apprehension. You will understand – everything that is involved.

‘Earlier this day it was proposed to me that I should sail away upon a ship without very much notice. I have come here to you, sir, on one of my father’s vessels – Captain Stewart, her commander, a trusted man in our employ, has accompanied me all the way to your door. He is here now, waiting in the hired
calèche
which I secured in Frederiksted for the drive here to your house. Perhaps you will be good enough to have some food taken to him.

‘I have come, Captain McMillin, in all this haste, actually to request you to do the same thing that I mentioned – you made me see, when you were our guest, that I could wholly rely upon you, sir. I am here to ask you, as a military man, to command the expedition which I am sending out. I am asking you to sail back with Captain Stewart and me for St Thomas – tonight.’

Captain McMillin looked at Camilla Macartney across the length of his glistening mahogany dining table. He had been listening very carefully to her speech. He rang his table bell now that he was sure she was finished, and when his serving man answered this summons, ordered him to prepare a repast for the waiting ship’s captain, and to send in to him his groom. Then, with a bow to his guest, and pushing back his chair and rising, he said: ‘You will excuse me, Miss Macartney, I trust, for the little time I shall require to pack. It will not occupy me very long.’

4

The story of how the
Hyperion
, newest and swiftest of all the Macartney vessels, was outfitted and armed for the pursuit and capture of Captain Fawcett is a little epic in itself. It would include among many details extant the intensive search among the shipping resources of St Thomas, for the swivelgun which, two days after Captain McMillin’s arrival on the scene, was being securely bolted through the oak timbers of the
Hyperion
’s afterdeck.

A surprisingly complete record of this extraordinary piece of activity survives among the ancient colonial archives. Perhaps the recording clerk of the period, in his Government House office, was, like everyone else in St Thomas, fascinated by the ruthless swiftness with which that job, under the impact of Camilla Macartney’s eye, was pushed through to a successful conclusion in precisely forty-eight hours. Nothing like this rate of speed had ever been heard of, even in St Thomas. The many men engaged in this herculean task at Pelman’s Shipyard worked day and night continuously in three eight-hour shifts.

It is significant that these shipwrights and other skilled artisans were all Negroes. They had assembled in their scores and dozens from every quarter of the widespread town, irrespective of age or the exactions of their current employment, from the instant that the grapevine route spread through the black population of the town the summons to this task which Camilla Macartney had quietly uttered in the ear of her butler, Jens Sorensen.

The
Hyperion
, under the command of her own officers but with the understanding that Captain McMillin was in sole charge of the expedition, came up with the
Swallow
a little under four days from the hour of her sailing out of St Thomas harbor.

Captain McMillin caught Fawcett at a vast disadvantage. The
Swallow
, very lightly manned at the moment, hung in stays, her riding sails flapping with reports like pistol shots as her graceful head was held into the wind. She lay some ten ship-lengths away to the leeward of an American merchant vessel about which the
Swallow
’s boats – now nine in number – were grouped, a single member of the crew in each. Fawcett and his two lieutenants, and nine-tenths of his crew of cut-throats, were ransacking their prize, whose officers, crew and passengers had been disposed of under nailed hatches. They appeared, indeed, to be so thoroughly occupied in this nefarious work as to have ignored entirely any preparations for meeting the
Hyperion
’s attack – a circumstance sufficiently strange to have impressed Captain McMillin profoundly.

The
Hyperion
’s officers, unable to account for this singular quiescence on the part of the pirates, attributed it to their probably failing to suspect that the
Hyperion
was anything but another trading vessel which had happened to blunder along on her course into this proximity. With a strange, quick gripping at the heart, quite new in his experience, Captain McMillin permitted himself to suspect, though for a brief instant only, that something of the strange power which he had glimpsed in his contacts with Camilla Macartney, might in some extraordinary fashion be somehow responsible for this phenomenon.

But this thought, as too utterly ridiculous for harborage in a normal man’s mind, he put away from him
instanter
.

The strategy of the situation appeared to be simple. And Captain McMillin formulated his plan of attack accordingly, after a brief consultation with his officers.

Realizing that there could be no effective gunnery from the handful of men in charge of the
Swallow
, Captain McMillin ordered a dozen men in charge of the
Hyperion
’s second mate over the side in the largest of the boats. The maneuver of dropping an already manned boat from the davits – a risky undertaking in any event – was handled successfully, an exceptionally quiet sea contributing to the management of this piece of seamanship.

This boat’s crew, all Negroes and all armed with the pistols and cutlasses which had been hastily served out to them, had no difficulty whatever in getting over the
Swallow
’s side and making themselves masters of the pirate vessel. The dozen Negroes had butchered the seven members of the pirate crew left on board the
Swallow
within forty seconds of their landing upon her deck, and Mr Matthews, the officer in charge of them, hauled down with his own hand the Jolly Roger which, true to the freetrading traditions of the Main, flaunted at the
Swallow
’s main peak.

The magnificent cooperation of the fifteen Negroes constituting the
Hyperion
’s deck crew made possible the next daring piece of seamanship which the
Hyperion
’s captain had agreed to attempt. This was Captain McMillin’s plan.

The
Hyperion
should lay alongside the American vessel, grapple to her and board – with all hands – from deck to deck. This idea, almost unheard of in modern sea warfare, had suggested itself as practicable in this instance to Captain McMillin, from his reading. Such had been the tactics of the antique Mediterranean galleys.

For the purpose of retaining the outward appearance of a simple trader, Captain McMillin had concealed the thirty-three additional members of his heavily armed crew, and these had not been brought on deck until he was almost ready to have the grapples thrown. These reserves now swarmed upon the
Hyperion
’s deck in the midst of a bedlam of shouts, yells and curses, punctuated by pistol shots, from the pirate crew on board their prize.

These were taken at a vast disadvantage. Their prize vessel was immobile. They had, for what appeared to Captain McMillin some inexplicable reason, apparently failed until the very last moment to realize the
Hyperion
’s intentions. Most of them were busily engaged in looting their prize. Under this process five of the
Swallow
’s nine boats had already been laden gunwale deep with the miscellaneous plunder already taken out of the American ship. Two of these laden small boats and two others of the
Swallow
’s nine were crushed like eggshells as the
Hyperion
closed in and threw her grappling hooks.

Then, in a silence new and strange in Captain McMillin’s previous experience in hand-to-hand fighting, his forty-eight black fighting men followed him over the rails and fell upon the pirates.

Within three minutes the American vessel’s deck was a shambles. Camilla Macartney’s black myrmidons, like militant fiends from some strange hell of their own, their eyeballs rolling, their white teeth flashing as they bared their lips in the ecstasy of this mission of wholesale slaughter, spread irresistibly with grunts and low mutterings and strange cries about that deck.

Not a member of the pirate crew escaped their ruthless onslaught. Hard skulls were split asunder and lopped arms strewed the deck, and tough bodies were transfixed, and the gasping wounded were trampled lifeless in the terrible energy of these black fighting men.