Cinnamon and Gunpowder (10 page)

I yelled at Captain Jeroboam over the noise: “Isn’t giving her the Brass Fox unwise?”

“I let her have this battle so we might take the war.” Jeroboam put his finger to his nose. “We’ll bring back an armada.”

During the siege, one of the prison’s cannonballs, by fluke of wind or powder, surpassed its range and punched a hole in the planks so near Mabbot that she had to dance to keep from falling in.

Mr. Apples rushed to her side. “Cap’m?”

“It’s nothing. Keep at it, Mr. Apples,” Mabbot said, irritated at the spilling of her tea. “Keep at it.”

After an hour of this inchmeal injury, the tower, haloed in dust, leaned as if considering a more comfortable repose, then collapsed spectacularly, dropping in clusters off the cliff and into the tortured sea.

Silence and dust followed. Mr. Apples set himself to realigning the guns, then the terrible metronome started again, this time picking away at the adjoining walls. Only when a white flag unfurled from the top of the prison and hung like a parched tongue did Mr. Apples cease firing. Mabbot put aside her tea and checked the breach of her pistols.

“Trip the mudhook!” Mabbot shouted, and the anchor crew ran for the windlass while the rest readied themselves for battle. The
Flying Rose
jibed to position in the lee of the cliff, well beyond the arc of the remaining carronades. Longboats were lowered and, full of pirates, made for the beaches.

Mabbot shouted to the departing crew, “Not a prisoner harmed! Hear me! Don’t touch the prisoners!” before disappearing into her cabin.

With all the boats gone to shore except Mabbot’s pinnace, the deck was nearly deserted. Jeroboam, wheezing in anticipation, said, “Now’s the moment, Quincy.
Now!
”

With a fierce yank, he broke through the weakened rail and nearly mangled my wrist in the doing. Off he went in a mad dash and I was compelled to shadow him, thinking, as I went,
This is the plan?
We ran flat-out toward the stern, heading for Mabbot’s personal pinnace, which hung behind the ship, her little sails furled coyly. The elegant script on her stern read
Deimos
.

We scrambled from the quarterdeck to the poop, and I was beginning to imagine what trouble sailing even that small boat would be for a pair so shackled when Jeroboam stopped in his tracks, stood straight at attention, and fell on his face. Though I tried, I could not hold him up, and, as he fell, he yanked me to my knees. His monocle broke with a pitiful sound. A short slender blade had pierced the back of his neck. Feng, who had thrown it, called for the captain, who emerged scowling.

She nudged Jeroboam with her boot, then turned a wry smile on me. “And you, Mr. Wedgwood, are you unhappy with our hospitality too?”

“No, ma’am,” I quavered.

“Nothing you need?”

“Nothing, thank you, Captain.”

She returned the blade to Feng, who cleaned it on the hem of his pants.

The weight of Jeroboam’s arm pulled on me, and I was obliged to kneel near him. A breeze carried his palm-leaf hat over the rail. It danced for a moment in the air before dropping.

I was left alone. Occasionally a flurry of gunshots sounded from the prison above us, but they seemed distant and unrelated to me. The plan, whatever it had been, was horribly bungled. Things were far worse now, irredeemable. What folly to have put my hope in Jeroboam, whom I could no longer bring myself to look at. When I tried to stand and get some distance from the heap of him, his arm rose and tugged me back. He was my keeper now—even Feng left us unwatched.

I had had my fill of murder and corpses. A revulsion crept into me bit by bit, until it was everything I could do to stay where I was and not run screaming, dragging the bloody thing behind me.

Thus yoked with the dead, I witnessed the interrogation of the prison warden, who was brought at gunpoint to the deck. This man’s keys had been ripped from him, belt and all, and he was forced to hold his pants up with both hands. Mabbot asked Mr. Apples a question with her eyes to which he merely shook his head.

A small heap of items, among them a tin cup, a prayer rug, and boots, were placed at Mabbot’s feet. “These were in the jailer’s chambers—he says they belonged to the Fox,” Bai said.

Mabbot, her fury barely contained, demanded of the warden, “And where is the Brass Fox?”

The man pressed his forehead to the wood and raised his folded hands in supplication. “Not here! He’s not here.”

“I’m beginning to grasp that. Where is he?”

“He escaped three weeks ago. We haven’t had him for three weeks.”

“Three weeks? Are you sure? Damn Jeroboam! Wish I could kill him again.” She paced, fuming, then gripped the jailer by the hair. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you for incompetence. Did he just swim away?”

“He was delivered with a dozen other criminals.” The officer moaned. “At first we didn’t know who he was—he’d blacked his hair and given us a false name. When we discovered we had the Fox, we sent right off for instructions. Sometimes they want the notorious ones hanged in the public squares in London, it makes for a good show…” Here the man trailed off, remembering whom he was talking to.

“Give his head a thump, Mr. Apples,” said Mabbot. “The contents are stuck.”

The warden flinched and blurted the rest: “By the time we got instructions back, he’d flown.” He held his hands up to show they were empty, as if he could be palming the Fox like a card.

“What were the instructions from London?”

“Immediate execution after interrogation.”

“Without trial or even a last meal.”

“‘Immediate’ was the word. But we never got to do it. The Fox is not a natural man.” The prison keeper wept. “Locks are nothing to him, he moves through the walls themselves. He took a hostage, one of the guards. There was a ship waiting for him. He had help.”

“What ship?”

“A Dutch merchant, the
Diastema
, I think.”

“Have you nothing for me?” Mabbot whispered.

“He left those things, a rug, a pipe, just things.”

Feng returned on another longboat with a thin bearded man who covered his eyes against the sun. His overgrown nails and the grey stripes in his long beard gave him the appearance of a badger woken from its winter sleep. He was naked, filthy, and his ankles were swollen and suppurating where the shackles had been. By the angularity of his ribs, the man was starving.

“Who is this?” Mabbot demanded.

“That’s Braga. He was in league with the Brass Fox,” the jailer said eagerly. “Helped him escape.”

“Bring him biscuits softened in a splash of wine, boys. Clothes for the man!”

The jailer stood in protest, but Mabbot kicked him down and placed her boot firmly on the buttons of his uniform. “By the looks of it, he’s been kept in a hole for … how long?”

“Since the Fox escaped.”

Mabbot pushed off from the jailer and made her way to crouch in front of Braga, who had ignored the clothes but was stuffing the hardtack into his mouth faster than he could choke it down.

“I know what loyalty the Fox demands,” Mabbot said. “I won’t ask what you think of him now.”

Braga finally looked up from his food. He muttered, through wads of half-chewed dough, “Your hair—”

“We aren’t talking about me, Mr. Braga. We are talking about the Fox. You would like to find him, I’ll bet, to kiss his cheek or to throttle his neck for leaving you here in this pit. I don’t care which. I am going to give you your freedom today, whether you help me or no.”

“I don’t know where he has gone.”

“But you know where he has been, you know his secrets.”

“Dug his tunnels around the Pearl River.”

“Tunnels?” Mabbot stood, her brow shining in the sun. “So that’s how he’s out-smuggling the Pendleton curs. Mr. Apples, tunnels! Yes, Mr. Braga, you can help us. I’m offering you a position on my ship for as long as you like, and in exchange you’ll tell me, and only me, Mr. Braga, all you know about the Fox. Is that an amicable arrangement?”

“Yes,” the man said, “but…” And he looked at the jailer.

“But you have some unfinished business with your keeper,” Mabbot said with a hint of disgust. “Make it quick. Bosun, loan our new shipmate a firearm. Trip anchor, Mr. Apples. Aloft and gather way. We didn’t come here for tea and crumpets.”

The crew moved up the shrouds like spiders to cast the gaskets from the sails while the jailer scampered across the deck begging, “Wait. Wait!”

Braga shot him twice in the head, dropped the gun as if it weighed too much, and began to bathe himself with a bucket and sponge.

Mabbot and Mr. Apples took the rug and other miscellany to disappear into her cabin, where I could hear their muffled argument.

The
Rose
was already wearing about, the sheets luffing anxiously as we crossed the wind and began to tack toward open sea, leaving the ruins behind us. A few other prisoners, wearing stupefied grins, had been brought aboard as recruits and, along with Braga, were given hardtack, panch, and a jovial tour. In my opinion, the disposition of the crew did not adequately reflect the horrors that the new recruits could look forward to. They explained the watch bells so blithely that I mumbled, “Oh, and they have ‘theater paint’ to look forward to, don’t forget that!” As soon as I said it, I feared recrimination, but, happily, I was ignored.

A morbid petrel alighted and stared at Jeroboam’s face, considering desecration. I shooed it away. I was being tested. Though I wanted nothing more than to be separated from Jeroboam’s body, I could not bring myself to beg these pirates. To do so would give up the last shred of dignity I had. And so I stood there, until the sun set and the waning moon brought its cold scythe across the shimmering field.

Mercy appeared in the guise of Joshua, who, with Mabbot’s keys jangling, unshackled me and led me toward my room. The moonlight was bright enough that I could see the child had no fewer than four cowlicks. It was then that a thought hit me like a pot dropped from the rafters: Joshua is the age my own son would have been, had he lived!

He is too quick to hide from; he saw my eyes watering and lifted his lantern to illuminate my face.

“Bring a book,” I mouthed to him. “A book, next time. You can’t write without reading.”

In my room, I tied the dough tin again to my belly. I had hoped to leave the crude practice behind, but, it seems, I won’t be escaping soon. I’ll have to conjure a repast for the vixen after all.

As I pace in circles, my repugnance at the day’s events has given way to a cold conviction: I cannot sit by as Mabbot callously murders every good man in the world.

Though I have no weapons, nor friends, nor money, nor hope of help, I swear that I will learn the scope of her mission. As an egg spoils from the tiniest crack, I will pierce the pellicle of her mystery and ruin her plans.

6

DINING WITH THE DEVIL

In which I earn a pillow

Saturday, August 28

I go, in my mind, to gentler times. Memory is a strange soup. My wife, when she was ready for me, wore a particular dress with a hem of lace poppies. It was her sign to me. She might say shyly, “A good day to go flower picking?” These days I can hardly recall her face and yet that hem is clear to me, its pattern burned into my fingertips.

Mr. Apples has either forgotten his duty or has been ordered to leave my cell open, for last night I was free to roam the boat deep into the night. Considering that it might be my last chance to see the stars, I moved along the bulwark, chilled to the bone as the graveyard watch went about their duties by lantern light. Cold as I was, it was good to stride freely under the filigree of the heavens. Still I am as far from freedom as I have ever been and daily getting farther; we push forever south with Africa an occasional stitch of ocher on the port horizon. The ocean, whose essence is fluid and unresisting, is more prison than the staunchest bricks or iron bars.

I have examined the davits and blocks of the longboats again and am confident that they are not beyond my ken. If I take my time and lower myself very gradually, I believe I can manage the lines from within the boat itself. Further, I think it may be done quietly, as long as I move with deliberate pace. The moon is just a shaving shy of new. If I’m to have the advantage of darkness, I’ll have to do it soon. In preparation I have waxed a small sack and filled it with dried figs, Mary Sweet, hardtack, and a flask of panch. I considered stealing the compass from the helm house but don’t want to raise suspicion. After the captain has been fed and attention drifts from me, I shall make my move.

Monday, August 30

I am alive. The shrew is appeased, at least for the week. This is how I did it.

Yesterday morning I rose early, still unsure of my recipes but with a fire in my belly. I fasted, as is my wont when faced with an important job, taking only the smallest bite of hardtack dipped in weak tea. I have found that hunger improves my sense of smell and gives inspiration a clean passage. In any case my nerves would not allow me to eat.

Conrad had already committed his crimes for the morning, and so I banished him from the galley. I was alone and strangely energized by the task before me. I clapped my hands together to scare invisible demons from the room and began.