Home From The Sea (16 page)

The sound Jim heard in his voice was sincerity, and a muscle inside him relaxed. Since
Bellowes’s
arrival he had half feared Toby was some sort of charlatan, a charming swindler and convincing liar. But whatever else was going on, he was sure by now that Toby was none of those things. He settled to listen with an open mind.

“You heard what Barney said?” The blue eyes were wide on Jim. “I was the first to get back here because I’m the one who
didn’t
sit in a pox shop, drinking myself legless. I left them all drunk as lords, and walked over here. I was looking for Charlie Chegwidden, as you’ve always known. He was …” Toby shrugged. “Charlie was the trustee of the group, all of us who survived to the end, and who started out on a merchantman called
The Rose of Gloucester
. You must have heard of it.”

The name was familiar. Jim searched through his memory while Toby waited, and at last he ventured, “If I’m remembering right, there was a mutiny aboard. The story made it back to the towns along the coast here because she shipped out of Plymouth and a few of the lads were local. I remember, just a few days ago Fred Bailey said
Charlie’d
shipped out on her, but he was off her before
trouble
struck.
Right?”

“Yes ... and no. Charlie was aboard in the trouble.” Toby shrugged expressively. “They … we mutinied because any number of the crew were being abused. There were floggings too often, and much too brutal. The captain was a God fearing man by the name of Jeremiah Graves.” Shadows gathered like crows in his face. “Two weeks out, Graves hanged a lad for having relations with another boy – and getting caught. A month later, it was another death aboard when a man died under the whip. His crime was to speak his mind to an officer about the treatment of his fellows. A few weeks later, the captain hanged another young boy for being in love with his friend … and he flogged the ship’s priest for trying to counsel him to leave such matters to the Almighty.” Toby’s voice was rough as crushed silk as he spoke these last words.

“Jesus,” Jim whispered.
“You?”

The fair head nodded. “Of course it was. But you already guessed this, didn’t you?” He sighed heavily. “I never had very much faith, Jim. I’d seen too much as a youth, growing up in rough places. Whatever I had, I lost on that voyage when I watched the suffering of my companions. I heard the prayers of innocents go ignored, as if the Lord didn’t care a fig about his children. They tell us never a sparrow shall fall without the eyes of the Almighty upon it, and yet innocents pray for respite and justice, and get nothing.” Toby seemed to clench his teeth to stop the flow of indignation, and began again in a quiet tone. “I protested three times. I was flogged to ribbons, you’ve seen the scars.
Touched them.
When the mutineers rose up, obviously I went with them!”

“I’d be shocked if you hadn’t,” Jim said evenly. “They killed the crew, and that damned captain?”

“No. A few were killed in the fighting, and the bodies thrown to the sharks. We put most of them, captain and all, ashore in the Azores with enough supplies to last them until another ship came along and took them off.” Toby looked into his cup as if it were a crystal ball. “We knew we couldn’t go right back to England without being arrested and hung. To go anywhere else, we needed enough money to pay fat bribes, stay in the shadows, till we were forgotten.
New names, new trades … the Carolinas, perhaps, or the Indies.
So we went hunting.”

“Hunting?”
Jim echoed, warming to the story.

A glitter was back in Toby’s eyes now.
“Treasure.”

Jim groaned. “You can’t be serious! Treasure hunting?”

For the first time in so long Toby laughed, but it was a painful sound. “Not at once, but eventually, after we – well, we came by a map. Or, a piece of a
map,
and as it happens one of our number had spent fifteen years in the navy, looking over the shoulder of a navigator. Harry Price was killed not long after, but he could read charts in his sleep.

“We took our bit of map to Lisbon, in Portugal. Paid a handsome fee to a
chartmaker
, and our navigator spent two afternoons going over the best maps in the world, matching what we had, until he found it.”

“A bit of a map?”
Jim demanded. “You were mad enough to take on the Americas, the Caribbean, on the strength of a little piece of a chart?”

“There was a lot more to it than that,” Toby protested. “No one was especially mad, though we were all desperate enough to be rash. You see, we heard the story in Kingston, Jamaica, of a great treasure … months before this, in the wake of the mutiny we’d picked up a cargo. All perfectly legitimate, contracted for in Caracas and delivered properly to market. We got paid,” he added, “honest pay for honest work, which you don’t often expect from a crew of mutineers!

“The news about the mutiny hadn’t yet reached Jamaica. We knew we were running in front of it, safe enough to go ashore, drink in their taverns,
spin
yarns with the locals. And there was a story we heard from a blind old woman who was said to have been a great beauty in her day, and now tells tales, minds children…

“It all began a long time ago, back in the great days when Spain was shipping gold out of the Americas faster than the natives could dig it out of the ground, and enslaving the Indians, working them to death by droves, to do the
labor
. It seems one of the natives they enslaved was a prince by birth, the last scion of a royal house with a lineage going back further than Henry Tudor himself. The tribe protected him even in captivity – or especially then. They thought
,
if he could escape, maybe their people could be reborn someday through his royal blood. In those days kings were seen as gods too, you know.

“So this Indian prince was jealously protected until they could arrange for his escape, and it was just damned bad luck when a storm came up, swamped the little boat he was trying to sail away from Spanish territory. He was clinging to the wreckage when the lookout aboard a pirate vessel saw him, and they pulled him aboard.

“He must have been a beautiful young man, because the captain of the pirate galley took a shine to him. Fell head over heels for him, in fact. They couldn’t even pronounce his real name, so they called him –”

“Fernando.” Jim swallowed hard. “I know. I was listening. I heard the whole story, the Treasure of Diego Monteras.”

Toby produced a faint, lopsided smile. “Well, then, there’s no point in me telling it again, is there?”

Jim was gaping. He knew he was sitting there with his mouth hanging open as if in an attempt to catch flies.
“You mean, it’s true?”

“Every word of it.”
Toby drained his mug to the leaves and set it down. “It’s not just a good story, Jim. And incidentally, it
is
a good yarn. It’s bought my supper many times over. People love hearing it because there’s magic in it. But the best magic is
,
it’s true. The bit of map and the letter came into the possession of the old woman in Jamaica. She was charged with keeping it safe by her grandson, who’d won it playing pitch and toss, but he never came back to collect it. He was killed in a battle with pirates and she kept the map, the letter, because she knew she was losing her sight and she realized how valuable they were. Nathaniel Burke – he liked to call himself our leader, and most of us found it easier to agree than argue – Nathaniel paid her a trifling sum for it, though the purse was more than she actually needed. Enough for her to live out the rest of her life with a maid to take care of her, food on the table, and a cottage above the beach.”

He sat back and regarded Jim levelly, soberly. “So there we were, Jim, in Kingston, with a ship –
The Rose of Gloucester
– that was sturdy enough for those waters, and a crew that had nothing to lose, and a bit of a map. We headed first to Portugal, as I told you before. Not England. We picked up a cargo in Barbados to pay our way, and the voyage east was easy enough. In Lisbon, our navigator made the match between that fragment from Diego Monteras’s chart and a very good new map from a master
chartmaker
.”

“And …” Words almost failed Jim. “You outfitted an expedition.”

“We picked up another cargo in Lisbon, bound for the port of Sao Luis.
Again, legitimate work.”
Toby was immersed in the memories now. “The pay wasn’t good, but it was enough to get us back to South America, which was at least in the right part of the world and comfortably far from waters where English warships are common. It was summer when we offloaded the cargo, and the
Rose
sailed north. Believe
me,
we knew
exactly
where we were going.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Jim breathed. “You found it.”

“We … found it.” Toby took a long deep breath. “An iron-bound chest of gems, about so big.” He sketched it in the air. “Like a mid-size brandy keg. It was Diego Monteras’s own share of the wealth, and enough to make a king green with envy.
Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls, tiny items of exquisite beauty and utterly beyond price.”
Toby tipped back his head and closed his eyes.
“God!
We thought we were free. We thought we had the rest of our lives to live and love and grow old in peace. Charlie and I got very drunk in celebration, and the next morning Nathaniel turned the
Rose
around and headed us back to civilization, to take on water and fresh food for the voyage home.”

His face darkened there. Jim was hanging on every syllable now. “A bastard storm came up out of the Atlantic,” Toby said quietly. “It was black as a funeral shroud, and a hundred miles across. We couldn’t make any of the Portuguese anchorages and we were running short of everything, including the time to make attempt a safe passage east before the fair season closed down.

“We ran ahead of monstrous winds, just two sails up and praying for calm waters. We got them, limped into the lee of an island without any name, and set about making repairs. We were a mess of broken rigging and smashed yards, we could go no further.” His face looked bruised now. “The devil sent the bill. He always does. And we paid up in spades.

“We were jumped by a ship of His Majesty’s navy, and thank gods she was just a tiddler, a sloop of war carrying 20 guns and a crew of 50 men at most. They knew the
Rose
on sight, since we were bloody notorious as a mutineer crew that was still at large. They came up on us in the halflight before dawn when our lookouts were dead asleep, damn them, and boarded us.

“It was only sheer luck that the king’s men didn’t find the treasure – they weren’t looking for it, and Nathaniel had just enough warning to get it hidden. Less than an hour later, we were named as mutineers and sentenced to hang right there on our own deck. We weren’t even to be shipped back to England in chains to stand trial.” The blue eyes closed.

“You fought,” Jim whispered.

“We fought. Of course we fought! Cornered animals always will.” Toby took a long deep breath and got a grip on
himself
and the raw memories. “Nathaniel was armed – he always is. He had a couple of pistols that were always kept loaded, and still are. We used to tell him, one day he’d shoot off his own cod, since he kept a brace of loaded pistols stuck in his belt! But that day we were damned glad he had them. He’s a good shot, far better than Barney ever was. Barney’s … well, he
was
cockeyed. He couldn’t see straight, much less shoot straight.”

The memories had a grip on Toby now. He was back there, miles and years away, living it all again. “So Nathaniel puts one shot right through the forehead of the white-wigged lieutenant in command of this tiddler of a naval vessel, and the other smack in the throat of his second in command, almost takes his head right off at the shoulders. Hell breaks loose. Every man on both crews is suddenly diving for muskets, pistols, swords, tools, anything we can get our hands on.”

For a moment he was silent, and his voice was hoarse as he said bitterly, “The decks really did run scarlet. A number of us were killed outright, more died later from their wounds. But we accounted for the naval crew right down to the last jack tar, may God forgive us, which I doubt he will. It was a matter of survival and liberty … and even a whipped dog will turn and fight at the end, supposing it’s the death of him.” He shivered visibly. “The deck of the
Rose
was a battleground, as if we’d fought a small war, which we won. There’s a place in hell set aside for the winners of battles, Jim, and I fully expect to roast there for a very long time indeed. Not,” he added pointedly, “that I’ll be alone on the spit.

“We had only barely enough hands left alive and strong enough to crew the
Rose
, get her out of there. Some of the men were for seizing the naval sloop, but the rest of us pointed out the wisdom of scuttling her. She was far too recognizable – she’d get us killed before we were out of waters where we could expect to run into English ships.

“So the stores of the little warship were transferred to the
Rose
, guns, powder, shot and all, and then we took the sloop herself out into deep water and opened the
seacocks
. She was gone in a few minutes, and her crew with her, God rest them. They were good lads, following orders, and we … we were fighting for our very lives. We either died fighting or we died hanging by our necks from every yardarm on our own ship – what choice did they give us?