Pirate Freedom (32 page)

I told the three men I had kept that nobody was going to make them turn pirate. "We're heading for Cow Island," I said. "Do your work and keep your mouths shut and I'll put you ashore there safe and sound, with my thanks. There are three of you, so each of you will have two others to swear that you were forced. Make trouble, and you're dead. We won't fool around with you. We'll kill you, capeesh? For now, you two are doctor's helpers. Do what he tells you."

There is a lot more I could say, how we threw the dead Spanish overboard and buried our own at sea, and who they were, and so forth. But time is getting tight.

Back on the
Castillo Blanco
, I did what I had been planning to do before we sighted the
Vincente
. I had some of our wounded stand guard on our food and water. Back there I said we had a lot of men, but after leaving Bouton on the
Vincente
with enough men to work her, we barely had enough sound men to handle the
Castillo Blanco
. So you could say it was a waste, if you wanted to. The thing was that those wounded men would not be much help at making sail or taking it in, but they could handle sitting in front of a door with pistols in their laps. It gave them something to do, and I thought it might save a few lives before long.

I WAS WRONG
about that. I have been trying to make myself skip this part, but that would be a kind of lie. The day before we sighted the
Magdelena
, we found one of my wounded sentries dead. Searching the ship got us nowhere, so after that I had two watch at a time.

And when we met up with the
Magdelena
at Île à Vache, I did one of the dumbest things I have done in my whole life. Being honest means I have to write about it, but it is not fun and I am going to keep it just as short as I can.

I had Rombeau send Don José over. His hands and feet were tied, and I could have tortured him then and there, but I did not. Maybe I had the guts to do it and maybe I did not, but what was for sure was that I did not want to. I told him I had found one secret compartment on his ship, and I knew maledizione well there was another. I wanted to know where it was, and if he did not tell me, we were going to burn him with hot irons—his face, the soles of his feet, and anyplace else we thought might get him to talk.

He said, "You may burn me, Señor. You may tear my arms off as you threaten. I cannot prevent you, but I cannot produce a second hiding place where none is."

So what did I do? I roughed him up a little, tied him to a timber down in the hold without food or water, and told him he was going to have the rest of the day and all night to think about what we would do in the morning. And I left him there.

In the morning he was dead, strangled just like Ben and the others. That is all I mean to write about this.

WE DID A
heck of a lot of work on Cow Island, and I am going to skip over just about all of it. First we shook up the crews, me getting more and Rombeau fewer. After that we really got to work, and ended up careening all three ships. The
Castillo Blanco
was first because I was worried about the scrape. After that we did the same thing with the
Vincente
. She was too good a ship to give up, and I knew—though most of the men still did not—that we would be going around the Horn with Capt. Burt. For a voyage as long as that, you want to start with everything in tip-top shape.

And after both of those, we did
Magdelena
all over again, mostly because we had gotten good at it. She was smaller than the
Vincente
, but carried more and bigger guns, and I have got to say she was the hardest of the whole bunch.

We got a few men on Cow Island, but not a lot. Four, I think it was. The thing was, there were not a lot there. And those who were wanted to sign on after we had careened our ships, not before. I did not want men like that, and I told them so. If they were not willing to work, I did not give a rat's rear end whether they would fight or not. I had more men now (and Azuka, who had come back with Willy when we shook up the crews), so I told Rombeau that if he wanted those guys he could have them. I do not believe he took even one of them.

There is another thing I should say. Okay, maybe a couple. One is that he had taken no prizes. The other is that I turned loose the doctor and the others as soon as we dropped anchor, exactly like I had promised. About the time we had the
Castillo Blanco
up on the beach, they came back, all three in a group. For one thing they had found out that Spaniards were not really popular on that island. For another, they had not been able to find any way
to get over to the Spanish side of Hispaniola. They wanted me to take them there, which of course I would not do. A day or so after that, they decided to sail to Jamaica with us. It meant we had the carpenter, which turned out to be a lucky break.

It is not a long trip, but we ran into a calm that made it longer than it should have been. We had been going pretty much nowhere for two or three days, I think it was, when one of the wounded men came running to report that his partner had been strangled. He had left his post to use the head, and when he came back he found the body. I went down and had a look at him, and it was Pete the Hangman. I searched the ship all over again, and had Novia, Bouton, and some others search with me. No dice.

Red Jack came early next morning with a round robin and a committee. The ship was cursed, they said. They liked me and all that. They knew how hard it was to be a good captain, and I had been a good one. But either we sold the
Castillo Blanco
in Port Royal or they would vote me out and put in somebody who would.

I told them I had been thinking pretty much the same way, but I was not going to sell our problem to somebody else and get more people killed. If I was going to stay captain, we would shift everything worth moving to the
Vincente
and abandon the
Castillo Blanco
and its curse. (I said curse because they had. I knew by then that it was a stowaway, and I had a pretty good idea who it was. But if I had told them then, there would have been all sorts of trouble.)

As it was, they just wanted to know whether I meant right now. I said bloody right, istantáneamente.

"Today?" They wanted to be sure.

I said, "Let's start loading the longboat. While we stand around here talking, we're just wasting time."

They were scared, and by that time so was I, a little. If we took the
Castillo Blanco
to Port Royal, they were going to be on board her for another three or four days, and it could have been a week. I was offering to get them off right away, so I won.

"What if we bring the curse in the things we are taking, Crisóforo?" Novia looked like she thought we really might.

"There's another secret compartment on this ship," I told her. "I can't find it, but I know there is one, and that's where he is this minute. He may or may not figure out what we're doing, but he'll have to stay there just the
same. He can't hide in one of the boats in broad daylight, and he's not small enough to hide in a cannon barrel or a water cask. We're going, and we're leaving him behind."

Which is what we did. The cannon were the hardest part, as they always are. But we used the sweeps to come alongside and were able to hoist them onto the
Vincente
with ropes running from the mainmast of the
Castillo Blanco
and main yard of the
Vincente
. The Caribbean was as calm as glass just then, which helped a lot.

I was the last to go, in the evening after a little breeze had sprung up. Before I left I went through the whole ship with a cocked pistol in one hand and my dagger in the other. What I yelled to the stowaway, I yelled three or four times in various places. There is no sense my giving it here more than once, because it was all the same. This is pretty much what I said in Spanish.

"Jaime! You win! We're going, and I'm taking your wife. If you'd rather we'd stay, or you want to go with us, come out and we'll talk about it. This is a little ship, but I don't think you can handle her alone." Here I waited two or three minutes.

"No hard feelings if you want to try. Head northwest if you can. That will take you to Cuba or New Spain. East ought to be easy. The first land you sight should be the French end of Hispaniola. We're leaving you a keg of water and half a barrel of salt pork. Good luck!"

I was hoping he would come out and give me his hand. I knew Novia— okay, let's be formal here, I knew that Señora Sabina Guzman—did not want him anymore. She would stay with me, we would set him ashore someplace, and we'd be rid of him.

At the same time, I was afraid he would jump me. In which case I was going to shoot him. Or whatever.

Neither of them happened. Novia and I were the last to leave. She was crying, and I felt pretty bad, too. The
Castillo Blanco
was a beautiful little ship, and she had sailed like a dream. She would be called a schooner now, but we called her a two-stick sloop. When I think of her it is always in one of two ways. The first is outrunning the
Lucía
, jumping around among the rocks of the Canal du Sud, half the time in the surf. The other one I am about to tell you about.

Novia and I were on the quarterdeck of the
Vincente
looking back at the
Castillo Blanco
. She had been a sort of resort hotel for us. I almost said a honeymoon hotel, and maybe I should have. Neither of us was ever going to for
get her, and both of us knew that. We were holding hands and wishing things had gone differently, when we saw the first flames. That was when the fire burned through the hatch cover.

Novia looked at me and said, "Crisóforo …?"

"No," I said. "Absolutely not. Did you do it?"

She just shook her head. Later she said she thought one of the crew must have done it before he got into the longboat.

The fire got bigger, and all of a sudden there was somebody standing on the quarterdeck. Novia screamed and pointed.

I said, "Is that him?," and she stared for a second or two, then asked for my glass.

She must have looked at him through it for a minute or more. Finally she took it down, slid the brass sections together again, and gave it back to me. I did not say anything more, but the question was still there, if you know what I mean.

Finally, she said, "Yes." There were tears in her eyes.

Rombeau came over and asked who it was, but neither of us told him anything right then. We were watching Jaime. I figured he would dive overboard any minute and start swimming, but he did not. He did not hold the wheel, or climb the rigging to get away from the fire, or in fact do anything. He just stood there. There was a big puff of flame and a roar we could hear just fine over where we were.

When the flames died down a little, he was gone. What happened, I am pretty sure, is that the fire had burned through the quarterdeck. That was the roar we heard, and the puff of flame. When it did he fell, and it must have been like falling into a furnace.

"I am a single woman now," Novia said, and went below. I knew she wanted to be alone, and I told myself right then that I should stay away from the cabin until pretty late.

The first thing I did after I left was explain things to Bouton. "There are only two or three things I'm sure of," I said. "The rest is guesses. If you've got better guesses, I'd like to hear them."

He nodded, "You will, Captain, if they find any faith with me."

"There was a secret compartment in that ship. I showed it to you the night we got Estrellita to come out of it. There was another one, too, one we never found. One I couldn't find even when I knew I was looking for a secret compartment."

"For what purpose?"

I shrugged. "Smuggling, maybe. Have you got a better idea?"

"I have no idea at all, Captain. What would be smuggled?"

"Gold, silver, whatever would show a profit. The gold and silver the mines produce belong to the Crown, because the king owns the mines. It can't be spent until it's been minted. Suppose a smart Spaniard could get hold of some of it before it left New Spain. What could he do?"

Bouton leaned against the rail and pulled at his nose. "What we would do, I suppose."

I shook my head. "We'd take it to Port Royal or some French colony, or a Dutch or Danish one, and sell it for whatever we could get. If a Spaniard went to one of those places, don't you think his government would notice?"