Silver (37 page)

When I swung back, I found our long delay was over. Smirke had finally lost patience with the captain, with criticism, with his men stirring for action – and was pulling his pistol from his belt. It was a marvellously old-fashioned and cumbersome contraption, but I had no doubt it would do the necessary. As Smirke drew back the firing-pin, he closed one eye and peered lovingly along the barrel; like much that he did, it was an act performed with the most disgusting sort of insinuation.

This gave our captain the chance to raise his own weapon, which Smirke did not seem to mind or even notice; he evidently believed the captain would not have the determination to fire first, and – in the long debauch of his life – had come to think of himself as
immortal. When this performance was finished, both men stood with their weapons pointed at one another’s hearts.

I am ashamed to say it was only now that I fully understood what I was seeing. I had always known our adventure would be perilous. I had seen two lives lost at sea. I had feared for Natty and expected soon to be mourning her. I had almost lost my own life and been made to contemplate Last Things. But I had never believed my existence would lead to
this
moment. Not to
the captain
in mortal danger. The captain, who had led us through difficulties of every kind. Whose kindness seemed a match for all the cruelties in the world. Who had taken care of me as considerately as if he had been my own father.

With this thought –
he had been like a father –
I jumped to my feet again, and the single word ‘No!’ burst from me as uncontrollably as if I were indeed a child. No sooner had I spoken than I saw my wish to protect the captain had in fact put him at greater risk – because he now had to push me further behind the shelter of the stockade for my own safety. And when he straightened from doing this, and began to aim his pistol again, Smirke tightened a finger round the trigger of his own weapon and fired.

The two men were no more than ten feet apart: the captain was certain to be killed. That was my instant conclusion, swept into my mind on a torrent of confused feelings – dismay, guilt, shock, dread. But this turmoil immediately subsided, or rather
changed
. Instead of producing an explosion, the chamber of Smirke’s pistol – which had been kept too long in readiness, and was useless with damp or some other infection – smoked, and spluttered, and that was all.

I expected the captain to say something about this, if only as a means of filling more minutes. But he knew the time for talking had passed. Accordingly, and with a courage I thought exceptional, he refused to acknowledge what had occurred, and merely continued
pointing his weapon. Smirke lost his energy and hung loose in his clothes like a large puppet. The captain, by contrast, seemed to intensify and harden, even leaning forward a little to make sure his bullet found its mark.

He fired – a hard sound, like two short lengths of wood clapped together, and the echo bounced back from the surrounding trees.

Did Smirke fall? Did his crew support him, then furiously spring forward to cut us down? I imagined all these things – but saw none of them. For in almost the same second that Smirke reeled backwards, yet another sound had occurred, which at first I did not notice. This was a sharp clang, such as you might hear in a blacksmith’s forge. I stared wildly at Smirke, searching for an explanation. Although his face was twisted like a gargoyle, he remained standing. His wide mouth had opened not to breathe his last, but to release another hideous bellow of laughter.

‘You think …’ he shouted, as he caught his balance again, and the mirth in his face curdled into hatred. ‘You think you can quench old Smirke so easily, Captain? You think you can tear the crown from the head and possess the kingdom? Or creep here with your crew of fools and children, and take me away over the sea where I’ve no wish to go?’ He paused to catch his breath, glowering like a Goliath; the captain, I was dismayed to see, no longer met him eye to eye but was fumbling with his pistol, and then with the satchel I threw towards him, so that he could begin reloading. It seemed a singularly forlorn tactic, and did nothing but fuel Smirke’s fury.

‘Damn you for a coward, Mr Captain,’ Smirke roared on. ‘Damn you for a fool, and an imposter, and a puffed-up, bragging, tedious … I’ll split you to the chine, I’ll …’ His excitement was so great, his words piled on top of one another, struggling for space, then shrivelled into sounds that were like gasps or grunts until they ceased
entirely – at which point he began grabbing at the buttons of his topcoat, where the mark of the captain’s bullet showed clearly over his heart.

A strange clumsiness now hampered his movements – unless it was the sluggishness of my own mind, which did not want to understand the things it began to see. Smirke slowly lifted the cloth of his coat – which he persisted in wearing (as a sign of his authority, I suppose), despite the rising heat of the day – and then his shirt. Beneath it was a square of thick brown metal, hung round his neck on a length of tarred string; it was covered in the silvery marks of hammer-blows, and I thought was probably the base of an old skillet that had been cut and altered. The remains of the captain’s bullet were pressed neatly against its surface, looking as wrinkled and harmless as the pupa of a butterfly.

The captain groaned when he saw this, and his shoulders drooped. There was something in this loss of confidence that shocked me more deeply than anything that followed, yet also made me love him more deeply. He flung his pistol to the ground, where it bounced towards me across the turf as though it had a life of its own; I snatched it up and felt the handle damp with sweat. My intention, of course, was to reload it myself, but fate was taking our authority away from us. My fingers shook as they set about filling the breech, and I glanced up expecting to make an apology for my delay.

There was no need. The captain had forgotten his pistol and was pulling his sword from its scabbard. Once this was done, he flourished his blade bravely enough in the face of our enemies, daring one of them to advance. Yet it was not a convincing performance, and seemed done more in sorrow than anger. Smirke was unimpressed, at any rate. He took a long stride forward, drawing his own sword and prodding his breastplate with a dirty finger, so the metal gave a muffled chime. His clothes no longer
seemed to hang on him, but were tightly filled with his heavy arms and legs.

‘You’ll kill me with that needle now, will you, Captain?’ he said. ‘You’ll murder me with your pin, like you murdered my shipmate Mr Jinks, God rest his soul?’ He threw a glance across his shoulder, more by rolling his eyes than turning his head. ‘I’ve sailed the seas with my friend Mr Jinks. I’ve shared more solitude with him than I want to say. And you murder him in his sleep? Now, I ask you, is that the action of a Christian gentleman, Mr Captain? Is that the example to be setting your young friends and mess-mates?’ He paused here, to swallow and give me a leering smile, then continued with his deliberate slowness. ‘You a murderer and me a murderer, Captain, that’s the way I see it. What’s the difference between us? Nothing. No difference between us. Except I might be a little more …’ – here he shrugged his shoulders, so the breastplate heaved on his chest – ‘a little more
comfortable
.’

Smirke was holding his sword low now, tapping the ground sometimes with the tip as though flushing out game. And while he advanced on the captain, his crew moved up behind him like his own shadow; they were so packed together I thought they might not fight us with blows at all, but instead smother us to death.

Then the picture changed again. Whether it had always been his intention, or whether it was a whim, Stone broke from the throng and stepped in front of them all. Smirke seemed a little surprised, and ready to divert his flow from the captain in order to assert his command. But when he looked into Stone’s blank eyes he changed his mind, and closed his mouth, and nodded – before beginning to suck his teeth with a disgusting relish.

Stone brushed his long wisps of white hair away from his face, then with great deliberation lifted his right arm, holding it very straight and apparently pointing out to sea. But he was not pointing
with a finger. He was pointing with a gun. A little silver pistol. And it was not directed towards the ocean, but at the captain’s forehead. Stone did not say a word, and his eyes never blinked. They merely gazed at their target as his finger tightened, then narrowed a little as the explosion sounded.

Because I had seen Smirke survive a similar threat, I thought for an instant there would now be a similar reprieve. But this was impossible. The moment Stone fired, the captain fell backwards, straight as a tree; when his body hit the earth, it sent a hard ripple of shock into my own hands and knees where I knelt on the grass. His face was a yard from my own, with his old cocked hat, green with mould along the seams, knocked away behind. I saw him more clearly than in my life before: the freckles across his nose and cheeks, the sandy-coloured eyelashes that darkened where they met the lids, the silver whiskers along his jaw. In the centre of his brow, which I had admired so often for its candour, was a neat black hole with a fringe of smoke clinging to its edges.

‘Oh, sir,’ I heard myself say, in a voice I scarcely recognised as my own. It was the first sound to break the silence, travelling through the heavy air like a crack through ice – and suddenly, to my great astonishment, producing an echo from the shore behind me. No, not an echo. A loud cheer – which I could not understand until I turned and saw the
Nightingale
, looking as pretty as a ship in a bottle, carving through the waves at the tip of the headland and sailing towards the Anchorage.

I wanted to stay still and grieve. I wanted to creep into the earth, and pull the grass over my head like a blanket, so that I could lie unnoticed beside the captain. My mind was not ready to leave his protection. My instincts, however – my instincts were interested in nothing but saving my life. With despicable energy I jumped up, seized the captain’s sword where it lay in his open hand, turned tail, and began running fast towards the shore. In the corner of my eye, I saw Mr Stevenson and Mr Creed follow suit – Stevenson pulling his hat from his head, to prevent it being swept off in the rush. The skin of his forehead was extremely white, and made a strong contrast to his weather-beaten face.

At every step I expected a musket-ball or the edge of a blade to slash into my shoulders. But either because they reckoned we were
easy prey, or because they were distracted by the appearance of the
Nightingale
, Smirke and his men did nothing. As I continued running, and my mind reassembled itself, I heard them calling to one another – saying how pretty our ship looked, and how they would be home soon. When I threw a glance over my shoulder, several of them were pointing and clapping one another on the back; only Smirke and Stone seemed less than excited – Smirke because he was gloating over the dead body now stretched before him; and Stone because he was intent on reloading his pistol.

The ground I ran across – it would be better to say
flew –
was the old marsh that Scotland and the other prisoners had turned into rice-fields. Even at speed, I was conscious of how neatly everything had been made: the rows of young plants, and the low walls that created a terrace leading down to the shore, where fertile earth gave way to sand. It made me pick up my feet in a high-stepping gait, because I did not like to destroy what they had so carefully created, even though I was fleeing for my life.

As the three of us reached the shore, Bo’sun Kirkby and Mr Tickle ran forward – Mr Tickle with his unlit pipe still clamped between his teeth. For all that he was not my captain, I was mightily relieved to see how determined he looked, especially since the prisoners – whose tight formation on the sand behind him had now broken up – were extremely confused. One or two had dropped down and pressed their faces to the sand, mumbling prayers that were inaudible to everyone except Mother Earth. Others had tramped into the water and stood with waves breaking round their knees, unable to decide what most deserved their attention: the pirates behind them or the
Nightingale –
which was now a few hundred yards offshore and putting down her anchor.

Our friends’ distress, combined with their near-nakedness and shivering, was miserable to see. Only Scotland had kept his
composure – still standing beside the bo’sun, with his arms held out so that his wife could shelter behind him. It was a brave defence but also very desperate and pathetic, since he had no weapon except his courage. Or none until I handed him the captain’s sword, still warm from my grip, and drew my own shorter weapon. Our two blades clanged together, which seemed to seal the brotherhood between us.

‘Thank you, Master Jim,’ he said, very grim-faced – then added with a touch of poetry that was never far from his speech, ‘We are all the captain now.’

‘We are indeed,’ I said.

‘We will make him proud of us.’

‘We will indeed,’ I repeated – although, when I looked inland again, I felt less than perfect confidence. Smirke had now ended his gloating over the captain, and was slowly leading his men down from the stockade; they had spread into a crescent, to prevent anyone slipping past them. None were talking, not even to curse us, but instead they kept a very menacing silence, swinging their swords lazily from side to side as if they were mowing grass.

The most terrible thing about this approach – more terrible than the fact of massacre it seemed to anticipate – was the appetite it suggested. Every swish of steel spoke of how the pirates would enjoy dispatching us, and of how they saw this enjoyment as merely the prelude to other pleasures now lying before them – namely, commandeering the
Nightingale
, and escaping from the island to whatever life they wanted.

At this point, when the likelihood of disaster became very clear to me, I found my terror had suddenly evaporated and my head was clear. It was not that I reconciled myself to death, rather that I found a way to keep my dignity – by deciding to end my life in a way that made me unlike my murderers. I would fight as myself,
in the best way I could. I would not allow my courage to weaken because I was a long way from my home, and because I had lost Natty and seen the captain die. I would not allow Death to think he had gained the upper hand because I had done wrong in my life – by stealing the map especially, and betraying my father. I would believe I might be forgiven my sins. I would accept the second life I had been given when I was rescued from the sea.