Chapter 315 A Courtesy Visit, with Cannon

Nat’s roar died at the reefs.

Further away, where the swell broke white against the coral and the Atlantic pressed hard against the pretty rock, a ship’s bell began striking aboard a black corvette. Her quartermaster turned a half-hour glass.

The Black Fortune lay at her kedges in a notch across the coast. A coral arm and a sandbar curled around the cove, one on either side, while mangroves crowded the water behind them.

Beyond the entrance stretched the deep blue known as the Tongue of the Ocean, where the water was deep enough for a man o’ war to lie near the island.

The Royal Mistake lay closer to the entrance, with the Sweet Lemon farther inshore. All three ships had slipped through the channels before the navy shut the doors, and the cove hid them from view.

There, the heat hung over, flies had stopped bothering to fly and took to walking instead, while crabs clicked among the roots, the mud stank of rot, and tar bubbled in the seams of the black hull.

At the quarterdeck, Bonnet held a teacup, Whitlock held a slate, and Mary, whom the whole ship still called Mark, leaned against the bulwark with her usual low opinion of the weather.

Whitlock rapped his quill against the slate, three crisp taps. "Two glasses of time have run since the last gun, Captain, to the very grain, and the third turned not since. The Admiral prescribed three, wind permitting, I have kept the sand faithfully, but the wind, I regret to say, is not my department, and I decline to audit it."

Bonnet set his teacup on the rail. "My dear, dear fellow, I shall confess it freely. I leapt, positively leapt, at the broadside, and flung tea across a deck that had done no mistake, nothing, to deserve it. I thought the heavens had split."

The quartermaster pressed two fingers to his own wrist with gravity, then lifted his chin. "Two broadsides, Captain, by my pulse, with a shade over two minutes betwixt them."

Then the captain picked up his cup again.

A gentleman could hardly be seen abandoning his tea in a crisis. "I do beg your pardon, but one of us must ask, and as I appear to be the one holding the china, the task falls to me. Is it... and I say this with the utmost delicacy... time?"

Mary spat over the side.

Her spittle landed on the water and sat there like a coin on a table.

"Will ye look at that. Dead as a wake, so it is. There’s not a puff in the whole bloody sky, an’ there’ll be none till she fills."

A voice came down from the masthead, hoarse as a gull. "Deck, ahoy! Thread o’ smoke ower the pines, sor! Dark an’ thin, like! Ah cannit sweer to it, mind, there’s sweat in me eyes the size o’ ha’pennies, mate!"

Whitlock entered it on the slate.

"Smoke. Unconfirmed. Entered and underscored once, Captain."

Bonnet shaded his eyes and searched the sky above the pines. "I took it for a cloud myself, Whitlock, a thin and rather sickly specimen, and I owe the poor creature an apology. But oh, I do hope the King’s captains are fretting, Mark! After all that bellowing and carry-on, it would be simply the civil thing."

"Sure they’ll be hunched over their sums, so they will, an’ hatin’ every last bloody figure."

Bonnet nodded, pleased with the thought. "I took the liberty of telling the chef to hold supper at the usual hour, or as near to it as the day’s engagements permit."

Mary looked at him as though he’d asked her to bury his dog. "Holy Mother o’ God, ye daft feckin’ peacock, we’re about to be shot at an’ yer worried about the gravy!"

She exhaled, pushed away from the bulwark and went to inspect her guns. Some of them stood primed, their lanyards coiled and ready, while the rest were lashed down, with the slow match still unlit in its tubs.

A gun captain, sweat streaming down his face, caught Mary by the sleeve. "Mark, me handsome, let us load the lot, do! The ladies’ve bin laced up tight since dawn, an’ they be gaspin’ for it, gaspin’. ’Tain’t decent, keepin’ a lady waitin’, she’ll go sour on ’ee, she will, mark my words!"

Mary removed his hand from her sleeve one finger at a time. "Yer turn’s comin’, ye randy bastard. Till then keep yer breeches buttoned and yer hands off the merchandise."

Forward, in the shade of the mainmast, Nub sat with his green hand in a bucket. It was the only way anyone had found to keep the buds from sulking.

Pike stood over him, wiping his face. "Why’s it always me what gets the sweat, eh? Every other bleedin’ bastard’s got a nice brow to catch it. Me? Two bare lumps an’ a face like a wet pie! Ain’t natural, that ain’t!"

He stamped his foot, slopping water out of the bucket.

"Mind the bucket, Pike bach, mind. They do sulk something terrible when they’re jogged, see."

On the hatch coaming, the superstitious sailor sat with his jar in his hands, waiting.

"Hot enough for yer, jar-man? Eh? Bit close, innit?"

"Och, I am having a jar o’ dirt, friend. And that is a fine thing in any weather."

A voice spread across the flat water from the Royal Mistake, as clear as if the speaker stood on the next hammock.

Tom was on her quarterdeck, one hand cupped to his mouth. "Fortune, ahoy! My man on the point reports the man o’ war lies where she lay, with the sloops tucked in beside her. That’s the whole o’ it."

Bonnet leaned out with his teacup raised. "Splendid, Captain Tom, simply splendid! I trust the Royal Mistake is in the very best of spirits? I fear we shall be a full length ahead of her at the entrance, but I give you my solemn word I shall say it sweetly."

"My ship is never late, sir. Early, on occasion. Late, never."

The Royal Mistake kept her old navy rigging beneath her Runt’s name, while the Sweet Lemon lay farther inshore, small and sour.

Gil sat on the Lemon’s gunwale, chin in his hands, attending his own funeral. "They’ve come to burn us out, an’ what’s stood in their way? Ten guns an’ a leak! She’ll founder afore Michaelmas, I’ve allus said, an’ she’s still afloat out o’ pure bloody spite, that’s all it is."

"Cheerful. Ye’re a regular sunbeam, Gil." Tom’s voice drifted back.

A dark catspaw moved across the water, the first breath of wind all afternoon, and every face aboard the Fortune turned toward it.

Crick knocked three times on the taffrail with his knuckles. "She be comin’, Cap’n, up off the sea, she be. A ship that quick leaves a widow stood in her wake, wringin’ her hands, and best us greets her afore she takes to followin’."

Bonnet inclined his head toward the empty sea with a bow so courtly it deserved a ballroom and a string quartet. "Pray give the lady my warmest compliments, Mister Crick, and my most abject apologies for keeping her waiting."

The hoarse voice came again from the masthead, cracking with excitement.

"The wind’s leanin’ west, mates! I’ll sweer to her now, or near enough, like!"

Whitlock held the empty glass up to the light. "The sand has run, Captain. Third glass, complete, and in a rare stroke of fortune the wind has seen fit to attend."

Bonnet drew a long breath that seemed to travel all the way down to his buckles, and let it out.

"Well, Whitlock?"

"It is time, Captain. By the glass, by the breeze, and by my entirely unqualified conscience."

Then the captain swung toward the guns, and every head on deck followed him.

"Mark, my dear? Are the ladies ready to receive callers?"

Her answer came flat down the deck.

"Ready as I’ll ever feckin’ be, so I am. Say the word, an’ stand clear o’ the ladies."

At last, the gentleman pirate looked past the entrance and smiled slowly.

"A courtesy call, with... with cannon."

He cupped a hand to his mouth. "Captain Tom! Captain Gil! Would you be so very good as to weigh, with my compliments and deepest esteem!"

"Aye aye, sir! Hands to the capstan!" Tom called back.

Across the cove, a boot scraped against the Lemon’s deck as Gil got to his feet.

"I knew it, I bloody knew it. Nowt good ever started wi’ a breeze, an’ that’s gospel."

A boat went out to the neck of the entrance and dropped a small keg on a line. The keg bobbed on the water like a hat hung on a peg by a man who intended to return for supper.

Bonnet finally took the wheel and gave the order as casually.

"Weigh, if you’d be so good."

The capstan began to clack as its pawls engaged one after another, and the kedge hawsers came over the bows, dripping water. Topsails dropped from the yards and hung there for a heartbeat before the breeze caught them and filled them with a long sigh.

Nub lifted his green hand from the bucket, and every bud on it turned toward the wind. Aboard the Lemon, Gil cupped his hands and shouted across the water.

"I’m bein’ brave, tha knows! Reight now! I’ll have thee all know it!"

Three black flags appeared at three mastheads, one after another, and the breeze unfurled them.

The entrance was wide enough for two ships abreast, provided one of them said its prayers. The Black Fortune and the Royal Mistake passed through together, bow for bow, so much alike they could have been twins. One was a frigate and the other a corvette, which, as everyone knows, is a frigate that never quite finished growing.

Ahead lay the open blue, the long swell lifting both bows, and a pale haze to the east. A cable astern, where a Lemon belonged, came the sloop.