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“Damn you …” murmured Springer and fell completely asleep.
“So most of the people must stay on the island, sir …” said Flint, making a pantomime of deference to the unconscious Springer, “… while Betsy sails to bring rescue to those who remain.”
It was the plain truth and Flint had known it from the moment he and the carpenter had designed the new vessel. There was only so much that make-and-mend initiative could achieve, and some of Elizabeth’s timbers were rotten besides. The carpenter had been sworn to silence under pain of death at Flint’s own hand, should the secret leak out, plus the promise of being one of those to be embarked in the new ship.
But it would eventually become obvious to even the stupidest among the crew that there would not be room for all of them aboard Elizabeth’s child. Any decent officer would therefore have summoned his men, given them the truth at once, and trusted to their good nature as seamen to understand that there simply was no other way forward. And any decent crew would have understood. But Lieutenant Joseph Flint had fallen so deeply into temptation that he was now driven by quite another logic than that which applied to decent officers who led decent crews.
“Thank you, sir,” said Flint, as Springer – lost in sleep – snorted and gargled like a hog. “Bah!” said Flint. “Will you just look at the swab?” He plucked out the pistol from under Springer’s hand and turned to Billy Bones. “Give me your chaw, Billy,” he said.
“What?” said Bones, his brow furrowed in puzzlement.
“What, sir!” said Flint. “Just spit out your chaw, at the double now.” Flint held out his hand.
“Me chaw?” said Bones, tested beyond comprehension. “Into your hand, sir?”
“Spit!” said Flint. “Now!”
“Aye-aye, sir!” said Bones. He’d seen the look in Flint’s eye and dared not disobey. So he leaned forward and spat out a plastic gob of black-brown tobacco, sticky and slimy with saliva. It splattered into the palm of Flint’s hand. Flint smiled without the least sign of disgust. He squeezed and moulded the tobacco to his liking, then he filled half the barrel of Springer’s pistol with sand, and rammed the sticky plug of tobacco down on top of it as a wad. Finally he deftly replaced the pistol without waking Springer.
“There,” he said quietly as he wiped his hands on Billy Bones’s shirt. “Just in case he ever gets the courage, eh, Mr Bones?”
“Aye-aye, sir,” said Billy Bones.
Then they walked out again into the fierce heat and the high, blazing sun.
“We’ll set them building the blockhouse tomorrow, Billy-my-chicken,” said Flint, “and you can let the word out among the people that Captain Springer is going to abandon them.”
Billy Bones licked his lips. He blinked and trembled. He muttered and groaned. He summoned every grain of his courage … and he ventured to dispute the matter.
“Bugger of a risk, this mutiny, begging your pardon, Cap’n,” said Bones, instinctively adding that last word – the supreme honorific of his vocabulary – in the hope that it might protect him. It was an arm raised in anticipation of a blow.
“Billy-boy, Billy-boy,” said Flint in a peculiar soft voice, without ever giving Bones so much as a glance, reaching instead to pet the green bird that clamped its claws in his shoulder and chuckled and nuzzled his ear. “Don’t ever question my orders again. Not so long as you wish to live. Do you hear me?”
Billy Bones was armed equally as well as Flint with pistols and cutlass. He was the bigger man, being taller and broader in the chest. He was a man in the prime of his strength and was used to keeping discipline over the scum of the lower deck. But he gulped and swallowed in terror, he bowed his head, he shook in fright. Then he took refuge in the seafaring man’s universal safe response to the words of his betters.
“Aye-aye, sir!”
Chapter 7
1st June 1752 Savannah, Georgia
As Long John laughed, he took care to keep an eye on the girl. He laughed till his belly ached at what she’d said. He laughed wildly over the thought that – of all the warped and twisted fiends that came in nightmares – Flint might be a gentleman. It was the solemn way she’d said it. It was the innocence of it, God love her, with her plump little arse and her big eyes and her bouncing tits. So even with the tears blinding his eyes, Long John kept a close watch on her, and on the room itself, Charley Neal’s liquor store.
The door was the only way out. The walls were heavily built, with one high window covered by an iron grille to make sure that the liquor did not wander off during the night. Still laughing, Long John kicked the door shut behind him, and leaned himself against it to make entirely sure she’d not escape.
He took these unconscious precautions because Walrus had been months at sea and not a sight of anything female had Long John taken in all that time, and when coming ashore to Charley Neal’s house Long John was as used to making up for lost time as any other seafaring man.
Finally, Long John drew forth a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. He took a deep breath, sighed happily and smiled at Selena, who all the while had kept an even closer watch on him than he had upon her. She was watching and waiting. She knew precisely what was in the man’s mind, and she knew that all the other girls were at that very moment laid on their backs with drunken sailors snoring contentedly between their legs, breeches blown to the four winds and hairy buttocks displayed to the world. She knew too, that each girl would be clutching a fistful of gold, which (after Neal’s percentage) they would keep for their own selves.
“Now then, my girl,” said Silver, “what might your name be? For I’ve taken the most powerful fancy to you, and no mistake!”
The words were true in a constricted sort of way. Long John looked at Selena in the dim light of the hot storeroom and he liked what he saw. The cheap cotton gown was her sole garment and it was thin. It covered her nakedness for decency’s sake, but all the pleasures beneath jutted and curved most appealingly.
“My name is Selena,” she said. “And I’m no whore.” She had made her decision and set down the rules. All she had to do now was enforce them.
“Indeed you ain’t,” said Long John. He smiled and produced a large gold coin. He held it up and turned it so it gleamed and shone.
“It’s no use,” she said.
“Oh?” said Silver, and looked at her afresh. “Aye,” he said thoughtfully, and nodded. “You ain’t like some o’ them dog-faced drabs neither, nor ain’t you neither. You’re quality, my girl. That you are!” He produced another coin. She sneered. He produced a third. There was now more money on offer than Selena could earn in years by any other means.
“I told you, John Silver, it’s no use. I’ve never been a whore, and I’m never going to be one.”
“Oh?” he said, with a sneer of his own. “Don’t tell me there’s been a virgin found in Savannah, for there ain’t never been one yet!”
She blinked, considering her own precise status in that regard, following attentions pressed upon her by a certain Mr Fitzroy Delacroix, who had once been her owner. Long John grinned, mistaking the signs.
“Well, there you are then, my little bird,” he said. “What was good for them, is good for me. And I ain’t no Jew nor Scotchman when it comes to paying the reckoning.” He flourished his three gold pieces. He set them on a nearby barrel. He thought the matter settled. “This’ll do nicely,” he said, looking round the room. “Private like, and quiet as a church.”
He threw off his hat and pulled his shirt over his head. He was a fine-muscled man: strong in the arms, flat in the belly, with a dominating physical presence. Selena crushed the impulse to run because there was nowhere to go. Instead, she stood her ground.
“I said, I am not a whore!” she cried, with all the force in her body, but she was seized by two powerful hands and hoist up off her feet, her eyes level with his.
“Well then, madam,” said Long John, glancing at the gold pieces, “just what is the price, then?” He grinned. “And don’t I get a little something for what I already laid down?”
He tried to kiss her lips, but she turned her face away. He ran his tongue all over and around the silky black column of her throat. She stayed rigidly still. He gave up. He set her down. He was puzzled and annoyed.
“Beach and burn me, girl!” said Silver. “Just how much d’you expect? You’re a rare fine shaped ‘un, I’ll grant you that, but this ain’t Paris nor London, and you ain’t King George’s mistress!”
“I told you. I’m not a whore!”
“Oh yes you are!”
“Oh no I’m not!”
“No?”
“No!”
“You bitch!”
“You bastard!”
“Whore!”
“I AM NOT A WHORE!”
In his anger and balked desire, Silver swung back his hand. But when it came to it, he couldn’t bring himself to strike the small, helpless figure. So he sighed and growled and cursed. And then, eventually, and very late in the day, it occurred to him that it just might be a good idea to pay some attention to what she’d been saying.
“Are you really not a whore?” he said.
“Are you deaf!”
“But all Charley’s girls are.”
“EXCEPT ME!”
“Oh … well … I …”
He fumbled for words. He was a stranger to the art of apologising and no words came. Instead a heavy guilt fell upon him: the guilt that sits on a man who knows he’s behaved very badly. Beyond that, as he looked at Selena, a tiny barb had been driven into Long John Silver, and it smarted. For a long time he didn’t even recognise what was happening, because he’d not had such feelings for years.
He picked up his clothes and his money and left, slamming the door thunderously behind him. And later, when he encountered Polly Porter, who’d gone out for a breath of air while Billy Bones was asleep, and she – ever open for business – welcomed him with open arms, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. There was no joy in a sweating copulation with a fat tart when his mind was full of the small, lovely, black figure staring back at him with fierce determination.
When Long John was gone, Selena was seized with a terrible shaking. She’d kept herself bold and calm while danger threatened and, now that it was gone, her legs shook and her teeth chattered, and there were tears too. There was a great quantity of these. She was very young and entirely alone and the world was a very hard place.
Chapter 8
20th February 1749 The island
Billy Bones trod heavily across the sand, making his way towards the marine sentry on guard at the latrine trench.
It was night but there was a bright moon and the marine recognised Mr Bones easily by the hulking shoulders and the blue officer’s coat with its rows of shiny buttons. Also there was a heavy ‘Pfff! Pfff! Pfff!’ of exhaled breath in time with the laboured footfalls, which was unique to Mr Bones. It was his unconscious and wordless protest at the need to struggle over soft sand in a hot climate.
The wretched marine drew himself to attention and reviewed all those little sins of omission and commission in the doing of his duties of which private soldiers can be found guilty by any superior officer who has a mind to do so.
It was bad enough being stuck out here by a stinking bog-pit to make sure that the bastard matelots shovelled sand over their shit when they’d shat, but it weren’t fair – not at all – for Mr bastard Billy Bones to come out to check that all was to rights. It was usually one of the mids, and they were all right. A quick “All’s well?” and off the little bastards went, holding their bastard noses. Then a shudder of ice ran down the marine’s backbone.
“Mygawdamighty!” he said as he realised what a fool he was, being afeared of Mr Bones, for if the bastard officers were walking the guard posts themselves and not sending of the mids … then the next one might be … Oh my eyes and soul … the next one might be Flint!
“Stand easy there!” said Billy Bones. “All’s well?”
“Aye-aye-suh!” said the marine, looking rigidly to his front.
“Huh!” said Billy Bones. He looked all around into the dark, as if a horde of wild savages was creeping inwards with sharpened spears. It was all for show, of course, as everyone now knew the island was uninhabited.
“Keep a sharp look out,” said Billy Bones.
“Aye-aye-suh!” said the marine. But Billy Bones lingered, cleared his throat, spat, and condescended to conversation.
“Damned hot,” he said.
“Aye-aye-suh!”
“Shouldn’t wonder if we don’t have fever on the lower deck before the week’s out.”
“Aye-aye-suh!”
And so they continued for some little time until one Emmanuel Pew came out to relieve himself in the trench. Pew was known to his mates as Mad Pew for his speaking of the Welsh language, and for being not quite right in the head.
“Ah,” said Billy Bones, and he waited until Pew had finished grunting and heaving, and had hauled up his breeches and buckled his belt. Then he turned and affected to take note.
“You there!” said he. “Damn your blasted eyes! Shovel away there with a will, like the blasted surgeon says, or I’ll flay the living skin off your blasted back!”
Pew jumped in terror and filled in half the trench in the excess of his desire to please Mr Bones.
“Now, back to camp at the double,” said Billy Bones. “And I’ll walk beside you so you don’t drown yourself falling into the blasted ocean.”
The marine went limp with relief as the big figure rolled away, puffing and cursing beside the thin, nervous, dark-eyed matelot who’d become the target of his attentions.
“Serve the bugger right!” thought the marine. “Bleeding mad bastard that one is an’ all, that bastard Pew.”
But the aforesaid Mad Pew was the objective of Mr Bones’s walk out to the latrine trench. As ever, Billy Bones marvelled at the acuteness of Flint’s observation, and his penetrating knowledge of the characters of the men.
Flint knew that Pew went to shit well after lights out, because at that time there was nobody there, and he wouldn’t be jostled and hurried. Some men are like that, and Flint’s knowledge of Pew’s habits enabled Billy Bones to get him alone for a few minutes’ conversation in the dark, with no possibility of being overheard. It thereby enabled Billy Bones to put certain proposals to Pew, and to ask certain questions of him, without risk of a hanging for the pair of them. And of course – did Mr Bones but know it – the fact that Lieutenant Flint was no part of the conversation meant that there was absolutely no risk to Flint himself. Indeed, Flint would have been the first to denounce Billy Bones as a traitorous mutineer, should the need arise.
So Billy Bones sounded out Pew and explained that Captain Springer was going to abandon him to his fate, but that there was a way out which was very much to Pew’s advantage. Pew nearly dropped in his tracks with amazement once or twice, to hear such things from Billy Bones. But he saw reason.
Over the next few weeks, Billy Bones had similar conversations with a number of others, all carefully chosen by Flint, and always in circumstances where Flint was saved harmless from any consequences, and always where nobody could see or hear what passed between Billy Bones and the other. Each man chosen was a skilled seaman, and together they formed the nucleus of a crew: Ben Gunn the helmsman, Israel Hands the gunner’s mate, Peter Black (better known as Black Dog) the carpenter, and Darby M’Graw the master-at-arms. These, together with Mad Pew the sailmaker, were the principal figures in Flint’s plan, but there were others too: foremast hands to haul on lines and work a ship.
Thus all this dangerous, careful work was planned by Flint, while all the actual risks were taken by Billy Bones. In this secret division of labour, Joe Flint wasn’t quite the perfect judge of men that he thought he was, for Flint believed it was no end of a joke that Billy Bones should stand between himself and danger, and what a fool Bones would think himself should he ever find out. But the truth of the matter was different. So great was Billy Bones’s devotion to Flint that he’d gladly have volunteered for the duty, if ever it had occurred to Flint to be honest with him. But such a thing would never have occurred to Joe Flint.
All the while, up at the North Inlet, close alongside the hull of the dead Elizabeth, the building of her daughter Betsy came forward in promising style. The carpenter’s crew laid her keel, raised up her ribs and planked her hull. They set her beam ends in place and fashioned old spars into new masts, and fitted her out with pumps and capstans, gratings and ladders, and all the complex gear that must be crammed into a sea-going vessel.
As these vital works proceeded, Mr Flint kept himself mightily busy – and clear away from Billy Bones – in building an impressive fortification at the other end of the island. For this major work he took nearly half the able-bodied men, with a month’s supply of food, and all the tools the carpenter could spare. They tramped across the island, and Flint took some more detailed observations of its geography as they went. Finally he chose a site on a thickly wooded hill, with a spring of clear water welling up near the summit.
“You will fell all the trees within musket-shot of this point,” he told the two midshipmen he’d brought with him as his subordinates.
He reached up and scratched the poll of his green parrot. This had become a habit of his when wrapped in thought. The midshipmen looked at one another and at the size of the pines on the hill, and they were glad that they wouldn’t personally be doing the physical labour.
“You will trim and shape the trunks, and they will be used to build a blockhouse according to this plan,” said Flint. He produced a rolled-up paper and looked around the hot, thick, pine-smelling forest with its buzzing insects and soaring trunks. There was not a rock or a bush or a bank of earth; only columns of living wood and the sandy soil beneath. There was nothing to rest the paper on.
“You there – Billingsgate!” he called to a seaman standing a respectful distance away, burdened with a heavy bundle of canvas for making tents. “At the double now! Here, Fido! Here, Prince! Good dog!” He smiled his shining smile and the seaman dropped his bundle and sped forward. “Down, Rover!” said Flint, forcing Billingsgate on to all fours. “And don’t you move, not on fear of a striped shirt.”
The man’s back formed a sufficient table to spread Flint’s plan. Like everything Flint did, it was beautifully done. It showed a loop-holed blockhouse of heavy timbers, with an encircling palisade of split logs. The mids leaned forward and examined the design. The more intelligent – or perhaps not – of them, Mr Hastings, frowned and spoke up.
“Please, sir,” said he, “don’t this plan more readily suit a defence against armed men already ashore? So wouldn’t we be better strengthening the seaward batteries up at … ugh!”
He shut up as the elbow of his less – or perhaps more – intelligent comrade, Mr Midshipman Povey, caught him hard in the ribs. He looked up to see the deadly smile splitting Flint’s face, for Mr Hastings had spoken the unchallengeable truth. Flint’s blockhouse was a nonsense. Any threat could only come from the sea and was best countered by batteries covering the few places on the island where ships, or ships’ boats, could make a landing. But from Flint’s point of view, the blockhouse was a most wise and sensible thing to build, since it kept himself so visibly away from Mr Bones’s politics at the other end of the island.
“Mr Boatswain!” he cried, and acting-boatswain Tom Morgan came doubling through the tree trunks. “Get yourself a cane, Mr Morgan, and stripe this insolent child a couple of dozen across the fat of his arse.” The colour drained from Mr Hastings’s face and he swallowed hard. Flint turned his face to the other mid. “And then deliver two dozen unto this one, for he’s as insolent as the other.” Flint smiled and tickled his parrot. “I’ll not have nasty young gentlemen answering back to their betters.”
Two weeks later the blockhouse was built and ready for occupation. Where only virgin forest had stood, there was now a great clearing with a massive log-house in the centre, surrounded by the stumps of the trees that had been sacrificed for its construction. As a fortification, it was thoroughly well made, commanding a clear field of fire in all directions, while the six-foot palisade was well placed to break up an assault, but too insubstantial to enable an enemy to take shelter there.
Had there been any real need for such a building, it would have served to perfection, and Flint even attended to minor details such as the fact that there was no natural basin around the spring from which water might be drawn. He had a large ship’s cauldron brought up, and the bottom knocked out of it, so it could be sunk in the ground at the spring-head to provide an artificial tank that constantly filled and brimmed with fresh water.
With the blockhouse built, Flint left a guard of four marines to occupy it, and marched his command back to the North Inlet, the Elizabeth, the Betsy, and Captain Springer. The long, straggling column, heavy-laden as it was (by Flint’s own design), laboured heavily to complete the journey and suffered various casualties. One man broke his leg, one got lost, four developed severe blisters from the straps of their packs and fourteen presented themselves to the surgeon with rashes from poisonous jungle plants.
Flint dealt promptly with all these accidents. He had the gratings rigged and awarded a dozen each to the rash-sufferers for carelessness, two dozen to the lost soul for stupidity, three dozen to the blister brigade for incompetence in lashing their kit, and four dozen to the broken leg (so soon as he could stand on it) for wilfully rendering himself unfit for duty.
With these punishments and others, there was now hardly one man of the three hundred foremast hands and petty officers that once had been Elizabeth’s people who had not felt either the lash or some more spiteful punishment. The mood of the crew was sullen and resentful, and only one push was needed to drive them to the great leap that Flint had planned: some of them … enough of them … sufficient for Flint’s purpose.
By now, too, Betsy looked like a ship rather than a collection of timbers. Her lower masts were stepped, and her standing rigging in place. The carpenter and his mates had even contrived to serve her hull with pitch and paint, to offset the worm. All she needed was men turning the capstan and she’d warp herself sweetly down the greased slide-way already laid out before her, and she’d swim in the waters of the North Inlet.
Flint saw that things had reached the moment of truth, and he held a conference that very night, safely away from the camp and out in the dark forest, with Billy Bones and some others including Israel Hands and Black Dog, who were the most intelligent, and others who were the least stupid of the chosen ones. Flint explained what each of them had to do, and made each man repeat it until it was clear they’d understood. Hands and Black Dog learned fast enough, but for the rest Flint had to keep his temper entirely under control. For once, he had to be patient and encouraging as these morons stumbled and mumbled and struggled towards learning their parts.
He could not afford any noise or dispute at this stage, for now he, Joseph Flint, was personally involved, and the danger to himself was acute.
Chapter 9
3rd April 1751 The Delacroix Plantation, South Carolina
Selena fought all the way, but her mother was twice her weight and three times her strength. The woman just put her head down and took the blows she received from her daughter and never gave back one – which amazing behaviour frightened Selena more than anything. Instead, her mother got sullen and angry and tried to persuade.