Pirate Latitudes

Chapter 36

FOSTER, A PROSPEROUS silk merchant, owned a large house on Pembroke Street, northeast of the dockyards. Hunter slipped in through the back, passing the separate kitchen block. He made his way upstairs to the master bedroom on the second floor.

He found Foster asleep in bed with his wife. Hunter awoke him by pressing a pistol lightly against his nostrils.

Foster, a fattish man of fifty, snorted and sniffed and rolled away. Hunter jammed the pistol barrel up one nostril.

Foster blinked and opened his eyes. He sat up in bed, not saying a word.

“Be still,” his wife muttered sleepily. “You toss so.” Yet she did not wake up. Hunter and Foster stared at each other. Foster looked from the pistol to Hunter, and back again.

Finally, Foster raised a finger in the air, and gently eased out of bed. His wife still slept. In his nightgown, Foster padded across the room to a chest.

“I shall pay you well,” he whispered. “See here, look.” He opened a false compartment and withdrew a sack of gold, very heavy. “There is more, Hunter. I shall pay you whatever you want.”

Hunter said nothing. Foster, in his nightshirt, extended his arm with the sack of gold. His arm trembled.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please, please . . .”

He got down on his knees.

“Please, Hunter, I pray you, please . . .”

Hunter shot him in the face. The body was knocked back, the legs thrown up in the air, the bare feet kicking space. In the bed nearby, the wife never awoke, but turned sleepily and groaned.

Hunter picked up the sack of gold and left as silently as he had come.

. . .

POORMAN, BELYING HIS name, was a rich trader in silver and pewter. His house was on High Street. Hunter found him asleep at a table in the kitchen, a half-empty bottle of wine before him.

Hunter took a kitchen knife and slashed both Poorman’s wrists. Poorman awoke groggily, saw Hunter, and then saw the blood pouring over the table. He raised his bleeding hands, but could not move them; the tendons had all been cut, and the hands flopped lifelessly, rag-doll fingers, already turning grayish-white.

He let his arms drop again to the table. He watched the blood pool on the wood and drip through the cracks to the floor. He looked back at Hunter. His face was curious, his expression confused.

“I would have paid,” he said hoarsely. “I would have done what you . . . what you . . .”

He stood up from the table, weaving dizzily, holding his injured arms bent at the elbows. In the silence of the room, the blood spattered with an odd loudness on the ground.

“I would have . . .” Poorman began, and then rocked back and fell flat on the floor.

“Ye, ye, ye, ye,” he said, fainter and fainter. Hunter turned away, not waiting for the man to die. He went back into the night air and slipped silently through the dark streets of Port Royal.

. . .

HE ENCOUNTERED Lieutenant Dodson by accident. The soldier was singing a song, stumbling drunk through the streets with two whores at his side. Hunter saw him at the end of the High Street and turned back, slipping down Queen Street, turning east on Howell Alley, just in time to meet Dodson at the corner.

“Who goes there?” Dodson demanded, speaking loudly. “Know you that there is a curfew? Be gone else I shall clap you in the Marshallsea.”

In shadow, Hunter said, “I have just come from there.”

“Eh?” Dodson said, tilting his head toward the voice. “What means your churlish speech? I shall have you know—”

“Hunter!” shrieked the whores, and they both fled. Deprived of their support, Dodson fell drunkenly down into the mud.

“Damn you for uncertain quim,” he grunted, and struggled to get up. “Look at my uniform now, damn you all.” He was covered in mud and manure.

He had already gotten to his knees when the words of the women suddenly reached his alcohol-fogged brain. “Hunter?” he asked softly. “You are Hunter?”

Hunter nodded in the shadows.

“Then I shall arrest you for the scoundrel and pirate that you are,” Dodson said. But before he could get back to his feet, Hunter kicked him in the stomach and sent him sprawling.

“Ow!” Dodson said. “You hurt me, damn you.”

They were the last words he spoke. Hunter gripped the soldier by the neck and pressed his face into the mud and dung of the street, holding the squirming body, which struggled with increasing force and, finally, toward the end, with violent wrenchings and twistings until at last it did not move.

Hunter stepped back, gasping for breath with the exertion.

He looked around the dark, deserted town. A marching patrol of ten militiamen went by; he stepped back into the shadows until they had passed.

Two whores came by. “Are you Hunter?” one asked, with no sign of fear.

He nodded.

“Bless you,” she said. “You come see me, and you’ll have your way without a farthing spent.” She laughed.

Giggling, the two women disappeared into the night.

. . .

HE STOOD INSIDE the Black Boar tavern. There were fifty people there, but he saw only James Phips, dapper and handsome, drinking with several other merchantmen. Phips’s companions immediately slipped away, showing aspects of terror on their faces. But Phips himself, after an initial shock, took on a hearty manner.

“Hunter!” he said, grinning broadly. “Damn my eyes, but you have done what we all knew you would. A round for everyone, I say, to celebrate your new freedom.”

There was utter silence in the Black Boar. No one spoke. No one moved.

“Come now,” Phips said loudly. “I call for a round in honor of Captain Hunter! A round!”

Hunter moved forward, toward Phips’s table. His soft footsteps on the dirt floor of the tavern were the only sound in the room.

Phips eyed Hunter uneasily. “Charles,” he said. “Charles, this stern countenance does not become you. It is time to be merry.”

“Is it?”

“Charles, my friend,” Phips said, “you surely understand I bear you no ill will. I was forced to appear on the tribunal. It was all the work of Hacklett and Scott; I swear it. I had no choice. I’ve a ship to sail in a week’s time, Charles, and they would not give me embarkation papers, so they said. And I knew you would make good your escape. Only an hour ago, I was telling Timothy Flint that very expectation. Timothy: answer true, was I not telling you that Hunter would be free? Timothy?”

Hunter took out his pistol and aimed it at Phips.

“Now Charles,” Phips said. “I beg you to be reasonable. A man must be practical. Do you think I would have condemned you if ever I believed sentence would be carried out? Do you think so? Do you?”

Hunter said nothing. He cocked the pistol, a single metallic click in the silence of the room.

“Charles,” Phips said, “it does my heart good to see you again. Come, have a drink with me, and let us forget—”

Hunter shot him, full in the chest. Everyone ducked away as fragments of bone and a geyser of blood blew outward from his heart in a hissing rush. Phips dropped a cup that had been raised in one hand; the cup struck the table and rolled to the floor.

Phips’s eyes followed it. He reached for it with his hand and said hoarsely, “A drink, Charles . . .” And then he collapsed on the table. Blood seeped over the rude wood.

Hunter turned and left.

As he came out on the street again, he heard the tolling of the church bells of St. Anne’s. They rang incessantly, the signal for an attack on Port Royal, or some other emergency.

Hunter knew it could have only one meaning — his escape from the jail of Marshallsea had been discovered.

He did not mind at all.

. . .

LEWISHAM, JUDGE OF the Admiralty, had his quarters behind the courthouse. He awoke to the church bells in alarm, and sent a servant out to see what was the matter. The man returned a few minutes after.

“What is it?” Lewisham said. “Speak, man.”

The man looked up. It was Hunter.

“How is it possible?” Lewisham asked.

Hunter cocked the gun. “Easily,” he said.

“Tell me what you wish.”

“I shall,” Hunter said. And he told him.

. . .

COMMANDER SCOTT, DROWSY with drink, lay sprawled on a couch in the library of the Governor’s Mansion. Mr. Hacklett and his mistress had long since retired. He awoke to the church bells and instantly knew what had happened; he felt a terror unlike any he had ever known. Moments later, one of his guard burst into the room with the news: Hunter had escaped, all the pirates were vanished, and Poorman, Foster, Phips, and Dodson were all dead.

“Get my horse,” Scott commanded, and hastily arranged his disarrayed clothing. He emerged at the front of the Governor’s Mansion, looked around cautiously, and jumped on his stallion.

He was unhorsed a few moments later, and flung rudely to the cobblestones no more than a hundred yards from the Governor’s Mansion. A contingent of vagabonds led by Richards, the governor’s manservant — and directed by Hunter, that scoundrel — clapped him in irons and took him away to Marshallsea.

To await trial: the nerve of the ruffians!

. . .

HACKLETT AWOKE TO the tolling of the church bells, and also guessed their meaning. He leapt out of bed, ignoring his wife, who had lain the whole night, wide awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to his drunken snores. She was in pain and she had been badly humiliated.

Hacklett went to the chamber door and called to Richards.

“What has transpired?”

“Hunter escaped,” Richards said flatly. “Dodson and Poorman and Phips are all dead, perhaps more.”

“And the man is still loose?”

“I do not know,” Richards said, pointedly failing to add Your Excellency.

“Dear God,” Hacklett said. “Bolt the doors. Call the guard. Alert Commander Scott.”

“Commander Scott left some few minutes past.”

“Left? Dear God,” Hacklett said, and slammed the chamber door, locking it. He turned back to the bed. “Dear God,” he said. “Dear God, we shall all be murdered by that pirate.”

“Not all,” his wife said, pointing a pistol at him. Her husband kept a brace of loaded pistols by the bed, and she now held them aimed at him, one in each hand.

“Emily,” Hacklett said, “don’t be a fool. This is no time for your silliness, the man is a vicious killer.”

“Come no closer,” she said.

He hesitated. “You jest.”

“I do not.”

Hacklett looked at his wife, and the pistols she held. He was not himself skilled with weapons, but he knew from limited experience that a pistol was extremely difficult to fire with accuracy. He did not feel fear so much as irritation.

“Emily, you are being a damnable fool.”

“Stay,” she commanded.

“Emily, you are a bitch and a whore but you are not, I’ll wager, a murderer and I will have—”

She fired one gun. The room filled with smoke. Hacklett cried aloud in terror, and several moments passed before both husband and wife realized that he had not been hit.

Hacklett laughed, mostly in relief.

“As you see,” he said, “it is no simple matter. Now give me the pistol, Emily.”

He came quite close before she fired again, hitting him in the groin. The impact was not powerful. Hacklett remained standing. He took another step, coming so near her that he could almost touch her.

“I have always hated you,” he said, in a conversational tone. “From the first day that I met you. Do you remember? I said to you, ‘Good day, madam,’ and you said to me—”

He broke off into a coughing fit, and collapsed on the ground, doubled over in pain.

Blood was now seeping from his waist.

“You said to me,” he said. “You said . . . Oh damn your black eyes, woman . . . it hurts . . . you said to me . . .”

He rocked on the ground, his hands pressed to his groin, his face twisted in pain, eyes shut tightly. He moaned in time to his rocking: “Aaah . . . aaah . . . aaah . . .”

She sat up in the bed and dropped the pistol. It touched the sheet, so hot that it burned the imprint of the barrel into the fabric. She quickly picked it up and flung it on the floor, then looked back at her husband. He continued to rock as before, still moaning, and then he stopped, and looked over at her, and spoke through clenched teeth.

“Finish it,” he whispered.

She shook her head. The chambers were empty; she did not know how to load them again, even if there were spare shot and powder.

“Finish it,” he said again.

A dozen conflicting emotions pressed in her mind. Realizing that he was not soon to die, she went to the side table, and poured a glass of claret, and brought it to him. She lifted his head, and helped him to drink. He drank a little, and then a fury overcame him, and with one bloody hand he pushed her away. His strength was surprising. She fell back, with a red imprint of a flat hand on her nightdress.

“Damn you for a king’s bitch,” he whispered, and took up his rocking again. He was now absorbed in his pain, and seemed to have lost any sense that she was there. She got to her feet, poured a glass of wine for herself, sipped it, and watched.

She was still standing there when Hunter entered the room half an hour later. Hacklett was alive, but wholly ashen, his actions feeble except for an occasional spastic twitch. He lay in an enormous pool of blood.

Hunter took out his pistol and moved toward Hacklett.

“No,” she said.

He hesitated, then stepped away.

“Thank you for your kindness,” Mrs. Hacklett said.